Omega City (10 page)

“Are you up to date on your tetanus shots?” Howard asked her.

“Look!” yelled one of the guys across the water. “Ropes. They must have taken a boat.”

“Find another,” came Fiona's voice.

“We need to stop the turbine,” Nate said. “Now. I'm not going to fit in that hole. Please, Savannah?” I think it was the first time he'd used her name.

Savannah sighed and clenched her jaw. Then she pulled off her hoodie and handed it to me with an annoyed look. “This is your worst idea of all time.”

“Agreed.” I stuck the map in the waistband of my jeans. “I owe you. I really owe you.”

“Yeah. You owe me a whole new outfit.” Savannah tied her long hair in a loose knot, took a deep breath, and jumped off the side of the boat. We saw her form, white tank top and pink pants, ghostly in the water, and then she disappeared beneath the elevator. A second later, her blond head broke the surface of the water inside the elevator. For a second she just treaded water, half in and half out of the elevator.

“Try not to cut yourself on the metal,” Howard said. “Tetanus.”

“You think?” Savannah swiped her wet hair off her face. Gingerly, she pulled herself up onto the broken floor, then stood, her legs braced wide to avoid the hole. “Okay. I'm in. Now what?”

“What do the controls say?” I leaned over the top of the cage, trying to read the panel through the bars. The pontoons butted up against the metal grid and the water inside sloshed around Savannah's thighs. I hoped she wasn't going to get electrocuted in there.

“They aren't marked. Wait, this one has an arrow.” She pressed it and the elevator shuddered upward.

I lost my grip on the cage and stumbled back, falling against the float of the catamaran as the broken-bottomed elevator lifted up out of the water with the awful sound of shrieking metal. The catamaran pitched wildly from side to side and we all held on tight to keep from being thrown off.

“Gillian!” Savannah shouted as the booth kept rising. She flattened her body against the wall and jammed her fingers through the bars. “The floor! It's crumbling!”

Nate made a leap for the bottom corner. He missed, but the move sent the boat directly under the elevator. The metal mast banged against the booth and Savannah wavered on her feet. Above us, there was a horrible crash, and then a big section of the jagged, broken bottom of the
cage swung free over our heads like a trapdoor. A giant, sharp, very deadly trapdoor.

“Stop! Stop!” Savannah jabbed her free hand against the buttons. Far above us the turbine shuddered and groaned, its ancient blades screeching and—marvelously—beginning to slow.

“You did it!” Eric cried up at Savannah. Nate hooted his approval and I pumped my fist in the air.

But we celebrated too soon. The elevator stopped, and started lowering again.

“Um . . . Savannah?” I said, as it clanked its way back to the surface of the water. “Stop the elevator.”

“I'm trying!” The elevator was dropping in fits and starts, the broken edge of the cage zipping back and forth over our heads. Eric tried to push our boat away from the cage as it descended so the hanging bits wouldn't pierce the pontoons.

“I'd get out now,” Howard suggested.

Savannah shrieked in frustration. She was trying to ease herself through the hole but every movement of the elevator sent the sharp, broken edge of the cage swinging wildly back and forth. If she dropped out now it was likely to cut her in two.

“Help me!”

Nate tried to grab for the broken edge and hold it out of her way but only succeeded in pulling the edge of the
catamaran under the elevator just as it dropped back into the water. Rusty froth churned up through the grates as the elevator juddered into the lake. There was a horrible tearing sound and the catamaran tilted wildly to the side, spilling us all into the water.

I surfaced, spluttering, and looked around. Grab for the wall? The elevator? The swiftly sinking boat?

“Help!” Savannah screamed, and I realized she was still trapped. “The boat! It's blocking the hole to get out!”

The cage was still lowering into the water, dragging the tangled rubber of the catamaran with it. We swam to the booth, tugging on the door, the walls, the ceiling, anything. Savannah was up to her waist in the water, then her chest.

“Gillian!” She was treading water now, her round eyes as huge as dinner plates. “Please.”

I reached for her through the bars, as if I could pull her through by force of will alone. “Hang on!” I shouted, though for what I didn't know.

