Succinct (Extinct Book 5)

by Ike Hamill

  Lisa moved closer. It wasn’t as bad as Ashley made out. The smell was dry and rotted, but it was an old rot. It smelled like whatever had gone bad in the building had gone bad a long, long time ago. Lisa stepped carefully into the entry. The ceiling vaulted up. Every corner was draped with a million old cobwebs. Those strands were coated in dust.

  “Hold this,” she heard Ashley say. When Lisa looked back, Tim was holding the door open so Ashley could brace it with a stick.

  Finished with his duty, Tim came through to stand next to Lisa. Penny hung back, sticking close to Tim’s leg. The dog didn’t like the smell anymore than Ashley did.

  “You going to stay out there?” Lisa asked her.

  Ashley poked a head in and then put her own arm up to her nose before she came in.

  “It’s awful,” Ashley said.

  Tim shrugged. “I’ve smelled worse. Hell, I probably smell worse right now.”

  Lisa blinked up at the lights. They were long, buzzing florescent tubes. Lisa couldn’t remember the last time she had seen those. For a moment, they had been a pleasant change. It seemed like forever since she had seen artificial light of any kind. They had been operating on nothing more than sun and firelight for… She didn’t even know how long it had been.

  “Electricity!” Ashley said.

  “Oh, holy shit,” Tim said. “It didn’t even occur to me—you’re right. Wait, does our gear work? Does the radio work?”

  “We left everything at the raft,” Ashley said. “I’ll run and go get the bag.”

  “No!” Lisa said. “It can wait. We check this place and then we go together.”

  “Yeah,” Ashley said, nodding. “Of course.”

  “That’s the same writing,” Tim said. “It looks the same doesn’t it?”

  Lisa looked at the sign that he was pointing to. It still took her a second to put it together.

  “You mean from the book?”

  “Yes, the one that I found in the cabin. Maybe this was the same person.”

  “We’re pretty far downriver. Maybe it was the same group,” Ashley said.

  “Yeah, that makes sense,” Tim admitted. “What do you think it says?”

  “Authorized personnel only,” Ashley said.

  They all looked at her. Even Penny seemed to be waiting for an explanation.

  “Isn’t that what it always says in buildings like this?” Ashley asked. “This room just has that bench and then the door with the sign. It must be just a place where you change your boots, hang up your coat, and then go inside. Places like this are always water treatment or power plants. They always have signs like that.”

  “If you’re right, then maybe we can use those words to start to crack the language in the book,” Tim said.

  “How about we go inside and find out what it actually is?” Lisa asked.

  Neither Ashley nor Tim moved. Lisa went past them and grabbed the handle. This door opened inward. As it did, the cobwebs and dust swirled in the air. She felt like she was disturbing a tomb that had rested undisturbed for a century.

  “Maybe I am,” she whispered.

  The smell was even stronger in this room. Lisa could see the source. The center of the room had long benches with cabinets underneath. The right side had tall cabinets for storage. Down the left wall, from the floor all the way up to the high windows, she saw rows and rows of cages, stacked vertically. She scanned the first few, barely glancing at the blankets and dolls in the cages, until her eyes landed on the fourth one.

  From the bars of the fourth cage, she saw something that made her heart flutter. The hand and forearm were pushed all the way through the bars, reaching for her. Pressed against the inside, she saw the fur-covered skull and the empty eye sockets, staring.

  Ashley sucked in a surprised breath.

  “Research facility?” Tim asked.

  “For what?” Ashley asked. “What happened to these animals? What kind of animals are they?”

  Lisa didn’t know what to say. She looked down the line of cages. Each one was a few feet tall and equally as wide. The doors were latched and locked. There were dozens of them, down the line, and they were stacked four high. Her eyes kept returning to the one with outstretched hand. The bones barely fit between the bars—there was no way that the fully-fleshed arm would have squeezed through. She imagined the terrified creature pushing its desperate arm hard enough against the bars to peel back the flesh.

