by Sam Sisavath
Danny had chosen living quarters with Carly and Vera, in a room designed for a family, with a queen-sized bed and a smaller single bed that could be unfolded from a crate. It was big enough for all three of them, and Carly had hung a sheet between the two beds for privacy. The room was in the back, near the bathroom. Without really thinking about it, Will and Lara had also chosen their rooms near Danny’s, essentially sticking together.
Kate was the exception.
“I’m going to have to start making up excuses to send Vera off on errands,” Danny said.
“Try not to give the poor girl nightmares.”
“No promises.”
“That’s not creepy at all, man.”
After a few minutes of wandering around the hallway by himself, committing the layout to memory, Will found Kate in her room, somewhere in the middle of the old residents of the facility and the newcomers.
There were other single rooms around them, and in the two hours since they entered the facility, Will met ten of the twenty-four people calling the facility home. The rest were scattered about the place, already in the midst of daily routines. They seemed like decent enough people, and he was glad they hadn’t turned the Entrance Hallway into a bloodbath. It would have surely soured everyone’s disposition.
He knocked on Kate’s door and waited for an answer. Unlike the concrete walls, floors, and ceiling, the doors were molded panel interior, made of composite wood. It was probably one of the few civilian touches in the entire place.
When he didn’t hear anything, he leaned against the door and said, “Kate, it’s Will.”
He waited again, but didn’t hear anything.
He was about to turn away when he heard, “Come in” from the other side.
Her living quarters were identical to his, with bright halogen lamps along the walls. There was a small bed at the far end of the room, a lamp on a nightstand next to it, a chair that didn’t look at all comfortable, and a small writing desk with another lamp perched on top. The halogen lights could be turned on and off with a couple of switches—one at the door, another near the bed. Otherwise it was a Spartan design.
Kate was pulling clothes out a box Ben’s people had supplied them, one of the many spoils of their occasional trips to the surface for supplies. She had changed into new pants and shirt, and was wearing sandals. They made her look comfortable and at home, and not the wired, often tensed woman from the road.
“Looks like you’re settling in.”
“I took a shower,” she said.
“How was it?”
“Hot. And great. You should take one, too, you kind of stink.”
He smiled, and was rewarded with a return smile.
He wasn’t entirely fooled, though. Kate wasn’t the same. Luke and Ted’s deaths had had a profound effect on her, and he could see the thousand-yard stare lingering in her eyes. She was putting on a brave face for his benefit.
“How are you doing, Kate?”
She looked at him for a moment, as if weighing her answer carefully. After a while, she turned back to her clothes. “You don’t have to worry about me, Will. You brought us here, like you promised. You can stop worrying about us now. About me.”
That caught him by surprise, and he didn’t know how to respond.
“I think I’m going to get some sleep,” she said. “They have sleeping pills in the Infirmary. I think I’m finally going to take some of those.” She paused, as if waiting for him to respond. When he didn’t, she said, “Thanks for coming.”
“Sure,” he said.
He took the hint and left.
He walked down the hallway toward his room in silence, trying to figure out what the hell had just happened with Kate.
*
Will needed something to take his mind off Kate, and found Ben on his way back to Operations. He fell in alongside the older man.
“You settled in already?” Ben asked.
“Not exactly. Where you headed?”
“I’m just doing my rounds, looking in on everyone before I close up shop for the night.”
“Mind if I tag along?”
“You didn’t take that shower like I suggested, huh?” He sniffed Will. “Maybe I was being too subtle.”
“Not in this lifetime.”
Ben nodded at Will’s bandaged hands. “You should get those looked at. That’s what the Infirmary’s for.”
“Later. Tell me about the people here. About this place.”
“There were ten of us in the beginning, but that ballooned to twenty-four. I guess a lot of people in town already knew about what Harold Campbell was building out here. It only took four years of year-round construction crews coming and going, after all.”
“How did you know about it?”
Ben chuckled and slapped his right leg, where he wore the brace. “Campbell wanted someone with military experience to do security over his facility until he needed it. You probably already know this, seeing as how you spent time here building this place, but Campbell was a little paranoid.”
“A little?” Will grinned.
“Okay, a lot,” Ben chuckled. “He refused to hire anyone that even smelled like a potential government agent. So he hired me. He figured a gimpy ex-Ranger would never be an active government spy. It helped, of course, that besides the gimp, I could still do everything he needed.”
“You were the one who brought these people here.”
“I brought nine, just the people I knew in town. The kid in the Control Room is one of them. Rick’s mother rented me the house where I stayed. She was a nice lady.”
“Was?”
“She didn’t make it. Not many people did. There are enough horror stories to last you a lifetime if you ask around.”
“I have a few myself.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“Campbell gave you the key to the place?”
Ben pulled out a plain rope necklace from underneath his shirt. It was nothing special, except for the circular pendant at the end, the size of a small quarter with a pronounced bump in the center. It looked like an elegant button.
