“That’s weird,” said Xela. “When I was researching caves it sounded like most of them got cooler once you were away from the entrance, like fifties and sixties, because all the heat went into the ground.” She slapped her backpack. “I brought another shirt and a sweatshirt.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” said Roger. “Getting closer to the core with all the lava and stuff. It should get hotter.”
“We’re nowhere near the core,” said Nate with a wry smile. “That’s like saying North Hollywood should be cooler because it’s closer to the Arctic Circle.”
Xela stared down the next leg of the tunnel. “So what’s going on?”
Nate shrugged. “Beats me.”
The sloping tunnel stretched on and on. The trio would walk in one direction for a hundred yards, then the tunnel would twist back on itself and drop them even lower. On one leg all the lights had burnt out and they inched through the darkness with two flashlights making circles of light on the floor of the tunnel. The scattered bulbs resumed after they rounded the next turn.
“How’d they do this?” Nate wondered aloud. His current estimate had them about three thousand feet below ground. “I mean, they would’ve had to move hundreds of tons of rock to make these tunnels.”
“Money,” said Roger. “Got enough money, you can do anything.”
Xela had gotten ahead of them. She glanced back. “How do you know they had money?”
He pointed at the bundle of cable on the floor. “All that,” he said. “Cable’s expensive ‘cause of all the copper. That’s why people steal it out of houses and stuff. This is all one piece of cable. All the way from the spiral staircase to here. No connectors, no splices, nothing.” He gestured at Nate’s belt. “How far we been walking now?”
He checked. “About seven miles.”
“Nine pieces of cable,” said Roger. “Each one more’n seven miles long. That’s some serious money, even a hundred years ago.”
They turned another corner and walked in silence for a few minutes. Xela stopped to brush the dust from one of the bulbs. Nate and Roger walked past her and she puffed away a few last bits of accumulated grit.
They reached the corner and Nate glanced back. Xela was examining one of the burnt-out bulbs. She looked up and met his eyes. “You guys go ahead,” she said. “I’ll catch up in a minute.”
“Something wrong?”
She shook her head. “No, nothing,” she said. “I’ll catch up in a minute or two.”
“We shouldn’t split up.”
Xela raised an eyebrow. “It’s not like I can get lost and accidentally start walking the other way. I’ll be right with you.”
“Why? What’s the problem?”
“Nothing.”
“So let’s stick together.”
She sighed. “I have to piss, okay?”
Nate smirked. “So there
are
some things you’re shy about.”
“Look, just walk around the bend and I’ll be there in two minutes, okay?”
“You sure you’re okay with us just leaving you here?”
“Yes. Will you please go? I’ve been holding it for an hour now.”
“Go away from the cables,” said Roger. “Rubber’s pretty crumbly in places. You don’t want to get a shock.”
“Important safety tip,” she said. “Thanks, Egon.” When he gave her a blank look, she just smiled and waved him around the corner. “Talk amongst yourselves,” she called to them.
Roger looked at Nate. “That’s a movie quote, right?”
“Yeah,
Ghostbusters
, I think,” said Nate
“You sure?”
“Yes, it’s
Ghostbusters
, you philistines,” Xela shouted around the corner. “How can you not immediately know that?”
“I think I was four when
Ghostbusters
came out,” Roger called back.
“It’s an American classic!”
“You always talk this much when you’re taking a piss?”
She laughed. “What if I do? That a real turn-off for you?”
Nate cleared his throat. “Y’know, I’d leave you two alone but there’s nowhere for me to go.”
* * *
They stopped for another break at the four-hour mark. All three of them were sweating. Roger’s face looked pink. Nate broke out the thermometer again. Roger gestured at it as he kicked his shoes off. “How hot is it now?”
“One hundred and two,” Nate said. He angled the thermometer towards the light. “Maybe a hundred and three. It’s flickering.”
“Okay,” said Roger. His pack slid off his shoulders. He reached up, grabbed a handful of t-shirt, and yanked it over his broad shoulders. “Too damned hot.”
Nate nodded. “Yeah, I think so, too.” He pulled his shirt off and tucked it through one of the straps of his backpack.
They glanced at Xela. “Don’t get your hopes up,” she smirked.
Roger shook his head. “Just wanted to make sure you were cool with—”
She peeled her shirt off, baring her tattoos. Her bra was bright green—
cockroach green
—with little white skulls on it. “I meant, don’t get your hopes up, I’m not going topless,” she said. “But thanks for the display of manly nipples and chest hair.” She used the t-shirt to wipe her forehead.
“Any time,” said Roger.
They slid out water bottles and drank. Roger splashed some in his hand and plastered his hair with it.
“Don’t go crazy,” said Nate. “Remember, this might have to last us another two and a half days.”
Roger shook his head. “Gets much hotter, we’ll have to turn back anyway.”
“Good point,” said Xela. She raised her bottle and poured a few drops on her head. Nate shrugged and did the same.
Roger padded across the tunnel in his socks. He put his hands against one of the wooden supports and pushed back against his heel. He closed his eyes and grunted as his Achilles stretched out. His feet shuffled and he stretched the other leg.
A trickle of dust and sand drifted down from the top of the arch. There was enough that it rattled when it hit the floor of the tunnel.
“Hey,” said Nate. “Stop it.”
Roger kept his eyes closed. “Just stretching my—”
“You’re shifting the arch,” snapped Xela. A small rock dropped and accented her words. It hit a stone on the floor with a loud
crack
. One the size of a basketball dropped next to it and missed Roger’s shoulder by inches.
He leaped away from the beam and another stone hit the floor. Then a third. They stared at the arch. A haze of dust floated around it, but nothing else fell.
