STERLING

 

Wednesday January 15 - 0302 MST

Twenty eight minutes until Turbocharger activates

 

You don't know the meaning of darkness until you're a hundred feet underground beneath a layer of million year old Utah bed rock with the lights out. The darkness just swallowed the light from my flashlight. I could barely see a few feet ahead of me. The powerful night scope on top of my rifle wasn't much help either. It needed ambient light to work. Even star light was enough to illuminate the world within the night scope. But down in the bowels of the Underground there wasn't even a sliver of moon light. Approximately ten feet past the edge of my light cone was about all the night scope could see. Beyond that was that the utter blackness that seemed to be feasting on our light.

I needed something else to focus on besides the darkness, so I clicked the radio on. "Hamilton, Iron Shack Actual. Come in."

All I got was empty air. Not even static. It was like the darkness was consuming the radio waves too. But I knew in actuality it was just being underground. The Earth's crust was blocking out all the random radio waves that caused static in the radio. Down here there was nothing but us.

Joe Morgan was walking beside me shining his own anemic light into the darkness. "Is it just me or is it freezing down here?"

His breath misted as he spoke. Doctor Johnson caught it too. "It's not you, Sergeant. There are a lot of cursed things down here and they sap the energy out of the very air."

I wasn't sure if it was the cryptic nature of Johnson's words or his ominously deep voice, but the chill in my spine got worse.

Morgan wiggled his flashlight. "You think it's messing with my light too? I feel like this thing is about to die on me."

Johnson panned his shotgun around letting the grip mounted light wash over the darkened stone ahead of us. "I'm one hundred percent certain it is. We shouldn't linger down here longer than necessary."

"We always had problems with the lights down here." Mister Sharks's voice caught me by surprise. He'd been quiet up until now. "They were always going bad on us. Corrosion or something. Worse than anything I'd ever seen. I still don't get why you keep guards down here. We only ever had a post back where you keep that cannon."

My footsteps echoed as we cautiously continued forward. "There was a break-in a few years ago. A lot of the relics we kept down here were stolen and ended up on the black market. Our security teams here are as much for keeping thieves out as they are for keeping things from escaping."

Sharks nodded. "That would explain the surge."

Now that got my attention. "What surge?"

"Stuff that most people ignore but you learn to watch out for. UFO and Bigfoot sightings. Chupacabras. That sort of thing. If it ain't coming from some red neck high on meth then it's usually one of our babies. Been seeing a lot of it in the check-out rack lately. Now I know why."

That was a source of intel I'd never considered before. But then again there was a reason for that.

"There it is again." Jacob spoke up from the back of the group. He was Morgan's airman and carried the team's SAW. In this case a M249 belt fed machine gun. He was also one of the quiet ones. When faced with adversity some people, like Morgan, got chatty. Others got very quiet. Jacob was one of those and I'd forgotten he was even with us until he spoke up.

In the distance I saw the faint, red glow of some far off light. Then it winked out. A few seconds later it came back. For a few chilling seconds I thought it was the eye of some creature blinking at us. But its rhythmic cycle reminded me more of something electronic. It never pounced on us though and when we reached the next bend in the tunnel it became obvious it wasn't a monster.

Our lights shined up at the ceiling at the source of the blinking red light. It was one of our radio repeaters with a thick, rubber coated antenna hanging down to absorb the signals it received from one corridor and relay them down the other. The red light was both a good sign and bad sign. Good in that it meant we weren't facing an exo. Jacob's words outlined the bad. "It's batteries must have died. That's why we can't hear Captain Hamilton anymore."

The repeaters down in C-Watch had battery back ups in case of power failures like this. But the environment was just nasty to electronics and so the battery backups couldn't be expected to last for very long. Still, I was relieved by this news because it meant we heard a real radio signal and not something like the Valafarian Reliquary in cell 97 that liked to fool people like us into coming to the rescue of ghosts.

I stepped forward into the last corridor to the heart of C-Watch. "We have to keep moving. Hamilton may be in danger."

As we continued on I looked for the only one of our group that hadn't spoken up in a while and found her gaze fixed forward like she was afraid something might appear if she looked away. "Airman Brighton, are you alright?"

She blinked in surprise at the mention of her name. "Yes, sir…and if I could ask a favor?"

"Go ahead."

"It's alright to not ask me that question every ten minutes."

"Oh." I felt the warm flush of blood flow into my cheeks from just a tiny bit of chagrin. "I hadn't realized it was that frequent."

She was right though. I was treating her like a child that needed to be constantly watched over. Right now I didn't need that. Everyone needed to be focused on the tunnel. Because we didn't know what could leap out of the shadows at any moment.