Succinct (Extinct Book 5)

by Ike Hamill

  Chapter 70: Liam

  “I don’t know,” Liam said, studying the lines. “It could be?”

  “Relax,” Robby said. “You’re doing fine. Describe the passages from the beginning. You came down through a hatch and then you went down a ramp?”

  “Yeah, the problem is that after the murder room there were so many twists and turns. It was all designed so that people could hide in little nooks and jump out to defend the place. I think it was intended to be confusing. I lost my sense of direction in those halls, so I have no idea.”

  That wasn’t the only problem. The biggest issue that Liam was having with the map was the way that the passage led to the first cafeteria. It was coming from the wrong side, no matter how he twisted around and tried to reconsider it. Robby wanted to know how to get back to the control room, but everything on the display suggested that the hall to that area didn’t exist.

  Liam put his finger on the cafeteria. The display was touch-sensitive, so when he laid a finger on it, the room lit up with a menu of strange words at the bottom.

  “I really want to say that this is the one where we came in. It’s the one where the chairs fell over.”

  Robby’s eyebrows went up. “Okay?”

  “But I swear that we came in this way,” Liam said. He trailed his finger to the left. When he did, the lines on the map reconfigured themselves. It wasn’t the easiest thing to read in the first place. It wasn’t a neat, clean representation of the halls and rooms. Instead, the boundaries were comprised of bands of different colors. Robby had explained it three times before Liam was able to see it.

  Once the map began to reconfigure itself, Liam lost his comprehension of it again.

  “I don’t know. It’s all changing now.”

  “No, that’s good!” Robby said. He reached out and lifted Liam’s hand away so he could see. “It’s showing us a new hall now.”

  “Oh! Yes, that makes sense. This would lead back to the control room,” Liam said, finally understanding. He was shocked when Robby grabbed his wrist and began to pull.

  “Come on, it might not last very long,” Robby said.

  Liam didn’t know what he meant, but he followed Robby.

  Sariah was sitting in the room, watching the kids sleep. Robby and Liam passed through silently, with Robby gesturing that they would be gone for a few minutes. She nodded and they slipped through the door to the hall.

  Robby headed right, over Liam’s objections.

  “I thought that…” Liam started.

  “Don’t think of the map as literal,” Robby said over his shoulder as he jogged. “We’re going to the cafeteria where the chairs fall over. That’s the one where the passage will have opened.”

  “Yeah?” Liam asked. Robby didn’t reply.

  They wound left and then right and then through the entrance to the cafeteria that the group was using as its headquarters. A couple of people were eating at a table near the kitchen. The group had divided into shifts so some people would always be awake, in case something changed.

  Robby paused and said, “Did you hear something from over here?”

  The couple nodded, gesturing toward the hall that led over to the other residence wing. Robby smiled and darted off. Liam was still standing there when Robby paused and waved him ahead.

  “Come on,” Robby said. Then, to the couple, “If we don’t come out in ten minutes, can you tell Mike where we went?”

  They nodded.

  After a turn, it all started to make sense to Liam again. He recognized the final hall and then the door. He was so excited that he drew even with Robby as they approached.

  “Yes, definitely,” he said to the question that seemed behind Robby’s gesture.

  Robby nodded with a smile.

  They swiped the door and it opened.

  Liam let out a relieved breath. He had thought that he was going crazy. They had been up and down corridors and studied the map a dozen times. Each time, it seemed more and more likely that Liam had just dreamed the whole control room. Jackson and Merle weren’t there to back him up, so he imagined that he could see skepticism building behind Robby’s eyes. Seeing the control room again was like vindicating all his memories.

  Robby was already roaming through the room and looking at all the panels.

  “It’s all color coded,” Liam said.

  Robby nodded, barely hearing him. Liam realized that he probably didn’t need to say a word. Any information he could give, Robby would have already figured out.

  “This is good,” Robby said, eventually. “This is very good.”

  Liam didn’t understand why. The controls seemed pretty utilitarian. There were buttons to turn on the subsystems for power, water, air, and various other things, but they had already been activated. It didn’t seem like there was anything more to do there.

  Robby finally finished his examination of the place and he turned back to Liam.

  “When you guys were still down in New York,” Robby said, “we found a structure under the old ranch in Donnelly. It was what Merle calls a ‘wet bunker.’ Those facilities were used to monitor the alien seeds left behind and try to predict when the next egg would be implanted.”

  Liam nodded. He had heard some of this before, but it had always confused him. Things that happened when he was a child often sounded like fairy tales of a world that had never really existed. To him, all that time had consisted of waiting. He had a hard time really believing that other people had been engaged in anything besides waiting for the end to come, like he had.

  “They were somewhat designed based on the oldest structures known to serve that purpose—like Stonehenge or the pyramids.”

  This was more fantasy from a world that Liam had barely ever known.

  “But this place was constructed by a different faction completely. The people who made this place believed in the supremacy of humans and the only threat they regarded as real was a threat that came from humans themselves.”

  “War?” Liam guessed.

  “Yes, or accident. Nuclear annihilation or an accidentally triggered pandemic.”

