Omega City

by Diana Peterfreund

  Eric gave Nate the short—and extremely skeptical version—of my theory about Fiona and her activities. “So then we went and looked up the torn-off page and we found that riddle, and we gave it to Howard—”

  “Howard,” I said. “Which way to get to the location you marked?”

  “It’s south of here,” he said, pointing to the left. “There doesn’t seem to be a direct road. Must be in the woods somewhere.”

  Perfect.

  Once we were sure we’d left Fiona and her companions behind, Eric and I sat up again.

  I looked out the window at the trees flying past, just a short field of grass away. In there, somewhere, was Dr. Underberg’s secret. His “last and lasting gift to mankind.” I had to find it before Fiona did. If she got her hands on that prototype, I knew she’d never show Dad. His last chance at proof would be gone. My eyes roamed over the grass and brush streaming by, when I saw something that didn’t belong.

  “Nate!” I cried. “Stop!”

  He pulled over and I tumbled out of the car almost before it came to a halt. There, sticking up from the weeds around the soft gravel shoulder, was a broken wooden pole. I spread the stalks of grass around the base, kicking until my foot hit something hard.

  There. I pulled the object up. It was an old rusty road sign. The only letters I could make out were HARO AY.

  CHARON WAY.

  9

  THE BATTLE OF THE BOULDER

  “CHARON WAY,” HOWARD FILLED IN BEHIND ME.

  “Yeah, that part I figured out all on my own.” Howard wasn’t the only one around here who could work out riddles.

  Eric was kicking at the dirt on the shoulder. “And here’s the missing road.” He pointed into the field. “Look, you can see where it used to go.”

  “So right down there”—I pointed—“is where the old Underberg family cabin is. Or was. Or something.”

  Nate was still behind the wheel of his truck, watching us from the window with wary eyes. “Okay, kids, this just went from interesting weekend science project to interesting start of a horror movie. Back in the car.”

  “No way!” I cried. Not when we were so close. The grown-over road beckoned.

  “Yes way,” said Nate, in the tone you hear from babysitters and summer-camp counselors. The one that says I’m totally your friend, except when I’m handing down the discipline. “Finding a model solar system is boring but harmless. Getting chased by people wearing jumpsuits and driving unmarked black SUVs down a nonexistent road to an abandoned cabin is—well, maybe exciting, but definitely not harmless. I’m not putting any of you in danger.”

  “Nate,” Howard protested, turning to his brother. “You promised.”

  Nate’s expression was unreadable, but he stared at his brother for a full two seconds. Howard, surprisingly, stared back.

  Right away, Nate’s expression softened. “Okay. But you guys have to swear that you’ll do exactly as I say.”

  We all nodded.

  “And that the second I say we’re going home, we go home.”

  We all nodded again.

  He sighed. “I’m going to regret this. I knew as soon as you two girls showed up at the door I was going to regret this. Get in.”

  We got in, and Nate backed up and turned down the overgrown road, driving slowly as we rumbled over the thick grass.

  “If I hit anything, you all owe me big time.”

  “Stop here.” Howard tapped the GPS. “We’re less than a kilometer from the location. It’s right in the woods.”

  As we got out of Nate’s truck, I looked back at the road. Were we far enough in to conceal the truck from Fiona and her friends if they drove by? I hoped so.

  We picked our way through the tall grass of the field toward the trees. There were signs posted there showing the boundary of the state forest and telling us that hunting and fishing were not allowed. We kept going, silent except for Howard’s regular updates on how close we were to the target.

  “Ah, this brings me back,” Eric said. “Dust? Check. Boredom? Double check.”

  “Yeah,” I replied, “but last summer, we were just wandering around this park. This time we’re going somewhere.”

  “Somewhere,” Eric echoed skeptically. “Everywhere is somewhere.”

  “You’re such a party pooper,” Savannah said to him.

