As it turns out, Abraham is the only one with any charge left on his cell phone. Hewitt’s had been damaged during his escape through the town and Ben’s had been dead before they’d even left the bar.
The flashlight mode isn’t great, but it’s more light than any of them had experienced for several hours.
The tunnel looks exactly as they expected, compacted dirt, well-worn on the floor with stones and large slivers of wood peppering the ground here and there.
Predictable passages or not, they take it slowly, looking around with a sort of paranoid expectation that something awful awaits them in each shadowy nook.
Hewitt is the first to notice that something seems off. It seems to him as if the murmur of the rainfall from outside has somehow changed in tone, like a gentle hum. He would almost swear he can feel it, in the ground or the air around them. The walls and floor seem to be cleaner, more uniform as they venture further into the mountain.
He doesn’t know much about caves or mining, but he assumes it has something to do with them being in a more stable environment as they move further away from the outside world. Maybe, he thinks he recalls something, there is some equilibrium or homeostasis in caverns. It could be something along those lines, but he doesn’t know where he remembers it from or whether he can trust his recollection as being entirely accurate.
Hewitt may have been the first of the three to recognize that something is different, that something seems wrong, but it’s Ben who first says something about it.
“Do you hear that whine?” the boy asks, looking around them for the source of a sound only he hears.
Neither his father nor Hewitt hears the noise, their ears not being as sensitive to the specific pitch of it, but both of them can feel that something is different in the air, and the smell of it isn’t right either. It should be smelling more earthy and stale, Hewitt suspects. Abraham is thinking similar thoughts, remembering family visits to caverns when he was growing up.
“I don’t hear anything, kid, but something sure smells wrong about this place.”
“Should we turn around?” Ben asks, feeling uncertain as he looks back to Hewitt in response.
He thinks for a few seconds before replying, “We probably should, but that’s not what we’re going to do, are we gentlemen? I may regret saying it, maybe soon, but I doubt whatever’s ahead of us can be worse than what we left behind.”
“God damn it, Hewitt,” Abraham mutters, stifling a reflexive laugh. “Why do you always say shit like that?”
“I don’t know, man. It’s a nervous habit.”
“You have always pulled that kind of shit since we were kids,” Abraham says, still trying not to laugh at the absurdity of it all. “You are always getting us in trouble, jinxing us with that bullshit, testing fate.”
“Whistling past the graveyard, maybe?”
“That is not better,” Abraham whispers.
They continue in silence, slowly making their way down the tunnel. Uncertain of what might await them just beyond the meager cone of light shed by the cell phone, they take their time. The light doesn’t reveal much, but there doesn’t appear to be much to see.
Abraham begins to hear a slight hum. He’s not sure if he even really hears it, so faint is the sound, it’s almost more than he feels it.
Moments later Hewitt reaches out to his shoulder to stop him, “Do you hear that?”
Abraham nods and so does Ben.
Their already creeping pace slows even further as they approach what appears to be a bend in the shaft ahead of them. The noise becomes gradually louder and more discernibly mechanical as they approach the source. Hewitt has goosebumps accompanying the chills he feels as they get closer to the corner in the shaft. The tunnel appears to take on a faint red glow, his mind playing tricks on him as his heart rate rises with each step. The others see the same thing but assume it’s just them as well.
There is no response but confusion, as they reach the corner and their adventure into the unknown becomes something far more perplexing.
Filling the tunnel ahead of them, only feet away is a concrete platform leading up to a wall of the same material spanning the height and width of the shaft. They’ve all seen enough movies and television shows that they recognize a hermetically sealed door with a mesh grate above it where a fan is circulating out of sight, pulling the air from the mine into whatever space might be beyond the door. Now that they know to look for it, they can just barely perceive the suction as the air is pulled past them in the space surrounding where they stand.
To the right of the door is a key card reader with a dot of red light illuminating the immediate area. Whatever this place is, it has power.
“Well, this is unexpected,” Hewitt says, unable to wrap his head around what he’s seeing after staring for a minute or more.
“Unexpected, but not entirely all that surprising, you know, considering everything else,” Abraham replies.
Both men chuckle nervously in response, Ben watching them as if they’ve lost their minds, and there they stand at a dead-end presented by a massive industrial door that opens on what, they can’t even imagine.
Abraham’s phone finally dies, leaving the three of them with only the ghostly red light to illuminate the already surreal and spooky surroundings.
To Hewitt, watching his friend and his son sleep, it looks like he is seeing the world through a film of blood or like everything surrounding him has been covered in it. Considering events, he wonders which analogy would be the more apropos.
Seconds, minutes, maybe hours later, he can’t begin to measure the passage of time, Hewitt feels his exhaustion dragging his eyelids together and he figures there’s no harm in letting go. He wouldn’t be any better off awake than asleep, he figures, when whatever comes next finally leaps out at them to drag them kicking and screaming into the grave. At least asleep, he might not see it coming or feel it when it hits.
