Succinct (Extinct Book 5)

by Ike Hamill

  “Ashley, what are you saying?” Lisa asked.

  “This,” Ashley said, pointing down to the hole where Tim was standing, “is indeed the entrance to the bunker. It’s the same kind of structure that the people of the observatory used when they hid near the monkey house.”

  “But why would you have to go in alone?” Lisa asked.

  “There might only be room for one. I don’t want to take that chance,” Ashley said. The way that the entrance narrowed at the opening, she could imagine the floor coming up and forcing her into squeezing into that space.

  “Does the journal say that?” Lisa asked.

  Ashley nodded, trying to keep the lie from showing on her face. In truth, she wasn’t quite sure what the journal said about it. They had documented the process of entering their hatch, but the specifics of why they had only sent one person were a little vague. There was probably a subtlety to the language that Ashley didn’t understand yet.

  Lisa studied her for a moment and then seemed to accept the answer.

  Ashley climbed down into the hole with her books and papers. She began laying them out on the floor of the hatch, hoping that she was right. The journal suggested that it was dangerous to enter the wrong sequence—maybe even fatal. It was worth the risk. She needed to find out what was going on in the bunker to see if there was any evidence of the rest of her family.

  “I don’t like this,” Corinna said.

  “Ashley, there has to be another way,” Tim said.

  Ashley looked up at the three of them—four, since Penny was looking at her as well.

  “I have documentation,” Ashley said. “I would let one of you try it, but you don’t know how to read this stuff. I believe that when I follow this set of steps, the system will automatically close the hatch. Then, after that, I’ll be presented with a display and a set of menus. So, if the hatch closes, you’ll know that I’m on the right track.”

  Tim looked at Lisa and said, “We forced the hatch open before. If she’s not out in a minute, we’ll force it open again.”

  Ashley doubted that it would be possible, but she didn’t say anything.

  Eventually, Lisa dropped her shoulders and let out a long breath.

  “Fine. But you be careful,” Lisa said, pointing a finger at her.

  “I will. When I make it through, I will see you over near where we parked.”

  Ashley knelt and found the right passage in the journal.

  The first action was, essentially, to “knock.” Ashley had to let the system know that she wanted a chance to prove herself as an authorized guest. This was mostly guesswork on Ashley’s part. The part of the journal that explained it was really dense.

  She whispered to herself as she ran her finger over the symbols. The numbers were clear, at least. She had to tap three times, wait the same amount of length, then tap once, pause, and twice. After that, the system would challenge her and she would have to respond based on a formula.

  Ashley took a deep breath. She didn’t know how hard to tap, or if it mattered where. She didn’t even know how fast or slow to go. There was no discussion of speed.

  “Whatever,” she whispered.

  Ashley tapped out the pattern.

  The response was immediate. Even though she should have expected it, when the hatch began to close Ashley wanted to scramble out of the hole before she could be locked into the tight space.

  Above her, the closing circle of steel was eating the sky.

  “A light!” she said. Her hands went to her pockets and she didn’t find her flashlight. “I don’t have a light.”

  As the hatch closed, someone above reacted fast. A small flashlight flew through the opening and landed at Ashley’s feet. She clicked it on a moment after the darkness closed around her.

  It didn’t matter for long. The lower walls around her began to glow.

  Ashley huddled under the lid of the hatch, waiting for the signal. In those few seconds, her imagination ran wild with all the possibilities. The journal was written a thousand miles away, in what might be a completely different reality. There was no way to know if the instructions she had would be valid in this bunker. The tapping had gotten a response, but maybe she had just triggered the bunker’s defense mechanism. Ashley imagined the air being sucked out to suffocate her. She imagined the whole space filled with water, so the hatch could purge itself of the intruder.

  From below her feet, a knocking came.

  She counted out the sequence, wondering if she should write it down. Consulting the notes, she calculated. The door was asking her for the second, first, and then seventh prime. Since the seventh was a two-digit number, seventeen, she had to add the digits together.

  It was too obvious. She didn’t think her response was correct. There was no time to hesitate. The journal said that her response had to come immediately.

  Ashley tapped out her answer and held her breath.

  Moments later, the floor began to rise. A frightened gasp escaped her. She gathered all her papers and pulled herself into a tight ball under the hatch. If the floor rose all the way, it was going to be tight. If the center of the floor somehow came up even higher, she was going to be crushed. The hatch might open again just so Lisa and the others could see her pulped remains.

  Ashley rolled to her side, trying to make herself as small as possible as the floor continued to rise. There was no mechanical sound to the movement. It elevated with soundless persistence. Ashley had dropped the flashlight and her foot accidentally kicked it under the overhang at the perimeter of the hatch. The thing was crushed and extinguished by the rising floor.

  Ashley let out a surprised scream. They would never be able to force open the hatch, but she desperately hoped they were trying. It might be the only way she was going to survive.

  It was too much to hope for, but she thought that the floor had stopped rising. Ashley held her breath and waited.

