In Situ (6 page)

*

Za’a stayed with Mot for some time
, as did the rest of the Arzat mothers and assistants, watching the young Arzats closely in their drugged state. The Medicine Men moved between them, checking for pulse and breathing. It was critical to get the timing perfect. As their bodies cooled, and at the moment the youngsters completely ceased any discernible life function, the Medicine Men would order them covered with the animal fat and sealed with the resin of Ne’e.

Mot was the last
, his heart was strong. When they finally came to cover him, Za’a looked at Mot one last time and tried to send him a final message of affection, but there was no response—he was “gone.” She looked to the top of the Chamber and made one final plea to the Great Creator to preserve and protect her son, then watched as the animal fat was poured over him and his crypt was carefully covered with a thick seal of resin.

As a final act, the Stone Carver went to each of the holes and chiseled the name of the
appropriate individual on the floor next to it. Za’a watched as he carefully cut the words into the wall below her son, making sure that the carver did it correctly: Mot son of the great Hunter Url.

*

When it was finally over, Za’a
looked at Fet. “Have we killed them?” she asked without speaking.

Fet felt her gaze and looked back. Her eyes, usually golden, had gone crimson. Her message to Za’a was clear and concise
, and yet it avoided directly answering Za’a’s question. “Now we have done all we can do,” she replied. “Their fate is in the hands of the Great Creator and destiny.”

The two females made the long climb back up through the caves together, the rest of their group following or just ahead. As they neared the main
Chamber, they felt the earth shake, and both of them instinctively knew that they had been right, and had acted just in time. Fet paused for a moment, slightly unbalanced, but Za’a was there to steady her.

She took Fet’s arm and led her back toward the
Great Fire.

Tom walked Alex over to a small ATV vehicle, the kind typically used for hunting or farm work. They were just outside the rectangle of trailers near his office. There was only a vague hint of twilight left in one corner of the sky. Batter had completely disappeared.

“Tom, what the hell was that all about? Who
is
that guy? And what is all the military doing here?” Alex asked as Tom jumped in the driver’s seat of the ATV.

Tom gave Alex a reluctant smile. “Hop in, I’ll tell you about it on the way.”

“On the way? On the way where?”

“Just get in Alex, would ya?” He gently tossed
her a hardhat with a miner’s lantern attached to the front of it and put another on himself.

Lights on
, Tom fired up the mini four-wheeler and drove around the trailers and headed directly for a large opening in the desert floor. As they approached it, a huge dump truck with wheels the size of a small house rumbled up the ramp seemingly out of nowhere. Alex thought for a moment that the giant truck might run them over, but the driver flashed his lights from two stories up in the cab and steered a wide path around them.

“That means there is another right behind.” Tom noticed that Alex had an uncharacteristic death grip on the grab bar in front of her, mistaking her excitement for fear. “It’s
OK, Alex, the drivers know we are on our way down.”

“Down? Down where?”
she asked, her eyes focused on the next truck that had just reached the surface.

Tom looked over at Alex and
flashed the very familiar smile that had completely enchanted Alex the first time she had ever seen him. “I am going to show you something absolutely amazing, and then I am going to show you something I’m sure
you
will find even
more
amazing,” he said, speaking loudly over the sound of truck passing them.

They came up over a slight rise and then were suddenly headed down through a massive opening at least four cars wide in the desert floor. It was like entering a steep freeway tunnel, complete with lights and bright yellow direc
tional lines painted on a concrete roadway. Alex squinted to try to see where the road went, but the tunnel bent back upward after a half mile or so, appearing to level out at what would be several hundred feet below the desert floor, so she could not determine what might be at the end of it.

“I think I
am already amazed Tom,” she shouted back.

“Just wait, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” Tom smiled and winked as he drove down the ramp.

Yes, still “Mr. Charming,” Alex thought as she glanced at him. They hadn’t spoken in months, and Alex flashed to their last conversation. Tom had mentioned something about a special assignment he had been working on, but it had gone past her at the time. She had been more concerned about wrapping up a couple of loose ends in their divorce.

