by Kevin George
THE TUNNEL WAR
BOOK 5 OF THE GREAT BLUE ABOVE SERIES
BY: KEVIN GEORGE
CHAPTER ONE
Carli Ellison’s blurred vision made it harder to control her jetpack. Just before her father’s guards had reached her at the end of the Main HASS’s outer platform, she’d taken a deep breath and mashed the jetpack’s power button, shooting skyward (even more skyward) in a matter of seconds. The guards’ yelling was quickly drowned out by wind rushing into her ears. Seconds later, the cold air stung her eyes, which filled with tears. She wanted to rub them away but dared not take her hands off the jetpack’s controls, not that she was actually in control of anything.
Carli squinted and saw the amorphous shape of Wyatt Bell zipping through the clouds above. She tried to keep up, but he flew so erratically that she quickly lost sight of him. Her hands were growing numb with cold and tiny sparks of light popped in front of her eyes. When she tried to take a deep breath, she coughed so wildly that she lost the grip on her power button. The jetpack abruptly cut off, sending her plunging back toward the interconnected group of High Altitude Survival Stations. She tumbled through the sky, her free hand grasping to find the jetpack’s controls, her vision darkening as freefall threatened to plunge her into unconsciousness.
Carli sped past one of the HASSes, missing its platform by less than ten feet. The ground was thousands of feet below, but she knew it would only take minutes to hit down, the same plunge that many hopeless HASS citizens had taken before her, including the person who’d once been most important in her life.
Mother, she thought, wondering what had gone through her mother’s mind after she’d stepped off the Main HASS’s platform. Did she regret it right away? Did she wish she could take it back? Did she wish she could suddenly fly to save herself and return to us?
Carli’s thoughts gave her the sudden clarity needed to grab the controls and reengage the power, shooting her skyward again. Glancing up, she spotted the underside of a HASS directly above. Carli dipped her shoulder sharply to one side, turning her entire body, narrowly avoiding the HASS’s platform. A blur suddenly sped toward her but turned away at the last moment, ending up beside her. Carli didn’t take her eyes away from the sky in front of her, but she sensed Wyatt’s presence and immediately felt safer.
“You have to be lighter on the controls,” he called out over the sound of rushing wind. “And don’t turn your body so drastically. Do it like this.”
Carli glanced over to see Wyatt shift his head to the side, his body turning gradually. She copied his movements and soon felt herself in greater control. Fear and adrenaline faded, replaced with a sense of freedom and wonder she never would’ve imagined. But no amount of awe prevented the cold from permeating her clothes and numbing her body. She didn’t know Wyatt’s plans and didn’t know how much longer she could stave off hypothermia.
“Follow me!” Wyatt yelled.
Before Carli could answer, Wyatt pressed the power button even harder and shot higher into the clouds, seemingly headed straight for the Main HASS. Carli followed, her turns sharper and smoother than before. She soared within feet of the Main HASS’s platform, where she caught a glimpse of several men—she thought she spotted her father among them—waving wildly at her. For a moment, she considered landing on the platform, finding safety, returning to the home and life she’d known her entire existence. But she didn’t look forward to being locked in her room for the next few years, which would undoubtedly be her punishment for all the trouble she’d caused today.
She spotted Wyatt speeding close to the Main HASS’s envelope, which was the metallic outer frame covering the HASS’s dozens of sacks filled with lifting gasses. Carli lost sight of him as he crested the top of the HASS. She followed his path, marveling at the sight of the envelope from this angle, having lived years beneath it without ever seeing it so up close. By the time she reached the top and searched for Wyatt, she found only sky and clouds, her chest tightening with fear that something bad had happened. She nearly soared right over the HASS when she noticed the slightest movement beneath her.
Wyatt stood on the metallic walkway that ran the length of the HASS’s envelope. Though Carli had explored plenty of areas she wasn’t allowed to go, she’d never had the nerve to access the ladders on the side of the envelope and climb to the walkway. It was mostly used by the HASS’s mechanics to enter the envelope and make repairs to the air sacks within. Carli had often dreamed of the thrill of standing atop the walkway, but her father had forbidden it and there were some rules she’d never dreamed of breaking.
