The Infernal Lands (The Aionach Saga Book 1) (49 page)

The aboveground portion of the facility was a small square
bunker with two tiers of razorwire fencing and a parking lot filled with
ancient rusted-out vehicles. The soldiers who opened the gates and let them
inside had the gray embroidered gear patches of the Engineering Division sewn
onto the sleeves of their uniforms.

Next to the front door was a burnt-out access card slider
with a shattered screen and a numerical keypad. Lieutenant Larabee gave the
door four sharp raps, and the metal gave four heavy
clangs
in return. The
door opened a few seconds later.

“Come in, gentlemen,” said the man on the other side. He was
clean-cut and built of average stock, with a little extra around the edges and
a head of thick, full gray hair. He wore handmade glasses with polished lenses,
and a white longcoat. “Commissar Wax. It’s good to see you again.” He took a
moment to regard Merrick, eyeing the lesions on his body with cold
apprehension. “And who might this be?”

“Corporal Merrick Bouchard.” Merrick heard his speech come
out slurred despite his best attempt at poise.

“To what do I owe… the pleasure of this visit?”

The Commissar spoke on Merrick’s behalf. “I’m not sure, Hank.
Strange things are happening. The city’s on high alert. The folks who came into
town the other day have become even more violent and dangerous. Our Corporal
here is one of them, though he swears he’s on our side, and not theirs. He
wants to see the power station. I’ve got forty men here ready to restrain him
if he tries doing any damage to our precious experiment.”

“As you say, Commissar.” Hank stepped aside to let them in.

The top floor of the bunker was nothing more than a single
metal room with a marble floor and an elevator on each side. A long staircase
descended past several landings on its way into the belly of the station.

“He is aware that the elevators don’t work, of course,” Hank
said, gesturing toward Merrick’s wheelchair.

Merrick was lacking the patience to be condescended to, or
spoken about as if he wasn’t there.
After tonight, people will know better
than to try
. “I’m aware. You’d better get started if you’re going to carry
me.”

Hank scoffed and began marching down the steps ahead of them.

“We can roll you, and you can feel every bump on the way
down,” said Lieutenant Larabee. “Or you can try to walk.”

“You’re in command of an entire platoon. Have me carried.”

Larabee frowned. “Are you in the habit of giving orders to
your superiors, comrade?”

“I’m still getting used to it,” Merrick shot back.

“I’d watch it, if I were you.”

“If I were you, I’d be kinder to the dway who’s about to save
the city north. Unless you’d like me to remember your name the next time you’re
hit by a ganger’s spike or a nomad’s sword. If so, I can arrange for my own
transportation.”

Larabee gave him a dark look, then summoned two soldiers to
carry him.

Pilot Wax watched with amusement as the soldiers propped
Merrick’s arms over their shoulders and lifted him out of the wheelchair.
“You’re either going to do something amazing to impress me, or you’re going to
die down there,” said the Commissar. “I’ll make sure of it.”

“I’ve been a Scarred Comrade my whole adult life,” said
Merrick. “And this is the first time I can say with absolute certainty that
something amazing is about to happen.”

They carried him down flight after flight of stairs, hitting
each landing in quick stride with the force of the entire platoon around them.
Kugh and Coker stayed close, poised to help him if his bearers lost their grip
or their footing. As they descended, Merrick noticed that there wasn’t a torch
lit among them; not a single lamp, candle, or sconce on the walls. The light
was coming from the ceilings, a faint glow so cold it was almost blue. One of
the panels was loose, and he saw a long translucent tube in the recessed cavity
above.
The electricity is already on
.

The sound of falling water grew from a dull rumble to a
deafening roar as they neared the end of the marble staircase. A floor of
natural stone opened into a high cavern with steel arches built into the
ceiling to support the glassed-in structure at the top. Men in white longcoats
watched the flow of the clear water that spilled over the side of a high steel
gate and tumbled into the deep pool in front of them. A set of stairs wound
around the back of the rock face, where stray drops from the waterfall had made
the steps wet and slick. A thin mist dappled Merrick’s skin. It was refreshing,
and the chill made him shiver awake and blink in the dim light.

