Book of the Lost: AAV-07d25-11: (A reverse harem, post-pandemic, slow-burn romance) (The JAK2 Cycle, Book 3)

by V. E. S. Pullen

  I couldn’t put it off any longer, I needed to take my chances.

  Cringing at the metallic shriek of the hinges, I pushed the door in just enough that I could shine my flashlight down a long hallway.

  I felt like I was staring down the corridor inside a spaceship or a futuristic submarine.

  The walls were constructed from sections of metal plating welded together into a long tube about eight feet in diameter and at least thirty feet long if not more, ridged joins between the sections like ribs every six feet, with a pathway made from a flat metal grate that seemed to float a few inches off the bottom curve of the tube for the entire length. There were shiny metal pipes running underneath the grate, six of them in a row and each about three inches wide, and I could feel heat radiating off of them.

  I pushed the door open far enough to step inside, and the hallway lit up in a cascade of hidden lights, turning the dull gray walls into an ethereal blue.

  At that moment, when the lights flickered on in a perfectly coordinated wave down the hallway — one with enough of a slope that I couldn’t really see what was waiting for me at the bottom — I was absolutely convinced that somewhere in here, I was going to find a room full of giant, sticky eggs hatching face-suckers. Right before a xenomorph grabbed me and turned me into an incubator.

  “Seriously, if anyone is down here, please say something because this place is fucking terrifying!” I yelled out, cringing at the panic staining my voice.

  Silence, except for the metallic hum of machinery, and the slight rush of water from the pipes underfoot. I crouched down and listened, and realized that three pipes were sending water up the tunnel, and three down, alternating with each pipe. Weird.

  I crept as quietly as I could down the corridor — which was pretty fucking quiet because this wasn’t my first rodeo — and made it to the end. I followed the hallway around, turning right at the fork even though Aesli always insisted “left is always right.” Little monkey.

  Azzie. Not Aesli, Azzie. That was going to take some getting used to.

  I ended up in a circular room with a domed ceiling and a hatch set flush into the floor in the dead center, with a keypad embedded next to it under a plexiglass cover. There were a couple other hallways leading off of it — and a battered steel-case desk sat against the wall to the left of me.

  The desk had three large computer monitors mounted to the wall above it, and a keyboard and mouse sat on the desk surface.

  I crossed the room and bumped the mouse. The center monitor woke up, showing a single blinking line: “Enter password.”

  I stared at the screen then shrugged, starting with the middle drawer on the desk.

  There was a lot of shit in those desk drawers — it looked like every random rubber band, paper clip, penny, allen wrench, and washer found a home in these drawers — but no sticky notes or notepads conveniently listing the password. Lots of tools, duct tape, lightbulbs, and pens, but no paper at all. I stared at that blinking prompt and debated trying some random words or phrases, but wasn’t sure what being locked out of the system would mean, so I resisted.

  On the slightest off-chance that the old guy that owned this place was anything like my grandpa, I flipped up the keyboard then stared dumbly at the tiny yellow post-it note mounted to the bottom by a solid layer of tape with “Security1” written in blue ball-point pen in neat, angular handwriting.

  Every “IT guy” and security specialist ever just rolled over in their grave.

  I typed “Security1” at the prompt, and the screen blinked then filled with a menu of choices and another blinking cursor at a prompt: 1. Logs; 2. Cameras - exterior; 3. Cameras - interior; 4. Administrate security system.

  I started with the logs. The last time anyone had put in an entry code or disarmed the alarm was over a month ago, a few days before Aesli and I realized that the reason no one had come to the ICU to check on her or bring her food was because everyone in the hospital was dead.

  I backed out and went to the interior cameras. The other two screens lit up and displayed four views on each, all frozen and all showing empty hallways similar to the one I went down to get here. I clicked on the feed that appeared to show the door, and scrolled back, watching myself walk backwards up the hallway and out of the door then the door shut partway, then the door shut farther. I kept scrolling back.

  Twenty-nine days ago, the door appeared to release from it’s latch and pop open to the scant inch or so that it sat at until I arrived.

  Thirty-four days ago, a small group of people carried what looked like a teenager and a child up the ramp and through the door, sealing it behind them. None of them were walking very steady. The recording ended at forty days ago, with no other activity around the front door besides the people leaving, the door mysteriously unlatching, and me.

  I switched to a different view and scrolled back, then checked all the others. Every time, the last signs of activity were thirty-four days ago, that was the last time anyone walked through any of the monitored hallways. I watched the six days of recordings available for each view, watching nearly two dozen different people — adults and children — quickly become just five, the five I saw carrying the other two out the door. The very earliest images captured showed those still active moving some bodies, but that stopped two days before the group left with the sick kids, and they never moved them out of the bunker through the front. The last movement was a single man with a white envelope in his hand moving through the hallways one way, then coming back through without the envelope. He shuffled slowly, hunched over, and I knew I’d be seeing what was left of him again.

  That was about the time I became aware that underlying the faint smell of ozone in the air, the ventilation system was distributing a low-level reek of decomp, something I’d become super familiar with over the last two months — so familiar I didn’t even notice it at first.

