Sidney's Escape

by Nirina Stone

  Gideon guffaws in agreement. “I made her promise. ,” he says. “She’ll be more amenable once we’re traveling. I hope.” He laughs and throws his hands up in the air.

  “I hope you’re right,” Henry laughs back. “In any case, I’m ready to go whenever you are. Don’t get me wrong. Love what you’ve done with the space.” His arms raise to take in the cavern. “But I could do with some sunlight, I’m not big on staying underground much longer than this.”

  “I hear you,” Gideon says. “We can go soon as she’s healed. We can go in two days.”

  They hear Sidney from the other room, moving about. Then, “Uhm—Henry!” she yells. He’s already running around the corner before she finishes, thinking she’s managed to fall off the cushions.

  “Gideon!” she continues as the old man follows in Henry’s stead. “Something’s happening.” She points in the air, where the virtual screen has stood still for hours as if on pause, as the cats charged under the sun.

  Now, they’re in a mass as they all walk, headed straight for the entry to Gideon’s lift. “Oh, the beacon,” he says, the same moment they hear a loud bang from the lift. They’d left it locked on the bottom floor, so as not to be surprised by another wandering animal. The day it had happened, they assumed it was an accident. Now, Henry wonders why they’d assume anything these bots do ‘an accident’, even when they’re broken. Seems to him, everything they do is somehow written in, by someone. Why, he has no idea. He doesn’t believe in accidents or coincidences.

  Another bang echoes from the lift, followed by another, and yet another. Gideon inputs some code into the air on the virtual screen, and now they’re looking at the wires and bolts inside the lift’s guts, right above the car.

  “What the—” Gideon says as he zooms out of the picture slightly.

  For a moment, Henry thinks he’s looking at nothing. The virtual screen is always in a tinge of green, no other colors are as clear. So at first he thinks he’s looking at air. As the old man zooms out though, he sees the unmistakable outline of a paw, attached to a striped hind leg.

  Then it hits him—he’s looking at two cats, one on top of the other. Another bang echoes at the same moment another cat falls on the now growing heap of them.

  “What are they trying to do?” Sidney whispers, as if keeping her voice down will stop them from coming.

  “Okay, then—” Gideon says again as he stares at the screen, then at Sidney. He swallows audibly and looks at Henry. “We go now.”

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Sidney

  GIDEON GIVES HER MEDICINE for the pain, despite Henry’s objections.

  “We can’t move as fast as we need to if I’m in pain, Henry,” she reasons. Besides, he’d given her a very small amount, all it does is numb her ankle and leg some.

  Gideon’s not listening anyway, he’s rushing back and forth, adding more and more things to their vehicle—one of his construction cars that he’s stripped down to its most basic bits. “The most important things we need,” he says, “are the engine, wheels and the cab.”

  That sounds like a lot to Sidney, but he’s done this for years, she tells herself. He’ll know what they’re facing out there.

  She doesn’t attempt to hide the bright smile she’s had on since Gideon’s announcement that they were leaving. Finally, she thinks, finally we head out of the Blue Dome. Sure, she expected to be in full working order before traveling out there in what Gideon calls ‘The Barren’, but the excitement, the adrenaline, and yes the numbing meds he gave her all add up to one excited Sidney.

  Henry frowns at her and shakes his head, likely knowing exactly what she’s thinking. More bangs from the other room, scrapes, and some high-pitched squealing metallic sounds makes Henry jump in the cab beside her, just as Gideon’s rushing towards the north end of the chamber. He places his handy disc beside the wall and quickly inputs his code. The disc blares an alarm and flashes red, making Gideon swear out loud. Then he inputs another code, slower this time. It pings green and the wall slides into a compartment to the right, leaving a ten by ten gaping hole in the wall. It looks far too small, as far as Sidney’s concerned. How in the world is this thing going to fit in that tiny space? But the way Gideon moves with confidence tells her it must.

