by Jack Lance
“Get ready to run.” he shouted, and looked back at the squid.
The giant squid creature seemed to anticipate some sort of attack, and lurched up out of the water suddenly. For a moment you could see its fangs, and a whole grouping of fat arms beneath and above it. It had made a crater of water around it that now crashed down, but didn’t wake.
Bailey pressed a button on the sphere and from it dropped a smaller blue ball into his other hand. He lurched and slung the blue ball up at the squid. It arced through the air over the lake and burst in a ring of electric plasma.
The creature cringed against it slightly, while behind it the lights on the control tower exploded. The creature stood over the surface of the lake for a few moments, and howled faintly before tipping and crashing onto its side. It lay spread out on the water’s surface before slipping down into the depths.
Bailey turned and walked past Jayne.
“No need to run.” he hollered, and then Jayne followed him back to the road.
They walked without speaking for a long while, until they were standing on the glass highway over the outer edge of the forests. Jayne stopped and looked down at the trees being pressed down so hard by the wind.
“Bailey.” she said quietly, and he stopped and turned around. “Why did we come here? I need to know.”
Bailey brought the sphere from his pocket and threw it to her. She caught it and examined its smooth metal sides, and one solitary button.
“Electro-magnetic pulse. Highly concentrated. Put simply, it fries all electrical appliances the pulse touches. That includes robots and heletanks. Some of the parts required to build it can’t be found in our city so this was the only way.”
Jayne threw it back and carried on hugging her freezing torso.
“Well what about that thing…” she said looking back at the lake in the distance, then noticed a trickle from her nostril.
She wiped it, and saw that it was blood.
“Sorry, Jayne.” Bailey said. “Our bodies are machines too. You’re going to feel sick for a while.”
Jayne walked on toward the tunnel through the dry sea bed with Bailey at her side.
“Where do you think that thing came from then?” she said.
Bailey shrugged and said “A planet where they’ve got giant squid, I guess. Shipped it here especially.”
“How did it die?” she asked “We aren’t dead.”
“When it shorted out the tower it must have discharged all of its electrical current into the lake. Usually it would discharge all of its electricity and heat into the ice. Stroke of luck in a way. I just intended to disorientate it for a while.”
“Fair enough I guess. Well, where to now?”
“Under the city. To the lava in the catacombs. We need to stay warm for the next month or so. There’s fresh water and fish down there too, so…”
“Fish diet for a whole month?” Jayne kicked her heel in protest.
“The time will fly by.” Bailey smiled at her.
They returned to the old city center in the north after a day of walking, and made their way down the junction lanes to a place where the street entered the underground catacombs.
It was strangely silent in the place, especially without the perpetual raving of the Old Gang party that would have been so prominent in the other dome.
They left the main streets and descended down the subway like tunnel. They went down into it to the caves and down ramps carved into the rock meant for vehicles from the old colony. They followed the deep ploughed geothermic electric generators to caves where the rock was warm to the touch. It was all fully functioning and feeding electricity to the colony, should anyone wish to tap into it.
After a while of searching they found a spot with a cavern dry enough and warm enough to sleep in. It was a smallish cavern next door to a much larger cavern filled deep with water. At the rear of the cave, in a small crater that had formed over hundreds of thousands of years, the rock glowed with the heat from the lava close under it.
It was the perfect spot, and well lit by three lanterns on the cave walls. Bailey set up a series of twig tripods along the water’s edge in the large cave to catch the fish, then later slow cooked the fish on the hot plate of rock. After four weeks the room had begun to smell, but it was only a temporary measure, until the winter storms passed.
Then one day, as they were sitting by a tripod at the water, Bailey said “I think I’m going to go and check on our way out.”
“Are you sure?” Jayne said, wiping the grimy sweat from her face.
“It’s worth a look.” Bailey said then looked away. “I’ve enjoyed being with you these past few weeks, Wendall. Have you enjoyed my company too?”
“You’re an interesting person, Aaron.” Jayne smiled.
“That wasn’t what I meant.” Bailey said, balling a fist slightly. “I mean I’ve actually liked you. I haven’t really liked anyone since I got here. Well, maybe the Beldins, but they’re gone now.”
Bailey went quiet, and Jayne thought for a good way to answer him.
“I’m flattered.” she said. “But don’t spoil things.”
Bailey heard her and rapped his fist against the stone gently. He then stood up and straightened his woollen top.
“I will be back soon. Ok, friend?”
“Sure.” she smiled.
Bailey left the place, and made his way back to the surface, to the town. He stood at the mouth of the tunnel, and looked up at the building that had toppled on its side over him, and then began making his way up to the biosphere highways.
At the biosphere he walked out of the tunnel, and over the first of the forests he stopped, and squatted down to look at something.
He had thought he had seen a man in the trough where the seas should have been. Bailey leaned forward and cupped a hand against the clear plastic and leaned forward to get a clear view.
