Coop activated the flashlight and aimed it into the vent, giving the pair their first peek inside.
A curtain of ivy and cobwebs blocked their view. Lamar brushed them away with his spear tip, revealing corroded flanges on the top and bottom of the vent, which probably once held an industrial fan in place. The rest of the vent was clear and every bit as wide as the cover suggested. However, time and the elements had not been kind to it, with the closest partitions badly rusted and partially warped. Coop could see jagged creases of compressed metal at several points where the seams collided. It looked profoundly unsafe.
“So, who gets to go first?” Coop asked, hoping that Lamar would volunteer.
Instead, Lamar balled up his right fist and placed it in the upturned palm of his left hand. Coop grinned and followed suit.
“Ready?” Lamar asked.
Coop nodded.
“1 … 2 … 3 … Scissors!” Lamar said, holding his index and middle fingers out in the shape of scissors.
Coop looked down in disappointment at his choice of Paper.
“Fine,” he said as he knelt down and faced the opening. “But if I need a tetanus shot when all this is over, I’m sending you the bill.”
Coop entered the vent headfirst, with the flashlight in his right hand and the hem of his robes in his left, to avoid snagging them on anything. Lamar leaned down to watch his progress. The flashlight backlit Coop’s hunched-over frame as he carefully made his way on his hands and knees, trying to avoid touching any of the seams in the metal partitions.
Lamar took a deep breath and then followed him into the vent. The first thing he noticed was the musty smell, like old books left to decay in a metal tomb. He crawled forward and a shower of dust leapt into the sky, shimmering in the dim light as it slowly heeded gravity’s call.
He paused after moving five feet in. It was the point where the outside light failed to reach; until he caught up with his flashlight-wielding companion, Lamar was effectively blind. From that point on, he tested the path with his gloved hands before moving forward, feeling for any sharp edges. It was a laborious process, one made all the worse by the claustrophobia-inducing darkness. He could see Coop’s flashlight lightly bobbing up and down as he crawled forward, some 20 feet ahead. Out of nowhere the light began jerking wildly up and down. He heard Coop make a noise that was somewhere between a halted sneeze and a cry of pain.
“You okay up there?” Lamar called ahead, worried.
Coop’s only response for several seconds was spitting noises. The flashlight gradually stopped waving.
“Just a cobweb,” came Coop’s voice, which sounded strangely distorted as it echoed off the narrow metal walls.
Lamar grinned and resumed crawling. While the going was slow, he was gradually gaining on Coop. When the flashlight was 15 feet ahead of Lamar, it suddenly stopped.
“There’s a metal grate here,” Coop called out. “I’m going to try and open it.”
Lamar heard the sounds of metal reverberating.
“Oww!” Coop said, more annoyed than injured.
Lamar was now 10 feet behind him. He watched the light judder and heard the metal ring out once again as Coop tried unsuccessfully to force the grate open once more.
“Hang on, I’m going to try something else.”
Suddenly the flashlight spun and weaved, shifting between reflecting the walls and ceiling as Coop tried to turn around in the narrow space. Lamar realized Coop had succeeded when the flashlight shone directly in his face.
“You wanna lower that?” Lamar asked, turning his head and shielding his eyes.
“Here goes,” Coop said as he reared back and donkey kicked the grate as hard as he could. The reverberations were much stronger this time, and they heard the whine of something metallic on the other side giving way.
“Harder,” Lamar urged as he drew closer.
Coop exhaled loudly, held his breath for a moment, and kicked again. The metal whining sound was more pronounced this time.
“One more time,” Lamar coached him, now just five feet away. The flashlight under Coop’s chin distorted his face, the shadows turning his friendly mug into something hideous and unnatural. The ghastly face tensed up and then grunted in exertion as Coop kicked the grate hard as he could. The metallic whine turned into a wrenching clang as Coop knocked the grate loose from its moorings, sending it clattering across what sounded like a wooden floor.
