by Ike Hamill
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Liam said. “If they arranged for the other chairs to turn themselves over, there’s no reason they couldn’t have identical chairs in this cafeteria to do the same.”
“Then let’s find out,” Merle said. He pointed toward the hall that led toward the officer’s quarters.
“That’s not the right direction. You told me that the exit will be this way,” Liam said. Of course, Merle had said a lot of things. His opinion on which direction was correct seemed to change with his whim.
Merle headed under the arch anyway.
Liam caught up just as Merle was headed through the doorway. Merle opened his arms in the direction of the bed and said, “See?”
The spread was pulled down. There was a mirror, face up, on the bed. It was definitely the room that they had been in. Liam’s brain twisted to try to make sense of the geometry of the place. They had gone in the same direction each time, looking for a hall that led to the exit. He was certain of it. Every time they found a cafeteria and then another hallway with rooms on either side, he had assumed that they were encountering a new division, like the floor plan had simply been replicated again and again.
With no markings on the walls to tell them where they were, it seemed possible.
Now, the impossible had happened. They had gone the same way, over and over, but they had somehow looped back to where they had started.
Liam tried to imagine it as a big circle. It still didn’t work—it would have to be enormous for all the turns to appear to be ninety degrees but actually part of a circle. And they hadn’t walked long enough for that to be true.
He put a hand to his head to contain the impending explosion.
“They’re tricking us,” Merle said. “They want us to be lost in here forever. I think they’re mad that I got out last time. Or, maybe they’re mad because I took at the corpses before they could bite me, like you said.”
“I didn’t say they would bite you,” Liam said. “I’m sorry I said anything at all.”
“I wonder if we’re still on Earth,” Merle said. “Maybe this was a gateway into space somehow. I wonder if my father is okay.”
“He’s fine, Merle. Listen, just shut up for a minute.”
Liam sat on the bed and hunched over, head in hands.
“We need to reset everything. Let’s go back to the start. If we go to the control room, maybe we can try again and this time mark everything somehow. You have a pen? I guess we could take things and leave them along the way, like breadcrumbs.”
“They’re never going to let us out now that we know the secret,” Merle said. He sat down next to Liam.
They both looked up as the door began to automatically shut again.
Liam stood slowly, still lost in confusion, and moved toward the door. When it didn’t open to his touch, he tried knocking like he had the previous time. The door didn’t respond.
“You knock to get in,” Merle said. “It’s supposed to just open automatically when you want to go out, like it did for me.”
“You caught it before it closed,” Liam said, knocking again.
Merle moved to his side.
“Exit,” Merle said at the door.
“You really think that will…”
Liam didn’t get a chance to finish. The door began to slide open, revealing a man standing across the hallway.
In an instant, the shape that looked like a man went dark and then appeared to only be a shadow. When Liam blinked, even the shadow disappeared. He looked to Merle. The young man was simply standing there with his mouth open.
“Did you see that?” Merle whispered.
Liam nodded.
The door started to close again and neither of them stopped it.
“What do we do?” Merle asked.
Liam let his breath out slowly, shaking his head. His voice came out weak and wavering at first. He cleared his throat and tried again.
“It was… I don’t know, it was a shadow or something, right? Maybe they have… I don’t know, Merle. Listen, I’m sure this will all make sense at some point. We just have to come up with a strategy to get out of here. Once everyone is here, I’m sure we’ll figure it out.”
“No way,” Merle said. “This place is messed up. I’m not going to let everyone else come here.”
“I don’t think there’s a choice,” Liam said. “People are afraid and they need somewhere safe.” Liam stopped himself before he revealed what he was really thinking—he needed somewhere safe, and there was nowhere safer.
“Okay, but I’m not going out there until we know where we’re going.”
When Liam turned his back on the door to see what Merle was doing, the young man was pacing near the bed. His hand was rubbing his chin as his eyes darted around.
“What are you doing?”
“There’s always more to these places than meets the eye. They have systems for keeping an eye on the soldiers. They have communications and controls. We just have to figure out…”
Merle trailed off as he started to pull the drawers from the bureau. He tossed them carelessly onto the bed, on top of the mirror. Liam moved fast to catch one of the drawers before it crashed into the glass.
“Careful.”
Liam snatched the mirror and moved it to the bathroom. A thin power cord dangled behind it. Merle was down on his hands and knees, looking under the bed. Liam took the mirror into the bathroom and tried to see how it would hang up. It was clear where the power cord would go. There was a recessed box in the wall with an adapter. Tilting his head and thinking about it, Liam figured that the mirror must be anti-fog or something. Maybe it had a light built into it. He shrugged and plugged it in. He could imagine himself staying in this room. Aside from food and something to watch, it had everything he needed. He could always bring a laptop with a DVD player so he could watch his shows. By now, he knew most of them by heart anyway.
