Laura stood in the pitch black cargo area, shining her flashlight over the trail of blood leading to the small open hatch and the dark ladder dropping below. The security guard shook his head. “I don’t like it. We don’t know where the ladder goes.”
He paced a small circle around the hatch, lit up by the diffuse glow from Laura’s flashlight. A warning label next to the hatch shouted ‘NO ACCESS WHILE UNDERWAY, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.’ With eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw the narrow ladder’s treads looked like simple textured rebar. He looked back at Laura. “This level isn’t on the deck plans.”
Laura pressed her handgun and flashlight together, one in each hand. “It might not be usable space.”
He sighed. “I’ll go first.”
Laura walked forward quietly and placed an open hand on his shoulder. “Go down backward. The best place to ambush you is from behind the ladder.”
He nodded, a small movement barely visible in the darkness. He stepped around the open hatch and backed up to the ladder. He held his shotgun at the ready, in front of him. He backed carefully down, trying to keep his gun at the ready while climbing with the other arm. He moved slowly in an awkward shuffle. One leg, hunching down with one arm, one leg again. She heard the faint clunk of his heavy boots on the thin metal rungs. Seconds later, he knocked on the lowest rung. Laura followed down, forward.
Reaching the bottom, her eyes scanned the small space in surprise. She realized she subconsciously expected an empty basement, with rooms. This looked nothing like a basement.
The ladder ended instead in a warren of criss-crossed metal support structures with narrow tunnel-like gaps between them. The darkness felt absolute pitch black, and crushingly claustrophobic. She flicked her flashlight over the walls. The metal reflected a uniform, institutional tan paint. The trail of blood continued down a bare diamond plate metal floor. Save for the blood, the mostly clean floors showed no sign of other traffic. The passageway hemmed in their shoulders, with barely enough width to fit. Laura’s head nearly scraped the ceiling. Looking behind her, the security guard stood hunched, his head cranked to one side.
The blood trail continued faintly now, but Laura tracked it with her flashlight. It strung away from the staircase, through a small oval opening. Laura climbed through first, folding her body through what felt like a small hole instead of a door. She hunched her head and swung each leg over the sill to fit, and clambered through the other side. The gargantuan ship rocked incessantly, nearly throwing her off balance. No sound from the violent wind and rain penetrated this deep inside the ship, but the motion was constant. A low groaning and creaking instead echoed and amplified in the small, hard space.
The passageway continued in a series of tight, blind corners punctuated with small, irregularly spaced oval openings. None of the open corridors spanned more than about ten feet. She had to duck and scrabble to climb through each of the small oval openings. She struggled to keep her head up and alert in the confined space. It would be way too easy to lay an ambush around one of the corners, or behind a doorway. She reminded herself that sometimes a wounded and cornered animal was the most dangerous.
She climbed through another oval gap. In front of her, her flashlight reflected off a blank wall. The corridor ended in a t-shaped junction, the blood trail leading right at a sharp 90 degrees. Laura pressed her right shoulder to the wall and swung around the corner, gun first. She released the breath she’d been holding through pursed lips.
Laura and the guard snaked through more sharp turns left and right. The map in Laura’s mind started to fade as the path grew more complex. It felt like some kind of endless zigzag. She climbed through another oval gap, and the lurching motion of the ship knocked her off balance. She threw her hand forward to steady herself, and smashed her watch against a sharp metal corner. There was a small crushing sound, then the tinkling of glass shards bouncing off the diamond plate floor.
Laura started to feel a rising swell of claustrophobia, raising the hairs on her neck. She wondered if she would die here, ambushed and squeezed between metal walls in a tight corner. She pictured her blood running between the hard diamond shapes pressed into the rough metal floor. Bright red, arterial, and pooling. As her body cooled, it would turn viscous and brown. She had flash photographed crime scenes like it first hand, from Albuquerque to Miami. How long would it take for anyone to find her? If the hatch was closed, would it be hours? Days?
She shook her head and pressed the thought out of her mind. She didn’t have time to think that way. They climbed through another narrow hole and came to a small square box with a ladder on one side. The security guard followed behind, clearly fatigued at the effort and contortion to fit himself through the openings. He lifted his leg to climb through, and lost his balance as the ship rocked. His weight carried him forward, ramming his forehead into the rough upper edge of the opening.
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His cheeks puffed out, stifling a scream of frustration and pain. He kept his mouth clamped hard shut. He tipped toward her, fighting to regain balance. She braced herself against the metal wall, cradling her gun and flashlight in both hands and bracing him with her shoulder. They fit tightly, wedged shoulder to shoulder with no room to spare.
