“I don’t know, seems a little weird.” Ryan, picking up on Jon’s attempt at politeness, keeps his voice low and statements vague. “I get the feeling not everything is as it seems… something isn’t right.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. I’ve gotten the same feeling a couple times.” Jon shrugs nonchalantly despite the trepidation that tinges his voice.
“You think we should try the independent approach? I mean…” Ryan asks, leaving his many concerns unsaid as his voice trails off.
“No, we play it cool and watch each other’s backs for as long as we can, then when we need to make a break, we go,” Jon replies as he tries to size up the sleeping professor. “This could be all in our imaginations anyway.”
Neither really believes that assurance, but they are unable to say why they are uneasy. Something about The Professor doesn’t sit right to them. They turn back to the hall, each peering in a different direction, their eyes manufacturing movement in every shadow. Every click of cooling metal or drip of water is the approach of an armed guard looking for them. Maybe they’re just being paranoid, maybe.
* * *
The seconds seem to creep by, moving no faster than the fine particles of dust drifting down from the ceiling, but when Ryan checks his watch it has been nearly six hours since they started watching the hall. Keith is still snoring lightly behind them, his peaceful slumber only interrupted a few times when he’d rolled over and grumbled, but never fully awakening. The tunnel has no connection with the surface above anywhere in the vicinity, eliminating any chance they might have had to watch the changing light and measure their passage through time. Instead, they can only assume that above them the sun is setting, casting a last few rays of orange light over the mountains like fingers clinging to the edge of a precipice.
After showing his watch to Jon, Ryan returns to staring down the hall. They nearly let their minds wander off again into the blissful state of non-thinking that they had only before experienced during long lectures, but a soft voice interrupts them.
“We should get moving,” Keith says from the shadows behind them. Neither of them had heard him awaken or move closer, so his sudden presence makes them jump. “If no survivors managed to find us by now they aren’t going to make it.”
The Professor’s voice is strained with the last admission, and if there were more light in their hiding place, Jon and Ryan would be able to see the deathly pallor that clings to his face, brought on by some unseen internal struggle. In the deep shadows of the tunnel, all they can see is the haggard face of a man thrust outside of the system he has spent his life working within.
“Shouldn’t we—” Jon’s question is cut short by Keith’s sharp gesture with his hands.
“No,” Keith says. “They’re gone. There is nothing we can do for them now.”
He turns his back on them and starts rummaging in the supplies. Jon and Ryan almost miss him mumble what sounds like: “This time I won’t fail them.”
With a puzzled glance at Ryan, Jon steps back towards the assorted gear and grabs an empty backpack from the shelf.
He grabs a box of some sort of food bar and shoves it into the bag, followed closely by a flashlight, some spare batteries, and a first aid kit. On top of this he stuffs a rough blanket before fighting the zippers until they close. Jon tosses the bag to Ryan and proceeds to stuff a second bag with a similar assortment for himself.
With bags packed, the men feel a newly discovered sense of purpose brought on by simply moving. Even if they don’t know where or what happened to the others they were with, at least they broke the spell of sitting in the dark and steeping in their thoughts.
With a determined gait, Keith sets off in the direction opposite the one from which they arrived. Jon and Ryan follow with a slightly less confident step and a chalky meal substitute in their hands to try and fill the gnawing sensation growing in their stomachs.
* * *
Walking single file down another stretch of tunnel, Jon glances around Keith’s head and sees a heavy steel door blocking their progress. Keith is muttering to himself again as they approach the obstruction. The door is set so that its hinges are protected by the surrounding concrete of the tunnel, and a depression along the right-hand side of the tunnel shows where it will swing in and sit recessed in the wall so as not to infringe upon the tunnel’s access. On the opposite side of the tunnel from the depression, a small key pad is also set into the wall, its numerals faintly glowing, and a large red light above glares angrily at the three of them.
