by Willow Rose
“That’s insane,” I said. “The question is, where the heck are Bobby Kay and his companions now?”
I scanned the room for anything helpful, while Al looked through the rest of the papers on the desk. I pressed a key on Bobby’s laptop.
“Can we get access to this?”
Al nodded. “It might take a while, though.”
“Knock yourself out,” I said and moved to the side.
Reese looked up at me, her eyes darkened by sadness. “But wait. If they’re out there and going to start a war, then where is Abby?”
“She must be with them,” I said. “They probably took her with them.”
“But what are they going to do with her? And where did they go? Where did they take my baby?” she asked, tears welling up in her eyes. “Will I ever see her again? Where is she, Harry?”
“I think I might be able to answer that,” Al said.
She was staring at the screen in front of her. I walked up behind her and saw the screensaver photo on the laptop. It showed Candice and Bobby Kay in front of what looked like the entrance to a bunker. He had his arm around her, and they were smiling widely at the camera, looking happy.
Al tapped on the screen with her gloved finger.
“My guess is this is where they went to prepare for the next phase.”
“A bunker?”
She nodded. “That’s where I’d hide out when things got ugly.”
“But, where is that bunker?” I asked. “How do we find it?”
“You’re in luck. I happen to know exactly where that is,” Al said, breathing heavily behind the gasmask. She rose to her feet and looked at me. I could barely see her eyes inside of that thing. She reminded me mostly of a giant mosquito.
“I’ll take you there.”
Chapter 39
Reese closed her eyes inside the car. Her head was spinning, and she couldn’t get a moment of rest from it. The voices were back, and they were all talking at once. Her brain was racing and wouldn’t stop. She just wanted it, for once, to be nice and quiet and silent. She was on her medication, and that subdued them slightly, but lately, they wouldn’t leave her alone. It was like they had all these messages they were trying to get through to her all at once.
Like they were trying to tell her something.
It had started when she was seventeen, a few months after she had been raped. That was the first time she remembered hearing the voices, and right after that, she had started believing her mother was trying to kill her. She had been obsessed with the thought that she wanted to hurt her, especially when she talked about taking her to see a therapist. So, once she was off to college, she believed she was finally free, that the voices would leave her alone, now that there was nothing to fear. But then she started having the same thoughts about her roommate, thinking she wanted to kill her, and that’s when she realized something was terribly wrong. She was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but she knew that wasn’t it. It wasn’t right. Two years later, she was finally diagnosed with schizophrenia and put on the medication that had helped her ever since. There were good days and bad days. Today was one of the bad ones. There had been many times she had gone off her medicine for different reasons, and every time, it made her lose the memories of what she had done. All that was left were these images, these dreamlike pictures in her head that she didn’t know if they were true or not. They all felt like when she believed her mother would kill her. The feeling of being betrayed or of someone being after you was so real, yet she couldn’t tell if it really was. For the most part, it was just illusions in her mind, and sometimes even hallucinations. So, what could she trust?
“Are you all right back there?” Harry asked, looking at her in the rearview mirror. She was hugging herself bending forward, eyes closed.
Now, she opened them and looked at him.
“I think so.”
They were driving out of town. Harry got them through the roadblock using his badge, telling the officers he was out on police business.
No one asked any questions. They all had that terrified look on their faces behind the masks, scared of being infected.
Reese could hear Abby now as they drove through the swampy landscape and hugged herself tighter when something else entered her mind, and her eyes shot open at once. She went over it in her mind, again and again.
Oh, God, let me remember.
She bit her lip. A flicker of pain followed, no don’t get upset…that won’t help. For God’s sake, think.
Was it a memory? Could she trust it? Or was it just in her head?
No, this is real. This is very real, Reese.
Harry drove up a gravel road between the tall trees, then headed through marshland before entering a small forest-like area with heavy Spanish moss dangling from the trees. Wild Florida nature was growing everywhere, obviously having been left out of human touch for a very long time. Yet, there was still a trail for the car, and that told her there had been other cars here recently. Soon, in the distance, what looked like an abandoned building showed up as if out of nowhere. It seemed strange to see a concrete structure in the middle of all this wildlife that appeared to have once been an orange grove.
Harry stopped the car and killed the engine.
“The entrance is inside,” Al said and pointed.
“Harry?” Reese said and looked out the window. “Harry? I need to talk to you.”
Harry got out of the car, then pulled out his gun. Al followed him, also pulling out a weapon and cocking it. The sight of the guns made Reese wince.
“Not now, Reese. We can talk later,” he said. “Stay here in the car.”
“No, Harry. I think I need to tell you something,” she said, but he had already slammed the door shut behind him and had started walking up toward the entrance of the building.