  “Phew,” Henry says as he and Sidney watch the old man scurry back to the vehicle and jump into the cab in front of them as his eyes grow wide and he swears out loud again.

  Despite her better judgment, Sidney turns around slightly, in time to see two of the robot cats turn the corner, their massive eyes landing on their now escaping prey.

  Gideon slams his disc on the cab’s dash, inputs a code again, still swearing and yelling and the vehicle shoots forward. A slight pressure on her chest has her look down—a nylon strap has extended itself from somewhere in her seat and wrapped itself around her. There’s another one around Henry, and a third around Gideon.

  She shifts slightly to her right to become more comfortable, just as a cat flies into the air, landing on top of the cab. Sidney lowers herself though there’s not much lower than the two feet off the ground that the vehicle’s large wheels allow. Still, she watches as the cat paws at the cab’s fiberglass cover above them, then it opens its mouth wide, its big robotic cat teeth right above her head. She remembers when another one was closer than this, about ready to snap her head off, and she shuts her eyes and screams. Henry places a hand on her arm, trying to calm her. He looks like he wants to hold her in his arms, but he can’t move the belt wrapped tight around his torso.

  Then, darkness.

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Henry

  THE CAR MUST BE TRAVELING over a hundred an hour he decides, though it’s hard to tell with the only source of light in front of them the blurry blue lights from the front of the car. He looks behind him again but sees nothing but black. It’s unnerving to think there are likely dozens of cats following them slowly in the dark right now. Silently, patiently, having only one goal: to catch them.

  “Is there any way to stop them?” he asks Gideon. “Any way to block this tunnel behind us?”

  “There is a way.” Gideon’s eyes are still on the tunnel ahead though he doesn’t have to maneuver the car. “But it means we can never go back. This is the only tunnel out—or back in.”

  Gideon explains to them that in Allenda’s earlier days, the domes were all connected through a massive superhighway on the planet. “It was all destroyed when the flus hit,” he explains. “Frankly I thought it was rather short-sighted, but it was the most effective way to localize the disease. They—we had to protect the clean domes above all else. All borders were closed. All tunnels gone.”

  It took him half a decade to dig through this little bit, and even then it wouldn’t take them all the way to the Red Dome. “It will get us close though,” he says. “It will take us a day in here, then another day or two in the Barren—What’s the matter with you?”

  Even though it’s dark in the tunnel, Gideon stares at Henry’s ashen face. Henry tries to fight the building nausea which started the second the car entered the tunnel. For whatever reason, any time Gideon mentioned a tunnel, he pictured something bigger, something with enough space to breathe. Not for a moment did he picture this—an actual hole they’re speeding through with barely an inch of space between the car and the earth all around them. Now the man says they’ll be in this situation for an entire day? All of a sudden, despite the oxygen pumping through the cab, despite his attempts to think of anything else, he suddenly can’t breathe. He hyperventilates and can’t even stop when Sidney starts yelling at him.

  His hand tightens around her arm as he fights for the next breath, then the next, and the next, before finally losing consciousness.

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Sidney

  “HOW’S HIS PULSE?” GIDEON asks her as she keeps her fingers on Henry’s wrist and counts.

  “Steady,” she says as she stares at Henry. All she sees is his profile.
His shadow, really. She can barely see his face in the dim light, but she can tell he’s still out.

  “I didn’t think to ask if either one of you was claustrophobic,” Gideon says. “But at least if he’s out, he’s breathing normally again.”

  “What’s that word mean?” she asks, frustrated. “Khalosto—”

  “Claus—” Gideon corrects. “Claustrophobic. It means he has a difficult time in tight spaces. My wife used to suffer that, too. It’s just a type of anxiety. He’ll be right soon enough. Soon as we get out of here.”

  Sidney realizes that Gideon hasn’t spoken much about his family, and it’s the first time he’s spoken about his wife, so she asks, wondering if he’ll be as open to sharing details about his people as Henry has been. They’ll be traveling together for a while, she reckons, and she can’t re-read her book in practically zero light like this, so she gets into conversation mode.

