Branch Off

by Dario Solera

  “Requin is waiting for her. In fact, he’s expecting me to bring this woman to him.”

  With a visible gulp, the guard swallowed.

  “What is your name, Private?”

  “Faucher, sir.”

  “So, Private Faucher, are you going to give me a vehicle, or do I have to contact command to report about your conduct?”

  The soldier looked like a kid now, with low eyes and a worried expression. He turned and fetched a key from a set of hooks behind the desk. “Your keys, sir. It’s that jeep,” he said, pointing.

  “Thank you. While you are at it, why don’t you phone the men at the gate to alert them that we are arriving?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Gagnier walked away, pulling vigorously at Léa’s arm, which he hadn’t let go during all the conversation. They reached the camo-painted car, and he opened the rear door. “Get in,” he said with a loud, firm voice.

  Léa obeyed.

  He went to the driver’s door, opened it, and got inside. The engine stuttered on as he turned the ignition.

  As the car moved, she shot a glance at the guard and saw him hanging up the phone on his desk. The jeep bumped on the drain grates at the gate of the garage and gained a little speed.

  While he drove, he didn’t talk for the couple of minutes it took them to reach the base’s gate, before he slowed down and halted at the barrier. Léa felt her heart in her throat as she watched the guard peeking inside the car, first at Gagnier and then at her, for what seemed like an eternity. Unlike the others, this soldier had a submachine gun, and another soldier waited a few meters away from the car.

  The man retreated and waved for them to go forward as his colleague raised the barrier.

  Gagnier kept looking in the rearview mirror and remained silent until the road bent and the base was no longer visible. Gradually, Léa’s heart slowed down.

  “You’ve been great,” he said.

  “I haven’t done anything.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You should find a job as an actor.”

  He giggled.

  “How did you know that the soldier at the garage would give you a car?”

  “I didn’t, but it’s always the kids that guard garages and other noncritical facilities. I bet he’s still debating with himself on whether to call command and ask about us. He has broken the procedures, and sooner or later someone is going to question him for the missing vehicle—or find the unconscious man.”

  Léa said nothing. The adrenaline was fading and the country landscape had a soothing effect on her.

  “We should have half an hour, more or less, then they’ll begin searching for us.”

  Twenty-eight

  The electric cart whirred fast in the tunnel with the particle accelerator to its right. Dubois was driving, while Geiger sat at his side. Sarah, Emminger, and Mairengo had had to squeeze into the backseat.

  At twenty kilometers per hour, it would take about thirty minutes to get to the labs. During the journey they had met a couple diagnostics and monitoring stations, but they were empty. The structure looked intact but abandoned.

  “Do you think we’ll find someone at the labs?” Sarah asked.

  “It’s likely we’ll find army personnel.”

  “You mean Swiss?”

  Emminger didn’t answer.

  She had given up the idea of searching for her parents now, and was crunching on a plan to collect information about what had happened on this side. She could tell parameters for her experiment off her memory without effort, and as minutes passed, her curiosity was building up. “If there are no scientists, finding some data is going to take a while.”

  To approach another monitoring post fifty meters in front of them, the vehicle slowed down. Dubois halted the cart, and he and Geiger walked forward to inspect the small recess in the tunnel’s wall. “Clear,” Emminger’s radio said.

  “The first thing we have to find,” Sarah continued as the tension for a possible fight faded, “is whether the accelerator has been used the same day and time we ran our experiment.”

  “Yeah.” Emminger jumped off and checked his watch. “Dubois, it should be another three kilometers, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “OK. We’ll walk the last kilometer. We can’t risk making too much noise. You and Geiger will move a hundred meters in front of us.”

  “Understood.”

  ***

  Dubois raised an arm and closed his hand in a fist, then he and Geiger knelt.

  “There’s movement,” the radio said. “The tunnel gets bigger and there are people; we hear them talking.”

  “Who, and how many?”

  “Don’t know. No visual. We’ll move on the other side of the gallery to get cover behind the accelerator.”

  “Copy that. Proceed.”

  Sarah watched as Dubois and Geiger disappeared behind the massive circular structure. She swallowed and tried to tell herself to stay calm.

  “We’ll walk to your previous position and wait there,” Emminger added. He motioned for the three of them to do as instructed.

  Now she could no longer focus on the job at hand because she could read worry in Emminger’s and Mairengo’s faces. They were perhaps used to that kind of situation, but she had trembling hands and cold sweat on her forehead.

  “When we get closer, there might be some action. I want you to move when I tell you to move, and always stay behind me.” He then spoke into his radio, “Switch to earbuds.”

  Without talking, they walked in file for a minute with trained weapons. Sarah closed the group, feeling out of place and vulnerable in the place that had been her workplace for two years. She expected a squad of enemy soldiers to appear in front of them, materializing out of the slight curvature of the tunnel, or maybe from one of the countless recesses that housed equipment and emergency shelters.

  Emminger’s earpiece buzzed and he stopped walking. He made some signs with his hands, looking at Mairengo and mouthing something. He then produced another gesture, and this one Sarah understood. They moved to the other side of the gallery, passing below the belly of the giant synchrotron.

