AT THE END of the tunnel, they were confronted by a high pile of construction debris that was going be difficult to negotiate. Ex held up his hand to stop. Alice started to speak, but Ex shushed him with a sharp wave; he’d heard something. After what had happened previously, Alice wasn’t about to ignore Ex’s instincts.
Ex was standing between two huge, mangled air conditioning ducts that had long ago fallen to the floor. He peered into the gaping duct on his left, and could see nothing but stagnant, slimy water. He checked the duct on his right, but saw only darkness. Up ahead, beyond the mound of debris, he could see a dim glow, indicating the entrance to another tunnel.
“What is it?” Alice whispered. Ex put his finger to his lips and squinted, listening intently. In a sharp movement he turned back towards the left-hand pipe. The attacker came suddenly, rearing a gruesome head and gnashing at Ex with yellow fangs dripping with saliva. Hysteria welled up in Alice’s chest as fear formed a knot in his stomach. He lurched backwards in horror.
Ex instinctively drew his sword from its scabbard and tried to stab the thing, but couldn’t get a decent swing in the confined space. The snarling, squealing and hissing from the creature was ear-splitting. When it lunged at Ex, viciously gnashing its teeth, he was lucky that it sank its teeth into the tyre over his shoulder and missed his flesh. Its jaw was locked, its teeth fastened into the tyre. It was not about to let go. Ex managed to drag the growling thing partially out of the duct, enough to take a swipe with his sword. He slashed, and decapitated it in a single blow.
Alice let out a relieved sigh and looked grimly at the severed head, lying a puddle of blood at Ex’s feet. It was the size of a fully-grown Rottweiler’s but hairless, grotesque.
“It’s some sort of mutated giant rat, by the look of the ugly thing,” said Alice. “This is madness. A bloody giant mutant rat … this place is getting weirder by the minute.”
His polemical outburst was suddenly interrupted by a loud rumbling from deep inside the ducts.
Ex glared at Alice wide-eyed, then grunted loudly: “Shit!”
Alice got the message. There were more Rottweiler Rats on the way, and they were coming fast.
“They’re probably pissed coz you killed their leader,” he yelled. “Let’s get the stuff out of here!” He whipped past the ducts, half expecting a giant rat to jump out and snap at him.
Ex bulldozed through the mountain of debris blocking their path. They worked as fast as they could to move the junk, mindful that the rats were getting closer. When they finally broke through the barrier and scrambled to the other side, Ex and Alice moved like greased lightning to seal it back off. Alice was filling the last gap when a rat’s foul head pushed through a hole and gnashed at him. Ex drew his sword, but Alice beat him to it and belted the thing with a powerful punch that smashed its eye socket. It let out a hideous squeal and backed off. Ex gave Alice the thumbs up.
While Alice and Ex were blocking the tunnel, Djard had shot ahead to scout. The two men were in a hurry to get away from, by the sound of it, the hundreds of giant, angry rat-things gnashing at the barricade, and sprinted to catch up. She motioned for them to halt, and pointed to a hole in the wall to the left, saying they should go there, rather than proceeding toward the dim light. The voice had said to keep going left, so Alice agreed it was the right move.
They stepped through the hole and struggled over a pile of fallen bricks, to find a long dark cavern with a curved roof on the other side.
“Looks like we’ve made it into a subway tunnel,” said Alice. “We won’t be too far from a station … Wait!” He’d noticed a high voltage insignia on the floor. Squatting down on his haunches, he started fishing around in the dark.
“It’s a long shot, but it’s worth a try,” he said, reaching into a cavity in the wall and grasping at something. “Got it…” He pulled hard at whatever he’d found. It came loose with a jolt, and catapulted him backward onto his butt.
Djard giggled. Ex grunted.
Unperturbed, Alice bounced back up and fiddled with the two thick cables he’d uncovered. He held them up and touched them together so they sparked.
Ex and Djard immediately recoiled.
“Power! Don’t ask me how,” he said. “Now, there must be something down here…” He groped industriously around and came up with a stick. “Cool,” he said. “This’ll do…” After another few minutes of groping, he uncovered some matting. “Perfect,” he announced, and wound the matting around the stick. Then, using the sparking wires, he set the matting alight. He proudly held up a burning torch to show his friends. “See, not just a pretty face, eh?”
