"Shit," he muttered. He sat there, knees pulled up, arms folded on top of them, his chin resting on them, while he watched the countdown and wondered if he had lost his mind somewhere along the way.
Daniel shifted a little and muttered under his breath, rolled over on his back and stretched out his legs. The moan was what made Kyle decide to grab his shoulder and squeeze.
"Danny, wake up," he insisted, which Daniel did almost instantly.
His lids snapped open and for a moment he just stared up at the ceiling, before shifting his eyes to stare at Kyle. "What?" he asked, his voice hoarse with sleep.
"You were having a nightmare," Kyle countered and released his shoulder again.
Daniel sat up slowly and pulled back against the wall. "I was?" He seemed puzzled by the idea and raked all ten fingers through his hair. "I don't know ... maybe."
"Yeah, well, I figured I'd better wake you up before you started kicking," Kyle said with a smirk.
Stan shifted. At some point he had keeled over onto his side and had spent most of his time asleep curled up in a fetal position. "Aw man," he groaned and pushed himself up. "I feel like a retirement home."
"We've been on our asses for too long," Kyle countered and glanced up at the countdown. "We still have about eight hours left."
"I've always hated waiting," Bark intoned groggily and sat up too. He blinked blearily at the rest of them, then hunched his shoulders and yawned heartily. "What I wouldn't give for a real bed right now," he added and let his head drop back against the wall behind him.
"I think we're all at that stage where even a decent chair would be heaven," Kyle said and got up. His knees popped and he grimaced lightly at the feeling. Decent food and a serious workout routine were on his agenda for when he got home. That and lounging on his couch - providing his couch was still his - watching some brain-dead flick from ages ago; now that would be heaven. "Too bad we don't have anything else to do but wait," he added.
"Yeah, well, eight hours aren't gonna go hopping by in a hurry now that we're awake," Stan pointed out and yawned big, inspiring Bark and subsequently Daniel too.
"We could leave now," Daniel finally suggested. His voice carried an undercurrent of something that Kyle could only identify as anxiousness.
Kyle's immediate response to this was the same as before. He shook his head, refusing to even consider the idea of leaving now. "No," he said. "We can't. We have to stay here as long as possible."
"And why is that exactly?" Bark asked, rose and arched his back. "Man, I'm getting cabin fever here. This place is too cramped and too fucking uncomfortable."
"I know it is. I agree," Kyle said and felt his own dose of anxiousness ripple under his skin. It was all about survival right now. He couldn't put into words what exactly it was he feared out there - apart from the obvious - but he knew it was essential that they stayed out of the way for as long as possible. "It's just ..." He sighed, shook his head, and again briefly wondered if he had lost his mind. Maybe he was seeing danger where there was none? "I can't explain it, okay? I've got this gut feeling that we should stay here, that if we start wandering around the place ... we might not all make it to the rendezvous point."
Daniel eyed him for a moment, and then pulled the blanket tighter around his shoulders. "I say we wait," he said.
"Make up your mind," Stan chastised him before focusing on Kyle. "Look, I get that you're nervous. At this point I don't want anything to go wrong either. But ... honestly ... what could happen? It's not like the other prisoners have suddenly turned into cannibals or something."
"Are you so sure about that?" Kyle asked and arched an eyebrow suggestively. "Look, I know it's crazy, I know I sound like I'm a couple of cans short of a six-pack. I can't explain it. I've always relied on my gut instinct and it's telling me that going out there right now is a very bad idea. I don't know why. I don't have prophetic visions or hear the voice of some fucked-up deity. But I think that thing in dome 6 - whatever the hell it is - has some kind of ... I don't know ... telepathic ability."
At this point all three of them were staring at him with varying levels of concern in their eyes. "And ... what? It's telling you to hide or it will eat you?" Stan asked, his tone intentionally unemotional.
This train was going off the rails fast and Kyle had no idea how to stop this right now. "No," he said quietly. Lying was never a good idea, but sometimes it was necessary. "Of course not," he added for emphasis. "Look ... people up here behave oddly. Think about it. The gardeners are slap bang in the middle of all this. The people in dome 4 act like zombies. The most normal of the lot are the people out there," he said, waving a hand toward the door and the dome outside.
"Well, there was that stampede," Stan agreed a little doubtfully.
"Stampede?" Bark asked and glanced from Kyle to Stan and back again. "Where?"
Kyle glanced at Daniel, who didn't look like he was paying attention right now, but he figured the kid would do that the second he found out about it. "Dome 4," he said.
Daniel looked up, focusing on Kyle.
"Well, technically the stampede happened in dome 3," Stan said and Kyle mostly felt like punching him in the face to make him shut up. "I didn't see it, just heard it. Sounded like a lot of people suddenly decided to relocate from dome 4 to dome 3 in a panic."
"We don't know what happened," Kyle said, slightly annoyed by the fact that Stan couldn't see what he was doing to the others. He wasn't so much worried about Bark; the guy seemed able to handle opposition. But Daniel? He looked scared now, worried, and Kyle didn't blame him one bit. "Might just have been some people who got freaked out by the loonies or whatever."
