Jeremy Robinson - SecondWorld

Vesely had saved their lives.

“What happened?” Pale Horse asked as he freed himself from the harness.

“Is maglev train,” Vesely said. “Magnets hold train above track. It hovers. No friction.”

Pale Horse rubbed his neck. The rapid acceleration had yanked his head hard to the side. “That’s why we were moving like a bat outta Hell?”

Vesely answered with a nod. “Emergency brake cut power to magnets. Train fell. Friction stopped us.”

“Did more than that,” Miller said, smelling smoke. He walked to the doors and had to force them open with his hands. Two men in red uniforms approached quickly. One held a fire extinguisher. Before they arrived, Miller stepped out of the car and did his best to look pissed. Vesely and Pale Horse followed.

“What happened?” asked one of the men, while the other blasted the smoking base of the subway car with the fire extinguisher.

“This piece of shit malfunctioned,” Pale Horse said.

Vesely backed up the claim. “I had to use the emergency brake.”

“That’s not possible, I—”

Miller drew his sound-supressed sidearm and shot the man in the forehead. The silent cough of the weapon was drowned out by the hiss of the fire extinguisher. The man putting out the fire had no idea his partner had been killed.

Miller quickly scanned the area. A large door that looked like it had been taken from a bank vault was the only exit. It was currently closed. A security panel to the right had a numbered keypad and palm reader.

“How will we get through?” Vesely whispered.

The door opened from the other side. Three more men dressed in red coveralls and carrying an assortment of toolboxes entered the terminal.

They saw the dead man right away, but before they could retreat, Miller and Vesely shot all three. The door tried to close, but stopped against the body of a man who’d fallen in the doorway. The heavy motorized door persisted, squeezing the man’s body. Pale Horse ran for the door, but before he could reach it, the door started moving again, and this time, didn’t stop until it was securely closed.

Blood poured from the lower half of the man’s severed body, pooling around the door.

“Oh my God, what happened!” shouted the man with the fire extinguisher.

He ran to the severed legs, dropping the extinguisher. “What happened!” he shouted again, and looked to Miller. That’s when he saw his dead partner and Miller’s gun aimed at his face.

The man’s hands shot up, which Miller took as a good sign. He wanted to live.

“What’s your name?” Miller asked. He walked toward the man, keeping the gun leveled at his head the whole time.

The man cringed and tilted his head away from Miller. “Ch-Charlie!”

“Charlie,” Miller said, his voice calm. “Would you mind opening this door for me?”

“Coming here wasn’t my idea,” Charlie said. “It’s my wife. She was going to take my daughter without me. I had to come. Had to play along.”

“ Charlie, ” Miller said, putting a little vitriol in his voice. “If you open the door, I promise I won’t shoot you.”

“Or k-kill me?”

Charlie was quick.

“Or kill you.”

Charlie nodded his head and shuffled his way around the pool of blood, stopping once he reached the security controls.

“What’s the number sequence?” Miller asked.

“Three, seven, seven, six, two, zero, pound,” Charlie replied, and then punched in the numbers. When he was done, the hand scanner lit up.

“Is that number code just for you?” Miller asked.

“For everyone in maintenance,” Charlie said. “The handprint checks against maintenance IDs. We can go anywhere but Security.”

“If the handprint isn’t in the maintenance database?” Pale Horse asked.

“I—I don’t know,” Charlie said. “Oh my God, you’re not going to cut off my hand, are you?”

The handprint screen turned from blue to green. The door unlocked and swung open.

“No, Charlie,” Miller said. “We’re not.” Then he clubbed the man in the back of the head, knocking him unconscious. He quickly bound the man’s hands and feet with plastic zip-tie cuffs and left him on the floor. He wouldn’t be sounding any alarms.

Careful not to step in the blood, the three men entered the space beyond. Using the two dead men like logs in a river, they leapt over the vast pool of blood left by the top half of the severed man’s body.

The door closed behind them. They were in a small, sealed-off, stark white room. A glass door on the far side was labeled AIR LOCK in reverse. A momentary increase in pressure popped Miller’s ears. The glass door slid open.

A stark white hallway led straight ahead, lit from above by rows of bright white LED lights. More framed propaganda lined the walls. Miller could imagine that just a short while ago this hallway was filled with Aryan refuges seeking shelter from the oxygen purge that would bring about their utopian SecondWorld. But the hallway was spotless. No trace of human presence remained. Somebody runs a tight ship, he thought.

At the end of the one-hundred-foot-long hallway, it opened into a fifty-foot-wide waiting area. The trio stopped, facing a line of ten elevator doors. Benches and small tables lined the walls. Stacks of pamphlets sat on the tables. The posters on the walls were informational, rather than propaganda, featuring pictures of the facility’s insides, which looked more like a five-star hotel than a secret underground Nazi base.

A large brass sign over the elevator doors read ARCHE 001.

“Arche?” Miller said.

“German for ‘ark,’” Vesely explained.

“As in Noah’s Ark?” Pale Horse asked.

“I think so,” Vesely said, then pointed to the right-side wall. “Look.”

A wall-sized diagram revealed the facility’s basic layout. A spiraling atrium made up the structure’s core; thirty stories down, each level tapering down toward the bottom. Doors lined the spiraling ramp, which was labeled “General Population Quarters.” A large room at the bottom was vaguely labeled “Security and Control.” The message was clear: you don’t need to be here.

Pale Horse pointed to a yellow arrow with text inside that read “You Are Here.” It showed the long hallway and the railcar terminal behind them. “I think they had a mall designer put this thing together.”

Above the terminal were several other large chambers that branched out and away from the central core, but some were colored yellow, some green, and some red. It’s all color-coded, Miller thought, like the crews on an aircraft carrier . Miller found a color guide at the bottom that revealed each section’s purpose.

Brown—Military

Green—Garden & Seed

Yellow—Menagerie

Red—Maintenance

Blue—Security

White—General Population

Using the color code as a guide, Miller found two different hangar bays, one near the surface, which looked like it could service planes like the F-16s they encountered. But the other descended straight down into the ground and opened up into a large cylindrical chamber.

Vesely noted Miller’s attention on the oddly-shaped hangar. “For foo fighters,” he said. “For Bell.”

Miller understood. They had flying craft that could take off vertically without a runway. He shook his head. The sci-fi bullshit was a little too much to swallow sometimes. He didn’t doubt its existence anymore. He just wished the UFOs actually belonged to a benevolent alien species.

It was all very interesting, but Miller already knew where they needed to go, Security and Control. If there was some way to stop the ongoing worldwide attack from this location, it would be there. He was about to lay out his simple plan when he heard the clacking of fingers on a computer keyboard.