“Um . . . Savannah?” I said, as it clanked its way back to the surface of the water. “Stop the elevator.”
“I’m trying!” The elevator was dropping in fits and starts, the broken edge of the cage zipping back and forth over our heads. Eric tried to push our boat away from the cage as it descended so the hanging bits wouldn’t pierce the pontoons.
“I’d get out now,” Howard suggested.
Savannah shrieked in frustration. She was trying to ease herself through the hole but every movement of the elevator sent the sharp, broken edge of the cage swinging wildly back and forth. If she dropped out now it was likely to cut her in two.
“Help me!”
Nate tried to grab for the broken edge and hold it out of her way but only succeeded in pulling the edge of the catamaran under the elevator just as it dropped back into the water. Rusty froth churned up through the grates as the elevator juddered into the lake. There was a horrible tearing sound and the catamaran tilted wildly to the side, spilling us all into the water.
I surfaced, spluttering, and looked around. Grab for the wall? The elevator? The swiftly sinking boat?
“Help!” Savannah screamed, and I realized she was still trapped. “The boat! It’s blocking the hole to get out!”
The cage was still lowering into the water, dragging the tangled rubber of the catamaran with it. We swam to the booth, tugging on the door, the walls, the ceiling, anything. Savannah was up to her waist in the water, then her chest.
“Gillian!” She was treading water now, her round eyes as huge as dinner plates. “Please.”
I reached for her through the bars, as if I could pull her through by force of will alone. “Hang on!” I shouted, though for what I didn’t know.
Our fingers touched. She grabbed my hand around the grid. The water slipped to her neck.
“Take a deep breath, Savannah!” I called to her as she pressed her face against the ceiling grid, her fingers straining against the metal bars. And then those, too, slipped beneath the dark surface of the water, and that was the last I saw of my friend.
13
CAGE MATCH
“SAVANNAH!” I DOVE UNDER, TRYING TO PULL AGAINST THE ELEVATOR AS if I could lift it out of the water like the Incredible Hulk. Eric yanked me back.
“Gills!” He shook his head and gestured behind me. “Help Nate.”
The Noland brothers were tugging on the half-sunken catamaran, trying to untangle it from the broken edge of the elevator cage. Eric and I paddled over and started tugging, too. But even as I pulled with all my might, there was a stopwatch going in my mind. Ten seconds. Twenty. How long could people hold their breath?
Nate dove under as the rest of us kept yanking on the mess of sail and float and torn rubber. Twenty-five seconds. Thirty.
“Pull harder!” I screamed.
“It’s—” Howard puffed, tugging. “Hard—to get—leverage.”
Forty seconds. My best friend was dead. I’d dragged her along on this journey to the center of the Earth and then I’d let her drown. I screamed, tugging as hard as I could on the material.
Nate burst to the surface, Savannah limp in his arms. They were both covered in scrapes from the broken bottom of the cage.
“Quick! Help me get her on the ledge!” We swam over to the steps and pulled Savannah up on the flat surface near the now-stopped turbine. She instantly began coughing, spitting up water and slime. Her arms were covered in messy scratches, and there was a nasty, deep-looking one across her torso, right where her shirt was nearly torn in two.
Nate thumped her on the back. “Get it all up.”
She clutched her shirt together with both hands and retched.
“Those cuts look pretty bad,” Howard said. “Lockjaw is, of course, the most well-known symptom of tetanus, but there are others . . . such as drooling, excessive sweating, and uncontrolled urination.”
Savannah glared at him with bloodshot eyes. “Gross. Shut up, Howard!”
“Also irritability.”
Savannah leaned over and threw up all over Nate’s shoes.
He jumped back so hard, I thought he might fall in the lake. “Eww, watch it.”
Savannah groaned and fell back into my lap. “Someone kill me.”
“No way,” I whispered, hugging her close. “We just saved your life.”
For a few moments we all sat there, catching our breath and wringing out our clothes. I cradled Savannah’s head in my lap, smoothing her wet hair out of her face, while she scrubbed at the cuts on her arms and body with her ruined hoodie.
