The Anomaly

by Michael Rutger

  “Let’s keep moving, Moll.”

  It’s not easy to maintain a sense of direction in a dark tunnel, especially when you’re doing your best to run, but it seemed to me that the fissure struck out at an angle for a long while, and then started to pull back around, curving in a gradual arc.

  Then it was straight again, very straight. Both the walls and floor became much smoother, too.

  “Have we been here before?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. I couldn’t be sure, but it didn’t feel like we’d curved around enough to rejoin the corridor off the main passage on the other side of the stone ball. “Pierre—you never made it to the end of either of those corridors before the ball, right?”

  “No. So this could be…Oh.”

  In front of us, the tunnel split into two.

  “For God’s sake,” Molly said. “So which way do we go?”

  “One way, together,” I said. “And if that’s not the right one, then we come back and go the other. Together.”

  “But which?” Pierre asked. He sounded worse than scared now. He sounded truly desperate. “Which way, Nolan?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “But how do you know?”

  “I don’t. It’s trial and error. It’s okay, Pierre—we’re going to get out of here.”

  “I don’t think I can take much more of this,” he said. “I need to see some real light. I need some real air.”

  I led us down the right fork, somehow confident it would be the correct one. But after curving harshly for about thirty feet, it dead-ended. No sign of anywhere to climb to. It simply stopped. In a site this complex, this was far beyond my comprehension. It was hard to believe they’d run out of time or energy. This side tunnel meant something. Just not to me.

  And either it was my imagination, or there was something happening now, too. When you touched your hand to the wall, it felt as though it was vibrating.

  “Christ,” Pierre said. “You said this was the right way.”

  “I was wrong. It’s not the first time.”

  We lurched quickly back to the fork. As we arrived there was a massive thud, far more resonant than any of the ones before. It sounded like something very heavy indeed.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” Pierre said. “If it’s making hundreds or thousands more of those things…”

  “It’ll be okay,” Molly said, though she didn’t sound like she believed it. “Pierre, it’ll—”

  “Seriously, Moll? What single part of this has been okay?”

  “All the bits where we haven’t died,” I said, planting a hand on each of their backs and shoving them up the other tunnel.

  The tunnel started off straight but then bent markedly to the right. It kept going, too. And got wider, until we could trot along three abreast.

  “Stop,” Molly said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “There’s light ahead.”

  Her eyes were better than mine. I hadn’t noticed it against the glow from the phone screen, weak though it was. When I turned it off I saw a soft light in the tunnel ahead.

  We were still and silent for a minute. Heard nothing.

  “It’s her,” Pierre whispered. “It’s Feather—coming back around to the gallery room.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “It’s three against one,” Molly said, her voice hard. “And I really kind of want to talk to her.”

  I nodded. “Okay, so. Very, very quietly.”

  They dropped back a pace and let me go first. Moving slowly and carefully made me more aware of the cramp in my stomach. The muscles were locking up. Could just be a spasm, the muscle wall twisted at some point in the last hour, accentuated by the fact my stomach had basically received three mouthfuls of food in the last two days. Hopefully it was that. If not, it was something from the claws of the thing that swiped me, or the gunk still smeared over me.

  There was barely any sound from our feet on the floor, but I held my hand up every few yards, and we froze, and listened. Nothing—except for the low vibration I’d noticed, and which I still wasn’t entirely sure existed outside my own head.

  Another few steps—still nothing.

  But gradually it became clear there was a doorway ahead, a perfectly rectangular opening. Whatever was causing the glow lay beyond.

  We crept closer and closer until we had no option but to commit, and stepped up to the edge of the room, and then into it, down a short flight of three steps—the first real steps, it struck me, that we’d seen in the entire site.

  It was immediately clear that the space was devoid of people. But it wasn’t empty.

  Molly came down after me. “What the hell…is this?”

  Chapter

  50

  The room was large and perfectly square. The ceiling was low. A path led directly across a flat, open space. In each corner stood one of the stark pyramidal shapes we’d encountered throughout the complex, but much larger: about four feet high.

  How could we see all this?

  Because the room glowed.

  I don’t know how else to describe it. The light didn’t come from any particular source. There were no fixtures on the walls or ceiling or floor, no torches or other forms of illumination. Light simply hung like a cloud within the space, a muted opalescent glow.

  “How is this even possible?” Pierre asked.

  “I’ve no idea. It’s not something we can do.”

  “You mean, modern technology?”

  “Now or ever.”

  We walked into the center of the room. There was a frieze on the floor, split into equal halves by the path, taking up the entire space. Portions were raised by about an inch. The edges were sharp, as if laser-cut, far more precise than anything we’d seen in the rest of the structure. The shapes within it were rigidly geometric—some large, yards to a side; others smaller. Some had tiny points of light within their boundaries. Again, not actually in the stone. The glows didn’t appear rooted to the rock itself, but as if suspended an inch above the surface. There weren’t many lights. I counted six in the left half, seven in the right, thirteen in total, widely spread. Most were a dull amber color. I turned to face the left portion.

  There was one in the upper left quadrant of this that was a deep, rich red. It was this that enabled me to finally find the pattern.

