Centralia

by Mike Dellosso

  From the corridor outside came the sound of heavy boots moving fast. Peter’s eyes darted to April. Had she led him into a trap? But she appeared just as surprised as he was.

  She took a deep breath and called, “Don’t come any closer. He has hostages.” April looked at Peter, eyes wide, lips pressed together, and flicked her hand, motioning him toward her. She was a quick thinker.

  Peter stepped behind her and pointed the gun to her head, grieving over how this might appear to the mother and daughter in the room, but one look reassured him that even the young girl had noticed April’s ruse and caught on.

  Peter moved April into the doorway, half in the room, half out. Down the corridor at least five guards had gathered, all brandishing handguns. None had taken a shot yet, which confirmed they didn’t want to risk hitting April.

  Peter moved into the corridor, staying close to the wall and keeping April between him and the guards. He glanced in the room and said to the woman, “You coming with us?”

  She gathered up her daughter and they both hurried to the doorway.

  “Get behind us,” Peter said.

  The woman, holding her daughter close, did as instructed.

  “Now,” Peter said to April, “how do we get out of here?”

  “Back. Go back,” April said.

  Peter backpedaled down the tunnel, holding the gun to April’s head with one hand and keeping his arm wrapped around her neck with the other. She clung to his arm to avoid losing her footing. The woman and girl from the room stuck close, staying behind Peter and out of direct line of any guns. The guards followed cautiously, crouched, guns trained on him, keeping a distance of fifty feet between them.

  At the next intersection, the corridors stretched in each direction like catacombs built to house the remains of long-dead saints. Dim lights illuminated the pale concrete in sections, giving it an appearance of motion as if it billowed and rolled to some subterranean tidal force.

  “Which way?”

  April pointed left. “That way.”

  They ducked around the corner, and the scuffing of boots on concrete grew closer as the guards hurried to close the distance between them.

  Peter picked up the pace, but April’s feet couldn’t keep up. She stumbled and nearly fell from his grip. Peter pulled her up as easily as if she were made of fabric and stuffed with cotton. “Hurry. C’mon.”

  A moment later two of the guards peeked around the corner, guns raised; then the others joined them. They had closed the distance to no more than thirty feet now.

  They approached another intersection. “Now where?” Peter asked.

  April squirmed under his grip. “Straight. Keep going straight.”

  At the intersection, they paused. Peter could feel April’s heart beating through her back against his chest. Their pursuers were still steadily closing the gap.

  Behind him, in the intersection, there was a scuffle, a whimper, and the woman screamed.

  Peter spun around in time to see one of the guards dragging the girl down the tunnel, one hand over her mouth, a gun to her head.

  Peter nearly dropped April. “No!” he shouted. Things were unraveling quickly.

  The woman, caught in the middle of the intersection between Peter and the guard, glanced at her daughter, glanced at Peter, a look of terror and hopelessness in her eyes. Her skin went pale, and her lips trembled at the sudden chill that had descended on the subterranean maze.

  “You have to remember,” she said to Peter, her voice cracking on every word.

  And then she turned and fled in the direction the guard had taken her daughter.

  The pursuing guards were now less than thirty feet away, so close Peter could see the intensity in the lead’s eyes.

  Confusion fogged Peter’s mind, and for a moment he thought of surrendering. The way the woman had looked at him . . . Those eyes . . .

  “You have to remember.”

  “Let her go, Ryan.” It was the lead guard. Guns aimed and ready to open fire, they continued their slow advance.

  Peter began to backpedal again. Karen and Lilly. After all he’d been through to find them, losing them like this . . . But he’d have to leave them. He couldn’t catch up to them, and he might never find them in this labyrinth. He found them once; he’d find them again. “We have to get out of here, April. How do we get out?”

  “End of the hall,” April said, her voice tight and strained. “There’s a door. It’ll take us out.”

  Just as April had said, at the end of the hall there was a solid door protected by a fingerprint scanner. Peter placed his thumb on the scanner. Nothing happened. He tried once more with the same result.

