Rachel Helps Them Out

Rachel paused momentarily at the top of the garage driveway to assess the outsize doors. Judging by their 13 meter height, if it was not a garage for behemoth mining dump trucks, it was for vehicles large enough to give them a run for their money for the title of the largest vehicles on Semiramide. The doors were not open, and their gargantuan nature made them emphatically shut, not merely closed. She thought that their thickness might match their height, as the squoncks from inside were no longer audible.

Rachel scanned the two huge portals in the glare of the automatic safety light. On the right one she was able to make out the outline of a door-within-a-door, a hatch sized for a midget but with its threshold half a meter above ground level.

Visualizing the challenge it would be to squeeze her not-small frame into the aperture made her feel determined, enough to transform her real-time fear into a memory.

A tiny pull handle projected from the tiny door, not even big enough for her whole hand. She put four fingers through it and pulled. A crackling came from the hatch seams, the protest of paint splitting from where it had filled in the sutures. Then the hatch was open, a space possibly wide enough to admit her shoulders and possibly not. She knelt down and began the test-squeeze.

Wiggle, waggle and twist and she was in to the hips. Once in, without the support of the door sill underneath, her torso bent suddenly at the waist, and she skinned her hands to prevent her chin from bouncing on the rough yet slimy garage floor. Another wiggle of her lower body, some bending at the knees, and a push with her stinging hands to get her feet on the floor, and she stood in the glare of another safety light, beside a vehicle as mammoth as the four story garage doors had promised.

She looked up at the Brobdingnagian trucks. They were not dump trucks as she had imagined, but tank trailer-trucks of a capacity that would not be found in even the wildest dreams of an industrial brewery magnate. She could not gauge their length, as their rears were lost in the haze of the back end of the garage, but as a healing acrophobia victim, she could see that a sensitive driver could have an attack of dizzy panic merely by mounting the ladder/stairs to get up to the cab.

The occurrence of a next installment of the scraping sound snapped her attention from the roof to the floor. It was clearly coming from underneath the adjacent truck. Far away, around where she guessed the middle of the tank trailer would be, she spied the barest suggestion of a moving metallic gleam. She sprinted there, attempting to be noiseless, and crouched to examine the remarkably small space between oily floor and the bellying undercarriage of the swollen vehicle.

Her initial perception was confirmed. A metallic, crescentic gleam waxed and waned in the gloom below the trailer . She remained baffled as to its nature, until a male voice ringing out from underneath flabbergasted her with its familiarity. “Rachel, are you there? It's time for the meeting, but we need help!” It was Manqu.

She realized that it was just a few minutes after the rendezvous time that Manqu had given her in his coded message left at the library. “Yes, I'm here. Can you get out?”

“Even with Yarawi’s help I can't lift this damn truck,” came the mildly irritated reply. “It's the first time they've parked here for as long as I can remember!”

Rachel was already on the greasy ground, squirming her way to the source of Manqu's voice. When she reached the midpoint of the tankers’ width, she saw a circular plate tilted up like a flapper valve on a factory smokestack. It was the partially-lifted cover for an orifice set into the floor under the truck. The dimensions of this disk and the opening it had been sealing were so generous that Rachel thought hoghole, not hominidhole, would be an appropriate name for it.

She discerned Manqu’s eyes peering out from under the lid. The problem was the absurdly insufficient space for the cover to be pushed up and off so that Manqu and Yarawi could escape from their tunnel. The cover was flanged, and freeing its tongue from the groove around the hole’s circumference was something that could only be done from above.

And only with a prying tool... something that Rachel did not have. She turned her head, hoping against hope that she would find a suitable instrument lying on the garage floor, but before she could even turn back to scan to the other side of the truck, she felt a poke in the ribs. It was Manqu, poking with and proffering a small crowbar. Apparently he thought of everything except for the possibility of a one-way valve at the conclusion of this phase of the journey-a valve in which he and his daughter were stuck.

Even with the tool, letting these genies out of their figurative bottle would not be easy, as Rachel’s literal elbow room was close to zero. It took much grunting and some cursing, but eventually a sweaty Rachel rolled the cover away. It rolled to the side, using an eighth of its circumference, and shimmied to the concrete floor with an oscillating CLUH-ANG!!!-ANG!-Ng!-ng!..ng.....ng.......n......... The hatch was open!

Manqu slithered out of the hole. Yarawi followed, and even she looked disheveled and tired.

There was nothing to do except get out from under. Rachel led the way, scooting and sliding, and all three activists made their inelegant, rug-rat-like way to regain verticality next to the huge tanker-truck, so that they could confer hominid-style, rather than annelid-style.

