"Perhaps our grenades blew the door down," Feargal guessed.
"And the cab, and the cable?" Peters asked. "No. This is not right. Anna?"
Anna was already starting down the chute, using rungs recessed into a channel in the concrete.
"Wait," Peters urged.
She looked up. "Why?"
"Something is strange here. It isn't right."
"It's a bunker," Anna said. "The grenades worked. This is what we're here for and we don't have time to wait."
She continued down. It should be difficult with only one working arm, but it was easy. At twenty rungs the buzzing in her head grew stronger, then faded, which meant she was inside the shield. Soon they would start dying. She wondered if this bunker would be as bright and colorful as Lars Mecklarin's.
Feargal followed above; his boots made a clinking sound on the metal. Some thirty rungs further down she reached the bottom. The floor was black and the air stank of exploded grenades. She studied the hole in the wall where the elevator door ought to be.
"They've removed it," she said to Feargal as he arrived beside her.
"What?"
She stepped up to the edge and touched the edges of the hole; rough cement with rusted bolt marks and holes leading inward, but no bolts. She leaned in close to the hovering drone, into the shaft that roared with the echo of its rotors, and shone her flashlight upward.
"Yes, there was an elevator cable strung up here," she said, pointing. Feargal leaned in beside her. "You can see where it was mounted."
"Why would they remove it?" Feargal asked, as Peters arrived at the bottom of the ladder.
"To bring something in," Peters offered. "Something large."
Anna snorted. "There is no demon down here. They'd all be dead."
"We need to think about this," he pressed. "Anna, something's not right."
Anna ignored him, and turned to study the wall where the Command door should be, but it was only smooth, unbroken concrete, set in a single circular pour. Any internal infrastructure like pipes, wires and the Faraday cage-like lattice of the protective shield were buried inside without any hint of a hidden exit.
"Anna," Peters went on. "Think, please. This wasn't some minor piece of work. Stripping a whole elevator this close to the shield? Even if they had Salle Coram's suits, they would have lost people. It had to be for a reason."
She looked at him. This was where command differed from support.
"The next demon arrives in less than six hours, yes?"
He frowned. "Yes."
"So what would you have me do? We've planned this. They moved their elevator, I see, but does it change the reality for us? This is the plan. If we don't shut down the demon under the pile, we might not have the numbers to take the next. We don't have time to think."
She struck the tab on a flare and dropped it down the open shaft, past the whizzing drone. At the bottom it bounced and settled, a hot pinprick at the bottom of a long, glowing well.
"Send the drone or I'm going now," Anna said.
Peters grunted but lifted the stick and screen from his pack and guided the drone down. The sound of its rotors faded as it descended, while on the screen the flare's red glow grew brighter. Peters turned the down-facing camera off and they watched the flat elevator shaft wall pass by, dappled with the drone's own reddish shadow.
"Like descending into hell," Feargal muttered.
At the bottom there was one metal door in the wall.
"No elevator cab," Peters said. "No blockade either." He spun the drone fully around. "Nothing."
"Maybe they needed another air shaft," Anna said, then pulled the pin on another grenade and dropped it. They all covered their ears.
BANG. The sound reverberated chaotically for seconds. Peters barely got the drone up out of range in time. In the ringing aftermath Anna unwound a light rope ladder from her pack and tossed the end down the shaft. The other end she knotted to the ladder rungs, then started down.
The descent was cool and smooth. At the bottom she studied the door by the bright red fizz of the flare. It looked heavy, a solid metal affair with a single handle. She tried it, and to her surprise it moved. She drew her gun, lifted the handle enough to disengage the lock with a loud clank, and pushed.
17. SIGNAL
The door swung slowly in, revealing the bunker beyond.
Ahead lay a dark metal walkway leading in under a low cement ceiling, lit by the guttering orange flashes of a few distant, dying electric lights. To either side were railings that guarded a sudden drop down into a dark, square well of levels and levels of inky flooring, stacked one below the other, only illuminated by haphazard bursts of orangey light.
It was nothing like Maine. It was industrial and brutalist, standing here at the top of some kind of central access stairwell. Everything was built out of metal bulkheads, raw cement or perforated flooring gantries, which cast a stuttering array of wild shadows every time one of the flagging lights spat on and off.
It was cold and the air smelled of rusted metal and death. Somewhere a fan droned feebly.
And there were bodies. Directly ahead on the walkway lay three bodies, reduced to raw bones. Their stained white lab coats and khaki pants lay deflated like old birthday balloons. The blank, dry eye sockets of one gazed emptily at her.
Anna dropped to one knee with her gun leveled, scanning the shadows of this strange, half-dead industrial space, searching for any kind of movement.
"Jesus," Peters said, emerging beside her. "What the hell happened here?"
She blinked, coming out of a lull to realize the bunker door was still moving to her left, driven by some hidden mechanism. It glided through a gap in the railing and settled into a metal alcove in the wall with a clank.
"Holy shit," Feargal said from behind her, "are those-?"
"Yes."
It was nothing like Maine, but that didn't change the mission. If anything this was more what a bunker ought to look like. Crude, masculine, bare bones and cold. If there were no people left alive, that would just make the job simpler.