Keith scratches his beard for a moment before reaching for the glowing numbers. Before his finger can punch the first digit, the tunnel is thrown into almost complete darkness. Only the keypad and red status light remain glowing, but as Jon and Ryan’s gazes are drawn towards the only source of light, it quickly fades leaving the tunnel devoid of light.
Eyes straining, Jon looks around quickly, seeing nothing but the noise his eyes generate to fill the blackness. Turning in place, he loses track of which direction he was facing and reaches out to try and find the wall and orient himself.
He finds nothing in the darkness. He gropes left and right. Still finding nothing, he steps forward, automatically lowering his arm to his side to maintain his balance as he transfers his weight into his front foot. As he lifts the trailing leg to join it, a light breeze kisses his face and nose.
The air brushes past him like a beautiful woman in a long silk gown before a blind man; a presence is felt and the air is disturbed, but no image is recorded and the presence passes on into the surrounding void.
Reaching tentatively forward, he finds nothing, and then to his right he hears a quiet metallic click as a heavy latch is secured in place. He steps tentatively forward again, remembering his two companions who had been momentarily pushed from his awareness by their sudden disappearance.
“You guys still there?” he whispers, as if afraid that his voice will carry farther in the darkened air.
“Um-mmm,” Keith’s mutter seems to echo off the tunnel walls and arrive from multiple directions at once.
“Yeah,” Ryan’s voice says from directly behind him, his voice much clearer though pitched almost as softly as Jon’s. “I think the door that was blocking our way just opened. I felt something contact the tunnel wall.”
Jon, now with some sense of direction, reaches towards where he thinks the door would be and finds only empty air. Then moving towards the wall, he reaches out, and instead of finding the rough texture of concrete, his fingers brush the smooth cool surface of the door. He runs his fingers along it until he reaches the edge where it transitions with only a small gap to the normal concrete of the wall.
In the darkness behind him, he hears a rustling, which stops as abruptly as it started. Then a shaft of blinding light pierces the darkness.
“Looks like it did,” Keith’s voice says from the behind the light. “Let’s get moving.”
“But why did it open? It’s not like you entered a code. And what happened to the lights?” Ryan asks, his voice slightly uneasy.
“Why question something that goes right?” The Professor challenges him before gesturing down the hall with the beam of light. “Now move.”
They head off down the hall once more, Keith bringing up the rear so that Jon’s and Ryan’s legs cast dancing shadows as they walk through the door in the direction indicated by the light.
The tunnel initially gradually slopes up, the grade slowly increasing until right when Jon figures there should have really been stairs installed instead of a ramp, the grade stops and the floor levels out. Immediately after leveling out, it makes a hard left turn and abruptly ends in another steel door.
Unlike the first door, this one has a large latch on the side facing them. Keith strides up to the door and grabs the handle but is unable to make it budge. His flashlight beam bounces around the hall, casting sharp-edged shadows on his arm and neck as he strains against the latch. It still doesn’t move. Years of neglect and the
damp environment in the utility tunnels have colluded to nearly weld the door shut.
Ryan gently guides the older professor to the side before grasping the latch handle. He braces his feet then rams his shoulder upward into the door while shoving the latch inward. The door seems impervious. He repeats his movement. This time, small flakes of rust float off and drift calmly to the floor.
“Come on,” Ryan mutters as he resets his feet for another attempt. He drives his shoulder up and into the door once more. This time it visibly moves, shifting slightly upward on its hinges. Before it can settle back into its rust-bound position, Ryan instantly switches the direction of his force, pulling the handle out to open the door.
The latch breaks free. Ryan continues to pull, his face strangely calm despite the whiteness in his knuckles. Finally, with a tortured squeal, the door begins to move, slowly gaining speed as the rust that had bound its hinges is ground into a fine powder that puffs up into the beam of the flashlight as an orange cloud.
Just as Ryan and the door begin to gain a little momentum, the door abruptly stops causing Ryan to stumble backward, but he catches himself on the wall. After brushing some dust off of his hand, he grips the door and gives it another tug. The door doesn’t budge.