“It’s the first electricity we’ve had in years,” Pilot Wax
shouted over the din. “We got the first turbines working upstream about a week
ago, after years of design and development. It took a long time just to locate
the right components. We had to build just about everything by hand.”

“Why not use the old HydroPyre station as a starting place for
trying to generate power?” Lieutenant Larabee asked.

“The HydroPyre station isn’t underground, so it’s vulnerable
to the starwinds. All our work could’ve been wiped out in a second. If we can
get this system to generate enough power to feed even a small section of the
city north, life here will soon be better for everyone. We’ll be able to start
producing goods in ways we never could before. So far, that seems a long way
off. We’ve barely managed to generate enough power to turn the lights on in
this station. We can harvest some electricity from the water coming through
here, but not enough, and we have no way to pump it back up to the top and create
a stronger flow. If we could, the yield might be much higher.”

Hank the technician stood watching the Commissar, impatient.
“What did you come down here for?” he asked.

“Where are the turbines?” Merrick asked.

Wax looked at him, and he felt forty other pairs of eyes join
the Commissar’s.

“Upstream,” said Hank.

“I need to see them.”

The technician climbed the staircase and disappeared behind
the rock face. Wax followed, and they carried Merrick up after him. Merrick’s
shoulders ached and his head was foggy. Every step his bearers took reminded
him of a different one of his wounds. They passed through the control room,
where the white-coats paid them little mind, and exited through a different
door into a higher chamber. Six gigantic cylinders were rotating in gentle
synchrony as the water spun them like slow paddle wheels. The room was warmer
than the cavern below, and a hot metallic smell was in the air.

“These are the turbines,” said Hank. “The water coming in
from the springs further up gets routed through these channels we’ve created
for it, where it flows along and spins these wheels as it goes by. The boxes
at the top here take the friction generated and—”

“Take me to where the electricity is.”

“Where it…
is
?” Hank asked, confused.

“Where you store it, once it’s been generated.”

“There’s no storing it. Either it gets used, or it doesn’t.”

Merrick was losing his will to stay awake, along with his temper.
“I need to touch voltage,” he said. He felt everyone’s eyes on him again.

“That’s crazy. You’ll die,” said Coker Reed.

“Bouchard, don’t be a whacko,” said Kugh. “You gotta go back
to the infirmary and get patched up. You’re so delirious, you don’t know what
you’re saying.”

The lightning will restore you
. Raithur’s words were
clearer than any others, and Merrick intended to put those words to the test. He
shrugged free of his bearers and stood under his own weight. He almost went
down after his first step, but when they tried to grab him again he held them
away.

“Corporal Bouchard, your friend is right, you know,” Wax
said. “You
will
die if you touch voltage. Electricity is not something
to be toyed with.”

Merrick tossed the Commissar a glance before addressing Hank.
“Voltage,” he said. “Show me.”

“The power lines are inside these tubes,” said Hank,
indicating the metal pipes snaking away from each of the turbines. “They link
up to the transformer boxes and are carried out through those wires up there.”

Merrick stumbled forward, pushing himself into a slow trudge
toward the closest transformer box.
The lightning will restore you
. The
words rang in his head, over and over, a cadence that drove him onward.

“You’re a dead man if you’re planning to go through with
this, Corporal,” he heard Pilot Wax say. “If this is some kind of trick, or an
act of sabotage like I warned you about, you ought to think again. You so much
as blink the wrong way, and I’ll see to it that you don’t walk out of this room
alive.”

I’ve already walked away from worse
, Merrick would’ve
said, if he hadn’t been so busy urging his legs to move and forcing his eyes to
stay open.
The lightning will restore you
.

“Lieutenant, you now have command of your men,” said Wax.

“Platoon,” Larabee shouted. “Make ready to fire.”

Merrick heard the
whoosh
of guns being raised, the
huck-chuck
of bolts sliding home, the
click
of safeties being thumbed off.

