by A. G. Riddle
I walk down to the butler’s office and pick up the phone. Mallory Craig begins speaking before I say a word. “Patrick. There’s been an accident. Rutger wouldn’t let them call you, but I thought you should know. He pressed too hard. Went too far too fast. Some of the Moroccan workers are trapped, they say—”
I’m up and out the door before he finishes. I drive myself to the warehouse and hop in the electric car alongside my former assistant. We drive as recklessly as Rutger did the first day he showed me the tunnel. The fool has done it — he pressed on and caused a cave-in. I dread seeing it, but urge my assistant to drive faster anyway.
As the tunnel opens on the massive stone room I’ve worked in for the last four months, I notice that the electric lights are off, but the room isn’t dark — a dozen beams of light crisscross the room, the headlamps of the miners’ helmets. A man, the foreman, grabs me by the arm. “Rutger is on the telly for you, Mr. Pierce.”
“On the phone,” I say as I traipse across the dark space. I stop. There’s water on my forehead. Was it sweat? No, there’s another one, a drop of water, from the ceiling — it’s sweating.
I grab the phone. “Rutger, they said there’s been an accident, where are you?”
“Somewhere safe.”
“Don’t play games. Where’s the accident?”
“Oh, you’re in the right place.” Rutger’s tone is playful and confident. Satisfied.
I glance around the room. The miners are milling about, confused. Why aren’t the lights on? I set the phone down and walk over to the electric line. It’s connected to something, a new cable. I shine my light on it, following it around the room. It runs up the wall… to the ceiling and then over to the stairs, to… “Get out!” I yell. I struggle over the uneven ground to the back of the room and try to corral the workers, but they simply stumble over each other in the choppy sea of light and shadows.
Overhead, a blast rings out in the space and rock falls. Dust envelopes the room and it’s just like the tunnels at the Western Front. I can’t save them. I can’t even see them. I stagger back, into the tunnel— the corridor to the lab. The dust follows me and I hear rock close the entrance off. The screams fade away, just like that, like a door closing, and I’m in total darkness except for the soft glow of the white light and fog in the tubes.
I don’t know how much time has passed, but I’m hungry. Very hungry. My headlamp has long since burned out, and I sit in the still darkness, leaning against the wall, thinking. Helena has to be mad with worry. Will she finally find out my secret? Will she forgive me? It all presupposes I’ll get out of here.
On the other side of the rock, I hear footsteps. And voices. Both are muffled, but there’s just enough space between the rocks to hear them.
“HEEEYYYY!”
I have to choose my words carefully. “Get on the telly and ring Lord Barton. Tell him Patrick Pierce is trapped in the tunnels.”
I hear laughter. Rutger. “You’re a survivor, Pierce, I’ll give you that. And you’re a brilliant miner, but when it comes to people, you’re about as thick as the walls to the structure.”
“Barton will have your head for killing me.”
“Barton? Who do you think gave the order? You think I could just knock you off? If so, I would have gotten rid of you a long time ago. No. Barton and Father planned for Helena and I to marry before we were even born. But she wasn’t a fan, may have been why she hopped the first train to Gibraltar when the war broke out. But we can’t escape fate. The dig brought me here too, and life was about to get back on track until your gimp ass came along and the methane leaks killed my crews. Barton made a deal, but he promised Papa it could be undone. The pregnancy was about the last straw, but don’t worry, I’ll take care of it. So many children die right after birth, from all sorts of mysterious diseases. Don’t worry, I’ll be there to comfort her. We’ve known each other for ages.”
“I’m going to get out of here, Rutger. And when I do, I’m going to kill you. You understand me?”
“Keep quiet Patty-boy; men are working here.” He moves away from the rock-covered entrance to the corridor. He shouts in German, and I hear footfalls all around the room.
For the next few hours, I don’t know how long, I ransack the mysterious lab. There’s nothing I can use. And all the doors are sealed. This will be my tomb. There has to be some way out. Finally, I sit and stare at the walls, waiting, watching them shimmer like glass, almost reflecting the light from the tubes, but not quite. It’s a dull recreation, the kind of reflection iron makes.
