Omega City (13 page)

This wasn't a place for an army. This was a place for people. For people to eat and sleep and work and learn and, yeah—even watch movies. For people to live, even if the world above had died.

“Thanks, Dr. Underberg,” I whispered softly, so no one else could hear me. “I knew you wouldn't let me down.”

But someone had let
him
down, that much was obvious. Omega City lay in ruins, and Dr. Underberg had disappeared. Why did no one know about this place? Why wasn't anyone taking care of it? I wished Dad were here. He'd be able to fill in the blanks and explain to us what all this meant. If it even was Dr. Underberg's. Maybe we were passing by all kinds of important clues without even knowing it.

The next room was the one marked A.T.R., and after the wonder of the movie theater, we couldn't help but drop in. Unlike the other rooms in this building, A.T.R. smelled of bleach. The floors and walls were tiled, and a long
line of enormous lockers stood against the far wall. We started walking in when Nate stopped short. “Careful!” he shouted. “There's a drop-off.” He aimed his flashlight down.

Sure enough, in the center of the room was an enormous tiled pit, with a large drain at the very bottom.

“What is it?” Savannah asked.

“Looks like a swimming pool,” Nate said. He pointed his flashlight to a ladder attached to one of the walls.

Eric laughed. “The driest place in this city is a swimming pool?”

“I guess we're above the flood level here.”

“How does A.T.R. mean swimming pool?” Savannah asked.

I wasn't sure, but I couldn't imagine what else a room like this might be used for. Nate was right, it looked just like when they drained the pools at my old school for cleaning. And the smell—that wasn't bleach. It was the remnants of chlorine. There were large, rusty metal hooks on the wall. Maybe they'd once been used for pool cleaning equipment.

All in all, this wasn't half as interesting as the movie theater. At least, that's what I thought until Howard opened one of the lockers and a person fell out.

AS THE MAN FELL TO THE FLOOR WE ALL JUMPED BACK, OUR SHOUTS OF surprise echoing around the darkened room.

I'll give Eric credit—he held on to his flashlight this time. “Wait a second.” He stepped toward the slumped figure. He shined his beam over the figure. “It's a space suit,” he announced.

No one moved.

“An
empty
one,” he clarified.

We crowded around and examined the suit. Big puffy arms and boots and gloves and helmet and all. I'd seen them in cases at the Air and Space Museum, but I'd never touched one before. It was heavy and bulky, which I guess
made sense, given that people would mostly be wearing them in zero-gravity conditions, but the actual material was thinner than I would have thought. Imagine having only a quarter inch of material between you and the vacuum of space.

Considering I had a good mile of rock between myself and the surface of the world at present, it seemed really minuscule.

Howard started examining all the pieces, comparing them to Z-series or constellations or I'm not entirely sure what else. However, it was clear he was much more excited about this suit than he'd been about anything since . . . well, since the last suits we'd found.

Finally, he said, “Wow! I think this is a Galaxy series! I thought they canceled this prototype because of heat transfer problems?”

“Maybe they canceled it because it was connected to Dr. Underberg, same as everything else?” I suggested.

“Maybe they canceled it and Dr. Underberg got it on the cheap,” Eric replied.

“Maybe none of us are astronauts and so looking at a space suit isn't nearly as important as getting out of here?” asked Nate.

But no one was listening. It was a space suit! And if there were space-suit prototypes in here, then that meant the battery prototype might be here, too. I opened up the
other lockers, but there was nothing more than some random tubes, hoses, and air tanks.

“Hey, Howard,” I asked, “don't astronauts train in swimming pools?”

“Yes. They simulate antigravity conditions—”

I tapped the map. “A.T.R.: Astronaut Training Room.” Only, why would they need astronauts in Omega City? If you were worried about survival, the space program would probably be the last thing on your mind. NASA wasn't even focusing on manned space travel these days, that's how low a priority it was for them.

