For a few more seconds, Laura remained in her position, still doubting. She then opened the rear side door and got into the car. I instead walked around the car and sat on the front passenger seat next to Mariann.
It had been clear that for a long time now, I was not the lead on this expedition. Mariann had taken over on the very first minutes and proved herself with her knowledge and experience. Never mind the fact that without her it would have been very difficult for us to even travel in baby steps at this place, not even mentioning attempts to leave or escape this place. It was hard for me to admit it to myself but I was about as lost here as that soldier had been.
Slowly, the car started moving and following a barely noticeable road. We rode towards metal monster in the distance under the rim of the crater.
“So?” Laura asked. “Why might we not find that red vehicle here?”
“Because it is probably back in the garage by now. The time here is not exactly linear, as I’ve mentioned before. We arrived at an empty house where there were both vehicles. The Professor took one of them and left. But on a different timeline, the man living in this house discovers when going for his morning dump that one of his cars is gone. Standing on the rim of the crater, observing it with his binoculars, he will see that again the car has been left into the crater somewhere. The keys will either be in the door lock cylinder, in the ignition, on the tire, or behind the visor. Or in bed or on the hood. Or on the antenna. Or nearby in the sand next to some footsteps which end there.”
“And why do we not meet that man?”
“Because the timelines run in parallel, they do not intersect. Just that sometimes they happen to come so close to each other that an interference is created, never mind that the amount of time between the different events is not always the same.”
The girl in black stopped the car next to one of the continuous tracks of the excavator, under the rotating center section of the main tower. That machine was truly gigantic. Although in the distance it seemed bluish gray, close by we could see all the black steel used in its construction, some of the beams thicker than several people standing side by side. And the platform the beams were attached to lied more than five meters above out heads. Much further away that it had seemed from the distance.
The caterpillar tracks themselves were roughly three meters tall, at least twice as wide and more than sixteen meters long. In total, the machine had six tracks in two groups of three. Thus is was clear that this could not have left the tracks on the rim on either ends of the crater. And despite the negligent ground pressure it produced, it was still a fascinating question how did they even manage to get it here. On its own it could have never crossed the rim of the crater and being delivered here would have required scores of other heavy motor vehicles and an army or engineers, mechanics and other construction workers. And besides the ruins at the bottom of the crater, there was no sign of any of that ever being in here.
Down here the ominous creaking of that rusty construct which had seen endless winds, rain, dust and cold was even sharper than before. Tall black tower, thick cables keeping in place the long steel truss with the wheel and the much shorter truss for counterweight at the opposite side. The cables also created their own sound. The whole thing looked like it might collapse at any second under its own weight or, conversely, wake up under the influence of some unknown intellect and start moving and working.
“Do not let yourselves get frightened by the way it looks.” Mariann said as if having read my thoughts. “It is still in full working order. It just needs lubrication and a new reactor module.”
She pointed at the thick open doors with large safety markings and an approximately container-sized void between them high above the tracks of the machine.
“You sure it won’t collapse right here?” Laura still doubted, still standing at some distance, out of the tall shadow the tower was casting.
“Sure. Also this was not at all the thing I wanted to show you.”
She headed in a different direction, towards the two parallel trails about 200 meters away which some other caterpillar tracks had left in the crater.
“This is the only place the Professor could have gotten out.” She said, stopping.
The tracks left by the caterpillar drive were at most two or three meters deep here and got even shallower as they climbed up the wall and then towards the crest of the rim. If elsewhere the question was how anybody could get out of the crater with that vertical wall, here if one were to follow one of the tracks it could not have been much of a challenge.
“Dammit!” I shouted, suddenly realizing it. “The machine that crossed the crater! It came from over here! It crossed this rim first, and with it’s weight pushed down on the edge of the crater turning it from a sheer vertical wall into the mild gradient we see right now. But whence we came from the tracks are that deep only because the machine had to climb it under it’s own weight and then slid down in a much softer ground and lower gradient.”
“Yeah, that’s likely what happened,” the girl in black said.
“You have probably had more time to contemplate that, haven’t you?” Laura asked.
