The dunes had shifted, exposing a jagged line of concrete and twisted steel. Henderson adjusted his goggles against the glare. “Moscow,” he said. “The old maps place it around here.”
Feldman laughed as he slid down the slope. “Every ruin, the first thing you say … ‘could be Moscow’. Always turns out to be someplace else. Moscow is further northeast. Kiev is a better bet.”
“I’m not sure this is even a city,” Anya remarked as she crouched at the edge of the breach. “It looks more like an industrial site.”
They widened the opening. Finally. Feldman hauled out a pane of glass fused into a blistered sheet. He held it up to the sun; light refracted strangely through the pocks and ripples.
“Rapid heating and cooling,” he observed.
By dusk they had unearthed a stairwell. The metal steps were misshapen, as though sculpted to conform to an otherworldly aesthetic. There was a dry, metallic taste in the air.
Henderson spat into the sand. “The priests are right. Some of these places are cursed.”
That night they huddled around a fire. Sparks drifted upward into a pewter sky. Demirovic shivered though the air was warm. “Call it what you want,” he whispered. “These places give me the creeps. I wonder if it’s worth it.”
Feldman coughed into his sleeve, surprised at the flecks of red. “If it’s Moscow, it’ll be worth it. Think of the artifacts buried there.”
Anya poked the fire absently with a stick. In her other hand she held a small shard taken from the pit they had unearthed earlier. The object was cold to the touch but it seemed to glow faintly as though it possessed some inner warmth.
“No fire did this,” she said passing the shard to Feldman.
Feldman’s eyes were fever-bright. “Imagine the power. It may still be here waiting for us to claim.”
They awoke at dawn. Overnight, the wind had deposited a fine ash across their blankets. Henderson’s skin had begun to itch and blister. The others were unaccountably weak and dehydrated. Still, they moved back to the stairwell, drawn by dreams of riches and inexhaustible power.
For five days, fighting an illness that they all assumed was the result of an ancient curse, they excavated an underground vault. Its heavy metal doors lay twisted outward. Beyond lay an inner chamber.
Demirovic spoke softly thorough blistered lips and teeth that were coming loose. “I’ve heard of places like this. They’re called ‘control rooms’.”
Anya shambled weakly forward. She traced her hand over a warped metal plaque affixed to one of the door frames. Its stamped symbol was barely visible. She took it for an ancient hieroglyph. The symbol was a trefoil consisting of three equally spaced blades radiating from a small central circle. The blades increased in width as they moved away from the middle.
They stood at the entrance to the chamber. Henderson, with the last of his strength, activated a glow stick and went through the doorway first. The others followed. They edged sideways, backs to the nearest wall. Together, they slid down and sat, exhausted.
Henderson brushed fallen hair from his shoulder. He raised his arm, illuminating their surroundings. On the wall across from them, the treasure hunters beheld what, at first, they took to be reflections of themselves. It was Feldman who understood first. They weren’t reflections. The strange figures on the wall were silhouettes of people … people dead for centuries. Somehow their images had been absorbed by the paint and plaster of the wall. The curse was real. They’d never leave the control room alive.
James C. Clar divides his time between the wilds of Upstate New York and the more congenial climes of Honolulu, Hawaii. In addition to his contributions to Sudden Flash, his work has also appeared in The Magazine of Literary Fantasy, Antipodean SF, Bright Flash Literary Review, Freedom Fiction Journal, MetaStellar Magazine and 365 Tomorrows.
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