The Black

by Neil Mosspark

  “It’s politics. We tried to do this in secrecy, but things… stuff I can’t even tell you about in the government, is coming apart at the seams. We have a week… maybe days before this hits the press. We want to have this under control and an understanding of what is inside. Right now, if we tell the public that there is an alien craft on our planet that is a ticking time bomb that will kill us in our lifetime, people will riot. Farmers will not plant crops. Governments will fall. Suicides. Murders. Anarchy. There will be upheaval like the human race has never seen. If you think the religious cults that come to the dome and pray are bad, wait until people start looting and rioting like when it showed up, but this time the police will walk off the job to be with their families.”

  Dave sat there looking at his bruised hands in his lap. He felt so petty for fighting in a bathroom less than twenty-four hours ago. The human race stood on the brink of disaster, and he was beating on Hollywood punks to make himself feel better. He looked up at Tony. “People have to be better than that. Once they know, maybe we would get a lot more help?”

  “Maybe, but people are selfish creatures. They want to take care of themselves and their families. Why would people run for election? Why would people deliver food to cities? Money would lose its value. Workers on oil rigs will just stop working to go home and spend time with their families. Trade falls apart, this all falls apart, we all live like cavemen for a few years before the big bang happens.”

  “I get it… it’s just a lot to process,” Dave stated.

  “Don’t worry about anything but doing your job. That’s all you should focus on right now. We need you to see if we can clear the collapsed tunnel they were using. If we can get access, get people inside, maybe the science teams can shut it down and save us all… but we need to get in there so we can try.”

  Dave leaned back in the seat, letting this sink in. Suddenly he felt even more ashamed for all the little moments he had ever wasted at work. The days he was five minutes late or had called in sick. Tony was obviously carrying a burden no man should ever have to shoulder, and here he was messing his life up over and over.

  The rest of the drive was quiet. Tony was exhausted. Dave could see now why the man was obsessed with the job. It wasn’t about climbing the government ladder; it was about saving the human race.

  “Well, let’s go clear a tunnel,” he stated.

  Chapter 6

  Dave spray painted a line up the skinny hallway of rock and across the ceiling. “Let’s get another brace in this section. I don’t like the looks of this.”

  “No problem, sir.” The female sergeant nodded before calling over to one of her subordinates. She pointed to the structure and gave direction before catching up to the lead engineer.

  “They should have it supported by the time we get back. You can check it as we exit,” she stated.

  Dave paused for a moment to consider how quickly her people were working and viewed the bent I-beam. The smell of paint fumes from his spray can hadn’t even dissipated before the soldiers moved inward to place new steel beams, bolting and then welding them into place with acetylene torches. He didn’t like the use of gas-powered torches here in the small space, but given that electrical equipment wouldn’t work in the tunnel, he couldn’t object. The pressure to produce results also didn’t help with the maintenance of safety.

  “Your people work quick,” Dave stated.

  The short-haired American sergeant smiled. “They are probably the best group I have had a chance to work with, and that’s saying a lot.”

  “Just make sure they are safe. I’m worried about the speed that they are working at. I know that we have to get inside quick, but the number of people in the tunnels and the amount of material being moved makes me nervous.”

  “We’ve got this, sir. It’s not our first rubble-clearing. The Canadians have a great system for bracing that they have been using since the west coast quake, and the Germans have been monitoring for stress fractures and shifting. It will hold. I’m confident.”

  Dave continued on down the tunnel. The military were working with the understanding that this was a no fail mission, and each of Dave’s workers that had been brought in were operating under the assumption that sometimes corners needed to be cut to get the job done, especially if the job needed to be done yesterday.

  Overall, it was a change from the UN-hired transient workers. The politicking was obviously put aside now. The teams of slow, hourly paid workers were replaced by hyper-engaged, hard-working men and women who simply wanted to work together and complete a task for the sake “finishing.”

  Dave paused for a moment, pressing flat against the wall as he watched another group carry crushed stone in buckets past them in the dim tunnel, lit only by hanging glow sticks. Dave could pick out most of the various militaries by their uniforms. Most of them worked in silence, only speaking up to indicate a problem or communicate an essential need.

  Walking farther down the tunnel, he looked at the walls. “These are good. The bedrock is more solid here. Can you see where the original diggers were working this by hand?”

  “I can’t imagine how long it took them to get even this far,” the sergeant replied, lifting her hard hat to wipe the grime from the top of her head.

  “It’s chipped away.” His rough hands caressed the grey sedimentary stone.

  Turning back to the task of walking the rest of the distance, he stepped over a puddle. The floor here was covered in about an inch of water in the middle. He noted absently that due to the angle of the tunnel, the liquid was draining now toward what they suspected was the original entrance.

  Stepping to the wall again, Dave watched as another team carried a rusted I-beam carefully down the stone corridor. He snuck a glance at the female engineer. She was shorter than him by two heads and had a compact frame. It didn’t help that clearly defined jaw line and muscular neck indicated that she kept herself in shape. It didn’t help that her green eyes seemed to jump out from under the blond crew cut.