Savannah was okay. She was okay. But I wasn’t going to risk anyone’s life again. Not hers, not the Nolands’, and certainly not my baby brother’s. I didn’t care if the battery prototype was somewhere in the city. Nate was right—we needed to find the quickest way out of here. Now.
I pulled the laminated map out of the waistband of my jeans and ran my fingers over the figures on the page. Omega City could wait for experts. We should go home.
After a moment, Savannah rose up on her elbows, coughed a few times, then cleared her throat and turned to me. “What now?”
I clenched my jaw. “Find the exit.”
Nate breathed deeply, then smiled. “Finally, you’re listening to reason.” He pushed himself to his feet, wincing a little.
“Are you kidding?” Savannah asked hoarsely. “I didn’t nearly get myself killed just to leave.”
“The important part of that sentence is that you nearly got yourself killed,” Nate pointed out.
“We’re never going to see this place again, you know,” she said to me. I looked at her, stricken. “We’re going to go up, tell the authorities, and then that’s it. It’ll be all over the news—not our secret anymore.”
“Sounds good to me,” said Nate.
“And not your dad’s, either,” she added. That made me hesitate. I figured if the mainstream media started taking Dad seriously, it would be a good thing. But what if they bypassed him entirely? I wanted Dad to be vindicated, but what if that only happened if he was the one to bring Underberg’s inventions to light?
“I agree with Savannah,” Howard said. “I hate that I do, but I do.”
“At the very least, we should see if we can find some sort of first aid station,” Eric added. He pointed at the blood staining Nate’s and Savannah’s clothes.
I checked out the map. “Right here, the first building on the diagram is a mess hall. There might be something there.” And we could kill two birds with one stone. Fix up Savannah, and search for the prototype.
“Either way, we should keep moving,” Eric said. “Fiona and her friends may have found another boat.”
I helped Savannah to her feet and together we eased across the ledge to the turbine. There wasn’t a lot of room between the blades, but we could get through if we threaded single file through the lowest two blades.
Except none of us moved. What if it started up again while we were inside?
Then again, what other choice did we have? The boat was sunk, and Fiona and her friends were after us. This was the only way out.
I squared my shoulders. “Okay. I’m going in.” I took a deep breath. The blades didn’t move. I touched one. It felt gritty like rust beneath my fingers. It was hard to believe a few minutes ago it was slicing through the air so fast it was a blur.
“Are you going to do it?” Howard asked.
“Yes,” I said, trying to convince myself as much as Howard. I closed my eyes and ran between the blades, forcing my feet to a halt after a few steps so I didn’t careen off the ledge on the other side.
Eric slammed into me from behind, then caught me by the back of my shirt as my arms pinwheeled over empty space. “Watch out, Gills—whoa.”
Whoa was right. Below us spread an enormous cavern, vaguely lit by massive blue floodlights focused up on the carved rock walls. It wasn’t quite as big as the lake chamber, but what it lacked in size, it made up for in sheer insanity. I gasped, but there was
no way to breathe it all in.
This, without a doubt, was the real Omega City.
The ledge we stood on was about twenty feet off the ground. Below me, a maze of boxy buildings like giant multistory trailers, some connected by walkways, some by tunnels, spread out along the ground. Many were underwater, or nearly so, while others remained above the water level. Some of the buildings had fallen over or collapsed on themselves, and debris the size of trucks floated in the submerged sections.
More tunnels led from the buildings in and out of the rock walls, which curved upward into a point like we were standing beneath a vast tent made of stone. All around the perimeter of the cavern and above me I could see windows or even buildings set into the walls. Everything was lit blue, like some strange, subterranean twilight had fallen over this vast, silent space.
Nate, Howard, and Savannah met us on the ledge. In the eerie blue light, I could see their mouths open, their eyes wide. Eric looked the same and I’m sure I did, too. Dad’s book had been full of wild theories, but even he had never dreamed of a place like this.
“Do you think anyone is here?” Savannah asked.
“No.” I shook my head. There couldn’t be. The lights and the cannon and the turbine must work on timers, or motion detectors, or something. How could anyone be here if the place looked like this? “It was built for survivors of a disaster, just like that recording in the elevator said. For the end of the world—a war or a comet or . . .”
