The Footsteps of Cain

by Derek Kohlhagen

  The intercom chirped again insistently, banging against his eardrums, and he groaned. He leaned across his body and slapped the glowing button on the keypad below the speaker.

  “What?” he groaned into the microphone.

  “Hey Sam...it’s Kelly. Er...are you okay?”

  Kelly Prince had always called him “Sam” without asking, even though she knew most others called him by the more formal “Samuel”. Not that he minded; it was refreshing to work with someone who didn’t always treat him like a superior.

  He grimaced at her question.

  Am I okay? No. I’d be better if you let me sleep for...oh...a week. Straight.

  “I’m fine, Kelly,” he said aloud. “What’s going on?”

  “Something’s...happened. You know that little project I asked you about?”

  “Uh...the server room...yeah.” He gave out a yawn that he thought might split his head open. “What about it?”

  “We’ve had a bit of a breakthrough. I don’t know for sure, but I think we may have figured out a way in.”

  He blinked, and his hazy brain focused. This was big.

  “Holy shit. How?”

  “George. We’ve been going back and forth over the radio. He stumbled across some old fragmented files that apparently contain user information. IDs. Passwords. They were buried pretty deep, like somebody had tried to hide them...I guess maybe in case they forgot their log-in? In any case, they’re there.”

  “Did he try them?”

  “Yup. Sam...they worked.” The excitement in her voice was unmistakable. “They worked!”

  Samuel took a beat to process what Kelly was telling him. A few months back, she had come to him, asking for permission to dig deeper into the Spire’s computer systems, another facet on the many-sided polyhedron of things that mystified them about the ages-old facility. There were many computer terminals scattered around the original buildings, only a few of which actually functioned. Up to this point they’d only offered superficial access. Whenever they’d tried to drill down into the core functionality...what they really needed...they’d always hit security measures, put into place long before they were born, that prevented any deeper penetration into the system. The prospect of circumventing the security protocols was...well, it was huge.

  “What did he find?”

  “Don’t know, yet. He’s down there, digging his way through the systems. I was about to head down; I thought you’d like to know in case you wanted to tag along...?” Her voice trailed off, waiting for his answer.

  “Okay, you got me. I’m interested. I’ll meet you down there as soon as I can.”

  “Great! I’ll see you in a few!”

  Samuel once again pushed the button on the intercom, and the hiss of the speaker fell silent. He laid back and stared at the ceiling, and even though he’d only just woken up, he was still exhausted. He considered taking a stimulant, then begrudgingly decided against it; he’d already taken way more in recent months than was medically advised, and he didn’t want to push his body too far. His role was too important to risk incapacitating himself.

  Being Maintenance Chief of the facility meant way more than cleaning up messes and scrubbing the bathrooms, as the title might have suggested. He was in charge of all upkeep of the base’s capabilities...air and water filtration, security, power, vehicles...pretty much anything that had been put together with a nut and a bolt. He was understaffed and overworked, and felt it in his bones. Working with the amount of resources he had at his disposal would have been stressful enough for a settlement of this size, but in the past six months more and more issues, malfunctions, and bugs had plagued the infrastructure. It was like the base itself was giving up, system by system.

  As if times weren’t hard enough.

  With another groan, he rolled out of his single bed and, trying to ignore the aches and pains shooting through his body, stood up. He was still wearing the faded, gray body suit that identified his station as Chief. He wore it when he was officially on the clock, which these days was most of the time. Despite the heavy material, the suit was ragged and torn in many places, reflecting the condition of its wearer with every broken thread.

  His quarters was small, but functional. He only needed it for sleeping, and the occasional wash-up which, due to the Council’s water rationing laws, never felt nearly often enough.

  Samuel stepped into the cramped bathroom, and turned on the light. He rubbed his eyes and ran his fingers through his hair, and peered blearily into the mirror. The face that stared back at him looked gaunt and haggard; although only in his mid thirties, he could probably be mistaken for someone a decade older. Gray hair had all but taken over his temples, and was creeping into the rest of his unkempt, otherwise auburn hair. His eyes, reddened with fatigue, stared back at him with clear emerald irises. Week-old stubble covered his square jaw, reminding him just how low shaving had become on his priority list. Time had not been good to the face in the mirror. Although still decent to look at, the dark circles around his sunken eyes told a story of a hard life and an unlikely happy ending.

  He turned on the faucet and waited as the pipes underneath the sink groaned with protest, before water began to flow from the spout and onto his outstretched hands. He splashed his face liberally, trying to drag the rest of his consciousness into the waking world.

  Despite his constant, deep fatigue, his team needed one hundred percent from him. They deserved at least that much. He knew that every one of them worked beyond their limits every bit as much as he did.

  In a normal situation he could just tell them to go home to their families and rest up. In an ideal situation he could just say “See you in the morning” at the end of the day, and they would go back to their individual habmods, eat dinner, relax, maybe play some cards with friends, and get a solid eight hours of sleep before returning to work. Using the word “ideal” to describe their current situation, however, would be insane. There was nothing ideal about the conditions they lived in. They received no paycheck, no benefits, no vacation. They worked for survival. It was the only compensation that mattered.

