The Dying of the Light (Book 2): Interval

by Jason Kristopher

  Civilians were packed in everywhere, jammed into every nook and cranny—the gym, all three bars, the common rooms of every dorm and warehouse. The broadcast was on every satellite channel, overriding every other bit of programming.

  Major Bill Shaw, Marshal Jennifer Michaelson, Director Reuben Hacker, and Colonel Burke were watching the broadcast from Hacker’s office, neighboring the large common room. And Shaw had never seen a president look so weary.

  “What I think you all need is the truth, something you can understand without having a doctorate, something that actually tells you what we’re facing here. You deserve to know the truth, so that you can protect yourselves and your families as you see fit. So I’m trusting you with this information, knowing that you will live up to my faith in you. With that in mind, ladies and gentlemen, what we are dealing with is—and I say this with utmost sincerity—zombies.”

  Shaw could hear shouting from the main room, and more than a little laughter, but the laughter had an edge to it that sounded a little crazy. He glanced over at Jennifer and saw that she’d noticed it too, but she shook her head at him and pointed to the television, where the president was continuing.

  “As you know, this illness is not contained to our corner of the globe. Other nations around the world are being notified at this moment by their leaders, who have been working closely with us since the beginning of this crisis. This disease is a global pandemic. Medical facilities, cities, towns, and even whole countries are being overrun by the infected.

  “Many of you are familiar with ‘Mad Cow Disease.’ The agent which causes this disease—a prion—is a natural protein that has become twisted from its normal form. In the case of this ‘new flu,’ however, the situation is much more dire. The prion will kill its host within sixteen to twenty-four hours after initial infection. Once dead, the host will then re-animate, and seek out new hosts.

  “There is no cure. Once infected, the host will die and reanimate. This process may take more or less time, depending on where on their body the victim was bitten. And yes, the primary mode of transmission is through bites, although any contact with bodily fluids will also result in infection.”

  “I don’t have to tell any of you what a zombie is. You’ve seen the movies and TV shows and read the comic books. What we are dealing with here is nothing short of a horror movie come to life. The dead are walking, and they’re hungry.

  However, as bad as this may seem, all is not lost, and even now a long-planned series of actions are taking place to safeguard our way of life. What you see here is a drawing of a bunker, built into the side of a mountain. This bunker will hold thousands of people, including all the food, water, and other facilities necessary to shelter them for up to twenty years. We call this Project Phoenix.

  “There are ten such bunkers spread across our nation. These bunkers are at this moment being stocked with supplies, as well as priceless historical and artistic treasures of our culture. Let me be clear. We will survive. The human race has resisted every attempt in our long history to destroy us. We will survive this as well. These bunkers have been outfitted with the latest in scientific equipment, and those who are chosen will work night and day to find a cure, a way for us to return to the surface of our world, and to save those left behind.

  “As of now, martial law is declared in the United States of America. All borders are closed, all airports and seaports are locked down. No unauthorized travel is permitted by air, land, or sea. Stay in your homes. Await your selection notification. Isolate the infected. Violence against military personnel or each other will be dealt with swiftly and harshly. Looting of any kind will be considered a capital crime.”

  Standing tall again, the president looked at the cameras one last time. “We will survive. We will go on. Life will prevail. In this, our darkest hour, I pray that God is with us all. Thank you.”

  Shaw looked over at Jennifer and Director Hacker, who were stunned. He didn’t glance at Colonel Burke, since the colonel had already known.

  Jennifer finally came to her senses, and looked back at him. “You knew,” she said. “You knew before you even landed.”

  Shaw shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I was… some of us were cleared for additional information ahead of time, just in case. And in this case, it turned out to be a damned good thing we were!”

  She shook her head. “Whatever.”

  He thought she might have said something else, but the noise in the other room started rising, followed by a sobbing wail that cut through the rest.

  Jennifer had bolted from her chair and was running before Shaw could even blink. He and the colonel reached the main room just as there was a loud crack from a pistol.

