angel of the city by r.j. leahy

Author:r.j. leahy
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: science
Published: 2013-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

An hour passes. The air, which was stale to begin with, is getting harder to breath. I stand and stretch. “We need to find a way out of here before we end up entombed with these relics. This wasn’t just some bunker. This was meant as a work area for a lot of people. They wouldn’t be climbing through manholes every day. There has to be another way out.”

We manage to rouse Pen and I give her another shot of dust. With Abby and I under each arm, we get her up and make our way to the back of the room. Abby finds a door that leads to a stairway going down. We pass two landings, but the doors are rusted shut. Breathing is becoming real work and Pen is in constant pain despite the coal.

At the next level, the door is slightly ajar. The hinges are rusted, but I’m able to force it open enough for us to squeeze through. We enter into a large room lined on both sides with machines I can’t quite identify, computers possibly, but even their cases have decomposed significantly. Some have rectangular openings that may have housed video screens, but the glass is long gone. I gently touch the front panel of the nearest machine and it falls away in rusted pieces, kicking up a cloud of dust from the floor. The age of the place is unmistakable, but how old? Hundreds of years at least.

I help set Pen on the floor and take a closer look at the machinery. In all the tunnels and underground bunkers I’ve been in, I’ve never found anything more advanced than a rusted flashlight or decomposed batteries. And nothing near this old. I pick up a piece of the crumbling metal. It’s light. Some sort of composite material, maybe.

“What was this place?” Abby asks.

I don’t have an answer. “Who knows? But it’s old. This has to pre-date even the old city.”

Pen groans. “Didn’t you two take history?” she asks. Her words are slow and mumbled, effects of blood loss and the coal. “There’s no such thing as the ‘old city’. At least that’s what my teachers said. It’s a myth.”

I smile. “Right.”

The official history of the city begins one hundred and eighty years ago with its founding. Our courageous forefathers, it’s said, fleeing a world grown poisonous, laid the first stones in the walls that now encircle us. If there’s any documentation of a world before that time, I’ve never seen it. But then who knows what lies hidden in the vaults of the Historical Committee. And how does the government explain the tunnels running like a maze under every building and street? They don’t.

Abby coughs. “The air is even worse here.”

She’s right. We have to find a way back up and soon.

Abby takes the flashlight and the right side of the room and I go left with the lamp. At the end of the first bank of machines, I find a large metal plate imbedded into the wall.

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