by J. L. Harden
“And how do you know that’s where they are?” Thomas asks.
“Because I was just there,” Kenji answers.
Thomas is still against this whole plan. And so is Anna.
“I’m sorry,” Anna says. “This is too dangerous. I don’t like it. We need to go back. I’m not a huge fan of the prison. Actually, I hate it. But it’s worked so far. It’s the safest I’ve been in weeks. I know it’s a terrible way to live. But it’s about survival. Those guys, the soldiers, they won’t be there. They won’t. They’ll go back to wherever they came from. We can still make it work. We can reinforce the entrance. We can survive in our cells.”
I’ve come to realize this is the main problem of surviving the plague, surviving an extinction level event. You are constantly fighting a war on multiple fronts. One against the infected and the monsters. And one against ourselves. It’s hard work getting everyone to agree to do the same thing, especially when that thing requires you to risk your life.
Before Anna can convince anyone to go back to the prison with her, we hear footsteps. We feel footsteps.
We all rush over to the window and look out into the arena.
We can’t see anything. It’s too dark.
But we can hear the heavy footsteps. We can feel the vibrations through the walls of the warehouse. We can smell something. The stench of rotting flesh.
We hear a noise. A roar. A moaning sound. It almost sounded like a whale’s call.
Long.
Deep.
The strange noise echoes around the dark chamber.
Anna points out the window. “There it is.”
I look to where she is pointing but I don’t see it.
“Where?” Kenji asks.
“It’s right there. In the far corner.”
“I don’t see it.”
“It’s looking right at us,” she says. “It’s right there.”
I can’t see anything. Not a damn thing. Just darkness. But my imagination takes over. I see eyes. I see a mouth full of razor sharp teeth. I see the thing that attacked us in the town of Hope and at the military outpost. I see the thing that killed Daniel’s team of mercenaries in the middle of Sydney. I know it is big. I know it is impossibly strong. I know it is a hunter.
It is looking right at us. We need to go. We need to go right now.
More footsteps. Loud. Heavy. Fast.
Getting faster.
“It’s coming,” Anna whispers. “It’s coming right for us.”
Kenji is looking out across the arena. His face is a picture of concentration. It’s almost as if he is immune to fear. It’s almost like he is no longer afraid of death.
He is used to it.
He is fine living with it.
He is friends with it.
“How do we get into the catacombs?” Ben asks. “Where the hell do we go?”
“Down,” Kenji says. “We go down.”
The footsteps are getting faster. Louder.
We climb back down the stairs and we get the hell out of the warehouse just in time. The monster crashes through the massive building, destroying the entire structure with ease.
Kenji pushes us forward and leads us out into the floor of the arena. “This way!”
I feel exposed. I feel like I am being watched and hunted. I feel like we are about to be ambushed. “I thought you said we shouldn’t be out here?” I ask.
“I did,” Kenji says. “We can’t cross it. We have to go down. The entrance to the catacombs is a trapdoor. It should be around here somewhere.”
“Should?”
The monster is convinced we are still hiding inside the ruins of the warehouse. This buys us some time.
Kenji locates the trapdoor.
We run over to it.
But something is wrong.
Kenji shakes his head. “No. This is not the right door. This is the wrong door!”
The trapdoor is locked with a padlock. A rusty old padlock.
I’m guessing Kenji hasn’t used this particular entrance.
The monster is finished destroying the warehouse. It knows we are no longer there. It turns. We feel it turn. We feel it come towards us. The ground is shaking. The entire arena floor, the entire chamber, the entire labyrinth is shaking.
“We don’t have time for this,” Ben says.
He raises his shotgun and pulls the trigger and destroys the lock. The shotgun blast is deafening. The lock is completely destroyed, as is a huge section of the door.
Ben flings it open.
Kenji is shaking his head. “Too loud. We’re being too goddamn loud.”
“No choice,” Ben says. “Let’s go. We’ll worry about the noise if we get a chance, if we’re still breathing.”
Down we go.
Into the catacombs.
Just before I run down the stairway, I sneak a look over my shoulder. I see a large and powerful and dark shape moving towards us at speed.
The speed of the thing scares the hell out of me and causes me to trip and fall. I fall head over ass and tumble down the stairs. Kenji helps me to my feet. The others are standing there, at the foot of the stairway, in a narrow tunnel, wondering which way to go.
We have come to another fork.
“Which way?” Thomas asks. “Left or right?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Kenji answers.
Before we can make a decision on which way to go, before we can move deeper into the catacombs, before we can move away from the stairs, a massive, monstrous arm appears.
The monster has made one last effort to seize its prey. It is reaching out for us. It is getting closer.
It takes me a few seconds to figure out what the hell is going on. The monster is too big to fit through the small trapdoor. But this fact has not stopped it from shoving one of its massive arms down the stairway.
It is reaching for us, searching for us.
The arm is fast and powerful. Its claws smash into the walls. Giant black talons, slice into the rock with ease.