  “Quiet!” shouted Jennifer, though there was not a peep from anyone in the room at this point. Someone—probably the person who had screamed a moment ago—was sobbing softly in the crowd, but everyone’s eyes were glued to the marshal and the gun in her hand.

  She waited for a moment, then holstered the weapon. “I know you’re all in shock. I am, too. What we need to remember is that we’re all going to get through this, but only if we work together. No one here is sick,” she said, looking pointedly at Shaw, who met her stare without flinching. “No one here is a zombie. They’d freeze solid here, anyway. So settle down. Go back to your dorms. Get some shuteye. Take the day off.”

  People began to stand, pulling up others who’d fallen or were otherwise frozen in place.

  “There will be another announcement in the morning,” said Colonel Burke, stepping into the room. “All personnel are to watch the station news at 1000 hours. Now get some rest, everyone. That’s an order.”

  Shaw could see some people bristle at the idea of a military man giving them orders, but Director Reuben Hacker began circulating through the room, talking to folks and calming them down. He appeared to be well-liked in the community, which meant his help would be invaluable in the weeks and months ahead.

  Shaw glanced at Burke, who shrugged, ever so slightly. None of them knew how long they’d be there. Still, survival was survival, regardless of the crap happening back in the world.

  Chapter Two

  AEGIS Bunker One

  Z-Day + 1 year

  Admittedly, I was frustrated as I looked across the advisory board table at Kim, and that was ignoring the couple of weeks of personal tension that had been building between us. “I don’t care how many more trays Hydroponics wants! We don’t have the metal to spare!”

  Kimberly Blake and I had been pretty happy overall since getting married right about the time we headed underground, but lately we’d started to argue with each other constantly—and I’ll admit, it was mostly because of me getting snippy. She almost always responded in a normal tone of voice, which was one thing I hated about arguing with her. It made it so damned difficult to stay mad at her. And she did the same thing now. “There’s more than three tons of aluminum down there, David. We do have it to spare.”

  I shook my head. “And what happens if we give out sheets of the stuff to just anybody who wants it? How long do you think it will take us to go through that three tons? Not very damn long!” I threw my pen down and watched it bounce off the table, ricocheting into an unoccupied part of the room, fortunately. “And we’re damned sure not getting any more anytime soon.”

  “Hydroponics isn’t just anybody though, David,” said Sheila, the head of BioSciences for the bunker. “It’s what keeps us alive. Fresh fruit, vegetables… you know how important those are. I don’t have to explain it to you.”

  I sighed, running a hand across my face, trying to massage some feeling back into it. We’d been at this ‘Resource Allocation’ crap for hours, and I felt like we weren’t getting anywhere. “I know, Sheila, I know.”

  At the head of the table, there was a slight cough as the governor cleared her throat. Angela Gates sat in the plush meeting room chair. She was in her mid-fifties and looked all of thirty-five, which of course caused no end of quiet consternatio
n among the other women of Bunker One. Her somewhat slight build also somehow gave her a surprising athletic ability, as I’d found out when I challenged her to a game of tennis one day on the modified court of Level Four. As my father would’ve said, she had ‘whupped my ass six ways from Sunday.’

  “Perhaps now is a good time to take a break,” Gates said. As she glanced around the room, there were relieved nods from all the division heads, and she smiled. “In fact, why don’t we all take a field trip? None of these allocations are especially vital, and I’m sure we could all use a breath of fresh air.”

  I looked over at Kim, raising an eyebrow questioningly at the mention of fresh air. We hadn’t had that in a year and had no way of getting it. Kim shrugged and shook her head. Clearly, she didn’t know what was going on, either.

  “All right, it’s settled, then. Be at the Observation Deck elevator in ten minutes, everyone,” said Gates.

  There was some general chatter as we dispersed, taking the opportunity to stretch our legs, grab some coffee, or make our way to the restroom.