"We still have to clear it," she said, rising to her feet and walking forward. "We still have to and locate Command."
The walkway was solid. The drop to either side teetered a long way down into darkness, but there were no signs of movement anywhere. She knelt at the cluster of bodies and rifled through their coats and pockets, navigating by the guttering lights. Three ID cards with faces and names. This one was called Reyes. The scent of rotting was long gone, though in places patches of skin hidden by clothing had dehydrated rather than decomposing. It felt papery and rough when her hands stroked it. These people had died a long time ago.
She looked ahead. Were they all dead?
"This place has been dead for years," Peters said. "Anna, there's something very wrong here."
"Agreed," said Feargal.
She strode over the bodies and went on, leaving Peters and Feargal to follow. In a way it was disappointing. Had she really come this far just to find a dead bunker with no one inside left to kill? Who had activated the demon, then?
"We should send the drone first," Feargal called after her, but she was done listening to anyone else.
The stairs clattered noisily as she descended to the top level, where a square gantry encircled the large central stairwell. The metal flooring grates flexed and groaned as she walked a circuit on them, running her hand along the metal guide rail. She peered over the edge, down into the sporadic dark of four, perhaps five more levels.
Nobody, but for scattered clusters of white jackets, like half-melted snowmen.
She scanned the walls of the gantry. Ahead there was a heavy security door, locked with a security scanner at the side. There were more bodies nearby, lying in small tangled knots of two or three, all long dead and reduced to bones. She knelt by one and rummaged in its ribcage, coming up with a browned pass on a rotten lanyard.
CHARLES GREY
"Charles Grey," she read. His photo showed h
im to be a man in his twenties, not so unlike Jake. Dead now. "Let's try your clearance."
She held the pass to the scanner, but it beeped and flashed red.
"We may need to blow it," Feargal said.
Anna dropped the card. "Rockets won't move this. We're not equipped. We need the drill and C4."
Feargal radioed it through to above, while Anna continued around the stairwell square, pausing in front of the only other exit point; a set of two swing doors on the opposite wall. She kicked them open and peered down a near-black corridor leading away; long and bare but for more ragged body clumps on the floor. At the far end a light crackled on and off. Open doorways without doors lined the walls.
"More doors missing," Peters said. "It's not normal."
"On me," Anna said, and advanced. At the first door on the left she paused, cocked her pistol, then peered through.
Beyond lay a huge, military-looking dormitory hall, filled with rows and rows of double-decker beds that stretched away into darkness.
"That's a lot of beds," Peters said.
Anna shone her flashlight in, picking out contours suggesting the hall was perhaps a football field in length and half that in width. Each bed was appointed with a matching black locker, brown bedding, and a single white pillow. Round lights were mounted on the walls, but only one in around twenty were operational, and many of those were guttering or so faded to a burnt sienna that they barely cast any light at all; offering a flickering porthole on a sad, grand tableau.
"A lot of beds means a lot of people," Feargal added, pointing to the door on the right, through which another huge hall lay, seemingly identical.
Anna entered the left-hand hall and walked amongst the bunk beds. There were enough there to cater for thousands. She shone her flashlight on bedheads and over the black lockers, but there were no pictures tacked up anywhere, no mementos of a home left behind, no signs of personality shining through, nothing like Maine. There were many bodies though, collapsed on and off the beds like flurries of wilting fall leaves. In places the pale mattresses were stained with the dark brown and yellow stains of their corrupted, burst bodies.
The air smelled like dust and diesel. The dull drone of fans working somewhere was a little louder, but she had no doubt now. This place had been dead for years, and it didn't make sense. She knelt by a cluster of bodies in a circle of orange light and pulled back their coats, seeking some sign of what had killed them, but there were no bullet holes she could discern, no evidence they'd turned into zombies themselves, nothing.
They were just dead. But what had killed them?
"Anything?" Peters asked.
"No."
"Someone took the doors off here as well," Feargal said, standing in one of the entrances and studying it with his flashlight. "The hinges are there but the doors are gone."
Anna grunted and strode on down the long rows of beds, while Peters reported back to the others up above, using the radio in low, uncertain tones.
The doors were a puzzle. The dead bodies were a puzzle.
At the end of the hall she exited and padded down the dark corridor with Feargal beside her.
"What do you think?" he asked.
"I think they're all dead."
Five more open doorways loomed ahead, to left and right, and again Anna approached cautiously, readied her gun and peered round.
The hall here was even bigger and even darker, stretching away like the sweep of a moonlit city, littered with bodies. Here there were no beds though, and the walls were lined with an unbroken black desk split into hundreds of small bays, each equipped with a large black computer screen and a black chair, with a label hung above. 38674 read one, lit by a sickly yellow lamp. 873 read another, in no clear order. They stretched round the whole hall's edge, encircling a bizarre glass meridian running down the hall's spine.