“In case the facility needed work,” Ben said, “or Campbell needed to make a quick entrance, he wanted someone here to be ready to open the Door for him. This thing is like a key, except it works by remote. There isn’t actually a key, key. Besides this pendant, the only other way to open the Door is the big switch in the Control Room.”
“Did he make it? Campbell?”
“Never heard from him. That day, or the days after. It’s ironic. Or tragic. Depending on how you look at it.”
“He would probably say tragic.”
“He would probably say that, yeah. You know, for a crazy, paranoid bastard, he really wasn’t all that bad of a boss. He paid me a pretty decent wage—way more than I could have earned doing anything else, especially with this gimpy leg—for doing almost nothing for two years. I heard he paid the construction people pretty well, too.”
“He did,” Will nodded. “The guy who gave me the job said the work was going to be enough to sustain his company for years.”
“You’re talking about Tom Lerner, the ex-Ranger.”
“That’s him.”
“You think he’s still around?”
“If he was, wouldn’t he be here? He knows about this place.”
“I never thought about it that way,” Ben said.
They entered Operations and walked for a few more minutes until they reached a steel door marked Turbine Room.
Will’s teeth began chattering.
Ben twisted the handle. “This is where the magic happens. Try not to splooge in your pants.”
“I’ll do my best.”
Ben led him inside a cavernous room lined with catwalks on top, circling a large steel turbine that took up nearly half of the space. The catwalks wrapped around the circular, almost barrel-shaped machine, the source of the massive hum that vibrated through the facility. He had to crane his neck to see the very top of t
he machine, which towered over them.
He could hear the turbine blades spinning inside the machine and could almost imagine the rush of water flowing from Lake Livingston, racing underneath their feet, churning out electricity through the generator shaft. Years ago, he managed to talk one of the construction crews working on the turbine into showing him the blueprints, but to see the behemoth at work and in person took his breath away, even if every inch of his body was shaking from the vibrations.
Ben called to someone. A tall, gangly man in overalls leaned down from one of the catwalks above them. He looked to be in his fifties, with short, cropped hair and eyeglasses that had a crack across one of the lenses. “Peter, this is Will! New arrival!”
Peter waved down to them and shouted back something that got lost in the roar of the turbine. Ben shook his head and tapped Will on the shoulder and pointed to the door. They waved to Peter, who returned it, shouting something else Will couldn’t hear.
Back in the relatively quiet confines of the hallway, Ben said, “I don’t know how he does it. A minute in there and I can barely feel my teeth.”
“It worked the very first day you guys got here?”
“Campbell ordered the turbine be tested out as soon as the facility was finished, but there hasn’t really been a lot of need to use up the juice over the previous two years. In fact, when I opened the Door the day after the shit hit the fan, it was only the third time in the entire two years I’d been working for Campbell.”
“What happens if the turbine goes?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Ben shrugged. “Peter’s a science teacher at the local high school. He’s also an ex-Army guy, and we usually met up for drinks on Tuesdays. So when this whole thing went down, he was the first one I called. Without him, I wouldn’t have a clue how to even start the thing up. Peter keeps trying to tell me how it all works, but it’s all Greek to me. He says Campbell had this entire facility designed to be operated by laymen, so a lot of the work is push-button stuff. I’m not sure if that’s comforting or insulting, to tell you the truth.”
“Probably a little of both,” Will said.
“Follow me, I’ll show you what happens if the turbine craps out on us.”
Ben led him farther up the hallway, about twenty meters from the Turbine Room. There was another steel door at the end, but this one didn’t have anything that looked like a lever, only a long rectangle of glass on the right side that was big enough for a person’s hand.
“Palm reader?” Will asked.
“Yeah, but it works with this, too.” Ben fished his pendant out and waved it in front of the glass display.
The door slid open to reveal metal stairs leading down into a dark room below.
“After you,” Will said.
Ben led him down the stairs. Halogen lights along the walls flickered on automatically as they moved down into a subbasement level. Behind them, the door slid closed.
“This place was designed for 100 survivors,” Ben said, “but obviously we’re not anywhere close to capacity. So we can’t use up all the electricity the turbine generates even if we tried. That’s where these come in.”
They were at the bottom of the stairs now, surrounded by large, rectangular-shaped silver metallic boxes that reached from the floor of the basement almost to the ceiling. They looked like big shelves, each one containing an LED display in the center that was hooked up into the wall behind them. Will counted twelve in all.
“Power cells,” Ben explained. “Everything we can’t use up goes down here and gets stored in these containers.”
“Emergency generators?”
“Yup. And I’ve timed it. The generators take exactly eleven seconds to kick in if the turbine shuts down for whatever reason.”
“Eleven seconds exactly?”
“To the second.”
“What’s the capacity?”
“It can only hold so much, but Peter says one month of uninterrupted usage, at full power. Longer, if you conserve.” Ben walked over to a computer screen hanging by a steel bracket from the wall. He touched it and the screen turned on, showing graphical images and scrolling readings of all twelve fuel storage containers. “Not quite at full storage, but it shouldn’t take long to build up.”
