Chapter 7: Fifty Feet Up

She found the pipe on what she estimated was day fourteen.

Time had become elastic, stretching and compressing in ways that made her uncertain of anything except the growing hole in front of her and the diminishing fuel in the generator and the constant, gnawing emptiness in her stomach.

The drainage pipe was clay — four feet in diameter, old, the kind of thing suburban houses had been built with in the 1970s before PVC became standard. It ran from her dungeon's drainage system out to the main sewer line, which ran to the municipal treatment plant, which was somewhere above ground.

She'd been digging toward it for two days, following the direction of the water flow, and when her fingers broke through the last layer of packed clay and touched the smooth, curved interior of the pipe, she sobbed. An actual sob — ugly, broken, the sound of a woman who'd been alone in the dark for too long and had finally found something that wasn't concrete and earth and her own desperate thoughts.

The pipe was intact. Better — it was dry. The drainage system hadn't been used in two weeks, and whatever water had been in the pipe had drained or evaporated. The interior was cramped and smelled like things she refused to think about, but it was open, and it went somewhere, and somewhere was up.

She couldn't stand in the pipe. She could barely crawl. On her hands and knees, backpack on her back — she'd packed it with the last of her supplies: one bottle of recycled water, a flashlight with dying batteries, a steel rod, the empty jerky bag she kept because the plastic could be useful — she entered the pipe and began to crawl.

The darkness was absolute. The flashlight threw a thin cone of yellow ahead of her that illuminated about three feet of pipe before being swallowed. The walls were slick, cold, and the smell was —

She didn't think about the smell.

She crawled. On her hands and knees, in filth and darkness, in a drainage pipe beneath a world she could no longer hear. The hum was gone — or rather, it was so faint down here that she couldn't tell if it had stopped or if the pipe was too deep to carry the vibration. Either way, the silence was total.

The pipe curved, straightened, curved again. It connected to other pipes — junctions where smaller lines fed into the main, grates that she passed without stopping because they led nowhere useful. She followed the main line, heading — she hoped — toward the surface.

The pipe began to angle upward. Gradually at first, then more steeply. She could feel the grade in her knees, in her hands, in the way the water would have flowed faster. She was climbing. Slowly, painfully, but climbing.

The flashlight died.

She was in complete darkness. The kind of dark that didn't exist on the surface, the kind that was a physical thing, pressing against her eyes. She stopped crawling and she breathed and she felt the panic rising and she pushed it down, because panic wouldn't help her here. Nothing would help her here except forward.

She crawled in the dark. Hand, knee, hand, knee. Feeling the pipe ahead of her with her fingers, making sure it was still there, still open, still going somewhere. Her hands were raw. Her knees were raw. Everything was raw.

The pipe ended.

Not at a wall — at a grate. A metal grate, corroded but solid, set into the top of the pipe where it met a vertical shaft. She felt it with her hands, felt the bars, felt the rust, felt the air moving through it. Fresh air. Moving air. Air that smelled like — she didn't know what. Not earth. Not pipe. Something else. Something that didn't belong in a world she recognized.

She pushed the grate. It didn't move. She pushed harder. The corrosion held.

She took the steel rod from her backpack. She wedged it between the bars of the grate and she pulled, using the leverage of the rod against the pipe wall, and the grate shrieked — metal against metal, loud in the silence — and gave.

It came loose in her hands. She caught it before it could fall and make noise. She set it aside, carefully, and she looked up into the vertical shaft.

The flashlight was dead. She couldn't see. But she could feel the air, and the air was moving, and the shaft was going up.

She climbed. Using the steel rod as a piton, jamming it into the joints of the shaft wall and pulling herself up, bracing her back against one side and her feet against the other. She climbed the way she'd crawled — slowly, painfully, one move at a time, with nothing but faith and desperation and the moving air telling her she was going the right way.

She was climbing when she saw light.

Not amber emergency light. Not the LED strips of the dungeon. Real light. Gray, diffuse, the color of an overcast sky. It came from above, filtering down through the shaft, and it was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen.

She climbed faster. Her arms screamed. Her hands left smears of blood on the shaft walls. The light grew — not brighter, exactly, but closer, more real, more present.

She reached the top. A manhole cover — heavy, iron, the kind that weighed sixty pounds and was designed to be lifted from above by municipal workers with specialized tools. She was below it, looking up at its underside, and the light was leaking around its edges, and she could hear —

Sound. Not the hum. Not the banging. Not screaming. Sound. Movement. Something living, something large, somewhere above.

She pressed her palms against the manhole cover. She pushed. Her arms, depleted and shaking, pushed with everything she had left.

The cover moved. An inch. Two inches. She shifted it sideways, grinding it against the rim, and the gap widened, and gray light poured in, and the air hit her face, and she smelled the world for the first time in fourteen days.

It didn't smell like her world. It smelled like something else. Something alien. Something that was not hers and had never been hers and was now, apparently, all that was left.

She pushed herself up through the gap. She pulled herself out of the shaft and onto the surface, and she lay on her back on cold pavement, and she looked up at the sky, and the sky was wrong.

It was gray, but not overcast gray. It was the gray of smoke, of haze, of something particulate suspended in the atmosphere that filtered the sunlight into something flat and strange. And through the haze, she could see shapes — large, dark, moving. Ships. Not human ships. Things that hung in the air and didn't move like aircraft, things that defied the physics she'd been taught in school.

She lay on the pavement and she looked at the alien ships in the alien sky and she thought: *The fantasy is real. The fantasy is real and it's nothing like I imagined.*

Then she passed out.