Hummingbird Salamander(100)

That gave me pause. If I wasn’t the right person, would I suffer Ronnie’s fate?

I pushed the button anyway. The door slid up revealing a red-lit antechamber. Stepped inside and the door shut again. A light mist hissed out of holes in the walls. Moment of panic. Drugged, poisoned. Found out. Didn’t belong here. Had never belonged here.

But the mist had a pleasant scent and I realized I was being decontaminated. Run through some protocol.

Why did I have to be clean to get to the other side, but Ronnie had come back out contaminated?

After it was over, the portal opposite slid open, a large, dim-lit space beyond.

I hesitated once more. I’d been given so many last chances to turn away that I hadn’t recognized. Now was being given another one. To heed the warning that was Ronnie’s corpse. To recognize the limits of what I had left to give. No normal life waited outside. But life of a kind waited. I could try a different part of the King Range wilderness. I could become expert at avoiding militias. Sleep by day, wander by night. Pipe dream. Faint home.

One thing I knew: if I crossed that threshold, I wouldn’t be going back there. Felt it in my bones.

So I bent and leaned through the door into another world.





[107]


You could say Silvina had built a bunker out of a cavern. Or a command-and-control center out of the top of a mountain. You could call it many things. You might be looking at it right now. You might know more about it than me. It would’ve taken years. Secrecy. Patience. So many millions. Piece by piece. Using different experts and contracts so no one knew the full extent of it. Toward the end, she must have trusted only “Friends of.” I had a vision of servants entombed with their ruler.

I had come out into a nondescript, rectangular space shoved up against the side of the mountain. Framed by rough-hewn stone walls and a steel-beam-reinforced ceiling studded with the dimmest possible blue lights. Every surface seemed chosen to reject mold and decay. A sterile quality I didn’t like but that was purposeful.

Not much of it registered as important. Just unfinished or hurried. You could see the outline for an elaborate kitchen and island on the far side of the room, with the mountain rock jutting out uneven above another concrete wall. But it had never been built. Instead there was just a sad-looking kitchenette with a cheap mini fridge. One huge doorway, opposite me, led to an area stacked with bunk beds, none of them used. A small medical clinic. A space clearly meant for exercise. Spartan, with mats and little else.

That Silvina had run out of money became obvious the more I explored. That she had spent it only on the most important things.

As I remembered Unitopia, I understood the space better. The disconnect was the scale. The scale was off. And the function. Not an island. A bunker. A cavern, with most of the same layout as Unitopia. Just that the “domes” were rough, limited by the conditions. Strange how that altered so much, how what should be familiar became so unfamiliar.

A smell of age and mustiness that came not from what Silvina had built but what surrounded it. The feeling of a cathedral, thick with history. Unitopia had that, too, but I recognized it here because it felt less human.

A door led to a cramped room with a few monitors against a far wall and more chairs and tables. A desk. A logbook with terse scribbled entries. The sense that Silvina at one time had meant to have a staff here, under the mountain.

The monitors alternated showing different views from the mountainside. Some reflected the long view of private satellites and drones. But some, from their vantage, were disguised as bits of the very gravel across which Hellmouth Jack and I had frantically searched five years before.

The ghost of my other life found that clever, even roughly elegant. That the ground had been alive with surveillance. That we had been shoveling cameras, not just stones.

The main dome, past all these unimportant adornments, lay beyond these impermanent monuments. Of this odd version of Unitopia. If the blueprint was true, nothing else remained that I had not seen, and all the rest was empty, and bleak.

I don’t think I hesitated. My steps were as steady as before. I leaned no more heavily on my cane. It was all laid out as perfectly as if a dream and there could be no tension, no suspense, because in a dream you were carried along without a choice.



* * *



In the dome, there was a great and terrible window at the far end through which, even from the entrance, I could tell things were moving. So I resisted the window, because it wanted all my attention. Instead, I tried to take in the place entire.

In that dome, too, was a kind of medical station, and more monitors—larger ones—along the left side. On the right side, built-in shelves housed books, but also technical equipment. Any odds and ends. Perhaps personal effects. A sliding ladder had been attached. The bookshelves weren’t painted. The raw wood and shoddy construction told me there’d been no time or no money to paint.

The silence here was profound. A kind of holy quality. The budget for soundproofing must have been unlimited. The soft blue light in that space soothed and suffused in such an unearthly yet pleasant way. The smell of stone rich with water. I could see in the near distance, where the stone lay exposed, the water glistening. Moss glistening. More cave than construction.

The muffling of so much, the vastness of the space and how that made so small what had been placed in it, made me not see everything at first.

But as I walked slowly forward, as my eyes adjusted to the scale … I came across a second body.