“Way to go!” Lamar cheered, their faces now a couple of feet apart.
“I think I pulled something,” Coop said with a grimace as he crawled backward out of the vent.
The light suddenly disappeared as Coop stood up to explore his new surroundings, leaving Lamar alone in the dark. The light returned and motioned for Lamar to come. He followed, holding up one hand to shield his eyes against the brightness.
Lamar crawled out of the vent and into a room that time forgot. As he stood up and stretched his aching back, images leapt out of the shadows at him, only to sink back into them as the flashlight’s beam swept the bunker: a smiling face staring out of a framed poster, a rolled-up projection screen on the back wall, a pair of aviator sunglasses on a desk, an empty gun holster hanging over the back of a wooden office chair, an engraved cigarette case, an enormous stack of carbon paper.
The air tasted stale and vaguely metallic. A thin layer of dust covered everything. The room was enormous — too large for the light to reach from one end of the building to the other. A dozen or more desks lined both walls, separated by matching filing cabinets, with a wide open corridor in the center. Many of the desks had CB equipment on them with attached microphones. One had a reel-to-reel recorder, while another housed a projector.
The flashlight abandoned the furnishings to investigate the surrounding walls. A poster directly across from the pair announced that “Peace is Our Profession,” written in the kind of billowy letters normally reserved for 1940s cartoons. One below it showed a blonde bombshell in a bomber jacket and Air Force cap winking in a coquettish pinup pose. The text beneath her declared: “Keep ’em Flying!”
Lamar tapped Coop’s shoulder and pointed at a newspaper spread out on a desk to their right. Coop trained the flashlight on it while Lamar blew the dust off to read it. The paper was so old and brittle that his breath tore a corner loose, sending it flying into the inky ether. It was an old issue of Stars and Stripes, whose headline boasted: “DOD Hails Titan Missile’s Ocean-to-Ocean Reach.” Beside it was a story on Eisenhower revamping his New Look policy to address Cuba’s relationship with the Soviets. A headline below the fold mentioned that someone named the “Big Bopper” and four others had died in a plane crash. Lamar looked at the date on the masthead: Feb. 8, 1959.
It was eerie being in here, seeing so many artifacts from an era that was nothing more than distant rumor to either of them. It felt less like trespassing and more like grave robbing.
Lamar and Coop slowly worked their way to the other side of the bunker, scanning their surroundings as they walked. On the opposite side of the building they found a large section of floor space — some 300 square feet — that was completely empty. Lamar didn’t understand it until Coop pointed the flashlight at the pine-board floors to reveal long score marks, indicating that heavy equipment once stood there but had since been removed, probably when the facility was abandoned.
The beam of light dimmed momentarily. Coop smacked the handle and the light came roaring back, a stark reminder that they didn’t have time for sightseeing.
“So, what’s the plan?” Coop asked.
“Look for keys. We need to access the generator building. If we can get it running, maybe we can get some of this equipment working.”
Coop cast a doubtful eye on the equipment Lamar planned to operate. The desk beside him housed a rusty microphone attached to a rig four times the size of John’s C.B., with an antenna that reached six feet in the air. Its front panel was decorated with two dozen switches, buttons and knobs, some of which were unidentifi
ed because the lettering beside them had faded over the decades. Those that were still readable were indecipherable: “KLT455,” “Distance 41-Plus,” “RX/TX.”
“And you think you can get this stuff working?” he asked dubiously.
“If you’ve got a better idea …” Lamar intoned.
Coop didn’t, so he set the flashlight down on its base with the light pointing upward, giving them both just enough light to work independently as they started scouring the immediate area.
“Gotta say, this is not how I pictured my vacation when I booked it,” Coop joked as he rummaged through a filing cabinet, getting a small chuckle out of Lamar. “If only I’d decided to stay home, I could be studying the I Ching right now. Maybe with a bottle of suds by my arm.”
“Right now, Grammy’s cooking for 15,” Lamar said as he opened and closed desk drawers in search of keys.
