Artifact

by Shane Lindemoen

  We looked across the graveyard of artifacts, and on the far side of the cave, what must have been at least twenty miles away, we saw one of the giant braziers dip onto one side. Molten oil the volume of a small lake poured over the sagging end of the brazier, in what looked like a waterfall of flame. It was breathtaking. Building–sized segments of chain on one side of the brazier finally broke and it majestically swung downward, spilling the entirety of its contents onto a mountain of antiques and buildings. A moment later, a gust of hot air blew us back a bit, and we could see things exploding as the lake of burning oil began to spread. The sound was horrendous.

  “Are you familiar with the scientific precept of Occam’s Razor?”

  “Of course,” I said quietly, unable to tear my gaze away from the spreading ocean of flame. “It’s bullshit most of the time, though. You know that right?”

  He nodded and what may have been a smirk creased round where his mouth should have been. “There’s never a simple answer for anything, is there?”

  “I – I don’t know…”

  “This,” he said breathlessly as sweat started beading on his pate. “I have no idea what it means.”

  The oil started to funnel through the pathways connecting piles and piles of antiques, monuments, buildings and vehicles – as it moved through the cracked landscape like lava, everything the molten river touched ignited and burst into flames. Plumes of black smoke began to fill the cave. The heat was beginning to rise rapidly.

  “We have to find a way out of here,” I said, scanning the granite staircases for an opening in the cave wall. The smoke didn’t seem to go anywhere, and simply congealed at the dome’s apex, albeit miles above the building that looked like the Burj Khalifa .

  “I agree.” He turned toward the mezzanine. “We have to climb, though.”

  He was right. This was a cave. Rule of thumb when you’re trapped inside of a building is to hit the lowest point where the oxygen is, stay below the smoke and crawl your way out. This place changes the rules. All of the oxygen was going to get siphoned away from the lowest points first like a chimney, until the fire eventually consumed everything. If there was a way out, it was up. Our only hope was to find a way out before we choked to death on the toxic black clouds of smoke. A second later, the roaring fires took a huge gulp of air, and we were momentarily pulled toward the edge of the entresol.

  Just as we turned to start climbing the stairs, another brazier broke free from its mooring and poured its lake of oil onto the acres of devices below. I quickly ran to the desk and started frantically scooping the jigsaw puzzle back into its box so that we could take it with us.

  When I finished scraping the last bit, the world started to finally halo out. I was going. I ran back toward the other me and handed him the puzzle.

  “What’s this for?” he asked.

  “I don’t know – take it with you.”

  “You’re not coming?”

  “It’s happening again.”

  He took the box and stood awkwardly, trying and failing to find something to say. Something passed between us that was quiet and beyond words. There was a sense that we were each permanently separating from an integral part of who we were.

  “Find a way out,” I said finally. “And if you can get to the surface, remember what we talked about.”

  We were shouting now, trying to make ourselves understood over the rising din of the fire quickly approaching our position. It was getting increasingly difficult to understand what he was saying without a face to sync with the words.

  “Wait,” he yelled. “What does this mean?” He asked, holding up the puzzle box.

  “Occam’s Razor,” I shouted. “I think we’re supposed to shake hands!”

  He shrugged and grasped my good hand. As the world started to rip apart, I began to see a pair of eyes coalesce onto his face – as well as a nose and a pair of lips. He reached up and touched his face, which was smiling.

  “Occam’s Razor!” He shouted back. He let go of my hand and turned toward the next staircase – without another word, he tucked the puzzle under his arm and started sprinting.

  “Thanks!” I yelled after him.

  He turned once more and took a step back, reaching his hand out to me. I couldn’t hear what he was saying.

  “For saving my life!” I yelled.

  He stood for a few moments with his eyes locked onto mine, and then his hand slowly dropped to his side. He nodded one last farewell and turned again toward the stairway.

  I walked back to the spreading river of fire. It was by far the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

  The jigsaw puzzle was of a photo taken inside the Sistine Chapel, in Rome. It was a close up of the ceiling during the exact moment when God missed Adam’s hand.

  The fires roared, and a third brazier broke free, pouring its judgment onto the ground. I sat down again, wanting to take in the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and then–

  5.

  –The river of flame gave way to utter nothingness. I was blind. Pitch colored darkness consumed me. I floated in starless space without axis toward a horizon of uncertainty that I could neither see nor touch. I instinctively crouched, and my palms felt a smooth polished surface below my feet that extended indefinitely out of reach. I heard a faint pounding, and what I thought was a series of frustrated, hungry moans.

  I reached away from my body into the inky, unending blackness, and I finally felt a wall. It was some sort of concrete masonry unit, coated with something that felt a bit waxy. My hands traced the outline of a sixteen by eight inch block of high density rock, and then what felt like mortar joints connecting several more – I realized it was a wall of painted cinder blocks.

  I was in a basement somewhere – the pounding and the moans grew louder until a beam of light strafed what I could clearly see was an L shaped corridor that broke away fifty feet to the left.