Kenji pulls me out of the way just in time.
The monster’s hand is thrashing around wildly. Eventually it begins destroying the walls and the walls begin to crumble.
Eventually the monster causes part of the narrow tunnel to collapse.
Chapter 33
I am lying on my back in the dark. I am breathing hard and so is Kenji. We hear the footsteps of the monster moving away. The noise and vibrations fade. The monster has given up.
Kenji switches his torch on. “Are you OK?”
I sit up slowly. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
Kenji shines his torch where the stairway should be. But it is completely destroyed. It has totally collapsed in.
The others are nowhere to be seen. Kenji and I have been separated from the rest of the group.
He walks up to the pile of rocks. “Jack!? Ben!?”
“Yeah,” Jack says through the rocks. “We’re all still here.”
“What the hell do we do now?” Thomas asks.
“Do you guys have a torch?” Kenji asks. “Can you see?”
“Yeah,” Ben answers. “Got the torch on my shotgun.”
“Good. On the wall you’ll find an arrow, a directional arrow.”
“An arrow?”
“Yeah. A small arrow etched into the rock. Can you see it?”
“No.”
“It should be there.”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Ben says. “There ain’t no arrows here.”
“What are you talking about?” I ask Kenji.
He shines the torch on the wall. Sure enough, carved into the rock, is a small directional arrow. “Someone has come through here and mapped the way out,” he says.
“Who?”
“Not sure.”
“Wait,” Ben says. “We found it.”
“Good.”
“Now what?” he asks.
“Follow the arrows. Stop when you get to the central burial chamber. We’ll meet you there.”
“Not far. About an hour’s walk. And keep an eye out for the infected. This place was deserted earlier, but you never know.”
“Infected?” Thomas says. “Down here? Goddamn it.”
“Understood,” Ben says. “See you in an hour.”
Kenji and I begin walking.
“Infected?” I ask. “I hate to say it, but we’re unarmed. And what did you mean, when you said this was the wrong trapdoor?”
“There are multiple entry points to the catacombs. They are spaced out around the edge of the arena. The entry point I had been using was not locked.”
“So we’re lost?”
“No, we should be fine.”
“And what about the infected? What if…”
“We run.”
Once again, speed and stealth are our only weapons.
We continue to move through the narrow tunnels of the catacombs, following the arrows. We walk for what feels like a long time. Hours. Days. The tunnels are dark and narrow. In some sections we have to turn sideways to squeeze through, in other sections we have to get on our hands and knees and crawl through.
We are constantly on guard, constantly in a state of high alert, waiting for the monsters and the infected to appear from the dark.
We walk in complete silence.
After a while, we round a bend and Kenji says, “We’re getting close.”
“How can you tell?”
He points to the walls.
Built right into the walls are the tombs. They are stacked up like bunk beds. They contain bodies, corpses. The resting dead. Some are more decomposed compared to others. Some are just bones. Skeletons.
I walk past the tombs and the dead, trying to keep my distance from the walls, trying to stay right in the middle of the narrow tunnel. “What the hell? Why are there tombs down here?”
“These are the people who built this place,” Kenji says. “The people who died building it.”
“How do you know that?”
Kenji points to a plaque on the wall.
To the brave men and women who gave their life for the pursuit of scientific progress and the search for a better tomorrow. You will never be forgotten.
“So these people were construction workers?”
“I guess so. And probably research scientists. Maybe some of them are military.”
“And they all died?”
“Apparently.”
“So why weren’t they given proper burials? Why weren’t they sent home?”
“Because this place was top secret. When these people started working here, they signed their lives away. They became property of the military and the company. They were assets. Expendable assets. Nothing more.”
We arrive at the central burial chamber. It appears to be empty. Branching off the central chamber are other, separate rooms. And these rooms are not empty. These rooms contain piles and piles of dead bodies. There does not appear to be any order. There is no respect. The dead are just piled up and left to rot.
“These are the victims of the labyrinth,” Kenji says. “The victims of the military’s training regime.”
“What are you saying?”
“My guess is that these people were prisoners. The baddest of the bad. They were trialed, found guilty. Thrown in here. They were hunted. They may have even been armed.”
“Hunted?”
“Yeah. Live enemy targets. Dangerous targets. Targets that shoot back. Targets that think.”
Kenji is shaking his head as he explains this to me.
“How do you know all this? Who told you?”
Kenji is staring at the piles of dead bodies. The torch is shining at his feet. His face is blank.
“Kenji? What the hell happened at the outpost? Where did you go? How did you get away? Who told you about this place?”
Kenji remains silent. No response.
And I feel like I am losing him all over again.
“Kenji, what happened? You just… you just disappeared!”
He finally looks up. He keeps the torch pointed down. “I was taken,” he whispers. “I was…”
He trails off, shaking his head because maybe he doesn’t really know what happened, or maybe he doesn’t want to talk about it.
