by Chris Ward
Kurou made a snorting sound that could have been a laugh. Victor decided it was time to end the conversation and get moving again. They still had at least another hour of hiking down into the valley.
Midmorning had come by the time they reached the valley floor. The snow lay in thicker drifts here, but there was less wind so its depth was more even and it had settled better, allowing for quicker travel. By the time they reached the overhanging rock that concealed the entrance to the secret place, Victor was exhausted. Even Kurou seemed to be panting as he walked alongside.
In front of the jutting rock was a clearing which was usually thick with shrubs in summer, but was now a snow-covered basin. It was probably where vehicles had once parked, and whoever had planted the trees to conceal the access road had felt it unnecessary to hide the parking area too. Victor was pleased to see it still stood empty, and showed no signs that anyone had ever been here. The light he had seen still bothered him though, although there was no sign of it now. If someone had switched it on, they had since switched it off again.
Victor led Kurou under the jutting overhang into a cave space beneath where the snow blown in by the wind was only a few centimetres deep. Out of the sun it was bitterly cold, but the wind could no longer reach them, and surrounded by rock walls clear of snow, Victor felt mentally warmer, even if his body was still shuddering like an old train.
‘We’ve arrived, have we, sire?’ Kurou said. ‘Best open the door for me, hadn’t you?’
The back wall of the cave was abnormally vertical for something supposedly created over millions of years by the elements. The straight up, strangely coloured wall had aroused Victor’s interest, made him go over and put out a hand to touch it.
And he had discovered it was a huge, heavy tarpaulin, covered with cement and rock chippings, hung from thick metal bars high above them, covering a huge set of metal doors behind.
It had taken Victor several days to find a way of opening them. He had searched everywhere for some secret opening mechanism or a keypad requiring a password, then in frustration he had jammed a knife into the gap between the doors and they had moved a fraction of an inch, enough to expose a secret that was so obvious he was kicking himself to not notice.
They were set on runners, and with a shove only hard enough to break the runner wheels through years of accumulated dirt, they slid easily back into orifices cut into the rock walls.
‘They’re a bit stiff,’ Victor said. ‘On my count, push.’
Ice caught up in the runners made them hard to move, but pushing together Victor and Kurou were able to move one of the doors far enough for them to slip inside. Kurou didn’t wait, shimmying through the gap and leaving Victor standing alone outside. Giving Kurou a moment to discover the wonders of the secret place on his own, Victor went back out to the front of the cave and peered down the incline towards the rise they had descended. He couldn’t shake a sense of unease, that something was going to go wrong, and as he looked up he thought he saw a shadow move out of sight behind one of the trees. It was so far away that it could have been a trick played on him by his tired eyes, but he didn’t want to stay outside any longer, just in case someone out there in the woods had seen them.
As he turned back towards the door, he spotted the source of the light.
Set into the rock above his head, a bulb covered by a plastic cover about the size of a shoe was trying to flash through a crust of ice and snow that had built up over it, probably blown on to it by the wind. It was still working, something that unnerved Victor immensely. There was no sign that anyone had been here, but that didn’t mean anything; there could be other entrances.
Victor slipped back inside the entrance and gasped.
The power was on.
A tall, sterile room with several doors leading off was illuminated by strip lighting. Victor had always used a torch when he came here.
A door to the left was open, a trail of dirty footprints on grey tiles marking Kurou’s passage. Victor hurried after him, worried that Kurou might have run into danger.
The lights were on everywhere. Victor jogged down corridors far higher than his head, past numerous doors that led to empty offices and workshops stripped of their equipment. Last summer, he had explored this place a few rooms at a time, thinking for a while that it was abandoned and emptied out. It was a vast underground base, the corridors and chambers stretching for miles into the side of the hill, in places looking like the inside of some office building or hospital, in others hewn straight out of the rock.
And it was completely deserted.
But it wasn’t empty.
On his third day of exploring, he had got up the nerve to descend into the depths, where he had come to a sealed door opened only with a keypad password. Walking almost bowlegged beneath the weight of his curiosity, Victor had wired up a battery to briefly power the door’s electrics and used a computer tablet with a password breaking program to get the door open. He had then secured it with a series of large rocks he had carried down from outside.
What he had found inside had both terrified and thrilled him.
He found Kurou standing at the bottom of the steps, just inside the door which was still propped open. Kurou was statue-still, his hands clasped in front of him, his head craning forward.
‘Kurou?’
The other man didn’t move. Victor took a few steps forward until he could see Kurou’s face.
He was crying.
With the lights on the cavern was more impressive than he had ever seen by torchlight, fifty feet high and several hundred long and wide, a space hewn out of bare rock. Overhead fans now hummed, and the icy, subterranean air that Victor remembered even during the summer months had been replaced by something like warmth as ancient air conditioners cranked back into action.
‘What is this place, sire?’ Kurou moaned. ‘Have I died? Have I died, sire?’
Victor had felt a similar sense of euphoria as he walked along the aisles of the great cavern, swinging his torch across its contents.