He lifted the lid on the toilet. Instead of water, it had something that looked like blue gel in the bottom. Liam wrinkled his nose and looked closer. Some of the people in Donnelly used outhouses so they wouldn’t have to worry about the septic system on the house that they had taken over. The idea was disgusting. Liam would rather move every few years instead of using an outhouse. The blue gel might be a dealbreaker too. He wondered if he could get used to it. So far, including the ghosts, it was the worst thing he had seen in the bunker.
“Aha!” Merle called from the other room.
Liam poked his head out from the bathroom.
“What?”
Merle had torn out the snowy scene from the fake window.
“Look at this,” Merle said, pointing at a hole in the white backing of the light. “I bet you that’s a camera. Even the officers were under surveillance here.”
“Who cares though? Is that worth ruining the fake window?”
“It means that there’s another control room that we haven’t seen yet.”
“There’s plenty of stuff we haven’t seen yet. For example, I still haven’t seen the exit. I also imagine there are utility rooms where the power is generated and the water is purified and everything. All we have seen is living quarters, kitchens, and cafeterias.”
Liam was about to correct himself, because as far as they knew they had only seen one kitchen and one cafeteria. It was all very confusing.
Merle put up a finger.
“But, if they’re spying on whoever lived here, then where does that person live?”
“What?” Liam asked.
Rushing back over to the bed, Merle flipped the mattress, sending the drawers and their neatly folded contents to the floor.
Liam rolled his eyes. “I need to use the bathroom. I’ll be right out.”
He went to the bathroom, shut the door, and looked down at the blue gel again. He wondered for a second if he should be using the toilet. Maybe the gel wasn’t normal, and maybe whatever he put in there wouldn’t go. As a test, he triggered the lever and waited. Nothing happen
ed with the gel. He pulled the lid from the back of the toilet to see if there was more gel in the tank. When he did, something caught his eye. Something had passed by the mirror.
Liam set the lid down slowly. His eyes darted around the bathroom, looking for another shadow. The lid was crooked, so he lifted it again to set it right. This time, he saw the thing that he had only seen in the corner of his eye. It was a tiny light, flashing twice in the corner of the mirror.
For no reason at all, when he set down the lid, he touched the corner of the mirror. A little menu popped up, just behind the glass of the mirror. The mirror was electronic, and there was a display built into it.
“Merle! You have to see this,” he said. The writing on the menu wasn’t something that Liam recognized. It looked like discrete letters, but they weren’t any letters that he recognized. “Merle!”
The door opened a crack. “I probably don’t want to see whatever you did in there.”
“No,” Liam said. He reached over and slid the door open the rest of the way. “This,” he said, pointing.
Merle came in and cocked his head at the mirror.
“Yup. Mutant Speak,” he said, nodding.
“What?”
“That writing—I call it Mutant Speak. I guess I should call it Mutant Write, since I’ve never heard it spoken before. Well, there was that one alarm and I never could figure out what that woman’s voice was trying to say.”
“This,” Liam said, stabbing a finger toward the mirror. “Do you know what this says?”
“I know a couple of words. That bottom one means exit, I think. Here…”
Merle shoved Liam out of the way and he started pressing different options on the menu. The whole mirror seemed to work as a touchscreen as the options expanded and took up more real estate. Merle puzzled and mumbled to himself, working his way down to some option that had a symbol next to it. When he pressed it, the mirror lit up into a video display. Liam could still see his reflection in the mirror, but his face was ghostly compared to the image of the room from above. It looked like the cafeteria they had been in.
“It’s, like, maybe the second one we were in?” Merle asked himself.
“What do you mean?”
“See? All the chairs are upright? Either this is a recording, or this isn’t the same cafeteria that we were in. I’m trying to find the… Here.”
When he hit another item, the screen showed a trashed room where the bed was flipped and the dresser drawers and contents were strewn around.
“Keep watching,” Merle said as he moved toward the door.
Liam saw Merle move into frame on the mirror display.
“Am I there?”
“Yeah.”
“So they’re probably live views. I guess maybe there’s not one control room. Maybe the surveillance is distributed to the bathrooms. How did you get it to come on? Last time I was in this place, I cleared a corpse out of a bathroom and I didn’t see anything like that.”
“The toilet. You have to flush it, or maybe just take the lid off. Whatever it was, something flashed when I messed with the toilet. Next thing I knew, the menu popped up.”
“Cool,” Merle said. “You know, maybe the door has to be closed too. That would make sense.”
“So, we solved that mystery. You ready to get out of here now?”
“One sec,” Merle said, moving back to the mirror. “If that’s the room, then this should be…”
After he pushed another option, the view changed to the hallway.
“I think this is just outside the room. Either that shadow guy is gone, or he doesn’t show up on camera. I don’t know which is worse.”
“Doesn’t show up is way worse,” Liam said.
“You know what I mean. Okay, let’s get out of here while he’s gone.”
“We still don’t know where we’re going.”
“Good point. Give me a second.”