“What then?”
“Then they stop storing and go into hibernation mode.” Ben touched a red button on the screen and the images faded to black. He turned back to Will. “So what do you think?”
“I think we’re lucky we got here in one piece.”
“Good. I’m going to need you and Danny to help me out here.”
“On what?”
“Everything.” Ben gave him a hard look, and for a moment he couldn’t help but feel as if they were conspirators inside a dark room, discussing traitorous plans. “I’ve been holding these people together by myself, but I could use a hand. Who we kidding? I could use two hands. It’s dangerous out there, and I’m not just talking about the creatures. What do you call them again? Ghouls?”
“It sounded appropriate at the time.”
“It’s not just the ghouls we have to worry about now,” Ben continued. “We ran into a couple of survivalists a few weeks ago. They started shooting as soon as they saw us. Lost one good man.”
“What happened to the shooters?”
“They weren’t very good at being survivalists. It wasn’t that hard to track them down.”
Will told him about the Sundays.
“The doctor?” Ben asked.
“Yeah.”
“She’s handling it well.”
“She’s tough.”
“Pretty, too.”
“I guess.”
Ben laughed. “Right. You guess.”
Will wasn’t sure how to take that. Before he could respond, the radio on Ben’s hip squawked, and they heard Rick’s voice: “Ben, it’s ten minutes till sundown.”
Ben unclipped his radio and spoke into it: “On our way.” He looked at Will. “Come on, I’ll show you what we’re dealing with when the sun goes down.”
*
There was something oddly terrifying about what he was seeing on the monitors, inside the Control Room a few minutes later. It was hard to tell how many of them there were, because they darted on and off the screens with almost serpentine speed, and it was difficult to predict their movements.
There had to be more than a dozen. Maybe two dozen. They emerged out of the woods, moving silently, and even the camera’s microphones had a hard time picking up the sounds of their bare feet against the soft dirt ground. They scampered around the open clearing, begrimed features camouflaged almost perfectly against the thick woods behind them and the nearly moonless night.
“That’s all they do,” Rick said. “Every night. They come out and move around the Door. Then—poof. They’re gone.”
“How long do they stay?” Will asked.
“Sometimes a few minutes, sometimes a few hours,” Ben said. “We can’t figure out what they’re doing.”
“They’re doing what they’ve always been doing,” Will said. “They’re probing.”
“Probing what?” Rick asked.
“The Door. Looking for signs of weaknesses since the last time they probed. It’s what they do. You’re looking at their forward soldiers.”
“Recon?” Ben asked.
Will nodded.
“Command and control,” Ben said. “What you were saying earlier. There’s a hierarchy in place. Leaders and foot soldiers. And we’re looking at the foot soldiers.”
“From every encounter we’ve had with them, they’ve always shown a remarkable ability to strategize. And there’s something else.”
“What?”
“You probably won’t believe me.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because I wouldn’t believe me if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.”
“What?” Rick said, tilting his head back, anxious to hear it now.
“I might have already
seen one of their commanders when they attacked us at the bank. It had blue eyes…”
CHAPTER 30
LARA
SHE SPENT MOST of her first day underground in the Infirmary. Not as a patient, but as its new caretaker. Ben said as much when he showed her the place.
“Will lied,” she told him. “I’m just a third-year medical student.”
Ben grinned at her. “Still three more years than any of us’s got.”
That made her feel better. Not that she was angry at Will for embellishing her credentials. In a way, she was flattered. It also made her determined to justify his confidence. Besides, she was at home here, back in her environment surrounded by things that she understood.
It felt right.
The Infirmary was fully stocked with enough supplies to take care of all the facility’s current occupants, and still plenty left over. Most of the equipment and inventory was still in boxes or shrink-wrapped in drawers and on shelves, with the exception of some aspirin and ibuprofen pills that had been opened and left on counters. She spent most of the day unwrapping and putting everything where it should be. She cataloged everything in one of the bulky laptops that looked twice as big as anything she had ever owned. It had a handle that made it look more like a suitcase when closed.
She was putting away syringes when she heard a knock behind her. She looked back to see Will in the doorway. “I was hoping you might have something for this,” he said, holding up his right hand, though he could easily have held up his left, since they both were covered in fresh bandages.
She waved him over to a swivel chair near a counter. “I need to see,” she said.
He held out his hands for her to unwind the bandages. It must have looked worse this morning, when the burns were at their reddest. They were second-degree burns, with the first and second layer of skin damaged, but that looked to be the full extent of it.
Will looked around the room. “How does a third-year medical student know where everything goes in an Infirmary?”
“I spent most of my weekends for the last two years working at free clinics around town. I learned a lot, but it might also explain why I had trouble holding onto a boyfriend.”
“Their loss.”
She blushed, and instantly looked over to see if he noticed. He was looking somewhere else, thank God.