An Underground Secret
It didn’t take long for the purge to begin. Rooms were searched and ransacked by Hodder’s men with a desperate kind of fervor. They were on the hunt for Joel’s family, and when they didn’t find them in their assigned living space, they searched all eighty rooms of the adjacent buildings. Anyone showing even a hint of subversive behavior was brought out into the public square and lined up to be read their charges.
Some fifty people in all fell under suspicion, which had more to do with finger-pointing by other residents who were scared and only trying to protect themselves. It was a modern-day witch hunt, and Hodder was clearly displaying the extent of his paranoid delusions and insanity. According to him, however, he wasn’t the one who was insane—everyone else was.
Despite all their searches, the Freemans and Joel’s family, the Carsons, were nowhere to be found. Their absence baffled and infuriated Hodder’s men. An even more extensive search of the entire base was conducted, but they still came up empty-handed. There were forces at play that Bill Hodder couldn’t understand. He felt his power slipping away, especially since the arrival of Greg, the outsider, when in fact it should have been quite the opposite.
Before ordering the purge of the base, Hodder had a heated private meeting with all of his men. With the exception of two trusted guards left to keep watch in the towers, they gathered in the operations center to listen to him speak.
The room was packed, and Hodder stood in front of them, arms crossed. Behind him was a large television, its LED screen smashed. All outside communications had been destroyed on the day of the initial mutiny. Their leader did not look pleased, and it was strange that a group of ex-convicts who could easily overpower him stood in fear of his retribution. It was the essence of group-think at work. Most of the men assumed that the others supported Hodder when in fact, most of them didn’t. But they had gotten too invested in Hodder’s sweeping vision to turn back.
Most of them had already committed murderous acts on his behalf and still needed Hodder to make sense of what they were doing. If anyone was going to provide leadership to the group or justification for the atrocities they had committed under his watch, it was Hodder.
Their leader seemed to be studying their faces, one by one, as his eyes swept from one end of the room to the other, and no one, not even his closest circle, knew why they had been summoned there.
Hodder stepped closer to the microphone. “We’ve reached a crucial moment where every action we take from here on out determines our fate. There is talk of a rebellion, and we must stamp it out immediately.” He paused, listening for the sharp intake of breath. “All of this has just reached my ears, coinciding with rumors of inflammatory talk among my most trusted men.”
They were noticeably baffled by his words, as some thought he was bordering on incoherence.
“That’s right,” Hodder said, as if reaffirming their thoughts. “It’s come to my attention that some of you believe that I’m unfit to be in charge of this base. After all of my steadfast leadership and determination, it comes as a surprise that you would see fit to question me.” Again, Hodder paused, as if studying each man’s demeanor.
“Pardon me,” Marcus said, interrupting and holding a hand up. Hodder stopped and immediately looked over to him, eyes wild with fury. Marcus asked, “Where is this talk coming from? Who is saying what?”
“That’s irrelevant,” Hodder continued. “What’s important is that your loyalty to the cause has come under suspicion.” He flew forward and kicked a nearby table over. “And I won’t stand for it!”
The room reacted with silence. Hodder regained his composure and pointed at the men, as if accusing them all. “You just remember, if the day ever comes where we are standing before others following the aftermath of this terrible time, we’re all in this together. What we’ve done here falls on all of us equally.”
The men knew it but couldn’t give voice to it. They said no words, but everyone felt the same. Who would protect them? They felt betrayed. Hodder had spoken in the past of ushering in a “new age” in which they shared power over the masses. Now he was talking as if the world they had once known still had considerable meaning. Worst of all, it sounded like he was trying to absolve himself of blame should the base be re-taken by the military.
“Don’t misunderstand me,” Hodder said, sensing unrest and making a hasty retreat. “It’s very unlikely that we’ll ever see the world beyond these walls, but should that day come, we have to remember why we did the things that we did. It was to ensure the survival of our species. The Ebola epidemic changed everything. Have any of you men ever considered that your own government would simply abandon you and allow you to perish from a deadly plague?”
