Sanctuary: A Post Apocalyptic Dystopian Thriller (Surrender the Sun Book 2)

by A. R. Shaw

  Another man dropped ahead of him. Bishop called forth the next team. In the back of his mind, he kept count of their losses. One injured, one dead. Please let that be the end, he prayed silently, though he knew they’d just begun.

  They rounded the corner then…They had them on the run. A door slammed, and a lock clanked.

  “Walt? First door.”

  “Detonate.”

  “Roger.”

  Bishop nodded at the soldier looking to him for confirmation with an eager smile.

  His name was Garrett Yeager, a quiet, tall young man with dark hair and an easygoing smile. He was originally from East Texas and was one of the Rockford Bay’s men who volunteered for the mission, a navy man who just happened to be equipped in the fine art of explosives. Yeager ran forward with his bag and landed on the floor, pulled out several items and affixed them on the lock, and then they all quickly retreated around the corner. Boom!

  They rushed forward again. This time the dim ambient light from above escaped them. They were on flashlights alone after getting through the bombed-out doorway. Backup lights flickered at the ceiling line at the end of the hallways. A clank on the concrete flooring caught their attention and rolled end over end. “Back!” Bishop yelled, and they retreated as a flash-bang grenade exploded. Bishop looked up through a smoky haze: there was only little damage other than grit blown from the sturdy concrete flooring.

  With ears piercing, he shook his head and opened his mouth to speak but couldn’t even hear his own voice over the tenuous ringing. “Move!” he yelled and grabbed the first soldier next to him, nearly lifting him off his feet and throwing him forward.

  The rest followed, crouched, armed, and ready. Yeager was already on the next set of doors, assessing the need. They were down and around the next flight of stairs. Again, Yeager detonated the lock…Bishop, this time, held back. A trap was in place…it’s what he would have done in the same set of circumstances. Even though they were working their way downward, he would have set up a contingency to lead them in a particular direction.

  “Walt, where’s the utility entrance on level three?”

  “Besides the main stairwell? Yes, a narrow utility hall on your left…a skinny gray panel door. Leads all the way through.”

  “Roger, Yeager, with me.”

  Bishop motioned for two of the men to stay, while the rest sought the secondary doorway that led down a narrow utility passageway covered in pipes and wires. They squeezed through with all their equipment, occasionally catching on the obstacles in the way single file.

  On the other end, another metal door stood in their way, covered in dust. The inside of the place reminded Bishop of something out of the sixties military era. Though he knew modern equipment had been installed, no one had been inside of the area for a very long time. He suspected not since the bunker was refurnished somewhere around 2020, with a thick layer of gray paint over the military’s old.

  As planned before, when they opened the door and stepped through to an empty hallway, the noise of people running echoed down the corridor. They were below them now. Bishop motioned five men to continue as the rest followed him, and as he rounded the next corner, there they were. There were only seven of them, armed with grenades and rifles with their backs to them. Two of his own men were on the other side of that door they were rigging to explode.

  Tapping Yeager on the side, he nodded to him to do his thing. With that, Yeager pulled out a smoke bomb and detonated it. They wanted to take them alive if possible. This was a diversion to try to communicate with them.

  “Put down your weapons!” Bishop yelled.

  Someone fired a steam of bullets, which blew chunks of concrete away from the corner from which they took cover.

  “We’re giving you a chance. You will die. Put down your weapons, now! Last chance!”

  Again they fired.

  And that was enough for Bishop. “Fire!”

  Through the darkened, smoky hallway, blast emitted from the streaming bullets. The fight only lasted a few seconds. They were cornered, and in the end, it was a regretful massacre.

  After removing his helmet, Bishop wiped perspiration from his brow after confirming the place was secure. Why did it have to be this way? They didn’t all have to die.

  Blood pooled on the concrete flooring as they neared the bodies with their flashlights handy. A now familiar iron odor hung in the air. His stomach lurched. “Check them,” he said and turned away in need to retch. A senseless loss of life…one that he felt powerless in the end to avoid.

  “Bishop? Over,” said Walt.

  “What?”

  “Was that it? How many down?”

  “Seven…they wouldn’t negotiate.”

  There was silence for a moment. Not sure of the other man’s reaction, Bishop just waited.

  “What floor are you guys on?”

  “Um…third, I believe.”

  “Good. Okay. I’m coming in.”

  “Wait, where’s Maeve and the kids?”

  “They’re fine. They’re right here.”

  “Stay with them till I get there.”

  “No. I’ve done my part. Mine are inside. In the greenhouse. I’m coming in, Bishop.”

  “We’re not secure yet, Walt.”

  “That’s thirty-one total by my count, Bishop. Those at the lake and now these seven. There are only families and a few soldiers left. That’s it. You’ve got them all. All that count anyway. It’s secure. Let me come in. I can reason with the rest.”

  He took a deep breath…he couldn’t blame the man for wanting to make sure his family was all right. Holding the mic back up to his mouth, he said, “Roger.” And then Bishop turned toward the bodies again and walked through them gingerly, stepping into the pools of blood. He slid open the barricaded door and squeezed through, his bloody footsteps leaving a fading trail behind him as he ran. He barely acknowledged the two soldiers he left there. “Be right back.”

