Read Online The Doomsday Machine (Horatio Lyle) by Catherine Webb - Free Book Online Page B

grey-greenness that battered the bricks in the wall and gleamed for just a second with a thousand diamonds of reflected light as it swallowed the broken glass and wires of the laboratory. Tess had never learnt to swim. She clung to Lyle for all she was worth and squeezed her eyes shut as the water hit, with a punch that knocked the breath out of her, lifted her feet from the floor, spun her round and round and burnt into her lungs and rumbled in her ears, so that she imagined it storming round her brain and rushing through her blood: a sickening whirlwind pulling at her skin and hair with a thousand hands, each more determined to be the one that finally ripped her apart. She felt the water spin her towards the ceiling and knew it was still rising, pushing up against the walls and carrying with it the detritus of the lab. Then she felt Lyle ’s head bounce against the ceiling and knew that her own head would follow just a second later. She took one last breath and waited for the water to roll into her nose and mouth and lungs while she held on to Lyle for dear life, however much of that was left. With her eyes tightly shut she felt Lyle ’s hand pulling at her and something metallic sliding against her shoulders. Cold water lapped at her chin.
    The movement of water that had spun her subsided. She wondered if death was like this - not especially violent, just a gentle shutting down of signals, since she had no doubt that the torrent must still be raging around her. When Lyle’s hand touched her shoulder, it was such a shockingly real gesture that instinctively she inhaled, and was astonished to find some air to breathe. Tess opened her eyes and saw utter darkness, and heard the sound of her own half-suffocated whimper and Lyle ’s rushed breath. She reached up and felt a tiny world composed of Lyle’s face, and a lot of metal box, so tightly compressed around her that she couldn’t even stretch out her arms to feel around the edges. The water still came no higher than her chin, and around her shoulders her hair loosely drifted. Lyle was treading water, the crown of his skull wedged against the top of the metal box he’d put over his head only a moment before. With arms outstretched, he was pressing his hands against the metal crate within which they now paddled, heads suspended in a bubble of trapped air. Tess considered this, together with the sound of Lyle breathing, a few inches from her, and said, ‘What the bloody hell in God ’s name I mean really is goin’ on?’
    ‘I’ll tell you,’ Lyle ’s voice was unnaturally strained, ‘if you just relax a little bit.’
    Tess realized she was still clinging to Lyle’s waist and loosened her grip. Lyle let out a long wheezing breath. ‘Thank you.’
    ‘Same question, an’ I don’t think as how you want me to go an’ scream in a small space like this an’ all! Where’s the rushin’ water thing and why we in a box ?’
    ‘Well, in order,’ said Lyle, his voice reverberating oddly in the crowded darkness, ‘no, please don’t scream, for more reasons than just the noise - the rushing water thing is all around us although I suspect the worst is over; and we are in a box because it seemed like a solid watertight surface and because I have an inherently practical grasp of the fact that air when compressed within an area of fixed volume by water rushing into a large room will have no way to escape, assuming the pressure from the water below is equal to the pressure of the air compressed inside the ...’
    ‘You’re scared, ain’t you, Mister Lyle?’
    ‘Now what on earth gives you that impression?’
    ‘Way as how when you get scared an’ all you talk science in that really squeaky voice, an’ how you don’t breathe an’ stuff.’
    ‘In this case, not breathing is a very apt response to our situation, Teresa.’
    ‘You had to go an’ say it, right?’
    ‘I think we might have enough time left for me to finish my explanation of pressure and