Utterly Mad

And so they would but for the time being, Catnip was tasked with setting up an auxiliary power supply for the facility. A generator at least, and also get a few of the excavation equipment back up and running. She thought about the prior while she worked on the latter. I was slow work though, most of the parts she wanted were in the now sealed off military base or lab. What wasn't had been appropriated by the aeroponics farm. Catnip spent a lot of time watching the work as well too. Workers jackhammering fragments of concrete into smaller peices to be hauled away in wheelbarrows and then shoveling away the left over grit and gravel.

Sometimes, things would be found in the rubble. Mostly office furniture, but one day a body was found. On another, someone struck metal with their spade a dug out another twisted cannister. The pink stone that was found within (just a tiny fragment Felicia noted) was passed around to a couple of the specialists. The architects agreed it was some kind of fossil, or perhaps an aggregate of some kind. "Good concrete material." Peter put in. Catnip was fascinated by it even more than the others. The little pink fleck seemed to tremble just the very slightest bit. When placed in a ziplock bag, it wasn't long before the bag had somehow inflated and burst. This rather gentle explosion released a gust from the bag, weak but strong enough to blow papers from a desk and ruffle Catnip's hair if she'd had any to ruffle. She wanted to see more of them, a whole one if possible. The fragment had been blown out of the bag and into the realm of lost things with it's little display. Felicia assumed it had been destroyed.

---

A few days later, the cleanup came to a sudden halt when an ungodly wail erupted from below. A sound the likes of which Catnip had never heard, but was altogether a little familiar. She'd heard the sound a couple weeks earlier, and a few months before she'd heard it while being dragged out of the desert. Screamers. The lowest level was filled with them. As workers descended into the depths, they found themselves faced with an abrupt break in the main staircase, dropping away into a sheer pit. Light was brought and shone down. What greeted their eyes was clear water and a shiny blackness reminiscent of polished rubber. When the light hit it, there was a ripple that moved across the surface of the water and the next thing anyone knew, the air was filled with the screaming of the pool below.