Above me, I occasionally hear drilling and pick axes striking rocks. They’re trying to finish the job. They must be close to the top of the stairs. Suddenly, the noise stops, and I hear yelling, “Wasser! Wasser!” Water — they must have hit— then loud booms. The unmistakable sound of falling rock.
I run to the entrance and listen. Screams, rushing water. And there’s something else. A drumbeat. Or a pulsing vibration. Getting louder every second. More screams and men running. The car cranks, and it roars away.
I strain, but I can’t hear anything else. In the absence of sound, I realize I’m standing in two feet of water. It’s seeping in through the loosely stacked rock, and quickly.
I slosh back into the corridor. There must be a door to the lab. I bang around on the walls, but nothing works. The water is in the lab now; it will overtake me in minutes.
The tube — it’s open, one of the four. What choice do I have? I wade through the water and collapse into it. The fog surrounds me, and the door closes.
CHAPTER 92
Snow Camp Alpha
Drill Site #6
East Antarctica
Robert Hunt sat in his housing pod, warming his hands around a fresh cup of burned coffee. After the near-disaster at drill site five, he was glad they had reached 7,000 feet without so much as a hiccup. No pockets of air, water, or sediment. Maybe it would be like the first four sites — nothing but ice. He sipped the coffee and considered what might account for the drilling difference at the last site.
Beyond the pod’s door, a high-pitched sound erupted — the unmistakable whirl of a drill under low-to-no tension.
He ran out of the pod, made eye contact with the operator, and jerked his hand across his neck. The man lunged and hit the kill switch. The man was learning, thank God.
Robert jogged to the platform. The technician turned to him and said, “Should we reverse out?”
“No.” Robert checked the depth. 7,309 feet. “Lower the drill. Let’s see how deep the pocket is.”
The man lowered the drill, and Robert watched the depth reading climb: 7,400, 7,450, 7,500, 7,550, 7,600. It stopped at 7,624.
Robert’s mind raced with possibilities. A cavern a mile and a half below the ice. It could be something on the surface of the ground. But what? The cavern or pocket, whatever it was, was 300 feet deep. Its ceiling was almost a football field above its floor. The laws of gravity just didn’t work that way. What had the strength to hold up one and a half miles of ice?
The technician turned to Robert and asked, “Start drilling again?”
Robert, still deep in thought, waved a hand over the controls and mumbled, “No. Uh, no, don’t do anything. I need to call this in.”
Back at his pod, he activated the radio, “Bounty, this is Snow King. I have a status update.”
A few seconds passed before the radio crackled and the reply came, “Go ahead, Snow King.”
“We hit a pocket at depth seven-three-zero-nine, repeat seven-three-zero-nine feet. Pocket ends at seven-six-two-four, repeat, seven-six-two-four feet. Request instruction. Over.”
“Stand by, Snow King.”
Robert began preparing another pot of coffee. His team would probably need some.
“Snow King, what is the status of the drill, over?”
“Bounty, drill is still in the hole at max depth, over.”
“Understood, Snow King. Instructions are as follows: extract drill, lock down site
, and proceed to location seven. Stand by for GPS coordinates.”
As before, he wrote down the coordinates and endured the redundant warning about local contact. He folded the paper with the GPS coordinates and placed it in his pocket, then stood, grabbed the two cups of fresh coffee and headed out of the pod.
They reversed the drill out and prepared the site with ease. The three men worked efficiently, almost mechanically, and silently. From the air, they might have looked like three Eskimo versions of tin soldiers racing around on a track, performing some sort of ballet in the snow as they danced around each other, lifting and stacking crates, opening large white umbrellas to cover small items, and anchoring white metal poles for the massive canopy that covered the drill site. When they finished, the two techs mounted their snowmobiles and waited for Robert to lead them.
He rested his arm on the plastic chest that contained the cameras and looked up at the site. Two million dollars was a lot of money.
The two men glanced back at him. They had started their snowmobiles, but one tech turned his off.