  Kim and I started toward the door to the hallways at the same moment, and I hesitated and stepped back to give her room—a dead giveaway that I wasn’t feeling too close to her right at the moment. Of course, that made her tense up, and that just made me even more uptight. She put a hand on my arm, but like the bastard I occasionally was, I shrugged it off with a mumbled, “Later.” I knew I didn’t have it in me to talk right then.

  A few minutes later, Kim and I were both all business once more as we approached the elevator to the observation deck, where the other seven members of the advisory board had gathered and were waiting for us to join them. The governor’s assistant, a short, quiet man named Daniel, held a whispered conversation with her as we approached, then nodded and left, smiling at us as he passed.

  I liked Daniel, even though he was eerily quiet, sometimes. I had nicknamed him “the ninja assistant” for his ability to show up exactly when needed without being called.

  Kim nudged me in the side and I turned my attention back to the governor, who was just answering a question from Orville Seward, head of Logistics.

  “We’re not talking about that right now, Orville. We’re here for some fresh air,” said Gates as she turned to the side and inserted one of only a handful of keys that opened the doors for this particular elevator. “We’ll get back to the meeting afterward.”

  Seward grumbled a bit, as he was wont to do, but stayed quiet as we all piled into the elevator. It wasn’t a tight squeeze, as the elevator was designed to accommodate classes of schoolchildren on occasion. The mechanism hummed a little, barely audible over the sound of the air rushing by.

  Several minutes passed, and after a muted ding, the doors opened onto the observation deck. With the protective shutters closed, the room was lit like the rest of the base, with the long, thin bulbs that were supposedly designed to exactly replicate the wavelength of natural sunlight. I had laughed when I found out about them. Which sunlight is that? I had wondered. Sunrise? Sunset? Dawn over the mountains or are we talking the sweltering heat of a Georgia August?

  I shook my head to clear it as Gates asked us to take seats on the comfortable benches spaced around the room. I sat next to Kim, and didn’t object when she slipped her hand in mine. In fact, it made my heart melt a little. Maybe we’ll be OK faster than I thought.

  “As I think all of you know, this room was designed to remind us that there is, in fact, a world up here,” said Gates, pressing a button on the room’s remote she had retrieved from a cabinet. The shutters receded into their alcoves, and the room was flooded with the soft warm light of a Washington sunset. From our vantage, we could see as far as Puget Sound. There was a gasp from one side, but I didn’t turn. My attention was riveted on the city.

  Or rather, where the city had been.

  “It’s gone,” came a quiet whisper from one of the women. “Just… gone.”

  She’s right, I realized. That’s why we can see all the way to the Sound. There was almost nothing standing between the bunker and the water. Tacoma, Auburn, Edgewood… everything south of SeaTac airport was razed, like the fires of Hell had consumed it. Nothing over a story stood, and most of that was charred, blackened from whatever hellish firestorm had swept through the area. I hadn’t been up here since Z-Day, but I found it hard to believe it had changed quite so much.

  Kim clenched my hand in an iron grip, and I noticed that she was glancing over at Gates who, for her part, wasn’t even looking out the window, but rather staring at the nine of us, her advisory board.

  Gates caught my eye and held it as she spoke. “I fought hard for these observation towers to be included in the plans for the bunkers. Most of the engineers were against me, and not a few of members of the military. They said the towers were an unnecessary expense and a potential weakness in bunker security. But I wouldn’t back down. I believe that the most important thing we can do is remember where we came from, and without seeing it for ourselves, without looking at it with our own eyes instead of some remote camera, we can never truly understand the impact of our loss.”

  She moved to one of the supports between sections of glass, placing a hand on the beam and smiling out at the world we had left behind. “I think sometimes—often, even—we forget why we’re in the bunkers. It’s only been a year, and look at us; we’re already fighting as though things like milled aluminum matter, in the end.” I noticed Sheila start to speak, but Gates cut her off. “Even if we have to build our hydroponics bays out of clay and straw, we can get by. Sometimes, I think we forget that, in our interminable meetings and schedules and reports and… well, and all the stuff we do to keep our minds off the real world.”

