by North, Geoff
Smart thinking. Cobe felt for the steel cable running up into the darkness. He pulled with all his strength and pushed with his good foot. He kept his left leg straight, poking out in front like a stick. It reminded him of the awkward way Trot ran. Pain, along with remorse for the simple-minded man, caused him to whimper. His head grew light and he felt suddenly cold.
“You alright?”
Cobe didn’t answer. He sank back down slowly onto the cool, cracked cement floor of the elevator shaft and wiped the tears from his cheeks.
“You must’ve broke something inside,” Willem said. “Maybe you spained it.”
“Sprained.”
“Whatever.”
The two boys sat in glum silence for the next minute. Something rattled above; the metallic sound echoed down the shaft, causing both to jump. Cobe winced as needles of agony shot up his leg.
“You figure it could be the lawman?” Willem asked.
“No.” Cobe had fallen down the elevator shaft only seconds after his brother—he’d seen the howler’s nails tear into the lawman’s clothes and flesh—it had been long enough to be certain Lawson was dead. Nothing could lose that much blood and live.
Willem was whispering now. “You can’t move, and I sure as hell can’t look after you…especially if that thing comes down after us.”
“I can move.”
“No, you can’t.” Willem stood and took a creeping step away from the elevator. He looked back, found Cobe’s round eyes in the dark, filled with fear and pain. “I’ll come back. I gotta find something…a weapon…anything.”
Lawson had wanted Cobe to take a gun from the armory room. Cobe had refused. He groaned and looked down, away from his brother’s stare. “Won’t do no good. You can get back into the room with all them guns, but only Lawson could get inside the cabinets.” He pictured the little gold key stuffed in the lawman’s pocket. “Help me up…I’ll climb back upstairs and get the key off his body…maybe grab his guns and them grenades he took too.”
Willem didn’t answer. Cobe looked up and saw that his brother was gone.
***
Willem’s plan was time-consuming, but simple. There were dozens of long aisles in the armory room and hundreds of locked cabinets. If the little gold key could open any of them, then perhaps the one person originally responsible for their safekeeping had missed locking one of the doors. Surely the lawman hadn’t tried them all since he’d come into possession of the key. There had to be at least one. After fifteen minutes and over three hundred doors, Willem still hadn’t found it.
A female voice spoke—the same one Willem had heard with the others when they’d attempted to punch in number codes on the doors of resting people.
“Unauthorized entry detected in Level E…Cylinder Room Eichberg…Lothair. Security, proceed with caution.”
Level E? What the hell’s going on way up there?
He rounded a corner, ready to try another aisle, and saw the office Lawson had taken them into for the books. Willem’s heart beat faster. What happened to the books we took? We can’t get onto Victory Island without them. The thought was ridiculous and almost made him laugh. Neither he nor his brother knew where Victory Island was—they hadn’t even known of its existence a few days ago—and the lawman was no longer around to show them the way. The two brothers would likely remain trapped down in Big Hole without him. We’ll die fast with Cobe on one leg and me with a single arm. What a useless gawdamn pair we are. He imagined his mother snapping at him for thinking such negative things. It wasn’t much of a stretch from there to picture the lawman smacking the back of his head and telling him to stop feeling sorry for himself.
The female voice repeated her strange warning about Level E in a tone that suggested she didn’t care one way or the other. The sound seemed to come from all around him.
The lawman was dead. Trot was missing and likely turning cold as well. Cobe would join them soon if Willem didn’t find something to fight back with. His eyes glanced over the bookshelf behind the chair. Throwing old books at howlers wouldn’t get the job done. He needed something heavy, something made out of metal. He pulled the chair away from the desk and started rifling through the drawers. Willem lifted an ancient stapler out and tossed it up and down in his hand. Where do the bullets come out? He placed it on the desktop and continued searching. The woman’s voice droned on about unauthorized entry and the need for caution. Willem ignored her and continued rummaging. He considered using one of the dozen or so ballpoint pens as stabbing utensils, but remembered howlers had no eyes to poke out.