  Then, so fast that her body left the floor, it dropped. The floor descended six feet or more and Ashley crashed down. She was still stuck in the cistern, but she had room to stand and collect herself. With the glow from the walls, she flipped through the journal to see what was supposed to happen next.

  The writing suggested that there would be a control panel.

  Ashley spun in a slow circle, looking for anything that looked like a panel. All she saw was the unbroken circular wall. Leaning forward, she tilted her head. In the glow it was hard to tell for sure, but it looked like the ghost of a dirty footprint. It was the first real sign that maybe someone else had been inside the hatch—maybe someone that she knew.

  She put her hand on the footprint.

  A few feet away, the wall seemed to turn translucent. As Ashley watched, a screen lit up with a series of symbols. She could barely take her eyes off of it to look at the journal. It had appeared like magic and she was almost afraid that if she looked away it would disappear forever.

  But she had to look down at the journal—she had to get the next set of instructions.

  Running her finger over the page, she was able to translate what it told her to do.

  “Initiate control sequence by ordering the options?” she whispered to herself.

  She knew the symbol for an ordered series of steps. That seemed to be what the panel was asking her to do. On the screen, the symbols seemed to represent the necessities of life. There was air, water, food, temperature, light, and a couple of things that she couldn’t interpret.

  “What’s most important?” she whispered. “If it’s human life, I would have to say the answer is air. People can live without food for quite a while. Water, much less. Air is measured in minutes, at the most. But temperature—does this mean any kind of heat? Certainly a person would die in minutes if it was cold enough. This is too ambiguous.”

  She flipped through the journal, looking for an answer. From what she could tell, the task was always to put items in order, but the set of items could be anything. She couldn’t find any specific answer in
the pages.

  “Have to come up with something. It’s probably timed,” she whispered.

  Before the problem paralyzed her, Ashley reached out and touched the symbols, leaving the two that she didn’t understand for the end. The items lit up and then disappeared as she touched them. As her finger lifted from the final choice, she already regretted her answers.

  “Temperature should have come before food—what was I thinking?”

  She had been thinking that a person could always find more clothes to wear if it was cold, or fan themselves if they were hot. Temperature changes could be adapted to, but food was always necessary eventually. The question had been ambiguous.

  The screen flashed with colors and then the colors whipped into a circle. Ashley flinched when the circle turned red and pulsed. Red was pretty much a universal color that meant “incorrect” as far as she knew.

  Another set of symbols popped onto the screen. Ashley didn’t recognize any of them. The one on top almost looked like a tree. The third one was nearly a square. Aside from that, they could have been random piles of odd lines.

  Flipping back and forth, she found nothing at all in her journal to suggest what the proper action should be. This time, the fear managed to paralyze her. She had guesses as to what to do—order the symbols from least to most complex, perhaps—but she couldn’t force her finger to touch any of them. There was too much risk and nothing to go on.

  The screen wiped itself clean and the floor began to move.

  For a second, she knew that the floor was moving but she didn’t know which direction it was going. It felt like she was going down, but the screen appeared to be descending as well. Ashley changed her focus and looked at the footprint. From that, she could tell that the floor was dropping. She let go of the breath that she had been holding and turned around slowly, trying to figure out what the next test might be.

  A portion of the wall opened up to a gap and then she could see down a ramp. Ashley didn’t wait for the floor to come to a stop. As soon as there was room, she dropped down and slipped through the gap. One of her papers fluttered free from her grip and she bent to collect it. From that angle, she could see that the ramp descended and then opened to a larger room below.

  Ashley pressed on.

  She walked down the ramp carefully, wary that there might be a trap. The entrance hatch was built to only let the correct people in, but there would still be internal defenses in case some undesirable people made it past. The room below looked like it was designed for that purpose. There were slits across the way and the room was wide, forcing her to move by many of the slits where people might be hiding with weapons.

  Ashley began to step into the room and then paused, her foot still in the air.

  She backed up the ramp a pace and scanned the journal. There was supposed to be some kind of surprise, and the designation for the room had the same symbol. There was also a symbol that Ashley thought meant “bottom” or “floor.”

  She took the journal and tossed it into the room. It landed on the floor and triggered some mechanism. A trapdoor opened and the journal tumbled down.

  “No!” Ashley cried, rushing forward. In her haste, she almost dropped the rest of her papers. The map of the flooded town slipped from her grip and she batted it back, away from the edge of the trapdoor. Taking a deep breath, she told herself to calm down. She could still see the journal down there. The pit wasn’t deep enough to claim it forever—it was probably meant to slow down intruders so they could be dealt with.

  With that in mind, she thought about the ramp and the pit. If there were a bunch of people trying to flood into the bunker, they would reach the pit and stall while they carefully made their way around. Some of those intruders could be dealt with through the slits across the way. That’s where she needed to be. Ashley stepped around the trapdoor and inched along the wall, testing the floor with her foot and watching for other traps.

