Above

by Roland Smith

  He shined the red flashlight behind us. There were gigantic sliding steel doors big enough to seal the entire cavern off to the outside world.

  “We know that the feds are going to show up here eventually.”

  My hope was they would show up in about one minute.

  “Our plan is to open the doors sometime this summer and set the bats free. The doors are soundproof, bombproof, and hermetically sealed. The bats should be just fine until we can let them out. Lod has a profound love for all of our wild brethren.”

  This guy was in his early thirties. Kate didn’t appear to know him. I doubted he had ever met Lod. I wondered what he would have thought of his beloved Lod if he had seen him shoot Martin Holds in the forehead.

  “So we are hostages,” Kate said.

  “That was probably too harsh of a word. And I haven’t introduced myself. My name is Dexter, but everyone here calls me Doc. I’ll be escorting you below. You and the boys will be put in our holding cube. I think you’ll find it comfortable. Your friend Alex will be taken to the infirmary so I can treat his shoulder.”

  “You’re a doctor?” I asked.

  “I’m a nurse practitioner, which is as close as we’ll have to a doctor for a long time.”

  “We had a doctor in New York,” Kate said.

  “He’s here. I just met him. He says he’s too old to practice medicine. He’ll be advising me when I need him.”

  Dexter looked at me. “I understand that you have claustrophobia.”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Oh, that’s good news. But I was going to say that there is nothing here that should trigger an episode.”

  “Except that we’re standing in a dark cave,” I said.

  “Light and fresh air is just a few steps away. We installed blackout doors so as not to overstimulate the bats. Follow me.”

  We followed him.

  He opened a door. On the other side was nothing but blackness.

  “Wait,” he said.

  He closed the door.

  “I know you’ve all been above for several weeks and have gotten used to the light, but you might want to put on your shades. The new Deep is brighter than the old one. Ready?”

  I was more than ready. The tiny vestibule we were standing in was beginning to get to me.

  Dexter opened the second door.

  It was bright, especially after the darkness of the cavern, but not overly bright. What shocked me, and by the look on their faces, the others as well, is what the light revealed. It was as if we had stepped through, not a door but a portal, into a completely different place. We were standing in a long hallway. The floor was smooth seamless cement. The walls were painted white. The temperature was perfect. The air smelled fresh. Lights, inset into the ceiling, ran ahead for as far as I could see.

  “Of course no one can imitate the sun,” Dexter said. “But these are full-spectrum lights. The newest thing. I understand that your old compound was a bit on the dim side.”

  I could see now that Dexter was wearing a sky-blue jumpsuit. He was well-groomed. Clean-shaven. Styled hair.

  We looked like a group of castaways compared to him.

  He had a holster with a pistol strapped around his waist.

  A nurse with a gun.

  I looked back. There was another set of steel doors as thick as my arm was long.

  Dexter must have noticed.

  “Four sets of doors. Everything here is operated by a centralized supercomputer. It is impossible for anyone to get inside without clearance. The third set of doors is just down this passageway. Follow me.”

  We followed Dexter.

  from being behind my back, and Bella locking them too tight.

  The third door was like the others.

  Massive.

  We walked down another passageway to a freight elevator large enough to park our motor home inside.

  “How about taking Kate’s handcuffs off,” Coop asked. “What could she possibly do down here?”

  He’d be surprised, but I appreciated him asking.

  “The cuffs stay!” Bella snarled.

  Bill pushed me into the elevator with the shotgun.

  Coop stood behind me. He held my hands. His hands were dry. I was amazed at how calm he had been through this ordeal.

  The elevator doors closed with a hissing sound.

  “Going down?” Dexter joked.

  Bella and Bill laughed.

  Coop, Pat, and I did not laugh, or smile. Nor did Carl, who looked grim, as if he were feeling the same dread that I felt.

  Hostages, Dexter had called us.

  I suppose that was better than corpses, but what the word implied was that Lod knew the FBI would find him and that he would need hostages.

  Lod plans for the worst and expects nothing to go smoothly.

  There were only two buttons. Up and Down. No stops in between. Dexter pushed the down button.

  I’d been in an elevator only once in my life. The Empire State Building. I was nine years old. We’d been on one of our rare daytime forays above. Lod met a man on the observation deck on the very top of the building. He handed the man a duffel bag. I was thinking more about the view than about why Lod was up there. I’d seen Lod pass briefcases to people a hundred times and never thought about what he was doing. I realized now that he was passing money to people. The elaborate security with Shadows and Guards was not for him. It was to protect the dead presidents he was delivering to people helping him above.

  My ears popped. We continued our descent. I looked at Pat. He was almost as pale as Alex.

  Down.

  Down.

  Down.

  Finally the elevator began to slow, then came to a gentle stop.

  “A thousand feet,” Dexter said. “Three hundred and four point eight meters.”

  The doors hissed open.

  Another short passageway. At the end of the passageway was the final set of doors. But this set — more massive than the previous doors — was closed.

  Dexter led us over to them. “We’re being checked out, or checked in, depending on how you look at it. It’ll only take a moment.”

  I searched the ceiling and walls for cameras. I didn’t see any.

