When the dust cleared, two blasted bodies lay mangled in the trench, their heat signatures already fading, and Emory slid over the edge, pulling Marty in with her. She knelt beside the mummy bag and Sullivan kept watch above.
“Get your light out, Marty.”
Marty shined his light on an Asian woman’s face as Emory unzipped the bag to reveal her badly battered and naked body. Emory began an examination.
“Multiple broken bones,” she called up. “Distended abdomen . . . internal bleeding.”
“She must have survived the avalanche somehow,” Marty muttered in amazement.
“Poor thing,” Emory said, zipping the dying woman back up to keep her warm. “John, there’s nothing I can do for her!”
Sullivan’s face appeared over the edge. “How long does she have?”
“An hour . . . maybe.”
The woman found her hand. “My friends . . .” she whispered. “Tammy . . . Ted?”
“I’m sorry, they’re gone.”
“Find the camera,” the woman whispered, trying to squeeze Emory’s hand. “There’s video of the crater . . . for future . . . future study.”
“We have it,” Marty said.
“Take it to our friends in Oklahoma . . . an Air Force bunker there. Tell them Yon gave it to you. They’re geo . . . geologists . . .”
“There are a lot of Air Force bases in Oklahoma.” Emory said. “Which one?”
“Altus,” said Yon. “They’re at Altus.” She lingered another ten minutes then died.
In the morning, they returned to the site and examined the remains of the man and woman Sullivan had blown up with the grenade. Each of them had a pistol and a knife. Another hundred yards down the trench they found a truly surprising sight: a reinforced concrete tunnel in the side of the crater wall.
“Where the hell does it go?” Marty wondered aloud.
“I’m guessing it leads to an old bunker,” Sullivan said, stepping carefully around the edge to enter the tunnel without sliding away down the steep wall of the crater. Emory and Marty followed, all of them switching on the flashlights attached to their carbines.
“What kind of bunker?” Marty asked.
“SACOM . . . Strategic Air Command. If this tunnel doesn’t lead to a missile silo, it should lead to a command bunker.”
They walked along a steel grating until they came to an open blast door, which in fact had been blasted right out of its casement by the asteroid impact. The door itself was now embedded in the concrete on the far side of a twenty-by-thirty-foot living space. The room was scattered with the charred remains of unidentifiable items and a few partial skeletons that lay among the ash.
“Blast wave,” Marty said. “This place imploded and they were incinerated instantly.”
They found another blast door, also blasted from its casement, and stepped into a perfectly round room filled with scorched and flattened electrical appliances. The remains of a concrete island were in the center of the room, with exposed plumbing sticking up through it.
“That was a sink,” Emory said. “This was a kitchen.” She pried open a smashed metal cabinet to find little more than ash and some melted glass jelly jars.
They checked the entire level and every room was the same. All of the doors were blasted from their casements, and the rooms were scattered with incinerated remnants of what had probably once been furniture and human beings. In all, they found between fifteen and twenty partial skeletons.
Sullivan kicked a scorched skull across the room. “Our two cannibals must have been living here when the rock hit.”
“But how did they survive?” Emory wondered. “All these people were cooked.”
Sullivan shined his light on Marty’s face. “What do you think, Mr. Shock Cocoon?”
Marty thought for a moment. “Where’s the missile silo?”
Sullivan pointed back the way they had come. “The silo was at the other end of that tunnel we came in through . . . vaporized on impact.”
“Well, so much for that idea,” Marty said. “Okay, so the blast wave was moving laterally through these tunnels, following the path of least resistance . . . which means if our two psychos from last night were in here at the time of impact . . . they must’ve been beneath this level. So we’re looking for a hatch in the floor, probably one that opens up.”
After another quick search of the facility, they located a round hatch in the center of the floor near the island in the kitchen. They hadn’t noticed it the first time because it was hidden beneath a piece of scorched sheet metal. Sullivan turned the round wheel and pulled the hatch upward to open it.
“And voilà,” Marty said, shining his light down a red steel ladder.
“Think you’re pretty smart, don’t ya?” Emory said, hitting him in the arm.
“Simple physics,” he replied. “Who’s first?”
“I volunteer you,” Sullivan said.
Marty shrugged and stepped forward, but Sullivan grabbed him and pushed him aside. “If you got killed, Princess would never let me hear the end of it.”
Emory smiled as he climbed down the ladder. “Careful, John.”
“Yeah yeah.” After twenty feet he stepped onto the floor at the bottom and shined his light down a short tunnel into intact living quarters. “Bingo!” he called up. “Cocoon Boy was right. It smells like ass down here, but it didn’t catch on fire.”
He found a battery-powered lamp on a table and switched it on, filling the room with light as the other two descended the ladder.
The twenty-by-twenty-foot living space was a proper mess and smelled of body odor and excrement. A quick look in the lavatory explained the sewer smell, and Sullivan shut the door. “There’s no water to flush with . . . they’ve been shitting in a bucket.”
Emory kicked around in the trash on the floor, many empty food cans and wrappers, scattered books and magazines. Sour smelling blankets and clothing.