During their short
marriage of only two years, Tom was always working on some “special assignment” somewhere far away that—as Alex later found out—apparently involved another woman. She had eventually forgiven him since she herself had more or less “stolen” Tom from some other woman he had been seeing at the time they first met. Tom was just that kind of man; the kind women want and are bold in pursuing. Unfortunately, he was also the kind of guy that probably needed to remain a bachelor.

Divorcing Tom had been painful for her but she was a realist. They were both very independent. They would both survive.
But she still loved him, and while there was no way in hell she would contemplate ever becoming involved with him again, she counted him on her very short list of best friends. He was a good man, and totally reliable with the apparent exception of his behavior with other females. One thing was for sure, he was a hell of a geological engineer-one of the best in the world.

“I can’t believe Batter is letting me show you this,” he said, shaking his head. They passed another of
the giant dump trucks grunting along in low gear as it made its way past them toward the top of the tunnel.

“Why’s that?”

“Alex, this project is top secret, and I mean
top
secret. The guys working on this practically have to sign their lives away to be here, and all of them have to pass a super-high level of security. They can’t even tell their families what they are doing, or even where they are,” Tom said, glancing over at her, as if he were expecting some response. They passed a rough handmade sign that read “Welcome To Underworld, Population: Not Yet, Elevation Minus 915 Feet.”

The tunnel flattened out and they entered an area the size of two or three football fields. It reminded Alex of a super-sized astrodome, complete with very bright lights beaming down in rectangular patterns from
overhead. She tried to keep her jaw from dropping.

“Pretty impressive huh,” Tom said, noting her reaction. He wheeled the ATV off of the main road and stopped. He just kept quiet and let Alex look.

The place was massive. Alex got out of the cart and let her eyes wander. What the hell was supporting this, she asked herself as she surveyed the ceiling which looked to be more than two hundred feet over their heads. They were almost a quarter of a mile below the surface. How had they managed to create such a large space with no visible supports?

“I know what you’re thinking
. Impossible, huh?” Tom was looking at the scene like a proud father.

“Yes
, Tom, this is friggin’ impossible,” Alex said, her head back, looking up. There was no doubt in her mind now why Tom had been selected to build it. He was probably one of the few people she knew of in the world that had both the engineering skills and geological background necessary to construct such a project.

“Was
, Alex,
was
impossible.” He smiled again. “Two words, carbon fiber. Look closely at the rafters. We’re building it like a giant egg using carbon fiber beams.” Tom raised his head and proudly looked to the ceiling himself. “Makes the pyramids look easy, doesn’t it? It’s going to be rated for a 9.0 quake when we get it done.”

“But Tom, the
expense…,” she said as her eyes scanned the structure.

“Noth
ing is too good for the ole United States government, Alex. They are basically letting me build this thing with no budget constraints. All of those lights, LED,” he said pointing toward the high ceiling. “More of your tax dollars at work in places you never imagined possible, right?”

Once Alex had gotten over the shock of the rafters
, she let her eyes wander over the facility itself. There were several buildings, some of them eight or ten stories high, set on the floor of the structure. It looked like a small town complete with storefronts and small streets, with the exception that everything was painted pure white and it appeared to be deserted. The project looked virtually finished, but for a large gash in one wall where a crew with heavy equipment was working removing debris. Alex could feel the hair on the back of her neck rising.

“So
, Tom, here is the obvious question, what the hell is it for?”

The smile disappeared from Tom’s face. “It’s a doomsday shelter Alex
, a doomsday shelter.”

Alex just looked back at the place in silence.

“Actually they are calling it an ‘ARC’—short for Auxiliary Repopulation Center. This is going to be like a small city when we get it done.” Tom kicked a lose piece of rubble away with his foot.

“But why? What specifically is it for?”

“Who knows?” he shrugged. “But no one needs to tell you about extinction events, or nuclear bombs, or world pandemic. Maybe one of those new telescopes spotted something. Maybe some politicians just got freaked out. I don’t really know, Alex. All I do know is that I was given an unlimited budget and a very short window of time to get my part of this thing done, with a rather large incentive bonus if I’m on time. Which brings me to our next topic. See that area down near the bottom of the ramp? We were doing some controlled blasting there, trying to get ready to install one of the last reactors…”

“Wait, reactor?”

