by Kelli Kimble
I appreciate the effort, regardless, I said. I didn’t want to hurt you. I didn’t want to hurt them, either.
She looked back over her shoulder at me, and though I’m pretty sure bears can’t smile, her lips drew back in a fair approximation of one. Welcome to the wild.
Thank you, I said. I reached down a hand to Gayle.
“Why haven’t you killed it?” Her voice was high-pitched with panic.
I got a hold of her hand and pulled her to her feet. “It was only protecting its cubs. Come on,” I said.
She kept her eyes on the bears retreating, but she moved along with me as I started to walk.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Did you communicate with it?” she asked, ignoring my question.
“Yes, and it knew us. The animals are calling us ‘the cat killers’. They’re grateful.”
“You mean, you. You’re the cat killer.”
“They don’t know the difference either way,” I said. “We’ve nothing to fear. The cats must have made life difficult for them.”
“And you didn’t want to kill them,” she said, smiling.
I didn’t know how to explain to her that it really hadn’t made a difference; if I hadn’t killed the cats, I would have had to kill something else. Maybe I’d killed the animals that were the biggest threat, but it had been entirely by accident.
I didn’t respond to her statement, and we walked in silence. I kept my senses out, watching for anything approaching. The small animals cowered and ran from the vibrations of our feet. Nothing larger came near.
We reached the other side of the meadow and plunged back into the forest. There, the trees were closer together, with more leaves, so the light was dim.
Gayle flinched at every bird that took flight, and every branch that cracked beneath our feet.
I should have told her I was watching for danger, but for some reason, I didn’t.
It was only maybe an hour before nightfall when we reached the base of the mountain. The tablet directed us right to the gates, and I was grateful for that. Otherwise, we’d have probably walked right past them. The wall was barely visible in the diminishing light because it was covered in vines. Trees grew beside it, and their branches further masked it from view.
The gate was open, and before we went in, I stretched out my feelings to sense what — if anything — was in there. It felt silent and oppressive, the way I’d expect a tomb to feel.
There was nobody there.
We went in and walked around. There were some dilapidated buildings outside, but we found nothing of interest in any of them.
A door stood open at the base of the mountain. Something littered the floor just inside, but I couldn’t see what it was in the dark. I imagined light, and it flooded the room, illuminating a host of human bones, strewn around.
“Oh, my gosh,” Gayle said. “Are those what I think they are?”
“It depends what you think they are,” I said. Sometimes, she made me feel old — though she had at least two decades on me.
“Those are human bones. People died here.”
“Yep,” I said. I kicked at a thigh bone with the toe of my boot. It rattled free of the pelvis and clattered against the cement floor.
“Why are they so . . . spread around?” Gayle asked.
“Animals, I guess,” I said, shrugging.
“You mean, animals as in bears, with a taste for human flesh.”
I suppressed an eye roll. “We don’t know it was bears,” I said. “Could have been cats. Dogs. Raccoons. Heck, even rats bite. They might have liked human bones to gnaw on.”
She huffed and went to the other door. It was clamped shut, with no visible handle. “How do we open this?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t know if we even want to. We don’t know what’s inside this place. What if they aren’t friendly to visitors?”
“If it’s Tabby, they’ll be friendly.”
“Right,” I said. I realized I was afraid of what we’d find in the mountain. If Tabby was there, my purpose would end. If there were others there, we’d be in danger. If nobody was there, what would we do, then?
I turned to leave the chamber and noticed a control panel in the corner. I went to it and tapped at the controls, but exposure to the elements must’ve damaged it. Nothing came to life the way the tablet did whenever I interacted with it.
“There’s got to be more than one door to a place like this,” I said. “An emergency hatch, or . . . something. They couldn’t have depended entirely on this door.”
We left the chamber and looked around the enclosed area again. Off to the left, a fallen tree obscured our view of the mountain wall. Other than that, there was nothing obvious.
It was getting dark, so we set up camp inside the chamber, with the fire just outside the door. It felt safer to be enclosed in a room — even if we didn’t know if someone could or would open the inner door from inside.
Gayle fell asleep almost immediately, leaving me alone to contemplate the mountain and what to do. No wonder Gayle had been so annoyed I could sleep, and she couldn’t; it was lonely and scary, being awake out there in the dark.
◆◆◆
In the morning, I woke, groggy and irritable. Gayle was annoyingly refreshed, so I let her go about making our breakfast. When she came back from getting water, she was whistling. I wanted to smack her. It didn’t seem like a good idea, so I simply accepted the canteen without comment and drained it.
“I was thinking. Can you just sense inside the mountain? I mean, like how you watch for animals and danger in the woods,” she said. She was studying the inner door again. In the brighter, morning light, there were yellow stripes visible on it. She ran her finger over one of the stripes.
“I could try,” I said. I cleared my mind and stretched out my thoughts. The wall was solid rock; the door was thick metal. I was surprised to find I could see inside. Of course, it was dark, but in my mind’s eye, it was lit with a spotlight wherever I turned my attention. The area was cavernous and huge. In the dark distance, I spotted a rock wall, and another door that was like the one we were looking at, except the stripes on it were still bright with color.