  “You don’t have access,” April said.

  Peter swung her around to face the door. “Unlock it.”

  The lead guard, a thin, muscular guy with short graying hair stepped forward, crouched at the waist, and pointed his handgun at Peter. He had a kind face, the face of a dad and granddad, and when he spoke, his voice was smooth and friendly, not forceful and commanding as one might expect. “Don’t do it, April. You can’t trust him.”

  So kindly was his voice, in fact, that Peter almost believed him and released April.

  April hesitated, her thumb hovering over the scanner.

  Returning to his better senses, Peter pointed his gun at the paternal guard. He spoke to April. “Do it! Open the door.”

  “No,” the guard said. “He’ll kill you once he’s out. He’s a killer; it’s what he was trained to do. He doesn’t care about you or anyone. He’ll do what he needs to do to survive and in this case that means killing you.” Again the guard spoke as if he were April’s father giving her advice about the kind of men she chose to spend time with.

  Peter loosed his grip on April. “I wouldn’t do that. Now it’s your turn to trust me. Trust me, April.”

  “You can’t trust him,” the guard said. “He’s a robot, and he’s been programmed to fulfill the mission at all cost, and you’re not part of his mission. You’re an obstacle.”

  April whimpered but didn’t move her thumb.

  “April, listen to me,” Peter said. “You didn’t want to be part of all this. I know you didn’t, okay? I know it. I could see it in your eyes. Now open the door and let’s both get out of here.”

  The guard stepped closer. He was now only twenty feet away. “April, if you unlock that door and go with him, you’ll be considered a traitor—”

  “You can’t be a traitor,” Peter said, “if I’m holding you against your will.”

  The guard inched forward. “You’ll be a traitor in our eyes because we know you had a choice. Aiding the enemy. It’s called treason. Do you want that?”

  April began to cry. She dropped her thumb on the scanner. The guard yelled, “April!” but it was too late.

  The door’s lock disengaged.

  The other guards advanced in a quick run, keeping formation.

  “Go, go!” Peter said. He pushed April through and shut the door as the guards arrived on the other side.

  Peter leaned against the door, his heart beating through his spine and into the thick metal, and surveyed the area. They were in another tunnel, this one more dimly lit; the bulbs were spread at farther intervals. Ahead was another door, another fingerprint scanner.

  “They can’t get in,” April said. “Only certain job codes have access and they’re not one of them.”

  Peter’s head spun. “Was that really my Karen? My Lilly?” he asked, mostly to himself.

  “Yes. That was them.”

  But it wasn’t possible. They couldn’t be his family. Surely the sight of his own wife would trigger something inside him, some kind of authentic memories. The woman had an emotional effect on him, but it was an emotional situation. But then there was the fact that, though they looked like strangers in his eyes, they both seemed to instantly recognize him. After all he’d been through in the past few days, was it really so impossible to believe that his wife and daughter might l
ook different from how he remembered them?

  They didn’t have time for this. The guards would find someone who had clearance to enter this corridor and would be opening the door any minute, maybe any second. “Where are they?”

  April slumped against the wall. “He took them.”

  “He who?”

  “Nichols.”

  “Took them where?”

  “Probably up. To the top.”

  “Then we need to get moving,” Peter said.

  The corridor led to a staircase that spiraled upward like a corkscrew and emerged inside a closet in the abandoned school.

  If Nichols had Karen and Lilly—Peter’s Karen and Lilly—then Peter was losing ground on them every precious second. “Where to?”

  April opened the closet door, which led to the gymnasium. It was early evening and the sun was low in the sky, casting dirty, burnt light through the clouded windows of the gym. The fissure in the floor was still at the far end, waiting like an open mouth ready to swallow some unsuspecting urban explorer or at the very least douse him or her with a dose of its hallucinogenic breath. They moved quickly across the gym floor and into the hallway.

  “There’s a safe house,” April said. “A farm just outside the town limits. He would have taken them there. It’s where the chopper lands.”