  “They used to experiment on monkeys, back before everything,” Tim said. “I guess they were similar enough to humans to make for good test subjects.”

  “That’s terrible,” Ashley whispered. She walked toward the nearest cage, brushing cobwebs out of the way and looking down at the desiccated corpse inside. The only things left were hair, bones, and mummified skin.

  “Oh!” Lisa said.

  They both looked at her.

  “Nothing,” she said, waving her hand briefly. “I just figured out the arm.”

  She pointed to the cage that she couldn’t stop looking at.

  “When we were going to Donnelly the very first time, we got sidetracked into a little cabin. There, the body of a ranger started moving again. It was just the light, calling to him. Before, I couldn’t figure out how the monkey got its arm through the bars. It just occurred to me that maybe they started moving again too, when the light came.”

  Ashley took a quick step back from the cages with wide eyes.

  “Not just any light,” Lisa said. “The light from the embryo. You know that story.”

  “Of course,” Ashley said. Still, she didn’t move any closer.

  “The animals are the least of the mystery here,” Tim said. Using his crutch, he began his slow inspection of the long room. “Why is it here, in the middle of nowhere? Why are the lights still on?”

  “I’ve seen bulbs like this that still work,” Ashley said.

  “Sure, if they haven’t been used,” Tim said. “You burn these things constantly, and they’ll only go a few years, at best. Maybe these lights only come on at night, but there’s no way that they’ve been going for decades.”

  “Half of them are dead,” Ashley pointed out.

  Tim only shrugged and kept walking to the far side of the room.

  “These could be special lightbulbs,” Ashley said. “Brad got those old bulbs from traffic signals and he burned one from before I was born that lasted until I was twelve.”

  “Or maybe someone replaced them,” Tim said, pointing to a ladder. It was stored in the far corner.

  Lisa tilted her head back to look at the lights. She was trying to see if the cobwebs up there looked like they had been disturbed recently. She backed right into the countertop in the center of the room. It reminded her of the chemistry lab in her high school. That had been a terrible subject for her, but the lab had been fun. The theory behind atoms and bonds was inscrutable, but the labs had been nothing more than following recipes precisely. She had liked that part.

  Lisa opened the cabinet under the counter.

  The shelves held beakers and flasks. There were scales and test tubes. It was exactly like chemistry class.

  “But why?” Ashley asked, looking over Lisa’s shoulder.

  “Yup,” Tim called from the other end of the room. “This has been used recently. The dust is disturbed on the ladder.”

  “But why?” Ashley asked again.

  “Why what?”

  “Why would they need this type of gear if they were experimenting on animals? Wouldn’t you think that the drugs, or whatever, would be designed and manufactured elsewhere? In the place where the animals were kept, they would only have to administer and observe.”

  “I don’t know, Ashley. I never worked in a lab. Maybe this equipment was for studying the blood or something.”

  Ashley shook her head. “No. Dad took me to one of those places. They had machines for analyzing blood, urine, and feces. It wouldn’t be like this.”

  Their heads snapped up at the sound of rattl
ing metal. Tim had swung open one of the lockers and was rummaging through the contents.

  “We have only looked in one cabinet, Ashley,” Lisa said. “Why don’t you make a more thorough search of the place before you jump to the conclusion that something is amiss?”

  Ashley looked taken aback for a moment and then seemed to reconsider. She nodded and put her hands to work, moving down the line of counters, and opening the doors underneath.

  Lisa leaned back and tried to consider the bigger issue—the nature of the facility didn’t matter. Its existence was important though. Aside from a few blurry pictures, somehow stolen from a satellite, everyone had assumed that the land beyond the Outpost was nothing but water and plants. People had theories on what they used to call the burn. Opinions had narrowed in on the idea that the alien infestation had wiped out everything outside of a certain radius. All the plants and animals beyond the Outpost now had grown since then. But she was standing in a building that was evidence that not everything had been wiped out. Tim had reported a cabin as well, although Lisa hadn’t fully trusted his account.