Stan stared at him for a second, and then suddenly got the point. "Oh, yeah, of course. Could be that too. What do I know? I was asleep when it happened after all," he said quickly and gave Daniel a smile that wouldn't fool a blind man.
Daniel glanced from Stan to Kyle and back again, then huddled deeper into his blanket, and Kyle wished they could get the hell out of here right now. "Look ... guys ... I know I wanna leave right now and I know you guys do too, but really ... I'm not messing around here. It's important that we stay here as long as possible," he said.
"As you keep saying," Bark said with doubt in his eyes. "Because of a gut feeling," he added thoughtfully.
"Yeah, I know how it sounds. Believe me, I do. It's fucked up. No question about that, but ... I really want to make sure that we all make it out of here. And I've trusted my gut instinct so many times with a good outcome, that I find it difficult to doubt it," Kyle said and glanced at the countdown. Seven and a half hours to go and he was really getting antsy. There was still time enough for so many things to go wrong that it made his skin crawl. "Just ... a few more hours. Okay?"
Bark eyed him for a moment and then shrugged. "Doesn't ruffle my feathers if we have to sit around here or there. It's the sitting around that bugs the hell out of me," he confessed. "And if there's danger out there, wouldn't there be danger in staying in one place too long?"
However little he might like it, Kyle had to agree with that. But his gut told him that this place was safer than out there. What that meant in the greater scheme of things was beyond him, though. It wasn't like that gut instinct was an exact science, after all.
"I don't wanna go out there," Daniel said with slight trepidation. "Not until I absolutely have to."
From the mouths of babes, Kyle thought and struggled briefly to suppress a smirk. Daniel was no little kid, but he was very young in his view of the world. He shifted his attention back to Bark, who was looking at Daniel with slight irritation, and then he glanced down at Stan, who sat there and stared sternly at the floor in front of his feet. "What about you, Stan? What do you think?"
Stan chomped down on his lower lip and scrubbed one hand over his face. "I don't know," he admitted. "I don't care either way. I just want out of here." He glanced at Bark, then at Daniel, then back at Kyle. "But I want to be dam
ned sure I can get out of here, so ... I say we stay."
Bark met Kyle's eyes and gave him a crooked joyless little smile. "Overruled by the majority, huh?" he asked, then shrugged again. "Okay, fine. If we gotta wait around for another seven hours, we might as well do it here," he conceded and grimaced when his stomach rumbled audibly. "Can we at least go out and get something to eat? I'm starving."
"I'm not the warden. You can do whatever you want," Kyle said and couldn't help that smirk from slipping over his lips; a smirk he was sure came out like a grimace. "I'm just worried. We're very close to a rescue. It would suck out loud if one of us didn't make it, because we got too impatient."
Apparently that was something to mull over. Bark frowned, glanced at the door, and then looked back at Kyle. "So, you're saying we can't get anything to eat for the next seven hours because it might be dangerous?"
This pulled a sigh from Kyle. "No," he said, struggling a little to be patient right now. "What I'm saying is that you can do whatever you want, Bark, but be careful. Keep your wits about you."
Again, Bark glanced at the door and pulled his lips in against his teeth in a sign of discomfort. "I am hungry," he said quietly, then got off the stool. "Okay, I'm gonna go out and get some grub and some water. Leave a light on for me, will ya?" This he said with a snide grin on his lips, before he pushed the door open and left the com-station room.
***
Step Four – On the move
Bark had barely stepped through the door, before the usual murmur of voices from outside started to rise in intensity. He took one step back and stared at something Kyle couldn't see. Kyle got up and joined the other man at the door, only to realize that something was happening at the far end of the dome, and it was driving people towards them.
"What the hell is going on out there?" Bark asked without taking his eyes off the commotion.
"Nothing good," Kyle countered, grabbed Bark's shoulder and hauled him back inside, before closing the door again.
Daniel was on his feet now, looking pale in the dim light of the room. "Are we safe in here?" he asked, and there was no doubt that he was scared.
Kyle had no answer for him, only stood there, with his hand wrapped around the door handle, while he was trying to hear what was going on outside.
"Are we?" Daniel pressed.
"Simmer down," Stan advised him in a somewhat distracted tone of voice, and withdrew to the rear of the room to stand beside Daniel. "This isn't the time to panic."
"I'm not panicking," Daniel snapped, and focused almost sternly on Kyle. "This is it, isn't it?"
Kyle glanced at him. "What's it?" he asked, then leaned forward and pressed an ear against the door. Apart from the commotion out there, which seemed to rise in intensity, there was something else, some kind of sound he couldn't identify. It was like an undercurrent to the rising crescendo outside. "What the hell is that?" he muttered.
Bark leaned forward and copied his stance - one ear pressed against the door - and listened for a moment.
"You hear that?" Kyle asked.
Bark nodded, an expression of deep concentration on his face. "Sounds like a massive jackhammer ..." He trailed off and pushed away from the door, looking at it like it was going to bite him. "That's the source of the vibrations you felt earlier," he said, his voice a little breathless.
That reaction made no sense to Kyle at first. "The machinery?" he asked.
"That's no machine making that sound," Bark said with a jerky shake of the head. "No way is that mechanical."
