The Lost Soul of the City (Nameless: Season Two) by Dean Koontz

Author:Dean Koontz [Koontz, Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-06-09T16:00:00+00:00

13

Beyond the next blast door, the second L-shaped corridor takes a ninety-degree turn to the left instead of the right, as did the previous one, and beyond the third blast door, a final L-shaped passage takes a turn to the right. The changes in direction are intended solely to foil radiation, which travels in a straight line, but the design seems excessive considering that this redoubt must be at least seventy feet below the city, sealed under massive strata of concrete and bedrock.

This structure is both serious and absurd, conceived by madmen incapable of recognizing the comic aspect of fleeing Armageddon by hiding in this snake pit for years, with the expectation of one day ascending to rule the ruins above. If they didn’t kill one another in their bunker, then when they did climb to the surface, not one of their kind would have known how to farm, attend to the husbandry of animals, mend shoe leather, fix an engine, produce antibiotics . . . Their only skill would have been politics, and whatever ragged survivors might still cling to life on the surface would have had enough of that forever.

The fourth blast door moves with little noise on a well-oiled barrel hinge. The space beyond is revealed by the amber glow of two fat candles in clear glass bowls, their flames pulsing in a draft.

Jimmie Freeman clicks off his Tac Light and follows Nameless into a receiving room. There are a desk, an office chair, and two straight-backed chairs circa 1962. Maybe new arrivals would have presented themselves here, seeking salvation in the hours before World War III, producing membership cards in the Club of Fools, engaging in a litany of passwords and countersigns.

With intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of delivering their payload perhaps eleven minutes after launch, Nameless wonders why those granted shelter imagined they would have enough warning to get here before they were vaporized.

This descent has been otherworldly from the moment Nameless followed Jimmie into the manhole in the yard of the lift station, but this threshold marks an escalation from mere strangeness to an unnerving eeriness. The stark, utilitarian furniture suggests that this is the first stop in a version of Hell that will be a maze of demonic bureaucrats, the bright-yellow walls meant to mock the hopelessness of all who enter here, the lambent candle flames a preview of more intense and eternal fires to come.

Just enough candles have been lit—one here, two there, at most a cluster of three—to allow them to find the way through rooms and corridors that Jimmie estimates amount to ten or twelve thousand square feet. With gestures rather than words, the kid leads, though not from in front of Nameless, but staying to one side. The throbbing flames cast bright salamanders that skitter up the walls and also throw off shadows that writhe as though they are tormented spirits condemned to these catacombs. Nameless wonders from where a bullet might come to put a sudden end to young Jimmie’s life.

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