Robert brushed some snow off the chest and opened one latch. The sound of the radio startled him. “Snow King, Bounty. SITREP.”
Robert clicked the button on the radio and hesitated for a second. “Bounty, this is Snow King.” He glanced at the men. “We’re evacuating the site now.”
He snapped the latch shut and stood for a moment. The whole thing felt wrong. The radio silence, all the secrecy. But what did he know? He was paid to drill. Maybe they weren’t doing anything wrong, maybe they just didn’t want the press broadcasting their business to the world. Nothing wrong with that. Getting fired for being curious would be a hell of thing, and he wasn’t quite that stupid. He imagined himself telling his son, “I’m sorry, college will have to wait. I just can’t afford it right now; yes, I could have, but I couldn’t stand the mystery.”
Then again… if there was something going on, and he was part of it… “Son, you can’t go to college because your dad is an international criminal, and ps: he was too dumb to even know it.” Robert wasn’t that stupid either.
The other man stopped the engine on his snowmobile. They both stared at him.
Robert walked over to the excess cover supplies. He picked up a closed 8’ white umbrella and tied it to his snowmobile. He cranked the machine and drove toward the next location. The two men followed close behind.
Thirty minutes into their trek, Robert spotted a large rock overhang rising out of the snow. It wasn’t deep enough to be a cave, but the indentation cut 20 or 30 feet into the mountain and cast a long shadow. He adjusted their vector to pass close by the overhang, and at the last second, he veered off into the darkness of the shadow. Despite riding close behind him, the two men matched his course quickly and parked their snowmobiles beside his. Robert was still seated. Neither man dismounted.
“I forgot something at the site. I’ll be back. Shouldn’t take long. Wait here and don’t, uh, don’t leave the ravine.” Neither man said anything. Robert could feel his nervousness growing. He was a terrible liar. He continued, hoping to legitimize his orders, “They’ve asked us to minimize our visibility from the air.” He opened the white umbrella and planted it beside him, anchoring it against the snowmobile, as if he were a medieval knight locking a lance next to him and readying his horse for a charge.
He backed his snowmobile out and resumed the way they had come, back to the site.
CHAPTER 93
Kate yawned and turned the page. The room was cold, and she and David were wrapped in a thick blanket now.
“Finish it on the walk out,” David said through sleepy eyes. “You’ll need to stop a lot.”
“Ok, I just want to get to a good stopping place,” she said.
“You stayed up reading as a kid, didn’t you?”
“About every night. You?”
“Video games.”
“Figures.”
“Sometimes legos.” David yawned again. “How many pages left?”
Kate flipped through the journal. “Not many actually. Just a few more. I can stay awake if you can.”
“Like I said, I’ve slept enough. And I don’t have a hike tomorrow.”
I awake to the soft hiss of air flowing into the tube. At first, the air feels heavy, like water in my lungs, but after a few deep gulps of the damp cold air, my breathing normalizes, and I take stock of my situation. The room is still dark, but there’s a faint shaft of light drifting into the lab from the corridor.
I rise from the tube and walk toward the corridor, surveying the room as I go. None of the other tubes are occupied, save for the ape-man, who apparently slept through the flood without incident. I wonder how many he’s slept through.
There’s still about a foot of water in the corridor. Enough to notice but not enough to slow me down. I slosh toward the jagged opening. The rocks that locked me inside are almost completely gone, washed away no doubt. A soft amber glow from above drapes the remaining rocks, which I push aside as I step out into the room.
The source of the strange light hangs thirty feet above me, at the top of the stairs. It looks like a bell, or a large pawn, with windows in the top. I eye it, trying to figure out what it is. It seems to stare back at me, the lights pulsing slowly, like a lion’s heart beating after it’s devoured a victim on the Serengeti.
I stand still, wondering if it will attack me, but nothing happens. My eyes are adjusting, and with every passing second, more of the room comes into focus. The floor is a nightmarish soup of water, ashes, dirt, and blood. At the very bottom, I see the bodies of the Moroccan miners, crushed under the rubble. Above them, Europeans lie prostrate, ripped to shreds, some burned, all mutilated by a weapon I can’t imagine. It’s not an explosion, or a gun, or a knife. And they didn’t die recently. The wounds look old. How long have I been down here?
