Want To Play? (Monkeewrench)

45

‘Roadrunner, Harley?’ Grace said quietly. ‘I just got another message.’

Harley and Roadrunner tore over to her desk and hovered over either shoulder to look at her monitor.

‘Open it, Grace,’ Harley said.

Grace clicked the mouse and a single message line appeared on the screen:

I DIDN’T WANT TO HAVE TO DO THIS

‘Jesus,’ Roadrunner whispered. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

Suddenly the lights in the office snapped out and the monitor flickered. The e-mail disappeared and was replaced by a blue screen. A few seconds later, the monitor started drawing a power grid schematic.

‘Power failure warning.’ Roadrunner stated the obvious.

‘Lot of good that does,’ Harley said. ‘We already know the power failed.’

‘Says the main isn’t receiving power,’ Grace said. ‘What exactly does that mean?’

‘Means there’s probably a big trunk line outage somewhere,’ Harley said. ‘Shit. It could be a while.’

He walked over to the windows and opened the louvered blinds, for all the good it did. The sun was behind a black wall of clouds that looked like they weren’t going anywhere soon. ‘Darkest goddamned day of the year and we lose power.’

‘Why isn’t the generator kicking in?’ Grace asked. ‘I thought we had it set up to take over automatically.’

Harley shrugged. ‘Who knows? We’ve probably never had the thing running or serviced since we got it. It’s like a car battery – use it or lose it. I’ll go down and take a look. Roadrunner, how much battery time do we have on the computers?’

‘Around two hours.’

‘I’ll report it to the power company and start making backups of our drives,’ Grace said. ‘You guys go see if you can’t get the generator running.’

‘Where the hell is the generator, anyhow?’ Roadrunner asked.

‘It’s in the power room in the garage.’

Roadrunner looked confused.

Harley rolled his eyes. ‘Didn’t you ever notice the door with the big yellow high-voltage sign on it . . . never mind. You’re hopeless. Come on, let’s go.’

‘But the elevator runs on electricity.’

Harley sighed impatiently. ‘The stairs, Roadrunner.’

‘Oh yeah.’

Roadrunner had reluctantly taken the lead down the dark stairwell, carefully mincing a slow side step to accommodate his size-fourteen feet. But the farther down they descended, the darker and more tomb-like the stairwell became and the more nervous he got.

‘Damnit,’ Harley barked suddenly, his voice reverberating in the concrete sarcophagus and nearly sending Roadrunner into the next world.

‘WHAT?!’ Roadrunner shrieked.

Harley paused to peel a big, sticky cobweb out of his beard. ‘Spiders. Sorry, buddy, didn’t mean to scare you. It’s just hard to remember all your phobias.’

‘You’re telling me you’re not creeped out by this?’ he asked angrily.

‘Oh, I’m plenty creeped out, don’t you worry.’

‘Well, I can’t see a damn thing,’ Roadrunner complained. He reached up and smacked one of the dark, wall-mounted light fixtures as if his ire could produce light. ‘And what about these? Aren’t they the glowy things that are supposed to stay on all the time?’

‘Yes, but the glowy things operate on battery and if you don’t change the batteries, they stop glowing eventually,’ Harley said in a tone more suitable for a toddler.

‘We need a flashlight. Why didn’t we bring a flashlight?’

‘Because we’re stupid. And don’t even think of asking me to run up and get one. Just keep moving. There’s a deputy down here somewhere and cops always carry those big-ass five-trillion-candlepower flashlights.’

Roadrunner was suddenly seized by a volley of sneezes that could have qualified him for the Guinness record book.

‘Jesus, you okay?’ Harley asked when he’d finally finished.

Roadrunner sniffled, then moved forward again. ‘Yeah. But somebody needs to clean this place out,’ he said in a nasal voice. ‘There’s enough dust in here to plant a garden.’

Harley grunted as one of his lug-soled motorcycle boots caught on a concrete riser. When he reached out to grab the railing for support he made contact with something furry. ‘Fuck!’ he squealed, snatching his hand back and holding it close to his chest. ‘Don’t touch anything. I think I just felt up a rodent.’

