by Seth Fishman
Some of them are locked. A couple are filled with discarded equipment or empty, never-used cots. As if this place used to be a big deal, filled with dozens of workers. Why would that be? Was this where the builders of the aqueduct slept? What’s worse is that we can’t really see any of this, we have to feel it out. The darkness is absolute; there’s no light getting in, and I’m starting to feel the black creep into me. I grab a hand—it’s Jo’s. We squeeze, and I fight down the panic.
“So do you know this Wilkins guy?” Jo asks as we dig along.
“Not really, no. I’ve just seen him around. I figure if he’s good enough to pull me from the well, and if he’s good enough to watch over Fenton’s water supply, he’s probably good enough to trust.”
She’s quiet for a moment. “I hope your dad is right.”
That makes me freeze up. “What do you mean?”
“You know, that this is where we should be. That he has an answer.” Her words are full of concern; she’s voicing what I’ve been trying to keep down for a while now. Are we too far gone to be saved? Should we even be here? But for some reason, her words have me on the defensive, annoyed that she’d doubt him. I own the monopoly on criticism against Dad.
“I’m sure he will, Jo,” I say, my voice not entirely kind.
“I miss my dad,” she says quietly, and I feel like a jerk. I pull her close, our jackets squishing loudly in the dark. It’s weird; as soon as I’m taking care of someone else, I lose my fear. We’re in the middle of nowhere, in a mysterious station in the dark being chased by hired men. But at that moment, I can only think of her, and how her hair smells oily and how her body is so small and how her mother doesn’t know that her father’s dead.
“You find anything?” someone calls from farther down. Jo starts, then sniffs. I can hear her wiping her face.
“No,” I reply, “nothing. This place is much bigger than I thought it would be.”
“Guys! Come here!” I think it’s Rob.
Jo and I leave the room we’re in and keep our hands close, touching occasionally to make sure the other is still there. I can see better now, but only well enough to know I’m catching up with the others, not to tell who they are. I quell my unease at the faceless shapes and move closer.
“What’d you find?” Jo asks.
“Another hallway and some lights.” I peer around a corner, and sure enough, there’s another long hallway. But at the end is a door, ajar, with a glowing red light the color of an exit sign emanating from its depths. Rob’s standing in the hallway waiting for us.
“What about the rest of this hallway?” Jimmy asks, and I try to count shadows. We’re all here. I wait for someone to answer, but they seem to be waiting for me. Weird. Don’t they realize I’m the one who gets panic attacks in the dark? I guess that’s what happens when you volunteer to go first.
Given the choice of direction, I’ll volunteer myself toward the pretty lights. “Um, okay. Jimmy, you leave Odessa and finish off the hallway, it’s not long—”
“No way,” he says, and I can hear the shake of his head against the nylon of his coat. “I’ll take her.”
“Fine.” No reason to argue with him. “Hurry up, then, and come back. Everyone else, this way.”
Jimmy helps Odessa stand and they leave, and it’s only after they’re gone that I think sending someone else with them might have been nice. A hand takes mine, and of course I think it is Jo’s, but only for a second. I can’t believe how soft his hands are.
“Hi,” Brayden whispers in my ear. I smile—he can’t see it in the dark, but I smile. Jo’s hand is nice, but his is better. I hold it tight. “You sure this will get us into the Cave?” His voice is worried, scared maybe, and I’d like to imagine the fear is on my behalf. Maybe that’s a little selfish.
“Not sure at all. But I trust my dad now. At least, I’m going to believe his lies were for my benefit.” I can hear my friends’ footsteps, their echoes behind me, and the red light seems to emit a hum, a buzz that filters into my thoughts. Dad’s always taken care of me.
The darkness behind me grows more absolute with every step we take toward the red light. As if I’m losing the space I’m leaving. I can make out the others—Rob, Jo, Brayden—all bundled tight with me like we’re in a haunted house or something, except this isn’t a ride, we didn’t pay to be here, and I’m not sure there’s a way out. I should stop thinking, or I’ll lose my nerve.
