Betty weighs almost nothing. Under what’s left of her dress, she is just skin and bone. I sling her over my shoulder like she’s a doll, her hand wrapped around my neck to give her purchase.
“Run!” I scream at Anton and Mister Nomura and Mister Pettus as I make my way over the counter, down the trapdoor in the kitchen to the lab. The smell of gas leaking fills my nostrils and I hold my breath so I won’t gag.
“Last resort. Mister Nomura let me do it.” Betty reassures me. I cover my mouth and nose with the front of my hoodie. Anton comes tumbling halfway down the steps. He lands with an audible thud but picks himself up again almost immediately.
“I’m okay, I’m okay. Anybody else smell gas?” he mumbles. There’s a racket up above, the sound of plates smashing, cutlery clattering down to the floor. Mister Nomura jumps down next.
“Run, you idiots!” he hisses at us, pushing me against the door. I pull open the latch and we file inside the entrance to the tunnels.
“What about Mister Pettus?”
“He’s right behind us! I’ll keep a lookout for him! Go!” Mister Nomura says and I can tell that he’s lying. I push against him. Mister Nomura pushes me through the door. The latch locks, trapping them outside in a place brimming with werewolves and slowly filling with gas. I kick at the door uselessly. Anton grasps my shoulder, slowly pulling me away.
“It’s okay. They’re going to make it. They’re going to be fine.” He says, doing the best that he can to reassure me. But his face is covered in soot and sweat and God I hope that’s not blood and they’re stuck out there and this is all my fault.
“Finn? We need you to get us out of here. Please don’t lose it.” Betty whispers in my ear. Between her voice and Anton’s touch, I can fight back against the tide of panic that’s threatening to swallow me whole. I start walking down through the tunnels so we can slink away in the dark places under the skin of Orsonville.
It’s barely two minutes later when the world above rocks and shudders. I try my hardest not to look back, not think about the huge pillar of flame mushrooming up into the sky for a brief instant, the plaster and cement and glass clattering down across Etchison Street.
I take the first half-dozen turns without even thinking, the directions seared into my brain after all those nights spent down here with Mister Nomura. Even now, in the deep darkness beneath the Earth, I can tell exactly where we are: 5 meters below ground, just under the EasyMart. Take the fork in the road west at a steady pace and you’ll find yourself where the Old Marsh place used to be. Go east without getting horribly lost and you’ll be near the outskirts of the Edgarhorn silver mine in almost an hour.
We move at a slow jog to save our strength. Gunda and her pack have obviously not found the hatch leading here, otherwise they would have already been onto us. Perhaps the explosion melted it shut. Maybe Mister Nomura held it, pushed against it as he struck the match…
Focus.
“Where are we even going?” Anton asks. I know he’s getting jittery, stuck here under the ground like this, not a word spoken between us for…how long have we even been here?
“Outskirts. I know a place that’s safer. You guys will stay put right there, batten down the hatches and wait while I go back.”
“What? Why would you even go back there? Finn, you heard what happened. The entire place probably went up in flames. For all we know…”
“Don’t say it. Just don’t.” I bark and Anton keeps quiet for a while, follows my lead. I place my hand against the walls, check for any markers. Judging by the incline, we’ve gone deeper than we should have. Perhaps I took a wrong turn, or maybe I’m just losing it for no reason. I’m panicking because we probably have about a dozen murderous shapeshifting psychopaths on our tails. I go west at the next junction. Maybe if we can follow the path then we’ll reach an exit soon. Maybe then I can gather my thoughts, try not to get us all killed.
Yeah, that will do. No one else dying. I can live with that.
“Finn, watch out!” Betty shouts over my shoulder. I overstep the ledge into thin air, sliding down a sharp incline that I would have seen if I wasn’t so damn blind. Anton reaches out, grasps my sleeve but it tears right off. Betty and I tumble down into the darkness, rolling into the dusk and rocks. I’m screaming for a good minute before I finally land on a slab of something so cool and rough.
“Finn! Are you okay? Betty?” Anton calls out to us from somewhere up above. He’s all alone up there right now. It hurts just to talk, but I still muster a weak little:
“Yeah Anton, we’re fine.”
“I’m coming down!”
“No, don’t…” I gasp, struggling to get up. I blink, fighting down the horrible ringing sound in my ears. Under my feet, the slap of concrete. I lean against a smooth surface that could only be a wall. “Betty? Betty, are you there? Betty, just talk to me!”
The lights go off from every direction, erupting into the pitch blackness underground. I turn around and keep my forehead pressed to the ground to avoid getting entirely blinded. White spots dance across my vision but slowly, surely, I get used to the illumination. Grasping the Fighting Staff in one hand I get up and turn around, expecting the worst.
