by Peter Clines
Roger padded across the tunnel in his socks. He put his hands against one of the wooden supports and pushed back against his heel. He closed his eyes and grunted as his Achilles stretched out. His feet shuffled and he stretched the other leg.
A trickle of dust and sand drifted down from the top of the arch. There was enough that it rattled when it hit the floor of the tunnel.
“Hey,” said Nate. “Stop it.”
Roger kept his eyes closed. “Just stretching my—”
“You’re shifting the arch,” snapped Xela. A small rock dropped and accented her words. It hit a stone on the floor with a loud crack. One the size of a basketball dropped next to it and missed Roger’s shoulder by inches.
He leaped away from the beam and another stone hit the floor. Then a third. They stared at the arch. A haze of dust floated around it, but nothing else fell.
Xela rapped on the walls. “It’s all sedimentary rock, isn’t it? Not really solid.”
“Thus all the beams and supports,” said Nate.
“Sorry,” mumbled Roger. “Didn’t even think.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Nate. “Let’s just make sure none of us push on anything else.”
Xela studied the roof of the tunnel. “How much do you think it’d cave in?”
Roger shrugged. “Enough to kill us?”
“No, I mean if this tunnel collapses, the one above it will probably go, too. And then the one above that and the one above that. Maybe all the way up to the sub-basement and the foundation. You could’ve brought the whole building down.”
“Cool,” he sighed. “Got it.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” she said. “Sorry.”
Nate shouldered his pack and took a few steps. “C’mon,” he said. “Let’s see if we can hit bottom before we’ve got to turn back.”
They walked for another twenty minutes, around four more turns, and Roger stopped. His brow furrowed and he looked at the air around him. He took a few more steps and stopped again.
Nate glanced back. “What’s up?”
“You feel that?”
Xela looked around. “Feel what?”
Roger stopped walking for a moment and crouched down. He set his palm against the ground and closed his eyes. For a moment Nate pictured the tanned, bare-chested man with a feather in his hair and cheesy warpaint.
Xela closed her eyes and rolled her head in a slow circle. “A tingle in the ground,” she said.
“Feels like an engine,” said Roger. His eyes opened and he looked up at them. “A big one.”
“We’re about forty-five hundred feet down,” said Nate. “Maybe we’re getting close.”
After the next hairpin turn Nate could feel it, too. It reminded him of big trucks and buses driving by on the street outside his office, or the tiny earthquakes that shook Los Angeles for a few seconds every month or so, the ones people only noticed after years in California. This wasn’t a brief tremor, though. It was constant. The longer he focused on it, the more he could feel it working its way through the soles of his shoes and into his bones. He was sure if he waited he’d feel it vibrate his teeth.
The trio went around two more turns and they could hear it. A low, rolling rumble. Roger was right. It sounded like an engine.
After the next turn they could see dust hanging in the air. The sound shook the beams. Halfway down the tunnel a trickle of sand fell in a steady stream. They could see a pile on the ground the size of a big bag of dog food.
“What do you think, boss?” said Xela.
“I think we’re safe,” said Nate. “If all this stuff has stood for a hundred years, it’d be real stupid for it to collapse the day we show up.”
“Yeah,” said Roger, “and nothing stupid ever happens in real life.”
They marched down three more legs of the tunnel. The rumble got louder but the vibrations didn’t seem to get any stronger. Then Roger staggered.
He took a few quick steps, as if he was trying to get his balance, then set his front foot down hard. Xela stumbled and caught herself. Nate felt his legs get rubbery and stopped moving.
“It’s the ground,” said Xela. “The ground’s level.”
They looked at one another. Roger grinned. They had a quick toast with their water bottles.
Their unbalanced muscles protested for a few more yards. Over five hours of walking downhill had messed them up. Nate was sure the real pain would start later, probably on the way back up.
The level tunnel stretched out for a few hundred feet. Up ahead Nate could see a wooden crate covered with a century of dust. There was a pile of spikes near it. He guessed they were the same ones holding the arches together.
The passage turned to the left. Instead of a hairpin turn, there was a small chamber carved out of the rock. The supports here were steel, the riveted I-beams that made up the insides of buildings.
A series of thinner beams descended between two of the supports. Strips of metal had been riveted back and forth across them to create a simple cage. Sitting in the cage was a wooden box the size of a phone booth. A heavy cable ran from its roof up into the shaft above it. Its cage door was propped open by a crumbling cardboard box and what looked like a wooden broom handle, also withered from years in the heat.
Something shiny sat in the dust near the broom handle. Roger crouched, plucked it off the ground, and held up a 2003 nickel for them to see. They scanned the dust for a few moments and Xela found the quarter a few feet away. “Finders keepers,” she said with a grin, tucking it in her pocket.
Across the chamber was a pair of doors coated with dust and grit. The heat had made their paint fade and peel. Nate glanced at Xela and she nodded back at him. She recognized them, too. This set didn’t have a bar stretched across them.
Roger gave the handles a quick tap, then a more lingering one. He turned and gave Nate a nod. The two men wrapped their fingers around each handle.