Our fingers touched. She grabbed my hand around the grid. The water slipped to her neck.

“Take a deep breath, Savannah!” I called to her as she pressed her face against the ceiling grid, her fingers straining against the metal bars. And then those, too, slipped beneath the dark surface of the water, and that was the last I saw of my friend.

“SAVANNAH!” I DOVE UNDER, TRYING TO PULL AGAINST THE ELEVATOR AS if I could lift it out of the water like the Incredible Hulk. Eric yanked me back.

“Gills!” He shook his head and gestured behind me. “Help Nate.”

The Noland brothers were tugging on the half-sunken catamaran, trying to untangle it from the broken edge of the elevator cage. Eric and I paddled over and started tugging, too. But even as I pulled with all my might, there was a stopwatch going in my mind. Ten seconds. Twenty. How long could people hold their breath?

Nate dove under as the rest of us kept yanking on the
mess of sail and float and torn rubber. Twenty-five seconds. Thirty.

“Pull harder!” I screamed.

“It's—” Howard puffed, tugging. “Hard—to get—leverage.”

Forty seconds. My best friend was dead. I'd dragged her along on this journey to the center of the Earth and then I'd let her drown. I screamed, tugging as hard as I could on the material.

Nate burst to the surface, Savannah limp in his arms. They were both covered in scrapes from the broken bottom of the cage.

“Quick! Help me get her on the ledge!” We swam over to the steps and pulled Savannah up on the flat surface near the now-stopped turbine. She instantly began coughing, spitting up water and slime. Her arms were covered in messy scratches, and there was a nasty, deep-looking one across her torso, right where her shirt was nearly torn in two.

Nate thumped her on the back. “Get it all up.”

She clutched her shirt together with both hands and retched.

“Those cuts look pretty bad,” Howard said. “Lockjaw is, of course, the most well-known symptom of tetanus, but there are others . . . such as drooling, excessive sweating, and uncontrolled urination.”

Savannah glared at him with bloodshot eyes. “Gross. Shut up, Howard!”

“Also irritability.”

Savannah leaned over and threw up all over Nate's shoes.

He jumped back so hard, I thought he might fall in the lake. “Eww, watch it.”

Savannah groaned and fell back into my lap. “Someone kill me.”

“No way,” I whispered, hugging her close. “We just saved your life.”

For a few moments we all sat there, catching our breath and wringing out our clothes. I cradled Savannah's head in my lap, smoothing her wet hair out of her face, while she scrubbed at the cuts on her arms and body with her ruined hoodie.

Savannah was okay. She was okay. But I wasn't going to risk anyone's life again. Not hers, not the Nolands', and certainly not my baby brother's. I didn't care if the battery prototype was somewhere in the city. Nate was right—we needed to find the quickest way out of here. Now.

I pulled the laminated map out of the waistband of my jeans and ran my fingers over the figures on the page. Omega City could wait for experts. We should go home.

After a moment, Savannah rose up on her elbows,
coughed a few times, then cleared her throat and turned to me. “What now?”

I clenched my jaw. “Find the exit.”

Nate breathed deeply, then smiled. “Finally, you're listening to reason.” He pushed himself to his feet, wincing a little.

“Are you kidding?” Savannah asked hoarsely. “I didn't nearly get myself killed just to leave.”

“The important part of that sentence is that you nearly got yourself killed,” Nate pointed out.

“We're never going to see this place again, you know,” she said to me. I looked at her, stricken. “We're going to go up, tell the authorities, and then that's it. It'll be all over the news—not our secret anymore.”

“Sounds good to me,” said Nate.

“And not your dad's, either,” she added. That made me hesitate. I figured if the mainstream media started taking Dad seriously, it would be a good thing. But what if they bypassed him entirely? I wanted Dad to be vindicated, but what if that only happened if he was the one to bring Underberg's inventions to light?

“I agree with Savannah,” Howard said. “I hate that I do, but I do.”

“At the very least, we should see if we can find some sort of first aid station,” Eric added. He pointed at the blood staining Nate's and Savannah's clothes.

