Instinct (19 page)

“Wow,” Ron said. “Let’s go get the others. They’ll want to see this.”

“Wait,” Judy said. She laid a hand on Ron’s arm. “Maybe we should just check it out ourselves first. Then we’ll know what to tell everyone. We don’t want to get them excited if it’s nothing.”

Ron nodded. He had a flare for the dramatic, and this idea resonated strongly with him. When she saw that he was on board, Judy knelt and pointed her light at the metal door.

“Go ahead,” she said. “You found it. You should get to try it first.”

Ron nodded again. His tongue darted out and wet his lips as he knelt down. He brushed the dust from the patch of floor where his knees would land and then he reached forward under the bins. There was a metal latch on their side of the door. He squeezed the latch and smiled when it popped in his grip. The door began to rise slowly. It’s pneumatic mechanism brought the door up about a foot. Ron coaxed it up another foot so they could see down inside. They didn’t see anything except a ladder. It descended into the darkness.

“Well?” Judy asked.
 

Ron held out his hand and motioned for the light. Judy took off the headlamp and gave it to him. He glanced up at the frame holding the grain bins and then slowly stuck his head under them. He pointed the light down into the hole. Judy stood back, watching. She bit at her cuticle.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. His voice had a hollow echo to it. “It goes too far down. I can’t see”

“Weird.”

✪
 
✪
 
✪
 
✪
 
✪

She climbed down with no light except the dim blue circle overhead. From below, she heard Ron’s feet clanging on the metal rails of the ladder. It was her own fault that she didn’t have a light. Ron had wanted to take a minute so they could go find more lights, but she knew what that might lead to. If they had delayed, Ron would have found someone else to tell of the discovery. If there was an advantage to keeping the secret, Ron would have squandered it.

“Oh!” she heard him say below. Judy stopped and looked down. His light quickly moved away from the bottom of the ladder. At least she had a sense of how much farther she had to descend.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I can’t tell.”

In the darkness, Judy rolled her eyes and sighed.

She reached the bottom. The tube they’d climbed down opened up into a small room of gray metal. It was small enough that Ron’s headlamp was able to illuminate the whole space. The room was a cylinder, like the tube they’d come down to gain access, but it was at least four or five times wider than the ladder tube.

“This is no bomb shelter,” he said.

He was right. On one side, a panel was built into the curved wall. A rolling black chair sat in front of the panel. The surface of the chair was covered with splotches of white mold.

Judy walked over to it. She didn’t want to touch the chair. The mold looked like it was dying to release its spores. The panel was formed in the shape of a sloped desk. Little TV sets were mounted across the wall, and the flat surface was covered in buttons and levers. Nothing was labeled.

“Swing your light over here, will you?” Judy asked.
 

Ron was investigating something on the opposite wall. She heard a deep metal clang and spun around Ron was standing in front of a black rectangle that had appeared in the wall.
 

“I found a door,” he said.

She approached slowly, expecting something to reach out the darkness and snatch Ron to unknown depths. Judy was ready to leap for the ladder if that happened. He spun and pointed the light in her eyes.

“It’s stairs,” he said.

Judy glanced at the ladder. Exploring was her idea, but she was beginning to think that they’d gone far enough.

“You want to go back?” he asked.

Judy surprised herself. “No.”

The stairs spiraled down through another tight cylinder. Their footsteps echoed with a metallic ring. Judy stopped on the second-to-last stair and watched as Ron reached for the latch of the big metal door. This door looked like it was meant to keep out, or maybe keep in, something serious. It was studded with big metal rivets and it looked like it weighed as much as a car.
 

When Ron pulled up on the latch, the mechanism sounded like a block of metal dropped to a concrete floor. Ron pushed. The door squeaked inwards. Cool, damp air washed over them.

Judy stayed on the stairs as Ron walked through the door. She saw his headlamp sweep over a big space.

“Wow,” she heard him say. “You could fit a…”
 

His voice was lost to the echoes.
 

“Hey, Ron?”

His light disappeared around a corner. She was alone in the dark.
 

She raised her voice. “Ron?”
 

Judy gripped the railing. She could find her way up the stairs and then feel around until she found the ladder. It shouldn’t be too difficult. But would the hatch under the grain bins still be open? Somehow she thought it wouldn’t. Somehow, when they’d opened the door to the spiral stairs, the hatch would have closed. Somewhere, on that dark, unlabeled panel, there was a dead button that was designed to open that hatch. It had probably been broken since before she was born. She would be trapped down here until someone else from their group just happened to stumble into the grain shack, and happened to find the mechanism to raise the bins.

She would starve, clinging to the ladder until her strength dropped her next to that moldy chair. She would hit every dead button on that dead panel, fruitlessly trying to find a way…

“Are you coming?”

His light was back in her eyes.

“Where did you go?”

“In this room. You have to see it.”

She followed close this time, staying in the protective bubble of the glow of his light. He led her into the big room. She didn’t get much of a look at it, because he immediately turned to the right and then turned again. She followed him into a smaller room with desks down opposite walls. Cork boards on rolling stands divided the room. Pinned to either side were maps, memos, and photos.
 

Ron moved to the first one and pointed his light at the center.

“Here,” he said.

He handed her a heavy metal object. She found the switch and a dim yellow light came from the end. It was her very own antique flashlight. It barely produced any light, but it was her new favorite thing in the whole world.

She joined her beam to the board where Ron was looking.

“This place was some kind of monitoring center,” Ron said. “All these surveys and photos show changes in the landscape over the years.”

