The Complete Four-Book Box Set

by Brian Spangler

  He thought to call to them; whirled around to see if there was anything he could stand on. He moved his eyes in full swings, dizzying himself in the process. And then his eyes landed on Sammi. She was walking along the other side of the great lobby, toward another corridor. Instinctively, his hands were up in the air, waving as if they were back in their Commune’s courtyard and he was trying to catch her attention as they readied for their morning walk to class.

  Sammi did turn to him, smiled briefly, and even attempted to wave with a subtle raise of her hand, before the lights nearest to her caught her eyes and turned her back around. But in the brief moment that she’d faced him, Declan had seen that something was wrong. Sammi was sick, although not in the same way as his mother and sister. Her face was pale, but not ashen; and thankfully, her hair had stayed the same bouncy red. But still, her eyes were darker, tired.

  Declan stepped forward, moving past a few bodies, trying to get closer to Sammi so that he could call out again. He glanced back over his shoulder at the corridor that his mother and sister had taken. Declan didn’t know which way to go. Another body thumped into his shoulder, causing him to reel back and fall to his knees. Thinking that the lights were instructing the bodies to hold him down again, he quickly jumped up, preparing to fend off the onslaught. But nothing came at him.

  Another morse line, he thought, and stepped to get out of the path of moving bodies.

  When he turned back, Sammi was already gone. Disappointed, Declan spat at the floor and wondered if the lights were smiling, satisfied with his loss. He cursed the flickering colors and spun around to follow his mother and sister.

  The corridor passed under his feet with fleeting steps. Running felt awkward to him—cumbersome and strange—after all, how often in his life had he ever been able to run? His heart beat hard and his knees and feet were punished by the unfamiliar gait. He was pushing past the graying bodies lining up to enter another room, when suddenly the floor jerked beneath him, causing him to stumble and fall. From his vantage point, he could see that nobody was moving; they’d all stopped. But the floor itself moved them along: a conveyor, passing them from the lobby to the next room. Declan jumped back up, trying to see over the line of bodies ahead of him, then sprinted to the end of the corridor. He continued to push bodies aside, gaining speed, until he was in the other room. Before he knew what was happening, the floor was gone from beneath his feet, and he was falling.

  He crashed onto a grated floor, and pain thundered in his legs, vaulting him forward. Declan caught himself against a narrow rail, his middle having hit the metal tubing hard enough to push the air from his lungs. Pin-lights darted across his eyes, and he reeled back, planting his feet firmly until he was still. He thought a bone was broken in his foot; he could feel the ache increasing, his big toe growing deaf to his commands.

  He rested then, waited until his breath came to him, before looking up to see where he was. Gasping, he choked on the air; it was filled with salt and a putrid decay that tasted acidic in his mouth. He spat once, trying to clear his mouth, but the powerful acrid taste stayed deep within his throat.

  A quick look around told him that he was standing at the railing of a thousand-hand drop. He’d fallen from the moving conveyor, dropping him on the other side of the corridor. Had he missed the small metal landing, he’d surely be dead; it was all that prevented him from tumbling to the bottom of a deep cavern. His hands rested on the metal railing, absorbing the cold touch as a necessary safety against falling.

  Looking over the edge, his heart went into his throat, lifting his stomach until he felt sick. He turned away. His knees knocked together until he dropped. He was terrified.

  In his lifetime, he’d never experienced height like this. Before now, the executive floor—where he’d walked with his mother once, on her first day of work—was the highest that he’d ever been. He remembered that his mother had pulled him back from the ledge as he had looked down at their courtyard. She’d embarrassed him, calling out that it was too dangerous to be so close. But this was ten times that height. Above him, he could see that the cavern was dome-shaped, and as tall as the lobby he’d just left. Gripping the cold metal, he forced himself to lean over and look below.

  “That’s where the heart is,” he mumbled. “It’s deep inside the earth.”

