Return of the Ancients Read online

  Barkin is going to pay for this, he thought, and jogged towards the bulge, leaning in close to the mechanism and waving his arms.

  *****

  ‘Moving into ignition lockdown.’ The room fell into silence. Even the chattering students were silenced by the suspense as they watched the screens.

  A computer-generated voice counted down from thirty seconds: Twenty-nine–twenty-eight–twenty-seven–twenty-six . . .

  One of the technicians was on his feet pointing. ‘Wha . . . what the . . . there’s a kid in there!’

  The room descended into shouting, panic and confusion. Beescomb went as white as a sheet as he recognised the figure on the screen. His mouth opened and closed, but no words came.

  Twenty–nineteen–eighteen–seventeen . . .

  ‘Shut it down, shut it down!’

  Barkin smirked at the rear of the observation room and nudged Otis. Harper grabbed and lifted one of the technicians from his seat, taking control of his command board. The scientist’s voice had gone up several octaves as he screamed over his shoulder, ‘Abort, abort! For God’s sake, abort!’

  Five–four–three–two . . .

  The synthetically calm computer voice intoned, ‘Laser firing commencing.’

  The room froze as if time had stopped. There was no sound or movement as everyone watched the screens. Edward held his breath.

  The photonic diamond glowed, turning the chamber, and their screens an infernal red as the particles, which were travelling at a fraction under the speed of light, were given an extra kick by the laser.

  On the screen, they could see Arn stop waving and turn to look at the bulge. The screen blurred slightly, like it was recording something behind a gauze veil. Then Arn blurred as the veil thickened and became more like a waterfall of oil.

  Edward sucked in a breath in horror. Arn seemed to bend unnaturally for a moment, his body distorting, his mouth opening in a silent scream of pain and confusion. The Hadean red glow of the diamond, coupled with Arn’s horrific contortions, made it a scene straight from the pit of Hell.

  The display went black.

  The only sound Edward heard was Becky screaming Arn’s name. She actually cares after all, he thought with surprise.

  The screen came back on.

  Arn was gone.

  Chapter 4

  Weird Things for Company

  Excruciating pain, dizziness and nausea. Light, then swirling colours, then darkness. Arn fell with a thump into mud and shards of something hard.

  He blinked. There was nothing in front of his eyes. He sat up and pushed the heels of his hands into them and rubbed hard. He opened them again – there wasn’t the faintest ray or particle of light. His head hurt, reminding him of the time he had spent too long at the beach and got too much sun on the back of his neck.

  It was like he was still locked back in the storeroom. Or have I gone blind? he thought dismally. He held out a hand, and waved it around – nothing.

  He sniffed. There was a rank dampness, and something else unpleasant. He held his breath and strained to hear – there was faint dripping coming from somewhere far away. Arn stood and reached out again. He took a few steps, groping in the darkness like a blind man, and then his hand touched a wall. It was slick with slime.

  He flicked his fingers. ‘Yecch.’

  Arn stepped sideways and his head banged into something metallic, showering him with flakes of what he assumed was rust. He swore loudly, and after the echo died away, he heard something in the distance – a movement, like a shuffling or dragging.

  ‘Hello?’ No response. The noise stopped. ‘Hello, anybody there?’

  It started again; this time it was closer. There came a soft murmur.

  Arn remembered the cigarette lighter in his pocket, and pulled it free, frantically spinning the strike wheel. A split second of spark showed he was in a long tunnel. Plenty of debris, but he could navigate it.

  The soft murmur came again, followed by a sound like a child giggling.

  ‘Who . . .?’

  He was breathing hard through his mouth, and felt his heart thumping in his chest. The shuffling was closer, and he spun the lighter’s wheel again.

  He shrieked, and fell back. There had been a ghastly face, all milky eyes and chisel-shaped teeth looming before him. The body looked slimy and colourless, but thankfully it had shrunk from the spark.