  For a moment he wondered if she whitened her teeth. Every time she smiled, they seemed to shine. Maybe it was the contrast of her tanned skin…

  “Looks like another load of scrap for the reconstruction crew.” She tipped her head toward the group and looked at Dave.

  He snapped out of his daze. “Yeah…”

  She squinted at him and snorted, shaking her head. Dave tried to feign innocence, but she ignored his attempts and stepped by him, taking the lead.

  Her demeanour stayed professional and to the point. “So the current theory is that this tunnel was constructed by survivors trying to escape years ago. The question I’m wondering is: where are the bodies? The original builders were barely were able to keep the ceiling from collapsing inward, and it obviously collapsed completely. So where were the workers?”

  Dave hadn’t thought about that morbid scenario. The tunnellers would probably have been inside when it collapsed. It was likely they were the cause of the failure. They squeezed by a group or uniformed engineers shifting new cross braces and overhead panels into place.

  Dave paused letting the sergeant move on ahead as he checked the braces would hold. The mix of loose soil and bedrock were unstable here, unlike the dense stone they had been originally digging through. He noted that the panels would stop any minor collapses from sealing the tunnel or crushing them, but a major failure would likely occur regardless of the braces.

  He dodged past soldiers in a mix of hard hats and military helmets as they painstakingly hand carried stones in buckets or in their arms toward the “city side” of the tunnel.

  “I wish we could use a conveyer belt system,” Dave called out to the sergeant, eager to replace the awkward moment with something they could both agree on.

  “Me too. This works only because we have so many people, but we both know the field would just wreck the motors. It’s even stronger down here in ET1.”

  “Really? ET1? Like extraterrestrial?”

  She lau
ghed, and the sound melted his calloused heart. She nodded. “My guys have been calling it that since your boss labelled it ‘Escape Tunnel one.’”

  “He’s not my boss… Well, he is, but he’s not,” Dave stated.

  She shrugged indifferently and turned to continue walking. Five minutes of stop-and-go traffic, sliding by workers clearing the floor of debris and improving the stability of the ceiling, they arrived at their destination. The far end of the tunnel.

  In front of them was a gigantic stone slab. Its surface was flat, as though broken from a quarry wall and installed in their way.

  “What do you think, Sergeant?” Dave tested. She was a construction engineer by trade but was catching on fast to the tunnelling side of the operation.

  “We think its pretty tall, but the way it’s braced at an angle…” Her small, gloved hand pointed to the rubble underneath the left side. “It makes me think the that weight has fallen toward us, and that it’s not thick. I think if we use a shaped charge we can clear this today.”

  “That’s good news,” Dave said.

  “Better news is that I can feel a draft.” She picked up a handful of dust from the floor and dropped it next to her industrial-sized glow stick. The motes of material puffed downward, but the ones that hung in the air gently wafted toward the space under the blockage.

  “That is good news. I think that the survivors weren’t digging this for very long before it collapsed. It probably took the wind out of their sails, and they quit.”

  For a moment, the air seemed charged. His nose wrinkled at the smell. Dave could feel the hair on his arms stand up as ozone filled the air. “Get your people under the shielded areas!” he told her.

  Dave tried to recall where the last shielded section they had walked through was. The team hadn’t shielded the entire length of the newly found tunnel yet and were only just clearing it.

  “Get out, get out, get out!” she yelled loudly, ushering people by her toward safety.

  Feet and glow sticks scrambled toward the light at the far end. The exodus was a rapid-pace controlled run. People chattered to communicate tripping hazards. The snake of people winding away through he tunnel operated as one body, sensing hazards and responding.

  “After you, Mr. Thompson,” she stated sternly, realizing he was being chivalrous.

  He was about to object but doubted she would care for his comments on the outdated idealism of women and children first.

  He jogged down the tunnel, rapidly closing the distance that had taken them fifteen minutes to walk. Once at the base of the ladder to the safety of the main hallway, he grabbed on and hoisted himself upward. The sergeant’s boot falls were quick to follow, and he felt the ladder shake as she traced his steps upward.

  Once standing inside the wide end of tunnel 18, he instinctively looked up to check the copper mesh on the walls.

  A minute later, the ozone crackled and the room lit with an orange discharge from the field pulse. The copper mesh across the ceiling glowed in waves as invisible particles they barely understood collided with the metal, being guided around them and into the grounded lines.

  “They’re getting more and more regular now,” the sergeant stated.

  Dave considered what Tony had told him two days ago about the increased absorption and the “big bang” that would follow.

  The bright, diffuse flickering light dimmed, to be replaced by soft orange light from the glow sticks hung on the walls and individual bodies.

  Everyone looked outward, waiting for the phenomena that always followed.

  Slowly, golf-ball-sized sparks of light popped into existence near the copper mesh of the walls and ceiling. Each floated toward the group, orbiting. Dave watched them self-organize, making lazy laps around them. Occasionally one would pass through an outstretched hand or bit of clothing, and the group would laugh nervously.

  After a moment, the lights evaporated, dissipating in ethereal smoke with no smell.

  “I don’t think I will ever see anything like that again,” stated the sergeant, her eyes wide and full of wonder.

