I wrote down everything Laura had told me and when I had filled my notebook I jotted the last few notes on the cardboard of the cover.
The story of Laura Ellen’s escape from the ‘Affliction’ had been told.
The tale of her survival in this new world was an unfolding drama yet to happen.
I thanked Laura, and she followed me out into the storm-filled afternoon. She watched me get into my car from the sidewalk. I started the engine and then, impulsively, she rushed to the car door and pounded on the window, her face pressed close to the glass, her mouth wrenched into some kind of expression of panic or despair.
“Tell me,” she breathed, imploring me. “How far away are other people from here? What have you seen? Am I really all alone?”
I tried to look hopeful, but it was impossible.
“I drove four hundred miles to get here,” I said, feeling a sudden heaviness in the pit of my guts. “And I never saw another living soul in all that time, Laura.”
The shock and slow horror started to spread across her face. She had survived by drawing strength from the hope that one day she and her daughter would strike out and meet up with others who had endured. The sudden realization that they were the only living souls left within hundreds of miles struck her like a brutal hammer blow.
I drove away slowly.
In the rear view mirror I could see Laura standing hunched and weeping with the devastation of her despair, her head cupped in her hands, her whole body shaking. She had survived the ‘Affliction’ – but enduring the aftermath would become an equally terrifying torture of isolation.
* * *
Sam Houston National Forest, Texas:
I was lost.
Not just disoriented.
I was absolutely, hopelessly… lost.
I plucked the sweat-damp notebook from out of my jacket pocket and scowled at the instructions again. They had come to me mysteriously via a scratchy disembodied voice over Ham Radio three days earlier. They read like a curious collection of precise details that pirates used to record the locations of hidden treasure. I frowned. Had I been told to take one-hundred-and twenty-eight paces north after the abandoned wooden hut… or one-hundred-and-seventy-eight?
I swore bitterly, and the sound tore apart the fragile silence.
All around me, pressing like a wall of foliage, was the forest: tall, magnificent stands of trees whose branches clawed at the wide blue sky. The canopy of leaves overhead was so dense that it almost blocked out the afternoon light and trapped the heat against the forest floor.
I stood gulping the warm heavy air with my chest heaving from impotent frustration, and then I turned in a slow, hopeless circle, hearing nothing but the brittle crackle of dead leaves beneath my boots. Amongst a grove of thorny undergrowth I saw a wooden sign, twisted with gnarled vines.
‘Lone Star Hiking Trail’ had been chiseled into the planking of the sign.
My frown deepened. I was in the right place.
“Hello?” I called hesitantly, for some reason made tentative by the silence, and a rising sense of foreboding. “Anybody here?”
The people I had come to meet were ex-soldiers, I reasoned. Maybe they were wearing camouflage gear…
“Hello?” My voice became louder, the tone bolder. I cupped my hands to my mouth to project the sound, and heard my own voice echo through the forest. Shafts of sunlight pierced through the forest’s treetops like lancing pinpricks of white light. They made the darkness of the shadows around me even deeper.
“Hello?”
Nothing. I sucked in a deep breath, counted to five, and my shoulders slumped with bitter frustration at all the time I had wasted. I turned on my heel – and walked into a sudden phalanx of soldiers, each of them bristling with weapons, and each of their faces striped in paint.
I let out a stifled little yelp of alarm.
The men’s expressions seemed carved in stone. They had silently materialized as if by a conjurer’s magic. They stood, tensed, and with their weapons at the ready. There were six of them, barricading the walking trail back to where my truck was parked. One of the men came forward in three quiet steps. He was broad-shouldered, wearing camouflage fatigues. His eyes were black and hard as stone.
“You are Culver?” the voice was suppressed to barely a whisper.
“Yes.” I blinked. Over the soldier’s shoulder I saw the rest of the men relax just a little. They exchanged glances, adjusted their weapons and their postures.
“You’re a journalist?”
“Yes.”
He held out a hand the size of a baseball mitt. The palm was gnarled with callouses, and there were half-moon rims of dirt crusted beneath his fingernails. “ID,” he insisted.
I had an old press credential in my jeans pocket. The soldier studied the photo on the plastic card for long seconds and then kept lifting his eyes to glance at my face for comparison. He took his time. At last he handed the credential back and sniffed.
“You’re late,” the soldier said.
I glanced at my watch and read the time through the cracked and grimy glass face. I was late.
“So are you,” I said. “You were supposed to meet me.”
“We’ve been following you since you started along the trail,” the soldier sounded bemused. “And we’ve been here since my men reported in from the cabin checkpoint.”
I started to shake my head. “There was no one in that cabin,” I said. “I looked.”
“Not well enough,” the soldier was dismissive. “I had two men there. In fact someone has been close enough to reach out and kill you ever since you entered the forest.” He shot a quick glance over his shoulder and nodded. Without the need for orders, two of the other men peeled off from the group and disappeared back along the trail in the direction I had come from, their boots scuffing up tiny clouds of dust at their heels until the wall of surrounding forest engulfed them.
The soldier turned back to me, his gaze professional and appraising – but ultimately a little disappointed. Maybe he felt the same way about anyone who had not served their country.
