‘But things are cool, right? We’re OK to stay here?’
‘I did get the impression he was in a hurry to get rid of us. I think we have at least until you’re back on your feet again,’ Ethan said.
‘I guess I better make a very slow recovery,’ O.B. said, biting into the peanut butter crunch filling.
‘Don’t let them see you eating like that then.’
‘How’s Darla doin’?’
‘Hey, man. You know better than I do. She virtually hasn’t left your side since you were shot.’
‘No, I mean how’s she doin’? Y’know. She won’t talk to me about it.’
Ethan thought for a moment.
‘Osgood is helping her out with some medication. She’s trying, O.B. I think she’s really trying.’
O.B. leaned back against his pillows with a mouthful of 5th Avenue and smiled. Although his leg still hurt like hell and he’d got pins and needles from it being elevated the way it was, he was surprisingly content. Before he could enjoy the moment, a vision of his family rushed into the foreground of his mind; the waves of dead lurching for his mother’s Station Wagon. The chocolate suddenly turned to shit in his mouth and he grabbed the bedpan so he could spit it out.
‘Dude!’ Ethan said, moving to his side. ‘You feeling sick? Want me to get Foster?’
‘No, it’s OK. It’s nothing, really,’ O.B. said, wiping the stickiness from around his lips. ‘Ethan?’
‘Yeah, buddy.’
‘Is it really safe here?’
Ethan realised O.B. wasn’t just asking his opinion. He asked the question as if he knew he had the ability to know more than anyone else—more than anyone should.
‘As far as I can tell, but I’ll let you know if I change my mind.’
5
Jason Schaffer closed one eye as he pointed the plastic gun at the arcade machine and opened fire. The digital sim he was controlling on screen responded in kind and sprayed the oncoming enemy soldier with a volley of bullets, cutting him to bloody pieces.
Another foe jumped out into the corridor he was navigating and received similar swift treatment.
‘Wow, Schaffer. You’re pretty handy at this,’ Salty said.
‘I used to play these things with my son.’ Jason hesitated when he realised he’d mentioned his child to a virtual stranger, but then readjusted his stance to dispatch another lurker in-game.
Darla and Raine also stood around the machine that was decorated with camouflage and brightly coloured military symbols.
Raine lingered behind them, peering over Jason’s shoulder at the unfolding carnage on the screen. As each bullet tore into the soldiers, her pupils expanded. The gunfire and the cries of the wounded and dying began to echo in her head until she couldn’t be sure where the sounds were coming from. Beads of sweat seeped their way out from her shaven hairline and her chest tightened like someone was suddenly standing on it.
She bit down on her lip and balled her hands into fists to try and stave off the psychological assault, but it was no good. She had to get out of there. She turned and headed for the door. Unfortunately for Father Edwards, he happened to be right in her path when she made a break for it.
The white-haired practitioner did his best to avoid the collision, but Raine didn’t even see him. Her shoulder struck his, sending him spinning into the edge of the nearby table. The screech of the table legs as they shifted violently across the floor alerted the others to what had happened.
They looked up just as Raine disappeared through the rec room door.
‘What’s up her ass?’ Darla said.
‘She’ll be fine. Forget about it,’ Salty said.
Their attention turned back to the arcade game, none of them showing any concern for Edwards, who pushed himself up off the table and dusted himself down.
Raine stumbled out onto the track of the inner roadway, clutching at her chest and trying to catch her breath. The air was cooler and more natural out there. The draft from the tunnel blew against her face, chilling the moisture on her skin.
Once sure she was alone, she bent over to grip the tops of her thighs, taking slow, controlled breaths. No sooner had she started to calm herself, she heard the gentle whir of the motorised transport cart coming from the east.
She inhaled deeply one more time and straightened up, wiping away the remains of the sweat from her forehead.
McCaffrey pulled up alongside her and leaned out of the driver’s cabin to get a closer look at her.
