When the Flood Falls. J.E. Barnard

monsters pressing in on her, she yanked. The stool moved a bit. The rack moved too. It rolled in toward Lacey, dragging her plastic stepstool sideways, pinned between the end plate and the wall. She shoved hard against the endplate but the rack kept coming, cutting off her only exit. She backed away, yelling for Wayne.

      If he answered, his voice was lost between the overhead hiss of hydraulic cables and the underfoot whisper of the rack’s wheels. The stepstool collapsed with a whine of tortured plastic.

      Her butt bumped the rear wall and still the rack came. She squeezed sideways, trying to fit between the end wall and the next rack. There wasn’t enough room. Nowhere to go.

      “Wayne!”

      The rack reached her hands, flat out at arms’ length. She leaned on it with all her might, but still it came.

      Her elbows bent. Her wrists were bending …

      The hiss stopped.

      The steel behemoth stopped, too, so close that she went cross-eyed at the blur that was her reflected nose. Her hands pulled back from the panel as if it were electrified. She closed her eyes and clenched her teeth, each quiet breath a victory against screaming.

      Wayne’s voice came from a long way off. “McCrae? Are you okay?”

      Deeper breath. And another. She tested her voice and heard it say calmly, “Yes.” Just a bit stressed by nearly being crushed to death in an enclosed space, but she couldn’t say that out loud. In Wayne’s book that would be whining. Ex-RCMP officers did not whine.

      “I won’t risk turning the power back on,” he called. “Can you push?”

      “It weighs a ton.”

      “It’s balanced like a dream. Once started, it will roll like a baby stroller. Now push.”

      He was right, sort of. It took a lot of will for Lacey to put her hands against the rack again. But with him pulling from the front end and Lacey’s feet braced on the wall behind her as she pushed, the monster began to move. She kept pushing as it rolled smooth and slow, unwilling to wait even a step behind the first chance of freedom. When it cleared the opening, she slipped out of the gap and past the pin-up posters to the widest spot in the vault’s corner. If she’d had Jayne Mansfield’s cantaloupes on her chest instead of these fried eggs, she wouldn’t have fit back there in the first place. She swallowed a hysterical giggle.

      “I’m clear,” she said. “Next time, you take the back, okay?”

      “Nobody’s going in there again until the installer adjusts the auto-close. It should take a good shove to get this to move. Not like a CD player.”

      “CD players only pinch your finger.” She might have been crushed, and even if she’d survived, she’d have been out of work for ages. Was she eligible for workers’ comp in Alberta? She wasn’t an official resident yet, just a temporary migrant from B.C. without a Calgary address or an Alberta health card. And here she’d thought the threats to life and limb had been left behind with her RCMP uniform. Deep breath. And another. She wasn’t crushed. No whining. “Do we put it back by hand, too?”

      “Nope. Go turn the power back on. We need to know if it’s one rack or all of them.” He pushed buttons and watched the immense racks slide out into the room.

      Lacey took her turn tapping the racks to start the auto-close sequence, pushing her fingers past the fear of touching those polished plates. The merest tap was all it took to start the racks. Nothing stopped them once they started except cutting the power at the switch box in the elevator lobby. Anyone hanging up a painting could get dragged sideways and mangled, like the stepstool.

      Wayne wore his old impassive ex-cop’s expression, but the flint in his eyes matched the steel vault door. “We’re done in here until that’s fixed. Go download the elevator log so I’ll know who to yell at. Then you can take a break.”

      Glad to escape the cellar that could have been her tomb, Lacey grabbed the log-reader gizmo and went, hoping she would remember where to shove the reader’s little flat plug. Wayne had shown her yesterday, but her hands had developed quite a tremor since then, and her mind wasn’t much better.

      Fortunately the elevator gizmo co-operated, scrolling up a neat list of card numbers on its little screen. Wayne’s key card number, the only one she recognized besides her own, was last, as it should be. The elevator hadn’t moved because the vault door was open.

      Wayne came out and closed the vault. She handed him the card reader and suppressed a shiver as the elevator doors closed her in. She hadn’t so much as remembered her old claustrophobia at lunchtime, but that was then. Deep breaths. At least it wasn’t underwater. Being trapped underwater in an enclosed space would have been her most terrifying RCMP shift come back to life.

      As Lacey stepped out onto the flagstone floor of the atrium, her goosebumps receded before the balm of sunlight pouring through the south-facing wall of windows. The rattle and clunk of distant power tools displaced the vault’s preternatural silence. Voices murmured from the Langdon Theatre overhead and the Natural History Gallery across the way. Paint fumes rose from the classroom level beneath the theatre, heading for the varnished log-roof beams three storeys up. No way to feel enclosed here, overlooking the sun-kissed Elbow River with its churning, brown current that set up an echo in her stomach. She pulled her eyes from the water, willed herself to stare at the landlocked front entrance instead, and reminded herself that she had not died. If nearly a decade in the RCMP had not cracked her, she would not cave on her first civilian job because of a near miss. She was fine. She would be fine when she had to go back into that gap later today. Or tomorrow. She would be fine. Deep breaths.

      Something bounced off her head and pinged against the elevator. More construction crew humour? She stepped aside.

      “Hey, up there! Whatever you’re dropping, quit it.”

      A baggie fluttered down, spilling triangular orange pills. From the landing half a flight up, a woman reached through the railing after it. Shaggy brown hair blurred her face. A baggy shirt and a loose skirt disguised her body. Add a droopy hat and here was the mess that had interrupted yesterday’s media event. Dee’s neighbour. What was her name?

      “My pills,” Shaggy whispered. “Please.”

      “You won’t want the ones that fell on the floor.” Lacey scooped up the baggie with its lone remaining pill and went up. She knew prescription speed when she saw it, and who but an addict carried Adderall in a baggie like it was trail mix?

      Shaggy’s hand shook as she fumbled the little orange pill to her mouth. “Please,” she whispered again. “Call Rob.”

      Gladly. Drug addicts were no longer part of Lacey’s job description. She pulled her phone and, lacking Rob’s direct number, called Wayne instead.

      “There’s a woman on the west stairs above the atrium, asking for Rob. Can you let him know?”

      “Will do,” he said. “Tell her to wait there.”

      Lacey turned her head away. “Tell him to hurry. She’s popping ADD pills from a baggie. Long-time abuser by her shakes.” If the woman flipped out, she would have to be restrained. What legal cover did a mere security installer have if she took down an out-of-control addict? She turned, saw the woman glaring at her, and hoped her words would be forgotten as soon as the little orange upper kicked in.

      Fast footsteps thumped on the glossy log stairs above them. The curator swooped down to sit beside the druggie. “Honey, you were supposed to stay off the stairs. You promised!”

      Stay off the stairs? Stay off the Adderall, more like.

      Shaggy leaned her head on Rob’s shoulder. “The paint fumes were killing me. The elevator didn’t come. I thought I could do it. I’m always better in summer.”

      “Yes, you are,” said Rob, patting her hand. “But it’s not really summer yet, and you promised you’d be careful if I let you come around today. What’s Terry going to say to us?”