14

by Peter Clines

  “Don’t you?”

  “I’m not having a lot of trouble believing all this.”

  “I am,” muttered Roger. “Still doesn’t make sense.”

  They left Nate to study the desk and moved to the shed. Xela pried open the door and barked out a laugh. “Oh, of course there’s a bathroom here,” she said.

  “Yeah,” said Roger, “if only you could’ve held it for another three hours.”

  She peered down the hole of the outhouse. “Not too sure I’d feel safe sitting there anyway.”

  “Worried something’d grab you?”

  “Worried I’d fall through,” she said.

  Nate crouched between the desk and the outhouse. The ground was covered with papers. They fluttered in the constant breeze coming out of the chasm. Most of them danced near the desk and pressed themselves in the rough corner where the floor and ceiling ran together. Some of them were trapped further out on the floor, pinned by random eddies and air currents. They were singed on the edges or burned black.

  Nate reached to touch one and it collapsed into ash that was swept away on the constant breezes. He squinted his eyes at the next one and tried to make out the faded ink lines. “Can you get photos of these?” he called over his shoulder.

  Xela looked back. “Which ones?”

  “All of them. As many as you can.”

  She nodded and bent to the closest page.

  Roger crouched next to her. “Drink some water.”

  “I’m not thirsty.”

  “Ain’t about being thirsty,” he said, “it’s about staying hydrated on the job, y’know? You’re not sweating that much.”

  Her lips formed a quick grin. “You’re watching me sweat. That’s not too creepy.”

  “Damn hot in here. Suck to get heatstroke at the bottom of those tunnels.”

  She pulled a bottle from her pack and he did the same. “We could ride the elevator back.” She washed the words down with a double mouthful of water.

  He took three deep swallows from his own bottle and wet his head again. “Don’t know about you,” Roger said, “but I’m not too keen on getting in a hundred-year-old wooden elevator with a cable a mile long.”

  She smiled again and went back to taking photos.

  Nate took a few steps and his eyes slid around the room. Generators. Cables. Pipes. Supports. Chandelier. Roger joined him and held out a water bottle. “Whatcha thinking?”

  He took the bottle, tipped his head back, and poured it into his mouth. “I’m thinking we’re missing something,” he said, wiping his mouth on his arm.

  Roger looked at him. “Whaddya mean?”

  Nate waved his arm at the row of generators. “Okay, you said movie generators are half this size and put out fifteen hundred amps, right?”

  “Think so, yeah, but it’s not really my thing, y’know?”

  Nate nodded. “So even if these aren’t any more powerful, there’s still six of them. So they’re putting out at least nine thousand amps. Maybe twice that.”

  Roger nodded.

  “If all this is going up to the building,” said Nate, “what’s using it all? It’s not like we’re using all this to power a couple dozen refrigerators and computers.”

  “Flatscreens suck up a lot of power,” said Roger.

  “Not that much,” said Nate. “Heck, I think a subway only uses a couple hundred to push a train. So what’s using all the power from six big generators like this?”

  “Guys,” called Xela, “take a look at this.”

  Xela was crouched in front of a piece of paper. As they got closer, Nate could see the brittle edges where more of it had crumbled away. Going off what was left, the original could’ve been the size of a large poster. Then he saw the lines, faded but still clear enough.

  “You see what I see?” Xela pointed at the drawing.

  The image was a large rectangle. It was divided into multiple levels, and the top three were subdivided by more layered lines, so each of the top three sections had two large squares separated by a narrow rectangle. It took Nate a moment to realize he was looking at a cross-section of a building. The Kavach Building.

  On the second floor, the right-hand square was marked with a thick X that filled most of the box. The mark was so heavy it had lasted a century. Four words were written outside the large rectangle next to the marked square. They were some of the only words on the sheet that hadn’t faded to a blur. Nate recognized all of them. He understood the bottom one.

  DANGER

  Across from the marked square was a different shape. It was another rectangle extending up to the top floor. There were four words next to Clive and Debbie’s apartment, right on the brittle edge of the paper. Half of the top two had crumbled away, but they could just read the bottom word.

  CONTROL

  Forty Eight

  Veek sat at the far end of the break room table. In front of her was a collection of all their notes and photographs, all printed out and labeled. More than half of it was information she’d learned months ago, long before she’d met Nate. Now that they’d discovered so much more, though, there was a chance of spotting something new or seeing a fresh angle on things.

  For the fourth or fifth time, she wished she had a working laptop she could’ve brought down. Something with a screen larger than her phone. The Wi-Fi didn’t penetrate this deep, but it still would’ve been easier than dealing with so much paper.

  She glanced over at the vault door. It was propped all the way open. Clive had found a small latch to lock it in position.

  She’d been in the sub-basement break room for four hours. Tim had split the watch up into three-hour shifts, but Veek had offered to take Debbie’s so she could spend the evening with Clive before he went off to work.

  In another eighteen minutes it’d be twenty-seven hours since she said goodbye to Nate and the others in the room below the vault door. “The airlock,” Tim called it. One way or another, the explorers should be headed back soon.

  Assuming nothing had gone wrong.

