Pressing hands over his ears against the continuing alarms, Senator Pulaski hunched over and turned in the other direction. He lurched down the tunnel, away from the vault door. “If it’s tear gas, then we have to get away.”
Blinking back tears, Adonia coughed as she yelled after him, “But… Harris told us to stay here!”
He retched out an answer. “Harris… isn’t… being gassed!” He staggered down the corridor away from the blocked exit. “I’m sure as hell not staying here.”
With increasing distress, Garibaldi bent over and also lurched away from the tear gas, reluctantly following Pulaski. “He’s… right. For once, the Senator seems to be doing the smart thing. Score another point for your wonderful system, van Dyckman.” He ran blindly, reaching out to feel the granite walls. “Harris told us this tunnel intersects with the one that leads down to the lower level. We can get out that way, and we’ll be away from the gas.”
Although Adonia could barely breathe herself, she clung to Harris’s instructions. She was in charge of these people, but the tear gas defense didn’t make sense. Security countermeasures were supposed to drive people toward an exit, to get them out of the facility in a dangerous situation, not push them deeper inside.
As the thickening gas burned her eyes, nose, and lungs, Adonia knew it would not be possible to remain in place, as Harris had instructed them. The Senator’s panicked retreat seemed more and more reasonable as the irritating gas thickened.
Coughing uncontrollably, van Dyckman hobbled after the two. “Get to the intersection with the incline,” he called ahead in a hoarse voice. “It’s another way to reach the main corridor, as well as the lower level. The system is working. It’s just a temporary glitch, but we have to wait it out… where we can breathe.”
Undersecretary Doyle followed them, while Adonia smeared her hands over the tears that flowed from her eyes, stubbornly hoping that Harris would cut off the gas and open the vault door as he had promised. They couldn’t wait any longer.
Shawn grabbed her elbow. “They’re right… and you’re responsible for their safety. Let’s go.”
The plumes of gas were like a toxic fog, still hissing into the confined tunnel and swirling around the vault door. No exit there. Unable to stand it any longer, Adonia and Shawn staggered away, following the others deeper into the facility.
They passed Mrs. Garcia’s closed storage chamber, and Adonia hoped the technician was safe from the noxious fumes. “We might have been better off sealed in there with her.” She coughed.
“No thanks,” Shawn said. “At least this way we can keep moving, get somewhere safe.”
Behind her, in addition to the clanging alarm, a new ear-splitting siren went off, making her whole body shake. She didn’t recognize the distinctive tone as any standard alarm employed by the DOE. Maybe it was one of the old military countermeasures still functioning in the facility. But this was far worse than any alarm signal; it seemed to pierce her entire being. She pressed her hands against her ears as she careened forward. It wasn’t an alert; maybe some kind of sonic weapon?
The siren was only one component of the devilish cacophony. A deep, low reverberation rolled down the tunnel, an invisible force driving them from the vault door. Her entire body thrummed with the subsonic frequency, down to the marrow of her bones. The sound came in slow, crashing pulses, growing worse.
On the other end of the frequency spectrum, she barely detected a sharp, needle-like noise that pushed her eardrums to the edge of bursting. The ultrasonic dissonance seemed to slice through her head. This was a full-spectrum, multifrequency sonic attack!
She had no chance to think, could not choose where to go. She could only react. The sonic barrage drove her away, and she instinctively fled, anything to escape the overwhelming noise. She gasped for breath as the low subsonics seemed to squeeze the air out of her lungs, while the mid-range and higher frequencies shook her body, pierced her skull.
She could barely think through the pounding, shrieking pain. With her eyes burning from the tear gas, Adonia saw the others in front of her careening from one side of the tunnel to the other, like drunken partygoers.
Forcing some small amount of control, Shawn urged them faster, pushing them along, but no one paid attention. Senator Pulaski screamed wordlessly as he staggered along, his eyes closed, shaking his head back and forth.
Still pressing her hands to her ears, Adonia crowded in among the rest of the group as they kept trying to escape the noise. Shawn yelled something, but Adonia couldn’t make out what he said over the cacophony.
When she tore her hands from her ears, she realized that trying to muffle the noise had not worked at all. The harsh dissonance hammered through her palms as if they were tissue paper. Maybe her eardrums had already burst, but with the incredible sonic pain, it didn’t seem to matter anymore.
She collided with van Dyckman and Garibaldi, pushing them to hurry. Her ex-boss tripped and stumbled to the concrete floor, but the older scientist grabbed him, helped him forward.
As they moved farther from the main vault door, Adonia thought the insane noise decreased, at least marginally. Positive reinforcement? Slowly, step after step as they careened down the tunnel away from the main corridor, the hammering pulses abated. For some reason they were being herded away from the vault door, by countermeasures that must have been designed to drive intruders to a holding area or interception point. Maybe that was where they were headed. She didn’t care. She just needed to get away from the barrage, to find some shelter, some respite from the attack. She and her fellow team members weren’t aggressors or intruders, but the system couldn’t differentiate among its targets.
Ahead, Senator Pulaski crumpled to the floor, and Shawn bent to help him up, even though the big man outweighed him by fifty pounds. Pulaski resisted, kicking out with his feet, as if he just wanted to curl up and die.
Barely able to see, Adonia shoved van Dyckman and Garibaldi forward to join Victoria. Helping Shawn with the Senator, she yelled in his ear. “Keep moving! The noise will grow louder unless we keep going forward.” The countermeasures would ratchet up until they went in the desired direction. The intent of the system was clear.
Together, they grabbed the squirming Senator. Shawn worked his hands under Pulaski’s shoulders, and he and Adonia strained to lift the big man up. They staggered forward.
As the merciless sonic barrage continued, they worked their way down the tunnel. Van Dyckman, Doyle, and Garibaldi all stumbled forward, not knowing where they were going, just heading away from the gas and the infernal noise.
Shawn and Adonia plodded along with the Senator in tow. She suspected the man would have died there if they’d left him. Old military countermeasures didn’t have much of a humanitarian bent.
Even with the sheer reactive need to escape the hammering pain, Adonia felt increasing panic. This couldn’t possibly be a test, or even a routine lockdown. She feared that Pulaski’s cell phone signal had caused a catastrophic overload while the Mountain was in lockdown.
But what if there was some real outside emergency, like the extremist attack on Granite Bay? A significant threat to Hydra Mountain, and they just happened to be caught in the middle? What was Rob Harris responding to?
In their frantic escape, they passed numerous oval vault doors of sealed dry-storage chambers on alternating sides of the tunnel. Adonia didn’t know how far they had run from the noise or where they were supposed to go.
Almost imperceptibly, the alarms decreased in intensity. When the haggard group slowed to a stop, pausing and panting, the sound naggingly increased again, spiraling up in volume, driving them onward again. “Must be motion sensors embedded in the walls,” Adonia shouted. “We have to keep going.”