Page 32 of Almost Midnight (Vampire Detective Midnight #8)

CHAPTER 32

THE COUNTDOWN

The suit immediately felt compressed.

Nick couldn’t smell anything from inside the suit, but the air was murky, dense, like walking through a cloud of fine iron filings. He felt disturbed by the weight of it, and the weight of the suit itself.

But they didn’t have much time to adjust.

The armored van supposedly had a decompression system in the event they had to go back inside. It would suck all of the radioactive matter out of the ventilation shafts, soak them in some kind of chemical to kill the reactions, then they were supposed to ditch the suits and leave them in a chute at the back.

The science team went over all of it before they left the hangar inside the bubble.

Now, Nick wondered if they would need to use it.

It seemed inconceivable they could get far enough in eighteen minutes to know whether the cave would even be accessible.

He turned to the others, and saw strange looks on their faces, probably similar to his own. They grimaced and lifted their limbs carefully, testing out the suit, and pretty much all of them looked freaked out, if not completely terrified.

Nick didn’t blame them.

The radiation would take a lot longer to kill him, but Nick had zero doubt it would kill him, if he got enough exposure. His survival instincts were pinging off the charts, just standing outside the vehicle.

He switched on his headset inside the suit.

“We need to move,” he said, his voice measured. “Everyone okay?”

No one answered him exactly, but he saw nods, some of them a little too adamant to be wholly convincing. Nick kept his voice as calm as possible.

“Follow me,” he said. “We’ll get as far as we can until we hit the halfway mark. If it looks unlikely, or even questionable, that we’ll make it all the way through, we’ll come back. Everyone understand?”

That time, he got murmured yeses through the speaker in his suit.

He felt himself calm down marginally.

He turned to Jordan. “You take up the rear, man. All right? You and I aren’t exactly immune to this, but we’re stronger than any of them. Okay?”

Jordan looked at him. His crystal eyes were still shocking, even to Nick, who still expected to see the man’s previous brown-colored irises. Jordan used to have eyes with some enhancement from organic lenses, but as part of his vampire transformation, those had been forced out of his head by his reconstituted vampire flesh.

Nick was glad he hadn’t been around to see that.

All of Jordan’s bionic-type enhancements had been purged from his body by the venom of his sire and his new vampire blood.

Now Jordan’s cracked-crystal eyes held a tinge of scarlet again, but Nick doubted it was because the other vampire was hungry. Pure survival instinct shone there; the suit and the toxic air were likely bringing up a form of aggression driven by fear for his life.

Nick could relate.

If he’d been a younger vampire himself, his eyes would probably be doing the same thing. As it was, he clamped as much control over his mind, instincts, and emotions as he could. Like it or not, he was responsible for these people.

He had to get them through this intact.

One way or another.

Nick began walking up the rocky slope towards the opening in the mountain.

It felt excruciatingly slow.

He took each step carefully, though, and talked the others through doing the same. They couldn’t afford to have anyone trip and fall down. The science team had been adamant that the most shielded part of their suits, by far, was the soles of the boots. They were heavily reinforced due to their need to be directly on the radiation-infused ground.

So Nick walked steadily but slowly, and not only by vampire standards.

He made his way, step by step, to the place where two massive slabs of rock leaned against one another, leaving a narrow, triangular-shaped opening that Nick had to bend down to pass through.

He didn’t stop when he reached it, but immediately stooped and bent his head.

He turned his body partly sideways to keep from touching the rock on either side.

The rock itself seemed to nearly glow.

“Don’t touch anything,” he warned the others. “Keep every part of yourselves off the rock if you can. Go slow if you need to. And everyone help everyone in front of them. Warn them, if you see them about to touch the rocks.”

No one answered him aloud that time, but he knew they heard him.

Nick slid the rest of the way through the opening then, and found himself in the dark.

The inside of the cave felt bigger than the opening, thankfully.

He ignited all the lights on his arms, shoes, and the top part of his face-mask, using the voice command inside the suit.

Immediately, the cave walls around him grew visible.

Nick could still see eerie waves coming off the rock walls and floor, rippling his vision from the dense, radiation-contaminated air. It looked almost like they were boiling hot, like he’d stepped inside a volcanic cauldron. He didn’t dare get any closer to either side.