  Dexter laughed. “You won’t find the cameras. I’ve looked. We’re using some kind of fiber-optic gizmo. The compound is riddled with them. Controlled remotely by our central computer. I hear there isn’t a blind spot inside the whole structure. We have microphones as well. Everywhere. We can hear a pin drop on a pillow. Just kidding about that, but don’t try having a private conversation. That won’t work out for you. We’re totally open down here.”

  Dexter was totally ignorant.

  I’m sure Bella and Bill knew this too. So did Carl. Lod’s private quarters would not have cameras and microphones. The Originals wouldn’t have them either. And there would be a very private room somewhere in the compound where no one was allowed except Lod and the Originals.

  The steel door slid open.

  A group of fifty or sixty people were there to greet us.

  They were smiling.

  They were clapping.

  They were wearing different colored jumpsuits.

  Bob Jonas was wearing a red jumpsuit.

  We stepped through the entrance.

  The door slid closed behind us.

  “Welcome,” Bob said. He shook Bella’s and Bill’s hands. He totally ignored the hostages, and looked at Carl. “We have a wheelchair coming for him.”

  The wheelchair appeared, pushed by a woman wearing a sky-blue jumpsuit like Dexter’s. Carl sat Alex in the chair. He was barely conscious.

  “This is where I leave you,” Dexter said. “I’ll get Alex patched up, then bring him over to your holding area.”

  They wheeled him away.

  Bob looked at Bella. “I think you have something for me.”

  Bella pulled Alex’s computer out of her pack and gave it to him.

  “Whoa!” Bob exclaimed. “
An RS32X. There are only a dozen of these in the world. It’ll be fun messing with this thing.”

  “Where do we go?” Bella asked.

  “Someone will take you and Bill to your new quarters.” He looked at Carl. “You’ll be billeted in the Guard and Watcher barracks.”

  “Watcher?” Carl asked.

  Bob pointed at the television monitors, which were hanging everywhere, flipping from one video feed to another. “I guess everyone here is a Watcher to some degree, but we do have a control center where the serious watching takes place, and where we can manipulate the cameras if need be. You’ll be splitting your time between watching, guarding, and listening.”

  The compound was similar to the Deep in New York. There were five levels in a horseshoe shape overlooking a huge common area, which was filled with people in colorful jumpsuits milling around looking for people they knew in plain clothes, and introducing themselves to the ones they didn’t know. There were probably a hundred and fifty people, but room for three times that many. The new compound was five times brighter than our old compound. There were plenty of chairs and tables. A lot of people were eating, getting plates of food from the cafeteria, bringing them out to tables in the commons to chow down. There were more children than we’d had in the New York Deep. A couple dozen of them, from what I could see. All of them, boys and girls, were wearing pink jumpsuits.

  A man and a woman in brown jumpsuits came over to us.

  “You must be Carl,” the man said. “I’m Sam and this is Tina. We’ll take you to the Watcher barracks as soon as we get these three situated. Lod just sent a message saying we could remove their manacles now that they’re in the Deep.”

  Carl unlocked my cuffs and cut Coop and Pat’s zip ties. There was no point in trying to get away. Where would I go?

  The door hissed open again, letting another group of people inside. I knew every one of them.

  More clapping and cheering.

  The door hissed closed.

  I rubbed my sore wrists.

  “I don’t see any dogs here,” I said to Tina.

  She smiled. “Thank God there are no dogs allowed.” She looked at Carl and shuddered. “Can you imagine what that would be like?”

  Carl didn’t answer.

  He could imagine it, and I don’t think he liked it.

  I guess that’s what hostages wore.

  Kate looked good in the yellow jumpsuit.

  Coop and I not so much.

  They made us take showers before they escorted us to the holding area, which was a transparent cube on the third level. By transparent I mean see-through on all four sides. People walking on the balcony could see us. People walking to their apartments on the back side could see us. People down the short hallways on the left and right side could see us.

  The cube was twenty by twenty feet. Twenty feet tall. Cement floor with a four-inch drain in the center. Two sets of bunk beds made out of stainless steel bolted to the floor. A square stainless-steel table with four stools around it — all bolted to the floor. A stainless-steel toilet and a tiny stainless-steel sink in the corner. A flat-screen TV hung down from the ceiling, showing live surveillance video of the Deep 2.0, including the inside of private apartments, and the shower room (men’s and women’s) where we had just taken showers.

  I’m not sure they showed us taking showers, but about every twenty minutes Coop, Kate, and I showed up on the screen sitting around the little stainless-steel table. I’m not sure why, because anyone could go up to the third level and see us live, which three kids had done five minutes after we arrived to stick their tongues out at us.

  Kate was glued to the surveillance monitor as if she had never seen one before. “Everyone appears to be color-coded,” she said. “The Originals are all wearing red jumpsuits. But these video feeds are bogus. They’re showing people only what they want them to see. No video of the infirmary where they allegedly took Alex. No Guard and Watcher barracks. No Originals’ apartments, at least I haven’t seen any red jumpsuits in any of the apartments. No surveillance control room, where all these feeds are coming from. Lod is blocking things he doesn’t want people to see. He’s only showing things that suit his purpose.”

