Fall of Man | Book 3 | Firebase:

by Sisavath, Sam

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know. A day. A week. But one of these days, those lights will go off and they won’t come back on. Anton’s plan was to implement his nonstop power system once he had enough money to do so. He had high hopes the civvies that got caught down here would have big enough wallets to make that happen.”

  “He was hoping, huh?”

  “Hope springs eternal, as they say. Though I’m starting to think that’s all bullshit.”

  Cole looked back at the door, trying to imagine the others’ faces when he eventually told them that he’d led them to a shitshow. LARS was supposed to be their refuge, their hidden escape from the craziness of the outside world.

  “Sorry,” Sal said. She sounded genuine.

  “For what?”

  “You came here for a reason. This was clearly not it.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” Cole said. “It definitely wasn’t this.”

  “100 pounds?”

  “Why?”

  “100 pounds?”

  “Okay, maybe not 100 pounds. Maybe 110.”

  “110?”

  “115. Geez, kick a gal in the crotch when she’s down, why doncha.”

  Cole wasn’t entirely sure about 115, either. It was probably a little bit…slightly north of that. Not that Sal was a big girl, but it’d been a while since he had to carry anything heavier than a 50-pound rucksack around for longer than a few minutes. And this was definitely going to take more than a few minutes. At least, if he wanted to be cautious and avoid getting killed on his way back to the elevator.

  “We definitely want to avoid that,” the Voice said.

  Definitely.

  “So let’s dump her and continue on our own.”

  Can’t do that.

  “Can’t, or won’t?”

  Can’t, Cole thought without hesitation.

  Oh, he’d thought about it. More than once. Seriously thought about it, too, but in the end there was just no choice because Sal didn’t give him any.

  He’d had two options that he could see to deal with Sal: Make her turn the elevator back on, then return to it on his own; or bring her with him like she wanted. He was prepared to follow through on his promise of the latter, but that was before he saw her condition. Except he couldn’t exercise the first option, because it wouldn’t have worked.

  “I can open it from here or at the elevator,” Sal had said. “Either option requires an override code. Which I happen to know and you don’t.”

  “At the elevator?” Cole had said. “All I saw was a button pointing up.”

  “You can slide the panel open.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “I should be; I helped install the damn thing. Hell, I helped install most of the electronics in this place. How do you think I survived this long? Sheer dumb luck?”

  There was nothing about Sal he would call “dumb.” She was clearly a smart woman despite the teen-heavy aesthetics of her wardrobe. She’d considered all the angles when she made her offer to help him; she knew exactly how to get him to do what she wanted: Help her escape LARS.

  “We could just, ahem, interrogate the code out of her,” the Voice had offered.

  Can we?

  “Sure, why not. We’ve done it before.”

  He had, but if there was one thing Cole had learned about (torture) interrogations—enhanced or otherwise—it was that you couldn’t really count on the results. At least, not when your life—or someone else’s—was at stake. (And right now it was both his and Emily’s lives on the line.) People who were in pain and who just wanted that pain to stop at all costs will tell you just about anything to achieve that end.

  So he’d agreed to follow through on his part of the deal: Take Sal back to the elevator. It was not the most optimal choice (The Voice had laughed at that. “Optimal, huh? This ain’t even 10 percent optimal, chum.”), but it was his only choice.

  Whatever happened, he had to get back up to Emily.

  “We’ve seen this movie before, haven’t we?” the Voice said.

  That didn’t matter to Cole. If he had to do it a hundred times, he would: Because getting to Emily and the child growing inside her was all that mattered then, now, and in the future.

  Fortunately for him, he didn’t actually have to carry Sal on his back. He couldn’t, anyway, given the dangers waiting for them between the control room and the entry hallway. According to Sal, there were seven crazies left that she knew of, that she’d spotted roaming the corridors in the last five days.

  “Seven, that you know of,” Cole had said.

  “Exactly.”

