Chapter 8 - The Sluice Gate

The warning klaxon on the drydock wall began to wail—a deep, oscillating horn that shook the concrete beneath our feet.

CLANG-CLANG-CLANG.

High above on the exterior bulkhead, the massive hydraulic intake valves began to turn. The groan of eighty-year-old cast iron fighting against twenty feet of harbor water pressure vibrated through the foundation.

"Move!" Tobias shouted, abandoning the drill and grabbing the pelican case.

We scrambled out from behind the pillar just as a six-inch jet of black harbor water burst through the rusted seams of the lower intake hatch, spraying across the concrete floor with the force of a firehose.

The water was already rising around our ankles—freezing, oily, and thick with harbor sludge.

"The bypass tunnel!" I yelled over the deafening roar of the pumps. "Where does it lead?"

"To the old coal bunker beneath Pier 7!" Tobias dragged me toward a narrow iron ladder set into the vertical wall of the drainage sump. "Climb!"

I grabbed the rusted rungs. The cold iron bit into my palms, sending sharp spasms through my numb fingers. Every muscle in my forearms screamed, the chelation pills fighting the toxins in my blood, making my stomach convulse with dry heaves.

I climbed three rungs before my right foot slipped on a patch of wet slime.

I fell backward, my hip slamming hard against the concrete lip of the sump.

Below me, the main sluice gate buckled with a deafening screech of tearing rivets. A wall of black water, eight feet high, roared into the chamber, sweeping away the wooden pallets and toolboxes like matchsticks.

Tobias dropped down from the ladder, caught me by the collar of my fleece, and hauled me upward with a single, brutal heave of his back just as the freezing torrent crashed over the bottom rungs.

We pulled ourselves onto the upper catwalk just as the heavy steel emergency flood door slammed shut behind us, locking with a hydraulic hiss.

In the sudden, muffled quiet of the coal bunker, the red emergency light on the wall flickered to life.

Standing ten feet in front of us, holding a silver semi-automatic pistol leveled directly at Tobias’s chest, was Penelope.

NEXT CHAPTER 👉 👉 👉

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