There's A Leak in the Boiler Room
A teenage skunk works in an extravagant mining outfit and copes with verbal and sexual abuse from his superiors, but there is something deep underground, something in the cold shadows that doesn't take kindly to strangers.
I believe this is my first "straight" story. I remember that this was inspired by a dream just before writing it (I seem to have a lot of dreams about caverns and being underground). Although I love the nice ending, it just feels to me like an adult Paul Zindel story.
You'll notice that the title and much of the inane babbling of the characters stems from the song "God's Away on Business," by Tom Waits.
There's A Leak in the Boiler Room
"So you see, ladies and gentlemen, because of the mineral's unfortunate location, theoretical speculation had to be disbanded. We uprooted our labs and moved them down two thousand feet below the surface. The moles on our team didn't mind, but I guess the wolves were less than pleased."
The reporters chuckled as they jostled one another, eager to snap a photograph of the professor with their bulky five thousand-dollar cameras. Jay Lee looked on as he sneered from the balcony of the southern sector, peering through his OmniSpex monocle at the scene one thousand feet away...and one hundred feet above. The rat was obviously enjoying his audience, judging from the smile he displayed whenever there was a camera flash.
The young skunk heaved a sigh that had been pent up for thirty six hours. He wiped sweat and dirt out of his stinging eyes. How he managed to get dirt in his eyes just by staring at hundreds of rock samples through little glass cases in the middle of a hospital-white room that couldn't allow dust because of sanitation precautions was absolutely beyond him. He tried to remember if they said anything about getting hazard pay, but he knew where his luck stood; in the same hole as he was.
Pocketing the monocle, Jay walked back to the lab, stopping at the door to look at the southern machine. It was just like the ones in the other three quadrants that surrounded the Spire. It was a bulky triangle of steel that stretched from the first level to the seventh, a length of two hundred and eighty feet. Enormous pipes, playfully referred to as The Brewery by those who work there, snaked out from the top to the bottom. At the base of the triangle was a gathering machine that carted the rocks, hopefully furnished with the miracle ore, up the pipes and into the kettles of the triangle where they were then processed. But of course, grabbing several thousand tons of rocks and dirt at the bottom of an ever-deepening pit often left you with some strange things (like grabbing a handful of rocks when you were a kid and finding that special piece of quartz or agate), so naturally you needed a battalion of scientists stationed down below to sift and study all those rocks.
Never mind the fact that said scientists have had no prior training or knowledge on how to live thousands of feet in the anus of the world, and yet all of the maintenance personnel, from those to the processing machines to the ventilation system, had all undergone at least eight months of rigorous tests and preparation.
Jay turned back to the door right when it suddenly swung open, almost clipping him on the nose. Standing in the doorway, fuming with the same anger that gave him the nickname "the hammer" by his coworkers, was Ollie Calvert. The grey fox laid his ears back and glared at Jay, who braced himself for the razor-thin Irish accent.
"And just what do you think you're doing out here, son?"
"It's my five minute break, Dr. Calvert..."
"Unless you haven't got a pair of functioning eyes in your head, son, Samantha didn't punch in. That means her shift is your shift, so kindly move the sightseeing tour into the lab. Now."
"She didn't punch in? But I just...I was walking with her when..."
The moment Ollie closed his eyes and started rubbing the right temple of his ash-grey forehead, Jay immediately snapped his muzzle shut. Ollie's selective headaches had become as prophetic down here as granny's rheumatic divining hands.
"You see that over there, son?" the hammer said, extending his arm toward the brewery. "That three trillion hunk of steel and plastic laminate is the entire reason we're here. Every day its bringing us closer and closer to hell, and all we're getting out of it is tons and tons of very raw, very old rock. And maybe one percent of that is anthelacite. Do you know how much that stuff is going for today?"
Jay stood silent. He might have been tasked to identify and research the stuff, but if his paycheck wasn't close to the market value of the material, he really didn't give a damn.
