Mind's Horizon

by Eric Malikyte

  5

  Nico gave him the signal, and Mathias smashed open the frozen grapheme cover that was protecting the bus's engine. It shattered into thousands of pieces like it'd been exposed to liquid nitrogen. Nico bent low, shined his flashlight into the engine, and felt around inside. Mathias held a knapsack to gather up the parts that Nico haphazardly tossed out of the compartment. There wasn't much time for finesse.

  "I'm going to try to remove the unit," Nico said. "Get the sled."

  Nico watched Mathias turn around, stumble up the hill, cut through the hole in the rusted chain-link gate, and motion for Hugo to help him untether the sled. He brought out the plasma torch on his belt and used it to sever the hoses and bolts holding parts of the engine in place. By the time he had it loose, Mathias had brought the sled back to him.

  "Winded?" Nico asked.

  Mathias nodded; he kept lurching over and breathing hard. "Forgive me, I'm not used to taking an EVA of this length."

  Nico shook his head and resisted the urge to tell the gangly bastard to man up; he let Mathias rest for a few moments before waving him over to help him lug the engine piece onto the sled. That piece only made up the engine block, less than a quarter of the entire machine. They spent about thirty minutes loading additional parts onto the sled before dragging it back up the hill.

  Nico spent several moments hooking the tethers back up to the sled, sealed up their packs, and had them take their seats.

  The extra weight slowed them down, but they managed to get back home using Mathias's GPS. Somehow, he'd managed to figure out the margin for error in the GPS signal and calculate how far off the location reticle would be. Nico hated to admit how useful Mathias had become, at least when it came to using his brains.

  Nico parked in front of the metal shutters and waved for Hugo to go find the lever to open them from the outside, then guided the snowmobile into the interior of the building and cut the engine.

  Hugo rushed inside and closed the shutter.

  "Eddy ain't back yet," Hugo said.

  Nico got off the snowmobile, shaking off some of the snow that coated the outer layer of his thermal jacket and pants. "I'll raise them on the CB; you two get that thing down into the tunnels and start thinking of ways to fix our generator problem."

  Nico descended through the hatch and left Hugo and Mathias to do some actual work for a change. He found himself in front of the CB again, and tuned into Ira's CB frequency.

  "Ira, do you read me?"

  No answer. He tried again.

  "Ira, it's Nico, do you read me?"

  He sank back into his chair and unzipped his jacket. If she was ignoring him again, or if Eddy was doing this on purpose, he'd... He tried to calm himself down.

  Failed.

  All he could do was wait now.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The storm clouds started to break up, giving way to patches of dim blue sky above. The snow itself stopped about halfway through their journey. Eddy took the snowmobile through what was once the 91 Freeway, where the snow would be smoothest. He took care to avoid large expanses of raised road, where the supports were weakest from the weight of the ice.

  The city of San Bernardino was practically entombed in the snow, and what buildings were still left standing were nothing more than skeletons of their former selves. Not that the city had been much better before the ice came; even before the war it had been no more than a decaying slum.

  Ira imagined she was a little girl again, riding passenger with her mom, peering out the window at the sights with a slushee squeezed between her tiny legs. The Carousel Mall—not much of a mall, just a decaying mausoleum waiting to be torn down and replaced by a new housing development that would never come. Now it was just a mound of snow and ice, the once prominent—at one time, iconic—sign barely peeking above the snow to a gray sky of twisting, indifferent clouds.

  The Inland Center Mall had suffered a worse fate when the war broke out. Even now, the ceiling was caved in from where explosions had detonated during an ugly fight between the Revolutionists and the Feds. With the snow covering it, it just looked like some frozen vortex to another world.

  There had been a bowling alley on H Street that Ira’s grandmother used to take her to. It had smelled of used gum and shoe polish before it finally closed down in the late 2010s, and now, who knows where the hell it was in that sea of white?

  The courthouse where her grandfather had gotten arraigned for his third DUI was also hard to find. Compared to Riverside, San Bernardino was practically a memory already.

  "My tío's garage used to be around here," Eddy said.

