Freefall

by Roderick Gordon

  “Be a man about it, Sam. Can’t you call them by their name? You’re talking about the Styx,” Drake growled.

  The man didn’t speak as he shuffled another step toward the window and leaned against the sink. The light from outside was bright enough that Drake could see his profile; he was wearing dark glasses.

  “Is something wrong with you?” Drake asked.

  “They blinded me, Drake. I can’t see a thing.”

  “How? What the heck happened?”

  “I think they’re using subsonics — similar to the Dark Light technology, but on a much larger scale,” Sam replied. “I was driving to a rendezvous point north of Highfield when I stopped at a crossing. I heard a low, deep sound, as if I was underwater — it felt as though there was a vibration right inside my head. I couldn’t move, not a muscle. I’ve no idea what happened next, but I came to a couple of days later in the hospital, with a bandage around my eyes. The Styx took my sight,” he said, using their name for the first time, spitting it out as if it was poison in his mouth. “I’m still astounded they didn’t just kill me.”

  “Maybe they were sending a signal to the rest of us,” Drake said softly. “A warning.”

  “Maybe,” Sam repeated. “But I can’t go back to active duty, not the way I am now, Drake. Even if I wanted to.”

  “I only just surfaced from the Deeps. I’m sorry I didn’t know about any of this.”

  “No, how could you have,” Sam said emptily.

  “I wonder who they grabbed Topsoil to help them develop the subsonic technology,” Drake pondered.

  “Perhaps it’s homegrown — perhaps the scientists in the Colony did it all by themselves.”

  Drake cleared his throat. “I should go,” he said.

  “One thing before you do — I assume you remember the facility I set up on a remote server at the university when we first came together as a network? The secure message exchange that no one was supposed to know about?”

  “Sure,” Drake confirmed.

  “Well, somebody does,” Sam said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Sam rubbed his brow. “I don’t know why I never took it offline when everything fell apart, and I still check it every so often. A couple of days ago there was a message for you. It’s got a lot of noise on it, but it seems to be from someone called Will Burrows. Does that name mean anything to you?”

  “Will Burrows …,” Drake repeated in a low-key way, not reacting to the information, although his heart skipped several beats. “No, doesn’t ring a bell, but thanks all the same. I’ll dial in to the server and have a listen,” Drake said. “And I’m sorry I crashed in on you like this. Good luck, Sam.”

  “Before you go, can I do anything for you? Do you want something to eat?” Sam offered.

  But Drake had already left.

  “The river continues up there,” Will pointed out to his father as they trudged down the long quayside, their soaked clothes dripping with water and their boots squelching. “So shouldn’t we follow it along?”

  “It might never hit the surface,” Dr. Burrows said, shrugging. “Besides, look at all these buildings … and the crane.” He and Will stood and contemplated the structures in front of them. “This place has to be a loading bay for the journey down. Especially given that,” he added, pointing at a large arch at the end of the quay, its edges painted white.

  They both approached it.

  “Large enough to drive a truck through,” Dr. Burrows observed.

  “Not now,” Will said as he knocked on the brick wall that completely sealed it up.

  But Dr. Burrows was already striding purposefully off into the shadows. As Will caught up with him, he found his father next to a large double-sized doorway. Like the arch, the cast-concrete frame around it had been painted white.

  “Personnel entrance, most likely,” Dr. Burrows suggested. It had also been blocked up, and he pressed a palm to the surface. “Cinder blocks,” he said. He tested several sections of the mortar, which oozed from the joints between the gray blocks and looked a little like dried toothpaste, tugging at a piece of it until it came away in his fingers. “Sloppy workmanship. This was done in a hurry.”

  “So what now?” Will asked.

  “Unless we can find an alternative way out, it shouldn’t be too difficult for us to knock through here.”

  After a quick search of the buildings and the rest of the quay, they realized that this was their only potential exit.

  Dr. Burrows clapped his hands together. “Fetch the tools, will you?”