I push my back against the wall and tiptoe forward, and the others follow. When I get to the door, I do a quick peek around the corner and back, but don’t really process anything. How do spies do that? The quick look, instant understanding of a scenario. I want photographic memory, but I’ll settle for good results. So I do it again, slowly, keeping my gaze on the empty room, trying to shove my fear back down my throat.
No one. Just a room. I turn the corner and step in and am not surprised to find that red light does not provide the same level of comfort as a normal bulb. The others enter, and we find ourselves in what is clearly the control room of the aqueduct. There’s a massive chair in front of a series of screens, a cockpit of buttons and switches, a few flashing lights. All of the screens are blank, except for one. It shows the front entrance, and the door is open.
“Creepy,” Jo says, stating the obvious.
“Did we close that?” I say, my heart pounding.
Jo shakes her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Are you sure?”
“It doesn’t matter. Either they are here and we’re screwed, or they aren’t.” She always has a fine perspective on things.
Rob, seeing electronics, takes control with a grace that he rarely displays. He settles himself down in front of the oversize console and starts fiddling with a keyboard, bringing a monitor to life. “Looks like the backup generator has kicked in, but only for the mandatory systems. Maybe the soldiers started to cut the power around Westbrook and that outage affected this station. The water’s still running, but we aren’t going to be cooking any food in the oven anytime soon.”
“Can you tell where the Cave entrance is?” Brayden asks, his tone urgent. “The soldiers are coming.”
Rob shakes his head. That probably was the first thing he tried to figure out. Then he seems to reconsider. “Well, sort of, but no. Just that there’s a gate labeled E9 that’s blinking and looks like it could be an open door, but not sure where it is. This stuff isn’t too complicated. Your Wilkins dude maybe wasn’t the most tech savvy, so they probably kept it simple for him. I think the computer is almost more of a record keeper than anything else. All he ever had to do, I bet, was pay attention for any alarms or internal fuck-ups and read the display.”
“He didn’t do a very good job this time, huh?” says Jo. I give her a look. “What?” she counters, unapologetic. “Where is he? Why aren’t the lights working? Why isn’t he taking care of things?”
“Maybe he’s in Fenton and now they are quarantined.”
“Maybe.” But she’s dubious.
After searching the room high and low, Brayden’s bent over in the corner, pulling something from the wall with an audible click. “This room isn’t a total loss, though.” He turns and waggles a flashlight in the air. “Bet there’s one in every room, if only it were bright enough to find them.”
Jo takes the flashlight from him. “Let’s go test out that theory,” she says.
Rob appears reluctant to stand up, and I’m about to say something when a shriek pierces the corridor, bouncing around the metal from every direction. We all freeze in whatever pose we’re in, and a perverted part of my brain thinks that we look really weird. I swear our gazes all meet. And then we run.
Brayden first, squinching his shoulders tight and doing a little hop through the door into the corridor, then Jo, who gamely switches on the flashlight and sends the beam down the hallway as far beyond Brayden’s feet as poss
ible, so he can see. I don’t dive after them, but grab Rob, who might just stay sitting he seems so comfortable in front of his monitors. I’ve already learned the lesson here, though, no more separating. Rob’s body is probably as worn as mine and running on empty. Even if he wanted to leave, he seems to need me to yank him along. At least with the flashlight, we aren’t running into the dark.
We round the corner and see the outline of Jo and Brayden at the door, stock-still, staring into a room. Jo’s holding the flashlight forward but sort of looking away, her hair almost white in the light. Brayden, on the other hand, is in a squat and peering intently.
“What?” I ask, but answer my own question when I catch up and take in the room.
Odessa’s babbling and crying, tears and snot down her face.
“I stepped on his head, I stepped on his face!”
