Intervention | NaNoWriMo 2018

Chapter 33

Nothing happened. The lights continued to flash and the display immediately in front of Lincoln's face remained lit. With the alarm blaring around him, Lincoln jabbed at the power button again. Nothing. The machine was not powering down and Marie remained unconscious.

"This is not good, this is not good," he said to himself as he looked behind the machine and saw a variety of cords extending from the machine to the wall. One of them had to be the power cord. Lincoln began pulling them out of the wall, one by one. Red alarms began to flash on the machine until eventually, the power went out altogether. Lincoln pushed the now dead monitoring equipment out of the way and turned his attention to Marie.

To his relief, Marie almost immediately began to stir. Lincoln felt a sense of relief rush through his body as he glanced briefly at Hamil in the other room.

Marie grunted, opened her eyes and sat straight up, her eyes wide as she looked around at the flashing lights. She relaxed when she saw Lincoln and reached for him.

"Lincoln," she said with a grin.

"We've got to go. I don't know how much time we have. I need to get you out of here."

"Where are we?" she said as she removed the bed covers and swung her legs over the edge of the bed and stood up. She braced herself against the wall as she found her balance.

"We're back in space."

"In space?"

"Yes. After they sedated you, they transported us back into orbit." Lincoln grabbed her hand. "Come on, we've got to go. Guards will be showing up any second."

"Where are we going?" Marie asked as they exited her room, Hamil and the guard watching their every move from the room next door. Lincoln continued towards the door that led out of the infirmary section but almost stopped dead in his tracks. He realized then that he hadn't thought the whole rescue through. They had to find their way to the portal room, through all the guards that likely roamed through the base during an active alarm, find the portal room, activate the portal and make sure that Marie made it through.

"Out of here," he simply replied to Marie and pushed the door open. Medical personnel ran past the door in both directions but he saw no sign of guards. Yet. He took Marie's hand and slid through the door. Although he hadn't spent a lot of time in the infirmary before, he knew the general layout well enough from Marie's prior visit, before her own escape down to Earth.

"What's going on, Lincoln? Where are all these people going?"

"The alarm," he said and pointed towards the ceiling. "It's an evacuation alarm. All personnel in the area are requested to immediately leave the area. It's used for situations where the whole unit is in immediate danger."

"It's for us?"

Lincoln nodded as he smiled at a nurse that passed them with a suspicious look. "Yes. The alarm was triggered by the guard I locked up back there."

"How did you-"

"It's a long story," Lincoln said as he looked around a corner in one of the many hallways. At the end of the hallway were a set of elevators. "Maybe I'll have time to tell you about it. Come on, we need to get to those elevators."

They sprinted around the corner and were almost to the doors when they heard the little bell that told them the elevator had arrived at that floor. Lincoln reacted instinctively and grabbed Marie who was still running towards the elevators, just as the doors slid open. A couple of guards stepped out and froze. The two pairs stared at each other until one of the soldiers pointed towards Lincoln and Marie.