He could indeed see a man running in the distance, away from his position. There were what looked to be dogs chasing him, and then more dogs joined them from the trees of the forest, running down the slopes of the beach and then over the steeper slope of the trough. They all converged on the man, who then stopped and turned to face them all.
“Oh shit.” he hissed, and then watched as he swung his arms left and right, and saw each of the dogs fall dead to the ground as he did so, some flying off through the air.
When it looked like they were all dead, Bailey waved his arms above his head frantically to catch the man’s attention.
Bailey stopped then, sensing something slightly wrong, and watched as the figure grabbed one of the dogs limp corpses in his mouth, and then sprung away like a toad, or maybe a lizard. He leaped away with its unusually long arms clasping the ground ahead of him. It leaped up onto the exposed dome wall and began running along it in Bailey’s direction through the huge scaffolds.
Bailey, now feeling an appropriate fear dropped to the floor and lay flat so to be less easily seen. He watched as the thing came closer into view on the wall closest to the road.
It looked like a Lantian, but with longer arms like a mantis, and broad webbed feet. It was wearing human clothes though, which fitted what still resembled a man quite well. It held the bleeding hound in its jaws with a blazing black hunger in its eyes.
He watched it run by, and then down to a gap in the wall that had been torn open, probably by those things.
Once it was out of sight, Bailey took a breath, and then stood back up and turned away. He froze again as he saw, over the trees walking across the moors, the huge squid like creature. It walked unlike any squid he had ever known of, with its legs below holding its huge body and head up above it. He heard that same faint howl as it walked on, and then Bailey made his way to the first highway junction, and then down toward the Border Security district.
As he dropped down from the demolished tunnel entrance onto the piled rubble of the highways, he kept looking around and over his shoulder, aware now that there were other things he
re in the dome. Here there were distant howls of wild dogs that sounded as if they were in packs of hundreds.
Bailey reached the main building of The Shell and walked up the steps, then on into the bowels of the place, to the officer’s mess. The mess was deep within the dome wall, close to the edge, and on finding the corridor that he and Jayne had entered by a month or so ago, he found that the ice had receded quite a bit.
He walked to the end, and out into the parking bays, finding it half full of that bank of ice. The exit was still blocked by a huge wall of white, and through the windows high in the wall he could see that the embankment reached up to there too.
He found the bikes half in and out of the ice, and so set about digging them out. Eventually he pulled both bikes out onto the concrete and began checking them over. Both seemed to be in full working order but would need to dry out, so he wheeled them both into a parking bay each and set them on their stands so that only the tyres were touching the wet floor.
Bailey began to walk back along the corridor the way he had come, but stopped as he noticed something in the corner of his eye. He had to back step a couple of times to look into a doorway to a room that looked a little different to the rest.
It wasn’t a social room but looked to be a heavy lockup of some kind. He walked inside and found the room to be a claustrophobic place with two massive doors sealed shut at the back side. There were deep scratches and cuts on all of the walls, and it didn’t take much deduction for Bailey to realize that those mantis creatures had been here, and had been furiously trying to get through those double doors. The whole room had been mutilated.
He saw the control pad to the side of the door still had power, and he recognized the make and model of the security mechanism.
He knew the default passwords that the manufacturers programmed the mechanism with on sale of the system, and used them now in the hope that the officers had been too lazy to change them. The passwords worked and the red light turned green.
The doors moved apart slightly, and there was a fowl hiss from inside. Bailey smelled the stench from within, and held a hand over his mouth as the doors were pulled the rest of the way open, and a mass of dust fell out from the inside.
Bailey walked around to get a better look inside, as the grey-blue dust cleared.
There were two desks facing each other and a bank of monitors along the back wall. At both desks were the dried corpses of men dressed in high ranking Border Security uniforms. The man at the left desk lay slumped back in his chair, and on closer inspection he saw marks around his neck as if he had been strangled to death. At the right was a man slumped back also, with an empty vial of poison on the desk that he had obviously used just after strangling his colleague. His left arm lay on the desk below something he had written on the congealed dust on the wall, apparently just before his death. He had simply written “Run”.
Bailey left the place and walked out of the Border Security building. He stood at the top of the steps for a few moments to compose his thoughts, and then walked down them and through the ground streets from cavern to cavern until he reached the northern center and the entrance to the catacombs.
As he stood at the subway entrance, he looked along the rest of the main street that looked to be particularly devastated. A burning gas pipe still burning at the side of the street, with a number of burnt out cars abandoned along it. He thought he had seen movement in one of the cars and so walked through them, careful of all of the many places that something devilish could be hiding. There was no movement, until the second before last car, when he saw something moving under a pile of clothes within it.
Holding a small knife in his trouser pocket, Bailey walked to it and leaned down to see inside. A man looked at him over the covers he had made from designer ladies tops, and then sat up and leaned toward him to get a closer look.
“Bailey.” he smiled wearily, and Bailey saw that it was Chester Barron. “You came to save me?”
“Err…” Bailey thought for a moment, then said “Yes! Come with me, I’ll get you cleaned up.”
