by Roland Smith
I wondered what he would have said if Alex hadn’t managed to disarm the gas.
“… I have never harmed another human being, except in defense of the Pod. You are my family …”
Lod glanced up at the third level and paused.
“… my new family. My own brother murdered one of our most loyal and valued Pod members, LaNae Fay, a few hours ago. My only granddaughter, Kate, along with two coconspirators betrayed us to the FBI.”
He shook his head sadly, then wiped away tears, or acted like he was wiping away tears.
We hadn’t told Kate what had really happened in the alley all those years ago during the blood moon. She didn’t know that she had two very weird grandfathers.
“Of course we apprehended them. I only wish we had caught on to their plan to destroy us sooner. They are confined in our holding cube.”
Everyone turned their heads and looked up in our direction. I actually felt a tinge of guilt, which was ridiculous because we hadn’t done anything wrong.
“After the perpetrators have served their purpose, the Originals will meet and decide their fate.”
Our fate was already decided, but I was glad to hear that we would be around until we had served our purpose, whatever that meant.
“While we wait for the FBI, I want all of you to return to your assigned duties. And remember, there are no mediocre jobs in the Deep. Every job is important; every job is necessary; every job makes it possible for us to live another day.”
I guess this final sentence was aimed at the people who mopped floors, emptied garbage cans, and cleaned toilets.
Everyone broke into applause and more cheers. The camera zoomed in on Lod’s smiling face.
Kate pointed. “There’s Bella and Bill.”
They were in their red jumpsuits, smiling, shaking people’s hands. Whatever magic Coop had worked on Bella appeared to be gone.
I walked over to one of the bunks and sat down. Every muscle and bone in my body hurt. Coop and Kate joined me on their own bunks.
I lay down trying to keep my eyes open.
It didn’t work.
Lod’s booming voice said over the speaker.
That woke us up.
We jumped out of our bunks and hurried over to the monitor.
The screen was split. Lod was on the right side of the monitor sitting at a desk. Agent Tia Ryan was on the left side, standing.
It was light outside.
It was raining and misty.
“How long did we sleep?” I asked.
Coop shrugged.
“It must have been several hours,” Kate said.
Agent Ryan was wearing a blue FBI Windbreaker and baseball cap.
Milling around behind her were dozens of policemen, FBI agents, patrol cars, helicopters, ambulances, fire trucks, and by the look of their gear, SWAT teams.
A lot of blue and red flashing lights.
I hadn’t seen Agent Ryan since Coop blew up the neighborhood, but she looked pretty much the same.
“Can I call you Larry?” Agent Ryan asked.
“No. You may call me Lawrence. Or Doctor Dane.”
“I’ll call you Lawrence.”
“Fine.”
Agent Ryan pointed behind her. “As you can see we have come in force.”
“I expected nothing less.”
“Are you going to come out on your own, or are we going to have to come in?”
“We are not coming out, and I doubt you are coming in.”
“Why is that?”
“Because the steel door your technicians are examining is almost impregnable. I say almost because I’m sure you’ll figure out a way to drill through it. But that will take several weeks, if not months. On the other side is a large cavern. Inside the cavern are about a million hibernating bats. I know that’s not an issue for the FBI, or the federal government. You don’t care about bats. You don’t care about any of our wild brethren. But we do, and so do a huge number of other enlightened citizens. We erected this outer door, at great expense, in order the protect the bats. If you make too much noise with drills or explosives it will disturb the bats. They will fly around in the cavern until they drop from the air, dead of starvation.”
Agent Ryan continued to stare at the camera. She didn’t seem to be overly concerned about disturbing the bats.
“But the bats are not your only problem. Beyond the first steel door are three more steel doors just as formidable as the first. My engineers assure me that if you use explosives on any of them this entire hillside will collapse. If we use explosives to stop you, which we will, this entire hillside will collapse. If explosives are used, our engineers’ best estimate of your reaching us is around three years at a cost of five hundred million dollars.”
Lod seemed to be enjoying himself.
Agent Ryan not so much.
“If you’re thinking that we will come out long before you begin killing bats and collapsing the hillside, you are wrong. We’re happy right where we are. We have decades of experience dwelling in the Deep. We have enough food, water, and supplies to last us for at least thirty years. Long after I’m dead.”
“If you collapse the hill the bats will die,” Agent Ryan said.
“Collateral damage,” Lod said. “Which will be on you.”
“How many of you are there?” Agent Ryan asked.
“As of right now, three hundred and thirty-three, but that could drop by four people soon.”
“Why?”
“Hostages. Hold on a moment.” Lod reached for something out of view and the picture on the monitor changed to a shot of Alex walking down a hallway with Carl. He was wearing a canary suit and had his arm in a sling. Carl was dressed in gray.
I was relieved he was alive and able to walk.
The picture changed to us wearing our canary suits and looking up at the monitor.
“I assume you recognize them,” Lod said.
“The boys. I’ve never met Kate or your brother, Alex.”
“He used to insist that people call him Alexander, but I think he’s mellowed in his old age.”
“What happened to his shoulder?”
“He was stabbed by his murder victim.”
“LaNae Fay.”
