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