  “It’s a map,” I said.

  Molly frowned down at it. “Of what?”

  “The Earth. Reduced to basic land masses. Look.”

  Once you’d seen it, the shapes fell into place. They showed the continents and the world’s major islands, simplified to stylized geometric figures. Done that way out of an artistic impulse, or maybe even to allow for gulfs of time long enough to involve continental drift.

  She pointed at the tiny rich red light. “So that’s us?”

  The glow was about a quarter of the way in from the left in its quadrant, about three-quarters of the way down. The approximate site of the Grand Canyon within a heavily simplified North American continent. “I think so.”

  “And the other lights are sites like this?”

  “They must be.” I held up my phone and took pictures of both halves of the room. One of the amber lights looked like it could be in Egypt. There was one in a rectangle that was presumably Australia. Another deep in the heart of Russia; one in France. One in what was probably Israel.

  Then I noticed one of the lights was up in an area that could be interpreted as the far reaches of Alaska.

  “Shit. Yes, they are.”

  The light there was the same dull amber as the others. But would it stay that way? Would they all? Or had we started something even bigger than we’d realized—something that would now arc out across the entire world in an avalanche of destruction?

  “Nolan—look. At the other one.”

  I looked back at the light that seemed like it must indicate our position. It had started flashing.

  “Why’s…it doing that?” Molly asked.


  It was pulsing at a rate of maybe once every two seconds, smoothly transitioning from off to on and back again. “I don’t know.”

  Pierre was looking twitchy. “Let’s go.”

  “But this could be a control panel. We might be able to stop this thing from happening.”

  “It’s far more likely we’d just make things worse,” Molly said, staring at the light and sounding scared. “As with every single other thing we’ve done.”

  “We have to try,” I said, and stepped off the path and onto the frieze, heading straight for the flashing light.

  “Nolan—no!”

  But nothing happened. I walked straight over and stamped on the light. When I removed my foot, the glow was still there, pulsing like a tiny inaudible siren. I tried again, and again, stamping down with increasing frustration and panic.

  Pierre put his hand on my arm but I shrugged it off. “There’s got to be something we can do.”

  He pulled at me, harder.

  “Let’s go,” Molly said. “Nolan. Please.”

  “It’s not working,” Pierre said. “Come on.”

  Molly led the way to the other side of the room, moving fast. As we ran up the matching set of steps I noticed a cavity to the left of the doorway. Lodged in there was a narrow slab of stone. There was a groove across the top step.

  That gave me reason to hope, but I decided to keep it to myself for now. Pierre caught up with us as we stepped out into the corridor beyond, which led left and right instead of continuing straight ahead.

  “Now where?”

  “Right,” I said. “And this time I’m pretty confident.”

  “Why?”

  “When we first got here, to this level of the site. On the other side of the stone ball. You went exploring down the other corridor by yourself. You found a doorway blocked with a single sheet of stone, yes?”

  “Yeah, I think.”

  “I’m hoping this was it.”

  I turned on my phone, noticing the battery icon was now in the red. We ran along the corridor, passing doorways of a style I was sure we’d seen before, curved at the top. The air felt different, too. Less stale. Less dead.

  After a hundred yards we encountered another corridor, crossing at right angles and noticeably wider. “Yes,” I said.

  “Is this it? Really?”

  It was hard to be certain. A rock tunnel in near-dark looks very much like every other near-dark rock tunnel you’ve ever seen—and God knows we’d seen a lot. But on the opposite side, a couple of yards down, was a doorway like the one we’d just come out of—surely to the corridor we’d first explored when we’d emerged here after the ladder. “I think so. Oh thank God.”

  “There’s one way to check,” Pierre said.

  He turned left and moved into the darkness. Stumbled but kept going. Molly and I followed. It wasn’t far. About sixty feet, if I remembered correctly.

  It didn’t take long before we hit a blank wall. This wasn’t like the one we’d seen before the map room, however—a point where the builders had stopped tunneling. This wall was uneven. It had been created by cementing an opening shut with rocks and mortar.

  It was the bricked-up end of the corridor we’d encountered two days ago. And the other side of it…

  …was the world.

  “Okay,” I said, scarcely able to believe it. “We’re in the right tunnel. The first one we were in when we climbed up here. So we just have to go back to the shaft and…”

  I realized Pierre wasn’t listening. Instead he was kicking at the wall. Kicking hard, time after time.

  “Pierre…”

  “I’ve got to have some air.”

  “You’ll get it when we’ve climbed down the shaft.”

  “I need it now. Nolan, I can’t wait anymore.”

  I tried to put my hands on his shoulders, to calm him down. “Pierre, I get it. But—”

  “I can break the wall. We can get out that way.”

  “What? Of course we can’t. We can’t climb down hundreds and hundreds of extra feet of canyon wall in the dark. Or maybe you can, but I can’t. Certainly not now.”

  I tried again to grab him but he shrugged me off. His skin was hot, his eyes wide.

  “Leave him,” Molly said.

  “No.”

  “Leave him, Nolan. Leave him here in the dark. I’m done being in this place. I’m going out the way we know.”

  She walked away.