  Declan pushed to stand, a distant heartbeat throbbing in his foot. He ignored the pain, and began his search for his mother and sister. The moving floor he’d fallen from was above him, turning inward toward the black walls that made up the sides of the cavern. With his eyes he followed its path, winding downward into a long, drawn-out spiral that stretched away from him and to the other side. The distance was great, and if not for the line of white coveralls standing against the dark walls, he thought he would have lost sight of it.

  Across the vast cavern, he saw other landings like the one he was standing on: jutting square pockets of metal affixed to the cavern wall. He could see that for each of the moving conveyers entering the cavern, there was a metal landing beneath.

  Maybe these are for maintenance, he thought. But none of them were connected. The only way on or off of the landing was to use the moving platforms above each of them. Or maybe they were used for building the cavern and then forgotten?

  Turning around, he pressed his hand against the rocky wall, which was wet, moist with a salty smell that reminded him of the ocean. But that wasn’t the source of the foulness, the putrid smell aching in the back of his mouth. That decay came from somewhere else. He leaned forward against the rail, looking down into what he couldn’t see.

  “They are mining something,” his voice echoed, recalling a conversation between his mother and father. The VAC Machines had drilled deep into the earth, mining for compounds to use with the ocean’s water. What kind of machine could drill a hole so big?

  Below him, more conveyors moved across the open expanse, crisscrossing back and forth like the streams of white iridescent coveralls from the lobby. But some of the lines of bodies were naked, free of coveralls, standing one behind the other, following in what looked like a motionless march down into the cavern.

  He spotted his mother and sister in one of these lines. Bodies naked, they moved obediently forward and stared ahead without expression. He screamed their names, but they were already too far from him to notice. He considered, then, that maybe they could hear him, but were just ignoring him. But, if that were so, he knew it was not because they had chosen to.

  At the end of their moving conveyor, there stood a robotic machine: a type of android, but bigger than Andie from their classroom. Its articulating arm swung in wide arcs, bringing a mechanical hand with rubber-tipped fingers to rest on the face of each person. He could hear the faint whirring sound of the arm as it swung around from one conveyor belt to another, alternating back and forth.

  Declan watched as a woman reached the swinging arm. As the arm swung around to touch her, he brought his hand to his cheek, remembering how his mother had touched him there. The mechanical arm stretched a rubber finger, pressing it against her skin. The graying of the woman’s skin began to quicken, starting at her temple and spiraling downward, like the moving conveyors around the cavern. When the woman’s skin had lost all color, Declan watched her body collapse in a jumble of legs and arms. Declan jumped when the floor beneath her suddenly opened and she disappeared into the cavern’s black depths.

  Declan forgot all about his fear of the cavern’s height as he counted the number of people between the machine and his mother and sister. Twenty, maybe a few more, giving him only minutes to pull them to safety. He ran from one side of the metal landing to the other, looking for anything that he could use to reach them. He found nothing. He looked back to the machine: eighteen people. Urgency spread over him like sweat as he desperately sought a way off the platform. He swung a leg over the front railing, hoisting himself up, only to drop back down undecided. The whirring sound of the machine and the collapsing of bodies thrummed in his e
ars. And with each swing and deathly touch, he kept a count, visualizing his family in the line. Declan realized how fast the conveyors were moving. He was losing time. Sixteen people.

  Climb the wall, he thought. It’s the only way down.

  Holding his breath, he climbed atop the railing, perching himself above the cavern’s depths. He rested all his weight on his good foot, leaving the other to help him balance on the railing. Fourteen people. He reached and grabbed for the wall, his hand slipping almost immediately. The walls were slick with moisture, and he struggled to hold himself. Thirteen people. He tried digging his fingertips into a fissure, attempted to grip its stony edge and shift his weight to his arms.

  Declan found a small lip in the rock face and took hold, shuffling a few hands away from the platform; he was climbing, attached to the cavern wall like the metal landings. Eleven people. The rocky wall gave little for him to hold on to. He found another fissure below his knee, and shoved his broken foot into the space. Sweat pestered his eyes, and he fought the urge to wipe them. The threat of falling brought on an overwhelming nausea that wetted his mouth and closed his throat. A jagged shard stabbed into the tops of his fingers, splitting one of them open and prying up a fingernail until it broke away. Nine people.

