WEST MILITARY QUARTER, MARKABIA
2047 HOURS (EASTERN TIME)
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That night, as was his habit, the first thing Detective Colonel Rigel Beta did when he returned home was turn on the TV. The news guy’s voice used to help him fight the silence in the living room and the chirping of crickets coming from outside.
Then, as usual, he went to the kitchen and took off his uniform on the way, leaving a trail of clothes on the floor that began with his boots and his belt and ended with his jumpsuit at the foot of the fridge. He opened it, drank some water from the bottle, and grabbed the chicken sandwich he had left over from the night before. But when he was going to take a bite, he realized that he had no appetite, and he didn’t put it back in the refrigerator, he just threw it in the trash.
He went to the bathroom and took a long shower.
The water removed the dirt that the many dust clouds traversed in the Southern Tropical Canyon had poured over him, and the soap washed away the sweat, now dry, that the heat and humidity had stuck to his skin.
But as he turned off the faucet, he had a distinct impression that he wasn’t quite clean, that there was still more to be cleaned up. It was an almost abstract feeling that no shower could ever make go away. The same feeling that had surely ruined his desire to eat. The same feeling that had weighed on his head since they had left the Canyon hours ago.
It was the scene of the crime, the horrible state in which those poor geology students had been found, the blood splattered all over the cave. And then, there was what he and his team had discovered in that hidden building behind those rock walls. What he’d seen there had disturbed him like nothing had disturbed him for a long time.
And when he went to bed and closed his eyes, trying to relax, everything that he’d lived in that place came back to him.
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Each one with their antiseptic helmet on—a kind of transparent diving helmet with small lights on the sides—Chris Snow and other Criminal Division officers fenced the open hole in the rock wall of the cave, while Rigel and Officer Bill Serrano looked through it at what they had discovered inside, a corridor built by the hand of man, with walls made of laminated plates, somewhat yellowed by humidity and confinement, a polished concrete floor and a ceiling covered with pipes and air ducts; all shrouded in mists of dust and a fuzzy darkness that longed for the moment in which those impertinent beams of light from the flashlights disappear to plunge everything back into that perpetual oblivion in which they had been for who knows how long.
Rigel, though, didn’t care for the claim of darkness and continued to probe it, moving his light from side to side.
“Has someone gone in yet?” he asked.
“Nobody yet,” Snow replied. Their voices sounded muffled as they spoke through the helmet’s oxygenation system. “We were waiting for you to give us the order.”
Then Rigel took a step into the corridor. When his boots hit the ground, the carpet of dust broke up in the form of clouds, and thousands of particles jumped everywhere, joining the many that were already swimming suspended in the air. He brushed them away with his hand; activated his flashlight to full power and pointed it forward. The light cut into the deep darkness and the mist-ghosts. Fortunately, the helmet was there to protect him from the musty stench that must be pervading every corner of this place.
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Once inside, the length of the corridor acquired a new dimension; it was larger than Rigel had imagined, perhaps a hundred or a hundred and thirty feet long. The laminated wall stretched to his left, and there, a little further on, he could see that ten or twelve doors were waiting for him, all closed. The wall to his right, however, the side through which he had entered, was but the opposite face of the very cave; a rough wall with rocky protrusions through which huge bundles of cables passed, and another air duct that was missing one of its grates. The grate they found outside, probably.
“Do you think this could be the killer’s hideout, Colonel?” Serrano asked him from the cave. His voice rumbled and then faded with the hiss of the wind.
“Perhaps,” Rigel said.
His voice created a chilling resonance that worsened as he took his first steps. Thud… Thud… Thud… That muffled sound got lost in the darkness in front of him—and in the darkness behind him. He turned on his heel, piercing the curtains of dust with the beam of light, and he peered through what was behind him.
“Be careful, Colonel. The killer could be out there,” Serrano insisted.
“It’s been a while since someone walked here, Bill,” Rigel replied. “There are other corridors, though, so…”
Yes, the killer could be around there, but he didn’t think so.
“According to the thermostatic and infrared detectors, there are no living things there,” Snow confirmed.
The flashlight revealed that, further on, the corridor curved to the left, where a deep shadow swallowed all visibility. Surely, whoever built that site must have followed the natural structure of the interior caves of that huge cliff. The question was, where would that curve take him and whether he was close to the exit or not?
“Chris, George; come with me,” Rigel ordered.
Officer Chris Snow switched on his flashlight and gladly entered the corridor. George Froia, the other officer, followed behind him with a small sonar kit in hand.
Bill Serrano stayed in the cave, watching them walk into the blackness of the unknown. Better that way; sometimes Bill didn’t know when to keep his mouth shut.
Rigel, Snow, and Froia walked down the corridor, and the echo of their footsteps filled the void that silence still claimed.
The flashlight beams swung back and forth like gigantic laser swords. They lit up the specks of dust in the air and the mist; the pipes running overhead, the yellowed plates on the walls to the right, and the shadowy rocks and those thick cables to the left. The passage of light also revealed something that shone from time to time descending the rocky wall: threads of water that passed under that network of cables, and other times it dripped from the ceiling pipes until it reached the floor and formed small puddles. That place hadn’t received maintenance in a long time.
As they moved forward, Froia’s sonar equipment was recreating a map of what lay ahead. The officer looked at the screen from time to time, then looked up at those tube-shaped lamps that hung high on the wall, just before the pipes in the ceiling. Of the five they had left behind; he’d already counted three that were ringed by black spots.
Snow searched the walls for an electrical outlet; found two, both with burn marks around them. A switch; also burned. He tried to light one. No answer. “If you’ve ever wanted to know what a true short circuit is…” he commented.
They continued, this time aiming their lights at the doors. They eyed them warily as if they feared they might burst open at any moment, letting out a horde of undead people or some other hideous creature.
Rigel tried to open a few, but they were all locked and he didn’t try to force them. They would see what was behind them later. Now they had to check the corridor circuit.
“I’ve seen creepy bunkers, but this one takes the cake,” Froia said.
Reaching the last stretch of the path, they began to probe into the darkness to their left.
“What will we find up ahead, George?”
George Froia looked at the sonar, but the screen flickered so much it was impossible to see anything. “Something’s wrong. I’m losing signal,” he said; tried to fix it, but to no avail.
“An interference?” Snow turned.
At that, the flashlights lost some of their power and even their helmet lights. It wasn’t much, but it was noticeable.
Froia snorted. He looked again at the burn marks around the lamps and thought he understood what had happened, although it was too soon to say anything.
Snow looked at Rigel. “We should go back?”
Rigel did not answer; he moved forward, and the others followed him.