Falling back on a bit of practiced charm, he told them, “Hell, being in politics, I thought anything possible, but not this. We were betrayed, gentlemen, we were betrayed by the very institution we’ve been taught to believe in our entire lives. We were betrayed by our elected leaders; we were betrayed by our fellow man, and we were betrayed by our God.” A collective gasp. “That is why we had to fight back!”
Hodder looked out into the group. Their eyes were uneasy, and he could tell that he was losing them. For him, it was all so simple: hold onto everything they had achieved through the most extreme measures. Base 42 was theirs. They had fought for it, lost men because of it, and he’d be damned before he ever let it go. Hodder pointed at a man standing near the front of the room.
“You, step forward,” he said. It wasn’t clear where Holder was pointing, and two men looked at each other, confused. “You’re Eric, right?”
A short, stocky man with an orange handlebar mustache and freckled skin pointed at himself. He wore a skull cap and a muscle T-shirt, exposing several tattoos that advertised his affiliation with a California biker gang. He had a pistol holster slung over his shoulder with a Magnum .45 seated in the pocket.
“Me?” he asked.
“Yes, please come here,” Hodder said.
The man reluctantly walked out from the crowd and approached Hodder. As Eric stopped in front of him, Hodder asked for his gun. “I want to see what you’re packing,” he said.
Eric looked around the room, and no one said anything in response. He dug into the holster, pulled out the handgun, and handed it to Hodder.
“This thing’s a real beaut,” Hodder said, taking the pistol and holding it up in the air. “Where did you get this? I mean, it’s not standard military issue. This is an outside weapon.”
Eric stiffened and asked quietly, “Well, where did you get your revolver?” He looked at the piece in Hodder’s pistol belt.
“Oh, this old thing? I bought it from a man who smuggled it inside the base. A man who’s in this room right now.” The man he was referring to was Marcus, whom he glanced at. Hodder held up Eric’s Magnum in admiration. “This is a really nice gun, I’ll tell you that.”
As Eric nodded, Hodder swiftly brought the piece down on his face, clubbing his cheek. With one strike, Eric fell to the ground. Some men in the audience began to step forward, but Marcus held up his arms and held them back. Hodder was relentless. He beat Eric over the head again and again, cracking his skull open, as Eric folded his arms over his head, trying to defend himself. The men stared ahead, shocked, even given what they had seen over the past several months. It made no sense to them. Hodder continued to mercilessly beat the man with the handle of the Magnum as he lay at his feet, stone-cold and unconscious. Blood was everywhere. It was all over the green carpet of the operations room, all over the pistol, and all over Hodder himself. He rose from his frenzied crouched position and looked at the men, breathing heavily with spittle running down his mouth.
“I won’t stand for any more of this talk behind my back. Do you hear me? Now all of you get your senses together and get control of this base before we lose everything. Do it now!”
There wasn’t a single objection in the group. Startled and shaken, the men shuffled out
of the room in an orderly file. Only Marcus remained.
“What the hell was that all about?” he asked.
Hodder tossed the Magnum to the floor next to Eric’s fractured and bloodied skull. “Sometimes, you have to put the fear of God in your subordinates.”
“But—”
“Get out of here and do your job!” Hodder shouted.
Marcus narrowed his eyes while displaying a hint of resistance. “You need to get your shit together.” And with that, he walked out of the room, leaving Hodder with a fresh corpse at his feet.
***
All hope was lost, Veronica thought. Her “trial” was pending, Greg had been captured, and her spirit had been broken. All she could do was lay on the mattress in her cell with her hand cuffed to a railing and try to keep her mind off the inevitable. She thought of her family and friends and how much she wanted to see them, to talk to them again and feel their touch—even that of her estranged parents.
She still had faith in Greg but little assurance that they could escape their fate. No matter where they went, death seemed to follow. Ebola was a fitting match for the other kinds of violence they had constantly encountered since the epidemic began.
