Omega City

by Diana Peterfreund

18

  VOICES FROM BEYOND

  I TRIED THE DOOR, BRACING MYSELF FOR ANOTHER BATTLE, BUT IT opened easily. The inside was dead black, and though I flicked all the switches on the wall near the threshold, the overhead lights didn’t seem to be working. I wondered if that meant the machines before us were dead, too.

  The room was filled with boxy, off-white computer monitors, sound boards covered with metal switches and plastic buttons, grimy keyboards, dusty speakers, old-fashioned black telephone receivers, and even cassette recorders. There wasn’t a flatscreen or flash drive in sight. What space wasn’t taken up with these machines was stacked floor to ceiling with videotape cases marked with neatly typed labels that read things like Plague, Famine, Fertility Problems, and Revolt. Another shelf held more recordings. US History, Vol. 4–12, I read on one, and Beginner Agriculture on another. Then I found the mother lode. Row after row of tapes sat on a shelf labeled From the Founder in handwriting I recognized well.

  Dad. Would be. In heaven. For a minute, I completely forgot we were supposed to be trying to find a way to escape and just stared in wonder at this wall of pure history. It was like the first time Dad had taken me to the big reading room at the university library, and I’d seen that massive wall of dusty leather books. No, it was a hundred times more exciting, because I knew exactly what I’d find on each and every one of these videotapes.

  Dr. Underberg. It was his city, after all.

  “I knew it,” I whispered to the tapes on the wall.

  “This is wild,” Eric agreed. He walked over to one of the sound boards and flipped a switch. The board lit up, buttons and lights blinking red, green, and yellow. “At least this works.”

  “Yeah,” I murmured, distracted as my eyes roamed the shelves. There was enough information here for Dad to write a hundred books.

  “Um . . . Gills? We were trying to contact the outside world?”

  Oh, right. Quickly, I turned on as many of the machines as possible. I picked up the phone, hoping to hear a dial tone, but I got nothing. I booted up the computers, but they just showed blue screens and command prompts. I couldn’t even find a mouse.

  “I think Omega City was built before Windows,” Eric said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The computers—never mind. Look, it’s another map.” He pointed down at the display board in front of him. It was illuminated in a rainbow of colored lights and when I joined him at the panel, I could see that this diagram put the sketch we’d found by the turbine to shame. Here was the entirety of Omega City laid out before us, level by level, chamber by chamber, and apparently system by system, too. There were different system maps, color coded for Communication, Electric, Atmospheric Control, and Water/Sewage, and overlaid on the general white outline of the chambers. According to the key, rooms that were marked with green lights were “operational” while those in red were listed as “offline.”

  “Should be blue for ‘underwater,’” Eric snarked. And most of the city was, in fact, in red. This place was huge. I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like when it was all working as designed.

  “Here’s the theater.” I pointed at the spot on the map. The lower level was listed as red on the Communications map, obviously, but the higher one was still green. “Find the intercom controls.”

  On another board, we found a massive panel of switches. I sat down on the wheeled desk chair in front of the panel and flipped the one marked MT Balcony.

  “Hey, guys. We found it. Can you hear me?”

  “Gills, turn the mic on.”

  There didn’t seem to be a switch on the microphone itself, but I found one labeled Master Control on the panel and flipped it. The next time I pressed the button for the balcony and spoke, I could hear the faint echo in the microphone that meant it was transmitting my words.

  “Guys? It’s Gillian. Can you hear me?”

  Silence. Was there an intercom button on their end, too, or was it only one way?

  “We found some more maps here so we’re plotting out an alternate route to the exit for us.” I looked over at Eric for help. He gave me two thumbs up, grinning.

  “Um, we’re fine here?” I added. “It’s nice and dry. And those suits were really warm. You were right, Howard.” I hesitated again. “I hope you guys are fine, too. And, um, I hope you can hear me. Otherwise, I’ll feel dumb.”

  Okay, that was awkward.