"Two billion a kilo, boyo. For every two pounds of this stuff, there's always a two with nine zeros dangling over it. But the stuffed shirt, porta-bellies working in those factories over there wouldn't know anthelacite if it developed in their gallbladders and shot out their pencil pricks like baseballs from Hell."
Please God, Jay spoke in his head, please let there be a point to this.
"It's your job, Lee...our job, to brush the comb through all this shit to find the metal, clean it up, ship it off to the western factory and collect our paychecks. What do you think we do if we find something other than anthelacite, Lee?"
"We send it to the eastern facto--."
"We send it to the eastern factory, right. According to the government it's legal to make a hole bigger than my aunt Germaine's bum but it's not legal to pocket some diamonds we find on the way...fussy bastards. Now Lee, kindly do your job so you can get your money, but more importantly, so you can get out of my way."
"Yes, sir," Jay said mechanically. He quickly swept passed the doctor and entered the hall, walking briskly to the airlock.
Ollie watched Jay for only a moment after the skunk entered the building, strutting in that goddamn cocky way of his.
They were all the same, whether they were assistants or fully-fledged operatives; they were all snippy, arrogant, and daft. None of them gave a worker's piss about their job anymore. They were all from the gimme-gimme generation, and if they didn't get what they wanted then they'd cry home to their lawyer-mothers or doctor-fathers complaining that the world owed them something. Ollie could think of what they were owed; a size fourteen boot straight up the wa-freaking-zoo.
The fox scowled as he started the trek to the eastern factory, clutching his head as centipedes began worming their evil way behind his right eye again. It didn't help his mood when he remembered that he had run out of his own stock of aspirin. He had already sneaked into the infirmary and purloined a number of bottles from its shelves; painkillers mostly.
Ollie knew he had an addiction, only he didn't like to think of it as an addiction because the pain was always there, pressing up against the front of his skull every morning, making the right side of his face twitch and his teeth chatter painfully. It wasn't an addiction, Ollie thought, because the pain was still there, and he needed the pills to get rid of the pain. He was doing himself a favor.
But the thought of those snotty little brats running the show in his lab made him cringe even more than the gremlins that galloped around his neural pathways.
He had just passed the rectangular sewage treatment facility between the southern and eastern factories on the second level when he heard a small scraping sound off to his right. At first he thought it was the squeak of some small bat that had lost its way, but as he stared into the dark space between the two buildings, he thought he could see a pair of eyes, reflecting the artificial light in a strange distorted color. For one lightning-quick moment, his inner child gave out a wail of intimate terror. But then the hardened, iron-headed, forty-two year-old scientist that had climbed through the slippery ranks of his field returned.
"Hello?" he said, sounding professional and not caring about the possibility that he could be talking to himself. He had frequently spent long evenings doing so anyways.
The faint eyes receded deeper into the dark, and Ollie grabbed his pocket flashlight (a dinky little thing about the size of an office pen, but it was powerful nonetheless), clicked the little black button, and shone a beam of whitish-blue light into the dark.
Yes, there was something there. It was still too far away for Ollie to see clearly, but he could barely make out the dim shape of something...
But then it was gone.
Screeee...screeee...screeee...
"Where are ya, little squeaker?" Ollie muttered, throwing his flashlight up and down the sides of the massive buildings. He stepped into the darkness, trying to catch a glimpse of what he had seen. He knew beyond a doubt that he had seen something, and it wasn't merely a trick of dancing shadows that were so prevalent here. At every quarterly assessment, he always scored a perfect twenty/twenty for vision, and as a geologist major with a series of backgrounds in various other fields, he knew that the old peepers had to be kept in fit condition in order to stay in the business.
He walked further, slowly, moving the penlight in perfect synchrony with his eyes, side to side. He knew he had to be getting closer to the cave wall, and the phantom squeaker must be losing ground. His shoes scuffed against the triple-reinforced grating. That, and his heartbeat being the only sounds he could hear apart from the monstrous rumble of the gathering machines below as they ate the rocks and carried them up the pipes.
"Come out, come out, wherever you are," Ollie whispered.