31
“Something is very wrong here,” Miles mutters as they step further into the cavernous darkness, away from the rain and the wind outside.
“Thanks for clarifying the situation for us so eloquently, Mr. Thousand-yard stare. Care to provide any additional astonishing insights?” Mariah replies with a smirk.
Miles looks around at the dirt and stone surrounding them, taking in the details, skeptical for the first time that Gale has led them astray for some unknown reason. It could be that their friend is just as mad as the rest of the people in this horrible town and this is a ruse inspired by that madness. It’s difficult to imagine anything like that being true, but the whole damn night has been difficult for him to wrap his head around and he was nowhere near being able to come to terms with or make sense of any of this.
Mariah is similarly confused by what she’s seeing, just another mine shaft carved into the wall of the mountain, no different than any other she’s seen in photographs or on screen. This certainly doesn’t appear to be a lab of any kind she’s ever seen.
“Gale, my friend,” Miles begins, glancing to the side where their friend is standing, “I’m not seeing any fucking laboratory here.”
Gale smiles knowingly and begins walking ahead of them confidently, not even acknowledging the surroundings. “It would hardly be a secret facility if anyone who glances in from the outside could see that it’s here.”
With no choice but to follow his lead, Miles and Mariah begin to trail after their friend, neither of them sure of his intentions or his state of mind. Neither of them is even particularly sure of their own states of mind, having had no chance to sit back and process everything that’s happened, from Kateb’s murder to this walk down an empty mineshaft toward the unknown.
Mariah speaks more to break the uncomfortable silence than anything else, “What sort of lab are we talking about here, Gale?”
“Well, you know the line of work I’m in,” Gale begins and then pauses, neither of his friends even knowing whether he’ll be saying anything further or if that was t
he end of the statement as far as Gale was concerned. He had always been a bit odd and prone to trailing off as other things came to mind. Neither of them would have been surprised if that is the case this time.
Finally, after a matter of a few seconds, he does continue, “Virology mostly. There are surprisingly few facilities out there where biosafety level four research can be performed. There are a lot of conditions that absolutely must be met before it’s even remotely safe to work with the sort of things requiring BSL-4 security.”
Mariah looks around, “And you’re saying that this is one of those places?”
“Absolutely,” Gale replies. “The mine goes deep, very deep, into the mountain, which makes securing the location surprisingly simple. We’re in a tectonically stable region with only a small population and limited visibility to potential terrorists.”
Miles had some experience with nuclear, biological, and chemical training through his time in the military, and he understands a little bit of what Gale is explaining as he continues telling them about how and why the CDC had decided on this location. Mariah has some passing familiarity with these things as well, though mostly from fiction and research for the courses she’s taught.
They travel deeper into the mine shaft, going further than they expected before they see what appears to be a bend in the tunnel.
Conversations taper off naturally, as all three of them develop varying degrees of apprehension regarding what could await them just around the bend. Blind corners have not been friendly to them lately.
In silence, the final few meters, they continue forward, Miles checking the chamber of his pistol in preparation for what could be ahead of them.
Abraham, Ben, and Hewitt wake almost simultaneously to the sound of hushed and indistinct voices. Too freshly awakened, they all start, producing numerous scraping and scrambling noises of their own, causing Hewitt to wince and hold his breath reflexively.
The approaching voices and, now audible footsteps, continue heedless, either not hearing or not caring about the noise the three of them produced in their surprise.
Abraham and Hewitt slowly rise to their feet, nudging Ben behind them. They steel themselves for the conflict they know is coming. The odds are not in their favor, both of them are well aware of this, but if any of these crazy locals want to get their hands on Abraham’s son, they are going to have to fight through the two of them to get there.
Their eyes adjusted to the red glow from the access panel, they begin to see evidence of flashlights or some other similar light sources bouncing around on the wall ahead of them where the tunnel bends to the left and continues mostly straight to the exit.
The wobbling, inconsistent glow gets brighter on the tunnel wall. The voices and shuffling sounds of movement grow louder but the way the noises echo in the mine makes it impossible to decipher anything being said or even how many voices are contributing to the sound.
It could just be wishful thinking on his part but Hewitt believes its only a few people, only five or six at most, and at least they’re not the zombies. None of the few he’d seen while escaping through the town appeared to be capable of communicating, or maybe they just hadn’t wanted to talk to him. He was assuming the former to be the case.
The downside, he figures, is that they’ll be armed. For the fifth or sixth time since Kateb’s death, he finds himself mentally comparing the people of the town to the angry villagers from the old Frankenstein movie. He imagines a group of the townsfolk coming around the bend with lanterns and pitchforks and he realizes he won’t even be the least bit surprised if that is precisely what he is about to see.
Tensed to react, both men remain steady and unflinching as the intruders round the corner and the glare of flashlights blind them.
