Randy Terri's Arc

Chapter 2 of 11

Randy drove his truck along the dirt roads that connected the scattered properties east of Calico Flats, the notebook open on the passenger seat with the coordinates written in pencil. The numbers led him past abandoned fields and collapsed sheds, through stretches of nothing that looked like every other stretch until the land started to slope. The coordinates brought him to a clearing where the pavement had cracked into pieces. A blue bicycle lay on its side near the edge, one wheel still turning slowly in the wind. Beyond it, a man sat slumped against a concrete pillar with his back to Randy. An empty glass stood upright on the ground beside him, and a medicine bottle had spilled its contents across the broken pavement, yellow pills scattered in a wide arc. Randy parked twenty feet back and approached on foot, watching for movement that didn't come. The man's hands rested palm-up in his lap, fingers curled but not clenched. Randy circled around to see his face and found skin that had gone gray and stiff. Randy knelt and checked the man's pockets without touching more than he had to. A wallet with no identification. A folded map with nothing marked on it. Then, in the inside jacket pocket, a photograph printed on thick paper that had survived the weather. It showed a concrete chamber underground, lit by harsh fluorescent light. Steel doors lined one wall, each with a number stenciled above it in white paint. A man stood in the center of the frame, facing the camera directly, wearing the same jacket the dead man had on now. Randy turned the photo over and found a date written in marker — three weeks ago — and a single word: "Sublevel." Randy stood and looked at the clearing again, at the bicycle and the pills and the man who had come here with a photograph of something underground. Someone had painted coordinates on his billboard, and this man had followed them and died here, maybe from the pills or maybe from something else Randy couldn't see. The photograph proved the man had already been inside whatever was below, which meant the way in was close. Randy folded the photo and put it in his pocket. The coordinates hadn't led to the entrance — they'd led to a warning.