Inside the car, Reese whispered to herself:
“I think it might be important.”
Chapter 40
“I used to study places like these. It was a hobby of mine. I visited bomb shelters all over the country, including this one. It’s been a few years, though.”
Al was leading the way, showing me inside a small concrete building not much bigger than a shed in the middle of nowhere. We used our phones as flashlights to get down the many concrete stairs leading to the basement six feet underground. There were rusty metal beams on the floor, and I found an old wall calendar from the sixties. Al guided me down a concrete hallway and stopped in front of a huge steel door.
“This bunker was originally built as a protective shelter for survivors of a nuclear war,” she said. “Now, most people don’t even know it exists. It was built back in the nineteen-sixties, at the height of the cold war and often referred to as the Miami Catacombs. It’s supposedly a five-thousand-square-foot maze of chambers and tunnels. Entering the shelter was a one-way trip. Its two-thousand-pound steel door was meant to seal survivors inside permanently. Once the door was shut, it couldn’t be opened from the inside. The inhabitants were meant to get out of the catacombs by digging out using tunnels that had been partly pre-excavated. They would then have radiation-free seeds with them to take to the surface that they could sow in the earth and start life all over.”
“Who was supposed to use this?” I asked and looked at the two-thousand-pound steel door in front of us. It was massive.
“It’s actually privately owned, except no one cares about it now. Too expensive, I guess, too much upkeep. But it was built and paid for by one hundred individuals from twenty-five of Miami’s wealthiest families.”
“Of course,” I said and touched the outside of the door with a scoff. “Gotta save those rich people so they can repopulate the earth.”
Al sent me a look.
“It’s said they even built a room designated to hold corpses, should any of them die while they were inside the shelter. Today, it’s left completely abandoned.”
She shone her flashlight across the dirty ground and up the sides of the massive gree
n door. It was left open, and we walked right in. We ended up in a stairwell, which led to a four-inch wooden door that opened into the shelter itself. Al opened it carefully, and we walked inside, cautious not to make a sound.
The air was humid already after a few steps inside. It smelled old and musty inside the first room.
“This is the decontamination area,” Al whispered. “Supposed to be used by anyone coming in that might have been contaminated by radioactive fallout.”
It was hard to tell that this rusty old dirty place had ever been anything but abandoned. We continued through another wooden door that led us into what might have been a recreational area or meeting room of some sort, judging from the rusty furniture—what might have been a couch at some point, and shelves, and a lamp that had completely fallen apart. I found a puzzle that was so moldy you couldn’t see what it was supposed to be on the picture. Under the ceiling hung droplets of water, and the paint had fallen off in big patches. The room ended in several hallways, leading left and right.
“Where do we go now?” I asked Al.
If this was a maze, then we risked getting lost in here. She shone her flashlight down one hallway, then another. She stood very still for a long time, listening, and I with her. Then she turned to gaze up at me from behind her mosquito mask. She signaled for me to be quiet and follow her, so I did.
Chapter 41
“Candice? I’m so sorry…for all this.”
Candice growled behind the gag. She was breathing heavily in agitation while the person sitting next to her spoke, fear racing through her chest, constricting it, making it hard to breathe properly.
“It was never meant to end like this,” he continued. “I hope you know this. I’m telling you the truth.”
I hope you know this? It was never meant to end like this? How else was it supposed to end, huh? Explain that to me!
She wanted to yell at him for being such a fool, for using her the way he had. And now, he had the audacity to sit there and apologize? As if sorry would help him in any way.
It’s too late, buddy. The ship has sailed. People are dying. And you want to apologize? You want my forgiveness? Is that it?
She shook her head, grunting behind the gag.
“I know, I know,” he said, sounding melancholic. “I’ve been an idiot. I used you. You probably know this by now, but I was the one who took that virus from your lab. I stole the keycard from your purse one day when visiting and went that same night. We broke into your lab and stole it. I knew all your codes, and frankly, it was a little too easy. We covered our tracks well. You didn’t even suspect a thing. You didn’t even see that one of the samples was gone, did you? I thought that would be the hard part, but it wasn’t. I don’t know what I was thinking, going through with this. I thought you’d never have to know. Gosh, I was a fool.”
Yes, you were a fool. No, that’s not even enough. You were a complete idiot! Releasing a deadly virus into the population—how could you have been so stupid? How could anyone be so moronic? You think you can make amends now? By bringing me here and saying you’re sorry?
Candice wanted so badly to say these things, to yell them at him, but she couldn’t. All that left her mouth was growls and grunts. She felt a deep stab of pain in her jaw as she tried to move it. It had been locked in that same position for too long; it was beginning to hurt terribly.