Xela rapped on the walls. “It’s all sedimentary rock, isn’t it? Not really solid.”
“Thus all the beams and supports,” said Nate.
“Sorry,” mumbled Roger. “Didn’t even think.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Nate. “Let’s just make sure none of us push on anything else.”
Xela studied the roof of the tunnel. “How much do you think it’d cave in?”
Roger shrugged. “Enough to kill us?”
“No, I mean if this tunnel collapses, the one above it will probably go, too. And then the one above that and the one above that. Maybe all the way up to the sub-basement and the foundation. You could’ve brought the whole building down.”
“Cool,” he sighed. “Got it.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” she said. “Sorry.”
Nate shouldered his pack and took a few steps. “C’mon,” he said. “Let’s see if we can hit bottom before we’ve got to turn back.”
They walked for another twenty minutes, around four more turns, and Roger stopped. His brow furrowed and he looked at the air around him. He took a few more steps and stopped again.
Nate glanced back. “What’s up?”
“You feel that?”
Xela looked around. “Feel what?”
Roger stopped walking for a moment and crouched down. He set his palm against the ground and closed his eyes. For a moment Nate pictured the tanned, bare-chested man with a feather in his hair and cheesy warpaint.
Xela closed her eyes and rolled her head in a slow circle. “A tingle in the ground,” she said.
“Feels like an engine,” said Roger. His eyes opened and he looked up at them. “A big one.”
“We’re about forty-five hundred feet down,” said Nate. “Maybe we’re getting close.”
After the next hairpin turn Nate could feel it, too. It reminded him of big trucks and buses driving by on the street outside his office, or the tiny earthquakes that shook Los Angeles for a few seconds every month or so, the ones people only noticed after years in California. This wasn’t a brief tremor, though. It was constant. The longer he focused on it, the more he could feel it working its way through the soles of his shoes and into his bones. He was sure if he waited he’d feel it vibrate his teeth.
The trio went around two more turns and they could hear it. A low, rolling rumble. Roger was right. It sounded like an engine.
After the next turn they could see dust hanging in the air. The sound shook the beams. Halfway down the tunnel a trickle of sand fell in a steady stream. They could see a pile on the ground the size of a big bag of dog food.
“What do you think, boss?” said Xela.
“I think we’re safe,” said Nate. “If all this stuff has stood for a hundred years, it’d be real stupid for it to collapse the day we show up.”
“Yeah,” said Roger, “and nothing stupid ever happens in real life.”
They marched down three more legs of the tunnel. The rumble got louder but the vibrations didn’t seem to get any stronger. Then Roger staggered.
He took a few quick steps, as if he was trying to get his balance, then set his front foot down hard. Xela stumbled and caught herself. Nate felt his legs get rubbery and stopped moving.
“It’s the ground,” said Xela. “The ground’s level.”
They looked at one another. Roger grinned. They had a quick toast with their water bottles.
Their unbalanced muscles protested for a few more yards. Over five hours of walking downhill had messed them up. Nate was sure the real pain would start later, probably on the way back up.
The level tunnel stretched out for a few hundred feet. Up ahead Nate could see a wooden crate covered with a century of dust. There was a pile of spikes near it. He guessed they were the same ones holding the arches together.
The passage turned to the left. Instead of a hairpin turn, there was a small chamber carved out of the rock. The supports here were steel, the riveted I-beams that made up the insides of buildings.
A series of thinner beams descended between two of the supports. Strips of metal had been riveted back and forth across them to create a simple cage. Sitting in the cage was a wooden box the size of a phone booth. A heavy cable ran from its roof up into the shaft above it. Its cage door was propped open by a crumbling cardboard box and what looked like a wooden broom handle, also withered from years in the heat.
Something shiny sat in the dust near the broom handle. Roger crouched, plucked it off the ground, and held up a 2003 nickel for them to see. They scanned the dust for a few moments and Xela found the quarter a few feet away. “Finders keepers,” she said with a grin, tucking it in her pocket.
Across the chamber was a pair of doors coated with dust and grit. The heat had made their paint fade and peel. Nate glanced at Xela and she nodded back at him. She recognized them, too. This set didn’t have a bar stretched across them.
Roger gave the handles a quick tap, then a more lingering one. He turned and gave Nate a nod. The two men wrapped their fingers around each handle.
The doors were heavy. The hinges gave a low groan that became a squeal as they continued to open. They might have been oiled once, but now they were coated with a hundred years of neglect.
The noise level jumped up a few decibels. The rumble was a steady roar on the other side of the doors, like a truck stop parking lot with all the engines running. A wave of heat washed out at them. It was close to painful, like standing in front of an open oven. The hot air rushed down their throats and scalded their lungs.
Nate squinted his eyes against the heat.
“Holy shit,” said Xela over his shoulder.
During his years in the industry, Roger had seen a lot of film stages. Some of them had been on the big studio lots like Warner or Paramount. Some had been at the smaller stages that cropped up all over Los Angeles, like Lacey Street or Ren-Mar or Raleigh. Most of the time the stages held multiple sets. A few of them had been filled by a single, enormous construction project. And a few had been empty. Seen like that, stages looked a lot like airplane hangars. They had enormous floors and ceilings two or three stories high.
The room on the other side of the double doors was as big as any stage Roger had ever seen or heard of. It could’ve been the size of a small stadium. He’d never sat on the ground level of a stadium so it was hard to be sure.
Once the blast of heat had faded, they stepped inside. The room was rough stone, and Roger felt sure it was natural, not something dug out like the tunnel. Steel girders framed the whole thing, extending up in a dome fifty or sixty feet high. Heavy buttresses reached out to brace the walls and his eyes followed them up. It was some serious construction work.