What Lies Below (3 page)

Into The Old World

Jack stepped carefully over the pile of rubble that blocked
most of the entrance to the building. Once, he thought, the entrance hall had
been a grand affair, a sprawling and large open space with huge panel windows
surrounding it that providing a stunning view out into the plaza that he also
thought would once have been beautiful. He’d seen the tiled floor in the centre
of the plaza, and although it was now broken, and overgrown with weeds and even
a few trees poking up from the cracks, the tiles were still colourful.

He glanced back, as he stepped down onto hard ground, and
looked out of the gaping holes that must have held single, massive panes of
glass. How anyone could have made such things was puzzling to him. There had
been a man at The Crossing that made glass, but it took a lot of recycled
bottles and scavenged broken pieces from the ruins for him to smelt anything of
size, let alone something to fill the huge holes in the side of this building.

Such were the losses of history, Jack thought. But maybe they
can still make it in the Inner Zone, maybe someone still has the knowledge.
They have to. He’d seen the glass panes on the Trans, and in the windows of the
large buildings in the compound where he had been sorted with the rest of the
captives.

But there was no one to replace these out here, he thought. He
glanced towards FirstMan, who stood just a few feet away and was searching the
ground and the room ahead of them, and then he looked into the once plush foyer
of the building.

There was an abundance of broken wood and cracked plaster
covering the floor, and as he glanced around he saw other things – bones, rags,
and bits of metal. A fight had taken place here at some point, and much of the
debris had been left untouched since then. Jack frowned. There were two sets of
stairs and two open shafts where lifts had once been, and there were a set of
doors beyond that, but no sign of a way down.

“Search the upper floors,” ordered FirstMan, and Jack looked
up to see RightHand heading up the left set of stairs, followed by one of the
other troopers. Another pair headed up the other stairs, while the rest
remained at the open entrance, looking out into the junk and ruins beyond the
plaza.

“Where do we look?” asked Ryan. The boy was picking at a pile
of broken wood and plastic a few feet away, where Jack imagined a desk of some
sort would once have been. Ryan picked out a long pole of plastic, turned it
over and then dropped it back into the pile. He stood up and frowned at Jack.

“We need to go down,” Jack said.

Ryan glanced around, checking first the lack of a way down the
stairs and then at the few doors that lined the back of the hall. “Through
there?” he asked.

Jack nodded. “Has to be,” he said. “I don’t see any other
way.”

Ryan didn’t look convinced. “Are you even sure there is a
down? Doesn’t look like one to me. No stairs.”

Jack walked over to the nearest lift shaft and peered down.
Darkness below and more rubble. He could vaguely see what he thought was the
bottom, some thirty feet below, and what looked like the top of the lift
itself. There was a large pile of metal cable collapsed on top of it and a
small hatch that was already open, revealing darkness inside.

“The lift goes down further,” he said, and then noticed that
Ryan and FirstMan were already next to him, also looking into the darkness.
“But why would they build a level that only the lift accessed?

FirstMan shrugged. “I’ve seen worse designs,” he said. “You
should see the conversion facility over at the RAD grounds.” He shook his head
and looked puzzled. “Utter mad chaos.”

Jack turned to face him. “I saw that place, or at least the
entrance to it, when I was captured,” he said. “What do they do there?”

FirstMan looked back down the shaft and then upwards. “You
really want to know?”

“I’m just curious,” said Jack. “I saw someone causing trouble
and they got dragged off that way.”

FirstMan smiled, but there was no joy in it. “Well that person
is about the unluckiest you ever met,” he said. “They…recondition people who
are a problem, mostly violent criminals and troublesome captives from the Outer
Zone. Brainwashing, or should I say, Resetting.”

“They actually do that?” asked Ryan.

FirstMan turned to the boy, seemed to consider whether he
should be telling the youngster such things, but then continued. “They do
indeed. And if you ever happen to be unlucky enough to bump into the HAC –
that’s Heavy Assault Corps, then you’ll be looking at the results of
that…facility. They stew up their minds. They don’t get rid of violent
tendencies, in fact I’d say they increase those, but they make them like
obedient dogs.”

“Nice,” said Jack.

“Absolutely,” said FirstMan. “I had the unfortunate pleasure
of having to escort a detachment to a drop off at a clearance zone, once. Not a
single one of them spoke, the whole two hour journey. They just sat there,
looking straight ahead into empty space.”