Kyle stared at him. "If it's not mechanical ... what is it?"
"I don't know. But it's too uneven to be a machine. There's no rhythm to it," Bark said and met his eyes. What he conveyed with a look, was something he obviously didn't want to convey with words.
"It's burrowing, isn't it?"
Both of them turned to look at Daniel, who had withdrawn to the furthest corner and was staring at the door. "It's like some kind of ... bug, burrowing through the rock. Like a jackhammer the size of a town."
"Shut up," Stan advised him none too kindly. He looked a little freaked himself. "That's ridiculous. Something like that doesn't exist," he added a little calmer. "Right?" he asked while his eyes shifted from Kyle to Bark and back again.
The rhythm notwithstanding, there was something organic to that sound, like someone thumping against a wall repeatedly. "Whatever the hell it is ..." Kyle trailed off, not sure what to say. He wanted to be encouraging, wanted to wave it all away nonchalantly, but how could he? He felt twice as freaked as Stan looked. "There's only one thing we can do right now. We have to get to dome 2. We have to get to the storage room."
Bark blinked in slight confusion. "I thought you said we should stay here as long as possible," he countered. Of the four of them, he sounded the most together right now.
"Yeah, I know. That was before I knew that it was doing that," Kyle shot back, waving a hand at the floor. "Now I think we have to move; as in right now."
For a second, they all just stood there and looked at each other, and then Bark bared his teeth. "What the hell are we waiting for?" he demanded, grabbed the door handle and pulled the door open.
They burst out of the com-station room and started running immediately, with Kyle leading the way, followed by Stan and Daniel, and Bark taking up the rear. Kyle had no idea what the others saw, but all he could focus on was getting where he needed to be without anyone stopping him; not that anyone tried.
There was general uproar around them. It wasn't quite panic, more a 'what the hell is going on' attitude and people were pulling back from the end of the dome where the tunnel into dome 2 was. Kyle ran as fast as he could, considering that he had to push through the crowd to get anywhere, and he occasionally felt a hand grabbing him. But nobody pulled him to a halt, which meant it had to be one of his companions. He didn't look back and he didn't stop, but kept moving as fast as he could, heart pounding in his chest while his gut told him all sorts of nasty things.
About halfway through the dome, the crowd thinned out and they could move more freely. Some people called after them to not go that way, but still nobody tried to stop them. They reached the tunnel, which was still covered with the tarp, when the first scream erupted behind them.
Instead of just pulling the tarp aside, Kyle yanked it off its anchoring, before looking back to make sure the three others were with him. He grabbed Daniel's arm and pushed him into the tunnel, then shoved Stan past him and stopped dead with one hand on Bark's arm. Bark, too, was staring back at dome 1, and he too saw what Kyle saw; namely holes opening up in the rock-solid ground and people disappearing into them.
"Fuck me," Bark rasped, grabbed Kyle's arm and shoved him into the tunnel. "RUN!" he yelled.
They raced through the tunnel, and burst out at the other end only to find that several rows of the housing complexes there had collapsed. But Kyle had no sense for the lack of aesthetics in this dome. All he wanted was to get the hell out, no matter how. "Move!" he snapped when Stan came to a stop. Instead of waiting for the other man to snap out of it, he shoved him hard in the back, ushering him forward. "Go go go!"
They continued their hap-hazardous dash through the narrow passages with Kyle in the lead. He did occasionally glance back to make sure the others were still with him; not that this was necessary. He could hear them clearly.
Halfway through, Kyle came to a skittering stop, his boots dredging up dust. Daniel ran into him and he only barely managed to remain on his feet. The passage was blocked off by the crumpled buildings ahead and there was a hole in the ground right in front of the rubble.
"Shit," Bark hissed. "We gotta get around this. How do we get around this?"
Kyle ran over the layout in his head, but realized that he knew too little of the dome's floor plan. Instead he glanced back at Daniel, who was staring at the hole and seemed incapable of doing anything else. "You've done a lot of running in this dome, right?" he asked.
"When I met you that first time, you said you ran here to keep fit," Kyle elaborated.
Daniel glanced around, looked briefly back at the hole, but then nodded. "Yeah. I know this dome pretty well," he agreed, obviously catching on to what Kyle wanted from him.
"So? How do we get around this?" Kyle prompted after a moment when Daniel stalled again.
"We go back to the last intersection and go left," Daniel said. "Down two intersections, then right. If the path is clear, that'll take us straight to the storage room."
Kyle nodded. "Go. Let's move," he urged the others. Whatever was making those holes, he had no wish to get acquainted with it.
Stan took off, followed by Daniel and then Bark. Kyle sent a brief look back at the hole when he started moving, and came to an abrupt stop again. Turning back, he squinted at the hole, certain he had seen some type of movement from it. What it had been he couldn't say, but he was sure something had briefly popped up from the underground.
"Shit," he hissed, swirled around and followed the others at a run. This was not the place he wanted to be left behind.
Like Daniel had promised, the path led them straight to the storage room. The door, however, was shut, and since none of them were injured, it wouldn't open. A little out of breath, they all just stood there and looked a little lost.
Dark Side of the Moon Page 33