  Having forced himself back to full wakefulness, Samuel toweled off his face and left his cramped living quarters through doors that ground open painfully on rusty hinges. As he entered the main lobby of his habmod he was greeted by the sights and sounds of humanity. People were clustered in small groups, and the muddled hum of many simultaneous, overlapping conversations reached his ears. Those that saw him emerge from his quarters acknowledged him with a nod here or a wave there, which he returned.

  His job afforded him little anonymity among the people, and so over the years he’d accumulated an uncomfortable measure of notoriety. Luckily, most knew to stay out of his way. He tried to keep a friendly exterior, but tended to avoid eye contact with anybody that he wasn’t on the job with, because conversations about the weather didn’t keep the facility running.

  He walked between the congregations of people to the external hatch, and set his shoulder to it in a practiced, familiar way. When the thick hatch stubbornly fought back, he sighed...reminded of yet another job that was awaiting his fractured attention. He wearily shook his head, thinking of all the things in his life that could use another shot of oil.

  Suddenly the door gave up its struggles, popped open, and all at once Samuel was bathed in the light of the morning sky. He instinctively covered his eyes with a hand, blinking away the sensitivity and allowing his pupils to adjust. When he could see, he dropped his hand and stood there, relishing the warmth of the early sunlight. A cool, arid breeze brushed his body gently, and for a brief moment he forgot everything and attuned himself to the sensation of temporary peace that it breathed into him. He imagined himself in another life, living contentedly in a world that wasn’t seemingly limping along on its last legs.

  When he opened his eyes, he snapped back to reality and was met with the sights and sounds of daily life at the facility. People scurried here and there like insects, enteri
ng and exiting adjoining habmods, or hurrying off to who-knows-where. A little girl with blond hair, dressed in a bright yellow sundress and towed along by whom Samuel assumed was her mother, waved to him with a smile on her face. Amused, he waved back. Her smile turned into a full fledged grin before she disappeared into the crowd.

  Samuel hoped that grin would stay on her face all day long. He hoped that little girl would know hope for as long as possible, before succumbing to the truth that, sadly, most ultimately did. That truth, which Samuel had come to know all too well at a young age, was that the speck of humanity that inhabited the Spire might very well be the only fraction of it left.

  He shook his head to clear his morbid thoughts. Although never far from the surface of his mind, they were far from productive.

  You can’t fix anything with mope, his first father had said. Although there were many details about the man that had slipped away, there were still a few that were stuck in his head.

  He looked up again and his gaze was drawn, almost magnetically, to the center of the facility and upward toward the metal assembly that shot hundreds of feet into the brightening sky like...well...like the facility’s namesake.

  The Spire. That’s how everybody had come to refer to the settlement, no matter how unimaginative of a name it might have been. The stories and legends that had survived the passage of time told them that, in its prime, it had been a state-of-the-art mining facility. It had stood throughout Samuel’s lifetime, and through the lifetimes of many generations past. The people could only estimate its age through the words of their elders, and the few scribbled texts that they had left behind. The generally held belief was that the Spire was somewhere close to six hundred years old, although it was suspected that no actual drilling had taken place for a great majority of its lifetime.

  The drill mechanism itself dominated the settlement’s profile. Countless steel girders ran the length of it, forming a complex scaffolding to support the sheer weight of the thing. The primary bore occupied most of the tower, but there were also dense clusters of secondary drills and sub-assemblies that ran parallel to the main shaft. Perched on the top was what was believed to be an immense sensor disc, pointed straight down toward the ground. A commonly-held theory was that the disc provided some sort of monitoring capability for the long-dead mining operations, maybe identifying valuable ores and minerals or perhaps tracking drill teams as they carried out their subterranean tasks. Children liked to scare one another with tales of how it still listened, patiently waiting for contact from the ghosts of the ancient miners, doomed to roam the tunnels with no hope of return.

  Since the drill had been silent for so long, the true purpose of its many components was a mystery to all. The dead machine had become merely a backdrop, a static piece of scenery that mostly was taken for granted.

  At its base, the drill tower disappeared from view into the Dome, the brain of the Spire, where the facility’s leaders resided and worked to provide a better life for its people, however they could. The Dome was about as wide as the drill was tall, and curved out of the ground in a gradual, shallow arc. Dusty steel paneling covered it from top to bottom, and here and there patches of rust covered it like old bloodstains. Although there were many service accesses along its perimeter, the main entrance was on the southern side, next to an old vehicle bay that jutted out of the base of the structure, where all manner of ATVs, buggies, and rovers were stored. They were ancient, to be sure, but Samuel happened to know that some of them still worked.

  Looking over the colossal, curved building, Samuel could see the countless windows, tinted against the glare of the sun, running around the Dome in rising concentricity to define the many floors that lay within. There were enough living quarters inside to comfortably house a thousand people, although the actual population of it was probably somewhere closer to two. The ground floor, the mining level, still held a myriad of abandoned equipment and supplies that Samuel still struggled to find a useful purpose for.