  Running up the three flights of stairs to the bunker entrance door, he made it finally as Walt came crashing through. They barely made eye contact as they passed, each man on a mission to those he loved.

  As Bishop made it to the Osprey, he found the other guard vigilantly standing by, his eye on any and all moving targets. Bishop nodded to him as he approached, and the soldier stepped out of the Osprey to give the newly formed family some privacy.

  “Bishop!” Maeve said as she stood, and he grabbed her around the waist, pulling her to his chest.

  “I’m fine. We made it,” he whispered into her neck.

  “Did everyone…make it?”

  “No…” he choked out in regret and held onto her with a viselike grip.

  Chapter Twenty

  Two things happened in quick succession after Jax pronounced the man dead. The woman’s hand quickly bolted underneath her thigh, and in one swift move, she swung out with a long hammer, which clocked Jax on the side of his forehead. The funny thing was that he totally expected her to pull something, but he wasn’t ready for that.

  The flashlight he’d held skittered to its side on the ice, spinning in circles, the light beam on circuitous path like a sped-up lighthouse. Then she was on him. Again, she swung the hammer down toward his head with one hand and jerked on his gun with the other as she tried to wrench it from his grasp.

  He could have stopped her battering his skull in, but in his own mind, the greater risk was losing hold of his weapon rather than his consciousness. Then when the third strike was coming down, he’d had enough and used the weapon to block her descent and then used that same momentum to wallop her in the chin. Then he was up. She’d grabbed one of the packs on the ground and attempted to fling the weight of it at him.

  He blocked her move with his forearm as he tried to raise his weapon in close quarters. She screamed in anticipation and ran out into the dark. With the flashlight swirling on end, his vision distorted, and when he did gain on the rhythmic dilation in his eyes, she was gone.

  On on
e knee and breathing heavy in the hardened snow, Jax said to himself, “I’m getting too old for this.” The swirling flashlight finally came to rest on the body before him, casting a profile shadow beyond with the dead man’s eyes opened wide and frozen. The other canvas pack lay nearby. Hands shaking with the unused adrenaline in his system, Jax stood finally, thinking that perhaps he had not seen the last of the dead man’s companion.

  That’s when he grabbed up the canvas satchel next to the body. A distinct odor wreaked from inside. Opening the pack, he knew. He knew from the smell alone what lay inside.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  He rushed through the corridors, until he saw the bloody tracks on the concrete increasing in their intensity. “It’s Walt!” he yelled when he heard the other soldiers.

  “Hey, can you tell us who these guys are—were, I mean?”

  Walt slowed his steps as he passed by the fallen bodies. One of them was an engineer he’d known as Dave. Dave was a good guy. He had a son in the bunker somewhere, who was only twelve years old. He shook himself out of it. “Uh…in a minute. Let me make sure my family’s safe.”

  “Take two…we don’t know who’s hiding down there around the corners,” Yeager said.

  Walt barely slowed…he didn’t care.

  “Walt! Don’t be an idiot!” yelled Yeager.

  He wanted nothing more than to take off at a run again but soon found himself sliding in another man’s blood on the now slicked concrete flooring. Bloody tracks were every damn where. So morbid…His family couldn’t see this. They’d become attached to many of the now slaughtered dead people in whose blood he was now tracking down the halls.

  “Shit,” he said as Yeager and two other soldiers caught up with him. Walt began rubbing the marred tread of his boots on the clean concrete in order to shed the evidence that he’d been complicit in the killing. His family didn’t need to know yet that he’d bargained for their lives.

  No, he had to get down there and make sure they didn’t see this. He’d convince them to stay where they were. That was the only way. Later, when Alyssa would find out about his part in the whole thing, he’d deal with that then.

  “Let’s go,” he said and opened the next door down to level four. Yeager and the others followed him as he went, his footfalls increasingly sloppy.

  “Slow down, Walt!” Yeager yelled.

  Yeager was a younger man in his late twenties, and though Walt liked the kid, he wasn’t going to take orders from him. “We’re almost there.”

  “Slow the hell down, Walt!” Yeager yelled out again as they approached the next level and the closed doors.

  “Alyssa!” Walt began to yell. “It’s Walt, baby, open the door!” he yelled again and pounded on the exterior of the greenhouse level doorway.

  “Walt, they could be armed. Just wait, man,” Yeager pleaded.

  “Of course, they’re armed. Alyssa!” He pounded again three times, his fistfalls echoing down the hallway.

  “Look, man, you’re going to get us killed…”

  Walt raised his hand again to send another volley when the door creaked open. A moist heat hit him squarely in the face at such a contrast to the cold and the unmistakable smell of peat moss registered in his mind, but he barely noticed; suddenly he held a blond woman in his arms, never seeing her face. She was there sobbing into his arms as he held on to her for dear life. “Alyssa…Alyssa.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “Only children go first—all of them. Any under fourteen are the first to go. They’re smaller, so we can fit more in that way. We can pull the incubators from the hospital. At least even the cargo area on the CV-22 is pressurized.” Then he started trailing off on his thoughts out loud. “It’s their ears…the lumen, I’m worried about,” Jax said. “The altitude…” “The elevation over the Rockies…but the Osprey can stay low still…a few of them might end up with tympanic rupture…still better than becoming pot roast.”