  Will returned to the launch and clambered down into it. He considered his two holdalls of equipment. If his father wanted to knock a wall down, he could think of a quicker way to do it. Messier, but quicker.

  “The tools!” Dr. Burrows yelled impatiently, and Will told himself it might be wiser to keep quiet about the explosives he’d squirreled away. Climbing out of the launch, he rushed over with the old canvas bag of tools that Dr. Burrows had helped himself to from the quartermaster’s stores back in the fallout shelter.

  Dr. Burrows rooted around inside it until he found a long crowbar. He immediately began to work on the wall, using the tapered end of the crowbar to chisel out the mortar in the joints between the blocks. “Soft as frosting,” he mumbled to himself, as it proved rather easy to dislodge. Having cleared enough of the mortar from around one of the cinder blocks, he rammed the crowbar under it and began to lever on it. “Here we go,” he said when the block finally came loose, dropping at his feet. “We’re through! And it’s only one layer thick!”

  With Will at his side, he held his luminescent orb up to the opening. All they could see was blackness on the other side.

  “We need to widen this,” Dr. Burrows declared, thrusting the crowbar into Will’s hands. Before Will had an opportunity to reply, his father muttered, “And I need some quiet time to think,” then abruptly turned and left.

  “Think about what?” Will called after him, but Dr. Burrows pretended not to hear. As he squelched off into the darkness, Will knew that his father was just going off to take a nap, and that he would be left to do the donkey work by himself.

  “Nothing changes,” Will complained as he started to work on the next block. “Nothing ever changes.”

  Will cleared a hole wide enough for them to get through, then went to fetch his father. He found him stretched out next to the oil stove, half asleep.

  “How’s that thinking going?” Will asked. “Umf … good,” Dr. Burrows said drowsily. “What about the wall?”

  “It’s done. There’s a room on the other side.”

  At Dr. Burrows’s insistence, they unloaded everything from the launch, then hauled it out of the water and onto the quayside. After they’d organized what they needed to take with them, they approached the opening Will had made.

  “Be my guest,” Dr. Burrows said.

  His father behind him, Will climbed through the hole in the wall into what turned out to be a corridor filled with empty drums and some old planking. They soon came up against a sturdy metal door, two handles on one of its sides. With a combination of pulling, kicking, and bad language, they managed to get both grips into the open position, then heaved on the door.

  “Not more water!” Will cried as a deluge of the most foul-smelling soupy fluid surged around them. Gasping from the stench, they waded into a room that was around fifty feet wide, with banks of lockers on either side. At the far end there was another door, but it was so badly rusted that they eventually gave up on it. They were also beginning to feel a little lightheaded from the stench.

  “Dad!” Will said, his voice muffled because he was holding his nose. He’d found out that what had appeared to be a cupboard was in fact an alternate entrance. The side room was about six feet square, and there were wide rungs set into the wall. Will raced up these, and smashed his way through some rotten planks at the top.

  “Watch it!” his father shouted as pieces of timber landed on him, but Will did
n’t care — he just wanted out.

  He forced his way through a bramble bush, then scrambled to his feet.

  He was in the open.

  “Topsoil,” he gasped. He tottered slightly as he put his head back and took in the wide-open sky above. For some reason he felt an impulse to duck — it was just too much to take in.

  “Wonder what time of day it is? Dusk?” Dr. Burrows pondered as he straightened up beside Will. “Or dawn?” he added, his voice downbeat as he peered at the dark, cloudless sky. Will turned to him.

  “Dad! We’re out! We did it!” he cried. He couldn’t believe that his father wasn’t over the moon. “We’re home again!”

  Dr. Burrows didn’t answer immediately, and when he did his voice oozed with disappointment. “It’s not exactly the grand retour I had in mind, Will. After all the things I saw and all my work down there …” He pressed the ball of his foot into the long grass in front of him. “… I wanted to come back with something that would wow the world…. I wanted to knock the socks off the archaeological community.” Drawing in a breath, he held it for a few seconds. “Instead, all I’ve got to show is a bag of tools from the Cold War …,” he said, slinging it to the ground with a clatter, “… and one of the worst haircuts in history. No, without my journal, my esteemed colleagues would just have to take my word for the whole shebang, for everything I saw … and … well … that just ain’t going to happen, is it?”