He lifted his stubbled chin a fraction of an inch. He was taller than me, with the kind of rugged face that might have been carved from stone by a hasty sculptor. The edges of his features were harsh as if unfinished, made brutal by the puckered slash of scar on his left cheek that reached all the way to his eye.
“Come with us.” the soldier said brusquely.
“Where?” I stood my ground. The soldier narrowed his eyes as though he was unaccustomed to being questioned. His mouth turned hard. “Valles is waiting for you.”
Roman Valles was the man I had travelled so far to meet – a former infantryman in the famous 82nd Airborne Division who was now the leader of a doomsday prepper group that numbered over one hundred members. But for all that I knew about Valles, much more about the man remained an enigmatic mystery.
“Where is he?” I tried to put a little defiance into my tone. “Where is Valles?”
“Waiting.”
“Where?” I persisted. The soldier’s patience was being tested and the restraint in his voice was forced.
“Close by,” the soldier conceded.
“Where?”
The soldier’s expression darkened and I heard him hiss a sharp breath of contempt. His eyes turned to flint and he seemed to hunch his shoulders as though he were tensing his body to lash out at me. There was ten yards of beaten dirt between us. That wouldn’t be enough to save me if the temper he was straining to keep in check finally slipped its leash. But I stood my ground. I could feel a betraying tick of nerves at the corner of my eye and the furnace-like heat of still air beat down on me so that sweat blistered across my brow. The soldier’s eyes flicked past my shoulder for an instant and then slitted.
“He’s twenty yards from here,” the soldier said flatly.
I frowned, confused, and then looked sharply to my left and then right. I could see nothing but trees. “In which direction?” Silen
tly I wondered if the soldier was toying with me. The forest was empty, quiet as a cemetery.
The soldier stamped his big booted heel in the dirt. “Downwards,” he said.
The tunnel beneath the trap door was just wide enough for a broad-shouldered man. It was concealed amongst the undergrowth, camouflaged beneath a carpeting of dead leaves. The soldier who had confronted me on the walking trail crouched on his haunches beside the black square of darkness and glared at me in a pointed challenge.
“Down you go,” he said.
I stood on the edge of the trap door and stared down. I could see the top rungs of a wooden ladder against one side of the hole, leading downwards into absolute blackness. The air rising up from the dark shaft was rich with the aromas of food and smoke. I could smell sweat and damp earth.
“How deep is it?” I asked softly.
“Deep enough.”
I frowned, untrusting. “Who’s down there?”
“We are.”
“We? You mean, Roman Valles?”
“Yes. And the rest of us.”
I blinked and flinched. “The entire community lives in this tunnel?”
The soldier shrugged. “It’s not a tunnel. It’s an underground world. The tunnel leads down to it.”
“How many people?”
Again the big soldier shrugged his shoulders. “More than a hundred.”
I shook my head in slow amazement and then hissed the question. “Why?”
“It’s good tactics,” the soldier was becoming irritated by my questions. “Ever heard of the Viet Cong?”
“The Vietnam War?”
The soldier nodded. “The Commies hid thousands of soldiers in tunnels beneath the ground. They built an entire network of connected subterranean channels. It gave them concealment and surprise. It allowed them to move troops without detection miles behind our front lines. Our philosophy is the same,” the soldier got to his feet and checked his weapon as if putting the conversation to an end. He gestured at the hole with the barrel of his automatic weapon, like he was ordering me. “And besides,” he grunted as I put my foot reluctantly onto the top run of the ladder. I was looking up at him, his body towering over mine, his face hard, and the light positioned behind him so that the details of his expression were mysterious in the shadows, “besides… the undead can’t climb up or down ladders…”
“But the Apocalypse is over.” In my own ears the sound of my voice seemed almost pleading. “The ‘Affliction’ has passed. A year ago.”
“So says you,” the soldier sounded cynical.
I went down the wooden ladder.
I went down twenty-eight steps, descending to the bottom of the claustrophobic shaft and then emerging into a wide subterranean chamber the size of a large living room that had been dug below the forest floor. The ceiling was low so that I felt the same kind of urge to stoop that people experience when running beneath the rotors of a chopper. I lifted my hand and ran my palm across the smooth surface of the earthen ceiling. The ground above seemed to vibrate. There were vast wooden support beams to reinforce the structure, and two doors, like old-fashioned mouths to a mineshaft dug into opposing walls. I could see the flickering glow of a fire leaping orange light and shadow along the tunnel walls.
I stood perfectly still, breathing the dank air until all six of the soldiers had descended and we stood in a cramped knot. The lead soldier stabbed his hand at one of the tunnel openings and I stepped forward. The soldiers fell into single file behind me.
“The next chamber,” I recognized the voice of the soldier who had spoken to me on the hiking trail. He was close behind me, his voice rasping and his breath stale. “That’s where Valles is waiting.”