Of all the eventualities Hewitt and Abraham had prepared themselves for, what neither of them anticipated is the simultaneous cacophony of both Mariah and Miles calling out their names in combined pleasure and disbelief.
The disbelief and uncertainty in those two voices doesn’t match what Abraham, Ben, and Hewitt find themselves feeling in response. As wound up and prepared for violence as both men had been, it’s a challenge to shift gears with the sudden shock.
Finally, they do deflate and the tension they’d both been holding in is released in shivers.
“It’s great to see you guys,” Hewitt says, with a grin spreading across his face. “Or maybe it would be, but we can’t see shit with those lights in our eyes.”
32
Relieved embraces are exchanged as they all let go of the fear and strain they’d been carrying with them, afraid they would never see each other again.
“What in the hell are you guys doing here?” Abraham asks, disrupting the brief pleasantries. He’s been wondering that very thing since the initial shock of seeing them there had worn off. There seems to be no logical reason for them to all be in the mine unless something had gone horribly wrong or they had been herded here for some reason, much like he worried he and Ben had been.
Hewitt raises his left eyebrow but almost immediately begins following a parallel thought process to what Abraham had already been thinking. The logistics involved in how and why their friends had also found themselves driven to the mine could have some dramatic implications, depending on what those reasons were.
The three new arrivals and Ben all react with differing degrees of confusion to the edge in Abraham’s voice, only Hewitt having stumbled upon the same conclusion in his quick analysis.
Miles reaches over and gently shoves Gale forward, “Apparently, our buddy Gale has managed to bring his work home with him in a big way.”
The smile on Miles’ face is sincere enough but there’s a visible tightness in the expression even in the poor lighting conditions that betrays something else beneath the surface. Hewitt figures they’ll get to that in due time. For the moment there are too many other questions flooding through his mind.
“So,” he begins, gesturing toward the wall obstructing the tunnel, “is this your doing then?”
“Well, it’s not entirely my doing, but it is my lab behind that door,” Gale replies with a nervous smile.
“Let’s get the fuck in there then, before anyone else joins our little powwow here,” Hewitt says with a touch of excitement.
Gale doesn’t miss a beat as he walks forward, brandishing a rectangular keycard attached to a chain hanging around his neck that he’s pulled from his shirt.
He waves the card before the scanner and the light turns from red to green. There is no audible beep like the group was expecting, and there is no thunking click signifying a lock being disengaged. Everything is silent beyond their nervous breathing and shuffling feet. Movies and television had ruined them all in some sense, establishing false expectations regarding high tech security doors.
Gale takes the handle and pulls the door outward without fanfare and they all feel a burst of air flowing past them and into the brilliant white space that appears before them as lights turn on automatically. Six pairs of eyes squint in response to the sudden increase in illumination.
Gale doesn’t wait for anything and he crosses the threshold like he had hundreds of times before, falling back on familiarity and routine for comfort under the awful conditions they find themselves here.
The others don’t immediately follow, requiring more time to process the new space ahead of them and react accordingly.
Ben is the first to follow after Gale, rushing into the new space with no small amount of enthusiasm. Abraham follows, spurred into action by his son. Miles goes next and Mariah after that, first glancing back at Hewitt to see what he’s doing. He stands there, watching his friends pass beyond the entrance into something alien and unfamiliar. He should be used to those things by now, having been thrust into a series of events that have boggled his mind to no end. There is no safety to be found here, he finds himself certain of that fact, but at least they’ll be together.
Finally, Hewitt follows, pulling the st
eel and concrete door closed behind him, absently marveling at how smoothly it sways on the hinges.
With a faint hiss of air pressure equalizing, the world outside is shut away.
Hewitt feels no relief, unable to shake the sense of dread that the worst is still to come.
33
Mathematics and the sciences had always been Gale’s greatest focus throughout school. In everything else, he frequently required some assistance, in the form of tutoring from his friends or supplemental learning materials, but in math and science, he was golden.
Tristan and Hewitt were his usual go-to’s for the tutoring or anything along those lines because they could not only help him to shore up the areas where he was lacking, but they could speak a language he had no trouble following. It helped that they never seemed to require any assistance at all, everything coming easyly to those two.
If he’d been a different sort of person, he might have envied the two of them their ability to integrate things the way they did; he just didn’t have the capacity to be jealous apparently. Instead, he marveled at their capacities to comprehend things that managed to elude him and to convey those concepts and facts in a form that he could somehow understand.
Gale remained at home with his parents after high school, commuting close to an hour, either way, to attend university nearby. His parents had been an older couple when they had him and neither of them was in great health by the time he was in his third year of college.
During the day, while he was in class, a nurse was in the home with his mother and father and he spent his evenings balancing homework and caring for his parents. While his affect may have appeared distant and often detached, he cared deeply for his family and it showed in the level of care he was sure to provide for them.
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