  “Are they inside?” Kate asked, pulling Sarah behind her. She quickly tracked her light in front of me. “What’s wrong?”

  Now that my vestibular had something to work with, I stood and studied my surroundings. The power was still out, and there didn’t seem to be any floodlights down here. I realized that I was holding onto something metallic and cylindrical.

  I switched on the flashlight and watched the small particles of dust swim for a moment, trying to shake the memory of the molten river of oil from that last place. I pointed my light at the wall and found a laminated map of the corridor. I ripped it out of its brackets and angled my light until I could clearly see the layout. There were two doors on the right of the corridor, one labeled GR and the other ER. There was an emergency exit at the other end, where it branched off with the lower part of the L. There was also an additional door on the left, directly across from the GR – and finally the stairway to the ground floor, which was behind us.

  “Where is it?” She asked, unzipping her jacket and draping it over Sarah’s shoulders.

  “This way.” I shined the light down the corridor and concentrated on my breathing.

  We moved slowly, preparing ourselves for what was at the other end of the hallway. As we neared the source of the pounding, we picked up the faint chorus of frustrated moans that was all too familiar. The door marked Generator Room in stark white stencil was to our right, but we moved farther, intent on seeing where the pounding was coming from. We needed to assess whether or not we had time to even deal with the generator.

  “If something happens,” Kate said quietly to Sarah. “What do you do?”

  “Run to the emergency stairs by the elevator and go to the second floor.” The little girl whispered back, “Tell Alice and Sid that you’re in trouble.”

  We moved around the corner and illuminated the empty hallway. The emergency exit at the end of the corridor was oscillating. There must have been countless zombies on the other side, bec
ause there was a thick puddle of blood oozing through the weather stripping on the floor. The map showed how the emergency exit opened to a stairway that ascended to a separate hallway on the ground level – this meant that the zombies were inside the building, albeit confined to a single hallway that probably opened to the facility’s exterior somewhere. Depending on how many there were, I imagined the entire stairwell crammed with corpses, the ones closest to the emergency exit pancaked by the hordes pressing down from above.

  “Come on,” Kate said.

  We walked back to the generator room and methodically went through the key–ring that Kate apparently policed from a zombified janitor. She said he was so emaciated that he could barely react to our presence – but he was at least aware enough to shadow us with his jaw wherever we moved. I had no memory of this – by that time I was probably walking around the mausoleum miles below the Earth’s surface with my faceless self.

  It was a long process, and I have no idea how long it took, but we eventually found a key with a pink cap that fit. Inside, we saw that the primary generator was dead and silent, but the backup generator was functioning just fine. Kate circled the behemoth combustion engine until she located the terminal block. She rubbed her stubble a few times and then shook her head. “Oh, man…”

  “What?”

  “Well, most of the wiring is intact. But it looks like some of it’s been cut,” She pointed at a distribution panel, and most of the wires on the bottom half looked fine – half of the wiring on the top, however, looked as if it had been cleanly severed.

  “We could have simply completed the circuit or something,” she said. “But the wire isn’t just cut–” She pointed at the wall where most of the wiring disappeared into various conduits through the ceiling. “The wires that were cut from the terminal block have also been ripped out of the ceiling. We couldn’t even hotwire these if we wanted to.”

  I tracked the conduit on the ceiling to where the rest of the wires seemed to disappear.

  “This wasn’t some accident,” I said quietly, turning quickly to leave the room, but Kate stopped me.

  “This place,” she said. “You do a lot of important work here?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “Because I’ve seen power supplies at important facilities like this before,” she said. “Like at the CDC or something – and they usually have several backup generators – at least one separate generator for the room where all of the important stuff was kept. I’m talking a whole floor of generators.”

  I thought about the Clean Room. I remembered something about a separate generator, but not much. “You’re saying that there might be another generator room.”

  “Has to be – let’s have a look at the map.”

  We studied the map for a moment and concluded that GR meant Generator Room – this was where we were – and that ER meant Electrical Room. Kate said that electrical panels and fuse boxes are typically kept separate from the generators because of the fuel. She pointed at the only unlabeled room on the map, which was directly across the hall. “Let’s check that one out.”

  We spent some time again looking for the right key, and when we opened the door a thick pungent scent of diesel wafted into the corridor. We found the Clean Room generator inside.

  There was a massive puddle of fuel on the floor. Kate inspected the generator with her flashlight, and revealed how someone must have been through already.

  It looked as though someone took a pair of bolt cutters to the thing, and snipped all of the exposed wire and hoses. It was completely useless and irreparable.

  “Well,” Kate said quietly. “That’s that…”

  “What does it mean?” Sarah asked.

  Kate picked her way through the puddle, taking in the extent of the damage. “Someone wants us dead,” she said softly.

  I stepped into the room and, just as I suspected, there was a pair of bolt cutters carelessly tossed onto the floor near the generator, covered with fuel.

  “So,” Sarah repeated. “What do we do now?”

  “I – I don’t know.”

  Kate and I stood in the puddle, numbly staring at what was our only chance to get the magnetic roller going. Somebody really went out of their way to make sure that the Clean Room remained inoperable.