  “Two hundred meters,” Howard intoned, eyes glued to the screen. My heart was racing, even though we were walking at a nice, steady pace. We trailed after him, over roots and fallen logs and ditches and hills. “One hundred and fifty. Keep your eyes peeled. Remember, we’re looking for something really small, like a tennis ball.”

  “How about a squirrel?” Eric suggested. “That’s the right size.”

  It wasn’t a squirrel. It was the battery. I just knew it.

  I surveyed the forest. There was no road—abandoned or otherwise—back here, and no sign of a cabin, even as Howard announced we were one hundred meters away from our destination. Only a football field’s distance. We should be able to see some sign of a cabin now, right?

  “Twenty,” said Howard. “Fifteen. Ten.”

  Ahead of us, a massive boulder rose out of the earth. We’d passed several others on our path, but this one was by far the biggest—almost the size of a tool shed. Howard walked right up to it, pressing the GPS into the stone. “That’s odd.”

  Savannah snickered. “Walking into a giant rock?”

  “The location is a half meter in,” he said, tapping the stone. “In there.”

  “Maybe the boulder is the treasure,” Eric said.

  “No,” said Howard. “It’s supposed to be as small as a tennis ball, remember?”

  Or a battery.

  But my brother didn’t buy it. “Maybe it’s a space rock. From Pluto.”

  Howard shook his head. “A meteorite would have left a crater, and probably blown all these trees outward around the impact site, like in Tunguska.”

  “The Tunguska Event,” I corrected, “was not a meteor impact site. There was no debris or crater, and witnesses say the sky glowed for days after—”

  “Are you kidding me?” Howard said. “Another conspiracy theory? I can’t wait to hear what you think Tunguska was.”

  I shrugged. “Lots of possibilities. Hydrogen explosion, electricity experiments, extraterrestrials . . .”

  “Aliens?” Howard blurted. “That’s nuts. And inaccurate. Soil samples taken from the impact site showed large amounts of iridium, which is consistent with—”

  “Guys,” Eric broke in. “I was joking. It’s not a space rock. It’s a wild goose chase.”

  I looked at the boulder with dismay. We couldn’t dig under there. And there was no sign of a cabin, abandoned or otherwise. Maybe we were wrong about the riddle. Or the math. Maybe Fiona had a better idea of where the treasure was, or what the treasure was. . . .

  Or maybe it was all a joke, just like Eric thought.

  Savannah had been pretty quiet this whole time, not even trying to flirt with Nate. Now she laid her hand on my shoulder. “Don’t give up, Gillian. Let’s look on the other side. Maybe he was off by a few feet, or there’s a clue carved into the stone or something.”

  “Oh, goody,” Eric said, in a tone that meant the opposite. “Another clue.”

  “That’s a great idea!” I said, brightening. We started around the side of the boulder, and I brushed away leaves and dirt as I went, looking to see if there were any markings cut into the stone.

  On the opposite side of the rock, there was a massive, perfectly straight crack, running from the ground to a few feet above my head. “That’s weird.” I ran my fingers along the crack, but couldn’t feel anything else.

  Eric scrambled up the side of the boulder, wedging his fingers and toes into cracks and divots as he went. “The crack makes a right turn up here,” he said. “A perfect ninety-degree angle.”

  Even weirder. I raised up on my toes, hopping in excitement as I watched my brother brush debris from the l
ine of the impossibly perfect crack. Could this be another clue? I should have brought the Underberg book. What if this rock just led to another riddle, the way the granite block in Solar Park did?

  Nate hurried around to our side of the boulder, his eyes wide. “Okay, time to go.”

  “Already?” I said. “What, you saw some dangerous-looking squirrels?”

  “No,” he replied. “The chick from the gas station and her friends. They’re just over the rise.”

  I caught my breath. Fiona. Were they following us? Or following steps of their own? And if so, what else did they know that we didn’t?

  “Hey, Gills,” Eric called down.

  “Shh!”

  He slid down the side and landed lightly on his feet on the dirt. “Sorry. I just thought you’d like to know that your space rock?” He swept away a curtain of moss. “It’s a door.”