‘It’s a storage facility,’ he said. ‘I’m guessing it is owned by the government. Why they decided to seal it away and disguise the approach road is anyone’s guess.’
In front of them, illuminated by bright strip lighting in the walls and roof, and large panels set into the floor, robots and machines and other kinds of military equipment stood lined up in rows, hundreds upon hundreds of them. To their left were huge caterpillar tread machines that looked like futuristic tanks, while to their right were hundreds of metal body suits hung on great rails several deep. The aisle directly in front of them was lined by metal cases and wooden crates, which Victor had discovered on his previous visits contained tools and parts, many of which were beyond description.
He had camped out here for several days at a time last summer, spending his time wandering around, trying to make sense of the place. The vast majority of the equipment was too heavy to move, so he had contented himself with picking through the boxes of old tools and computer equipment, poaching as much as he could carry to take back to his workshop. He had felt like a thief, but from the rust around the edges of many of the machines he could tell no one had come here in decades.
‘The greatest toyshop in the world,’ Kurou suddenly screamed, his arms high over his head like a mad professor. Before Victor could respond, he had dashed off down the wider central aisle, screaming at the top of his voice.
Victor didn’t know what to make of it. The spindly body receded towards the rear of the cavern, then Kurou was gone, vanishing into one of the side aisles. His footsteps echoed off the countless rows of war machines like the notes of a piano built from old car parts.
It was some minutes before Kurou returned, huffing and puffing from an aisle to the left, his coat fallen off his shoulders to hang around his waist like some gypsy shaman.
‘Sire, we must get to work.’
‘Doing what? We came here to hide.’
Even as he said it, he wasn’t sure h
e believed it. He had wanted Kurou to see this place, just as he had wanted to meet the strange man who had been fixing up his battered old machines. He couldn’t get over the childlike view that he was in the presence of some kind of Santa Claus of machines, and that what he could learn from Kurou might change his life forever.
‘There are workshops, yes? Computer mainframe rooms? Testing chambers?’
Victor nodded. ‘The upper floors are all research laboratories. Some of them are filled with machines I couldn’t guess at the use of. Others are filled with scientific equipment. I always got the impression that this place had been left ready for use in the case of a future war. One rather like the one we have going on right now. At least so it seems.’
‘Joy and jubilee,’ Kurou said. ‘More candy than a crow could ever want.’
‘I don’t think we should touch anything. I only ever took a few tools and a couple of old computer parts. There are whole rooms just full of junk.’
‘You are too meek, sire,’ Kurou said. ‘This is a goldmine shining so bright I fear for my poor remaining eye.’
He rushed off again before Victor could respond, disappearing into the aisles. Victor sat down on the ground beside Kurou’s bag to wait, unsure what to do next. Bringing them here had been the extent of his plan. It was the only safe place he knew of, and he had to hope that the city council didn’t know about it either. With the last train set to leave this afternoon, he was beginning to think they were in the clear. Even if Patricia had followed them long enough to discover the entrance to the secret place, she wouldn’t have time to get back to town and bring help before the train left. If she wanted to escape, she had to go soon.
It was quite possible that by tomorrow the town would be near-deserted, inhabited only by wraiths and those too poor to buy their way on to the train. If this place had remained hidden for so long, there was a chance the approaching enemy might roll right over the top of them without ever knowing they were here.
On the floor beside him lay the bag Kurou had brought. Victor reached out and picked it up.
Something inside was giving off a faint clicking noise.
He reached inside and pulled out the old radio from his workshop. He had never been able to get it to work, but now an LED was flashing red. The tuning control had been ripped out and replaced with a click button that Kurou had taped down. Victor had no idea what Kurou had done, but it had been tuned to a station broadcasting in a computer language Victor didn’t recognise. He was about to press the button to see what happened, but he thought better of it and put it back down just as Kurou reappeared.
‘Your radio is making clicking noises,’ Victor said.
Kurou sat down on the floor beside him. ‘Very interesting indeed, yes,’ he said.
‘What is?’
‘This.’ He pointed at the radio.
‘What’s that sound?’
‘Binary, sire. Computer language. These are commands being relayed from a mainframe to the drones it controls.’
‘What radio frequency is that?’
‘Digital, sire. A secure line.’
‘How can that radio—’
‘I made a few adjustments, added a couple of components from some you had lying around. I calibrated the coordinates to where I suspected the mainframe computer was based, and intercepted all digital signals within a certain area. Easy peasy, sire.’
‘And you can understand what its saying?’
Kurou leaned theatrically towards the radio and cupped a bony hand behind his ear.
‘If I pay attention, sire. Fluency isn’t my strong point, but I can get the general gist.’
Victor gave a disbelieving shake of the head. Understanding binary by ear? That was quite a skill.
‘And what’s it telling the drones to do right at the moment?’
Kurou smirked. ‘It’s telling them to bomb a railway line about five miles east of here.’
24
Lies and black stains
Robert woke from a fitful sleep to find himself slumped on the sofa with the manila envelope of photographs scattered on the floor around him, an empty bottle of vodka lying on its side in the middle.
