by Ryan Husk
“No way,” said Janet, eyes widening in awe. “It’s like walking into a spaceship.”
“I imagine there’s an alarm going off somewhere,” Edward said, pointing to a sign on the wall that said THIS PLACE PROTECTED BY DESANTO SECURITY, INC. “But I’ll wager good money nobody’s monitoring it anymore.”
At the end of the corridor was a cage elevator. Inside the elevator, they could see, were two pallets of shrink-wrapped containers. Edward shined his light on it. Dodson’s MREs, the best made anywhere.
He looked back at the others, and smiled.
“Don’t get ahead o’ yerself, cowboy,” grumbled Jeb, who moved up to inspect the elevator. “If there ain’t no power, this elevator ain’t gonna take us nowhere.”
Edward slid the door to one side. There was a control panel that looked a little dusty. He stepped over to it, looked over the controls, and flipped a few of them. At first, nothing happened. Then he flipped the largest switch, and lights came on inside the cage. On the wall, a panel lit up. There were two buttons on it: UP and DOWN.
Edward looked at Jeb, and smiled again.
* * *
Marshall was worried about Margery. He held her hand as they stepped into the elevator. He didn’t ask her if she was all right—ever since her diagnosis, she had gotten really, really tired of answering that question.
Jeb, Wade, and the O’Hares decided to stay up top—just in case the elevator broke down and got stuck, there would be people outside who could rescue them. Marshall asked Margery if she wanted to stay with Wade up top, but she wanted to go down. She still had an adventurous spirit, she still wanted to see this thing through. Also, Marshall suspected, she wanted to go ahead and get deep underground, which would put her far, far away from the demonspawn and the Face.
Edward stood in front of the control panel, looking it over. Marshall noticed that he kept the AA-12 slung at his side, and a Beretta in his hand. Gordon was holding the Glock. It’s like everyone was expecting trouble.
Edward hit the DOWN button. For an awful second, nothing happened. Then, all at once, the floor shook. The cage shuddered hard and the doors closed faster than he would’ve thought with a loud witch’s scream. Then, they were headed down, down, down. Marshall looked up at the cage’s roof, through which he could see the thick cords lowering them.
Margery made a sound of discomfort. Marshall squeezed her hand. She squeezed back, but feebly.
Edward turned on the flashlight connected to the bottom of his shotgun, and aimed it around. The flashlight’s beam illuminated the limestone walls as they continued down. Then, Marshall turned around, saw a faded, dusty screen. All that was on it were numbers: 30. Every few seconds, it ticked higher, in increments of ten. First 40, then 50, then 60. “Our depth,” Ed said, pointing at it. They all watched it carefully. When it reached 140, the elevator slowed. The cage rattled, swayed, and rattled some more. The sound it made carried differently now. They were in total darkness, but Marshall knew they were near the bottom, and had come into the caverns.
When the screen behind them read 150, the elevator shuddered to a stop, and the doors parted. Edward’s light painted what looked like a reception area at a dentist’s office, with fat, whitish, yellowish walls. There was a kidney-shaped oak table, on top of which was a plastic tote, its top removed, and a few bottled waters stacked inside.
Edward stepped forward, and waved the others out. Then, he grabbed Janet by the shoulder. “Janet, stay here in the doorway, don’t let the doors shut. Margery, you wanna stay here and look after her?”
“We can do that,” Marge said, putting on a brave smile. “We’ll guard the exit, right, Janet?”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” the girl muttered. Edward looked at her. “Sorry…just…getting a little irritable again.”
“Check your blood-sugar, then,” he said.
“I don’t wanna leave them here alone,” Marshall said. Before Ed could say anything, Marshall pointed at the kidney-shaped table. “We can use that to keep the door propped open.”
Ed looked over at the table. Shrugged. “Not a bad idea. Gordon, Marshall, help me move that table into the elevator.” They did as asked, and they grunted and groaned as they moved the heavy beast into the elevator door. “A’ight, let’s scope the place out. Sweep your beams from the center of the room to the right, I’ll sweet from center to left. Keep your eyes peeled.”
