by Sandy Nathan
“OK, Grace, we know how he works now. He tears you down. Everybody here’s got stuff they want to hide. Bad stuff, maybe. I was a fallin’ down drunk. Spent so many nights in the gutter, only Grandfather and the Great One could pick me up.
“I had such a low opinion of myself that Grandfather had to send me out to save some dyin’ people lost in the desert. That’s how I met Will Duane and them. Only when I healed them an’ brought them home did I believe I could do anything.
“But that low down part of me’s still there. If Sam Big tuned into that, he’d probably have me down those stairs and drinkin’ all the hooch he’s got. That’s how he works. The way you look now is how he works.
“That SOB needs killing. All of them down there, ‘cept maybe a few of Sam’s friends, need killing.
“And Sam needs to do it. I got my hand on his heart. This is a good man. If he’s ever going to be 100% right with himself, he needs to kill Sam Big and do it quick.”
“Hurry up,” Wesley called. He stood in the field, blue lights coming from his hands, blocking out Sam Big’s voice. “I don’t know how long I can do this.”
“OK. Jeremy, you got that stuff you told me about?” Bud asked him.
“Yeah,” he handed out some architectural drawings. “They’re the original plans for the underground. The metal and concrete parts should be the same.
“People live on the lowest level, the seventh level. There are two more levels that can be inhabited. See level five and six …” Jeremy showed them catwalks that circled the three floors on the plans. “These are for maintenance. We can get to above where Sam Big is sitting, if the structure is still good.
“They Bigs are used to darkness. I’m going to zap them with light when we go in. That will be from the shelter’s lighting system. I can control it from my computer. I’m going to alternate bright light and darkness. Blind them.
“We have night vision glasses and …” Jeremy passed out black goggle things to everyone. “Gas masks. So we can use these,” he continued as he distributed canisters of tear gas. “I wish you’d had nerve gas, Mom.”
“We did, Jeremy. The people of Ellie’s planet took it out when they moved the containers.”
“Grace, come over here,” Bud said before they got going. He put his hand on her chest above her heart and closed his eyes. His face was relaxed but intent. She gasped and then smiled at him.
“Bud. What did you do?”
“I just messed with your energy, Grace. An’ you know what? I found out you’re a good woman. I hope you know it, too.”
“I do, Bud. I feel fine.”
Sam sat up, and stood slowly.
“How do you feel, Sam?” Bud asked.
“Good.” He closed up his commando suit. “What did you do?”
“Oh, I just reestablished the truth in you. You’re a good man, Sam.”
“OK, folks, we got a job to do. It’s show time.”
46
Wes slid through the first doorway and into the underground. Light from a fixture in the ceiling flooded the space beyond the portal. Jeremy had turned the shelter’s lighting system up as bright as it would go. He had set the lights to alternate between on and off. The Bigs’ eyes wouldn’t be able to adjust. Wes adjusted the light filter on his facemask. He was set for light or dark.
The plan was for him to go down first and scope the place out. He would relay information to Bud via their psychic connection. They were as hooked up mentally as they had been when Grandfather had led them.
When he slipped through the first doorway, Wes stood perfectly still, scouting the battlefield. The underground was a world of concrete and steel. The stairway into its heart passed through a series of foot-thick round metal doors that screwed shut. They were set in steel housings surrounded by cement. Every door had a generous landing on both sides. The landings were heavy steel mesh with welded staircases going down to the next level. Even though the doorways were only three feet in diameter, the tunnels leading to them allowed plenty of room to stand.
Standing at the top and looking through the first doorway, Wes could see all the way to the seventh, and lowest, level of the shelter. The Bigs had opened their home to them. Wesley’s jaw clenched.
Jeremy had blown the first four levels open. The first two landings were wrecks, doors blown off and lying in the rubble below. Their landings and stairways were twisted and hanging, an impediment to getting in or out. Rescuing Sam’s people would be hard if anyone was chasing them.
