Subterranea

by P. K. Hawkins

  Murky had to hold back tears as she spoke. “Are Mom and Dad really dead?”

  The woman cussed softly to herself. “Jesus, is that really what they told you?” She paused, obviously giving careful thought to her answer. “No, your parents aren’t dead. Probably. Not yet, at least.”

  “What do you mean, not yet?” Laura asked.

  The woman paced around a couple of times before she appeared to come to a decision. “Okay, look. I don’t care what’s classified or not. You four obviously have a right to at least have a clue about what’s going on.”

  “Who even are you?” Henderson asked.

  “For now you can call me Agent Larson.”

  “Agent for what?” Jesse asked. “The FBI?”

  Agent Larson smiled a little at that. “We’ll just say that for now. I’d give you the real answer, but…”

  All four of the kids spoke at once. “It’s classified.”

  “Now you’re starting to get it. As for what’s going on, well, most people probably wouldn’t be surprised to know that the government has been doing a lot of secret things as part of the Cold War. We’ve got to try to stay ahead of the Russians.”

  “So the Russians did this?” Murky asked.

  Larson shook her head. “This wasn’t the Russians. This… this was our fault. There was a secret project some way away from here. Discoveries were made, and they were being studied in a hope that we could weaponize them. In the latest attempt to study the phenomena, a miscalculation was made. Something that was supposed to happen in the lab went elsewhere, and… well…”

  “Please don’t say ‘it’s classified,’ again,” Henderson said.

  “It is, but… honestly, I don’t care anymore. I’ve been assigned to the project as a liaison, but no one has been listening to me when I said things were getting out of control. It’s my military counterparts who are responsible for blowing the lid off this thing. The responsibility for people knowing is no longer on me.”

  She looked around at a few of the supply crates that had been haphazardly stacked in the tent and went to sit down on one of them. “It’s called Project Subterranea. It’s an offshoot of a previous project that investigated the possibility of alternate realities and other dimensions. Subterranea refers to a specific dimension that was discovered. We don’t know if it’s from Earth in another time period, or a different planet altogether, or a parallel world or universe. All we know is that the portals we’ve discovered open onto some kind of underground world, a world full of things that we have only begun to imagine.”

  Jesse looked at her with unabashed wonder. “Really? That doesn’t sound like a bad thing at all. That sounds awesome!”

  “It was, except then something on the other side realized we were poking holes into their world.”

  “What kind of something?” Laura asked.

  “Ant-like creatures. Giant ones, the size of humans, except with eight legs instead of six. They walk on the back four and use the front four like arms.”

  “Really?” Murky said with undisguised interest.

  “That’s even more awesome!” Jesse said.

  “I don’t know what’s crazier,” Larson said. “That I’m just blabbing away government secrets to a bunch of kids, or that you’re believing all of this without calling me a liar.”

  “I’ll call you a liar if you want,” Henderson said. “I can call you a lot worse things than that, too.”

  “Not helping, Henderson,” Laura said.

  “The first time we opened the portal and found them on the other side, they swarmed out and kidnapped a large number of our personnel as well as our scientists. I tried to convince everyone that it was too dangerous to open the portal again, but the general in charge of the military side of the project was convinced we could get some of these ants and, I don’t know, breed them as super-soldiers or something. He was always pretty nutty. So they programmed the machinery to open again, this time with plenty of soldiers on the other side to capture some. It was not as easy as the general expected. Some other giant creature came out of the hole first and wiped out most of his forces before the ants invaded again. This time, the machinery used to open and close the portal was damaged. We suspected the portal was going to open again by itself, but not in the lab any longer.”

  “So it just opened in the middle of Kettle Hollow?” Laura asked.

  “That was the flash and rumble you felt. The portal to that underground world is right in the center of your town. No one has gone into town yet, but surveillance suggests it’s just like at the lab. The ant things poured out of it and grabbed everyone, then pulled them back in. We have no way of telling yet if anyone in the town escaped them. Except for you four, that is.”

  “Why are you still surrounding the town then, if it’s over?” Laura asked.

  “In the lab, the portal would only stay open for so long. There were fail-safes in place to close it after a maximum of fifteen minutes. But surveillance shows that it’s not closing. There’s no way to shut it down, and no way to be certain more things, things much worse than giant ants, might not come out.”

  “What happens to the people after the ants take them?” Murky asked.

  “We have no idea. We’ve never sent anyone in after them. All we know is that the underground tunnels go on for a long way, and that something down there is providing light so that it’s not completely dark.”

  “And you’re not going to send anyone in after them now?” Jesse asked.

  “The general in charge of the military side of the operation has forbidden it. Their goal is to contain anything trying to come out, and to find a way to close the portal permanently. They’ve decided that the townsfolk are an unfortunate but necessary loss.”

  “Necessary?” Laura asked incredulously. “Those are our family and friends!”

  “I’m sorry,” Agent Larson said. “I truly am. But there’s nothing more I can do.”

  They were all quiet for a moment before Henderson said, “We could do it.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You could let us go,” Laura said. “We could be the ones to go into the center of town and go in looking for them.”

