Story code: ST-001738
Part 3: The AP Biology Underground
Gary stumbled backward, his heavy boots tangling in the dead vines. He fumbled his cell phone from his belt clip, his thumb mashing the emergency dial. Vance lunged forward, his soot-stained fingers grasping frantically at Gary’s wrist.
“Gary, no! Please!” Vance begged, his voice cracking into a desperate sob. “The thermal dampeners are down! If you bring sirens here-”
Gary shoved the disgraced teacher backward into the dirt. “911!” he yelled into the receiver, his voice pitching with raw panic. “I need police and fire at the Vance residence at the end of Oakridge Cul-de-sac! Hazardous materials! Immediate threat to life! There is something breaking out!”
The chittering shriek behind the plywood pitched higher, sounding like a dentist’s drill hooked to a massive amplifier. The segmented, glowing appendage ripped sideways, tearing a jagged horizontal gash through the wood. The ruined iron hasp finally gave way, dripping into the dry grass in a pool of bubbling, silver slag.
Sirens wailed in the distance almost immediately-a patrol cruiser must have been idling on the adjacent avenue. Vance stayed on his knees in the dirt, his hands covering his head, weeping silently into the sleeves of his ruined shirt.
Two Oakridge police officers sprinted through the side gate less than two minutes later. They came in fast, their heavy duty belts jingling, sidearms drawn and sweeping the yard.
Gary pointed a trembling finger at the smoking shed, his aluminum clipboard forgotten in the gravel at his feet. “There! He’s built something! It’s superheated, it’s burning right through the walls! He said if we use water, it’ll kill us all!”
The lead officer took one look at the glowing slag pooling in the grass and the blinding blue light piercing the splintered wood. He didn’t hesitate. He holstered his weapon, grabbed a heavy steel Halligan breaching bar from his tactical belt, and marched straight for the makeshift door.
“Oakridge Police! Stand back!” the officer bellowed. He jammed the wedge of the heavy iron bar into the smoldering gap where the lock used to be and threw his entire body weight backward.
The damaged plywood tore in half with a deafening crack. The door blew open, releasing a massive, billowing cloud of white steam and acrid smoke.
Gary braced himself for a monster. He braced for a wave of lethal radiation, for a biological horror, for the end of his perfectly manicured neighborhood.
Instead, the sharp, metallic smell of ozone and burning wood abruptly gave way to the heavy, humid stench of wet potting soil, liquid fertilizer, and overripe vegetation.
The blinding blue laser vanished, suddenly replaced by the broad, sun-mimicking glare of a dozen high-wattage halide grow lamps.
Standing in the doorway wasn’t a biological terror. It was a teenager.
The kid was wearing a heavy, oversized leather welding apron and a thick fiberglass welding helmet. In their right hand, they held a portable plasma cutting torch-the source of the blinding blue light and the shrieking, high-pressure hiss of compressed air. In their left hand, they gripped a long, segmented pair of heavy industrial crucible tongs, the iron tips glowing cherry-red from where they had been violently hooking and tearing at the melting wood.
The teenager clicked a heavy valve on the torch. The chittering shriek died instantly. They reached up with a thick leather gauntlet and flipped the welding hood back.
It was the Miller boy. The kid who lived three houses down from Gary. He looked completely terrified, blinking heavy sweat out of his eyes.
Gary pushed past the bewildered police officers, his heart hammering against his ribs. He stepped over the smoking ruin of the door and looked inside.
The shed wasn’t a structure at all. The camouflage netting was just a canopy covering a wide, excavated set of concrete stairs leading down into a massive bunker Gary had no idea existed. The oppressive heat radiating from below wasn’t an engine or a bomb. It was a jury-rigged, high-intensity ecosystem.
Gary descended the first two steps, the humid air instantly plastering his collared shirt to his chest.
Rows upon rows of thick PVC pipes stretched across the subterranean room, circulating heated water beneath dense, towering canopies of hydroponic tomato plants. The “chaotic, unpredictable rhythm” of the smaller heat signatures on his drone screen now made perfect sense. They were the motorized tracks of heavy, high-pressure sodium lamps sliding slowly back and forth on greased rails to simulate the sun, baking the room to keep the massive plants alive.
But the tomatoes weren’t what made Gary’s breath catch in his throat.
Sitting on overturned Home Depot buckets and folding metal chairs were a dozen teenagers. They were perfectly silent, staring up at Gary in the blinding glare of the grow lamps. Some were holding glass pipettes and petri dishes. Others had thick, heavy textbooks balanced on their knees-the very same advanced AP Biology textbooks the Oakridge School Board had violently banned and confiscated three months ago for “inappropriate curriculum.”
Vance hadn’t locked the door to keep a monster inside. He had violently padlocked the door to hide his students from the neighborhood’s most relentless compliance officer. He knew Gary would shut them down.
“The primary cooling cycle failed, Mr. Vance,” the Miller boy whispered upward, ignoring the stunned police officers entirely. “We couldn’t breathe. We had to cut the lock from the inside. We had to vent the room.”
Gary didn’t hear him. The massive electrical ballasts hummed-a 220-volt system that would have instantly electrocuted everyone in the flooded room if the fire department had sprayed their hoses.
Gary’s eyes moved past the whiteboard covered in erased genetic equations and locked onto the front row. Sitting on a folding chair, right beneath a massive tomato vine, was a girl in a yellow sweater. She was slowly lowering a pair of protective safety goggles to her neck. She held a banned textbook against her chest like a shield.
“Madison?” Gary choked out, his rigid authority instantly evaporating in the sweltering heat.
His sixteen-year-old daughter stared back at him. Her face was flushed from the overwhelming temperature of the bunker, but her eyes were entirely defiant. She didn’t drop the contraband book. She simply tightened her grip on it, waiting for him to make his next move.