“That’s one big family!” Coop said with an appreciative whistle.
“Thursday is cousins’ night in our household,” Lamar explained. “The whole clan gets together to talk sports, TV, how much they hate their jobs, who’s sleeping with who, and I’m just sitting in the corner, counting the minutes until they leave. I don’t have anything in common with them; it’s like I speak Java, they speak Perl. I never know what to say to any of them.”
“That actually sounds pretty sweet to me,” Coop said with a small smile that hid traces of bitterness.
Lamar looked at Coop like he was bonkers.
“My family rejected me after … the incident,” Coop explained, his expression souring as he reflected. “Nobody visited me in prison. My calls were refused. All my letters came back unopened. When I got out, I moved upstate for a fresh start. The first thing I did was write my folks a long letter telling them how I was getting on. Told them not to worry about me.”
Coop paused pensively for several seconds. After a nod of encouragement from Lamar, he continued.
“A month later I get a reply,” Coop said. “It was just one sentence: ‘Don’t contact us again.’”
“Ouch,” Lamar said, wincing empathetically.
“Your family may not understand you, but at least they didn’t disown you,” Coop said before returning to work.
An awkward silence descended on the pair, which only accentuated their unease in this oversized time capsule. Lamar had cleared out three desks and was moving on to the fourth while Coop searched the ones on the opposite wall.
“You come up with anything?” Lamar asked after several more minutes of searching.
“Squat.”
As Coop moved the flashlight over so they could check the last grouping of desks at the back of the building, a flash of color against the drab gray wall caught Lamar’s eye. The shadows made it hard to tell what exactly it was, but it wasn’t reflective like the framed posters and appeared substantially larger.
“Hey, Coop, can you bring the light over here?”
Coop aimed the flashlight in the direction Lamar signaled to reveal a four-foot map against the back wall, across from where the heavy equipment had once stood. Unlike a normal map, it was divided into quadrants, and featured no location or road names. Instead, it showed looping white lines across seemingly random parts of the terrain with numbers beside each swirl.
“What kind of map is this?” Lamar asked, mystified.
“It’s a topo,” Coop responded as he handed the flashlight to Lamar, who brought it in close so they could study the map together. “A topographic map. Instead of marking streets, it charts elevation. See these rising numbers here?” Coop asked as he pointed to a location in the center of the map. “That means this is a hill.”
They both fixated on a red pin in the lower-left quadrant of the map. It was positioned just west of a sizable blue blob that Coop guessed was a body of water.
“So, I think this is us here,” Coop said. “And that must be the lake.” His finger glided up the map as he looked for more distinguishable landmarks. It paused near the center. “See this area where the elevation dips? That’s gotta be the floodplain.” His finger moved right until it stopped on the western edge of the floodplain. “Which means the campsite is right around … here.”
“Forget the generator,” Lamar said, the flashlight bouncing in his hands as his excitement grew. “This is our ticket out of here. Let’s take it outside, where we can have a better look.”
Coop nodded happily as he removed the pin from the map and gingerly peeled it off the wall. The ancient map was delicate but made of sterner stuff than the newspaper, and it held together as Coop folded it up and stowed it in his jacket’s interior pocket.
He had started back toward the ventilation shaft when he noticed the light wasn’t following him. Coop turned to see that something had caught Lamar’s attention. He was aiming the flashlight at a desk to his left, staring at it intently.
“Lamar?” Coop said.
No reply.
In the center of the desk was a motivational desk blotter with two side-by-side images. The left side showed Elvis Presley in an Army uniform, saluting a superior officer. “Good Soldiers Follow Orders,” the text below it stated. On the right side of the blotter was General MacArthur, puffing on a corncob pipe. “Great Soldiers Don’t Wait for Orders. They Lead by Example,” read the text box below it.