  She saw a seam behind her and thought about the tactical advantage it would give if the invading force could be surprised from behind. Knocking on the wall, she heard a mechanical response. Ashley decoded the sequence and replied with her knuckles.

  She smiled as the seam opened, revealing a passage.

  Ashley began working her way through a twisting hall that was full of tight squeezes and hiding places. Eventually, she saw the other side of the slits. There was nobody manning these defensive positions. She was beginning to really believe that the bunker was completely empty. Before, she had secretly feared that she would find the corpses of her friends and family. She didn’t know which was worse.

  She had no choice but to keep moving.

  Around one more twisting corner, she finally found a straight corridor that led to a door. Squaring her shoulders and taking one last deep breath, she strode forward. There was no obvious handle or control on the door. When she reached forward and put her palm against it, she felt it move a little to the side. With an easy swipe, the door took over, sliding into a frame with a little whoosh of air. Ashley stepped through to a control room.

  On one side she saw rudimentary controls and colored buttons. On the other, a panel was extended from the wall that was full of buttons and displays. Some of them showed menus and others showed rooms of moving people.

  Ashley approached slowly, trying to figure out what she was looking at. The scenes might have been from a movie. People walked down halls and sat at cafeteria tables. In one, a group of kids were playing soccer in a long room, trying to kick the ball at a rectangle of tape on one wall. She squinted at the screens. There was a girl who looked like Dina, from Gladstone. She liked to wear her hair in a French plait, when she could get her sister to help her with it. If she would only turn her head, Ashley would know if it was really her.

  A door on the other side of the room opened and Ashley spun toward it.

  Walking through the door, a man was putting a mug to his lips to sip. When he saw her, he froze. The mug slipped from his fingers, spilling its contents down his shirt and pants as it tumbled to the floor. Some kind of plastic, the mug bounced and hit the man in the knee. He jumped back from the impact and the door closed in front of him.

  Ashley’s hands went to her mouth and her eyes were wide as she looked at the door.

  It slid back open and she couldn’t believe that what she had seen was actually true.

  “Merle?” she asked.

  His eyes were as wide as hers.

  “Ashley?”

  He ran forward and they caught each other by the shoulders. She knew what he was doing—he had to put his hands on her to make sure that she was real and not some strange ghost or hallucination. She was doing the same thing.

  When she was sure he was real, she pulled him into a hug.

  He gripped her tight for a second and then pushed her away.

  “Where did you come from?” he whispered.

  “We found your mom’s truck. We came down that hatch.”

  He staggered back and his eyes went to the screens.

  “That has been sealed for a year,” he said. He rushed to the control panel and sat on the edge of one of the chairs.

  She looked at his face as he squinted at the screen. It was no wonder that it had taken her so long to recognize him. She had seen him earlier that spring, but he looked so much older now.

  “How long have you been down here?”

  He pressed his finger to one of the screens. The display showed the ambush room that she had just crossed. Merle pushed back from the panel, settling deep into the chair. He looked over to her.

  “It’s back,” he said.

  “What is?”

  “We have to tell your father.”

  Ashley’s hand went to her chest. Her heart felt like it was going to explode.

  Merle was just standing there and Ashley couldn’t get out the words to ask where her father was, or if Janelle, Jim, Brad, and Romie were there as well. Her mouth didn’t seem to work at all. Her legs worked though—she ran
to the door and tried to push it to the side like she had with the other door. Her foot slipped in the spilled tea and Merle caught her before she could fall.

  “I have to do it,” Merle said. “Some of the doors are only reacting to original people only now. This is one of them.”

  He reached beyond her and swiped open the door. Ashley sprinted down the hall, waiting at the next door.

  Merle jogged after her, laughing.

  “Are you the only one out there?” he asked.

  Ashley looked down and realized that she wasn’t holding any of her papers anymore. Thinking back, she couldn’t remember when she had let them go. It didn’t matter—she could get them later.

  “That door isn’t locked,” Merle said, pointing.

  She swiped it out of the way and pushed through while it was still opening. Ashley stumbled into the cafeteria and realized that there were people she knew. They were sitting at tables and some were eating. The room went silent and everyone looked at her as she scanned the faces for her family.

  A few people stood and some began to move toward her, smiles forming on their faces.

  “My father—have you seen my father?” she asked.

  Merle grabbed her hand and began to pull her toward the exit. The crowd made a path. A few people began to clap as Merle and Ashley rounded the corner and ran down a hall.

  “He’s in Pod Two,” Merle said.

  Ashley didn’t care—she only hoped that he would run faster. She tried to fix an image in her head and remembered the faces from the cafeteria. Were they dramatically older? What if it had been years? When she thought about Romie and Brad, she stumbled. Merle slowed and caught her once again.

  “Are they alive?” she asked, between gulped breaths.

  “Who?”

  She shook her head, trying to dismiss the idea that she might somehow be too late.

  “My family—Romie and Brad.”

  “Oh,” Merle said. “Yes. Of course.”

  “Jim and Janelle?”

  “Yes. Yes—they’re all up here.”