  A chopper. He was going to fly them out of Centralia. “And where would he go then?”

  April stopped at the double doors that led out of the gym, turned, and glanced at Peter. “No telling.”

  If Nichols got them on a chopper, he could whisk them away to a military installation anywhere in the world, and the chances were very strong that Peter would never see them again. Whether they were really his Karen and Lilly he wasn’t certain. But he had to get to them, had to find out the truth. “We need to find them first, before the chopper comes.”

  April pushed through the doors. “Follow me.”

  Outside the school, April led him across the property and into the woods. Trees stretched their limbs overhead, blocking out much of what little light was left. Underbrush littered the ground as though it had been planted there for the one purpose of making their journey slow and tedious.

  April pushed a low-hanging branch out of the way and, slightly out of breath, said, “There’s a tunnel from the bunker that goes directly to the farmhouse, but we were at the wrong end to access it.” She turned and looked at Peter. “They’ve had a big head start.”

  Peter stopped and listened. In the distance the sound of blades chopping at the air grew closer. “We need to move,” he said. He pressed past April and broke into a run. Branches slapped at his chest; thorns tore at his arms. He had no idea how far he was from the farm, but the growing sound of the chopper’s rotor told him he needed to make better time than he was.

  The helicopter grew ever closer and louder until it passed overhead. The sound produced by its whirring blades was not unlike the spinning knives of a blender. Peter saw it through the forest’s canopy—a dark-gray Black Hawk, flying low, just higher than the treetops. It moved ahead of him. He pushed on, pumping his arms and willing his legs to go faster.

  Peter glanced behind him but could no longer see April through the tangle of underbrush. He wondered if she was still following him or if she’d taken the opportunity to escape. Regardless, he needed to get to the safe house before Nichols boarded that chopper with Karen and Lilly.

  Finally he saw the forest’s banded tree line and the muted light of evening on the other side. The Black Hawk’s concussive beating of air was still loud. It was landing. As he drew nearer, he saw the chopper touch down fifty or so yards from a two-story German-style brick farmhouse.

  At the tree line he broke from the woods and found himself in a field of ankle-high grass, taking fire. Five gunmen poured from the house, all carrying automatic weapons and firing them in his direction. Rounds hit the ground, bit through grass, kicked up dirt. Bullets whizzed by his head like bees caught in a tornado. Peter nearly fell. Hunched over, he ducked back into the safety of the woods and behind the protection of its stately residents.

  From where he stood, he had a good look at the house and watched helplessly as Nichols emerged with a woman and small girl. Peter was at least a hundred fifty yards away and couldn’t get a good look at their faces, but he could tell by their gait and the way they moved that it was the mother and daughter April had led him to in the bunker. They ducked as they approached the chopper, and a gunman prodded them along.

  Peter fired at the men near the house and dropped one of them. As the remaining gunman on the house’s porch returned fire, the group moved as a unit closer to the chopper. Karen and Lilly boarded, then Nichols. The other gunman left the house and joined the group in the chopper. Peter held his fire; he didn’t want an errant bullet to strike either the mother or the daughter.

  When all were on the chopper and the door closed, Peter burst from the woods as if pushed out by an explosion and ran in a full sprint across the field. But he was too late. The Black Hawk wobbled, teetered, and lifted off the ground, its blades cleaving the air like a scythe.

  Peter pushed harder though there was now no hope of rescue. If this was Karen and Lilly, they would be carried away and he’d have no idea where to begin to look for them. Tears sprang to his eyes and blurred his vision. The ground seemed to undulate beneath him as if the moorings of the earth’s crust had been loosed and its tectonic plates become like jelly.

  The chopper lifted into the air, turned and tilted, and flew off.

  As Peter reached the site from where the chopper had lifted, something hit him high in the back of the right shoulder and bit like a hornet’s sting. The force of it spun him to the side and knocked him to the ground. His shoulder throbbed. He tried to move his arm, but it wouldn’t cooperate.

