Authors: Dennis Liggio
"Mikkel!" said Szandor, turning his head to see me lagging behind.
"I'm fine, keep going!" I gasped, not wanting my brother to slow down for me. His pause already made him next to last in our panicked train of survival.
We ran through this shorter tunnel before coming out in an incredibly large chamber. The others had paused just a moment to shine some lights and get their bearings before running, so I had a glimpse of the fullness of this space. This chamber dwarfed any others we had been in. At least a few hundred feet across, this round chamber looked to be a gigantic basin or holding tank. If there was a ceiling it was high above us. If there was a floor, it was far below in the unfathomable darkness. A metal grate bridge was the only way across the room. And it wasn't a big one. The black metal crosswalk was maybe eight feet across. Water fell in the center of the chamber from pipes on the sides of it, but not a stream, more of a continuous drip.
When I finally made it to the bridge, the others were already running across, their boots making a
clang
whenever they came down on the metal. I didn't stop in my run, catching up to Szandor as we ran for our lives. The ghouls were right behind me; they must have overtaken me on the turn.
Szandor and I sprinted, our boots also slamming down hard on the bridge. Something in that resonance sounded off to me, especially as we reached the middle of the walkway. With my LED light, I could just vaguely see that the metal was less black here and more orange. The ugly orange color of rusted and weakened metal.
Then there was a cascade of events.
First a hot flash and my scar throbbing.
Then my foot coming down hard on something that wasn't as solid as it had been anymore.
Next was the squeal of metal as it bent and tore.
Then the bridge fell out beneath me as my brother, the ghouls directly behind us, and me fell through space.
A Warm Place
Falling is a strange feeling. Without the frame of reference of ground, there's a profound disorientation. There's the rush of the air and that sick feeling in your lower abdomen that says something is really wrong. You might also feel some of these sensations if you jumped or otherwise chose to fall. But when you don't choose, there's panic. Nothing else matters but that panic as you reach out, floundering, trying to do anything to make the fall stop. You cling to the first thing you find. You are looking for that single anchor point, that single solid thing to make the rest of the world make sense.
As ghouls fell into the void below me, I grabbed out wildly. Just swiping in the air for anything I could find, anything that had any solid mass. This should have been impossible. Shock, the vastness of space, not even knowing what I was grabbing at, should have made my hands empty. But maybe there was some intuition in the Bad Feeling I got. Maybe I was just lucky. Though this was such a long shot it seemed like even my luck got lucky.
Somehow I grabbed my brother's boot. I felt the leather, laces, and grime as my arm tensed as much as I could to stop my fall. Then the rest of my body snapped still, pulling at my arm. Pain ripped through me, but I didn't think I dislocated my shoulder. With great effort, I pulled my other arm up to make my hold two-handed. In that moment, nothing mattered more to me than holding onto my brother's boot. I ignored the gunshots, the screeches, the shouts, and even the spears which whizzed past me into the darkness. Only the boot.
The center section of the bridge had collapsed and fallen down. Szandor, who had been right in front of me, had fallen too. He lacked the intuitive warning I received, but my brother's survival instinct has always been extremely strong. Maybe that's his super power. He can survive anything if he gets to complain about it later. When we fell, Szandor had grabbed the end of the dangling catwalk. With a death grip that was trying to ward off... well, death, he held onto that piece of metal. And I held onto his boot.
Szandor shouted and screamed, probably from pain, but he knew he needed to hold on. He was keeping us both alive. But help didn't come immediately. It seemed like the others had other things to take care of first by the sounds of their shouts and shots. So eventually Szandor quieted and just focused on holding on. My brother and I are in good shape, but nobody would ever think of us as super strong. So Szandor holding on while I was dangling from his boot hurt like hell. I know because he told me so later.