Two rows of giant floor-to-ceiling glass panes dominated the hall's central axis, laid out in parallel like a Bordeaux colonnade. Some were lit from the edges with a range of colored lights, glowing strangely in the dark like huge, forgotten TVs tuned to the signal card, in green, pink, orange. She strode over, and saw that their clear surfaces were lightly etched with finely-drawn maps, showing places Anna couldn't recognize, absent any names or coordinates. She walked down the middle aisle between the two rows, trailing her hands to the smooth glass, reading the worlds underneath like Braille. Here she could pick out rivers and major cities, there coastlines and roads, but nothing she recognized.
Each pane had a corresponding number above it, matching one of the numbers on the bays along the walls, and in the center of each was a single red dot with an irregular assortment of red lines radiating out, each of different lengths. In some cases the lines reached to the edges of the glass, while in others they barely stretched beyond the dot itself.
What the hell was any of this? It felt like a mausoleum to some past conspiracy, but it didn't mean or explain anything. It didn't give her revenge for Cerulean. It didn't help her find Lucas. It didn't help her shut down the demon. It was nothing, a great wasted hole in the ground.
"Is this New York?" Peters asked.
That woke her up. She spun but couldn't see him, swallowed up in the darkness. Separating in a place like this was not a good idea; she'd let herself get careless. She followed his voice back along, squeezing through a narrow gap in the panes, and at first mistook him for another body, squatted up close to a glass panel that looked like all the rest. Then Feargal loomed out of the darkness too, moving in smooth silence. Both their faces looked drained of color in the shadows.
Feargal leaned in to look as she approached. "Maybe," he said, tapping the glass. "Lower Manhattan Island, perhaps? It's extreme close-up."
Anna drew up and leaned in too. The map was lit a faintly glowing green, and showed a grid of four or five unlabeled city blocks, like any modern city, though as she studied the intersections and street angles, she began to realize this one was familiar. She'd seen it many, many times before.
"It is New York," she said, as her heart sank. And she knew exactly where. She leaned past Peters and traced a road along the glass, up from what had to be Madison Park to what had to be 23rd Street, then across along Fourth, Third, to Second Avenue, where the red dot sat.
"Twenty-third and Second," she said.
It meant nothing to Peters, but Feargal turned to stare at her. He remembered.
"No way. You can't be serious."
"I am," Anna said, and tapped at the red dot in the center. "That is Sir Clowdesley."
The dot was the same as any of the others like it, though the red lines were not; every one of them stretched to the edge of the glass.
"I know that name," Peters said. "Is it Amo's coffee shop?"
Anna nodded. If it weren't for the cold-cut diamond in her middle this would have shocked her too. Instead she looked through the glass, now, and began to understand. The room, the glass panes, the desks and all the dead bodies.
It did make sense.
"This was their radar," she said.
"What?"
She looked at Peters and Feargal. They were almost there, but the trees in the way still prevented them from seeing the forest. It just required a large enough leap, a certain callous disregard for what normal people would do in any normal situation. But she wasn't normal now, and she was more callous than any of them.
"This dot is Amo," she said, tapping it again. "These lines are his strength as a hydrogen line emitter. It makes sense that he'd be the biggest, as we know the infection started with him." She gestured at the other glass panes. "It's a radar array with people as the signals." Her mind rushed through the possibilities. "On one of these panes I think we'll find ourselves. You, me and everyone in New LA, maybe everyone who survived the apocalypse, possibly everyone in the world. They could all be here, pinned up as red dots. It means these people were watching us long before the world ended."
It was beautiful, really. Elegant. They didn't have a cure either.
They couldn't stop it. But they could track it.
Feargal stared at her blankly. "I don't follow. Why would they do that? How would they?"
"To predict the date of the outbreak," Anna said, running the sequence of events through her head rapidly. "Think about it. We must have been easy to find, people who went into unprecedented comas all around the world, all at once? I expect they covered up for us. Why else were we not all in government research labs, being pored over by the best brain surgeons in the world? Because they didn't want that, they wouldn't want a panic. Imagine the resources they would have expended, to catch and contain us all? This is nothing compared to that. Watching us would be easy, and serve the same essential purpose."
"But what purpose?" Feargal asked, still struggling with the concept. "I mean, predict the apocalypse? How would they know where and when it would start, if it started with Amo and Lara having sex? How could they predict that?"
Anna shrugged. It all seemed suddenly so obvious. "Easily. Now we know the infection spread on the hydrogen line, starting with Amo in New York." She tapped the dot again. "This is Amo. Look at the lines stretching out from him. That has to be a measure of his strength as an emitter. We know we're all emitting still, we're infectious; that's why Salle's people couldn't come up, why the demons are out there, why all the bunkers are trying to kill us. That's all old news. What these maps show us is, we were emitting even before we became infectious, just not at a triggering level."
Peters nodded. He got it. Feargal looked between them plainly lost.
Triggering level?" he repeated weakly.
"Look, these red lines look like the strength of a radio signal, agreed?" Anna ran her finger along a few of them, radiating out from the Amo-dot. "Like a wave form? They have to be a measure of signal strength. I'm guessing that signal strength grew in power over time, starting small after the coma and getting bigger over the year. It syncs up with the idea that Amo was recovering fast, faster than any of us. So was it the sex that started the apocalypse, or just what the sex represented?"
The Last Mayor Box Set Page 104