“I fell near the transformer!” Betty yells at me from the other side of the street. “Isn’t this awesome?”
***
“Why is there a town under Orsonville?” Anton asks, patting the dust off his palms, looking around at the rows upon rows of abandoned buildings, neatly arranged under the skin of the world. Betty’s slung over his shoulder.
“It’s not a town. It’s a military installation.” Betty says, pointing up at the series of signs neatly arranged near what possibly used to be the entrance. The emblems are faded and ravaged by rot, but the words STATES ARMY and NO TRESSPASSING can be made out clearly.
“There’s a secret underground military base under Orsonville? How long has this thing been around?” Anton asks, struggling with the impossibility of it all.
“My guess is since the 60’s. My dad, he is super into this black ops conspiracy stuff. He told me there are bunkers that are supposed to be Arks that will restore civilization in the event of a nuclear war. He told me there are sixteen all over the country alone.” Betty says, as she tries to peer through the dust-caked windows.
“So the army built a bunker to preserve human civilization 50 years ago under a little mountain town and nobody noticed?”
“Yeah, funny how that happened.” I say and I know exactly what it must feel like, never having all the answers. Just like Mister Pettus. Orsonville seems to be a magnet for these sorts of things. Perhaps there’s something about it, something that makes it ideal for the strangeness, allows it to take root and grow undetected. But if that is so, how come it wasn’t even mentioned in passing in the Helfwir world map? How could a place like this have ever escaped them?
Come to think of it, how come Chancel Road didn’t materialize inside the town, when I first came here? Why did it choose to keep its distance from it?
“What’s a Zitt-former?” Anton asks and my eyes go wide, staring at him. “Says here, on the sign. Place looks like a fortress.”
“It’s pronounced ‘zeitformer’. It’s German for time-shaper.” Betty corrects Anton and suddenly the big black building looms into view, wreathed by rusty razor wire. Its perimeter is festooned with gun placements, long since reduced to rust.
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The great door is bent and battered, torn from its hinges.
Something inside whirrs and whines.
“Is that thing running?” Anton asks. “Did you turn it on?”
“Get me closer, I want to see.” Betty urges Anton. I close my eyes and focus at the great hulking shape in the silo. Peeling stickers warning unauthorized personnel about radiation pop up to the forefront of my vision. Somewhere inside that mass of metal and wires beats a heart of pure uranium. The entire thing is covered in kilometers of wire, all of them twisting and turnings as they snake outside the building.
“Betty, how long could a nuclear reactor keep this place running?”
“Not for long, certainly. Unless someone was drawing power from it, then the reactor would enter a ‘safe mode’ and stop working to avoid an overload, since no-one was using the excess power that was generated. Why do you ask?”
“Because that thing inside? That’s a nuclear reactor. And unless you turned it on then I am guessing that it’s in operation.” I tell Betty. She grins nervously.
“You’re joking, right? Finn, please tell me you are joking. You’re not joking. So there’s a thing called a ‘time shaper’ that the army was developing in a secret base”
“In the 60’s” Anton adds.
“In the 60’s…”
“Underground.” Anton says.
“Underground, yeah. And that thing is powered by a nuclear reactor but somebody got it running again? What the heck is a ‘time shaper’? Why does it need so much power?”
“So it can break through a point in history that is easily malleable and allow an army of werewolves from the past to invade the present day.” I tell them. Anton’s jaw drops. Betty nods, slowly.
“Okay, that makes sense.”
“How does that make even a lick of sense?” Anton says, unbelieving. “A time machine? A werewolf time machine?”
“Technically, it’s a Nazi werewolf time machine. But I don’t think they give a damn about that first part anymore.” I say. Anton just stares. “Betty, can we stop it?”
“Stop a nuclear reactor? Finn, this isn’t like sabotaging a car. You can’t just cut off the brakes and hope for the best.” Betty says.
“What if you cut off the power that is being diverted? Force it to shut down?” I suggest.
“Even then, we’d need to find the time shaper and stop it. After that, someone would have to be here to make sure this shuts down properly and doesn’t send the uranium plummeting down into the water reserves and just poison everything. Even if we did save the world from werewolves, we’d just doom Orsonville.” Betty says.
“So we need a way out, right?” Anton says, hoisting Betty off his shoulder, handing her over to me. “I’m off.”
“Where do you think you’re going?” I yell at Anton, as he starts moving away from the building back to the street.
“Find us a way out! All this mess is beyond me! You girls try and find a way not to kill us all!”
“Take me inside” Betty says, grinning. “I wanna see the super-secret reactor.”
***
Betty has a field day with the place, checking the controls and going over the dog-eared manuals. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think she reveled in the insanity of it all.
“Okay, thankfully the entire electronic system has been jury-rigged and a lot of the old parts have been replaced, so I don’t have to struggle with the older parts of the machinery. That means I can control it from here.”
