Monolith: Blue Moon Appalachia Book 2 by Barry Napier & Steve Higgs

Author:Barry Napier & Steve Higgs [Napier, Barry & Higgs, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-07-20T23:00:00+00:00

The First Warning. Tuesday, May 23. 10:13.

The tunnel we entered into wasn’t quite what I had been expecting. It was narrow but very straight. The walls were incredibly smooth and slightly glistening with what I assumed was run-off water from somewhere. My best guess was that the smoothness came from thousands of years of being exposed to the moist conditions. There was also a wet, earthy scent that was stronger than the one I’d noticed earlier. This one was an odd smell for sure, in that it reminded me of something dead on the side of the highway. It was faint, but certainly noticeable.

The tunnel ended after only ten seconds of walking. It came to an end at yet another little chamber. But this chamber was particularly odd. Both Poppy and I simply stood there for a second, taking it all in as I slowly swept the light around.

There were no shattered solar panels here. Instead, there were indications that someone had been living in the space.

To the far-left wall, there was a sleeping bag and several blankets. The blankets were neatly folded, sitting at the end of the sleeping bag. Not too far away from these, there were four candles—three of the traditional stick kinds, jammed down into glass bottles, and one large, scented one. From the very faint smell I detected in the otherwise musty air, I thought it might be lavender scented. It had done a pretty miserable job of masking that funky smell I’d picked up back in the tunnel.

The rest of the chamber, which I estimated to be about twenty feet wide, resembled a messy dorm room. There were a few empty, balled up fast food wrappers on the floor. A cardboard box to my right seemed to be serving as a makeshift dresser that contained a few items of clothing. A small, plastic bin next to this box contained a toothbrush in a plastic bag, a small tube of toothpaste, and spray-on deodorant.

“Well,” Poppy said as I continued to scan the light around in a circle. “I sure wasn’t expecting this.”

I wasn’t sure what to think, honestly. I wondered if it might just be the dwelling of a homeless individual, but something about the clothes made me nix this idea. The clothes were of fairly nice quality, and the sleeping bag looked almost new. I walked over to it and, prepared to grimace and yank my head away, I sniffed at the blankets. They weren’t fresh by any means, but they also weren’t filthy.

I then turned my attention to the fast-food bags. They were fairly large, from a popular chain. There were three bags in all; two of them still had the receipts attached to the bags. One of them showed a total of fifty-seven dollars. The other was for just under forty. Being that the third bag was about the same size, I figured it was a safe bet it had been for a similar value. Spending this much cash on fast food provided further evidence this most likely wasn’t the dwelling of a homeless person.

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