Alice stood and held up the torch so he could see better. “Now we can see where we’re going,” he said, happily. Suddenly he recognised what he was holding. “Shit!” he yelled. “This is bone … and hair … human hair!”
The torchlight lit up the walls around them. When Alice saw the detail in them he was mortified. Bodies had been melted into the very fabric of the walls. With their mouths gaping open in silent dying screams, hundreds of people had been frozen in situ. It reminded him of the devastating mass petrification of the citizens of Pompeii following the catastrophic eruption of Mt Vesuvius.
“Bodies,” he gasped. “Melted bodies … this is a graveyard!”
He stood there stunned, unnerved. His mind was doing somersaults, trying to rationalise it. Why did it all look so old? What on Earth could have vaporised people and fused them into the concrete?
Ex didn’t care. He snatched the torch out of Alice’s hand and walked off. Alice was too mind-blown to even notice. He stood transfixed while Djard and Ex blithely navigated their way over a mountain of human remains, searching for an exit.
Left alone in the darkness Alice felt the strange world closing in on him. Suddenly, a rustle from behind reminded him of the rats, and he yelled after Ex and Djard: “Hey, wait!” He took off after them, running over a veritable carpet of brittle human bones. They crunched under his feet: skulls, shinbones, rib cages and skeletal hands rose from the eerie, foggy, earthen quagmire, seeming to claw at his legs like a nightmare from the pages of Dante’s Inferno.
At the end of the tunnel Alice climbed through a hole in the wall. Djard and Ex were on the other side, waiting for him. With the panic attack subsiding, he was beginning to think more rationally. He looked about, and spotted an alcove leading off to the left. He pointed at it.
Holding the torch, Ex led them into the alcove, which revealed a narrow staircase leading up into darkness. Climbing the stairs, they emerged into a claustrophobic, low-ceilinged tunnel. Alice could see the torch in Ex’s hand was just about spent, and feared they’d be lost in pitch blackness if it went out.
As though he’d read Alice’s mind and got it dead wrong, Ex tossed the torch on the ground, where it promptly went out. Alice was just about to go off at him when he discovered his fear amounted to zero. Instead of being pitch black, the tunnel was glowing in bright blue phosphorescence.
Djard looked about in awe, like a kid on her first visit to a theme park.
“Probably some sort of firefly,” Alice concluded, knowingly.
Whatever it was, it gave enough illumination for Alice to negotiate their way. It forked just ahead of them. Sticking to the plan, he led the way into the left fork. As he entered, he was engulfed in vertical banded rays of arcing blue lasers. Then he disappeared. Djard and Ex were forced to shield their eyes from the intense light. When they opened them again they were left dumbfounded … their friend had disappeared.
Alice was alone in a strange dimly lit room that appeared to be a mix of living room and museum exhibit. Confused by his apparent transportation through a solid wall, he scanned his surroundings, noticing display cases containing all sorts of unusual artefacts: fossils, skulls, shrunken heads, antique Victorian curios and old rusted toys. Stacks of mouldering books lined the walls in bookcases, others were piled up in corners. It was elaborately furnished, but not tastefully. There were a couple of marble busts on pedestals. All in all, a weird collection of the most bizarre curios.
“Hello? Someone here?” Alice growled, suspecting he wasn’t alone in the room.
A single spotlight lit up over a tall, high-backed Victorian chair in the middle of the room, its back facing him. “Welcome, Alice,” a voice declared from the chair.
He recognised the voice from the footway and moving around to the front of the chair he growled, “How do you know my name?” He stopped suddenly, stupefied at the sight of the person sitting in the chair.
Dressed in a pair of modified black coveralls, with long white hair receding from a widow-peaked high forehead, and facial skin that had an unhealthy transparency, the alien-looking man looked up and said with an ironic chuckle, “Because you were my experiment.”
Alice’s jaw dropped. “You? What the…?” he exclaimed. “No, it couldn’t be!”
