The lift driver smiled and waved at the two of them as he saw them approach. He was a large burly bald man who looked as if he had taken the lift up and down his entire life. His body rippled with muscle with every move. “Hello,” he said with a grin, “I wasn’t sure when you’d be coming to see me. I had orders to wait for you.”
“Orders from who?” Smoke asked much too quickly for the lift driver’s comfort, he could see it in the man’s eyes.
“Man from the sixth. He said to wait for a man in a longcoat and a silly hat.”
“My hat’s not silly,” Smoke grumbled under his breath.
“He said to wait for you,” the lift driver said, “Now you’re here, we can go now.”
“You’re not going,” Penelope said without any sense of humour in her voice, “I’m taking this lift to the ninth below. You’re going to get to safety on the surface. Though, when you take each lift up with the other lift drivers use the slow descent mechanism. That way Smoke and I will be able to get out of here safely.”
The lift driver nodded his head with every word Penelope spoke. Smoke couldn’t tell if he understood the words coming out of Penelope’s mouth, but he’d make sure. “Could you repeat that for us?”
The lift driver scowled at Smoke. “I’m not an idiot,” he said angrily.
Smoke raised his hands in surrender. He didn’t want to take a hit from the big man if he didn’t have to. It’d likely kill him with that amount of muscle. “Didn’t mean to offend,” Smoke said apologetically. “I only want to be sure so when we try to go up we won’t have to do something drastic to get back up. No offence intended, just covering my ass. I hope you understand.”
Penelope shot him a look that he didn’t know exactly what it meant. It either said he made a nice save or that he was an idiot in this sleep deprived state and would say anything to anger someone. He hoped for the former. The lift driver gave Smoke a wary look and said, “I’m to take the lifts back to the surface with the other lift drivers and use the slow descent mechanism to send it back down to you. You are obviously someone important and doing something important otherwise you’d already be going back to the surface.”
Smoke nodded accordingly, “Yes, that’s exactly what I wanted to hear. Have a safe trip; we should hopefully be back up only a few days after you.”
The lift driver nodded and turned towards the lift on the opposite side of the town. He’d soon take it up and be safe. At least safer than Penelope and himself which really wasn’t saying much. “Well,” Penelope said as she moved towards the crank to the lift, “final floor. Do you think we’ll find Blue down there?”
Smoke shrugged, “I sure hope so.”
As Smoke stepped onto the platform he could see Penelope looking into the distance. Her eyes squinted as she attempted to see farther. “Holy shit,” she said with surprise.
“What is it?” Smoke asked.
“It’s Blue.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s true,” Penelope said with a grin. “Look!”
Smoke looked in the direction Penelope had been staring. He couldn’t see anything, “What are you talking about? There’s nobody there.”
“I’m sorry Smoke,” she said quietly.
Pain erupted in the back of his head as everything went black.
14
The pain in his head eventually woke him, though he couldn’t quite open his eyes. He concentrated on what he could in the way of his surroundings; he could feel he wasn’t moving up or downward. He didn’t know how long he’d been out. He groaned and touched the back of his head where Penelope had hit him. He managed to open his eyes a bit and look upward at the ceiling of what he assumed, or at least hoped to be the ninth below.
He managed to roll over to his side and looked up at Penelope who’d been sitting on the lift, “It’s about time you woke up,” she said with a hint of humour.
“Where are we?” Smoke asked with a groan.
“Ninth below,” she said with her grin never leaving her face. “I did a bit of a look around, no sign of Blue anywhere yet, but we’ve still got some time.”
“How long was I out?” he finally asked.
Penelope said something under her breath and Smoke demanded to know again. She shrugged and said, “About three days. You really needed the sleep Smoke; I figured the best way to make sure your body didn’t continue to keep you awake was to knock you out. Essentially I turned you off and then back on again.”
“What?” Smoke asked not recognizing the saying.
Penelope gave a lazy wave of her hand and said, “Don’t worry about it. It’s an old saying, you wouldn’t understand.”
“I can’t believe you hit me,” he said, ignoring the comment and rubbing the hurt spot again.
“It worked didn’t it?” Penelope said with a sense of pride.
Smoke shook his head and managed to get to his feet. He looked around the ninth below and marveled at how much it looked like the eighth. He had been here a few times in his younger years and the floor had always seemed darker than the others. Some of that may have had something to do with the people who had lived down there. They were just as likely to kill you where you stood, for no reason at all, than to help you along your way. It was hard to tell which people were which, considering the odds were great they all were savage killers.
Since the creation of the ninth below it had been used as a prison for those too dangerous to live amongst the rest of the underground. It had made sense that the lift driver for the eighth and ninth belows had been a hulking man; he’d need to be in order to bring prisoners down and to check in and make sure everything was alright. Normally things were not the best for the prisoners; it was uncommon for someone new to survive a week. Those that did tended to do alright until such a time when they could be released back into the rest of the underground. Prisoner releasings however, were very rare; almost unheard of.
