Dura

Part 9

We resurfaced inside of a warm underground pool. I climbed out of the water and helped Dura – who couldn't swim with all of her thick clothes – onshore. She still had her rifle, but I had lost mine. A blue, ultraviolet light shone down on us from the ceiling. I froze in my place as I looked around. The room – reminiscent of a Turkish bath – was filled with naked Neanderthal women. They laid spread out on carved rocks or floated around on their backs in the water, smoking long pipes. After a few seconds, I noticed that they didn't care about us. They were high out of their minds from whatever they were smoking.

"An opium den," I said to myself in disbelief.

Dura, now limping on her left leg, began walking. One of the women grabbed her leg with a weak grip. Dura pointed her rifle at her and pulled the trigger with no hesitation. But nothing happened. The ammunition must have been ruined under the water. She turned the rifle around and hit the women in the head with it. No one reacted. There was a set of red clothes on the wall. Dura pointed at them. I put them on and covered my face. It wouldn't fool anyone for long, but maybe it would buy me a few extra seconds. We sneaked up a flight of stairs and entered an empty corridor. We turned the corner just to find another empty corridor, then we walked up another set of stairs and entered a third equally empty corridor. It was a maze. From time to time we passed a few civilians or workers who weren't on duty. They didn't seem to know who we were. Probably I had been kept a secret to everyone except a selected few.

We stepped into a long hallway with armed guards at the other end. Both walls had rows of hollowed-out, barred alcoves filled with Denisovan prisoners, all of them yelling and wailing. From what I could tell, they had recently been captured and their spirits weren't entirely broken yet. The guards shouted at us as soon as they saw us. One of them picked up his radio from his belt and yelled something into it. We tried going back but stopped in our tracks as we heard more guards coming from that direction. Once again, we were trapped. The guards on the other end were joined by a group of soldiers that began walking through the hallway, toward us. We didn't have anything to defend ourselves with. I was sure this was it, the end of our futile attempt at escaping. Dura, too short to reach it, pointed at what looked like a set of controls on the wall. At first I didn't react, not because it was difficult to understand but because I was too stressed to think.

Dura shouted at me.

I snapped out of my paralysis and grabbed the biggest lever on the panel, but Dura kept trying to tell me something. I was doing it wrong somehow. I had to stop, look at the panel and think. An almost impossible task. Next to the lever, there were sets of metal switches. Without thinking about what they could be, I began flipping all of them in a frantic motion. Dura leaned her head against the wall and closed her eyes. It was time to pull the lever. Although all of this happened in less than a minute, it felt like an eternity. I thought the lever was stuck at first, but it was only I who was weaker than I had ever been before. The soldiers had started running toward us now and even fired at me. They probably didn't follow their orders, given that they had avoided firing at my before, but rather acted out of fear of what I was doing. The bullets bounced off the walls next to my head. I screamed, grabbed the lever with my other hand as well and used my body weight to pull it down. Clunk! It worked. I had no idea what would happen, but I did not have to wait long to find out. The cells – represented by the switches – opened up and the prisoners leached out and turned on their tormentors. In the chaos that followed, Dura took me by my hand and sneaked past everything. In the middle of the hallway, close to the floor, there was a ventilation shaft. Dura grabbed a rifle from a soldier being attacked by a Denisovan and kicked open the shaft. We crawled inside. The echo from the screams faded away as we went forward.

The air flowing through it was ice cold. After some time, we passed above a room where two researchers examined something on a large round table. I stopped and looked down the air vent.

"Alex?!"

The researchers looked up at me. Their mouths were covered with surgical masks. My heart dropped to my feet. Alex's naked body was strapped to the table, like a macabre version of the Vitruvian man. His head was missing.

Dura, who crawled in front of me, gestured to me to continue.

I had no choice but to comply.

"My God, he's dead, he's dead, he's dead," I whispered, trying to hold my tears back.

Maybe he had died by mistake, or maybe they had chosen to examine his body while they focused on my mind. A numbness came over me. It suppressed my panic. My best friend was dead. I heard his words like an echo inside my head as I kept going:

There's a certain balance here, you know?

We crawled, climbed and jumped down to different floors. My hands turned freezing cold from the metallic surface, then red, then numb, hard and pale. If I didn't get out of here soon, I would get frostbite. When we finally did get out, we found ourselves inside of the mine. The slaves didn't do anything to stop us. In fact, they acted as if they were afraid of us. I felt for them while we ran past them, trying to find our way up to the surface. Their misery knew no limits. Their only crime was belonging to the wrong species, which apparently lay outside of the Neanderthal's circle of empathy. I wondered what life was like in the heart of the Denisovan civilization.