Doc sat against the opposite wall from the one Jak and Krysty had spent time salting with their explosives. He shook his head, listening to the frantic crack of weapons overhead, and offered a silent prayer to his Maker for his friends left so unprotected and outmanned in the pit.
“Are you acquainted with the works of the Bard?” Doc asked.
“William Shakespeare?” Bernsen looked puzzled.
“The very man,” Doc agreed with a nod.
“He was no scientist.”
“On the contrary,” Doc said, “I believe he indeed was. And his spheres of investigation were the vagaries of the human heart versus the morality of civilization using power as a catalyst.”
“Perhaps I’ll look upon his works in time,” Bernsen.
Doc wasn’t fool enough to think the man was sincere. It was only an effort at placating him. “As the Bard said in his work The Tempest , ‘Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.’ I’ve found that, in my years, to be a most apt statement.”
“But we have a chance to get out of here,” Bernsen said. “Those people are going to get caught. In the process they’re going to get us caught, as well.”
“You cannot say that. These people are very good at what they do. You have not seen even a fraction of the perils they’ve faced together during their travels.”
“Fool’s luck.” The scientist shook his head. “You, my friend, are guilty of a most destructive false pride.”
“That shall remain to be seen, and I shall have a front-row seat.”
“THAT LOCK’S not going to hold them long.”
Dean knew that, listening to the way the scratching of the monkeys filled the bathroom. “There’s not going to be another way out of here, either. One way in, one way out.”
“Got to be,” Louis replied.
A self-light flared in the darkness, illuminating first Louis’s features, then spreading across the interior of the bathroom.
It was a big room, perhaps the biggest of its kind that Dean had ever seen. His heart pounded in his chest, causing blood to rush through his ears.
Stalls lined the wall to his left, flanked by urinals. Shattered mirrors clung haphazardly to the tiled walls. Bugs fled across the tiled floor, retreating from skeletons that were decades old and corpses that may have only been weeks in decaying.
“Up,” Louis said, holding the self-light toward the ceiling. “Mebbe some crawl space we can get through.” He cursed when the self-light burned his fingers, and dropped the flaming stick to the floor.
Dean hated being left blind in the darkness. His skin crawled at the sound of the monkeys’ nails scratching against the door.
Louis struck another self-light, then pushed his way through one of the stalls. He stood on the toilet and shoved one of the acoustic tiles out of the metal frame that formed the ceiling. Glancing down at Dean, he said, “I think we can get through here. Hurry.”
Dean hauled himself up beside Louis and caught the lip of the metal frame. It took a lot of strength to pull his body up inside. The collection of dust and odor sent him into a sneezing fit as he lay against the top of the ceiling. The floor of the next level was scarcely more than two feet above him.
“Dean,” Louis called.
Looking back, Dean saw the other boy struggling to pull himself up. Reaching down, Dean caught the vest of Louis’s body armor and yanked him through. As he passed through, Louis dropped the flaming self-light to the floor.
“See anything?” Louis asked.
“There wasn’t time,” Dean replied, choking as the dust filled his lungs.
Another self-light flared into being. Perspiration dripped down Louis’s face, glowing like pearls. “Over there.”
Dean looked, seeing the access shaft in front of them. He started for it immediately. Before he reached it, Louis dropped the self-light, but finding the entranceway to the access shaft was no problem. Dean crawled inside, then found it shifted straight up within a few feet.
Louis lit another self-light. “Can we make it?”
“I think so,” Dean said. “Be a hard climb.”
“Beats the hell out of staying down here.”
The sound of the door finally crashing inward filled the bathroom and echoed through the crawl space. An instant later brown hairy hands gripped the sides of the metal frame where Dean and Louis had come up through.
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