He walked further into the cave to give the others space.

Then he turned around, both to give them light, and to count bodies to make sure everyone was still with them.

He winced, grimacing, when Rose Walker, Forrest’s mother, stumbled and nearly fell into the rock wall. Forrest caught her, luckily, and gripped her arm, guiding her the rest of the way through. Everyone else walked so slowly and carefully, Nick started to get stressed out for other reasons. He checked the timepiece inside the suit, and noted they’d already used up four and a half minutes.

He watched nervously as the clock tipped under thirteen minutes left before the last person was inside.

“Okay,” he said. “We don’t have much time. We’re all going to walk forward as far as we can, then make a decision. We all decided we would continue forward if it seemed likely the cave was open the rest of the way. That said, anyone who wants to go back, anyone who gets a bad feeling…” Nick looked at Malek. “…Or changes their mind, only needs to say the word. Anyone can turn back whenever they want.”

The silence after his words felt dense.

Nick wasn’t sure what the silence meant that time.

Truthfully, he couldn’t let himself think about what it might mean.

It was too late for that, too.

He turned around slowly, and began to walk deeper into the cave.

* * *

Nick thought he was hallucinating the light at first.

Three minutes, thirty-four seconds, pulsed in the corner of his mask.

They had only three more minutes and change before they had to make up their minds whether they needed to turn around and go back out of the cave and into the armored vehicle to be decontaminated.

The corridor continued to slant downwards, at an increasingly steep angle as they walked. The angle was nerve-wracking on its own, and not only because it might be slightly tougher to walk out than it had been to walk inside.

They hadn’t hit any real obstructions yet, though.

To Nick, the lack of obstructions was almost more unnerving.

It meant they might actually risk going forward.

It also meant that, if they did, they could die before they got to the portal itself.

Or the portal might not even be there.

He wondered suddenly, whether they should turn back when they hit the time limit, even without any obstructions. Was he being foolhardy? Should they come back tomorrow, send in the drone, wait for a third or even fourth day before attempting to go all the way?

Every part of this suddenly struck him as insanely reckless.

They reached an area where a small part of the ceiling had caved in. There was plenty of room to walk around the debris, single-file, so Nick didn’t so much as slow down.

That’s when he realized the light ahead had grown brighter.

He was trying to decide if he should say something, when Malek’s voice rose in Nick’s ear inside the mask.

“I see it, too, Nick,” the prescient seer said.

“So do I,” said Tai.

“I do, as well,” Rose Walker chimed in.

Wynter didn’t speak, but Nick realized he could feel her agreement.

“If we’re going to turn back, we have forty-five seconds,” Kit said nervously.

Nick glanced at his own clock, and realized she was right.

But something about that light seemed have changed the calculation for more than just Nick. He didn’t want to be the one to say it, though. In the end, he was a coward, and didn’t want to be the one to suggest everyone he loved risk dying down here.

In the end, it was Wynter who broke that silence.

“I think we should go ahead,” she murmured.

There was a silence after she spoke.

The clock continued to count down through it, and Nick was still walking, and everyone behind him was still walking, too.

Then the clock went past the first timer, and the numbers turned orange.

Nick kept walking.

Everyone behind him kept walking with him.

* * *

He was starting to panic for real now.

Five minutes, six seconds, pulsed in the corner of his mask.

Fuck.

The light was growing brighter, but there was still no sign of the tunnel’s end. Every step they took brought them lower and deeper into the mountain, and made the light just that much brighter, but they were running out of time.

Four minutes, forty-two seconds, the light pulsed.

Nick walked right into it.

He smacked his face hard enough to completely shock himself.

He could blame the strange lighting, or the thickness of the air, or the distortion through the green-lit mask. Even so, it was jarring, if not completely off-balancing, to walk face-first into something he hadn’t seen at all, especially as a vampire.

Vampire vision, not to mention their other senses, including an ability to sense air pressure and feel objects through a process not dissimilar to echolocation, meant that running into objects just wasn’t something that happened to a vampire.

Well, not under ordinary circumstances.