“What’re we looking for?” asked Marshall, pointing the flashlight that Ed had given him.
“Some kind of power switch. A lamp. A generator. Anything that’ll give us light or power.”
Gordon said, “Here.” He flipped a switch on the wall, but nothing happened. “The elevator was working just fine, and the blast doors up top opened. So why aren’t the lights working?”
“An independent generator,” Edward said. “Left on low power for trips up and down, but that’s it. The facility’s main power is somewhere else. C’mon.”
They moved cautiously, like blind men through a minefield. The first corridor was wide open, with scant desks here and there, a few stacks of crates. Marshall popped the lid off of one tote, found a few pamphlets on basic survival. There were two maps along the wall which outlined the entire facility. Edward put his forefinger on it, found the spot that said YOU ARE HERE and then followed the paths away from there. Then, he found what he wanted, and tapped the spot. “There it is. Let’s go.”
Marshall looked at Margery. She seemed okay to keep going. He imagined she was still reliving what they had seen at the cemetery, a horror that would never leave their memory. Maybe down here, the Face will never see us, the demonspawn will never find us.
They came to a T junction. Here, they looked in every direction, saw the halls lined with stacks upon stacks of plastic and wooden totes. There were closed doors in every hallway, and a wide corridor that had numbered parking spots. For the RV-driving survivalists that never invested here, Marshall thought. At the end of the corridor, there was a large cage elevator, one big enough to bring vehicles up and down. More corridors splintered off from it.
“Which way?” Gordon whispered.
“Down here.” Edward pointed to the hall on their left.
Twenty more minutes of exploring yielded only more large doors, which opened easily with a push. The doors led into empty stalls, most of them wide enough to fit several RVs. Edward tapped a few switches beside them. No lights came on, no machinery cut on. However, a couple of the large bay doors had standard chains, and when Marshall tugged on them, the doors rose and revealed more boxes. One bay contained large steel drums, the side of which had labels saying FLAMMABLE and COMBUSTIBLE.
“Fuel,” Marshall said. “Some diesel over here. That’s a good sign.”
“Why?” asked Janet.
“Fuel has an expiration date. Diesel lasts longer than gasoline.”
“But every vehicle we’ve got runs on gas,” Gordon said.
Edward waved them on down another corridor. “We can drive back into town at some point, hotwire a diesel truck, I’m sure.”
Another ten minutes of searching, and they found a room filled with pallets of MREs, water bottles, and two small diesel-powered generators. Another large bay door opened easily, and inside they found several boxes labeled MEDICAL. They checked a few boxes, found sumatriptan, odansentron, ampicillin, cephalexin, and many other bottles with labels Marshall had never heard of.
“Good, good, this is all good,” Edward said. “Some of these have expiration dates a few months out. Not bad. Better than I’d hoped.” He pointed down another hall, this one narrower than the others. The doors were all unlocked, and they opened into offices that looked like they had been in various stages of preparation before the whole project was shelved. Blue tarps and white sheets were thrown over a few computer monitors, some CPU towers, tables with stacks of boxes and MREs.
The hallway ended at a set of steps, which went down to a set of swinging double doors. Edward pushed through, aiming his
weapon around. Marshall followed, one hand holding his gun, the other holding Margery’s hand. The flashlight he clenched between his teeth.
They stepped onto wide metal scaffolding that overlooked a large room filled with boilers, tall coolers, and a generator the size of a car garage. “Janet, take a seat at the foot of the stairs. Eat something. Anything. There’s stuff in my bag if you need it. Marshall, follow me with that flashlight.”
The main generator was large, cylindrical, and covered in panels and dials. “Three diesel-powered generators in one,” Edward said. “Each one cranks out eight hundred kilowatts apiece.” His hands moved over a few of the dials. To Marshall, it looked like he was searching his memory, trying to remember how it all worked. “All told, we’ve got 2,400 kilowatts available to us. Hey, shoot that light over here.”
“Thorry,” Marshall said, and took the flashlight out of his mouth. “You know how to work these?”