  I nodded, completely agreeing with her and wondering how we could have been so blinded by our circumstances. I resolved to come up here more often, to remember what was truly important, what we were all living for, and why.

  Gates had one more surprise for us, though.

  “At the same time I was fighting the grand high muckety-mucks, I had my own engineer make a slight modification to the design of this particular tower. As far as I know, it’s the only one that can do this.” I don’t know what she did, what secret button she pressed or hidden ID scanner she used, but suddenly the windows opened. Not a lot, just thirty degrees or so. Enough for the strong, cold wind coming up the side of Mount Rainier to blast us all from our ennui, from the doldrums of our underground existence and to put the fire back in our souls. It was nothing like the recycled, filtered air we had below.

  I looked over at Gates as the rest of the group—Kim included—moved forward to the windows, breathing in deep draughts of the cold mountain air. Gates smiled at me as though she was supremely innocent, one eyebrow slightly raised as if to say, “What?” I decided it was more likely to be Alfred E. Neuman’s classic phrase, instead: “Who, me?” I gave her a slight bow of the head and a grin, and was rewarded with a wink.

  Well played, Angela, well played, I thought. You know exactly how to keep us in line. None of us is about to question anything you do, now. Not with this reminder. I snorted and shook my head, then moved to take Kim’s hand at one of the windows.

  I wasn’t going to miss my fresh air, after all. Even if I knew it was the carrot Gates was using to keep her asses—pun intended—on the straight and narrow.

  We’d finally concluded the meeting, getting some actual work done this time. As it turned out, that literal breath of fresh air was just what we needed to spur us on. I let go of the aluminum argument, and Sheila agreed to at least investigate the alternative methods I had posited, such as the clay hydroponics trays. Among several other positive steps forward, I was feeling pretty good about our progress.

  Then we got back to our quarters and I noticed the tension between Kim and I all over again. But I was feeling optimistic enough from our successes earlier in the day to be ready to talk about it now. In my experience, that’s the only way out of a situation like this.
But, as usual, Kim beat me to it.

  “So what’s the deal, David?” she said, coming to sit across from me on the small coffee table in our equally small living room.

  And these are the big quarters, I thought. “I’m not sure, Kim.”

  “Think it’s PTSD?”

  I shook my head, stood, and began pacing the short length of the room. Pace, pace, turn. Pace, pace, turn. Damn, this is a tiny room. “I don’t think so.”

  Kim sighed. “Is it the kids thing?”

  I stopped pacing. We’d had discussions several times over the last year about having at least one kid, maybe more. Maybe now was the time to hash it out.

  The plan was for everyone to have kids, lots of them. After all, you can’t repopulate a world with a measly hundred thousand people. But I had concerns we hadn’t been able to resolve.

  “I want kids,” I said, sitting down across from her once more and taking her hands in mine. “You know that. I think we’d be great parents.”

  “But…”

  “But… well, look at us! We’re stuck hundreds of feet underground in a hole that we can’t come out of for probably twenty years because the surface of our world is covered with monsters. And I’m not just talking about the walkers. Look at what happened with Tom and his men. This is just… it’s not a good place, at all.”

  Kim kept looking down at our clasped hands, and I could see by the set of her shoulders that she was feeling defeated and saddened by my words. But they were nothing but the truth. How could I lie?

  “It won’t always be this way, David,” she whispered.

  “Oh, babe, I know that,” I said, trying to keep the frustration out of my voice. We’d had this same argument too many times. “I know it won’t. But how can we bring a child into this, knowing what we know? And what if Mary finally finds out that I’m infected? Who knows what that would do to a child? I won’t have some zombie baby.”

  Kim choked on her reply. “I know that, David. We’ve talked about this before. But Mary hasn’t been able to find anything out yet. What if she never does?”