by Randi Darren
Vince really did have spectacular night vision, but even he needed some light to actually see. And down here, there was no light at all.
Not a single speck of light, reflected or otherwise.
It was pitch dark.
Pushing his fingers into a vest pocket he retrieved his lighter and flipped it open, igniting it at the same time.
Soft orange light spilled out into the room. It didn’t eliminate the darkness, but he could see more now.
Ahead was a steel doorframe and a solid looking door. And beyond that door, only the darkness knew what lay in wait for them.
Walking ahead, he transferred the lighter to his left hand and checked his saber with his right. He lifted it slightly to make sure it would clear the sheathe and let it drop again.
Places like this was where the long since dead were. Given enough time, magic, or a necromancer, those dead could be walking around.
A sword wasn’t ideal, but it was better than his fists and feet.
Red hit the ground behind him with a thump.
Did she drop down without holding on to the ladder?
Pushing the thought from his mind, he focused on what was ahead of him.
Reaching ahead he grasped the door handle and gave it a slow turn. A click of the latch coming free was all he heard.
Pulling on the door there was a hiss of decompressing air as he broke the airlock from the entry tunnel to whatever lay beyond.
Stale air blew past him and ruffled his hair. Giving it a sniff, Vince couldn’t detect anything that could be a problem.
Moving forward, he continued onward. As he passed through the doorway there was a click, followed by a whirring noise. Vince froze, waiting, tense. Those sounds were usually something that proceeded a trap.
Yet nothing happened.
Even as the whirring grew louder, still nothing happened.
There was a thump from deep within the darkness, followed by a reverberating series of clacks. Light began flooding in from the ceiling down the hallway. Each time he heard that clack, another light turned on.
Closing his lighter while moving as little as he could, Vince watched as those lights came closer and closer.
Finally, a clack sounded right above his head, and the hallway he was in was immediately bathed in blinding, life sucking, fluorescent light.
Peering upwards he could see the recessed light fixture in the ceiling.
“Magic light. Bringer, Red would like to leave now,” Red grumbled.
“It’s not magic,” Blue said softly. Her voice was smooth and kind.
“No, it’s not magic,” Vince agreed. Standing upright he continued down the hall. “It’s electricity. And light bulbs. Both of which aren’t common or normal anymore.”
On exiting the corridor, he found himself in what could only be described as a lobby.
All around him were things he’d seen a thousand times in many a building. Except they’d always been in pieces and broken fragments.
Here, they were all intact.
Dusty, and unused, but intact.
“Red feels like this is a tomb,” grumbled the Cursed One.
“I feel no undead,” Blue countered.
“Bicker later, loot now,” Vince commanded. His tension had long since passed. There was nothing alive here. And if Blue was certain that there were no undead either, it meant this was a piggybank.
Waiting for him to smash it open and make off with the loot.
“We’ll pack it up at the entryway here, and close that door back up above us on the way out. We’ll collect all this on our way home,” Vince said.
He moved over to the counter that could only be the receiving desk. Rifling through the papers on top, he began opening drawers and cabinets, looking for anything of value.
Mountains of paper were mostly what he found. As he got to some of the cabinets in the back, ones that looked as if they’d been unused even when this place was inhabited, the paper changed. The papers near the counter and spread out everywhere else were of a lesser quality than this.
All of the paper in these cabinets was crisp, firm.
And almost every paper had “Groom Lake: Classified” written all over it.
Finding nothing of use or importance, Vince left the lobby and began looting each room in succession.
Then he spent an hour searching room by room. Looting, sorting, and packing everything of value he found.
At the end of that hour, Vince found himself standing in front of a door unlike anything else in the complex.
Locked, barred from his side, and very, very heavy.
The locking mechanism was complex and looked like it was fastened in each corner.
To his eye, it had more the look of a vault door than anything else.
Maybe this is why this place is abandoned?
Staring at the door, what he first thought was texturing were actually… dents.
A large number of dents that could only be caused by whatever had been on the other side of the door.
Soft footfalls behind him alerted Vince to the fact that someone was coming up on him.
Red would have used the opportunity to pounce him if he hadn’t noticed.
“Hey, Blue, can you feel anything on the other side of this?” Vince asked, pressing his fingertips to one especially large dent.
“I… a plant? I think? Nothing else. It was sleeping,” Blue said. Moving to the door she stared into the corner where the frame met the wall. “It’s awake now. Nothing is in the room with it. Everything is dead. It’s a… strange plant. I can’t hear it very well from here though. These walls are as thick as the door.”
“The walls…?” Vince asked.
Everything points to this being a holding cell.
Making a decision, Vince flipped the bar out of its holding bracket.
“Is this wise, grove husband?” Blue asked with a tremor to her voice.
She wasn’t a martial woman, but she’d volunteered to be here. Fear wasn’t something you could avoid, it was how you dealt with it.
