The Nightworld (16 page)

Chapter 32

The rest of the trip seems almost like a dream. We don’t see anybody—just husks of dead vehicles and scraps of garbage. We stop a couple of times to siphon gas from cars, and we get lucky both times. I don’t even know if it’s the right kind of gas for the bike, but it seems to work. Lara is quiet, so quiet I start to get really worried.

We mapped out the route off the freeway using Gus’s roads atlas. He was right—this thing has come in handy now that our phones and GPS no longer work. Geothermal Systems, Inc., is located on Grand Avenue, which looks deserted. It seems like a normal storefront type of building.
ROBERT LANGLEY, CEO
is stenciled beneath the company name on the door in gold-foil lettering.

I shake my head at the smashed window. “That doesn’t look good.”

Lara puts her hand on my shoulder. “Let’s check it out anyway.”

We find a gas station on the next corner with an attached service center. There’s a banged-up car parked in the first bay, but the second is empty, and I pull the bike in. We cover it with some car covers that we find folded on a metal shelf. We carry our stuff with us—if someone steals the bike, at least we’ll still have the contents of our backpacks. Tank is relieved to get out of the sidecar, and he lifts his leg on every signpost and fire hydrant we pass on the way back to the storefront.

The door is unlocked. Inside, the place has been looted of most everything. Even the desks and chairs are gone, most likely burned for warmth in some trash can. There’s a huge illustration on one wall about how geothermal energy works. A gray metal file cabinet has been knocked over on its side. Tank is running around sniffing everything.

“Don’t you pee in here, Tank.” I try to sound like I mean it. I don’t really know why it would matter, though.

So much for safe haven. I don’t know what I expected to find, but at least there had been a goal, and a light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. I know I’d hoped to find Charlie here, hoped that his stepdad had headed to Detroit because he knew something that would help save his family.

Lara looks as defeated as I feel. She scuffs at some loose papers on the floor. Tank barks from one of the back offices.

“What’s he into now?” I start toward the office. Lara follows.

There’s a large walk-in closet in the office. The door is ajar, and Tank is frantically scratching at the carpeting. He stops every few seconds and sniffs all around, and then he starts digging again, trying to make a hole where there is no dirt.

“Tank. Come on, buddy, stop.” I walk to the back of the closet to get him. He’s got a corner of the carpeting up, and there’s wood flooring underneath it. There’s something else too, something I just get a glimpse of before the corner of the carpet flips back down to cover it.

It’s a hinge.

“Lara.” I grab the corner of the carpeting and start yanking it up. Lara sees what I see, and she helps. When we’re done, we’ve exposed a three-foot-by-three-foot trapdoor with a round handle set into it. Tank sniffs at the edges, as excited as I’ve ever seen him. Lara and I exchange a look.

“Should we?” I think we’ve got nothing to lose, but I want her opinion.

“Duh.” She grins.

I grin back. “Okay, you hold Tank.” Lara grabs his collar and tugs him away from the door. I take hold of the handle and pull. Slowly the door inches upward, and then suddenly it lifts itself. I spot pneumatic lifts on the underside as it rises. A staircase leads down to . . . somewhere.

“Crap!” Tank lunges, and Lara loses her grip on his collar. He’s down the stairs before either of us can stop him. We both start down the stairs at the same time, which results in a crash.

“I’ll go first, okay?” I don’t want to sound sexist, but I also don’t want anything to happen to Lara. She nods, and I start down.

The stairs end in a huge room lit with fluorescent bulbs set into the ceiling. It’s mostly empty, and there are two doors on the far wall. Tank is scratching at the bottom of the left one. I try the handle. It opens. Tank runs in ahead of us.

Inside, there’s what looks like an observation booth—a glassed-in room with a counter and what looks like a closed-circuit security system. There’s nobody in the chair behind the counter. Past the booth there is another door. Tank looks back, waiting for me to open it.

I do.

Chapter 33

They all died. It was a virus, a sort of a spore that settled in their lungs, and grew, and killed every one of them. We found the bodies of the last two, a man named Dan and Robert Langley, CEO of Geothermal Systems, himself. He was the last to die.

It’s all in the computer log. Langley detailed the course of the virus, and how it killed over half of the colony before they even knew what was happening. They developed a vaccine, but it was too late. The spores had already floated into people’s nostrils and attached to their lungs, where they were dormant for three to seven days.

Then the cramping began. Langley described it as similar to what he’d heard tetanus started out like, before people could get inoculated against it. Stiffness, progressing to cramping muscles. But where people with tetanus used to die from being unable to breathe, people in the colony died because their muscles spasmed and cramped so severely that they broke bones. Patients went through excruciating pain as their muscles contracted so strongly that femurs and tibias snapped. Organs were crushed and death finally came, but never soon enough. Survivors hauled bodies to the incinerator on the far end of the complex. There was no other way to dispose of them. The log for the date three days before we arrived was gruesome.