The transformer was a tall box of flat gray metal with coils
jutting from the top like bug antennae. Merrick had to stand on his tiptoes and
press himself against the side of the box to reach the nodes. The audible hum
of electricity melded with the churning of the turbines, and he could feel the
nodes buzzing in his chest as he lifted the outer insulation to expose the live
wiring beneath.

He stretched both hands out over the coils, inches away from
death or deliverance, and felt the rush of raw adrenaline coursing through him.
He was so close now that the hair on his arms was standing up like a thousand
soldiers at attention. He forgot his pain, forgot his plight, forgot about the
men who lay dying in infirmary beds horizons away. He forgot about the forty
guns trained on his back and the white coats staring down through the high
window. The only two things in the room were himself and the power, and there
was nothing between them but the space of a small movement.

In the absence of all else, Merrick saw his mother’s face. He
heard her voice. He didn’t remember what she looked like or how it sounded when
she spoke, but he knew it was her. She was there, and she whispered to him. She
spoke to him of her sadness, and a regret all her own. It was as if she’d laid
those regrets out like an outfit on a bed, to show him what they meant, so he
would never find the same things for himself. His life was a casualty of her
selfishness, and now there was nothing left but the lives she’d left behind.
Not just his life, his mother said. There were others, too. Others he didn’t
know, and that he might never know. He was meant for more; meant to make the
right decisions where she failed. Now that he could change everything, he couldn’t
turn away from the gift she’d given him. Not if he wanted to. Not if it took
everything he had.

Lightning
, Raithur had said. That was how it felt, the
instant Merrick’s hands grasped the coils. Like lightning bolts shooting
through him, sprinting up his arms and engulfing his chest and quaking in his
eyeballs like the shudder of a fast train. His body went stiff as a wood plank,
every muscle tightened to the last fiber. The soft glowing lights in the
chamber flickered and surged at the interruption. This was power, and it hurt
more than any heartache he’d ever felt. He began to discern the Commissar’s
voice over the rattling in his brain.

“Lieutenant, hand me your rifle. Second Platoon, stand down.”

There was a rush, and a flurry of movement.

“Coffing shit… he’s turning black as burnt sausage,” someone
said.

“He’s still not dead,” said someone else.

“I’m putting him out of his misery,” came Pilot Wax’s voice
again.

There was a moment of interminable silence, followed by a
pair of gunshots. Merrick was shoved to the side, and one of his hands came
free of the coils. He held on tight with the other, unable to feel anything
else. When he turned his head, everything in the room was blurred and shaking
like an earthquake. Two more gunshots sounded. Two more hard blows knocked him
away from the transformer. His knees folded, and he slumped to the floor.

His whole body was humming. White tendrils curled up from his
skin; whether smoke or steam, he couldn’t say. He tried to move, expecting the
same stabs of pain he’d been feeling since he woke up in the pile of corpses at
the jailhouse. But there was no pain. There was only the memory of it, a vague
recollection of the places that had burned and itched and stung. When he found
he could move without trouble, he took a breath to test his insides. Either he
was too numb from the shock to feel anything, or there
was
no pain.

As he looked down at himself, his skin began to fade from asphalt-black
to a deep red, then a bright glowing pink, and finally, to a warm tan color. Even
his hands regained their normal coloring, all the way out to the fingertips.
The only sign that he’d been through anything at all was that his fingernails
were still missing.

He clambered to his feet. Before, there had been holes in
him; gashes where he could see the meat and fat and bones inside. Now there was
fresh skin, though it was hairless and tougher than the rest, like the scar
tissue that formed over old wounds. Even the places where the Commissar’s
bullets had struck him were glazed over with tough, smooth fibrosis. He felt
the sites of his rejuvenated wounds to make sure they were real. It was all
there.
He
was all there.

When Merrick looked up, every soul in the room and the glass
control cage above was staring at him in stunned silence. The heat inside him
was undeniable now; he could feel it lying in wait, alive and yearning. There
was no stopping him now.