There wasn’t much I could see in this area, but clearly, nobody was around. A stillness permeated everything, and dust motes were the only movement.
I pushed on through the second door. There, it looked more like a building. The walls were brick, and the floor was concrete. There was a dripping in the distance. I moved forward down the hall. There were rooms on either side of the hall at regular intervals. Some of the doors hung open, revealing simple, rectangular rooms. The leftover clutter made them look like classrooms. One had many desks; another looked like a lab, with broken chemistry equipment strewn over a table. Another seemed like an office, with desks.
I came to a set of double doors, and I went through them. There, the rooms looked more like living quarters; many had beds and cabinets in them. Some of the beds were made; some just had rusty springs.
Even though I wasn’t physically inside the mountain, I felt a sort of pressure from the hugeness of it. What if it collapsed? Nothing would survive the mass of the mountain pressing upon it. I fought to calm myself, but my breath came in pants, and my hands were starting to shake.
What do you see? Gayle asked me.
Nothing. It’s just empty rooms. There’s nobody here.
Did you check everything? What if someone is hiding?
They can’t see me, I said. How would they know to hide from me?
The mountain, it’s so big. Someone could be living in just a little corner of the place . . .
No, I said, cutting her off. You don’t understand. It’s abandoned.
But I did wonder if I could find some food somewhere.
I pushed on, moving through hallway after hallway. There were strange tanks in some rooms, but there was nothing in them. I found what seemed like a dining room, but there was nothing edible left in it.
I was starting to get tired, so I snapped back into my body. “We’ve got to figure out where to get some food,” I said.
“I have an idea, but you’re not going to like it.”
I stared at her. I knew what she was going to say: She wanted me to find some animal and kill it.
“You just need to sense where there’s, I don’t know, a squirrel or a rabbit. Then, catch it with your mind and kill it. We’ll cook it up and feel a lot better.” She looked satisfied with herself.
I again found myself trying not to smack her. “Go get some water,” I said. She left the chamber with the canteens. “And get some firewood, too!” I called after her.
I swallowed my disgust and concentrated on finding some woodland creature that would be our dinner. It wasn’t difficult, and I felt somewhat sheepish we’d not done it before.
Not wanting to leave the chamber, I levitated it back to me. It was a small rabbit. I had no idea how to prepare it for cooking, or what parts of it were even something we’d want to eat. I left it for Gayle to sort out and turned to the tablet.
It seemed like it had to have some detail about the inner workings of the mountain; surely, they’d needed manuals and such to keep a place as big as that running smoothly. I tapped through the various topics, and history caught my eye. It documented scientific evidence of what it called “human evolution”, claiming we’d evolved from primates. Like monkeys?
I pored through the document, fascinated. In the city, we’d been taught we were put there by God, and God had given our city’s ancestors the will to wipe most of mankind clean in the same way He’d used the flood and Noah to reestablish mankind. The idea that we’d developed slowly over time as a result of environmental stressors and circumstances resonated with me. Hadn’t I evolved into my abilities with stress?
Gayle announced her arrival by dropping a load of branches and firewood outside the chamber door. She came in and handed me my canteen.
I nodded towards the rabbit. “I don’t know how to cook it,” I said. At some point, the fact that I was just a teenager had to have some validity, right?
She scrunched up her face. “Okay,” she said. “I guess it can’t be that different from a chicken.” She picked it up by a leg, holding it out in front of her, like she thought it might give her a disease. I supposed it could have had fleas. She went back out by the fire and bustled around.
I fell back into my study of history. The evolution discussion devolved into technical details, and I swiped forward to move to a new period in history. I found several pages about ancient Egyptians, with unintelligible notes scrawled in the margins.
I took it out to show it to Gayle. “Who do you think made these notes?” I asked.
She glanced over at it. The rabbit carcass made a sickening crack as she broke a bone. I kept my eyes away from it. “Probably Silver. Or one of his siblings. He had a ton of them.”
“He’s the one from here, right?”
“He was the leader, yeah. He came with two of his siblings at first, but later, more came.”
I hunched on the ground and traced one of the notes with my fingertip. These were the people we were looking for. This was where they were from, but they weren’t here. Where could they have gone?
A flash of imagery crossed my mind’s eye. I blinked. I hadn’t been trying to use my abilities. So, what had that been?
I set down the tablet, closed my eyes, and tried to focus on what I’d seen. But the flash had been too fast, and the memory of it slipped out of my grasp in wisps. Only the impression of a blue sky remained. I lifted my eyes to the sky above us; it was overcast. I couldn’t see the color of the sky at all. I sighed.
“What’s the matter? Don’t like to see the guts of what you’re about to eat?” She dumped something into the fire, and it sizzled. A black cloud billowed out of the fire, along with the smell of burnt meat.
I shuddered. “It’s not my favorite thing to see, no. But I was sighing because I saw something. In my head, I mean. But, before I could really identify it, it was gone.”
“Huh,” she said. She was ramming a stick through the rabbit’s body and not really paying any attention to me.
