Jenny Plague-Bringer(139)

Sebastian closed the doors through which they’d entered and latched a security bar in place.

“That won’t hold them long.”

“Let’s find their exit,” Juliana said. She turned and led the way again, through the double doors. To her left was the clinic and pharmacy area for the base. To her right, the suite of offices from which Kranzler and his cohorts had ruled the base, and she went that way.

They passed the offices and reached an intersection of corridors.

“If it’s laid out like our section, the exit should be somewhere...” Sebastian pointed to their left.

“You’re right,” Mia said, still holding onto him. “But the guards are waiting for trouble, and they have machine guns. We don’t make it out alive, that’s what I see.”

“We can’t go back!” Sebastian said.

“No, they’re coming from that direction, too. We’ll die fast,” Mia agreed.

“Where can we go and survive? Hide in the offices? Can we try that?”

Mia concentrated. “You’ll die. We have to move from here!”

They ran down a side corridor, towards the network of supply and maintenance tunnels. Sebastian kept pointing to different doors, asking Mariella what she saw.

“Where do we go?” he kept asking. “That storage room? That maintenance closet?”

“That...yes! We live longer if we go in there.” Mia smiled, pointing to the door marked MAINTENANCE.

“Are you kidding?” Juliana asked.

Sebastian pulled on the door. “It’s locked!”

“Here!” Juliana threw him the keyring she’d lifted from the guard. “Maybe one will work.”

“Which one?” Sebastian started testing them, one key after another.

“It ends up being that one.” Mia picked out a key, and Sebastian skipped to it.

“Yes! Thanks!” He opened the door, and cool, dank air whirled out. “It’s a...cave.”

“The S.S. are going to gun us down in about ten seconds!” Mia told them, letting go of Sebastian and running into the open door. “Unless we go this way now!”

“I’m convinced,” Sebastian said, following Juliana into the door and closing it behind them.

They moved into a rocky cave space where the air was stale and thick. It was dimly lit by scattered electrical bulbs, and it echoed with the familiar rattling sound they’d heard every night from the ventilation panels in their rooms, only a hundred times louder. They faced a piece of machinery as big as a small house, with wide ventilation ducts running horizontally over their heads, feeding fresh air all over the administrative quadrant. The lower levels beneath the offices, she knew, were the residence and recreation areas for the officers, the scientists, the medical staff, and the administrative personnel.

A single enormous vertical duct extended from the top of the machine and vanished into the rock ceiling overhead. It would reach all the way to the surface, sucking in air from above. Juliana now fully understood why they would need such an elaborate ventilation—the air in this cave area tasted like death, with no plants anywhere to refresh it.

Sebastian opened the access panel to the machine, which was the size of a small door, and he stepped inside. Juliana leaned in for a look.

He stood in a steel-walled cavity the size of Juliana’s room down in the cellblock. A constant blast of fresh, cold air hammered down from the giant shaft to the world above, creating a windstorm that blew Sebastian’s hair back and forth across his face. A coal-powered furnace heated the air, its exhaust whisked away by a narrow duct—even in spring, the mountain air in Germany was chilly. An array of large fans all around him sucked the heated fresh air away along a tangle of aluminum ducts to feed the rooms inside the base.

“Look!” he shouted to be heard over the clanging machinery and whooshing air. He jumped up, reaching into the wide vertical duct, and then he hung there, swinging in midair, one hand out of sight. He waved with the other. “Rungs.” He dropped to the floor, his nose crinkling. “Smells like somebody cleans this duct with some nasty chemicals, too. Don’t breathe too deep in there.”

“Do the rungs go all the way up?” Juliana asked.

“It looks like it. Will we live if we go this way?” Sebastian asked, taking Mia’s hand so she could look into his future. Juliana couldn’t help resenting it.

“Maybe...it’s all confused, I can’t see...” Mia’s forehead crinkled.

“What if we stay right here?”

“They’ll hunt us down.”

“‘Confused’ sounds better to me than getting hunted down. Ladies should go first.” Sebastian held out a hand to Juliana.