World Beneath the World

James Abraham Carter

The whine of the base camp generators vibrated through the soles of John Lysterim’s boots, a steady, mechanical pulse that had been the soundtrack of his life for the past four years. At sixty-eight, John’s frame was bent with age, and his muscles were feeble. But though weak in body, his mind was still vibrant with ideas and enthusiasm; his hazel eyes were sharp as they scanned the diagnostic readouts glowing on the mobile terminal.

Before him sat the Infernum.

Resembling a colossal steel rectangular prism resting upon heavy-duty caterpillar tracks, the machine, named after the Roman underworld, was a marvel of applied physics. At its front sat the blast-head—an assembly of gimbal components that allowed a massive, faceted lens, which looked like the eye of an industrial cyclops, to swing in any direction. This was the disintegrating beam emitter, a device capable of exciting molecular bonds to the point of structural collapse, allowing the vehicle to literally unmake the earth before it and disperse the atomized debris at a rate of ten miles an hour.

It was a masterpiece, the child of John’s genius, but it belonged, legally and financially, to the man stepping out of the dust-caked off-road vehicle twenty yards away.

Eric Nolan slammed the door of his black SUV; the sound was sharp in the desolate wilderness air. In his mid-fifties, Nolan wore his wealth like the ostentatious feathers of a peacock: his muscular frame filled out a tailored Gucchi suit, a Patek Philippe watch adorned his thick wrist, and John Lobb shoes shod his feet. His posture was rigid, and his expression was perpetually calculating. He rounded the hood, offering a hand to Siya, his Indian trophy wife.

John watched her step down. Siya, clad in a light blouse and miniskirt, was twenty, small-boned, with dark skin, luminous eyes, and the quiet grace of someone who had learned early in life to make herself as invisible as possible. Her two year marriage to Nolan was an open secret of transactional convenience—a wealthy mining magnate and the young woman whose body he had purchased from a desperate family half a world away.

"John," Nolan called out, his voice cutting across the roar of the generators. He strode forward, Siya trailing half a step behind him like a shadow. "Diagnostics green?"

"Green enough, Eric," John said, straightening up and wiping a smear of grease from his thumb onto his overalls. "The thermal dissipation units are holding, and the beam focal array is properly aligned. We’re ready for the test run, a descent to the three-mile mark."

"There’s been a change of plan," Nolan said smoothly, stopping inches from John. "We’re going with you."

John stared at him, his face frozen in disbelief for a moment. "Going with me? Eric, are you out of your mind? This is a shakedown mission. The machine hasn’t been subjected to subterranean test conditions yet. If something were to go wrong, it could easily become a steel coffin for all of us."

Nolan’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. He leaned in, lowering his voice so the technicians hovering near the ramp couldn't hear. "Listen to me, Lysterim. Without my capital, your marvelous machine would still be blueprints on an ink-stained drawing board in some university basement. You take us, or I pull the plug. Right here. Right now. You can spend the rest of your natural life suing a shell corporation in the Caymans."

John’s jaw tightened. Over the years, as he had gotten to know the man, he had come to despise Nolan—his casual cruelty, his arrogance, and the unconcerned way he treated human lives as disposable commodities. But the Infernum was John’s baby. To kill it now was unthinkable.

"It’s madness," John said stiffly. "If something goes wrong—"

"Then we die together," Nolan interrupted, clapping a heavy hand onto John’s shoulder. "Exciting, isn't it?"

Siya stood quietly beside her husband, her hands clasped tightly before her. Looking up at John with fear swimming in her dark eyes, she timidly inquired, "Mr. Lysterim... what kind of dangers... will we face down there?"

Before John could speak, Nolan snapped his head toward her. "Quiet, Siya. Keep your mouth shut. You’re a stupid girl from a gutter caste; you wouldn’t understand the technical details even if I spent the entire day explaining them to you."

Siya instantly dropped her eyes, her shoulders curling inward as she retreated behind a mask of frozen compliance.

John felt a hot spike of anger in his chest. Racist. Misogynist. Bully. The words formed like acid on his tongue, but before he could voice them, the lead technician, a young African-American woman named Iris, hurried over, clutching a clipboard to her chest.

"Mr. Lysterim, all pre-start checks have been completed. The trajectory is set for a three-mile descent at thirty degrees. Whenever you’re ready, sir."

