Survival of The Fittest | Book 3 | Final Ride

by Fawkes, K. M.

  I mean, it was seriously the size of an airplane hangar. Or however big an airplane hangar might be, since I’d never actually been in one of those and had no point of comparison. Okay, so it was like a mall. A complete mall, not just a few stores. It was at least three stories tall, and the ground level was full of… well, I could only call them cubes. It was full of cubicles, like it was some sort of office building and those were all the little pieces where they stuck people to work. Some cubes were big and some were small, but exactly zero of them had actual ceilings on them.

  And there were people in those cubes. People rushing around inside of them and down the halls that connected them like they were stuck in some enormous anthill.

  And suddenly, that mouse inside me got even more nervous. Because she recognized this. She recognized the one section that was made up entirely of greenery, and the other section that was made up of what looked like sleeping quarters, complete with bunks in every room and tiny bathrooms attached to each. She saw the larger cubes and realized that those were the gathering areas. Maybe the cafeteria, or a meeting hall, or something like that. Those were the places that the leaders called people to when they wanted to have serious discussions with the whole group.

  I recognized them because I’d seen this sort of layout before, in my uncle’s bunker. Only this wasn’t just some bunker. It was more like a compound.

  An underground compound.

  And it was already full of people.

  I dared a glance at Will and saw him looking back at me, all big-eyed and serious. And I knew exactly what he was thinking. No, he hadn’t necessarily seen a bunker before—and he hadn’t been there with me while I was in the bunker my uncle had managed to put together—but it wasn’t hard to tell what this was. It wasn’t difficult to stand there above the whole thing and feel like we were gods looking down on something someone had created.

  And more: Something someone had created, and then filled with people.

  I gulped at the question of where they’d come from, and sent him another questioning glance. We hadn’t come here voluntarily, and I didn’t think it was a big jump to guess that all of those people down there had been forced into this compound, just like us.

  It didn’t answer the question of why. But it did mean that this just got a whole lot bigger than we’d thought it was going to be. Because if we were going to try to escape, I realized, we were now going to have to try to take all of those people with us.

  If they were here as prisoners, then there was just no way I could leave them to their fates.

  Also, for the record, I was really tired of having to play an action hero.

  Chapter 5

  I grabbed for Adam’s arm before I could stop myself, not even thinking about it. Action hero, indeed. All action, no thinking—and that was going to have to change if I was going to keep myself alive.

  I didn’t exactly want to keep getting hit in the head with the butt of a gun.

  But what was done was done, and the moment I had my fingers wrapped around Adam’s arm, he whirled on me, his face a mask of anger.

  “I am getting really tired of you laying your hands on me,” he ground out.

  I gave him my most charming smile. “And I’m getting really tired of being dragged around with no answers about where we are and what we’re supposed to be doing. Look, I don’t know how much you know about everything that’s happened out there, but I know the chemical that was used. I know how it works, I know what it does, and I know where it came from. I even know how to protect against it. And I know how to find out whether there’s going to be another attack—and where it might be. I can see that you’re gathering people here for some reason—”

  I cast a quick glance at the rooms spread out below us, my eyes scanning the area to take in as much as I could while I had the opportunity.

  “—And I’m thinking that you must know what you’re doing, at least a little bit. If you know things and I know things, then it makes sense for us to team up. Combine the things we know. Figure out how to survive this whole situation. What do you think?”

  I forced my mouth to close again—though there was more I would have said, if I could—and watched him.

  Thank you, brain, I thought to myself. Because it had evidently finally decided to join the party and give me the words I needed.

  Instead of relying on my fists, I’d finally found my intellect. And it had told me that if this guy was the leader of this whole thing, and he’d already somehow commandeered this bunker and gathered this many people, then he either knew what he was doing or thought he knew what he was doing. And either way, he probably thought rather a lot of himself.

  Which meant that I needed to stop playing badass, punchy heroine and start playing master of feminine wiles. I needed to appeal to his ego.

  I needed, in short, to stop knocking him down.

  I could feel Will sort of jerk in surprise behind me, no doubt thinking that I was giving far too much away, but I figured I’d let him in on my little mental progression later. It wasn’t like I could suddenly call a secret conference with him while I was flirting with Adam. Hell, it wasn’t like Adam and Zach would have given us a private conference in the first place. They didn’t seem like they’d be the sort to respect their prisoners wanting to hold a private conversation.

  Adam, in the meantime, was looking me up and down as if he was actually considering what I’d just said… and finding it pretty damn tempting. Just as I’d thought he would. Men who weren’t used to being in power weren’t as confident as they seemed. Which meant that if someone came along boosting up that confidence with plenty of compliments, they ate it right up.

  At the end of the day, they needed someone else to believe in them, too. It confirmed the delusions that they were building in their own minds.

  I stifled the grin I could feel growing on my face and leaned forward conspiratorially.