  Fuck.

  I guess it was too much to hope that the bunker would just be sitting empty.

  I found the envelope taped to the wall, in the hallway leading to a communal dining hall with tables and chairs that could easily seat forty. Inside was a thick sheath of papers covered in spidery handwriting, and it would be hard to read in the light of my flashlight except I didn’t have to: everywhere I moved, lights would flicker on in front of me. It was kind of nice, and made the place seem less threatening and terrifying, and so did the multiple, spacious rooms I’d found filled with overstuffed couches, beanbag chairs, and a forest of potted and hanging plants that appeared to be hooked up to some kind of drip irrigation system.

  This place had pretty high ceilings — I’d guess at least twelve feet in the rooms and eight in the hallways, and lush plants draped and trailed down everywhere, and in the bigger spaces, there were always big pots and urns with dwarf trees and ornamental grasses clustered in almost every corner. I thought it was weird that very few of them seemed to be food-type plants — just a few trees here and there appeared to be fruit bearers — but who was I to judge their #preppergoals?

  Of course, all that was before I discovered the two giant-fucking-hydroponic greenhouses in rooms the size of a warehouse, with massive tanks that seemed to be housing fish and shellfish intermingled in the planting beds. I only went in those rooms because they had double doors — common rooms instead of bedrooms — and it seemed unlikely that I’d find bodies within them, and I was right. But there were still what felt like another hundred doors or so left unopened.

  When I found the letter, I settled into a comfortable, padded chair right there in their dining room, and spread out the pages on the table in front of me.

  “If you’re reading this, then you found the door I opened. Welcome to what used to be a happy home for thirty-three people, thirteen of which were children. My name is was David Petersen, oldest son of David Petersen who owned this land, and husband of Marcy Petersen. Father of three: David, Jonah, and Maribelle. They’re We’re all dead.

  I hope whatever foreign government d
esigned this virus burns in hell where they belong.

  This was our home, and now it’s our grave. If you’re a survivor, if you found this place because there’s nowhere else that’s safe out there, then you’re welcome to make it your own.

  I think a few of us left days ago, but I can’t be sure, we were all keeping ourselves separate hoping to keep it from spreading any further.

  All I ask is that you please bury or burn any bodies that you find. We did what we could, moving our kin to the freezers until there was no one else able to carry the dead, only those weak and dying themselves. The ground might be too hard to bury us, so burning would be fine too, just don’t leave us for the animals. Please, give us that, and then you can have this place with a clear conscience.

  Look to the library, it has all the information you need to keep this place going. It’s mostly self-sustaining, and no matter when you’ve arrived, I expect most of it to still be in working order. A few of the aquaculture tanks will probably be overcrowded or need draining, but the rest should be intact. There’s a book in the library, a thin book with a solid black cover hidden in plain sight on one of the shelves. Look for that book. It has all the passwords and codes you’ll ever need in it.

  Good luck, stranger. I hope you find a way to survive, but I think it’s more likely that this is our extinction story, that the human race will die out along with all the values and ideals that this great nation was built upon, values and ideals that we’ve turned our backs on in recent years, bringing down the wrath of God upon us.

  The only solace I take with me to heaven is that they never took my gun. To my dying breath, I bore arms like the constitution written by our forebears promised I could. My children died with their guns in hand, and my wife breathed her last breath with her favorite rifle at her side.

  I will see them again in the paradise promised by our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”

  He went on some more after that, mostly religious and anti-government but pro-’Merica rhetoric, the contradiction of it all was baffling; he hated government interference, yet couldn’t stop praising democracy and the constitution. He resented oversight, yet justified and defended their actions using the very same laws and structures he claimed to hate. He wanted to end the tyranny by giving a dictator power.

  I gave up and began to skim after the third page, only getting excited again when I found the hand-drawn map of the complex on the last page. There appeared to be nine private bedrooms to search for bodies in, as well as two large bunk rooms for the kids — outside of the nursery, of course — and an infirmary. That’s not to say there couldn’t be bodies in the wood shop, sewing room, one of the walk-ins in the kitchen, or the game room, but that seemed less likely.

  This place… it was unreal. Way beyond what I could’ve ever imagined possible, and my cold, dead heart grew three times that day when I realized what it would mean for Aes— Azzie and I.

  His arguments didn’t change any of my own thoughts or beliefs. They didn’t even give me a new perspective on the time before JANUS. There was only one thing that I ultimately took away from his manifesto: I needed to remove those bodies before I brought Aesli here. She didn’t need to see any more death.

  It took me a few days, two hazmat suits, a full box of disposable gloves, four plastic bags that I barfed in, and a dozen body bags stolen from a funeral home, but eventually I removed all of the decomposing bodies from beds all around the complex. The last to succumb in each family, I guess.

  Most of them took more than one bag because I tried to include as much of the stained and destroyed bedding as possible including their high-end air mattresses; I discovered that if I punctured the mattress and let it deflate, I could wrap the body up in it and usually capture most, if not all, of the liquids. By my seventh or eighth, I had a system down.