  “Where is your wife?” She realizes it’s probably not the best leading question when Gideon’s shoulders tense.

  “She—passed,” he laments. “Oh it’s been years now.”

  Nayne would probably give her a hard time right now, asking such a question that should have been obvious to her. She knew he’d traveled here from the Red Dome with his entire family—his wife, their teen pregnant daughter, pregnant with the illegal twins. What does logic tell you, Nayne would have said, given that you saw his granddaughters and no one else. What’s a reasonable conclusion from that?

  That his wife and daughter had died of course, Sidney thinks. Though it’s possible they live in the Red Dome, what were the chances that Gideon—so protective of his family—would have been okay with having them live in different domes? Really?

  So she says, “I’m sorry Gideon.” What was the word Nayne taught her? “That was in-say-tive of me.”

  “Insensitive,” he corrects. He looks at her and offers a kind smile. “Oh, child,” he says. “You are just about the most polite Feral I’ve ever met and don’t you worry about that. My wife Terrion would have loved you!”

  “Did she have the flu?” Sidney whispers.

  “No—” he says. “No, she—she died protecting my other girls from those damn raiders. She died and our daughter died not long after.”

  He sniffs and Sidney thinks back to her nayne. Those damn raiders is right, she thinks, and wipes a tear from her eyes.

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Petra

  SHE WALKS SOUTH, TOWARDS a rubble she recognizes. I’ve been here before, she thinks, but when—? Nothing but the beeping greets her, nothing more than an empty broken home. Someone died here, she remembers. More than one someone—a few people have died here, though not recently as far as she can tell.

  Scanning the rubble, she can see that a cloaking device was used to hide the true nature of the home—a device that would be considered illegal in the old laws of Allenda. She doesn’t know how long she’s been gone, but wonders if some of the laws have changed. It’s not like she’d receive an update, not these days. Not since the days when updates were sent every hour, on the hour. They’d stopped doing that a long time ago.

  Then her eyes land on the large cats strewn all across the way. It’s like a line of cats followed each other here, and—wait—

  She follows the line to the end. A hole in the ground. Her scans show that it leads several feet down, maybe thirty or fifty feet to her estimation from here. In her way lie inert bodies of about fifty robot cats. What in the world would cause them to throw themselves down this hole? She knows it would not take her too long to dig her way past the animals. There’s no real way down from here. She looks around, still scanning. What in the world happened here?

  Instincts tell her that the girl, Sidney, had been here. She no longer is, that much is clear. What’s not clear is how long ago she passed through here.

  She follows the beeping, past the cats. One of them struggles to its feet as she walks past and she runs a quick scan as it approaches. The beeps must have attracted them here, she decides, but to what end?

  She attempts to communicate with the inferior bot and continues her scan. Unclear. Moving swiftly, she pulls the rest of the cats out of her way, throwing them up into the air as she does.

  Just twenty minutes later, she steps into a large cavern, sensing that this is the origin of the beeps. She scans, finds no signs of life, though it’s clear this was a home once.

  She connects it to the illegal home she’d found above ground, and senses that it is about an acre of space. It’s been here a while—several years—but when was the last time Allendians had been here? As she walks through, she makes her way around the corner, finding a large square silver box. She presses on a big black button and, finally, the beeping stops. She wasn’t aware of it before, but the beeps were grating on her internal systems.

  Then she turns towards a setup of plush cushions and blankets—a very Allendian setup from her recollections. They loved their comfort, clearly even in a hole in the ground.

  She spies something that doesn’t fit in the whole decor and stops to pick up a desiccated tree bark.

  Written by an Allendian child she decides as she reads the misspelt words. “Dearest Petra,” it begins. Most of the words have faded or have been smudged across the bark, she can’t decipher the entire note. However she catches a word every now and then. She reads “Barin” and “Red” and “drive”. It’s signed, “I love you, Sidney.”