  He’d rested too much of his weight on his fingers, and his hold on the wall broke. Declan sucked in a breath, and lost most of his grip. All of his weight fell to his injured foot, with only three fingers clutching the rocky lip. His body swung outward, opening up to face the depths below. Shutting his eyes to squeeze the sweat from them, Declan pushed his broken foot around, resting his heel in the opening. When the fissure held, he shifted more of his weight to his heel.

  Looking to the conveyer closest to him, he judged the distance and wondered if he could jump. Seven people. His arms and legs were shaking, violently trembling beneath his coveralls. He wasn’t going to make it. He tried to ignore his quivering muscles as he looked again at the closest conveyer. If he jumped, he’d fall off, he was sure of it. He might land on the conveyor, but he’d tumble over into the chasm below. Six people.

  I can make it, he thought desperately, and then looked over to the metal landing, apprehension eroding his hopes.

  Declan made his way back, dropping down onto the landing. The crisp sound of ringing metal echoed off the cavern’s far wall. He searched past the floor’s metal grating, through the mesh of raised steel triangles. Choking on his breath, and knowing that he couldn’t save them, he counted anyway. Four people. Surrendering, he felt insignificant, lacking and small, like a salt-gnat in the massive cavern. Three people. Declan collapsed onto his belly, pressing his face into the metal as he poked his fingers through the grated holes. Tears came to his eyes, giving in to gravity, just as he had given in moments before. Two people remained in front of his mother and sister. He held onto the grate, calling out their names, telling them that he loved them, apologizing in sorrowful heaves for having abandoned his attempts to save them. One person.

  Declan’s mother and sister stood quietly, never looking up to see who had been calling out to them. Instead, they calmly followed the last remaining person in front of them.

  Declan was winded from his attempts to get off the platform, and his breathing remained heavy, leaving warm drops on the metal floor, like the moisture that blanketed the walls. The cavern is breathing, too, he thought wildly. He wanted to turn away, to hide his eyes, but he didn’t.

  Hadley was first. She advanced on the moving floor, stopping at the machine. Declan fixed his eyes on his sister while the articulating arm swung around, welcoming her with a whirring whisper. It extended a finger and touched her temple—and as he’d seen happen with the others, all the remaining color in her body drained away, until finally she collapsed, lifeless. Declan cried, hating the sound of his helpless whimper. His crying turned to sobbing when it was his mother’s turn. Again, he forced himself to watch, owing it to her, owing it to the both of them, for having failed to save them. Only when his mother’s body fell from the conveyor did he finally shut his eyes. He wasn’t blind to this, not the deeper insides of the VAC Machine.

  When he finally brought himself to face the nightmare he’d witnessed, he saw for the first time how many bodies there were. There wasn’t just the single corridor from the lobby: every floor had a similar corridor feeding the cavern, just as their room’s corridor fed the great lobby. It was a labyrinth of moving conveyors twenty or more levels deep, each separated by hundreds of hands. Rolling onto his back, he closed his eyes and felt an errant tear race down the side of his face. He stayed there for a while, listening to the mechanical arms swinging back and forth, delivering their deadly touch. He listened to the crumbling of fallen arms and legs, and then to the sickening sound of flesh sliding off the conveyor belts toward the black depths. In his mind, he saw a tangle of bodies piling up at the bottom of the cavern, like a fleshy hillside of blank faces and empty eyes jutting out in every direction. He hoped to hear a scream, just once, but he never did.

  The dead don’t scream, he thought, and felt hysteria rising in him.