This was hardly an ordinary circumstance.

The shielding from the suit sent out vibrational waves from each of their bodies, bouncing the hard metals of the radiation away to keep it from penetrating their skin, flesh and bones, and eventually killing them.

The mask was thick and organic.

This air was unlike anything Nick had ever moved through.

Whatever precise mix of those elements made Nick unable to see the glass-like wall in front of him, Nick didn’t see it. He smacked into it, and jumped back, nearly knocking over Wynter and Kit in the process.

He caught hold of his wife’s arm in one gloved hand, and Kit’s in the other.

The instant he was sure neither would fall, he let go, unsure how much radiation would be on his hands just from being in here, and unsure if he would mess up their shielding just by touching them.

He turned back to the strange, invisible wall, the instant he released them.

The light was brighter now.

That might have confused him, too.

None of them, not even the humans, needed the lights on their suits anymore, so they’d turned them all off in an effort to save power for the shielding.

Now Nick stared at what could only be a radiation dome. He saw a handprint-shaped panel on one side, and, without hesitation, stuck his hand on it.

They didn’t have time to fuck around.

He was already at the very edge of killing all of them.

Three minutes, twenty-two seconds, the light pulsed in the corner of his mask.

The numbers shone red now, and had started to tip into a darker red.

The door in front of him opened.

Nick walked forward, scanned the walls, found the next handprint panel, then exited the small chamber. He stepped all the way back, and waved the others forward sharply.

“There’s no lock,” he said, his voice hard. “Go. It’s a decontamination chamber. Fit as many of you inside as you can. Then whoever’s closest, put your hand on the panel on the right to trigger the process and open the next door.”

When Kit hesitated, Nick had to bite his lip not to bark at her.

Luckily, she seemed to grasp Nick’s panic quickly.

She lurched forward, going all the way inside and squeezing herself tight against the wall. It was obvious the chamber was only made to fit two or three people at a time, max.

Wynter tried to hold back, but Nick practically shoved her.

Go, goddamn it, he thought at her harshly. Jordan and me last. We can stand this a lot longer than any of you. You’ll be dead in under a minute if your shields fail.

She bit her tongue, and he felt anger seethe off her, but she stepped forward and crammed in next to Kit. Tai went in next, then Morley, who Malek pushed ahead of himself.

And that was it. No one else could fit, despite Tai and Kit’s size.

Morley put his hand on the inside panel, and the panel in front of Nick and the rest of them still on the outside began to close.

It closed excruciatingly slowly.

Only when it had closed entirely, then sealed with a low hiss, then hissed again as it presumably decontaminated them, did the door in front of the four inside the chamber begin to slowly open.

“Goddamn it,” Nick muttered under his breath.

Two minutes, four seconds, the clock told at Nick.

The numbers were blood red now.

When it hit two minutes, the numbers began to blink threateningly.

Slowly, the door on the other side of the chamber began to close.

Nick already had his hand on the panel on their side, but the door on their side didn’t move until the one in front of it finished closing inside the transparent frame, then sealed with a barely audible hiss.

Then, excruciatingly slowly, the door in front of Nick began to open.

“Get inside!” Nick didn’t hide his panic now.

He motioned sharply at Forrest Walker, who stood closest to the door.

The hybrid motioned his mother, Rose, inside first, then Charlie and Malek, then walked into the chamber himself last. The four of them were an even tighter fit than the first group had been.

As it turned out, they were too tight of a fit.

Forrest placed his hand on the hand-shaped panel, and the door beeped at them.

They rearranged themselves. They sucked in their breaths. They tried again.

The door beeped again.

They tried again, that time with Rose so mashed into the wall, Nick worried she might be suffocated before the doors let them out.

The door beeped again.

Forrest got out of the chamber.

“No!” Nick snarled. “Stop being a fucking hero! There’s no time!”

“Someone has to get out,” Forrest said, sounding as panicked as Nick. “Trust me, I don’t want to. But one of us fucking has to––”

“There’s no time!” Nick growled.

“None of us will make it, if we don’t!”

Without a word, Malek bent down where he stood next to Charlie.