And so for a period of time which probably was minutes, I dangled. All the light was above me and I had only my personal LED. But I dangled in a vast void where the darkness was far stronger than the light. I could only see myself and Szandor, who still had his own LED. In the suffocating darkness around us, nothing else was close enough to see. Though I had been distracted by other noises, I hadn't heard the catwalk or ghouls hit bottom. I'm sure they did, but it might have been so far below that the sound had come far after it happened. As soon as I fell, it was like the volume on everything else had been turned down. All that registered in my mind was the void and my brother. I looked down into the deep darkness below me, dangling by the boot of someone dangling by a broken piece of metal and wondered if this was it for me. Were we going to end years of monster hunting by falling to our deaths?
Fear. It's a funny thing being afraid. It's one of the most basic human emotions. It's something we feel with our bodies. Oh, we feel it in our frantic emotions, in the cold locking of our minds, but fear is almost a body emotion. We will shiver, tense, and fill with adrenaline sometimes without even realizing we're afraid. Sometimes we seem almost the last to know we're afraid, our bodies having prepared for fight or flight long before the realization comes to us. And when you can neither fight nor flee, it's something your body and emotions can't deal with. Shutting down is a real danger, as is some type of nervous breakdown. But sometimes, something very different happens.
Have you ever been so afraid, have you ever felt so much fear, that is flipped to its opposite? I stared down into that black abyss, one handgrip and bootlace away from death itself, and was more afraid than I had ever been in my life. And in that moment I felt so much fear, so much more that I could deal with, and was so mind-numbingly afraid that somehow I pushed through it. And on the other side... there was no fear. Instead, I felt something so surprising that I still look back and wonder if it was some hallucination of a dying brain.
I felt love.
It wasn't some torrid passion, it wasn't the starry eyed happiness of finding some you can spend the labors of your heart on. First and foremost, it was peaceful. It was calm and it was caring. My mind immediately went to the feeling I always got from Mom. She'd come home from work, having given eight year old me the responsibility of caring for my six year old brother after school. She'd smile and touch my head, saying, "Good job, Mikkel." It was the love of that touch, the joy of hearing those words, the warmth of someone caring for you more than anything in the world.
And somehow, what I felt was more than that. This was the love and affection you'd receive from a lifelong partner. I bet people who had been married and in love for fifty years felt this. This feeling was big, so big, that it felt larger than anything I'd ever expect from another human being. It was a love I felt in my bones, my skin, in a warmth in my scar that wasn't painful. This was a love that sank down into me and became part of my DNA. Though the intensity eventually faded when I left this place, in a way, it never left me.
Szandor didn't get any of these feelings as he hung on. What he does remember are the whispers. I heard them too. We couldn't make out what they were saying because of so much other noise. But layer upon layer of the soft hissing of whispered words seem to echo up from below us. I don't think it was sinister, but I admit I was in the midst of my love experience and that may have biased me. I don't know where those whispers came from. I can't imagine anyone was down at the bottom nor how whispers could travel up to us when so many other noises were going on. But as long as we both dangled, we heard them.
Eventually, it was all over. Someone started pulling Szandor up, which pulled me along with him. As I was raised, the feeling and the whispers dropped away. I was only half conscious of reality, as if I viewed everything from far away. I felt vaguely like a fish in a fisherman's cooler - they had just opened it up and were pulling us up out of it. I remember feeling hands on me and the world changing orientation as they laid me flat on my back. I looked up into Meat and Delilah's concerned faces. Someone had to pry my hands off of Szandor's boot; I hadn't even been aware that I was still holding onto it.
I breathed, almost unaware how tensed and locked my lungs had been, how my breaths had been shallow ever since I fell. My chest rising and falling, I stared up at their faces and then when they moved away, I looked into the blackness above us as well. I remember hearing Szandor talking loudly about how we dangled, trying to burn off his adrenaline and somehow get back to normalcy. After a while, their attention returned to me.
"I think Mikkel is dead."
"Give him some more time."
"Should we just be sitting here? We scared them off, but the ghouls may be back soon. And in greater numbers."
