Mine (30 page)

Right before they reached the exit leading into the hallway, they heard the whir of an electric motor and then a heavy metal thunk
.

They hobbled into the corridor, took the elbow turn, and stopped.

The giant door was closed. The Doer was there, standing at the nearby wall, shutting an access panel.

Not
the
Doer, Joel realized as he got a better look. This one’s left lower appendage dangled uselessly below it.

Instead of turning and walking toward them, the Doer lowered itself to the floor and began crawling in their direction.

Being the only one currently capable of dealing with it, Joel leaned Mike against the wall and started to do the same with Leah.

“Oh, my God,” she said.

Joel looked back down the hall. The Doer had stopped about fifteen feet away and was looking into Leah’s light.

Every hair on Joel’s body stood on end.

“Antonio?” Leah said.

Joel stared, hardly believing his eyes.

Despite the aging and gray, hairless, scar-covered body, Joel could see the Doer was Antonio Canavo, his old cabin mate. Antonio started moving again, so Joel let go of Leah and took a step toward him.

“Stop.”

Antonio continued on, unfazed.

Joel took another step closer. “Antonio, please stop!”

No hint he’d been heard.

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

Antonio lunged forward, his good arm stretched toward Joel’s leg. If Antonio’s body had not been so damaged, he would have likely reached his target, but the awkward attempt was easy for Joel to avoid.

Antonio flopped onto the floor. When he looked up, he opened his mouth and a deep, rattling noise rumbled out.

It took a moment for Joel to realize it wasn’t a single elongated sound but three different tones.

“Ooo, ahhh, ooouuu.”

Over and over and over.

“I think he’s trying to talk to us,” Joel said.

“Yes, yes,” Mike replied. “Talking to us.”

“Can you tell what he’s saying?”

“Not him, she.”

“It’s Antonio, Mike. He was with us on the hike.”

“He was Antonio. Was, was. Not now. It’s a Doer now. It speaks for her.”

Joel looked at the broken body of the kid he used to know. He wanted to believe some of Antonio was still in there, but he also hoped Mike was right, that the person they had known was long gone.

“Ooo, ahhh, ooouuu.”

Joel looked past Antonio to the door covering the passageway. Leah’s light was barely strong enough to reach it, so he wasn’t able to pick out the wall panel Antonio had shut, but he knew approximately where it was.

“Stay here,” he said to Leah and Mike. “If he comes at you, just, I don’t know, push him back.”

As Joel leapt over Antonio, Antonio flung his arms up in an attempt to grab Joel’s legs, but missed. Joel found the panel within a few seconds and popped out the cover. But his hopes of quickly opening the door again vanished when he saw the rows of switches inside. They were all identical and none were marked.

He flipped them one at a time but nothing happened. They must have required some kind of combination. With so many switches, he could be here for years and still not hit the right order.

They wouldn’t be getting out this way anytime soon.

“There has to be another way out,” he said as he ran back to them. “An emergency exit. We’ll have to go back the other way.”

“What about Antonio?” Leah asked. Their old friend was still trying to crawl within range of them.

Joel looked at him. “Right now we have to look out for ourselves. If we can do something for him later, we will.”

He started to put his arm around her waist, but she gently pushed it away.

“I’m okay. Really. Mike needs your help more than me.”

“You lead,” he said to Leah as he propped up Mike. “We’ll be right behind you.”

N
INETY-ONE

Leah

T
HE IMAGE OF
the gray-skinned Antonio would be forever etched in Leah’s mind. That he was still alive was mind blowing. She tried not to imagine what he’d gone through, but couldn’t help having quick flashes of what could have happened. And if he was still alive, what about the others? Was the Doer they’d seen in the meadow another camp mate?

As they moved back into the giant room, her mind conjured up the possibility of one of the others who hadn’t returned from the hike leaping out of the darkness and grabbing her with its gray arms.

She felt the desire to take Joel’s hand but he was busy helping Mike. So she slipped her fingers into her pocket and touched the bag that held the folded Hershey’s wrapper. The talisman calmed her.

They zigzagged through the room so Leah could shine her light on the walls and look for another way out. But all they saw were dozens and dozens of pipes running up the walls into the darkness.

They were several feet past the point where Mike had earlier collapsed when the far wall finally came into view. In the middle sat a door identical to the one Gray-Antonio had shut, only larger. This door was open.

She halted in front of the threshold. “Unless you spotted a way out that I didn’t, then this is the only one.”

“I didn’t see anything else, either,” Joel said.

She didn’t step through it. “You know there’s not going to be another way back to the surface through here.”

“There’s got to be,” Joel said. “What if something happened that trapped whoever this place was meant for down here?”

“Look at it, Joel.” She motioned at the door. “That’s a
vault
door. The one Antonio shut, that was a vault door, too. There’s only one way in and out of a vault. These were designed to keep whatever’s down here down here.”

The struggle between knowing she was right and wanting some way to protect his friends played out on his face. He’d lived the role of the savior for so long, she knew, it was part of his DNA now.

“Maybe you’re right,” he finally said. “But there must be an administration office or something like that. Someplace where we can find instructions on how to open the main door.”

Now that was a possibility. Still, there was a bigger problem.

“She’s in there somewhere,” Leah said.

“I know. But it’s not like she can’t find us again out here, too. Look, I know it’s a small chance, but maybe we’ll be able to find out how to open the door and get out before she attacks again. If we don’t, then we stand our ground.”

Leah crept up to the doorway and shone her light inside. A hallway ran straight out, while another ran side to side.