Merle tapped on and on. It was becoming clear to Liam that Merle had no idea what he was doing. He kept going back to the same menu items again and again, like he expected something different to happen. Just as he was about to call off the experiment and leave Merle behind, something new came up on the screen. It was a series of red lines. Some were parallel and some intersected. With another press, some of the lines turned green.
“Ah. Yup. I get it.”
“You get what?”
“It’s a map, don’t you see?” Merle asked.
“That doesn’t look like a map.”
“You have to combine the red and the green in your head. Watch.”
Liam still didn’t have any idea what Merle was talking about. He tried to combine the red and the green in his head, but the lines didn’t even match up. Nothing about it made any sense. The only good thing was that Merle had found something in the lines that made him confident about where they should go.
“Follow me."
They took a right after leaving the room, backtracking from what Liam could remember. Merle paused at each intersection, looking up at the ceiling and moving his lips before he pointed and started down a new path. He had the map in his head. Liam kept quiet, so he didn’t accidentally jar it out of there.
Moving through the cafeteria, Merle didn’t even seem to notice that the chairs were upright again. Liam kept a close eye on them as they walked by. They went through the door in the corner—it should have led to the kitchen area, with the big stoves, ovens, and sinks. Instead, they went down a flight of stairs and Liam almost felt seasick. His whole notion of the place had been upended. At the bottom of the stairs, Merle tugged on a heavy door. This wasn’t one of the sliding doors that the rest of the place had. This must have been a fire door or something. It was made of metal and even when Merle leaned back, pulling with all his weight, the door moved very slowly.
The lights weren’t on in the next room. Merle motioned, but Liam hesitated.
“Just go in. They’ll come on,” Merle said.
Liam took a hesitant step forward.
“But be careful,” Merle said just in time. Liam’s hand found the railing in the dark. “It’s a raised platform.”
The lights began to glow overhead and Liam looked down on rows of machines stretching out on the concrete floor. The room was massive, and they were on a little platform with a railing. To his left, several stairs led down. He followed as Merle quickly led the way.
“It’s through here, and then we have to climb,” Merle said over his shoulder.
“And you know what all of these things do?” Liam called.
“No!” Merle shouted over his shoulder. Now that they were headed out, Merle seemed almost joyful. His fear had been forgotten back when they had found the map.
Liam came around the corner of a machine and found Merle waiting for him by another heavy door. This one had a sign with a picture for stairs and more strange writing against a red background.
“This goes up to the exit. The elevators are right there,” Merle said, pointing and then swinging the door open and motioning for Liam to go first.
Liam went to the bottom of the first flight and looked up through the center. The stairs climbed upwards, the flights going back and forth until they disappeared in darkness above. Liam gave a low whistle at the sight.
“Yeah, the town is a higher elevation than the entrance.”
Liam put his hand on the railing and started to climb. As he reached the first landing, the lights on the next level above began to glow.
“So, wait, you carried the corpses up all of these stairs to the exit?” Liam asked. When he glance back, Merle was looking down at the stairs.
“Merle?”
When Liam paused, Merle slid to the side to move around him.
“You told me that you hadn’t tried the freight elevator. That’s not true though,” Liam said.
Merle slipped past him and began taking the stairs quickly, leaving Liam behind.
“Merle—just tell me what happened,” Liam said. He was already
breathing hard from running and then climbing. Now, Liam was starting to turn red with irritation at Merle. “There’s no reason to lie.”
Merle paused at the next landing.
“I figured you wouldn’t take the stairs if you knew that the elevator worked. Especially when you found out that the elevator can only be started from the bottom,” Merle said.
“We’re going to need that elevator,” Liam said. “Don’t you think we should get it going?”
Liam figured it out as soon as the question left his mouth. “You’re scared of the elevator. What did you see?”
“It doesn’t matter. Someone else can get it working when they get here.”
“Sure, except that if we can’t get it working, this place is useless to the group. As we discussed, they’ll have tons of people and supplies to move in. If there’s something wrong with the elevator, then they should be moving that stuff to another location, right?”
Merle’s only response was to slump his shoulders and sigh.
“Let’s go back down and make sure it will work, okay? I’m here with you. So far, we’ve seen some weird stuff, but it was all pretty harmless.”
Merle looked down.
“I’ll get it moving. You have to ride it up.”
“Fine,” Liam said.
If not for the strange display, Liam wouldn’t have believed that anything was happening. Merle had hit a series of buttons and then a little needle began to descend down an inverted triangle. As the needle moved the orange triangle disappeared to be replaced by a purple one.
“Once this needle gets to here, the elevator is all the way down. That’s when we can open the doors.”
“And there are no controls above?”
“There are controls up top, but when the car is all the way up, the doors to the elevator can only be opened from inside.”
Liam cocked his head.
Merle grabbed a strap and hauled it up.
“It’s weird. You’ll see.”
Once the outer door was up, Merle slid the inner door to the side. He stepped halfway onto the platform and gestured for Liam. Testing his weight on a careful foot, Liam stepped into the car of the elevator.