“Honestly, Blue, I trust you and your abilities. So, yeah. We should be fine,” Vince said. Giving the wheel a spin, the four locks popped and disengaged.
“And if we’re not,” Vince paused and heaved on the door. With a crunch, it swung out into the room. “Then we run.”
Even before the door opened completely, the interior of the room looked as if it had been at the eye of a tornado.
Light came down from above, though in spots it flickered or was off entirely.
The door stopped moving at the halfway mark, and ground to a halt.
Even after Vince gave it another shove, it went no further.
Slipping in between the frame and door, Vince looked to see what was behind the door.
It was a huge skeleton. Easily as big as an elephant, with a head that held a frightening number of pointed teeth.
Spread around that corpse were a number of human skeletons.
There’s the door knocker, and whoever was locked in here. That means whoever locked the door left… and never came back?
Frowning, Vince continued inward.
Before he could inspect the room any further, his eyes were drawn to a flickering light near the center of the room.
There, hanging over an empty pit, was what looked like an oval window.
As he got closer, Vince knew it was no window. A window needed to be placed in a wall, not floating in the air.
On top of that, windows didn’t have magical fritzing around the edges.
Then the window crackled and shrunk to the size of a dot, and expanded back to its normal size.
Glancing into the pit, Vince realized there was no visible bottom.
A bird flew in through the window, and flapped its way over to a corner of the room. Coming to stop, it dropped into what Vince assumed was its nest.
“It’s a… doorway to somewhere else,” he said aloud. “This whole room was a containment room to wherever that do
orway goes.”
“I sense magic, and life on the other side of the doorway,” Blue said, sidling up to him.
Vince frowned, contemplating the doorway.
Blue casually laid her hand on his lower back, moving in close to Vince’s side.
She and Green had slid themselves into his bedroll rotation without a word of discussion. Blue was rather possessive of him, and Green pretended that she wasn’t naked and waiting for him in his bedroll when it was her turn.
Both were rather stoic as far as their personalities went. They really did seem far more Elven than all of their Dryad sisters.
“Magic, you say… well, that means it leads to the Wastes, or the worlds everyone else came from,” Vince said, staring through that window.
Other worlds weren’t even a debate anymore. The fact that Elves, Orcs, Dwarves, every race out there, all had different world stories had ended that question.
The only real question had really been how and why did the worlds collapse.
The doorway rapidly increased to three times its size, then shrunk again.
Maybe… the worlds didn’t collapse. Maybe this gateway expanded, dropped its occupants for that area, and then closed up again.
Tearing his eyes away from the window, Vince noticed a platform on the edge of the pit. On that platform was a seat level control bank with mechanical inputs.
How to make the doorway work perhaps?
Moving over to that set of switches, knobs, turn wheels, and buttons, Vince found they were all labeled. Each one had a piece of paper taped above it.
“Shift forward?” Vince asked no one, reading a label.
“This place is bad. Red thinks we should leave,” Red said. She’d slipped up behind him without him actually noticing.
“It’ll be fine,” Vince said, turning the dial.
The doorway made a crackling noise and then turned in on itself, only to open up again. Except it was looking into somewhere else now.
It was even nighttime. Time wasn’t fixed.
Blue came over to stand beside him as well, her head cocked to one side.
Moving the dial some more, Vince watched as multiple worlds flew by. Almost all of them were empty landscapes of forests, plains, or ocean.
So they ended up doing exactly this and something huge jumped through. It somehow managed to clear the gap and land on this side.
Either someone got out and shut the door, or the shut door was part of the procedure?
No doubt about it though… this is probably where the Wastes came from. But… if it’s true, why did they keep working on this? For years after that catastrophe they caused, judging by the paperwork we found. This was only recently abandoned.
This was long ongoing even after they wrecked the world.
Why keep playing with it if you already managed to end the world. To the point that it was a generational undertaking.
Vince sighed and let go of the dial.
Clicking once more, the window inverted and opened.
Opened onto a room with people in it.
A young man with brown hair was staring back at them through the gateway. He was seated behind a wooden desk with a magical construct in front of him.
“What the…” said the man
Beside him a female Waster, or so Vince assumed since she had animal ears on top of her head and a tail, lifted something that looked a lot like a gun to her shoulder.
“Andrea, wait!” shouted the man.
Red hissed and leapt on top of the control bank in front of Vince, her eyes glowing hotly. Ready to fight and take lives in a heartbeat.
A beautiful woman in strange tightly fitted attire to the man’s right flung out a hand, and a series of blazing symbols started to spread through the air.
Stepping up closer to Vince, Blue held out her staff in front of her. A visible green aura began to rapidly spread out around her staff. The light began filling the room.
It all happened in under two seconds, and it looked like it was going to get worse.
Vince reached out and flipped the dial forward, trying to move the portal forward as fast as possible.