‘You alright there, Miller?’
‘Yeah. I was just wondering how you can have a handful of people living in a facility this size and still feel like you’re on top of each other,’ Raine said.
‘You goin’ a little stir crazy? You kinda get used to it after a while. The walls, the enclosed spaces. I know it sounds weird, but it starts to feel safe.’
‘I guess I’ll have to take your word for that.’
McCaffrey thought for a moment, stroking the stubble on his chin.
‘Hey, you wanna take a ride with me?’
‘Is this where you try and persuade me to solve another one of your problems?’
He chuckled.
‘I don’t think this is gonna be anywhere close to that herd we have out front. Crawford called me on the radio just now. Says she’s got somethin’ she wants to show me. Sounded pretty worried, and it ain’t usual for Crawford to be worried.’
‘Where is she?’
‘She has a place in the northwest corner, away from the main blocks. Like you, she enjoys her privacy,’ McCaffrey said.
Raine looked back to the living quarters and then climbed up onto the vehicle and sat in the passenger seat.
‘Well OK then,’ McCaffrey said as he accelerated and turned west towards the outer roadway.
They passed a huge bulkhead, towering 20 feet above them—reinforced frames welded to thick concrete.
‘Blast doors to the vehicle entrance. One hundred and fifty tons of steel, designed to withstand the shockwave and overpressure of a nuclear explosion. There’s nothing left in operation that could find its way through there,’ McCaffrey said.
They soon left the roadway behind them and travelled through a far less maintained area of the facility. There were no concrete walls—only the exposed rock faces of the cavern. The air grew colder and it darkened. The lighting now guiding their way was nothing more than a few bare bulbs, suspended from the ceiling by a length of rope.
Every now and again, a collection of low-flying bats would swoop by them. One flew a couple of inches away from Raine’s ear and then shrieked into the darkness behind them.
During the relatively short journey, the facility had transformed from a scientific outpost to a genuine haunted house—or more accurately, a haunted storage vault. Raine saw boxes and pallets stacked on top of each other, huge spools of white cable, forklift trucks collecting cobwebs and trailers unhooked from their cabins, left to rot.
When they passed the numerous cylinders of maraging steel, she shifted uneasily in the passenger seat.
‘Are they what I think they are?’ she said.
‘Relax,’ McCaffrey said. ‘The nukes were decommissioned elsewhere. Explosives removed. The plutonium and uranium would have been recycled and converted into fuel rods for nuclear power plants. What you see here are just empty shells.’
‘I guess I’ll just have to take your word for that too.’
‘I know you don’t find that so easy, but we ain’t irradiated. That I’m certain of.’
Raine noticed that the cavern walls were closing in and they were reaching the end of the line. Before she could ask the question, Crawford’s cabin appeared through the shadows.
Suspended from the ground, the completely wooden structure had more in common with a large treehouse than anything else. In the midst of their dark and damp surroundings, it could not have looked more out of place.
‘I know it’s weird,�
�� McCaffrey said, bringing the cart to a stop.
‘Yeah, no shit,’ Raine replied. She gazed up at the cabin and the dancing lights in the windows.
‘We had nothing to do with it. It was just here. One of the engineers that were here before us must have made it for themselves.’
‘I would have liked their job. Lots of time on their hands,’ Raine said.
‘Seems that way, doesn’t it?’ McCaffrey stood at the foot of the twenty or so steps that led up to the front door. ‘After you.’
Raine placed one boot onto the first step, glancing behind it to the stilts elevating the cabin and the criss-crossed supports holding them in place.
‘It looks hokey, but it’s safe enough,’ McCaffrey said.
She just about believed him and climbed the creaking staircase to the top.
McCaffrey followed close behind, rapping the back of his hand on the door.
‘It’s open,’ came the muffled voice from inside.
Although Raine had found the cabin’s exterior to be out of place, it was nothing compared to its interior design.