“On one hand… and on the other, the right timeline has touched our own. Sometimes in dreams, sometimes when awake, I have seen these tracks being made. I have heard the ground give way. But I have not see the thing that creates them. But I do know that when these tracks were made, the bottom of the crater still had fertile soil and there were grass and trees. The local climate was different. Mud was… something more than a distant memory.”
“We won’t be going from here?” Laura asked.
“No. Not here. From here one can only get to the Center Station and to… places… beyond that. One can’t usually even dream of those places. Anomalous fields are too strong and bend the timelines away from each other. We’re gonna use the tunnels.”
“The tunnels?”
“Yep. Between the Nameless Town and the Center Station, there was once a tunnel a few kilometers long. Arrow straight. In that tunnel there was a linear accelerator. The generators and the injection complex were located in the Center Station and the detector complex was built deep under the Institute, partly into the sections and departments which had for a long time been considered totally destroyed and forgotten. The event that created the crater may have buried the town underneath but the tunnels should still exist. After the event they even managed to clean it out and create new access shafts.”
“A linear… particle accelerator?” I asked with strong skepticism. “Here? On the territory of a former Soviet Socialist Republic?”
“Yes.” The girl in black gave a strong nod. “A conducive region for all sorts of science and experiments. The world here was much more sensitive, much thinner than elsewhere. Here the fabric of reality was much easier to pierce through. I don’t know about everything they researched in here but you can be sure that ultimately it was about military applications. When the Union collapsed then for a few decades nothing happened in here. It is very hard to justify hanging on to a black project classified at such a depth that not a single physical document exists to tie it to the government apparatus.”
The girl in black took a last look at the two caterpillar tracks before us and then turned to look a the towering excavator not too far and the…
“Where’s the car?” Laura asked.
I too turned around, carefully examining the surroundings of the excavator base in order to try and notice either the front or the rear of the vehicle. Then I suddenly noticed it, much further away, several hundred meters away on the other side of the mining machine near the edge of the inner wall of the crater.
“We definitely did not leave it there.” I said.
I was still peeling my eyes to try and find the force or the people who had moved the car without us noticing it. The car itself was barely noticeable at nearly a kilometer away. Only the color of the vehicle contrasting with the red and brown bedrock of the crater allowed me to notice it.
“What the hell…?” Asked Laura, stupefied, after raising her binoculars.
She lowered them again and for a dozen or so seconds she kept staring into empty space before raising them again.
“That’s not possible.” She said again, more to herself than to us. “Impossible I say. This sun, the crater and those stories of Mariann are starting to affect you mind Laura, time to wake up.”
I too got my binoculars out to look at the car in the distance, immediately noticing a group of people standing near it. The first person I recognized was the girl in black, those two guys to the left looked like the Professor and his young assistant. By the front of the car there was a woman whose hair looked like Laura’s. The group seemed to be arguing over something. The man that looked like the Professor was repeatedly pointing at the excavator.
That woman who looked like Laura got her binoculars, raised them and then she froze. For a moment, she lowered her binoculars to be sure that the thing she was seeing was indeed the thing she was seeing and then from her lips I could read words that also immediately reached my ears.
“Mariann? What’s going on?”
The group in the distance by the greenish blue sedan glistening in the sun froze and started to scan the distance. Those that had their binoculars were soon observing us in return. The only person whose demeanor remained unchanged was the girl in black, not disturbed by the least by this strange phenomenon.
“Indeed.” I lowered the binocular. “What is going on?”
“The timelines touching each other.” Laura stated. “Right now we’re seeing that, right?”
“Yes.” Mariann said.
With the tip of her boot, she drew two parallel lines on the ground. Next to those she drew two waves.
“Let’s say that these two express some period of time in both time and space. They run in parallel, so they cannot intersect. These are the timelines I mentioned. But as with everything in nature, their true form is a wave. Now these waves stretch and compress, they phase and move like normal waves. We ourselves cannot sense any of that because we live on a wave. However the space in which these waves exist, moves as well, just like how orbiting heavenly bodies are free-falling in a straight line along a curved space, these waves may also travel in a curved manner because the space is curved. And thus sometimes the crests of these waves come so close to each other that some things will bleed through.”
“And at the moment, we’re located…,” I started.