  He pushed the madness down when, somewhere in the distance, he heard another mechanical sound. It was a churning, and a thump thump thump: a machine-driven grind that repeated without pause. As he focused, listening to the new sound, it became louder and clearer, overpowering the whooshing and whirring of the death-touch arms. The sound began in the blackness, where the bodies had fallen to, crept up the muggy walls, and reverberated over the moving conveyers. Declan swallowed hard, beginning to understand what the cavern was, what it was for; what it did.

  The VAC Machine was eating.

  12

  Isla had to stop and rest. Panting, she sat back onto her heels and leaned against a panel of sheet metal. She pressed her cheek to the cool steel as beads of sweat fell into her eyes, stinging them. She was already exhausted; her heart pounded and she gulped at the air, wishing she’d brought some water with her. She’d never been an active person—her days were filled with simple lab work—and crawling on her hands and knees through an air duct definitely wasn’t lab work.

  Have I gone far enough? As she rested, her arms and legs stayed eerily busy: trembling, as if repulsed by what she was doing.

  She wanted to laugh at the crazy idea that she’d come up with. But of course, it wasn’t crazy—not at first, anyway. For months, she’d worked in her lab, synthesizing rare earth compounds, listening to the mechanical churn going on behind the mysterious steel door. From time to time, she’d hitch up onto her toes, looking inside to see the mechanized orchestra of swinging arms and dancing blood vials. Not once had she seen a drop or slip: only order and perfection.

  But then one day, while watching, she’d seen something new for the first time. It was small, and tucked away in the shadows of the blood vault’s corner. Isla widened her eyes, stretching high onto the tips of her toes. She’d found a clue. And that clue had led to an idea: a crazy idea.

  At once she recognized what was in the corner: a vent cover. And where there was one vent cover, there were more. Isla studied the walls and the ceiling, imagining ductwork passages hidden behind them. Ventilation systems had been a favorite for her and Nolan. They’d explored most of the aging ductwork in their Commune’s building. Pitted white from the salty air, the vent covers appeared seemingly out of nowhere—once they knew to look for them, that is. But when word had gotten out, the ductwork had become a playground for other kids, too: a dangerous playground. Soon, deafening thunder rumbled through their building, brought on by untethered hands and knees racing through the tunnels, like rats in a maze.

  Isla wondered if the same were true here: did ductwork connect the blood vault to her lab? She’d set her eyes through the small portal window, following from the rear corner, across the far wall, and into her lab. Within minutes, she’d found another vent cover under a lab table. The cover was outfitted with simple spring clips, and had easily popped off the wall. At one point she’d ducked o
ut from under the table, glancing up at the lights: the glass bulbs stayed dark and empty, uninterested. She’d peered into the vent shaft: the hope was that she could make her way across her lab, through the wall, and into the blood vault. What she’d do once inside, she wasn’t sure about. Maybe she’d read what was written on the vials? Or maybe she’d take one, and analyze it?

  An explosion echoed inside the vent, startling Isla from her resting spot in the warren of ductwork. She must have started to fall asleep, because the sheet metal was humid from her breath. Isla looked at the condensation and used her finger to draw a circle, poking two dots for eyes. She finished the artwork with an upturned curve for a smile. She grinned back at the face, but soon the moisture dripped a crooked path, cutting through the smile. And as she moved to wipe the face away, another explosion echoed. When she realized the source of these “explosions,” she began to laugh, and had to cup her hand over her mouth. She was the source: she was buckling the sheet of metal beneath her whenever she shifted her weight.

  “I guess that means I’d better get a move on,” she told the smiley face. Isla waited for a reply, then gave the face a quick swipe with her palm. Turning, she spied the soft light at the end of the ventilation shaft. Long yellow fingers stretched through the room’s vent cover, casting light from the blood vault into the ductwork. She crawled toward it, following the familiar hum of the mechanical arms. As she listened to them singing, she could imagine the jointed tubular limbs racing across the room, picking up and putting down the blood vials. When her hand broke the first beam of light, Isla stopped. She waited: for an alarm to sound, for an objection to be voiced. When she heard nothing, and a mechanical arm swung across the face of the cover, all hesitation went away, and curiosity won her over.