  "Yeah?" Ira said, resting her head against his back.

  Lena snickered.

  She could almost feel Eddy's eyes piercing through the layers of snow, peering down memory lane. "That's where I learned engines. He'd take me there after school and I'd help him reassemble them."

  "Isn't that against child labor laws?" Lena asked.

  "Shut up, Lena," Ira said.

  Soon they were climbing hills and ascending what they hoped was left of the old mountain road leading up to Big Bear. The treetops that were left standing just inches above the snow line. Here, their progress slowed to a crawl.

  It was damn eerie. This had all once been a forest, where bears and dear and rabbits lived. Campers and hunters alike would come here to enjoy the elements, get away from big city life. Now there weren't even ghosts, just miles and miles of ice marching up the incline, and the howl of the wind that swept razor-sharp icicles up on long sweeping arcs to nowhere. A never-ending cycle.

  Slowly, a massive, icy cliff came into view over the top of the next hill. It was only dwarfed by the snowcapped mountain peaks.

  Eddy brought the snowmobile to a stop. Ira got off and started walking toward the base of the cliff. She squinted her eyes, trying to see the top. It was a straight vertical climb, and there didn't look like there was any other way up.

  "Your heat signature stops at the top of that cliff," Eddy said.

  "Sweet!" she said.

  Ira's hands scurried and scuttled through her pack, snatching hold of her multi-spectrum binoculars. What her eyes couldn't see, the binoculars easily picked up in infrared.

  "What do you see?" Eddy asked.

  She saw a large heat signature emerge from beneath the ice. That was a surprise...somehow she’d imagined it'd be above ground. "I think it's inside the mountain."

  "Inside?" Eddy said.

  "Cannibals!" Lena said.

  Ira rolled her eyes from within her goggles and started digging through her pack for climbing gear. "Hope you didn't skip leg day."

  "Wouldn't that be arm day?" Eddy said.

  "Technically, it'd be cardio or both. I never went to the gym." She shuffled around in her pack, retrieved her climbing picks, and watched Eddy and Lena dig theirs out from their own packs.

  "This is stupid," Lena said. "We're going to die."

  "Always a possibility." Eddy walked over to the icy cliff face and stabbed a spike into it. The spike gave off a loud clang that sounded down the mountain. "Doesn't mean you need to remind us every five seconds."

  Lena crossed her arms and pouted.

  Ira laughed and followed Eddy up the cliff. Eddy was already ahead of her by several feet; she shook her head.

  No you don't, she thought. I'm getting there first.

  A smile formed beneath her facemask, stretching her chapped lips. Lena was trailing behind them, probably pissing and moaning with every foot she climbed. The cliff's top was only about a couple hundred feet above her current position, and she'd climbed higher before.

  "Gotta move faster, slowpoke," Ira said, chuckling. She could feel the adrenaline pumping through her veins as she climbed past Eddy.

  Ira began to climb faster; she could feel her pulse in her temples, could see her breath streaming from her facemask.

  The top was so close. The bright, bluish ice chunks sticking out near the top, clawing at the air, harshly co
ntrasted with the drifting gray clouds high above.

  She was going to make it!

  "Ira, don't—"

  "—Shit!" Ira felt her body drop several feet in an instant. She swung a desperate arm out, stabbing her pick into a solid piece of ice. She let one hand dangle off to the side and told herself not to look down, but—stupidly—she did anyway.

  The frozen landscape below her stretched on for miles. The ice sheets looked like an eldritch claw rising up from beneath the Earth to crush what was left of the city in its grip. She squeaked, tried to stifle her own fear of painting the ice below an unflattering shade of red, and stabbed her other climbing pick back into the ice, stabilizing herself.

  "Jesus," Eddy said. "Don't scare me like that!"

  "Right." She grunted, hoisted herself up, and kept climbing. "Because I did it on purpose!"

  Eddy reached the top first and helped pull her up over the edge of the ice wall. Ira dusted herself off and took a look around their surroundings, while Eddy stayed behind to help Lena.