The gateway sputtered and hissed, rapidly changing worlds as the dial spun.
Then it crackled loudly and blew out to a size twenty times its original before collapsing to nothing more than a pinpoint.
After that it turned red and began to vibrate uncontrollably. Finally, it began to expand again.
Looking to the controls, Vince read over all the labels.
“There, lock size,” he said. Thumbing the switch, he looked to the doorway.
It was still a very angry red, but it was no longer growing. It’d stopped at a size no bigger than a dinner plate.
Sighing, Vince now had a pretty good idea of what had happened. At what had almost happened to them.
“And so, we now know how the Wastes were made, and how everyone here died. It wasn’t the Elves. It was humans,” Vince said softly.
Letting his eyes fall away from the portal and to the controls, Vince sighed.
Everything that had gone wrong for so many people, was by the hand of man.
Frowning, Vince reached out and brushed a thumb across a number of black and white photos that were taped to the top of the boards.
His parents had talked about these before. He’d even seen a few in his time.
Running his fingers across them, he moved the dust aside. There’d been a lot more decay here since it had been open to the environment.
A young man stood there in the photo, holding up a placard in front of himself. He was a handsome man, human, though he had a neutral expression on his face.
The type you saw on prisoners.
“Subject one,” Vince murmured, his heart speeding up.
Moving to the next picture, he brushed the dust off with trembling hands.
The same man and woman stood side by side in what looked like a test room. The woman was wearing a long white lab coat, and the man was bare chested with monitoring equipment attached to him. They were smiling this time. Whatever resentment the man had, it wasn’t apparent in this photo.
Swallowing to fight the sudden dryness in his mouth, Vince moved to the third picture.
His fingers stopped as he brushed away enough dirt to see the faces of three people.
The man, the woman, and a baby. Both of them were all smiles, and the baby looked as if it couldn’t be old enough to hold its own head up.
Father, mother, and… me?
“Bringer, what’s wrong? Your heart is beating very fast,” Red asked, peering into his face, still crouched on the controls.
“I think… my father wasn’t human. Or at least, not from this world. And my mother… worked here,” Vince said, carefully freeing the pictures.
He wanted to go search through all those rooms again. He’d avoided personal objects, photos, and anything that didn’t have a value in the Wastes.
Now though, there were possibly things here that had value to him. Maybe even the possibility of learning more about his parents.
Or where they went.
“Oh,” Blue said. “That does explain your genetics, and why I have to fight constantly to ensure our child will be a Dryad. Green has made similar complaints.”
Vince blinked at that and gave his head a shake. The number of women currently pregnant by him was eight.
Not counting the Dryad seeding event.
Meliae hadn’t been joking in the least. Second wave of children indeed.
“Come on, I want to recheck all those rooms,” Vince muttered. “Maybe I can find some clues about my parents.”
By the time they left much later that night, Vince discovered very little of his parents’ life here. It was as if they’d packed up everything of personal value and left.
That or they had very little to take with them.
Realistically, Vince only had more questions than he had previously.
In fact, by the looks of it, his mother was
manning the station that controlled the portal.
Did she make a mistake? Did she summon the creature that murdered the room? Did she escape and lock the door behind her, dooming all those that were still inside?
So many questions.
He did find one clue as they left the next morning though.
There was a map on the counter he’d overlooked previously. It had the look of something that someone had prepared to help guide their way to a specific location, rather than giving them a lay of the land.
Listed at the top near the old Canadian, right where Montana met Washington, was a circle.
He knew for a fact his parents had gone up north several times.
It was a long shot, and maybe went nowhere, but maybe this circle was where they’d gone.
Taking the map with him, he’d fled the complex entirely.
Chapter 20
“Keep your hood up,” Ramona ordered Vince.
Shrugging his shoulders, Vince reached up and pulled the hood on his cloak lower over his features.
Normally he wasn’t one for cloaks and hoods, they tended to get caught on things, but Ramona had insisted. Even going so far as to demand he keep the hood up as they entered into the boundaries of what people would consider “Vegas”.
That’d been an hour ago when she’d made that demand clear, and since then, he’d kept his hood low.
“Won’t they question me about the hood? I can’t imagine guards letting someone just wander in without showing their face,” Vince asked.
“Gold goes far in Vegas, it’ll only cost a few standards, and the wall guards will let us pass without a care,” Ramona explained.
Guards. Guards and scouts out there wandering around.
He’d sensed and seen a few persons out there. Watching them. Tracking them.
It made his shoulderblades itch and his skin prickle.
The idea of being watched so casually set his nerves on edge.
His Ranger instincts demanded that he immediately dive to the side and get into cover. To hide, wait, and disengage.
The watchers left them alone though. Whether it was because Ramona and Leila were clearly not human or because the watchers didn’t care, there was no contact.
“Is this going to be the norm? No humans in Vegas?” Vince asked quietly.