“Indeed, Secta,” he expounded arrogantly, “the very person who reduced you to zeroes and one’s.”
Alice was reminded of the stingray and felt his neck. “I don’t get it. What is this? Where the stuff are we?” Alice eyeballed the skinny man mean as a cut snake and hissed, “You better start talking Secta or this’ll get real ugly … and believe me, you don’t want that to happen.”
He got the desired reaction. Secta was intimidated and acquiesced. “Okay, okay, keep your hair on, happy to accommodate.” He got up gingerly and motioned to Alice, “Please, take a seat.”
Alice reluctantly obliged, reminded of the last time he took one of Secta’s seats.
The name Secta had struck Alice’s forehead like a fist — his brain was ready to explode.
“This is impossible! You brainwashed me!”
“No Alice, it has been one hundred and thirteen years since we last met. I de-molecularized you, transformed you into energy, safe for aeons, never to be freed — those were my orders. But somehow you transmute to life, though I suspect because your atomic structure is unstable you will soon disintegrate.”
“What? Get to the point!”
Secta began to pace like a thespian on the stage. “You see while you were entombed your little demonstration went wrong. Your ferry full of peace mongers collided with the submarine and then zap, Sydney was gone. A nuclear explosion enveloped them all and you my dear experiment, you were the cause. What irony, what pathos.”
Alice was horrified. “Hang on, are you saying the ferry hit the sub and it exploded?”
Secta stopped pacing and fronted Alice. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
Alice folded him arms defiantly. “Crap. How could you have survived all those years?”
“More irony, it just so happened I had injected myself with a longevity serum I'd formulated, so the explosion you triggered also condemned me to an eternity in this underground prison.”
“Right, now I get the irony. You condemned me to a holographic prison and wound up in one of your own.”
“Precisely.”
Alice had got the picture, it all added up. With what he’d experienced with the Vixen, the devastation, the mutations. “So, was only Sydney destroyed?” He muttered sorrowfully.
“Hardly, it set off a catastrophic chain reaction. All of the warring nations with missiles aimed at one another launched them — retaliatory— you my dear Alice surpass Robert Oppenheimer as death the destroyer of worlds.” Secta grinned macabrely, letting the horrific thought sink in.
Alice buried his face in his hands. After a moment of contemplation, he looked up at Secta. “But how, how’d you live down here?”
“This was my office at Oceana headquarters.” Secta said motioning to his habitat. “It’s an old, World War II fallout shelter. I was here when it happened.”
Alice get out of the chair and prowled about like an angry tiger. “So what, only you survived?”
The statement rattled Secta. “I locked my sister Hope in her lab and she died ... there were a few others trapped down here but over time they died. The feed from the old CCTV camera has revealed others over the years, you know, out there. You obviously came across some of them.”
Alice froze, he’d had an epiphany and turned to face Secta. “There’s only one thing to do, I have to go back.”
“What do you mean, back?”
Alice shirt-fronted Secta and bellowed, “You got me here buddy now you’re going to send me back!”
Secta shook his head. “Impossible. Can’t be done.”
Alice let go of him, “Why not?”
Secta took over pacing the floor. “Because everything I would need to do that is in my old lab and between it and where we stand are mutated creatures that would kill you the moment you set foot there.”
Alice prowled closer to him, “Don’t give me that!” His aggression made the skinny man flinch. “You’ve had to survive all these years, you have to get food and power from somewhere.”
“The power comes from tapping into Oceana’s nuclear grid that remains active ... food, well there’s a way to an underground shopping mall … but.”
“No buts Secta. How come these creatures haven’t killed you on your shopping sprees?”
“Because I stocked up when I was younger, fitter ... I haven’t needed to go back for years. The things there would have proliferated by now, creatures grown bigger, more dangerous.”
Alice was on a roll. “So, if I can get us to your old lab can you send me back?”
“That’s a massive if Alice, but yes, then maybe I could try.”
“I tell you what, if we don’t try then I’m going to throw you to those mutants for what you did to me. If I had been on that ferry history might not have turned out the way it did. You got that? Now, release my friends, we’ve got work to do.”