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, making him gag, 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 the lid opened. There was a click and it 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.

He left the girl behind, therefore. She seemed to be coping on her own, and he had to think of himself. Elsewhere, a couple of other people were climbing out of their cubicles. Randall ignored them as well and staggered across the damp floor.

He reached the door and paused before it, listening. Apart from the exertions of the three other people in the room, he heard nothing. No gunfire, no explosions, no shouting. There was only silence, exacerbated by the sound of water dripping somewhere. Perhaps it wasn't an attack after all, he thought. Perhaps the place had suffered some kind of malfunction. A cyber attack on the facility's computer systems, maybe?

He decided to risk activating his head phone. If there were no attackers, there would be no-one to locate him by means of its radio emissions. He thought its wake up word, but nothing happened. The phone was dead. The thing used blood glucose as a power source, he remembered. If he'd been in hypersleep for more than a year, his blood would have been without glucose and the phone's batteries would be flat. The phone would probably come back to life in an hour or two, when it had had time to recharge.

Until then, he had to rely on his merely human senses, which were telling him that the complex was empty except for himself and the other sleepers. They were also telling him that he was cold. He was soaking wet with sleep gel and the room was as cold as a freezer. If he didn't find clothes and warmth soon, his enemies wouldn't have to find him. He would just die from hypothermia.

He pulled on the door and it opened. The corridor outside was in darkness. He started to edge warily out when a fearful, trembling voice came from behind him. "Excuse me? Do you know what's happening?"

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

He looked back and saw that the young woman had removed her mask and feeding tube and was standing beside her cubicle, trying to cover her modesty with one hand. Her hair was plastered to her head and shoulders and hypersleep fluid was dripping from her, pooling on the floor. Behind her, two other people had managed to escape from their cubicles. A middle aged man and a woman who looked to be in her fifties. The other sixteen cubicles all stood open but there was no movement from them. Randall assumed they were all dead.

He turned back to the door and ventured out into the corridor, but another voice from behind stopped him. "Hey, the lady asked you a question. What's happening?"

"You know as much as I do," Randall replied. Then he stepped out into the darkness.

There was only one hypersleep chamber, it seemed. The rest of the small complex contained support machinery, none of which seemed to be still working. "Lights on," he said, and a small glimmer of light appeared through the crack under the door further down the corridor. Everything else remained in darkness.

Randall headed for the light, shivering with the cold. He opened the door and found a small storeroom containing maintenance and diagnostic equipment. He picked up a memory crystal reader and pressed the activation button. He then turned it this way and that, looking for the small red light that most equipment had these days that would tell him that it was trying to interface with his head phone, but there was nothing. The device appeared to be completely dead. So was everything else he tried.

"Where's the water coming from?" said a male voice. Randall turned to see that the man had followed him. "Places like these are supposed to be completely sealed. Not even air gets in or out."

That was a worrying thought. Randall wondered how much air they had. How much time did they have before they suffocated? The dripping of water had increased in pace, he realised. It was turning into a steady trickle. It was coming from one of the other rooms opening out from the corridor and he went looking for it.

They found it in the computer room. There was a crack running across the ceiling and down one wall and dirty water was trickling in from outside, forming a deepening layer on the floor. "I'm guessing there was an earth tremor," the man said. "The computer sensed it and woke us up before the place filled up completely. There's probably a team on its way already to get us out of here."

"Maybe," said Randall, but something made him think it was more complicated than that. There was a feel about the place. A feeling in the air. A look to all the surfaces in the complex. The walls, the ceilings, the computer. It was hard to tell in the gloom, but all the surfaces that were supposed to be shiny and white had a dirty yellow look to them, a colour that he associated with age and neglect. He touched the top of the computer with his fingertips. It should have felt smooth, like glass, but there was a roughness to it and some of it even rubbed off onto his fingers. A rough, grey powder.

The man saw what he was doing and did the same thing, then stared at the residue on his fingers with eyes widening in alarm. "You know how long we were asleep for?" he asked.

"No."

"I think we should find a way out of here."

"Yeah."

There was an elevator at the end of the corridor, but none of the controls worked. The other man put his fingers in the crack between the doors and grunted with effort. "A little help," he said. Randall put his own fingers in the crack and between them they managed to pull the doors open with a grinding noise, as if the mechanism was badly corroded.