  “So there could be more.”

  “There could be.”

  “How many more?”

  “If I knew that, I wouldn’t have told you there were seven that I know of.”

  And that was how their conversation on the subject ended. Sal had kept track of the crazies as much as she could using the surveillance cameras, but there were blind spots that she still couldn’t see. Not just the ones where the hidden cameras were smeared on purpose with thick black paint but other parts of the facility that didn’t have eyes, such as some of the private quarters.

  “How many private quarters?” he’d asked.

  “Two. Both belonging to Anton.”

  “Anton.”

  “Yeah, Anton. No surprise, but he didn’t want cameras watching him while he slept or, ahem, did other things in his private abode.”

  “He has two quarters?”

  “One where he sleeps and the other where he works out. He’s a bit of a fitness freak. But also a bit of a germophobe. So he has his own personal gym. I guess he doesn’t like sharing his sweat with other people, even his really rich clientele.”

  Seven crazies. One of them was Fred the celebrity chef. The others were a combination of LARS staffers and the clients that had been down here, being wined and dined by Anton and Fred, when the shit hit the fan.

  “Four staff, including Fred, and three civvies,” Sal had said.

  Cole hadn’t bothered to ask her for specifics about the survivors. He was going to shoot, stab, or kill anyone that stood in his way between the control room and the elevator. The only one that would survive his path back up to Emily was Sal.

  “For now,” the Voice said.

  Cole hadn’t answered that.

  “Right?”

  He remained mum.

  “Oh, come on,” the Voice said. “She played us like a fiddle. She at least deserves a bullet to the other leg for that.”

  The Voice was probably right (“Probably?” it said, laughing.), but Cole couldn’t afford to think that way. He had to simply accept what he had to do and proceed like there were no other choices.

  Because, frankly, there weren’t.

  Sal had survived the initial day of the infection by a combination of sheer luck and skill, weaving her way from where she was—the generator room, two corridors down—and over to the control room while everyone was busy killing each other. Or killing the ones that weren’t infected. She hadn’t gotten to her current location scot-free; a crazy got her in the thigh with a screwdriver. Three times.

  “His name was Ronald,” she said, “and he would have gotten me a fourth time if Pete didn’t jump on his back and started bashing his head in with a hammer. You might have seen Ronald outside there.”

  Ronald, of course, was the dead body outside the control room with half the back of his skull missing and most of his brains coating the floor.

  Sal had managed to stanch her bleeding with a towel from a small connected bathroom, then found a roll of duct tape to seal the wounds. She’d been smart enough to clean the wounds first.

  “How’d you know about duct tape?” Cole had asked.

  “Huh?” she’d said.

  “Duct tape. How did you know it’d work?”

  “I didn’t. It was the only thing I had available. This reminds me to tell Anton to put a first-aid kit back here.”

  The duc
t tape was wrapped tightly around her right thigh, with another towel placed between the sticky side and her skin. Sal, like Dante, Zoe, and even Fiona, knew how to stay alive even if they didn’t have all the skills that Cole or Emily did.

  To allow Sal to move (so he didn’t have to carry her), Cole had created a crutch for her using the arm of the chair she was sitting on then attaching it to a broom handle he’d found in a small closet. The duct tape that had saved Sal’s life came in handy again, and he used it to fuse the two parts together.

  “Whoa, you totally MacGyver’ed it,” Sal had said when he handed her the finished product.

  “Mac-what?”

  “MacGyver. You know. That guy from that TV show who could make things out of anything?”

  “I don’t know who that is.”

  “You don’t watch a lot of old TV, do you?”

  “You do, apparently.”

  “Yeah, well, try getting stuck down here for months at a time. You figure out pretty fast that TV Land is the best channel evah.”

  He wasn’t sure who MacGyver was, and Cole couldn’t “make things out of anything,” but he thought he had the next best things: A pump-action shotgun and a Glock pistol. Of course, whether he’d still have all the ammo for them between the control room and the elevator was another story entirely.