  She wanted to ask him what was happening, but he didn’t even look at her; instead he trained his weapon forward and resumed walking.

  Not knowing what to expect was killing her. She was used to unknown outcomes, but not like this. Hidden behind the accelerator, without direct lights above, she felt a little more at ease. A kid could walk below it, but the thick support struts placed every meter or so gave a decent cover. She could hear her heart pounding fast and hard.

  They walked around a large structure, maybe one of the smaller detectors. The tunnel was wider here, and its geometry allowed direct line of sight to where it met the main Institute building.

  Dubois and Geiger were closer to them now and were hiding behind a strut some thirty meters farther. Emminger signaled to stop.

  There were voices, although Sarah could not understand what was being said. They sounded normal, calm, and they certainly did not mean harm.

  “Move forward and report,” the squad leader said in a low, deep voice into his radio.

  More silence waiting for something to happen, her heart racing.

  Emminger’s radio buzzed. “How many?” he asked. “Fuck!” he grunted. “Contact with enemy forces,” he whispered to Sarah. “German.”

  She swallowed down a lump, and she wiped her sweating hands on her black cargo pants. “What do we do?” She couldn’t help thinking that she was no soldier.

  “We’re not going to—” Gunfire erupted a few dozen meters farther. “Stay back,” he said, shoving her farther behind the recess they were hiding in. “Report!” He waited for a second, listening. “Fall back!”

  Submachine guns resounded in the tunnel with many short, purposeful bursts.

  “Do you copy? Fall back!”

  The bullets stopped, replaced by angry footsteps and voices.

  “Dubois, report!”
Emminger waved his hand at Mairengo. “We need to go there,” he said.

  “You’re leaving me?”

  He handed her his pistol. “I’m sure you can fire it. You’re American, right?”

  Sarah stared at the gun. She had never touched one, but she took it out of instinct. It was heavier than she thought and cold, but smaller than most guns she had seen in movies.

  “You have to go. Use another cart and return to the shaft, try to make it home. Be sure not to take the one we used, as batteries are running low.”

  “No!” She shook her head frantically.

  “There’s no other way. We can’t fall back or they’ll follow us. They’ll search the tunnels. We’ll try to buy you some time.”

  She wanted to tell him they were going to die, but the look in his eyes showed he knew already.

  “Go!” he yelled in a whisper.

  From her crouching position she rose and took a couple steps backward. She tucked the gun in the breast pocket of her bulletproof jacket.

  Emminger gave her a relaxed military salute, and then he and Mairengo moved toward their deaths.

  Even with her trembling legs she managed to set a brisk pace in the opposite direction, glancing behind her every few seconds. The accelerator towered near her.

  More gunfire resounded in the still air.

  Sarah ran.

  ***

  The electric cart’s full battery gave the vehicle a decent thrust, and she kept the pedal to the floor, with the speedometer reading just below twenty-five kilometers per hour. If she had done the math right, it would take her another forty minutes to reach the shaft.

  Gunfire had ceased a while ago, and it was not because she had gotten farther. Emminger and Mairengo were either captive or dead. But that wasn’t her problem. Her fault, certainly, but not her problem.

  All she had to do was to keep driving and then climb the ladder up the service shaft. “Damn.” It was not going to work. How the hell was she going to make it back through the anomaly? “Vehicle, vehicle,” she repeated. She needed a car, a truck, anything with wheels and an engine. The two jeeps were gone, and she doubted she would find something else. Where could she find a car?

  Judging distances was impossible down here, so she had to rely on the signs printed on the concrete walls every two hundred meters. The detector, the one where everything had started, was now eight kilometers farther, while the shaft was about one kilometer closer than that.

  She shot glances around her at the cart’s flimsy structure. Even that was better than nothing. But the damn cart was stuck underground and the anomaly didn’t reach the tunnel, that deep below ground level. “What the hell am I thinking? Going around in an electric cart on muddy ground? While bombs fall on me?”

  The accelerator’s support struts whizzed past quick, making a whooshing noise as their slick concrete base reflected the sound of the cart’s wheels and motors.

  Maybe she could risk it and go through the anomaly on foot. It didn’t feel safe, and it was a long walk to Geneva on the other side.

  “Think!” The tunnel ran near the older and smaller accelerator’s facility. The two met at some point between there and the anomaly, but they were not directly connected. “Cooling tunnels!” The power substations drew cold water from Lake Geneva for chilling from an intake tunnel, pumping it back out through an outtake one.

  She was going north now, and she would have to meet one of them very soon. Missing a secondary passage was easy at that speed, so she eased down and paid more attention to the wall. She stopped many times and turned to look the way she had come, doubtful about where she was. After several minutes, a small steel door appeared and she halted the cart in front of it. The plaque at its side read, “Outtake Cooling Tunnel.”

  With a wheel on it, the door looked sturdy and heavy, like those in submarines. She rested her hands on the cold metal and hesitated. What if there was water on the other side? She shook her head. It couldn’t be, and there were no warning signs.