"Then let’s get this show on the road," Nolan ordered, turning toward the heavy hydraulic hatch at the rear of the Infernum.

**********

Inside the cabin, the atmosphere was cool and sterile. John strapped himself into the pilot’s harness at the forward console, his fingers moving methodically across the initialization sequence. Behind him, Nolan and Siya took their seats in the auxiliary compartment.

"Sealing hatch," John announced over the intercom.

A pneumatic hiss echoed through the hull as the heavy steel door locked home. John threw the primary breaker.

The deck plates beneath them shuddered as the massive electric drive motors engaged. At the front of the vehicle, the faceted lens began to spin, emitting a low, rising whine that vibrated in the marrow of their bones. A lance of blinding, violet-white energy erupted from the lens, striking the solid earth in front of the incline of the descent ramp.

The rock didn't shatter; it simply dissolved, turning instantly into a scintillating mist of disconnected atoms that vented away through the machine’s exhaust flues.

The caterpillar tracks engaged with a heavy clunk, and the ten-ton steel prism slid forward, rumbling noisily into the glowing, man-made abyss. The darkness closed in behind them, swallowing them as the digital altimeter spun downward at a steady rate: 100 feet... 500 feet... 1,000 feet.

For the first twenty minutes, the ride was uneventful. The monitor displayed the temperature and stress loads on the hull in steady, calming greens. John kept an eye on the telemetry; his mind was focused entirely on the machinery until a sound cut through the steady whine of the Infernum’s engines.

It sounded like a muffled, choked sob.

John frowned, glancing over his shoulder. The hatch in the bulkhead separating the control compartment from the rear cabin was half-open. Thinking there might be a pressure leak or a mechanical failure in the environmental controls, John unbuckled his harness and slipped aft.

The sight that met him froze the breath in his lungs.

Siya was on all fours on the hard metal deck, stripped naked and ball-gagged to stifle her cries; her dark skin gleamed with cold sweat, and her face was twisted in agony. Nolan was kneeling behind her, his hands clamped on her hips, his body moving with violent, rhythmic brutality as he mercilessly sodomized his young wife.

Siya’s wide, terror-stricken eyes darted toward John as he stepped into the cabin.

For a fraction of a second, John’s instincts screamed at him to intervene—to pull the monster off the helpless girl and smash his face against the steel deck. But as he took a half-step forward, Siya’s eyes widened further. She shook her head in frantic, desperate negation. No. Her gaze pleaded with him. She was terrified that any interference would bring an even worse retribution down upon both their heads.

Nolan was too lost in his own depravity to notice the intrusion.

Stunned, sickened to his stomach, John realized he was helpless. He could not save Siya from the monster she lived with. Nolan was twenty years younger, powerfully built,, and physically vital. While he, John, was an old man well past the prime of his youth. With a sickening knot of shame twisting in his gut, John turned his back, retreated to the forward console, and strapped himself into his seat.

Five minutes later, the soft tread of bare feet signaled Siya’s approach.

She stood beside the pilot’s chair, her clothes hastily pulled back on, her face pale and streaked with tears. She glanced nervously toward the rear cabin, then leaned down close to John’s ear.

"He's... he's fallen asleep," she whispered, her voice trembling so hard the words barely formed. "Once he is spent like a beast… He sleeps like one."

She sank onto the deck beside his console, burying her face in her hands, and the dam burst. In a rush of broken, agonizing sentences, she unburdened her soul.

She was from the lowest rung of society, an untouchable from a rural Indian village whose parents had sold her to clear crushing debts. Nolan had promised them a fortune; he had given them a pittance and taken her to a gilded cage where she was neither a wife nor a human being, but a possession, an object to be used. Her parents were now dead. She had no one and was at the mercy of a creature who derived his only true joy from sick sadism.

"I can't go to the police," she sobbed softly, clutching the cuff of John’s sleeve. "He owns them. Please... please don't confront him. He'll kill you, and then he'll take it out on me a hundred times worse."

John stared at her, his hands clenched into fists so tight his knuckles were bleached white. "If I had known..." he murmured, his voice shaking with a rage he had never felt before. "If I had known what kind of animal he was, I would have smashed this machine with a sledgehammer before I took a penny of his money."