Scree-scree...chuh!-chuh!-chuh!-chuh!-chuh!
Ollie wheeled around as something began running toward him, its steps resounding on the grating. His heart did an Olympic pole-vault in his chest as the chafing bump against the steel came right up to him. His penlight shined on the floor, but there was nothing there. He realized that whatever was here with him was underneath the grating.
Taking a deep breath to steady his jangled nerves, the grey fox stepped slowly and cautiously back to the pathway, to the light. He could hear and feel the thing beneath him tap several times with each step he took. As he kept walking, he wondered what creature could have existed down here for so long without being discovered by the drill teams and technicians.
"I'll find you," Ollie said out loud, speaking directly to the invisible animal. "I'll find you, little squeaker, and straight into the pickle jar you'll go."
As though taking the fox's word as an affront, the thing gave a loud squeal and began banging against the grating, surprising Ollie again. He turned and quickly stepped backwards, shining his penlight rapidly against the walls and the floor as the animal scraped against the metal floor, squeaking in short angry bursts.
Suddenly he was back in the light. He could hear the animal squealing in the dark, and as he sniffed at the air Ollie caught the scent of oil and gasoline coming from the dark corner. He turned, and was shocked when he almost bumped into a short otter girl with long brunette hair. She stood at the railing with her back to him, staring down into the rumbling abyss. Ollie, regaining his professional composure, knew immediately who it was. The side of his face ached and throbbed with that dull pain, but hopefully kicking some fresh insubordinate ass would help. It always did before.
"Samantha, are you so confident in your ability to scrub rocks with a toothbrush that you think you can skip out on your designated hours?"
Samantha didn't turn around in dumb surprise as the grey fox had hoped. He would have delighted in seeing her expression of terror at seeing him standing there behind her, but once again she managed to annoy and disappoint him. He was about to tap her on the shoulder (nothing forceful, of course, just something with a little authority behind it) when she spoke.
"There's a leak."
Ollie could feel the pain take shape in his head, pressing painfully up against his skull, and this...the otter's inane, nonsensical words only added to his agony. He grabbed his head and said "What?"
"There's a leak...there's a leak in the boiler room."
"Samantha, what the hell are you talking about--."
But that was as far as he got. Samantha whirled around in a flurry of brownish hair and fur, and Ollie could only make out a pair of strangely colored eyes, pinkish skin, and a row of glistening teeth before his throat was ripped open.
His eyes blurred and rolled in his head as he fell to the steel walkway while blood, black and stodgy, flowed out from the massive wound. He looked up in time to see Samantha, eyes aglow with a ferocious light, descend upon him with outstretched claws. And so Ollie "the hammer" Calvert, who enjoyed berating people and telling them what to do, died with no voice and no regrets.
He was only the second.
Jay, still dressed in starched white lab uniform, was eyeing a cubical rock that glinted in its glass casing. It was only a few inches on each side, weighing perhaps two hundred fifty grams, and shined with a purplish-blue color. Unless Jay was a total idiot, what he held in his hand was a small hunk of anthelacite. He grabbed a toothbrush from one of the sanitary sinks and proceeded to scrub at the metal, making sure to get into every crag and crevice.
Somewhere a door was being opened and shut. Jay turned his head and saw Nicole walking toward him. Oh goddamnit, Jay thought as the lithe hyena grabbed a pair of latex gloves and glided over to him, her black hair done up in a tight bun, small spectacles perched far down on the bridge of her muzzle. She caught his eye and Jay swore again when she flashed him a smile.
If she comes onto me again I'm just walking away, he thought vehemently. He had already gotten on badly with Dr. Calvert because of her damn paroxysms of lust. But why wasn't she wasn't in the same kettle of fish? Well, who are you apt to blame first; an eighteen year-old summer-worker not yet in college, or a thirty-four year-old woman with a degree in geology and sociology?
A better uncertainty would be whether or not that that is a legitimate question.
"Hey, jay," Nicole said. It was merely a salutation, but it still made the skunk's heart beat nervously. He concentrated on the rock, making sure to get everything.
