by Harley Vex
“He’s gone,” Dr. Shetlin said, her voice small. “He’s gone. Something happened.” She swore again and backed away the best she could on her knees. “My kids are out there." She let out a breath and took the phone she'd thrown down, the one that could reach no one. Then Dr. Shetlin stood and faced us, now huddled in the tunnel’s entrance.
“Can we do anything?” David asked.
“There was a flash of light from the sky just before we came in,” I said, trying to ignore the form in the elevator and the blood that had pooled on the floor. Mr. Ellis. Our bubbly Astronomy teacher, who would never coach another basketball game. He was now a heap of flesh, his skin reddened and his body swollen. Even though I’d dealt with death before, there was no sterile white sheet this time.
Vomit threatened to rise in my throat.
Dr. Shetlin stood there, leaning against the mine wall, shaking with indecision. At this moment, we were no longer there.
I stood alone. Everyone else had backed into the last shelter of the tunnel.
“Do you know what’s happening?” I asked.
"Does anyone have a working phone?" Dr. Shetlin asked, frantic. She appeared in the tunnel. Dr. Shetlin was no longer the calm, collected woman I had met when we first came out of the elevator. "Did anyone's phone not get hit by the burst? We have our own underground power supply down here, but...never mind. I’ll never get through!”
Huh? What had Mr. Ellis told her?
I stepped forward. “You know what’s going on, then?”
“Laney,” David said, taking my arm. “I can handle this.”
I focused on his grasp because that meant I didn’t have to pay attention to the elevator. My hands trembled. Christine said something to Bethany, and Jerome dug into his jeans to produce a dead rectangle that had no more use than the dust bunnies trying to hide out in the corner.
"I don’t think any of us can handle whatever’s going on,” Jerome said to David.
Dr. Shetlin breathed out. She glanced back at where Mr. Ellis lay. I could no longer hear anything. Yes, he was gone, and I allowed some relief to pour over me. "I have to go. Wait down here for a few hours before you try to go to the surface. There might still be some dangerous particles raining from the sky. Your group made it down before they hit. Wait for a little while, and they'll stop."
"Particles?" I asked, heart hammering in my throat. "What particles?"
"Muons," Dr. Shetlin said, babbling. She wiped a layer of shining sweat off her forehead. "They kill in high numbers and can rain down when the atmosphere gets hit by too much radiation. They don't last long, but they can poison food on the surface. I have to go. I’ll send help. Stay here for a few hours, and then do something on the surface to let the rescuers know you’re alive. Dr. Marson should be up shortly."
She turned away and ran.
Her kids. They beat us out, and I couldn't blame her for leaving.
The elevator doors closed, and I knew she was riding with the body up to the surface.
That left us stuck down here.
Another wave of panic slammed into my heart, and dizziness stole over me.
“What the hell was that?” Christina asked.
Muttering filled the air as people whispered. We all stood there and stared at each other. No one spoke for what felt like an eternity. I checked through the Collider window, but Dr. Marson had vanished and we couldn't go into that chamber without radiation suits, right? Anything that needed its own underground power plant had to be dangerous.
Dr. Shetlin had left without one.
She wasn’t thinking. Heck, none of us were.
I waited for David to come up with something funny, like how muons sounded like something to do with cows, but he was pale and sick-looking. He glanced at me and Alana. He even shot Christina a glance. Tony and Mina shrunk back, along with Eric and Bethany. The ten of us didn't know what to do.
Our guide had left us with only a partial answer. Whatever happened up there, Mr. Ellis knew what it was, and maybe Mrs. Taney did, too.
"Did you hear what they were saying?" Alana asked me, breaking the silence.
They were all dying.
No. It couldn’t be.
"A little," I said. "Mr. Ellis said—" I straightened up and got my composure. "He said they're all dying on the surface.”
Tony cursed. “That thing came from space. Part of it must have hit before we came down here, and maybe there was a Phase Two. Was it a supernova?”
"It was that light," Mina said. "It did something. But we were up there when it hit, so we should at least feel sick, too.”
"Don't say that," Christina said, standing behind Bethany.
"You heard Dr. Shetlin," Tony said. "She said something about particles. The light would come first, and then the dangerous particles would come later, right? They don’t move as fast as light. So yeah, it was probably a supernova.”
“So the deadly part came right after we got down here?” Alana asked.
"That makes sense," I said. The floor seemed to go out from under me. "Mr. Ellis and Mrs. Taney knew this would happen. They were freaking out, trying to get us down here as fast as they could.”
“Order!” David shouted, clapping his hands.
Everyone stopped. We all looked at David and waited to hear what he had to say.
“It was probably a nuke, with all that radiation,” David said. “The teachers. They were trying to rush us down, especially Mrs. Taney. And Mr. Ellis was acting completely out of character when he got us to board the elevator.”
Tony patted his own chest. “That was not a bomb. We would have felt the shock waves. I’m going with the supernova theory.”
David ignored him and fixed all of us in his stare, keeping the attention. “Mr. Ellis was the Astronomy teacher and Mrs. Taney is the Physics teacher, so they know about that kind of stuff.”