Before Siya could answer, the world fell out from under them.

The Infernum had literally dropped out of the earth entirely. The forward boring beam, suddenly meeting no resistance, flared blindingly white before automatically cutting out. The machine plunged into empty space, tipping forward before slamming nose-first into a sloping mound of soft, yielding soil.

The violent impact threw John and Siya hard against the control console. The Infernum slid forward onto level ground and came to a stop as the lights flickered, died, and then sputtered back to life on emergency auxiliary power.

John groaned, shaking his head to clear the roaring in his ears. Beside him, Siya was stirring, gasping for air. 

From the rear cabin came a wild shout, half fear and half fury.

"What the hell was that?!" Nolan bellowed, staggering through the hatchway, clutching his head where he had bruised it against the bulkhead. "Lysterim! You incompetent bastard, you’ve crashed us!"

John ignored him. Nolan’s earlier bravado was typical of the bully: they were brave only when they thought they were in control. John ignored him and leaned over to steady Siya, helping her sit up.

"Get your hands off my wife!" Nolan roared, lunging forward. He grabbed John by the collar of his shirt, hauling him to his feet and shoving him hard against the instrument panel: an act of violence to make himself look tough and to hide his fear and cowardice. "I asked you a question, you old fool!"

Siya took in the scene. John had shown her kindness, and the thought of her cruel husband hurting him overcame her own fear of the brute. "Leave him alone!" Siya cried out, scrambling to her feet and grabbing at Nolan’s arm. "He didn't do anything! Look at the monitors!"

Nolan paused, his wild glare shifting from Siya to the main external viewscreens.

The cabin went dead silent.

On the screens, the pitch-black void of the tunnel had vanished, replaced by an alien, breathtaking panorama. The Infernum had broken through the wall of a subterranean void so vast that the ceiling was lost in the distance. Luminous, golden clouds billowed across the cavern roof, shedding a soft, aurate glow over a landscape that defied imagination.

The machine had come to rest on the ledge of a cliff. Below them stretched a dense, prehistoric jungle of towering, fern-like trees with fronds of shimmering emerald green. The forest bordered the glassy, azure waters of a subterranean sea that stretched away to a horizon hidden in the warm, golden haze.

"My God," John breathed, forgetting his anger at Nolan in the sheer magnitude of the discovery. "We’ve broken through. It’s a cavern... a whole world down here."

"A world," Nolan echoed, his eyes widening as the fear cleared from his brain. Greed—instant, feral, and overwhelming—replaced his anger. He let go of John’s shirt, his hands trembling slightly as he stared at the screens. "Do you know what this means? Minerals. Oil. Unspoiled land. I own this. I financed the machine; I own every square inch of this unknown world!"

"We need to run diagnostics," John said, keeping his voice level to hide his disdain for the man as he checked the secondary monitors. "The hull took a beating on the drop, but the structural integrity is holding at eighty-nine percent. The tracks are clear. We can go outside."

Nolan’s hand instinctively dropped to the shoulder holster beneath his jacket, where his heavy-caliber revolver rested. "Get the hatch open, Lysterim. We're going for a walk."

**********

The air outside the Infernum was thick, warm, and heavy with the scent of damp earth and strange, sweet-smelling blossoms. Stepping out onto the damp soil was like walking into a greenhouse the size of a continent. The aureate clouds above cast a perpetual, twilight-like radiance over the landscape, painting everything in shades of amber and gold.

The trio walked cautiously away from the heavy tracks of the machine; their shoes sank softly into the leaf-mould. Towering fern-like trees rose hundreds of feet into the air, their trunks festooned with bulbous, brightly colored fruits and heavy clusters of nuts.

John reached up, plucked a golden, pear-shaped fruit from a low-hanging branch, and sniffed it. Detecting no pungent chemical odors, he took a small bite. The flesh was sweet, bursting with flavor that tasted like a cross between a peach and fresh cream.

"It’s edible," John told the others, passing a second fruit to Siya, who accepted it gratefully.

