“We have to leave this place,” she said. “The sooner, the better. The door won’t hold forever.”
“What are you up to?”
“We’ll break into the armory and arm ourselves.”
Ramses looked at Ksenia quizzically. “Sounds like a plan but please remind me next time to ask you who taught you to shoot and where you learned your good English.”
“Okay. Follow me.” She stepped into the dark corridor. The faint growling of the crazies was reaching them from the first floor. Ramses lit their way.
“Say,” he said. “Why didn’t those cops shoot back? They didn’t shoot back. Can you believe this? They all have a gun holster on their hips but none of ‘em were shooting at us.”
“They are robots,” Ksenia said, “not humans. Now you know what to do to survive.”
She halted in front of a heavy metallic door. She turned the handle, but the door was locked. She hit the door with her palm. “We have to find a way to get inside! We need those weapons!”
Ramses shook his head. “You’re looking really on edge.”
He searched in his pocket and fished out the keys he had found on the dead policeman. He put them into the torchlight. There was the Opel logo on the key fob. Car keys. No use for them at the moment. They had to escape from this place first before searching for that Opel in the parking lot. He put the keys away.
“Are you trained to pick locks by any chance?” he asked. “‘Cause I’m no expert here.”
“Unfortunately, no. The keys to the armory were on the first floor with the duty officer. Before this chaos began, that is.”
“We’re gonna have to use physical force, then.” He took a closer look at the three door hinges. “I’m thinking to try breaching it at the hinges.”
He touched the hinges, which were luckily not hidden from the outside. Easier to break. The latch side was strong, but he decided to break it too.
They went to the third floor, which was packed with various construction tools because of all renovations going on. They did not turn the lights in the corridor on and used the flashlight. Ramses picked a sledgehammer and a crowbar off the floor.
“Look around for some power-driven tools,” he said. “Like a drill or something.”
They rummaged through the tools, dispersing the darkness with the torchlight. Trickles of moonlight flowed through the windows and helped them see better in the dark. They found smaller hammers, cement spatulas and paint cans. Ksenia spotted a bulky plastic case under a stepladder and brought it to Ramses.
“That’s nice,” he said, opening the case and looking approvingly at the perforator. “Better than a drill.” He scanned around. “But we need the drill bit.”
“What’s that?”
“The drill bit?” He scratched the back of his head. “The thing, that’s attached to the business end of the perforator.” He looked at her tired face. “You know, to perform the drilling?”
“Ah.” She nodded weakly. “I got it – sverlo.”
Ramses felt a relief. “Yeah, whatever. Get a drill bit. Look around the place where you found this case.”
All the tools left by the construction workers were in disarray. There was an extension cord on a windowsill which Ramses added to his pile of items. Ksenia was lucky to locate the drill bits. She took an ax, too. They grabbed all the stuff and went back to the armory. There was a power source in the corridor, but the extension cord was not long enough to reach the armory door, and Ksenia had to go on a search for an extra cord. She came back with the cord and Ramses connected the two cords together. Then he plugged one of them into the power socket.
“Okee-dokee.” He revved the perforator, and it started buzzing loudly. “All systems are go, Houston.”
Ksenia gave him a tired smile.
“You drill near the latch,” he said handing her the tool. “Once you start, the plaster will crumble like a cookie. I’ll go at the hinges.”
He took the sledgehammer and hit it against the upper hinge. A loud buzz instantly filled the building. It was numbing and it was continuous.
He put the sledgehammer down and looked at Ksenia.
“We’ve triggered the security alarm system,” she said. “But no one is coming to arrest us.”
“It’s gonna attract more deadheads from outside,” Ramses said. “Let’s hurry up.” He raised the sledgehammer and launched another hit against the hinge.
Ksenia pressed the drill bit to the wall surface near the door frame and began working, too. Pieces of paint and plaster crumbled to the floor. Dust and cement particles, barely visible in the faint light, were floating in the air. In a quarter of an hour, the instrument got very hot, and they switched it off to give it a rest. Ksenia sat on the floor.
It took Ramses nineteen hits to break the upper hinge. He took a break, wiped the sweat from his forehead and sat down beside Ksenia. He looked at her dirty face and dusty clothes, and he felt sad. His mind had not fully absorbed the irrationality of the things happening to them.
He said, “You’d make a great construction worker, for sho’.”
She smiled and coughed. “Yeah, you bet.”
He looked around the place. “Air-conditioning wouldn’t be such a bad idea around here. I’m dying.”
“You hang on in there,” Ksenia said standing up. She picked up the perforator and continued drilling. Through the ceaseless noise of the alarm system, she heard a gnashing sound of metal against metal and stopped.
“Damn!” she said, looking at a stump of the drill bit. “I’ve broken it!”
She put the perforator down and knelt beside the tool case to look for a replacement for the broken drill bit.
Ramses took a swing and smashed the sledgehammer against the middle hinge. The hinge did not move.
There was a distant clang coming from the first floor. Ramses stopped working and raised his head. Ksenia stood up and listened, but she could hardly hear anything.
She took her gun and the torch. “I’m going to check it.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.” She tucked the pistol under her sweater and picked up the ax. “Don’t worry about me.”
She turned to leave as Ramses said, “Wait … Ksenia.”
She stopped and glanced over her shoulder.
“Please be very, very careful there,” he said.
She weighed the ax in her hand. “I will.”
“When this is all over, I’ll take you to the Aziza restaurant. Best place in San Francisco.”
She snapped the torch on and smiled wearily. “Sounds like a deal. I’ll take you up on that.”
As Ksenia had left, Ramses got back to the middle hinge. With half a dozen powerful blows he broke it off. His muscles were tensed and beads of sweat dripped down his forehead but he was glad that he was winning this battle. He rested the sledgehammer against the wall and removed the broken mountain screws. Then he inserted the crowbar into the gap between the door and the doorjamb. He used some force to spring the door away from the frame. The metal resisted, but he maintained pressure on the tool and soon heard faint creaking. His hands were shaking and his T-shirt was damp. Useless. The gap was too narrow yet.
He moved the crowbar side to side to free it up and tried to separate the lower hinge but the weight of the