“I think it was important,” I said. “I didn’t . . . whatever I saw, I wasn’t using my abilities on purpose. It was just there.”
She shrugged and held the rabbit over the fire with the stick. “If it was important, it’ll come back to you,” she said. “Stuff like that always works that way. Like when you go into a room to get something, and once you’re there, you don’t remember why you’re there. But, eventually, you do remember, and you go about your day. Right?”
“I guess,” I said. I picked the tablet up and flipped forward through the history again. I stopped to skim a section about the Native Americans and how the Europeans decimated them. It pricked at a fear in me. Would Tabby’s group welcome us — assuming we could even find them?
My stomach growled, bringing me back to the present. I chanced a look at Gayle’s roasting stick. It was starting to look appetizing. Thank goodness. She rotated it gently over the coals of the fire. Bits of fat dripped out of the carcass. “This is done,” she said. She took it off the fire and poked at it with her finger. “Yep, it looks perfect.” She held it out to me, and even though I knew it would be too hot, I dug my fingers into it and tore a hunk of meat off the haunches. It burnt my fingers, but I ripped it into bits and stuffed it into my mouth, barely chewing it.
“Easy,” Gayle said. “There’s plenty for both of us, and it seems like you can easily catch another tomorrow.”
I nodded and measured my bites, chewing slowly. At home, when we didn’t have enough to eat, sometimes I’d count each chewing motion to prolong it. I started counting in my head and closed my eyes, trying to savor the taste and enjoy the food.
“What do you think we should do, then?” Gayle asked. “I mean, it seems like maybe we should still try to get inside. What if we can find supplies that could help us, or some sign of where they’ve gone?”
“That’s a good idea,” I said. “I’ll go back inside and look for an entrance. There has to be another one.”
She took the tablet and called up a map of the mountain. It showed the elaborate structure inside. It was ingenious, really. They’d built a buffer around the living area, which extended both above and below the base of the mountain, providing at least 12 stories to the manmade space.
“Find us on the map,” I suggested. “It’d help to orient me if I knew where we were in relation to all this.”
She tapped and dragged her finger, and a bright red dot illuminated on the tablet. We were outside a door, yes. But the map clearly showed at least two other places where the internal structure of the mountain connected with the outside.
“This should be right around the corner,” I said, tracing a corridor that appeared to lead outside. I pointed off to our right. “Just over there, maybe even inside the fence.”
“Great. We’ll investigate that as soon as we’re done eating.”
She offered me the rabbit stick, and I tore off another strip of meat. I’d never imagined rabbit could taste so good. It didn’t take us long to strip it clean, right down to the bones. I broke a leg bone and used the pointy end to clear bits of meat from between my teeth. “That was great, Gayle. Thanks for cooking it,” I said.
“Thanks for catching it.”
We used the tablet to find our way around the edge of the mountain, looking for the door that seemed to be on the map.
“Look,” Gayle said, as we rounded a large hunk of rock. “That looks like a path.”
We followed the path — and darned if it didn’t lead to a door. It was propped open, and just inside, leaves and balls of fur stirred slightly in the breeze.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to an especially large ball of fur, twigs, and leaves.
“I’d imagine it’s an animal’s nest,” she said. “Can you sense any in here?”
I fel
t for signs of life, but it was cold and empty. “No. There’s nothing in here.”
“Then, let’s go.” Gayle entered the room, and I followed.
I reached out into the darkness ahead. There was another door. It was closed. “There’s a door,” I said.
She tapped at the tablet, and it lit up faintly, just enough to light our immediate path. We came to the door. It was metal and looked heavy but was ordinary in shape, with a corroded handle. I turned the handle and pushed. At first, the door didn’t move, but then, I felt bits of rust sprinkling down on me, and the door gave way.
It was pitch black inside. If we didn’t have the tablet, I wouldn’t have been able to see my hand in front of my face. But we edged in; Gayle held the tablet high to light our way. We were in the buffer between the shell of the mountain and the living space carved out of the innards of the mountain.
“There’s a door to our right,” Gayle said.
We moved forward and to the right, watching the dot on the map advance as it moved through the labyrinth of the mountain. We came to the door, and I recognized it as the door I’d pushed through earlier in my mind; the one with the bright yellow stripes on it. There wasn’t a handle, but a control panel was in the wall to the left of it. I ran my fingers over the panel, trying to sense what to do. But, when I touched it, it lit up, just like the tablet.
A prompt came on the screen.
“It says, ‘Override Protocol?’” I told Gayle.
“Seems like the answer to that is ‘yes’,” she said.
There was a green box with the word “yes”, and a red box with the word “no”. I hovered my finger over the green box. “What if it this doesn’t control the door?” I asked. “What if the protocol is something that traps us in here?”
Gayle didn’t give me time to worry about it too much. She reached around me and tapped the “yes” button.
A buzzer sounded, and a yellow light started to flash. Then, the door slid open. As it did, lights flickered to life in the hallway beyond.
“Good job,” I said. I looked around and noticed a large, loose rock on the ground near the door. I used my mind to push it into the doorway so that if the door tried to close, the rock would block the way.