“Only took ’em five months to turn into animals,” Sullivan muttered.
Emory picked something up from the floor. “Check this out.”
The men came to stand on either side of her as she flipped through a pamphlet advertising a company called Survival Estates. It showed the renovation process of a decommissioned minute man missile silo and advertised the sale of individual condos within the newly renovated complexes, all of them sharing a common kitchen area and living room.
Sullivan grabbed the pamphlet away from Emory. “Lemme see that fuckin’ thing.” He stood paging through it. “You gotta be kidding me. Listen to this: ‘Feel secure in the knowledge that no matter what happens to the world above, you and your family will be safe and sound in your own personal Survival Estate.’ Survival Estate!” He smirked and gave the pamphlet back. “Those sorry fuckers upstairs deserve a goddamn refund.”
Emory paged through the pamphlet, shaking her head. “Fucking twenty-twelvers. My God, how stupid. Get this . . . this little room right here . . . it cost them a hundred grand!”
Sullivan looked at Marty. “And I thought you were stupid.”
“Oh, it gets better,” she went on, turning the page. “ ‘We offer round-the-clock security, state of the art telecommunications, and guaranteed technical support in the event . . . in the event of any malfunction.’ ” She laughed and tossed the pamphlet aside.
Sullivan chuckled. “I wonder where the repair crew is.”
“I’m wondering something else,” Marty said.
They looked at him.
“Where are the missing arms and legs?”
“That’s right!” Emory looked at Sullivan. “The bodies in the tent.”
“Let’s get the fuck outta here,” Sullivan said, heading for the ladder. “We must have missed another hatch someplace.”
Emory was following him closely up the ladder when she heard a pistol shot from a
bove. Sullivan’s full weight crashed onto her and she nearly fell from the ladder with him as he dropped to the concrete below. The hatch slammed above them, and Marty jumped off the bottom rung, shining his light to see a stream of blood running down Sullivan’s face from beneath his helmet.
“He’s hit, Shannon!”
She scurried down the ladder. “Watch the hatch!” she told him, dragging Sullivan clear. “If it opens, shoot!”
She grabbed the lamp from the table, set it down beside Sullivan’s head and pulled off his helmet to get a look at the wound.
“Is he dead?”
“Not yet.” Her fingers trembled as she probed his matted hair. “John, can you hear me? John!”
She found the bullet wound, and to her utter surprise, the bullet had not penetrated his skull, but was lodged in the bone just above his hairline. “He’s gonna be out of action for a while . . . but he’ll live.”
“Thank God!”
“Thank Kevlar, Marty. His helmet slowed the bullet down.” She decided to leave the bullet where it was for the moment, knowing it would help stanch the flow of blood, and got to her feet. “Any ideas?”
Marty took off his own helmet and stood scratching his itching scalp. “We’re rats in a barrel . . . and the idea man is out cold.”
“Can they lock us down here?”
He shook his head. “It’s not that kind of hatch. It’s geared in a two-to-one ratio on this side. That means we only have to turn it half as hard as they do to unlock it. The trouble’s going to be fighting our way up out of here . . . and that’s your department.”
“We need a goddamn grenade,” she said.
“What about the launcher?”
“There’s no way to open the hatch wide enough to fire it without getting shot, and we don’t— Hold on a second!” She took a knee beside Sullivan and pulled a yellow-tipped high-explosive grenade from his harness, remembering something she had learned in basic training. “Something about a centrifugal fuse.”
“That’s what arms it?”
“Yeah, I think.”
“Is the launcher barrel rifled?”
“Yeah, the grenade has to spin in flight to be accurate.”
He knelt beside her and took the grenade, spinning it nose down on the concrete like a top. He did this many times, spinning it as fast as he could without bumping it against the floor. “That should do it.”
“Don’t drop it or you’ll blow us to shit.”
He put the grenade in his pocket and went to the ladder. “I’ll need you to open the hatch so I can throw this thing into the room.”
He climbed quietly up to the top, and Emory climbed up tight behind him, hooking into his harness with a carabiner so she would have both of her hands free to push the hatch up. Marty hooked an arm over the top rung to keep them both from falling and took the grenade from his pocket. “Okay,” he whispered.
She twisted the wheel to unlock the hatch, and though she could feel someone fighting her on the other side, Marty had been right about the gear ratio, so she was easily defeating the other person. She felt the gear come to the end of its turn and whispered into his ear, “I’m pushing up in three . . . two . . . one!”
She had to shove with all her strength to lift whoever was sitting on the hatch, and she felt a muscle pop in her shoulder as she strained against the weight, but the hatch lifted nearly six inches before there was another pistol shot. Marty felt a harmless tug at his body armor as he tossed the grenade through the gap before Emory dropped the hatch.
They heard the blast on the other side, and Emory was shoving the hatch upward even before the flash of fire completely dissipated, urging Marty to climb with her because they were still hooked together. They struggled up from the hole as one being and sprawled on the floor with their legs not quite out of the hatchway, drawing their pistols from their harnesses and trying not to choke on the stench of raw cordite. There were panicked voices coming toward them, flashlights dancing on the walls through the smoke as they opened fire on the tunnel way.
