Forty Days of Flash Fic: Day Eighteen
Jul. 7th, 2012 05:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jeriendhalContinuing For Your Safety (Sorry Tez and Maria fans. We'll be getting back to them in a couple of episodes.)
* * *
The plane landed right on schedule and the van started up again to back out of the cargo hold and onto a cracked asphalt road crossing level, grassy plains. As they left, he caught a glimpse of anonymous buildings at what looked like any of a thousand regional airports that once dotted the country. He wondered if they were going to explode once the van had gone out of sight.
After a half hour they turned right onto a new road, the asphalt dark black and fresh. After perhaps a half a kilometer, the road dropped down into a ramp that led into a tunnel. They went down deep, and he felt his ears pop as they descended, ignoring one of the nurse's offer of chewing gum to help with the discomfort.
The road leveled out and they passed through series of three blast doors, each about a meter thick, which shut with heavy thunks behind them as the van slowed, then stopped in the middle of a quite ordinary looking parking garage.
"Now what?" he asked.
"Now you get to meet everyone," the fox nurse said. She released his wheelchair from its safety clamps and rolled it down the van's access ramp. A pair of soldier machines, shaped like a bear and a wolf respectively, opened a pair of double doors as they approached. They rolled through, into the largest enclosed space the man had ever seen.
It was a single chamber, with angled walls to either side rising up into an A shape somewhere in the darkness above him, and far down below. He couldn't be sure how far. On the level they entered, titanic statues towered over their heads, lit by carefully positioned spotlights. He recognized the Statue of Liberty, removed from its base and carefully reassembled deep below the earth, a gigantic statue of the Buddha, a woman dressed in flowing robes holding a sword in her upraised arm, and finally, incongruously, a heavyset Asian man in greatcoat.
On the walls to either side there were catwalks rising every five meters or so, connected to the main level and disappearing below it via angled elevator platforms. They were apparently there to allow access to series of ominous looking doors, the size and shape of morgue shelves, stacked five units high, that lined the walls. And standing on all the catwalks were machines of every size and shape, made to appear like cats and dogs, wolves and leopards, bears and lions and creatures he couldn't name and which probably had never existed outside of fairy tales. They crowded the railings, staring down silently at him as the nurses wheeled him forward. He couldn't see the end of the chamber in the darkness ahead, but he guessed it was half a kilometer long minimum. There had to be hundred of thousands of the machines, perhaps more than a million, all staring down at him with expressions that spoke of devotion and pity.
Bearing witness.
* * *
The plane landed right on schedule and the van started up again to back out of the cargo hold and onto a cracked asphalt road crossing level, grassy plains. As they left, he caught a glimpse of anonymous buildings at what looked like any of a thousand regional airports that once dotted the country. He wondered if they were going to explode once the van had gone out of sight.
After a half hour they turned right onto a new road, the asphalt dark black and fresh. After perhaps a half a kilometer, the road dropped down into a ramp that led into a tunnel. They went down deep, and he felt his ears pop as they descended, ignoring one of the nurse's offer of chewing gum to help with the discomfort.
The road leveled out and they passed through series of three blast doors, each about a meter thick, which shut with heavy thunks behind them as the van slowed, then stopped in the middle of a quite ordinary looking parking garage.
"Now what?" he asked.
"Now you get to meet everyone," the fox nurse said. She released his wheelchair from its safety clamps and rolled it down the van's access ramp. A pair of soldier machines, shaped like a bear and a wolf respectively, opened a pair of double doors as they approached. They rolled through, into the largest enclosed space the man had ever seen.
It was a single chamber, with angled walls to either side rising up into an A shape somewhere in the darkness above him, and far down below. He couldn't be sure how far. On the level they entered, titanic statues towered over their heads, lit by carefully positioned spotlights. He recognized the Statue of Liberty, removed from its base and carefully reassembled deep below the earth, a gigantic statue of the Buddha, a woman dressed in flowing robes holding a sword in her upraised arm, and finally, incongruously, a heavyset Asian man in greatcoat.
On the walls to either side there were catwalks rising every five meters or so, connected to the main level and disappearing below it via angled elevator platforms. They were apparently there to allow access to series of ominous looking doors, the size and shape of morgue shelves, stacked five units high, that lined the walls. And standing on all the catwalks were machines of every size and shape, made to appear like cats and dogs, wolves and leopards, bears and lions and creatures he couldn't name and which probably had never existed outside of fairy tales. They crowded the railings, staring down silently at him as the nurses wheeled him forward. He couldn't see the end of the chamber in the darkness ahead, but he guessed it was half a kilometer long minimum. There had to be hundred of thousands of the machines, perhaps more than a million, all staring down at him with expressions that spoke of devotion and pity.
Bearing witness.
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