In the next two levels, the doors and surrounding steel framing were blown open, but the landings and walls around the stairways weren’t so damaged. This made the doorways much more dangerous. A dozen Bigs could be hiding out of sight on the platform behind the walls.
Wes realized something was wrong right away. The lights were alternating light and dark, as he knew they would. When they first went on, the Bigs howled, but then they fell silent and stayed that way. The lights kept cycling. Why were they silent?
He used a tiny periscope to check what was on the other side of the fourth doorway. The first of two maintenance walkways were supposed to be on the other side. Another maintenance scaffold circled the floor below. The plan was that he should use the walkway to make his way around the perimeter until he was above Sam Big’s chair. There were openings in the ventilation system there; he could go through one and reach the main floor. If he could kill Sam Big and his chiefs, he would. Then he’d call the others down to rescue people.
Sam Big’s Voice rolled past Wes and out the top of the stairs. He could imagine it covering the grassy field like a lethal toxin. Sam Big found each person’s weak spots and hammered them, but he didn’t seem to notice Wesley or the fact that he was in the underground. Why?
Wes paused, listening before going through the doorway. Sound was reverberating incorrectly. He had become an architect because he loved building things and also because he was acutely aware of space and volume, and the physical world around him. The vibration of the landing and rail beneath his hand was wrong for a solid space.
When Jeremy handed out the plans to the underground shelter, Wesley had inhaled them. He could read plans like others read comic books. He knew the layout of each of the levels, where the mechanical, electrical, and other systems were. He knew the shelter, as Jeremy had designed it.
The place below him wasn’t what Jeremy had constructed. In the original plans, the three lowest levels were floors with eight-foot ceilings at most. Above the main hall were two floors of rooms accessible from the levels below. Jeremy said that he had built the extra floors to give the inhabitants of the shelter more space as the radiation cleared. When the instruments said it was safe, they could open a door in the ceiling and have more legroom.
Using the periscope, he took a careful look at the other side. A vast space greeted him. The second and third floors of the underground had been removed, creating a huge cavern three stories high. Its ceiling was supported by a lacy confection of metal rods that the most sophisticated engineer would have admired.
What was going on?
This had to be the work of some advanced civilization. Sam had said that at one point in the shelter’s long history, everyone could read and use computers. Then that died out. Made sense. Only an advanced society could accomplish the engineering feat the ceiling supports represented.
How did they make that open space? Where did they get the steel framing? Where did they put the dirt? He could hear the sound of the ocean. How could that be?
Wes couldn’t figure it out, but he had to move.
He stuck his periscope through the doorway again. Whoever had removed the floors had left the doorways and their cement supports up. The metal stairways connected the landings, swinging almost whimsically across space. The maintenance corridor was a steel catwalk attached to the cavern’s outer wall, not a hallway within a building.
The lights went off again. His night vision glasses gave him better vision than he would have without
them, but not much. He could see Sam Big and a dozen or so of his henchmen sitting against the far wall. They sat like they were holding court. Sam occupied a throne of a chair with a few others arrayed along the wall with him. Still more were seated on the floor like loyal subjects. The pit where they kept the women lay in front of them and to the left. He could see moving forms within it, but nothing clearly. Black holes in the far walls must be passages to other chambers, or tunnels that Sam dug.
Bud, he thought furiously, sending Bud a thought message, there’s something wrong. Ask Sam how high the highest part of the main hall is.
As high as two Bigs, Sam’s answer came via Bud’s thoughts. Most of it is the height of just one Big.
Wesley realized that the excavation must have happened after Sam left. He thought one more question, Are there levels lower than the main floor?
Again, Bud relayed the answer from Sam, No.
Wes slipped through the opening and onto the catwalk. He was on red alert the instant his foot hit the metal. He knew how a suspended metal corridor of the type that he was standing on should feel if he were the only person on it. He knew how the sound of his movement and breath would echo in an empty chamber. This place was not empty. The Bigs were not its only occupants.
