American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,119

tank and shines her light in. It’s full. Then she looks at all the cables running to the circuits in the wall, and, though her electrical knowledge is rudimentary at best, everything seems hooked up to the right place in order to run a fair amount of the building. Probably not whatever the hell is behind those metal doors, but maybe the lights.

She considers her choices. Again, if she turns on the generator, she could be alerting people that she’s here. Yet at the same time, Mona really, really doesn’t want to be stumbling around in the dark in this place, with so many dark corners occupied by who the fuck knows what, so she shrugs, shuts the cap, grabs the rip cord, and starts her up.

It takes minimal effort to get the thing going. The lights outside flicker, then fully come on. She walks back out and looks around.

With the lights on the place is not quite so intimidating. It is antiseptic and cold, yes, but it’s not the dour cenotaph she was trawling through before.

She keeps walking down the hall, trying her key in all the locks. None of them gives. One door’s little glass window is broken, and she stands on her tiptoes and peers inside. It’s like an airlock from the sci-fi movies in there. She starts to wonder if she needs to be wearing a lead shield over her torso as she walks around in here, because though Mona has absolutely no desire for children anymore, she still doesn’t fancy the idea of her uterus bubbling away like a teapot.

Some of the laboratories have windows that allow her to see in. There are huge old electrical conduits on the walls and floors, and she can see places around them where enormous pieces of equipment once stood. It’s like her mother’s house, with the ghostly inverse shadows on the walls and floors telling her of belongings long gone.

She absently glances in each window as she walks from door to door, trying her key. It’s the same thing, as far as she can see: a dimly lit, empty room with severed electrical cords dangling from the ceiling or snaking out of the walls. They must have had a hell of a power bill at this place. But this was a government-funded lab, so they must—

She freezes where she stands. “What the hell?” she says aloud. She turns back and peers in one lab window.

This lab is empty like all the others. But for a moment she could have sworn that it was different. It’s like it changed when she turned away, just for an instant.

She thought she saw the lights were on, glowing much cleaner and whiter than the fluorescent ones out in the hall. But there was also something new in the room: a huge, cone-like device sitting in the middle of the floor with an unbelievable amount of wiring leading to it. And though her brain refuses to consider this suggestion, she is sure she caught a fleeting glimpse of two men standing around the cone-like device, dressed in gray suits and skinny black ties and horn-rimmed glasses, discussing something that seemed to be slightly irritating to them, as if it were just a casual workday.

But now the room is empty, just like the others: the lights are gray and weak, and there are no people inside. There are no men inside, and no cone-like device sitting on the floor, either, but she can definitely see where one was: there is a circular indentation in the blank concrete, like the device was sitting there for years and years, years and years ago.

Is it possible, she wonders, to see the imprint that lives have left on a place, just like how she sees the shapes of departed machines on the floors and walls of each tiny room?

As she wonders for the hundredth time what happened in this place, her toe catches something on the ground and it almost sends her sprawling. She curses, mentally thanks God her finger was nowhere near the Glock’s trigger, and looks back at what tripped her.

There is an enormous crack in the paved floor. It stretches across the hallway and crawls up the walls and even across the ceiling. The hallway beyond the crack is askew, in fact: the floor ahead is one to three inches higher on the left side and correspondingly lower on the right. It’s like a miniature tectonic rift. The crack she tripped on isn’t the only