The killings were not needless though, the people of the ninth below had a tendency to starve. Darkplant was rarely grown this far down, typically because the seeds didn’t usually make it. The last of the seeds would be taken by the eighth below which left very little or nothing for the ninth. Killing a person meant a fresh supply of meat. Not good meat that was safe for human consumption, but it was something to put in a person’s belly regardless.
Without the prisoners, the floor seemed brighter and ironically more full of life. He took a step and found his legs trembled. His head hurt and that would be a problem. He doubted any serious or permanent damage had been done, though the fact that his legs wobbled concerned him. As he took more steps towards the abandoned town he found his legs getting more and more stable. He sighed in relief.
“We have any food?” Smoke asked eagerly.
“I was able to find a few small rations,” Penelope said with hurry. “They won’t last long, but it’d keep us fed, or at least fed enough for a couple days at least.”
She handed him a small chunk of protein wafer wrapped in a small piece of onionskin paper. He took a small bite from the morsel and began walking. The wafer didn’t have much of a taste to it, but it filled his belly with only a few bites.
A question then crossed Smoke’s mind. Why would they bring anyone who is a savage killer to the surface? He looked around and saw countless bones and the left over carnage from the level, but nothing recent. Nobody had come down and slaughtered the whole place, thus meaning everyone from the ninth who had been alive would be going to the surface with everyone else.
It was possible they would be used as cannon fodder for what Smoke hoped would be an army. Skilled fighters with a taste for blood could be something of an asset to a fighting force. They’d eat well, better than they had in a long time, and get to sleep on real beds, not the cots supplied for them or the ground. Basically they would earn their freedom if they help in the destruction of the towers. A great deal, one Smoke couldn’t imagine any of them would have turned down.
The town was smaller than
Smoke remembered. A dozen small single story houses stood in two rows of six. It was less of a town than a tiny homestead. A shame with all the open space the ninth level had to spare. Smoke would check out the tiny town and would then continue searching the open areas in hopes he’d find a place Blue could be hiding. If nothing came up he’d have to turn around and hope he came across Blue on the surface. Though he believed the lift driver would have told Smoke if she had come back up. It wasn’t like he was the driver for the second below; he’d only see maybe a few faces weekly, not a dozen or more in a day.
The houses were drab and falling apart; the decades of ill repair had taken their toll and Smoke couldn’t believe a person could live in such a way. The holes in the walls gave anyone from the outside a way in to kill the person residing inside. He doubted there would be locks on any of the doors; they would have been pointless anyway. As he passed each house he looked inside to see if Blue would be in the rooms. When Blue wasn’t present in any of the visible rooms he walked back to the first house and opened the door. Penelope went to the house across the road and entered.
The house was a depressing image of poverty and despair. No furniture or personal effects were present anywhere. It didn’t look as if anything of the sort had ever been present in the home. He walked through each room inspecting it thoroughly. When he couldn’t find anything he promptly left the house and entered the next.
Each place was a copy of the last. Smoke couldn’t help but feel remorse for the people of the ninth below. More so than for the people from the seventh or the eighth. The people on the seventh may run the risk of being captured, re-educated and sold into slavery, but if they acted properly and accepted their role, their lives actually turned out fairly decent.
People from the eighth were certainly worse off in their ways of living, but their desperation brought the opportunity of servitude. They were more willing to sell their freedom or the freedom of their children to a tower family. It gave them the ability to live life to its fullest, the only drawback was they had to cook and clean for the families. Almost seemed a fair trade once a person thought about it.
For the people of the ninth there was no respite. They lived and died in perpetual fear of being killed and eaten every moment of their lives. Smoke had never heard of an elder from the ninth. There was a reason behind that. The ninth below was the most dangerous of all places, you fought to survive and if a person couldn’t fight they died thus becoming the food for others.
The people of the ninth were dying quickly though. Smoke suspected it had been due to the cannibalism. He’d read many years ago from an ancient text that the consuming of human flesh was detrimental to the body. Something called a prion and something called Kuru had to do with it. He couldn’t remember the exact wording or what the prion and kuru had to do with any of it, but he knew it was deadly.
After each home had been checked Penelope met back with Smoke. She gave him a look of grave confusion and said, “She’s not in the town. There are a few houses… or I guess what I’m assuming are barns would be more accurate, farther out that I could see. We could go check them out.”
Smoke nodded. The exhaustion of the case had begun to catch up with him, not in a physical or mental way that the lack of sleep had caused; this was taking more of an emotional toll. He was beginning to get frustrated that it didn’t matter where he looked, Blue wasn’t there. “Yeah, let’s go check them out. I counted five of them surrounding the town.”
“Which one first?”
Smoke sighed and scratched his head. He knocked the hat off and watched as it fell to the ground. He picked it back up and shook the dust off. “I don’t know,” he said feeling more disheartened than he knew he should have. “That one.”