“We had to get power up in some bad areas,” he said, opening a panel and looking at the instructions and the key legend to familiarize himself. “Bombed out cities, power plants that the workers abandoned because they got tired of hearing the bomb warning sirens every day. Fallujah was a blacked-out town during the April siege.” He shrugged. “A generator like this, it ought to be able to pump out enough energy to power four or five hundred homes for a while, especially if we watch our consumption.” He found the primer, and the primary pump. He grabbed hold and pumped six times, referring to inside of the panel to make sure that was all that was needed.
The large machine started to hum, vibrate loudly, shaking the floor, the scaffolding, and then finally settling down to a low whirring sound. A few dials lit up. Edward went to those, consulting the instructions again. He flipped the main mixture switches. The generator hummed loudly again, then stabilized. Then, it all went completely quiet. A hissing sound. Then it started whirring again. All at once, all of the dials around the generator lit up. Now, it was just a matter of following the blinking lights. That’s the way it seemed, anyway. Whichever one lit up next was the next one he pressed.
Then, all at once, the entire room lit up. Halogen lights everywhere winked on.
“There we go,” Edward said.
“We’ve got power?” Janet said hopefully. “Like, all over the caverns? Just like that?”
“Just like that.” He turned and looked at them. “Welcome home, guys. Get comfy. We’re gonna be here a while.”
* * *
“So, what’s up, Ed?” said Wade. “What’s this about?”
Edward put down a bowl of water for Atlas. The sound of the dog slurping water echoed up and down the limestone corridor. The others were standing around the pallets of MREs they found in one of the empty RV stalls. Marshall was sitting on the ground with Margery. The O’Hares were standing near a wall, holding each other. Janet was knelt beside Atlas, petting him, while Gordon stood close by watching her. Wade and Jeb were leaning in a doorway that led down into yet another unexplored series of corridors.
“If you know somethin’, Ed, I think you should share it,” Wade said.
Edward looked around at all of them. Their faces were dim in the flickering light. Jeb had found a box of candles and used his cigarette lighter to give them all some light.
“It’s just a theory,” Edward said, “but I wanted to share it. Didn’t have time to discuss it while we were on the move. But after seeing the ISS footage Janet showed me, the black cloud swarming Earth, and noticing how the sunlight still permeates the Face, I got to thinking. And then I saw those things…eating the people. And Janet, Gordon and I have seen swarms snatching people up, some cows too. Then we saw it eating the grass, the trees, everything.”
“Well, don’t keep us in suspense, young man,” Greta O’Hare said. “What is it?”
Edward sighed, and put his hands on his hips. “Well, I can’t be sure, but I think…that it might be an ecophage.”
Everyone exchanged odd looks.
“The hell’s an ecophage?” asked Jeb.
“One of the least likely ways I thought it could all end,” Edward said. “It’s far-fetched, but given what we’ve seen, I think it’s the only explanation.” He scratched his chin, thinking. “There is a theory, called the ‘gray goo theory,’ that says any advanced civilization will eventually create what are called SRPs, self-replicating probes. They can go from one world to another, devouring all the useful resources—helium, oxygen, hydrogen, and biological material—and basically devour it and repurpose it to make more SRPs, which then in turn continue on to other worlds and devour more resources. They would leave nothing behind but brown and gray goo, the waste byproduct of their work.”
Gordon winced. “Nanomachines?”
Edward nodded. “Or even femtomachines—femtotechnology being even smaller than nanotech. Basically intelligent molecules. No single nanite or femtite would be sentient on its own, but as a collective swarm they would have a superintelligence. The theory is, if any civilization ever created them, they could slingshot around planets, using gravity assists, and ride solar winds from star system to star system, and eventually cover the whole galaxy is something like fifty thousand years.”
“But that face,” Greta said. “It’s like something out of a nightmare.”
“It might be trying to scare us. Maybe it’s studied us. Maybe it knows our End Times myths and is trying to disorient us.”
“It sure as shit has worked,” Marshall said.
