Razor Mountain — Chapter 3.1

Razor Mountain is a serial novel, with a new chapter published every week. For more info, visit the Razor Mountain landing page.

Christopher woke up in pain. His head hurt. His fingers and toes and face felt as though they had been scraped across sandpaper. His legs hurt the most, especially the right one. His ankle throbbed. His hip ached. Cataloging his pains, he decided it would probably be faster to find the parts of his body that didn’t hurt.

Slowly, experimentally, he rolled himself onto his side. He paused in his movement every inch or two, as different parts of his body twinged and spasmed. After a minute or two, he managed to get himself onto his stomach, his forearms against the floor under his body.

“I should be dead,” he rasped. “Why am I not dead?”

His throat was so dry, it felt like it was sticking to itself when he tried to swallow.

The exertion and pain had him breathing heavily and beginning to sweat. His clothes, he realized, were still slightly damp, although they had dried quite a bit while he slept. How long had he slept? The floor beneath him looked like stone, gray with flecks of other colors. It felt like stone, but it was oddly warm, as though it was heated from within.

Christopher slid each knee up, pulling into a fetal crouch. He looked up to see the metal door set into the stone wall, recessed several inches. There was a short step down from the doorway to the floor of the room, a low lip that he used to begin pulling himself up. He imagined how he must look, like an old man in a dramatic commercial for one of those “I’ve fallen and broken my hip” devices.

Standing highlighted a whole new slew of pains, including a thumping headache. He was finally able to stand, so long as he kept most of his weight off of his right leg. He paused to breathe and take in his surroundings.

The low-ceilinged room was about fifteen feet wide and twice as long. A stainless steel table with four matching chairs sat in the corner across from him, in what appeared to be a tiny kitchen, with a sink, small cupboards, and a few feet of counter space. In the middle of the long wall was a drab green couch. Beyond, in the opposite corner, was a rectangular wooden desk. A large green box sat on it, covered in dials and switches. It looked like a World War II radio. Above the desk, a wide cork board was attached to the wall.

As far as Christopher could tell, the walls, floor and ceiling of the room were all carved directly out of the rock. It wasn’t polished to a shine, but it was uniformly smooth, every corner and seam perfectly straight. Bright light poured out of long, thin openings evenly spaced across the ceiling. Christopher looked up into the glow for a moment, but couldn’t tell if there were some sort of recessed light bulbs, or if the light was channeled from outside. The light from the tiny window in the outer hatch was certainly more muted.

Christopher hobbled slowly around the room, leaning on furniture and walls to stay steady. The surfaces all had a thin layer of dust. The place felt empty and disused, but wasn’t as filthy as he would have expected if it was some long-forgotten bunker from decades ago.

The couch seemed to be thick, tough fabric stretched over an oddly hard substrate. It felt like furniture built for sturdiness rather than comfort.

There were several open doorways leading out of the room. Each one had a stainless steel frame with fluting that had a distinctly Art Deco look to it. Christopher couldn’t quite remember when that style had been popular. The 1920s? Maybe earlier. Sometime between the  world wars?

The first doorway led to a much smaller room. It was crowded with shelves, all packed full of boxes, cans, bags and containers — all of it food. It was mostly simple staples: rice, beans, flour and so on. The cans held a little more variety, from vegetables to fruit to meat. The labels were incredibly generic: white text on a faded blue-gray background. There were no ingredients or nutrition facts. Just the name of the food in a slightly skinny font. However, he began to notice that each container had a little triangular symbol in the bottom left corner, like a simplified glyph of a snow-capped mountain.

He walked out past the couch, to the second doorway. This led into an almost identical small room. The shelves in this room were tighter against the walls. They were filled with outdoor gear. There were neatly tied bundles of canvas, probably tents; a camp stove; heavy wool coats; backpacks; lanterns; hatchets and knives; and a rack of pistols and rifles. Once again, everything bore the same dull green-gray, and many of the items had the little mountain symbol somewhere on them.

There was a slightly smaller doorway at the back that led to yet another, smaller room. A large closet, really. It was mostly filled by a machine that looked like some sort of boiler. The stone base melded seamlessly with the floor. It was composed of several stacked cylindrical sections, with thick pipes running between. More pipes ran out of the machine and into the floor around it, like stubby little legs. Others went into the ceiling. Apart from a couple of fluted steel flourishes, it was dull and gray, like everything else in the place.

The only other thing of note in the room was a steel toilet in the corner. It had no tank, just a pipe that came out of the wall. Christopher pulled the heavy metal lever on the side, and clear water quietly swirled down the bowl.

He returned to the main room and took the third and final doorway to what was clearly a sleeping area. There were three small, metal-framed bunk beds, with posts riveted to both floor and ceiling. The mattresses, if they could be called that, felt like the same uncomfortable material as the couch, covered with heavy fabric. A pair of small footlockers was bolted to the end of each bed. Christopher opened one and found a precisely folded sheet and blanket, and a dense, small pillow at the bottom.

He returned to the main room and looked around for a moment, utterly perplexed.

“Where the hell am I?”

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