Rachel had not been restricted and contorted for long enough for her muscles to cramp with any severity, so she reached the upright state first. Yarawi unfolded her arms to cautiously push herself up on long legs that still seemed to have some spring in them, as her face showed only minor pained grimaces. Her father was still on the floor, attempting to unship his cramped limbs. Unlike Yarawi, he made a face and gave out an ow!, followed by a cracking that caused the girl to wince. He nevertheless successfully re-achieved the standing posture, but immediately leaned on the tanker’s outlet valve manifold which projected from its undercarriage, irregular, hard and uncomfortable-looking though it was.

As Rachel observed her friends recovering from their ordeal, she noticed that they were clad in black formfitting one-pieces, resembling wet suits but of thinner material. The suits glistened as though they were wet.

Rachel's eyes met Yarawi’s. They stepped forward, Yarawi somewhat unsteadily, and embraced. Rachel touched Yarawi’s suit. Not water... it was grease.

“We had so many tight squeezes I lost count,” Yarawi explained. “That was a tough hike down there... I'm burnt out.”

Rachel and Yarawi formed an equilateral triangle with Manqu at the vertex. Their gazes directed at him in close attention. He cleared his throat and turned his head slightly to address Rachel.

“Yar and I just came from the library, all the way underground. It wasn't easy, but I can say that from here it will be easier. I won't bore you too much with the details of our little spelunking expedition. We had to wear these special greased suits to make it at all. We’re now going to locate the documents mentioned in that photocopy you and Yar showed me the first time you visited our house...”

He paused and seemed to enter a reverie. “Wasn't that a great evening? Joss always cooks well, but that was really something special ...” Manqu stopped talking altogether.

"Dad! Yes, it was great, but what about why we’re even doing this?” Yarawi loudly reminded him.

“OK, I got distracted. As soon as I saw that photocopy I knew where to find the documents. As Chief of Security, I cover everything ARSA in Sprawn City, so I have to know where everything is, and how to get to it. Being a glorified janitor has its benefits! This AssRep is a big-ass country, so even though we're not the capital, we’re the main legal center for the whole Northeastern Quadrant. That's a lot to cover. The library's the biggest part, but there are also visual media, recordings, rare, antique and special collections, and even a small legal museum, which I have to say is very boring...”

He paused again. “Oops!... Sorry! ... I did say I wouldn't get distracted... OK, the important point is that the document we need is in the hardened facility, and we're almost at it now...,” He looked up and then added, “Rachel, it looks like you have a question.”

“Why couldn't you get here the same way I did?” Rachel asked in a puzzled tone.

“Your question has much sense," Manqu responded. ",Obviously making a document depository hardened is even more effective if no one knows where the thing is. So the MISS, in their diabolical wisdom, put it somewhere no one would ever guess. To make it even harder for people like us, they set up a system so the depository won't even open unless you go through that tunnel first. In fact, the thing that opens it is turning that hominid-hole cover we just came out of. You have to know about the tunnel, you have to have the great fortitude to get through the tunnel,” here, Manqu paused to flex an elderly bicep in a mock macho-man gesture, “and at the end, you have to know the combination to get out of the tunnel. Only entering that correctly on that particular keypad will admit you to the fabled inner sanctum of those torts, pleadings, depositions, decrees, demands, briefings, petitions, writs, judgments, judgements, motions and affidavits that are regarded as so dangerous to the status quo that they must be relegated to a high security area that only a glorified janitor can get to.”

Manqu paused, wiped his brow and enunciated a “whew!” Rachel glanced at his daughter and saw her looking with great pride and also amusement at Manqu.

“Did he memorize that list before giving that little speech?” Rachel asked Yarawi.

“I never heard him say anything like that before,” was the response. “But he has been hanging out around law libraries for a long time.”

“I’ve done that too, but I couldn't do a speech like that off the top of my head,” Rachel marveled.

“Especially after sliding through slimy tunnels as though you were a ...” Yarawi let her voice trail off.

Rachel turned to Manqu. “When you were putting in the combination to get out of the tunnel, did you remember it right away?”

“No, and it really scared me. But it seems the designers overlooked requiring people to know it right away. Even so, the cover was hard to turn. The damn thing took a lot of attempts.”

Rachel was silent, but inwardly illuminated. The squoncks... and the scrapes... I knew that's what they sounded like.

Panic flashed on Manqu's face. He quickly slid his timepiece out from a barely visible slit pocket in the groin of his skin tight suit. Words tumbled out as he consulted it anxiously: “One thing those sadists at MISS did not overlook was giving us an incredibly tight time window to get into the hardened depository...”

With amazing alacrity for a virtually elderly hominid, he began running towards the back of the huge tank trailer, yelling, “Come on! Follow me now! Ask questions later!”

His daughter followed and Rachel brought up the rear.