I search the bodies, hoping to see one in particular. But Rutger isn’t here.
I rub my face. I’ve got to focus. Got to get home. Helena.
The electric car is gone. I’m weak, tired, and hungry, and at that moment, I’m not sure I will ever see daylight again, but I put one foot in front of the other and start the arduous trek out of the mine. I pump my legs as hard as they’ll go and brace for the pain, but it never touches me. I’m driven to get out of this place by a strength and fire I didn’t know I possessed.
The mine flies by in a flash, and I see the light as I hike out of the last turn of the spiral. They’ve covered the entrance to the tunnel with a white tent, or a plastic sheet of some type.
I brush the flap aside, and I’m surrounded by soldiers in gas masks and strange plastic suits. I wrestle free, but they tackle me and hold me to the floor. From the ground, I see a tall soldier stride over. Even through the bulky suit, I know who it is. Konrad Kane.
One of my captors looks up at him and speaks through the mask in a muffled voice. “He just walked out, sir.”
“Bring him,” Kane says in a deep, disembodied voice.
The men drag me deeper into the warehouse, to a series of six white tents that remind me of a field hospital. The first tent has row after row of cots, all covered in white sheets. I hear screams in the next tent. Helena.
I struggle at the men at my sides, but I’m too weak, from lack of food, from the walk out, and from whatever the tube did to me. They hold me tight, but I continue to fight.
I can hear her clearly now, at the end of the tent, behind a white curtain. I lunge for her, but the soldiers jerk me back, walking me down the row so I get a good look at the people lying dead on the skinny cots. Horror spreads over me. Lord Barton and my mother-in-law are here. Rutger. Kane’s wife. All dead. And there are others, people I don’t recognize. Scientists. Soldiers. Nurses. We pass a bed with a boy, Kane’s son. Dietrich? Dieter?
I can hear the doctors talking to Helena, and, as we move past the edge of the curtain, I see them swarming around her, injecting her with something, and holding her down.
The
men hold me as I struggle. Kane turns to me. “I want you to see this, Pierce. You can watch her die like I watched Rutger and Marie die.”
They drag me closer. “What happened?” I say.
“You unleashed hell, Pierce. You could have helped us. Whatever is down there killed Rutger and half his men. The ones who managed to make it back to the surface were diseased. A plague beyond anything we could imagine. It’s devastated Gibraltar and is moving through Spain.” He pulls the white curtain back farther, revealing the entire scene: Helena tossing in a bed surrounded by three men and two women working feverishly.
I push the guards off me, and Kane holds a hand up to stop them from chasing me. I run to her, brush her hair back, and kiss her cheek, then her mouth. She’s burning up. Feeling her boiling skin terrifies me, and she must see it. She reaches out and caresses my face. “It’s ok, Patrick. It’s only the flu. Spanish Flu. It will pass.”
I look up at the doctor. His eyes dart to the ground.
A tear wells in my eye and rolls slowly onto my cheek. Helena brushes it away. “I’m so glad you’re safe. They told me you were killed in a mining accident, trying to save the Moroccans who worked for you.” She holds my face in her hand. “So brave.”
She jerks a hand to her mouth, trying to suppress the cough that shakes her whole body and the rolling hospital bed. She holds her swollen belly with the other hand, trying to keep herself from hitting the rails at the side of the bed. The cough continues for what feels like eternity. It sounds like her lungs are tearing apart.
I hold her shoulders down. “Helena…”
“I forgive you. For not telling me. I know you did it for me.”
“Don’t forgive me, please don’t.”
Another round of coughing racks her and the doctors push me out of the way. They give her oxygen, but it doesn’t seem to help.
I watch. And I cry. And Kane watches me. She kicks and fights and when her body goes limp, I turn to Kane and my voice is flat, lifeless, almost like his voice that comes from the mask. Then and there, in that makeshift Immari hospital, I make a deal with the devil.