  Will nodded, now understanding the reason for his father’s pessimism. He wondered if he should broach the subject of the Styx again. His father was in for a rude awakening if he thought that he’d have a free hand to publish all his secrets, because many of those were the Styx’s secrets, too. They would never allow him to do it. But Will knew if he mentioned this it would most likely result in another argument with his father, and he wasn’t in the mood. He was just too dog-tired to get into that now.

  Instead he plucked a leaf from a small sapling and crumpled it in his hand, smelling it, smelling the greenness of it. It had been awhile since he’d encountered anything remotely like it. “Where do you think we are?” he asked.

  “Well, one thing’s for sure — it’s not an extinct volcano in Iceland,” Dr. Burrows smirked as he shone his light around, the beam catching the foliage of the mature trees that seemed to be everywhere.

  Will took a few steps. “It might not even be England. We’ve come such a long way.”

  “I sincerely doubt we’ve gone that far.”

  In the failing light, they began to explore, pushing their way through the undergrowth.

  There seemed to be many abandoned buildings concentrated within a relatively small area. And what could have been a roadway ran between them, although so many bushes had encroached on the asphalt surface, it was difficult to tell it apart from the surrounding vegetation.

  The buildings were brick-built, either one or two stories high, and nearly all had broken windows. It was no problem for Will and his father to gain entry; all the doors were open or off their hinges. Inside, paint chips that had peeled off from the ceilings speckled the floors, giving the impression they were covered in snow. Will and Dr. Burrows were exploring the first floor of one of these buildings when, in the distance, they spotted the twin headlights of a vehicle lancing through the rapidly amassing darkness.

  “I don’t know who they are,” Dr. Burrows whispered, “but I don’t want to tangle with them. I say we get our heads down for a few hours and check the place over first thing in the morning.”

  “Sure,” Will agreed, hoping his father was going to suggest just that, because he was dropping on his feet. They found themselves a dry corner in one of the ground-floor rooms, and slid into their sleeping bags.

  They left the luminescent orb on the floor between them, half covering it so that the light wouldn’t alert anyone to their presence. Through his weary eyes, Will watched the branch of a tree that had grown in through one of the broken windows. When he finally couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer, he let them slide shut, and filled his lungs with the cool air. It might have been because of his roots in the Colony, where his real family had come from, or because he’d been underground for so long, but he found that he was incredibly sensitive to the rhythms there on the surface. And it wasn’t the chirping insects or the occasional call of birds on the wing, but the silent rhythms, the rhythms of nature. He could almost feel the vegetation around him as it grew.

  But more than this, he missed the rhythms that had been so much part of his life deep in the earth — the almost imperceptible settling of rock and soil, and the odors that somehow interacted with the base of the nose, that felt primal and basic and safe. Although he wouldn’t have said anything about it to his father, he was already missing his subterranean existence. And with that thought fading in his mind, he drifted into a dead sleep.

  Will rolled over onto his back and fluttered open his eyes.

  He cried out as the bright dawn light burned his retinas, and he quickly jerked back into the shadows, holding his eyes. After much blinking, he slowly emerged into the light again, still shielding his face. As he wriggled out of his sleeping bag and put on his boots, he felt as though every move he made was incredibly leaden, then realized it was the effects of the gravity. Normal gravity.

  “Morning,” his father said cheerfully, crunching over broken glass as he entered the room.

  “Morning,” Will replied, then yawned cavernously.

  Dr. Burrows glanced at him. “Feeling rough?”

  “Yep,” Will said through another yawn.

