Firelight - Chapter 3: Into the Mountain

The calendar Patrick kept—scratched marks on the shelter wall, one for each day since the bombs, meticulously maintained for two hundred and eighty-seven years—read Day 104,971. Three months before the expedition would arrive and change everything.

***

Ailana's legs burned.

They'd been climbing for three days, following switchbacks carved into the mountainside by people long dead. The path crumbled in places, forcing them to scramble across loose scree that shifted under their boots. Twice she'd nearly fallen, catching herself on jagged rocks that tore through her gloves.

Patrick never slowed. Never looked back. He kept climbing, his long legs eating up the distance while she struggled to keep pace. The thin air made every breath a labor, each inhale carrying the acrid bite of ash and the faint metallic tang of irradiated dust. The cold bit through her layers of clothing. She'd wrapped a scarf around her face to keep the wind from stealing what little warmth she had left.

The mountain loomed above them, its peak hidden in gray clouds—the permanent overcast that had blanketed Novum since the bombs. She couldn't remember the last time she'd seen true blue sky. Below, the wasteland stretched to the horizon, a patchwork of brown and black punctuated by the skeletal remains of cities. From up here, the devastation looked almost peaceful. Distance made the death pretty.

She hated that.

"How much farther?" she asked. Her voice came out rough, throat raw from the cold air and the grit that coated everything.

Patrick stopped at a switchback, finally turning to look at her. His face was weathered, deep lines carved around his eyes and mouth. A thick beard covered his jaw, more gray than black now. He'd aged in the years since he found her, though she couldn't say exactly when it had happened. One day he'd been strong and vital, the next she'd noticed the stoop in his shoulders, the way he favored his left leg.

"Another day," he said. "Maybe two."

She wanted to ask if he was sure, if Greenwood was even still there, but she didn't. Patrick didn't tolerate questions he couldn't answer. Instead she pulled out her canteen and took a careful sip. The water was nearly frozen, burning as it went down and tasting faintly of the iodine tablets that kept it safe from fallout contamination.

Patrick watched her drink, then turned back to the path. "We'll camp at the next shelter."

"Shelter?"

"They built rest stations along the route. For miners and traders. Most should still be standing."

She shouldered her pack and followed. The supplies they'd taken from the caravan were heavy, but necessary. They'd eaten through half the food already, and what remained wouldn't last more than two weeks. If Greenwood was gone—if that girl had told the truth about it falling—they'd be in trouble.

But Patrick believed. Or he acted like he believed, which amounted to the same thing. So she followed.

***

The shelter appeared around a bend, tucked into an alcove carved from the mountain face. Little more than three walls and a roof, but the stone had been shaped with care—the walls curved rather than angled, and someone had carved a frieze of interlocking vines along the lintel, a decorative touch that seemed absurd this far into the wilderness. Even their rest stations had been beautiful. After days of sleeping in the open it looked like paradise. Someone had built a fire pit in the center, and ancient soot stained the stone ceiling.

Patrick set down his pack and began gathering kindling from a pile of dried wood someone had left behind. Ailana searched the area for anything useful, but found only empty cans and a rusted knife blade broken off at the handle. She tucked it in her pocket anyway. Metal was metal.

"Start the fire," Patrick said. "I'll check the area."

She knelt by the pit and began arranging the kindling. Her fingers were stiff with cold, clumsy. It took three tries to strike her flint, but eventually a spark caught. She fed the tiny flame carefully, adding larger pieces as it grew. Heat washed over her face, almost painful after hours in the wind. The smoke carried the sharp scent of pine resin and something chemical—whatever had leached into the wood from three centuries of irradiated soil.

Patrick returned as she pulled out their rations. He carried a dead rabbit in one hand, its neck twisted at an unnatural angle. He'd snared it somehow, though she hadn't heard a shot. But she'd smelled it—the musk of the warren, warm and animal, carried on the wind from fifty meters up the trail. She'd noticed the scent before they'd even reached the shelter, had known something alive was nearby without understanding how she'd known. The awareness had been so natural she hadn't questioned it.

"Found a warren fifty meters up the trail," he said. "They're surviving better than I expected."

His knife moved through fur and membrane with efficient motions, the blade sliding like he'd done it a thousand times. He had, probably. He'd been doing this long before he found her. The coppery smell of fresh blood mixed with the smoke, and Ailana's stomach cramped with hunger.

"How did people live up here?" she asked. "Before."

Patrick didn't answer right away. He skewered the rabbit on a stick and propped it over the fire. Fat dripped into the flames, making them hiss and pop, filling the shelter with the rich smell of roasting meat.

"Greenwood wasn't always a haven." He paused, staring into the flames. "It was a research facility. Underground complex built into the mountain. They studied... things. Classified things."

"What kind of things?"

He met her eyes. "The kind that makes people drop bombs."

Her gut clenched, the rabbit turning sour against her teeth. "They built weapons here?"