  “Gills, look at this.” Eric was rummaging in one of the crates near the floor. “Walkie-talkies!” He turned a set on. “Testing, testing.”

  A lot of good those did us, since we were standing in the same room. If only we’d had them back at the movie theater. And they weren’t going to help us contact the outside, either.

  “See if you can get online or something,” I snapped.

  “I don’t think these computers are hooked up to the internet, Gills,” he said. “I don’t think they’re even in color. They look like they’re from the eighties.”

  “Find something that says ‘outside line,’ then. Maybe we can call 911.”

  “Okay,” said Eric. “But you’re going to have to be the one talking to them, because there’s no way I’ll be able to bring myself to tell them a story that starts with us crawling inside a boulder and getting shot at with a water cannon.”

  But try as we might, there didn’t seem to be any connection to the outside world. Some communications room. It was all well and good if the world truly did come to an end, but what about the rest of the time?

  “Hey, Gills.” Eric was studying the map panel. “Check it out. These are the air vents.” He pressed a button on the panel, and little dotted blue lines started marching around the screen, showing the path of air from one chamber to another, from room to room to room.

  “Did you just turn the turbine back on?” I asked him.

  He bit his lip. “Um . . . maybe?”

  Maybe he’d made mincemeat out of Fiona and her goons. Except, they had to be farther than the turbine now, right? Still, even if they were in the city, there was no way for them to guess which way we’d headed or where the others were hiding. We’d be safe for a little while.

  I really wished I could talk to Savannah and the Nolands.

  “But that’s not the point. Look at this.” He traced a line of dots across the map, from the hall outside the Comm room and straight across the map, across the entire chamber to C-block, over where we’d seen the classrooms and the military barracks. “We didn’t go up those stairs, way back at the entrance, because it just led to this room here.” He pointed at a room marked O.D. “But the air vent goes to that room. I wonder if we could crawl through and bring everyone else back like that.”

  “Crawl through the vents?” I shook my head. “That sounds really dangerous.”

  “That sounds dangerous?” Eric blinked in disbelief. “After swimming up elevator shafts and Russian gas traps and everything we’ve been through? At least we’ll be above the flood waters. Come on, let’s go check out the size of the vent.”

  So we went outside and pulled the grate away from the vent. It wasn’t actually too bad—about the width of a doorway, but square, so it was the same height. Not that I was thrilled about the idea of getting trapped in an even smaller space than we already were. We shined our lights down the tunnel as far as we could, and saw nothing—no spiderwebs, no collapses, and most of all, no water. There was a soft breeze, though, which must mean the turbine was doing its job.

  “I think it’ll be okay.”

  I stepped back. What if we got trapped in the tunnel, not able to stand or move or run if we had to? Maybe I should tell Eric that if there were worms, they’d definitely be in there. And what about Nate? Somehow, I didn’t get the sense he’d be thrilled about crawling into some tunnel.

  “Gillian?” A crackly voice floated out of the Comm room. “Can you hear me?”

  “It’s Savannah!” We sprinted back inside.

  The blinking light was coming from the room mark
ed Gym. I leaned over the microphone. “I’m here. We’re here.”

  “Thank goodness!” Savannah let out a big breath. “It’s so good to hear your voice. Nate’s been freaking out. Are you okay?”

  “We’re fine. The phones don’t work, though. We’re trying to figure out a way to get you up here.”

  “Yeah. The intercom button thingy didn’t work where we were, so we moved.”

  “Eric thinks you can crawl through the vents and meet us.”

  There was nothing but silence on the other end of the line.

  “What vents?” Nate asked at last. If he was scared, I couldn’t hear it through the intercom.

  “There are—air vents. Nice ones. Big.”

  “Nice air vents?” Eric said, making a face.

  I ignored him. “We can see the whole layout of the city from here—what parts are okay, what parts are flooded. What systems are working . . .”

  “How does that exit we’re heading to look?”

  I checked the map. Green. “It looks fine. We just have to get you guys up here.”

  “So what’s the story with the air vents?”