"Nicole," he nodded.
She smiled at him, grabbing a glass case and setting up her tools next to him. He scowled, but she didn't notice, or at least she pretended not to notice.
"You've been avoiding me, Jay," she said. There was a soothing, nectar-like melody in her voice, but Jay could hear that threatening inflection he was used to hearing from her, especially when she was disappointed in his performance.
"So?"
"So...it wouldn't look good on your papers if I told old ash-face that you haven't been reporting in for work on a regular basis. And you know how hard the old man can be on 'subversives.'"
Jay went cold; he knew she was bound to do something like this, but he didn't know how close she and Ollie were.
"You wouldn't do that..."
"I've got you by the balls, Jay, and you know it," she said. Jay did know it, and he could easily distinguish the equal mixture of menace and tenderness in her voice.
The skunk sighed as he tried to focus on his piece of metal. He looked at Nicole's sample, and wasn't surprised to see that she was just brushing up a black, dirt-encrusted rock. He wondered if that was what her heart looked like on the inside.
"Supply closet, sweetie. I'll wait ten minutes, just like the other times. You know the drill."
"Yeah," was all Jay could think of saying. With machine-like disinterest, he placed the freshly-polished rock into another sink on the other side of the room, filled with a saline-based solution. Then he took off his gloves, threw them into the sterile wastebasket, and stepped off to the supply closet. He eyed the other researchers who worked diligently with their toothbrushes, feeling like he himself was being scoured by their eyes, wondering if any of them knew.
Hell, some of them probably did know, they were just afraid of getting blackmailed by Nicole.
She entered the supply closet exactly ten minutes later, on the dot. He was ready for her, wearing the clothes that she had designated for him. A simple black shirt and ripped blue jeans, both of which were tight enough to force all the circulation from his body to his head.
"Well," Nicole said as she walked up to him in the confined space, wrapping her arms around his waist and nuzzling his nose. "Quite the bad boy, aren't you?" and she gave a tittering laugh that made Jay's skin crawl.
She brushed her lips against his neck, and outside came a clattering sound that made the skunk jump.
"We shouldn't be doing this," Jay said, shivering with nervous enjoyment as Nicole pressed herself against him. She kissed his neck, and nipped hard with her front teeth. Jay gasped and clutched at the hyena's back. He hated it when she did that.
"It's a little late for that now, honey. You knew what you were getting yourself into when I offered you some downtime two weeks ago."
_Did I?_Jay wondered as he felt her hands slip under his shirt and caress the fur of his chest. She kissed his nose lovingly before drawing him into a violent kiss. Her tongue hugged the curves of his teeth and the walls of his mouth, and he could taste the familiar scent of scotch on her mouth. He tried to compete by imitating her movements, but she was too aggressive for him to make any headway.
She roughly grabbed the bulge that developed in his pants, rubbing slowly. She was forcing him against the wall, and he let her; as long as she knew she was in control, he got to get out of this without any scratches or bruises.
Suddenly he heard her unzip his pants, the sound loud and jarring in the small room. She brushed her muzzle against his, subsequently forcing her bosom into his chest, pushing him harder against the wall. "You know what I want, honey," she muttered into his ear.
"I don't know..." Jay said nervously, and was rewarded with a painful nip to the ear.
"You don't have to," Nicole whispered caressingly. She gripped him too roughly. He could feel her fingernails digging into his skin. He knew that it would be another night of hydrogen peroxide and cotton balls again.
Then they heard the scream. It was shrill and loud, and seemed to surround their little cocoon of steel and concrete. They stood stock-still, as though they were statues stuck in some awkward pose.
Lust and passion long since deceased, Nicole removed her hand from Jay's pants and moved to the door. Jay re-buttoned his pants and put his starched-white uniform back on, mainly just to feel more comfortable. He looked over at Nicole, who had the door open wide enough to peek into the room.
"What is it?" the skunk whispered anxiously. "Did somebody see us? What's going on?"