The doors were heavy. The hinges gave a low groan that became a squeal as they continued to open. They might have been oiled once, but now they were coated with a hundred years of neglect.
The noise level jumped up a few decibels. The rumble was a steady roar on the other side of the doors, like a truck stop parking lot with all the engines running. A wave of heat washed out at them. It was close to painful, like standing in front of an open oven. The hot air rushed down their throats and scalded their lungs.
Nate squinted his eyes against the heat.
“Holy shit,” said Xela over his shoulder.
Forty Six
During his years in the industry, Roger had seen a lot of film stages. Some of them had been on the big studio lots like Warner or Paramount. Some had been at the smaller stages that cropped up all over Los Angeles, like Lacey Street or Ren-Mar or Raleigh. Most of the time the stages held multiple sets. A few of them had been filled by a single, enormous construction project. And a few had been empty. Seen like that, stages looked a lot like airplane hangars. They had enormous floors and ceilings two or three stories high.
The room on the other side of the double doors was as big as any stage Roger had ever seen or heard of. It could’ve been the size of a small stadium. He’d never sat on the ground level of a stadium so it was hard to be sure.
Once the blast of heat had faded, they stepped inside. The room was rough stone, and Roger felt sure it was natural, not something dug out like the tunnel. Steel girders framed the whole thing, extending up in a dome fifty or sixty feet high. Heavy buttresses reached out to brace the walls and his eyes followed them up. It was some serious construction work.
Hanging from the center of the dome was a makeshift chandelier. Three big metal rings sat one inside the other, and dozens of light bulbs hung from them at different heights. At least half of them were burned out. What was left bathed the room in a light somewhere between yellow and orange, like an ongoing sunset.
Six huge cylinders of black metal dominated one side of the room. Each one was fifteen feet h
igh on their round face and maybe twenty long. Heat rippled around them and they flickered like mirages. Roger got a little closer and could see vents. Something reddish-gold was whirling in there, racing around the inside of each cylinder at blurring speeds. They were the source of most of the noise echoing in the chamber.
“Holy shit,” he said over the roar of the machines. “They’re generators.”
Roger saw the bundle of cables they’d followed back and forth for ten miles. The cables split off and ran to—ran from, he corrected himself—the different generators. Behind the big machines he could see some huge pipes running down into a ditch. They were as big as air conditioner ducts, and it looked like there were two of them for each of the generators. Nate walked past them and crouched down to look in the ditch. Whatever he saw must’ve been pretty cool because he kept shaking his head and looking at it again.
Xela was standing halfway between Roger and Nate. She was turning around in a slow circle, looking at everything. Her hands were fumbling with her backpack, trying to pull out her camera. It would’ve been quicker to look, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the huge room. Her skin was gold in the yellow-orange light.
Roger tried to picture laying out track for a camera dolly if the big chamber was a film set. The track came in ten-foot sections and he guessed he’d need at least twenty of them to go across the room. Going from the door to the back wall was trickier, across the ditch, but he guessed it would take fifteen pieces of track to run between them.
Not as big as he first thought, but still a big room.
He glanced over at Xela. Her camera was finally out and she pointed it at one thing after another. He waved to get her attention and pointed up at the chandelier.
She looked up and grinned. Her head tipped back. The camera went up. Her stomach went taut and her tits pushed against the green bra.
Roger glanced over at Nate. He was still staring into the ditch. It didn’t look like he’d moved. Roger waved to get Xela’s attention again and pointed at Nate. She glanced between them and called something to Roger. He could hear her voice, but couldn’t understand her over the noise of the generators.
Xela turned and moved next to Nate. She looked down into the ditch. Her camera hung from her hand at her side.
Roger took a few steps toward them. It was enough of a shift to give him a better view of the ditch. It was deeper than he thought, and it looked natural. It was a crack in the ground, and its sides were rough and uneven.
Another few steps and he realized he’d misjudged how wide the crack-ditch was, too. It was at least fifteen or twenty feet across. It was hard to be sure with all the heat ripples in the room. The big chamber was closer to round than he’d calculated. And it looked like the other side was a few feet higher than their side.
Roger noticed one of the tattoos on Xela’s bare shoulder—an elaborate oval filled with hieroglyphs—and glanced down. The far side of the crack was still going down. What he’d thought was a ditch looked to be a canyon in the floor.
Then he was next to her. Xela reached out and grabbed his hand. She had a strong grip for such a slim woman. It made a number of thoughts dance through his head for a moment.
And then he was looking down, down, down, down...
* * *
Nate stared into the abyss. He didn’t know if it stared back, but he was pretty sure it had singed his eyebrows. As it was, he closed his eyes and saw the red after-image of the bright, jagged line he’d seen far below.
“I’m not crazy, right?” he said to them. The words rasped at his overheated throat, but his friends were close enough to hear him. “Is this what I think it is?”
“Holy fuck,” said Roger. “Holy fuck.”
The canyon went down for miles. Nate had climbed to the top of the Hollywood Hills once or twice and looked out ten miles or so to the Pacific. Now he looked straight down at least that far. It was a wound in the Earth, a cut deep enough to draw blood. Not just a swell of red but the bright, pulsing blood that only came with serious injuries. They could all see it shifting and writhing far below, the filament of a hundred-thousand-watt bulb.