  Eric cut in on the microphone. “It’s not so bad. You just need to go to the room marked O.D. on the map. It’s right down near the C-block. You see it?”

  Nate’s voice crinkled through the speakers. “Yeah.”

  “Observation Deck,” Howard piped in. “That’s probably the Observation Deck.”

  “And then find a way to crawl up into the air vent.”

  “Yeah,” said Nate. “That’s the part where you lose me.”

  “You want to get out of here, don’t you?” Savannah’s voice filtered through.

  Eric started giving out detailed directions about when they should turn and what other air passage intersections they might pass, but I stopped him with a hand over the microphone.

  “They’ll never remember all that,” I whispered. “They’ll get lost.”

  “We can still hear you,” Savannah said, annoyed.

  “I’ll remember,” said Howard. “I’ve been working on my memory palace.”

  “What’s a memory palace?” Savannah asked him, and then they all started talking at once, and I couldn’t make out any of Howard’s explanation or exactly what Nate said to get him to shut up and focus.

  Eric ripped off a sheet of paper from a notebook and started scrawling directions. “Okay,” he said. “This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to give them the first few directions, then I’m going to get in and meet them halfway.”

  “You are not!” I exclaimed, grabbing his arm. “We don’t split up.”

  “Too late,” Nate said over the speaker.

  That was different. Eric and I had been together, and so had the Nolands and Savannah. I wasn’t sending my baby brother off alone. Nate of all people should understand.

  Eric handed me a walkie-talkie. “We’ll be in contact the whole time. I won’t get lost—you’ll tell me where I am.”

  He wanted me to sit here and listen to him getting trapped in an air vent over a walkie-talkie? Dad would kill me if anything happened to Eric on my watch. “You don’t know the conditions of those tunnels. You don’t know what’s inside them.”

  “Yes we do.” Eric tapped the blue dots on the screen. “Air.”

  Air . . . and collapses and drop-offs and spiderwebs the size of beds and bat colonies and . . . sure, giant worms. Why not? They had to like air vents. It was nice and dark inside them. I opened my mouth to say all of this to Eric when Savannah’s voice came out of the speaker again.

  “Are you guys still there?”

  Oops. I’d been silent for too long, thinking about what it would mean to let my kid brother—and he was, even if he never acted like it—crawl away into a dark tunnel without me. “Yeah. We’re here. Sorry. We’re . . . figuring stuff out.”

  “Don’t you see, Gillian?” Eric asked. “This is the best way. The safest way.”

  “Splitting up again?” I felt my eyes burning. “Eric, you didn’t even want to be in the back of the line before. Now you want to go off alone?”

  “Honestly? I’d rather go off alone than sit here alone.”

  “Why is that?”

  He gestured to the Plague shelf. “This place is creepy.”

  “This place is awesome!”

  He nodded. “Exactly why I think you should stay and I should go.”

  I had no argument for that.

  “Besides, one of us has to stay here and man these controls, give us backup info. You can tell us where to go if Howard’s memory palace is more like a shack.” He switched on our walkie-talkies. “Testing?”

  “One two three,” I answered glumly.

  “Okay, guys,” Eric said. He gave them the first set of directions and they repeated it back. Savannah even made a little jingle out of it.

  “Up past two, turn right. Over past three on left, then turn left. Straight past five on right, turn right. We can do this.” I wondered if she was trying to talk herself into it, too.

  “And I’ll meet you there and bring you the rest of the way in,” Eric said. He stuck his walkie-talkie into yet another pocket of his utility suit, then tugged at the zippers on the wrists. “I’m still not entirely sure what these are for.” He unzipped them and some crumpled silver material slipped out and dangled from the cuffs.

  “Gloves.” I unfurled them. The palm and fingertips of each glove had little bits of rubber on them, like the bottom of a sneaker. “I bet they’re for traction.”

  “I wish I’d known about this when we were climbing up the elevator shaft. Maybe they’ll come in handy in the tunnel.” He tugged them on.

