Jack the Overlander

Thirteen (Part 3)

Gregor tore through the pristine halls of the power plant, the red lights and alarms screaming all around him. His right hand grasped his sword, drawn on instinct; his left held Luxa's arm, helping her to keep up with his breakneck pace. Originally, he'd planned on finding Hornfels, and, if he was somehow incapacitated, making sure the reactor blew up. It had been a noble, if impulsive, reaction to the sudden blare of the alarms. Now, though, with the floor rumbling and the distant sounds of collapsing stone, Gregor realized he was already too late. The destruction of the plant had already begun, and now he and Luxa were stuck on the wrong side of the entrance. His priority shifted from aiding Hornfels to getting himself and Luxa out of the building alive.

It was massive, too, and there were no windows anywhere. Hallway after hallway, junction after junction. Just the spotless white walls and the dim red flashing of the alarm lights. He felt like a rat in a maze. Turning corner after corner, he began to panic. He could feel the floor trembling beneath his feet now. "Oh, man!" he thought. What had he imagined he was going to do up here? And now we was going to die, truly, actually, not like when he'd fought the Bane was really, irreversibly.

"Gregor!" Luxa shouted. She wrenched her arm from him and reversed who was holding who. "It says 'EXIT'!"

Gregor whipped around and stumbled after her. He saw the sign, the neon-red word camouflaged in the flashing of the alarms. The pair pelted towards the sign, descended a short staircase and found themselves facing a single, white door. Gregor mashed his hands onto the handle and yanked. Pain shot through his wrist. Locked.

A chunk of ceiling hit the ground next to him. Swearing, he lashed out at the handle with his sword, which remained solid and rattled disparagingly at him.

He felt something slide from his belt. Luxa had his dagger — Solovet's dagger. She sliced as he had and the blade notched into the handle uselessly.

"Here!" Gregor bellowed. He snatched the hilt from her hand, yanked the blade from the handle, and drove it along the crack between the door and the wall. He felt the lock sever and the door lurched open.

Adrenaline still pumping, he took Luxa's arm again and they hurtled through the door. Immediately, he registered two things. One, it was darker outside than in the plant. Two, he was completely immersed in liquid ice. Water rushed over him. His brain was freezing. He thrust his legs and arms and came to the surface, water flying into the night air around him. Images of ice, sharp and clear, receded to the edges of his consciousness. He became aware of the blessed warmth above the surface. He was treading water, floating, a buoy in the liquid, a thermometer in liquid nitrogen. Luxa was beside him, hair plastered everywhere, ghostly white. There was the plant, behind him. The door had been an emergency exit. They'd fallen in a lake — the lake, which the plant was positioned over.

The sound of the alarms issuing through the door reminded him: the plant was about to explode.

"Swim!"

He struggled to slap his body into submission. His muscles felt jerky, still pumping with adrenaline but rapidly numbing from the terrible, terrible cold. He was freezing. He couldn't think of anything except going forward, getting as far as he could through the morass of electric cold. He had to keep moving, because he had to get away from the plant.

Luxa was still beside him, swimming. His face was smacked repeatedly with douses of water. Suddenly a signal passed up through the blocks that were his legs: ground. He was walking, neck-deep, waist-deep, knee-deep. Luxa was emerging from the water next to him, shaking violently. He was shaking violently. The water was down to his ankles. It was gone. His feet were gone. He could feel nothing, nothing but the air around him, coasting into his clothes and frosting them, evilly —

The plant exploded. Gregor fell forward onto the beach, and a crash of water cascaded over him, a reminder of how much warmer the cold air was than the lake. Fire shot into the sky behind them. The lake was swirling in, collapsing, like a whirlpool. He'd seen water like that before. Twitchtip...

Gregor forced his knees under his body. He wobbled over to Luxa on his hands and knees, grabbed her, hoisted her up. They fled, lopsided and numb, a pair of fugitives deserting the scene of the crime. They stumbled and leapt and staggered to a line of trees and plunged inside. The light from the plant faded into darkness. The chirpings of a forest at night rose to replace it. Luxa's skin was wet and cold next to him. His skin was wet and cold. His clothes were constraints, dreadful freezing weights that hung on his body. It was so cold. So cold.

For fifteen minutes, they rambled on through the woods. Gregor didn't know what he was doing. Where was he leading them? Luxa's breathing was fast and shallow, her lungs constricted by the icy chill. Suddenly, they burst forth from the line of trees. There was a road — a black, paved Overland road — stretching across in front of them. For unknown reasons, the sight of the road blasted Gregor like a moving train and he stopped, holding Luxa to him for warmth. He regained his senses.

Right in front of them, a boulevard branched off of the main road. Middle-class homes lined the street. He saw a Canadian flag tethered to a pole. They were in Canada.

It was bad, though. He was getting weaker by the moment. Numb, shaking, dripping, and so very, very cold. How long did it take a person to catch hypothermia, and then to die? There was no snow anywhere, but it was nighttime, and it was colder at night. The air, a warm gust as he had left the waters of the lake, had quickly transformed into a cruel sheet that washed through his clothes, plastering them to his body, chilling him inside and out.

"C-com-me on," he chattered. They were out of options.

Up the street they went. Gregor steered them into a driveway, then onto the concrete walking path. Even in his state of fear and exhaustion, uncertainty threatened to blind him as he walked up the path. He stopped in front of the wooden door, which loomed over him like the mother of all evils. Here he was, a strong young man, showing up at some random dude's doorstep in the middle of the night. He was soaked to the bone, dressed in alien clothes and probably looked about as completely out-of-place as it was possible to look. And that wasn't even considering Luxa's appearance.

On a bat, you could always retreat and form a better plan. Here, now, every second threatened to steal their fingers and toes and then their entire bodies. Freeze them off, unmoving blocks of iron-hard matter.

He knocked.