“Yeow!”

I had to shield my eyes.

It wasn’t heat, but flashy light that caused my anguish.

If you’ve ever been to one of those tall, circular hotels with all the rooms facing a middle courtyard, you’ll get the sense for how this facility was built. Think of a hollowed-out silo with a middle shaft maybe fifty feet across, with glass paneling up and down the interior, and with offices and rooms built into the hollowed-out rock surrounding the main drop. Twenty stories high, underground, and with two-hundred feet of derrick above the surface, the bunker complex was touted as a wonder of engineering.

The scene inside the central shaft was exactly what you’d expect to see when a multi-billion-dollar science facility was shitting the bed. Imagine lightning zapping up and down a bottomless mine shaft, but instead of looking like a tree with many branches, the beam of blue-white energy was a single, thick trunk. I couldn’t see the top or the bottom of the dig site from my doorway.

“The fuckers really did it.”

I wasn’t really sure what ‘it’ was that they did, other than ‘it’ sucked. There was lightning in the shaft, the whole world experienced an earthquake at the same moment, and Death had visited me in my room. Yep, it sucked big time.

The dorms were built about halfway down the twenty-story shaft. The industrial sections were below, such as the machines running the beam of the drill. The busier people-friendly sections were above, like the cafeteria, administrative, and science divisions.

I strode over to the windows, still guarding my eyes from the glare.

I looked into the heart of the complex.

Extensive structural damage was evident as I peered through the cracked safety glass of the observation windows. Across the open space, but on the same level, several dorm rooms were on fire. Their doors were open, and the flames inside burned wild with no one using so much as a handheld fire extinguisher to put them out. No one was over there at all.

In fact, I saw no human movement anywhere on the levels visible from my spot.

Three stories down, on the other side, a long section of the glass had shattered and broken away. The floor was canted downward, so if there had been people over there, they would have slid out into the equipment forty feet below.

Glancing toward the bottom, I realized there was nothing forty, sixty, or even a hundred feet down. The drill had gone to town and chewed through the stone, as it was supposed to do, but none of the water or rock had come back up. If someone fell into the shaft, how far down would they go?

Instinctively, I stepped back from the glass.

The beam was hard to watch, as it was almost as bright as the sun, but it was easier to see the effects it was having on the rest of the tunnel, and it wasn’t as singular and uniform as I’d thought. Little offshoots came out of the main bolt, sometimes striking the walls or zapping through the glass and into those burning rooms below.

“I’ve seen enough,” I whispered, backing away even more.

I sprinted for the stairwell to go up.

The door slammed against the wall as I pushed it open.

“Shit!”

Inside the stairwell, I took risers two at a time until I reached the first landing.

Panting, I halted when I heard—

Yes, screams came from far away.

Down? Up? Could I help them? Could I even help myself?

Not sure there was a choice, I continued going up, hurrying past the names on the doors to each level.

[CAFETERIA]

[MEDICAL]

[CONTROL]

I stopped at the door for the topmost level of the complex.

Every fiber wanted to run a few more flights and be at the underground parking level and exit, but I had a gut feeling there were people alive in the control room. If they were there, it wouldn’t cost me much time to peek in and remind them to run, don’t walk, to get the hell out of there.

I yanked open the heavy door that said [CONTROL].

The inside looked like a billion-dollar recreation of a NASA control center. Rows of computer workstations huddled around the central shaft of the complex, and hundreds of giant monitors flashed data far beyond my understanding. However, where there would normally be men and women scientists scurrying back and forth, there was now only a handful of them gathered near the exit door.

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They were talking in a group.

A lone female scientist crouched by a broken window next to the pit, looking down. I had a strange feeling those screams had come from a falling woman, and I thought I’d found the source of it. Who had gone through?

It didn’t matter anymore.

“Hey! Everyone has to get the fuck out of here!” I didn’t care about protocols or pleasantries or that I was the hired help, and they were the owners of this underground Death Star. It was time for these people to go.

CONTROL, like every level, was one large floor around the central tube. It was the only one that had a ring of mirrors lining the tops of the central windows, as those provided a quick way for technicians to look down the tube to the heavy equipment at the bottom.