“At the crest on one such wave.” The girl replied. “As are they. This roughly a kilometer between us is the distance between the centers of two timelines in this space. The true distance may be much less, maybe just a few meters. If we try to make it to them then we will see them disappear, the car will also disappear from there and reappear under the excavator.”
“So that there is a parallel universe?” Laura asked.
“Its an adjacent world.” Mariann said. “I have no idea how much of a parallel to us it is and neither how much of a universe it may be.”
“How many of such adjacent world are there?”
“What did Mar… I mean what did I tell you in that house under the darkness of night in front of the fire?”
“At least a four-dimensional...” Laura started pensively, “...hyperfabric?”
“Yes, at least a four-dimensional hyperfabric.” Mariann smiled. “That’s a great analogy.”
“Why here?” I asked. “Why is it that we see that adjacent world precisely here?”
“The same reason why we will never again see the Professor. The Center Station. This proximity to the Center Station takes what is already a twisted up world and adds yet another level of incomprehensibility to it. We can go by the way, the entrance to the tunnel is about a hundred meters further from the spot you saw the car and them standing.”
“Let’s say, I send a rocket at them.” I said. “What will happen?”
“They will see the rocket fly right thorough them and disappear because it is not real for them. You see the rocket fly right through them because for you, they are not real.”
“Mariann, maybe it is time for you to tell us why we’re here.” Laura said. “What is our goal?”
“The goal?” Mariann asked. “That’s a really long story. The goal is never unified. For that we need to talk about your goal, his goal.” She glanced at me for a moment. “Mine, the Professor’s, the goal of those who sent us here. We need to speak of the goal of this place here and finally the goal of the place we will finally reach. That’s the least amount of goals we need to cover. As all these goals are related to each other and have an influence on each other.”
Without anything else to say, she started walking back towards the excavator. Despite how far it was from us, it still seemed to tower above us in a threatening manner. Sometimes it seemed as if the top of it was shuddering in the wind with soul cleaving creaks. The sun had also turned more desolate and pale, the air more autumn-like.
On a more poetic moment I would have been certain that the girl in black was correct. In here, to believe in something also meant to create it into existence. And it seemed to me more and more that the world was reacting to how we were located in it and how we behaved. If the speed and the direction with which we moved within the world was unsuitable for said world, it would immediately become a little more hostile to us. The air grew colder, the sun paled and the wind rose. The blue in the sky lost all color and become covered in gray clouds into which started flowing darker tones still. These darker shades seemed to be heavier as they flowed and pooled into the lowest depressions between the clouds. And then a strange gentle wind started to blow across the bottom of the crater, preceding a massive thunderstorm.
“If you spend too much time observing the sky in this place, you really will see a storm.” Mariann said, gently touching my shoulder. “Let’s go. We still have a lot to talk about.”
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“About goals.” I said.
“Yes.”
“We started walking again. Straight towards that green car and the group of people still hanging around nearby it.
“Your goal, Olav, was to die.” The girl in black suddenly said. “To die in a better way than by spending your days in the bar and drinking yourself to death.”
“Wait, what?!” Laura asked, stopping. “You want to die?!”
“That is not quite correct.” I said, feeling the need to calm the situation.
“That is relatively correct.” Mariann said. “You have traveled far, discovered much of the world. It no longer excites you. There’s nothing left for you. The world has lost its mystery. That’s why alcohol. To spend the night drinking so that in a sleepy stupor a memory would brightly come to you, even for a fleeting moment, as if a dream long since forgotten. That’s also the reason you came here. I’m pretty sure you were told that this was suicide mission and a one-way ticket. And despite that you came.”
“You’re correct, I like to drink and to remember.” I said. “But to be honest, there was no chance for me to refuse. To visit the Route had a long-time dream of mine. And then finally I was contacted and made an offer I could not refuse.”
“First of all, maybe once a long time ago it really was your dream. But that dream died a long time a go. For you, this expedition to the Route was akin to having another bottle of tequila.”
“Now wait a minute!” I raised my voice.
“Second of all!” Mariann continued in a demanding tone. “Second of all, it’s not really like you did not have any other options. During the last two months there have been offers to search for Xanadu, or walk the trail of admiral Byrd in the Antarctic or the Nazis when they looked for Shambala. The Order or the Black Sun has made you at least two offers to go to Scandinavia to look for traces of Hyperborea. Never mind the Russians who have sent you carts full of research on Tikal, the Dead Cities, the twin towns of Iram and Wabar, even on the mythical Livium and the Seven Pillars. Despite all that, you choose drinking and the Route. While instead you could have been managing the excavations in lost city erected in honor of the cosmic Old Gods.”
