“Is that—mouse tracks?” Silk asked.
“No. Rats,” Mira answered, her voice low and thoughtful.
“I’m not fan of rats, but can’t they be killed with ease?” Silk asked.
Mira rose, flicking the mud from her fingers. “I saw some rats clean the carcass of a hog in less than a day. And where there’s one, there are hundreds, maybe even thousands. What I don’t get is why they aren’t out here?”
“Nocturnal,” I said. “Maybe these aren’t fans of the sun. Not many rats from my cities would be out in the daylight, unless there was something hunting them.”
“Or a lack of food. That makes them move, too,” Mira said. “We would find them in abandoned camps, but only as long as the food held out.”
“Which means they’re foraging in The Empty,” Chloe said, her eyes following the dizzying array of tracks.
“Successfully, too, judging by the bones. Those skeletons aren’t ancient,” I said. “Two wings, filled with rats, and only a day or so to clear them out. We can’t use fire, and don’t have enough ammo, even if they were kind enough to line up and let us potshot at them one by one.” I cracked my knuckles in frustration, examining the muddy trail again as if it had secrets to reveal.
“What if we don’t kill them all, or at least not now?” Silk asked.
“You mean find a safe room and operate from there? That could work, but it will have to be close enough to the main entrance for a fast exit. Just in case,” I said. I held up the map taken off the wall. “There’s an entire ground level wing we haven’t seen, and we’ve got lights on and plenty of daylight up top. Let’s go in, check the other wing, and make a decision based on what the best option is. By tonight, we’ll have a base, an emergency exit plan, and we can begin clearing rooms. I don’t think the top level is where the reactors will be. It’s too close to the surface, and it doesn’t make sense in case the power system fails.”
“What do you mean?” Silk asked.
“The lights. The hum of power. All of it. If it’s running off one source, it seems likely the designers would keep backups close by, where the system could switch over in the event of an emergency. I’m betting there are systems that can’t go offline, not if the facility was expected to function.” I shrugged, because I didn’t know what we were looking at, other than a fort made of secrets.
“Then we drink, eat, and go back in, but this time, we find a place to sleep that doesn’t squeak when we lie down,” Silk said.
“You have a history with rats?” I asked her.
She jabbed me in the arm while making a pretty frown.
“You might say. I had a disagreement with one who exited the pack of a merchant. While I was in the tub.” She shuddered. “Do you know rats can run along the edge of a tub while avoiding the flailing hand of a woman? Quite nicely, I might add. Took me four tries to get the little bastard, and even then, I think I only made him angry.”
“I’m glad you survived,” I told her with mock gravity.
“I know you are. It would be quite the shame to waste me on a stupid death by rat. I prefer something more . . . impressive,” she said with an elegant sniff. Her lips curled in a sarcastic twist, adding to her beauty.
“Like giant rats in an underground lab built by people who wrecked the planet?” Chloe asked, all innocence.
“Much more to my liking. I always did have a flair for the dramatic,” Silk said, but her smile took the sting of any retort away. She knew who she was.
“I’ll take my death the way I like danger. Distant and unthinkable,” I said, starting the walk back toward our original point of access. I stopped halfway between the rat trail and the main entrance.
“Why here?” Chloe asked.
“Rats have great noses. Less chance of tweaking them with the smell of food. Eat up. We go under in five,” I said, pulling my pack off but keeping my shotgun on hand.
We ate and drank in companionable silence, then stood as a team. “Let’s go,” I said. “My lead. Guns ready. Legs ready too, just in case.”
The stairs were drying out from air exchange, but still far from safe. Descending in a slow, careful pace, we made it down to the main landing in two minutes, speeding up due to the familiarity of the path. The piles of bones greeted us with mute silence, only the unknown hum of distant machinery breaking the oppressive atmosphere.
“Quiet as death,” Silk murmured. Her words echoed off the nearest wall as I leaned down to examine the bones.
