by Warren Fahy
“Wow,” Nell said. “She’s something.”
“She certainly is,” Dennis nodded and looked at his watch. He frowned, sighing.
“What’s the matter?”
“The initiation of our power supply seems to have been postponed. Once again.… I had hoped the lights would be on for our tour today,” he apologized. “Most of the projects we are working on will require a strong light source, of course.…” Dennis looked up at the dimly lit lighting structure hanging from the high ceiling. “They must be having more trouble.”
“Nell!” Sasha called. “Come here!” Her voice echoed across the rows.
Dennis shrugged. “You might as well go with her. There’s not much more to see at the moment.”
“Well, it was nice meeting you, Dennis. See you around.” Nell shook his hand and ducked under the lower bench of algae jugs. “Where are you?” she called from the next row over.
“Over here!” Sasha’s voice sang like an opera singer.
“OK.” Nell stooped and crawled under the lower shelf of another row of bottles.
“One more!” Sasha shouted, and Nell climbed under the next row. As she came out from under, Sasha kissed her on the forehead and Ivan licked her face. “Ha ha ha!”
Nell laughed as she climbed to her feet and dusted off. “There you are!”
“Come on!” Sasha ran, leading Ivan and Nell with a lavender flashlight she had taken out of her purse and pointed north into the dark.
“Where are we going?” Nell asked.
“A secret passage!”
“Where does it lead?”
“The palace, of course! Crummy old Stalin wanted to have lots of food for himself, so he built a secret passage to the farm!”
“Oh. Wow!”
Sasha and Ivan took Nell through the dark, led more by Ivan’s nose than by Sasha’s flashlight, and they finally arrived at the northwest corner of Sector Five. The young girl, her white clothes now smudged with dirt like her snow-white dog, opened a small panel in the rock face, revealing a hatch wheel. She jumped up as she cranked it down, twice. A door popped out, disguised to look like part of the natural wall. Sasha and Ivan wedged it open to a tunnel, which coursed to the left and right.
“The palace is this way!” Sasha whispered as Ivan took off to the right.
Nell followed her through the door, and Sasha pulled it closed. Then they ran after Ivan.
“Where does the other direction go?” Nell asked.
“To your honeymoon suite!” Sasha laughed. “That’s where Stalin took his sweeties!” she shouted over her shoulder. “I think it goes to the railroad in Sector Seven, too. So he could make his getaway back to Moscow!”
Nell tried to catch up with the precocious princess through the barrel-vaulted corridor that headed steeply uphill. “Have you gone down there?” Nell panted. “Back the other way?”
“No,” Sasha said. “I tried to go down there once, but I saw a ghost! A really scary ghost. Ivan tried to bite it.”
Nell sweated in the warm, stuffy air as she followed Sasha up the stifling passage, with a few glances over her shoulder at the deep dark behind them.
They finally reached a wall with a hatch, which opened into a room with a red velvet curtain similar to the one in the conservatory, but only a third of the size.
Sasha closed the door behind them, breathing dramatically. “I’m pooped!” she whispered.
Nell saw a glass-tubed spiral stairway in the far left corner, like the one in the conservatory. Most of this room appeared to be used for storage, with crates of canned and dry foods and stacks of bottled water.
“Can you open these curtains?” Nell said.
“Yes. You’re going to love it, Nell!” Sasha ran to the right side of the curtain and jumped up, giving a golden sash a full pull downward and laughing in delight as Nell ran to look through the opening crack.
Nell exhaled and could barely catch her breath as the ten-foot-wide window revealed an underwater world brimming with luminous creatures darting, swirling, and bobbing on the other side of the glass.
Sasha overheard shouts nearby and she ran down a hallway to the right of the window. Ivan ran ahead of her and sniffed at the hatch at the end of the hallway, which was slightly open. Sasha peered through at the palace foyer and shushed Ivan, perking her ear at the opening. She overheard the guards talking there:
“Find Nell Binswanger. Take her to Sector Three immediately, but don’t alarm her,” said a voice in Russian. “Tell her that her husband requested her presence.”
