The Mountain

by Kevin George

  Emma resisted against Artie’s grip, pulling them both to a stop.

  “We can’t,” Artie said before she had a chance to insist on helping.

  Martin flapped his wings a single time, shooting himself forward while easily swatting Isaac aside. Isaac crashed against the hallway wall, slumping to the floor, unable to slow Martin’s race toward the Descendant. When Artie pulled her again, Emma didn’t fight. Ahead, the rest of their group had come to a stop, each of them looking back with eyes widened. The thwup of Martin’s flapping wings filled their ears, the sound convincing Emma to ignore the pain and keep running.

  James unexpectedly turned around, rushing past Artie and Emma.

  “What are you—”

  “I didn’t survive this long to fail in the end and be slaughtered from behind!” James called out, his face twisted in anger.

  James screamed as he rushed at Martin, the huge Aviary lowering his head, bowling into the middle-aged man and knocking him aside. Martin’s wings wobbled for a moment, causing him to slow and land on his feet to steady himself. He no sooner began flapping again than Carli turned around and charged.

  “You have to succeed,” she yelled as she rushed past Emma. “Do it for Wyatt!”

  Artie wondered who Wyatt was but didn’t have a chance to ask. Martin was ready for the charging human this time, banking to the side as Carli approached, not slowing down or losing his flight path after knocking her aside with his powerful wing. Emma looked back to see Martin flap a few more times, cutting the distance between them in half. The door to the secret room loomed ahead, but Emma knew they’d never reach it in time. Chad and Olly, running side by side ahead of Emma, also realized the inevitable as they glanced back. Chad turned and scowled at Olly, who managed no more than a shrug and small frown. They both seemed to know what the other was thinking.

  “It has to be us,” Chad said.

  Olly nodded and turned to Emma. “Whatever you do, make sure you get that door open, wife.”

  Chad froze upon hearing that last word. When Emma rushed past him and their eyes met, regret looked back at him and Chad knew the prince wasn’t lying. Chad wanted to ask how, to ask why, but Emma ran toward the three fallen Aviary bodies and the door in front of which they’d died. Sensing that Olly had stopped next to him, Chad considered attacking the prince one last time but knew that would only hurt Emma. With a glance toward the Aviary speeding their way, Chad braced himself for impact, but not before glaring at Oliver a final time.

  “You’d better fight harder than you did the last time.”

  He hadn’t meant it as a joke but saw a smirk on Olly’s face nonetheless. Together, the two sprinted forward and launched themselves at the Aviary. Martin flapped his powerful wings but didn’t smash through them as easily as the last humans. Olly and Chad absorbed the bone-jarring impact and held onto Martin’s wings, even as the Aviary snapped his sharpened mouth at them, stabbing Olly in the arm and Chad in the side. As much as Chad wanted to look back to check on Emma, he kept his eyes on the other side of Martin, watching as Olly also struggled to hold on. The prince’s unexpected toughness made Chad fight to keep strong, as the two boys fought to give their friends a few extra seconds.

  When Martin’s sharpened mouth finally found Olly’s hand, Olly unleashed a scream of pain and let go, the wing knocking him back into the wall. Chad smiled but found that his strength had waned, too. With a final flap, Martin knocked the second human off him, shooting Chad up toward the ceiling. Chad’s back absorbed the brunt of the force, but his vision still flashed to black, his consciousness holding on just long enough for him to feel a falling sensation and another thud. . .

  Ahead, Emma and Artie put more distance between themselves and the Aviary, while drawing closer and closer to the door and the cold vapor seeping out of it. Emma kept her eyes straight forward, but Artie couldn’t stop from glancing back, watching his lifelong friends—at least one friend—fighting off the Aviary and ultimately being flung aside. Chad and Olly hit the wall and ground hard, neither of them moving as far as Artie could see. Instinct told him to go back and check on them, an instinct that was hard to ignore.

  “We can’t!” Emma said, feeling the slight lag in her hand as Artie slowed. “You can’t!”

  When Artie felt her grip loosening, he knew what she planned to do. He held on tighter and accelerated, pulling her with him.

  “I’m not going anywhere without you ever again,” he said.

  Martin’s flapping wings were joined by angry squawking growing louder and louder. Neither Emma nor Artie looked back for fear of slowing down, but they sensed the Aviary getting closer. With every passing second, they expected to be crashed into from behind, but they soon found themselves within reach of the vaporous room, both of them nearly slipping as they slowed to open the frigid door. Artie finally stole a glance back, seeing Martin less than twenty feet away and closing quickly, his lips pulled back in a sneer, his wings so wide that they filled the entire width of the hallway. . .

  Emma yanked him into the freezing room. Artie nearly slipped on the slick surface but maintained his footing long enough to help push the door. The tip of Martin’s wing shot in through the opening at the last second, the door slamming into it and failing to shut all the way. From the other side of the door, Martin expelled a screech of agony and his wing pulled away. When Emma and Artie slammed their shoulders into the door a second time, it shut with a victorious click.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  Artie stared at the door, flinching when he heard loud banging over and over from the other side. He raised a protective arm to hold Emma back, but she shook her head and pulled it down.