Then again, those always had been Dr. Underberg's two great loves: space and survival. I looked around the room. If Omega City was really his, it would make sense he'd want to train astronauts. Even if we descended into the Earth, he wouldn't want us to give up on the stars.

“Astronaut Training. Brilliant deduction,” said Nate, steering me around by the shoulders. “Now let's go.”

But I wasn't the problem. The rest of us headed out into the hallway, but Howard didn't budge. He just sat there on the tile, the space suit pooled in his lap, examining every inch.

“Howard.” Nate waved at him.

He unscrewed the helmet.

“Howard!”

He paused, helmet poised over his head. “Come on,”
he said. “Please? I've never actually touched one before.”

“Right, he has time to play dress-up but I can't braid my hair?” Savannah asked.

Nate sighed and rubbed his temples. “She's right, buddy. Let's go.”

Howard looked longingly at the suit as his brother led him out to us. Savannah gave an annoyed grunt, but I totally understood how he felt. Howard getting to touch an actual space suit was like me visiting Area 51.

Or like now, I guess. Like visiting Omega City. I couldn't stop running my fingers over the lines on the map. Had Underberg really designed this place? Every detail felt like him, but if he'd made it, how come Dad never knew? How come no one did?

The map indicated we needed to go down a set of stairs and then up again into another rock chamber to reach the Comm room, so we headed in that direction. But when we got to the spot where the staircase was supposed to be, we found nothing left but a long, dark shaft. Nate and Eric aimed their beams down the shaft, where I could just make out water far beneath us.

Nate was teaching us all kinds of new swear words today.

“Now what?” Savannah asked when he'd finished.

Eric stood, looking down at the water, then abruptly swung his flashlight around to Howard. “How do the
astronauts breathe when they're in training?”

“What does that matter?” I asked.

“Do they use the suits, are there tanks, what?”

“They use the suit apparatus,” Howard said. “But they're usually assisted in the water by scuba divers—”

“Oh, no,” I said, holding up my hands in a T symbol. “Time out, no way. Don't think what you are thinking.”

“You think there's scuba equipment in those lockers by the pool?”

“Eric,” I insisted. “No.”

“There is,” said Howard. “I saw it. So what?”

“Gills, let me see the map.”

I shook my head but he snatched it out of my hands and pointed out the fan shape of the movie theater. “Look, there's a hashed line down here by the stage in the movie theater. That's got to be another exit.” He traced his finger through that hashed line, through several more rooms and over to the stairwell. “All these rooms are connected and I bet they're underwater. Still, we can get to the Comm room by scuba diving.”

“I don't know how to scuba dive,” said Savannah. “Don't you need to take classes or something?”

“We have—Gills and me.”

Getting certified had been Eric's tenth birthday wish. He'd made us take all the specialty courses: night diving, cave diving, even rescue diving. But neither of us had been
since before the divorce. And we'd never done it without a grown-up before.

“That doesn't really help the rest of us,” said Nate.

“If we can get to the Comm room, we can maybe call for help,” Eric argued.

Nate looked doubtful. “You want me to let the two of you strap on God-knows-how-old scuba equipment, dive off the balcony of an underwater movie theater, and go someplace I can't follow you? I don't think I can allow that.”

I nodded eagerly. “Yes! I agree with Nate!”

“I don't like the idea of us separating,” Savannah said. She was holding her flashlight like a prayer candle, and it cast her cheekbones in ghostly planes. “What if something happens to you two?”

“Something's going to happen to all of us if we don't get out of here,” said Howard. He was looking at the map. “I don't see another way through to the exit.”

Eric folded his arms. “I'll listen if anyone has a better idea.”

Nate was silent for several seconds, and much as I hated to admit it, I couldn't think of an alternative, either. We couldn't get to the next exit from here, and we had no idea how close Fiona and her friends were.

“Are you sure, Eric?” I asked. “It's going to be really dark down there.”