  But as efficient as I became at removing their bodies, it wasn’t any less painful by the last one than it was with the first.

  The bodies in the walk-in freezers were easier on some levels, but harder on others. They were already wrapped up in sheets like mummies, their flowered or patterned 450 thread-count shrouds keeping them anonymous, but a child’s body is still obviously a child’s body. And there were practical difficulties, like the inflexibility of the frozen corpses — it was a lot harder for me to carry them out solo when I couldn’t use a firefighter’s hold on them.

  I found a few more notes similar to David Petersen’s manifesto but none as helpful as that first one with his instructions to find the book — something I did, first thing, and it contained every code and password for the entire underground complex. I felt a tiny twinge of regret because it ruined the fun of figuring them out on my own, but it did make things a lot easier.

  In the middle of the night, and requiring a few trips back and forth, I took the bodies to one of the houses slated for destruction and put them all together in one of the back bedrooms. The next morning, the disposal team hit the house with their flamethrowers, lighting up the accelerants they’d saturated the interior with days before once it was determined it would never be livable.

  I stayed until the house had burned to ash, which was far quicker than seemed possible but I guess the clean-up dudes knew what they were doing. I said a few words for David Petersen and his family, then drove back to where they’d build my little cabin, sleep in the tent I had set up where my house would be.

  I decided that night not to tell Aesli I’d been to the bunker. We would open it for the “first” time together, discover all its secrets together, and it would be exciting and not scary or tragic or re-traumatizing.

  I’d leave David’s letter in the mission control room, removing any mentions of bodies, and erase the video feed and logs for the times I was there. She’d never know that our new home was once a mass grave.

  I hated that I was going to be lying to her, but it was necessary. As amazing as that girl is, she’s still just a kid, and I needed to protect her from some of the awfulness in this world.

  Sometimes I have to keep things from her, for her own good.

  End of Part 1

  II

  Beyond the Walls

  Chapter Fourteen

  Azzie

  It was pouring rain and I thought I was going to die.

  My teeth were chattering like machine gun fire, shivers rippling through me, and I was so cold and tired and sore that I could barely move. Tai watched me with concern but didn’t say anything after I snapped at him the third time.

  I wasn’t going to be a burden on them. I didn’t need them to do everything for me, like a child or an invalid, I was perfectly capable of contributing. Maybe not doing an equal share of the work, but I wasn’t going to sit around while they waited on me—

  “Get out of the way and sit your scrawny ass down,” Gemma pushed me towards an upside-down bucket off to the side. “I don’t need you creepin’ around, hunched over and moving like a little old lady, you’re just pissing me off now.”

  I made a half-hearted protest, but seriously, I was about to fall over anyway and this way I could at least feel like it was Gemma’s fault I wasn’t helping.

  Tai glared at me and I made a face. I wasn’t ready to give up yet when he was bugging me, but things changed in the five minutes since he’d last said anything! And I finally felt like maybe I could rest — like before I fell over — because we were somewhat safe.

  We were in a barn about three miles cross-country from Salem, ten miles by road. It took hours to walk here: unfamiliar terrain, in the complete blackness of the middle of the night, and we couldn’t use lights because we didn’t know what — or who — was around us.

  It was overcast and gloomy all the way up until the rain started almost an hour ago, and everyone else seemed to be able to adjust to the low light but for me it was all I could do just to see what was right in front of me. I tripped and fell twice, the second time possibly skinning my knee but I hadn’t checked yet because… because my fingers were too numb to work
the zippers and buttons and buckles on my clothes and boots.

  I’d put a rain poncho on right away, but both times that I fell landed in wet patches; my gloves got soaked through so I took them off and my hands hadn’t warmed up yet.

  “Fucking hell,” Sev hissed from behind me, and I realized he saw how fucked up I actually was right now. I decided it was time I surrendered.

  “I’m sorry,” I whined, miserable and trying hard not to just start crying. “I don’t want to b-be a b-burden — we’ve only b-been out of there a f-few hours and already I can’t f-fucking hack it! But I need help-p-p-p…” I trailed off as my voice cracked and another wave of chills swept over me.

  “Fucking hell!” He burst out and tossed down his pack. “Guys, she’s fucking freezing!”

  They swarmed me then, all of them trying to find out what was wrong; I tried protesting that it wasn’t anything, I just needed some help with my clothes, but I was almost instantly overruled.

  Somewhere along the walk, Tai was kidnapped by aliens and replaced by a drill sergeant because he went all authoritarian on our asses. “Luka, get her boots off. Sev, you and Sasha try to figure out how to get a fire going — look for a metal bucket or bricks, and pull down some of the wood from those stalls, try to break it up. Spider, go through her pack and get her a complete change of clothes and find a towel — if she doesn’t have one, check my pack. Luka, once her boots are off, help them get the fire going, and see if you can make her a hot drink, ideally herbal tea and not coffee. I’ve got some in my pack. Sunshine, you carry hand warmers, right? Where in your pack— is that— is that blood on your sock? Jesus, Azzie. Jesus, what did you do—?”