“There’s no need to bring them,” I said, nodding at Warner and Hypatia. “Let them go. You and I can go alone.”
“No, your baggage comes along for the ride. Besides, they might have information we need. They might even get to see Daddy, too.”
Hypatia paled. “Daddy?”
“Yes, my father. You’ve heard of him?”
Warner’s eyes bugged out, and Hypatia’s mouth dropped open. She said something so faintly I couldn’t hear her.
“You’re parahuman,” she said to Hypatia, “so technically my father is your great-great-great-great-great-granddaddy, or something. He’s been dead for centuries, but it’s almost time for him to rise again. That’s why I’m in such a tizzy these days. Before he died, he told us to tidy up the place, and I’m a bit of a procrastinator.”
“You were supposed to tidy your house?” Hypatia asked.
“No, stupid, the earth,” she said with a smile. “It’s gone way downhill—civilizations and complex societies sprouting up all over the place, superstition and war at all-time lows. I don’t know how we ever let it get this far. Don’t worry; we’re almost done—you won’t have much to do.”
Then the kitchen exploded.
15
SUBTERRA
There was no warning, no whistling like you hear when a bomb is dropping in the movies, not even the sound of Gus pulling a pin from a grenade. We were sitting there one moment, and the next, the entire house exploded around us. The walls, floor, cabinets, and everything else were reduced to fragments and sent whirling around like we were in the center of a tornado. Through the chaotic torrent of splintered wood, metal shards, and twinkling bits of glass and ceramic, I could still make out the forms of my friends, seated just where they had been and looking as terrified as I was. I was probably screaming, but I can’t be sure, because I couldn’t hear anything above the noise of whatever disaster had occurred. I could see fragments of daylight stabbing through the gaps in the debris, but gradually they faded and were gone.
And then it stopped as suddenly as it had started. All was still, silent, and cold. I could see nothing but utter blackness.
“Uh,” Warner said, “did we just die?”
Hypatia had grabbed my hand hard enough to hurt. “What on earth was that?” she asked in a furious whisper.
“Calm yourselves. Everything is fine. We have our own methods of transportation that can’t be tracked,” Jakki said. I could hear her fashionable shoes clacking across the room. Were we still in a room? I felt in front of myself and found the kitchen table right where it had been. The floor felt solid as well.
“It’s a bit like a wormhole,” Jakki went on, “just a teensy bit more violent. Wait there.”
“A gale! Chicka boom! Twisty twister!” said Gus, sounding equal parts enthralled and terrified.
“Okay, everyone,” I said. “Gus is just fine. No need to worry about Gus.”
“Pineapple?” said Gus.
“No pineapple!” Warner, Hypatia, and I shouted.
“Yes,” said Gus, which I really, really hoped meant “Yes, okay” and not “Yes, but if it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll just pull the pin on my grenade in this enclosed space and see what happens.”
There was a noise in the corner, and I looked to its source, which was pretty much useless, since I couldn’t have seen my hand in front of my face. A second later there was a blinding light as Jakki switched on a flashlight. Warner, still looking a bit woozy from all the mental tampering, squinted and groaned.
“Oh, stop complaining! The light is for your benefit. Come on, we have places to be. Let’s go!”
As my eyes grew used to the light, I could make out that we were standing in a perfectly reassembled kitchen. Everything was exactly as it had been, except the goose’s neck was bent in the opposite direction and Gus was standing facing the wall, instead of leaning against it. Actually, he was still leaning on it, but with his face instead of his back.
“I said move. Come on!” commanded Jakki.
We stepped out the front door. Where there had been a barren field and nothing but horizon for miles in all directions was now nothing but absolute darkness. The damp air was chilly, but not quite cold, and utterly still. Jakki swung her flashlight back and forth in front of the house. “There should be a light switch here somewhere,” she said. “Ah! There it is. Nikola, could you get that?”
