Brad Thor - The Athena Project

Two cages later lay a little girl’s doll. There had been animals here all right , she thought, but the animals had been the ones outside the cages. She could think of nothing worse than torturing a child. The anguish people had been forced to suffer at the hands of the Nazis was beyond imagination.

At the end of the rows of cages, they passed through an open doorway and into a communal shower. As they looked up at the large shower heads protruding from the ceiling, they all were thinking the same thing. Had this shower been used to gas prisoners? There was no telling. All Gretchen Casey knew was that the more she saw, the sicker to her stomach she was becoming.

To their left was a large, metal door. It was hung on a track with pulleys and a cable that ran into a conduit and disappeared into the wall at the far end of the room. Rhodes tried to slide the door open, but it wouldn’t budge. Unlike the other doors they had encountered, this one seemed to have rusted to such a degree that it couldn’t be moved, not even with all three women working on it at once.

They gave up and walked to the end of the shower room. A small flight of tiled steps led up to a door, which they were able to open.

On the other side, they found themselves in a wide, semicircular room reminiscent of an airport control tower. Desks, which appeared to have held all sorts of equipment at one point, were pressed up against large glass windows. It seemed to have been designed as an observation station. But designed to observe what?

Casey walked over to one of the windows and tried to use her flashlight to illuminate what was on the other side. It was no good. The thick glass acted like a mirror and bounced most of the light right back in her eyes.

Using her flashlight to guide her, she walked over to the door at the far end. She had no idea what kind of experiments the Nazis had been working on, but there was something about the scope and layout of this observation station that told her whatever they were observing from here was very important.

Opening the door, she felt a cold rush of air from the other side. She raised her flashlight and cast its beam into the darkness. What she saw was amazing.

The observation station was built overlooking a giant cavern. Looking up, she saw that the ceiling was almost entirely covered with some sort of crystal formations. As she played her flashlight across it, the light was refracted into a prism of colors. The ceiling was like a giant disco ball.

“You girls should see this,” Casey said over her shoulder.

There was a viewing platform underneath the observation room’s window and she stepped out onto it. She was joined by Rhodes and Ericsson, who also cast their flashlight beams upward.

“What is this place?” asked Julie.

“I don’t know.”

They swept their flashlights in a wide arc and the walls of the cavern, just like the ceiling, burst to life, refracting the light in all directions.

“What’s down there?” Ericsson asked, shining her light down below.

It was hard to see, but about thirty feet down was a large platform or stage of some sort.

Rhodes had already walked to the other end of the viewing platform. “I’ve found some stairs over here,” she called out.

When Gretchen and Julie joined her, they saw that the rusted door they couldn’t budge from the inside fed to a ramp of some sort that led down in the same direction as the stairs. It must have been used for moving equipment.

Megan, who always preferred to be on point, stepped onto the stairs and began to lead the way down.

The stairs had been carved out of the sheer rock wall. There was a railing, but as it had been submerged for God only knew how long, she didn’t put too much faith in it. Instead, she chose her steps carefully, as did Ericsson and Casey. They were less concerned with where they were than where they were going.

With their flashlights lighting up the stone steps, they took them one at a time. It wasn’t until they reached the very bottom that they paused to look around.

Casey was the first to see them. Rhodes was the first to choke back a scream.

Despite all the mayhem they had seen as operators, nothing could have prepared them for what they found. It was beyond horrific; beyond grotesque.

Human skeletons protruded from the rock walls surrounding the platform. It was as if they had been fused with the cavern itself. The mouths were wide open in silent screams.

“What did those bastards do?” asked Rhodes.

Casey was having trouble speaking. Her heart rate had spiked and it was all she could do to keep things under control. She was plenty tough, but this went beyond rational explanation. Her mind was screaming for her to get out of there. She was scared, but she was also in charge. She had to control her fear and not let it control her.

“Jules, are you okay?” she asked, reaching out and putting her hand reassuringly on Ericsson’s arm.

Julie nodded, slowly.

“What the hell did those bastards do?” Rhodes repeated.

“I have no idea,” replied Casey.

“People just don’t grow out of walls.”

“I know.”

“So what happened? What the hell happened?”

“Megan, you’ve got to calm down,” said Casey.

“What do you mean, calm down ? Look at these skeletons. Look at their mouths all open. It’s like they were alive when this happened. This is beyond horrifying.”

She was right. The word shocking didn’t even come close to describing what they were looking at. There were skeletons of adults as well as children. What the hell had Hutton sent them into?

“I’m going to video all of this and then we’re going to get the hell out of here,” said Casey, asserting her command. “You two can go back upstairs if you want. You don’t have to stay down here.”

“No,” replied Ericsson, pulling herself together. “We don’t split up.”

“She’s right,” said Rhodes. “We stay together.”

“Good,” answered Casey.

After filming all of the bones protruding from the walls, she focused on the platform itself. There were two discolored patterns in the cement where some large object or objects had once sat. Looking more closely, she could see that those objects had been bolted down.

Casey shot several close-ups of the marks and then said, “Okay, that’s it. We’re getting out of here.”

They were pretty far below ground, but she tried to raise Alex Cooper over the radio anyway. As the quartz was so well known for amplifying radio signals, she thought it was worth a try. Cooper didn’t answer. Casey decided to leave it until they got back up into the tunnel and beyond the airlock.

Everyone was shaken by what they had seen. It was a shock to all of them. Despite Rhodes’s love of being on point, Gretchen ordered her to fall back. Casey would lead her team out.

They were cautious, but they mounted the steps a lot faster than they had coming down. Though they had witnessed something beyond their worst collective nightmare, all of them had a very bad feeling that the true evil of the facility had not entirely been revealed to them.

“By the way,” said Rhodes as they got to the observation platform, “there’s no way in hell I’m sleeping in that hotel tonight.”

“I agree,” added Ericsson. “I say we get in the car, drive, and don’t stop driving until the sun comes up.”

Casey was with them. “I’m all for that,” she said, as she pressed on.

They moved through the observation station, out the door, and down the short flight of stairs into the shower room. From the shower room, they moved past the cages, and though Casey didn’t want to, she allowed her eyes to be drawn to the little girl’s doll again.