by Harley Vex
“I’m here,” I shouted, voice echoing off the rock walls that I knew surrounded us.
My eyes adjusted. Yes, the red lights were still on, just enough to mark where the doors were, but I couldn’t see anything else.
And with a gut punch, I realized one body didn’t have the benefit of being mummified under the ultraviolet light.
“Hold your nose.” Where was Mr. Ellis? Hadn’t someone put him in a closet? But down here, there wasn’t much for air circulation.
“Oh,” Alana said slowly, as she also reached the bottom with a click. “Jerome. Watch out. Hold your breath.”
He landed with a soft thud. “We need to find another exit and GTFO, for multiple reasons. Now, there was a bit of food that I stashed down here, just in case we had to get away from David. He worried me from the start.”
“Where is it at?” I asked, praying that I wouldn’t have to use my phone to light the way. “We can stuff as much in our pockets as possible, then find another way out. It’ll depend on where those radiation suits are.”
“That’s the plan. Dr. Marson’s looked big enough to be comfortable in, even if we took some food with us,” Jerome said.
“We have to find where they keep the suits,” I said. “And that means my phone's flashlight.” So I would have to use it.
“Don’t waste it,” Alana said. “You might call your father once we get over to where at least a few cell phone towers are still working.”
“If they’re still working,” I said. “We haven’t heard the guy on the radio since early last night.” Maybe the power grid is getting screwy from everyone in the alive zone panicking. Or riots were happening. Or worse, people were still dying from the radiation, but more slowly, especially on the borders. Would we find a slow increase in sick survivors the farther east we went?
Jerome’s footsteps approached me in the dark. “Chin up, Laney. Something has to be working and someone has to be alive out there. I bet your father’s fine, other than worrying about you.”
He probably thought I was dead, unless he remembered the field trip would take place in a mine. Did I tell him that? Maybe. Or maybe not, because I wasn’t aware of the Collider being so far underground when he signed my permission slip.
We moved through the facility, Jerome and I leading the way. I kept my phone off for now. Slowly, our eyes adjusted and we could see the outlines of doorways. Metal equipment. Counters. We reached the computer room, where everything was now off, and felt our way along the tables back to the little kitchen.
The smell wasn’t bad here. I could almost pretend it wasn’t here at all.
“I left a small box of food under a box of cleaners,” Jerome explained as a cabinet door squeaked open. “We’ll still have to be careful with it, though. There’s not much. Mostly some energy bars, with a chocolate coating that will not hold together in our pockets.”
“Energy bars are good. Calories are good,” I said, stomach rumbling. “Need my phone?”
Jerome felt around. “Yes, please. Just for a second.”
I pulled out my phone and turned on the flashlight. “I should have grabbed Dr. Shetlin’s phone, but it probably got burned.” I focused on Jerome leaning under the sink as I spoke. “Maybe we’ll find Dr. Marson. In some state.”
“I think you may be right,” he said.
Alana shifted next to me. “Would he help us? The guy just vanished and didn’t come back. He knew we were down here.”
“Maybe he had a family of his own to check on,” I said, “and he couldn’t get back. Or get help.”
Jerome fished out the energy bars and handed us each a few to stuff in our pockets. That would leave us with another day or two’s worth of food that wasn’t poisoned.
And after that, we had to get to the prepper’s mine in Colton before David could block it off and leave the three of us to starve. That would be as bad as getting trapped down here. Or ambushed the moment we left. For all I knew, David had already found out about our escape.
And if he blocked off any other exits to the underground–
I wouldn’t think about that. I turned off the phone and forced my eyes to adjust again to the darkness.
“How much battery is left?” Alana asked.
“I don’t know. We need to find a way out of here.” At least we had food. That was one positive. Jerome passed the bars around. We had ten. I stuffed three into my pockets.
Feeling my way back through the computer room that I hoped I’d never see again, I found the door and exited back out into the stench.
Yes. There was a body down here, and even getting stuffed into a closet hadn’t helped that situation. Panic swirled through my chest. We couldn’t stay down here. The thought of being trapped, even in an enormous space, sent my throat closing and my heart trying to beat its way out of my chest. “Jerome. Alana. Hold your breath, and then we need to make our way down the hall that Dr. Shetlin took us down. There was a door that was locked at the end, which I think might have the protective suits.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Jerome said. “I’ve got the keys, since Alana handed them to me.”
We wasted no more time. The three of us felt our way down the narrow corridor, which to my relief, had those red lights shining and giving off just enough light for us to see by. We passed the big glass window that showed the main Collider down below, which was also lit by faint red safety lights.
And finally, we came to the door.
It was closed and marked with a sign whose color I couldn’t determine in the red light, complete with a black text that marked it as a restricted area.
“We’re here,” I said.
“Yippee. We’re almost out of here. I can sense it.” Alana stood beside me.
Jerome stepped forward, and I held my breath as he tried each labeled key. The doorknob had a colored sticker above the lock, but the red light made everything the same shade, so it was impossible to tell which was which. But at last, once he pulled the last key from his pocket, I grabbed the wall.