“The Yellowstone supervolcano?” Howard suggested.
Nate had said that during the Cold War the government built the interstate system—tens of thousands of miles of highways—to help people escape from a nuclear disaster. Was a place like this what they were meant to be escaping to? If something bad happened to the world above, were we supposed to find this place?
Except it wasn’t built by the government. It was built by Dr. Underberg.
“This is what Dr. Underberg meant when he wrote about his last gift to mankind,” I said. “It’s not the battery, it’s a whole city. Omega City. The last city.”
Eric, of course, looked skeptical. “But it’s in ruins.”
“Yeah.” I shrugged. “Kind of like everything else connected to Dr. Underberg.” I consulted the map and pointed. “The mess hall is down there.” Thankfully, it was in an area of higher ground.
We took another set of stairs bolted into the wall down to a raised walkway. Below the walkway, the rough rock ground was covered in puddles, but the ramp to the first of the elevated, trailer-like buildings was dry.
On the metal door was a large Greek omega symbol painted in red, and then a number 1. On the map the building seemed to contain several smaller apartments—the mess hall, a hair salon, even a grocery store. We’d surely be able to find something to treat Savannah’s and Nate’s wounds inside.
“Go ahead, Gillian,” said Nate. “I think this just became your party.”
I turned the handle and opened the door. Fluorescent lights flickered on.
But the inside of the building looked like a bomb had gone off.
14
THE VERY MESSY MESS HALL
LIGHT FIXTURES DANGLED FROM THE CEILING, LETTING OFF EERIE FLICKERS, and the halls were clogged with debris, loose paper, broken furniture, and some kind of unidentifiable black sludge.
“We’re not going in there, are we?” Savannah asked. “It’s disgusting.”
I glanced pointedly at the tattered, bloody remains of her velour pants and her vomit-spattered shirt.
“You’re right,” she admitted. “Can’t get worse.” She stepped inside.
We skirted the mess, trying to find our way through the tangle of hallways to a place where we could get our bearings.
The whole time I could hardly keep from squealing. Dr. Underberg had built this. And he couldn’t have done it alone, either. There had to be hundreds of people: construction workers, electricians, plumbers. People put this massive project together . . . somehow.
And now, it was nearly destroyed. What had happened here? How did my dad not know any of this? How come no one knew? If people had helped Underberg build this city, there had to be lots of people who knew about it—unless the government had iced them, too.
And yet, we’d been to other war bunkers before. There was one under Parliament in London that was a museum now. There was another out in a hotel in Virginia that was originally built for Congress. The government kept a whole missile launch station in a hollowed-out mountain in Colorado.
If this was here, a little more than an hour from our house, how many more were there? And if we didn’t know about them, then who were they built for?
We found the mess hall, which featured a smattering of metal folding tables and chairs scattered haphazardly—some overturned—on a wrinkled linoleum floor. Over-head, foam ceiling tiles lay crookedly around a grid punctuated by burned-out fluorescent lights. One wall featured a cafeteria-style opening and buffet stations, and from what we could see of the kitchen beyond, the industrial-sized stainless steel ovens and refrigerators and storage containers were all open . . . and empty.
Eric pulled the first aid kit off the wall near the light controls. “Score.” While my brother started sorting through the bandages and ointments, I went with Howard to look around. In a pantry off the kitchen we found a jumble of items that must have spilled from the racks on the wall, including flashlights, whistles, water bottles, a few military-style freeze-dried foods, and, yes, some packages of patented, Underberg-brand astronaut ice cream.
But nothing that looked like the prototype for the Underberg battery. Oh, well. Probably a long shot that he’d keep it in the mess hall, anyway.
“Strawberry? Chocolate?” I called to the others.
“No vanilla?” Nate called back.
“Don’t worry—you can have your pick.” I’d had no idea astronaut ice cream came in so many flavors. I gathered an armful of the stuff and went back to the tables.
“Is there anything else in the storage room?” Savannah asked, wincing as she dabbed a peroxide-soaked cotton ball against her arm. She was still clutching her clothes together with her injured hand. “Like maybe an extra T-shirt?”