Jack looked back down the shaft and finally noticed the set of
rungs studding the wall at one foot intervals. They seemed to lead both up and
down, and he could see that they went all the way to the bottom.

“That’s our way down,” he said, pointing.

FirstMan frowned, but then saw what Jack was pointing at. “You
want me to send my guys down there?” he asked.

Jack shook his head. “No, me and Ryan can handle this. Better
off without a lot of heavy boots stomping around down there. Also, I don’t know
if those rungs will take the weight of that armour you guys are wearing.”

FirstMan nodded, reached to his waist and pulled away a radio
handset. “Well this is my spare, if you know how to use it? Yell if you need
us.”

Jack took the radio, clipped it onto his belt and then turned
to Ryan. “Want me to go first?”

“No way,” Ryan said as he sat down, swung his legs over the
edge of the shaft, and shuffled towards the ladder. “I’m gonna find the loot
way before you can sniff it out.”

What Lies Beneath

Jack followed the boy down the shaft, squinting as his eyes
adjusted to the darkness below. He could just make out Ryan, about fifteen feet
below him, as the boy dropped down onto the top of the lift. A quiet, dull thud
echoed faintly up the shaft as he landed. Jack thought he heard something else,
a clattering noise of some sort from far above them, and wondered what
RightHand and the others were doing up there.

He glanced upwards to see that the shaft rose high into the
building and then darkness, and thought for a moment that now would not be a
good time for something to drop down from that height. With this he sped up,
taking the rungs two at a time and hoping none of them would break. Finally he
hopped onto the top of the lift and looked down the hole that he had just seen
Ryan disappear into.

“It’s okay down here,” said Ryan, looking up at him from
inside the lift. “There’s…ah…the remains of someone down here in the corner, at
least I think it was a person, but it’s really old and dusty, so try not to
step on it. I nearly did.”

Jack started to lower himself and then peered down into the
hole once more. He saw the boy kneeling on the ground, and a moment later there
was a spark and a flicker of flame as Ryan lit a makeshift torch made from a
scrap of wood with some cloth tied to it.

Good lad, Jack thought. You haven’t forgotten the things I
taught you, even if you haven’t gotten rid of that reckless adventurer streak.
Not a bad thing, really.

Jack dropped down into the lift, felt the structure shudder and
then settle once more, and watched as Ryan stepped out into the opening outside
the lift. Jack stepped forward, moving beyond where the boy stood. “Okay, now I
go first,” he said, grinning as Ryan frowned with annoyance. “Just in case
something is down here.”

In answer to that, Ryan flashed his knife in the torchlight.
He held it tightly in his other hand and smiled back. “I’m ready for that too,”
he said.

Jack nodded and took out his own knife, thinking again that he
was glad the FirstMan had put his gear aside instead of sharing it out among
the Junkers. He knelt down next to the lift. “Can you shine that over here?” he
asked.

Ryan knelt beside him and lowered the torch to the bottom of
the lift, peering and trying to spot whatever it was that had caught Jack’s
interest. The torchlight was dim, maybe lighting up twenty feet from the spot
with a yellow, flickering glow, but it was enough for the two of them to see
underneath the lift, and to see there was nothing underneath it but a concrete
floor, half a foot lower than the floor inside the lift.

“What?” asked Ryan.

“Bottom floor,” said Jack, standing back up and looking around
the room outside the lift. “Means unless we find a stairway or something, this
is the lowest level and we don’t need to search any lower down. Also means that
with the open shaft and decent ventilation its ok to leave that flame lit.”

Ryan looked confused for a moment, looked at his torch burning
in the darkness, then he seemed to realise what Jack meant.
Gas below ground
.
His mouth turned to a silent
oh
and he nodded.

Jack already suspected that what they were looking for was not
far away. Glancing around the large room, he saw piles and piles of boxes and
crates, all seemingly filled with cables and rusted gadgets, some of which
looked similar to the thing that FirstMan had described. But he knew it had to
be a sealed package that he took back up with him, or the circuit board would
be useless after so many years exposed to the elements.

He stood in the darkness, watching as Ryan walked around the
room, uncovering more boxes as the light from the torch explored the unknown.
There was a set of double doors at the other end of the room, a single corridor
with three doors leading off it, and another door in the far corner.

But which of them leads to what we want? he thought. Where
does the trail lead us?

