He passed another group before reaching a doorway, but their food-spattered appearance differed little from his and they paid no attention to him. Janvert plunged through the door, was hit by a cold shock of water spraying from overhead nozzles. He gasped, splashing through the water, and was almost clean when he emerged on the far side through another door into a wide, dimly lighted tunnel. Water was draining off him, off the captured weapon in his hand, collecting in a puddle under him, but there were similar puddles all around.
Janvert glanced left—the long vista of a tunnel down there, but few people and none of them appeared interested in him. He looked to his right, saw a spidery stairway similar to the one at the underground river. The stairs went upward into gloom and that was his direction. Janvert turned, slogged toward the stairs, began climbing, drawing himself up by sliding his left hand on the rail and pulling. His mouth was hanging open with fatigue and the aftermath of that shocking shower.
At the fifth rung on the stairs, he saw legs appear at the top. He fired his weapon without pausing, kept it humming as he climbed the remaining steps. Five sprawled figures lay on a platform where the stairs ended. He limped around them, his gaze fastened on a door beyond them. The door had only a bar latch which he lifted. The hinges were on the inside to the right. He pulled the bar. The door creaked open, revealing a dank dirt passage and the upthrusting roots of a tree stump that the door’s movement had pushed outward and down. Janvert dragged himself past the stump into starlit darkness, heard the door creaking closed behind him. The stump tipped back into its concealing position with only a faint thump.
Janvert stood shivering in cold night air.
It took him a moment to realize that he had escaped from Hellstrom’s madhouse human hive. He peered upward: stars. No doubt of it—he was outside. But where? The starlight gave him few clues to his surroundings. He could see a faint suggestion of trees directly ahead. He groped for the stump that masked the exit. His fingers encountered a hard surface which a fingernail told him was real wood. His eyes were adjusting, though, and escape from the tunnels had tapped a source of energy he hadn’t known existed. There was a faint glow in the sky slightly to his left and he guessed that would be Fosterville. He tried to recall the distance. Ten miles? His overworked body would never make that on bare feet. The area in front of him appeared to be a grassy slope with dark spots in it.
Most of the water had dried from his body, but he still trembled with the cold. He knew he couldn’t delay any longer. Those bodies behind him would be found. Hellstrom’s people would be out here after him all too soon. He had to put distance between himself and that camouflaged exit. No matter how he did it, he had to get back to civilization and tell what he had seen.
Taking the sky glow as his compass point, Janvert set out down the slope. He clutched the captured weapon in his right hand. This thing was his passport to belief when he told his story. A demonstration of this weapon on a convenient animal would silence all doubt.
The rough ground hurt his bare feet, caught his toes with unseen rocks and roots. He stumbled, hobbled, ran full into a low wooden fence, and fell across it into the dust of a narrow road.
Janvert picked himself up, studied what he could see of the road in the starlight. It appeared to angle down to his left in the general direction of what he thought was Fosterville. He turned in that direction, stumbled down the dusty track, panting, not trying to be quiet. He was too worn-out for that. The road dipped into a shallow swale and he lost the sky glow for a moment, but had it again at the next rise.
The dust kicked up by his feet tickled his nose. There was a breeze like a feather touch on his right cheek and down his arm and his bare flank. The track dipped once more and turned gently to the right into a deeper darkness that suggested trees. He missed part of the turn, stubbed the little toe on his left foot against the edge of a rut. He hissed a curse, knelt, and gripped the injured member until the pain eased. As he knelt, he saw a sudden flickering of light in the darkness directly ahead. By reflex, Janvert brought up the captured weapon, pointed it, and fired-a single humming burst.
The light vanished.
He straightened, groped his way forward with his left hand outstretched, the weapon held close to his right side. His outstretched hand was too high to meet the next obstruction, and he fell across a cold metallic surface, the weapon scraping it with a noisy clatter that froze him for the moment it took to realize he was sprawled half across the hood of a car.
A car!
He eased himself back, skinned his elbow on a hood ornament, then guided himself with his free hand around the left side of the car. At the window, his fingers explored an open crack at the top and he smelled tobacco smoke. He tried to peer through the window, but it was too dark. There was a rhythmic wheezing inside, though. He groped for the door handle, jerked the door open in a startling flash of light from the automatic switch. The light revealed two men in business suits, neat white shirts and ties, slumped unconscious in the front seat. The driver held a smoldering cigarette which was charring a circle in the left leg of his pants. Janvert took the cigarette and dropped it in the dust by his feet, crushed out the burning cloth with one hand.
The man lighting a cigarette—the flicker of light at which he’d fired. This weapon didn’t kill from a distance, then. Walls and distance made it less than fatal, and it obviously had a limited range beyond that.
Janvert shook the driver’s shoulder, got only a lolling head for response. They were out cold. The movement opened the man’s coat, though, revealing a shoulder holster and a snub-nosed magnum pistol. Janvert took the gun and then saw the radio beneath the dash.
These weren’t Hellstrom’s people! These were cops!
What the drone said (Hive axiom).
You Outsiders! It’s your children we’re after, not you! We’ll get them, too, over your dead bodies.
“How can he be Outside?” Hellstrom demanded, outrage amplifying the sudden surge of fear that swept over him. He whirled from the dark north end of the gloomy aerie, strode across the room to the female at the observer console who’d called out to him.
“He is,” she said. “See! There!” She pointed to the screen glowing with green brilliance in front of her. The screen showed Janvert’s figure, its outline shimmering in the scattered radiation of night-vision projection. Janvert was creeping along a dusty road.
“That’s the north perimeter,” Hellstrom whispered, recognizing the outline of the landscape beyond Janvert. “How did he get out there?” Reluctant admiration for this incredible male warred in Hellstrom with a swelling rage. Janvert was Outside!
“We’re getting reports of a disturbance at level three,” an observer at Hellstrom’s left called.
“He’s found one of the hidden doors out of level three,” Hellstrom said. “How did he get that far? He’ll be at that car with its watchers in seconds! The car’s right down in those trees.” He pointed at the screen. “Have the watchers heard him yet?”
“We have a pursuit team out after him,” an observer on the left called. “They’ll be a few minutes, though. They were on five and we routed them through the upper exits.”
The observer in front of Hellstrom said, “I got an interference flash just before I saw him, as though he’d used his weapon. Could he have knocked out the watchers in that car?”
“Or killed them,” Hellstrom said. “Poetic justice if he did. Who’s observing that car?”
“The team was pulled back an hour ago to help search for the escaped captive,” someone behind him said.