Perhaps my memory of their exact words was skewed by the event. Someone helped me up. And got me walking. Someone went over the situation with me.
When the catwalk had collapsed, that had put a chasm between the ghouls and my allies. The ghouls were still pissed and began to throw spears. This is where Delilah unshouldered her P90, screamed at the ghouls, and began firing. Diego also started taking shots with his hunting rifle. Meat pulled out his handguns but waited for the opportunity. The ghouls couldn't overrun us due to the gap between us. All they could do was screech at us and throw spears. Even the best spear is nothing compared to a modern firearm, so they ghouls took heavy casualties.
Technically, they could have gotten to us. Around the circular walls of this massive room there was an additional, but much more narrow crosswalk. Only wide enough for one person, it did come around to this side. But it would have taken the ghouls some time, the same time during which Diego could get them on his scope and kill them. Five tried going that way before the ghouls gave up. The shaman ghoul had stayed behind the ghouls - I knew because Diego mentioned how much he tried to get a shot at the shaman and hoping to solve the whole problem by taking out their leadership. Instead, the shaman barked some orders and the remainder of the ghouls broke off, taking their wounded with them.
"Odds are we demoralized them enough that they won't try that again," said someone, I think Meat. "That said, I agree we should get moving. We need to make camp somewhere and this is not it. Let's put at least a little distance between us and this place."
Not far from there we did find a place that seemed perfectly suited for our purposes. This was another cavernous chamber with water flowing through it quickly, like a rapidly moving stream. Large pipes spilled out water from about fifty feet higher than our elevation, luckily not near us. A network of catwalks ran through this room, but there was no solid cement platforms near the bottom, only a network of noisy metal bridges. High above all the other catwalks and the large pipes feeding water into the room was a cement platform that jutted out from the wall. Only a long ladder connected to it, the other end of that ladder ending where catwalks intersected. On that platform was a small building, not larger than a shack. We suspected that it was a maintenance rest station, a supervisor's office from the construction, or perhaps even a radio terminal. Szandor suggested it was an Overseer's Office, because it
oversees
everything. Nobody thought his joke was funny.
Whatever its original purpose, we found the small building trashed. Someone had been through here and stripped everything of value. There was a rotting wooden desk, a small mishmash of what used to be paper documents that were now stuck together after their ink had run from them, and the saddest wooden chair I had ever seen. At Meat's direction, we hauled the rotted furniture out and threw it off the side of the platform into the raging waters below. Szandor was responsible for the chair, which first clattered loudly on a catwalk before then falling into the water, much to everyone's chagrin.
The platform was ideal to all the tactical-minded members of our crew. It had high visibility of all entrances to the chamber. It had only a single way to get to it, which might be a problem for a retreat, but it also meant that we could see and fire upon any ghouls or others that tried to get up here. It was above the raging river, the catwalks, and the pipes into the room, so while it was damp, there wasn't a risk of actually getting wet or encountering falling debris. Besides the lack of a secondary retreat, the only other possible issue was the stability of the platform. We had already seen one set of Avalon's well-made Undersystem engineering failing after all these years, nearly killing my brother and I. But everything about this platform seemed solid.
We knew as we pulled the backpacks off our weary shoulders and started to pull out our gear that we couldn't all fit in the building. Since we had no wounded, it was also obvious who was going to sleep in the little shack. Jericho and Fala took it over without a word and the rest of us couldn't be bothered to complain. Other than having a water-stained roof and some privacy, there really wasn't a lot of advantage to it. The platform around the shack was wide enough that there wasn't any problem with us all setting up tents. Time to rest, a less wet floor, and a safe place were the most valuable things to all of us.
After the tents were setup, Meat designed a watch schedule. At all times through our "night" there would be two people awake. I could see the worth in that; double the set of eyes, extra protection for such things as someone falling asleep "accidentally" or goofing off, and should calamity happen to hit, one of them could guard the ladder while the other could make sure the rest of us woke up to combat the threat.