Jack looked at the smaller corner door, thinking. That it was probably
a storage room for cleaning materials. Seemed to be the obvious choice. He
glanced at the three doors. One of those, maybe? But, no. The double doors led
somewhere else, maybe into a larger storage room. He judged a direct line from
the lift opening to the double door, envisioning someone wheeling a trolley out
of the lift and directly across the room. He glanced at the floor, peering
through the scattered pieces of debris and broken plaster that had fallen from
the ceiling and onto the worn concrete. The paint marks had worn away over the
centuries, but there was still a trace of them. Deep lines crossing the gap
between the lift and double doors, those painted in yellow. The other lines,
three of them and much thinner, heading to the corridor and the three doors,
and then a blue line weaving its way across the floor towards the smaller door.

He tried to twist his brain around the image on the floor and
closed his eyes for a second. In the darkness inside his mind he saw an image
of the Sorting Room, where he had been sent down one corridor along with some
of the other captives, and others had been sent down different corridors. Coloured
lights marked the different destinations and this was somehow similar to that. Then
the image was gone, and he saw an automated factory, with small metal robots
making their way around the different machines, delivering parts and picking up
new ones. This was an image of the Picking Factory, he thought, but one from
long ago. Where the image had come from he didn’t know, maybe one of his old
magazines, but as he opened his eyes he saw, just for a moment, a ghost
superimposed on the cluttered and dusty room in front of him. A large robot
with a trolley following behind it moved out of the lift and drifted forward,
its wheels skittering over the flat, unobstructed floor and ignoring the real
debris that was there now. It rolled forwards, heading across the room towards
the double doors, following the painted line. It slowed until the doors opened
and then sped through them into the interior of the next room. Then the ghost
was gone.

“That way,” Jack said, pointing to the double doors, and Ryan
turned from the box over by the smaller door, which he was peering into, and
looked towards the doors. The boy’s mouth opened a little, and Jack waited for
the questions, but then Ryan just nodded, accepting Jack’s intuition. He
dropped the box and started forward, holding the torch aloft to light the way.

And that was when the loud crashing noise came from far above.

Intruder

RightHand peered into the darkness of the third floor,
aiming his assault rifle high into the rafters. As he had discovered on the
second floor, after he and his men negotiated the crumbling stairway, the
levels of the building were built with an odd ceiling cavity, maybe four feet
thick, that was filled with rusty cables and piping. Many of the pipes had
cracked and fallen, and were probably the cause of the collapsed ceiling, most
of which now lay on the floor of the large open space at the top of the stairs,
but much of the cabling still hung down from above like some crazy plastic and
metal spider web.

This probably isn’t going to take very long, he thought, as he
looked out across the rubble covered floor.

There weren’t any side rooms or corridors on this floor or the
one below, just a large open space, and he also thought that by the state of
the stairs they would only be able to access two more levels, possibly just one.
He glanced among the rubble, which was mostly broken masonry and rusted metal,
and decided there was nothing worth risking going out into the room for.

It would probably collapse if you did, he thought.

Across from him, fifty feet away, there was movement, and he
watched as one of his men came up the other set of stairs, glanced around the
room without leaving the safety of the stairs, and nodded once at him.

“Move to the next floor,” he said into the microphone balanced
near his chin. The other trooper nodded, looked up and then moved away, heading
up the stairs to the next floor.

But the next floor wasn’t like the previous ones at all, and
RightHand frowned as he looked out of the stairway entrance into the vast room.
Here, much of the ceiling and probably most of the upper floors had collapsed
downwards and was now piled up, filling more than half of the space of the
original room.

He took one step forward, signalling for the men in the
opposite stairway to stay where they were, and edged into the room to look
upwards.

There was something too regular about the debris, he thought.
He didn’t know what it was, but the cabling, panels and masonry weren’t stacked
up as though they had just fallen there. Some of it, he mused, almost looked as
though someone had put it there, exactly as it was, maybe as some form of
barricade.

And he kept thinking that right until the bug crawled out of
the gaping hole in the ceiling above and dropped down to the ground, chittering
and clicking at him.

Before the thing moved more than a few paces, RightHand fired
his weapon, a single shot into the front of the creature that tore away a large
chunk of its carapace and imploded its face.

Damn bugs, he thought, Let just hope there’s only one of the—

Another bug dropped from the hole in the ceiling, and then another,
and another.