When the Devil Dances

The other problem with keeping the descent in control was footing; the walls of the air shaft were covered in slime. It was no great surprise once she thought about it; the air in the shaft had come from millions of human throats. Humans put out a tremendous amount of moisture from their lungs and combined with the dust from dead skin cells the water deposited on the walls was a perfect breeding ground for slimes of all type. Thus not having her feet slip out from “under” her was nearly impossible. She understood that part of her purpose was to prevent the children from oscillating the way she was tending to, but they were still going to get covered in slime.

Somehow she didn’t anticipate running across a laundromat any time soon.

She carefully stepped over an opening and read the number. She was at the top of G and, technically, she could stop any time. But there were four openings in the sector and the optimum one was the second from the bottom. Better to drop a little farther, further away from the entrances and further away from the spreading Posleen.

Finally she reached her opening and bounded outward, swinging in and landing on her butt despite all her struggles to avoid that. She quickly stood up and backed into the opening, pulling the cable with her.

There was a take-up winch on the left hand side of this corridor so she first clamped the cable in place then hooked it up to the winch.

There were climbing harnesses and safety lines aplenty in the maintenance packs so she hooked herself off then leaned out and shook the cable.

* * *

Wendy had had quite a time getting the children onto the cable. First she had to find clamps for it, then she had to find harnesses that would fit, then she had to convince Billy to take Amber, then she had to run down all the kids who had tried to escape. She had always thought of the expression “dragged them kicking and screaming” as a metaphor, but no longer; Shakeela had actually climbed back up the ladder and was hammering at the door they had come in when Wendy tackled her.

She returned to find that Nathan and Shannon had unbuckled themselves and were trying to pry open the door at the end of the corridor, but she got all three connected to the cable before too long. Finally she took Billy’s face in her hands and pointed out the opening.

“Billy, you have to stay with your back to the shaft, facing the wall,” she shouted. “You’ll have to work to stabilize yourself; otherwise Amber will be crushed against the wall. Do you understand? Face the wall.”

The boy nodded looking at her with dark eyes and then pointed at her with a questioning expression.

“I’ll follow you down; I have to work the winch.”

He nodded and closed his eyes, pointing over the side.

She patted him on the shoulder and then clipped off her own safety line and leaned out into the shaft, swinging the cable back and forth and waving to Shari far below.

Billy caught at the ropes to keep from being pulled out by the weight of the cable, but Wendy had it clamped down and he wasn’t going anywhere. Until she released the clamps.

The biggest problem in lowering the children over the lip of the opening was the weight of the cable. Each child was in a harness, either one from the maintenance closet or, in the case of Shakeela and Nathan, a “Swiss seat” made of rope. Each of these was, in turn, attached to a short length of climbing rope and this was attached to clamps on the cable itself. There were two children per clamp and they were currently occupying their remaining free time holding onto each other and, almost to a child, crying their eyes out.

But the cable would pull the children over the lip in an instant if Wendy simply let it slip. And the winch was too far forward to use to attach the children. So she had pulled a section of cable back into the corridor, attached it to a safety ring, set up the tandem rigs and attached the children. Now she faced the problem of slowly lowering them over the side.

She finally took the remains of the climbing rope, looped it through the same ring to which the cable was attached and tied it securely to the last of the children’s clamps. Then she set up a complicated but safe method of lowering the cable over the side using the friction of the rope against itself. Furthermore, she could clamp it off to stop the whole process and she could do it all from the edge.

She nodded at Billy, who was strapped in next to Kelly. The younger girl was now more or less catatonic, but when her brother pushed forward and over the edge she let out a strangled scream and grabbed onto him.

Billy managed to keep Amber from being crushed against the side and he did it all while stroking his sister to try to get her to calm down and having his eyes tightly shut.