"Maybe. Or maybe they were trying to stop them. Hard to say now." He turned the rabbit, watching it cook. "But when the bombs fell, the researchers sealed themselves inside. Brought their families, their supplies. Figured they could wait out the fallout."

"Did they?"

"For a while. Long enough to matter." He pulled the rabbit from the fire and tore off a leg, handing it to her. "Eat."

The meat was tough and gamey, but hot. She ate slowly, savoring each bite, licking grease from her fingers. Patrick gnawed on his portion in silence, staring into the flames.

"You've been here before," Ailana said. It wasn't a question.

Patrick's jaw tightened. "A long time ago."

"During the war?"

"After. When things were still falling apart, before the Gray Death spread." He tossed a bone into the fire. "I came here looking for answers. Found only ghosts."

"What kind of answers?"

"The kind that don't exist." He looked at her across the flames. "I wanted to know why. Why the empire bombed us, why billions had to die, why the world had to end. I thought maybe the scientists here could explain it."

"Could they?"

"They were already dead when I arrived. All of them. The infection had gotten inside somehow, and it..." He shook his head. "I didn't stay long."

Ailana absorbed this. Patrick rarely talked about his past, about the man he'd been before becoming the wasteland wanderer who'd saved her life. Every scrap of information was a piece of a puzzle she might never complete.

"Why are we going back, then? If they're dead?"

"Because dead men keep secrets." Patrick's voice was grim. "The facility survived anything they threw at it. The data servers should still be intact, the archives preserved. Whatever they were studying—whatever they discovered that made the empire want them silenced—it's still there. Waiting."

"And you think that information is worth the risk?"

"I think it's the only leverage we have." He stood, brushing ash from his pants. "The empire is still out there, Ailana. They didn't drop bombs and forget about us. They're watching. Waiting. And someday they'll come back to make sure their secrets stay buried."

Her grip tightened on the canteen, the metal pressing cold half-moons into her palms. "What do we do with the information if we find it?"

"We survive. We get off this rock. And then we make them pay." Patrick's eyes were hard. "They murdered four billion people. They need to answer for that."

***

"We'll reach the entrance tomorrow," he said. "If it's sealed, we'll have to find another way in."

"And if it's not sealed?"

"Then we hope whatever's inside is friendly."

She didn't like the way he said that. "You think there are people?"

"Something's generating power. The girl from the caravan said Greenwood fell a month ago, but she didn't say what happened to the survivors. People don't just disappear."

Ailana finished her rabbit and wiped her hands on her pants. "They could have died."

"They could have." Patrick tossed his bone into the fire. "Or they could be waiting to see who comes knocking."

The wind howled outside the shelter, carrying flurries of gray snow—ash mixed with ice, the perpetual fallout that still drifted from the upper atmosphere three centuries after the bombs. Ailana pulled her blanket tighter around her shoulders and stared into the flames. Tomorrow they'd reach Greenwood. Tomorrow they'd find out what had happened to its people.

She had a feeling she wasn't going to like the answer.

***

They reached the entrance just after noon the next day. Ailana spotted it from a hundred meters away—a massive steel door set into the mountain face, thirty feet high and half as wide. Closed, but not sealed. Someone had left it cracked open, a gap of darkness beckoning.

Patrick stopped on the path, studying the entrance. Ailana came up beside him, her hand drifting to the revolver on her hip. The air here smelled different—stale and chemical, seeping from the gap like breath from a corpse. And underneath it, something else. Something alive—a sour, animal musk that shouldn't have been detectable at this distance, not through the wind and the cold and the hundred meters of open ground between them and the door. But she could smell it as clearly as if the source were standing beside her. Her skin prickled with a recognition that had no name.

"Stay behind me." His voice dropped low.

They approached slowly. Scars and pits covered the steel door, rust bleeding from ancient welds. Someone had painted words above the entrance, huge block letters faded by time and weather:

GREENWOOD RESEARCH FACILITY AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

Below that, in fresher paint, someone had scrawled:

THEY STILL MOVE

"Cheerful," Ailana muttered.

Patrick didn't smile. He drew his revolver—a massive thing that made her guns look like toys—and checked the chamber. Six rounds, already loaded. He'd been expecting trouble.

"When we go in, you stay at my six. Anyone comes at us, you shoot first and ask questions later. Understood?"

"Yes."

"And if I tell you to run, you run. Don't look back, don't hesitate. Just get out and keep moving."

She wanted to argue, to tell him she wouldn't leave him, but the look in his eyes stopped her. This wasn't a debate.

"Understood," she said.

Patrick nodded. He stepped up to the door and pushed it open with his free hand. Metal shrieked against stone, the sound echoing into the depths. The darkness beyond swallowed the light.

He pulled a glow stick from his belt, cracked it, and tossed it through the gap. Green light illuminated a corridor carved from stone, walls smooth and artificial. Emergency lights flickered along the ceiling, their glow dim and uncertain. Power still running, then. Somewhere deep inside, generators still humming.