  “You’ve got to be joking,” Agent Larson said.

  “What harm could it do?” Laura asked.

  “Wha… what harm? Kid, this is not a game. If any of you go down there, you’ll be killed.”

  “And if we hadn’t been out biking by the quarry, we would be down there anyway and still killed,” Laura said.

  “Yeah, think of the paperwork if you keep us up here,” Jesse said. “Also, think of the fact that we actually know what’s going on now and we can totally go tell the news.”

  “No one would believe you,” Larson said.

  “If we go down there and don’t come back, then you don’t have to worry about whether or not that’s true,” Laura said.

  Agent Larson appeared to think about this for a few seconds. “Okay, look, here’s what I’m thinking. This is nuts, but they won’t let me send anyone down that’s more capable. Maybe, though, there’s a way to help you that might give you a very small chance to actually do this.”

  She checked the labels on a couple of the crates until she found one marked “Experimental Communications.” It was metal and locked shut, but Agent Larson pulled a key out from the pocket of her suit and unlocked it.

  “Okay, wait, so you’re actually going to let us do this?”

  “I’d rather not be responsible for the deaths of four kids, but whatever cover story my agency concocts to hide what happened here tonight, I don’t actually trust that they wouldn’t make you vanish anyway just to keep it consistent. Being honest here, if I don’t let you go try this, then you may very well be on borrowed time anyway.”

  “This is nuts,” Jesse said, but he didn’t seem afraid. Murky was the only one of them who seemed frightened of what could happen, but she didn’t want to be the weak little one among them.

  “Here.” Larson
pulled out something that looked similar to a walkie-talkie, but it was much larger and heavier. “One of the things we developed for Project Subterranea was a way to communicate that wouldn’t be interfered with by all the stone in the way. It’s experimental and expensive, but maybe if you take this, I’ll still be able to communicate with you while you’re down there. I don’t know how much advice I’ll be able to give you, but at least you won’t be doing this completely blind.”

  Laura took the device and put it in her backpack. It was a tight fit with all the homework she already had in there and the device’s antenna poked out through the open zipper, but she would be able to carry it that way.

  “Okay, but how do we get out of here and back to town?” Henderson asked. “Are you just going to walk us in like that’s a totally normal thing to do?”

  “I’m going to walk out the front flap,” Agent Larson said. “Wait exactly two minutes, then go to the back of the tent and lift up the canvas to get under it. There’re guards there now, but I’ll make sure there aren’t when you leave. The soldiers grabbed your bikes, so you should find them back there, too. There’s a dirt road just to the east of here. The entrance is blocked off from the highway, so the military isn’t wasting any man power to guard it.”

  “That will take us most of the way back in to town,” Laura said.

  “Once you’re in town, you won’t be able to dilly-dally,” Agent Larson said. “We may be keeping our distance, but there’s cameras pointed at it from every direction. The general will probably see you enter and try to stop you, so you’ll have to get to the portal and go down as quickly as you can.”

  “Won’t you get in trouble once they find out we escaped?” Murky asked.

  “I honestly don’t care anymore,” Larson said. “After tonight, I’m done with all of this. They put an entire town of innocent people at risk. One way or the other, it’s time for me to take an early retirement.”

  She went back to the front flap but gave them one last look before she left.

  “Good luck, but I’ve got to be honest: I don’t think I’m going to see you four ever again.”

  Then she left.

  Chapter Three

  After counting to exactly one-hundred and twenty Mississippi, the kids did as they had been instructed and snuck out under the back canvas of the tent. Agent Larson was true to her word in that there was no one waiting there, but their bikes were piled unceremoniously to one side where they could easily get them. Quietly, they all grabbed their bikes and went in the direction Larson had indicated. There seemed to be angry shouting from elsewhere in the camp, but none of them dared see what it was about. Agent Larson was probably providing them with a distraction.

  They took their bikes quickly down the path, none of them daring to speak at all until they were at the backyard of one of the houses at the edge of town. Henderson was the first to speak up. “Anyone else expecting to wake up any time now?”

  “I don’t know,” Murky said. “It doesn’t seem that weird to me.”

  “The military locking down our town and a portal to another dimension full of ant people doesn’t seem weird to you?” Laura asked.

  “Of course it’s weird,” Murky said. “Stuff like this usually doesn’t happen in Kettle Hollow.”

  “Murky, stuff like this doesn’t usually happen anywhere,” Laura responded.

  Murky shrugged. “I don’t know. I bet it does all the time and just no one talks about it.”

  It was eerie passing by the various houses on the way to the center of town. Kettle Hollow was small enough that they knew almost every person by name, as well as who should be in which houses doing what at this time of the evening. Old Mrs. Harmsen should have been in her house with the television blaring as she watched The Cosby Show or Highway to Heaven. Annette Schuler should have been practicing her trumpet. Mr. Turnbull should have been closing up the pharmacy and harassing any kids who were dawdling by the magazine rack. But everything was dark and quiet except for the continued low rumble that emanated from the town’s center.

  “Maybe we should check some of the houses,” Laura said. “Just in case anyone is still here.”

