The CRES code

Chapter Three - The Second Awakening

He was choking!

Fluid covered his face, covered his whole body. There was a mask on his face and a tube going down his throat, choking him, suffocating him! He reached a hand up to it, intending to pull it out, and his hand bumped against a hard surface above him.

His eyes flew open in alarm. Everything was dark! He felt the hard surface above him, pushed upwards against it. It wouldn't budge. Wild panic threatened to overwhelm him. He'd been buried alive! Left to die at the bottom of a deep, forgotten grave...

No, wait, he found himself thinking. This is familiar. I've been here before. What... When...

I'm in a hypersleep cubicle! Relief flooded through him. He allowed himself to relax, to lay back down on the hard surface and wait for an attendant to help him out.

The last time, there'd been a window in the cover. That doctor, what had been his name? Wilson. Wilson had opened it to look in at him. Randall waited for that to happen, but it didn't. He remained in darkness, immersed in fluid that was still uncomfortably cold.

The hell with this, he thought at last. He reached up and pushed against the lid. It remained stubbornly closed, though. Probably locked from the outside. A feeling of panic began to steal over him. Could his enemies have found him again? Maybe just killing him wasn't enough. They wanted him to suffer, so they'd woken him up and then left him in the locked cubicle, the life support system keeping him alive for days and weeks and years until he went mad...

He pushed at the lid again with no more success than before. He pushed again with every ounce of strength he possessed but there was no movement in the lid at all. His heart began pounding faster as he fell closer to panic. He began pounding on the lid. He couldn't even scream with the tube down his throat...

Suddenly there was a click and the lid swung slowly upwards with well oiled efficiency. Randall threw himself upwards and scrambled over the side before it could close, trapping him inside again. He landed hard on the tiled floor, gasping with exertion and relief, and his hands flew to the strap holding the mask in place over his face.

The mask came free, and then he was pulling the tube up out of his throat. He retched and coughed as it slowly came out one inch at a time, and then he threw it across the room. He sucked in great breaths of air as his diseased body trembled and shivered. Where were the doctors? By God, but someone would pay for leaving him alone like this!

The floor was wet, he found, and the room was almost in darkness. Of the thirty or so flourescent lights in the ceiling, only three were working, but it was enough for him to see that there were nineteen more hypersleep cubicles in the room. They all had their lids open, and he could see movement in one of them where someone was trying to climb out. Randall climbed carefully to his feet, using his own cabinet for support. "Hello!" he called out. "Hello! Is anyone there?"

The facility had suffered some kind of malfunction, it seemed, and the system's emergency procedures had woken everyone up early. Another attack? Had his enemies found him again? Got to get out of here, he thought. Lose myself before they find me.

He staggered across the room, leaning against every cubicle he passed as he went. He looked into one of them as he passed it and saw an elderly man lying in the liquid, the mask still over his face. The display on the support machine showed no metabolic output. Not even the minuscule amount of a man in hypersleep. The man was dead.

So were the next two he passed, but the next contained the person trying to climb out. A young woman in her late teens or early twenties. Good looking, if he had the time to think of such things. Right now, though, he just had to get out of there. Find somewhere to hide. It occurred to him that it might not be him the attackers were looking for. The place was full of criminals, after all. Any one of them might be the target. They would probably want to eliminate any witnesses, though, so he still had to escape, and quickly.