by Inmon, Shawn
When they reached the spot where the cabin had once stood, Alex tried to picture the layout in his mind. He walked to a specific spot and kicked at the grass. When he found nothing, he moved a few feet away and again scuffed at the grass. On his third try, he saw what he had been looking for—several pieces of straight wood mostly buried in the dirt.
Alex kneeled and pulled the grass and dirt away from it. After a few minutes work, he was able to wedge the trap door free. He looked down into the utter blackness of the space below the wood and shuddered. He remembered how disorienting the darkness had been in the tunnel. Even though he had simply crawled straight ahead, he had felt dizzy and lost.
“I’m going to crawl the tunnel again, but this time I am not going to do it in the dark.”
“Good. I will build us some torches,” Senta-eh said.
“It’s no fun crawling through there. The space is very tight.”
“Are you saying I am fat?”
Alex looked at her lean figure and laughed. “No one would ever say that. I’m just saying it is not fun crawling through the blackness.”
Senta-eh was already plucking dead grass here and there that she could wind around a limb and make a torch. “You might come out on the other side, see the door and step through it. Then I will not get a chance to say good-bye.”
“Here. Sit,” Alex said. Monda-ak dropped immediately at the command, but Alex ignored him.
Alex and Senta-eh sat cross-legged on the grass, knees touching. He reached out and held her hand. It was not the soft hand of someone who had never known hard work. It was calloused from practicing her archery and the skin was rough from sparring practice. They were the hands he loved.
“I would never leave you like that. I don’t ever want to leave you. I want to be with you, always. If I didn’t have Amy-eh waiting for me on the other side, depending on me, I would never leave you.”
Senta-eh smiled, but there was no joy in it. “No matter where you go, you lose. It is a horrible place to be. I am sorry. Your first obligation is to your daughter. That is what I want for you. But selfishly, I want you here with me. Always.”
Alex leaned forward and kissed her, long and slow.
When she sat back, there was happiness in her smile and sadness in her eyes. “We will see now if you stay or if you go. I’ll build a fire while you gather what we need for the torches.”
Alex wandered off in a slight daze, the feel of her lips—which were soft—on his.
If a door is there, can I step through it and leave her? A picture of Amy, still four years old in his mind, flashed. And how can I not?
He cut down two branches that they could use as the handles for their torches and returned to where Senta-eh had built a fire. Together, they wove grass and talked about anything other than the fact that he had just kissed her. When they had run out of topics enough to wonder about the weather, Alex said, “I think we’re good to go. I’ll drop in first. Stay close behind me—we don’t know what manner of creature might have found the tunnel and made it their new home.”
“I will be close enough behind that you will feel my flame on your posterior.”
He called Monda-ak to him. “We can’t take you with us, but we won’t be gone long. You know I would never leave you. I need you to stay here and guard the horses. If anything bothers them, kill.”
Monda-ak’s tail thumped lightly. He understood.
Alex scratched the dog behind the ears, and crawled head-first down into the tunnel.
Douglas Winterborne had been soft and pudgy, but obviously he wasn’t a large man, as the entrance to the tunnel was tight. Alex held the torch out in front of him and crawled his way forward.
Having some source of light made the tunnel somewhat less disorienting, but no more comfortable.
Alex crawled forward and down seven or eight feet, then the tunnel leveled out. At that point, it got a bit larger and Alex couldn’t help but wonder who had dug it for Winterborne. He was sure the man hadn’t dug it himself.
A new memory came front and center in his mind: Lanta-eh telling him that Draka-ak had killed all the craftsmen who had built his escape route from his quarters.
I can see Winterborne doing the same thing. Bastard.
After he had crawled for what felt like a very long time, he saw something ahead of him that he had totally missed on his blind crawl through the tunnel—a second tunnel that branched off to the right. Alex closed his eyes, remembering. He was sure he had clung to the left wall of the tunnel, so he likely had crawled right past it without even knowing it was there.
Alex stopped suddenly and, sure enough, felt a warmth on his posterior. She had not been kidding. At the spot where the second tunnel branched off, the tunnel also enlarged. He scooted forward and moved slightly off to the right, looking down into the right branch of the tunnel.
Senta-eh crawled up beside him, a question on her face.
“When I crawled this in the dark, I never saw this tunnel. I went right by it.” Alex’s voice was muffled in the close quarters and sounded unpleasant in his own ears.
“What do we do?”
“I need to see what is down there.”
“If what is down there has babies, or sharp teeth and claws, we might regret that choice.”
Alex considered that, but looked at the tunnel. The walls were smooth. They were dug by men, not by animals.
“It will be all right. I think there was something down there that Doug-ak wanted. I want to see what it is.”
Alex turned and crawled forward and, once again, down. He expected the tunnel to level off, but instead, it continued to descend. It was an eerie feeling, climbing so far down beneath the surface. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up as he realized they were twenty, fifty, then a hundred feet below ground. And still the tunnel descended.
It had been a warm day on the surface, but here, the temperature had plummeted and the humidity had risen. His skin felt slightly cold and clammy.