He gave me a disgusted glare. “Are you seriously trying
to psych me out of saving all our lives?”

“No—I just . . .”

“I'll have you with me,” he said. My throat grew tight. “I won't be scared. We can do this, Gills. Together. Like we used to.”

We used to have Dad . . . and Mom. We used to use brand-new equipment. We used to not be trapped in an abandoned underground city.

But
not
diving wasn't going to fix any of that. “Okay,” I found myself saying.

Nate shook his head. “I can't take care of you if I'm not with you.”

“You can't take care of us, period,” said Howard. His brother looked at him, stricken. “I'm sorry, Nate, but you can't. You know you can't. This isn't like at home.”

Nate said nothing.

“Should we take another vote?” Eric asked.

“I vote no,” said Savannah. She grabbed my hand. “Don't do it, Gillian. It's dangerous. You could drown.” Her eyes were wide and fearful in the dim light. I remembered what she looked like, caught in that elevator as it went underwater, and my stomach turned over on itself.

I knew how the vote would go. Eric and Howard wanted us to dive. Nate and Savannah didn't. I'd be the deciding vote. And I had to get us all out of here. Somehow.

“It's dangerous here, too,” I said. “We have to try.”

We returned to the astronaut training room and found the best two sets of scuba equipment we could—inflatable vests, masks, head lamps, breathing equipment, and air and depth monitors. They didn't seem quite as modern as the ones Eric and I had learned on, but it was the best we could do. The air pressure in the tanks seemed okay and we tested all the valves and tubes thoroughly. There were no wet suits but Howard showed us how to set our silver jumpsuits on “warming.”

“Won't these short out when we get in the water?” Eric asked.

“It says they're waterproof.” Howard shrugged.

We lugged everything back down the hall to the movie theater balcony and put it on. As Eric helped me assemble the pieces, we rehearsed all the diving details I hadn't bothered thinking about in a while: stuff like descent and ascent times, clearing our ears, signals to our partner, and how to make sure we were taking big enough steps off the side of the boat—um, or balcony, in this case—so as not to catch on the tanks we were wearing on our backs. We put on flippers and stuck our sneakers in the pockets of our suits. We went over the map again and again until it was burned indelibly in our brains. We needed to go down through the door of the theater, through one hallway to a large chamber marked
P
, into the stairwell and out through a lower level, through another hall, and up another set of
stairs to the Comm room. Reluctantly, I handed my precious diagram to Savannah.

“Please don't die,” Nate said, once we were ready.

“
Please
,” Savannah added.

“And you guys stay here,” Eric said, setting the timer on his dive watch. I used to make fun of him for wearing it around the cottage. Now I was grateful. “Hopefully, we'll be able to get in touch with you from the Comm room, but if we can't, stay here and at least we'll be able to find our way back to you or send help.”

Nate looked grim. “For how long?”

“What?”

“An hour? Four hours? How long should we stay? When should we start freaking out?”

“We're not already freaking out?” Howard asked. “I thought that them strapping on old scuba diving equipment and leaving the rest of us here with no escape route was us freaking out.”

Savannah bit her lip. I wasn't sure if she was keeping herself from snapping at Howard or whimpering in fear.

“At least an hour,” I said. “We'll know by then if we can get a message out.”

“And what if Fiona and those guys show up?” Savannah asked.

“We'll hide behind the seats,” Nate assured her. “Don't worry. As long as we're together, I'll keep you safe.”

Once upon a time, Savannah might have fainted dead away at the prospect of Private Pizza saying something like that to her. Now she just looked unsure.

There were probably more plans we should have made, but I knew if I spent any more time thinking about it, I'd never be able to get in that water.

I hugged Savannah, waved to the Nolands, and lined up next to my brother on the edge of the railing. He took a big step off the balcony, and when he cleared out of the way, I followed him into the depths.