The guard breathed deeply to gather himself. After a long breath, he shifted his forward foot, hunched down again, and swung his rear foot inside. He carefully swung his knee into place, careful not to jam it into Laura. Her flashlight shone a crazed pattern of shadows on the tight walls from their dense tangle of limbs. It was like a painful, dangerous game of twister.
He finally righted himself, and fished his shotgun out of the previous compartment. He hunched in the low ceiling. Laura saw his face in the reflection. His forehead bled freely from a long, angry gash. Blood dripped down his face. His eyebrows diverted most of the flow around his eyes and down the side of his face. His uniform shirt started to soak through. He blinked to keep the drops out of his eyes.
Laura knew his injuries wouldn’t kill him, but she worried pragmatically about the bleeding. Her hand to hand combat instructor at Quantico taught her the same slash across the forehead as an old knife fighters’ trick. Slashing above the eyes was a dramatic flourish, but the torrent of blood also made it hard for your opponent to see. They needed every advantage they had in this tight space.
They took their bearings. In front of them, a short ladder led upward. Laura climbed two rungs and looked just above the opening. The only path forward looked grim. Laura swallowed hard when she saw the even smaller passageway, which narrowed to tight crawling height only and crisscrossed by low support beams and pipes.
She squeezed the security guard on the shoulder and jerked her chin toward the ladder. She climbed first. She exposed her hand, and waited for a beat. No gunfire. She hoisted her arms over first, leading with her gun and flashlight. She kept them forward, supporting her weight on her elbows. The diamond plate floor dug hard into her elbows, and she winced with pain. She slowly walked one elbow forward after the other, bringing her legs into the crawlspace.
She crawled forward on her hands and knees. The floor tore her sleeves and pant legs open. Her elbows and knees grated against the floor and started to bleed. She held her head up and forward, her flashlight and gun in front of her at the ready. She had no idea how the security guard behind her had any space to move at all, but couldn’t risk turning herself around to find out.
Soon, she came to a pipe jutting across the already cramped space. It sloped left to right, its heavy, black cast iron bulk higher above the floor on the left. She shimmied to the left to give herself as much space as possible. The blood trail did the same, in a curve of dots and smears. Even the widest area had no space to crawl on her hands and knees. Laura dropped to her stomach and sprawled her limbs to the side, commando crawling under the pipe. The entire front of her body scraped against the cold, hard floor, the blood trail was smearing against her. She smelled, against the machine oil and dust against her face, the sharp metallic tang of fresh blood.
The ship shuddered violently. The constant, unsettling motion never stopped, but this was different. It felt like the impact with a large wave at the wrong angle, sudden and jarring. With no holds for her hands or feet, the jolt shunted her to her right, wedging her lower back underneath as the space narrowed to nothing. She grunted involuntarily as the air was knocked from her lungs and her body held fast between the cold metal floor and the bulk of the iron pipe.
She scrambled with her arms and legs, but there was nothing to grab. The beam from her flashlight bounced wildly around the cramped space as she tried to knock herself free. Laura took in shallow gasps of air, her stomach wedged hard to the floor.
The security guard crawled closer behind her, shimmying his body partially into the gap next to her. They barely fit. He put a hand on her calf and moved his head as close as he could, whispering. “Ok. I’m going to count to three, then I’ll try to pull you free.”
Laura nodded.
“When I get to three, breathe out as much as you can.”
“Ok.”
He pressed himself against the opposite wall, and braced his shoulder against the pipe. He grabbed her upper arm with one hand, and her knee with the other. “One. Two.”
Laura purged the tiny amount of air from her lungs.
“Three.” He pulled her arm and leg, hard. She was wrenched free. The guard’s elbows smashed against the wall with a booming crash. Her stomach scraped across the floor. She slid into the front of his body, and gulped in air. A second later, the pain washed over her. The floor scraped the front of her body raw, her back badly bruised. She panted, thankful for oxygen but suppressing a scream in pain.
After a minute, they both nodded. The guard slid backward and Laura finished her climb under the pipe. Back on her hands and knees, progress was faster. Ten feet later, the blood trail ended and they stopped again.
Laura paused. She examined the blood, pooled in a denser spatter here. She played her flashlight over the scene and found a ladder, tucked into an alcove above them. She crawled under it, and looked up. Her heart sank.
Above her, another access hatch taunted her. The man had crawled out, and locked them in from above.