I checked out the map. “Right here, the first building on the diagram is a mess hall. There might be something there.” And we could kill two birds with one stone. Fix up Savannah, and search for the prototype.

“Either way, we should keep moving,” Eric said. “Fiona and her friends may have found another boat.”

I helped Savannah to her feet and together we eased across the ledge to the turbine. There wasn't a lot of room between the blades, but we could get through if we threaded single file through the lowest two blades.

Except none of us moved. What if it started up again while we were inside?

Then again, what other choice did we have? The boat was sunk, and Fiona and her friends were after us. This was the only way out.

I squared my shoulders. “Okay. I'm going in.” I took a deep breath. The blades didn't move. I touched one. It felt gritty like rust beneath my fingers. It was hard to believe a few minutes ago it was slicing through the air so fast it was a blur.

“Are you going to do it?” Howard asked.

“Yes,” I said, trying to convince myself as much as Howard. I closed my eyes and ran between the blades, forcing my feet to a halt after a few steps so I didn't careen off the ledge on the other side.

Eric slammed into me from behind, then caught me by
the back of my shirt as my arms pinwheeled over empty space. “Watch out, Gills—whoa.”

Whoa
was right. Below us spread an enormous cavern, vaguely lit by massive blue floodlights focused up on the carved rock walls. It wasn't quite as big as the lake chamber, but what it lacked in size, it made up for in sheer insanity. I gasped, but there was no way to breathe it all in.

This, without a doubt, was the
real
Omega City.

The ledge we stood on was about twenty feet off the ground. Below me, a maze of boxy buildings like giant multistory trailers, some connected by walkways, some by tunnels, spread out along the ground. Many were underwater, or nearly so, while others remained above the water level. Some of the buildings had fallen over or collapsed on themselves, and debris the size of trucks floated in the submerged sections.

More tunnels led from the buildings in and out of the rock walls, which curved upward into a point like we were standing beneath a vast tent made of stone. All around the perimeter of the cavern and above me I could see windows or even buildings set into the walls. Everything was lit blue, like some strange, subterranean twilight had fallen over this vast, silent space.

Nate, Howard, and Savannah met us on the ledge. In the eerie blue light, I could see their mouths open, their eyes wide. Eric looked the same and I'm sure I did, too.
Dad's book had been full of wild theories, but even he had never dreamed of a place like this.

“Do you think anyone is here?” Savannah asked.

“No.” I shook my head. There couldn't be. The lights and the cannon and the turbine must work on timers, or motion detectors, or something. How could anyone be here if the place looked like this? “It was built for survivors of a disaster, just like that recording in the elevator said. For the end of the world—a war or a comet or . . .”

“The Yellowstone supervolcano?” Howard suggested.

Nate had said that during the Cold War the government built the interstate system—tens of thousands of miles of highways—to help people escape from a nuclear disaster. Was a place like this what they were meant to be escaping to? If something bad happened to the world above, were we supposed to find this place?

Except it wasn't built by the government. It was built by Dr. Underberg.

“This is what Dr. Underberg meant when he wrote about his last gift to mankind,” I said. “It's not the battery, it's a whole city. Omega City. The last city.”

Eric, of course, looked skeptical. “But it's in ruins.”

“Yeah.” I shrugged. “Kind of like everything else connected to Dr. Underberg.” I consulted the map and pointed. “The mess hall is down there.” Thankfully, it was in an area of higher ground.

We took another set of stairs bolted into the wall down to a raised walkway. Below the walkway, the rough rock ground was covered in puddles, but the ramp to the first of the elevated, trailer-like buildings was dry.

On the metal door was a large Greek omega symbol painted in red, and then a number 1. On the map the building seemed to contain several smaller apartments—the mess hall, a hair salon, even a grocery store. We'd surely be able to find something to treat Savannah's and Nate's wounds inside.

“Go ahead, Gillian,” said Nate. “I think this just became your party.”

I turned the handle and opened the door. Fluorescent lights flickered on.

But the inside of the building looked like a bomb had gone off.