Looking Up

One day, I woke up and the sky was gone. No sun, no stars. No blue vault and no dark tempests. Nothing. Just emptiness -- not quite black or quite white, and yet no shade of gray I’ve ever seen. It hurt to look at, and we quickly learned to stop looking entirely.

We started running lights all the time. Vast floodlights that made our cities glow like fireflies and drew our eyes away from the terrifying non-spectacle above. When we stopped being able to tell night from day, we ran the lights brighter. Then people started seeing things in the empty gash above us – hints of strange writhing shapes and flashes of unfamiliar colors – so we turned our lights skyward veiling any unpleasant visions with their warm orange glow.

Then people started getting sick -- coughing, choking, spitting blood. It started in their lungs, but soon their skin turned yellow and their teeth turned black. When the birds started dying, we went inside. Inside our offices. Inside our factories. Inside our apartments. We barred the doors and covered the windows in paint and lead. We bored great tunnels into the rocks below us so we would never have to look up again.

Then our homes and workplaces filled with the same haze, and the people inside started dying. The weakest went first: the oldest and the youngest, smokers and asthmatics, but the rest of us weren’t far behind. Some people seemed fine only collapse one day vomiting blood, but most just wasted away in hospital beds while doctors and loved ones failed to save them. The survivors did the only thing we could, we moved into the tunnels. When the illness spread there, we moved lower. We dug through the rock with our great earth movers ever further, ever deeper, the disease always right at our backs. Then the inevitable happened. We ran out of fuel. No more coal. No more oil. Our great drills went silent, our factories shut down, and our floodlights went out.

We’ve been stuck down here for twenty-three years. We live off food we grow with cranklights and the fungus that feeds on the dead. The bleakness has stopped following us, but we know it is still waiting there, just beyond our ceilings, and it’s my job to keep it there. Which is why three decades after the sky went away, I’m the only one who never stopped looking up.

They call me Gazer. I suppose I used to be Stargazer, but, well, there aren’t any stars now. I find cracks in our collective roof, places where the bleakness snuck in and never snuck out again. Then I sit and I watch. I don’t know what I’m watching for, I just know that I haven’t found it. If a crack looks bad, I send for the Sealers to patch it up. Otherwise I just sit and stare waiting for the day (or is it night?) when the stars will return. The others say I’m crazy, weird in the head; they tell their children, “Don’t be like him, he’s not right!”

They really shouldn’t bother; no child wants to be like me. Why would they? The caves are all they’ve ever known. They’ve never seen the sun or the stars, or the blues, grays, blacks, and reds of a living sky. It’s all stories to them. They’ll never understand why night after night, day after day and all the indeterminate hours in between, I sit hunched in my tattered parka in some forgotten tunnel or huddled in my sleeping bag trying to spot light from the shafts above. All of us who remember the sky remember what we lost but the true tragedy is that an entire generation has grown never knowing what they’re missing.

I do it for them and I do it for the dead. My parents, my friends, my wife… Allison, and millions -- probably billions -- of people have died down here in the dark. If their children do the same, then they died for nothing. I wait for the sun, so that when it returns, I can go to my grown daughter, and my little nephews, and my baby niece, and even the young man who sells potatoes outside my home and shout joyfully “This is the sun, the source of life!” and they will see it and finally understand.

Right now, I’m sitting at the entrance to the Workshop staring at black. We used to repair our drills here, back when we still had the parts. Now its smoke-stained walls are covered in the dust of neglect and the whole place smells of rust and moldy leather. I don’t mind the grime. It beats the sweaty, shitty, choking crush of humanity in the Living Tunnels, but there is also danger here, so I have to be careful. There are no lights in the Workshop now. If there were, I’d probably have to snuff them anyway. Light is dangerous when you’re alone and far from your home tunnels. It attracts too much attention.