  "Does it feel slightly warmer up here?" Ira asked.

  Eddy's grunts while heaving Lena up over the edge echoed up the hill toward the mountain's peak. "No idea."

  Ira walked forward, fastened her climbing picks around her belt, and waved her hands around. The temperature had risen several degrees—something you got real sensitive to when surrounded by constant biting cold. She could see a small dark area near the start of another incline. She wiped the ice away from her goggles—it was a cave! She ran over to it; her feet made scrunching noises in the fresh snow.

  She stretched her hand out to the cave. It was heat all right, faint, but it was there. She tested her footing in the cave mouth and proceeded forward.

  "Ira!" She heard Eddy's feet rapidly crunching across the snow. "Wait up!"

  The walls of the cave looked like they had been blasted out, melted at precise angles that it looked more like a subway tunnel than anything else. She could see faint hints of pipes and rock beneath the thick coating of ice, cascading into pitch-black darkness. She was starting to get the feeling that the heat signature was a generator of some sort, and if that was the case, Nico would be very happy.

  Deep into the tunnel, out of daylight's reach, she thought she saw movement. She couldn't be sure; but it was as if the darkness itself moved, like some great beast stirring after a long slumber. The memory of a nightmare she'd had flooded to the surface of her thoughts; the beast turning its head to her on a leathery hill before a gray sky. Her heart seized in her chest for half a moment, but when she squinted her eyes harder, she saw nothing. Panicked, she sparked a flare, turning the interior of the tunnel a bright orange-pink.

  The tunnel was empty. It had only been her imagination.

  Still, for a moment, a nameless fear crept upon her, like a whisper in her ear.

  "Damn it." Eddy came up behind her, then bent over hands on knees and caught his breath. "Don't run off like that!"

  "Sorry," Ira said. "I got excited."

  Eddy checked behind himself. "Yeah, but as annoying as her bitching is, Lena might have a point. I mean, what the hell could be buried out here that gives off a heat signature like that?"

  "Careful, there...I’m getting the strong urge to run ahead and leave you both behind." A tiny voice inside her told her to listen to him, to listen to her fear. Ira silenced it. This was her moment.

  "All I'm saying is that we need to be careful, okay?" Eddy looked around himself, a faraway look in his eyes. "This would have been right in the middle of the forest. If that's the case, I don't imagine many people knew about it."

  "Uh-huh, exciting, right?" Ira continued walking toward the end of the tunnel.

  It was a strange mix of emotions she was feeling. She was excited, yet, despite that, there was this sinking feeling in her gut. She tried to tell herself that it was just nerves.

  "Ira." Nico's voice called over the CB. "Ira, goddamn it, answer!"

  Both of them stopped in their tracks and looked at each other. Ira imagined both of their expressions read something like, oh crap, we did it again.

  Eddy scrambled for his CB receiver, which was wrapped up inside his pack to keep it from freezing over; Ira's hands covered his as he raised it to his mouth to respond.

  "Might be better if I answer," Ira said.

  "Right..."

  Ira grabbed for her own CB, squeezed it tight. "Hey, what's happening, bruh?"

  Eddy grabbed at the CB, wrestling with her for it for a moment. "Are you clinically insane!"

  "Yes, now let go."

  "Thank God," Nico said. "I've been trying to raise you for an hour straight! Where the hell have you been?"

  Ira pulled the CB away from Eddy's grip, giggling like an idiot. She couldn't help herself—for once she was excited.

  "Something funny to you, Ira? You better have a good fucking excuse for doing this to me again. I thought you were dead!"

  "We found a heat signature in the mountains."

  "Mountains? Which mountains..."

  "North."

  "Like, Big Bear?"

  "Yeah."

  "You idiots went all the way out there? Do you realize how dangerous that is?"

  "Yeah, we survived, so..."

  Nico’s voice cut out for a moment. Ira could imagine him cursing and stabbing his knife into his desk over and over again. "Do you need assistance?"

  "Not yet. We're inside a tunnel, approaching the source."

  "I'm getting the others, you're going to give me your exact location."

