Chapter 4 - The Sub-Zero Clock
"No!" I screamed, turning to bolt toward the door.
My foot caught on a patch of black ice near the threshold. My cane flew from my hand, clattering across the concrete floor, and I fell hard onto my side, my injured ribs slamming into the freezing ground with an agony so intense that my vision turned completely white.
Petrov grabbed the edge of the massive steel door, his heavy boots skidding against the ice, and slammed it shut with a deafening, thunderous CLANG.
The heavy locking bar dropped into place from the outside.
Then, absolute, terrifying silence.
The red emergency flashing lights inside the room were instantly cut off as the automated security system isolated the vault. The overhead LED strips flickered twice and died, plunging Vault 4 into pitch-black darkness.
The only sound remaining was the steady, rhythmic, high-pitched hiss of the liquid nitrogen pipes circulating through the six steel containers.
-40°F.
I lay on the freezing floor, gasping for air, every breath tearing through my chest like barbed wire.
In sub-zero temperatures, exposed skin begins to suffer frostbite within three to five minutes. Hypothermia takes hold within ten. Without heavy winter gear, a human body dies in less than twenty minutes at minus forty degrees.
I didn't have twenty minutes.
My winter coat was open, my left arm was trapped inside a cloth sling, and my body was already weakened by severe concussion and blood loss from two days prior.
"Alice... calm down," I whispered to myself, my teeth already beginning to chatter uncontrollably, my breath blooming into thick white plumes in the dark. "Think. Use your head. Think like Dad."
I pushed myself up onto my knees, my fingers already going numb as I groped blindly across the ice-covered concrete floor until my hand touched the smooth aluminum shaft of my cane.
I pulled it toward me, using it to drag my body up against the cold steel face of the vault door.
There was no inner emergency release handle. Mark had removed the interior safety push-bars two years ago to prevent internal theft—a violation of OSHA regulations that I had flagged three times in my internal audits.
I took the handle of my cane and began slamming it against the heavy steel door with all the strength left in my right arm.
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
"HELP!" I screamed, my voice coming out thin, brittle, instantly swallowed by the dense, sound-dampening insulation of the walls. "I'M IN VAULT 4! HELP ME!"
Nothing.
Outside, the warehouse was insulated by three feet of solid concrete, double-pane steel panels, and miles of industrial noise reduction. No one in the main lobby—not even the state troopers—could hear me.
My fingers lost all sensation. The tips turned a waxy, terrifying white.
I fell back against the steel door, sliding down onto my rear, my body shaking so violently that my teeth clicked together like small stones.
I'm going to die here, a dark, insidious voice whispered in the back of my mind. Mark failed to kill you in the blizzard, so you came here to finish the job yourself.
"No," I choked out, tears freezing into tiny, stinging beads on my eyelashes. "No."
I looked through the darkness toward the six steel containers.
The copper pipes overhead were hissing. The liquid nitrogen was being pumped from a central compressor unit located outside the vault wall—in the main utility corridor.
If the nitrogen kept pumping, the temperature in the room would continue to drop down toward minus sixty.
But if I broke the feed lines...
I dragged myself across the floor, crawling on my hands and knees toward the first stainless-steel box. The frost on the concrete burned through my wool trousers, eating into the skin of my knees like acid.
I reached the copper pipe running down from the ceiling into the top of Container 001.
It was covered in a thick sleeve of solid white ice.
I raised my aluminum cane with both hands, took a ragged, freezing breath, and swung it with everything I had left against the copper joint.
CRACK!
The brittle, frozen metal didn't bend. It snapped cleanly like a dry twig.
A violent, roaring geyser of white nitrogen gas erupted from the broken joint, blasting into the dark room with a deafening screech!
The pressure drop triggered the emergency automated safety shutoff in the main utility room outside.
Across the room, three heavy mechanical relays clicked loudly: CLACK-CLACK-CLACK.
The hiss of the circulating gas cut off completely.
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The temperature stopped falling.
And fifty feet away, on the outer wall of the utility corridor, the automated safety cut-out valve blew open, releasing a massive cloud of pressurized white gas directly into the hallway where Detective Ortiz and the state troopers were searching the building.