And he unlocked the door with a gentle click, pushing it open. More red light poured out, and Jerome reached into the room and pressed something on a cabinet. “These people prepared.”
One of those battery-powered counter lights turned on, blinding me at first, and on the other side of a blink, I spotted what we were looking for.
Four protective white suits.
“Yes!” Alana said. “We can get out of here. We can get ahead of David while it’s still daylight, and maybe even beat him back to Colton.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Alana and I poured into the room after Alana. The counters in here had more of those under-cabinet dome lights, the one Dad had in the kitchen that you pressed and turned on. This room wasn’t super sterile or anything, like a place dealing with biohazards would be, but we just needed something to cover us while we traveled under the sun.
More dread curled in my stomach. These suits would protect us, right? I knew radiation suits were for blocking stray particles but not for things like gamma rays. Mrs. Taney had said something about that once.
Would they do any good blocking UV light? I voiced my concerns out loud as Alana and Jerome walked down the short row of suits.
“It’s better than having our bare skin exposed to that,” Jerome said. “If that tarp helped, these will, too. They might not be perfect. And our faces will still be exposed to the light. Great.” He looked at the plastic face shield, which was tinted orange but nothing else.
“We can look down as we walk,” Alana said.
My heart thumped. “I don’t like the thought of this.”
Alana took my arm. “I know you don’t, Laney. You probably like it the least out of all of us.”
I was glad she understood. I pulled a suit off the rack, unzipped it, and slid inside. Alana helped me zip it up from behind, and it was clear these were all a two-person deal. The whole thing crinkled and I moved my fingers inside the gloves. The fabric was plastic
really, and it would be all that was between us and the deadly sun. But it would keep some of the rays off us.
If I didn’t think like that, I’d never get the guts to get out of here.
The ozone layer was half depleted–
We were in the Arizona desert–
No. Stop it.
“Laney?” Jerome asked.
“I’ll be okay. I have to be,” I said, pulling the hood over my head along with the plastic face shield. Yes, this wasn’t designed for blocking the sun. But it was better than nothing.
“We need something for our faces,” Alana said, searching the room. “We could pull the hoods tight, though. They work like trash bags.”
“Trash bags. The newest fashion,” Jerome said, using his pull string to pull his hood almost closed around his face. Now only his nose and lips were visible. “I’m ready for the runway, baby.”
Alana and I both laughed.
And I was getting increasingly glad that Jerome was coming with us. He and Alana were keeping me sane. We’d need each other once we were out of here, and beyond.
Because this disaster was making everyone show their true colors.
“Okay. So we have some protection,” Alana said. “We’re going to make it. We get to the gas station and see if any of the vehicles start, first of all. That’s just five miles away. If we don’t take breaks, we can get there in maybe an hour and a half. We might even be able to see it once we find the exit.”
“I hope,” Jerome said, loosening the hood around his face.
“We still have an issue,” I said.
Alana, who was already heading out the door, faced me. “What?”
I grabbed some of the touch lights off the bottoms of the cabinets as I thought. Then I grabbed a plastic bag to hold them in. We could take that, plus some water. There was a package of bottles in here. Even though the desert had cooled, we’d still need the water. Wearing the suits would make us sweat.
“What if there are no vehicles that start once we get to the gas station? Not everything is in one of these Faraday cages.”
The mood in the room dropped. Reality wasn’t fun. I swallowed.
Alana turned to me. “I’ve thought about that, and the worst thing that would happen is David and the others catching up to us.”
I waited for her to say that they’d give us a ride to the next town, which was straight up the road, but she didn’t. David would find a way to leave us behind. We’d defied him for the last time, and his ego wouldn’t be able to take it.
Alana couldn’t deny that reality. She’d been around David more than I had, and if my hopeful friend didn’t think anything good would come out of that, then I believed her.
I should have held my temper back and accepted my role on the bottom. Balling my fists, I followed Alana out of the suit room, and through a doorway that led to a metal set of steps.
We were headed down to the Collider itself.
The Collider, and the underground generators that powered this place and had survived the burst.
My skin tingled as the air cooled further. There wasn’t much heat down here, and I wished I could stuff my hands in my pockets. I doubted the Collider itself was that dangerous, especially when powered down, but once we emerged in the tunnel that housed the long metal tube, it was clear that we had a distance to walk.
I blinked, eyes adjusting to the low red light that was just enough to see by. “We’ve got a ways to go.”
“Gulp,” Jerome said.
“We’d better get started. Dr. Marson was down here. That means that unless he’s dead down here, he got out,” Alana said.
I couldn’t argue with that point. I took the lead, walking along the metal catwalk. The tunnel was smooth stone, clearly cut by a machine, with an occasional red light hanging down from the ceiling. The catwalk was narrow, with just a screen between us and the bottom of the stone tunnel below, and the Collider itself was just a curving, metal tube that I guessed was shaped like a giant oval. Our suits crinkled and a faint breeze blew against my face, the only skin exposed to the air. I kept my plastic face shield up. It wouldn’t do any good against the sun.