They managed to find a pathway leading down. It was steep in places and slippery. Siya removed her high heels, which were not at all suited to the terrain, but as she did so, she lost her balance and fell in the mud. Nolan laughed as John helped her up. The engineer glared at the man. Siya tightened her grip on his arm: a silent plea to say nothing. The engineer held his tongue with difficulty, and they continued on, finding an easier slope leading toward the edge of the subterranean sea; the gentle lapping of its dark waves provided a soothing rhythm against the strange silence of the underworld. Shortly, they arrived at the beach. John scanned the shore, looking for shells that would indicate the presence of animal life, as Siya looked at her mud-splattered clothes and her body.

“I must wash,” she said. “I can’t go on like this.”

John glanced at Nolan, but the man was too absorbed in examining a mineral-encrusted rock to care about his wife.

“All right,” he replied. “But stay in the shallows. I’ll have to watch out for danger. Is that okay?”

She nodded and began to remove her clothes, stripping down to her black underwear, and entered the water. Siya completed her ablutions without incident, and John breathed a sigh of relief. He hadn’t seen any signs of animal life. Perhaps this underground world was a kingdom of plants only.

Then, as Siya emerged from the surf, the jungle exploded, providing him with a horrifying example of subterranean fauna.

With a terrifying hiss that sounded like escaping steam, a tall, bipedal creature burst from the dense fronds of the treeline. Standing nearly seven feet tall, it possessed the chitinous, segmented body of a giant insect, with long, rod-like forelimbs and a head dominated by multifaceted compound eyes that burned with an intelligence that was alien and predatory.

Before any of them could react, the creature lunged. Its powerful arms wrapped around Siya, lifting her effortlessly off her feet as it shrieked and turned to bolt back toward the cover of the jungle.

"Siya!" Nolan screamed.

He whipped the revolver from his holster. With frantic precision, he fired twice.

The heavy slugs slammed into the insectoid’s back. The creature staggered, emitting a high-pitched, metallic shriek of pain, but its vitality carried it forward, and it vanished into the dense undergrowth, with the screaming girl still clutched in its grasp.

"After it!" Nolan yelled, breaking into a frantic run.

John, shot through with fear for the girl, plunged into the jungle after Nolan, his older muscles burning with exertion as they forced their way through the tangled, fern-like vegetation, whose density forced them to walking speed. They followed a trail of broken fronds and dark, viscous greenish fluid leaking from the creature’s wounds.

The two men were a contrast. Nolan, with his powerful frame, bulldozed a path through the underbrush; his wife had been stolen, and he meant to get her back, but his motivating desire was more a concern for the loss of a valuable object than the motivation of love. John followed in his wake, physically weaker but morally stronger.

After a breathless struggle of about a hundred yards, they broke through a bank of dense ferns into a small, secluded clearing.

At the base of a low limestone cliff, the giant insectoid lay motionless on its side, the dark fluid pooling beneath its chitinous thorax. It had succumbed to its gunshot wounds just inches from the mouth of a small, low-ceilinged cave.

Siya lay crumpled in the dirt beside the dead monster, having fainted from terror.

As John and Nolan stumbled into the clearing, John staggered forward,dropped to his knees beside the girl, and reached out to check her pulse.

"Get away from her!" Nolan snarled, possessive jealousy flaring in him.

Before John could react, Nolan shoved him violently, sending him sprawling into the dirt. The brute knelt by his wife, shaking her violently until her eyes fluttered open.

"Don’t die on me,” he muttered angrily to the dazed girl as he hauled her to her feet. “I paid good money for you.”

While Nolan was distracted, John pushed himself up, wincing from the pain in his ribs. The only thing that stopped him from kicking Nolan in the head was his realization of his own physical weakness, which would doom such an attack to failure. The engineer focused on his surroundings. The very least he could do was to keep an eye out for other dangers, and as he did, his gaze drifted toward the mouth of the cave in front of the dead creature.

From the cavern interior came a strange, ethereal luminescence—not the golden glow of the roof clouds, but a steady, pulsing silver radiance that seemed to breathe against the damp rock walls. Inside the cave, massive crystal formations jutted from the floor and ceiling, glowing with an inner light that felt almost hypnotic.

"Don’t go near that cave,” John warned, stepping back. "Those crystals... the radiation they’re emitting isn’t like anything on the surface. It could be lethal.”

Nolan turned, his face twisted in a cruel, triumphant sneer. He shoved Siya aside—she collapsed weakly against a fern trunk as he leveled the heavy revolver directly at John’s chest.