I SPLASHED DOWN INTO COLD BLACK WATER, THEN BOBBED BACK UP, fitted my regulator in my mouth, cleared my mask, and pulled it down over my eyes. Far above me, I saw the others' flashlights, up on the balcony. I waved to them, but I couldn't tell if they could see. Eric, his face distorted by the equipment, made the OK signal at me. I returned it, he pointed his thumb down, and under we went.

Scuba diving takes a lot of precision, but when you get your balance right, it's pretty easy—you feel weightless. No wonder they used it for astronaut training.

I'd scuba dived in the dark before. But that had been in class, with Eric and my parents, in a cave that had been
certified completely safe for beginners. The abandoned movie theater was nothing like that.

Hand in hand, we kicked our way down the aisle, our head lamps roving over row upon row of empty seats. In places, the velvet or the carpet had torn and pieces drifted up toward us like ghostly arms of seaweed. We avoided these as we floated over the chairs and to the stage up at the front. There, my head lamp cast a giant shadow of Eric's profile on the glowing white movie screen. I laughed, and bubbles escaped my regulator.

Eric gave his shadow bunny ears, then moose antlers. He turned his arms into Godzilla and pretended to make it eat his flipper. You'd never guess he was the same boy who'd freaked out over giant earthworms. This is what happens when you get my brother in the water. I wondered if the others were up on the surface watching this. If they could even see us fooling around when they were trapped up there.

I grabbed his arm and pointed to my wrist.
Time, Eric
.

Okay
, he signaled back. At least he wasn't afraid of the shadows. As for me . . . well, the nice thing about being underwater is you can't fall. Besides, the bubbles always go up.

Together, we floated over the stage and behind the screen to the movie theater's back door. Eric turned the doorknob and swung it open, sending some grit on the floor swirling into little eddies. Eric swam through the doorway and I followed.

By now, the others would see the lights passing out of the room and know we'd at least made it to the next chamber.

I tried not to think too hard about how that meant that if something went wrong, there'd be no way for them to reach us, but the fact loomed up, even larger than the walls of rock separating us from the surface. My breath sped up in my regulator and I reminded myself to calm down. We needed to conserve our air. I checked the pressure gauge—still at seventy percent.

I shut my eyes. Up on the surface, Dad was waiting. I imagined his face when we told him what we'd found, and what it would mean for his research. I held the image tight in my mind as I opened my eyes and swam on.

We headed single file down a narrow hallway and then out through another door. This one was a much larger chamber, and when we entered, my jaw dropped so suddenly I barely hung on to my regulator. It was a parking garage. On the map, it had been marked with a simple
P
, just like on a map at the mall. But I'd never seen a parking garage that looked like this.

The beams of our head lamps bounced off windshields and metal hoods and darkened red taillights. Through the murky water, we could make out the giant shapes of submerged vehicles. From tiny golf carts to giant cement mixers, backhoes and diggers and flatbeds and four-wheel ATVs, there had to be at least twenty vehicles parked in
this chamber, end to end, like cars packed into a ferry.

This was not like scuba diving with my parents. This was more like dreams of flying.

We floated over the hoods of frozen pickups and by the windows of big rigs, glancing in at their unused, drowned gearboxes and headrests and cup holders. I couldn't imagine how such big machines had gotten here in the first place. There had to be some kind of giant elevator or driveway or ramp or something that could have let such big vehicles get all the way down to this level. Maybe there was even an alternative route to the surface. But though Eric and I made a full circuit of the chamber, I didn't see any kind of entrance or seam cut into the rock walls. Enormous metal plates reinforced the chamber in places. Maybe behind one of these plates there'd once been an opening, but now they were all bolted shut.

We gave up and continued our search for the exit. Eric's dive watch showed we'd been under for fifteen minutes. My pressure gauge now read 2500 psi, which meant the air was fifty percent gone.