“Yes, sir!”
Sasha didn’t breathe as she slowly pulled the door closed and turned the crank wheel to lock it. Then she ran back to Nell with Ivan. “Stay here, Nell!” she whispered as she ran past her and up the spiral stairway with Ivan.
Nell hardly heard her, gaping through the portal at a sea that might have existed 300 million years ago, but no: almost every underwater species she saw was new, unprecedented, revolutionary. Horned chitons slid over the glass, hunted by fluorescent sea spiders as thousands of ammonites jetted in schools chasing blue squids. A star-shaped giant opened its monstrous arms on the bottom of the lake.
Sasha raised an eye over the edge of the second floor, peering into the empty conservatory. A buffet table had been laid out with breakfast to the right of the great window. Ivan whimpered as he smelled sausages and bacon. But the rest of the scientists were not there.
9:32 A.M.
As Nell’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, she could see the giant starfish on the lake bottom open and a plume of particles erupt from its center. Out of nowhere, glowing schools of neon blue bullet-shaped squids appeared, flashing red light as they fed on the plume of food.
9:33 A.M.
Sasha let Ivan follow her into the conservatory, running to her father’s desk. Ivan sat, restrained, in front of the breakfast buffet in whimpering reverence as Sasha scanned the bank of video monitors on the wall behind her father’s chair. She spotted the one showing the lab in Sector Three. All the scientists she had met two days ago were there except for Nell and Geoffrey. “No,” she whispered, and tears streaked her crumpled face. She could see that they were arguing and angry. The men in front of them were guards, and they were pointing their guns at the scientists.
“Sasha!” came a loud voice.
She jumped, and Ivan barked, leaving his place before the altar of food to stand by her side.
Galia pushed in the hatch to the conservatory and glared at her. “Have you seen Nell Binswanger?” he asked.
“Who?”
“Dr. Binswanger?”
“Oh. Yeah. Her.” Sasha shrugged. “Why?”
“She needs to catch a shuttle, right away.”
Sasha turned away from him. “She’s in the farm. Talking about fertilizer, I think.” She went to the banquet table and loaded food onto a plate. “Ivan’s hungry,” she said. She put another plate down on top of the thick pile of food. Then she looked casually at the cadaverous associate of her father, smirking. “And screw you, Galia, by the way.”
Galia blushed, adding a little color to his gray face. “Sasha—”
“Toodles!” She waved and Ivan barked good-bye as they both ran and jumped down the spiral stairs.
9:35 A.M.
Nell turned to exclaim in awe as Sasha motioned silence to her and ran past her.
Adrenaline tightened Nell’s body as she saw the terrified expression on Sasha’s face.
“Come on!” the girl whispered, motioning Nell to follow her as she hurried down the hallway toward the foyer. “I know where to hide you!”
“What’s going on?” Nell whispered.
Someone’s feet started pounding down the spiral stairs behind them. “Galia!” Sasha whispered.
Halfway down the hall, Sasha pushed on a narrow panel of inlaid stone on the left side and it slid inward, revealing a tight passage. Ivan wiggled through first, and Sasha motioned Nell to follow him. Nell squeezed into the crevice, and Sasha
slipped in behind her.
9:36 A.M.
Galia jumped down the spiral stairs two at a time and entered the storage room. He noticed the curtains on the window had been opened, and he touched the fog that was still on the glass from Nell’s breath.
Galia pounced down the corridor, following a hunch—which led nowhere. He grimaced. Where could she have gone this time?
9:37 A.M.
“You seem to be in a hurry,” Geoffrey said.
“We are in a cave, Geoffrey,” Maxim explained calmly as the two cars raced through the void. “Much of our power and all of our oxygen comes from the surface, but we cannot rely on those sources forever. Exhaust from gasoline-powered generators and vehicles is filling Pobedograd with smog, as you have noticed. We need clean energy. We are now one button away from creating it. And not a moment too soon.” Maxim smiled.
Geoffrey nodded. “Well, what kind of power are we talking about? Nuclear?”
