Blake nodded. “Agreed. Okay, let’s do this.”
The boys got out of the SUV and made their way to the cargo space at the back. Quinn grabbed the backpack of supplies they brought with them; a couple of super-bright LED flashlights, several bottles of electrolyte-filled water, climbing rope, and snacks.
He pulled the backpack on and then walked back to the driver side and put a note on the dashboard that read Gone Hiking with the date.
“Why’d you do that?” Blake asked.
“Look around,” Quinn said. “No one’s here. If something happens to us they need to know we’re out here. Besides, this place looks closed for the season. If the police come by, I don’t want them to tow the SUV. We’d be screwed.”
“Good point. As long as we’re home in time for dinner and don’t raise our parents’ suspicions, we’ll be good.”
Quinn nodded and sighed. He didn’t like lying to his parents, but the boys agreed they didn’t have a choice. They had to find out what was going on and they had to do it before six p.m., when Quinn would normally be home from dinner and track practice. Since he had the day off, Blake had called in sick to work and the boys played hooky from school to explore the cave in more detail. Thankfully, it wasn’t unusual for Quinn to take the SUV to school occasionally since Daddio would happily ferry Dad to and from his law firm. They’d probably have a lunch date together if Dad could pull himself away from clients for an hour.
Quinn locked the SUV and the boys made their way around the campground, following signage that directed them to the trailhead.
“It smells different,” Blake commented.
“Yup,” Quinn answered. The scent of summer in the woods had been replaced with the slow decay of leaves mixing with earth and the dying underbrush of the forest. “Looks different, too.”
No rain had fallen in several days and the forest floor, though damp in spots, was mostly dry. Their hiking boots gently thudded along the leaf-covered trail. Nature chirped and buzzed around them as several chipmunks squeaked their displeasure and scampered into the underbrush.
Thirty minutes went by and the boys continued hiking.
“Something’s not right,” Blake said. “I don’t recognize this part of the trail, at all.”
“We haven’t gone past the trees yet. Remember? There’s that huge line of fallen pine trees we followed.”
“I’m telling you, we’ve passed it. It’s back there,” Blake insisted.
Quinn looked around. Blake was right, the forest didn’t look familiar. “How did we both miss that? It was so obvious before.” He looked ahead shrugged. “Let’s go ten minutes more in this direction.”
“Okay, but I’m telling you we passed it.”
Five minutes later, the boys turned around.
“Told you, so,” Blake said, grinning.
“Yeah, yeah. Let’s keep our eyes open for the trees this time. We can’t be far from it.”
Several minutes later, Quinn stopped. “Look,” he said, pointing up at an oak tree.
“What? Oh!” Blake exclaimed. Several of the lower limbs had been snapped off and several broken limbs half-way up the tree hung precariously, defying gravity while daring the next big gust of wind to send them crashing to the ground.
“Something hit those,” Quinn said. He started looking around for the fallen pine trees but didn’t see any.
“This is definitely the spot we left the trail,” Blake said, extending his arm and pointing into the woods. “Look, this whole line of trees is just…missing…like someone just scooped a straight line of trees right out of the forest.”
Quinn stepped over to Blake and looked down his arm. Suddenly, the missing row of trees became embarrassingly obvious to him. He gasped. “Oh wow, you’re right!” He looked around again. “Wait, the trees are gone!”
Blake nodded, his face awash with disbelief. “I think they cut them up and got rid of them.”
Quinn nodded. “That’s definitely weird, because I’ve seen storm-fallen trees stay in the woods for years. You know what’s creepier though? Who’s the they?”
“I have no idea,” Blake said. “But I bet Victor Kraze knows.”
A feeling of unease settled over Quinn. “Should we leave?” Now I’m not sure if I want to go through with this.
“Dude, we didn’t drive three-and-a-half-hours up here to turn around and drive three-and-a-half-hours back to Portsmouth empty-handed. We’ve got a couple hours up here, at most.”
“You’re right, you’re right. This is just getting weirder, that’s all. Okay, let’s go. You know where this is? I don’t want to get lost this time. It’s not as easy to see where things are this time.”
“All we have to do is follow the empty row of trees back to the trail. We won’t get lost, I promise.”
“Okay,” Quinn said. “Let’s do it.”
Blake led the way again as the best-friends retraced their steps through the forest, occasionally seeing small, straight lines of fresh sawdust. “Looks like they put tarps down wherever they could to minimize the sawdust and leave no evidence behind.”
“Whoever they is did a really good job,” Quinn said. “You can tell people have been walking around though, there’s all kinds of tramped leaves and ferns. They might have been careful to remove the trees, but they were careless with their presence.”
❖
Victor
“Sir,” a security guard said, knocking at the open door. “One of the new motion sensors has been tripped. We’re going to check it out, but I thought you’d like to know. Looks like a couple of teenagers are exploring the woods again.”
Victor Kraze looked up from the laptop he was working on. “Two teenagers?”
“Yes, two boys.”
“Do you have them on video?”
“I believe so. One of the new tree cameras we installed detected the motion.”