  Eric was right. There, clear as day, was a rectangular outline formed by the cracks in the stone. I reached up with trembling fingers to trace the outline, while Eric started feeling around inside the crack on the right side. He tugged and tugged, and, impossibly, the rock shifted. The crack widened, revealing a dark hollow that smelled of rot and glowed with dim red light.

  My breath caught in my throat. I had no explanation for this. I’d been looking for a cabin. A battery in a box or on a shelf. But this . . .

  “It looks like the gates of hell,” Eric said softly.

  “Fitting,” said Howard. “Pluto was the god of the underworld in mythology.”

  “You swore,” Nate reminded me under his breath. “You swore when I said to go, you’d go.”

  I stared at the entrance, afraid to blink, as if it would suddenly vanish. This was real. There was a treasure. It was right in there.

  We should have brought Dad. Dad would know what to do. But there must have been some small part of me afraid this was just one more wild goose chase. I hadn’t wanted to see that look of disappointment on his face if there’d been nothing there, like Eric had thought.

  But now? Now, I’d give anything to see him tell us what in the world we’d just found.

  “Another fifty meters,” said a strange voice, not nearly far enough away to suit me.

  Nate cursed.

  “Should we run?” Savannah whispered, her eyes wide.

  “Too late,” Nate said under his breath.

  “Hello?” came the voice again. Deep. Rough. Close. On-the-other-side-of-the-rock close.

  We all froze.

  “Is anyone there?”

  Nobody on our side of the rock said anything, moved anything, maybe even thought anything, just in case.

  On the other side, I heard footsteps and then a harsh, feminine whisper. Fiona. “Get out your gun.”

  I swear my heart stopped, and I don’t care what Howard might say about it being scientifically impossible.

  Gun. The word was a drumbeat in my head. Gun. Nate was right. We should have left.

  Somehow, I heard Nate hiss, “Inside,” and then he was shoving us all into the darkness.

  “No—” Sav protested as we jostled and squeezed our way in. All our efforts at silence had ceased, but the only sounds I heard were the shouts from the other side and the horrible grinding as Nate and Eric threw themselves against the stone door, trying to shut it and keep Fiona and her friends out. I saw a glimpse of Fiona’s face glaring at me, then a flutter of hands in the crack of light.

  Fiona cried out, “It’s his kids. They found it—” and then a massive clang as Eric threw down some sort of metal bar across the door, shutting us inside.

  Wait. There was a metal bar? Inside the boulder?

  “They have a gun. They have a gun.” Savannah was hyperventilating beside me.

  I blinked, trying to adjust my eyes to the red glow. The inside of the rock was hollow, a sort of metal cage with the form of the boulder arcing just beyond. Tiny red pinpricks of light glowed from every crossbar of metal. There was nothing else inside. No box. No shelf. No battery.

  “What is this place?” Nate asked.

  “Oh my God, oh my God,” Savannah blubbered.

  “This can’t be it,” Howard was saying, still clutching tightly to the GPS. “It was supposed to be small, the size of a tennis ball.”

  “It’s pretty small,” Eric pointed out. We were all pressed together inside the space, clinging to the center as if afraid the metal box around us might electrocute us.

  Outside, there was a commotion.

  “What do you mean you can’t get the door open again?” Fiona was shouting, her voice shrill. “I’m so close. I will not have the Seagrets get there first.”

  Get where? The boulder? I had half a mind to let her know that there was no treasure inside this rock. The other half, of course, wanted to shout out to her that I knew she’d been messing with my dad all along, so there!

  But as for treasure, there was . . . um. Metal. A boxy metal cage with red lights. I looked around, following the grid of red lights that outlined our new space. What little illumination came from the red lights showed my friends’ frightened faces and the rough, hollowed-out rock wall beyond the cage. Nothing remotely interesting, except . . .

  There, opposite the door, embedded in the grid at about waist level, was one big red light, several inches across. A button. And Howard was staring right at it.

  “The size of a tennis ball . . . ,” he murmured, reaching out.