“Yes, Alex, this place is all going to be powered by a series of small self-contained nuclear reactors.” He pointed to an area where six large cylinders several stories tall were lined up near the gash.

Alex shot him a look of complete disbelief.

“I’m not kidding. They are all chained together. When one wears out it automatically shuts itself down and another fires up. The scientists say that they could theoretically power the entire complex for several hundred years. Just one of them will produce a hundred thousand kilowatt hours a day for fifty years at full power. They’re like giant batteries. The boys are working on placing the last one of them now.”

“Amazing. I’d heard of them
but….”

“Anyhow,” Tom continued, “we hit an old lava tube
, Alex, and I mean old, millions of years old. Somehow we completely missed it before in the surveys. But what is really interesting about it is what they found
in
it.”

Alex felt the hair on the back of her neck rising again
, her paleontologist radar was pinging. What who found, she thought.

“Anyway
, we just had an entire team down here for the last few days clearing it out so that we can get going again and…,” Tom paused.

“Clearing it out, clearing it out, what did they find Tom—tell me?” she
asked, grasping his arm.

Tom looked suddenly uncomfortable. “Well, I spoke to one of the
paleontologists….”

“Paleontologists!” she squeezed him harder.

“Come on Alex,” he looked at her sheepishly, “there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t tell you. I would have been fired immediately. Hell, I might have been shot. He brought in his own people.”

“
He? He who? Batter?”

“Yes
, Batter. He has total authority here, if you couldn’t tell. I think he answers directly to the President.”

“The President,” she said, remembering Batter’s phone call. “
OK, OK, you were saying….”

“They found some stuff Alex. One of the scientists told me it might be pre K-T.”

“Pre-K-T! Pre-K-T!” she was beside herself. “Take me down there, Tom.”

“I knew you were gonna be pissed at me.”

“No, Tom, I’m not,” Alex gulped, pissed off at him, but trying to control her excitement. “Please, just take me down there.”

Tom was not about to argue. Winning an argument with Alex was next to impossible. He checked his watch and noted that it was getting late
, and he would have loved to propose getting some dinner instead, but he knew better than to try to talk Alex out of going down to the caves now that he had opened his big mouth. Besides, he was still confused by Batter allowing Alex down in the first place. No telling if he would change his mind, if he did, Tom knew Alex would go nuts.

*

Tom had been totally astonished by her appearance this afternoon. He had no idea that she had been working so close by, not that it should have really surprised him. Alex was always poking around someplace in that damn desert.

He
had been trying to work out a problem with a reactor location with one of his engineers in his office when they heard all of the commotion at the gate, but at first he hadn’t really paid attention. There was always some group of curious hunters or hikers that the security guys were chasing off.

When the commotion had continued,
Tom had finally glanced up at the security monitor and seen Alex, instantly recognizing her signature stance and her unbelievable body even on the lousy screen. She was crazy, that is what he loved about her, and she was beautiful. The fact that she had no idea just
how
beautiful made her even more attractive. Why, he wondered, had he ever allowed himself to screw up their relationship? She was perfect, he thought now, looking at her.

*

They got back in the ATV and he wheeled them down to an area just a few hundred feet past the main entry ramp and parked. A dozen or so workers were focused on positioning the last nuclear cylinder in place on a cement foundation next to five others that had already been installed. Tom noticed that their attention was totally diverted to Alex when she got out of the cart. He signaled to one of the foreman who immediately dropped what he was doing and walked their way.

Alex, on the other hand, was staring at a large gash in the side of the wall
, where another crew of equipment operators were at work removing what appeared to be the last of some rubble, loading it into one of the massive dump trucks with an equally massive skip loader. In the center of the gash, a rough opening ten or twelve feet wide and equally as tall, dropped into total darkness.

“What can I do for you
, Tom?” the foreman offered helpfully, trying not to stare at Alex and failing.

“Andy, meet Alex Moss. We are going to take a short trip down into the cave. Do you guys still have some gear around?”

“Sure Tom, but…,” Andy hesitated, “isn’t it a little late to be spelunking?” Andy gave Tom a sly grin.