  “What good would it do if they are?” Henderson asked.

  “They might be able to come with us and help get everyone else back.”

  “If we found another kid, then maybe,” Henderson said. “But if we found an adult, all they would try to do is stop us.”

  Laura looked like she wanted to argue, but Murky could tell that she couldn’t convince herself that he was wrong.

  “It would take too long to look anyway,” Jesse said. “Kettle Hollow may be small, but you heard Agent Larson. As soon as the military guys realize we’re poking around where they don’t want us to, they’re going to come for us. We need to get to that portal before they can stop us.”

  The buzzing sound grew deeper the closer they got to the center of town, and occasional flashes of electricity arced up in the air from the main intersection. It seemed pretty obvious to all of them where the portal was. What surprised them though, was the sheer size of it. When Murky had heard the word “portal,” she’d confused it with a “port hole” and imagined it to be something small, like a little round window that they would barely be able to fit through. Instead what they found was a massive hole in the ground nearly thirty feet in diameter. It could have looked like a semi-natural phenomenon, a sink hole that might have collapsed open in the middle of the intersection, except for the edges of the portal, which had a static blue color and hurt Murky’s eyes to look at it. The edges of the hole were rotating fast in a clockwise fashion, like dyed water going down a drain, except the border was only half a foot wide before showing the hole beyond.

  “It looks like a swirly,” Jesse muttered.

  “A what?” Murky asked.

  “A swirly,” Henderson said. “It’s when someone dunks his head in a toilet and flushes it.”

  “Um, I don’t think the swirly itself looks like this, just the water when it flushes,” Laura said.

  “Says someone who’s never had her head stuck in the middle of one,” Jesse muttered.

  Beyond the edge of the portal, right where the town’s lone stoplights should have been, there was a ragged edge of rock followed by a steep drop off into darkness below. Along the edges there were a series of stairs carved into the stone. The stairs didn’t look like they had been there until recently, as they were rough and looked like they’d been carved hastily, but also they seemed to be at very strange angles and sizes, like they had not at all been designed for humans to walk on them. The stairs twisted and turned over various outcroppings as they went deeper down into the dark, but instead of being pitch black, the deepest depths of the hole had a haunting dark green glow.

  “I wonder what’s causing that,” Laura said.

  “Maybe the rocks have some kind of chemical reaction,” Jesse said. “Or maybe there’s something down there that’s bioluminescent.”

  “I have absolutely no idea what that means,” Henderson said.

  “Maybe we don’t have to do this after all,” Murky said. “Maybe we can go back and get them to change their minds.”

  Jesse turned to frown at her. “Murky, have you ever known an adult to change their mind when they’re wrong?”

  Murky shrugged. He had a point.

  They all hesitated at the edge, none of them wanting to be the first to step over the strange border and begin the climb down those stone steps.

  “Are we sure this is safe?” Murky asked.

  “No,” Henderson said. “In fact, I’m pretty sure this is all the exact opposite of safe.”

  “Hey, does anyone else hear that?” Laura asked.

  “Yeah, it’s pretty hard not to hear it,” Jesse said. “That buzzing hum thing is rattling my teeth.”

  “Not that,” Laura said. “I thought I heard…”

  She didn’t need to finish that thought, because now they could all hear the clear sounds o
f engines as multiple vehicles drove in their direction. Since there was little chance of it being someone driving through town at this point, none of them needed to point out that it was probably trucks and Jeeps full of military personnel, all of them on their way to stop the four kids from interfering, even if there wasn’t exactly much to interfere with at this exact moment.

  “I think that means time’s up,” Laura said. “Last chance for anyone to turn back. You could probably hide in one of the buildings and not be noticed. Murky?”

  “I don’t want to go down there,” Murky said, “but I don’t want to go back, either. So I’m going with you.”

  “Jesse?”

  “Um, yeah. Sure. I’m going. It’ll be fun, right?” Jesse didn’t sound at all convinced, but he also didn’t seem to want to turn back.

  “Henderson?”

  “Hell yeah I’m heading down there. Let’s stomp some ant people butts. And you, Laura?”

  “My parents are down there,” she said simply. “Let’s go.”

  When no one else made the move to be the first to step into the portal, Laura gingerly put a foot over the strange swirling blue energy and onto the first step. Murky had no idea what would happen if any of them stuck their feet or hands in the energy itself, but she didn’t want to find out. As Laura started down the steep stairs, Murky followed her, with Jesse behind her and Henderson in the rear. They were all just down below the edge of the rock when the vehicles came to a stop nearby and multiple voices began shouting at them to stop.

  “No more time,” Henderson said. “Everyone, move!”

  They did the closest thing they could to running down the spiraling stairs, but the sizes of the steps themselves made running awkward. Also, Murky found she couldn’t make herself go too fast for fear that she might lose her balance and go tumbling down into the abyss. Once they were about twenty feet down, she risked looking over the edge, then immediately wished she hadn’t. She thought she could see a floor slanting off into the green glow somewhere below them, but it certainly wasn’t near. If any of them slipped and fell over the side, they wouldn’t survive the fall, at least not from here.