Before I could move a muscle, there was another shocking explosion, and the little cottage once again was reduced to shards, swirled as if at the center of an F5 tornado, and was gone.
“Go on,” Jakki said, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. “It’s right there.”
The light switch she was referring to was just that, a simple toggle-style switch like you see on every wall in the world. The only difference was that this one was mounted to a telephone pole that was anchored in the ground. I raised the switch and was blinded a second time as gigantic stadium lights crashed to life high above us, bright as day.
Describing this will be extremely difficult, but I’ll give it a shot. The lights above us were the brightest I’d ever seen. My friends and the dirt at our feet were illuminated so brilliantly that I might have worried about sunburn. The glow extended around us and faded off into the distance. Despite their extreme radiance, no matter how hard I peered into the darkness, all I could see was utter blackness in all directions for what could have been miles and miles. My first impression was that we had been transported to some barren planet far from any sun. A place so distant that not even starlight could touch it. The view was unsettlingly desolate, even more desolate than Kansas had been.
“Welcome to Subterra,” Jakki said, spreading her arms. “Your new home and future gravesite.”
The name told me all I needed to know. We were in a cave. In some ways it was not like a cave at all. It was obviously wired for electricity and the ground was perfectly flat and dry in all directions, but there was no denying that distinct underground feeling. As if proof was called for, there was a distant series of clunks, and lights around the perimeter of the space blazed to life, revealing massive metal supports zigzagging up and down the walls, meeting at the top of the chamber in a perfectly hemispherical dome. It was as if some planet-sized giant had cut a globe in two and set the top half over us. I felt instantly dizzy—the immensity of what I was seeing made me feel a lot like you feel when standing on the edge of a tall cliff. Never had I seen or even heard of a construction approaching the scale of that one chamber. Ever seen the Hoover Dam? You could store a few dozen in that cavern and have plenty of space left over for your boat.
I realized that my dad must be down here . . . somewhere.
“That’s better,” said Jakki. “I wanted you to get a good look at things. How do you like my daddy’s house?”
“He doesn’t share your knack for decorating,” I said honestly.
“It . . . could use a couple plants, maybe,” Warner said.
“Maybe a fountain,” Hypatia offered.
Jakki was clearly offended. “I put a ficus in the corner just over there last month. Nobody notices anything I do.”
“I don’t see it,” I said, squinting into the distance.
“It’s about four miles straight that way,” she said.
“I’m not sure it’s getting enough light,” Warner said.
Jakki shook her head. “Of course it isn’t. I don’t water it, either. That’s what houseplants are for, isn’t it? You bring a living thing into your home, subject it to inattention and apathy, and wait for it to wither and die. It’s almost as good as a fish tank. Whenever I feel down, I like to close my eyes and remember that somewhere in this world there is a small life that will die alone because of me.” She sighed blissfully. “Okay, we should get going!”
Not far from us was a low metal building I’d missed while gawking a
t the cave, one of those prefabricated aluminum garages. Inside it stood a few small electric scooters connected to chargers on the wall.
“Grab one, and let’s move,” Jakki said.
“Scooters? Are you serious?” Warner said. “Aren’t villains supposed to get around in things like monorails, chariots pulled by bears, and things like that?”
“They’re small, efficient, and don’t need fuel. No gas stations down here,” said Jakki as she mounted her scooter. “They’re fun, too. You humans are the scourge of this planet, you ruin everything, and you’re just begging to be wiped out, but you really got it right with the scooters. Gus, I’ll ride with you.”
Jakki made Gus sit in front of her and wrapped her arms around his midsection. He shuddered visibly and started the engine. “Let us scoot!” she cried.
“Aren’t you worried we’ll take off?” I asked, grabbing the front spot of the closest scooter before Hypatia could claim it.
Jakki laughed with disdain. “And go where? Take one wrong turn down here, and nobody will ever see you again. These lights don’t stay on forever. If you lose sight of us, you’ll probably die of thirst before we can find you again. Hit it, Gus!”