  They’d spent yesterday and this morning searching the big room. Every piece of furniture examined, every drawer and locker opened. They’d found some clothes that had fed generations of moths and a pair of reading glasses—spectacles, really—with gold frames. They’d also discovered a few silver notes Andrew guessed might be worth twenty or thirty dollars each from collectors. This assessment came with a lecture on material possessions which Tim put a quick end to.

  Debbie had pointed out that they were leaving trails in the dust. It was hard not to notice someone had been in the room at this point. This worried them at first, but it was agreed the room had stood untouched for so long it didn’t make sense someone would be looking at it in the near future. With that decision made, she started to clean while the others searched. Veek’s college roommate had been the same way. In the face of crisis and uncertainty, the best thing for some people to do was break out the Dustbuster. It was amazing what a can of wood polish and two rolls of paper towels had accomplished. The sub-basement wasn’t sparkling, but no one would’ve objected to eating a meal at the table.

  Veek picked up a pile of pictures and shuffled the top one to the back. She tapped them on the table to straighten the stack. She looked at the new top photo. It was a low shot, looking up at the front face of the building.

  “Fuck,” she said to no one in particular.

  It wasn’t even loud enough to echo against the hard walls of the room. She pushed her glasses up onto the bridge of her nose and considered saying it again.

  She was angry about not being down there with Nate. She’d been angry for four days, since they’d first explored the sub-basement with Tim.

  Eight years! She hadn’t had an asthma attack in just over eight years. She’d biked to work three times last summer and never felt a twinge in her lungs. Hell, she’d tried a kickboxing course two years ago and never felt short of breath once. Half the time she didn’t even carry her inhaler, and when she did it
always felt like a useless gesture. It was like carrying a condom in her bag in college when she knew she was going to be the last one having unexpected sex.

  But down there in the tunnels it had kicked in. She was close to doing something amazing with her life, and her lungs had tightened up on her. She’d felt the straps settle around her ribs and known they were getting ready to bind her chest. It had taken all her will to force warm air into her lungs.

  And now he was down there with Roger and the slut. Which was unfair, but it was how she found herself thinking of Xela more and more. How’s that old joke go? she thought. The difference between a nymph and a slut? A nymph sleeps with everyone. A slut sleeps with everyone except you.

  Not that she wanted to sleep with Xela. Or thought she was a slut. She just wondered who Xela wanted to sleep with. Because experience had taught Veek that women with Xela’s looks and attitude tended to get a lot more guys than women who looked like...

  Well, like Veek.

  The metal staircase creaked. She looked over her shoulder and saw Andrew coming down the steps. A brown and white sweater vest wrapped his torso and clashed with his sky-colored tie. “Ahhh,” he said. “I didn’t realize anyone was here.”

  “Someone’s always keeping watch here until they’re back,” she said. “You heard Tim say so.”

  Andrew gazed at a spot in the air for a moment. He studied it for a moment and then shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, my mind must’ve been elsewhere.”

  “Right,” said Veek. “Good thing you’re not volunteering.” He’d been pretty useless during the search of the sub-basement and the airlock.

  “Now I remember,” he said. “Timothy wanted me to work on Sunday.”

  She turned her head toward the vault door so Andrew wouldn’t see her roll her eyes. “Change your mind?”

  “No.” He walked past her to glance through the vault doors, his arms and hands close to his side. He leaned back and turned his head to her. “They’re still not back?”

  Veek set her photos down on the table. “No.”

  “No word on if they found anything?”

  “I just said they’re not back yet.”

  His chin went up and then dropped down. “Ahhh.”

  “So what’s up, Andrew?”

  “Nothing,” he said in his sing-song voice. “I just wanted to look around some more and see if there was anything else to find.”

  “We went over the place pretty good yesterday,” Veek reminded him. “Tim and I did some more this morning.”

  “And you didn’t find anything interesting?”

  She twisted around to look at him. “More interesting than a bunch of underground rooms and tunnels?”

  Andrew’s head dipped to one side, then the other, then back. His shoulders swayed as he did. “I was just wondering about our meeting in the lounge. About what was hidden here.”

  “All this was hidden here.” She gestured around her.

  His side-to-side swaying became a nod. “Yes,” he said, “this was here, but it wasn’t hidden. We don’t think the message on Nathan’s wall was about protecting a kitchen table, do we?” He bared his teeth at her. She almost flinched before she realized he’d spread a smile across his face.

  “Maybe we’ll find out,” Veek said.

  “Maybe we will,” said Andrew. “If our Lord is willing.”

  It crossed her mind that she was two stories underground and there was a good chance no one would hear her if she started screaming. Andrew’s smile encouraged that sort of thought. Then again, he’d always given her the creeps on some level.

  They stared at each other for a moment, and then Andrew’s smile faded. “Well, I shan’t take up any more of your time,” he said. “You looked quite deep in thought when I came down the stairs.”

  “Yeah,” she said. She gathered up the ream of notes. “We’ve got a lot of stuff to go over at this point. Don’t want to miss anything.”

  He gave another nod. “Yes,” he agreed, “that would be bad.”