Roadrunner sneezed again. ‘This place is hermetically sealed. If a rodent ever managed to get in here, it’d be dead by now.’

‘Oh yeah? So what else is furry, the size of Rhode Island, and has a heartbeat?’

‘Probably just a spore cluster.’

‘What the fuck’s a spore cluster?’

‘I don’t know. The stuff that’s making me sneeze.’

‘You just keep telling yourself that, Roadrunner.’

‘We should have brought a flashlight.’

‘Shut up. Where the fuck is the door?’

‘You say “fuck” a lot when you’re nervous.’

‘Who’s nervous?’

There was a hollow thunk as Roadrunner collided with the steel door. ‘Ouch.’

‘Good job. You found the door.’

Roadrunner pushed on the steel bar and the door swung open onto the garage, which was even darker than the stairwell had been.

‘Deputy Mueller?’ Harley called out. The only answer was his own echo. ‘Deputy? Are you down here?’ More silence.

‘If she were here, she wouldn’t be sitting quietly in the dark waiting to ambush us,’ Roadrunner said.

‘Good point. So she’s not down here. Probably took off when the lights went out. We’re going to have to do this without light.’ He paused, imagining the layout of the garage in his mind. ‘Okay, the generator room is directly across from us, on the other side of the garage,’ Harley said. ‘Grab onto my shirt and we’ll grope our way down the wall.’

Roadrunner clamped onto Harley with a death grip and shuffled behind him blindly. ‘Ick. The floor is sticky. Is your hog leaking oil again?’

‘My hog has never leaked oil. Okay, we’re here.’ He dug in his jacket pocket, pulled out his key ring, and started feeling each one, searching for the small padlock key. ‘What I’d like to know is why we have a padlock on the generator room. It’s not like anyone is going to steal a two-thousand-pound chunk of metal.’

He finally found the right key, popped the padlock, and opened the door.

The power room was even blacker than the rest of the garage, if such a thing were possible. It took a moment for their eyes to find the hulking form of the generator in the corner. They clambered over to it, trying to decipher its parts with their hands.

‘So what am I feeling for?’ Roadrunner asked.

Harley scratched his beard. ‘Check the cords, connections, and let me know if you find any buttons. I think this thing is supposed to have a reset switch on it somewhere.’

Roadrunner reached out blindly and found a dangling cable that seemed like it should be connected to something, but what did he know? He’d failed shop class in high school two years in a row before the frustrated teacher had finally given him a passing grade in exchange for help with what had then been a state-of-the-art Kay-Pro computer.

As he maneuvered around the generator to get a better grip on the cable, his head connected painfully with a very sharp metal object attached to the wall. ‘Ooowww!’ he squawked, stumbling back and holding his head.

‘God, you’re a klutz. You’re going to end up killing yourself one day.’

‘Hey, it’s dark, okay?’

‘What did you run into?’

Roadrunner reached out and felt the offending piece of metal. ‘It’s . . . a metal box. On the wall.’

‘That’s the breaker box. Hey, good idea. Maybe we just tripped something.’

‘Yeah. That’s what I was thinking. That’s why I just gashed my head on it,’ Roadrunner grumbled.

Harley squeezed next to Roadrunner and felt around for the box. ‘Okay. I found it.’ He pulled open the cover and started feeling around inside. ‘I can’t see shit, but one of the switches is facing a different direction.’

There was a click and suddenly the lights blazed on. ‘YES!’ Harley shouted victoriously.

‘Thank God . . .’

And then the door to the room slammed shut on them with a deafening metallic thud.

‘Oh shit!’ Roadrunner panicked.

‘Don’t worry, buddy. Door doesn’t lock automatically. Against code. Here, I’ll show you.’ He walked over and reached for the handle.

Outside the generator room, a pair of gloved hands slipped the padlock through the hasp and snapped it shut.