I went forward slowly. There was no choice. I could not turn back. As I got closer to the end of the shaft, the light became stronger. I felt myself walking down a gentle incline, the floor seeming to slope away beneath my feet. I counted one-hundred-and-twelve paces before the shaft finally ended and I stood at the edge of a large underground room, perhaps fifty feet square. The walls were roughly finished, the ceiling and support beams arranged with less precision than the chamber below the ladder. Light flickered from torches hung on the walls and from curious pinpricks of sunshine I realized must also have been concealed ventilation shafts that reached all the way up to the surface. The air was heavy but not fetid.
Clustered against the walls were desks and tables: an eclectic assortment of odds-and-ends furniture and chairs. There were grubby-faced people sitting at some of the tables, eating. They were wearing sweat-stained t-shirts and shorts. Their bodies were slick with sweat and the dirt of hard labor. They looked up at me with flickers of curiosity and then returned hungrily to the food before them.
Standing under a shaft of white natural light near the center of the chamber stood a man, removed and apart from all of those around him. He was wearing combat fatigues. On the sleeve of his jacket was the famous red and blue ‘AA’ badge of the 82nd Airborne. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, his expression thoughtful. He glanced at me, and then his gaze swept to the faces of the soldiers who were gathered at my sides.
“Damian? Is this him?”
The soldier from the hiking trail stepped forward and nodded his head. “Yeah. He checks out.”
“Anyone following?”
“No,” the soldier made his report. “He was watched all the way.”
“You took all counter-tracking precautions?”
“Yes.”
The man in the middle of the chamber seemed to relax. “And his vehicle?”
“Secure. Nothing suspicious.”
“Very well.” The man took his hands from behind his back and strode towards me, smiling.
“Mr. Culver. I am Roman Valles. It’s good to meet you at last.” He extended his hand.
“You’re a hard person to track down, Mr. Valles,” I said with classic journalistic understatement.
Valles shook his head. He had a short-cut crop of dark hair and a wide, unremarkable face. He looked ordinary, yet exuded a confidence and compelling force of character. It was easy to believe he was this group’s leader. He carried himself like a General.
“I’m not hard to find… if and when I want to be found,” the smile stayed on his face. “But if I didn’t want to meet you, Mr. Culver, I would either have ignored your messages and you would never have found me. Or… I would have brought you here – like I have – and then execute you.”
Valles’ smile seemed to flash with sinister intent. It lasted for only a split-second – so brief that it could merely have been a trick of the light or my imagination.
I felt an ice-cold chill shiver down the length of my spine.
“Why did you reply to my messages?” I managed to ask.
Valles shrugged like that information was secret. He dismissed the soldiers who had been my escort and they drifted away. Valles stared into my eyes like he was trying to see my soul.
“Why did you send the messages?”
“I’m a journalist,” I said, which answered nothing. I let Valles draw his own conclusions. He arched his eyebrows at me and the smile slid across his lips until it became just an upward tug at the corner of his mouth. “Damian is my brother,” Valles said, changing the subject. “My other brother, Adan, is here too. Adan is in the new shaft at the moment, leading the digging. Perhaps you will meet him before you leave.”
I kept my face impassive. “Will I leave? Or did you bring me here to execute me?”
Roman Valles laughed. It was a sound that didn’t suit the man. He clapped me on the shoulder the way a man greets a buddy at a bar.
“I didn’t bring you here to silence you, Mr. Culver,” Valles was still smiling, bemused. “I brought you here because I want you to tell our story. I want the publicity.”
That caught me off-guard. I tilted my head to the side and looked at Valles with curiosity. He nodded, as if the gesture was in answer to my silent question.
“Y
es, I mean it,” Valles confirmed. We had drifted towards a wall where a primitive radio set-up was arranged on an empty desk. A man was sitting before the set with headphones clamped over his ears and his back arched over the desk, listening with concentration. Valles touched the man’s shoulder and the radio operator twisted around with a sudden start. He snatched the cans off his ears.
“Anything?” Valles asked.
The operator shook his head. “Just the usual.”
The operator turned back to the Ham Radio set. Valles grunted and then turned back to me. “I intend on building an army here in Texas,” Mr. Culver. “A new army, made up from the remnants and survivors of the U.S. military, and anyone else fit and willing to restore order. That’s why you are here. I want you to write about us. We’re patriots. I want you to bring the people to us.”
“An army?”
“Yes,” Valles insisted. “The new world will need order, government, organization and law. Those things cannot be restored without the support of a strong military.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You want a dictatorship, with you as the leader?”
“No!” Valles’ face became hard and fierce in an instant. The denial was spat from his lips. “I’m a soldier, not a politician. When a government for the people can be established, I will hand over control of the army we build to those leaders. But first we need an organized, restored military. That’s my mission… and that’s why you are here. You will write your book and you will tell them about this meeting and the information I give you.”
“You need publicity.” It wasn’t a question.
“Correct.” It wasn’t a denial.
* *
Roman Valles cleared away space at one of the tables and we sat. I took the notebook from my pocket. Valles watched me in silence, his hands clasped on the raw wood of the tabletop, his gaze fixed. He looked composed, calm and in control. He waited patiently until I had found a fresh page. When I looked up again he was watching me expectantly.
The Enduring: Stories of Surviving the Apocalypse Page 13