  While he was creating Sal’s crutch for her, Cole tried the radio again. He shouldn’t have bothered. He got only static.

  “What’s that?” Sal asked.

  “It’s a radio,” Cole said, clipping the two-way back to his hip. It didn’t work now, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t work later. The thought of tossing his only link to Emily left him cold.

  “Yeah, I can see that,” Sal said. “Who’re you trying to reach? Your friends in The Welcome Room?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which part of ten floors of solid concrete don’t you understand?”

  Cole sighed. “So how exactly do you communicate with the guys upstairs?”

  “There’s an intercom system in the elevator paneling.”

  “I didn’t see anything.”

  “You also didn’t know there was a hidden compartment in the paneling, either,” Sal said.

  They stepped outside the control room with Cole leading the way. The outside corridor was just as empty—except for Ronald, the dead man with the missing back half of the skull, on the floor—as the last time he’d seen it. Bright lights buzzed above him, and the generator in the nearby room hummed, providing the ever-present trembling along the walls, floor, and ceiling.

  But no crazies.

  Not yet.

  “All clear?” Sal asked from somewhere behind him.

  “All clear,” Cole said.

  “For now,” the Voice said.

  Cole ignored it and stepped outside, then over Ronald’s lifeless body. He kept his ears open and his eyes forward, fully expecting a crazy to round the corner thirty yards up ahead at any second.

  Clink!

  Cole spun around.

  “Oops,” Sal said. She had kicked the screwdriver in Ronald’s hand with the other end of her makeshift crutch. She flashed him a slightly embarrassed grin. “Sorry.”

  “She’s going to get you killed,” the Voice said. “You’re not going to make it to the elevator to even turn it back on. She’s going to get you killed first. You know that, don’t you?”

  Maybe.

  “Oh, there’s no maybe about it, chum. It’s going to happen.”

  Don’t be so pessimistic.

  The Voice laughed. “I’m just trying to keep you on your toes.”

  Yeah, well, you’re doing a pretty shitty job of it.

  “Okay, okay, I’ll do better.”

  Good. Now shut up so I can concentrate.

  “Yes, sir!”

  The Voice might have laughed, but Cole was too busy turning around and moving up the corridor.

  Tap-tap as Sal followed, the tapping noises echoing each time she placed the bottom end of her crutch against the floor. The wooden stick would have made an even louder sound if he hadn’t wrapped another towel around it, then duct taped the fabric into place. It would also keep Sal from slipping by giving her better traction control.

  He hoped it was enough, because if not…

  No, he couldn’t think about the if not part. It had to be enough, because he had to get back to Emily.

  Not in an hour.

  Not two hours.

  But now.

  “What the hell is happening up there?” he’d asked as he stood in front of the wall of monitors. It was the surveillance system that Sal had been using to keep tabs on him and everyone else still running around LARS.

  There were ten monitors—five on top and five more on the bottom—embedded into the wall. Each one was the size of an average computer monitor. The control board could toggle between different cameras with the push of a button, but that wasn’t all it could do. One of them controlled the elevator, but if Cole thought he could back out on his deal with Sal, she quickly corrected him.

  “I put a passcode on the controls, in case you were wondering,” she had said.

  He had grunted, all the while focusing on two of the monitors: They showed different angles of the warehouse aboveground; what Emily had called Anton’s Welcome Room.

  And Cole didn’t like what he saw:

  Emily and Greg were inside the smaller of the two offices, while the others were milling about in the larger one. There were men in BDUs walking around the building, armed to the teeth. The only comfort Cole could find was that both Emily and Greg—but especially Emily—looked fine. Or, at least, he couldn’t see any obvious injuries on her. The others, too, appeared unharmed.

  But there was nothing about what he was seeing that he liked. And that pretty much convinced him he had to get back to Emily as soon as possible, even if he had to carry Sal on his back.