"A star blew up and rained death on us," Bethany said. "That's awesome."
“It must have been a bomb,” David said.
"Wait a minute,” Alana said. “I took Astronomy last year. Mr. Ellis said there were no stars close enough to blow up and do damage to us. And other space disasters are super rare.”
"It must have been a nuclear war,” David insisted, raising his voice. “Who knows how many people it’s killing right now?”
"We don't know what it was," I said. I thought of Dad in New York. Did this thing hit over there, too?
What if the entire planet got struck?
No.
I couldn't do this again.
But I had to.
We might be the only survivors of our field trip. Everyone else—the rest of the class, Mrs. Taney, the lady behind the counter—could be dead or dying. And all because they weren't far underground.
CHAPTER FIVE
Dr. Shetlin said she’d send help. That was the only thought that kept me sane enough to avoid freaking out.
We just had to wait for a few hours, then go to the surface and give some sign that we’d survived, right? And Dr. Marson had to be down here, somewhere.
With David’s direction, our group retreated into the computer room, which was just off the main chamber and behind a plywood wall. Inside, the computers hummed as if business were normal, and a few displayed creative screensavers. Clearly, the particle smasher wasn’t transmitting data right now, but the sight allowed me to let out the breath I’d been holding.
Nobody spoke much now. I didn’t think anyone knew what to say or what to do other than follow Dr. Shetlin’s instructions. David told Bethany and Eric to go look for the other scientist, and they did, leaving the rest of us.
Despite being underground and despite the wires snaking along the ceiling, this place felt ordinary, almost like a school computer lab. I stood there with Alana as the others fanned out, opening desk drawers and searching through them. People seized candy bars, chip bags, and even a brown paper sack with a sandwich inside.
Jerome emerged from a doorway that clearly led to a break r
oom. The plastic wrapping up a big water bottle case squeaked as he hauled it forward. “I found this. If Dr. Shetlin was right about there being radiation on the surface, we’ll need something to drink that didn’t get poisoned, or whatever.”
“Can these particles do that?” I asked. Numbness had fallen over me. The thought of a planet-wide catastrophe was so alien that my mind refused to process it, even if Dad was in New York. On one hand, I knew full well how bad things could get, and how fast, but on the other, my brain still refused to let it all hit me at once. I’d gotten familiar with how it worked in response to trauma.
“Great. Water,” David said, taking the case from Jerome’s grasp and holding it up. “Everyone. We will need to ration this out, so if you need one of these, let me know.”
Alana leaned close to me and whispered, “Someone likes to be in control.”
I rolled my eyes because that was a normal thing to do. Yes, my brain was still in the protection mode, which also activated when Mom found those first weird moles on her upper arm and back. They were just normal sunspots, only they weren’t.
Screw protection mode. It would fall away later, and then I would face reality. But would that happen soon enough? Did it matter?
What the hell was going on at the surface?
“How long are we going to be down here?” Alana asked next. And I could tell that she was in protection mode, too.
“I don’t know,” I told her. “We don’t know what’s happening yet, and Dr. Shetlin should come back when she finds something out.”
Alana sat down in a chair and rotated so fast that feared she was going to throw up. Around us, everyone else went silent as Jerome, Tony, and David laid out bottled water and snack foods. Time lost meaning as Alana and I sat there in silence.
My stomach rumbled with hunger, but every time I thought about Mr. Ellis in the elevator, it subsided, and I just felt sick. Slowly, as I joined Alana in spinning chairs and trying to distract myself with computer card games, my protective armor fell away.
Dr. Shetlin hadn’t returned in two or three hours.
And then Eric and Bethany returned with the news that Dr. Marson wasn’t anywhere in sight, and might still be in a locked area that they couldn’t get into.
“Great,” Christina said. “Maybe he left through another exit, or went down the Collider tunnel, which we can’t get to.”
I stared at Mina and Tony, who sat in the corner together, and then at Christina, who stuck to herself at another station. The pile of food was maybe enough to last us all for a few days. The scientists of the Huge Collider, at least, had stocked up, probably to limit long supply runs and gas. The guys had laid out plenty of soup cans, bowls, paper plates, and boxed snacks in the adjoining break room. David spoke in a low voice to the guys, and his hiked shoulders told me that his terror response went straight to acceptance. Already, he was taking action.
Then David straightened up and clapped in the doorway, grabbing everyone’s attention.
“Okay, everyone. We still don’t know what happened on the surface, but we have to take it seriously. If it was nothing, then the other tour group would have come down by now, or the school would have called.” David looked into a kitchen, at a round clock on the wall that was still working. “It’s already close to three. We’ve been down here for four hours.”
I snapped my gaze to Alana. “Four hours?”
She paled. “We couldn’t have been down here for that long. Wow. Maybe they just forgot about us.”
I wanted to agree with her, but comforting words just gave people false hope. I’d heard too much it’ll be okay from aunts and uncles out of state who weren’t here to see Mom deteriorate. Then, those morphed into stay strong when the worst finally happened. I hated both sayings.
A tremor raced through my body, and I knew my armor had cracked.
“We could see something bad up there,” I said.
Alana put her hands on her knees. “We don’t know that yet.”