“Where did you...” I tried to find the right words which would express both my astonishment and my exasperation at the same time.
I could not. Mariann was correct. I had received offers. Wondrous, astonishing, unbelievable offers. Some that would have taken me to places millions of amateurs look for each year and others to places which were so secret that even knowing their true names were grounds for getting extra-judicially shot. And still I had come here. Despite that, my journey to the Route, to nowhere, to here had been my own choice. And how the hell could that girl know all this anyway? How did she know of things she could not and should not have known anything about?
“Did you spy on me or did my employers do that?” I asked, still incensed.
“They did.” She replied. “During my voluntary… incarceration to get info from me, they were forced to reveal all they knew about it to learn anything new. It really was a surprise to see how little they knew.”
“You also told them what you have told us?” Laura asked.
“Yes. Just as Olav guessed back at the house, for me, information in itself has no real value. It’s more like folklore.”
“And because of that, you are invaluable to everybody.” I said.
Mariann only shrugged, still smiling.
“Why did I come here?” Laura now asked playfully, as if expecting Mariann to guess her reasons as well.
“Your curiosity about the Route. And also to find out what would be the assignment which would pull Olav from the bar and sober him up. And if I understand it correctly, it has been some time since you grew tired to death of your professorship.”
“Damn,” Laura smiled. “That is the truth.”
“The Triumvirate put in a lot of work to build a team to be sent here. People willing to die and perform their duty even when in certain death.” Mariann said.
“What was their goal?” I asked. “It is pretty clear it was not just a simple expedition.”
“Their goal was carried by the Professor. The only thing they saw was the Route being out of order. And the best they could come up with, despite me revealing to them, everything they wanted to hear, was that there must be some kind of malfunction in the Center Station. In essence he was supposed to guide the expedition. You only accompanied them because of your extensive experience about things going wrong. I was brought along in case I should remember some new information that could be of help. And the soldier...”
“...because for you something being classified means nothing.” Laura finished her thought.
“Indeed.” Mariann smiled.
“Is there really a malfunction in the Center Station, though?” I asked.
“That is impossible to know.” The girl in black said. “The Center Station was a mysterious place even before everything went to hell and the world twisted out of it’s original shape. It was the place all suspicious and unexplainable phenomena tended to be focused on, whether due to their nature or their origin. That’s why it is called the Center Station. However when things went off the rails, everything distorted. The Center Station, what it was in nature, got amplified, it became inaccessible in the very literal definition of the word. Spatially, temporally. One cannot even know anything specific regarding it. It disallows the release of information located within it’s grasp.”
“But then does that not make it possible that the Data Agency which orders around the Committee was right? That should the Professor reach the Center Station and resolve the malfunction, the Route will go back to being what it used to be? And then one can return from the Center Station?” I asked.
“The Route can never go back to what it used to be. It it tightly tied to the order of the world in here. Supposing that through some miracle, the Professor does make it to the Center Station then considering how messed up the timelines are in here, more than two kilometers from the Station as the crow flies, and how the weirdness increases as the distance decreases on a scale of natural logarithm, then it is possible to say with a lot of certainty that by the Yefremov generators at the at the Center Station the things are so complicated that human personality, the existence of a malfunction and resolving it lie in a superposition with eight valences. Add to that a four-dimensional time, never mind the four-dimensional space.”
“So there is no way back?” Laura asked.
“A way back you say?” The girl in black started to laugh in a hollow disappointed mockery. “Terms like ‘forward’ and ‘back’ are useless and without meaning, especially here. Mainly because they cannot be used to refer to the same object or concept each time they are used. All they manage to express is a clear way in which a human mind is limited when trying to make sense of the world, especially if the world decides to or is forced to reveal itself before us in its true form. ‘Forward’ and ‘back’ is a bivalent conception over a single dimension. But if time has opened up like a four-dimensional fabric made of timelines or time-threads, then describing movement in the terms of a single dimension is of no use.