  Tim was making his way back down the length of the building, opening and closing the lockers as he went. Ashley’s search took her the opposite direction. They were going to converge in the middle.

  Lisa waited to see what they would find, and wondered if it would help them solve the mystery.

  Ashley pulled something from one of the cabinets. She set it down on the counter and pushed her hair back behind her ears before she hunched over the thing.

  “What is it?” Lisa called.

  Tim turned to look.

  “I can’t tell,” Ashley said.

  Chapter 66: Liam

  “The door started to close and they got stuck. It’s some kind of motor,” Jim said.

  They chased him down the corridor, through an arch, and into one of the dining halls. Liam had seen it before, or at least one just like it. He still wasn’t sure of the layout of the place. Every time he felt like he was getting his head around it, everything seemed to flip the other direction.

  “We need a lever,” Mike said. He picked up one of the chairs as they raced through the cafeteria. When he felt the weight of it, he tossed it aside.

  Liam slowed to look at the chairs and then up at the ceiling that was designed to look like a fake sky. Besides the one that Mike threw, a few chairs were tipped over. This had to be the place he had seen earlier.

  “Through here,” Jim said. He was at the corner of the room, waving them on. Before they reached him, he sprinted ahead.

  Sariah was the first to follow. Liam brought up the rear.

  Mike was already at the pantry door by the time that Liam caught up. He was talking to Robby through the gap. The gas leaking from the pantry at the bottom of the door was a quickly dissolving fog, like an exhale on a cold morning. There was a hissing sound from behind Robby and Janelle.

  “We’re going to get it open. There has to be something around here we can use.”

  “Look for the control panel,” Robby said. “There has to be one somewhere. Liam, you know what to look for, right?”

  Liam blushed and shook his head. He was about to answer when it dawned on him—Robby had to be referring to the control panel from the bathroom. Maybe there was something similar. He hoped that wasn’t the only answer. Merle had been the only one who could break the code on that.

  Still, he scanned the room, eager to help. He looked for any kind of shiny surface. His eyes finally found one, above the sink. There was a mirror mounted to the wall above the sink. The sign wasn’t in English, but Liam had a pretty good idea that it said something about employees washing their hands.

  Sariah and Mike were pulling at the door, trying to get it to budge, while Liam moved to the sink. He tried the taps and swiveled the faucet. Nothing happened except that the water started to flow.

  “It has to be something unusual,” he told himself as he glanced around. “Or maybe it’s not the mirror this time.”

  It dawned on Liam that it would be easy to disprove that the mirror held the control panel. He got his fingernails behind one of the edges and tried to pry it from the wall. It would only move up. Shifting his grip, he managed to slide the mirror up a few inches until it unlatched. Behind it, he saw that there was a power cord going to a recessed outlet in the wall.

  “Yeah,” he said. He called over his shoulder. “I have something.”

  They were still trying to move the door with brute force. Liam kept looking. Next to the sink, the water supply lines were mounted down the wall. There were cutoff valves that would interrupt the supply to the sink. Liam didn’t know a lot about plumbing, but his hands went to the valves. He turned one off and then the other. The water from the tap slowed and then stopped. Liam shook his head. Turning the valves the other way, the water sputtered and spat before it ran again.

  “Damn it,” he whispered. Glancing over his shoulder at the others only made his heartbeat quicken. They were frantically trying to use a frying pan to pry open the door. When they lost their grip, it clattered to the floor. Jim looked like he was about to completely lose it. Janelle’s little face peered through the gap with darting eyes.

  “It has to be something,” he whispered.

  Liam laid his palm flat on the mirror, praying that anything would…

  “Oh!” he shouted, jumping back when the display lit up. It stayed on for a second and then began to fade away. Liam slapped his hand to it again to keep the thing awake. “Sariah? Mike? It’s here.”