Patrick squeezed through the door, gun leading. Ailana followed, her own revolvers drawn. The air inside was warmer than outside, but stale. It tasted of recycled breath and old machinery, underlaid with something sweeter and more rotten—the sickly tang of biological decay that made her gag against her sleeve. Debris littered the floor—broken equipment, scattered papers, dark stains she tried not to examine too closely.

They moved deeper. The corridor branched, tunnels splitting off into darkness. Patrick chose directions without hesitation, like he knew where he was going. Maybe he did. Maybe he'd mapped this place before, in the time before the bombs.

She didn't ask.

They passed a room filled with overturned desks and shattered computer screens. The debris told a story—panic, flight, violence. Someone had smashed everything in rage or fear, leaving nothing intact.

Another room held rows of empty bunks, their sheets stripped away. Personal items littered the floor—photographs, jewelry, children's toys. The people who'd lived here had left in a hurry, or hadn't left at all.

A third sat sealed behind a door marked with biohazard symbols. Patrick gave it a wide berth. The air near it tasted like copper pennies, and Ailana's skin prickled.

"What's in there?" Ailana whispered.

"Nothing we want to see."

They continued. The facility was larger than she'd expected, corridors branching and intersecting in a maze of stone and steel. Signs pointed to various sections—LABORATORIES, RESIDENTIAL, COMMAND CENTER, CONTAINMENT—but many had been torn down or defaced.

"Where is everyone?" Ailana whispered.

"Deeper," Patrick replied. "They would have retreated to the secure levels when things went bad."

"What went bad?"

He didn't answer. They rounded a corner and found themselves in a larger chamber, some kind of atrium. A balcony ringed the upper level, looking down on a floor fifty feet below. More emergency lights flickered, casting everything in sickly yellow.

And in the center of the floor, surrounded by rust-red stains and scattered bones, sat a pile of belongings. Packs, weapons, supplies—everything a group of survivors would need. Everything the caravan had been carrying when Ailana killed them.

Patrick stopped at the railing, staring down.

"Trap." His voice was barely audible.

The hairs on Ailana's neck rose. The silence was wrong—too complete, too heavy. Something waited in the darkness. The air carried a new smell now, sour and animal, like a den of predators. And beneath the smell, beneath the silence, she could hear something that shouldn't have been audible at this distance—a low, arrhythmic thrumming, dozens of pulses beating at different speeds, coming from the walls and the tunnels and the darkness below. Heartbeats. She was hearing heartbeats through stone, and the recognition of what that meant wouldn't come for years.

"Where are they?" she asked.

Movement in the shadows. A sound like metal scraping stone. Patrick spun, bringing his gun up, but he was too slow. Shapes detached from the darkness, moving with unnatural speed. Not running—gliding, like they weighed nothing at all.

People. Or they had been once. Now they were something else. Their skin was gray, eyes white and milky. Their mouths hung open, revealing teeth filed to points. Dozens of them, emerging from tunnels and doorways, surrounding the balcony.

"Run!" Patrick roared.

He fired. The massive revolver thundered in the enclosed space, deafening. The nearest creature's head snapped back, but it didn't fall. It staggered, then kept coming.

Ailana ran. Behind her, Patrick fired again and again, each shot a physical blow against her ears. She heard him moving, following, but she didn't look back. She'd promised not to look back.

The corridor stretched ahead of her, emergency lights strobing as she passed. More shapes appeared from side passages, reaching for her with gray hands. She fired her right revolver, the recoil bucking up her arm. One creature fell. She kept running.

A hand grabbed her shoulder. She spun, driving her left gun up under the thing's chin and pulling the trigger. Its head exploded in a spray of black fluid. The body collapsed, but three more took its place.

She couldn't reload. Couldn't stop. She holstered her guns and ran, trusting her legs, her training, her desperation. Patrick's revolver boomed behind her, each shot punctuating her gasping breaths.

The entrance. She could see daylight ahead, that blessed crack of gray sky. She put on a burst of speed, throwing herself through the gap. The steel door was right there, heavy and solid. She grabbed it, pulling with all her strength.

Patrick burst through behind her. His face was pale, blood running down his left arm. "Help me!"

Together they hauled on the door. It moved slowly, too slowly. The creatures were in the corridor now, running at them with that terrible gliding stride. White eyes gleaming in the emergency lights. Mouths open in silent screams.

The door slammed shut. Patrick threw a rusted bolt, locking it from outside. Something hit the door from within, hard enough to make the steel boom. Then again. And again.

Patrick staggered back, clutching his arm. Ailana caught him, holding him upright. Blood soaked his sleeve, dripping onto the stone path.

"We need to go," she said.

"Yes." He looked at the door, at the sounds of things battering against it from inside. "Yes, we do."

They stumbled down the path, away from Greenwood, away from whatever salvation they'd hoped to find. Behind them, the door shuddered with each impact, and in the darkness beyond it, things that had once been human screamed for blood.

Ailana didn't look back.