  “He can crash into it as much as he wants,” she said, steam streaming between her lips. “He’s not getting in.”

  Artie continued looking toward the door, though it wasn’t Martin he was imagining. Each time there was a break between the pounding, he shuddered at the thought of the Aviary heading back down the hallway, feasting on the easy targets sprawled across the floor. He didn’t know if any of his friends were still alive; he wasn’t so certain a quick death would’ve been as terrible as the alternative death that might be coming their way. . .

  “I know,” Emma said, taking his hand and gently leading him away.

  Artie shivered and followed her deeper into the cold cloudiness. The room was dimly lit, but all the light in the world wouldn’t have let Artie see more than a few feet through the surrounding vapor. He occasionally caught glimpses of strange box-like structures, some with flashing red lights, some with no lights at all.

  “I still don’t understand what’s going on here,” Artie said.

  Emma shook her head, squinting through the cold. “Neither do I. I know what we’re supposed to be doing, but I don’t know why. All I know is this is our best—and only—chance to stop that. . . thing out there.”

  Together they walked slowly through the room, the occasional bang on the door making them jump. Temperatures were lower than they’d been in the Nothingness, and the sweat on Artie’s face began to solidify. He wiped away tiny flakes of ice. Though it hurt to breathe deeply, Artie couldn’t stand the silence and found himself beginning to babble.

  “I tried to make it back to the city a long time ago, make it back to you,” he said. “Every day we’ve been apart, I thought about you, I survived for you, I replayed that moment we shared in the Main Tunnel before I was forced to leave. And then you come back here, and I don’t know what you did since the last time we saw each other but—”

  Emma pulled her hand away from his.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it to come out like that,” Artie said, realizing too late that his voice still held an edge to it. When Emma didn’t respond, he sighed, his frustration growing. “But Olly? The two of you?”

  “I did what I had to do for The Third, to better my people, not that any of it mattered in the end,” she said, the fire in her voice quickly extinguishing. “I tried to help and I fail
ed. Maybe I can make a difference here, for the people here. I don’t know what anything in this room is, but there’s another door back there.” She pointed through the cloudy vapor. “A door that’s supposed to hold. . . I don’t know. . . some type of savior. They thought I could access it, me being a Jonas and all.”

  Artie snorted, twin streams of smoke blowing through his nose. “Just because you married Olly doesn’t make you a—”

  “I know what you’re thinking, but there are things you don’t know, things I just learned, not that I fully understand them,” Emma said. “But it ends up I’m the true Jonas that should’ve been in charge of the city.”

  “You?”

  “At least I had a chance to lead my people before the city became engulfed in lava,” she said wistfully.

  “Engulfed?”

  Emma stopped so suddenly Artie nearly bumped into her. She stepped close enough so they could make eye contact through the cloudiness.

  “We have a lot to talk about later,” she said. “If there is a later.”

  She grabbed his hand and pointed to the far wall, which materialized through the hissing cold. Releasing his hand, she grabbed his wrist and pressed his palm against what appeared to be some sort of access plate. It was freezing to the touch, but not cold enough for Artie to avoid feeling a prick of pain. He yelped, but Emma kept his hand pressed flat until the palm plate flashed green and the door in front of them clicked open. Emma let go with a gasp and pulled the door open.

  They were both so focused on what was inside that neither noticed a small red light flashing above the door.

  The room was filled with as much hissing vapor as the outer room, though Emma and Artie both sensed this space was much smaller. A single spotlight shined from above, illuminating a single chamber similar to the ones from the other rooms but only bigger and brighter, with a control panel that glowed green.

  Artie approached it carefully. “Do we—”

  “We didn’t go through this much just to look at it,” Emma said.

  She didn’t know how to work the controls but after pressing a few buttons, a light began to glow within the chamber’s window and a whirring sound grew louder. Emma backed up, taking Artie’s hand for a moment before letting go. The chamber slowly slid back, rising into an upright position just before its hatch hissed open, allowing another great cloud of vapor to escape. Several seconds later, the silhouette of a human form appeared from within, stumbling forward and falling to his knees as he emerged.

  Emma and Artie stared at the old man, whose head remained down, shrouded by a mop of stringy white hair, most of which appeared to be frozen together. He wore some sort of shimmering body cover and muttered incoherently between fits of coughing. When he finally looked up at them, his skin remained tinged a light blue.

  “The world,” he croaked. “Has it ended?”

  Emma knelt in front of him and shook her head. “Not ended but covered in ice and snow. White Nothingness.”

  The old man sighed, launching another round of coughing that caused him to double over. Emma offered a hand of support but could do nothing until his breathing calmed. When it did, the old man continued to mutter about the world ending.

  “What’s your name?” Artie asked him.

  The old man looked up, his expression a mask of confusion. At first, Artie doubted the old man knew who he was, but then he saw one of his eyebrows lower.

  “If you were the one to release me, if you were able to access this room, shouldn’t you already know who I am?” the old man asked with a smirk. He squinted, looking more closely at Artie until shaking his head. When the old man turned to Emma, his confusion returned but only for a moment. His expression softened into one of recognition. “Yes, I can see it now. You are my family.”

