Tunnels 02 - Deeper

by Roderick Gordon

  Cal and Drake followed her out into the adjoining corridor, which was lined with warped shelves. On these was a variety of obscure, arcane-looking equipment, corroded to dull browns or bleeding verdigris. Cal's gaze settled on a floor-standing machine with rotted bellows and four glass cylinders protruding from its top. Next to it stood what was evidently a foot pump.

  Looking up, he noticed a wooden wall rack housing all manner of lethally pointed instruments, many rusted in place on their rests. Next to this was a chart. Although it was badly affected by mildew, he could make out angular pictures and bizarre writing. He had no idea what it meant and no time to make sense of it.

  Tramping through pools of cloudy water, they passed down several more narrow corridors. These were empty except for networks of broad pipes running the lengths of their ceilings, from which old lagging and skeins of cobwebs hung.

  And then they turned off into a room. It was L-shaped and stacked floor to ceiling with massive glass cylinders. While he and Drake waited for the signal from Elliott, Cal's attention was caught by the contents of one of the jars.

  It contained a man's head in cross section. It had been cut very precisely from the top of the cranium down, so the brain and everything inside the skull was visible. Somehow it didn't look real — it was difficult to imagine it had ever been a person. Cal made the mistake of leaning over to examine the jar from the other side. As the light from his lantern penetrated the yellowy fluid in which the head was immersed, he saw a single staring eye and the growth of dark bristles on the man's bleached-white skin, as if he hadn't shaved that morning.

  Cal gasped. It was real, all right.

  He turned away, it was so ghoulish. But then his eyes alighted on things just as bad in other jars. Floating, hideously deformed beings, some whole and others partially dissected.

  They moved quietly into another area — octagonal and dominated by a single solid porcelain plinth in the very center. Corroded metal bands looped over the plinth, obviously to hold the subject in place.

  "Butchers!" Drake muttered as Cal glimpsed scattered tools — scalpels, giant forceps, and other bizarre medical implements — in the shards of broken glass covering the floor.

  "Oh, no," Cal blurted, a chill spreading through his gut. Although this room didn't have anything like the ghastly specimens he'd just seen, the most awful feeling hung in the air. It was as though the echoes lingered on, of the acute pain and suffering that had been perpetrated within its walls, from many years ago.

  "This place is full of ghosts," Drake said in sympathy.

  "Yes," the boy replied, shivering.

  "Don't worry, we're not stopping," Drake assured him, and they pushed through into a larger corridor — it resembled the one they'd been in before, with the oddly slanting sides. They trekked down this until Drake brought them to a stop. Cal caught the suggestion of a breeze on his face again — they must have reached the other side of the Bunker. He leaned heavily on his walking stick, grateful to rest his leg, and tried not to think about what he'd just seen.

  Drake listened for a while, peering through the lens over his eye, before turning his miner's light on to a low setting. In front of them was a naturally formed area, circular and about a hundred feet in diameter, with an uneven rock floor. Cal counted as many as ten lava tubes leading off from it in different directions.

  "Tuck yourself down in one of those, Cal," Drake whispered, pointing randomly at the lava tubes as he wandered out into the open. Elliott had remained behind, crouching low at the exit of the Bunker.

  Drake noticed Cal wasn't following him. "Get moving, will you?" The boy groaned and took a few reluctant steps. "Elliott and I are going to split up and look for Will, but you keep watch here. Chances are he could pass this way," Drake explained, adding quietly, "if he hasn't already."

  Cal had hardly gone any distance when a hiss came from behind him. He stopped. Elliott was still crouched down, her rifle braced against the side of the opening.

  Drake froze but didn't turn to her.

  "Come back!" Elliott called to Cal in an urgent whisper, never looking up from her rifle.

  "Me?" Cal asked.

  "Yes," she confirmed as she panned across the scene through her scope.

  Cal crept back to Elliott, who momentarily drew her hand from her rifle to thrust a pair of slim stove guns at him. He took them and backed farther into the corridor behind her, keeping his head down.