It was already midmorning, a cold sun breaking through a gap in the curtains. He got up just as the door opened and Isabella appeared, carrying a tray of food and coffee.
Her eyes were bloodshot, her face sore.
‘I thought we should have a good breakfast on our last day here,’ she said, giving him a weak smile.
Her resolution reminded him of how much he did love her, even if she was a weaker prototype of his second beloved daughter.
‘I know this has been hard for you, Isabella—’
‘Hard?’ She looked about to say something else but bit her tongue. ‘It is what it is, Father.’
‘That doesn’t mean I’m happy about the situation. Victor Mishin might not have been my choice for you, but before this terrible business…’ He shrugged. ‘I guess there were worse possible suitors.’
‘The train leaves at twelve, Father. I packed some things for you.’
Her organisation was impressive. In the midst of trying to find his other children, he had done nothing for himself. In truth, he couldn’t see himself leaving until he knew what had happened to Patricia. There might be no more trains, but he had all-terrain vehicles up at the mine. He could use one of those—
A knock came on the back door. Isabella turned white, and looked about to drop the tray, so Robert took it from her and put it down on the table in the corner.
‘Stay here,’ he said, heading for the kitchen.
It was Papanov and Franko. Their eyes were bloodshot, as if they’d not slept. One of them kept coughing as if he’d contracted influenza overnight.
‘Do you have proof?’
‘We found a busted up chimney around the back of the Lenin Building,’ the first said. ‘Looks like someone escaped from that basement apartment after all.’
‘Patricia? Then where is she?’
We found tracks, looked like three people,’ Papanov said. ‘Difficult to tell with tracks in the snow. Looked like boots, couldn’t be sure of the size.’
‘Do you have anything solid for me or not?’
Franko sneered. ‘Did your daughter have a favourite colour, sir?’
‘Blue.’
Franko reached into his pocket and pulled out a square of blue cloth, holding it up. There was a black stain in the middle. ‘Looks like a handprint of soot smeared a bit by the snow to me,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t you say it looks like a message? Perhaps a cry for help?’
Robert snatched the cloth out of the man’s hand and stared at it, turning it over, running his fingers over it. The so-called handprint was more of a smudge, barely discernible as anything. It was true, though, that Patricia’s favourite colour was blue. As a small child he had taken her ice fishing, and she had spent hours just gazing down at the surface. He remembered her asking him, rather sinisterly, ‘Is my heart that colour, Daddy? Because I wish it was.’ He had assured her that her heart was red like the comic book hearts in the books she had liked to read, but by her early teens he was not so sure.
If it really was a sign from Patricia that she lived, like the handkerchief found in the basement apartment that was definitely hers, then she was still out there somewhere. Papanov and Franko had done what he asked, proving that she was still alive, even if the cost to Robert had been high.
‘The train leaves at two,’ he said, holding the first man’s gaze. ‘The station doors will open at one. When you arrive ask for me.’
A smile spread from one man to the other. ‘Thank you, sir,’ Papanov said. ‘We’ll spend the time beforehand looking for your daughter, just as a service to you. I can’t promise we’ll find her, though.’
‘Knowing that she lives is a grace you have given me,’ Robert said. ‘Thank you.’
‘We’ll see you at one,’ the first man answered. He tipped his hood to Robert, then they headed back d
own the path.
As Robert closed the door and turned around, he gasped at the sight of Isabella standing just a few feet behind him.
‘Was that wise, Father? If they find out you lied to them—’
‘Those men are common thugs,’ Robert said. ‘I paid them well. I owe them nothing more, and the train is full. They can die here with the rest of the worthless.’
‘But what about Patricia?’
‘I will stay behind and wait for her.’
‘No, Father! What about me?’
He put his hands on her arms. ‘Isabella, you are a grown woman now. You can look after yourself. If your sister has been kidnapped, I have to stay behind to look for her. I wouldn’t abandon you, and I can’t abandon her.’
‘You are abandoning me!’
‘I’m sending you to safety!’
Isabella thumped her small fists against his chest, then turned and fled upstairs, sobbing into her hands. Robert sighed and headed for the living room. He was just opening the door when a light on the stove heater began to flash, signalling that it was out of fuel.
He thought about heading out on to the streets to look for Patricia, but Isabella would probably come downstairs soon to collect a few mementoes from the shelves, and it was minus fifteen outside, even at ten a.m. In all likelihood, he had no hope of finding Patricia before the train left, so it wouldn’t hurt to fill the heater up before he headed out.
But when he went to take the key from the little bird box outside the back door, he found it missing.
Frowning, he headed down the back path, wondering if he had left it in the door to the shed. The footprints of the two goons were still fresh on the path, and Robert scowled, thinking again about how much money he had paid, and what he had promised them, all for a little empty hope.
The door to the shed hung ajar. Feeling his anger begin to rise, Robert went inside and looked around.
A five-litre plastic container was missing.
Footsteps on the ground led back outside. It looked like one set, but he couldn’t be sure, as they seemed to mingle with the two lines that led up to his back door. Perhaps one of them had stood guard while the other stole the gas. From the look of the footsteps, they had probably done it last night before they came to see him.