  “Howard,” Nate warned. “Don’t touch anything.”

  Howard pressed the button, which promptly blinked off. There was the sound of whirring, of engines coming to life, as one by one, the lights went off all around us, then blinked back on a sickly greenish white. Everything shuddered, and a clanking groan filled the space as sheets of metal rose from the floor beyond the metal cage to enclose us and block out the outline of the boulder. I felt my stomach push up against my chest.

  We were going down.

  10

  THE WORLD BELOW

  I CAN’T TELL YOU WHO STARTED SCREAMING FIRST. TRUTHFULLY, IT might have been me.

  But after a few seconds of shrieking ourselves hoarse, we sort of tapered off. After all, it wasn’t a roller coaster, dropping us down into nothingness. More like . . . an elevator, clanking us down in slow, steady fashion. And who screams in an elevator?

  This one apparently came complete with elevator music. A tinny, tinkling melody started playing, and we all quit shouting “Help!” and “Stop!” And “Howard! What did you do?”—that one was Nate and Savannah combined—to listen.

  We were only a few stories down when the music was replaced by words.

  “Greetings, survivors!” said a cheery man’s voice.

  Survivors? It was tough to see my friends’ faces in the pale running lights. But since we’d all gone from screaming our heads off to shocked silence, I imagined they were making the same face I could feel I was. Eyes wide, mouth wider.

  The voice went on, as calm and carefree as ever:

  Congratulations on escaping the attack, plague, or natural disaster that has brought you here. Our condolences on the family members and/or appendages you may have lost during the end of the world.

  “The end of the world?” Savannah choked out.

  “Appendages?” bleated Eric.

  Rest assured, you have reached safety.

  We would like to take this opportunity to remind you that pets, plague-infected persons, enemy combatants, and firearms are not permitted entrance. Please terminate or discard these items before your descent.

  The music started up again, no doubt meant to accompany our efforts to do whatever it might take to . . . discard our pets or plague-infected loved ones. Down and down we went, as the music looped through the speakers and echoed up into the endless tunnel that we could still make out beyond the metal grid at the top of the elevator. We all stared up into the shaft as it receded into shadow and we descended deeper into the Earth.

  “What’s happening?” Sav asked. “Where are we?”


  We all looked at Howard, but he was staring through the grate above our heads as if it would provide some sort of answer.

  “Gillian?” Eric prompted.

  I shook my head. This wasn’t in Dad’s book. I don’t think this was even in Dad’s world.

  Finally, with another enormous grinding of gears and screaming metal, the elevator touched the ground. The music morphed into a brassy little fanfare, like we were about to meet a king, and the disembodied voice said:

  Welcome . . . to Omega City.

  “Oh,” said Savannah, Eric, Howard, and I in unison. “Omega.”

  Wait . . . Omega City?

  “This means something to you?” Nate asked. But no one answered, because just then, the doors slid open.

  Howard was the first to peek out. “There’s nothing here,” he said flatly.

  I pushed past him and out the door. “That’s impossible.” And I wasn’t about to trust anything Howard said after his little button-pressing escapade.

  We were standing on an odd sort of platform, an artificial cement island in the middle of a vast underground lake, like a giant dock. About ten yards in front of us I saw black waves lapping the side of the platform, and distant drips and splashes resounded through the chamber. If there was an opposite shore, I had no idea how far away it was. To our left and right on the platform were several other cylindrical elevator shafts, just like the one that had taken us down. They all wound upward and disappeared into the inky blackness high above. The ceiling—if that’s what it was—appeared so far away that I couldn’t see it at all. In fact, all I could see were tiny twinkling lights, like stars, far, far away.

  A wave of dizziness washed over me, like the whole thing was about to tip over and spill us into the black hole over our heads.

  “What,” Nate said, though it sounded more like a gasp, “is this place?”

  “It’s Omega City.” I tried to calm my nerves. The others had joined me on the platform. I put my hands out to the side for balance.

  “Yeah,” Eric said softly. “Didn’t you hear the guy on the elevator?”