She means Wilkins. The guy who saved my life is lying at our feet. His arms are rigid, legs stiff, and his massive beard is thick and gray and almost covers his entire wrinkly face. Jo turns and stares at me, her face pale, her red-rimmed eyes roaming everywhere, as if she can’t focus or doesn’t want to. I pull her to my shoulder, and she whispers, “I don’t want to see this.” And I’m sad, because another person we were supposed to rely on is dead, another person like her father.
“What happened?” Brayden asks, one of the first stupid things I’ve heard him say. Wilkins has the virus. It’s obvious. And what’s more obvious is that the virus is spreading. And maybe it’s farther than we thought, than even the soldiers knew. Maybe the worry should be if the town isn’t quarantined. Who knows how far this thing has spread? Maybe the world is screwed. The thought makes me dizzy, and even though I’m holding Jo, I kinda want to sit down.
Jimmy’s shaking his head like he can’t believe it. I guess he’s taking it from another angle, since he’s infected himself. His breathing is becoming labored, and his face is showing more signs of aging: his jaw is rounding out, and wrinkles are forming at the edges of his eyes. I wonder how fast it goes from here. I look around at the others: no sign. Yet.
“I saw that the door was inched open, so I shoved at it, but it was stuck,” Jimmy says, as if to actually give Brayden an answer. “Something big in here, I thought—something fell, like a chair or mattress or something. So I pushed until it opened, about a foot or so. And then I stepped through. Couldn’t even see what it was.” He sucks in a breath and looks at poor sobbing Odessa. “That’s when she came in after me. And stepped right on the dude’s face.”
“On his face?” repeats Rob dumbly.
Jimmy nods. “Yeah, on his face. She fell over, and I thought it was her leg, maybe pain or something, and she starts screaming. But then I felt around, and I know a beard when I feel one. Ugh, I think he shat himself too.”
He did; he must have. The smell is toxic, though I’m not sure I noticed it before. Must have had the same effect on the others, because as soon as Jimmy mentions poop, we all try to stop breathing.
I reach out a hand to Wilkins’s face. There’s enough light generated by the flashlight to see him if I wanted to, but I don’t. I let my hand quest over the contours and, though my body calls for me to flinch, I don’t because I want this—to know for sure if my guardian angel is really gone. I take in the cold, yielding surface that is his forehead, then cheek, then nose.
“Mia,” Brayden says, soft in my ear, “you shouldn’t touch him.”
It’s too late for that, I think, and don’t answer. He doesn’t pull me away; no one does. So I guess we all think the same thing. If we didn’t have the virus before, we do by now.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, but the others clearly hear me, because of course they’re watching weirdo Mia touch the dead guy. No one is gonna ask why I’m apologizing to him; they leave me to it, and we have an odd moment of silence between us.
Jo touches my shoulder. “We have to keep going.”
I take a breath, and it catches. I had no idea I was crying. If Jo tells me we have to get going, Jo who has so much more to mourn about than me, I’d best suck it up. Still, there’s something about this man I never actually spoke to. He’s lying faceup; no one to pull him out like he did me.
There’s a noise, persistent and shivering. An engine, a snowmobile, a shout, a gun—we can’t tell from this far inside the aqueduct, but it’s faint and growing louder. We all clue in to the sound; the noise is sharp and dominates the room. We don’t like what we hear.
Rob turns on the walkie-talkie, and we stare.
. . . tracks, sir.
Good. A pause, the voice Sutton’s. Sergeant, the one called Mia. The girl. Make sure we get her. I don’t care about the others. Please hurry—there isn’t much time.
As long as there’s time for us, sir.
Don’t question me, Sergeant. This is the only way.
Sutton’s voice is apologetic, as if unused to giving orders.
“What does he mean, ‘I don’t care about the others’?” Odessa asks. She’s leaning on Jimmy, her eyes wild.
“Who cares?” Rob yells. “They’re almost here!”
Everyone’s up, and we’re back in the hallway, scrambling against each other for space, looking for rooms. We don’t even know where we are. Jo smashes into a door and bends, grabbing her shoulder and cursing. I reach for her, but she grits her teeth and pushes me on. The door at the end of this hallway leads to a T-junction, and after a fruitless search to the left, Jimmy calls, “I got something!” and then, “Brayden, Rob, get here now.”