“No shirts,” said Howard, emerging with a bunch of shrink-wrapped packages. “But I found something even better.” He tossed a pile of them on the table. “Space suits.”
I looked at the little folded packages, each about the size of a cereal box. These were certainly not space suits. Across the table, Eric ripped one open, and shimmery silver material slid out of the package and into his lap. He lifted it up.
“No way,” said Nate. “We’ll look like extras from a bad sci-fi movie in these.”
Howard read off the label of his. “Waterproof, fireproof, tear-proof, and soil-resistant.”
“Just resistant?” Eric asked. “Come on, Underberg, don’t let us down now.”
I turned my package over in my hands. “Omega City Utility Suit” was printed at the top in bold black letters, right above another omega symbol. Below that was typed the following:
MADE BY THE ARKADIA GROUP
Below that was another symbol, like two upside-down Js crossed over a map of the world. Actually—I peered closer—they weren’t Js at all. There was a little extra hook on the tail end of the J.
A shiver rushed across my skin that had nothing to do with my wet clothes. I’d seen that J symbol before, on Fiona’s arm. At the time I’d thought it was an initial, but maybe it was her company logo. Maybe Arkadia Group was the name of the development firm where Fiona worked. If so, then maybe Nate had been right that Omega City belonged to them and we were the ones who were trespassing.
But that couldn’t be right. If Omega City was theirs, they certainly weren’t taking care of it very well. And it didn’t explain Dr. Underberg’s diary or the treasure map we’d used to get here. My dad had never mentioned or written anything about an Arkadia Group. Underberg worked for the State Department and NASA.
Then again, Dad hadn’t known about this city, either. Maybe he’d gotten all kinds of things wrong about Underberg’s life.
No. I refused to believe that. No one knew about the city. Back at the boulder, Fiona had worried that Eric and I would find Omega City before she did. So she couldn’t work here—she didn’t have any idea where this place was. Even if the Arkadia Group had made these suits for Dr. Underberg, that didn’t mean they knew what he’d done with them. Maybe he’d just bought them and put them here. My fingers trembled as I pulled open the packaging. What if Dr. Underberg had literally put them here? What if he’d touched this very suit?
“At least they’re dry,” Eric said. He peeled off his shirt.
“Eww, Eric, don’t change in front of me!” Savannah covered her eyes and grimaced.
“Would you say that if I were Nate?” he teased.
Nate looked scandalized by the idea.
Savannah didn’t answer, just frowned down at the suit in distaste. “They look so baggy.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers, Sav,” I pointed out.
She bit her lip. “I’ll put it on if you do.”
I was on board with that. After all, silly or not, at least the jumpsuit was dry, and I couldn’t say the same for my jeans and T-shirt.
Savannah and I retreated to a space behind the empty fridges in the kitchen area while the boys used the mess hall to change. It wasn’t easy getting my damp jeans off, and I actually had to have Savannah help. She held up her pink velour outfit, which now looked like a giant used dishrag. “This was my big Christmas present,” she said. “I saw it in a magazine and spent weeks begging my mom for one.”
“I’m sorry, Sav,” I said. I mean, I didn’t understand who’d spend a hundred dollars on a pair of sweatpants, but I did know how much she loved them. I’d done my fair share of begging for presents over the years.
She shrugged, balled it up, and tossed it in a corner. “I don’t think Nate even noticed.”
The silver suit weighed practically nothing, and closed with a silent zipper. They only came in one size, and after you put it on, you folded and zipped portions near the ankles, knees, sides, elbows, and shoulders to make it fit you perfectly. There was even a zipper near the neck, but I’m not sure what it was for since the collar didn’t seem adjustable. Not to say they were skintight. Once we’d adjusted our suits to fit according to the directions on the package, they were still a little loose, more like a mechanic’s one-piece suit and less like some kind of space-age leotard. Still, they were dry and warm, which was an improvement. I almost hated putting my wet sneakers on again afterward. Too bad there were no space-age boots lying around on the broken, dangling shelves. I did, however, find a toiletry set, and Savannah was able to brush her teeth and rinse her mouth out.
Omega City Page 10