  Framed by the entrance, he could see Drake standing dead still in the open, his jacket flapping in the slight breeze. He hadn't extinguished the miner's light on his forehead, and its faint beam caught some of the larger boulders and rock outcrops around him, projecting stark shadows against the walls. But nothing stirred.

  "Got something?" Drake said quietly to Elliott.

  "Yes," she said slowly. "A feeling." Her voice was deadly serious and she looked tense, her cheek pressed hard against the rifle stock. She was rapidly switching her aim from tunnel mouth to tunnel mouth. In a single swift movement she unhooked several more stove guns from her belt and laid them on the ground beside her.

  Cal squinted to see what the concern was all about. Nothing was moving in the area beyond Drake. He couldn't understand it.

  Seconds ticked by.

  It was so silent Cal began to relax. He was certain it was a false alarm, and that Elliott and Drake were both overreacting. His leg ached and he shifted his position a little, thinking how much he wanted to stand up.

  Drake twisted around to Elliott.

  "I say, I say… the invisible man's at the door," he declaimed loudly, no longer making the least effort to lower his voice.

  "Tell him I can't see him right now," was Elliott's response, in nothing more than a whisper. As she rapidly moved her aim to another tunnel mouth, she stopped abruptly, as if lingering on something in it, before she finally swung the rifle back on to Drake.

  "Yes," she mumbled with a nod of her head, looking at him through the scope. "I should've been on point. It should have been me out there, not you."

  "No, it's better this way," Drake said matter-of-factly. He turned his body away from her.

  "Good-bye," she said in a strained voice.

  There were a few seconds, as long as centuries, then Drake answered her.

  "Bye, Elliott," he said, taking a single step back.

  Instant pandemonium.

  Limiters spilled out from the lava tubes, their weapons raised. The way they moved, they resembled a swarm of malevolent insects. The shadowy dullness of their dark masks and long dun-colored coats seemed to spread from the dark voids of the tunnel mouths, as if they were an extension of the very shadows themselves. Too numerous to count, they lined up in an unbroken semicircle in front of the lava tubes.

  "DROP YOUR WEAPONS!" ordered a piercing, reedy voice.

  "SURRENDER YOURSELVES!" came from somewhere else.

  As a man they began to advance.

  Cal's heart had stopped. Drake remained exactly where he was as the line closed in. Then he took another step back.

  Cal heard a single shot and saw the fabric at the tip of Drake's shoulder burst, as if a tiny charge had gone off within it. The impact skewed him around, but he quickly righted himself. Elliott answered with rapid volleys, working the bolt of her rifle at blinding speed. Limiters fell one after another as she picked them off. Every shot found its mark. Some soldiers were flung backward as the powerful rifle bucked in her hands, others dropped where they stood. But still they continued to advance. And they didn't seem to be returning fire.

  In one smooth movement, Drake bent down. Cal thought he'd been hit again, but then he saw he had a stove mortar in his hands. He struck its base against a rock and a flame erupted, spearing from its mouth. A swath of Limiters was quite literally obliterated. Where they had stood were just a few patches of smoke — the blast had wiped them from existence. Shouts and cries and screaming came from all over. But more Limiters pressed forward, now returning fire at Elliott.

>   Cal backed down the corridor, away from the opening, the stove guns clutched tightly in his sweating palm. The sole thought crashing through his brain was that he had to get away. Somehow.

  Through the clouds of smoke, he thought he saw Drake totter a few steps and fall. At that very moment Elliott seized him by his arm and whisked him away. Then she was running, running and pulling him behind her, so fast he could barely stay on his feet. They'd covered a couple of hundred yards before she heaved him into one of the side rooms.

  "Cover your ears!" she screamed.

  A bone-shaking explosion erupted immediately. The blast knocked them both off their feet. A fireball and chunks of flying concrete hurled down the corridor past the doorway. Elliott must have primed some charges as she'd moved off. Before the debris had a chance to settle, she picked herself up and yanked Cal back out into a swirling storm of dust. Little patches of fire sizzled and spluttered in the puddles of water on the ground.