  He had fallen into a puddle of slimy water, and he frantically spun the flint wheel again and again, trying to keep up a continuous flashing of sparks. There was a scuttling and splashing from further away in the darkness, but thankfully there were no more things being illuminated in front of him.

  ‘Must have been a wild dog.’ Arn spoke this thought aloud, simply to take comfort from hearing his own voice. It didn’t work. He sounded scared and his voice was about several octaves higher than normal.

  Once more he spun the small wheel, another spark of light and this time a small red glow flashed back at him from the ground ahead. He scrambled forward, and felt around in the dark muck. His hand closed on a cylindar about three inches long, smooth, and strangely warm. He flicked the lighter again, and in the split second flash he saw the red glass-like rod.

  ‘What the hell?’ It was Fermilab’s diamond. ‘How did you get here? What’s going on?’ From some reason, Arn thought he’d be in real trouble now. He shoved the finger-length stone in his pocket, and wiped his hands on his shirt.

  His constant flicking finally encouraged the last squeeze of gas to erupt in a tiny flame, and the bright light made him squint. In the seconds of light he had, he saw that the tunnel went on for miles, but he also saw that the small tongue of flame was bending – a breeze.

  ‘Thank you God,’ he whispered. ‘If air is coming in, then I’m damn well going out.’ Arn scrambled to his feet.

  His thumb ached and he bet he had a blister forming, but he kept flicking the wheel. He moved as quickly through the damp tunnels as the debris would allow. He only slowed to glance over his shoulder when he heard a strange shuffling coming from behind him. It was impossible to see in the inky blackness, but he increased his speed, knowing that if the flint wore out on the lighter, he may never find a way out . . . and he had a feeling that the thing didn’t need light to see him.

  Arn had been changing hands to share the load on his thumbs, but after what felt like hours of trudging through the thick darkness, the wheel spun without sparking. No matter what he did, it refused to do anything more than spin uselessly. The little orange lighter had given up.

  Orange?

  He’d forgotten . . . it was orange. He didn’t know how long he had been travelling underground, but he now also noticed that he could make out the dim shapes of the debris covering the floor. Light, he marvelled. He dropped the lighter and started to run, leaping over fallen rocks, decayed steel girders, and in one instance what he thought looked like a weird rib cage.

  He eventually came to a shaft of blue light falling from the ceiling across a tumble of boulders blocking the tunnel.

  He pulled in long ragged breaths, feeling the fatigue of the run and the heavy mental drain of wandering through pitch darkness with nothing but sparks of light, and some weird things for company.

  The hole in the collapsed ceiling led to a shaft going straight upwards. No sky was visible, so the shaft must have twisted on its way to the surface. But there was definitely natural light coming from somewhere further up.

  He didn’t give it a second thought and pulled himself up into the hole. It was narrow – that was good; it allowed him to brace himself between the walls, and slowly inch himself higher. His muscles protested, and his back was scratched a thousand times over by the sharp walls, and felt sticky with blood.

  He had to pause several times to work out how to traverse some difficult sections, and he wished he had have spent a little more time on the gym rope, or the rock-climbing wall at school. It didn’t matter; he was going to get out, even if it meant his back was shredded
.

  What felt like hours later, he pulled himself up and out into the light. He rolled onto his back and sucked in a deep breath, wincing from the pain and waiting for his breathing to calm. He sniffed and frowned. The air smelled different, strange.

  He opened his eyes and just as quickly had to shut them. They streamed with tears from the glare. After hours in the gloom, it would take a while for him to adjust to bright light again.

  Sitting up, he cupped his hands around his eyes and squinted between his fingers, breathing slowly and allowing his vision to come back into focus.

  What . . .?

  Chapter 5

  The Wasteland

  What happened? Where am I? Arn had assumed there’d been some sort of explosion and the Fermilab facility had collapsed, burying him inside. But now . . .

