You’re out of time. Move it. Make the call.
He shoveled the rest of the money into the duffel bags and zipped them up. Then he picked up the extension phone on the control console and called next door. One ring. Two rings.
“Yes.” Yes, that was definitely Tangent.
“The item is in my office,” Carson lied. “On top of the bookshelf. You go across the tarmac, into the warehouse one, and go through that building to the admin building. The doors are unlocked. Turn left, down the hall, last office on the left.”
“How do we get out of here?”
“You’ll find a sledgehammer next to the door you came in. It’s in an empty cardboard box right by the door. Knock the hinge pins off and then you can push, the door straight out.”
“Okay.” There was a pause. “Carson.”
“What?”
“Our association doesn’t have to end here, you know.”
“Yes, it does. You brought too many friends with you tonight. Otherwise, it was nice doing business with you.” I probably shouldn’t have said that, he thought as he hung up the phone, grabbed the two duffel bags, and walked over to the conveyor belt. Now they’d know he was onto them.
He got up on the motionless belt and scuttled into the safety cage, dragging the two bags, until he reached the steel batwing doors of the interbuilding aperture. He listened, and sure enough, he could hear shouts and the banging of the sledge on the front door in the feed assembly building. He also thought he heard a car engine somewhere outside. He waited impatiently, and then suddenly there was a banging and hammering noise coming through from the demil building’s front door.
They’re heee-e-re, he thought irreverently. Then, to his surprise, someone started hammering away on the connecting door between demil and the feed-assembly room. Unlike the front door, the connecting door was aluminum. That damn thing wasn’t going to hold very long.
Shit! Now what? He began to panic, especially when he became aware of someone on the other side of the aperture doors. He backed away from them as they were pushed in toward him, held only by the belt cogs. He could see through the side of the cage that whoever was using the sledgehammer on the connecting door had battered the middle of the door into an ominous bulge and was now going after the hinges. The guy in front of him was pushing and shoving, and, slowly but surely, the crack between the aperture doors was widening. He was trapped.
At that moment, he caught a glimpse through the crack of a single baleful eye in a straining red face. Almost instinctively, Carson kicked out at the doors, catching the man on the other side full in the face with the edge of the door. There was a grunt and the pushing and straining stopped.
Carson had forgotten about the belt cogs and their locking effect on the aperture doors. He had to start the conveyor belt again in order to escape. He scrambled back out of the cage and ran for the console, very conscious of what was happening to the connecting door, and of the sounds of vehicles and shouting from out in front of the demil building.
He smashed down on the button to start conveyor belt, but nothing happened. Then he remembered he had opened the breakers. Panicking now, he ran across the room to the wall that had all the breaker panels.
Frantically, he searched for the right breaker, straining to read the labels. Then he kicked himself mentally: Look for an open breaker! He finally found it in the fourth panel, reset it, and bolted back over to the main control panel. He hit the button again and the belt cranked into motion. Then he realized that they would hear the belt, which might bring the rest of the crew back into the assembly building to aid the man on the belt, whose inert form was even now pushing through the aperture doors.
Got a cure for that, he thought, hitting the main power switch for the Monster, which came to life with a reassuring roar of pumps, motors, blowers, and steel teeth. Keeping an eye on the disintegrating connecting door, he ran to the belt and hauled the two bags of money off. He waited a couple of seconds for the man’s unconscious body to come past the edge of the safety cage. Whoever he was, he was middle-aged, still red in the face, especially with that nasty gash across his forehead where the door had taken him out. He was also wearing some kind of shoulder rig.
Carson was about to haul the man’s body off the belt when the top.hinge of the connecting door came flying off in a loud crash, pinging down onto the concrete floor between his feet. Carson didn’t hesitate. He jumped onto the moving belt and crawled against the direction of the belt’s travel and through the now-unlocked aperture doors. He stopped just inside the cage on the other side, marking time on his hands and knees against the movement of the belt, until he saw another man thirty feet away complete the destruction of the connecting door and step through. The instant the man was out of sight, Carson scrambled out of the safety cage with his bags, jumped off the belt, and ran for the back of the feed-assembly room. Over the noise of the Monster, he heard one prolonged scream and then the sounds of more vehicles roaring down the tarmac with what sounded like several sets of brakes screeching to a halt. He had just about reached the very back of the feed assembly room when someone yelled from the front doorway for him to halt.
Halt, my ass, he thought as he rounded the partition of the coffee area at the back and went through the steel fire door into warehouse four, encouraged by the sound of a bullet ricocheting off the door frame. He dropped the bags, slammed the door shut, and then rolled the forklift he had prepositioned against the fire door, snubbing the back right wheel tightly against the door’s bottom. He grabbed up his bags and walked quickly, not running now. That forklift was going to buy him all the time he needed. He trotted down the first row of multitiered shelves stacked up to the ceiling. Behind him someone was banging on the fire door.
By the time he reached the door into warehouse three, he knew he was going to pull this off. All the doors were blocked from the inside. He could get out of any building, but they would need some heavy equipment to get in. Even with that crowd out there. One more warehouse and he could duck out into the fire lane, and from there into the woods outside the fence. He had decided to cut the fence in two places, one down near the demil building, the other at the opposite end of the warehouse line.
He was still furious about Tangent’s betrayal, but what the hell — he had the money, and Tangent wasn’t going to get his precious cylinder. He’d have to figure out how to dispose of that thing later. He was sorry about the guy on the belt, although the other guy should have reached him in time. That scream, however, didn’t augur well.
He hurried through the door into warehouse three and was in the act of rolling the next forklift into position when he heard the unmistakable earsplitting roar of a chain saw starting up down at the far end of the warehouse, followed by a terrible screeching noise as someone obviously started to cut through the far metal wall of the warehouse. He couldn’t see through the forest of steel shelving towers, but he could sure as hell hear it. What the hell was this?! Had he miscalculated? They had chain saws?
He grabbed the bags and zigged to the right, instinctively heading toward the fire doors on the rear wall of the warehouse. These rear doors all led into the back alley, his escape route to his truck. As suddenly as it started, the chain saw went silent. He stopped ten feet from the fire door and crouched down behind a shelf tower. He peeked between two shelves in time to see a large man wearing a helmet and oversized goggles about two hundred feet away down the aisle, trotting toward him between the shelving tiers, casually throwing things into the lanes as he came. And then the shadows behind the man erupted into dazzling sun-bright light, accompanied by a whoomping sound and then the roar of fire. Stunned, Carson saw other blooms of incredible fiery radiance exploding in the warehouse to the right and left of the lane where the helmeted man was still coming, each succeeding blast of the incendiaries throwing every detail of the high metal roof beams and trusses into stark relief, even as clouds of bright white smoke billowed above the shelving tiers.