“No! Pobedograd’s engineers built a dry steam geothermal generator for the city, but never activated it. The largest dry steam project in whole world is located north of San Francisco,” Maxim said. “It was built in 1960 and is most successful alternative energy project in world history. Pobedograd’s dry steam plant was built two years before that, and it is completely self-sustaining.”
“Ah, well done,” Geoffrey said. “How does it work?”
“Soviet engineers discovered a huge reservoir of steam in sandstone layer under Mount Kazar which is heated by six-mile-wide lake of magma,” Maxim said. “Using this geothermal energy the dry steam power plant they designed will feed electricity and heat to the city and, at the same time, pump water from river to injection wells, replenishing steam reservoir indefinitely.”
“Incredible!”
“All we must do now, Geoffrey, is detonate caps at the bottom of the well. The steam that rises will drive the power plant’s turbines. Only one button needs to be pushed to set the plant into perpetual motion.” Maxim’s casual smile failed to mask his apparent frustration.
As he spoke, the car squealed right and hurtled down a narrow road behind the speeding SUV. A long dark warehouse streamed by them on their right. On the left, a steep plane of rock like the polished side of a great pyramid sloped from the edge of the road.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” Geoffrey asked.
The warehouse ended, and a rock wall rimmed the road on the right straight up to the roof, 450 feet above them.
“I mean, if that’s all it takes to turn the power on,” Geoffrey said, “why haven’t you done it already?”
They continued a few hundred yards before they finally stopped at the foot of stairs carved straight up the gleaming slope of rock on the left side of the road.
“We are not waiting any longer, Geoffrey,” Maxim said. “We’re here. The power plant is up these stairs. Are you ready?”
Five men got out of the SUV in front of them, pointing machine guns in every direction. “Come on, move fast,” Maxim said. “As fast as you ever did on Henders Island!”
Maxim opened the door. Geoffrey got out behind him and noticed that the air was at least fifteen degrees warmer in this part of the city.
“What?” Geoffrey did a double take as the five guards ran up the stairway with Maxim lunging three steps at a time behind them. Alarmed by their frantic haste, Geoffrey sprang up the stairs after them, wondering why they were in such a hurry.
He looked around intently, but there did not seem to be any imminent danger. Perhaps they were afraid of some invisible gas, Geoffrey hypothesized, though the warm air seemed fresh compared to the other sectors.
As Geoffrey pumped his legs up the stone steps behind the others, he was reminded of the pyramid in Palenque he had climbed as a boy. He was impressed by the stamina of the billionaire in front of him as his own lungs bellowed and sweat poured down his face. Then Geoffrey saw a large building that resembled the bridge of a battleship at the top of the polished slope to their left. Dim light swirled in the long windows of the building, which he guessed must be the power plant Maxim had referred to.
Half the distance to the building, the stairs ended at a small terrace. The guards’ flashlights illuminated a heavy ten-foot-wide steel hatch to their right. It was set in a rock face that reached ninety feet up to the cavern’s ceiling, which was bearded with stalactites.
“OK,” whispered Maxim to his men, reaching his arms out to them. He had bounded up the stairs without a pause for nearly a hundred yards. He was a powerhouse of a man, Geoffrey realized as he caught his breath. Maxim pressed close, addressing them like a quarterback in a huddle. “Geoffrey, I want you to identify any animals you see.”
Geoffrey nodded. “OK.”
“Be ready for anything!” Maxim stressed.
A guard who was even bigger than Maxim, a giant, opened the huge door. The other four went in first. Maxim pushed Geoffrey in as the giant guard shoved the heavy door closed behind them.
They stood on a metal landing inside a tall cylinder faceted with purple crystals. The crystals shimmered on the walls hundreds of feet into the dark above them like a gigantic geode. The air felt sauna hot and dry inside the vertical chamber.
A phalanx of seven massive aluminum pipes rose from the bottomless shadow below. Fifty feet above, the enormous steam culverts elbowed together into a tunnel cut through the glittering wall of the crystal chimney.