But what had caught Lamar’s eye was a bit of impish graffiti on the blotter. Someone had drawn devil’s horns on MacArthur’s face and tried to cover it up with a Mickey Mouse sticker, which only partially obscured the doodling. Lamar’s eyes went from Mickey’s smiling visage to the message below and back again, burning the combination into his mind.
“Mouseketeers lead by example,” Lamar whispered to himself.
“Hey, you coming?” Coop called out from the shadows, snapping Lamar out of his musings.
“Sorry,” Lamar mumbled as he followed Coop over to the ventilation port. Coop got on his hands and knees and proceeded to crawl back into the shaft. Lamar took one last look around the bunker before following.
As Lamar wriggled his way through the shaft’s narrow confines, that phrase — “Lead by Example” — echoed in his mind, stirring something deep inside. While he had spent much of today’s journey reflecting on his many mistakes yesterday — getting the group lost, falling asleep on watch, trusting Ken — Lamar now found himself lamenting his conduct instead. Each memory was more painful than the last, like a pinprick to his conscience. And after each one, that phrase repeated, louder and more insistent.
The times he had treated the others contemptuously for falling behind.
Lead by Example
Hiding Ken’s tutelage from Gaby and Coop because he didn’t trust them enough.
Lead by Example
Barking orders at the others.
Lead by Example
Threatening to leave Gaby behind for questioning his decisions.
Lead by Example
Lamar crawled out of the shaft, blinking at the sky. After spending so much time surrounded by darkness, the overcast sky looked blindingly bright. As his eyes adjusted, they focused on Coop, who was standing beside the ventilation shaft with the map opened in front of him, spread out across the exterior wall of the bunker.
“I think I’ve figured it out,” Coop said, humming excitedly to himself as he studied the map. “This road on the map has to be that road right there,” he continued, pointing to the dirt trail off to their left that looped around the hill above before disappearing from view. “That’s gotta be Reactor Road. And it leads all the way back to the main highway. Now, if we follow the highway west for about …”
Coop paused to do some quick calculations, placing two fingers on either side of the distance converter in the map’s legend to get a sense of scale, and then applied that to the road.
“…15 miles, it should take us to the nearest town,” Coop continued. “I’m guessing that’s what this Fawke’s Mill notation means. Assuming it’s still there, we can … Lamar?”
Coop paused again as he looked up from the map to see that Lamar wasn’t listening. Instead, he was staring at the field they’d crossed to get here, his eyes wide with surprise. Coop followed his gaze and saw tiny patches of greenery sprouting throughout the fallow field. When they had crossed that field nearly two hours ago, it had been nothing but ash and dust. Now they could see tiny flowers starting to emerge from the soil, and the trees along the edge of the field were beginning to bud.
The transformation wasn’t as pronounced or jarring as what they’d seen in the clearing earlier in the day, but it had all occurred in the 45 minutes they’d spent in the bunker.
“Hollleeeey shit!” Coop whispered, giving a low whistle of admiration. He flashed back to Lamar’s prediction hours ago in the clearing, that they might find more patches of greenery like it, and now it had come true.
“How did you know?” Coop asked. “What does it all mean?”
Lamar continued to gaze at the slowly morphing field, tugging thoughtfully on his scraggly goatee for several long moments before replying.
“Maybe the iku aren’t what we thought.”
* * * Four Hours Until Sundown * * *
Beverly struggled to pull on her fur-lined jacket with only one arm. Her blackened left arm hung limp and useless at her side, oozing yellow-green puss through numerous open sores. She found the sight repulsive, so she wore gloves to hide it. The rest of her shivered as she layered on clothes, but no matter how she bundled up, nothing seemed to stave off the chill.
Her entire body ached, and her breathing was raspy. She held her good hand to her forehead, testing it for signs of a fever. Both of them felt ice cold.
As she zipped up her jacket, the door to the teepee opened and Gaby backed through the entrance, carrying someone’s legs. Ken came in behind her, lifting the unconscious man by the shoulders.
The Truth Circle Page 40