Chapter 6
Total darkness enveloped us, broken only by the frantic, pulsing red glow of the bio-hazard cases' LED displays.
The sound of the alarm was deafening inside the enclosed metal space, echoing off the steel walls and vibrating through my teeth. The air was already growing thin, heavy with the sharp, chemical smell of ozone and leaking refrigerant.
"Help me!" I yelled, throwing my shoulder against the locked aluminum door. It didn't budge. The industrial latches were designed to withstand highway crashes; human muscle was useless against them.
Beside me, the scarred man was on his knees, his hands frantically flying over the control panel of the nearest silver case. The scar on his face glowed blood-red in the pulsing light.
"Shut up!" he screamed, his voice cracking with sheer terror. "Shut up and let me think! If the pressure differential hits zero, the pneumatic valves will release the gas into the bus's ventilation system!"
"Where's the manual override?" I shouted over the noise, ignoring the excruciating pain in my fractured left arm. "You brought the master USB drive from Vance's terminal! Does it have the bypass protocols?"
He froze. His eyes went wide in the red gloom. "The USB... it's in my outer jacket pocket..."
I didn't ask for permission. I reached over, grabbing his coat, and ripped the small black drive out of his pocket.
"Give me that!" he lunged for me, but in the tight confines of the luggage bay, his size worked against him. I kicked out with my boot, catching him squarely in the chest and shoving him back against the rear wall of the bay.
I crawled on my belly toward the primary silver case. The LED display read:
CONTAINMENT INTEGRITY: 42%
TIME TO RUPTURE: 01:48
SYSTEM ERROR: UNQUALIFIED MANUAL PRESSURE SHIFT
Below the screen was a small, weather-sealed port marked DIAGNOSTIC ACCESS.
My hands were shaking so violently I could barely align the rectangular plug. My vision was starting to tunnel—whether from the terror, the lack of oxygen, or the early effects of a chemical leak, I couldn't tell.
01:25... 01:24... 01:23...
I shoved the USB drive into the port.
The screen flickered violently. A string of green system code began scrolling across the display at terrifying speed, overriding the red error messages.
MASTER ACCESS GRANTED - OFFICER IDENT: RICE_M_8804
ENTER DUAL-AUTHORIZATION BYPASS CODE:
"The code!" I screamed, turning back to the scarred man. "What's the dual-auth code?"
He was slumped against the spare tire at the back of the bay, clutching his throat. His breath was coming in wet, rattling gasps. "She... she changed the master key..." he whispered, his eyes rolling back in his head. "She didn't trust me... she set the timer before we even walked out to the bay..."
My heart sank into a cold, bottomless abyss.
Rice hadn't just sacrificed me. She had engineered the entire scenario to eliminate her partner as well, leaving her as the sole operative to trigger the release remotely from a safe distance once the bus was on the highway.
The display ticked down:
00:45... 00:44... 00:43...
WARNING: ATMOSPHERIC VENTILATION ENGAGED
Above our heads, I heard the faint, mechanical hum of the bus's climate control system kicking into high gear. The air intake valves were opening, preparing to suck the contents of the luggage bay up into the passenger cabin overhead.
There were forty innocent passengers sitting above us—sleepy commuters, students, mothers—completely unaware that the air coming out of the overhead vents was about to deliver a lethal dose of neurotoxin.
I looked at the silver case. I looked at my broken left arm. Then I looked at the ash-wood cane lying on the floor beside the scarred man.
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The cane wasn't solid wood. Where it had struck my arm, a long, vertical crack had opened near the handle, revealing a glint of polished steel underneath the dark varnish.
It was a sword-cane.