A scouting party reported a crack in the roof and I’ll need light to investigate it, but I will not risk using my cranklight until I’m sure I’m alone. Right now my best friends are my ears and nose. You learn to tell the difference between the normal rustle of bat wings and the erratic flaps that signal that some interloper has disturbed their nest. The paws of feral dogs come down with a muffled whooshing sound of escaping air and uplifted dust and make a clicking noise when their claws hit rock at certain angles. A deeper stepping sound without the click usually means barefoot feral children, who, generally speaking, are far more dangerous. Adults in shoes all sound about the same, but you can tell them apart by the smell. Longterm tunnel dwellers – desperate, dangerous people -- know to mask their scent with mud or ash, so someone with a sweaty reek usually means the person got lost in the tunnels. If I have enough food to share, I help them, if not I avoid them. A starving man will kill for a slice of bread.

I hear no footsteps, the bats are making their normal hunting noises and the smells haven’t changed since I got here. I’m still not convinced I’m safe though. There’s a water drip nearby and it could mask a particularly stealthy interloper and the stale air could keep me from smelling someone until they’re practically upon me. I leave my pack and sleeping bag in a niche by the wall and with slow, careful movements in my old sneakers, I walk around the length of the main Workshop chamber and check each exit in turn. There are five of them, counting the one I came in by. When I’m as sure as I can be that they’re all safe, I return to the center of the chamber and begin pumping the handle of my cranklight. Even a faint light takes some effort, but my arms are strong and used to the motion. After a moment, the flashlight turns on and I use my eyes for the first time in hours.

Exploring a few feet of smoky brown rock at a time, I build a picture of the chamber in my mind. I had forgotten how big the Workshop is. It stretches more than a hundred yards from end to end and the cavern walls bulge outward irregularly in a squat shape like a toad. Except for cleared patches near the walls, the entire cavern is filled with the rusted hulks of old machines. Here and there my flashlight will catch a strip of green paint or a torn reflective warning label, but I don’t bother trying to guess what things were. Just being here makes me feel like a grave robber.

To make room for the ever growing piles of machinery, the Workshop’s builders expanded the walls in all directions until they had to put in new supports to keep the roof from buckling. Looking at the ceiling now, I see that their efforts were in vain. Two of the four support columns are in pieces amid the junk, and the portion of ceiling they held up has fallen and left a large gash. It’s a wonder the whole cavern didn’t collapse.

As I scrabble over the fallen stone and rusted metal, I notice that a trickle of water is falling from the space in the ceiling and draining into a pool below. That explains the dripping sounds. The water in the pool looks a little yellowish under the cranklight, but I drink a little and it tastes all right. Now that I’m finally under the opening, I can see that the water has bored a nice little channel for itself through the limestone. I think it’s limestone, anyway. I was never any good at geology. The water is flowing down from what appears to be a natural cave thirty feet above my head.

The worst part of doing what I do is the climbing. The older tunnels were built hurriedly by inexperienced excavators, so cave-ins are a fact of life. Any passage upward could expose us to the dangers of the nothingness above, so holes like the one in the Workshop have to be explored. At least today I remembered to bring rope. The climb will be a long one, and I’m not as fit as I used to be, but as far as I’m concerned, it’ll be worth it because there’s a chance – a faint but real chance – that at the top of that rope, I’ll find the stars.

Shink! From one of the tunnels behind me, I hear the sound of metal on metal. I stop the handle on my cranklight and the cavern is black again. Shink! Too late. That time it sounded like it came from in front of me. I stand stock still. Did they see my light? I’d been so careful. Shink! Behind me, again. Shink! To my right this time. I crouch down among the rubble and try not to breathe, but if the sound is what I’m afraid it is, I’m already dead. Shink!

There is the shadow of a flash in front of me. I catch a slight acrid smoky-bloody smell on the wind and hear footfalls echoing off the walls. I raise my head slightly. Shink! This time it was right in front of me. Sparks at a tunnel mouth, the flash of a big shadow with a long knife, and then darkness again. Butchers.

There are no farms in the outer tunnels, but there are people, and people always find a way to survive. Most outcasts eat bats, rodents, insects, or whatever else they find down here – small things that always leave you hungry. The Butchers chose another path. They roam the catacombs in packs with their sharp knives looking for anything or anyone they can kill. Sometimes they’ll slaughter a whole settlement and leave nothing behind but a pile of broken bones with the marrow sucked out. Shink!