When he had lost track of how far down they might be, the tunnel finally leveled out and enlarged. It was wide enough that he could stand up. Senta-eh stood as well, but had to stoop to keep from bashing her head.
They crept ahead silently. The tunnel turned to the right and when they went around the bend, their torches illuminated a door.
Chapter Eleven
The Discovery
It was not a black, shimmering door like Alex had seen in his basement, or the one that Douglas Winterborne had been trying to reach when he was torn apart by dire wolves. It was an industrial steel door that looked as out of place in Kragdon-ah as a jet airplane.
“Is that one of your doors?”
Alex considered how to answer that question. “It is not a door that will take me back to my time. But, it is a door that looks like it is from my time, if that makes sense.”
Senta-eh firmly placed two fingers against her forehead.
Alex stepped forward and turned a knob. A stainless-steel knob that was a complete anachronism in this time.
It was not locked, but the door did not want to budge. Alex pushed his torch at the door and examined the casing. It looked to be solid steel.
“Stand back a bit,” he said to Senta-eh, then delivered a strong front-kick to the door, just like every hero in every cop show he had watched as a child.
The door pushed open a few inches with a screaming squeal that reverberated in their ears and down their spine. There was nothing but inky blackness beyond.
Alex kicked it again and it opened another half foot, then stopped, wedged tight.
Alex’s heart beat faster. It was so loud in his ears, he wondered if Senta-eh could hear it.
He pushed his torch forward into the room, followed by his right shoulder and head.
It was a control room.
A control room for what, Alex could not immediately guess.
The flames of his torch bounced off flat-screen monitors and he saw keyboards, mice, and what appeared to be CPUs.
There were coffee cups scattered around and a few dishes. It looked as if someone had been here just a few minutes before, and would return soon.
Alex was not a superstitious man, but he felt an unnerving presence in the room.
Alex glanced at Senta-eh to see if being close to this much actual stama was impacting her.
Her expression was blank. Everything in the room was so far beyond her comprehension, her frame of reference, it was meaningless.
The room was not large. There was one long counter with the computer equipment and a few landline phones. Off to the left, Alex saw another counter. A coffeepot, thick with dirt and dust, sat next to what Alex was sure had once been a microwave oven.
This place must have been sealed up tight to stay this pristine. Other than Douglas Winterborne and his tunnel-diggers, we must have been the only humans to step foot here in tens of thousands of years.
Off to the right, Alex saw a single window that opened into another room. The glass was so dirty he couldn’t see through it, but there was another door beside it. This door swung into the room easily.
When Alex saw what was there, he slammed the door shut with a certain superstitious dread of his own.
“A nuclear missile,” he mumbled, not realizing he had switched back to English.
“What?” Senta-eh asked.
Alex shook his head to clear it. He tried to bring what little he had ever known about these missiles back into his mind.
I think the delivery system would cease to be operational after just a few years. Certainly after a few decades or centuries. But what about the payload? I was a soldier, not a weapons tech. This is above my pay grade. I have no idea what the half-life of that stuff is. For that matter, I have no idea how many years into the future I’ve gone.
Alex had lived in Kragdon-ah for so long that he had slowly, piece by piece, forgotten about things from the twenty-first century. Everything except Amy, who was never far from his mind.
He turned to Senta-eh who stood like a statue in the middle of the room. Alex could see that nothing here made any sense to her.
He touched her shoulder to bring her focus back on him. “I think this was what Doug-ak was doing here. I think when he stepped through the door, he knew this was here. He thought that whatever was here would make him powerful.”
“He was not powerful. He was weak.”
“He was. And now he’s dead and that’s a very good thing, I think. Let’s go see if his door is still here.”
They walked to the door that led to the tunnel. Alex took one last look over his shoulder at the only surviving remnant he had seen of his own time. Of course, it was a weapon.
He stepped through and closed the door behind him.
The climb up was not difficult, and Alex felt glad to be away from what was hidden far below. Before long, they came to the spot where the tunnel had branched off, turned right, and continued on.
Their torches were not built to last long. Alex had thought they would be through the tunnel in just a few minutes. Their detour had delayed them, and they burned down until they went out completely. Alex was once again in the tunnel in total darkness. This time, though, he was not alone, and knowing Senta-eh was there made a difference.
They crawled along just a few more minutes and Alex saw the light that streamed down from the hole at the other end.
“I never thought about what would happen if the hole on the other end was filled in,” Alex said.
“Are you saying you cannot think of everything?”
Alex did not answer her, but picked up his pace. He remembered the last time he had crawled up and out of this hole, he had been worried that Douglas Winterborne would be waiting there with a gun aimed at his head.
This time, he popped up out of the hole and reached back for Senta-eh. Once on the surface, they scanned the area for any possible predators. They had not brought their primary weapons with them. Alex’s spear and Senta-eh’s bow were not a good fit with crawling and so they were left with the horses. They did not want to run into any other alpha predators like the dire wolves who had torn Winterborne apart.