“Mira, what do you make of these?” I asked.
With Silk and Chloe standing guard, we knelt, looking closely at the nearest deposit of remains. Some were clearly human, but others could have been almost any mammal. Or bird.
She flicked through them like a teenager in a record store, looking for a hidden gem. “Blood chicken. Iguana, maybe a basilisk. That one’s a rat, but not full grown. Seems they’ll eat their own in lean times.”
“Not surprising,” I said.
“Human, for sure,” Mira said, holding up a femur. “Young. A child, maybe ten or so.” She put the bone back with a reverent touch, her eyes darkened with sadness. “the rats have cracked some of them for marrow, but not all. I think there’s plenty of food around here, but where?”
“Not in The Empty,” Chloe said. “That’s for damned sure.”
“Even in this area, where there’s vegetation and water. Maybe if there was some kind—what the hell is that?” Mira said, her voice growing tight.
She pulled a wide, flat object form the bone pile, it’s surface shining with the pallor of metal. It was nearly black, streaked with angry red, and twice the width of my hand.
It was also a fragment.
“A shell?” I asked, moving some of the bones away to look for other pieces. We were wasting valuable time. Rowan was coming, and I was digging through a rat’s garbage dump looking for clues to a question I couldn’t define.
Mira found three more pieces of the skeleton, placing them side by side on the floor like a puzzle taking shape.
I’d lived in Oklahoma long enough to recognize certain things from the desert, and what I saw made me tighten the grip on my shotgun. “It’s a carapace.”
“A what?” Chloe asked. “What’s that word?”
“Like a shell, but for an insect, or some forms of sea life,” I replied. “This one must have been two meters long.”
“It’s a fucking scorpion?” Mira asked. “Right?” Her voice shook with disbelief. She knew The Empty, and this was something she hadn’t seen before, at least not this particular variety. That made it new, and therefore even more dangerous.
“And the rats ate it? Do you think they killed it?” Chloe asked, her tone filled with worry.
I turned a piece of the carapace over in my hands, noting the deep, regular score marks, made by a predator. “I think they killed it. And then they ate it.” I kicked at the next pile of bones, and the next, and then one more just to be sure. The farther I went into the hallway, the more scorpion exoskeletons I found. By the time I was ten meters in, their shiny exteriors were the bulk of each pile. “Clearly, these rats have developed a taste for scorpion meat.”
“How big are these fucking things?” Mira asked.
“Big enough to treat a scorpion the size of me like a snack. That’s a problem,” I said. Standing, I dropped the remains with revulsion, turning back to the stairwell. “Let’s check the other side. I have a feeling a simple door isn’t going to be enough to keep these rats at bay. We’re going to need something a little more substantial.”
We crept back to the main stairs, careful not to make noise since we were well beyond high alert. The notion of a horde of predators at our back turned us into part-time ninjas, our steps light and silent.
“Wait a second,” I said when we rounded the corner into the other wing. Everyone stopped, holding our collective breath at the scene before us.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Mira hissed, taking an involuntary step back.
/> I had to look twice just to make sure we hadn’t doubled back. The hallway was a virtual duplicate of the other, right down to the deposits of bones.
Yawning jaws and empty eye sockets were peppered through a storm of predatory trash, the jackstraw of skeletons similar in every way except one.
I bent to pick up a long skull, the jaw gone but still armed with formidable teeth. “Mira, I’m no expert, but would you say this is a giant rat skull?” It weighed at least ten kilos and was longer than my forearm.
“I would, Jack. I also note that there isn’t a scratch on it,” Mira said.
I repeated my search from the other wing and, after a minute fraught with silent examination, turned back to everyone with my nerves humming like high tension wires. “You know what I don’t see here?”
“Scorpion shells?” Chloe offered.
“You would be right. And you know what that means?” I said, searching the long corridor for signs of a very different kind of game trail.
“We’re in the middle of a war between two kingdoms,” Silk said. “And both of them are always hungry.”