“Mike, do you know which way she is?” she asked.

“Left…right…I don’t know…everywhere.”

“Not exactly the answer I was hoping for.”

“Sorry. Sorry, sorry.”

Leah crossed through the opening, and, with the mental flip of a coin, went left.

This part of the facility was not completely dark. Every thirty feet or so, a safety light threw a dim glow over a small section of the hall, like illuminated pools dotting a quiet midnight canyon. There were doors along each side, some with round, boat-type windows in the upper half. The spaces beyond these windows were uniformly dark.

They tried the doors as they passed. Many wouldn’t open, and those that did revealed only work rooms filled with tables and equipment but no useful information.

The hall curved to the right so they could never see more than thirty or forty feet ahead. Leah guessed it encircled the entire facility, and if they kept going, they would end up back where they’d started. This thought was reinforced when they reached the junction of a hall that went straight off to their right. If she wasn’t mistaken, this was the same hall directly across from the big door they’d come through, and bisected the circular route they were on.

As they continued around the curve, the rooms they came to now were different from those before. These were living quarters with beds and small desks and cabinets for clothes. Most of the beds were neatly covered with sheets and blankets. A check of the cabinets and small closets revealed clothes, some hanging, some in neat, folded piles. The style was really old, but none looked worn out. They were like costumes on a movie set just waiting for their actors.

Leah and her friends continued to find other living quarters until they reached the point where they had started. They looked down the bisecting hall.

It was the only part they hadn’t checked, so if there was something in the facility that would help them open the door, it would be down there.

Along with the Reclaimer.

“Maybe I should go alone,” Leah said. She’d fought the Reclaimer off once. If necessary, she’d do it again.

“We go together,” Joel said, echoing Leah’s earlier words.

“Together,” Mike agreed.

N
INETY-TWO

The Reclaimer

T
HE RECLAIMER APPROACHED
the creatures in a planned progression from one set of sensors to another. She could have rushed to where they were, been there in nanoseconds, but after her previous experiences, caution was advised.

She would, of course, be terminating their existence. That had been a foregone conclusion once they’d left the land above, but her scientific curiosity had been activated, so a delay was inserted into her agenda.

Why had they come? What did they hope to achieve? The answer to these questions would help her avoid a repeat problem during the data collection redo. Failing again would not be acceptable.

Prior to reaching the intruders, she received a message from her second servant. The Translator and his companions had apparently attempted to flee. Fortunately, the servant had automatically invoked its lockdown protocol and sealed the door before they could escape.

As physically damaged as her servant might be, the Reclaimer was pleased its programming had operated at peak efficiency. She sent a targeted burst of energy that would stimulate its atrophied pleasure receptors in a show of appreciation.

Concerned that the Translator would sense her renewed attention, she merely accessed her sensor’s data stream without taking active control of the device, and watched as one of the companions tried unsuccessfully to open the door. When it became clear to them that they would not be getting out that way, they headed back into the facility.

Previously the Reclaimer had focused solely on the Translator, so this was the first time she’d taken a good look at its two companions. She categorized the slightly shorter one as female and the other as male, both approximately twenty-five years old. Interestingly, both exceeded the normal physical specifications for their sex and age, based on not only the unreliable data the Translator had sent, but also information the Reclaimer herself had collected during her first years after activation.

As sub-routines automatically catalogued every piece of information possible about the two, the Reclaimer watched them make their way into the heart of her home. This pleased her. After her scientific observation node was satisfied, it would be so much easier to take control of them and program their husks to function as additional servants.

An indicator nudged her consciousness.

While still tracking the creatures’ progress, she accessed her log. The information node had data on the companions it deemed important enough to alert her. She opened the report.

Shock was not a sensation written into her programming, but the 757-millisecond pause she took after she reviewed the file could be described as nothing else. According to the report, the female was Satellite One, and the male was the lost Satellite Two.

How could that be?

The Reclaimer had been extremely diligent when she set up the information network containing the trio. To avoid any problems, she had used protocols that had been adjusted after her failed experiments with her original test subjects. She had painstakingly built mental walls in their delicate minds that should have never allowed them to even remember each other, let alone figure out a way to come together.

She funneled all she had on the Satellites into her processors, correlating and analyzing timelines. Nothing pointed toward them remembering one another.

Was this also information the Translator had kept from her? Again, there was no other logical explanation.

Analysis indicated that fault ultimately fell on the Reclaimer. At some point, while she had prepared the three before releasing them back into the land above, she had made an error in their programming.

Solution:
Obtain Translator. Catalog its true memories. Determine the nature of the fault. Terminate Translator. Rewrite protocols.

Error potential:
Possibility of Translator expiring prior to extraction of information—63.12%.

Backup calculation:
Probability of 51.83% that the nature of the error can be deduced from Satellites.

Backup solution:
Keep Satellites alive. If sufficient information is extracted from Translator, terminate Satellites. If Translator dies during data transfer, mine Satellites’ memories and then terminate Satellites.

The Reclaimer analyzed her choices, and selected the path that gave her the highest chance of success.

N
INETY-THREE

Joel

M
IKE NO LONGER
needed to lean as heavily against Joel. Still, Joel kept a tight arm around him as they followed Leah down the bisecting hall.

Doors sat along the left wall every fifteen feet. Along the right, however, there was only a set of wide double doors located at the midway point. The first three doors on the left were labeled
LAB A
,
STORAGE MAT 1
, and
LAB B
. Leah opened each, shined her light around, and then continued on with only a shake of her head.