by Henson, Lynn
“Huh?” Blake replied.
“Never mind,” Clayton said more to himself, “Guess it should’ve been obvious that this shithole isn’t the place you’re bringing us to.”
But Blake wasn’t so sure. I don’t feel the pull anymore. There’s no urge to leave. Why not? Clayton’s right, we’d be lucky if this shed provided shelter from rain, much less keep us alive. So why do I feel like I’ve lost something? He suppressed the urge to look inside the shed again and said, “Let’s look around here.”
“What? Why? There’s nothing here,” Clayton observed.
“There, uh, might be something to scavenge here,” Blake said.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Clayton said, incredulous.
“No, no... Maybe it’s a good idea. I could use a few minutes,” Bree admitted. “Can you make sure the shed is safe so we can go in and help the people who were hurt in the landing?”
Curtis looked at her for a moment and shrugged. He opened the noisy sliding door and after checking to the left and right sides, he moved in assault rifle ready. Clayton followed after him, drawing a pistol out of his jacket pocket, leaving Bree, Kim, Lisa, and Blake outside. Bree asked in a lowered voice, “What’s going on? Why are you stalling?”
“Because... because I don’t feel any strong feeling to go in a particular direction,” he admitted.
“What? What’s going on?” Lisa asked, confused.
“Later, later. I’ll explain later,” Kim promised, “So this is the place? This isn’t exactly what I had imagined.”
“No, this isn’t the place... I can’t really articulate what I’m feeling. But I think the closest I can get is that I have this strong feeling like I’ve lost something,” he tried to explain.
“So there’s something here that we need to find?” Bree asked.
“Something that might lead us to where to go?” Kim further asked.
“Um... definitely maybe,” he answered.
Kim glared at him, “This better not be some kind of joke.”
“Take it easy,” Bree defended him.
“Alright,” Kim acquiesced. “I don’t suppose you could describe what we’re looking for? Maybe a hint?”
“Sorry, Kim,” he sighed. “I’m sure if we can find it, it will be obvious.”
“I bet you can’t even promise that,” she said over her shoulder as she walked in the direction they were going prior to stopping at the shed.
“I’m confused,” Lisa admitted.
“Walk with me,” Kim called back to her. “I’ll try to explain.” Lisa hurried after her. Curtis emerged from the shed. “There’s nothing in there but shit. Literal and figurative. Do what you have to do, I’ll walk back the way we came and handle any of the infected that are still coming our way.”
“Thanks, Curtis,” Blake said gratefully. He didn’t say anything as he walked towards where the zombies were approaching. The shed door screeched again as Clayton pushed the other one open and came out. “There ain’t nothing of value in there. And if we’re planning to catch some Z’s in there, we’re in for a mighty cold night,” he reported.
Bree went inside and Blake followed after her. They found a relatively clean spot on the floor and Bree sat down with her back to a wall. She spread her injured leg out gingerly and carefully probed her knee with her fingers. Cammy stuck her head in the door and sniffed. Blake guessed whatever smell test she had administered was passed as she decided to come inside followed by Herbie and Bob.
“Aren’t you going to sit?” Bree asked him.
“Oh, no. I’m going to go look around. If I sit down now I’m not sure I’ll be able to get back up,” Blake told her. Bree nodded and he headed outside, pausing at the door to let John, Gao, and Doris come in.
A few steps out of the shed he heard gunfire from his left. A look in that direction confirmed that it was Curtis. He headed in the opposite direction, where Kim and Lisa had gone. He had only walked a couple of minutes when he arrived at another section of the property with more concrete foundations, but no structures built on top of them. What the hell? Did like a tornado hit this place and suck away all the housing? Lisa and Kim were entering a copse of trees. He walked over towards them and noted more gunfire in the distance. They looked up at the sound of shooting and saw him approaching. Lisa waved and Blake tried to hurry over to see what was on the other side.
As he cleared the trees, he immediately saw another concrete foundation that stood at the center of a copse.
“Look! Doors on the ground!” Lisa observed as she stepped up onto the concrete and crouched to examine them. “Maybe there’s like a bomb shelter under there.”
The doors in question were huge. If opened you could drop a large truck through them.
“That looks pretty heavy duty for a bomb shelter,” Blake observed. “Maybe it’s for farming?”
“Farming? Like for what?” Kim asked.
“Maybe to store grain? Maybe this used to be a farm and they parked their harvester thingy over these double doors and dumped the grain in?” Blake hypothesized.
“That sounds plausible,” Lisa agreed. Blake crouched down to look closer. “I wonder how they open.”
They left the double doors and walked around the perimeter of the concrete foundation. “With these trees surrounding this foundation, it feels like a magical glade.”
“A what?” Lisa asked, confused.
“Like unicorns and shit,” Kim clarified.
“Not like that!” he objected as he moved into a dense part of the trees surrounding the concrete. “Well, kind of like that actually.” He pushed through a particularly dense pair of bushes and emerged in a partially concealed area. He was looking at what appeared to be the door to the top of a stairwell. Compared to the dated looking frame made of concrete that surrounded it, the door itself looked to be very modern looking. It looks like something out of a science fiction movie. I half expect there to be lights on it or a control panel that shoots a laser into your retina. He walked up to it and ran his hand across the front. Cold and smooth just as he’d expected, but he didn’t see a lock, a card reader, or any obvious way of opening the door. “Blake?” Kim called.