"Oh my god," Nicole said mutely. From the light that came in through the open door-slit, Jay could see Nicole's brown eyes widen, engorged with terror. More screams, coming from all around them. Jay felt his heart thumping in his chest like a small piston engine. He walked slowly over to where the hyena stood riveted to the spot, audience to a scene of horror coming from the room they had vacated just a few minutes ago.
Jay put a hand on Nicole's arm. She jumped and turned to look at him, and for a moment Jay thought that he had no idea who he was looking at. He looked into the face of someone frightened and bewildered, nothing he had come to known from spending all those hours in this same supply shed with this woman.
She shut the door and locked it, oblivious to Jay's protests. She stepped to one of the racks and started rummaging for something. Jay could hear her muttering things like "...Gotta get out of here," and "What the hell," while he stepped to the door, unbolted it, and opened it up just a little bit to peer through.
A little bit was all he needed to see; the corner of one of the saline solution sinks was just in view off to the left, and the wall-mounted cabinets were just ahead, but everything was out of order. All the glass that should have been in the cabinet was now scattered all over the floor, blending with the cleaning liquid...and all the blood.
Jay felt as though his stomach had leapt up into his throat. He had never seen so much blood in his life. Cold sweat, the species of fear that is most intimate to a body, broke out and made his breathing quick and ragged. He was about to shut the door when an explosion rocked the facility, sending the two flying against the shelves of stocked equipment. Nicole gave a stifled scream, and when Jay fell to the floor he landed painfully on the sharp corner of something smooth and hard. He scrambled to get up as his side burned and he felt something wet slick over his side. He grabbed Nicole's arm and dragged her out of the rubble. Blood was flowing from the cut above her left eye in a long stain that curved under her jaw.
"What's going on?" she said. Jay didn't know, all he did know is that they had to get out of here.
She managed to get to her feet when another explosion shook the foundation of the building. Jay grabbed her and went to the door. She was holding something in her hand, but Jay could just make out a dim outline before he found himself flinging open the door and running through the chaos of what had been the laboratory.
Everything was an utter mess. Glass and other debris littered the floor like a war zone, and the blood only added to the illusion. He could hear screaming everywhere, and more explosions rang out from above. What the hell happened, Jay thought numbly as he ran into the automated airlock. The glass doors shut with a mechanical snap (Jay felt a slight discomfort in his ears as the airlock pressurized), and the two were blasted with a liquid spray that was supposed to eliminate potential toxins and harmful particles outside the body, but it only made Jay side burn even more. He saw Nicole wince and put a hand over her forehead.
After the spray, he looked down at his side and realized just how deep his injury was. The side of his lab coat was streaked with red down to the edge.
Oh god, what the hell is going on here...?
The doors opened, and they were running through the white corridor that led outside. They were almost at the door when it burst open, and standing in the doorway was Kip Dawson, the groupie-conscious professor Jay was eyeing with his monocle half an hour ago. Only now, the rat's coat was all torn to pieces and stained red; the fur around his eyes was gone, exposing the pink flesh beneath. His eyes were aglow with a mad light as he tittered at them in a high-pitched giggle, displaying rows of sharp, displaced teeth. Jay quickly thought of a bunch of wet nails thrown haphazardly together.
"Put a nickel in the slot...let it ring, let it ring, LET IT RIIIIIIIINNNG!"
Kip charged at them. At that moment, Jay jumped back as Nicole raised her arm, bringing up the thing she grabbed from the supply room. There was a hiss and a frosty white smoke burst out of the can she held, spraying the Kip-thing in the face. It stopped as though poleaxed, shrieking in a frightful rage. It began scratching and tearing at its face, sending bits of hardened flesh down to the white floor.
Quickly, the screaming stopped. The creature fell backwards, and as its head struck the floor it shattered into several large pieces, just like, strangely enough, a cold watermelon.
Jay looked from Kip's dead body to Nicole, who finally managed to bring her arm down with some amount of twitchy difficulty, like the Tin Man without his dosage of oil. She too stared down at Kip, her hands shaking like leaves in a thunderstorm.
