The Music of the Machine (The Book of Terwilliger 2)

by Michael Stiles

  “I thought you said not to shoot in here,” Perla shouted.

  “We can’t let him call Nathaniel,” said Flem. Then he shuddered and put a hand to his head. Tinch looked startled as well. An instant later Perla understood what was bothering them. The hum changed in intensity, and a picture suddenly appeared in her mind. A man’s face. It was like an afterimage on her retinas, as though she had been staring at a photograph for a long time and then closed her eyes.

  “That’s the intruder alarm,” said Flem.

  Perla knew the face. “Rayfield,” she whispered. “He’s here for us.”

  “Get down low,” said Flem.

  Tinch had taken advantage of the distraction and was moving quickly to hide behind the nearest shelf. It would have been funny under different circumstances, seeing someone of Tinch’s bulk scurrying so fast. In another moment he had disappeared behind one of the high shelves. Perla drew her own pistol, flipped the safety, and froze, completely unsure of what to do next.

  Flem took the plugs out of his ears and motioned for her to do the same. Then he got down low and leaned close enough to whisper in her ear. “Remember how I said this room is a big bomb?” He raised his head slightly to peek between the boxes on the shelf. Somewhere nearby, maybe in the next aisle, Tinch was lurking. “Wait until I tell you, then run out the door and get as far away as you can. All right?”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll be right behind you. Wait till I give the word.” He began creeping toward the far end of their aisle. Perla crouched down and waited. The exit was only a few yards away, but she had no idea where Tinch was hiding. That question was answered soon enough, when she saw him peeking at her between two wooden crates. “He’s here!” she shouted as she pointed her Colt at Tinch’s face and tried to pull the trigger. Her vision went all fuzzy and she dropped the gun. Was this some mind trick by Tinch? She shoved the heavy crates as hard as she could, making some boxes fall off the shelf on the opposite side. Tinch backed out of the way, and Perla found her vision returning to normal.

  “Don’t use the gun!” Flem yelled.

  “Then come over here and help me!” When she stood up to look for Tinch, she saw him hurrying away down the next aisle. “Come back here, you assdrip!” she called as she picked up her gun.

  “Perla,” Flem said, “don’t worry about him. Just run.”

  “But―”

  “Run.” Perla noticed that he had a grenade in one hand and a big block of the plastic explosive in the other. He molded the compound around the grenade, pulled the pin, and threw the whole lump of material in a high arc over the shelves. She couldn’t see where it landed. Then they both ran as fast as they could. Flem followed her out of the door and pulled it shut.

  The explosion came a few seconds later, when they were only a dozen paces down the hall. The lights went out and the ground heaved beneath their feet. Perla caught herself with her hands as she fell. Something heavy hit her back, pinning her to the ground. She gasped for breath and inhaled a mouthful of dirt. She coughed and retched and spat out dirt until she could breathe again. “Flem,” she said, trying to shout but managing only to whisper. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Flem!”

  It was utterly dark. Her ears were ringing and her head hurt, either from the explosion or because she had hit it when she’d fallen. Her earplugs were gone. She tried to get up, but was held down by something heavy that had come to rest on her back. It felt like a piece of rock. She writhed and slithered until it shifted slightly and she was able to sit up. When she did, her head bumped another rock that had lodged just above her. She felt around and found Flem on the ground nearby. There was a pulse in his throat. Unconscious, not dead. The tunnel had collapsed around them, leaving only a tiny pocket where they had somehow not been crushed by the falling ceiling.

  “Run,” Flem mumbled. Then he erupted into violent coughing. He sat up suddenly and Perla heard the crack of his head hitting the rock. “Ow,” he said. “Where are we? What are those lights?”

  “There are no lights,” Perla said. “It’s dark.”

  “I see spinning lights. Oh, golly. My head hurts.” He shifted and tried to get up, but there was no room to get up, so he sat back down again with another groan.

  “Tunnel caved in,” said Perla.

  “Yep,” Flem said.