  The wheel rotated easily, and she pushed the door open. Beyond it, she found a vertical shaft with a ladder going downward, with lamps every couple of meters. Looking down, she tried to remember the length of this tunnel. It couldn’t be much lower underground, but it ought to be quite long as it ran to the lake on an ample bend toward the southeast.

  “Five kilometers at worst,” she told herself, and then she began descending the rungs.

  Twenty-nine

  The anomaly lay somewhere before them, invisible through the thick fog rising from the fields, yet present and powerful. Gagnier pulled up near a tall tree and checked the rearview mirrors. “Where is everyone?”

  Léa had ditched the handcuffs and moved in the front seat, and she was now looking around at the vast country land. The air brought a faint smell of burned plastic.

  “No one has stopped us. Why?” He glanced over at her. “Don’t you find it strange?”

  She shrugged.

  He shook his head after checking the time on his wristwatch. “Thirty-eight minutes. I don’t understand. Too easy, too smooth.”

  “Does it matter?” Being there, a hundred meters from the gate to her own world, she didn’t care the least about how they had made it. “We’re here. We’ve been lucky. Let’s go,” she said, with a quiet determination in her voice.

  “Yeah.” The car moved forward. Gagnier kept it in second gear, not sure what to expect.

  “Maybe they let us go,” Léa said as everything was beginning to blur away.

  Thin, grey smoke welcomed them on the other side instead of the fog. The sky was greyish but the air was clearer. Two wrecked carcasses of vehicles hampered the road.

  “I don’t like it.” He released the accelerator, and they proceeded slowly while his eyes darted everywhere. After several meters, he hit the brakes and said, “Get out.”

  Léa jumped off the jeep and backed away from it. The air was still, silent. Toward the city, a few columns of smoke billowed into the sky. She brought a hand to her mouth and whispered, “My God.”

  “What?”

  She pointed at the horizon.

  Gagnier seemed to listen for a long moment. “No gunfire.”

  They moved to the side of the road, across the shallow, grassy ditch that lined it, just to stay away from the easy target that the car was.

  “We must get to Sarah’s parents’ address,” she said.

  “Suddenly I’m not so sure that’s a good idea. How do you know she’s there?”

  Léa sighed and waited a second. “I just know.” She didn’t. She could only hope.

  “What if we don’t find her?”

  “We’ll wait. We don’t have much else to do, do we?”

  “We could go to the labs. Figure a way to put things right.”

  “And how are we supposed to do that? Turn some knobs on a control panel? We need her. Besides…”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” She avoided telling him how she didn’t want Sarah to shutter the anomaly, and herself with it.

  Gagnier nodded. “Look, I’m now officially a deserter. I should report to command straight away.” She tried saying something, but he raised his right hand. “I will help you get there, but then you’ll be on your own.”

  Léa bit her lips. She hadn’t thought about going around alone. She had taken Gagnier’s presence for granted, but he had his duties to fulfill, and as absurd as it sounded in those circumstances, she could not ask him to desert.

  “Deal?” he asked.

  “Deal.”

  He smiled. “Let’s take the car.”

  ***

  The muddy road gave way to dirty tarmac, and suddenly the jeep stopped rocking, its wheels rolling with a satisfying smooth sound.

  “This time we’re not breaking into any house,” Léa said.

  He snickered. “No.”

  All the buildings seemed intact, but there was no one around, a fact that turned the place into a modern ghost town. At every corner, b
ehind every window, she expected someone to pop out.

  As the car took a turn and merged onto a wider street, a couple burned cars appeared in the distance, fumes still seeping out from the remnants of their bodywork. She and Gagnier exchanged a worried glance. A small commercial building showed signs of a fire long since put out. More smoke billowed farther behind the block, and litter flew in the feeble breeze.

  With a frown she asked, “What happened? And where is everyone?”

  Gagnier pressed on the pedal and the car gained some speed. “Civilians must all be in refugee camps.”

  “Look there!” she exclaimed.

  “What?”

  She turned in the seat and tried to get a better view of a wrecked vehicle. “It was some kind of tank. Destroyed.”

  “Can you describe it?” he asked, accelerating further.

  “I don’t know.”

  Soon, another came into view on the main road.

  “That’s German.” He had to turn the car around to avoid getting too close. “Those bastards! And they said they would help us!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Léa, wake up!” he shouted. “The Germans attacked us. On the helicopter you saw the same things I did!”

  For a time she was silent and stared at the street through the windshield. They had talked about it while in the cells, but he had been dismissive. Maybe, like her, he had hoped it was only a mistake. They had gotten a brief glimpse at this world. Not wanting to pester herself with those thoughts, she had kept busy with memories of Sarah—a slightly different Sarah at that, but still her.

  “I’m sorry. It’s just that—hell, we’re under alien attack and they turn their backs on us? And where are the aliens?” he said, looking up at the sky.

  As the jeep progressed toward the city, more burned buildings came into view, but this time it looked like action had ceased just moments ago. Dull flames burned here and there in the rubble, and many armored vehicles lay at the sides of the streets, destroyed or abandoned. There was no one, and not a single house seemed inhabited.

  “There must be someone from the army somewhere,” Léa said.