The chaos that had once taken place was obvious in every square inch of the building.
“Where do we go from here?” I asked.
“The main floor is mostly offices for those who ran the company, meeting rooms,” Dr. Evans said. “The upper level is residential units. Everything of value took place underground.”
“How far down does this place go?” Avian asked as he took the building in.
“Five stories.”
One of the few memories I had recovered surfaced. When I had been kidnapped, they took me outside the building for the first time in my life. The sun had seemed so bright. It was the first time I had ever seen it.
Because I had lived my entire life underground up to that point.
“Let’s get a move on,” I said, turning back to the group. “We don’t have any time to lose.”
Dr. Evans nodded. “This way.” He crossed the lobby to the long hallway. “There is a room full of generators and solar storage units at the back of the building. We’re going to have to get them back up and running or we won’t be able to see a thing down there in the dark.”
It was a long walk to get from one end of the building to the other. Finally, Dr. Evans opened a door and brilliant sunlight spilled through. The door let out onto a flat landing, backing up right into the mountain side.
This was the back door Dr. Evans had shoved me out of after he had Dr. Beeson wipe my memory.
This was my true birth place.
On the other side of the landing, there was a door going into a separate section of the building. Dr. Evans broke the door handle and pushed it open.
It looked like a garden of machines. Rows and rows of them sat inside, filling the middle of the large room in aisles. Along another wall sat tall, black boxes that hummed loudly.
“Energy storage devices?” Avian asked, indicating the black boxes.
Dr. Evans nodded. “Solar energy, to be precise,” he said in a raised voice. “Being this far out we tried to be as self-sufficient as possible so as to not draw questions from the local utility companies. The entire roof of the building is covered in solar panels. These devices ran the majority of the power.”
“And these?” I asked, tapping one of the machines with the barrel of my assault rifle.
“Backup generators,” he said. He crossed to a large tank that was twelve feet tall and probably six feet across. “This is fuel for them all. Enough to last a few days.”
“Is the fuel good enough to get them back up and running?” Bill asked. “Fuel only lasts so long.”
“Yes,” he said with a heavy sigh. “We’re going to have to hope the solar power is just switched off and it can be easily turned back on.”
With that, he turned to a control panel on one wall and West crossed the room to help him.
I walked back out onto the landing, kicking at the snow. It exploded in front of me in a big puff.
“Do you realize you walked about three-hundred fifty miles from here to Eden?” Avian said from behind me. “We’re close if you were driving a vehicle. But walking that distance…?”
“I wonder how long it took me,” I said as I leaned against the side of the building and crossed my arms over my chest. Disappointment settled into my heart. We weren’t exactly being quiet here. First with the gunshots, and then our talking. If my sister was here, she would have heard us by now.
I had to assume that since she hadn’t come out, she wasn’t here.
Of course she wasn’t.
Avian shook his head. “You have always had impressive stamina, but your hiking was all through desert and mountains. Even if you managed twenty miles a day that would have taken you a couple of weeks. And I doubt you walked in a direct line to us.”
“Bill walked a lot farther than that, didn’t you?” I said, nodding to where he stood in the doorway. His firearm was held ready in his hands as he scanned the mountains around him.
Bill simply nodded.
“You came from somewhere on the east coast, right?” Avian asked.
Bill nodded once again. “Yeah, but I think I got out of there before it got real bad.”
“It was real bad from the beginning,” Avian said, though not in a challenging way.
Bill nodded for a third time and I knew that was the end of that. The past was a place Bill didn’t visit and did not invite others to.
Whatever had happened in his past, I had a sense that the present was better for him. Even if it was a post-Evolution world.
The door that had been left propped open leading back into the building suddenly illuminated, the lights flickering on in a line down the hall.
“Got it!” West shouted from inside. He and Dr. Evans stepped back out onto the landing.
“This way,” Dr. Evans said as he stepped past us and into the hall.
We walked past offices and conference rooms and back into the lobby. Dr. Evans crossed to the elevators and pushed the button to go down. It illuminated.
“No, wait—” West started.
There was an ear-splitting clatter. Bang—bang—bang.
The ground and walls shook and we all scrambled back as something behind the closed elevator doors plummeted into the depths of the building.
The doors dinged open just as the elevator crashed down the shaft. A cloud of dust exploded out the open doors.
“As I was about to say,” West said, looking at Dr. Evans with stupidity in his eyes. “The elevator is doubtful to work after all these years.”
Normally, this incident might have made me laugh, but at the moment, all my nerves were on high alert. I’d crouched into fight mode, my finger poised on the trigger. My eyes swept the area.
Avian and Bill were positioned exactly the same.
“Shall we take the stairs then?” West said. I glanced back at him to see him shake his head. He started toward the door with the “stairs” sign.
Slowly relaxing when nothing came rushing out after us, I turned and we all shuffled to the stairs and stepped into the dim light.
The air was old tasting, smelling all the more pungent since the ventilation system had just kicked back on. The lights above us flickered after such a long time of being dark and cold.
We only went down one flight of stairs before exiting on the floor marked as 1UGL—first underground level.
The door opened up into a maze of hallways that had endless doors breaking off of them.
“This is where the important offices are,” Dr. Evans said, his voice sounding far away as if already living back in his days of glory.
“This is like freaking déjà vu,” West breathed, breaking off to the right before turning down another hall and disappearing out of sight.
An approving smile pulled on Dr. Evans’ cybernetic face before he started to follow. “I think he remembers.”
Bill, Avian, and I lagged a bit behind, weapons ready, even though we all knew there were no more Bane inside.
“This is the freakiest place I’ve ever been,” Avian said, his eyes inspecting each doorway as we followed West and his scientist grandfather. “Is anyone else feeling incredibly claustrophobic?”
Bill nodded and I internally agreed. The halls were narrow and lined with door after door. The lights flickered overhead, cold and white. Maybe it was just a play of the lights, but it did feel as if the walls were closing in on us.
“I assure you the building will not, in fact, collapse on you,” Dr. Evans said impatiently. I looked up to see him standing outside an open door. West was gone; he must have already been inside. “This building was built to withstand earthquakes and attacks. It is as solid as the day it was built.”
“That’s not what’s freaking me out,” Avian muttered under his breath as we stepped inside the office.
The place looked ransacked. A large desk sat in the middle of the room and the walls were lined with drawers and cabinets. It looked as if all of them had exploded, papers flying everywhere.