  “What is his purpose?” I asked.

  “Only Lod knows,” Kate said.

  “I suspect that Alex knows,” Coop whispered almost inaudibly.

  I’d forgotten they were listening as well as watching us.

  “Did they take the flash drive from you?” Coop whispered.

  “I have it,” I whispered back. I’d managed to palm Alex’s silver bullet when they took our clothes. I hoped the little box it was stored in was waterproof.

  Kate got under the stainless-steel table.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Looking for bugs. Found it! Well, them.” She emerged with four tiny microphones trailing severed wires in the palm of her hand. “I’m sure they’ll replace them, but for the time being we should be able to talk at the table without being overheard if we keep our voices down.” She looked at Coop. “Are you wearing tap shoes?”

  Coop grinned. “Didn’t have time to change them before we got kidnapped.”

  “Are you really as calm as you appear?”

  “Did you ever read An Inland Voyage by Robert Louis Stevenson?”

  “No.”

  I had, and I knew what was coming. Coop’s favorite sentence in English literature.

  “There’s a line in the novel, and it goes: ‘Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.’”

  “So, you’re a clock?” Kate asked.

  “Ticktock, ticktock.”

  “And you understand what’s going on here? Lod is going to kill us.”

  “I think he wants to kill us,” Coop said. “We’ll see if it works out for him. Hope it doesn’t. In the meantime, I’m not going to get upset about it, which doesn’t mean I’m not going try to get out of this situation. Trust me, I’d do anything to save you and Pat and myself. It’s just that I think a lot better when I’m not angry, or frightened. How about you?”

  Kate was smiling, shaking her head in wonder.

  “Welcome to Cooplandia,” I said. “It’s kind of a combination of the Land of Oz and Hogwarts.”

  Coop laughed. “I haven’t heard Cooplandia in years. We had these twin sisters, the Floreses, who used to look after us. Poor women. Felt sorry for them. They said that they lived in the United States but that I lived in Cooplandia with a population of one.”

  Something changed on the monitor.

  Lod was on the screen. He was stepping from the bat cavern into the first passageway. In front of him a group of people was heading toward the second steel door. He looked up at the camera and gave it a thumbs-up.

  “Last group,” he said. “We are all safe.”

  A cheer went up from the commons.

  “Seal it!” he said.

  The doors began to close.

  The cameras followed him down the passageway through the second door.

  “Seal it!”

  The second set of doors began to close.

  He stepped through the third set of doors.

  “Seal it!”

  A thousand-foot elevator ride and one more set of doors.

  Agent Ryan was too late.

  She probably didn’t even know where we were.

  “Watch,” Kate said. “There will be plenty of room in the elevator, but Lod won’t join the last group. He’ll wait for the empty elevator to come back up for him and make his grand entrance all by himself.”

  Kate was right. The elevator doors closed with the last group aboard as Lod made his way slowly down the passageway.

  “So, quickly, what’s the story with this flash drive and the computer Bella gave to Bob Jonas?” Kate asked.

  It didn’t take us more than a minute to tell her about the laptop and the drive because neither of us had
any idea how Alex had intended to use them.

  Up on the monitor Lod was stepping into the elevator. The camera zoomed in on his finger pushing the down button, then back to his somber thoughtful face. He had a Bluetooth device in his left ear and a keycard hanging from a lanyard around his neck.

  The cheering for the final group died down and a hush fell over the crowded commons. I walked over to the balcony and looked down. Everyone was staring through the open steel doors down the passageway. They had wheeled in a small stage with a microphone stand on this side of the massive doors. As soon as they saw Lod, they began to cheer again.

  Lod smiled, nodded, and waved, pausing to shake the hands of the Originals dressed in red. He mounted the steps to the stage.

  Kate and Coop joined me.

  “I remember this,” Kate said.

  Coop and I looked at her.

  “My grandfather’s notebooks,” she said. “I saw a sketch of this stage with the steel door behind it. He’s been planning this moment for years. It’s unfolding just as he imagined it.”

  She went on to tell us about Lod’s notebooks as the crowd continued to cheer.

  Lod held his hands up in the air.

  The crowd quieted.

  “Seal it!”

  “It’s like remembering bits of a story I read long ago,” Kate said.

  The doors began to close.

  This was a horror story.

  is almost here,” Lod began. “Sooner than expected, but not entirely unexpectedly. We knew they would find us. In fact, we wanted them to find us. We are going to use them as a conduit to tell the world why we are here. Do not be afraid when they arrive. This is not a hiding place. It is a refuge. They cannot get inside. They will try to negotiate with us. What they will discover is that we are not here to negotiate. We are here to save the earth. To get people back on the path they should have never left. It could take months, maybe even years, to level the playing field above, but it will level, and when it does we will emerge and help those who have survived.

  “There are no secrets in the Deep. You will hear and see me speaking to the FBI on the monitors. Do not be afraid of some of the things I will be telling them. I will be lying to them just like they will be lying to me. You have all read their lies in the newspaper articles. How I planned to bury those left behind in our former quarters. How I planned to use sarin gas to kill people above …”