James Hynes: Kings of Infinite Space

“Motherfucker!” she said, careful to keep her voice low. “What have you done?”

“Callie!” Paul gasped. “It’s okay! This is a dream. This isn’t happening.”

“Then wake up!” she snapped, crouching forward, getting her feet under her. “It may not be happening to you, but it’s sure as hell happening to me!” She glanced around the corner, and Paul followed her gaze. The heap of wriggling men had collapsed in on itself. J.J. was off to one side, stomping angrily in a circle. Colonel was standing, but bent nearly double, gasping and clutching his arm. Olivia Haddock had pulled her gown up to her knees and stripped off her gloves and her homecoming sash, and she was crawling up the slope towards Stanley Tulendij, who lay in the fetal position at the base of the big phallic rock.

“Listen,” said Paul, but Callie whirled on him and said, “The only thing I want to hear from you is how I get out of here.”

Paul met her eyes and nearly burst into hysterical laughter. But he mastered himself and glanced up the aisle, towards the passage where he and Bob Wier and the procession of pale men had entered. Callie started convulsively in that direction, but Paul grabbed her arm. “Not that way,” Paul hissed. “It’s too far, and we’ll get lost.” He glanced up the other aisle, towards the ravenous heap of pale men ripping Bob Wier to shreds. “They’ll know a way to get ahead of us.”

The light in Callie’s eyes nearly flared into panic, but then she looked past him and her eyes focused on the pole ladder at the junction of the aisles. She pulled free of Paul and dashed, crouching, to the ladder. She lifted her head warily over the cube horizon and then started to climb, lifting her knees and placing her feet without looking, her gaze fixed on the pole above her.

“I don’t know where this goes,” Paul hissed, but he had already scrambled after her to the foot of the ladder. Above him Callie’s backside disappeared into the glare of the lights. “Oh boy,” breathed Paul, and he grasped one rung and stepped up onto another and started to climb.

Before he knew it, Paul had risen past the fluorescent fixtures, up into the coils and loops of black wiring. Above him he saw Callie climbing as energetically as a monkey, while below he saw the dusty metal cowls of the lights and, below that, the cubescape laid out like a map, each cubicle fitted with a battered little computer, each desktop covered with neat stacks of paperwork and littered with pens and highlighters and coffee cups. Paul struggled upward, his arms and legs beginning to tremble, and he glanced down the length of the cave and saw the pale men still swarming over the livid scraps of Bob on the floor. Colonel was sitting at one of the folding tables while J.J. bound his arm with a dishtowel; Olivia had propped Stanley Tulendij up into a sitting position and was stroking his large, white forehead with one of her limp, sodden gloves. The pool was still sloshing from side to side; tendrils of steam still wafted from the surface of the water; and in the rippling refractions Paul saw the wreck of the smoker with its legs up like a drowned black dragon.

He looked away, suddenly afraid that his mere gaze would draw other gazes in return. Above him the pole ladder rose into a perfectly round hole drilled into the ceiling, wide enough for a person, the edge of the hole rimmed already with the stumpy beginnings of dripping stalactites. Callie was already ascending into the hole, and Paul’s heart lifted. We’re almost there, he thought, a few more seconds and we’re out of sight. He pulled harder; above him only the dirty soles of Callie’s feet were visible in the hole.

“Callie!” Paul whispered eagerly. “Wait for me!”

Some trick of the cave, some subterranean acoustical freak, caught his whisper and magnified it, and it echoed round the walls of the cavern like a pinball, bounding off the ceiling, ricocheting off the stalactites, reverberating against the walls. All the faces of the homeless men turned as one, like sea anemones, away from the shredded form that had held their attention, and looked up towards the source of the echo. Colonel and J.J. glanced up angrily through the glare of the fluorescent lights. At the base of the pillar, Olivia Haddock leaped to her feet, letting Stanley Tulendij fall over like a sack of meal.

“There they go!” she shrieked. “Bite them! Kill them! Off with their heads!”

With an awful, yearning groan, the pale men leaped up and swarmed down the cave towards the cubicles and the ladder. Colonel jumped up, shoved J.J. aside, and started after them. Paul looked away and climbed frantically towards the hole. Suddenly, Callie’s face loomed out of the darkness. She reached down and grabbed Paul’s arm and hauled him up into the gloom.

“Nice work, jackass,” she said. “Come on.”

PAUL TRIED NOT TO LOOK BACK, and soon they were climbing in near darkness. He glanced down once and saw the distant, dwindling circle of light obscured by wriggling shapes and pale faces looking up at him, so he lifted his gaze to the blackness above and hauled harder. Above him he heard Callie grunting with exertion, and the slap of her feet on the rungs, and the slight ping each rung made when she let go of it. Paul felt warm droplets against his face, and he wasn’t sure if they were the condensation of the tunnel or drops of Callie’s sweat.

“You still there?” she asked once, panting, and Paul could only grunt in return. He had no way of telling how much time had passed or how far they’d climbed; for all he knew they could have been climbing for hours or for five minutes. His cerebellum told him, we can’t be that deep, but his lizard brain told him he would be climbing in the dark for the rest of his life. The thought that the ladder might not go anywhere was too much to bear, so he concentrated on his hands and feet.

“I feel a breeze,” said Callie, and a moment later, his arms and legs shaking with exhaustion, Paul felt it too, first from one direction, then from the other. They were passing side passages in the tunnel, but they both kept climbing. Under his palms and the soles of his feet, Paul thought the ladder vibrated to a more complicated rhythm than that of his and Callie’s ascent, and he thought, too, that he heard sounds from below — the faint ringing of the ladder’s rungs and a steady, bubbling murmur. He didn’t stop to listen.

A moment later the tunnel ended, but the ladder continued. They still climbed in pitch darkness, but the sweating rock walls fell away, and they found themselves climbing through a narrow space that extended into the distance on either side. The reverberation of their efforts — their harsh breathing, the ring of the ladder — made a duller and flatter sound. The air was drier and dustier. Paul felt cobwebs brush his face, and his back scraped against a metal beam and a bristling wad of insulation.

“We’re in a building,” panted Callie. “I think we’re in the wall.”

The soft clang of her feet on the rungs stopped, and Paul stopped when he touched her foot with his trembling, sweaty hand. She caught her breath in the darkness above him. “That better be you,” she said.

“Why are you stopping?” He tightened his hand on her foot.

“We’re at the top.” She fumbled at something in the dark. “There’s a latch, I think.”

Paul looked down; the light at the bottom of the tunnel was a twinkling pinprick now, and the ringing and murmuring he wasn’t certain he’d heard before was perfectly clear now. “For chrissake, just yank it,” he said.

She grunted above him; something rattled violently. “Got it!” she cried, and at the same instant an avalanche of crushed and empty soda cans cascaded down the ladder, rattling off Paul’s head and fingers, and clanging against the ladder. Sticky little droplets of warm soda pattered against his forehead. Paul hunched his shoulders and ducked his head until the cans clattered down the ladder, then he looked up into a dim light to see Callie hoisting herself through a little square hole. He glanced down one last time to see the fading flash of crumpled aluminum as the cans tumbled into darkness, then he raced up the last few rungs. There was a hollow thud as Callie knocked away the cardboard box over the trapdoor, and Paul put his palms on the cold tile on either side of the trapdoor and levered himself out. Callie reached into the hole and tried to pull the door shut, but there was no handle on the upward side.