“I was knocked unconscious,” he continues. “I think. Or drugged. I’m not sure.”
“You’re not sure?”
“The outpost. That’s the last thing I remember. I was on the gun tower. I had the infected lined up in my sights. I had the sun behind me. I had the perfect vantage point to cover you guys. I must’ve taken out thirty. Maybe forty. I was in the zone. And then all of a sudden…”
All of a sudden he goes missing and Maria was shot and all hell broke loose, and the goddamn military outpost was set to self-destruct and it self-destructed in a massive thermobaric explosion.
“What happened?” I ask.
“Darkness. I woke up in the dark. I felt tired. Lethargic. I could barely move. I thought I was alone. But I wasn’t.”
“Who else was with you?”
“Tariq.”
“Tariq?”
“Yeah. He said he had saved me. Dragged me inside. Got me to safety.”
“How did you survive the explosion? It was massive. We barely got out in time.”
“We survived in the safe room,” he answers. “It was deep underground. Underneath the outpost. I guess it was like a panic room.”
“So wait just a damn minute. Back up. Did you accidentally shoot Maria?”
“What? Maria was shot?”
“Yeah. Right in the goddamn chest. She would’ve been killed if she wasn’t wearing the NBC suit.”
Kenji shakes his head. “No. I didn’t shoot her. The last thing I remember is shooting the infected. One by one. I remember the nano-swarm showed up. I was hiding from it. And then Jack drove the Humvee away from the outpost to distract the nano-swarm. You guys ran after him. I was covering you. I saw an infected man chasing and gaining on Maria. I took him out.”
Kenji’s brow is furrowed in concentration. He is trying to remember how it all went down. But he can’t.
“This is the last thing I remember,” he says. “But I definitely did not shoot Maria. No way.”
I think about what this means, because as far as I can tell, it can only mean one thing.
Tariq shot Maria. Tariq tried to kill Maria.
“Tariq shot Maria,” I say.
Kenji nods. He is not surprised. “We should never have trusted him,” he says. “We should’ve left him there to die. We were warned. But we didn’t listen. He is a liar. He is evil. He is a psychopath. He knocked me out. While I was providing covering fire. He drugged me. And then he tried to kill Maria. When I woke, I had no idea if you guys had survived. I had no idea where I was. I had no idea what was going on. It was torture.”
This is all too familiar.
This is an all too familiar scenario.
“How did you get down here?” I ask. “How did you get inside the Fortress?”
I think back to the ditch of severed hands at the Vehicle Access Point. And it makes me sick to my stomach. Someone cut all those hands off. Someone who has no conscience. Someone who is prepared to do what it takes to survive and enjoys doing what it takes to survive.
“Tariq brought me here,” Kenji says. “I didn’t realize what had happened at first. I was so confused. He kept me in the dark. He kept lying to me. The whole time. But it boiled down to this; I was his protection. He had seen my skills with a gun. This is why he wanted me around.”
“So you walked from the outpost to the Fortress?”
“Yeah. I didn’t realize I was his prisoner until it was too late. Until we were inside. He threw me in here. Left me here to die. It was then, once I was behind bars that he confessed everything to me. He told me who he really was. He told me everything. He killed all those soldiers at the outpost. He was the one who set the self-destruc
t sequence. He is a killer. A mass-murderer.”
He is a psychopath.
“I honestly thought I was going to die down here,” Kenji continues. “I thought I was going to die alone. I thought I’d never see you again. Any of you. Ben showed up a few days after I was put here. I’m not sure how long it was. I lost track of time almost immediately. But Ben’s presence gave me hope that you were still alive. He would pass in and out of consciousness. He would talk about you and Maria in his sleep. I knew you were alive. I knew you were down here. I knew that Tariq, or whatever his name is, lied to me.”
“He told you that we were dead?” I ask.
“Yeah. He told me that you had all died in the explosion at the outpost. Or that’s what he led me to believe. So yeah, I thought you were all dead. It was this sick form of psychological torture. He was breaking me down.”
He is a liar.
“How did you get out?” Kenji asks. “How did you find this place?” He takes a deep breath. “Where is Maria?”
“We got away just in time,” I say. “Just before the outpost exploded. We got away in one of the Humvees.”
I tell Kenji what happened at Daniel’s camp and how we left him there because he went crazy. I tell him that Jack ran off to find Kim, and then Maria and I followed the military here. And then we were captured by General Spears and locked up.
I tell him about the man in the gas mask.
I tell him that he injected me with a time-release nano-swarm. I show Kenji my watch, and I tell him that in exactly twenty-four hours, the nano-virus will be activated and it will eat me from the inside. It will eat flesh and bones and everything.
I tell Kenji that the man in the gas mask has taken Maria. And that he is going to execute her on camera and show the world. And that this public execution, will most likely coincide with my death. I tell him I don’t know why. Most probably because he is insane.
I say, “Maria has been taken to the Control Center. This is where she is right now. This is where she will be executed if we don’t do something.”