“We’ve waited a few hours,” Tony said from his chair.
"Anyone ready to go up?" David asked. "I think we've waited long enough. If the second group was still alive, they would have come down by now."
Mina stood up as Tony wrapped one arm around her. “There could still be deadly radiation. What if it doesn’t stop?”
David shrugged. The spotlight was on him. “Then we will find out. We can’t stay in this mine forever. If the generators or the power plant down here run out, there’s nothing but a ladder all the way back up. The elevator won’t work.” A bit of fear shone in his eyes, and I knew his own claustrophobia was kicking in.
Terror squeezed its way into my heart, making it race. The thought of being trapped down here—just no. I raced for the elevator and punched the metal call button. “Has anyone found Dr. Marson? He was down here, too.”
And I waited for a few terrifying seconds.
The elevator hummed, and I sighed in relief. But then Alana appeared at my shoulder to wait.
“Maybe we’ll get some answers. Finally,” she said.
“We don’t know what we’re going to see up there,” I told her. “But I think it won’t be good.”
“We don’t know that.” Alana watched as the others gathered behind us. Collectively, we were a ball of nerves.
I could barely swallow as my palms broke out in sweat. David was right. We had to get to the surface and figure out what was going on. If the radiation would get us, it would get us. Dr. Shetlin hadn’t told us how long the power down here would last without people to man it, and we had seen no one else down here. Besides, we couldn’t reach Dr. Marson. He’d probably appear, eventually.
After a long, tense few minutes, the cage descended and elevator doors opened.
I wasn’t ready for the smell that wafted out.
It was already starting. Yes. We’d been down here too long, and Mr. Ellis continued to lie there. He was still swollen, with his face turned away. The blood around his head had turned a dark brownish color. That old rock song played through my head. It was the one about the reaper. I shook my head, trying to clear it, but it stuck, getting louder and louder.
“We need to drag Mr. Ellis out,” Jerome said, pushing around me to look. “He has to go somewhere out of the way. A closet, maybe.”
Vomit rose in my throat, and I turned away, gagging. And I wasn’t the only one. Alana whimpered and did the same.
“Who wants to volunteer?” David asked. “He might be too dangerous to touch.”
“We have to do it,” Jerome said. “We can’t ride the elevator with him in there.”
He was right. I didn’t want to return to the surface with a dead body—a body no one at the top had cleared. Someone else coughed. People hung back. No one wanted to look at dead bodies. I got that. You found something else to observe, like a painting on the wall or the pattern on the floor, only there was nothing here but rock, plywood, metal, and glass.
Jerome got in front of me. He wore a mask of numbness. He waved Tony closer and grabbed Mr. Ellis’s arm by the sleeve. The two of them dragged him out, grunting and trying not to breathe, while David stood back. He was a dead weight. Literally. At last, they placed him in a small room off to the side and closed him inside.
Tony wiped his mouth and backpedaled, along with Jerome.
And Mr. Ellis had left a faint, crusty blood trail. I turned away. Could radiation make you bleed out like that? I knew it was a horrible way to go, but hell.
“We can’t leave him down here,” Mina said. “What about his family?”
David coughed. “We don’t know if they’re alive.”
Mr. Ellis was only the second body I had seen. When and if the power went out, Mr. Ellis would lie in the dark until we got someone down here to recover him. The funeral might have to be a closed casket. At least his folks wouldn’t have to look at him in such an awful state.
If anyone ever came down for him.
What if—
The cloud of
panic swirled in my chest again, and I grabbed the wall. Dad was in New York. That was far from here, and maybe whatever happened hadn’t struck the area, but I didn’t know. We knew nothing about what the surface looked like.
But the elevator was clear now, save for the puddle of dried blood. I had that to worry about first. One thing at a time. Taking Alana’s arm, I said nothing as I stayed close.
Everyone got on, and the elevator dipped under our weight. No one coughed now. It was just tense silence. My nose had gone numb to the smell.
The doors closed.
The elevator lights flickered.
Bethany wrapped her arms around herself. “We had better hope the power stays on long enough to get us to the surface.”
The elevator rose and my stomach dropped. It was too late to get off now. I watched the adjacent ladder through the cage. No one spoke. We were all silent. We could head up into the deadly cloud of radiation, but we had to take the risk. Mr. Ellis got farther and farther away as we rose, passing rock and strata. The elevator’s hum remained steady, then faded, then remained steady again.
At last, after what felt like an eternity, the steel double doors appeared in front of the elevator and we stopped.
We were at the surface.
“We made it,” Alana breathed.
Some people cheered. We had escaped from the underground.
But at what cost?
Was I getting sick? Mr. Ellis had died within an hour. I listened for anything outside the double doors, but there was nothing. It was all silence.
The doors opened halfway and the surrounding hum died. Our light flickered and went dead.
And we found ourselves on the cusp of a nightmare world.
CHAPTER SIX
The lights in the Visitor Center flickered.
And then they went out as we stood in the elevator, filling the building with darkness.
The elevator swung, remaining in place as a few people screamed. But the power going out was the least terrifying element in this picture.
Nothing was right. The sight, the sound, the smell...