Randall woke to a trilling over his heart. The TV was on and he had an empty glass in one hand and the remote in the other. He levered himself up onto his feet and stood half dazed, circling and trying to dig the phone out of his pocket.
It was Blake. “Randall, you up? We have a situation here and I need you to come in. I’m sending you a waypoint.” “Yeah, okay, I’ll be right there.” Randall pulled on some pants and stepped into his boots while shucking his bathrobe, then grabbed a jacket, feeling for keys in the pocket.
In the truck, the map showed a destination marker in a green patch, with a 22-minute route to the nearest point accessible by road. The highway was empty and he would arrive in 15 minutes. He called Blake.
“Randall, where are you?” There was a screaming roar, like a jet engine, drowning out Blake’s voice. “We lost two guys in there, we don’t know what the hell we’re dealing with.” Randall said he was ten minutes out. “Listen, don’t tell anybody about this. We’re sealing off the whole area.”
Emergency vehicles were crowded along the access road nearest the waypoint, lights blazing. Randall held his badge out the window and someone in a uniform waved him over the shoulder and up a dirt road between the trees. The sound of radio chatter and chainsaws filled the warm summer night, and up ahead was the high-pitched, shrieking roar.
As he approached, he saw two fire trucks feeding long, lazy jets from their deluge guns into the second-story windows of a ruined building. The windows were all blown out and the upper floor was partly demolished. Chunks of masonry and metal were scattered around. A yellow glow flickered through the windows and an open doorway. Randall parked next to Blake’s van on the gravel turnaround and climbed out. It had been calm out, but now there was a breeze. He couldn’t feel any heat at this distance, but the treetops around the house were lit by the blaze.
Blake walked up and began shouting in his ear. “The call came in a couple hours ago, neighbor up the road heard a bang and saw a bright flash. I don’t know what to make of it. We’ve already poured four truckloads of water in there and it hasn’t done a thing. It had mostly burned out by the time we got here. The water isn’t coming back out either. Some kind of crater or sinkhole. And whatever’s still burning in there isn’t making any smoke—hold on, what?” He pressed an earphone against his head and started shouting into the microphone. Randall studied the building again. The trees were swaying in the wind, but he couldn’t make out any convection currents or smoke. They seemed to be leaning in toward the building, and one had fallen against it.
“We sent two guys in there with full gear,” Blake said. “We could hardly hear them over the noise, but they said they were headed to the basement. Then all at once they cut out. No radio, video, vitals, nothing. Just gone. We got Hadley going in now on a tether.”
They walked up to a small group crouching beside one of the fire trucks. One of them was unspooling a thick ribbon of yellow woven material from a ratcheting drum attached to the truck. The ribbon snaked across the gravel driveway and into the open front doorway. The breeze toward the building was constant but there was no heat. The only sound was the powerful roar from within.
Someone handed Randall a pair of headphones and he clamped them on. The sound dropped to a tolerable level, though his ears were ringing. A voice sounded in the headphones.
“Gimmie some more slack. Mostly empty in here. Floor’s blown up.” A laptop showed video of mostly unrecognizable shapes in a green monochrome, occasionally a bit of wrecked machinery, then a stairway. “Fire’s in the basement. No heat, normal atmosphere. No toxins or particulates at all. Windy as hell.” The video jerked as the drum ratcheted out a few more meters of ribbon. Then the screen went blank. “Hadley.” Blake’s voice was calm on the radio. “Hadley, come in.” He gestured to pull him in. The drum reversed and slowly took up the slack in the ribbon. It drew taut and rose off the ground between the truck and the doorway. Then it slackened and fell back to the ground. Blake grabbed the ribbon and pulled it in easily, windmilling his arms. The end snapped out the door, and Blake dragged it over and held it up. The ribbon was sheared clean across.
“The only thing that could sever that line was Hadley’s own cutter. What is going on in there?”
“Let that go and you better hold on to your ass. I’ll go full speed on the winch. Keep talking whether you can hear me or not. And go slow, we have all day.”
Dawn was at least an hour away. The fire was still glowing, but the trucks had given up spraying into the building’s shell. Randall walked across the gravel driveway, waiting at each step for the line attached to his harness to pay out.
“Pretty breezy here at the door.” Leaves whipped past him and disappeared into the building. He clicked on the spotlight and played it over an interior wall, marked by long gouges. He stepped inside.
It appeared to be a deserted, wrecked warehouse. The ceiling was warped and fractured, with rails for an overhead crane dangling from one end. The floor had partly collapsed, or been blown away, in the middle of the space, and didn’t look stable.
“There’s no loose debris anywhere. Not a splinter.” He saw the bottom half of a commode and some broken pipes sticking out of a wall, oozing water. Tool racks, workbenches, a laboratory hood. He walked along the outer wall, the roar from the lower level vibrating underfoot.
“Here’s the stairwell. Going down.” There was a bright flickering coming through a doorway below, and an immense wind flowing down. Cables, branches, and trash that had snagged on sharp edges whipped in the gale. The doorjamb below looked sandblasted, bright metal scraped clean. Randall gripped the handrail and stared down, waiting for slack on the line. The slack came, but he waited. “Cancel that. Moving on along the perimeter of the ground floor.” He picked his way along the wall where the air was quieter. At the far end he found another stairwell and looked in. It was dark down to a landing, where the concrete stairs doubled back. “Descending by southeast stairwell.”
There was another landing below and another turnaround. He tucked the spotlight under one arm and tugged at the tether to feed it between the handrails. He aimed the spotlight down and saw the lowest steps were under a rippling layer of water. “You sure you cut all the utilities?” he asked. “All the ones we know of,” Blake said. A steel door hung at an angle from one hinge at the base of the stairwell. Randall waded into the water and stepped through.
He was in a subbasement room with a low steel grate ceiling. There was equipment, boxes, gas cylinders and junk everywhere. He wrapped the tether around the arm holding the beacon and yanked some slack in the line. The environmental indicators on his visor display were all normal. He picked his way through the debris and down a short corridor, emerged into a large open space and saw the fire.
It was a gas line. The pipe stuck out from the wall and ended in a jagged tear. A foot from the end of the pipe, a brilliant blue jet began, then expanded into a dazzling tongue of orange flame streaming toward the middle of the building, reflected in the water covering the floor. It ripped and snapped like a flag in a hurricane. The sound pounded against Randall’s chest, and he felt the heat on his face. “There’s a gas fire down here. Must be a pirate tap on a main line nearby.” Blake said something in his headset he couldn’t make out. “It’s gas, cut off the gas supply.” Randall pulled on the tether but there was no slack. He kicked up some water and saw that the wind was irregular and swirling in this part of the building, not particularly strong. He walked back to the first room and yanked on the tether again but it didn’t give. He tucked the spotlight under his arm, reached to the small of his back and unclipped the line.