“So, what was the plan by doing it, you might ask,” he said with a deep sigh. “I wish I could answer that. It has all gone completely awry.”
Candice tried to calm herself. It wasn’t good to get too agitated behind the gag. She began so easily to hyperventilate, and that only made things worse. Often, she had trouble breathing, and she’d gasp for air.
“As I said, I’m terribly sor…”
He stopped himself. It took Candice a few seconds before she realized why he had paused mid-sentence. But as she stopped breathing so heavily, she heard it too.
There were steps outside the door—footsteps sounding very different from the ones she was used to hearing when she was brought food and water. They stopped by the door, and that was when her heart dropped.
“Did you hear that?” he asked.
She nodded, wondering who could be out there.
Bobby moved around next to her, and then started to yell:
“In here! We’re in here! Help!”
Hearing him scream that made Candice’s pulse quicken. Why was he calling for help? Wasn’t he the one keeping her here? And why would he call for them to come inside, risking cutting the wire and setting off the bomb?
Didn’t he know about the bomb?
Don’t! Bobby, don’t!
But, of course, he couldn’t hear her behind the gag, and he continued.
“In here! Help! HELP!”
Chapter 42
Reese felt uneasy. It was like her head was about to explode. She couldn’t sit still inside the car and had to get out. When it finally became too much for her, she opened the door and stepped out.
“I have to talk to Harry,” she mumbled, anxiously walking back and forth, her toes in the flipflops getting dirty from the dust that she whirled up. “I have to tell him what I remember. He has to know.”
No, Reese. He told you to wait.
Reese glared toward the small shed-like concrete building, biting her nails, calming herself, telling herself it could wait. She could tell Harry everything once he got back. She took a deep breath, and her shoulders came down slightly. She exhaled again, and just as she let the air back out, she was certain she heard something. Something that just about stopped her heart from beating: her eyes grew wide, and, without blinking, she looked toward the small building where Al and Harry had disappeared.
Was it a baby she could hear? Was it a baby crying, and was the sound coming from inside that place?
Reese gasped and clasped her chest, barely able to breathe. Never had she heard it so vividly. Never had she felt her daughter’s presence so clearly.
My baby! It is her. I can hear her crying. She’s here.
Her heart knocking against her ribcage, Reese stared at the door. They had left it ajar, and she could peek inside and see the stairs leading down. She wondered if she should just go in.
No, Reese. Harry told you to stay where you were. For once, do as you’re told. He’ll yell at you if you don’t listen. You know he will. He wants to protect you. It might get dangerous down there.
Reese turned her back on the shed and walked to the car, determined to ignore the crying. It was probably only in her head anyway—just like all the other times when she felt certain she had heard Abby crying. She placed her hand on the handle and was about to open the car door when she hesitated.
What if it really was her baby down there? What if Abby was in there somewhere? She could be in danger.
I can’t just wait here while my baby…while my child…I have to get her. She’s crying for me.
Reese let go of the door handle, then took a few steps toward the shed when she changed her mind once again and paused at the entrance. She looked inside at the concrete stairs leading six feet down. Her hand on the door was shaking heavily as her baby’s crying intensified. She closed her eyes and shook her head.
How could she ignore it? How could she not go?
Reese’s eyelids shot open, and she stared into the deep darkness, then made her final decision. She pulled the door fully open, then walked in, whispering anxiously under her breath as she reached the stairs leading down, the crying becoming so loud she could barely hear her own thoughts:
“Mommy is coming, Abby. Mommy is coming now.”
Chapter 43
Al stopped midway down a long hallway by a steel door. We had been through so many rooms that had just been left there, with bunk beds, desks, and even books on the shelves, for sixty years. It was all covered in mold, and the bunk beds were rusty, and the mattresses beyond disgusting. The air was thick and musty. It felt damp and clammy against my skin.
“Why are you stopping?” I asked.
Al raised a hand.
“Shh, listen. Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
She signaled for me to be quiet, so I shut up. I heard a small voice, yelling for help. It was coming from behind the steel door in front of us.
“HELP.”
Al turned to look up at me. There was deep concern in her voice.
“Someone is behind that door.”
“We’re in here! Help!”
I looked at Al, then at the door, wondering who it could be. If it was Bobby Kay and his group, then why were they calling for help? It sounded like a man’s voice, so it couldn’t be Candice, could it?
“What do we do?” Al asked.
With the gun in my hand, I walked to the door and knocked on it. The sound of my voice echoed in the empty hallways.
“Who is in there?”
A second passed before the voice answered. “Our names are Candice and Bobby Kay Smith. We’re being held against our will in here. Please, get us out.”