They were near the bottom of a shaft that reached high above them into darkness. Randall guessed that the elevator car was up there somewhere. There was a ladder against the side of the shaft, but it was designed to be used when the shaft was empty. A man climbing up it wouldn't be able to get past the elevator car.

"Maybe there's more than one level at the surface," the other man said. "If the car's right at the top, we can climb up and get out at ground level. If the car's at ground level, though..."

Randall nodded. They would be trapped. They would have no choice but to wait and see if help came for them. "We need light," he said. "Maybe we'll be able to see if there are doors below the car."

"Nah, I'll just climb," the other man said. "If there's no door I'll just come back down."

"If you think you're up to it," said Randall. "Aren't you suffering from some kind of incurable disease?"

"Yeah. Eddington's gliomitis. I've got three or four months until I drop dead, but until then I'm as strong as I've ever been. Dinsdale Loach, by the way. That's my name."

"Randall,"

"That your first name or your second name?"

"Just Randall."

Loach gave a broad smile. "Okay then, Randall. See you in five." He reached into the darkness of the elevator shaft, grabbed hold of the ladder and began climbing.

Randall stared up after him. The hypersleep gel was drying on his body and he rubbed at it, trying to get it off him. Then he saw movemment behind him and spun around. It was the two women, both looking thoroughly miserable and shivering with the cold.

"Is there a way out?" asked the older woman.

"He's gone to find out."

"What do we do if we can't get out that way?"

"Find another way out."

She nodded. The look in her eyes told Randall that she knew what he was saying.

"Everyone else is dead back there." Randall nodded. "What happened?"

"I don't know."

"Is there anything to wear?" the younger woman asked. She was still trying to cover her body with her hands.

"We're all in the same boat," the older woman replied. "Don't let it bother you."

"It's not that. I'm cold!"

"Come here," the older woman replied. She took the younger woman in her arms and hugged her, rubbing her body to generate heat. The younger woman's eyes closed in relief, then she started rubbing back.

Randall watched them for a while, wondering whether the rules of polite society would allow him to join in. Then he saw the older woman glancing at him out of the corner of her eye and he looked aside in embarrassment.

"My name's Emily," the older woman said. "Emily Turner."

"Randall."

"Yes, I heard you say. What's your name, sweetie?" she asked the younger woman.

Jane. Jane Harper."

Randall looked back in sudden interest. "You're his daughter," he said. "This place belongs to your dad."

She nodded. "Zaidi's disease," she said. "I've got less than a month. Dad wouldn't trust any other hibernaculum to look after me."

"So he put you away with a bunch of criminals and terrorists?"

"He wasn't expecting us to be awake at the same time and talking to each other. So what did you do? You some kind of gangster or something?"

Randall was in no mood to tell the story of his life so he ignored the question, turning back to the elevator shaft. Loach was lost in the darkness, but Randall could still hear him steadily climbing above him. Loach, he thought. Could it be the brother of Douglas Loach, chairman of Chelsea Holdings, long thought to be the cover for most of London's organised crime? He remebered someone telling him once that Douglas had a brother but he'd never bothered to remember his name. It was probably on his head phone somewhere, but the device was still refusing to turn on.

"So, what are you in for?" Jane asked Emily.

"You haven't heard of me?" the older woman replied. "Emily Turner, the eco warrior?"

The younger woman's eyes widened in surprise. "That's you? You're the one that blew up the Louisiana sea wall?"

Randall's ears pricked up in surprise. He'd invested heavily in the land reclamation project. The sabotage of the sea wall had cost him a considerable sum of money.

"There are dozens of endangered species in those wetlands. The war to save the environment may be all but lost but that's no reason to stop fighting."

"I've found a door!" Loach called down from the top of the shaft. "I'm trying to get it open."

Randall thought about climbing up to help him, but there wouldn't be room on the ladder for more than one man to reach the door. He waited, therefore, while sounds of straining effort came from above him.

"It's opening! It's open a crack! Almost got it... no, it's stuck." More sounds came drifting down from the darkness, sounds of even greater effort. "It's moving! Ah, it's easier now. Done it! The door's open!"

"What can you see?" asked Emily.

"Just darkness. I'm going to have a look around."

Randall reached for the ladder to follow him up. "Hey!" said Emily indignantly. "Isn't it supposed to be ladies first?"

Randall ignored her and began to climb.