  “Let’s be honest, Adam. Those of us who have any knowledge right now have a responsibility, am I right? We might be the only hope humanity has.”

  Something flickered in his eyes and his lower lip twitched, and I knew immediately that I had him. I didn’t know this guy’s story. I didn’t know how the hell he’d found this bunker or what he had to do with the amusement park sitting above it—hell, I didn’t even know how this bunker had come to be under said amusement park—but it was becoming pretty obvious that he thought he was doing something important.

  With luck, he thought he was actually helping the people below us, the same way my uncle had thought he was helping the people he’d forced into his own bunker. And with even more luck, I’d be able to take advantage of that aspect in Adam’s personality.

  The way I hadn’t been able to with my uncle.

  Adam was evidently a man of action, because it took him less than no time to decide that I was interesting enough to invest some effort in. I didn’t know how much he actually trusted me—probably not at all, to be honest—but it seemed I’d given him enough of a reason to at least give it a try.

  He spun quickly to Zach—who, I saw, flinched at the movement. I wondered how often poor Zach had been punched. I wondered why he still hung out with Adam at all.

  “Take them to be prepped,” Adam snapped. “Give them a tour, but not the large one, and then show them to their room. Don’t answer their questions. Don’t give them any information. I’ll meet with them later to find out what they know and see if we can use that knowledge in our plans.”

  Zach nodded once, making the movement sharp—but not sharp enough for a military man. There was also no salute.

  No, these were definitely civilians. Civilians who had somehow come by a bunch of military gear and were playing dress-up with it. I filed that away under the heading of Proof They’re Not Military and then moved on. I’d go through that mental file later, when I wasn’t in the middle of trying to convince the head of the whole thing that I could be an asset rather than an enemy.

  “Do you wa
nt them in a single bunk?” Zach asked.

  A quick nod from Adam, and then, “And give them the schedule for the bunker. They’ll be allowed to move around on their own once I see that they’ve managed to settle in peacefully.”

  That must have meant more than it sounded like it meant, because Zach tipped his head and looked at Adam like the other man might have actually lost his mind. Then he evidently came to his senses, remembered that he wasn’t supposed to question Adam’s orders—a guess on my part, but it seemed like a solid one—and nodded again.

  A second later, Adam had whirled away and was gone, and Zach was motioning for us to follow him down the staircase that seemed to lead to the floor of the bunker.

  “Into the anthill,” I whispered, falling into step behind him.

  Chapter 6

  As we were walking down the longest staircase in history—it literally led from that top lookout level down to the bottom level of the bunker, and it was a whole lot more than the three stories I’d originally thought—Will grabbed at me from behind.

  “What are you doing?” he hissed in my ear, his breath tickling the delicate skin.

  I turned my head enough to speak over my shoulder, and hoped Zach was more concerned about his own impending mission than about what we were doing—or what we were talking about.

  “Shut it,” I hissed back. “You really think right now is the right time to ask me for my plans?”

  I widened my eyes at him and gave him my best 'are-you-stupid-or-something' look, then let my gaze swivel around us at the general situation. I could see enough of Will’s face to see him suddenly look rather abashed, and though I felt a little bad about it, I turned around to the front again.

  Yeah, I knew he was more of a low-level criminal who specialized in things like break-ins. He definitely didn’t do a lot of customer service with the clients—or throwing down cover for the crime being committed. But he should have known better than to try to get me to lay it all out for him when we were literally only two steps behind one of the bad guys.

  He was too smart for that.

  Probably freaked out over what was going on, though, my brain told me quickly. He was a lockpicker and safe breaker. He was used to going in to do a specific thing and with a specific plan—and usually, I guessed, within a specific time frame. So this whole thing—flying by the seat of our pants while actively being taken prisoner and potentially locked into an enormous underground cavern—had to be… well, overwhelming, really.

  It definitely wasn’t going according to any plan.

  When I turned my gaze back out over that bunker, I saw that we were making pretty quick process down to the floor. It was getting harder and harder to actually see over the walls of all of those cubicles, and from down here, it must have seemed to people like they were in normal rooms.

  Unless, of course, they looked up and noticed that there were no ceilings. And then saw Adam or someone else standing up on that platform and watching them.

  When we got down onto what I would come to think of as the main floor, I saw, too, that the people weren’t actually just wandering around aimlessly, like I’d thought they were doing. Instead, they all appeared to have tasks.

  There were people in one room folding clothes—though where the clothes came from and where they were going, I had no idea. People in another room were sweeping and mopping their way through the room. Housecleaning duty? Would they move from room to room doing this particular chore? What about the people who had already been in that room? Was this whole thing some sort of assembly line of moving pieces? People constantly progressing from one room to the next, doing their assigned tasks for a set amount of time and then moving on?

  It made a certain sort of sense. But I wanted an explanation as to why they would be doing it.

  In another room—the kitchen, I saw, as I took in the ovens and refrigerators—there were a group of people washing dishes while another group was chopping vegetables at a center island.