Finally we found a door marked with a stair symbol. We opened that one and swam into a stairwell, where we found the cracked remains of the collapsed staircase we'd been trying to reach from above. I glanced up at the surface glittering at the end of my head-lamp beam. That meant we were more than halfway to the staircase we needed.
My breath shuddered in my regulator. More than halfway there, and half my air gone. Could we still make it there and back?

Eric must have sensed my fear, since he squeezed my hand as we slowly went deeper, clearing our ears and checking with each other as we descended one flight, then another. We passed through an open door into another small, narrow hallway.

I gestured to Eric.
You go first
.

He cocked his head at me as if to say,
You sure?

I waggled my arm through the air like a snake. “Worms,” I gurgled through the regulator.

Bubbles erupted from his face as he laughed. But he still went first.

There were more dark doorways, more black, underwater rooms. Some were bare, some filled with crates or mechanical equipment I couldn't identify. One had an examining table, another what looked to be a pretty elaborate dental chair, with a lamp and a drill arm and everything. Shards of metal flashed on the floor as I cast the beam of my head lamp across the room. I peered closer, only half surprised to see scrapers, picks, and even one of those little tooth mirrors scattered across the underwater floor. Guess it was a dentist's office—or had been, once upon a time.

Finally, we hit the end of the hallway. Here was another
door with a stair symbol on it, but though the knob turned, we couldn't get it open. Eric tried from above, then even let some of the air out of his vest, put his feet on the floor, and shoved against it as hard as he could. He turned to me and lifted his hands in defeat.

I checked my pressure gauge: 1700 psi, or two-thirds of the tank gone. We were losing air faster than I'd have liked. According to our training, we should surface when we still had about 500 psi left, or the pressure in our tanks would be too low for us to move air out of them when we breathed. And now I saw our mistake. The way above had been blocked—we should have realized the lower passage might be too. And we'd already used over half our air, which meant we wouldn't have enough for the return trip.

Which meant there was no way back to Savannah and the others.

I exhaled in a rush of bubbles through my regulator.
Okay, Gillian. Think
.

We could go back to the stairwell with the collapsed staircase. At least there we could breathe. We could call out to the others. They'd probably hear us. But then what? We'd be trapped at the bottom of the stairwell.

Every way I looked, I saw the walls closing in. Even my head lamp couldn't shine a way through the darkness surrounding us. I lost track of my breaths as I tried desperately to think of an alternative.

I didn't even realize I'd been drifting until my tank thumped loudly against the wall of the hallway. I wheeled my arms through the water and knocked my head lamp askew.

My breath in my regulator went wild.

I felt Eric still me, straightening my head lamp. He made the OK symbol in front of my mask. I nodded, miserably, and answered him.
OK
.

But I was
not
okay. I was miles below the Earth, dead-ended in an underground chamber with my brother and two ancient scuba tanks. And even my friends who
could
breathe on their own were trapped while lunatics with guns were looking for them.

Great idea, Gillian. Just get the pizza delivery guy to drive his little brother, you, and two of the people you love most in the world out into the middle of nowhere to look for something bad guys with a lot of power are willing to ruin lives over. Ignore the fact that when Fiona comes looking for Omega City, she brings two burly dudes, at least one gun, and a whole truck full of equipment. There's no way this could all go wrong
.

Eric tapped the pressure gauge dangling off my BC. 1500 psi. Less than a third of my air was left.

I held my breath, which was something they taught you never, ever to do while scuba diving. Then again, they also taught us not to dive in unexplored caverns, so it wasn't like
we were really following directions, anyway. I breathed in, as slowly and calmly as I could.
Think
.
Quickly
.

I opened my eyes and looked at my brother through the lenses of our masks. His eyes were wide and scared, too. I gestured to his pressure gauge and he held up five fingers. Fifty percent. Okay, at least he was doing better than I was.

Behind him I saw a pair of metal double doors with a button box on the outside. An elevator? If it was stuck on this floor, we were done for, but what if it wasn't?

