J. Mitchell - The Severed Tower

Devoid of any features, with eyeless faces of smooth, oily darkness. Strange hands rose up, reaching for the girls with impossibly long fingers of putrid—

Mira screamed. Both girls flipped their lights back on.

The hallway again. Dirty and crumbling, but empty. There was nothing there now.

“What the hell was that? ” Ravan shouted, aiming her rifle all around.

“We’re in trouble,” Mira said, icy terror beginning to form in her stomach. “Put the gun away, it’s useless. Get behind me. Back to back. We have to keep shining our lights at everything in our field of view. We’re going to move down the hall for the door at the end.”

“What for?” Ravan planted her back against Mira’s.

“Because we need to find a way out of here right now.”

They started moving, shining their lights all around.

“Those things—they looked like people, ” Ravan said.

“This place is flooded with Dark Energy,” Mira said, shining her light everywhere in front of her. The floor, the ceiling, the walls where each met. “It’s an Anomaly. A bad one. It’s why we’re dizzy, why it’s getting hard to think. It’s changing our molecular structure, which means it’s messing with our brains.”

“That doesn’t tell me what those things were!”

“They’re called Void Walkers. They’re… impressions, sort of, all that’s left of the consciousness of whoever came in here before us.”

“You’re saying that’s what’s going to happen to us? ” Ravan almost turned around, but Mira shoved her back in place. They had to keep moving, had to keep thinking.

“Yes,” Mira said. “Just keep looking everywhere with your light. They can’t do anything if you’re looking at them.”

“Why?”

“There’s something in chaos theory that says things don’t actually exist until you look at them.”

“That’s crazy,” Ravan said tightly.

“It is what it is! I don’t understand it, I’m not a scientist, all I know is Dark Energy works the opposite. It only exists when you’re not looking at it.”

It took a while for Ravan to process that concept. “So—we just, what? Keep looking at everything and we’ll be fine?”

“Until we can’t think straight anymore,” Mira replied, “and we’re just two vegetables sitting on the floor. Then they’ll come for us.”

“I am not ending up like that. How much time?”

“Funny thing. Technically, we should already be gone.”

“Why?”

“Dark Energy works fast. It’s created by any preexisting source of radiation. I don’t know why, but if you bring an outside source of radiation into a field of it, it acts like a dampener. It slows down the effect.”

“You’re carrying something radioactive! ” Ravan fumed.

“It’s a long story. I need it for something important. And don’t complain. We’d already be like those things if we didn’t have it. At least now we’ve got a shot.”

“ How much time? ” Ravan asked again.

“Half an hour, maybe less.” It was true. The plutonium’s radiation wouldn’t hold off the Dark Energy for long. Mira just hoped the exit was on the other side of this door. If it wasn’t…

They reached it, and it was as she thought, reinforced steel. A card reader rested to the side of it, probably for allowing entry, but they wouldn’t have to worry about that. It was already yawning open.

Mira opened it the rest of the way and moved in, shining her light everywhere, with Ravan at her back.

While the first rooms had been interesting, they were more or less mundane, and they provided no clues to the underground structure’s function. This new room changed all that.

The walls were lined with old computer consoles covered in dust. Half the monitors were dark and dead; the rest were either flashing on and off or showing frozen images of error messages. Three chairs sat at different places at the computers, designating individual work stations. On the wall, just visible under a coating of grime, was a huge electronic map of the United States, with small, pinprick lights embedded all through it. Most of them were dark and lifeless now, like the cities and places they used to represent, but the occasional one still flickered weakly under the dust. All of it bathed the room in an eerie, flashing, and pulsing hue of dim color.

The wall across from them held something even more unexpected. Windows. A whole row of them. It was too dark to see what was on the other side, but a door was inset next to them.

Mira was having a hard time processing it all. Was the dizziness back? Honestly, she couldn’t tell now. She wasn’t sure what “normal” was anymore. She shook her head, tried to think as they moved.

“It’s some kind of control room,” Mira managed, “but for what?” Keep reasoning, she told herself. Keep thinking. She moved to the nearest computer bank and wiped away years of dust with her hand.

Ravan eyed it all strangely. “Where are we?”

Mira’s head swam. She lowered the light to rub her temples.

Something moved on the other side of the glass and she instantly raised the light back up. There was nothing now.

Mira swallowed. “Ravan. Keep your light up, we have to concentrate.”

There was nothing near to help them, which meant only one place left to go. They stepped through the door in the wall of windows. The room beyond was circular—its walls curving outward, well beyond the reach of their lights. Wherever they were, it was huge.

“This… Dark Energy,” Ravan began, her light shining up. “You said radiation creates it?”

Mira tried to think, to push through the fog in her head. “Any source of radiation that was here before the Strange Lands would create a fountain of the stuff. A generator, scientific instruments, even a microwave would—”

“I think it might be a little bigger than that.”

Mira followed Ravan’s light upward. Something massive filled the center of the chamber. At first she only saw dusty metal, painted white and black. Whatever it was stretched up to what must be the giant, circular door in the ground they had seen earlier, more than a hundred feet above them.

Mira eventually recognized it. “Great,” she said in a whisper. “It’s a missile silo.”

And they were in its launch tube. What was in front of them was very unmistakably a giant missile, resting stoically where it had been placed who knew how long ago, towering upward toward the door in the ceiling. Ravan’s light found the USAF logo on its side, and it became clear that what they were looking at was just the top of the missile, only its warhead. The rest of the thing’s girth lay below them, in some deeper chamber.

“Okay. We know what it is. Now how do we get out? ” Ravan asked, shining her light all around. There were no stairs, no ladders, nothing that would allow them to reach that huge door. Climbing the missile wasn’t an option either. It was sheer and smooth, and there were no handholds.

Mira tried to think, but it was getting harder. Her thoughts formed like ice in a—

Something moved back where they had been. They shined their lights inside.

Nothing.

“Jesus…” Ravan said through clenched teeth. “We gotta think quick, I’m starting to fade here.”

So was Mira. She forced herself to concentrate. An idea occurred to her. An unlikely one, but it was something. She moved back into the control room and Ravan followed. Together they brushed off the computers and knobs and dials, revealing the different controls: FUEL PRIME; TARGET ACQUISITION OVERRIDE; WARMUP PROCEDURE; LAUNCH CYCLES; ENGINE A, B, C. GO/NO GO. All archaic, lost terms from a technological world that no longer existed. Mira’s attention moved over them as she looked for something that stood out to her. Eventually she found it.