The place was small and picture-book homely. Like the image you would see on a cheap Christmas card. Red and black throws over the small sofa and lazy boy recliner. An old wind-up record player. A fur rug laid out in front of a fake log fire that had strands of illuminated orange paper flapping around to mimic roaring flames.
The west wall was virtually covered from corner to corner with a canvas depicting the siege of Fort William Henry by Major General Louis-Joseph de Montcalm during the French and Indian wars in 1757. Red and blue coated soldiers charged at each other through the dense fog of musket smoke. One of the British officers in the painting’s foreground defiantly raised his sword as his horse was about to fall.
Crawford sat at the back of the living space. Shrouded by the smoke of the Lucky Strike cigarettes she’d been chain smoking.
‘God damnit, Crawford!’ McCaffrey said, as he tried to waft some of the smoke away. ‘You tryin’ to set fire to the place?’
‘You’re lucky I ain’t high,’ Crawford said, her voice groggy from her habit.
As McCaffrey moved in on her, he noticed her face in the glow of the lamplight on her desk. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen Crawford look concerned about anything.
‘What’s up?’ he asked.
Crawford poured herself a measure of bourbon from a half-empty bottle and offered some to her two visitors. Both declined.
She shrugged and knocked back the liquor in one. Just behind her, against the wall, Raine saw the hulking metal frame of a rather dated longwave radio system.
‘Come on, Crawford. You’re making me nervous. What do you have to show me?’ McCaffrey said.
Crawford shifted her gaze to Raine and then back to McCaffrey.
‘She’s fine. Speak freely,’ he said.
Crawford maintained her silence. Instead, she reached back to the radio console and fiddled with a few of the switches. After a loud blast of static noise, a man’s voice came through the speakers.
‘This is Attorney General Myles Teller. I’m here with Secretary of Commerce Elaine Lynch and a further thirty government officials. We have been held up in the Rysler Observatory complex along with a small security detail since Washington was overwhelmed. We’re running low on food and other supplies and we have injured people here. I’m appealing to anyone on this governmental channel who has the means to travel: we’re trapped in here and are in dire need of rescue. I know it will be hard in the country’s current state to gather the resources and manpower needed to come and retrieve us.
‘It’s important to recognise that based on our latest intelligence, as far as we know, we are all that remains of the former government of the United States. We hope you will find the courage and the resolve required to answer our call for urgent assistance. This is Attorney General Myles Teller… signing off.’
As soon as the message ended, Crawford switched off the radio.
‘How old is that message?’ McCaffrey said.
‘Hard to say. It’s on a relay,’ Crawford said, pouring herself another whisky. ‘For the record, I didn’t want to know, but I knew you would.’
Before she could lift the glass to her lips, McCaffrey snatched it away from her and gulped it down. He started to pace back and forth in the rear of the cabin, muttering something to himself that Raine couldn’t quite make out. Then he stopped, refocussed, and looked at Crawford.
‘How soon can you get your bird in the air?’
‘Seriously? You saw that place with your own eyes, Donny. It was swarming with those fuckin’ things,’ Crawford said.
‘That was a long time ago.’
‘How do we even know that’s Teller’s voice?’
‘I heard him speak plenty over the broadcasts before we lost contact with Central Control. It’s him.’
‘So, let me get this straight,’ Crawford said, angrily stubbing out her cigarette. ‘You wanna lay your life on the line, and mine, for a desperate message that could have been recorded months ago?’
‘We don’t have to take a stroll through the city. We just land the chopper at the observatory, search the place for survivors, and get the hell out of there.’
‘You make it sound so easy when you say it like that,’ Crawford said.
McCaffrey nodded with a steely determination. ‘Do you have any more objections to this mission, Major?’
The mention of her more senior rank enraged Crawford and she jumped out of her chair to face him down.
Raine thought about stepping in, but it wasn’t her business, and she was curious as to how the confrontation would play out.