"What was that?" Jay said, motioning to the bottle the hyena held in her hand. "What did you use?"
She looked down at the bottle and muttered something. She coughed and said in a more clear voice "Liquid nitrogen. I don't know why they kept it here. We were going to get rid of it on the next transferal..."
Jay looked back down at Kip's body. He felt only a little grief for the rat, having had no good friendship with him. He grabbed Nicole's shoulder and helped her to walk forward. She was shaking madly, and had to hold on to him to keep from falling. She pressed against the wound in Jay's side, making him grind his teeth in pain, but he pushed on forward, stepping over Kip's body and guiding Nicole by the arm to the door.
The skunk opened it, and what he saw made a scream form a knot in his throat, threatening to burst out. Fires had broken out and filled the western and eastern factories. People were running around on the catwalks, only as Jay could see it a handful of them were normal. All the others had that malformed look about them. Blood ran freely from the upper walkways as though it were raining. It was as though Hell had grown impatient with its guests.
"We have to get to the spire," Nicole said, and Jay agreed. It was the only exit to the surface.
The spire was really a massive column of steel that made up the center of the entire expanse, and also the very foundation of the walkways and structures. It served mainly as an elevator that carted things from the hole to the surface. Walkways extended from the spire to each level, making a well-connected series of paths, allowing anybody to move up or down by using the elevator--which would be a waste of time because of the handrails that were located near the four factories and along the spire itself.
Jay and Nicole ran for the spire, their ears filled with the squealing and scraping and gurgling of the things they could see and others they could not. Jay tried the doors, but they wouldn't open.
"What the hell? How come we can't get in?"
Nicole took him by the arm and led him back a few steps, pointing to a triangular light above the doors. It was flashing red.
"The system's failed on this level. We can't get to it here...we have to go up." They looked up, seeing a straight line of red flashing triangles.
But there at the top, one triangle that was yellow and unblinking, a silent symbol of hope to the two survivors.
Jay leapt to the handrail and began the ascent to the first level. He went two rungs at a time, desperate to get quickly away from this pit. Visions of a bright, sun-filled landscape began dancing in his head.
"Jay!"
The skunk looked down to see Nicole wrestling with Ollie Calvert, his face horribly distorted and a massive gaping wound in the middle of his neck. The liquid nitrogen spray can Nicole had had rolled away dangerously close to the edge.
Jay jumped down to the floor and dived for the spray can. He grabbed it and jumped back up. He caught sight of Ollie's hideous face before a fist slammed into his mouth and threw him against the safety railing. His grip on the can faltered, but he managed to keep hold.
"Di di mau! Di di mau! The ghost birds sing for a dead diamond ring...more wine, pennyweight!"
Ollie was screaming in their ears as he flailed his arms wildly, knocking them around and forcing them into the railing. Nicole shouted at him, but Jay didn't hear. He picked a moment to attack, and when Ollie turned on Nicole he brought up the spray can and pressed the trigger.
Just then, Ollie whirled around, slapping the can out of Jay's hands and sending it down to the rumbling abyss below.
Oh shit.
Ollie cried out more nonsense as he jumped for Jay, his arms outstretched and claws glistening blackly. The skunk tried to defend himself, but the grey fox was far too strong in his new, terrible state. Nicole gripped at Ollie's waist and managed to haul the vulpine off of Jay, but at that moment another explosion from below shook the spire, throwing Nicole off balance with the combined weights. She fell backward, just short of striking her head on the railing. Ollie, however, was not privy to such luck. His head struck the metal bar with a dull THUK! sound. He didn't move after that.
"Nicole!" Jay shouted. He ran to help her up, throwing Ollie to the side. She got up with a groan, coughing and sporting a fresh scratch on her face to accompany the one above her eye, which started bleeding again.
"We have to keep going," Jay said, pulling her by the arm to the handrails. She stopped short, telling him to wait a moment.
"Help me with this," she said, grabbing the unconscious-possibly-dead Ollie by the arms. Jay knew what she wanted to do, and he shook his head. Nicole gave him a reproving look, and he immediately grabbed the fox's mud-stained Loafer-laden feet. They heaved and tossed the body over the side, watching it fall into darkness.