“I’m not buyin’ this,” Jeb said.
Edward looked at him. “But you buy a giant red-eyed face covering the whole sky.” He looked at them all. “It would explain the cloud seen from space, and what Rebel News was saying about a large rock that approached Earth, attained orbit, and then spread all over the planet. And it would explain why the Face is translucent—the reason we can see the sun through it is because it is not a solid, it is a cloud, with more nanoparticles in it, I imagine, than every molecule in every cloud on Earth. It forms an ecophage, a thing that devours ecosystems.” He shrugged. “I’ll believe that before I believe it’s the Devil looking down on us.”
“Aliens sent this?” Janet asked, still knelt beside Atlas and give him love.
“Maybe. Or maybe they didn’t ‘send’ it at all. Maybe it got out of their control and killed them. Maybe the idiots who made it aren’t even around anymore, and it’s just following its programming. Either way, it means it cannot be reasoned with. We can barter with it. We cannot negotiate. Even if we could speak its programming language—which we can’t, and never will be able—it wouldn’t care about us any more than we care about the grass that we mow in springtime. It’s here to harvest us, simple as that.”
“Simple as that?” said Marge, looking up at him. Her eyelids were droopy. The migraine must be really bad. “Ya mean we’re all just food?”
“To this thing, yeah.”
“You said any advanced civilization could make it,” Gordon said. “Is it possible some government on Earth made it?”
“Anything’s possible at this point, Gord-O.” He looked at all of them. “Listen, I’m not telling you all what to believe. I’m just telling you what this thing’s nature probably is. Its nature is biovorous—it eats all biological life-forms, including grass, trees, whatever. That’s my thinking. But there are limits to this kind of thing.”
“Like what kinda limits?” asked Colt O’Hare.
“Well, I’m not scientist, but from what I’ve read a swarm of bio-converting SRPs would generate a lot of heat in their environment. Their work itself—that of converting biomass into more SRPs—would make a ton of heat, maybe so much so that they would collapse if they got too big. So, if it is what I think it is, it might not get any bigger than it already is.”
“It’s already fuckin’ huge,” Jeb said.
“Jeb, language,” said Wade, pointing at Janet on the ground.
“Sorry.”
Edward nodded. “Yeah, but what I mean is, it may have a
size limit, meaning it can’t get so big that it’s everywhere at once. Maybe that’s why the Face zips around the planet, it’s trying to keep an eye on all of us, but it can’t be everywhere at once.”
“So you’re saying maybe we’ll be able to go out an’ hunt an’ forage occasionally?” Wade said.
“Yes. But if not, well, we made it this far and we’ve got shelter. We’ll just have to watch out for each other. Janet, be very careful about your diet, so as to use your medication as little as possible. Same goes for the rest of us. We eat sparingly, and only use meds when we absolutely need them.” He added, “We could be down here for years. Maybe the rest of our lives.”
He let that sink it. Nobody said anything.
“All right,” Edward said, clapping his hands. The sound and echo jarred Greta. “Let’s get a good look around and start mapping these caves. We’ll need to find every resource, all stockpiled MREs, anything we can use for lights, kindling, warmth. The articles I read said there were lots of blankets still down here, so let’s find those. Make yourselves at home, people. This could be it for a while.”
Part II
CLOCKWORK
I.
Jake Marler experienced the end of the world from a cubicle. Sitting there in faded jeans and the crewneck sweater his girlfriend had bought him, with his headset affixed firmly to his head and with several empty cans of Monster energy drinks littering his desk, he had sat in his swivel chair, staring at his computer screen and trying to help field the calls coming into the Polk County Emergency Response Center. Beside him had been his gym bag with his workout equipment, which would forever be the last relic he had of his past life, though he hadn’t known it at the time.
Jake had been considering going over to his friend Sammy’s place that night, grab a few beers, play a little Magic: The Gathering, maybe some co-op video game. Or maybe not. He still owed Sammy $800 for helping him pay his rent and now Sammy was tight on cash and needed the money back. If Jake went over there he’d have to admit he didn’t have the money.