  “Anything about this seem creepy to you?” Will muttered into my ear, standing right next to me.

  “Um, creepy doesn’t even start to cover it,” I muttered back.

  Then I turned to Zach, who up to this point had been scurrying through the rooms as if this was just something he wanted to get finished with as quickly as possible.

  “Who the hell are all of these people? Where did they come from?”

  He stood and stared with us into the kitchen, and I let my eyes wander over the space. It was a big room, much like what you would have expected to see in a restaurant. Several ovens lined one side of the room, several sinks sat on the other, with the island in the middle and lots of countertop space around the edges. Pots and pans hung from a fixture in the ceiling and I saw several knife blocks on the counters. Drawer after drawer was stacked between cupboards, and I counted ten refrigerators on the far side of the room.

  The place was freaking decked out. This couldn’t be something that Adam and Zach had built within the last week. This was something that had taken a whole lot of planning and a whole lot of money. And time. Definitely time.

  “How long has this place been here? Who built it?”

  He finally turned to me at that, his mouth sort of twisted as if he was partially frustrated and partially trying to keep the words inside his mouth rather than letting them escape.

  “Look,” I said, letting my voice drop. “You and I both know that this thing outside is dangerous. I probably know a whole lot more about it than your boss, if that’s what Adam is. And the more I know, the more I can help. But I’m not going to be able to figure out what to do about any of this unless you tell me what’s going on here. I can tell you’re a good guy. I can tell you want to help these people.”

  That part right there was a gamble, because I didn’t actually know anything like that, and I had no freaking way of knowing whether he was actually a good guy or not. But I was willing to bet on it. And I had found out a long time ago that assuming the best of people—and then telling them that you were assuming the best of them—stroked their ego just enough to make them want to share with you.

  And if I could get him to share with me, I could start figuring out where exactly we were and what I was going to do about it.

  His face relaxed a fraction of an inch, and his eyes flicked to the side again, to the kitchen.

  “I don’t know how long it’s been here, honestly,” he said. “I wasn’t here when it was built. But it was all waiting for us when we arrived.”

  He turned and walked away before I could think of an answer to that, and I rushed after him, my hand reaching out for his arm.

  “What do you mean you weren’t here?” I asked. “You guys just sort of… found this place?”

  He didn’t answer for quite a while, and before I knew it, we were in the gardening section of the bunker—which looked almost exactly like the one my uncle had set up. The entire thing was a hydroponic system, with grow lights on full blast on the walls. Only this hydroponic system was about five hundred times as big as my uncle’s—and a whole lot more mature.

  In fact, I realized, these weren’t new seedlings that had just been planted. These were fully flowering and fruitful bushes. Every bush or plant I saw had some sort of fruit, vegetable, nut, or melon growing from it. And those plants were producing a lot of food. Ten people were moving through the room with baskets, pulling fruit and vegetables from the plants and bushes—and even some small trees, I saw now—and shoving the food into various baskets around them. It didn’t look like they were dividing the fruits and vegetables into different baskets, though, and when we walked into the next room, I saw why that was.

  The next room was full of people going through the baskets and separating the food into different categories on long counters. I could see everything. Tomatoes, squash, peas, beans, cucumbers, berries, potatoes, cantaloupes…

  It was a virtual cornucopia, right there in that underground bunker. And it was all being shuffled into p
iles, and from there into chutes that seemed like they had to lead to some sort of warehousing situation—where, I assumed, there were more people to handle the produce as it made its way into the right boxes or shelves or whatever it was they used to store stuff.

  It was like we were in the middle of a factory that was also a garden. And it was manned by people who weren’t even looking at each other. All of them had their eyes on their hands, their mouths sealed shut as if they’d been told that any talking would earn them demerits. They all looked as if they’d been beat right down and didn’t have the fire or the energy to fight back anymore.

  “And who the hell are all these people?” I asked quietly, feeling awkward for breaking the near silence in the room. “Where the hell did they come from?”

  Because though the place was insanely organized, it was very, very obvious that no one here had come from the military. This might have been a military base or something like that, but it was being manned by everyday, completely ordinary citizens.

  And none of them looked like they wanted to be there. None of them looked like they even knew what they were doing.

  I put a hand out and stopped Zach before he could turn away from us.

  “You seem like a guy who knows things,” I said quickly. “Tell me what you know. Tell me how I can help you help these people to be safe.”

  Because there was one other thing that I hadn’t really considered yet. One ace up my sleeve that I hadn’t thought about too much. And that was Zach himself. Like I said, I thought he was probably an okay guy. I thought he was probably doing this for the right reasons, based on the way he was looking at the people and the small amount of feedback he’d given to the people around us. When he spoke, they looked at him like he was one of them.

  They looked at him like he was an ally.

  And I was thinking he might be an ally to us, as well. But only if I started treating him like one.