Chapter 7 - The Extraction
The temperature inside the vault was dropping rapidly as the automated emergency cooling systems kicked into overdrive to combat the breach. My breath blossomed into thick white clouds in the dim light of Jordan’s flashlight.
"The air duct," Jordan said, pointing his flashlight toward a heavy aluminum ventilation shaft near the ceiling of the rear wall. "It connects to the main exhaust tower on the roof. If we can breach the grate, we can bypass the hallway entirely."
"Victor, get up," I snapped, grabbing my breaching tool and wedging the hardened steel blade under the frame of the vent.
"I can't... I can't climb that!" Victor cried, shivering violently against the cold floor. "My legs are frozen, Aaron! Please, don't leave me here!"
"You're going up that shaft if I have to throw you up it," I said, slamming the pommel of the tool against the aluminum until the rivets sheared off with loud pops. The grate fell away, revealing a vertical metal tunnel leading upward into the dark.
From inside the tunnel, the scratching sound grew louder.
"Jordan, give me the thermal unit," I said.
Jordan handed me the nozzle. I aimed it directly up the vertical shaft and pulled the trigger for three full seconds. A column of intense, superheated air roared up the duct, incinerating the preliminary wave of parasites that had begun descending from the roof units.
"Move! Now!" I shoved Victor toward the opening.
Driven by the pure, desperate fear of being burned alive or eaten, Victor scrambled up into the shaft, his knees and elbows scraping frantically against the sheet metal. Jordan followed immediately behind him, securing our gear bags.
I climbed in last, reaching back down to throw the thermal spray canister against the vault floor, setting it to auto-discharge a continuous wall of heat behind us to seal the shaft.
We crawled through the dark, cramped metal tube for ten agonizing minutes, the heat from the lower level rising behind us like a furnace, while the freezing mountain air pulled us forward.
Finally, with a heavy kick, Jordan smashed open the exterior louvers of the roof exhaust tower.
We spilled out onto the gravel surface of the bunker roof into the torrential downpour of the West Virginia night.
Down in the parking lot below, blue and red emergency lights were flashing through the trees. A convoy of twelve armored Homeland Security vehicles, led by Agent Marcus Cole, had just broken through the front gate, their floodlights sweeping the complex.
"Aaron!" Cole's voice boomed through a loudspeaker from the ground below. "We have the perimeter secured! Stand down!"
I reached into my vest, feeling the cool, hard steel of the four syringes containing Compound 9 intact against my chest.
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I looked at Victor, who was lying on his back on the gravel roof, weeping hysterically into the rain, his soul completely broken by the nightmare he had helped create.
"He's all yours, Agent Cole!" I shouted down into the storm. "I have what I came for!"