  “You might be suffering from a form of jet lag. Subterranean lag,” Dr. Burrows said with a laugh as he lit the stove and put a pot of water on it. He checked his watch and then glanced at Will. “You’ve no idea how long you’ve slept, or what time it is, do you?” He didn’t wait for his son to respond. “You do realize you’ve probably been operating on days of more than twenty-four hours? Your circadian rhythms will be all over the shop.”

  “What do you mean?” Will asked, not because he was really interested, but because his father expected it of him.

  “In the absence of daylight, the melatonin level in the brain doesn’t follow normal patterns. It should rise as the sun goes down, so you feel sleepy.” Dr. Burrows reached over to pick up the luminescent orb, examining how the fluids inside had turned oil-black in the presence of daylight. “Underground, all we’ve got is these. The light they emit is close to sunlight, but it’s always on, and doesn’t follow the night-and-day sequence we’re used to up —”

  “Oh, Dad, can you tell me about this another time?” Will pleaded with him. “I’m not really taking it in.”

  His father fell into a peeved silence, which continued as they drank their oversweetened tea.

  “Right,” Dr. Burrows began, “if you’re quite ready to listen to me now.”

  Will mumbled a yes.

  “We’re in an abandoned air base — I’m not sure where, exactly, but it’s definitely England — and there seems to be a security patrol, but they’re not soldiers. Probably a private contractor. So, come on, pack up what we need to take with us, and hide the rest of it here.”

  “Why? What’s the big hurry?” Will asked.

  “Because we’re going to London,” Dr. Burrows said.

  They took a quick look around the base, as Dr. Burrows rambled on about what he thought each building was. One of them had earth banked up around its walls and also a thick wall just in front of its entrance — Dr. Burrows said it was to protect it from bombing. The interior had been stripped, except for an antiquated air-conditioning system and yards of electrical cable running everywhere — Dr. Burrows said he thought it was a control center. On the opposite side of the building was another entrance, but this place turned out to have a more macabre purpose. They found themselves in a long room with a series of metal racks against one wall. Each rack had three tiers, and each tier had a number stenciled on the whitewashed wall at the end of it.

&n
bsp; “Disinfectant,” Will announced, sniffing the air. “Was this a hospital or something?”

  “Probably a morgue,” Dr. Burrows said.

  “What — for dead bodies?” Will asked.

  His father nodded as they emerged into the daylight again. He pointed to a church spire in the distance.

  “Let’s head for that — there’ll be a road nearby.”

  They came to a huge stretch of tarmac, cracked and covered with piles of broken-up concrete.

  “S’pose this was the runway?” Will asked, scanning it up and down, and squinting across at the large warehouselike structures beside it.

  “They’re called C-Class hangars,” Dr. Burrows said, noticing where Will was looking. “All this is postwar, like the deep-level shelter they built below.”

  Crossing a field, Will and Dr. Burrows went through a hedge, then scrambled down a sparse verge to find themselves on a single-lane road, which they began to follow. It took them to a tiny village, and Dr. Burrows made a beeline for the only shop there, a combined post office and convenience store.

  Before they entered, Will clapped a cautionary hand on his father’s arm.

  “Money! We haven’t got any money!”

  “Oh, haven’t we?” Dr. Burrows replied. With great ceremony he unbuckled and took off his belt. There was a zipper on the inside of the belt, which he opened; then he pulled out a polyethylene bag with a rubber band wound around it. Inside this bag was a roll of bank notes, which he counted and stuffed into his pocket. “We need to make sure we’ve got enough to pay for any traveling expenses, so don’t go wild in there, Will,” he said.

  A bell rattled above the door as they entered, and a portly man bumbled out from a back room. Will selected himself some potato chips and a soda from the fridge, while Dr. Burrows only had eyes for the display of chocolates, adding a newspaper as an afterthought.

  “Looks like it’s going to be a nice day,” the man said congenially, wheezing a little as he spoke. He was dressed in a brown checkered shirt and a woven tie, which looked as though it was made from material better suited for a pair of socks.