“Yes. That’s a capital offense.”
“You are not a country or a government.”
“That depends on your viewpoint, Agent Ryan.”
“How about letting the hostages go as a gesture of goodwill.”
“I feel no goodwill toward you whatsoever. And I’m certainly not going to open the doors to let them out so your SWAT team can come in. I should mention that there is only one way in and one way out. One front door. I know this won’t stop you from looking for a back door. I’m just trying to save you some time. The other thing you’re looking for is our power source, thinking that if you cut it, the doors will magically open for you. They won’t. We are operating off the grid. A combination of generators and batteries. I regret that we are using fossil fuel, but there is no way around that. It would have been nice to use solar, but we knew that you would find the panels and destroy them. So there was no choice.”
“How much fuel do you have?”
“It will outlast our food supplies.”
“Back to the hostages. I think we’ve identified all of the cameras in your surveillance system. We haven’t found any blind spots. We could back all our personnel and vehicles off. Say a half a mile. We couldn’t possibly breach the opening at that distance before you close it again.”
Lod shook his head.
The door to our cubicle opened. Carl pushed Alex inside, but not viciously. He gave us a look, which I couldn’t read, and a slight nod before closing the door and locking it with the keycard around his neck.
Kate rushed over to him. “Are you okay?”
“I’ll be fine. Nurse Dexter did a pretty good job patching me up. He gave me pain meds and antibiotics.” He pulled a couple of bottles out of his pocket.
�
�Lod, I mean Larry, is talking to Agent Ryan,” I said.
“I’ve been watching it. Everyone is watching it. This place has come to a standstill.” He looked at Kate. “Did you find any blind spots?”
She shook her head. “Full coverage as far as I can tell.”
“Bugs?”
“I yanked out the ones around the table.”
“Did they give my laptop to Bob Jonas?”
“Yes,” Coop answered.
Alex gave us the slightest smile. “Good,” he whispered, then in a normal voice said, “Let’s hear what Larry has to say to the FBI.”
Agent Ryan was talking.
“I can assure you that if your brother is guilty of murder we will prosecute him to the full extent of the law.”
“He will be prosecuted, but not by you.”
“What are the others guilty of?”
“Kate is guilty of treason, and the two boys are her coconspirators. It was a close-run thing. You almost caught up to us before we got inside. It wouldn’t have mattered. I would have sealed this place whether the last of us made it here or not, and that includes me. Sacrifices have to be made.”
I felt something tapping on my leg. I glanced down. Alex had his hand open. He leaned close to my ear.
“Do you have the drive?”
I nodded.
“Give it to me. Subtly. Smile like I just told you something that was humorous.”
I smiled.
“You appear to know a good deal about how the FBI functions in these situations,” Agent Ryan said. “So you know I can’t give up on the hostages. How about you and I having a one-on-one conversation …”
I reached into my pocket, slowly, casually, and wrapped my hand around the little box. I leaned over to Alex and whispered, “The box got wet in the shower.”
Alex smiled and whispered, “Waterproof. Give it to me.”
“… you must have a cell phone, or a landline. Let’s talk about this privately and see if we can work something out.”
“We don’t have a landline, or a cell, down here. And I guess you haven’t looked at your cell lately. You don’t have a signal either …”
“He did it,” Alex said under his breath. “He figured out how to take out the US without hurting his precious wildlife.”
I pulled the little box out of my pocket and handed it to him.
“In fact,” Lod continued, “no one in the United States has a cell signal. All the smartphones and watches just got stupid. I took down the cellular network nationwide.”
Agent Ryan turned around and looked at the people standing behind her. The cameras followed her gaze. Several of them were fishing their phones out of their pockets, looking at them, and shaking their heads.
“It’s not surprising there isn’t a signal up here,” Agent Ryan said.
“No signal anywhere in North America,” Lod countered. “While you were checking your signals I took out cellular in Canada, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, oh and here goes Iceland and Greenland as well. The talking heads on the television are screaming about it right now. Make a call on your sat phone. Call the FBI office in DC. Call a landline. They’ll verify it. But make it quick.”
Agent Ryan nodded at one of the other agents. He hit a button on his sat phone.
“No GPS in cars,” Lod continued. “People are going to have to actually figure out where they are going on their own. Paper map companies are going to be happy. If people want to talk to someone they are going to have to find them and talk face-to-face …”
I looked over at Coop. He was expressionless, but I suspected he wasn’t very upset about this.
“… because after I take out the sat phones, landlines are going out next. I never did like the phone company.”
The agent on the sat phone looked at Agent Ryan and said, “Cellular is down nationwide.”
“Call our New York office,” Agent Ryan ordered.
Lod grinned. “Too late. Sat phones are down. That was a tricky one.”
Agent Ryan looked back at the guy with the sat phone. He shook his head. “It’s out.”
Agent Ryan was clearly shaken and trying to hold it together. “What do you want, Lawrence?”
“You mean my list of demands?”
“Yes, what do you want?”