  Between the drill tower and the Dome, the whole thing looked like some supreme deity had taken a sword and thrust it deep into the earth, so that only the hilt was still visible. Although the facility had stood for hundreds of years, it was showing more and more proof that it could not escape the attention of time forever through the layers of dust and wear.

  Encircling the Dome were the habmods, or habitation modules. It was a pretty name for what they actually were. Originally there had been only a handful of them, constructed along with the rest of the facility, presumably to house additional mining personnel. These were made in the same architectural style as the rest of the Spire, with plain steel panels bolted together to form aesthetically unimpressive metal boxes. As the population grew over the years, a necessity came with it to build more housing, until eventually a shantytown of home-made shacks had risen up to completely encircle the Dome. Most of the shacks were composed of left over mining equipment and supplies, since the Spire seemed to have no further use for them. Everything from old sheet metal and stripped vehicle parts, to bed frames and empty food canisters had been used to erect the makeshift homes. Understandably, living in them was pretty miserable, so it was appreciated by the people that the Council had established a rotational habitation schedule, ensuring that everybody got a chance to enjoy the significantly more comfortable, original habmods, or “cans”, as they had come to be conventionally known.

  Beyond the clusters of habmods was the massive outer wall of the Spire. It rose sixty feet into the air, and was easily thirty feet thick all around, giving the citizens all the protection they needed from the harshness of the Wastes beyond. The great, gaping maw of the wall’s main gate stood on the west side. Another mystery in the long list of inactive systems, it had been stuck open for as long as anyone could remember. To buffer this vulnerability, an ancient barricade of refuse of all different kinds of materials had been nailed and bolted together to block the entrance against incursion. It wasn’t much, but it was sufficient to close the envelope of their security and preserve their peace of mind.

  Eight guard towers bulged out of the wall at even intervals, for the purpose of keeping watch inside and outside the facility. Samuel marveled at the engineering that could have produced such things; like the rest of the wall, the exterior of the towers was completely smooth...no junctions or cracks could be seen in their reflective surfaces. It contrasted starkly compared to the Dome, with its rusted paneling and peeling paint, and Samuel had long suspected that the wall had been constructed long after the Dome, after the denizens of long ago had found the need to protect themselves from the rest of the world.

  There were three floors of internal corridors inside the wall that ran between the towers, not counting the top of the wall, which was also accessible as a fourth. Perched on the peak of each tower was an impressive, foreboding cannon that faced defiantly out into the Wastes. The enormous weapons would give even a large army pause at the mere sight of them but, unfortunately, their intimidating appearance alone would have to be enough, for they were all as functionally useless as the Spire’s drilling mechanisms. No living inhabitant of the settlement had ever seen them move so much as an inch, much less fire a round.

  The stories said that the wall and cannons were originally intended to fend off raiding parties, who long ago had sought the valuable ores and minerals that the facility had once produced, back when there still was anybody left out in the Wastes. As the tales went, there were fewer and fewer engagements with hostiles as time passed, until eventually they had stopped altogether, hundreds of years ago. These days, all the Wastes had to offer them was an all-encompassing, echo-eating silence.

  Invigorated by the fresh air, Samuel briskly moved on, dodging through the crowd and toward the Dome, where most of the systems that kept the facility running were located and therefore where he spent most of his time. Although the size of the Dome above ground was impressive, there were far more sub-levels that the eye could not see. Air filtration, water recyclin
g plants, power generators, maintenance bays; there was a maze of tunnels underground that housed the real guts of the place. Kelly Prince would be waiting for him, three levels down from the surface, in the computer server room.

  Samuel thought again of the unexpected news Kelly had brought him of George’s breakthrough. He wondered what mysteries could be locked away inside those dark stacks of wires and motherboards. His interest was piqued, but even so he made sure to tie his hopes firmly to the ground. His past had taught him not to expect too much of undelivered promises.

  He picked up his pace.

  * * *

  Chapter 2 – Samuel

  As Samuel made his way to the Dome, a single voice began to rise above the dull hum of the crowd. It grew louder as he approached, until he was able to clearly make out the words of the speaker. He knew at once who it was.

  “Fear not, blessed people of the Spire!” the voice rang out with passion. “This is not where you will end! Many layers of paradise await you, if you would only see the truth! The Reclaimer is not a monster! Not evil! He comes to ease your pain, and deliver you beyond this horrid place! Fear is unnecessary! It shall have no hold over those that take this Message into their hearts and minds, and let it restore their weary souls! Your passage is at hand, do you not see? We will be the last ones of our kind to exit this world, and we can do so with grace if we but submit to his will!”

  Samuel saw the crowd first, and then, once he drew near enough, the speaker came into view. A tall man with flowing blonde-silver hair stood on a makeshift pulpit, his hands thrown out to the people gathered there in a grand gesture of welcome. His clear, melodic voice was amplified by his vigor, and his eyes shone with an almost maniacal zeal.

  Even considering his contempt for the man, Samuel had to admit that Tristan Englewood was charismatic. Everything about him drew others’ attention, from his earnest, attractive face to his intense, piercing eyes. Also, as was evident in the faces around Samuel, he could deliver an oration that would make even the most surly and cynical of minds stop and listen.