  The message is clear, she decides. She’s on the right track. She walks towards a dark tunnel and peers through it, staring into the dark, not hearing a thing. She scans and the results indicate more of the robot cats are down there. It’s a tiny space, but she makes her way through, slightly in a hunch. It won’t be possible for her to run in this tight space. Still, she moves forward as fast as she can—she has a mission and she’s on the right track.

  Chapter Thirty

  Sidney

  HENRY COMES IN AND out of consciousness throughout the trip in the tunnel, and she checks his pulse from time to time, to make sure he doesn’t suffer a cardiac arrest, per Gideon’s instructions.

  She manages to sleep, but only a few minutes at a time. If not for the calming medicine, she’d find none at all. Despite Gideon’s assurance, she worries for Henry.

  “We should see light soon, in about an hour,” Gideon says.

  She sighs with relief. Though she knows she definitely doesn’t suffer claustrophobia like Henry does, she anxiously looks forward to some light after traveling in the dark for so long. A change of view, that’s what she needs. Something more interesting than the dark walls of the tunnel. The walls started off black when the car started moving from Gideon’s lair but now she can see their coloring has lightened up some and they’re a dusty dark brown. She can’t wait to get out, can’t wait to finally see something outside of the Blue Dome, for once in her life.

  “Okay, you ready?” Gideon asks as he passes her a stick. He’d said the only way to bring down the tunnel once they’re safe, the only way to stop the large cats from following them is to blow it all to smithereens. He passes her two more sticks and instructs her to count to five, then throw them out the car the moment he opens the glass cab. He can only open it about three inches, so she has to really give the sticks a good push through in order for them to fall on the ground behind them. They do this for the next hour until, finally, Gideon says, “Here we go!”

  The yell startles Henry awake and he sighs in relief when he catches the coral light that seeps towards them like dawn. “Finally,” he says, the same moment Sidney pushes the last stick through the slit behind them.

  Then, the moment the car launches itself out of the hole, Gideon depresses a button without stopping the car. “We need to be out of the wavelength of the explosives,” he yells as he slams his hands into the steering wheel and makes a sharp turn to the left. As if the car wasn’t already going at breakneck speed, he pushes it faster until they’re going faster than Sidney could imagine anythin
g short of a rocket ship could. She can’t even appreciate the fact they’re finally out of the tunnel when the first blast hits, closest to them, then keeps going. She looks back, thinking she’ll see a cat or two come through after them anyway, but all that happens is the ground behind them growls and collapses in on itself, further and further away. Explosives still continue even as they speed away, too far away now to hear any more of it.

  I’ve got to get my hands on one of those, she thinks, seeing that they’re far more powerful than any of the little blasters she used to fashion in the Blue.

  Chapter Thirty One

  Henry

  HE SIPS FROM HIS WATER tube as Gideon adjusts the car’s instruments, ensuring the autopilot heads straight for the Red Dome. A small part of Henry is embarrassed that he lost consciousness for most of the day they’d spent in that tunnel, but neither Gideon or Sidney brings it up so he doesn’t address it either. He counts his blessings. Awkward enough, he thinks, as he tries not to think about it too.

  “How many times have you made this trip, Gideon?” he asks the old man, who now turns his seat to face Henry and Sidney as they all bite into the dry nutty crackers he’d packed for the trip. “It has all the essential nutrients we need,” he’d said in the cavern, “and comes in a handy portable package. What more can you ask for?”

  Some taste other than raisin, Henry had thought at the time. Maybe some salt or cream—something that would make it go down easier.

  He takes another sip of water to help him choke down the thing.

  Gideon laughs. “Oh, more times than I’d like to count,” he says. “Hundreds, I guess.”

  That’s a good sign, Henry reckons. At least one of us on this trip knows their way around the alien world. He’s lost, out of place in the vast emptiness of this place after having spent all his life in the Blue. Even the raiders he’d lived with there never showed any inclination to ever step outside their safety zone.