The bottom drawer was the biggest of the three and it was locked. Willem rattled it back and forth ineffectively. There was a little room, he noticed. If he could jam something into the gap and use it as some kind of lever—he looked at the stapler. Willem picked it up a second time and studied it more closely. He slipped his thumb into the space that ran down the length and it popped open. Willem worked the thinner end into the half-inch-wide opening above the drawer and pulled back. It opened some more but the old lock refused to give way. Willem twisted the stapler until the flat end was sideways, giving him more leverage. He stood over it and pushed down. Something snapped and the drawer slid out on its hidden rollers for the first time in centuries.
Willem’s eyes lit up when he saw the pistol sitting atop a pile of ancient manila folders. He lifted it out, surprised at its light weight. This was a gun made for the likes of him—light, compact, and undoubtedly deadly. He left the office and rushed down an aisle of locked weapons, anxious to get back to his brother.
The elevator doors were shut when he returned. Willem held the gun out before him and turned in a slow circle. His brother was gone. Cobe would never have left him behind without a damn good reason. Something had either spooked him so bad it got him up and moving on his bad knee, or that same something had taken his brother away.
Willem moved slowly towards the stairwell. The gun shook in his hand, its short barrel quivering back and forth. Gotta calm down. Have to think like the lawman. Have to be brave like him. He went up the first five steps and stopped, unwilling to reach the first landing—too afraid to see what he might see around that first corner. The lawman’s bravery had got him killed. Even armed as he now was, Willem knew he was no match for a howler. He backed down the steps and returned to the elevator doors.
Another thought occurred to him. Maybe Cobe had heard something coming. Maybe he had figured out a way to shut the doors on his own to keep safe. Willem tucked the small gun into the waist of his pants and tapped lightly on one of the doors. He pressed his ear against the join and listened. He knocked louder and whispered his brother’s name. He pounded with his small fist and called out, “Cobe, you in there? Cobe! Open up and let me in.”
The doors opened. Cobe wasn’t inside.
The dark shaft he and his brother had fallen into was gone. Willem pulled the gun back out and stepped into the small white room. A smooth rail of black plastic ran around three walls and ended at what looked like another keypad next to one of the doors. Willem touched it with the end of his pistol and the doors slid silently shut.
Chapter 18
“Installation compromised…Eichberg, Lothair cylinder reactivated…awaiting further thaw and evac proce ——— Unauthorized entry detected in Level E…Cylinder Room Eichberg…Lothair. Security, proceed with caution.”
Trot was dimly aware that the female voice out in the hallway had started saying something else. Her tone was the same, but the words were different. The majority of his attention was focused on the old man rising from the metal cylinder like a waking skeleton. The green light flashing through the crack of open door only added to his sense of paralyzing fear.
“I ain’t got no food,” Trot said. Both thumbs twisted at the rope strung through the holes in the waist of his pants. The strange man before him lifted an emaciated leg from the cylinder and slid the rest of his body after it. He leaned against the edge and stared at Trot, his pink eyes and
black pupils unblinking and unreadable. Trot looked down; the man was naked. He looked more like a corpse than a living person, his bones poking through white skin, casting sickly shadows of gray in the recesses above and below. Trot dropped his gaze to the floor, unsure what to say next and feeling more than a little uncomfortable. “Ain’t got no clothes either.”
The old man glanced down at his nudity. “I’m sorry…I’ve been cooped up so long I forgot what state I was in when I was frozen.”
“You were frozen? Why… Why ain’t you dead?”
He looked at Trot and tilted his head to one side, as if summing up the man before him fully for the first time. “You’re not quite all there, are you, Trot?”
“Folks say I’m stupid, but I manage on my own… What did you say your name was?”
“Lothair.”
Trot took a step back to the door. The smell in the room was terrible since the cylinder had opened. “I was looking for my friends…I got lost and I need to find them. I ain’t got no food.” He took another step back. “I’ll be going now.”