Until now.
Wyatt waved his arms frantically, nearly about to push the power button on his jetpack to follow Carli, when she suddenly spotted him. Carli eased her speed and turned gently, aiming for the walkway, which appeared very narrow as she made her landing approach. She tapped the power button gently to slow her landing, but her face and hands and fingers—every exposed part of her skin—became colder and colder, and she struggled to keep her grip on the controls. She dropped too quickly and when she tried to press the power button a final time to slow her descent, her finger slipped off and she overshot the walkway.
Carli turned at the last second, missing the walkway’s railing by less than a foot. Wyatt instinctively reached out to grab her, but his fingers skimmed her feet as she fell past. Carli crashed into the HASS’s envelope, the pliable metallic fabric giving way beneath her, cushioning her fall enough to prevent serious injury but not enough to prevent serious pain. She grunted, the inside of her shoulder catching fire despite so much of her body being frozen numb. Carli lay atop the envelope, her eyes closed to the pain, her ears filling with wind and Wyatt’s distant cries.
“Don’t move!”
She needed a moment to process his words. When she understood and opened her eyes, she stared down at the envelope, the metallic fabric bowed beneath her. Afraid of endangering the HASS if she punched a hole in the fabric, Carli slid aside, the fabric popping back into place without her weight. She sighed, but her relief didn’t last long. Her body began to shift farther and farther back, gravity’s invisible hand pulling her back along the gently sloping, yet very slippery, side of the envelope. Carli tried to grasp at the envelope, but she couldn’t tell if the fabric or her fingers were more slick.
The jetpack, she told herself, the machine weighing heavy against her back. She tried to reach for the handheld controls, but they were stuck beneath her body. The more she tried to reach for them, the less steady her body became. She imagined herself plunging over the side in the next several—
She jerked to a halt, afraid to move her head to see what had stopped her, afraid to take a breath for fear she’d start sliding again. When she did begin to move, she was gradually pulled up the envelope’s incline.
“I’ve got you,” Wyatt told her.
Carli tried to help by crawling but only succeeded in slowing their progress. She went limp and allowed Wyatt to pull her closer to the top, where the envelope evened out. Carli finally looked up at him, offering a breathless ‘thanks’ as a gust of wind threatened to throw them both over the side. Wyatt knelt and wrapped his arms around Carli, their combined weight the only thing keeping them from being blown away. Once the gust died down, Carli let go and scurried back, her red, numbed cheeks burning for a different reason.
“We need to move!” Wyatt called out, pointing toward the walkway.
Carli nodded. She nearly slipped as she tried to stand and decided to crawl the rest of the way, glancing back to see Wyatt doing the same. She reached the railing and climbed over, collapsing to the walkway floor, hugging her knees and curling into a ball as she tried to steady her breathing. Though the sun shone brightly, uncontrollable shivering attacked every
part of her body. She didn’t look up when Wyatt leapt the railing nearby.
“Are you okay?” he asked, pulling off his goggles as he knelt beside her.
“No, I’m n. . . not o. . .okay,” she snapped. She started to shrug the pack off her shoulders but stopped, afraid to be atop the HASS without it. “What the hell is this th. . . thing I’m w. . . wearing?”
“Jetpack,” he said, shifting his body to block her from the next gust of wind. “My parents always worried the HASSes would eventually fail, so they’d been designing the packs in secret for many years.”
“Before they leapt?” Carli asked, instantly regretting how she’d blurted the question.
Wyatt’s eyebrows lowered and he took a step back before shaking his head.
“They wouldn’t do that,” he said, his voice strained.
Carli stood and reached for his hand. Wyatt pulled away, causing Carli to frown.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I haven’t been this close to anyone for a while.”
“I never thought my m. . . mother would l. . . leap either,” Carli said. “Living up here. . . in the clouds. . . it’s not for everyone. Plenty of people have decided they couldn’t handle it any longer.”
“Especially when you live in constant fear of being cut off from the Main HASS,” Wyatt said.