They zoomed off into the blackness.
I started my scooter, and Hypatia climbed on behind me. “Can you drive this?” she asked.
I pressed a button, which brought the small engine purring to life. “No,” I said as I turned the throttle, and we shot wobbling off into the darkness.
Warner caught up with us not long after and appeared to be comfortable with his scooter, if a little perturbed that we’d gone on without him.
“Had to go quick,” I said. “Hypatia was losing her nerve.”
“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!” said Hypatia as I almost lost my balance by turning my head and talking at the same time.
We sped along and caught up with Jakki and Gus before they reached the wall.
I had known the wall was large, but until we approached I had failed to grasp its true scale. Have you ever stood close to a skyscraper? Imagine something even taller, but so wide you can’t see the edges, a surface so flat you don’t even realize it’s curved until you notice it hangs directly above you when you look up. The wall of the cave was bigger than that. Once more I was dizzy at the realization of its immensity and nearly toppled over again, which elicited another series of screeches from Hypatia.
As we drew near, I could make out a new feature of the wall, a single gaping maw of a door that must have been a quarter mile tall at least, and probably half that wide. As we passed into the mouth of the door, the lights lining the massive dome went black behind us and were replaced by new lights along the roof of the tunnel. These revealed a path that narrowed and curved out of sight.
After that, our path took us on a confusing, entangled journey through tunnels, over a bridge or two, and eventually through archways cut into the black rock no wider than I could have stretched my arms. Finally, we passed through one last portal, and I nearly fell off the scooter in shock.
“Holy mackerel,” I whispered to myself, pulling the scooter to a halt. We were supposed to keep going, but I couldn’t cope with what I was seeing otherwise.
Warner pulled up alongside us, his mouth hanging open, speechless with amazement.
Hypatia took a deep breath and said, “Oh my . . .”
We had entered another dome, this one every bit as large as the first. But the other dome had been empty, and this was anything but.
Right there in front of our eyes, glowing like an island of light in the immense darkness, stood a massive structure stretching up into the open space above like some monumental pillar. Atop it, a bright light flickered orange, then bluish violet, then orange, then bluish again. There were glowing shapes etched in the blackness. Neon shapes. It was a sign. I blinked, and the shapes made letters in my mind. Then those letters made words: TENTACULAR ARMS. Fainter rectangular lights formed a regular grid that climbed the sides of the pillar. These sights assembled in my brain, and finally what I was seeing made sense. It was a massive hotel, standing right there in front of us, in the middle of the cave. As strange as it was to see a building there, it was even stranger to see it lit up, as if someone had simply picked it up from downtown Chicago or Los Angeles and set it back down in the cave without turning the lights off.
I took a second to rub my eyes and slap myself on the cheek, just in case I was hallucinating. I started the scooter again, and we moved closer, a bit more slowly now. As we approached, I could make out delicate stone-carved ivy winding its way up the corners and along arches over each of the windows. Welcoming golden light blazed from every side and from a line of streetlamps out front.
Then I saw something else. Off in the distance, other vague shapes suggested other buildings around the far edges of this new dome. A single line of buildings formed in a ring around one central structure, the hotel. We were at the center of an underground city.
“I’ve changed my mind,” said Warner over the faint grinding of our tires on the cave floor. “Jakki’s dad has style.”
“She was lying about that, Warner,” Hypatia said testily.
“I know. I was joking about—”
“Well, don’t joke about that. Okay?” Hypatia said. “Things are bad enough without—”
“What are you guys talking about?” I asked.
“Jakki talking about her father, like he built this place. It’s not true,” Hypatia said.
“Who’s her pop again?” I asked.
Warner drew closer, and I had to adjust course to keep from bumping into him. “According to old historical accounts, or legends, depending on whether you believe them, the Old Ones originally came from one primordial ancestor. He’s supposed to be this immortal, giant monster that terrorized Earth for thousands of years.”