Dust broken free by the door’s long overdue movement continues to drift leisurely to the floor until a faint breeze stirs the particles into a billowing cloud that swoops out of the darkness to assault the men’s eyes and nostrils. Coughing, sputtering, and blinking his eyes furiously, Jon edges forward to look around the edge of the partially open door.
The tunnel continues as dark and unadorned as the concrete box they had been walking through, but after a short, level area that would be barely large enough for the door to open into if it swung that way, the tunnel slopes steeply upward. The flashlights they had been using to navigate are blocked by Jon’s body as he surveys the hallway, taking in the faintly illuminated rough patches on the walls. Examining the rough walls and grimy floor, he realizes that there is enough light to see them, enough light not originating from the flashlights behind him. Jon quickly makes a hushing motion with his hand lest there be someone behind the faint light filtering down the tunnel.
He edges out into the hall, creeping, hoping there are no loose rocks to kick or sticks to break. His feet and any hazards are hidden by the stark shadows cast by the faint light reflecting from the walls from the source ahead of him. As he edges along, the light grows in intensity. He pauses, and the light continues getting brighter. Something inside him, an instinct from his species’ primal days in the wild, tells him the light is not a search party warming up their spotlight, a predator, so he continues forward.
Jon stops again at the line between the shadow cast by the roof of the tunnel and the strange light. Before him the tunnel slopes upward again, a rusted chain hanging from the wall as a handrail. The light’s pale glow looks nearly as bright as the noon sun but provides none of the warmth, nor does it illuminate any colors. The tunnel and Jon’s own body appear to be ghostly mimics of themselves.
Cautiously he leans into the light, looking for its source. The tunnel only continues upward far enough that its end is hidden from the flat section by the roof. The moon’s light shines directly into Jon’s face. It seems to fill the end of the tunnel, nearly blinding him. There doesn’t appear to be an armed welcome committee waiting to arrest them, so he trots up to the end of the tunnel, ignoring the chain handrail.
The moon illuminates a grassy slope covered intermittently with small scrub brush. At the foot of the slope, a short fence marks a transition to a grove of loosely spread pines. With the moon’s light behind them, the trees form a black void with ragged edges. Jon has never seen a more welcome sight. The trees mark the edge of campus and a taste of freedom that has been denied them while they have been hiding from the patrols. He waves for the others to come up and join him before turning back to scan the vista.
“Look over there,” Ryan says after coming up behind Jon and pointing into the distance. The trees are sheltered in a low valley, the opposite side of which is marked by the large white mass of a bluff whose windswept top appears as barren as the moon in the white light. But Ryan is not pointing across the valley. Instead his finger is aimed down the valley to where the brightly twinkling lights of the town can be seen.
“There’s a creek down there amongst the trees. It probably goes all the way into town and connects with the other creeks that come down from the mountains,” Jon says, eyes fixed on the promise of an escape. “All we have to do is follow it and we should end up right off the main street.”
The moonlight reflects off the piles of snow that cling to the slope. It provides just enough light to make the slope look navigable and make them confident that there is no one waiting to ambush them. Finally escaping the university campus where they have been trapped for the past few weeks should be as easy as walking down a hill and taking a leisurely stroll along a moonlit stream.
Seeing that the other two aren’t going to argue with his assessment of their new course, Jon steps out onto the hill. Around the opening of the tunnel, the ground is fairly level, but after a few steps toward the trees the gradient increases sharply, and Jon nearly loses his footing on a loose patch of stones. He slides a little way down the hill until his foot slips into a snow drift. The drift is hiding a depression in the hillside where a tree or a boulder had once sat before succumbing to the effects of gravity and spring runoff and tumbling down the hill. The sudden drop coupled with the stopping of his forward motion by the packed snow flips Jon forward so he ends up sliding once more down the slope. Only this time, he is head first and gaining speed more rapidly.