Carli’s eyes narrowed. She felt a sudden desire to stick up for her father, but a gust of wind reminded her of everything that had happened and everything that Wyatt had lost in life.
“I’m so sorry for what happened to your home,” she said. “I tried talking my father out of severing your connection cable, but the other leaders had already agreed.”
Wyatt nodded, looking over the side of the railing. “I know, I got the note you sent to me in that ball. But I don’t think your father would’ve cut the cable had he known about the message I receiveed over the radio.”
“Wait. . . w. . . what? The r. . . radio? It w. . . worked?”
She shivered so severely that she stumbled, grabbing the walkway’s railing to steady herself. Wyatt noticed and unzipped his heavy coat, showing a bag that he’d attached to the front of himself. He carefully removed the jetpack and then the other bag, opening it to another set of heavy clothing like what he was wearing, as well as a second set of flight goggles.
“I was hoping you’d come,” he said, handing over the clothes.
He helped Carli remove her jetpack, but she insisted that she could pull the clothes on by herself, a struggle as her hands shook so severely. As she dressed, Wyatt told her about his final frantic moments in the Comm HASS, about the radio crackling to life as the lines were being severed with the Main HASS, about the strange message received from whoever existed out in the unknown world.
By the time he was done, Carli had finished dressing and no longer felt the biting sting of cold wind. She donned the goggles last but hesitated to pull them over her eyes.
“That proves someone else is out there. . . that we aren’t alone in the world,” she said in awe. “We have to tell my dad and the other leaders.”
Without awaiting a response, she turned and headed toward the ladder leading below, stepping over her jetpack along the way. Wyatt frowned but did not budge.
“It won’t matter if we tell him,” he called to her. Carli stopped and turned, her eyes slivered but not from the cold wind. Wyatt looked toward the empty spot in the sky where the Comm HASS had once floated. “I don’t have any proof of the radio transmission. . . not anymore.”
“My father would still want to know,” Carli said, offended by Wyatt’s lack of faith in Stephen Ellison. “If you’re worried that he wouldn’t believe you—”
Wyatt shook his head. “Doesn’t matter if he’d believe me or not. I won’t stop you from going down to tell him, but I can’t go with you. Like it or not, he sentenced me to death aboard the Comm HASS. I can’t take the chance of that happening again.”
Carli walked back toward him, shaking her head, stopping in front of her jetpack lying on the walkway.
“It wasn’t like that,” she said. “It wasn’t you he wanted to get rid of. It was the Comm HASS that he thought was empty and useless.”
“The Comm HASS wasn’t either one,” Wyatt said with a snort. “Regardless, I can’t trust him now. I can’t trust anyone up here now.”
“Nobody?” Carli asked.
“I wouldn’t have built a second jetpack and risked my life coming here if I didn’t trust you,” Wyatt said. “But my future isn’t in the clouds any longer. It’s down there.”
He looked over the edge of the railing, unable to see the ground beyond the massive HASS envelope and the heavy cloud cover rolling in beneath them.
“Whatever is out there—whoever is out there—I’m going to find without the help of your father or any other HASS leader,” Wyatt said, bitterness creeping into his voice. “Maybe I’ll come back with proof one day.”
“What sort of proof?”
“To start with, coordinates from the GPS tracking system connected to the Comm HASS’s radio,” Wyatt said. He held up his left arm, pulling back his sleeve to show a watch-like device attached to his wrist. “This device should’ve received a transmission of the whereabouts of whoever I talked to. Once I have those numbers, it’d just be a matter of following the coordinates and locating whichever ground ark hailed us, exactly the way all of the tales foretold.”
Carli leaned in closer, seeing that the GPS device on Wyatt’s wrist showed nothing. “Why isn’t it working?”
“After hearing the radio transmission, I didn’t have time to reconnect the tracking system and link it to the device,” Wyatt said.
“The system was broken?”
Wyatt frowned and shook his head, looking away. For someone who’d soared across the sky and saved Carli from sliding off the top of the HASS, Wyatt appeared unexpectedly timid about her question.
“Then what?” Carli asked.