  “What’d you mean only the children? You mean women and children first?”

  “No. That’s not what I said.”

  Raising his hands up, Austin said, “I…don’t want to separate families. That’s just asking for trouble. There’s no way anyone will go for that.”

  After arguing for what seemed like hours, though it was only half of one, both men were nearly yelling.

  “Look, Austin.” Jax firmed his mouth into a thin line. “I’ve seen starvation before. I know what it does to humans.” Shaking his head, sunken eyes flashed before him, dolls’ heads upon a wooden table. “No…we’re too far gone already. The children, youngest to oldest, go first. It’s the way it has to be. In fact, to make it fair, no mothers allowed. Teenage girls should help care for the children. Get them out of here. They’re nothing but prey here, anyway.”

  “Oh my God. You’ve lost your mind. No one will go for this! They’ll riot. And we don’t even know what we’re sending them to.”

  “We know what we’re sending them out of. That’s a given. After what I found in that pack this morning, no. This situation here…it’s failing fast. This society is breaking down, Austin. And sure, many will decide to stay, and that’s their prerogative.”

  “Jax, families will pack up and leave…out there, if we start breaking them up. They’ll take their chances…on the ice. That’s a sure death.”

  Silence lingered while both men took deep breaths.

  “They’ll die anyway. This is the only way they live in this scenario. Take away the temptation, now—before it’s too late.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “Stay with the bird, Harris. I’ll send someone else out here to help.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  As Bishop held Louna in his arms and led Maeve by the hand outside the plane as Ben followed, he said, “There’s blood in the snow out here…we don’t know why. It wasn’t us. But inside…there’s more, and it was us, regrettably.”

  “I know you tried, Bishop. I know you did your best.”

  “Wasn’t good enough, unfortunately,” he mumbled under his breath.

  “Bishop?” a voice came over the radio.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  “Structure cleared.”

  “Thanks, Yeager.”

  Someone had already moved the guard’s body by the entrance as he ushered his new family inside, and when he looked around, he saw one of his men with a body in a fireman’s carry walking away in the distance. “Hey, Dillon, not alone! No one goes anywhere alone!” he yelled and then grabbed the first man inside the bunker to go with him, armed. These men still have so much to learn.

  Once they got past the first floor, Maeve said, “What’s that?”

  A woman’s screams emitted from the stairwell below them.

  “I don’t know,” he said, quickly handing Louna back to Maeve. “Here, let me go check it out….stay right here.”

  Running down the stairwell, the woman’s anguished cries tore at his soul.

  Around the corner he found his men bearing helpless somber looks, while a woman tugged at a bloody body on the ground. “We’re sorry, ma’am,” one of his men said.

  “What’s going on here?”

  “You…killed him!” she screamed, her eyes full of hatred.

  He walked a few paces toward her crouched over her husband’s corpse. He waved for the other men to back away from her. He’d eyed the pistol on the dead man’s side. Grieving widow or not, he wasn’t taking chances with his men.

  “You didn’t have to kill him!”

  He watched as she transformed from a sobbing widow to a calculating murderer…the wheels were turning in her brain. Her dark, short hair hung over one eye. Dressed in black faded denim and a dingy purple sweater, her gray sneakers were coated in red from the blood-slicked flooring. Crouched down over the dead body, her left foot slipped in the blood, leaving a line as she slid her knee up. The whole time she glared at Bishop…the whole time her left hand cautiously and covertly leaned in toward the concealed weapon.r />
  “Stop!” Bishop yelled at her. “Don’t…don’t do it!” he yelled. As if in slow motion, she did do it. He held her eyes the whole time. In their depths, he watched as anger turned to despair. She’d already made the decision. She was not turning back, and he was going to help her do it whether he wanted to or not.

  “Please!” he yelled out finally, but she already had the weapon in her palm. It happened so fast. There was nothing he could do.

  He already had his weapon drawn on her, and then without even making the decision, his pistol discharged, and suddenly her wailing stopped. Her eyes, once in grief, and then anger, resignation…now relief. She lay backward with a single shot to her center mass.

  “God dammit!” His breath came in gasps.

  “Sir, you had no choice,” one of his men said, trying to console him.

  It was little consolation.

  “Bishop?” came Maeve’s worried voice from above.

  “Damn,” he said under his breath, knowing that Maeve not only heard the whole thing but also probably saw him from her position…not the woman but his actions.

  He also heard the sound of muffled crying coming from Louna. His heart shattered for that child. While he was trying to save her, he was also causing her more grief.

  “Clean this up,” he said to the men. Turning, he ran back up the stairs. He anticipated Maeve’s somber expression, but what he didn’t expect was seeing Ben standing there, with no emotion on his small face and his rifle in his small hands, standing in front of his mother. What in hell am I doing to these kids?