  He blinked another few times and got slowly to his feet, still cupping his hands over his eyes against the glare. For as far as he could see, there was nothing – no modern facility with its strange, sagging sandwich building, no roads, no metal sculpture, nothing at all.

  He turned in a circle. In fact, there were no trees, no grass, not even any hills. It was like a desert, but not quite as hot and dry. He looked at the sun, just up over the horizon – was it morning? A warm breeze blew past him; that was what he had found strange – it smelled like . . . nothing. The word sterile came to his mind.

  There must have been a nuclear explosion, he thought. But when he knelt down and sifted through the sandy dirt, it ran freely through his fingers – no melted or fused glass or rock, no building debris, nothing but grains of bleached rock.

  ‘But . . . what was that thing, then? A dog, a deformed dog . . . or maybe a giant rat.’

  But it giggled – it was watching you, following you. It looked like a . . . He shook his head to clear the argument that was washing back and forth in his mind.

  He licked his lips; he’d need something to drink soon.

  Maybe he should wait here, otherwise when Dr. Harper or Mr. Beescomb came to look for him, they’d never find him. Arn looked back at the hole he had just climbed out of. It was just an open wound in the flat surface, like a dry sinkhole. He turned again, looking at the ground, and then the landscape – it had a wiped-clean look – like someone had dragged a giant beach towel across the sand, flattening all the features.

  There was no one . . . There will be no one. That scornful voice in his head again, filling him with dread and pessimism:

  Stay here and die.

  The warm breeze wafted again, and he turned his face into it. He remembered a science class on weather, and the droning teacher telling them that wind usually blew from the coast – if that was true, then that’d be a pretty good place to head towards.

  Arn looked back at the hole for a second. There was water down there; maybe he should . . .

  Forget it. The thought of climbing back down into that labyrinth was both frightening and repellant. Instead, he used his foot to make an arrow in the sand.

  ‘I went this way,’ he said, to no one but the sterile breeze.

  I’ll head towards the coast, he thought – see what sort of land this is. And if there are any rivers, that’ll be where they’ll empty. Besides, if this was still home, then the coast was to the east – twenty-five miles; sure, a long way, but he was young and fit. He turned into the breeze and started to walk.

  ‘Winds always blow from the coast, and the coast is east,’ he repeated automatically.

  Unless its winter, then breezes blow towards the coast, not from it – you’re going the wrong way, dummy.

  Arn groaned. Heads you win, tails I lose, he thought and kept walking into the breeze.

  *****

  No one spoke or moved for many minutes after Arn had vanished from the observation screens.

  Edward was in shock, but excited – an idea forming in his mind. Becky closed her mouth, and pushed through the crowd of bewildered teenagers, scientists and administrators, to stand before one of the large screens.

  ‘What happened? Where did he go?’

  One of the technicians got to his feet. ‘Vaporised.’

  ‘Stop that sort of talk.’ Dr. Harper frowned and took a step towards the screen.

  Beescomb was still regaining his wits. ‘Where . . . where’s my student, Harper? What just happened here? Can we get someone down there?’

  Harper ignored him and squinted at one screen, then the next. He barked some instructions to his team, and moved to a control panel, quickly ordering a lockdown of the facility. One of the screens began to flash, and Harper said to his senior scientist: ‘All right, Takada, shut it down . . . All of it.’

  Jim Takada nodded, rapidly tapping in the command sequence on his computer, before stopping and frowning, and then repeating his movements again, this time with more care. He swore under his breath and lifted his hands from the keys for a second, and then he tried it again.

  Harper, dragging his eyes away from his screen, noticed Takada’s frustration and turned to him. ‘What’s up? What’s wrong?’

  Takada shook his head. ‘It’s just . . .’ He entered an alternative sequence into the computer, then shook his head again. He spoke out of the corner of his mouth, ‘It’s just not shutting down. In fact it’s still running as if there’s a high-speed, high-energy collision taking place – but that’s impossible. The energy draw is phenomenal . . . and it’s building.’