  Veek kept adjusting the photos in her hand. She didn’t want to look at them until Andrew turned, because she had a gnawing feeling he might just stand there and stare at her for a while. So she shifted them again while she stared at the vault and watched him out of the corner of her eye.

  Andrew’s head bobbed side to side again. Then he turned and walked back to the stairs. “Have a wonderful evening,” he said.

  “You, too,” she answered. She counted out all eighteen steps as he headed back up to the basement. To be safe, she even listened for his footsteps across the floor and down the hall to the laundry room. She knew he was more annoying than dangerous, but sometimes he managed to blur the line.

  Veek settled back into her chair. A picture of the cornerstone topped the stack, brought up by her shuffling. It had printed in landscape format, so she was looking at it sideways, and just for a moment something about seeing the block at this angle made sense. She glimpsed something that vanished the instant she focused on it.

  And then, before she could retrace her mental steps, a faint sound echoed out of the vault door.

  * * *

  “Holy shit,” said Roger. “We there?”

  “I think so,” Nate said.

  The trio had spent last night ten tunnel-legs up from the generator room. Today had been twelve hours of marching back up through the tunnels. They’d trudged along like the walking wounded for the last hour. Xela leaned on Roger. Nate’s shoes had turned to concrete sometime around lunch.

  But they came around the corner and there was the spiral staircase at the top of the last leg of the tunnel. The wrought iron looked like a slanted shadow. They stopped for a moment and felt their muscles tremble. Nate’s calf stiffened and he forced his toes up to fight off the Charley horse.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s not get caught up in the moment.”

  “Damn straight,” said Roger. “I need a beer.”

  “Oh, dear God,” Xela said. “I’m going to wash all this dust off me and then sleep for at least a day.”

  Nate glanced at her. “What about all the photos? You’re going to pull them all off the camera, right?”

  She sighed. “Maybe?”

  “This doesn’t get priority over cleaning up?”

  “Nate, my dearest,” she smiled, “nothing personal, but fuck you.”

  “Typical woman,” said Roger. “Coolest thing in her life and she’s more concerned with her looks.”

  She reached up and gave him a gentle slap in the back of the head. “Sorry,” she said. “What I meant to say was fuck you both.”

  “Doesn’t look like you’ve got the strength,” said Roger.

  “Oh, I could do it,” she assured him. “You’re just not worth the effort when you stink like this.”

  They laughed. It took some effort so they had to stop walking to do it. Then they plodded toward the spiral staircase. It took them five minutes to walk the last two hundred feet.

  “Thank God,” Roger said. “Stairs. Was worried I couldn’t go uphill anymore.”

  The steps clanged under their feet. Nate counted them out loud and after a few minutes Xela and Roger joined him. They followed the twisting path up the stairs and tried to make a song out of the numbers.

  They rounded the bend on the seventy-fifth step and saw Veek in the little room waiting for them.

  “Hey,” she said. Her smile was a tight curve beneath her glasses. “Welcome back to the surface world.”

  “We, the Morlocks, accept your welcome,” said Xela. She threw up a power salute with a weak fist. “Take us to your showers.”

  Veek and Nate looked at each other for a moment and then she gave him an awkward hug. He wrapped his arms around her and hugged her back.

  “Tell me you found something cool,” she said.

  “Unbelievably cool,” said Nate.

  Forty Nine

  Nate wanted to go to Debbie and Clive’s apartment right away, but he changed his mind
after climbing the ladder and the two sets of steps that got him to ground level. Veek pulled his arm across her shoulders and helped him walk. He told her about the generators, the fault line, and the cutaway diagram they’d found.

  Roger and Xela stopped at the first floor and both gave him ragged salutes and smiles. “Conquering heroes,” said Roger. Nate returned the salutes before continuing up the back stairwell with Veek. His legs were trembling.

  “So,” she said as they stepped onto the lounge landing, “Xela’s not going up to her apartment.”

  “Doesn’t look like,” he agreed.

  They went up a few more steps. “Her and Roger,” said Veek.

  He glanced at her. “I wouldn’t’ve pegged you as the jealous type, Velma.”

  “Jealous?” She thought about it and snorted back a laugh. “Oh, yeah. That’s what calls to me. A guy who shaves once a week and doesn’t use articles or pronouns half the time.”

  Nate had a follow-up question but exhaustion settled on him like a lead apron. He’d been eager to get back and see Veek’s face light up when he told her about the generator room. With that done, his body was shutting down. Every step took a major effort.

  Tim was waiting for them at the top landing. “Didn’t think we’d see you so soon,” he said. “What’ve you got for us?”

  “Big stuff,” said Nate. “Tons of pictures.”

  “There’s a bunch of generators down there,” said Veek, “running off a fault line.”

  Tim’s eyebrows went up. “How deep down are we talking?”

  “About a mile,” said Nate. He tried to say something else and yawned.

  “Dead on your feet,” said Tim with a nod. “Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”

  Nate had a response for that, too, but couldn’t remember what it was. He relented to the terrible weight of his eyelids for a moment. When he opened them he was in his apartment and his sneaker was trying to get off his foot. Veek sat on his steamer trunk with his right foot in her lap. The laces were undone and she tugged on the sole. It popped off in her hand.