Dan will be dead within the hour. I don’t think I can get him to the incinerator; the cramps have started. From what I can tell, the antivirus is effective—just too late for us. I’ve left several batches in the lab freezer. I hope it helps whoever finds this log.

If you’re reading this, everything you need is here. We worked out all the kinks before the virus hit. There are instructions for all of the various factories. Before you trouble yourself with those, go to the lab freezer (behind you if you’re seated at this computer) and administer three CCs of the antivirus intramuscularly, now. Don’t wait. If you do, you’re lost.

I hope that what we created here will not end with me. I have hope for you, stranger, brother, sister, human. Perhaps one day the sun will shine again.

Robert Langley

We did what he said. We gave each other the injections, and we gave one to Tank too. It’s been two weeks, and no sign of stiffness. No cramps. I think we’ll be okay.

The factories Robert mentioned are different areas in the colony. They’ve got a hydroponic farm, and a geothermal energy plant, and chickens and a trout farm and a science lab. Everything they needed to survive is here, and we can run most of it well enough to live for a long time. There’s light, and heat, and hot and cold running water, and enough food. There’s just one thing missing: people.

We figured out that first day why Tank was so frantic to get down here. When he ran into the second room, he immediately went to a wall of coat hooks where it looks like colonists hung their jackets and sweaters before they ate in the common dining hall. There was one particular jacket there that he leaped up to get. When I took it from him, my heart broke. It was an army jacket. And on the pocket was a name patch embroidered with the word
TINY
. I never found Charlie’s name in the death rolls later, but I felt at that moment that he was gone. I sure hope I’m wrong.

I still haven’t figured out how Charlie’s stepdad knew Robert Langley; he did work for a drug company, but I don’t know if that’s the connection. I read all of the files I could find, and it seems like this Langley guy had been setting up this place for a long time. I don’t know if he knew what was going to go wrong with the world—he just knew
something
was going to go wrong. He got investments from people all over the place, and in return he promised them a place in the colony. He sent them word to come when the darkness first fell, and they all came, from the sounds of it. They all came and they all died.

Lara and I spend our days tending to what needs tending, and playing with Tank, and watching what’s happening aboveground on closed-circuit televisions. They’re connected to infrared night-vision cameras, so we can see clearly what’s out there. We’ve seen murders occur on them, watched people turn on each other for nothing more than a coat. We’re afraid to let adults know we’re down here, so if they come into view we usually just watch to make sure they aren’t trying to get into the compound. But the children—that’s a different story. If they wander into the black-and-white vision of the cameras, and they look like they’re alone, with no adults, we dart outside and fetch them in. So far we’ve brought in nine: two girls and seven boys. All of them tell us stories about how their parents have been killed. For a jacket. For a scrap of bread.

The children are innocent. They haven’t turned into monsters yet who would kill for a jacket. There’s still hope for them. At least that’s what Lara says. Most of the time I think she’s right, but sometimes, I watch all the children at dinner, laughing and yelling, and something makes me think of an island, where little boys were stranded, and their true nature was revealed.

So far we’ve been lucky down here. Everything seems to be working the way it’s supposed to, and all of the children are healthy. We’ve inoculated all of them. There’s still enough vaccine for many more. So far, no government men have stormed our little castle underground, though the crackle of static often wakes me, heart racing, from my sleep. It always takes me a second or two to realize the sound is only inside my head.

I keep the guns oiled and ready.

“Are you ever coming out of there? I’ve got some hot cocoa for us, and the fire is going.” Lara leans against the door of the lab. Tank is at her side, as he always is now. I look up at her and smile. She’s so beautiful, and I’m so lucky.

“I’ll be right out. I just want to try a couple more combinations.”

“That’s what you said an hour ago.”

“This time I promise.”

When she’s gone, I make a note of the combination I’ve just tried on the device. All three buttons at once, then the left one, then the left and the right together. That combination produced the largest area of illumination yet. There’s a puzzle I have to solve, and I’m no scientist, so I don’t know if I can. But if I do, I think there’s a chance my father’s device might be an answer to end the darkness. I think that’s what he was trying to tell me. He played some part, no matter how unwittingly, in how all of this began, and he died before he could try to end it. I know he was smart, brilliant even. He could have fixed this, and I think that he was on his way to doing so with this device before he was killed. And this has become my mission, my obsession. I have to figure out how to destroy the dark.

And so I try one more combination of buttons, just one more, on my father’s device.

Copyright

The Nightworld

Copyright © 2011 by Jack Blaine

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

www.epicreads.com

ISBN 978-0-06-213379-3

EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2011 ISBN: 9780062133793

First Edition