  “Wait,” Kate said suddenly. “Look at this.” She shined her light on the generator’s terminal block. None of the wires seemed to have been cut on this one. “They probably figured that they didn’t have to mess with the terminal block,” she said. “Since they completely ruined the generator itself.”

  I shined my light on the panel as well. “What are you thinking?”

  “We could jump it,” Kate said, focusing on the remaining cables sprouting out of the distribution panel.

  “Jump? Like a car?”

  “I thought you were a physicist,” she said under her breath.

  “I know how it works,” I said defensively. “I just don’t know how you expect to do it.”

  “This distribution panel is intact. If we could supply power to it with the generator across the hall – by like, running wire from the Clean Room’s terminal block to the backup generator’s terminal block – we might be able to get this going.”

  “That’s very dangerous. You think you can figure out a way to do this?”

  She circled the block, studying the wires branching out of either end. “Yeah. Everything looks good. If we could simply get some voltage running through these things, we could get the Clean Room up and running again.”

  I studied the terminal block, tracing the wires as they disappeared into some more conduits in the ceiling, mentally following their complex routes through the building into the Clean Room. “How do you suppose we do it?”

  “Well, it would be major fire hazard,” Kate said. “And a lot of the wire is going to melt – and we’re probably going to have to figure out a way to suspend the wire so it doesn’t ignite the fuel on the floor.”

  I glanced at the ground, noticing that fuel and coolant was beginning to run out of the room into the corridor.

  “But,” she continued. “We could head upstairs and start pulling random wire out of the ceiling – braid large enough spools together to make a larger wire, and we should be able to do it.”

  “That’s not very safe.”

  “No.” She smiled, “But I don’t know what else to do. We just have to make sure to power down the backup generator before we try running any wire into this terminal block. Like I said, at the very least some of the wiring will melt – the worse that could happen,” she glanced down at the floor. “The electricity arcs to the floor, and we ignite the fuel–”

  “–and burn the building down.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “What about this?” Sarah asked. She pointed out an oversized three-pronged socket hidden from view underneath the distribution panel. It looked like there was both a plug and a socket for either end of a very large power cord.

  Kate knelt and inspected it. She smiled and ruffled Sarah’s hair. “You’re too smart,” she said, and turned to me. “These generators are custom made.” She rubbed her thumb across the Honda logo. “All we need is an industrial extension cord – but a special kind of cord. It looks like a regular extension cord, but the plugs are twice as big and the cord is twice as thick.”

  I bent down to see what she was talking about. “Does the other generator have anything like this?”

  We walked back to the other room across the corridor, and hidden underneath the bottom of the terminal block was a plug and socket, exactly the same size and shape as the plug and socket on the Clean Room’s terminal block.

  “We just have to find the cord,” Kate said. “We should have a look around.”

  “No pulling wire out of the ceiling?” Sarah asked.

  “Not if we can find the extension cord.�
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  “There are a couple of maintenance closets upstairs,” I said. “If you two are okay down here, I’ll head up and see if I can find anything.”

  Sarah glanced at the bend in the hallway and started twisting the bottom of her shirt, but remained silent.

  “I’ll hurry back,” I patted her shoulder. “Promise.”

  Kate nodded and started looking around with her flashlight. Sarah stayed close, holding onto the tail of Kate’s shirt. The zombies on the other side of the emergency exit tirelessly continued their siege.

  6.

  I entered the lobby to an echoing whisper of hoarse moaning. There must have been thousands of them pressing into the barricades, which weren’t going to last much longer. The windows had long ago been pulverized to dust by the multitudes. How the flimsy, shoddily placed doors and planks held this long is beyond reason, reality and logic. But such things had been rare in this place. The good news was that it didn’t look like there were very many windows exposing the prime network of hallways. Most of the windows were inside offices – so all one had to do was simply close the doors, and have enough spares around to barricade what was left.

  A wave of memories hit me as I stood in front of the name of the research center written large on the wall. The Center for Energetic Materials, and underneath the misquoted inscription read,

  The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes.

  A bloody handprint swept away from Proust’s name toward an office. I followed until I came upon a pair of legs jutting out of a door. When I was satisfied that whoever those legs belonged to wasn’t going to get up and follow me, I moved on.

  The spirant moaning echoed off the walls, seeming to come from everywhere, menacingly close and at the same time distant. And somehow those dead voices formed a chorus of ravenous dissonance.

  More scared than I thought I’d be – much, much more scared than I’d hoped I would be – I moved toward the hallway beside the information kiosk. I reasoned that most maintenance closets I ever saw usually orbited the restrooms. I followed the signs. My long-term memory was still completely blank, and I may as well have been navigating a maze. I spent some time anxiously walking the halls, often backtracking as some hallway or other closed to a dead end. It didn’t help that the only light I had was a tiny generic flashlight. I grew worried that I was going to lose myself – and I focused on what I remembered from orienteering – I kept the location of places that I visited tacked onto my internal compass, hoping that I could at least make my way back to the lobby if things got bad.