Alex remembered the game path that wound through the forest. They soon found it and worked their way through the trees and brush. When they came to the edge of the forest, the vista was familiar. Another open plain, like a smaller version of what was on the other side of Winten-ah, then a sloping hill where the door had been.
“Let’s not risk exposing ourselves,” Alex said, pointing to the plain. “This is where I watched them tear Doug-ak apart.” He walked to a tall tree on the edge of the grassy area, looked up, and began to climb. Senta-eh followed easily behind him.
When he was forty feet up, everything opened up in front of him. His eye traced the path he remembered Winterborne taking, then past that, to where he had seen the door.
Again, the door was gone.
Where it had once stood, shimmering darkness against the natural world, there was only grass and a few scattered boulders.
“Is it there?” Senta-eh asked from just below him. Her voice was tight.
“No. It’s gone.”
“I am sorry, Manta-ak.”
He looked down at her, standing on the branch below. A slanting ray of the afternoon sun lay on her dirty and sweat-smudged lovely face. “We’ve done everything we can now. I have my answer. The doors are gone. There is no way back.”
Alex scanned the area, looking for the telltale sign of curved gray backs that would indicate the dire wolves had found them. There was no sign of them. They climbed down and dropped lightly to the needle-covered ground.
“We shouldn’t leave Monda-ak alone with the horses any longer than we have to,” Senta-eh said.
“I can find my way back there from here. I remember it now. We don’t have to go back through the tunnel.”
Alex was not certain whether it was faster to go through the tunnel or not, but he knew he did not want to pass right by the nuclear weapon buried there.
They took off at a fast jog. They followed the ridgeline until they got to the spot where the fence had once marked Denta-ah off from the rest of Kragdon-ah. They hurried around it and heard low growls coming from the area where they had left Monda-ak and the horses.
They sprinted toward the sound, with Senta-eh outdistancing Alex a fair bit. They each only had a single weapon—their stabbing knives. They had left everything else with the horses.
When they turned, their hearts leapt. Monda-ak stood, legs spread wide, head lowered, facing a pack of the coyotes that roamed the region. He stood directly in front of the horses, moving his head warily from side to side.
No coyote was a match for Monda-ak. No two were. As they ran, Alex counted five, though, and knew that many could tire the dog out and attack him from behind and the side.
As that thought crossed Alex’s mind, it played out in front of him. The biggest of the coyotes attacked from the front, but it was only a feint. Monda-ak sensed an opportunity and lunged forward, snapping, but the coyote was gone. Two others attacked from his flanks.
Alex whistled sharply and the dog leaped forward. The two attackers snapped at nothing but empty air. Monda-ak ran straight toward Senta-eh. When he reached her, he turned and snarled at the coyotes.
Coyotes only attack when they have everything in their favor, and with the arrival of Alex and Senta-eh, those scales had tipped away from them. They snarled and whined and circled, but with each step, they moved a little further away.
The horses’ eyes rolled back in their heads and they pulled and tugged on the reins that had been tied to a low-hanging branch.
Alex and Senta-eh went to them and gentled them, speaking quietly, stroking them, and waiting until they settled down.
Alex smiled at Monda-ak. “You are a brave boy. I know you would have killed all of them, but I am glad we arrived so you didn’t have to.”
Unlike the horses, Monda-ak returned to calm almost immediately. He laid in the grass, grinned, and let his
tongue loll. For all Alex knew, he had already forgotten the coyotes had ever attacked.
Alex spent the trip back to Winten-ah making plans. He had slept in the communal sleeping rooms since he had stepped through the door, but that didn’t feel right now. After the binding ceremony with Senta-eh, he wanted them to have something of their own. He decided he would ask Sekun-ak if he could build a small house at the base of the cliff for the two of them.
When they arrived back at the cliffs, the first thing Alex did was seek out Ganku-eh. She had been the chief of Winten-ah for many years. It had been her decision to form Alex’s army and send it into battle against Douglas Winterborne and Denta-ah. That decision had impacted both Winten-ah and herself greatly. While the army was gone, invaders had struck, killing many Winten-ah, including her husband, Banta-ak.
She had stepped down as chief and had been in decline ever since, not at all sure she had made the right decision.
Alex found her in the room at the top of the caves, staring out over the field where children once again played. She had once been among the most important people in the tribe. Now, she sat here all day, doing nothing. Her hair had gone gray and her intense vitality had disappeared. She seemed intent on simply marking time until her own death.
When Alex climbed the ladder into the room, she smiled wanly and said, “Gunta, Manta-ak. The door in Denta-ah is also gone, then?”
“Yes. I found something at Denta-ah, though. I know you think you made the wrong decision when you declared kunta on Denta-ah.”
Kunta was the ultimate price a tribe paid for developing technology—complete destruction.
Ganku-eh turned her vision back to the scenery below. Privately, she dwelled on this very subject, but publicly, she never spoke of it.
“I followed the tunnel Doug-ak used to try and escape back to the door. The first time I crawled through it, I was in total darkness. This time, Senta-eh and I brought small torches so we could see.”