John froze.

"Lethal?" Nolan laughed, a harsh, grating sound that echoed off the cliff face. "Lethal for you, maybe. But for me? This is the end of the game, John. Time for me to drop the pretense.”

John stared at the barrel of the gun, shocked. "What are you talking about?"

"I’m talking about the future,” Nolan said, his eyes gleaming with mad fanaticism. "Did you really think I was just a simple mining tycoon? A man who makes his money digging holes in the dirt?" He shook his head slowly. "I’m more than that. I am a member of the Crimson League—a coalition of sovereign dictatorships dedicated to the inevitable overthrow of weak, degenerate democracies.”

John felt the blood drain from his face. Over the past few months, the tensions between the democratic nations and the Crimson League had risen from their usual slow simmer to boiling point, with speculation that war was imminent. "The Crimson League... you funded the Infernum?"

"Using my own companies as a front, yes,” Nolan grinned. "The League needed a weapon. Something that could tunnel beneath heavily defended federal borders, bypass every missile defense system on the planet, and plant atomic charges directly beneath the capitals of the free world. Your machine has proven itself. It is the key to global conquest, John, and also to my advancement to the inner circle of the organization."

Nolan gestured with the revolver toward the cave mouth. "Here is my proposition, Lysterim. You are going to come with me. You will help me pilot this machine back to the surface, and you will put your brilliant scientific mind at the disposal of the League. We will rebuild the world in our image."

"And if I refuse?" John asked quietly.

"Then you die right here,” Nolan said, his finger tightening slightly on the trigger. "Or better yet... I’ll push you into that cave. Let the radiation dissolve your organs in a slow and agonizing death. It will be an appropriate ending for someone who opposes us."

"No!" Siya screamed, crawling forward and clutching Nolan’s trousers. "Don't kill him, Eric! Please! He didn’t do anything to you!"

"Shut up!" Nolan roared. With a vicious backhand, he struck Siya across the face, sending her crashing hard into the dirt, where she lay motionless, a thin trickle of blood running from the corner of her mouth.

"Choose, Lysterim," Nolan snarled, keeping the gun steady. "Join us, or walk into the destroying light."

John looked down at his hands—hands that had built a miracle, only to see it turned into an instrument of slaughter. He looked at Siya, broken and bleeding on the damp earth. Then he looked at the deadly, silver-glowing mouth of the cave. His shoulders sagged in defeat. He was an old man, weak and helpless. Then he straightened his spine, for although feeble in body, he knew he could still be strong in spirit.

"I’d rather die than be an instrument of tyranny,” John said softly as he looked his enemy in the eye.

Nolan’s face darkened with murderous rage. "Then have your wish."

With a sudden, violent attack, Nolan struck John in the chest with a powerful kick. Unbalanced, the engineer stumbled backward, falling through the veil of glowing silver mist-light and into the interior of the cave.

The last thing he heard was Nolan’s harsh laughter echoing off the stone, followed by the sound of him dragging his weeping wife toward the jungle trail.

**********

The pain was immediate, and it was agonizing.

As John struck the cavern floor, a wave of liquid fire washed through every vein in his body. It felt as though his blood had been replaced by molten iron. He gasped, his lungs burning as he tried to draw breath, his fingernails clawing uselessly at the cold stone floor.

This is it, he thought, his vision fragmenting into blinding bursts of white light. This is death.

And then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the pain subsided into a warm, floating numbness.

John blinked. Awareness had returned, and the damp cave floor beneath him felt different. His hands—previously gnarled with arthritis, the skin spotted with age—were smooth, firm, and steady.

He pushed himself up.

There was no strain in his back. No ache in his joints. He stood up effortlessly, taking a deep, experimental breath of the silver-tinted air. He looked down at his arms. The loose, sagging skin of late middle age was gone, replaced by the taut, hard muscle of a man in his early twenties. The silver radiation had not destroyed him; it had reversed the cellular clock entirely, stripping away forty years of decay in a matter of minutes.

A sudden realization struck him with the force of a physical blow.

The giant insectoid. The creature hadn't been fleeing mindlessly; it had been dragging its dying, wounded body toward the cave, seeking the miraculous, restorative power of the radioactive crystals to heal its wounds, but it had run out of time.