Hypatia couldn’t stop herself from adding, “And it’s utter hogwash we don’t need to be getting worked up about.”
“She seems to buy it,” I said, indicating Jakki, who was making Gus do fun little swerves as we approached the hotel.
I couldn’t see her sitting behind me, but I heard Hypatia roll her eyes in her tone. “Of course she buys it. Every account of the Old Ones from every period in history says they believe their father or Eldest or whatever they call him is going to show up any day now. It’s like a fairy tale to them, but because they have trouble with creative thinking, they take it at face value. It’s not even a good fairy tale.”
“Why not?”
“It doesn’t make sense! He’s immortal, but he died. He’s so big he blots out the sun, but nobody has ever said what he looks like. The entire world lived in fear of him for thousands of years during the Stone Age, but nobody bothered to write anything down?”
“They didn’t have writing in the Stone Age,” I pointed out.
“We did,” Hypatia said testily. “Parahumans were developing primitive methods of information transfer at the time, like text messaging and blogs. Nobody has ever found as much as a single credible account of a giant world-devouring force of pure evil, and that’s the sort of thing your average blogger tends to take notice of.”
“I bet I could take him,” Warner said, flexing a spindly arm and almost losing control of his scooter.
“Good to see you’re feeling better!” I said.
I’d hoped that might change the subject, but when Hypatia gets on a soapbox, it can be hard for her to climb down. “I think their ultimate goal is to create the illusion that he’s come back, that they have this superpowerful being at their disposal, so the humans and parahumans won’t put up a fight. It would allow them to take control of the world without actually—”
“Hey, pause that,” I said. “We’re here.”
Despite the streetlamps in front of the hotel, there was no street or parking lot, just a flat dirt floor. So we left our scooters near
the door among a dusty assortment of randomly parked golf carts, scooters, and jeeps, and mounted a wide stone staircase to a massive door of ornate gold-plated metal and stained glass. I stepped up to it, took a deep breath, and, with effort, pulled it open.
The interior of the hotel looked pretty much the same as every other nice hotel I’ve ever seen, with the exception that other hotels have staff working and people checking in, checking out, and waiting around. The Tentacular Arms was completely empty. Dust blanketed the tables and countertops. More dust hung in wispy tendrils in the air. A distinct musty smell overpowered the senses.
Jakki was waiting for us in an obese high-backed leather chair alongside an urn of cucumber water that had gone rotten about four years before. She had changed, and her new outfit, an off-white silk blouse with gray linen pants and jacket above gleaming red shoes, was immaculate, which I found particularly impressive since Hypatia, Warner, and I had all just taken the same trip and were at least a little covered in cave dirt with flecks of mud on our faces.
She smiled brightly at our appearance, as if pleasantly surprised we had dropped in for a visit. “Hey, kids! Come have a seat. I sent Gus to get your rooms ready. This is where you’ll be staying while you’re here. It’s about noonish local time, so we’re going to have a little chat and you kids can get to work tomorrow, bright and early. How’s that sound?”
She gestured to a few chairs across from her. I fell into one and found it so comfortable that I was almost unable to keep my eyes open. Hypatia and Warner sat on either side of me, and Hypatia scooted herself a bit closer, either so we could be nearer to each other or so she could be just a little farther from the huge urn of suspicious-looking liquid next to Jakki.
“What is it you want us to do?” I asked.
“Where are we?” Warner wanted to know.
“Is there a bathroom nearby? I’d like to wash up,” said Hypatia.
Jakki held up her hands as if trying to calm us. “I know you all must have questions, and let me assure you, they will all be answered in due time. First things first. You are now in Subterra, our research and development community.” She pointed with two fingers at Hypatia and Warner. “You two will continue in your studies, much as you did before you came here. The main difference is that you will be paid a highly competitive wage and will be allowed to study and work on whatever you like. Eventually, you may even be able to leave from time to time, if you prove yourself loyal enough. Isn’t that nice?”
The Unspeakable Unknown Page 18