  As they dashed through thick eddies of choking smoke, a tall shape loomed before them. Elliott shoved Cal out of the way and dropped to one knee. She worked the bolt. The Limiter was coming straight for her, his gun up. She didn't hesitate. She squeezed the trigger. The muzzle of her rifle spat, the flare illuminating the Limiter's surprised face. The shot hit him square in the neck. His head whipped forward onto his chest as he disappeared from sight, back into the billowing dust. Elliott was already up.

  "Go!" she howled at Cal, pointing down the corridor.

  Another dark shadow plunged at them. The rifle still at her hip, Elliott pulled the trigger. There was dull click.

  "Oh, God!" Cal shouted, seeing the look of deadly intent on the Styx's face turn to one of triumph. The man thought he had them cold.

  Cal raised his walking stick pathetically before him as if he was going to use it to beat him off. But in the blink of an eye, Elliott had dropped her rifle and grabbed Cal's hand, thrusting the stove guns he was holding in the direction of the Limiter. She pulled at the trigger mechanisms.

  Cal felt the recoil and the intense heat as both guns blasted at point-blank range.

  He couldn't look at the result. The man hadn't even screamed. Cal was rooted to the spot, his sweating, shaking hand still clenching the smoking cylinders.

  As Elliott yanked something from her rucksack, she yelled at him. But Cal was almost dumb with fear. She slapped him with such force his teeth rattled. It shocked him back into action, just as she slung a charge into the corridor where he thought they were about to go. How were they going to get away if she closed off their escape route?

  "Take cover, you idiot!" she bawled, kicking him across the passage. He fell into a doorway on the opposite side.

  The explosion was smaller this time, and they immediately sprinted through the section of corridor where it had gone off. Cal tripped on something soft — he knew it was a body — and was grateful the dust shrouded everything from sight as he blundered through.

  It was as if time had collapsed to nothing. Seconds did not exist. And Cal's body, not his mind, dictated his actions, making him flee. He had to escape — that was the only thing that mattered. Basic instinct had taken control of him.

  Before he knew it, they were back in the operating theater with the gruesome ceramic plinth in the center. Elliott hurled a cylindrical charge behind them. They had only gone halfway through the adjoining L-shaped room when the shock wave from the blast caught up.

  Horror of horrors, it shattered many of the specimen jars, cracking them open. Their contents slopped out like dead fish as the air filled with the sharp tang of formaldehyde. He glimpsed the semi-dissected head skedaddling across the floor by his feet, its half-mouth grinning crookedly at him. Its demi-tongue sticking out mischievously. Cal leaped over it as he followed Elliott out of the room, and they tore through the ensuing corridors. They took a succession of left turns and then a right — although the dust and smoke weren't nearly as thick here, Elliott halted abruptly and frantically looked around.

  "No, no, no!" she ranted.

  "What?" he puffed, hanging on to her.

  "NO! Wrong way! Back… go to go back!"

  They hurriedly retraced their way around several corners, then Elliott paused to glance down a side corridor. Cal could see the anxiety in her eyes.

  "It has to be that way," she muttered uncertainly. "God, I hope it—"

  "Are you sure?" he interrupted urgently. "I don't recognize…"

  She pushed open a door. He was following so closely behind that as she stopped he crashed into her.

  Cal blinked and shielded his face. They were bathed in light.

  They found themselves in a big white room.

  It was startling.

  There was absolute calm.

  It was completely at odds with everything else Cal had seen in the Bunker: perfectly clean, with a pristine white-tiled floor and newly whitewashed ceiling, down the middle of which a long line of luminescent orbs were suspended.

  Along both sides of the room were polished iron doors; Elliott had already gone up to the nearest of these and was peering through the glass inspection window set into it. Then she moved to the next one. The doors all had large check marks daubed on them in black paint, applied so thickly it had run over the buffed metal.

  "I can see bodies," she said. "So this is the quarantine area."