John clenched his fists, feeling a surge of raw, youthful vigor coursing through every fiber of his being. He had been transformed from the timid elderly man he had been but moments ago to a vigorous, energized youth.

He didn't waste a second. Turning on his heel, he sprinted out of the cave, his legs moving with a speed and lightness he hadn't experienced since his college track days, as he followed his quarry’s footprints, which were clearly visible in the loamy soil.

Bursting out of the treeline into the jungle clearing, he saw Nolan’s heavy revolver lying abandoned in the undergrowth, half-buried in crushed ferns. A few feet away, deep gashes in the soft earth and broken fronds told the story of a violent, sudden ambush. Nolan and Siya had been caught by something fast, silent, and overwhelmingly strong.

He thought of Siya. He remembered how good she looked while bathing in her underwear, and how the wet fabric had clung to her shapely figure. It had been decades since a woman had affected him thus. Nolan was a brute. She deserved better, and he meant to be that man if she would have him.

Fired by a new kind of zeal, John grabbed the revolver and followed the trail of broken vegetation. He moved like a phantom through the dense foliage, his senses preternaturally sharp.

After half a mile, the jungle opened up into a cleared area in which stood a city, but it was unlike any city on the surface world. The metropolis was cellular in structure, consisting of hexagonal buildings that abutted each other, forming a unified sprawling habitation about a mile square with ramps leading to the various levels of the colony.

Insectile creatures similar to the one who had kidnapped Siya were in evidence, as well as more numerous beings of a larger, more robust build that John correctly guessed were the workers of the hive. The girl was no doubt a captive somewhere in that maze of hexagons, but how was he to find her, and how was he going to slip past the bustling activity of all those insectoids undetected?

An idea came to John. Insect vision wasn’t as sharp as that of vertebrates, and ants relied on smell to identify members of their colony. If he could smear his clothes with the secretions from one of the creatures, then perhaps he could use this olfactory disguise to infiltrate the city. It was a desperate gambit, but the only one he had.

Quickly, he set about searching and soon found a trail whose hard-packed earth suggested frequent use. Here, he waited tensely in ambush. It wasn’t long before one of the creatures came along the path. John’s knuckles whitened on the heavy branch he had found. The creature came closer, nearer. He sprang from concealment, the branch swinging in a savage arc.

The hardwood connected solidly against the insectoid’s head with a sickening crack, and the creature folded like a bad hand of cards. It crashed heavily onto the path, twitched once, and then lay still in death.

John dragged the corpse into the bushes and proceeded to rub its blood over his clothes and skin. It was a noisome task, but it had to be done; so he stifled his revulsion and continued until the sickening chore was completed.

Stepping from the undergrowth, he then proceeded toward the strange city, gun in hand, praying that his mad scheme would succeed. The first test came as he approached the ramp leading to the upper surface of the habitation, which was crowded with scurrying insectile creatures.

John tensed as one of the warriors guarding the base of the ramp touched his face with its bristly antennae. His heart raced with fear as the thing’s mandibles clicked. It took all his willpower not to flinch and give himself away. The creature was at least seven feet tall, and the power of its limbs was evident. He might be able to kill one, but there were dozens of them, and he only had four shots left in the revolver.

The creature withdrew its probing antennae. John hurried up the ramp, wiping sweat from his face with a shaky hand. He had passed the ordeal of the inspection, but now that he was in the city, where would he find Siya? Gaining the upper surface, he looked about, and his eyes fell upon a tower about a hundred yards distant. It rose significantly above the other structures, which might indicate its importance and therefore be a place where captives might be taken.

He set off toward it without delay, pushing his way through the throng of insectoid beings that scurried here and there with ant-like movements. Soon, he was at the entrance to the tower and was about to step across its threshold when a wild scream of unbridled terror echoed down from above.

“Siya,” John gasped in fear as he lunged through the doorway and sprinted madly up the ramp. He swiftly gained the tower’s uppermost floor, burst into the gloom-shrouded room at its apex, and then stopped in horror at what he saw.

The remains of Eric Nolan lay strapped to a wooden table. The man had been dissected with precision. Another table was also there, and bound to it with thick leather restraints was Siya. She had been stripped naked; her dark skin bruised and trembling; her eyes wide with terror as half a dozen of the tall, bipedal insectoid creatures stood around her wildly struggling form, brandishing large surgical knives with razor-sharp edges.