  “We’re trapped.”

  Flem sighed. “That wasn’t part of my plan.”

  “I didn’t think so.” Perla fought back a wave of panic and forced herself to organize her thoughts. Her earplugs were not in her ears. When was the last time she’d had them? The ringing in her ears was slowly subsiding, which was what made her realize something. “The hum stopped.”

  As soon as she said it, the droning sound started up once more. It seemed weaker than it had been, less steady, but almost immediately she felt her mind losing its focus.

  “They turned on a generator,” said Flem. “Nathaniel’s got lots of backup generators. The machine runs on electricity.”

  “Why do you sound so happy?”

  “It’s a good thing. That means people are still alive down in the deeper tunnels. I was afraid the whole cave might have collapsed.”

  Perla didn’t care much whether Nathaniel and his Horsemen lived or died. No, that wasn’t true: she would rather see them all dead. “That’s terrific,” she said. “But you know what? We’re still trapped a mile underground. In the dark. With no air.” Again the panic tried to well up, and she suppressed it with some effort.

  “Yep,” said Flem. “That is a problem.”

  * * *

  The cavern shook and the Horse Room was plunged into darkness. Sarah and John, who had been hiding in their dark tunnel to watch Nathaniel’s speech, clung tightly together until the rumbling was over. They could hear Nathaniel shouting from the platform at the center of the room, trying to make himself heard over the confusion of the Horsemen.

  “Generator!” Nathaniel shouted. “Where’s Mike Ludd?” A minute or two later the lights came on again and the hum came back to life. A lanky man came out of a narrow passage at the far end of the room, directly under the hind legs of the blue horse, wiping his greasy hands on a rag. All the others watched the thin man with distaste as he made his way through the crowd to Nathaniel and whispered into his ear.

  “That’s Brown Mike,” John said quietly to Sarah.

  “Why do they call him that?”

  Nathaniel nodded and slapped the thin man on the back. The man smiled, showing teeth that were an off-putting shade of brown.

  “That’s why,” said John. “He’s in charge of the machine.”

  Nathaniel began gathering his Horsemen in small groups and giving them orders. Several of the men went into the narrow passage that Brown Mike had come out of. Three others were assigned to stand at the center of the room near the big metal chairs to guard their two prisoners. Sarah recognized one of these guards as Kevin Larson. Most of the rest went with Nathaniel into the wide shaft that led up toward the front gate. A few others headed down the passage where John and Sarah were hiding. Sarah shrank back against the wall, certain that they were going to raise an alarm and grab her. The men looked at her and John as they walked by, but not one of them showed any sign of concern. They just looked and moved on.

  “Did you learn their disappearing trick?” she asked John, once they were gone.

  “It doesn’t fool them,” said John. He didn’t bother to whisper; he spoke loudly and clearly. “It’s a dumb trick anyway, not sophisticated at all. What I’m doing is different. There’s a section of the brain that notices irregular things. Like when you’re walking through a crowd and suddenly you see someone you know. That part of your brain fires off a signal saying that you’ve just seen something you didn’t expect, that doesn’t fit in with everything else you’re seeing. If you know where that part of the brain is, you can just turn it off.”

  “So they can still see us…”

  “They c
an see us. I’m just switching off that little signal that tells them they’ve seen something wrong. They can look right at us and it doesn’t register that we’re here.”

  Sarah wondered why he was still standing there, looking at the four men who were standing guard. “Can we go now?”

  “Three of them,” John said to himself. “Larson, Bowers, Lingelback. Arthur’s men.”

  “Does that matter?”

  “Nathaniel’s trying to prove a point to Arthur—that the Society is under his control now. Arthur’s own guys are guarding him, but they won’t help him.” He pursed his lips and nodded, as if making a decision. “Sit tight here. I need to have a word with Arthur.” He took off his hat, folded it up, and put it in his back pocket. Then he searched his other pockets until he found a folding knife, which he flipped open.

  Sarah grabbed his arm to hold him back. “What are you doing? You’re just going to walk in there and stab him?”