Barron left his home in the burnt out car and limped on bare feet in his shredded clothes alongside Bailey to the subway and then down under the town.
“It’s so beautiful down here, don’t you think?” Barron said looking around the catacombs in amazement.
“We’re nearly there.” Bailey said, helping the big man along a little.
As they entered the last cave, Jayne stood up and walked to them.
“Doctor Barron?” she said shaking his hand.
“Do I know you?” he said squinting at her.
“I know of you.” she said. “What are you doing here in this place?”
He looked at Bailey in confusion, and Bailey said “He got stranded here during the last escape. Maybe Chester would like to explain the rest of the story.”
“Oh, you poor thing.” Jayne said, and walked Barron to a seat close to the lava heated plate.
“Please, don’t pity me.” he said miserably. “I suppose if I don’t tell you now, Bailey will somewhere down the way. I take it this isn’t common knowledge?”
“No. Most people in the colony don’t even know there was an escape.” Bailey shrugged.
“Well, I can be glad for that. It was my fault you see. They bought me off, the men from the citadels. They said they’d make me an officer here in this city. When it all went wrong this was the only place I could think of to go. But look, it was all a dream. Lies conjured by those serpents in the tower.”
“And you fell for it?” Jayne said shaking her head.
“So many dead.” he said solemnly. “And why? Why did it have to be this way?”
“Let’s get some food going.” Bailey pointed to the hot plate, and Jayne brought some fish.
They sat and ate the fish bits while talking a little further. Barron seemed to have calmed by now, and Bailey began to talk to him more in depth.
“There’s a few things I’d like to ask you, Chester.” he said taking a bite from his meal. “Like how you survived for this long out here. It’s been what? Four or five months”
“With difficulty.” he said and continued eating.
“Well, it seems like quite a dangerous place. I saw a few things when I went back up there today.”
“Like what?” Jayne said, a little surprised.
“Firstly, that creature, the squid, isn’t dead. I think we only stunned it. Or maybe I saw another one. The point being, is I saw a giant squid up there, that we should be on the look out for. Secondly, I saw something… else.”
“You mean the dogs?” Barron said.
“A lot of dogs, yes. But something besides the dogs.”
“Insects.” Barron said.
“Yeah. Mantises I think. About the size of a man. Maybe a bit bigger.”
“And you left it until now to tell me?” Jayne said.
“I didn’t want to scare you, but yes there are other creatures alive here. What do you know of them, Barron?”
“I was attacked by one of those things.” he said, throwing a large fish bone onto the floor. “I managed to kill it, but I was starving so I… I ate it.”
Jayne looked away to hide her disgust.
“You know, they might be Lantians.” Bailey said looking up at him demonically. ”They’ve either mutated, or what I think is more likely, they evolved cross generation to match the Narcosian nature, once the dome was opened to the outer atmosphere.”
Jayne looked at them both and said “Doesn’t evolution take billions of years? This only happened a hundred years or so ago.”
“No.” Barron said, sounding a little ill. “Evolution makes changes at the same rate the environment changes. If there’s a cataclysm like what has happened here, evolution revolutionizes in leaps and bounds. Aaron’s theory is sound. They may well be the same species as us, or used to be.”
“And you ate one.” Bailey smirked.
Barron glared at him and said “Yeah don’t rub it
in.”
They lived there for another week, not venturing out of the cave incase they ran into any of the now indigenous life forms.
After a week, Bailey left the cave and walked around to within earshot of the surface entrance, and heard from it a dull howl, that he suspected came from the squid creature.
He returned to the cave to find Jayne and Barron talking beside the lake.
“You have great bone structure. Do your people come from the south islands?” Barron said reaching to touch her face.
Jayne pulled back, smiled and said “That’s real sweet.”
“Today.” Bailey said, interrupting them. “Get your things.”
They all packed what little they had into the tiny shoulder bags, and then followed Bailey out of the cave to the surface. They walked at ground level through the main streets and outer factory districts to the cavern containing the Border Security pyramid.
They followed Bailey up the steps and through the building to the long corridor of the officer’s mess.
“We get out this way, Chester.” he said over his shoulder to him, as they huddled against the freezing drafts. “Stay close.”
They walked along the length of the partially flooded corridor, with the only sounds from the dripping wet ceiling.
Near the end of the corridor, Bailey stopped and stood still. The other two stopped behind him and waited to see what the problem was, if any.
Bailey turned to the door to the room with the heavy lockup he had seen the other day. The metal door to it was closed now, and he was sure he hadn’t closed it when he left, so someone else had been through here and done it. He turned and stepped up to it, and then reached for the button to open it.
He pressed it and the door slid away, and the three looked inside at the heavily scratched room. They found it was full of the mantis like creatures, who had somehow found the two corpses, and now had them laid out on the floor and were slicing down at them with the razor sharp ends of their arms. They all turned as the door opened, surveying them with their wider than normal eyes, and baring an enormously wide set of black jaws. One of them sliced down at the open stomach of the General, cracking through it to the plastic floor.