‘That’s my bird up there. If I say we don’t fly, we don’t fly.’
McCaffrey stood his ground, virtually nose to nose with her.
‘Official protocol states that if we discover any senior members of government in need of rescue, we must go to their aid—all other priorities rescinded.’
‘You could be putting this whole research project in jeopardy. Without me and you, the medical staff are finished. Nothing is more important than this right now.’
‘You think I don’t know that? If we do this—salvage what’s left of the establishment, it will consolidate our position. Maybe even allows us to expand and add more personnel.’
Crawford took a step back and smiled ironically, dissolving the building tension in the air. She picked up the empty glass and raised it towards him.
‘I’ve been drinking.’
‘You could destroy a bottle of that and you’d still be a top pilot,’ McCaffrey said. ‘So, you’ll fly?’
Crawford screwed up her mouth and let out a sigh. She grabbed the bottle from the desk, filled her glass again, and knocked back another generous measure.
‘Yeah, I’ll fly, but I ain’t leaving my seat when we touch down.’
‘I wouldn’t ask you to.’ McCaffrey then turned to Raine. ‘What about you, Miller? Fancy taking another ride with us?’
‘Can I bring someone else along?’ she said.
‘Hey, the more the merrier,’ McCaffrey replied.
6
Ethan sat with his back against the rec room wall, knees tucked up to his chest. He focussed on the Rubik’s Cube he was holding, twisting and rotating its multi-coloured sections to try and match them up.
Salty looked over at him as he pecked the food from between his teeth with a matchstick.
‘Never understood the fascination with those things,’ he said.
‘It has three billion combinations, but only one solution. Supposed to be therapeutic,’ Ethan said, never taking his eyes off the cube.
‘I’ll stick to drinkin’ if it’s all the same.’
‘Hey, man. You can do both.’
‘Ain’t no way I’m gettin’ stuck in this chicken coup forever, vegetatin’ on fuckin’ brain teasers.’
Salty’s comment surprised
Ethan so much, he finally placed the puzzle box down and paid attention.
‘Are you suggesting we go back out there?’ he said.
Edwards, who was sitting on the next table, leaned in to listen to their raised voices.
‘Out there, outside these walls—that’s reality. This here, all these puzzles and arcade games, it’s all make believe,’ Salty said.
‘They have always been. Reality is whatever you want it to be.’
‘Bullshit. You might be able to tell yourself that when you have a few of them cocktails in ye, but when you wake up in the middle of the night, your sheets soaked through with sweat, you’ll know better.’
‘I might not sleep like a baby in here, but at least I sleep.’
‘So, you’ve read the tea leaves in the brain of Doctor Death in there? ‘Cause, I ain’t got a psychic bone in my body, but even I can see he’s a few fries short of a Happy Meal.’
Ethan’s frown deepened.
‘I haven’t got a clear read on him yet. There’s definitely something off about this place though.’
‘Don’t misunderstand me. I ain’t sayin’ this is all bad news. It’s a place to lay low and regroup for a while and it’s worth stickin’ around to see how much useful information they can give us on our less than sweet smellin’ friends outside,’ Salty said.
‘You think that science will save you from what awaits?’ Edwards said.
Salty and Ethan twisted in their seats to look at him. He was slumped in his chair, Bible in hand, his head tipped back, staring off into the empty space in the centre of the rec room.
‘You been holdin’ out on us, Reverend?’ Salty said.
‘The answers to your questions were here all along, before this plague rained down upon the earth. They were right under your nose.’ Edwards placed the small, leather-backed publication on the table and slid it towards the two men.
‘Does the dog die at the end? I can handle it as long as I know up front,’ Ethan said.
‘Scoff all you like, young man, but it foretold this day would come. Do not marvel at this, for an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out, these who have done good to the resurrection of life, and these who have done evil to the resurrection of judgement.’
Everything Dies [Season Two] Page 9