This was our only option. I didn't need to think about Dad's research right now. Not with my brother floating in front of me, breathing ancient air and looking nervous, even behind the scuba mask.

I signaled for Eric to wait and swam back down the hall to the dentist's office. I grabbed a handful of metal implements off the floor, then swam back and shoved the thin end of a few of them inside the crack between the doors.

Eric got the picture quickly. We used the metal sticks as leverage to widen the crack, then pushed our hands in, tugging with all our might. The doors ground and squeaked against their runners, but opened. Eric eased into the empty shaft and aimed his head lamp up, while I crossed my fingers that the elevator car was higher than the water level. I caught the flash of his light against the surface of the water, several stories up.

He looked at me, a question in his eyes. I gave him a
thumbs-up, which in scuba language doesn't mean “okay.” It means
let's go up now
.

It was tight quarters in the elevator shaft, what with our tanks and all, but we wrapped our arms around each other. It was like Eric said. We wouldn't be afraid if we were together.

I checked my pressure gauge. Only 750 psi left—the red zone. I hugged him tighter. It would be okay. All I had to do was go up.

Up.

We started to ascend. One story. Two. Numbers were painted on the inside of the elevator doors. The ascent was agonizing, but Eric, of course, made us follow guidelines, going slowly and stopping to readjust to the pressure. I refused to look at my pressure gauge. Three. Was the air inside my regulator getting thinner? Was I breathing more than I should? Would I have any warning or would I try to breathe in and find nothing to suck? We passed the door marked 4, and then hit the surface.

I instantly ripped the regulator off my face and breathed in real air. Above us, my head lamp illuminated an endless shaft with no elevator car in sight. I quickly looked back at the water level before I started getting dizzy again.

Air. Real air. I was happy staying here forever, now that I knew I'd have something to breathe.

“What floor are we going to?” Eric asked, bringing me back to reality. Right. Bobbing in an elevator shaft was not a permanent option.

“Six.” I paddled over to the ladder built against the wall. “But we won't be able to climb up with our tanks on.”

“If we climb up,” he said, “will we be able to open the door from the inside?”

Another good question. We probably should have saved the dental tools, but it was too late to go back for them now. I didn't have the air and I doubted Eric did, either. Eric unhooked himself from his tank and it bobbed away from him, kept afloat by the inflated vest.

I did the same and grabbed the rungs of the ladder. “Kinda slippery.”

I kicked off my flippers next, then went up a few rungs, hooked my arms around the ladder, and slipped my shoes back on. Eric followed. The ladder wasn't so bad, as long as you just stared at the rung in front of you and tried not to think about anything else, like your soaking shoes or your cold, slippery fingers, or what might be waiting when you got to floor six. Also, there was real air to breathe. That was a definite plus. I concentrated on that: breathing and climbing.

This was the only way. Up one rung. We'd figure it out when we got there. One more rung. Wouldn't Dad
be proud? Another rung. Check that Eric was still right behind me. Think about how, if we fell, at least it would just be splashing down into the water.

You know, as long as I didn't slam against the wall.

When we got to the floor marked six, the door was indeed shut, and I saw right away that there would have been no point bringing along those dental tools. We'd never be able to pry the door open while dangling off the ladder.

“What's the holdup?” Eric asked from below.

Four feet higher, near the top of the door, was an old rusty lever that looked like it was supposed to be attached to something. I looked at it. The handle part had a wide base. I wondered if it was somehow supposed to connect with the actual elevator door when it hit the floor. I pushed on it and the doors groaned, which seemed promising. I threaded my feet through the rungs of the ladder, holding on for dear life, and tried again, this time with both hands.

Nothing happened.

“No!” I shouted at the lever. “Open up, you stupid thing! Open!” I banged on it with my hands. “Open! Don't you see, you're the only way out!”

My words echoed up and down the elevator shaft, and I clamped my mouth shut, embarrassed. I was screaming at a piece of metal. First Howard, now inanimate objects? How low was I going to sink today?