I looked past the endless field of workstations and duty desks to the alien light beaming in the shaft. Like I’d observed earlier, tendrils of energy branched off from the main bolt, like snakes smelling the rat they were about to have for dinner. “Lady, get away from that window. I’m clearing out! I recommend you all do the same!”

I’d done my part to help survivors, so it was time to lead by example. I shot out the door, headed for the stairwell, and climbed to the next level. I emerged in what looked like an underground parking garage. A few workers used the space to park their cars, but it was mostly used to store crates of redundant equipment and scientific packages. The central shaft was now hidden behind rock, so I couldn’t see the blue light, but the rest of the donut-shaped cavern was lit by small emergency lights.

The brightest light came from the tunnel to the surface. Up there, I would know what I’d gotten myself into with this place. Was it going to be a massive battle already in progress? We’re robots fighting aliens? Would I be in danger of being tagged by falling bombs?

I jogged at a cautious pace.

The tunnel was built for construction equipment to pass through, so it was every bit of twenty feet tall and wide. Maybe a hundred feet from the inside to the outer exit. It was also angled up a bit, so you had to drive uphill to get out. I now went up the incline, ever more anxious to see the battlefield or whatever war front I would have to fight in.

When I made it to the exit portal, it took five seconds to realize how much things had changed.

The road was gone.

The intricate security gate was gone.

Nebraska was gone.

There was now a pleasant-looking pastoral valley below me, and it hadn’t been there the last time I’d gone to work.

“This can’t be real…”

I slapped my face a few times, to be sure I was awake.

Normally, the area around the drilling complex was a dull, mostly-flat grassland for many miles in all directions. Driving to and from the job site from the nearest town was like repeatedly reading the same page in a book for an hour straight. No matter when you looked out the window, you felt as if you were in the same spot. Over and over. But not anymore. The terrain below me was no longer dull, flat, or grassland.

A gravel road ran along a lush, green valley toward a small village about two miles out. Rows of stacked rocks lined the route and different types of crops colored small fields up and down the roadway, creating a patchwork quilt of color. Beyond the town, a grouping of brown hills stood above the rest of the terrain. A lone tower, possibly made of stone, rose above the lands at the highest point. I’d never been to Europe, but I had seen it on TV, and the landscape looked like a country over there.

Was this the war Death had warned me about? If so, it didn’t look so bad.

I stumbled over and took a seat at the bench on the left side of the tunnel exit. The builders had placed a stone bench on either side of the tunnel exit, so pedestrians could rest or wait for rides to pick them up from the outdoor parking area.

After a minute or two of reflection time, a quiet male voice got my attention.

“Where are we?” he asked.

Marcus Barksdale, the leader of the whole operation, had followed me out of the facility. He was a portly sixty-something guy who was almost as round as he was tall, and always walked with raspy breathing, as if his weight problem wasn’t quite killing him fast enough, so he added a smoking habit. He was a nice guy, I’d come to find out over the past few months, though his physical condition usually kept him close to his desk.

“I have no fuh—freaking idea,” I replied.

Other scientists had come with him. They hovered at the darkened exit, half in and half out. Most of them had white coats on, a mode of dress they all supported with religious fervor, though one short girl, a redhead, had on civilian clothes. Only Marcus came all the way to the bench, though it still wasn’t far outside the tunnel.

“Thanks for getting us moving,” he said. “After the beam anomaly, and seeing what was still happening in the pit, I think we’re all surprised to be alive.”

I stood up to get a better look at who was left alive from the science team.

“Did you guys get a visitation from Death?” I asked Marcus and the others.

Some of them shrank back into the shadows.

“Nobody?” I pressed when they didn’t answer.

They shook their heads no. Marcus as well.

“Do you guys all see this?” I pointed behind me, toward the French valley.

More of them retreated.

They saw it.

“Here, watch this, though I warn you, it might stink.” I’d been carrying the box, so I set it on the ground and pressed the button. I jumped back on the off chance the stench came back.

The recording played. “Salutations, I’m Death…”

The men and women of the science team crowded to the end of the tunnel again as they watched Death fumble through his lines, but they would not come into the sunshine. For several minutes they stared with rapt attention at the display, and they even stayed quiet while the weird static went until the end. When it finished, I turned to them.

“Death clearly said the dark energy from the drill caused all this. Is that possible?”

The guy’s eyes were vacant.

“Well, did you cause all this?” I pressed.