"I always hated that fucker," Nicole said. Jay sniffed in agreement and began pulling her to the railing again.
They climbed quickly, not daring to go by single rungs in case they didn't reach the elevator in time. Screams and squeals followed them up, and they could hear the scraping and tapping of things everywhere.
It seemed like hours had passed when they finally reached the first level two hundred feet later. Jay's arms burned as though on fire, and his side throbbed with mind-numbing pain. He scrambled up to grab Nicole's hand as she gave one small push for the top. They ran wheezing to the elevator doors. Jay grabbed at the handle--Oh god it's not going to open we're going to die here, he thought--and swung open the doors.
It smelled like someone had thrown a bottle of beer into a tank of methane. They shut the doors and grabbed their cards, hoping that the elevator still recognized the electronic coding to send them off to the surface. Jay tried his first, and was rewarded with a soothing female computer voice blasting from a group of minispeakers.
"We are sorry, but this card is not valid. Please try again."
Nicole immediately took hers and swiped it through the little slot.
"We are sorry, but this card is not valid. Please try again."
Panicking, she realized that she had the card upside-down. She tried again, this time with the card facing the correct direction. A loud BING-BONG that made Jay think of the doorbell of his home in Madison, Wisconsin sounded out, and a series of lights popped up beside the card-slot. They were the levels from 1 to 12, and a bright green one that said "topside." Somebody had obviously been in a playful mood before this day, because somehow they had scratched in "PARADISE" and an arrow pointing to the green button. Jay didn't know who did it, but he agreed.
Nicole slapped her palm against the topside/heaven button. There was another _BING-BONG_noise, and Jay was filled with that strange rising feeling in the pit of his stomach as he felt the elevator ascend. The hyena slumped back, thumping roughly against the wall of the elevator.
Jay looked at Nicole, who looked back at him with tired eyes, and they immediately embraced each other in a tight hug. Relief washed over their muscles and brought tears to their eyes. They were going to get out of this after all.
That was when another explosion, this one larger and louder than its predecessors, shook the spire. The lights went out in the stalled elevator, leaving the two in darkness and apprehension.
"No," Nicole said. "No, no, no. This isn't happening...This isn't happening!"
Jay didn't say anything. He just wanted to hold Nicole. Somewhere there was sanity to be found in their hug. Tears streamed down his face; they were almost out.
He heard Nicole say "Oh my god," and she tightened her arms around him.
Minutes pass, the spire shook, and the scraping noises grew louder, closer.
"Jay?"
"...Yeah?"
"I love you."
Jay coughed out what might have been a laugh. It was just amazing how crazy the world had become in so short a time.
"I love you, too."
More minutes pass, another explosion.
Suddenly, the lights turn on in the elevator and they feel themselves rising again. Jay suppresses the urge to laugh, afraid that if he did he might never stop.
In the light of an orange Friday morning sun, Jay and Nicole stood together above the edge of the pit. They were holding each other's hands, and their tails unconsciously tapped together. Smoke, black and thick like some massive organism, climbed high into the sky and invaded the clouds.
Jay breathed in fresh air, letting it out in a heavy sigh.
"The ship is sinking," Nicole said.
"What?" Jay looked at her, concern wrinkling his brow.
"You can hear it. It's going deeper into the ground, and the spire's going with it, too. The ship's sinking. Hopefully it'll keep those things down there with it."
Jay nodded. He continued to stare down into the abyss, his mind going back to that one saying he remembered hearing from his calculus teacher. It was something like "if you stared into the abyss long enough, does it stare back at you?"
Yes, it does, he thought. It does, and if you're not smart enough to look away it'll make you blind or worse.
They could hear the wailing sirens of fire engines in the distance. A soft wind blew the black smoke away into the west, where it would slowly die off and dissipate. Jay and Nicole, still holding each other's hands, turned their backs on the pit and walked away, glad to be alive on such a nice day.