“Don’t do anything. Show me the video feed first.” Victor stood and followed the guard to the security room across the hall from his office.
“Back up tree-cam four’s footage by five minutes,” the guard instructed the one manning the complex security system.
“Sure.”
Moments later, two bodies zipped backward in reverse. Then, normal playback resumed and they watched two teenagers pass by the hidden tree camera.
“Can you zoom in on their faces?” Victor asked.
“Yup.” The guard at the console tapped a few buttons and the video feed looped back and replayed, zoomed in and focusing on the boy’s faces.
Victor smiled when he recognized Quinn and Blake. “Tell everyone to stand down. I need to see what these boys are capable off, and I want no interference of any kind. Let them go wherever they want. If any of your personnel sees them, they are to ignore them and go the other way. If they bump into them, they should play nice and tell the boys to scram but not chase them away or bring them in. Keep the cameras rolling, though. I’ll be watching from my office.”
“Sir, what about the conversion chamber?”
“You heard me,” Victor snapped.
The two guards looked at each other and shrugged. One of them picked up a radio and began relaying instructions to the other security teams.
Victor turned and walked back to his desk, the corner of his lip pulling upward.
Excellent…
❖
Quinn
Several minutes later, the boys made it to the end of the fallen line of trees and stopped. Quinn looked left and pointed. There’s the entrance.
The lichen- and moss-covered concrete tunnel entrance, with its weathered Keep Out sign, looked just like he remembered.
“Still not meant for us,” Blake said, smiling wickedly. “Right?”
“Of course not. Here, grab some flashlights.” Quinn turned his back to Blake, who reached over and unzipped the backpack. After pulling out two LED flashlights, he zipped the backpack up and handed one to Quinn.
Quinn instinctively checked his cell p
hone; it had no service. “Ready?” he asked, feigning a smile. I’m having second guesses about this, but as long as I’m with you, I’ll be okay.
Blake winked at him. “Come on, chicken.” The boys walked down the stairs and made their way into the tunnel. This time, their super-bright flashlights illuminated the tunnel and exposed all the creepy looking roots, cracks, and water seepage they had missed from their first trip into the tunnel using only Blake’s cell phone flashlight.
“Nobody must know this is out here,” Quinn whispered.
“Why?”
“There’s no graffiti anywhere in here. Nor is there any on the concrete box thing.”
“Good point.”
As they walked over the old wooden ties that connected the rails of the mining car tracks, the tunnel’s darkness settled in behind them. The air became cooler as the boys descended toward the familiar metal door that led into the strange chamber, their flashlights illuminating the way.
“I don’t hear it this time,” Blake whispered over his shoulder.
“Hear what?” Quinn hissed.
“Remember last time, all that thrumming machinery?”
“That’s right. The silence makes it more ominous,” Quinn said, shivering briefly.
Moments later, the large, rusting door blocked their path. The boys turned off their flashlights and Blake pulled on the door knob. With a faint scratching sound, it opened. A dim blue light illuminated the room. They stepped in cautiously, looking around for signs of life. When they saw none, Blake clicked on his flashlight and Quinn let go of the door. The old door closer hissed as it pulled the door shut behind them.
“It still looks like Cerebro,” Quinn said, pointing his unlit flashlight to the ceiling of the geometric chamber. At the center of the dome, the glowing blue-white ring on the conical silver thing with the three upside-down antenna arrays looked like it was off, but he could see faint pulses of blue-white light fan outward across the top of the dome and travel down the walls in the eight translucent tubes built in between the hexagonal panels that covered the sides of the octagonal chamber.
“Is this low-power mode or something?” Blake asked.
“Let’s find out,” Quinn asked. He walked over to the hatch in the floor and pulled it open. He shined his light down into the hole and then climbed down. “This is where those battery looking things were.”
“I’ll wait here,” Blake said.
When his foot hit solid ground, he stepped off the ladder and turned around. Instead of a plethora of green lights, only sparse red lights shone in the darkness. The tubes from the chamber above were barely providing any illumination. He clicked on his flashlight and swung it around the large room. He walked over to a battery and studied the readout.
“If they are batteries, I think they’re totally drained or barely recharged,” Quinn said loud enough for his voice to carry up through the hatch to Blake. “All of the batteries have red lights. Before, they all had lots of green lights. I think that indicates their charge status.”
“I wonder how long it takes this thing to charge?” Blake asked aloud.
Quinn shrugged, as if he were face-to-face with Blake. “No clue. There’s nothing down here but these battery things. I don’t see any other doors or trap doors, so, uh, I’m coming back up.” He pocketed his flashlight and climbed back up the ladder to the main floor of the cavern.
“I wonder if we drained it when we got zapped?”
“Well,” Quinn said, exploring what he could see in the strange chamber with his flashlight, “it was a lethal dose of zap. If they hadn’t resuscitated us, we’d be dead.”
“You think they do this to other people?”
Quinn shook his head and smiled, his wild imagination coming alive with possibilities “I think they were interested in us because we survived. I’m going to guess they didn’t blast anyone yet…but obviously I don’t have a clue. I agree with Mr. St. Germain—I think we were an accident.”