  Harper looked back at the screen, and then brought one hand up to his face. ‘Oh no, no, no – where’s our diamond? What the hell happened to the acceleration lens?’

  Takada spoke over his shoulder. ‘The kid must have it. Maybe that’s why we can’t shut the track down; he’s done something to the collision acceleration instrumentation.’

  The rise and fall of a siren could now be heard in the corridor outside. Further along the room, a female technician in thick spectacles skidded along the floor on the wheels of her chair to a different position at a long wall of electronics. She flicked some switches, then read some numbers off one of the small screens – speaking loudly, trying to be heard over the raised voices, the pulsing beeps now coming from most of the control panels in the room.

  ‘I’ve got radiation – something is bleeding high gamma down in the pipe room.’

  Edward heard Harper swear, and then saw him rub his chin in nervous indecision. That concerned him more than anything he had seen – if Harper was worried, then so should they be.

  Edward felt a rising panic, and looked back at the screens that had showed his friend disappearing only moments before. The more he stared, the more the image looked . . . wrong.

  Harper also looked along the bank of screens, shaking his head slowly. He turned back to the bespectacled technician. ‘I don’t see anything. There can’t be a leak . . . There should be nothing to leak.’ He shook his head again. ‘Doesn’t make sense at all. Regardless, I’ll have a team go in and shut it down manually.’

  ‘Well, we’d better hurry; we’ve got an enormous power drain going on.’ She turned back to her station; between her and the other technicians, the activity was now furious.

  Edward took his glasses off and wiped them. Replacing them, he moved closer to the screen. He frowned, took his glasses off again, and rubbed them even harder on his shirt. This time after he put them back on his nose, he squinted and then spoke softly, ‘Look.’

  Even in all the confusion, Harper must have heard him, and turned to stare at Edward for a moment, his eyebrows shooting up in recognition, as though remembering the students were still in the control room.

  ‘I need everyone cleared from this room – authorised personnel only.’

  An electronic voice intoned from a speaker overhead, the phrase repeated in an emotionless repetition: secure lockdown initiated – secure lockdown initiated . . .

  Harper turned to a small black-and-white screen showing sets of enormous doors sliding shut at several exits to the building, and larger, two-foot-thick blast doors moving in
to place in the deeper areas of the underground facility. Harper swore again and turned to the group, urgency now in his movements.

  Edward spoke the word again, ‘Look.’

  Harper looked briefly at Edward and made motions to herd the teenagers from the room. ‘Sorry all, but we’re going to have to evacuate you immediately. Looks like we have some sort of, ahh, electronic or magnetic disturbance. Nothing to worry about, no danger. We’ll find your friend. He’s probably just managed to wander off into some section of the tunnel that isn’t under surveillance.’

  The school group started to move backwards towards the door. Edward stood his ground, and pointed to the screen that had once shown his friend. This time he yelled it: ‘Look!’

  Harper studied the screen, and then turned back to face Edward. ‘There’s nothing to see, son.’

  Edward kept on pointing. ‘That’s just it. It’s not what we can see . . . it’s what we can’t.’ He looked from Harper to Beescomb. Many of the technicians had swivelled in their chairs to listen to him. ‘There’s something missing from the room . . . other than Arn, I mean. C’mon, look.’ He pointed at the screen to where his friend had been standing.

  The entire room had fallen silent, and every eye was following the line of his pointing finger. No one heard the pinging, beeps or sirens anymore.

  Edward walked right up to the screen and jabbed his finger at it. ‘Near the collision recording section – see? There’s something missing . . . like a small bite has been taken out of the machinery and background. But if the device was damaged, you’d know about it, right?’

  Harper frowned, and leaned so close to the screen that his nose was almost touching the glass. He spoke over his shoulder. ‘Takada, take a look at this. What do you make of it?’