The heat rose up at them, an ongoing stream of air that made him squint. It smelled like fire. His eyes watered from it. Out of the corner of his eye he could see it rippling Xela’s hair across her scalp.
“Is this...” She paused to rub her eyes with the heel of her hand. Then she raised her voice to be heard over the rumbling generators. “Is this a volcano or something?”
Nate let his eyes drift up to the edges of the huge crack. “I think it’s a fault line,” he said.
Roger shook his head. “Those are miles underground.”
“We’re miles underground,” said Nate. “At least a mile, maybe more.”
“Doesn’t make any fucking sense.” Roger shook his head again. “It can’t be a fault line.”
“It’s just a little one, I think,”said Xela. She looked across the canyon. “It’s only twenty feet or so.”
“And a hundred miles down,” Roger said.
Nate gazed past Roger. A dozen metal pipes hung over the edge of the canyon, each one at least four feet across. They reached down for the distant fire and disappeared into the distance. It was far enough that the huge pipes couldn’t be picked out against the canyon walls. He was sure they kept going all the way down.
He closed his eyes for a moment and then looked over his shoulder. A red rope of light burned across his vision. He blinked a few times and wondered if he’d damaged his eyes somehow.
The pipes ran across the ground, held up on squat brackets. They almost formed a platform behind the generators. In fact, Nate could see some low catwalks stretching back and forth across them. There were tanks and valves and huge wheels to spin. It all led into the generators.
“They’re geothermal,” said Nate. “They run off the heat of the earth. The magma and all that.”
Roger dragged his eyes from the chasm to look at Nate. “What’s that mean?”
Xela squeezed his hand. “It means they’ll run forever.”
Forty Seven
It took another ten minutes before they could drag themselves away from the fault. Nate had heard of people hypnotized by the sheer scale of the Grand Canyon when they saw it in person. All the movies and television specials in the world couldn’t prepare someone for the sight of a solid object that went from horizon to horizon. Seeing an exposed fault line had the same effect.
They wandered to the generators. There was a battered desk set up a few yards past them. The discolored wood blended into the stone wall. A few yards beyond that was a wooden shed, its boards just as bleached as the desk.
Nate could feel the heat coming off the generators. They weren’t red-hot, but he thought they’d still burn his fingers. Each of the big turbines was coated with years of dust and dirt that had cooked into soot. He wrapped his hand in his shirt and took a few swipes at the hot metal. The steel gleamed beneath the grime.
“Check this out,” said Xela. She’d used her own shirt to clear a big patch on the next generator in line. A strip of silver and black was riveted on the dull metal. She gave it another wipe with the shirt. Nate and Roger looked over her shoulders at the curling letters.
Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Co.
Roger glanced at them. “That’s a real company, isn’t it? They make kitchen appliances and stuff?”
“I think they used to do everything electric,” said Nate. “How much power do you think these put out?”
Roger shrugged. “Generators on set are half this size. Think they put out something like fifteen or sixteen hundred amps.”
Xela gazed up at the steel cylinder. “Does twice as big mean twice as much power?”
He shrugged again. “Not my thing. Might mean more power. Might just mean they’re older.”
Nate walked along the row of generators. Each one had the Westinghouse label, hidden by the layer of dust and silt. He recognized it by shape. T
here was a heavy plaque marked with a Roman numeral at the base of each generator. He was standing in front of IV, and Xela had just cleaned V. The one closest to the fault line was VI. He took a few more steps, passed III, and approached II.
Xela had her camera up again and was getting photos of each plaque. “Did you notice the base?” She pointed at the floor. The generators sat on a raised platform carved out of the rock. It was fitted with steel straps that wrapped back and forth across it. “These things are solid.”
The desk was warped and cracked. It reminded Nate of pictures of house fires, where some of the furniture had been in the home and exposed to the heat but hadn’t caught fire. In front of the desk stood a charred-white framework of wood that might have been a chair a hundred years earlier. A windswept pile of rags between the legs was all that was left of a seat cushion.
The desk itself was barren, and warm to the touch. There was a black fountain pen and a cracked ink bottle. A newspaper stuck out of one of the desk’s pigeonholes. Nate touched it and the edge crumbled away. He yanked his fingers back and tried to read what he could of the fragile headline.
“Anything?” asked Roger.
Nate shook his head. “I wrecked some of the date. I think it’s the twentieth of some month in 1894, but that’s all I’ve got.” He angled his head. “It looks like there’s a dozen little articles all on the front page.”
Xela pushed him gently aside and lined up her camera. It clicked once. “You know what bugs me?” She dipped her head at the rolled-up paper in the pigeonhole and the camera clicked again. “In the movies, when people find some dusty old chamber or something, there’s always a newspaper with some big banner headline that nails the date. ‘Titanic Sinks’ or ‘Japanese Attack Pearl Harbor’ or something like that. It always knocks me out of the movie.” The camera clicked again.
Nate smirked. “You think it’s more believable that this is a crap daily paper?”