“Stop.”
Trot stopped. “Please don’t make me stay. I got to find my friends. My hands hurt.”
“Do you have a last name, Trot?”
“My name’s Trot…don’t have no other.”
“My full name is Lothair Efrem Eichberg, and this cylinder—this room, this entire complex belongs to me.” Lothair moved in front of Trot, blocking him from the door. “You are trespassing on my property.”
“Don’t know what trespassin’ means,” Trot whimpered.
“It means you have entered my home without permission. You owe me some form of explanation. What year is this?”
Trot’s face quivered. He shrugged. “There’s this year and last year… Didn’t know they had names.”
Lothair looked about the small room. It had served as his crypt for centuries. The cryo-cylinder had been his tomb. But things seemed different. The cylinder he’d voluntarily lain inside back in 1976 was a behemoth over sixteen feet long and weighed almost a ton. It had been made of titanium, its exterior surface painted white. This one was smaller, its surface silver and gleaming. He stepped back in front of it, ran the tips of his wrinkled fingers along the door’s open edge. It was warm and moist-feeling. It felt like something alive. He pulled the lid down and heard it click into place. A soft hiss sounded from somewhere as air was forced back inside.
“I’ve been lying in this cylinder since before you were born. I was here before your father…before his father and his father, before they were born. People have lived their lives and they’ve died…generation after generation. I’ve been here the entire time.”
Trot made a nervous laughing noise that sounded like snot lodging in the back of his throat. “That ain’t true. Nobody can live that long…’specially not all in one place with no food and water.”
“Yes…they can.” The pink eyes were on Trot again. The black pupils held him in place. “And in all that time I never once felt sorry for myself. I never grieved for the family I left behind. I never missed anyone. Something went wrong centuries ago. A malfunction…a glitch in the thawing process occurred and I was left lying in that cylinder, wide awake and waiting. Decades…centuries could already have passed before I awoke. Can your slow mind even begin to imagine what that was like?”
Trot shook his head again. They stood in silence and stared at each other. “Please let me go. I have to find my friends…my hands hurt.” Trot started for the door again and Lothair grabbed his arm. It felt like ice.
Lothair only meant to stop him from leaving. He pulled with half his strength and Trot flew back into the cylinder. He rebounded from the unyielding metal and fell to the floor. Trot curled his hands into his chest and made one final yelp as his head struck tile.
Ages ago Lothair might have been shocked to see someone hurt right before his eyes—or at least excited to see pain inflicted on another human being. He felt nothing but mild surprise. How had he done that? Where had he found the strength?
Blood started to pool slowly under Trot’s head. The gnawing hunger that had kept Lothair company for centuries twisted in his sunken gut and clawed up into his chest and throat. He could feel it aching in his tongue and gums. Lothair was on his hands and knees before his mind could give the command. His thin blue lips smacked at the cooling dark liquid, his gray tongue lapped it up. He sucked on the floor’s surface until it was dry, and then he went to work at the back of Trot’s sticky head. He clamped his mouth over the still-oozing cut and felt the blood slide down his throat and warm his gut. He gnawed lightly at the clammy skin on Trot’s forehead until the man started to groan.
A red light blinked on an unfamiliar control panel set into the wall next to the cylinder. It made a beeping sound. Lothair pulled himself off Trot with an effort and staggered to the light. He recalled the setup of things when he’d been laid to rest in the twentieth century; a single computer larger than a refrigerator had been connected to one end of the cylinder. A backup power generator, bigger still, had been tied into the other end. The cylinder now was much smaller; the hulking forms of the mainframe and generator were gone altogether. The entire room seemed different—cleaner, less cluttered...almost alien. Lothair began to wonder if he was even still in the Dauphin installation.
The light blinked again. Lothair studied the smooth black screen it had come from. What am I supposed to do with this? He lifted his hand towards it, but before his fingers could touch the reflective surface, a female voice spoke.
“Eichberg, Lothair…recognized… You have one message.”
