Tunnels 06 - Terminal

three-pronged symbol.
    There was a flash as intense as that from an arc welder’s torch. Elliott was thrown backwards onto the floor of the chamber as if she’d received an electric shock.
    ‘No!’ Will shouted, rushing to Elliott’s side and helping her to sit up. ‘Are you okay?’
    She closed her fingers into a fist and then splayed them open again. ‘I’m fine. Doesn’t hurt at all,’ she replied with some surprise. ‘But that was really weird.’
    Will was angry now. ‘You’re saying!’ He swung round to the bushman. ‘What the h—?’
    The floor of the chamber shook.
    Jürgen went into a crouch, thinking there was more to come. ‘Earthquake,’ he said. ‘They’re quite common in this part of …’
    But it wasn’t an earthquake, and he knew it as he trailed off.
    With the howl of displaced air, the ceiling above them disappeared and they were drenched in sunlight. Shielding his eyes from the glare, Will had an uninterrupted view of the clear sky. ‘What?’ he gasped.
    Before any of them knew it, the walls either side of the panel disintegrated. The oddest thing was that the only sound was the rush of wind all around them. Their eyes hadn’t had time to fully adjust to the light, but from what they could see there was some kind of giant wave moving away from them, away from the pyramid, and at a rate of knots. A wave of stone and dust sweeping through the giant trees of the jungle.
    With Karl carefully holding a case filled with additional syringes of newly prepared vaccine on his lap, Werner had been driving the small Kübelwagen along the jungle track.
    But as Karl pointed urgently at something, Werner began to apply the brakes.
    The boy had spotted that the sky above the trees was suddenly full of birds, as if they’d all taken flight at the same the time. Great flocks of them were wheeling and intermixing at some speed. And as he’d been watching them, these flocks dispersed to make way for something else; these weren’t birds, but a variety of differently sized projectiles with hard, irregular outlines. Because Karl had been so quick to notice something extraordinary was happening, Werner wasn’t caught completely by surprise as a sizeable piece of masonry spiralleddown and crashed onto the bonnet, making the whole vehicle bounce on its springs.
    He’d just brought the Kübelwagen to a complete stop when a length of tree root struck the windscreen, shattering it. As the bombardment continued like a freak hailstorm, Werner shouted at Karl to get out. Then he protected the boy with his body as they both hunkered down against the side of the vehicle.
    Without any of them uttering a word, Will, Elliott and Jürgen together began to shuffle forward, beyond where the wall of the chamber had originally stood.
    ‘What is this? One second we were inside, the next we’re out here,’ Will said finally, still reeling at the sudden development.
    ‘Unbelievable,’ Jürgen was repeating over and over, as they stepped to the edge to the pyramid and peered down at the tiers below.
    ‘It looks completely different. All the stones with carvings have gone,’ Will observed. ‘It’s as though it was hidden by a layer of stone.’ He was right; the pyramid’s appearance had been transformed in only a few seconds, and the darker substructure was now fully visible.
    ‘Unbelievable,’ Jürgen said once again, his voice oddly flat.
    They were all feeling rather numb as they struggled to find an explanation for what they’d just experienced.
    ‘But how come we’re still here … and alive?’ Elliott burst out. ‘Why didn’t we get swept off the pyramid too?’
    Neither Will nor Jürgen answered her, their eyesight still adjusting to the sunlight and allowing them the first glimpse of something else that confounded them. As the veil of dust retreated into the distance, they could see that the jungle hadbeen stripped away, as if a plague of locusts had devoured everything in their wake. But there weren’t even any uprooted trees – simply acre upon acre of bare earth, with the occasional piece of vegetation strewn across it.
    ‘The jungle’s just disappeared,’ Will said. He shielded his eyes, straining to peer further into the distance. ‘Do you see? There’s nothing but empty ground right over to the other pyramids.’
    Elliott gave an odd laugh as she drew Will’s attention to the area below them, to the churned-up soil around the base of the pyramid. ‘That’s where our camp