“Who could have modified a reactor? I mean, Gunda’s pack is in high school and Billy’s dad was a mean drunk! How could they know how to do this?”
“They don’t. But my dad does.”
My jaw nearly hits the floor. “Your dad?”
“I tried to tell you, back before you left the school. I went through my dad’s stuff, after they came to us and found Lisa’s body. I looked through his diary, overheard a couple of things. They’ve been using him, Finn. They’ve known that he was hiding in the mines for years now and threatened him that they’d let everyone know about the monster living in the Edgarhorn. But I think he was more scared of what they might do to me.”
“Betty, I don’t know what to say.”
“He’s not a bad man, my dad. He’s just scared and very tired of running all the way around the world. He wanted Orsonville to work for me more than for him. He wanted a normal life for us. Except he didn’t think this through.”
“Betty I’m so sorry I didn’t listen to you” I say and she reaches out her hand, wraps it around my shoulder and squeezes. “What do you want me to do?”
“Find a radiation suit. There should be a few left that haven’t fallen apart completely yet. Help me get in one.”
“What if there’s any leftover radiation or something?”
“The suit will protect me from the worst of it. Besides, I don’t think the it will actually harm me. Dad must have been in the guts of this thing for months when he was modifying it.”
“I don’t want you to stay here.”
“Tough kitty toenails then, I guess.” Betty snaps at me. “Go. Help your boyfriend find a way out, follow the power line trail. Save the world. Tell my dad to come pick me up.”
I back away and run out of the building, along the outskirts of the military base. Anton is running back, waving his arms in the air frantically.
“Freight elevator! It’s a rusted over bucket of bolts, but I think it can carry us! Where’s Betty?”
“Betty’s staying here to keep a leash on the reactor. Said we should follow the power line trail. I say we take it as far up as it can go, then climb the rest of the way.”
Anton helps me up the elevator. It’s a rusted, barely working mess but it should hold us. The generator and gear train groan as they gorge on leftover power from the reactor. Anton pushes the UP button and the thing lurches forward, climbing up from the bowels of the Earth at a steady, grueling pace.
“Hey” Anton asks me, five minutes into the climb. “Is that date offer still on?”
My stomach is tied into a knot; my heart is racing, every muscle in my body is so damn taut that it hurts but I can’t help but laugh. I nod even as I’m doubling over and Anton grins at me, blushing.
“Finn, come on, that’s embarrassing.”
I break into another fit of laughter. Anton catches on, a snigger escaping his lips before he gives up to it too. He falls to the floor of the freight elevator, guffaws like a little kid.
“We’re probably going to be killed…by Nazi time traveler werewolves…and you wanna make date plans?” I gasp, trying to catch my breath.
“I was thinking I could take you somewhere nice but I don’t know if I can afford it. How about MacDonald’s?”
We laugh again and then we kiss and then the freight elevator stops and we’re there, end of the line. Anton breaks away from me, helps me up on my feet.
“We can’t know what’s out there for sure. I think you should hand me over the bat and I can get out, check the place out before we move in. Okay? Finn, did you…”
It hurts me that I have to do this. But it’s the only way I know to keep him from being killed. I bring my hand down at the side of his neck close to his head. A quick chop, so fast he doesn’t even notice it. Anton goes down on the floor. He’s going to be unconscious for the next three minutes. Long enough for me to go out, sabotage the time shaper, save the world. Then he can yell at me as long as he likes, break up with me, never speak to me again for all I care.
“I’m sorry.” I mumble and kiss him on the forehead for good luck. Pushing the reinforced blast door open, I step out into the grotto hewn into the living rock of the Edgarhorn.
I see Gunda, leaning over the time shaper’s controls. Without missing a beat, I start running. The world slows down around me. My feet barely touch the ground as I cover the distance between us. She turns to look at me, her eyes radiating madness. She is naked, her form covered in scars from the beating and the burning and God knows what before, but she still manages a savage little grin as she shifts.
The rest happens at the speed of the inevitable:
-Gunda reaches her hand out to pull the activation lever. I unsheathe my bat, start to swing.
-My blow goes halfway up in the air. Gunda’s form explodes into a mass of muscle and fur and teeth and bone. There’s still a split second left. I can do this.
-Gunda’s arm moves deceptively slow, her elbow moving upward. It connects with the bat, stopping it halfway. I’m wide open in mid-air, no way to protect myself.
-Pain explodes in my gut as she pushes me off her in the same fluid motion. I roll down on the hard packed snow and…
…time resumes its normal flow. I stumble, uselessly, struggle to reach her but I know that it’s too late.
“I won.”
Gunda throws a switch and the world begins to ripple like the surface of a lake.