  They rushed to his side.

  Liam tried to describe what Merle had done earlier, with the bathroom control panel.

  “It’s like a series of menus. You pick one thing and then the next,” Liam said.

  “Describe it again,” Robby called. He couldn’t see the display from his position and the power cord didn’t let them get it much closer to him. They tried to describe the symbols on the display, but Robby couldn’t make any sense of the things they told him.

  “Jim, you go. You tell me,” Robby said.

  “Okay,” Jim said. They parted and brought him right in front of the mirror so he could have a good view. “It looks like… I don’t know, it’s like a curvy thing sitting on top of a flat line.”

  “Does the line move when you touch it?” Robby asked.

  “Yeah,” Jim said. His finger was pressed to the surface of the mirror. “It kinda wiggles.”

  “Good. Slide to the right and then down,” Robby called. “Now what?”

  They went on, back and forth, for several minutes. Jim got better at his descriptions. He made reference to things that Robby understood but didn’t make any sense at all to Liam’s ears. From the glances that Mike and Sariah shared, they weren’t following either.

  “Like that yellow flower in the buckle,” Jim said to describe one of the complex shapes.

  Robby’s response was, “Good. That’s the one we want.”

  Liam squinted at the shape that the boy hit, puzzling over Jim’s description.

  A second later, they heard the hissing sound stop. It was followed quickly by Janelle’s happy laugh. Liam turned to see the door swinging open. He panicked when it looked like it was closing again, but the door was simply folding back in to disappear into the pantry. Robby came out with Janelle in his arms.

  “Thanks!” Robby said. He came forward and gripped Liam in a one-armed embrace. “Now we just have to figure out what triggered that thing.”

  “Maybe it was on a timer?” Jim asked.

  Robby shook his head. “I don’t think so. It would be too dangerous to lock people into the pantry and then flood it with gas on a timer.”

  “Speaking of which,” Sariah said. “Should we get out of here until this place airs out a little?”

  Robby and Mike both nodded.

  Setting his daughter down, Robby said, “I pray that you’ll remember this before you run off again?”

  She nodded solemnly. When he walked toward th
e pantry again, taking a deep breath before he crossed through the doorway, Janelle tried to tag along. Robby stopped her by holding up his flat hand. She froze like a statue and waited for her father to go inside and emerge with the crate from the bottom shelf.

  They all followed out to the cafeteria.

  “Some rations, it looks like, but also some manuals,” Robby said.

  They looked more like pamphlets to Liam. There were lists and pictures in that strange language, but the booklets were too small to have very much information. Robby thumbed through the short stack and then dropped them on the table. Janelle was already pulling the tab on the end of the bag to open the rations. She slid out a plastic container that had individually sealed compartments.

  “Gross,” Jim said, shaking his head.

  “Probably,” Mike said. “I bet they were nourishing back during the Cold War.”

  “This technology is out of place in any timeframe” Sariah asked. “There’s no telling how old or new it is.”

  Mike shrugged. “It’s hard to know what the military was capable of. They guarded their secrets from everyone, even their fellow citizens.”

  Robby had taken a chair and was moving his finger down the face of one of the pamphlets. His kids were looking over his shoulders. The three of them were sharing whispers as they tried to decipher the strange symbols.

  “This cafeteria looks like the place for our base,” Mike said. “Who wants to come with me to lead the others?”

  Sariah had wandered back to the entry to the kitchen. She was studying something over there. Liam volunteered. It seemed like everyone else was busy. The corridors looked different to him now. Liam was surprised at how immediate and profound the change was. When he had seen Robby and Janelle trapped inside the pantry, the door held open by a compressed metal pan, it had seemed like the bunker was attacking them.

  Then, Robby and Jim had deactivated the door. It was different from when Merle had used the map to find their way out. Merle’s ability to read the map had seemed almost like black magic. Robby’s approach had been methodical and logical. The people of Donnelly were colonizing and taming this place.