Judy scanned the photos. They were mostly of trees and streams. They looked like the album of an amateur nature photographer. The composition was terrible. There was no art to the photos. In more than one, she saw men who wore shorts and Hawaiian shirts. They looked funny with their shaved heads, grim expressions, and cheerful shirts.
 

“Binaural beats induce theta rhythms in ninety-three percent of subjects,” Ron read from the other side of the board.
 

Judy was looking at a map of the farm. It showed all the buildings, fields, and the road. There were several stars affixed in a circle around house. She used her fingers to gauge the scale and figured that the radius of the circle was about five miles. Only one of the stars was annotated. A line led to a note that read, “Alpha Site: infestation eradicated with +47089 protocol 0-21-7.”

The star was pretty close to a big rectangle of a building. Judy traced the lines. It was only a guess, but she was pretty sure that the star marked the location of the grocery store she’d visited earlier that evening.

“Why would they put this place here?” Ron asked from the other side of the board. He came around to Judy’s side. “We’re not close to anything. There’s nothing strategic to protect out here, right?”

“I think maybe this place is in the middle of something,” Judy said. She traced her finger over the ring of stars on the map.
 

“Ugh. Like what? Nothing but trees, if you ask me. The only thing good about this place is that it’s supposed to be safe from the air monsters. And we haven’t seen any water…”

“Shhh!” Judy said, cutting him off.

“What?” he whispered.

She took a deep breath and shut off her light. Ron reached up and shut off his headlamp, too. As the darkness settled around them, the sounds of the place came to life. It was mostly themselves that they heard. Judy recognized her own breathing and heartbeat as the majority of what met her ears. She could hear Ron’s breathing too. It amazed her how quickly her ears became tuned to their surroundings.

She heard it again. It was a loud, “THUNK,” from the big room. Judy extended a hand and moved towards her memory of the doorway.
 

“I heard something,” Ron whispered.

“Shhh!”

Judy’s hand found the doorway and she grasped the cold metal. As she leaned forward, she could tell the difference when her head moved into the big room. It sounded more open. She resisted the urge to turn on her flashlight. She wanted to hear everything, and using the light would only dull her attention.

Click, click, click, click.

It could have been footsteps across a metal floor, or some clockwork mechanism in a machine. She sensed Ron approach her from behind.

BANG!

The sound reverberated in the room for what felt like an entire minute.
 

“We should get out of here,” Ron whispered.

Judy agreed.

She turned on her weak yellow light and Ron lit the place with his headlamp. They moved towards the doorway to the spiral steps. They were almost there when Judy heard the clicking again. This time, it was five clicks. They definitely came from the spiral staircase.

Ron tapped her on her shoulder and she almost screamed.

She looked back. He was pointing to another doorway, across the room. It took her a second. She was about to ask him why he was pointing to the other door when she saw why. Above the door was a red and white sign, that clearly read, “EXIT.”

She nodded. Another exit seemed like a great idea.

Before they reached the other exit, they heard another, CHUNK.

Judy only hesitated for a moment, and then they both hurried for the other door. It wasn’t another staircase, as she’d hoped. This was a straight hallway that stretched so far that her light couldn’t find the end. They began to run slowly down the length.
 

Judy turned off her light. She could see fine with the glow from Ron’s headlamp, and she wanted to conserve the batteries, just in case.

At the other end of the hall, they were both panting for air. Judy hoped it was just her smoker’s lungs, and not a lack of oxygen that caused her lightheadedness. Ron tried the door. He was careful, but the latch still made a racket when he turned it. It sounded like some ancient mechanism slammed into place when he dragged the handle downwards. He pulled on the door and the old hinges squealed. Judy looked back the way they’d come. She expected to see some black shape following them. There was nothing but darkness behind them.

“You first,” Ron said, pointing at the door.

“Fine,” Judy said. She stepped through the door and smelled the musty air. It was even cooler and damper than the air they were already breathing. Through the door, they found a landing. Another set of spiral stairs led down into the dark.

“I thought this was an exit?”

“It must go back up later,” Ron said.

Judy gripped the handrail and started down. Behind her, she heard Ron move in intervals. He ran down a few steps until he was caught up, and then he shined his light towards the top. He looked between the stair risers, watching for pursuit.

Judy stopped.

“What?”

“We can’t go this way, unless you have SCUBA equipment on you.”

“What?”

Ron turned to look over Judy’s shoulder. The cylinder was flooded. The water was perfectly clear, but even so, they couldn’t see more than three turns of the spiral stairs before the light wouldn’t penetrate any farther.

“So much for this exit,” Judy said.

“We have to go back,” Ron said.

“You think?”

They climbed. They didn’t make it far before a noise from below stopped Judy again. It was a wet, bubbling sound, followed by what sounded like a heavy piece of meat slapping against a cutting board.

“Faster,” she whispered.

They ran up the steps.

With all their clanging on the spiral stairs, it was hard to hear anything from below, but Judy thought she did. She thought she heard the noise of something enormous crawling out from the water. They’d woken something with their stupid lights and now it was gaining on them as they wound up and up, around the tight spiral of the stairs. When Ron slowed, Judy pressed on his lower back with her free hand. Her flashlight was tipped straight up.

They reached the top of the stairs, pulled themselves through the door and slammed it behind them. Ron wrestled the handle until the door was latched once again. They didn’t have anywhere else to go. The hallway ended at the door.

Ron spun towards the other end of the hall when they heard the noise. Right on cue, Judy’s light flickered and then went out. At the far end of the hall, from where they’d come, the door opened and revealed a white rectangle of light.