  Liam crossed his arms, suddenly feeling cold.

  “For us, that’s a good thing. They constructed that part of the bunker to be a self-contained living environment. The other part of the bunker is for observation and defense.”

  “Observation of what?”

  “The exterior,” Robby said. “Do you see how all the bunker controls are on these two walls?”

  Liam nodded.

  “Well, these two would be for defense and monitoring.”

  “But there’s nothing to look at or do,” Liam said. The walls were blank.

  Robby nodded. “Unmanned, they wouldn’t expose the controls or monitoring because they wouldn’t want an enemy to stumble upon them. When the last of the commanders left their stations, the panels closed.”

  Liam shrugged. He supposed that it all made sense, but he didn’t know what good any of it did for them. Regardless of whether there were more controls, they didn’t have access to them.

  Before he could state any of that, Robby pointed to him.

  “You’re the key,” Robby said.

  “Me?”

  Robby moved alongside Liam and put an arm around his shoulder.

  “Have you noticed that things work for you here that don’t work for other people?” Robby asked.

  Liam shook his head.

  “The panel in the kitchen, the big exit, and the map in my quarters—they all responded to you when they didn’t respond to anyone else.”

  “Oh?” Liam asked. He hadn’t noticed that at all.

  “I believe that the place imprinted on you when you first came in.”

  “But you said that the controls would be hidden from invading enemies. Why doesn’t it think of me as an invading enemy?”

  “I’m not sure yet, but we’ll figure it out. You must have done something inadvertently that unlocked the bunker’s ability to imprint,” Robby said,
leading him toward the blank wall.

  “Oh?”

  “So, somewhere on this wall, I’m guessing that you’re going to find a trigger.”

  “How?”

  “That, I’m not sure of. If I had to guess, it’s only going to take you laying your hand on the wall in the right place and it will pick up on your signal. You’ll know right away. The same way that the doors work—sliding to the side at a touch—this panel will work. Maybe they will unfold from the wall or light up or something. When that happens, I want you to come through that door and let me know.”

  “What?” Liam asked. He turned toward Robby with wide eyes. “What do you mean?”

  “I might be wrong, but I’m almost certain that it’s not going to work if I’m in the room.”

  “Why?”

  “The system doesn’t know me. They were clever about this kind of thing. They would have made it so a commander couldn’t be coerced into turning on the controls. If an unknown person is in the room, I’m guessing you won’t be able to unlock it.”

  Robby took his arm from Liam’s shoulder and stepped away from him.

  “But what if I can’t get out of here once you leave? What if I can’t find my way again?”

  “You’ll be fine.”

  “What if the lights go out?”

  “Liam, you can trust me. I’m only going back to the cafeteria. I’m sure that will be far enough. I’ll give you ten minutes and then I’ll come and check on you. All you need to do is start at one corner and systematically work your way to the other. Divide the wall into an imaginary grid.”

  Robby moved to the door where they had come in and Liam almost ran after him. Robby only paused to make a star on the door with a marker and then he returned to Liam’s side.

  “Take this,” he said, handing the marker to him. “When you find the spot that opens it, make a mark, okay?”

  It wasn’t okay at all, but Liam didn’t know how to say it. He didn’t want to let Robby and everyone else down. At the same time, all he wanted to do was go back to his room and curl up on the bed, safe from everything that might be swirling around in the open air above. He didn’t want this responsibility and he didn’t want to be in this control room, so far away from everyone else.

  Robby seemed to read the fear on his face.

  “It’s okay,” Robby said. “You know what? When Merle and Jackson get back, I’m sure one of them can do it. The place could have imprinted on them as well.”

  Liam frowned.

  “That’s a shitty trick,” he said.

  Robby raised his eyebrows.

  “I’ll do it.”

  Robby didn’t wait. He probably wanted to get out of there before Liam changed his mind. The door slid shut behind Robby, leaving Liam alone in the control room. He turned slowly, looking at the panels that had started the place up and then over to the blank wall, wondering if Robby could be right. He usually was. That was the problem with Robby—even when he explained things, they were never completely transparent. It was like he was holding back on some of the details, or maybe assuming that the other person was picking up on things that they weren’t.

  Liam moved to the wall, deciding to start at a corner, about waist high. He put his hand on the wall and brushed along, hoping for some response.

  He blushed at an embarrassing memory. When he was a teenager, one of Corinna’s friends, Kris, had come over when Liam was alone. He hadn’t answered the door. Back then, he had days when he didn’t feel comfortable answering the door. Kris had come in anyway.

  “Hey, Lee,” she had said. His name was already short—he never understood why people wanted to shorten it more.

  “Hey,” he had said.

  It wasn’t so much what she had said after that, but the look on her face. He had known right away that she wasn’t there to check in on him or have a polite conversation. She had been there to take something from him, and he hadn’t been sure that it was something he wanted taken. Unfortunately, his brain hadn’t been stronger than his hormones, and he had let her do things and he had done the things she asked.