10
The lights blazed around us while the clock in my head ticked down to a war that would determine whether my people would survive. Inwardly, I seethed over the stupidity of humans, all while making ready to fight creatures that fell somewhere between natural and manmade monsters.
I listened to the distant hum of unseen technology at work, somewhere below us in the warren of space carved long ago. I saw no life other than human, just bones and an implied threat that at some point, there would be hallways filled with monsters.
“It’s the lights. They don’t like the lights,” I said.
“Even the scorpions?” Mira asked. “They travel during the day. Not often, but still . . .”
“But most of them hunt at night, right?” I asked.
“They do. Rats too. They move about during the day, but they prefer the night as well. Maybe we’re making them stay in their lairs?” Mira asked, craning her neck to look for an obvious tunnel or other hiding place for the beasts.
“We’ll keep our eyes open, but for now we have to go down another level. As long as the lights hold, we have some minor advantage.” I held up the key, taken from the mummified officer. “We go room by room, looking for things that are locked, secure the reactors, and then make ready to repulse any invasion from Rowan. If we don’t find the reactors, not much else will matter. Leaving to fight another day is not an option, because once we lose control of our power sources, we’re back to single water wheel. And Rowan will have endless power to go with his sneaky fucking ambition,” I said.
“So we go under,” Chloe said, more statement than question.
“We do, eyes open and guns up, and we do it right there,” I said, pointing my shotgun to the metal staircase descending to our right. There were lights below and no motion. I couldn’t see any bones piled up, either, which gave me hope that the warring factions of predators had kept their disagreement to the top floor. I took the lead and began going down the stairs. Time was not our friend, and I needed a break. The idea that hundreds of monsters loomed overhead made me nervous. Knowing the beasts were held in check by a power system as old as I was made me twitchy, and I couldn’t afford that reaction. I needed to be calm and cool, all while moving ever forward to reclaim a part of my past that would secure our future.
If freedom was a destination, then the first steps were here, with the pocket reactors and other technology left over from when the world was whole.
“Ready?” I asked.
The murmur of assent from everyone was a mix of caution and dread, but that was better than silence.
“Follow me,” I said in a low tone, and one by one, we began to descend the second stairwell, its steps going down into unseen depths of a facility that was held hostage by creatures out of a nightmare.
If the first level was a graveyard, the second was a complete surprise. Not only was it free of bones, it was clean, bright, and the air hummed with purpose. We were closer to the source of power, and I felt an odd resonance in my teeth.
“You feel that?” I asked.
“Hear it and feel it,” Mira said “Heard something like it once before. They rebuilt an electric motor at Wetterick’s, but it came apart when the cranked it up. Made this kind of whine, gave me a headache in the process.”
“I think we know why the rats and scorps don’t like it down here. Harmonics,” I said, reshuffling the deck of our chances in my mind.
“What’s that word mean?” Silk asked.
“If the reactors have been running for a long time without maintenance, then they may be deteriorating. The noise we’re feeling is from something being out of tune or broken. I’m betting it keeps animals away like poison. Their hearing is better than ours. Makes sense that they would find this floor to be a threat. Maybe the sound is enough to make them lose their hearing. Or worse,” I said. For the first time since we came down the stairs, I felt a flare of hope. We might have an advantage over nature.
Now, we had to use it.
“Got that map?” Silk asked, holding her hand out as she searched the wide corridor.
I gave it to her, glancing at the layout. We had a single hall, then two offshoots and a series of rooms that terminated in another stairwell going down. There were elevators to the far left, but I wouldn’t take us in there under any circumstances. The risk of being stuck—and vulnerable—was too great.
“What are you looking for?” I asked, but Silk just pored over the image, her lips moving in silence. She was memorizing the map.
When she gave a small nod, she handed it to Chloe. “Commit this to memory, then you too, Mira. We need to know where we are at all times.”
“Got it,” Chloe said.