  “I. . . I’m family?” she asked. “I’m Emma W. . . Emma Jonas.”

  The old man smiled and nodded. “And my name is Charles Jonas.”

  EPILOGUE

  Far away from The Mountain, in a separate facility not altogether different from the one built by One Corp. (despite the two facilities having zero official connection), a tiny red light began to blink on one of the countless control panels within the darkened, empty control room. The tiny red light was the first domino to fall in a series of reactions, starting with the rest of the lights blinking on, the rest of the control panels turning on, the air filtration systems coming online and the heating systems raising the temperatures throughout the entire facility.

  Once living conditions stabilized, allowing for the survival of humans, the final sequence in the chain of automated reactions occurred in the facility’s coldest room. Dozens of cryogenic chambers lined both side of a massive storage room that remained well below the point of freezing. Every chamber remained powered on, fully functioning, maintaining perfect temperatures to keep their occupants in a proper state of cryonic slumber. But one of the chambers—the first in line nearest the cryo room’s entrance—received a signal from the control room and its warming engines whirred to life, a bright light shining within. The warming process was slow, but the chamber’s readings showed its inhabitant to be healthy and stirring from his cryo-stasis.

  When the chamber door eventually hissed open, Brandon Revano stumbled forward, his mind as cloudy as the hissing vapor in the room around him. He no sooner stepped through the chamber door than a drawer opened from the side of his chamber, warmth radiating from within. He reached inside and removed a heated blanket. His shivering hands nearly lost their grip on the blanket and he struggled to drape it over his shoulders. The added heat eased his shivering and made it easier to breathe, as well as helped to loosen his stiff muscles.

  He hobbled forward without looking back at the rows of chambers. Though his mind often took hours to reach full clarity after awakenings, he’d been through the process enough times to know where he was and what he had to do. The door slid open to the hallway and a line of lights flashed on, leading him on the proper path to the control room. Once inside, he looked up at the countdown clock, expecting to see zeros across the board. Nothing could’ve been further from the truth. Not only did the numbers continue counting backward in the seconds and minutes place, numbers—and not exactly small numbers—existed in the days, months and years section.

  “Something’s wrong,” Brandon croaked, his voice strained from not being used in many years. This wasn’t the first time he’d been the only person awake in the facility, but it was the first time he’d experienced a problem, which made the situation feel far eerier than ever before.

  His fingers shook as they danced over the controls for the facility’s security cameras. Holographic image after holographic image displayed in front of him, showing one darkened room after another, with no sign of intruders (the likelihood of which was practically non-existent, but one Brandon spent plenty of time checking anyway). The outer door remained intact and closed, with no hint of tampering. A final camera check of the facility’s largest, most important room found everything still in place, though he knew it would’ve been impossible to install enough cameras to give complete coverage of every nook and cranny.

  “A m. . . m. . . malfunction,” he said.

  Part of Brandon was tempted to go back to his chamber, climb back in and return to cryogenic sleep until the clock ticked down to his normal time of awakening. As custodian of the facility, he had a duty to wake every 25 years to ensure everything remained in working order, a small—albeit lonely—price to pay to be part of the group of survivors. But even though nobody would know if he was doing his job properly, there was no telling what the others might say if they ever discovered he’d neglected his duties.

  The commander wouldn’t appreciate that, Brandon thought, regardless if she finds out in 100 years or 1,000 years.

  Brandon had never been briefed on the proper protocol to follow in the case of an unexpected awakening, but it made sense to launch a thorough investigation. Despite being famished and thirsty, he didn’t want to risk
eating and drinking, and thus delaying his return to cryo-stasis if he solved this mystery quickly. He started by returning to the cryo room and inspecting his chamber, searching for any sign of a malfunction that would’ve caused him to be woken early. He found none. Wrapping the warming blanket tightly around his shoulders, he hurried down the line of chambers, finding them all in normal, working order.

  Brandon stopped in front of one particular chamber, a chamber he carefully inspected every time he awoke. The glass on Commander Askren’s chamber remained heavily frosted, but Brandon could still see her outline inside. He stared at the chamber’s control panel but stopped from touching any of the buttons. As much as he wanted to see her, he dared not wake her unless he knew with certainty that a problem existed.

  He proceeded to the facility’s communication room next, accessing numerous systems that allowed him to check conditions not only in the facility but also across the world. At one time, cameras had transmitted images from all different parts of the globe. But each time Brandon emerged from cryo-stasis, more and more of those cameras no longer worked, until he was left with very little information about the condition of Earth as a whole. Still, it came as no surprise to find temperatures still dangerously low, with changes being negligible from his last time awake.

  With everything else in working order, the only statistics left to check were under the system labeled Settlement. Always the most nerve-racking moment, the word ‘Connecting’ began to flash beneath a tiny, holographic image of a satellite dish. Every time Brandon attempted to connect to the Settlement’s computer system, his pulse quickened as he waited for the link to establish. Dread filled his mind, which concocted every potential doomsday scenario that could’ve destroyed the Settlement and the cryo facility’s only chance to escape this snow-covered hell.