“’Forward’ and ‘back’ cannot describe our movement with enough definition. We also don’t know in which direction ‘forward’ or ‘back’ point to or in which direction we ourselves are moving. It doesn’t matter though that we are stuck here nor that we would not have the option to move anywhere. Becoming lost is still possible though, as that is only dependent on traversing an event horizon of some certain type.” Marian kept staring at the two of us for a few dozen seconds. “For example that group still standing around that car over there.”
I turned my eyes towards the group and the car, to whom we had gotten quite close by to. Still they eyed us, looked at us with their binoculars and probably created numerous theories among themselves about our nature and existence. It seemed that even though from our perspective we were standing no more than 30 meters from them, from their perspective we were still more than half a kilometer away from them.
“Just a few more steps and...” Mariann mused.
Just a few more steps and both the group of people people and the car faded into nothingness right before us like a shimmering mirage above a hot desert sand. Due to my gut feeling, I turned back towards the excavator and saw that very same green sedan stand right under the main tower of the excavator.
“And now, if you were to look back towards the caterpillar tracks at the bottom of the crater...” Mariann said.
I turned and rose the binoculars hanging around my wrist. It took me no time to locate the dark red pickup truck parked at the two massive tracks. And I also noticed 5 people nearby it. This time I recognized them much faster; it was all of our expedition team, minus the soldier. The Mariann over there still had her little carriage with the breathing tank. The people were examining the tracks, until the Professor’s assistant alerted them to what was presumably our presence.
“There’s no soldier there.” Laura said.
“No there is not.” Mariann agreed. “Something here demands that the soldier perishes. And there exists no timeline on which he survives for more than two hours after entering the Route. Two hours of the time of the general group, I mean. At least I have not found such a timeline yet. But at the very least I hope this has been enough for the two of you to see how the threads of time function in reality, such as it is here.”
“The threads of time are separated from each other by the event horizons which are like the walls or borders of the timelines...” Laura said.
“That’s how they are supposed to be like.” The girl in black said. “But in here the event horizons have fractured and crumbled away in pieces and shards, leaving the timelines naked. That’s why there exist these places where one may bleed through into the next. However in the Center Station, all timelines are positioned at the same space-time coordinates all mixed up with one another. There are no event horizons between them, they are all one. And the only thing keeping that bunch of waves together is the quaternary field of the Yefremov generators.”
“Let me guess, that’s just one way of explaining things?” I asked.
“One of the more scientific ones.” Mariann said with a smile.
“Why did you come here?” I asked the girl in black. “What is your goal?”
“To find myself once again. And by doing that I would be free of the oxygen tank and the breathing problems.”
“Before you said that all this military guarding the Route could not have stopped you if you had really wanted to leave against their will.” Laura said. “What did you mean by that?”
“I meant what I meant.” The girl said.
“You are not the same kind of a human as we are, are you?” Laura asked. “Most definitely you are not from a world that is familiar to us. As I have gathered from your stories, you are also not from this place. You are from somewhere else, some other timeline.”
“Maybe I am.” The girl said in a thoughtful tone. “But this place has become my home. Here I am, here I will always return to. This corner of the world, the limits, the twists and turns and the mechanics I know best. But that is irrelevant, ultimately.”
“Why did you have that oxygen tank?” I asked. “What happened to you?”
“My lungs got burnt. I lost more than sixty percent of functional lung tissue. When I got pulled out of this place into the world you are from. This way.”
She pointed at a large concrete pipe jutting out of the vertical crater wall at a height of about five meters.
“Where are we going?”
“A simple answer would be ‘forward’. Forward from our current position.”
“So the story about your lungs…?” Laura insisted.
“As you have probably been explained to, an uncountable number of expeditions have entered the Route, both with military as well as with civilians. And none have returned. At the same time, off the route many people have appeared and then also returned to it, without anybody managing to capture them.
“Let me guess, you were the first one that was captured?” Laura remarked.
“I was the first one who had no means to stop my own capture. It isn’t only our own familiar human kind who uses this place and the Route as a kind of natural crossing formation, there are many other human civilizations and parallel worlds who also want to know what goes on other timelines. Maybe they can even navigate between them with certainty. With regards to people who have entered the Route but have never come back, they are not lost forever, if the timelines here truly make up a four-dimensional fabric then you can be sure that people who have not chosen to remain here, have all gone back, but apparently none have made it back onto the same timeline or worldline they came from.”