  “We need to clear that stone fall before the next discharge.” Dave walked toward the explosives magazine, a large reinforced cargo container that had been dragged down the wider tunnel a few days ago and held a small amount of explosives.

  Dave collected the detonation cord, a chemical igniter, and a brick of malleable red semtex.

  “I’m going to set up a charge. Get everyone back down to the blast area,” he told the sergeant.

  She nodded before turning away. For a moment Dave glimpsed an encouraging smile as she kept eye contact.

  “Everyone on me, we are doing a head count and heading to the bunker,” she called out. The glow sticks and uniforms gathered around her as she tended to the troops.

  Dave swung down into the tunnel and quickly moved down the length. Setting up the blast right after a discharge was the best timing, since he was still worried about the “harmless” static that might be strong enough to ignite the det cord.

  Stuffing the explosives against the base of the wall and into the cracks around the edges, he rolled a large boulder over it to force the blast into the stone. It wasn’t much, but every bit helped. At the worst it would have no effect other than to pulverize a stone to dust that someone would have had to carry out in one piece.

  Working quickly, he unrolled the cord from the spool. The explosion would likely be directed toward the city side of the tunnel, and he wanted to be safely out of the small, confined space before setting it off. Memories of being to job sites where his peers had misjudged the amount of explosives or gotten careless with timers tickled the back of his mind.

  It took him a while to unroll and walk, but eventually he moved up and out of the tunnel, tossing the roll up the six feet onto the floor of tunnel 18. It rolled a short way into the larger chamber, and he climbed the ladder for the second time before retrieving it. Rough hands unravelled the length of it, and he stepped into the bunker.

  It was a reinforced alcove into which they had slid a cargo container. The red door of the structure seemed alien against the grey stone around it.

  Once inside, Dave pulled the door almost all the way closed behind him as he stood at the entrance. The darkness of the room was noticeable, since it was lit only by the glow sticks in each man or woman’s hands.

  Looking around to ensure that everyone was safely away, he could see that the uniforms were organized and against the walls, leaving him enough room to set and then screw on the timer.

  “Sergeant, you mind sounding the blast horn?”

  The woman picked up the air horn and held down on the valve as everyone covered their ears. She was holding it facing outside of the bunker, but it still made everyone wince. She stopped and dropped her arm.

  He counted down the last few seconds in his head and tossed the timer into the dirt outside the door before pulling the metal barrier shut.

  “Firing,” Dave said calmly, and everyone in the room covered their heads and huddled together. A quiet firecracker pop outside was followed almost immediately by a faraway dull thud, and everyone looked up, disappointed.

  “They were expecting a bit more,” the sergeant noted.

  “Story of my life,” Dave said, laughing.

  He could see the smile of her square, perfect teeth in the orange glow of the chemlight.

  Pushing open the door, he reminded himself of their impending timeline. He also promised himself that barring the end of the universe, he would have to at least pursue the idea of getting at least on a first-name basis with her.

  The crew walked out, and the smell of cordite hung in the air as it wafted with a small amount of dust rising from the hole they had all climbed out of.

  Dave pulled a dust mask from his pocket and didn’t wait for the dust to settle before dropping back down into the hole. He carefully worked his way down the length, checking for new cracks, spraypainting areas he wanted reinforced. It was easier to do this wh
en no one was filling the space.

  They were on a timeline, but he wanted them to be safe regardless.

  Getting farther down, he could hear boots behind him jumping down to follow.

  Raising the light, he could see that their original obstacle was now a pile of manageable rocks. Pleased with his work, he pulled a few away, checking the stability of the roof, painting the entire area so that the work crews could layer it with steel to avoid any rock-fall accidents as they went.

  He checked the ground and could see a bit of blue plastic.

  Bending down he pulled at it, and it held fast under the rubble. Pulling away stones, he excavated the material.

  “What is it?” the sergeant asked. He jumped a little, not expecting her to follow so quickly. She held her light up to get a look.

  “I think it’s a piece of tarp,” Dave stated, picking it up.

  “What’s it from? Did we bring it in?”

  “Nope.” Dave wondered for a moment. “I think we are getting close.”

  Dave wandered out, and the military team went to work, efficiently clearing and reinforcing simultaneously.

  Tony would need to see this.

  Chapter 7

  Dave watched the team pull stones out of the small tunnel, passing them along in a bucket brigade manner and out onto the floor of the wide-open tunnel. The stones began to pile up as they cleared the rubble from the collapse.

  So far they had not hit any larger blockades as they had encountered a few days ago. Dave looked at the pile. The material coming out of the tunnel had changed from grey to an almost a purple tint. The colour change meant a change in the density of the rock.

  “Let’s give them a break. I want to check the stability of the tunnel,” Dave told the sergeant.

  She walked over to the hole and yelled down, “Everyone out! Lunch break, you have one hour. Get some food into you and rehydrate.”

  The uniforms piled up the ladder, dusting themselves off. They were hard workers; some looked exhausted, while others smiled and joked. All of them chattered, and the volume came up as the group found space to open their ration packs.