Six Read Online Free PDF Page A

over Steve and mutters, “Come on, come on,” at his inert body.
    Meanwhile, Colonel Peterson slams the telephone receiver down on its cradle. “There’s no dial tone.” He pulls a cell phone out of his Army uniform and fumbles at its keys. “And no cell signal either.” He heads for the door. “Wait here, Tom. I’ll get help.”
    But when Peterson grabs the knob on the steel door, it doesn’t open. And when he tries to unlock the door, the lever doesn’t turn. He jiggles the lever and gives it a firm twist, but the thing won’t budge. “The door’s locked! The security system must’ve automatically locked it.” He looks over his shoulder at my dad. “And now it’s stuck!”
    Dad stops the chest compressions, which aren’t doing much good anyway. He gazes first at Peterson, then at the flickering LEDs on the servers. Then he lifts his head and wrinkles his nose, as if he just caught a whiff of something unusual. A second later I catch it too, the unmistakable odor of a lit stove.
    I start to panic, trembling in my wheelchair. Natural gas is leaking from the lab’s heating system and wafting into the office through the ventilation grates.
    â€œ Out ! ” Dad yells, jumping to his feet. “ We have to get out ! ”
    He hurtles toward the door and pushes Peterson aside. Grasping the doorknob with both hands, he pulls with all his might. When that doesn’t work, he beats his fists on the door and shouts for help. Peterson shouts too, but there’s no response. I don’t hear any voices or footsteps in the corridor now. Everyone else has fled the building. We’re trapped and no one can help us.
    Then another explosion shakes the walls and ceiling. The second blast is closer, twice as loud as the first. Belatedly, I figure out what’s going on. It’s pretty easy to ignite a room full of natural gas. The smallest of electric sparks would do the trick. Someone is pumping gas into the laboratory’s offices and blowing them up.
    Dad rushes back to his desk and grabs a hammer from one of the drawers. He starts pounding on the lock, trying to smash the dead bolt. But it’s no use. The lock’s made of hardened steel. Unicorp spent millions of dollars to protect its top-secret research from spies and thieves. The lab’s security is impregnable.
    The scent of gas gets stronger, making me nauseous. All I can think of is the explosion that’s going to happen any second now, the flames leaping across the room, the blast crushing all of us to pulp. Oh God, oh God! We’re going to die here!
    Dad drops the hammer and leans against the door, his chest heaving. He looks straight at me with an anguished grimace. I remember seeing this expression on his face once before, years ago, when I asked him to describe what Duchenne muscular dystrophy will eventually do to my body. Now I see it again, his lips pulled back from his teeth, his eyes wide with grief and despair. He doesn’t care about himself or Peterson. He’s thinking only of me.
    I have to turn away. I can’t look at him; it’s too painful. And as I stare in the opposite direction, I happen to glance at the tank of liquid nitrogen sitting beside the server rack. Attached to the tank is the spray canister Dad uses to cool the circuits of his experimental computers. The nitrogen, I remember, is super-cold, more than three hundred degrees below zero. Then I remember something else, something I learned in my tenth-grade physics class at Yorktown High: Steel becomes brittle at very low temperatures.
    â€œThe nitrogen!” I yell at Dad. “Spray nitrogen on the lock!”
    For a second he just stares at me in surprise. Then he dashes to the nitrogen tank, detaches the spray canister, and slips its long nozzle into the gap between the door and the door frame.
    Dad presses the canister’s trigger and sprays liquid nitrogen on the