  He rolled to his back and suddenly grew very dizzy. The ground moved, rose and fell like the waves of an open ocean. The sky swirled and spun. Darkness crept in, first around the edges of his field of view and then closer to the center. Eventually the darkness consumed everything, and all that was left was a feeling of falling, falling.

  Falling.

  Down, down he dropped; head over heels he tumbled into a bottomless, ethereal tunnel like Alice into her rabbit hole. His stomach churned; his head spun. He groped at the air, kicked at the emptiness. Twisted and writhed. But nothing would slow his descent into the abyss of darkness.

  Then something appeared above him. It too was falling but quicker than he was, closing the gap between them. An object or a person, he couldn’t tell. As it came into view, he realized it was another person, facedown, arms and legs extended like a skydiver, wind pushing back the facial features.

  As the image grew closer, he could tell it was a man; then closer still and he saw who it was. Nichols. He was laughing. A deep, red-faced, fun-house laugh. He fell to within fifteen feet of Peter and hovered there, laughing, mocking. Peter was the source of his amusement.

  Peter was about to say something, to ask Nichols what had him so amused, when the older man drew a gun and without hesitating, pointed and fired at Peter.

  Peter’s eyes snapped open and tried to focus, but his surroundings were nothing more than a blur, a collage of straight lines and bulbous figures and varying shades of gray. His head still spun, and that feeling of weightlessness was still in his gut, but he was not falling. He was in a room, in a bed, secure on solid ground. White walls, white ceiling. But not concrete. Sheetrock walls, tile ceiling. A television perched in one corner, fastened to the wall by metal brackets, facing the bed. A large window covered with partially open vertical blinds took up most of the wall to his left. Sunlight filtered in and dusted the room in a soft glow.

  It was a hospital room, and he had an IV running from a pump beside the bed to his right arm. The pump clicked rhythmically.

  Peter lifted his right hand and combed his fingers through his hair, felt his face. He had at least a day’s worth of stubble covering his jaw. He rubbed h
is temples and strained his mind to think, but it was like trying to squeeze water from a dry sponge. He couldn’t remember what had happened.

  Slowly the memories returned. The tunnels, the bunker. Centralia. April. Their escape. The farmhouse. Karen and Lilly. He remembered the chopper, remembered it lifting off with Karen and Lilly on board, but that was it. How had he gotten here?

  Like the surge and flow of a tidal wave following an impressive ebb, a great feeling of desperation overcame him. Panic, almost. He had to find Karen and Lilly, but he had no idea where Nichols had taken them. They were as lost as two pleating pins in a world full of haystacks. They had no doubt seen him running after the chopper. What must they think? Did they believe he was dead? April had said they’d been told he was dead once before.

  Peter sat up in bed and reached for the IV, but before he could yank it from his hand, the door to the room opened and in walked a man. Nichols. He had a woman with him. The two of them crossed the room without saying a word and stood at the foot of the bed.

  Peter sat back, tense, hands balled into fists. “Where am—?”

  Nichols held up a hand. “No questions yet. Let me explain fully, and then you can ask all the questions you want. You’ll get your answers.”

  Peter nodded. He’d go along with Nichols for now.

  “Peter, this is Dr. Ambling. She’s been a part of your training from the beginning. She’s a graduate of Stanford, PhD in psychology, ten years in clinical practice and as many in research. She specializes in memory manipulation and replacement.”

  Ambling clasped her hands in front of her and dipped her chin at Peter. She was an attractive woman, midforties, brown hair and glasses. She wore a brown dress suit and white blouse. She looked like a middle school librarian.

  “I brought her here to corroborate everything I’m about to tell you. No more games. No more lies.”

  Peter wanted to trust Nichols. The man had that air of respectability about him that was common to politicians and other government officials. Making it that much harder to tell which ones were sharks. He couldn’t help but think Nichols was a predator as well and capable of any trickery or lying to feed his ego. Besides, the man had already lied to him, tricked him, manipulated him. He hadn’t earned any trust.