This time the sparks come from the left where I see a tall silhouette sharpening an axe. Shink! More sparks to my right. There are at least five of them -- all coming from different directions. I’m going to die. I remember when reports of “cannibals” first began emerging down here in the tunnels. We called them savages, beasts, monsters, anything to deny the fact that they were people just like us. The more we dehumanized them, the more we underestimated them and the harder they became to fight. The truth is they’re every bit as smart, human, and hungry as we are, and their numbers are growing.

Shink! Six of them now, and I’m completely surrounded. There is nowhere to run now. The Butchers are too used to hunting in the dark. If I so much as move they’ll be on me in seconds, and if I don’t move, they’ll find me anyway. Shink! They’re signaling to each other with the sparks, making sure they have a tight perimeter around me. Shink! They do.

There is still one tenuous path open to me. They don’t know about the shaft above me and I doubt they brought climbing gear. Slowly, so slowly, I rise back to my feet and take up my rope. Blindly, with nothing but memory to guide me, I hurl the grappling head at where I think I remember there being a ledge. The coil of rope snakes out of my hand with a rush and I hear two clangs – the first as the hook bounces off sheer stone, and the second as it hits the metal below. The sparks stop and are replaced by rapid footfalls even as the clangs keep echoing.

I snatch rope, hand over hand, until I feel the cold steel of the grappling hook again. The footfalls are all around me now. I can hear tense breathing and smell dried blood. I swing the rope again and this time only hear one clang. The hook has caught. I tug on the rope and it holds. Without hesitating again, I jump and grab it. I start shimmying up as fast as I can, leaping a foot at a time and not worrying about rope burns. I’m maybe six feet off the ground when a butcher knife pierces my thigh. I kick out with my other leg and hear and feel the wet squelching of a breaking nose.

With the knife still in my leg, I pull myself up the rope and out of reach. The knife in my leg stabs me again with every foot I climb. Fiery waves of intense pain buffet my mind from all sides, but some mix of instinct and adrenaline keeps me climbing. I can feel strong hands tugging on the rope beneath me. Two more feet... Three, and I feel the ledge with my hands. I grab, pull, and scramble over it. The rope is still taut beneath me. I’m not really thinking anymore, but I find my bloody hands tugging the knife from my leg and cutting at the rope. It tears, then snaps. I hear a clattering thud as at least one body crashes onto the machinery below.

I’m safe for a moment, but the Butchers are legendary for their tenacity. I have to keep moving. I can feel hot blood flowing down my thigh with every heartbeat and realize that if I stay here, I’ll die. I grab the cranklight from my belt and risk a moment’s light. Ahead of me a man-made tunnel with old wooden supports slopes upward – a mineshaft? I stagger along the passage in the dark for maybe twenty feet before I’m too faint to keep moving and lie down in the dark. I try to make a tourniquet from my shirtsleeve, but the wound is too high up my leg and the blood keeps flowing out of me.
Another twenty feet of limping and crawling and I find a metal door at the end of the shaft. It feels hard and heavy and rusty with age as my fingers search it all over for some kind of handle, but there is none. I rise a little and feebly throw myself at it, but it does not budge. For all I know, it’s welded shut. Shink!

The one with the axe is at the bottom of the shaft. Maybe I blacked out for a moment, or maybe they had rope after all. I rise again and slam into the metal door. Shin… He heard me. I can hear the pound of bootfalls as he runs towards me. He’s almost here already. I rise again and throw myself desperately at the door, not caring if I hurt myself. Once, twice, and then the creak of failing metal. I flail a foot or two past the threshold and collapse on my side. Only then do I register the light. It’s all around me and yet I can’t see anything.

With one last brief exertion, I push myself onto my back and stare up blinking. Above me shines a lime green sun shines in a sky the color of dried violets. Sulfurous yellow clouds float above me and everything seems too bright. The ground in front of me is just a flat, featureless plane, blank and reflective, like a mirror. It’s not my sky and not my earth, but as black spots appear in my vision and the last bit of adrenaline drains out of me, I find myself smiling. I haven’t spoken in hours, but my lips move and my parched throat forms words, “Close enough.”

The Butcher is above me now, an older man with an oily beard and sunken cheeks. I see him and know I am going to die, but he just drops his ax and nods. As his head turns back to the sky and my eyes go dark, I think I hear him say in a voice clear and harsh like crushed glass, “Close enough.”