“Coming,” he said as he left the small area and pushed through bushes to re-emerge into the magical glade. When he freed himself from the bushes, Kim and Lisa looked up at him, their expressions a mix of surprise and relief. “Where’d you disappear to?” Kim wanted to know.
“I might’ve found something,” he pushed at the bush like he was holding a door open and beckoned them over. “Want to see?”
They exchanged a glance and hurried over. After a short but intense bout of walking through bushes, Blake showed them the mysterious door that must lead underground. They examined it for a minute, touching it as Blake had. “This is completely out of place here,” Lisa murmured.
“Besides being such an expensive looking door?” Kim asked.
“Agriculture really isn’t my area of study, but I don’t think this door qualifies as farm equipment,” Lisa elaborated. “Even if this leads to a bomb shelter, I would think the door would be more normal looking. How does this even open?” she asked as she stood feet apart in front of the door and ran her hands along the edges.
“Kim? Lisa?” called a female voice from the concrete glade. Kim looked in that direction and made her way through the bushes. “You’ll be ok here, Lisa?” Blake asked. Lisa waved him away without looking at him as she continued to look over the door. He decided to follow after Kim.
Doris was just coming into the glade from the direction of the shed. Kim was walking over to her, waving. “Oh. You’re here?” Doris asked, brushing dust from her clothing which Blake noticed she’d swapped for a clean set. Gao carefully shimmied in after her, trying not to let any plant life touch him. “What’s going on?” Kim asked.
“Bree asked me to tell you to come back. More infected are coming this way. They want to talk about what to do,” Doris reported.
“L
isa!” Kim yelled, “Come on! We have to go back!” The bushes rustled and Lisa popped out of them, brushing twigs from her shirt. They exited the glade together and walked back to the shed. The distant shooting was now occurring with more frequency. They walked into the shed where everyone was clustered near the doorway so as to make use of what little light remained since the sun was setting. Kyle nodded as they walked in and said, “Ok. Curtis told me that zombies are coming in every direction and once we lose daylight we’re going to be in pretty deep shit. We need to find shelter. Question is, is this rickety shed shelter?”
“Did you guys find anything?” Bree asked in Kim’s direction.
“Nothing that’s going to be suitable to spend the night,” Kim answered.
“So we move on. Or take our chances here,” Clayton summed up grimly.
“Well, how safe is this shed?” John asked. “If we just shut ourselves in here and make sure the door stays shut, won’t we be ok?”
“Those doors won’t hold,” Blake told him, “I bet if I tried I could bend them out of shape. Those things never stop. They’ll keep at it no matter how long it takes to get in here.”
“We’d be safer on the roof,” Lisa suggested, “Like back at the base.”
“It’s different here,” Bree pointed out, “If we get surrounded, we’ll be stuck on the roof.”
“Then we go to someplace more defendable,” Kyle said.
“We only have an hour of sunlight left,” Clayton warned, “Maybe less. If we don’t know where we’re going and it gets dark it’s going to be real easy for them to sneak up on us.”
“Is that better than getting stuck here?” Blake thought out loud, “Do we know how many infected are heading our way?”
“Curtis said he’s shot maybe a dozen or so of the ones that followed us here from the crash,” Kyle said.
“Landing,” Bree corrected.
“Crash landing, thanks,” Kyle continued, “But he’s having to walk around because there are more coming from different directions, so it’s really hard to say how many are on their way here.”
“How do they know we’re here??” Doris asked, sounding a little upset.
After a moment Blake answered, “Might be the noise from Curtis’s rifle.”
“So he just stops shooting then,” John concluded.
“No...” Kyle said as if it wasn’t totally obvious, “If he hasn’t been shooting at them they’d already be up in our shit.”
“We stay here and kill all the zombies, or we run and find someplace better?” Gao complained.
“Nobody said it was ideal,” Blake pointed out.
“Where is this awesome place you promised? I want option three,” Gao further complained.
“Do we know where this place is?” John asked reasonably, “Maybe if we found a house and it has a map or someone we could ask then we’d be able to find this safe haven.”
“That sounds like a plan,” Clayton agreed. “Anybody got a better idea?”
When no one said anything, Kyle said, “I’ll go roundup Curtis.” He walked outside.
“Pack up,” Clayton suggested. “Gotta head out as soon as they come back.”
The group collected their things and congregated outside. After doing one last walk around the shed, Blake went outside and pulled the doors shut. Everyone looked a little more perky after having taken a break and their loads looked a little lighter than they appeared earlier. They headed in the direction of the magical glade, and after a few minutes, they arrived at the trees surrounding the place.
“Can you guys look at something?” Blake asked of the group and led them through the bushes after prompting them to put their stuff down. They stood nuts to butt in the small area in front of the door.
“Where does it go?” Cammy said in awe.
“We think maybe a bomb shelter,” Kim said.
“How do you open this?” John asked.
“No idea. Curtis?” Blake asked.