  I started thinking about drop-offs again. And about Dad, who had no idea his kids were trapped underground. And about Eric leaving me alone in this room. I clutched the walkie-talkie to my chest. There was no point in panicking. We had too much work to do.

  Eric and I hugged, and then I saw him into the tunnel. I watched the shape of his body, silhouetted against the head lamp, all the way until he made his first turn. Then I returned to the Comm room to wait.

  “How you doing, Gills?” came my brother’s voice.

  I depressed the button on the walkie-talkie handset. “Fine. Trying not to think too much.”

  “How’s that going?”

  “Not well.”

  “Want me to sing? I bet it’ll be like singing in the shower. Good echoes.”

  “Please,” I begged. “No.” Eric was many things, but musical was not one of them.

  Ignoring me, he busted out with a truly atrocious rendition of a pop song. Then he tried “Singin’ in the Rain.” When he got to “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” I turned the volume on the handset to low and went looking for a distraction.

  Fortunately, the Comm room provided that in spades. There must be hundreds of videotapes, but I knew precisely where I wanted to start. On the Founder Message shelf, I picked the one marked Monthly Message 1 and stuck it in the VCR. The machine made a few unpleasant grinding sounds and started to play.

  At first it was nothing but shots of waving fields of grain and seagulls soaring over sunlit beaches, set to melancholy music, and then, a man’s voice.

  Earth . . . how beautiful it once was. How perfect. Able to sustain such vast quantities of life, able to recover from everything we’ve done to it. We shall not abandon our mother.

  It was the same voice we’d heard in the elevator, and back on the entrance platform, and in the Russian box. This was the voice of Dr. Underberg himself. My mouth dropped open in awe. Dad would be going nuts, listening to this. But before I could watch any more, the singing on Eric’s end stopped. I paused the video.

  “Everything okay?” I asked into the walkie-talkie.

  He made a terrible sound, something between a cough and a minor explosion.

  “Eric!” I cried.

  “Sorry,” he said. “There’s—” Another exploding noise. “Dust.”

  Just d
ust? Sneezing sounded seriously dangerous in a metal tunnel. Better him than me. “Gesundheit,” I said, and went back to the video. Finally I could get some answers about Omega City. This place was unbelievable and utterly secret. How could it be that my father, who had spent years studying Underberg, didn’t even know about it? He couldn’t have built it single-handedly. When I pressed play, the image melted away to a scene of a middle-aged Dr. Underberg sitting on a bench in Solar Park. He addressed the camera directly:

  Those of us who have chosen to remain, while so many others have left, deserve praise for our loyalty. We shall not discard our home like it’s nothing more than a broken cocoon.

  What was that supposed to mean? If he was talking about Mother Earth, where else were you going to go? It wasn’t like there was a secret base on Mars or something.

  Wait. Was there a secret base on Mars?

  My friends, it is clear that our lust for violence and bloodshed is what is tearing our world to pieces. We must band together, as people of Earth. For now, we truly are a people . . . of Earth.

  “Gillian? Calling Gillian Seagret. Respond at once.”

  I paused the tape again as my blood ran cold. I knew that voice. Even through the tinny echo of the speakers, I knew.

  Fiona.

  19

  SPEAKER OF THE LOUSE

  “GILLIAN, IT’S FIONA. I KNOW YOU CAN HEAR ME.”

  How did she know where I was? How did she know I was alone? My gaze flew to the intercom panel, where an orange light blinked.

  “Turn off the master control, Gillian. What we have to discuss is not for everyone’s ears.”

  I caught my breath. The master control? Did that mean that my conversation with Savannah and the Nolands had gone . . . oh, spitballs. It had gone everywhere. It was like the school’s PA system—the office could contact individual rooms, or they could turn on every speaker in the whole school at once. And that’s what Eric and I had done.

  Eric! We’d sent him into the vents and then, thanks to the master control, we’d given out directions to Fiona and her friends.

  “Gillian, I will not ask you again. We know where you and your friends are now.”