By the time I catch up, Jo’s acting as a standing spotlight, illuminating the three boys as they twist a submarine-style door, turning a wheel that’s apparently pretty tight. Odessa sits on the floor, panting, trying to conserve her energy, and I realize how—in light of everything, of the virus and us running and how close we all are to danger—she’s in pretty bad shape. Infection, probably the virus from being so close to Jimmy all the time, pain, exhaustion. It’s a wonder she’s even awake. I catch her eye, and she makes a face.
That’s everyone doing something but me. The thing is, as soon as I heard the radio . . . no, maybe before, maybe as soon as we found Wilkins, I knew what I had to do. And standing here twiddling my thumbs clinches it. I take a couple steps backward and look down the black hall behind me. A number of seconds pass, not so that they notice me, but to let my eyes adjust. The hallway takes shape, and with a small smile, I toss away any thoughts of me being crazy. Right?
There’s a thunk and then a spinning sound. Metal slides through a metal groove, and the door opens. The boys shout, even Rob, a guttural yawp, and I feel it too. We’re going to live. From this far down the hallway, I can still see inside, a half cave, half manmade structure. Another red light shines on the wall, illuminating a series of machines with hoses twisting from their frames into a small pool of water. The pool takes up half the floor and separates into two thin channels that flow through two fairly wide-meshed grates. The rest of the floor looks like concrete, like the edge of a swimming pool.
“What’s all this?” Jimmy thinks aloud. His voice echoes in the small space.
“Must be where the water is tested for purity,” Rob muses.
“So one hole goes to the Cave and the other to Fenton?” Brayden asks, his voice showing relief and even excitement.
Rob squats, puts a hand in, then shakes off the water. “Sort of, one should go farther into the mountain, to the original source of the spring, the other to Fenton. The thing is,” he says, pointing at one grate, “the one that goes to the water’s source should head on a separate route to the Cave. Otherwise there’d be three grates here.”
Jimmy might have asked more, but we don’t have time, and Brayden, as if reading my mind, hops into the pool, where the water sloshes up to his waist. He blows through his lips, probably because of the freezing temperatures on his poor unmentionables, and then bends and dips his foot th
rough one of the large holes in the grate. He squeezes to the other side, then turns back and motions for everyone to follow. And they do, even Odessa gets up and is handed through by Jimmy to Brayden. I stand transfixed, watching it all from just beyond the door, which I’ve inched toward slowly this whole time. Jimmy goes for it next, and he scrapes himself pretty hard against the rusted grate, his body almost too big now to make it. I think tetanus first and then, with horror, of how that blood has the virus and how the water flows toward the town.
“Jimmy,” I shout, “wipe that bar, stanch the blood!”
He looks back at me, confused, then he gets it and he slams his hand against his arm. Rob sloshes forward and whips out his cap and wipes down the bar, then throws the cap onto the ground, away from the water. By then, Jimmy has his arms wrapped, having ripped some of his undershirt into a bandage, for all the good it’ll do.
They’re all there, standing in the puddle, waiting for me. I bite my cheek, step back toward the station.
“Where are you going?” Jo cries.
“They’ll find us here,” I shout, walking backward, feeling the darkness surround me. “They’ll track us down. And they’ll know we came this way. The grates here won’t stop them. We need something bigger. We need to make it hard for them to get up here.”
“What are you talking about?”
I set my jaw. “We need to burn this place down.”
• • •
Maybe I had it all wrong. Maybe I like being alone in the dark. All my life, I’ve shivered at the thought of a moonless night, and now I’m leaving my friends and heading toward it. I can feel my heart keep time with my footsteps as I run down the hall toward Wilkins’s room. Maybe I wasn’t done saying good-bye. No, I berate myself. I have to do this. They’ll find us if I don’t.
