"You OK?" she asked as she jogged around the stone, relishing in the fact that she was in better physical shape than her do-all, win-all husband; a husband that was so good and masterful at everything he did. She finally found something that she completely mastered over him in and she basked in her superiority. She rubbed it in now as she continued to make circles around the boulder.
"No," he said, still breathing heavily. "I think I'm about to regurgitate my lung."
She laughed lightly, continuing to circle around him and the boulder.
"Your enjoying torturing me, aren't you?"
"Thoroughly," she jeered.
Terry noticed the boulder then for the first time. "This is sure out of place here, don't you think?" He gestured at the surrounding forest.
Monica ran the forest trail four times a week, and this was Terry's first venture through the national forest. "We call it Old Stony. It's our half way marker."
"We're only half way?" he cried, deflating into the boulder as he wondered why he ever agreed to do this. Something was poking his in the back. "What the..."
He turned around and faced the stone on his hands and knees; and there, poking out of a small crack in the stone was a tarnished key.
"Monica. Come look at this."
"What is it, Honey."
"Just come look." She kept running past his but he reached out and caught her wrist and pulled her down next to him.
"What do you make of that?"
"What?" She didn't see it.
He placed his finger on the head of the key and her eyes widened with surprise. It was the most illogical places anyone could have thought to place a key and she thought it was a pretty good joke. At least, she thought it was a joke until Terry turned it and a rectangular section of rock moved away from the rest of the boulder. It wasn't a perfect rectangle, but there was no doubting that it was a doorway, it was just the right size.
"Give me a hand here," he asked her as he dug through the dirt in front of the door. She fell in beside him and helped pull the dirt away. Terry stood up and squeezed his fingers into the crack of the door and pulled.
The door came open another inch and Terry saw a line of light spill out from inside the boulder.
"I hear a motor running in there," he said. "I think the door is run on hydraulics and will open by itself if we can just get some more of this dirt out of the way."
They dug for another ten minutes, then had to jump out of the way as the heavy door hissed open in front of them.
"Well," she said, "Now what do we do?"
"We explore," Terry said excitedly as he walked through the threshold and into the tiny room beyond.
"It's an elevator," he said, noticing the console on the right hand wall. There was only one button and it was labeled 'down'. he pushed it, just as Monica screamed, "Don't!"
Outside, a lone runner rounded the bend of the trail and passed Old Stony. As he passed, he dragged his hand across the face of the stone. He paused in his jog as his ear caught the faint sound of a woman's scream. He shrugged it off as his imagination or a panther or something in the woods and continued to run.
The elevator traveled at a high rate of speed into the earth, then slowed gradually to a stop.
"I sure wished you wouldn't have done that." Monica patted her chest, panting for breath from her scream during their decent. She jumped again as the door opened.
"Oh, my God."
The expanse before them was the largest underground room either of them could have imagined. There were large black metal boxes lining each wall for hundreds of feet on both sides. The ceiling was dark and out of site above them. The door to the elevator began to close, taking their only light with it. Terry caught it before it could shut and wedged it open with a nearby wastebasket.
"What is this place?" Monica asked.
"I don't know, but someone didn't want anything left behind here." Terry lifted his hands and showed her the black soot that covered them. Burned ash covered the bottom of the wastebasket. He wiped his hands on his shorts, leaving dark stains on them.
"Here's a control panel." Monica looked over the metal box and lifted the lid. All the breakers were shut off and one by one, she turned them on. Light spilled over the room and computer terminals blinked into existence in front of the black boxes that lines the walls. Humming and whirring and hundreds of other electrical sounds echoed through the room.
"What is this place?" Monica asked for a second time.
Terry crossed over to one of the computer terminals and said, "Whatever it is, it's definitely old."
"Why do you say that?" she asked, joining him.
"This computer isn't new. It's, I don't know. It's just old." He searched the back of the of the console and saw heavy gauge wire snaking away in all directions. "This is an old mainframe. Remember back when the first computers were invented, they took up whole rooms. This is one of those computers, except, this one is bigger than any I've ever heard of before."