  Luckily for him, he didn’t have to do that. Not that it was going to make the task on his hands any simpler. But then again, he was used to doing things the hard way. That was how he’d lived most of his life. At least, until he met Emily. She’d changed more than just his life; she’d altered his future.

  Emily…

  Cole peeked around the corner and took in the hallway with the generator room.

  Empty.

  That was good. He wasn’t looking forward to shooting his way to the elevator so soon. Not with his currently limited ammo supply.

  Six shells for the shotgun, and nine bullets for the Glock.

  Fifteen “rounds” in all.

  Cole stopped next to the corner.

  “What’s wrong?” Sal asked behind him.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Why did you stop?”

  “I’m thinking.”

  “About what?”

  About how I’m going to get the both of us to the elevator and aboveground without neither one of us dying.

  He said out loud, “Nothing. Let’s go.”

  “You first,” she said.

  He smirked, not that she could see it. He went around the corner, the Remington leading the way. The Glock felt heavy on his hip, but the pouch with the two spare shells behind his back was light.

  Much, much too light.

  “Eyes on the prize,” the Voice said. “We’ve been in worse jams, remember?”

  Yes, we have.

  “And we got through all of those, didn’t we?”

  Yes, we did.

  “So we’ll cross this bridge, too, even if we have to kill everyone in our path.”

  Yeah, Cole thought, even if I have to kill everyone in my path…

  Chapter 16. Emily

  “He’s on the other side?” Stoner asked.

  Emily nodded before putting the radio away. She’d gotten it back from Zoe and had been trying to reach Cole. He hadn’t responded. She wasn’t sure if he could even receive her. Or, for that matter, if he was even still alive down there.

  Don’t think like that
. Cole’s still alive.

  He’s still alive…

  “What’s your blood type?” she asked Stoner, hoping to steer the conversation away.

  “Why?” Stoner said.

  “Just answer the question.”

  “Hey, who’s the one with the bigger gun here?”

  Emily rolled her eyes, purposefully letting him see it even while she fed new 9mm rounds into her half-empty magazine.

  Stoner and his men had arrived with enough ammo and guns to weaponize a small town. Fortunately for her, they weren’t stingy with the good stuff. The extra rifles, handguns, and bullets were in rucksacks piled up on a table. There was a specific bag carrying enough MREs to last a few weeks, along with more of the gas canisters that Stoner’s men had tossed into the warehouse earlier. Everything was military-grade, which made perfect sense since they were all ex-soldiers until very recently.

  The leader of those men was chuckling. “All right, tough lady. My blood type’s O negative. Why?”

  “So is mine.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes. So is Greg’s. And Bolton’s. Dante’s. The others, too.”

  That was mostly true. She didn’t know Tommy’s blood type, but it was a good bet he was O negative just like the rest of them.

  Stoner’s eyes widened slightly. Not by very much—probably because he didn’t want her to see his surprise—but it was enough to indicate just that: surprise.

  “And?” he said anyway, even though she suspected he already knew what the revelation meant.

  “This thing that happened,” Emily said, “it’s not affecting anyone with O negative blood. You, me, and the others.”

  She looked out the office window at Cameron, the young man who had been standing guard outside earlier but was now walking around the warehouse with Greg and Tommy. The others—mostly the women—were still inside the bigger of the two offices nearby, with the exception of Zoe, who was outside with Dante.

  They were all looking for that hidden way down to the LARS facility below, going on the hope that one actually existed. But the more she thought about it, the more she was convinced it did. After all, how did Anton get all the machines and heavy equipment where they needed to be? The elevator in the center of the room was regulation-size. There was no way you could transport the supplies needed to run a place like LARS using it, even if you were to do it one at a time. Even if that were possible, it was too time-consuming and inefficient. And if she knew anything about Anton, inefficiency wasn’t one of his traits.