One of the creatures stepped forward, raising its scalpel in preparation to slice open the terrified girl’s belly from groin to navel.

"Get away from her!" John shouted wildly.

He rushed forward, jerking Nolan’s heavy revolver from his hip pocket. With the steady, unflinching reflexes of his newly restored youth, he raised the weapon and fired three rapid shots.

The heavy slugs found their marks with devastating precision. Two of the insectoids dropped instantly, their chitinous shells shattering on impact, while a third staggered backward and collapsed across Nolan’s mutilated corpse.

The surviving creatures, terrified by the deafening thunder of the firearm and the sudden loss of their hive members, let out a piercing, whistling shriek and scattered into the dark rooms surrounding the central chamber of the tower.

But one, braver than the rest, hadn’t fled. It sprang up from behind the table where it had ducked and hurled a knife at John. The surgical blade was ill-balanced, and the handle struck his wrist rather than the point. But even so, the impact was enough to make the engineer drop the gun.

Then the insectoid was rushing at him, another blade poised for a fatal strike. John leapt to meet its charge and grabbed the creature’s wrist, stopping the plunging knife. Both wrestled madly for possession of the weapon, staggering about the room like drunkards. The creature was immensely strong. It broke John’s grip and swung at him again. He ducked the sweeping slash that would have cut his throat had it found its target, thrust his arm between the insectoid’s legs, slammed the other into its throat, and then hurled the creature to the floor with a pivot.

The insectoid’s head struck the stone with fatal force, and silence descended upon the room, broken only by Siya’s ragged sobbing.

John sprinted forward, grabbed his gun, seized a fallen knife from the floor, and used its razor-sharp edge to slice through the thick straps binding Siya to the wooden table. As the bonds fell away, Siya flung herself against his chest.

She looked up, her dark eyes swimming with tears, staring in utter disbelief at the young muscular man holding her. The facial structure, the bright, intelligent eyes—they were identical to the older man she had known, but the body was that of a youth in his prime.

"Mr... Mr. Lysterim?She gasped, her voice laden with amazement. "Is it... is it really you?"

"It’s me, Siya,” John said softly, as he removed his shirt and wrapped it around her shoulders to warm her. "The crystals in the cave... they didn’t kill me. They gave me back my youth.”  

She stared at him, marveling at the miracle, before burying her face in his shoulder and weeping with a mixture of shock, relief, and exhaustion.

"We need to go,” John said gently. “But first I must smear you with the blood of these creatures. The scent will make them think you are a member of the colony. It is the only way we can escape this city alive.”

The task was swiftly accomplished. John lifted Siya’s arm over his shoulder and supported her weight as he helped her off the table. "Nolan is gone. The machine is waiting. We’re going back to the surface.”

They hurried from the tower and swiftly made their way toward the city’s perimeter. All went well until an inectoid of the warrior caste stepped into their path as they approached the exit ramp. The thing ran its antenna over Siya, and John could see that she was absolutely terrified. He gripped her hand in silent communication to steady her as she stood trembling under the creature’s revolting touch. He dared not speak, lest his human voice betrayed them to the thing.

The fingers of John’s other hand tightened on his revolver as a strange wailing cry suddenly rang out across the hive - the insectoids in the tower had raised the alarm. The warrior’s antenna stiffened. It turned toward the sound. John seized upon its distraction, and still gripping Siya’s hand, he pulled her past the thing and led her down the ramp to freedom.

They hurriedly entered the jungle, but after a few minutes of rapid walking, John could see that Siya needed more rest time to recover from her horrible ordeals.

“We’ll stop here for a few minutes,” he said, pointing to a large flat rock.

“Thank you,” she replied, smiling gratefully at him as she sank to the stone. Then after a few minutes, Siya excused herself and stepped behind a screen of vegetation to answer a call of nature.

Hardly a minute had passed when John heard her scream. He leapt to his feet and burst through the undergrowth. The engineer gasped in horror at what he saw. Siya was struggling in the powerful grip of a tentacle that had shot out of a hole in the riverbank of the stream in which she had washed away the insectoid’s disgusting blood.

