Freedom

Chapter 33

I felt like Bilbo Baggins. I'd emerged from a truly claustrophobic shaft into an honest to goodness tunnel. Not man-made, but a tunnel all the same. I had room to stand up straight, and if I reached upward for the ceiling, I found nothing. It felt good to have a little space to move around in. That was the good news.

The bad news was that getting there had been the result of innumerable twists and turns. Where more than one option had presented itself, I had made decisions – and I hadn't made them with any sort of pattern in mind, like always going left. I'd just gone where I felt like.

Before, there had always been the option of going back to the waterway and taking my chances with the channel. That option was now gone, because it seemed highly unlikely that I would be able to find my way back.

The air here was no more stagnant than it had been half an hour ago, which was a good sign. Somewhere, fresh air was getting into this system of caverns. Now, that somewhere could have been a long way off – and likely was – but it was comforting to know it existed.

As I went deeper, my surroundings changed from grim tunnels to a fairytale wonderland. There was phosphorescent fungus growing on the rocks, and the pale light it gave off changed the way I perceived the stone. The tunnel itself was getting bigger, and the fungus let me see just how big.

I found the remains of a stalker, illuminated by a particularly bright patch of fungus. His weapons and ammunition were decayed beyond use, his armor was inferior to mine, and of course, he had no water or rations – not that there was a shortage of water. He did have some medical supplies, still sealed in plastic, which I tucked into my armor's many pockets. The man was little more than a skeleton, but his presence suggested that I was nearing some kind of exit – after all, he'd gotten here somehow, and it hadn't been from the channel. His armor was too bulky. That meant there was another way.

There was a sort of junction shortly after the body – a shaft led off the main corridor, but I decided not to risk it. Maybe that was wrong, because soon, the ground began to slope downward again. After clearing a roomy, but low-ceilinged chamber, I discovered that the floor of the tunnel was rounded and smooth. That meant there had been water flowing here at one time.

At the moment it was dry, but there was no fungus growing below head level. That meant water wasn't out of the question. I sped up. I'd successfully outrun the danger before, but just because there was more space didn't mean I was safe. The water would still be just as cold, and I'd still be just as hypothermic if I had to swim.

My light showed me strange fossils in the rock, and at one point, a huge, white spider. Not as big as the one Sagaris and I had found dead in that structure back at Rostov, but big enough that I walked more carefully after that.

Depressingly, I found myself going lower and lower. I felt like I'd gone down so far I had to be approaching the earth's core. And the deeper I went, the more disturbing the caverns became. I saw strange things. Not the things themselves, but signs and hints. When I peered down a vent in the rock, I saw strands of webbing as thick as my arm. I went in the opposite direction – but there I found a dead end. A dead end with peculiar patterns in the stone walls. I couldn't understand it until I backed up, letting my light illuminate a larger section of wall. The patterns were not, as I had originally thought, some kind of carved relief. It was just a hint of a fossil buried in the rock – fossilized teeth. Teeth that were about a meter long.

I didn't like the look of the crack in the ceiling, but I liked the idea of staying even less, and decided to try my luck with it. That was a cramped ordeal, and I got stuck more than once, finally emerging in a low space just large enough to crawl in. There was no fungus here, and it was not a corridor. I was just adrift in the black. So I chose a direction and crawled until I found a wall, which I followed until it sloped upward. Then I climbed. And so on.

Things got even stranger when I got into the larger caverns. There was a lot of water in them, very cold, clear water – which I hesitated to drink, but ended up drinking anyway. Stalagmites and stalactites made some of the larger chambers quite spectacular, and the fungus and pools of water created interesting effects on the walls. The place was not, in spite of everything, without its charms.

But I didn't linger, not even in the really pretty rooms. By now there had been more branches in the path than I could keep track of, and I was hopelessly lost, aimlessly taking whatever path presented itself to me.

And suddenly, the fungus was gone. In one room it was there, in the next, there was nothing but my light to guide me. It almost got me killed.

A deep chasm yawned in front of me. I couldn't see the bottom. I couldn't see the ceiling. I couldn't see the walls. I wasn't even sure what direction I'd come from. All I knew was that there was a bottomless drop right in front of me.

I was so surprised and horrified that I jumped back, knocking some rocks loose from the edge. I heard them tumble down the stone. The clatter died away, echoing. I never heard them hit bottom.

There was a voice from the darkness. "Why don't you come over here?"

I could hardly believe it. It was coming from across the chasm. "Hello?" I called back. "Friendly stalker."

"Why don't you come over here?"

I was taken aback. I guess I thought he might identify himself.

"How?" I shouted back. "Is there a way across?"

Silence.

"Hello?" I called out, looking down. I couldn't even see the other side of gap. My light didn't go very far – maybe I could make it, if the other side was just out of sight – but it still didn't look good. I took a couple of steps to my left, wondering if I could find a place where the chasm was narrower. "Who are you?"

No answer. I paused, turning my trunk to pan my light around. There was nothing to see. My hand was hovering where my Glock should have been.

"Anyone there?" I asked, not so loud this time. My voice still echoed. I seriously considered turning off my light; it wasn't doing me any good, and it was making me a target. On the other hand, I didn't want to fall.

"Why don't you come over here?"

I stepped back, away from the gap, swallowing. "How?"

Nothing. I thought of the dangler fish, and wondered if there was really someone over there. I didn't think there was.. No one human, at any rate. It was a trap. Maybe an anomaly that could somehow mimic a human voice. Maybe something else. I didn't want to find out.

"Maybe I'll find another way," I called out, backing away from the edge. There was no reply, and I didn't mind. There was something about that voice that I didn't like. Something artificial.

I'd always chosen paths that I hoped would take me up. They never did – or at least, never more than a few meters. No, I was steadily going deeper, and though I didn't know exactly how far down I was, I had an idea. There are underground tunnels and facilities all over the Zone. Some even say that the X-Labs are all networked, like one big basement for the area surrounding Chernobyl. I don't know anything about that. But underneath the man-made structures are the caverns, which are almost as well known. The ones near the surface, anyway – I was far below those. I was in uncharted territory. Heck, they hadn't even mapped a quarter of the labs yet, and those that they had were said to change periodically, making efforts to record them useless.

I knew that I'd made a mistake when I didn't try to swim my way out. The Zone was always changing, but even if it wasn't, I would have been in new territory anyway. Nobody came down this far. Nobody was this stupid.