  “Pierre,” I said, as calmly as I could, “I want to get out of here as badly as you do. But this isn’t the way. Like Moll says—we know how to get out. Let’s just do it.”

  But he wasn’t listening. Maybe he couldn’t even hear. He’d been solid the whole time. Thoughtful, dependable, always ready to do the right thing. He was done with that now, done with keeping on keeping on. He’d run out of being that guy.

  And I was running out of being that guy, too.

  I tried one more time to lay my hands on him, to again talk him down. He kept kicking at the wall, though it was clearly achieving nothing.

  I did the only thing I could do. I believed he’d come to his senses soon. Sometimes you need to let the spastic energy out, let the panic fly.

  And sometimes maybe you have to say screw the other guy and look after yourself.

  So I turned and walked away.

  Then I heard Molly scream from up ahead in the darkness, and shout out in fury.

  I ran along the tunnel, phone held up in front of me.

  “Feather,” I said. “Let’s talk.”

  But then I saw Molly. She was rigid, eyes wide, an arm wrapped tight around her throat. And it wasn’t Feather’s.

  “Hey, Indy. Weird situation you’ve got yourself into this time, hey?”

  It was Dylan.

  Chapter

  51

  I stopped dead in my tracks. In the near-darkness it was exactly like seeing a ghost.

  “Feather…said she killed you.”

  “Fake news,” Dylan said cheerfully. “It’s an epidemic, man. So—where are the other dickheads?”

  “Dead,” I said, angrily and very loud. “Ken and Gemma and Pierre are dead. They died on the other side of that fucking ball.”

  “Well, I’d be lying if I said I gave a shit,” Dylan said. “And, hey, saves me doing it.”

  “But…why did Feather say you were dead?”

  “To keep you on your toes. Or off them. Without me there’s no way home, right? Very dispiriting. A real will-sapper. She’s all about the psych stuff, that girl.”

  “Where’s she now?”

  “Out of here. With my phone, because apparently you’ve got hers. Reporting back to base. Mobilizing Palinhem—or the ones we trust, anyhow. And about time, because once we thought you’d found the right place she was only supposed to sit tight and observe until it was confirmed. Which she did. But she also talked, hey.”

  “Not much.”

  “So how come you’re here, instead of trapped back there?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Right, Indy. She made a mistake. Doesn’t matter. I’m here to clear that up. It’s what I do.”

  “You’re with Palinhem as well?”

  “Of course. My father and grandfather, too.”

  I realized something. “It was you, wasn’t it. You and Feather. You met in the parking lot of the hotel, a couple of nights before we came down here.”

  “And you nearly found us. But didn’t. Story of your life.”

  “Wait—your grandfather? But…the founder, Seth Palinhem—he only died ten years ago, Feather said.”

  “God, but you’re dumb, man. There was no such guy. You need a story to explain why a foundation’s got so much money to spend, that’s all. In reality it’s older than your stupid country. Than any country. Feather’s born and bred to it, too, but she had a shine for you, Indy. She’s got big ideas and might have tried to wrap you into them. I don’t have that problem. I know my place. My job is not to reason why.”
>
  “Then what—”

  “It’s to make sure things happen nice and clean. Make sure all the sheeple out there, the ten billion dumb assholes of the world, never understand what’s going on, never suspect what’s being done in their name. You do not take risks with the mission. You tie up loose ends. You tie them up hard.”

  He moved his other hand out from behind his back and placed the barrel of a handgun firmly against Molly’s temple. “So let’s get that done.”

  I was ten feet away from him. Even if I’d been faster and fitter and less broken there was no way I could get to him before he pulled the trigger. There was no point even trying.

  For a moment I felt that car crash swell of relief that comes when the worst is happening all around you, right now, and you can stop bracing yourself for it.

  I breathed out slowly and held my hands up.

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay, Dylan—you win. I’m not going to come at you. You know that.”

  “Ya—because you’re weak. All fucking talk, man.”

  “Maybe. Also because I know when I’m beat, and Molly is my friend, and I’m not going to be the cause of her death. You’ll have to do the deed by yourself. But what I don’t understand is why this is so big a deal.”

  “Seriously? It’s the biggest deal there is, Indy. It’s how we start again. How we reboot that big fuckup out there.”

  “Reboot what?”

  “Planet Earth. It’s not the first time. The other cycles—everything was lost. Almost everything. A few pockets escaped the flood. Cleanup crews that survived. Their DNA is supposed to collapse once they’ve done their job but somehow last time they made it into legend and the next human bloodline. The giants you’re forever talking about—it’s them. Echoes in the blood. But that’s why the last reboot didn’t work. You talk all the time about ‘anomalies’—and ya, I’ve seen your dumb show—but you don’t get it. Mankind is the anomaly, jackass. Humans are the fuckup, the thing that got mangled and messed up. This time we’re ahead. This time we’re going to run the game.”

  “What game?”

  “The game of life. When the Ninth Prophecy comes fully to pass and all is wiped from the Earth, we’ll be safe, in position to make sure it’s clean this time, and ready to lead the way into the next epoch. It’s time, my friend. This is a planet of dead men walking. And you helped us find the switch on the electric chair.”