If ever she had a chance to redeem herself in her final hours, she thought the time was then. Never particularly religious, she prayed quietly to herself, asking for an end to the horrors surrounding her. She prayed for life, for another chance, and for an end to the plague. For a moment, she felt at peace, when suddenly the door to her cell opened and a man she had never seen before stepped in. He entered her cell armed with a pistol and holding a file in his hands.
“Hello, Veronica, I’m Douglas. I’ve been assigned to look over you until your trial.”
Veronica was confused. Douglas was a large man, over six feet, but his bottle-cap glasses and geeky demeanor made him look less intimidating. He had short, grayish-hair parted to one side with a cowlick in the middle. He wore green hospital scrubs, and she couldn’t tell if he was one of Hodder’s men or one of the occupants of the base. However, the pistol belt around his waist was a clear giveaway that he was one of the bad guys. He was clean-shaven and friendly, but there was something off-kilter about him that sparked her distrust.
“What do you want?” she asked. “I don’t want to be bothered right now.” She turned away from him and looked at the wall next to her. She felt helpless cuffed to a railing and wanted to be left alone to her thoughts. Besides, he seemed scary.
He stepped closer. “Well, I have some nice information for you that I think will make you happy.” He flipped open the file and read from it. “You’ve tested negative and have been declared completely Ebola-free.”
Veronica shook her head in amazement, not saying a word. Douglas took a step backward and closed the cell door, instantly making her feel fearful.
“I think it’s pretty great news, how about you?” he asked.
Veronica paused, trying to think of how to respond. She held her free hand out and spoke. “Douglas, it’s the best news I’ve heard all day. Thank you. Now please leave.”
“Sure, sure, I can leave,” he began. Instead of turning to the door, however, he began to walk closer to her bed. “It’s just, I was hoping that we could talk. You know, maybe get to know each other.”
She was ready to lash out at him when suddenly, she noticed a ring of keys around one of his belt loops. “What do you want to talk about?” she asked.
Douglas nervously came nearer to her bed, still with the file in his hand. “I don’t know. Maybe you could tell me a little about yourself. Where you came from. What you like to do. Those kinds of things. Don’t see too many prisoners around here as pretty as you.”
Douglas looked down at the floor nervously, as if regretting the comment. “I mean. Well, you know what I mean.”
Veronica tried to keep her composure and turn the situation to her advantage. The strange man’s unexpected visit afforded her an opportunity. “That’s quite all right, and thank you.”
Douglas looked at her and smiled. “Do you mind if I sit?”
“Um. OK,” Veronica said. “But you have to take these cuffs off first. It would make me much more comfortable.”
His eyes followed her pale arm up to her bruised wrist, circled with handcuffs linked to the railing. “I don’t know if I can do that.”
“Please, Douglas. Just for a moment. Then we can talk.”
He appeared to be struggling with the decision and side-stepped near to the railing, his sneakers squeaking on the floor. “I guess. As long as you promise not to do anything.”
Veronica laughed and then covered her mouth. “What am I going to do, run amok in this cell?”
Douglas hesitated for a moment, then unfastened the key ring around his belt loop. Veronica felt elated. She had won the first battle. Now all she had to do was convince Douglas to let her go. He flipped through the many keys on the ring, finally coming to a series of much smaller keys, most likely for handcuffs. He leaned over the railing against the wall with a small key between his fingers.
“I’m not sure which one it is. This might take a while.” He placed it in the handcuff keyhole and turned it. It didn’t work. Veronica waited patiently as he tried key after key to no avail. She grew more apprehensive by the minute, and just when she was about to lose hope, the next key clicked and unlocked the handcuffs.
“There you go,” Douglas said. He released the cuff from the railing and Veronica was free. As she moved her arm away, the cuffs dangled, still connected to her wrist.
“Thank you,” she said.
“No problem,” Douglas said, standing over her bed indecisively.
“Have a seat,” Veronica said. She glanced at his pistol, then looked away.
Douglas hesitated and stammered but slowly took a seat on the bed next to her. The mattress sank as he sat down.