  It was more than just bodies. As Cal went to see for himself, there were two — in some cells three — corpses stretched out on the floor. It was obvious they'd been dead for some time, as they'd already begun to decay. A clear, gelatinous fluid, flecked with yellow and red, had leaked from them and pooled on the stark white tiles.

  "Some of them look like Colonists," Cal said, noticing what they were wearing.

  "And some were renegades," Elliott said in a strained voice.

  "Who did this? What killed them?" Cal asked.

  "Styx," she replied.

  The mention of that name instantly brought him back to the seriousness of their situation, and he began to panic.

  "We don't have time for this!" he shouted, trying to steer her back toward the door.

  "No, wait," she said. She was frowning at him but not pushing him away.

  "We can't mess around here! They'll be following…" he gasped.

  "No, this is important. These cells have been sealed!" Elliott said, examining the edges of the door. Like all the others, it had thick new welds on all four sides, and no handle to open it. "Can't you see what this is, Cal? It's the Styx testing area we heard about — they've been trying out some sort of bio-weapon here!"

  Cal was right behind Elliott as she reached the next cell, and he noticed its door didn't have a mark painted on it. As she looked in, a face jumped up at the window. The eyes were bloodshot and swollen. It was a man — in a state of extreme panic. Angry red boils covered every inch of his skin and his cheeks were hollow, his face cadaverously thin. He was shouting something, but they couldn't hear so much as a whisper through the glass.

  He began to beat weakly on the window with both fists, but still there was no noise. He stopped, peering at them with his demented, darting eyes.

  "I know him," Elliott said hoarsely. "He's one of us."

  He was mouthing something, trying to communicate with her by emphasizing the words with his lips.

  It was meaningless to her.

  "Elliott!" Cal begged. "We have to leave!"

  She ran her fingers over a length of the weld that stretched unbroken around the edge of the door in a thick slug, wondering if she could somehow blow it open. But she knew they didn't have time to try. All she could do was give the man a helpless shrug.

  "Let's go," Cal shouted, then screamed, "now!"

  "OK," she agreed, swiveling on her heels to run back to the door through which they'd entered.

  They were immediately plunged back into the darkened world of the Bunker, the dust-laden air swirling around them. As their eyes readjusted from the clinical brightness of the strange room, th
ey continued down the corridor in the direction she'd originally been taking them.

  "Keep close," Elliott whispered as they crept along.

  After a short distance, she came to a halt.

  "Come on, come on! Which way?" Cal heard her mutter urgently to herself. "Has to be down here," she decided.

  Several corridors later, they entered a small hallway from which two doorways led off. She went from one to the other, then paused between the two, shutting her eyes.

  By this point, Cal had lost all faith in her ability to get them to safety. But before he could express his doubt, there was a clanging from nearby. A door was being battered down — the Limiters were closing in.

  Elliott's eyes flicked open.

  "Got it!" she shouted, choosing which doorway to take. We're in the home stretch now!"

  At the end of a sequence of lefts and rights, they were slipping and sliding down the stairs into the submerged basement again. This time Cal had absolutely no qualms about lowering himself into the stagnant water and was clambering up the stairs on the other side in seconds flat. Elliott had held back to set a sizable charge on the opposite stairway just above the waterline. Once she'd done this, she caught up with him, and they were just passing under the sections of collapsed concrete as the charge went off.

  The whole place shook and torrents of silt fell over them. A deep rumbling turned into an ominous grinding noise: Everything seemed to be shifting. Huge slabs of concrete crashed down, sending water and dust in all directions, and sealing the way behind.

  "That was a close one," he heard Elliott pant as they thundered through the linoleum-floored room and climbed into the duct, scrabbling their way down it.

  Emerging from the duct, Cal dropped onto the floor of the Great Plain again with a cry of pure relief. Elliott helped him to his feet and right away began retracing their steps along the wall. They raced on until they were swinging around the corner into a lava tube, away from the plain. And they didn't stop running.

  * * * * *

  Will didn't know how long he'd been asleep when he was rudely woken by urgent shouting. His head hurt like crazy, a vicious throb stretching across his temples.