He ran as fast as he could toward the Bigs. Out of the corners of his eyes, he saw bulbous white forms swarming over the railings, heading for him. Multi-faceted red eyes reflected his form. Enormous split mandibles snapped like the blades on hedge clippers.
Wes shot energy beams from his hands at the creatures. They dropped, to be replaced by others. He aimed his palms at Sam Big and the others. Light sliced the Bigs in two. He sliced them again, and again. They were motionless, as though nothing had happened. He realized that they were paralyzed. Or dead.
He looked across the hall. The white creatures were dropping from the scaffolding on silken cables, swarming over women in the pit. The women didn’t resist, acting as though they were drugged.
They were spiders! White spiders with bodies five feet long and legs extending twice that span filled the hall. They raced toward him, dropping down the scaffoldings, crossing the vast space, swarming.
Silken threads fell around him. Wes slashed with his bright blue lights, striking as hard and as fast as he could. A curtain of silk fibers dropped around him.
Something bit him at the back of the neck. Everything went black.
47
“They got Wes.” Bud stood with his feet spread, fingers on his temples. “We got to get down there, fast.” Everyone jumped. Bud kept fingering his forehead. “Grace, you got flame throwers? We need them, and as much gun power as you got. And explosives.”
“I have an incendiary device—what used to be called a flamethrower,” Grace said.
“You know how to use it?” Bud said.
“Yes.”
“And I’ve got plastics and what I need to use them,” Jeremy added.
“Those might get us in and out of there alive. Let’s go, they’re killing him.” Bud ran toward the opening. Mel, Henry, and James followed him. “No. Only me, Jeremy, Grace, and Sam are going. If you don’t hear from us in ten minutes, go back and get Lena and get as many of those kids as you can carry. Run back to the cliff and be prepared to defend it with your lives.”
“There are that many Bigs?”
“It’s not Bigs. I don’t know what they are. I been trying to reach Wes all the time he was in there. Nothing. Then they tell me they’ve got him.”
“It’s a setup,” Henry said.
“Yeah. But they don’t know what I can do when I’m mad. And they don’t know about them,” Bud waved his hand in the air. Outlines of warriors in war paint and bonnets appeared. “I will not let them kill a spirit warrior.”
They saw what Wes had seen when he went in, the two ruined landings that would make rescue or retreat hard. They saw the opened doorways and went through them until they reached the landing of the fourth level.
When he stepped on the platform, Sam froze. “This is not right. Let me do something.” He stood by the side of the door and made a deep noise, something like Grace’s throat-singing Buddhist monks might have made. It was very brief.
Sam stood there. Finally he said, “It’s not safe.”
“We know that,” Bud said pulling out his periscope in preparation for going through the door.
“No. We must not do what they want.” Sam looked at the cement wall of the passageway behind them, tapping it with his fingers. “Jeremy, can you make a small explosion here?” He pointed to a specific spot. “Like this?” He indicated about three feet square.
“The air vent. You knew it was there.” Jeremy grinned.
“Yes, by the sound in the wall. My people have found it, but we couldn’t get to it through this.”
“Well, I can.”
“Not too much, Jeremy,” Sam entreated. “My people are not far behind the wall.”
Jeremy blew a hole into the vent and they made their way on their bellies through the duct system, traveling in a large circle around the hall.
After what seemed like miles, they came to an arm of the duct system poking toward the center of the hall. Grace dragged herself into it. She was the smallest and lightest. She left her weapons behind: no room for them in the pipe. At the first vent aperture, she peered through the slatted opening into the room below. She was about a fourth of the way over a huge hall, which was at least three stories high. The ceiling was held up by an elaborate metal frame. The walkway was a bridge draped between the doorways. Everything else had been removed.
