The Happiness of an Orphan's Mother

II

After some time, the previously narrow tunnel widened to dimensions large enough for the corridor to begin to resemble a two-way underground station. The walls and ceiling were mostly infested with tangles of electrical cables that ran in and out of cracks in the walls along rectilinear paths. However, there didn't seem to be a single electronic device switched on down there: although every now and then Maicon came across some light bulbs or generators in the middle of the path, they were all switched off. He felt frustrated, but sought patience to continue. Nothing in that plant worked. As much as he heard about the modern and innovative achievements of Continental in Maceió, everything he had seen until then seemed ruins with centuries of existence. As he walked cautiously through the hallway with his pistol always in his fists, he looked at the walls around him, and suddenly he felt a chill rising and descending his spine without ever stopping. He couldn't explain exactly why, but there was something weirdly bizarre about them. They were weird, not a bit natural. At first they seemed identical to the earlier parts of the installation, but something in them disturbed his spirit. Per it was the subtle details hidden in the wall paintings or some illusion created by the lack of light, but Maicon felt being observed. He kept an eye on his front and his back, but whenever he looked back, he never found anything but the complete breeze. He thought he was paranoid. Nevertheless, he persisted in the pace of the walk without being shaken by uncertainty, without completely ignoring that the space of the tunnel was getting shorter and shorter.

Eventually, the tunnel ended up in a much larger and more extensive clarity than Maicon could see. In front of it, the corridor opened up to a large and extensive room, and the path that had until then remained straight diverged into short roads that followed in multiple directions. Spread around and occupying virtually all the space there were countless giant machines of the size of buildings, all of them with the surface flattened and the metal horribly corroded by a thick brown layer of rust. Maicon didn't know exactly how to identify them. Each of them was different from the others, some were simpler and more compacted in cobblestones, and others had more irregular, almost abstract formats, but all had equally enormous dimensions, to the point of turning the room into a true maze. When he looked up, the boy was no longer able to see the ceiling, but he was sure that the iron structures were no less than dozens of meters high. The penumbra remained dense as always and was broken only by the shy light of the lantern.

A knot formed in the policeman's throat when he realized that he would have to decide which direction to go. From where the rookie was, he could not see where each of the roads went, only that they were all surrounded by the huge machines that flanked them on both sides. To its right, unlike the other routes, a trail continued down a smoothly inclined path, as if it were on the edge of a hill.

Maicon turned on the radio on his shoulder.

"Lanuvel, change," he called. He waited for a minute for an answer to come from the other side, but he heard nothing but static. "Change. Lanuvel? Anyone listening?"

As much as he insisted on the call, no other voice answered him. The sharp noise coming out of the communicator could be a sign of interference in the channel. The boy looked at the device, set it up, repeated the call several times and made all the adjustments he could think of, but everything turned out to be useless. Whatever he did, the colleague's voice would never reach him.

Maicon finally realized: he was left alone in the midst of the darkness. Maybe he should've felt the panic falling down his goose and boiling his blood, but hold it on. His uniform didn't give him that luxury. Surrounded by steel curtains in a strange underground maze, his imagination could be dangerous even to himself. For a moment he thought of taking the way back thinking that he had passed straight through some crossing, but immediately he remembered the rifle that was carrying on his back. Without other alternatives, he took a deep breath and chose to take the path to the right following the slope down.