by Holly Hook
I kept my mantra up. Alana breathed heavily. My legs were sore, but I was able to keep my feet on them okay. I had to. There was no other choice.
A hundred and twenty rungs.
Four minutes down. Somewhere, something thumped. I wondered if we were getting close to the Huge Collider and if some part of it might be working.
"I see light," Jerome said.
Hope--that monster--rose inside of me. Light didn't make sense, but I could make out the rungs better with each one I took. The glow was red and bloody as if we were descending into some horrible underworld, and then the smell hit me.
I had forgotten about Mr. Ellis.
"Hold your breath," Jerome said.
I tucked my face into my shirt. At least, Jerome declared that we had reached the bottom. I hit ground and Gina gagged, pressing against the wall. The mine had little red emergency lights that hung up near the ceiling. They must have come on when the main power went off. These people had some kind of backup, which was a smart idea considering that they worked down here all the time.
"Don't look," Jerome said.
There was a dark, bloated form on the floor. I turned away and we stepped into the big room, which was dim. Little red lights had come on around the collider itself, making it look like a bloody metal worm that extended as far as you could see into its dark tunnel. I could barely make out the walkway that wrapped through the ground with it in both directions. That room with the radiation symbol wasn't far from here. I was glad that David hadn't thought of them. Some genius he was.
"Do we have another way out of here?" Gina asked, coming up behind us. The computer room was completely dark, but she peeked inside of it. Alana turned off the flashlight and my eyes had to take a moment to adjust. The smell wasn't as bad here. Mr. Ellis had only been lying there for a day or so.
"I'm not sure," I said. "We figured there has to be a hatch or something."
"I hope so," Gina said. She took a bunch of slow, fast breaths, which reminded me that we were far underground.
And possibly trapped.
"We can't just stand here," I said. I thought of my sketchbook on the surface, which might sit forever on that bus. Or worse--David would get in there and pry through everyone's stuff. I hated the thought of him going in and looking at all my drawings. Then he would really know what bothered me.
"Suits," Alana said, holding up a finger. She was a dark shadow in the red light. This place was creepy, like an abandoned Halloween haunted house. It was late at night and all the people in costumes had gone home, leaving just this stench in their place.
We made our way down the tour tunnel, moving along the Collider tube, keeping the flashlight off. At last, after a long walk, we came to one of the service hatches that led to the metal tube. Across from it was the exclamation point door. Alana had kept the keys and tried several until she finally got the door open. It was dark in here. This, like the computer room, didn't have any emergency lights, so we had to use the flashlight again.
"Yes!" Gina shouted. A row of yellowish white suits hung in a row.
"How do these work?" Jerome asked, taking one of the suits off the hanger. He had a hard time just figuring out how to free it from where it was hanging. The suit itself was scary, yellow-white with a narrow plastic face mask. This looked like something someone would have to wear in a nuclear power plant. The headpiece had the same cylinder type shape with a mouthpiece for breathing and talking. I shuddered at the thought of having to put that on.
"Are these going to protect us from the sun?" Alana asked. "I don't know that much about that kind of stuff, to tell you the truth."
My forte was math, so I let Jerome answer. "They should," he said. "I'm about ninety percent sure they will."
"I don't want to put that on," Alana said.
I was glad I wasn't the only person who was freaked out. This was worse than anything I'd seen in the hospital.
"We only need to if there's a way out of here," Jerome said. "There's like, six of them in here. I found Dr. Shetlin's." Jerome held up one of the suits, which had her last name on the front. "I don't think I can fit into that one. There had to be a tall dude working down here at one point."
I agreed. Jerome moved around until he found one. He handed me the Shetlin suit. It wasn't as heavy as I thought it would be, but the fabric was this strange, smooth material and I had to use some effort to hold the suit up. I left the room, suit in tow, and eyed the hatch that was just across the passage. There was a number pad for a passcode, but also a manual key lock which was probably put in for events like this. Alana had the right key, or our escape would have ended right here.
"Before we open this," she said, "We put on those suits."
"The collider is off," Gina said.
"Just in case," she said. "There could still be radiation in there. It's obviously not safe if they need these suits. Dr. Shetlin said something about the particles in there giving off gamma rays and possibly destroying our DNA or something."
"Good idea," Jerome said. "I'm almost sure the collider is off, but if we find a hatch, we need these suits on anyway."
It took us forever to put them on. My palms sweat and I was aware that the morning was growing older and more mature on the surface. David was up there, waiting for night to move. He was trapped for now. We had an advantage if we got out of here.
The air got stuffy as soon as I got into the suit and Alana zipped me up in the back. This was a two-person job. Jerome and Gina had already gotten dressed and I helped Alana into hers the best I could. She fumbled with the keys and undid the lock, then turned the wheel on the hatch. I sounded like I had the world's worst case of snoring.
"Ready?" Jerome asked. He sounded hollow. We all sounded like we had the worst colds.
"As ready as we're going to be," I said, trying not to think about Dr. Shetlin and the fact that she'd been the last person to put on this suit.
She might have been saved if she'd remembered to put this on before leaving.