“And since one cannot sense changing the lines and no trace of that ever taking place remains, then it is also impossible to say if one has changed the lines and how many times already.” I said.
“And whether you have changed into one that has been ripped apart like it happened to our soldier or instead onto an Ouroboros.”
“An Ouroboros?” Laura asked.
“A thread with the ends tied together. A closed time-like loop. A pole, if you were to run around it, you might catch up to yourself and run yourself down.”
“Frightening.” I said.
“Indeed.” Mariann agreed. “There aren’t too many worse thing than going outside to gather firewood and then to get back to your hose to see yourself already having fired up the stove and making tea or something.”
Without much effort, the girl in black heaved her body into the reinforced concrete tunnel with surprisingly thick walls. Or was it really some sort of a pipe for fluids or gases? She then bent down to also help up Laura. I also climbed up and noticed a closed hatch with rust spots and a wheel on it a little deeper in the pipe.
“The accelerator tunnel has long since collapsed.” Mariann explained, reaching her hand out to me. “And those segments which are still intact, I don’t think you want to know what goes on in there. It is still the Center Station. But this here is a service tunnel. Properly shielded and it has survived everything that happened. The effects of the Center Station are properly neutralized as well.”
“And where are we going?” Laura asked.
“You’ll see when we get there.”
Mariann advanced along the bottom of the tunnel towards the large steel bulkhead door. The concrete inside the tunnel had crumbled in spots revealing the rebar reinforcement lattice. She climbed over the larger piece which had fallen from the ceiling and finally stopped in front of the door. She slid her fingers along the handles on the wheel and then grabbed onto it, trying to get it moving.
I kept observing her struggle for a few moments, hearing the rusty surfaces creak as they rubbed together, it seemed the wheel moved no more than five centimeters back and forth. I then decided to join her and offer my help. I leaned in over her and also grabbed the wheel with both hands, With both of out efforts the wheel finally started moving and soon Mariann could open it up on her own. She soon opened the bulkhead door.
From the pitch black darkness behind the door blew a draft of cool air full of smells of crude oil products.
“Are we the first people who have stepped in here since the end of the world?” Laura asked after having climbed through the small opening.
“I doubt it.” Mariann replied. “Although it really is not a path that’s exactly known. Most people won’t even make an attempt at the bulkhead door, assuming it to be bent with damage or seized up with rust.”
“Does the same thing happen here as with the cars that somebody comes, sees that the hatch is open and then closes it again?” I asked.
“It does.” The girl in black said.
She produced a small silvery windproof lighter and ignited it. It worked surprisingly well at bringing light into the pitch darkness in the tunnel. We could see the dusty bottom of the pipe we were in, we could see the walls with crumbled concrete which revealed the steel reinforcement, and also, the pipe seemed slightly oval as if it had buckled inward slightly with all this time. The pipe seemed to be nearly three meters in inner diameter.
“For the man who lives on the edge of the crater, or who lived there, depending on when you happen to come across his house… for that man it is important to keep this hatch closed at all times to keep those living in the tunnels out of the crater.
“Somebody lives in here?” Laura asked with a suddenly frightened voice. “Or something?”
“Somebody or something. The man on the edge of the crater could tell you many stories of them, but in his stories the monsters are always different. Sometimes they have wings, sometimes they do not. Sometimes they have thick pale skin, other times they have long hands and fingers with underdeveloped hind legs. Skulls devoid of eyes and instead of a nose there is a tall slit above the mouth which gives them an extraordinary sense of smell. Until now though I have not seen a single creature though, not of any kind. But I also haven’t gone too deep into the tunnels. However strange voices and sounds, boxes falling down and rolling around, pipes rustling… all that is quite common and dare I say, normal.
The people may be gone and the world is twisted out of its frame but the equipment in the center of it all is for the most part still functional and running. The scientists here were incredibly adept at creating cybernetic backup systems. Although I doubt they ever planned for the one in a billion chance that the whole complex would be kept in check by a satellite network up high on a geostationary orbit, still observing the whole region. Not a single person, just cold self-adjusting tech.”