There was nothing to talk about as we walked. My eyes adjusted again to the dark, and I searched the walls for any signs of a stairwell or a ladder. “This goes on forever.”
“We need to find one of those scooters. Or a golf cart,” Jerome said. “It would be even better if we could get something like that to the surface.”
Alana looked down at the walkway, which was maybe eighteen inches wide. “Nothing would navigate this very well. Looks like the team here did everything on foot, and this is probably just a service walkway.”
I was afraid she was right. I started to sweat under the suit, but I didn’t want to dare taking it off. The thought of finding the exit, then putting the suit back on in a hurry, scared me.
“I think I see something,” Jerome said at last, from right behind me. He looked over my shoulder as he tapped it. “Is that a ladder?”
We all stopped. I leaned forward, squinting. Jerome was taller than me, of course, but once I stood on my toes to look over the curving Collider tube ahead, I saw it.
Another ladder.
Metal rungs, leading up into a hole in the ceiling. We would have no nice, easy way out. “Great.” And just then, I realized how sore my arms were.
“There has to be another exit. How did they get the materials down here to build this thing?” Jerome asked. “I doubt they did it with just one ladder and stairway. There must be a bigger exit, and an easier one. I’m not climbing a ladder with these slippery gloves on.” He wiggled his fingers as if to make a point.
“You have a point,” Alana said. “I bet it’s on the opposite side of this tunnel as the facility. This tunnel must loop back around eventually. It won’t hurt us to look.”
I was glad that Jerome had the idea to keep going, because not too far after the ladder, maybe two minutes later, in fact, we came to an opening in the cave wall. The ceiling sloped upward, and more thick wires joined with some large lights that were off.
“Halleluja,” Jerome said.
I breathed a sigh of relief as we stepped into a large area where the catwalk turned into a solid rock floor. The Collider tube still ran under us, but it sloped downward and out of sight. The room here was neatly carved out into a round space about the size of a small house, and it looked like some kind of staging area lit by the faint red. Two doors led to small offices behind glass, and best of all, a stone ramp led upward, towards more faint light that I might not have seen if I hadn’t spent so much time in the darkness.
“That’s the way out,” Alana said, grabbing my arm.
I took a breath. “I think so, too. They must have used this area to roll down equipment. Jerome, you’re a genius.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” he said. “It just made sense for a place like this.”
“Let’s check these little offices,” Alana said, reaching into my bag. She pulled out a light and opened one of the doors, then clicked it on with her palm and shone it inside. “No one’s here, but there’s a binder on this desk. Looks like Dr. Marson must have dumped it, because the rest of this office is dusty and that isn’t.”
I followed her inside while Jerome checked the other office. He said something, but I didn’t hear him. “So he came out this way, and probably went up that ramp. If he had a soul, I bet he didn’t leave the exit blocked or shut.”
“Food!” Jerome shouted. “It’s expired, but we’re taking it.”
Alana and I rushed out of the little office, leaving the dust-free binder behind. Jerome emerged with a dusty cardboard box, and it was stacked full with little bags of potato chips. It was one of those grocery store snack boxes, and I imagined it had been brought down for the construction workers. That meant they were old, but we’d take them.
“Care to open your bag?” Jerome asked. “Say trick or treat.”
Alana laughed. “We hit the jackpot. There
isn’t going to be much safe food out there.”
I was starting to feel better about our chances. Thankfully, though, Alana found another plastic bag from a recycling box that no one had bothered to empty, and she took the chips. That bought us another couple of days, maybe.
After searching the two offices, which clearly hadn’t been used in at least months and were just there for storage, we faced the ramp.
It was time to get out of here and never look back.
And it was time to brave the new world, where people no longer wore masks and everyone was willing to do what it took to stay alive. It was all about natural selection and survival now. The thought hit me like a truck, and I grabbed the doorway of an office and faced the ramp.
Then I took a breath. I knew how to deal with death and grief. The others didn’t. “Okay. I’m ready. Up we go.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The builders had clearly made the ramp for vehicles, because navigating it on foot was grunt-inducing and also sweat-inducing. We took turns carrying the bags with our supplies, with Jerome offering to handle both bags for much of the journey. He was the opposite of David. David would have made me and Alana carry everything as punishment.
In short, the ramp had to be inclined by only five or ten degrees, but it was enough to make walking up it difficult.
“Jerome, thanks,” I said.
“Yeah. I don’t know what we’d do without you,” Alana added. “I didn’t realize we were so far down in the ground.”
“That’s why we survived,” Jerome puffed. He looked up at the distant light, which might have been another quarter mile above us.
At least it felt that way. With the ruddy glow, it was hard to tell if it was evening or still mid-afternoon. The good news was that we’d probably emerge on a road, or at least a service track that would lead us back to the main drag. Vehicles would have needed to get down and back up again when they were building the Collider.
We didn’t speak the rest of the way up the ramp. And at last, the ramp’s angle flattened out, and I knew we were close. I squinted, and I could see now that most of the light was coming from underneath a mostly closed garage door. Dust and rocks were visible on the other side.