Not daring to shoot, should he hit Siya, John jerked the insectoid knife from his belt, dashed madly to the rescue. He swiftly slammed the blade into the snake-like limb that had wrapped itself around the wildly screaming girl.

The tentacle convulsed violently and flung Siya onto the loamy soil. She was free, but now John was severely imperiled as more of the creature’s limbs shot swiftly from its burrow and attacked him. He fought furiously, slashing with his knife in a frenzy of violence, but the monster’s limbs were too many, and he was soon overpowered as a serpentine member wrapped around his neck with crushing force, choking off his breath.

John dropped his knife. The world eddied toward darkness, and he thought his time had come. Then a sharp report tore through the humid air, and the tentacle around his throat went mercifully limp.

Siya withdrew the smoking revolver from the burrow. It had fallen from John’s pocket during the violent struggle, and the girl had snatched it up and bravely shot the horror in its lair. She rushed to his side and helped him free the snake-like limb still wrapped around his neck.

Both comforted each other in the aftermath of horror.

**********

The ascent through the earth was smooth and silent.

Seated side by side at the forward console of the Infernum, John and Siya watched the digital altimeter spin upward: 5,000 feet... 2,000 feet... 500 feet. The disintegrating beam, now set on low power to act as a headlight, hummed a steady, melodic tune as it pushed back the darkness separating them from the upper world.

With a gentle shudder, the Infernum emerged onto the surface in the remote wilderness clearing where their journey had begun hours before.

John reached up and threw the main hatch release. The heavy steel door swung outward, and a rush of cool, fresh outdoor air flooded the cabin.

"We're home," John said, smiling back at Siya as he pressed the hatch-release button.

He moved forward to step onto the landing ramp, but as he looked out across the distant horizon, the smile vanished from his face. Siya, stepping up behind him, let out a soft gasp of horror.

Far away, hanging low against the distant sky, a colossal, terrifying mushroom-shaped cloud was billowing into the stratosphere. Even at this distance, the faint, ominous rumble of a cataclysmic explosion rolled across the wilderness—the definitive, apocalyptic eruption of nuclear war between the Crimson League and the Federation of Democracies was now upon them. The surface world would soon be engulfed by a civilization-ending nuclear conflagration.

John stood frozen for a long moment, watching the column of death climb higher into the poisoned sky. Then, a profound sense of clarity settled over him. The old world was being consumed by the fires of its own hatred and greed. There was nothing left out there for them.

He swung his gaze across the base camp and saw a group of young men and women—university students and technicians, part of his team who had stayed behind to monitor the surface telemetry—staring up in shock and terror at the terrible cloud on the horizon.

John stepped onto the ramp and called out to them; his young, strong voice rang clear and authoritative above the strong wind that was blowing the atomic fallout away from them.

"Hey! All of you! Get in here! Now!"

Startled, the young students, three women and two men, hesitated for a moment, then began scrambling up the ramp, piling into the spacious rear cabin of the Infernum in a flurry of confusion and fear.

As the last of them scrambled inside, John pulled the heavy steel hatch shut and locked it down. “We’re going below. There’s another world down there,” he said to them as he walked back to the forward console, settling into the pilot’s seat.

Siya slid into the co-pilot’s chair beside him, her hand resting softly and trustingly over his.

John looked at the controls, then at the rear viewscreen, showing the dark, welcoming mouth of the descent tunnel leading down into the strange, golden-lit cradle of the underworld.

"What do we do, John?" Siya asked quietly.

John engaged the powerful electric motors and turned the machine around until it faced the tunnel. The faceted lens began to spin, casting a warm, violet light against the dark rock below.

“We must build a new civilization beneath the earth and, from there, repopulate the planet after the surface radiation has died down and nature has recovered.” he said, his voice steady with purpose, as the Infernum began its descent into the earth. “Although our numbers are small, the revitalizing radiation from the crystals will enable all of us to have many children, well past the age when fertility usually ends.

“The insectods are one of many dangers we will have to face, but we survived the ordeal, proving that the dangers can be overcome. We have tools on board with which we can build a fort, and the disintegrator ray of the Infernum can be used as a weapon of last resort. I’m confident we can survive and flourish.”

Siya thought about the future. Her cruel husband was dead. She was free at last. She smiled at John shyly. “You are a good man, and I look forward to being the mother of your sons.”

The End