“You have it, and that’s good, but there are shifting sands underneath us. Based on how this floor looks, and just how fucking big this place is, certain things might have to wait,” I said.
“Like the reactors? Thought those were at the top of our list,” Mira said.
“They are, along with survival. But this floor is huge, and based on the map, we could be down here for weeks and not clear every room. That means we need to prioritize in case we need to shift goals in mid-fight. Case in point—if we find a control room, everything stops. If we find a computer system under power, everything stops. We need power, but we also need the means to control it. Are we all clear?” I asked, receiving nods and tightened hands on weapons. “All right then. Forward.”
We stepped lightly down the wide hallway, a scent of ozone and damp in the air. The smells were far less grim than up top, and the lack of shadows made our first ten meters little more than a walk in the park. At the first door, we surrounded it as I tested the metal handle with a small push.
It was open.
“Going in. On me. No firing unless I fire first.” I clicked the handle and pushed into the room, gun leveled and eyes scanning as a light flicked on automatically. It was the kind of sleeping quarters doctors and researchers used at facilities where they burned the midnight oil. Two beds, a table, lamp, and standing metal cabinets were all I saw, each painted the bland institutional gray of a government hue.
Their labels were a different matter entirely.
“I think I know where that key we found goes,” I said.
In stenciled lettering on a locker were the words FR:Cache.
“The dead guy? This is his—his place?” Chloe asked.
“If not, then it’s a hell of a coincidence.” I opened the standing cabinet, seeing only metal hangars and the deteriorated remains of a pair of shoes. “Cleared out, but that doesn’t mean everything is gone. This isn’t a permanent place for anyone. Just a place to crash for a few hours, or maybe over a weekend. Nothing personal here.”
“Move on and mark this as clear?” Mira asked. Silk was staring at the hallway, listening.
“Good enough. Next door,” I said.
We fil
ed out in silence, opening six more doors to find the same setup, free of relics or information, although one desk had an ancient can of Coke on it, and my mouth flooded with remembrance of all things carbonated and sweet.
On the seventh door, we hit pay dirt. Of a sort.
The room was larger, with two long tables in the middle, and the benches of a mess hall used by up to thirty people at one meal. Attached to the back was a commissary kitchen, racks of canned goods sitting in mute silence, their labels revealing that even after I was in the tube, military people still ate shitty canned vegetables to counteract the fresh, flavorful meat in their diet. The armed forces couldn’t be accused of spoiling troops with things like flavor and comfort.
“Wonder how fast that food would kill you?” Silk asked.
“You’ve seen these cans before?” I asked her. I turned a row of cans labeled Tomatoes; Whole, Peeled and heard the thump of desiccated remains inside.
“Now and then. People find entire stores from your time under The Empty. Storms must have covered them over whole,” Silk said. She trailed a long finger down a can of butter beans. “I don’t like butter beans now, even when I’m hungry.”
“That’s because they’re evil, and no one should ever eat them. Let’s check out the kitchen. We won’t cook there, but might find knives, weapons. Who knows,” I said.
I was right. Nothing had been removed, not even the wax paper and cling wrap hanging in wall racks as ancient sentinels to a time when people had food that wasn’t cooked over a fire. There were ovens, pans, pots, and an array of tools that would be going with us to the Oasis—even the stoves could be useful, given tinkering to provide a source of natural gas. The kitchen was our first true golden strike, but it wouldn’t be the last. I knew it in my bones. The granary was packed with leftovers from my time, all for the taking if we could secure the reactors and clear a few hundred murderous beasts from above our heads.
After, of course, we killed Rowan and his goons.
“Mark this location on the wall map, and let’s move on. Time isn’t our friend, not now,” I said. We filed out again, gaining confidence in our routine. Stalk, open, clear. Stalk, open, clear. Room by room, the floor opened to us, spilling secrets large and small, adding to the list of things that would be going back to the Oasis.
Future Reborn Box Set Page 32
