“Better than an elevator?” asked Mila.
I puked over the railing’s edge in response.
This floor’s placard read “Floor 92,” and when I looked left of the landing, I noticed the stairs stopped abruptly here. The Indigo Reserves rested overhead, and must have been secured with a separate entrance.
Phoenix ushered us out of the stairwell and into the hallway. “You got the keys?” he asked Mila.
She pulled a keychain from her pocket.
“And the badge?”
She nodded again.
“Let’s move, then.”
Phoenix scanned the badge to the right of a metal door in the hall’s center and pulled a circular device from his pocket. He placed it between his upper and lower eyelids and covered his iris before pressing his face against the door’s retina scanner.
“Digital retina duplicator,” he said to me as the scanner beeped and the door clicked open. “Sparky hacked the system and downloaded Howey’s retina signature last night.”
“Couldn’t he have hacked the codes from Howey’s badge, then?” I asked.
Phoenix shook the badge in the air. “The badge contains a small blood sample. The codes are fragments of his DNA that aren’t stored on the server.”
“Right,” I said, as if storing blood droplets in ID badges made perfect sense.
The room we entered consisted of walled concrete and steel pillars. A single staircase in its center led directly to the ninety-third floor. We climbed, and at the top of this staircase, we found another door and a slab of thick glass guarding the Indigo Reserve room’s entrance.
Around us, six women in white lab coats stood flabbergasted at their workstations. The first to recover from the shock pulled a gun from under her desk. Another threw a handful of mints at us. The one with the gun shook her head and muttered, “Jesus, Trish.”
I’ve seen many movies where the hero gets shot. Usually, he’s breaking into a bank vault at the end of the movie, and some clerk behind the counter pulls out a gun and shoots him in the chest. Despite the blood that pours out of him, he manages to stanch the bleeding, continues robbing the bank, and then sleeps with the nearest blonde before receiving any medical attention. I knew this was not one of those movies.
Phoenix fired his gun twice in the air, and the Federal employee who’d been holding hers threw it across the floor, crying.
I picked the gun up off the floor.
“We need someone to give us an eye,” said Mila. “Now.”
The group of women gave more watery sobs, and I heard one of them mutter something about Trish giving up one of hers because she had a lazy one. Trish responded to this suggestion by showering the mutterer with a handful of Tic-Tacs.
Mila shook her head. “Oh, for God’s sake. You get to keep it in your head. We just need it for a minute.”
“Sorry, Trish,” muttered a woman.
An employee with black hair hurried toward the stairs and the retina scanner. “But I don’t the know codes,” she said.
Phoenix scanned the badge again and held his eye to the scanner. “We’ve got them.”
The woman placed her eye in the scanner after him. Five clicks sounded, and the door swung open.
“We needed two different retina signatures,” he explained to me as the woman ran back to her colleagues.
Behind the door, a towering warehouse five stories tall loomed. Rows of glass racks stood perfectly aligned, filled with cases of Indigo that sat undisturbed below dimmed lights. The room’s refrigeration sent a shiver down my spine as it leaked through the open door.
The vaccines were kept at a constant temperature of fifty degrees to ensure their viability. There were no workers or drones roaming the warehouses’ hundreds of rows.
We stepped inside, and the door clicked shut behind us.
Mila shook her head. “This isn’t right.”
A clock flashed 12:00. The room’s power had been recently reset. I wondered if the grand chandelier’s fall down on the seventh floor had caused it.
“You got the stuff, Meels?” asked Phoenix. She shoved her hands into her pockets and nodded. “What about you, Kai?” he said. “Check your pockets.”
I reached into my front and back pockets, and felt the lint balls I’d touched earlier. “Just these stupid things.” I moved to toss them.
“WAIT!” He grabbed my wrist. “Didn’t you learn anything from the paper clips?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I can’t trust anything around here.”
Mila rolled her eyes. “I’m pretty sure you thought that before the paper clips.”
Phoenix gripped my wrist tight in his hand. “Those are gum wrapper bombs. Altogether, they have a combined force of ten kilotons when detonated.”
“Holy shit,” I said, remembering Bertha’s comment. The others nodded. “And you wonder why I can’t trust things around here…”
Phoenix ignored my comment. “We’re going to line them along the warehouse’s left wall, spacing them equally to make the most of the blast.”
“Won’t that knock out the Indigo?” I asked.
Phoenix gestured toward my recently acquired gun. “Shoot the rack.”
“Uh… what?”
“Shoot the rack,” he said again.
I fiddled with the gun the woman had slid me, pointed it at a rack of Indigo, and fired.
Nothing. I tried to pull the trigger again.
Nothing. The stupid gun was jammed. I shook it and tried to fire again. Mila rolled her eyes. Maybe I had the safety on. I slapped its sides with my fingers.
Mila grabbed it. “Give it here before you shoot your brains out.”
She fired at the nearest rack of Indigo. The space around the rack rippled, and the bullet dropped to the floor.
“Force fields,” I muttered.
Phoenix rubbed the stray hairs on his chin. “Something of the sort.”
We lined the gum wrapper bombs along the wall, hid behind a rack farther back, and poked our heads out to watch.
I stared at the line of gum wrappers that seemed incredibly unlikely to explode. “How do we set them off?”
“It’s a somewhat scientific process, really,” said Phoenix, sucking in a breath. “Significant force must be applied to the wrapper at just the right angle to trigger an appropriate chemical reaction within its solution-soaked paper. The first bomb’s detonation will trigger a similar process in the others, instigating a chain reaction, and, subsequently, a series of detonations.”
Phoenix was really well read.
Mila shrugged. “I’m gonna shoot one until it blows.”
Phoenix nodded. “That works too.”
Mila fired at the first bundle of gum wrappers along the wall. An explosion of fire erupted. I jammed my fingers into my ears as I fell to the floor, knocked back by the chain of explosions that followed. Smoke and debris slammed against the rack’s side, but the force fields appeared, absorbing the blows and protecting both the Indigo and us. The wall the gum wrappers had been lined against wasn’t nearly as lucky: it was blown to smithereens.
My ears rang as the smoke cleared. One side of the warehouse was now exposed to open air, and the cooling system’s engines hummed furiously as they fought to keep the warehouse chilled.
Mila pointed to helicopters hovering overhead. Shit, she mouthed. Feds.
Phoenix shook his head and grinned. Not Feds, he mouthed.
Music blared and trumpets thundered as the ringing in my ears gave way to the blistering beat of mariachi music.
Big Bertha was here.