“Interesting theory.”
“There’s only one way to find out,” Quinn said, smiling wickedly. He shined his light on the other door in the chamber.
“Let’s go see what’s on the other side. I bet it’s a secret control room?” Quinn asked, becoming giddy.
“Or another tunnel.”
Quinn chuckled. He crossed the room and shined his light on the door. Just like the one they came through, it needed to be pushed open from inside the chamber. “Let’s kill the lights. I’ll see if I can push it open first.”
“Okay.”
Then the boys clicked off their flashlights and listened for a moment. Using the dim blue light of the chamber, Blake walked over to Quinn. When Quinn was satisfied his enhanced hearing heard no voices on the other side, he put his hand and shoulder on the door and gently pushed. The door didn’t budge.
“Gotta push harder,” he whispered.
Blake nodded in the darkness.
Quinn pushed harder and felt the door move.
“Nice,” Blake whispered. “Nice and easy.”
Quinn pushed and the door slowly opened…half-an-inch, an inch, an-inch-and-a-half, two inches, three inches, four inches…Quinn stopped and listened. There were still no sounds. He peered through the open door and saw more rock. He pushed the door open more and stuck his head through the opening.
The room was empty.
Jackpot.
He pushed the door open and stepped through it, Blake close behind. “It is a control room of some kind,” Quinn said.
“Whaddaya know?” Blake commented. He clicked on his flashlight and started swinging the beam of light around from object to object.
Quinn did the same and stopped on a bank of old-looking beige computer banks, complete with blinking lights and large data tapes, stacked to one side of the room against a gray cinderblock wall.
“How do they keep these things running?” Quinn said, walking over to one of the refrigerator-sized computer banks.
“They must have bought all the spare parts,” Blake teased.
“Seriously, is this high-tech place running off ancient computer technology?”
He shined his light over a bank of dials with various metrics; next to it was a bank with two magnetic data tapes in standby mode—according to the yellow indicator bubble. Next to that sat three banks with rows upon rows of quarter-inch jack outlets each with red and green light bulbs. Only the third bank had old, cloth-covered wires connecting various outlets with no discernible rhyme or reason. Two smaller banks with unfamiliar dials and knobs sat next to those.
“All of these…computers…have power. This place is still running,” Quinn said softly.
“Those are computers?” Blake asked, whipping is light back and forth on the monstrous boxes.
Quinn shrugged. “Maybe they’re all parts to one computer, but I don’t know. I wasn’t born when these things were built.” He turned around and shined his light on the other side of the room. It was sparsely furnished with a desk, a long table, and several old, dusty chairs.”
Blake walked up to the table and reached out to touch it.
“Don’t!” Quinn hissed.
“What?” Blake asked, jumping back.
“Look at all the dust on this stuff. If you touch that, your fingers will disturb the dust and leave evidence we can’t get rid of. Someone’s clearly coming down here every so often to check on the big computer things. We don’t need to tip them off that we were here—especially since none of this furniture looks like it’s been used in years.”
Blake nodded. “Right. But how do they get down here?”
He shined his light around and found another tunnel opposite the door they entered in. They approached the archway that led to the tunnel and stopped to examine it with their flashlights. It was made of cinderblocks and not poured concrete like the one they had discovered that led them down into the chamber. About fifty paces away from them, a metal cage of some sort reflected back their light.
“Looks lik
e the Batcave,” Quinn said.
“What?” Blake asked.
“It looks like the elevator in the Batcave that goes up to Wayne Manor.”
“Oh, right.”
The boys made their way toward the other end of the tunnel. The cage, they discovered, separated them from a very old elevator shaft that disappeared into the darkness above them. Several chains hung on the far side of the shaft. Three vertical columns of steel i-beams—one on the back off the shaft and one on each side of the shaft, reinforced with cross bracing attached to the rock walls, supported what Quinn assumed was the elevator car frame. The inside of each i-beam had gear teeth, so Quinn assumed the elevator car traveled by means of a geared mechanical system—maybe even a hand-crank.
A noise above him startled him.
“Turn your flashlight off,” Quinn hissed, clicking his off. Blake complied.
Voices above them grew louder until the sudden screech of metal made both boys jump.
Someone opened the elevator door up there.
Footsteps on metal traveled down the shaft as men’s voices echoed down with them. The metal screech echoed once more and a mechanical device whirred to life, causing the chains on the back wall to shake. Suddenly, the tunnel and the control room behind them were bathed in white utility lights that switched on.
Quinn and Blake looked at each other, surprised.
“Run!” they both whispered.
1-16 | More Unanswered Questions
Blake
BLAKE PULLED OPEN THE CONTROL room door and barely held it open for Quinn. He was almost across the chamber when he heard Quinn yelling at him in a loud whisper.
“Blake, stop!”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Blake screeched, his lungs heaving for air as his flight response kicked in. He spun around to look at Quinn. “Where the hell are you?” He asked, alarmed that Quinn was not right behind him.”
“I’m right here. I’m invisible.”
Blake yelped and jumped back. “Oh my gosh, you really are; I can’t see you!”
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