A short flight of steel stairs before them joined a catwalk that ringed the column of dry steam pipes. On the far side, Geoffrey could see a stairway zigzagging from the catwalk up the wall to a corridor on the left, which presumably led to the power plant. The men’s flashlights illuminated electrical conduits running up the side of the huge steam ducts. Thick cords had been patched into the conduits, joining a cable plugged into a heavy-duty yellow switch that lay on the catwalk connected to a car battery between the reaching arms of two men who were obviously dead.
Geoffrey’s eyes followed the guard’s jerking flashlights over the catwalk and saw that at least a dozen corpses were strewn across it. The empty drape of their clothing outlined skeletons. Their hands were chalk drawings of bone dust. They wore the same bulletproof vests and black uniforms worn by Maxim’s other guards, who jabbed their weapons everywhere now as they peered into the shadows.
“When did those men die?” Geoffrey asked.
Maxim raised a finger and whispered back. “Three nights ago.”
Geoffrey’s blood froze. “What is going on?”
Maxim yelled, “Now! Punch that fucking button!”
One of the guards darted down the metal stairs and tripped over one of the bodies lying there, falling noisily onto the catwalk that circled the steam ducts. The racket echoed up and down the shaft around them.
Geoffrey glanced up into the towering well above. Like pixie dust shaken off the walls, a phosphorescent storm swirled and descended like a living funnel cloud gathering. He hit his host’s broad arm and pointed. “Look!”
“What is it?” Maxim said.
“I don’t know. But it’s coming!”
Maxim roared, “Hurry!”
Geoffrey saw the horde of glowing green creatures swirling down the shaft flare brighter at the sound of Maxim’s voice. A distinctive hum grew, a wheezing, ringing buzz that paralyzed him; it was a sound he could never forget. He tried to convince himself he could only be imagining it.
The guard untangled himself from an electrical cable looped around his foot as the other guards yelled at him.
They all heard the screaming swarm descending.
“Keep going!” Maxim shouted.
The man dived for the switch on the catwalk below. On the other side of the switch, glowing creatures emerged from the hairy skull of one of the corpses and shot straight into the man’s eyes and mouth.
The men above heard his gurgling scream as it was cut short.
Geoffrey recognized the milky flow pouring down the walls as tiny Frisbees launched out of it at the
convulsing man on the catwalk and the man reached out his arms toward the detonator, his hands falling inches short.
“No!” Maxim yelled, and he started down the steps, but Geoffrey and his chief guard pulled him with enough strength to hold him back as the horde closed in. Two guards began opening the hatch behind them.
Geoffrey pushed Maxim through the hatch and leaped after him as the guards closed it behind them.
Even through the steel door, they could hear the wheezing drone that filled the well inside. The hulking guard stood with his back to the sealed hatch, talking through his walkie-talkie while directing the others to get Maxim back to the car.
“No!” Maxim shouted, and he dived at the door again as his four guards restrained him.
“You can’t go in there, chief!” said the guard who stood against the hatch.
With his mind still scrambled by what he had just witnessed, Geoffrey thought he could see a strange luminescence behind the guard standing before the hatch. As he reasoned that it must be a trick of light, perhaps emanating from the guard’s flashlight, a glowing replica of the door peeled away, arching over the guard. “Watch out!” Geoffrey shouted.
The guard looked up and screamed as a luminous creature wrapped around his back and shoulders like a cape.
“Get it off me!” the giant man wailed, trying to move, but the animal stuck to his back like taffy, gluing him against the door.
They all backed away and Maxim pointed at Geoffrey. “Tell me what it is, damn it!”
Geoffrey yelled, “I don’t know!”
The screaming guard heaved back and forth, stuck to the door as a white blob like the head of an enormous slug enveloped his face and its translucent flesh turned crimson.
The other guards opened fire with their machine guns, riddling the man’s body until he crumpled forward, peeling away from the hatch. His back was cloaked by a glistening mass. Then suddenly, his headless torso rose and in place of his head was a pale, amorphous lump with huge black eyes. His arms reached toward them.