The tunnel through the collider was long and winding. We followed the bloody metal snake around curve after curve. Something hummed. I waited to feel some effects of the atmosphere in here--maybe a seizure from the magnetic forces Dr. Shetlin said they needed to use--but nothing came. We were surviving so far. Our suits made odd crinkling sounds with each step we took in single file. The walkway was only wide enough to allow one of us at a time. I felt like I was walking through another dimension.
We walked for what felt like ten minutes. This service walkway must go through the entire collider, which she said went two miles out and looped back around another couple of miles under the desert. Any hatch we found might come out far from the road. That could be both good and bad. I thought about that water Jerome still had in his pockets.
"There," Gina said after I had started to panic and the walls had begun closing in again.
A ladder.
It rose into a hole in the ceiling and there was another big yellow sign next to it. EMERGENCY EXIT.
We all sighed in relief at the same time. "Ready for another ladder?" Jerome asked.
"We're going up. Not down," I said. "I think we can handle it."
"We had better hope that David doesn't figure out that there must be another way out of here," Jerome said. "I'll go first just in case he's up there."
"What a gentleman you are," Alana said.
"And sexy," Gina added. "Don't forget about that."
Jerome turned around and flexed his biceps, which none of us could see under that suit. "You're right about that. I'm way sexier than that David guy."
"Let's just go," I said. I didn't feel like laughing. My mind was spinning with everything that could go wrong. I knew they were just trying to use humor to cope with all of this, but it wouldn't keep us alive. We needed survival skills. That was the only thing that was important now.
Jerome was the first up the ladder. I took a breath of the stale air under my plastic mask and followed him so I was second in
line. It was dark in this shaft except for an occasional red light every thirty rungs or so. This was even tighter than the other ladder we had come down. We had no elevator shaft next to us.
And way above, very far above, there was a light.
A faint light, but a light. It looked like the thinnest crescent moon I had ever seen. A hatch. Of course there would be one so no one would fall down this shaft and break their neck. I was glad. None of us knew if these suits would keep the sun's radiation off.
It was also hard to climb in the gloves and plastic boots. My feet kept wanting to slip off these rails. This was something the builders of this place had overlooked. But high into the climb, I could begin to smell something through the filter on the front of the mask. Fresh air. Dry, cool air, but fresh air that was filtering down through the hatch.
"We're almost there," Jerome said.
My arms were burning. My feet were cramping. I couldn't climb much longer. At last, Jerome asked if we were ready and opened the hatch.
Light streamed down at us and a reddish brown sky spread overhead. The haze remained as thick as ever, but the sun was enough to warm me just a little. I closed my eyes and looked down the ladder and Alana, who was right behind me behind her own plastic, and waited for the burning to begin.
"Out," Jerome said. "If it's going to kill us, it's going to kill us. There's no going back."
I climbed out. He was right.
And I stood there under the deadly radiation, waiting for the truth.
Gina and Alana came out of the hatch and stood next to me. I kept my eyes most of the way closed. A minute passed. My skin felt fine. Another minute. I was still okay.
A thud sounded as Jerome closed the hatch. "I see the Visitor Center from here. I think we came out a couple miles away from it. Let's get moving. I think it's getting close to late morning."
I opened my eyes. Alana smiled at me and gave me a thumbs-up. We stood next to what looked like a giant power box and a telephone pole. The road ran in both directions about fifty feet away. The builders had put the escape hatch close to the road. Bless them.
But the gloom of the sky was as deep as ever, casting the whole desert in a sickly reddish glow. The smog had showed no signs of clearing up. There was even a bit of haze around the Visitor Center as if some of it were now forming on the ground. I was glad for the mask. It would filter out any toxic gases, right?
"I think we're okay," Gina said. "I feel all right. These suits were an awesome idea. I'm just glad you guys were able to lock that door behind you."
I about withered. I had told Gina she couldn't come with us. I meant to keep her safe...but oh, crap. What did she think of me now?
It might not matter, I told myself. The two of us didn't have the time to become friends, anyway. We all had to think about ourselves.
Jerome leaned forward. "I can't see anyone," he said. "I think they're all in the garage. We had better move before one of them looks out here and sees us."
Chapter Ten
We walked. It was all we could do. It would be suicide to go back and grab the Cat now. It wasn't like David could drive after us until the sun set. We had the suits and he didn't. David no longer had access to them. He could have taken them if he had remembered the one simple part of our tour and if that had happened, the four of us wouldn't be walking down the road through a dying world.
"Forty miles," Jerome said. "I still have the food and water, but if we want to eat or drink, we'll need to do it fast. It'll involve stepping out of our suits."
"And where do we do that?" I asked, looking around the desert.
The cacti were troopers. They were holding on, staying green and plump along with the scrub plants. They must be tough to survive out here in the first place under a blazing sun. They were used to taking abuse. The sun's killer rays probably wouldn't kill them anytime soon. Something had to survive this, right?
But there were no birds.
Except for the dead one lying on the road about a mile up.
"Poor thing," Alana said as we took a wide berth around the carcass. A hawk. It lay face-down, wings splayed out. It had probably been flying around, just searching for a bite to eat when the second burst of radiation hit. I imagined it spiraling down, down until it hit the concrete and died here. It must have been a horrible way to go.
