The hydraulic guide-shoes of the freight lift slammed into their bottom stops with a wet, iron thud.
The heavy steel platform rebounded twice on its suspension springs before settling flush with the catwalk deck. Around the crew, the darkness split open.
They stood twenty feet above the floor of Filtration Basin #4. The cavern was vast, an underground vaulted cathedral carved from black schist and damp limestone, large enough to swallow three full city blocks. Overhead, banks of industrial sodium-vapor lamps buzzed with a sixty-cycle hum, bathing the entire reservoir in a sickening, amber glare that cast long, greasy shadows across the wet ironwork.
Below the grated catwalk, four colossal circular settling tanks churned. Each tank was sixty feet across, filled to the brim with a viscous, chalk-white slurry that hissed and bubbled as mechanical paddle arms dragged slowly through the depths. The air was a suffocating soup of boiled sheep tallow, swimming-pool chlorine, scorched copper pennies, and ozone.
Julian Vance gripped the gurney handle. In his ears, the thirty-hertz cavitation roar of the four Worthington flood pumps vibrated through the steel grating, rattling the soles of his work boots.
In any retail establishment, entering the warehouse floor from the clean front sales floor was always a slap in the face. Customers saw neat shelves, bright fluorescent lighting, and smiling clerks in clean smocks. But once you pushed through the double-swinging rubber impact doors into the back stockroom, you found the broken pallets, the leaking bleach jugs, the crushed cardboard…