“It is amazing it has stayed functional for this long.” I noted.
“If there’s one thing these Russians can do at all, it is mindlessly simple military equipment.” Agreed Mariann.
Soon, remains of crumbled concrete access shafts started to appear in our way. There seemed to be one after every twenty meters or so. In each shaft, although they were dark, I could see rusty rungs sticking out of the much narrower vertical shafts. They seemed to be about the diameter or sewer manholes.
However in most cases, almost the whole shaft had collapsed along with the ladder inside it, laying as an unordered pile of rubble on our way which we had carefully climb over. We also felt occasional vibrations all around us which dropped pieces of loose concrete all around us. However the girl in black was not alarmed by them the least.
“What about these vibrations?” I asked.
“The Center Station.” Mariann said. “The tunnel might be shielded from the fields but the physical rotation of those generators causes tensions in the surface that surrounds the complex.”
“How far do we have to go?” Laura asked. “I have no wish to meet some monster while we only have your flip lighter for illumination.”
“They don’t like the smell of fire.” The girl in black said. “Not too far now. The next access shaft should be the correct one.”
Soon yet another vertical access shaft appeared from the darkness. The only notable feature on it was that it was intact. Both the concrete collar that reached down from the ceiling as well as the ladder, seemingly. There was one other strange feature here. Onto the wall of the pipe was fastened a rod with a hook at the end of it. With some effort, Mariann took it off the pipe wall and used it to pull down the sliding section of the ladder. This section slid under the narrow steel U-shaped rungs so it was even narrower. She replaced the hooked rod and then stepped onto the first rungs of the ladder. Despite a layer of fine rusty powder being left on her fingers, it seemed to be still able to bear weight.
She slowly started to climb up of it, followed by Laura and then me. As I was the last one, I had no idea how long our travel up the ladder was going to be. Ahead was pitch dark, and perhaps an endless emptiness, same was definitely behind us. And around us was claustrophobic concrete tunnel our bodies constantly rubbed against. We did not talk, we only climbed.
My fingers suddenly touched Laura’s legs. She had stopped, and so had the girl in black ahead of her, apparently. I could feel the somebody above me shift their weight and then blinding daylight reached me, bouncing around the two bodies above me and making my eyes water. A heavy cast iron cover above us was moved to the side and after that we slowly climbed out of the pipe, still half-blind, onto a cracked damp pavement.
I stayed there on the pavement, sitting until my eyes became adjusted to the daylight. As I looked around, I could see a possibly abandoned and forgotten cottage district around me. The grass in the yards had grown tall, the colors had faded, the steel chain-link was rusted, pavement was cracked and full of potholes and buildings looked like they were slowly falling into ruin. The sidewalks and the curbstones were sinking into the ground, I now also noticed chain-link fences ripped and the wooden fences about to topple over. I could see something else as well, just about the only thing that did not look dilapidated in this place. A boxy green four door sedan with mirror finish chrome surface on the wheel faces. That very same car we had used to drive to the excavator in the crater and then left there. And then found gone.
“Now that is an interesting coincidence!” Mariann said, having also noticed the car.
“I don’t believe in coincidences.” I said.
“That is bad, In here you will have nothing besides coincidences. If you start attempting to divine some patterns or rules behind them, it will not end well for you.”
I crawled back to the manhole in the ground and took a look down the hole. But instead of all-encompassing darkness, I saw water down there, reflecting the sky and a dark shadow of my face back at me. I put the cast iron lid back onto the manhole.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“A few decades before the end of the world.” Mariann said.
“So where are we?” Laura repeated my question with a slightly different intonation.
Mariann sad nothing. Instead she opened the driver door of the car and found the keys and then went to open the trunk. As the trunk lid rose, it revealed mine and Laura’s backpacks with out stuff.
“But still? Where?”
“Look over there, towards the North.” Mariann said, pointing at an overgrown yard next to us.
Behind that overgrown yard was a small patch of forest, but through the trees we could see a pale yellow pasture, extending for at least a few kilometers. And on the horizon I think there was a small town. But what really grabbed my attention, even through the trees, was a steel triangular tower hanging down from the sky.
“As I said.” Mariann gave a smile while walking back. “Welcome!”