Chapter 6 - THE STEAM TUNNEL
The air turned instantly bitter and dry, smelling of frozen rust. A thick, white fog of heavy gas crept across the linoleum, swirling around the wheels of my chair like dry ice. My lungs seized on the first involuntary breath, a suffocating panic clawing at my throat.
"Get low!" Carl barked, shedding his corduroy coat and using it to plug the lower vent along the north wall. "Carbon dioxide is heavier than air, but the initial blast comes from the ceiling diffusers! We have less than three minutes before the oxygen saturation drops below twelve percent!"
Rachel coughed, her hand over her mouth, her other hand frantically shaking the steel padlock on the fire door. "The latch won't budge! Carl, shoot the lock!"
"Can't!" Carl yelled through a fit of coughing, his face flushed dark red. "The ricochet in this concrete box will kill us faster than the gas! Miriam, where does the old coal chute vent to?"
Miriam was on her knees between rows six and seven of the filing cabinets, clutching her satchel, tears streaming through the dust on her cheeks. She pointed a shaking finger toward the back corner of the room, behind a massive, retired industrial air handler. "The boiler intake... it connects to the old brewery tunnel under Market Street! But it's bolted shut!"
"Not for long," Carl said.
He dragged a heavy steel microfilm cabinet toward the air handler. "Rachel, help me tip this!"
Together, they slammed the corner of the two-hundred-pound metal cabinet against the rusted hinges of the sheet-metal intake grate. The sound cracked like thunder through the small room. Once. Twice. On the third strike, the rusted bolts sheared off with a screech of tearing metal, leaving a three-foot-square opening into blackness.
A draft of freezing, damp air poured into our faces—foul-smelling, but rich with life-saving oxygen.
"Go! Miriam first!" Carl ordered.
Miriam scrambled through the opening on her hands and knees, disappearing into the dark brick pipe.
"Brianna, you're next," Rachel said, coughing violently as the fog reached her waist.
"I can't crawl through that with this cast, Rachel!" I cried, my voice raspy. "My foot won't bend!"
"You're going through if I have to drag you by your shoulders," Rachel snapped, her face fierce through the red strobe light. She didn't wait for an answer. She reached under my arms, lifting me out of the wheelchair with raw, adrenaline-fueled strength.
My bandaged foot scraped against the concrete floor. Pain exploded behind my eyes—a white-hot lightning strike that made my vision swim with black spots. I gasped, swallowing another mouthful of the biting CO2, and my head dropped onto Rachel’s shoulder.
"Carl, take her legs!" Rachel wheezed.
Carl lifted my splinted leg with careful, steady hands, sliding me backward into the cold brick tunnel. The rough mortar scraped my hips, but the air here was moving. It was the draft from the municipal storm drains.
Rachel crawled in right behind me, and Carl squeezed his broad shoulders through just as the room behind us turned into a solid white cloud of death, the gas hissing like an angry serpent.
Carl reached back, pulled the bent metal grate back into the frame, and jammed a heavy iron pry bar through the latch to prevent anyone from following us.
We lay there in the cold, wet darkness for a long minute, our ragged breaths echoing against the curved brick ceiling.
"Everyone alive?" Carl asked, his flashlight beam cutting through the damp mist.
"Alive," Rachel choked out, wiping black soot from her forehead.
I leaned my back against the wet brick, my hands trembling as they touched my stomach. The baby kicked—a firm, sudden flutter against my palm. A single sob broke from my throat, half agony, half relief. "She's okay. She's moving."
Miriam crawled over, holding out her satchel. "The records... I dropped the 1998 register, but I held onto the terminal key and Thomas’s private address book."
Carl took the small, worn leather notebook and flipped it open under the narrow beam of light. Inside the front cover, written in fading blue ink, was a single entry from November 1998:
David's trust fund: Union Terminal Locker 418. Key held by Evelyn. If anything happens to me, find Father Gregory at Holy Cross Church in Pittsburgh. He witnessed the private placement.
"Pittsburgh," Rachel said, her voice dropping. "That's three hours by car. The transit buyout meeting is at nine o'clock tomorrow morning at the county courthouse."
"We don't need to go to Pittsburgh," Carl said grimly, shining his light down the tunnel toward an iron ladder leading up to a storm sewer grate. "Marcus doesn't know we're alive. He thinks our bodies are going to be found by the morning maintenance crew. He's going to head straight to the terminal right now to empty that locker before Evelyn can double-cross him."
"How do you know that?" I asked.
"Because Marcus is a coward, Brianna," Carl said, helping Rachel pull me into a seated position on a dry utility ledge. "He knows Evelyn was willing to murder her own brother tonight. He knows that as soon as the deed transfer clears tomorrow, Evelyn will dispose of him just as easily to keep the three million dollars for herself. He needs the contents of Locker 418 as leverage against his own mother."
"Then we beat him to the terminal," Rachel said, her eyes flashing with a cold, fierce resolve I had never seen before.
"We can't go through the street," Miriam whispered, looking up at the sewer grate. "Evelyn has the county sheriff’s deputies on retainer. She’ll have them watching the perimeter of St. Jude."
"They're watching the front doors," Carl said, pointing past the ladder into the darkness where the tunnel widened into an old brick archway. "This line runs straight under the old rail yards. It comes up inside the abandoned baggage handling room of Union Terminal."
Carl climbed the iron rungs, pushed the manhole cover aside by two inches, and peered out into the rain-soaked night.
May you like
"Clear," he said, dropping back down. "Rachel, take your sister’s shoulders. We have four hundred yards of tunnel. When we come up, Marcus will already be inside the concourse."
"Let him get inside," I said, my voice hardening until the tremble disappeared completely. I looked down at the silver key resting in my palm, the cold metal biting into my skin. "He thinks I'm dead in that cellar. Let him open the door."