  “Sure, why not? They won’t even know I’m there.”

  “Forget Arthur! We need to find Perla and get out of here.”

  “It’ll only take a minute. I can’t leave him to Nathaniel. This might be my only chance to get to him.”

  Sarah still did not let go of his arm. “What do you plan to do with the guy in the other chair?” The man in question didn’t look in their direction at all; his eyes were closed and he appeared to be in deep concentration.

  “We either have to leave him or kill him. If Nathaniel wants him alive, the whole world might all be better off if he’s dead. I don’t want to know what Nathaniel plans to do with those two.”

  Sarah didn’t like the casual way John talked about killing, but she could tell that his mind was made up. “Just do it quick, then.”

  John took a deep, slow breath and concentrated on the three Horsemen who were standing guard. “Okay,” he whispered. “Here we go.” He took a slow, deliberate step out of the shadows and into the big chamber. Sarah stayed in the darkness of the tunnel, swallowing hard as she watched for any sign that they had been spotted. She cringed every time one of the men in blue looked her way, but she was concealed in the dark and none of them seemed to notice John. Sarah was impressed; Big John tended to be the most noticeable person in any room.

  He began to cross the room very slowly. It seemed like a terribly long way to the middle of the huge chamber. The three guards stood silently next to the platform, most of them watching the wide tunnel that they used as the main entrance to the chamber. Larson looked over at John, watching him the way he would look at a bug on the wall, before losing interest and looking away. But there was one pair of eyes locked on him all the while: Arthur could see him, and he watched John and his knife with alert eyes.

  The man in the second chair, whom Nathaniel had called Cruller, suddenly raised his head. He was facing the other way, away from Big John, so Sarah could only see the side of his face. “Yes,” he said to no one in particular. “No questions.”

  John stopped moving and waited.

  “At the right time,” said Cruller. Then he lowered his head again and was silent.

  John stood still for another minute or so, then started making his way closer to Arthur. The trouble started when he was halfway there. He seemed to be having difficulty picking up his feet; he was sliding his sneakers across the floor instead of lifting them. Sarah wondered why he was doing that, but then it occurred to her that Arthur must be doing something to him, attempting to hold him back.

  The Horseman called Bowers turned his head to look at John. John glared at him and Bowers’ eyes lost focus again. He and the others were getting restless, looking around as though they could sense that something was not right. Larson was almost close enough to reach out and touch John, and John was nearly able to reach Arthur, but he was unable to lift his foot to step onto the platform. It was a stalemate: Big John was trying with everything he had to step up on the platform so he could reach Arthur, while Arthur was weighing his feet down so he couldn’t move. They struggled silently like this for a long time, and it was clear that John was not winning the battle. Larson and the others were blinking their eyes as though waking up from a nap. It was only a matter of time before they saw John standing just a few feet away, immobilized with the knife held tightly in his hand.

  Sarah was weighing the risks of calling out to distract the Horsemen when a new voice called out from the big tunnel at the far end of the room. “Larson!” The speaker was hidden in the shadows at the far end of the chamber, so Sarah couldn’t see his face.

  Larson turned to see who was calling him. “Seymour?”

  “Nathaniel wants you up at the front door. All of you.” Seymour experienced a sudden fit of coughing, then spat loudly on the ground.

  “Then why doesn’t he call us himself?” said Larson.

  “Doesn’t want everybody to know. That’s why he sent me. Better get going; he’s pretty ticked off.”

  The other two guards turned to Larson to see what he would do. Larson took one more look at Big John, shook his head as though unable to make sense of what he was seeing, and turned to walk uncertainly toward the wide tunnel that led up toward the upper tunnels. When the other men hesitated he said, “It’s your asses on the line if he decides to kill somebody.” Bowers and Lingelback hurried to join him, and the three of them went up toward the surface to look for Nathaniel.