Bouncing over the mounds of small trees buried in snow and skidding over patches of bare earth, Jon curses the deceptive slope. It looked so benign, just an easy walk down to an inviting valley below. His hands are bruised and cut from trying to slow himself down, his teeth are close to rattling out of his head, when he sees his only chance to stop himself: a lone pine sprouting from a bare slab of rock. He lunges, scrabbling sideways as he continues to tumble down the slope, and just as he is about to slide past the tree, his foot connects with something solid and he is able stretch out and grab the trunk with one hand.
Jon’s body swings around, and he is able to grab the rough bark with his other hand just as his legs drop off into space. The tree is perched on the edge of a small cliff, its roots having wedged their way between the rocks that form the hard top edge of the drop off. Jon clings to the tree a little tighter, his fingers digging into the bark as he glances below him to the slope at the base of the cliff that tapers out into more trees along the stream.
He manages to pull himself up until he is resting mostly upon the cliff top and relaxes his grip on the tree trunk as he lets out a sigh. Looking up the slope, he to tries to see the other two and let them know he’s ok, but the hillside bathed in dappled moonlight, covered in boulders and snow patches, makes it impossible to discern anything. He pulls himself up into a seated position next to the tree and is about to call out when he is suddenly blinded by a light from the top of the hill. A loud click and whine preface a loudspeaker’s announcement.
“Halt. Do not move.” The voice commands without any emotion as another light blinks on a short way from the first, its beam striking both Ryan and Keith where they are standing barely out of the tunnel entrance.
“Turn slowly and make your way to the top of the hill,” the voice commands once more. Silhouetted against the glare, Jon can see Ryan and Keith turn slowly and raise their hands. As Ryan is about to place his left foot down to complete his turn, the loose dirt and rocks under his right foot give way and it slides out from under him. He pitches forward, catching himself on his hands and knees. Fortunately for him, he falls behind a large boulder, which shields him when the men behind the floodlight at the top of the hill open fire.
Bullets begin pouring down the slope, most directed at the rock behind which Ryan is no
w cowering. But plenty start kicking up puffs of dirt around Keith’s feet, and still more begin pattering and skipping off the stone slab beneath Jon. As soon as the first bullet whizzes by him, Keith jumps down the hill into a full sprint. He is several strides farther up the hill than Ryan, so as he runs past he is nearly at full speed. Keith reaches out and grabs the larger man by the shoulder, pulling him from where he was hidden.
Keith’s momentum and Ryan’s inertia combine to send them both tumbling down the hill. Keith manages to right himself after a few rolls, but the increase in his speed caused by the uncontrolled tumble sends him rolling once more. Ryan follows suit, his legs flailing, trying to gain enough purchase to force himself upright for longer than for a few strides, but each time he manages to stand, the unpredictable and steep slope soon claims his balance.
The spectacle descending towards him stuns Jon into immobility and causes him to nearly forget the bullets being aimed his way as he watches the other two fly downward outpacing the small avalanches their passing creates. Rudely bringing him back to his own predicament, a bullet impacts the bark of the tree sending a spray of splinters into Jon’s face. Before he can flinch away from the stinging spray, another strikes the rock in front of him directing rock chips up into his face and the arm he is raising to protect it.
Being stung from all sides but one, Jon rolls away from the pain towards the edge of the cliff behind and without thinking leaps off the edge. For a moment he feels like he is floating and the staccato burst of the rifles fade from his ears. It seems almost peaceful as he looks out over the valley. Then gravity takes hold once more, and the sound and the trees come rushing back into his awareness to greet him.
As he approaches one of the trees below, the top branches seem to reach up to meet him, but when he comes crashing through them they part with only stinging slaps to his face and arms. It isn’t until he is nearly halfway down the tree that he connects with a branch big enough to slow his fall, but instead of being able to grab it, the branch grabs the backpack that he has somehow managed not to lose, and he is flipped upside down until the next branch catches his legs. He is left hanging, the bag lightly tapping him in the back of the head as he swings back and forth.
Seeds to the Wind (The Medicean Stars Saga Book 2) Page 8