Charlie let out a shocked yelp when the seer picked her up like she weighed as much as a doll, and placed her neatly on his shoulders. He straightened inside the tall, narrow space, and now the suited human sat on him like she was a four-year-old getting a ride from her father at the zoo. She blinked down at the rest of them, but both suits seemed to be holding.

Forty-eight seconds, the clock beeped at Nick.

“Get back in!” Nick snapped at Forrest.

The hybrid darted back inside the chamber.

That time, when he placed his hand on the panel, the door began to close.

Again, it was excruciatingly slow.

Thirty-one seconds…

Twenty-four seconds…

Sixteen seconds…

Seven seconds…

Nick watched it up until the very second the organic glass connected with the frame embedded in the wall. Then, there was a hiss as the door sealed, and relief flooded over him.

It was only him and Jordan now.

His suit started to beep at him audibly as the panel on the other side of the glass first began to slowly open. He glanced at Jordan, who returned his look with a mixture of obvious relief and nerves of his own.

Nick glanced at the beeping zero in the corner of his suit’s mask.

Only vampires on this side of the glass now.

They should be okay.

They had to be okay.

He felt it when the field on his suit began to fail.

The change was more dramatic than he was prepared for.

Some part of him thought he wouldn’t feel it that fast; or maybe, he wouldn’t feel it at all, and the damage to his body would be subtle at first. He wondered if maybe he’d just be sick later, at least until his vampire body was able to fully repair itself.

Instead, he felt it the very instant the first shield fell.

It was around his calf. The muscle immediately felt compressed, and then like it was being eaten from within. A second, even more crushing weight fell on his back when two of the shields there flickered and then died.

Nick nearly staggered as the radiation hit him there, and had to fight the impulse to put his hand out to the rock wall when the shield over his head clicked off.

He saw Jordan start to reach for the rock, and grabbed the other vampire’s suited arm.

“Don’t,” he warned. “It’ll be worse.”

Jordan looked up at him, nodded.

Through the mask, Nick saw the other vamp’s jaw had hardened, and his fangs were already beginning to extend.

Both of them turned to watch the door slowly close on the other side of the glass.

By the time it closed all the way and sealed, they were a minute and a half past the zero mark, and the clock in Nick’s suit was still counting backwards.

It showed the radiation levels in black and red spikes on a different panel.

Nick mashed his hand down on the handprint next to the glass door, and it slowly, slowly began to open.

He and Jordan stumbled inside as soon as the opening was large enough.

Nick placed his hand on the panel in there, and already, the bones and flesh of his fingers felt off.

They felt too soft, like his skin and normally marble-like vampire flesh was growing porous. He fought back a wave of revulsion at the odd sensation, and prayed like fuck the door would immediately reverse directions once he triggered the mechanism.

It didn’t.

The door opened all the way to its full span, stopped, then slowly began to close.

Nick wanted to scream.

His head hurt. His body was getting harder to hold up in the suit.

Jordan staggered while Nick watched, and leaned against the glass wall.

Both of them stared while the glass panel slowly closed.

It felt like it would take forever.

To Nick, it felt like they might already be dead.

Then there was a low hiss, loud enough inside the chamber to make him jump.

The hiss felt different inside. Nick realized it wasn’t only the doors sealing, it was something inside the room cleansing them. The second hiss hit even more strongly than the first. Something rushed over the outside of his suit, like a vacuum of air being sucked entirely out of the small space.

He immediately felt so much relief, he nearly staggered a second time.

He still felt like he might puke.

His body felt fucked up in ways he hadn’t known it was possible to feel, at least not since he’d transitioned. He was tempted to lean against the glass for real, like Jordan, but he didn’t dare take his hand off the handprint panel, even for a second.

He hadn’t even begun to think about what might be waiting for them on the other side, or who might have put the door there, or why, or how they’d managed to successfully fit the radiation-filled corridor with a state-of-the-art decontamination chamber.

He’d not even known such a chamber existed; he’d never seen one that quick and efficient in his life, despite all his years of living inside a dome, and occasionally venturing outside of it to surf and do other slightly crazy things.

Anyway, it was too late to worry about that now.

The door was already opening in front of them.

And it’s not like they’d had any choice.