Thankfully, we had already passed the place where Dr. Shetlin lay when we had come out of the hatch. I was glad. I didn't want to see the nice woman lying dead in full daylight. Well, in what was almost full daylight. The reddish glow made me think the world's strangest storm was about to unleash at any moment, full of bloody rain.
The sun remained a pale orb behind the smog, which drifted overhead, lazy and lumpy. It peeked out every once in a while, but mostly it remained hidden, doing its dirty work from behind curtains. I looked up every once in a while, tracking its progress across the sky. Noon. Then early afternoon. My feet were beginning to hurt and my head was pounding with thirst. I wished I had drank something out of that awful sink in the bathroom. Then I would have to pee. Maybe it was a good thing that I hadn't had anything in that case. Asking someone to unzip me so I could squat by the side of the road was both dangerous and embarrassing, so for now, I kept track of the sun.
The day was long, but not long enough. The sun dropped closer and closer to the horizon as I forced myself to keep walking. No one spoke now. Jerome had the valuable water with him, but even he couldn't get it out without risking exposure to the sun. We all had to conserve our energy as much as we could. I got used to the suit and the plastic mask began to fog up after a while. I wanted to lick the moisture off. Anything would do. My head pounded harder with each step and a wave of dizziness washed over me. We should have drank before we got up the ladder. I would collapse and then David would come by at sunset, moving much faster than we could, and mow us down with the Cat while the others cheered.
"A gas station," Alana said. "A gas station! We passed this about ten minutes before we got to the Visitor Center and I forgot!"
My heart leapt and I let the hope monster back in. There was a low building with a wooden deck straight ahead. I had been so busy watching the sun that I hadn't noticed it. A barrel sat out front and there were two cars parked in the lot. The building would get us out of the sun. It would have more food. Water. Food for days, even. Maybe a car started and we could steal it.
I walked faster, pushing my thirst back. The gas station was maybe a mile off and beyond it, the desert rose into a low hill that blocked the view of what was ahead. This was a fifteen minute drive from the Visitor Center. I did the math. The bus had been moving at fifty-five miles per hour. That put this at about thirteen or fourteen miles from the Visitor Center. We'd made progress, but not enough to reach town by sundown. This place would have to do for tonight.
That final mile was the worst. I wanted to drop to the concrete and close my eyes. I wanted to just lie there and beg the headache to go away. I shivered. The desert was no longer hot and that might be the only reason we hadn't died yet, but even at this new temperature it wouldn't take long.
And at long, long last, we crossed the threshold to the gas station. Happy's Gas. It was a horrible name and the place was trying to do an Old West type thing with the barrel and the hay bales sitting out front, but the open door and the hand sticking out of it told a different story. No one here was alive. We were wandering through a world of corpses.
"Hello?" Alana asked as she peeked her head in. It was as if she still expected someone to be alive.
"Alana," I said. "They all died a painful death here. Let's loot and keep moving."
She faced me. "Why do you have to be so negative?" Her voice sounded like a yell through that face mask. I wanted to get inside so I could get out of this suit. The gas station was dark inside, but there was a wall of drinks. Bubbly drinks. Clear drinks. Colorful drinks. And most importantly, cold drinks. Well, maybe. Even warm would work right now.
"Because it's the truth," I said,
stepping into the gas station after her. "Look. Dead, dead, and dead."
"I didn't realize gas station food was that bad," Gina said.
It was a horrible time to be making a joke. I faced her, but remembered what I had done and turned away. We weren't buddies. Never would be.
The clerk was leaning over the counter as if he had been trying to call for help. His cell phone was under his hand, which was swollen and purplish. He looked like some kind of bad Halloween prop, lying there with his eyes open and staring at the pizza which had stopped rotating in its little oven sometime yesterday. His pupils were dilated. Full of nothing. A void. I hated that void. It was where Mom had gone after her long battle. It waited for all of us unless we got lucky and the religious folks were right about one thing. There was a woman lying in the aisle directly in front of us, with her arms over a much smaller figure.
I turned away before my brain told me what it was. But I couldn't stop it. The thought finished itself, no cushion added.
A little kid had died in here.
In pain.
Throwing up all over the floor.
"I can't stay in here," I said, turning away.
"We'll take the bodies out," Jerome said. "I can't smell anything. These masks are doing some good. It's not like we're actually going to have to, you know, touch them."
"Four," Alana said. She sounded tiny. "Four people died in here. I wonder where they were trying to go?" She stood next to the guy who was at the door, hand hanging out.
"I can't move the kid," I said. I had seen adults dead. Teenagers dead, but not a little kid. I couldn't even tell if the child was a boy or a girl. It was lying face down, hair in a black, goopy mess. These people hadn't even gotten to die clean like Mom had.
"We'll do it," Jerome said. "Just look away or help with the adults."
I took a long breath, which dragged out in the respirator. It was blocking the stench. We might have to keep these suits as long as we could, provided no other survivors tried to relieve us of them. Jerome muttered something and he and Gina appeared at my side, then moved to the bodies.