  "I got Eddy with me." She rolled her eyes. "Oh, and Lena. I guess she's useful too."

  "No, Ira, give me your latitude and longitude."

  "Fine." She looked up at Eddy, cut her CB off.

  "What are you looking at me for?" Eddy asked.

  She pushed his CB into his chest and walked off. "Nico needs the latitude and longitude for this place."

  "Seriously?" Eddy said. "And where the hell are you going?

  "Where the hell is my sister going?"

  "Down the rabbit hole."

  "Give me the goddamn coordinates!"

  Eddy and Nico's voices became echoes in the distance. The buzz from the CB stopped as Ira neared the end of the tunnel. She looked up, cleaned her goggles again, and was greeted by a set of black metal doors.

  "Jackpot." Ira ran her gloves over the surface of the doors, felt out their grooves. That unconscious fear returned, a fear that was rooted in government conspiracies, alien abductions, and that ancient fear of the unknown that lies dormant within everyone.

  After a time the sound of Eddy's footsteps came scrunching up to her. They stared at the black metal doors together for a while.

  "I've never seen a door like this," Eddy said.

  "Yeah, most doors open inward!" Ira covered her mouth dramatically, and Eddy flipped her off.

  "You know what I mean," Eddy said.

  "No, no I really don't."

  He sighed. "This looks like something the Feds put up, like a base from the war."

  "Which probably means it'll have food and extra supplies?"

  "Maybe." He stared at the door, fists forming. "Or angry Feds."

  "'The war's over, we're all just folk now.'" She tried not to grin too wide.

  "Yeah, okay, maybe I'm just being paranoid."

  "Ya think?"

  "Why do I hang around with you?"

  "Cause you love me."

  "Oh, God, if you guys are gonna have a moment," Lena said as she approached from behind, "please don't."

  "How nice of you to join us," Eddy said. "We were just talking about how much we missed your beaming positivity."

  "Whatever," Lena said. "What is it, we found a door, now we're all happy and shit?"

  Eddy pointed at the door's complex grooves and rusted markings. "This door is probably the entrance to a Fed facility of some kind."

  "Cannibals?" Lena said.

  "No cannibals?" Ira said.

  Eddy turned bac
k around to face the doors—which seemed more like some kind of gate, now that Ira thought about it—and tore his facemask off. There was a single seam down the middle, so they probably receded into the interior of the wall.

  "How're we gonna do this?" Ira asked.

  "I'm thinking," Eddy said.

  She watched Eddy scratch his head through his thermal hood.

  There were exhaust vents off to the left and right of the doorway, which explained where the rise in temperature had come from. Ira looked around for anything that might allow her to access the door, get inside. The access panel looked worn, rusted, and all the screens seemed to have burnt out not long after the ice hit.

  Her eyes drifted to the vents, then down her own slender frame, and back to the vents.

  "Maybe I can fit through," Ira said.

  "You're welcome to try." Eddy swung his hand out, gesturing toward the vent.

  Ira turned her pack over, and the sound of tools slapping against the ice echoed through the tunnel. She scooped up her crowbar and approached the exhaust grate. The grate was solid metal, but the ice and sub-zero temperatures had caused it to weaken significantly over time.

  Ira wedged the crowbar between the wall and the metal grate and pulled on it with all her strength, but it wasn't enough. She sat down and pouted.

  It had been one hell of an effort, and all she managed to do was rattle it.

  "Finished?" Eddy was grinning like a jackass.

  "You could help me, you know?" Ira said.

  "I could, but if this is a Fed facility, you're not going to get in that way anyway without something better than your crowbar."

  "Damn it."

  She scooped up the CB receiver, squeezed it tightly. "I hope Nico hasn't left yet..."

  "I'll raise him." Eddy grabbed for his CB, walking past Lena to gain some privacy.

  "Tell him to bring his plasma cutter!" Ira said, putting her CB back.

  Eddy gave her a nod.

  After a few minutes of back and forth from Eddy and Nico, he dropped the receiver from his face and cut the transmission—put the receiver back in his pack.