  Arthur watched them go with an unreadable expression on his face. He seemed to be doing some sort of calculation in his head. John exhaled a huge lungful of air that he had been holding onto for quite some time, but his feet were still stuck to the ground where he stood.

  The Horseman called Seymour stepped out of the passage where he had been hiding. Sarah now saw why he had stayed out of sight; he was covered from head to toe in reddish-brown dust. Even his face was completely coated with it. From the sound of his cough, it was inside his lungs as well. He walked unsteadily to Arthur’s chair. Sarah could see that he had something in his hand, but it took a long moment for her to realize what it was. He was holding a gun.

  Her first thought was to cry out to warn John. But John was right there, only a few steps away from Arthur and the dusty man. He must have seen the gun before Sarah had. But John was completely still, immobilized by Arthur’s power. She was still considering what to do when someone very strong grabbed her from behind, covering her mouth to prevent her from screaming.

  * * *

  Perla managed to get up on all fours to dig with her fingers in the suffocating darkness, clawing her way through the loose chunks of debris that blocked the tunnel. Every time she worked some dirt free, more of it poured down from above to replace what she had removed. Her mouth was coated with it; her eyes stung and watered. It felt futile and she wanted more than anything to give up, but Flem was right behind her and she forced herself not to show her fear. The hum had muddled her thoughts and left her confused, which was unpleasant but came with one benefit: at least she couldn’t concentrate too deeply on the very real likelihood that she was about to asphyxiate underground.

  Then her right hand pushed through into open space. It caught her by surprise when she met no resistance at all. She lost her balance and planted her face in the dirt. The air was cooler on the other side of the cave-in, and there was a little bit of light as well. She lay panting for a minute before she called to Flem: “I’m through!”

  It took several more minutes to extricate themselves from the rubble. Flem was bigger around than Perla and they had to do quite a bit of careful digging to get him all the way out. He had to remove the holster from his belt and leave it behind. Then they were free, and they lay side by side on the rocky floor until they both felt like they could breathe again.

  “Trapped,” Flem said in a raspy voice. “That’s always been my biggest fear. Trapped in the dark.” He looked at the rubble of the collapsed ceiling and shuddered. “What are you afraid of, Perla?”

  Losing my mind, Perla thought. Not being able to think. But what sh
e said was, “Bugs.” She felt vulnerable, and it was a feeling she hated. The hum made her vulnerability feel mercifully distant. It wasn’t all that bad a sound, really. Almost musical.

  They made their way through little-used back ways that Flem knew from his many attempts to find a way out. Perla tried to ignore the pain in her bleeding fingers. Finally they came to the straight shaft that led from the upper, man-made levels down to the natural caves below. Several men in blue clothes ran past on the way up toward the higher levels. Perla and Flem found a dark place to hide, waiting to see if any of them would come down the tunnel toward the weapons storeroom. None did.

  “He’s nearby,” Flem whispered suddenly. Perla didn’t need to ask who he meant.

  Nathaniel appeared a moment later, talking quietly to a gray-haired man with a crooked nose. They were only a few yards away, close enough for Perla to smell their body odor. “It could be a false alarm,” the gray-haired man was saying. “But they say it looks like him. He went up to the guard shack at the Arsenal and they turned him away.”

  “Not a false alarm,” said Nathaniel, running a hand through his silver hair. “I’m expecting him. Make sure he’s met at the front door. I’ll be up in a minute.” Perla wondered who they were talking about. Whoever the approaching visitor was, Nathaniel seemed quite excited to see him.

  She looked down and saw that Flem had drawn one of his guns. She put her hand on his arm and shook her head. “Our job is to find Sarah and get out,” she whispered. “Killing him is suicide for us.”

  Flem grimaced and put his gun away. They resumed their earlier method of hiding in plain sight. Perla led the way with Flem instructing her on which way to go. Whenever they passed a Horseman in the passage, they moved to the shadows to conceal the dirt that covered them from head to toe and Perla put her hands behind her back as though they were tied. They came to the chamber that Nathaniel used as a bedroom and office, but there was no sign of Sarah.