The message appeared on the screen in aqua-blue-colored letters. Lothair read the letter his great-granddaughter had written him. How odd. To read the words of an ancient relative sent directly to me. An ancient relative who is also my descendant. He made the calculations quickly. Lothair had been frozen for ninety-four years before the final massive coronal ejection had forced the installation into a power-conserving lockdown. Something had gone wrong and Lothair’s cylinder had accidently reactivated at that same moment. A glitch in the system. A glitch that had him lying awake in the cylinder for nine hundred and ninety-six years.
“What year is this?” Lothair knew, but he wanted to hear it from the computer. He wanted to know how this technology—centuries old, yet completely new to him—worked.
“3066.”
Trot stirred on the floor behind him. Lothair looked down at the writhing figure. The urge to tear out his throat and suck down the blood was almost impossible to resist. I can break his neck, put an end to his suffering, and feed on his intestines. Lothair could feel drool running down his chin. But I don’t care if he suffers. He would taste so much better warm and alive. Lothair studied his hands. He stretched out his fingers and curled them back into fists. They may have looked weak—pale white, wrinkled, and covered in liver spots—but a raw power was awakening in his body. He could feel the DNA enhancements his granddaughter had mentioned in her letter growing as he moved.
This newfound strength gave Lothair an even more insidious idea. He would break the man’s spine over his knee, render him immobile, and eat him alive. He lifted Trot effortlessly into his arms and placed him across one leg. He pressed down on his upper chest and lower abdomen. Pain started to bring Trot back to consciousness. He groaned in agony as the pressure against his spine intensified. “No…it hurts…Lawman… Where’s the lawman?”
Lothair stopped pressing. Who was this lawman? Was he one of Trot’s missing friends? More questions challenged the raging hunger in his brain. How many of them are there? How did they get down into the installation? Lothair lowered Trot back to the floor and watched him drift back into unconsciousness. The Dauphin facility needed to remain secure. Lothair’s frozen family and clients had to be protected. As simple as he was, Trot would have to remain alive a little while longer.
Lothair went back to the black screen. “My granddaughter…Edna… Where is she, and how do I go ab
out reviving her?”
Chapter 19
Cobe called out for his brother after ten minutes. He shouted at the top of his lungs after five more. Willem had been gone too long. He should’ve told him to put something inside the armory door to keep it from shutting. There was no chance Willem could hear his yelling with it closed. Cobe prepared to scream his name again anyway but the female voice they’d heard earlier on Level A cut him off.
“Unauthorized entry detected in Level E…Cylinder Room Eichberg…Lothair. Security, proceed with caution.”
All the locked rooms above on all the levels were occupied by sleeping dead. Cobe reasoned someone living had entered one of those rooms. And since howlers didn’t have eyes, he also reasoned the one that had killed Lawson couldn’t possibly have entered the proper six-digit access code into any of the keypads. As hard as it was to believe, that could only mean Trot was still alive. A small square of yellow light appeared far above Cobe in the empty shaft. The rumble and squawk of shaking metal followed moments later. The light winked off after a few seconds and the rumble stopped. The light winked back on—a little brighter and a little closer—and the rumbling started back up, a little louder.
Something was coming down the shaft towards him. It was stopping at every level. The lawman had said something about the elevator before they’d used stairs. What was it? The light got brighter. The rumble-squawk got louder. Level after level. Level after level.
Lawson’s words came to him. That would’ve been the easiest way down. Elevators were built to carry folks level to level in seconds.
The elevator was a giant slab of square metal designed to lift people up and down throughout the shaft. Cobe forgot about the throbbing pain in his knee. He could see the dull, gray underside of the thing bearing down on him out of the shadows less than four floors away. He grabbed one of the door edges and started to pull his way out. The pain shot up his leg again, and he ignored it, digging into the concrete floor with his good foot and pushing. The noise of the descending elevator became deafening. He could feel the vibration of its movement, the rush of pushed air. He was halfway out. My legs… It’s going to cut my legs off.