“What prisoners are you talking about?” he said, breaking the quiet of the room.
“We’ve come to pick up these prisoners,” Nikki said, sliding the paper we’d brought with us.
He looked at the paper without picking it up then frowned making more wrinkles on his leathery face. He punched a button on the desk top and inspected the display of names that sprang onto the monitor in front of him.
He shook his head, snapped the display off, and then rubbed a hand over his bald head. “Why can’t you people get things straight. I got the order to release these people just a while ago and—as are my orders—requested the written authorization. And never got it. You’ll have to wait until I get it.”
“It was sent over ten minutes ago,” Nikki lied.
“Let me call,” he removed a talkie from the surface of the desk where it had appeared to be part of the flat surface. He spoke his number then listened a moment. “Nothing,” he said. “What in the world’s going on at central? Have the riots spread that far?”
I didn’t wait around any more. I slapped him up the side of the head with the barrel of my shotgun and he fell over his desk top in a really fine Rip van Winkle imitation.
“A little hasty” Nikki suggested. “You do have a plan, right?”
I shrugged.
“I was hoping you had an idea when you tucked him in.”
“It seemed like the thing to do. Let’s see if we can get into the cells.”
We ran toward the metal door leading to the prison cells. I dilated it open and came face to face with a bag lady.
She looked at me a moment, then stared past me at the comatose warden. I knew she saw the warden’s body and she knew I knew. We both pulled up our weapons at the same instant and fired. I missed and hers connected.
Her gun was of a type I’d never seen before: a short-barreled hand gun with a heavy, lead-pellet-filled projectile about ten centimeters across. The huge slug caught me in the chest and knocked the wind out of me, causing me to keel over as I tried to breathe. Only the ballistic armor incorporated into the bag lady outfit kept me from greater harm.
The bag lady quickly tried to reload her weapon as Nikki jumped past me and fired; Nikki’s shot missed. Rising to my knees, I fired again.
This time I connected with the lethal flechette load of the shotgun. The bag lady fell with a large, fist-sized hole in her chest.
I gasped for air a moment and stood up. The first thing that captured my attention was the sound of water.
“What?” I said.
“That’s why she had such an ineffective weapon,” Nikki said, pointing to a the streams of water gushing through the plastic of the hallway. “Anything else is too dangerous. Your first flechette load as well as mine punctured the plastic walls.”
“Damn. I wonder if it will hold up?”
As if to answer my question, a large chunk of plastic broke off from one of the tiny streams of water and a torrent of water gushed in. Moments later, the other hole widened to admit more water.
“Come on,” I said, “We don’t have much time. We’ve got to get the prisoners out of here or they’ll all drown.”
We splashed down the passage to the fork in the hallway, ” I’ll take the left,” Nikki said.
I dashed down the right. I was glad to see that most of the cells were empty. I stopped at the first occupied cell I came to. I tried to open it. It appeared to have an electric lock of some type. I heard a shot down the hall. Trouble?
“You OK Nikki?” I yelled over the racket the water was making.
“Blasted the lock,” Nikki yelled.
Might as well try it, I thought. I motioned the young man inside the cell to stand back and placed the muzzle of the shotgun on the plastic lock while trying to aim downward so any flechettes that went through the lock wouldn’t harm the prisoner or puncture the plastic bubble of his cell.
I pulled the trigger and the lock exploded apart. My ears rang.
“Get going,” I told him as I pushed the heavy plastic door back, “the prison is flooding.”
He didn’t need any prompting. He scooped up a small bag of belongings now floating on the rising water and jumped out of the cell and sloshed toward the elevator.
The water was now ankle deep. I ran to the next cells and had soon blasted eight more open freeing three men and two women (none of whom I knew) and also freeing three of my team members who—to my surprise—didn’t recognize me. Then I remembered my bag lady get up. I didn’t take time for reunions but just ordered them to the door and hoped they didn’t try to attack me since I looked like one of the old hags they had undoubtedly learned to hate.
That completed the release of everyone on the wing. The water was now knee deep and rising rapidly.
I half waded, half swam toward the fork. “Nikki, you almost finished?”
She came splashing up with two bedraggled women, “Yeah. That’s it. Let’s get out of here.”
We made our way to the main chamber. I looked through the clear dome and water at the load of prisoners getting out of the elevator above us. I scooped up the little warden who was still draped across his desk, the water lapping at its top. The elevator was coming back down for the five of us when the power went off.
The water was chest high and the elevator was frozen half way down.
“We’ll never get out,” one of the women said.
And it looked like she was right.
Chapter 22
“Listen,” I said over the gushing roar of the water, “We could last a long time if we had to by getting up to the top of this chamber. It’s air tight and the dome top would create an air pocket.
Someone would eventually come and rescue us.”
Maybe, I added to myself. The idea wasn’t all that reassuring.
“It’d be better to get out,” Nikki said.
Especially since no one will probably be coming to help, I thought. I didn’t say that since I didn’t want to panic everyone. “Yeah. It would be better if we could get out on our own. The only way up is the elevator. So let’s see if we can get up the elevator shaft.”
It sounded easy; it wouldn’t be, I thought.
The plastic was as slick as only the new plastics can be. Like trying to get a hold of a greased stick of frozen luber. The first order of business was to cut some hand holds into the plastic.
“Stand back,” I said, throwing off my bag woman mask and hat so I could see better.
Some great sage in the dark and distant past said that guns were only tools. So far that theory had held up; the shotgun had worked well in opening the prison locks. Now I was going to test it out as a chisel. I fired three times at the tube of the elevator. The projectiles chewed three jagged holes, fortunately without punching more holes in the dome beyond the elevator shaft. Each hole was about a third of a meter higher than the next. They were the perfect size for climbing, I discovered as I pulled myself up on them and was nearly against the base of the elevator.
I placed the muzzle of my gun against the clear elevator floor above me and fired, creating another hole. I quickly fired another six shots around it, trying to ignore the splinters of plastic that threatened to put out my eyes as they splattered from of the impact of the flechettes.
The holes made, I used the gun for a lever and broke out the area around the shots until a man-sized hole was created over my head.
I tossed the shotgun into the elevator, held the jagged edge of the hole, and scrambled through it. I turned and reached down toward the two women and Nikki who held up the floating warden, below me. “Who’s next?”
One of the women climbed up and I grabbed her hand and pulled her through. She sat on the floor as I pulled up the second woman. The warden was the tough one. The water had risen nearly to Nikki’s neck was but she had a foot on the lower hole I’d punched in the plastic and now half lifted the floating warden out of the water as I grabbed the fabric of his jacket.