He pointed to a small barn in the distance. It was a three mile walk, nothing terrible, but far enough out of town that a person could scream and nobody would ever know, not that anyone would have cared regardless. The barn was in better repair than the homes in the town, though it looked as if it could be knocked over with enough effort. As they approached the smell of rotten flesh filled their noses. Smoke slid the door open and looked inside. A body sat strung to a chair. The smell of death and rotted flesh was putrid and pungent.
Smoke’s immediate thought was the body was Blue and she had died a horrid death. The face had been peeled off as well as suffering several stab wounds to the torso. As Smoke examined the body further from the doorway he could see the body was male. He didn’t know who the man was or what he had done to warrant such brutality; he didn’t really want to know either. It was more than possible this man was intended for a future meal.
He looked to Penelope. He expected her to have a look of horror or for her to have left the door to retch. Instead she stood beside him with a hardened stoic expression. She had been examining the body alongside him. She looked less phased by the horror in front of her than him.
“What do you think?” Smoke asked.
Penelope rubbed her nose and said, “We should burn this place down. It’s a travesty that he was just left here to rot and be buried by the boomers. We’ll burn it down and continue on. Give this poor guy a bit of a funeral. Same as any of the others that may have bodies within. They may be criminals and killers, but they are still human.”
Smoke nodded, “Do we have anything to start the fire with?”
Penelope entered the barn and began searching. Smoke followed suit almost immediately. The barn had been pretty bare, nothing that Smoke could see that would start a fire with any sort of efficiency.
“Eureka,” Penelope said finally.
Smoke turned as she produced three kerosene lamps. “These should work just fine,” she said with a grin, “Do you have any matches?”
Smoke shrugged and began searching the pockets of his longcoat and his trousers. He shook his head and pulled his hands from his pockets. “Nothing,” he said sadly. “We may have to leave this poor guy here. He’ll be buried soon enough.”
Time of death had always been a tricky thing to pinpoint this far down in the underground. There were no insects to eat away the dead flesh or spores from plants to bring along fungi. The best a person had would be the state of decay that took place from their natural microbes. This man looked to have been dead for quite some time though not enough to have left the bloating stage however.
Smoke rubbed the back of his neck and left the barn with Penelope quickly, leaving the dead man behind. He could see the look of disgust on her face mixed with the despair of not having the matches to give the man a proper send off. Smoke thought back to the town and if he had seen any matches anywhere. If any had been there he didn’t recall, it was not something he wanted to go back for only to leave empty handed anyway.
“Let’s try the next place,” Penelope said, “and hope to hell there’s no bodies in that one.”
“I don’t think there will be,” Smoke lied.
Penelope raised her chin a little in agreement and continued following him. “Should we split up?” she asked. “We could cover more ground that way.”
Smoke shook his head, “No, the barns are dangerous places that could be trapped or still have a person inside. If Blue had been kidnapped I’d be expecting to see her kidnappers with revolving pistols. I’d need backup if that happened. She might be alone, but if that’s the case she’s dead already and I’ll need help with her.”
The rest of the walk to the barn was in silence. That was one thing he enjoyed about Penelope, she knew when to stop talking. He liked traveling with Constance, but she did enjoy talking and letting him know what was going on inside her head. She was a sweet girl who forgave a lot, more than she probably should have, but Penelope was better traveling and inspecting company. The sound of their boots on the ground had been the only noise present along with their breathing and the sounds of the ventilation shafts.
Smoke looked up to the vents that shot out oxygen from the surface to allow the people of the ninth below to breathe. He didn’t k
now if anyone would be brave enough to come down to this level to do any repairs if anything went wrong. Someone must have been brave enough; otherwise this place would have been a graveyard as far back as a century.
When Smoke had been nothing more than a young boy he had heard of all the killing that happened on the ninth below and he couldn’t help but picture mounds of dead bodies reaching all the way to the ceilings. He’d picture the lift drivers taking the corpses of other floors as well to add to the piles. He’d been an imaginative child; he sometimes wondered what had happened to his imagination as he got older.
The first time coming to the ninth below had been a bit of a shock for him. He had expected things to be a horror show of carnage and terror. Instead he had been met with dozens of people who eyed each other warily and avoiding coming into any sort of close proximity with one another. He couldn’t remember why he had gone down to the ninth below for the first time. It was an uncomfortable place to be then, and now that nobody remained it was still unpleasant, though only a fraction less. Before ever going he had done his best to avoid the place as best he could. If he didn’t have to go past the sixth below he was happy.
The next barn was much larger than the previous. Smoke took a second to smell the air. If anyone had been dead inside he couldn’t smell it. Penelope opened the door and peered inside. She turned back to him and shook her head, “There’s nobody inside. It looks like this place hasn’t seen a soul in several years.”
Smoke nodded, “We should move on then. We’ve got a few more to check out.”
The Engine What Runs the World Page 18