Someone screamed and a flashlight fell, shining back into the tunnel to reveal three more wretched looking souls in filthy clothing, one of them a woman, their eyes wild with hate, their gums bleeding with scurvy.
Emory and Marty shot them down without hesitation and quickly reloaded, laying in wait in the gathering silence for close to ten minutes before daring to speak.
“What do you think?” she whispered into his ear.
“I think we got ’em all this time . . . but who knows?”
They waited another minute before Emory set her weapon aside and unhooked the carabiner from his harness. “You stay put . . . I’ll go for the M-4s.”
She returned quickly and they searched the immediate area, finding six freshly killed bodies. “Wanna look for their hideout to make sure . . . or get the fuck outta here?”
“Let’s get the fuck outta here.”
She went below and used smelling salts to bring Sullivan into semiconsciousness. “I need you to help climb outta here!” she urged him, dragging him back and sitting him up at the foot of the ladder.
“What the fuck happened?” he moaned. “My head is splitting!”
“Just climb, John L.” She pulled him up by the lift strap on his harness and helped him get his foot onto the bottom rung. It took them some time to reach the top, but within thirty minutes they were all in the hybrid and rolling slowly south over the rocky terrain, the video camera locked up in the glove compartment.
Marty drove while Emory removed the bullet from Sullivan’s skull and applied a dressing. Sullivan was still only in and out of consciousness, severely concussed.
“So where we headed?” Marty asked, glancing at her in the mirror.
“Might as well head for Altus AFB down in Oklahoma,” she said, climbing into the front and grabbing the road atlas. “We can give that camera of Yon’s to her geologist friends and see what kind of setup they got, maybe stay with them . . . unless you got a better idea.”
“I’m all out of ideas.”
She studied the atlas as they bounced along. “Okay. We’ll find a highway and drop down to Interstate 80, then cut east across Nebraska and drop down through Kansas by way of Topeka. That’ll put us real close to Altus when we hit Oklahoma.”
“Kansas,” he groaned. “You ever been through Kansas?”
She chuckled and closed the atlas. “One good thing about Kansas, Marty . . . an asteroid strike could only be an improvement.”
Thirty-Eight
Major Benjamin Moriarty pushed back from the table and sat studying what was left of his decimated officer corps. He was down to four lieutenants now and a mere handful of noncoms, having been forced the day before to put Captains Winterfield, Scarborough, and Phelter—along with ten other enlisted men—before a firing squad after trying them all for sedition and attempted mutiny. The one positive result of the debacle was that the battle for the collective conscience of the men was finally decided, and those few hundred who remained in the ranks now understood that the weak must serve to bolster the strong in whatever capacity was required, and that morality was no longer anything more than a defunct and pointless luxury.
The meal had been meager. A potluck affair of heated vegetables poured from mostly label-less cans scavenged from in and around the city of Denver. The meat had been provided by Captain Winterfield, and it was only the third time the officers were driven to eat another human being. The regular ranks had been supplementing their diet with human flesh for the better part of a month now, but Moriarty and his staff were still in the process of learning that it was an acquired taste, to say the most.
“Lieutenant Ford,” he said quietly, picking at his teeth with a thin sliver of wire. “Direct the cooks to find another way to season the meat.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Captain Winterf
ield may have been a candyass, but there’s no reason he should taste like one.” His men chortled dutifully, all of them having difficulty with the sweet flavor of human flesh.
“Lieutenant Yoder,” Moriarty said, noting the bilious look of his most junior officer. “You look a little green around the gills, son.”
“I’m sorry, sir. It’s still a little hard for me. I’ll adjust, sir. Don’t worry.”
It was no secret that Yoder had been a friend of Captain Winterfield, and Moriarty had chosen Winterfield for their meal with precisely that in mind. “I’m sure you will, son. You’re a fine officer and I’m depending on you to set an equally fine example for the men.”
“Sir.”
“Now, if the rest of you will excuse us, Lieutenant Ford and I have some things to discuss before retreat.”
The small hotel dining room cleared, and Ford sat looking at Moriarty through a pair of sagging eyes. He was sallow and gaunt-looking and his gums had begun to recede with the onset of scurvy.
“Eat some more,” Moriarty said with a gesture toward the platter in the center of the table.
“I’m fine, sir. Thank you.”
“Eat! You’re dying before my eyes, damnit, and I need you strong!”
“I’ll only throw it up, Ben.”
“Should I have put you on trial as well?”
“You know very well that I support you,” Ford remarked wearily. “It’s not my fault that starvation and cannibalism disagree with me.”
Moriarty despised the smaller man’s weakness but he needed him too badly, knowing that Ford was the glue between him and the rest of his staff.
“Then I want you eating two cans of cat food a day from now on,” Moriarty said, realizing that he was playing right into the lieutenant’s hands, but there was nothing to be done about it. Waiting him out wasn’t working.
“Yes, sir,” Ford said, wanting to shout Hallelujah! but concealing his victory.
“You will, of course, be expected to eat the minimum amount of meat before the rest of the staff. If they find out I’m treating you special, we’ve got more trouble.”
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