  He had the same feeling in the control room—ordered to feel up the wall without being asked if it was something that he wanted to do. The wall wasn’t responding at all to his random fumbling. It was like Kris all over again. Eventually, she had taken control and done what she wanted. Liam hadn’t seen her again after that day.

  He came back to the present, realizing that he was just standing there, staring at the blank wall.

  “I need the panel open,” he said with a timid voice.

  Nothing happened.

  “Now,” he said—still nothing.

  He moved toward the door with the mark, prepared to go and tell Robby that nothing had worked. It hadn’t been long enough. He couldn’t really say that he had given it his best effort when it had only been a minute or two since Robby had left. Liam sighed and turned back to the panel with the environmental controls. He only looked at them, afraid to touch anything. Their whole community was living in the warren of passages and rooms that were controlled by those switches. If he accidentally turned off the air supply, everyone might die.

  Liam blinked as he considered that. They had been fighting for so long to stay alive. All their plans and careful work had come to this. Everyone was trapped underground, hiding from an invisible and irrational force. It was just like before, only worse.

  His finger hovered over the blue square, wondering how long they would all be able to breathe if he hit it. He could press the blue one and then wait a minute or two before he hit the yellow one to kill the lights. It was never something that he would even contemplate doing, but with the switches right there, some part of him was dying to know what it would feel like to exercise that much control.

  He jerked his hand back and then stuffed both of them in his pockets. Robby had been a fool to leave him alone in that place.

  Robby had been a fool.

  That idea alone made him happy. Everyone in their community—from the oldest down to the youngest baby—seemed to have an advantage over Liam. They had all grown up with parents and rules. The world had been a solvable puzzle for every single one of them. Liam never once imagined himself to be the same as any of them. It was amazing to think that Robby had been dumb enough to leave Liam in this place alone—the one place with power of life and death over everyone. If Robby could make that kind of mistake…

  He turned back around to the blank wall.

  “Open the panel,” he said, taking a step toward it. He knew the thing could hear him. Maybe it had imprinted on him, maybe it hadn’t, but he knew that it was listening.

  “I said, open it.”

  He wasn’t sure what he intended to do—hit the wall? Kick it?

  He didn’t have to find out. With one more step, a seam appeared in the middle of the wall. A moment later, with another seam, a rectangular portion of the wall began to push out and then tilt. When the lid slid back, he saw all kinds of buttons and surfaces. Next, another portion of the wall began to slide upwards. This revealed a shiny surface at eye-level that lit up from behind. It was a monitor. All the words were in that strange language. The green-tinted views were all from aboveground. He was watching security camera feeds from the outside world. Warm safety washed through him. Nothing up there could hurt him. He was safe in here.

  “I just need a chair,” he said, glancing around.

  He turned for the door—there were chairs in the cafeteria. Glancing back at the controls, Liam changed his mind. Before he left, he wanted to see if he could make sense of any of the buttons. It was his discovery. Robby hadn’t been able to open the thing, and Robby’s notion of how to get it done had been all wrong. The discovery belonged to Liam, and he deserved first crack at looking at all the controls.

  On the left, the buttons were laid out in a grid. Aside from the colors, they weren’t marked with anything. It wasn’t until he hovered his finger over one of them that he saw the markings. The symbol
s on the buttons didn’t even appear until his finger was close enough to touch it.

  There were also rectangles that seemed to work as touch sensors. Hovering his fingers over those, they lit up with little circles beneath the pads of his fingers. Liam wondered what pressing them might do.

  He tried it.

  The view on the screen in front of him changed immediately. Instead of showing a view of the highway overpass, it showed the interior of the ambush room. The next screen was a bunch of bar graphs, fluctuating up and down to some slow rhythm. Liam cycled through the rest of the views, trying to figure out what he was looking at. A lot of them were labelled at the bottom. He could only wonder at what the symbols said. Robby had figured out some of the language, and he guessed that Merle had a working knowledge of it as well. The characters weren’t broken up into discrete forms. Some of them looked like a dozen different shapes all strung together, reminding Liam of cursive. Corinna had tried to teach him that black art, but it seemed like she barely knew what she was talking about when it came to cursive writing.

  He turned at the sound of footsteps. He hadn’t even heard the door open.

  Robby was carrying two chairs.

  “I thought we might need these.”

  “How did you even know that I would get the panel open?”

  “I didn’t, but I figured that if you did, we would need these.”

  Liam saw Robby’s eyes on the buttons and screens.

  Chapter 71: Corinna

  Working her way down through the mountains, Corinna looked for a good place to stop. Her shoulders were worn out from fighting the motorcycle. If she didn’t see a place soon, she was just going to have to pull over and set up a tent. Clouds had moved in overhead, erasing the stars and making the moon a fuzzy orb. There was nothing worse than waking up in the rain.

  Her headlights picked up a flash of orange paint on the road and Corinna mashed the brakes, slowing the motorcycle as fast as she dared. It had been a while since she had taken the western route down to the Outpost. Usually, she liked to take her time and go down through Gladstone. That route was longer, but it meant that she could use the roads that Brad and Robby maintained. This western route was only marked when people had spare time.