Terry walked on down, deeper into the room, while Monica watched the green display of the computer screen. She wasn't into computers that much, but there were application programs booting up and their names flashed across the screen. She caught glimpses of some of the title names and a sudden chill crept up her spine.
"I want to get out of here, Terry. Terry?" She looked up and saw Terry's back, already a hundred feet further down the room. "Terry!" she shouted as she ran to catch up with him.
"What is it?" he asked, not even looking at her, at the panic in her eyes.
She clutched his arm. "I want to get out of here. Now, Terry."
"What's wrong? There's nothing here to be afraid of. There's no one here."
He shrugged her off and walked to the end of the room where a large door hid what lay beyond. It was a sliding door that opened upward on a track, kind of like a garage door, but four times as large. A green button opened it and a red button closed it. Terry pushed the green button and the door clicked upward with a pregnant groan that filled the room with a grinding screech of straining motors and unused wheel bearings. The door jammed about four feet from the floor, the motors above the door smoked, rattled, and shut down as they died a noisy, mechanical death.
This room was much smaller than the other. Another mainframe lined the left wall, its lights blinking repeatedly. The lights were off here too, but what light that spilled in from the larger room revealed five glass tubes lining the right wall. A yellow, glowing liquid filled each tube.
"Oh, my God." Monica stepped back to the door, but Terry crossed to one of the tubes and placed his hand on the smooth glass.
"I wonder who they were?"
She wondered why he sounded so concerned. She was creeped out and wanted now more than ever to leave. Even as big as the rooms were, she started to feel a sense of claustrophobia and desperately wanted to leave.
Terry crossed from one tube to the other, examining each body in turn. They were all men and were surprisingly similar in features. In fact, Terry thought, I think their all alike. There all the same.
"Clones," he said, not realizing that he had spoken aloud.
"What'd you say?" Monica heard him, but she had to ask anyway. The images of the computer screen in the other room flashed through her mind. Many of the programs running had the word clone in them, and it just clicked in her mind what the programs were referring.
She ran to Terry, grabbed his arm and tried to pull him back out. But he staggered back before she got to him and they crashed into each other.
He grabbed her and started to back away. She saw a look of horror on his face that she didn't understand. He was so excited and giddy about their discovery, and now, he looked like a frightened teenager after their first auto accident.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
"It moved..."
"What?"
"IT MOVED...!" His voice echoed through the room and his arm came up, pointing to the glass tube he had been standing in front of. Inside the liquid, the clone began to thrash and turn violently within the confines of his cell.
In a split second, Terry had the sinking feeling that he knew what this place was. Whether military or privately funded, someone had built this cavern of computers several decades earlier. Their mission was to clone a human. He saw the cells of humans growing rapidly in the glass tubes of ambiotic fluid as the project reaped the rewards of its hard work. Suddenly, funding stopped and the facility was shut down and all printed material and papers were burned in the trash can he had used to wedge open the door of the elevator. When the scientists left, they turned off the lights and left the new embryo's to die on their own.
But they didn't die. They lived. They grew into men. Men that were now trying to escape the tight confines of their glassy womb. All five tubes were rocking back and forth now as the clone's within fought for freedom. Yellow liquid spilled from the tops of the tubes and onto the floor.
"Come on, let's go." Terry said, frightened for his life now. He was facing the unknown and running never sounded more appealing than now.
As they entered the larger room they heard glass shattering behind them and the wet, slapping sound of flesh striking the floor. As they approached the elevator they heard the unmistakable sound of running footsteps behind them. They didn't turn to look. Terry kicked the trash can out of the doorway and repeatedly pushed the up button for the elevator.
When the door opened out of the boulder, the trail was empty and the sun was setting low on the horizon.
Terry had no trouble keeping up with Monica as they ran down the last half of the forest trail to their vehicle. As they sped down the road, never to return to the forest trail, five sets of new eyes watched the amber tail lights of their vehicle as it disappeared from sight.