The floor looked as it had in Jeremy’s photo composites and floor plans: a living area, the pit with the women, the Bigs’ court at the back of the room. All was exactly as she expected, except that everything was hung with gauzy ropes as thick as her thumb. She could see forms moving under the gauze.
And then she saw them: Hundreds of huge spiders massed around the opening of the fourth door, ready to attack when they came through.
Sam Big was still caterwauling, but his Voice had a pleading quality, as though he were singing to save his life. Her eyes went to the source of the sound, an opening on the far side of the hall next to the Bigs’ court. She saw the human figures sitting on chairs, draped with spider silk. Red bled through it. They were dead. Wesley must have shot them while they were alive, or they wouldn’t have bled. How long did they sit there alive?
Sam Big’s voice came from the wide opening next to the dead bodies. She could see a ramp going down.
The shelter had an eighth level! She could see daylight coming from it and had the crazy idea that she heard the ocean. Sam Big was down there, lobbing halfhearted insults at them. That’s where Wesley was!
Grace backed out of the vent as quietly as she could. She knew that spiders didn’t have ears, but were acutely aware of vibrations. If they knew she and the others were there, they’d mass around the vent where they’d have to exit, the one above the dead Bigs.
“No, is not so!” Sam whispered into his radio mic when she told them what she’d found. “The hall is the height of two Bigs in the middle. The rest is just above the Bigs’ heads. Some of them hit the ceiling. It’s not high. This is not the underground.”
“What else is it? How’d the ceiling get so high?” Bud asked.
“I don’t know. When I left, the ceiling was low. Rooms were above it, but sealed off. It’s where we put the dirt from our tunneling. And there is no other level below the seventh. There is not.”
“I was tryin’ to get ahold of Wes all the time he was gone,” Bud said. “I couldn’t reach him. It was like his mind was turned off. He would have noticed that the ceiling wasn’t what was in your plans—he’s an architect. He would ‘a’ sent me a message asking about it. I didn’t get any.”
“They did something to him.”
“Yeah.” Bud’s eyebrows pulled in and down. His face reddened. He looked like he wanted to bite. “They tricked him.”
“We have to be careful they don’t trick us.” Grace said. “The simplest thing would be to go over to the exit, firebomb the place, and wipe out everything in it, then rappel down into the hall and find Wes.”
“But that would kill the women and my people in burrows,” Sam said.
“Do you think they’re still alive?” Bud asked.
“They could be,” Jeremy said. “Some spiders inject their food with venom, then wrap it up to eat later. They only eat live food.”
“We need to get out of here,” Grace said. “The spiders will find us. They can go out through the hole Jeremy blew. Let’s head for the vent on the other side and see what happens.”
The spiders were in the tube when the group got to the vent above the dead Bigs. They could feel the spiders’ legs skittering inside the vent and see them traveling along the scaffolding of the hall. They finally reached the opening above Sam Big’s throne.
“Fasten your line here, on the post, balance yourself on the wall with your feet and drop.” Grace rappelled into the room. Jeremy followed her. Both had rappelled down everything from boulders to mountain faces with the general. Sam was slower, but made it down.
“Wait just a minute, I want to send a message.” Bud crouched inside the vent tube, set to back off the edge. He let out a scream of defiance that echoed down the pipe and around the hall. Bud Creeman had declared war. Something came out of his palms. Whereas his Power usually displayed as cool blue beams, this was explosive and hot. A firebomb flew back up the tube they’d just exited. Shrieks followed. The tapping and sliding of spiders’ limbs on the vent’s interior ceased. The spiders behind him were dead. Bud leapt off the hot vent and slid down to the main floor.
The spiders attacked, coming from under the scaffolding, their perches around the fifth doorway. From all around the hall. Even from under the silken mantel covering the women’s pit.
Bud shot flames everywhere. None of the rest did anything for fear of getting in his way. Dead arachnids piled up, twitching and scratching their pointed legs on the floor.