The old man reversed course and sprinted across the square. He ran down the blockhouse steps and through its open door. His boots splashed in the faintly glowing puddles on the floor of the central hallway. As he ran, he ducked and dodged the dangling, rusting light fixtures. The smell of mildew and rot was almost overpowering.
Doc charged into the first room he came to, skidding on the concrete floor. Before him was a row of squat, heavy-looking machines. They looked like pumps of some kind. In the dim light, he quickly examined them. Yes, they were definitely pumps. He located the starter switch on one of them and depressed it. Nothing happened.
He tried the others with same result. He kicked aside some of the debris from the fallen tile ceiling and saw the thick electrical cable on the floor. They were electric powered.
There was no generator in the room. The wall opposite the hallway was laced with rows of heavy pipe. He scanned the various dials and gauges set at intervals along the wall. Some had cracked faces and missing indicators. All the others read zero. The system was off-line, either because it was simply broken, or because of the lack of operating power.
Doc was slammed by a crushing sense of hopelessness. Without a blueprint or a schematic of some kind, how was he ever going to figure it out? He smothered the thought and moved on. If there was a generator in the building, he had to find it.
And quickly.
It wasn’t in the next room he checked, but in the one after it. There was no mistaking it, either. It was the size of four refrigerators, stacked one on top of the other. Doc located the ignition switch, pressed it and got nothing. If there was a battery in the system, it was long dead. The pull-start rope produced nothing, although the engine did turn over.
He found the generator’s gas tank and discovered the root of the problem. It was empty.
“Hell’s fire!” he cursed, slamming his fist on top of the tank.
He knew that whitecoats sitting on a biological time bomb wouldn’t leave themselves a single way to deactivate it. They wouldn’t completely depend on electrical power that could be shut off at a critical moment by any number of mechanical failures. There had to be a more direct method. He thought about the lake above, and the pressure of thousands of tons of water. Perhaps the deactivation system was gravity powered. Perhaps it could use the water pressure to physically or hydraulically move a barrier out of the way.
Doc rushed on. Now that he had a clue what he was looking for, he wasted no time on the offices where it appeared people had been living. The last room in the corridor had more of the squat pumps, and the pipes along its wall were much bigger in diameter.
When he saw the red steel wheel, and the sign above it, he knew he had found the drain plug. The wheel was part of a massive valve set in a bend in a thick pipe. The peeling red-on-white sign was stained with rust but it was still legible. It read: Extreme Danger: Emergency Use Only! System Test and Certification Required Every Thirty Days. Secure Escape Route And Evacuate All Downstream Personnel Before Operating Valve.
There was a dusty clipboard hanging on a hook below the valve. The faded top page was a maintenance record. It’d been almost a hundred years since the system had been checked and certified.
Not that that mattered. It either worked or it didn’t.
And there was no way to evacuate anybody.
Doc untwisted a loop of steel wire that locked the rim of the wheel to the valve. When he tried to turn the wheel, it wouldn’t budge. He jammed his sword-stick through the spokes and used it like a lever.
With a crack and a creak the wheel moved an inch or two, then the turning became easy. From somewhere on the other side of the wall came a squeal. The squeal grew louder as he spun the valve open.
Then something boomed. The floor rocked violently and the air was ripped by a deafening noise. The roar sounded as if he had just unleashed Niagara Falls.