“So what did you want to talk about?” Veronica asked.
“Oh, you know. Maybe just get to know you some. Where are you from? What did you do before all of this shit went down?”
“I’m originally from Colorado, but I moved to Carson City about two years ago where I work at a bookstore. I love to read. It’s just my thing.”
“Me too!” Douglas said. “What’s your favorite book?”
“I don’t know,” Veronica said, pausing. She laughed. “What about you?”
“I like Science Fiction. Maybe Dune?”
“Me, too. I love Dune.” His face brightened as she continued. “And what are you doing here? You’re not one of Hodder’s men, are you?”
Douglas paused, looking upward. “Yes and no. I mean, I wasn’t originally, but I volunteered for prison duty.”
“What did you do before this?”
Douglas laughed nervously. “I worked for a correctional facility in Reno.”
“Really? Well, that makes sense. Might as well keep doing what you know.”
“Yeah, I had just got the job a few weeks before the outbreak.” Douglas looked down as his voice took a more solemn tone. “Things got really bad there. It was terrible. Ebola spread throughout the prison…there was…just nothing anyone could do about it.”
Veronica sucked up her pride and placed her hand on his shoulder, startling him. He looked over to her with surprise. The light from above reflected onto the thick lenses of his glasses. He was slouched over like some big child, and she felt the time might be ripe to try to appeal to his better nature.
“Listen, Douglas. What they’re doing here, it’s not right. You seem like a good person. You need to help me get out of here.” She tried to read his expression. “I was kidnapped and taken here, beaten, and locked up. My friend came to get me, and they got to him as well.” Veronica moved closer to him on the bed. “Our so-called trial is scheduled for tomorrow. I think they plan to kill us. Please, you have to help me.”
Douglas’s eyes dropped, and then he stared forward with a large sigh. Veronica quietly waited, hardly breathing.
“D
ouglas? Please listen.”
His backhand flew across her face before she could even finish her sentence. After a loud, startling pop, she fell back onto her bed in shock. Douglas rose from the bed and stood up over her as she buried her face into the mattress, trying to crawl away from him on her knees.
“You must think I’m pretty stupid, huh? Like I’m just some Joe you can toy with? You bitches are all the same. Flash us a little smile and try to get what you want. Well, I’m in control now, and the games are over.”
She lifted her head. Her eyes watered and her face stung with pain. “They’re going to kill me! Do you even care? What the hell is wrong with you?”
Douglas took a step forward and then fell onto the back of Veronica’s thighs as she squirmed underneath him. He leaned forward and placed his hands on the back of both her arms, pinning her down. Her face dug into the mattress as she screamed. Douglas ignored her muffled pleas for help, unfastened his pistol belt, and tossed it to the side of the bed.
“All I care about is that you’ve been cleared for Ebola. Now we’re going to have some fun.”
With his heavy weight crushing her, Douglas struggled to pull off Veronica’s jumpsuit. He was anxious and consumed with lust. Her head shot up and she screamed, “Wait! You’re doing it all wrong!”
“What?” he asked, pausing.
She could barely breathe, her face was turning red, but she continued. “Get off of me and let me take this thing off. Would you at least do that?”
Douglas stopped and seemed to consider it. He nodded and slowly pushed himself off of her. “Don’t try any funny business.” He grabbed the pistol belt on the bed and stood up as Veronica turned over.
“Let me catch my breath,” she said. The sumptuous shape of her breasts underneath her jumpsuit, combined with her exposed cleavage, excited him even further. As she pulled down her jumpsuit, Douglas could see that she wasn’t wearing a bra. He dropped the pistol belt to the ground and then began to unfasten his pants.
“Look into my eyes,” she said, pulling her jumpsuit down, exposing her breasts. Douglas couldn’t take his eyes away from her. It was just the moment she was looking for. Once his pants dropped to his ankles, Veronica fell back against the bed, drew her leg back, and flung it forward full-force, delivering a hard kick directly into his crotch.
End Days Super Boxset Page 109