When Carli heard a tiny voice barely louder than the wind, she assumed at first that Wyatt was whispering. But he quickly turned and looked beyond her, pointing to the first person reaching the top of the ladder at the far end of the walkway. Carli spun and felt her stomach sink.
“One of my father’s men,” she said. “We should at least tell him about the message. My people aren’t as bad as you think.”
The man raced at them from far away, waving his arms wildly, his words lost in the wind but his tone clearly angry. Wyatt hurried to secure the pack to himself. Carli did the same, but not with the same level of enthusiasm.
“You think they’ll let you leave with me again?” Wyatt asked. Carli’s frown was all the answer he needed. “Didn’t think so. I understand your entire life is here, your family and your future. I just thought. . . I don’t know. . . that you’d want to see more out there. . . and then your message to me. . .”
“I do want off this HASS, I do want to see the ground and find whoever is out there,” Carli said, unable to quell the sense of desperation rising within her.
“But. . .”
She glanced back to see two more men joining the first, the trio slowed by swirling winds yet moments from reaching Carli and Wyatt. Carli sighed.
“But my father might know what else to do.”
Wyatt nodded, forcing a smile though his eyes filled with sadness. “I understand,” he said. “But I’m still going to try.”
He lowered his goggles and tightened his straps. Carli stepped forward and touched his arm.
“Please be careful out there,” she said.
He nodded and stepped away, placing his finger over the power button. Before he pushed it, he stopped and turned to Carli.
“The tracking system didn’t work because I disassembled it,” he said. “You see, I needed its parts to build a second jetpack.”
Carli frowned, looking down at the jetpack controls in her hand. The pack suddenly felt heavier on her shoulders.
“What will you do now?” she asked.
> “Find the Comm HASS on the ground,” Wyatt said. “Hopefully it didn’t hit down too hard. Hopefully the tracking system wasn’t destroyed so I’ll have a chance to fix it and track the radio transmission.”
“And then you’ll come back?” Carli asked, unashamed of the hope that filled her words.
“And then I’ll see what else is out in the world.”
Their eyes locked and Carli couldn’t avoid seeing his sadness, nor could she avoid feeling her own. As the cries of ‘stop’ grew louder from her father’s men, Carli suddenly had a glimpse into her future, a glimpse of the regret she’d forever feel if she stayed behind and watched Wyatt fly away. Afraid that such regret would ultimately lead her on the same plunging path her mother had taken, Carli lowered her goggles and pressed her power button, shooting high into the Great Blue Above. Wyatt joined her moments later, neither of them paying attention to the yelling voices fading below. . .
CHAPTER TWO
James Jonas pushed button after button, some of them glowing, some of them not, dozens that he was completely ignorant about, others that he knew would accomplish nothing. In the end, nothing worked and the Comm Center radio remained quiet, the voice of the frantic boy on the other end still replaced with silence.
Not that the rest of the room was silent. James pulled at the hair on either side of his head, staring in agony at the quiet radio speakers, his lifelong goal finally met but cut off prematurely. Frustration mounted, as he was unable to figure out how to make further contact with the outside world. He sensed the others nearby—sensed that they weren’t like any human he’d ever known—but it was Sally’s babbling that made him squeeze his eyes shut.
“They’re from The Mountain, all of them,” she said. “Every single one was tossed from the top and told to fly if they wanted to live. It sounds like they were rescued by the same young man that happened upon me in the middle of the snowstorm when the vehicle was—”
“Would you shut up for a moment and let me think?” James snapped.
Sally quieted, but the noise near the radio room’s swinging doors exploded, the Swarm of rejected Aviaries becoming agitated by James yelling. High-pitched squawking and clicking and shrill screams filled the room, so freakish and unnatural that James finally turned away from the radio and glanced toward the door. More than a dozen figures had gathered in the shadows, their misshapen forms silhouetted against the dim lighting of the hallway outside. James squinted to see them better but was almost relieved there wasn’t enough light. Though he was glad the cruel Mountain guard hadn’t been the one to find him, he finally began to process the screams he’d heard from the hallway minutes earlier.