“I get it,” Lod said. “You thought we were negotiating. I am not negotiating. There is nothing you or the government has that I want or need. I’m just telling you what’s going to happen as a courtesy. As soon as I’m finished and send this video off to the press, I’m going to take out the Internet. By the way, I should mention this: The cellular network and the Internet are not coming back anytime soon, if at all. This is not immediately reversible. It’s not like I threw a switch and all you have to do is turn the switch back on. It doesn’t work that way, as you will soon find out.”
“People will die.”
Lod nodded. “A lot of people, but more important, at least to me, most of the corporations are going to go down, along with the government and Wall Street. I’ve tapped into most of the power grid. Remember that unexplained brownout on the East Coast three months ago? That was us. Washington, DC, will be the first to go, then state governments, then cities.”
“To what end? There will be anarchy.”
“That’s exactly what we need. A new start. We need a population of people and a governing body that care more about the earth than they do about what they can take from the earth. I have no idea how it’s going to turn out. It will be interesting to watch from the Deep.”
“And I suppose you want to be the leader of —”
“Oh,” Lod interrupted. “In the excitement of the moment, I forgot to mention something. We do have sarin gas, explosives, and if you get this far, weapons. It’s only fair that I tell you that if you somehow manage to breach what we consider our sovereign territory, any part of it, including the first door, we will defend ourselves. You’ve been warned.”
“Let’s talk about —”
“Good-bye, Agent Ryan. And good luck on the new planet Earth.”
Pat, and Alex. We were watching the monitor from the table.
I wanted to see the celebration through the window.
People were dancing, cheering, high-fiving.
Lod had sketched this scene in one of his notebooks.
The charred pages were coming back.
Coop walked up and put his arm around me. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” I said, but I wasn’t sure. “My grandfather sketched his future and it has all come true.”
“What do you mean?”
I told him about Lod’s little notebooks.
“How much do you remember?”
“The sketches and notes are still coming back to me. Faster, now that we’re here … now that it’s too late. I’m so sorry to have gotten you and Pat into this.”
“I got myself into this,” Coop said. “I followed you into the Deep. I followed you here. I’d do it again. I have no regrets.”
Coop kissed me.
“I don’t have any regrets either,” I said. “Not now.”
He grinned.
I grinned back.
“Hey, you two!” Alex said from the table. “If you have some spare time, why don’t you join us so we can figure out what we’re going to do.”
Coop and I walked over to them hand in hand, smiling.
Pat was smiling too.
“Glad to see you’re all deliriously happy,” Alex said. “But we need a plan of attack. I’m open to suggestions.”
“I’m kind of stumped,” Pat said. “I’ve never been locked in an inescapable glass box before.”
“Don’t worry,” Alex said confidently. “We’ll get out of the cube. What I’m worried about is how we get back up top.”
“Those doors are formidable. I’m not sure how we …”
I tuned them out. Seeing the celebration had somehow unlocked a secret memory compartment inside my head. In it were all the notes I had ever
seen. It was as if I were leafing through a photo album. Image after image … Motor homes. Steel doors. Surveillance room. Infirmary. Barracks. Apartments. Kitchen. Cafeteria. Holding cube. Lod’s private quarters … They all made sense …
“There’s a back door,” I said.
“What?” Alex said.
“A back door,” I said. “Another way out.”
“How do you know?” Coop asked.
“Lod’s notebooks. In one of his sketches there’s a shaft with a ladder leading up to the surface. It’s inside his private quarters. I might not be remembering it perfectly, or maybe some of the sketch was burned. But in my mind the shaft appears to end before it reaches the surface. I guess that doesn’t make sense.”
“It makes perfect sense,” Coop said. “It’s a dead ender. Remember those, Pat?”
Pat nodded at him like he knew exactly what Coop was talking about.
“What is a dead ender?” Alex asked.
“When you’re tunneling it’s hard to tell where you are up on top,” Coop explained. “We popped through in the wrong place several times. You can’t leave a hole that people will fall into. You don’t want them to know that you’re tunneling under their property.”
“And you don’t want to block your tunnel with fill,” Pat added.
“Right,” Coop agreed. “So you cap the hole a few feet underground with a piece of wood, or something. That way you don’t have to use a lot of fill to top it off. We made our caps three feet below the surface, or about two big wheelbarrows full of dirt. We’d disguise the surface scar with lawn turf, or whatever landscaping they had on top. I’d guess Lod’s dead ender is a lot deeper so no one can find it above.”
“I’m not surprised he left himself a way out,” Alex said. He pointed at the cheering crowd on the monitor. “A lot of these people are new to the Deep. They’re happy now, but after a year or two that could change. They might want to see the sun, and Larry holds the key to the sky.”
“The keycards on the lanyards,” I said. “We have to get ahold of one.”
Alex shook his head. “Not just any card. Larry’s card. Dexter is not only a good nurse, he’s a talker. He told me that his keycard opens only a few doors. The Originals’ and the Guards’ keycards open more doors, but not all of them. Larry’s keycard opens every door in the Deep. He personally programs all of the keycards and has been doing it since they started locking doors down here, which was about two years ago. Dexter said they had to send an authorization request directly to Larry. If it was approved, and a lot of times the requests were rejected, a reprogrammed keycard would arrive in the mail.”