“What?” Curtis answered.
“You’re in the military. Is this like a military door or something?” Blake clarified.
“You know I’m a private first class, right? This looks like something that belongs on a space station or something,” Curtis said with a grunt.
“Why didn’t you tell us about this a few minutes ago?” Clayton asked.
“It’s locked,” Lisa reported.
“Yeah, sorry. But does anyone have any ideas on how to open this door?” Blake asked everyone.
“Hold yer horses there,” Clayton said in sudden realization. “Is THIS the safe place you’ve been leading us to?”
He exchanged a look with Bree and said, “It might be. I’m not entirely sure.”
“What the hell you talking about?” Clayton demanded to know.
“Just that... it will be obvious when we see it,” Blake tried to explain.
“You holding out on us?” Clayton demanded, sounding hostile.
“No! No... it’s just... it’s hard to explain,” Blake stammered.
“Better try,” Clayton said flatly.
“This is the place,” Bree said suddenly.
“It is?” Clayton and Blake both said at the same time.
“But we haven’t figured out how to get in,” Bree continued, “So we can either leave and hope we can find a house or something, or we can work on this door.”
“Alright,” Clayton said after taking a moment to digest that. “We need to open this door. So what do we do?”
“Leave some people here to work on it, and the rest of us go see if there’s something that will open it. Maybe the door is unlocked by something nearby,” Bree suggested.
“That’s actually not a bad idea,” Lisa said, sounding excited.
“Ok,” Curtis agreed, “I’ll stand out by that concrete foundation and make sure there are no surprises. Anyone that wants to search, go with at least one other person.”
Lisa, Clayton, Doris, and Gao elected to remain at the door to see if they could figure out how to get it open. The rest of the group went out to the concrete circle with the double doors on it where Curtis settled into his familiar routine of standing guard.
“You should stay too B,” Kim said to her sister. “With that injury, you’re just going to slow us down.”
“Ok,” Bree said reluctantly and sat down on the edge of the concrete.
“Meet back here in thirty minutes!” Kyle said loudly. “Don’t make the group go looking for you!”
Kyle and John left the glade in one direction. Herbie, Cammy, and Bob walked out in a different direction. Kim started to walk out of the glade when Blake called out to her, “Hey, give me a sec Kim!” She paused and crossed her arms as she watched him. He crouched down next to Bree. “You don’t know that that door leads to whatever shelter I’m sensing,” he whispered to her.
“I know,” she agreed.
“Then why-”
“I’m gambling,” she admitted, “I’m betting that that door leads to whatever safety you’re being pulled towards. If you had told them the truth, I think we’d be on our way to who knows where.”
“That’s true... but what if-”
“Don’t worry about that. Just find the key to opening the doors. We’ll talk about what to do later,” Bree reassured him. He nodded and went over to walk with Kim out of the glade.
They walked for several minutes and Blake asked her, “So what do you think?”
“About what?” Kim asked.
“About my... being able to sense how to escape from danger?”
“I don’t really know,” she admitted, “We’re putting a lot of trust in something that even you’re not sure of.”
“Um... true.”
“And it kind of falls on the paranormal side of the fence, doesn’t it? Kind of hard to buy into it when you can arguably chalk up these feelings to stress and delusions.”
“Er... valid points. So if you feel that way then why are you helping me look for a way to get inside that
door?”
“Because my sister thinks it’s possible that you actually have this ability. And who’s to say she’s wrong? She’s been hanging around with you since the shit hit the fan. And besides that, she just flew an airplane. We’re at the beginning of the zombie apocalypse. I guess I shouldn’t automatically discount the impossible.”
“I... I guess I can’t argue with you there.”
“Hey, so where are we going?” she asked and suddenly stopped, looking around.
“I was following you,” Blake informed her.
“No... you definitely started walking and I was just going where you were going.”
Blake realized that he’d gotten distracted in their conversation. Not that there had been a whole lot to see on the way here: fields, grass, and some trees lit by the setting sun. Everything had a wholesome golden, orange look to it. Up ahead, there was a low stone wall and behind it, partially hidden by a tree and bushes, was a black van.
“Wow, a van. Let’s go check it out,” he suggested.
As they got closer, Blake discovered that it wasn’t a van at all. He hurried to the wall and slowly climbed over it, continuing to take in what he was seeing. Nestled within the bush and partially wrapped around the tree was a helicopter. He paused and gave Kim a hand as she climbed over the wall, joining him near the wreck. There was extensive damage to the helicopter, and from here they could see that it hadn’t started off as black, but had turned that color from fire. From where they stood, they were facing the back of the vehicle and the left side was smashed in by a tree. That tree had taken some of the impact from the crash and was bending ominously over the chopper. Blake cautiously started to make his way around the right to see if that side had easier access to the interior.
Kim followed behind him and to his right, bringing her rifle to a ready position. She nodded at him, and he continued around the broken tail of the helicopter. The right side was scratched up but in better condition than the mauled left side. The windows on the side door were tinted and he couldn’t make out anything inside. He continued up and looked into the cockpit. The pilot was still inside, and he was moving. “Kim!” he said with urgency, “We got a live one!”