The Z Chronicles

by Ellen Campbell

  He missed all of her.

  Sarah.

  Sarah who had already barricaded herself into her office when he’d spoken with her on the phone, before the phone finally went silent. And before that final click, the keening screams of the revived dead had grown in volume as the sound of a splintering door sounded out. And her screams.

  Sarah, who was probably dead along with a billion others.

  Gordon shook his head, pushing those thoughts away because they didn’t do any good. They never did any good. After sixty-one days down here below the rocky soil of Kentucky, very little about his old life did him any good to remember anymore. Not his memories of life above, not his degree in chemistry, not the job he’d been so excited to get at ChemGo, and definitely not Sarah.

  An image of Sarah’s hand on his leg flashed through his memory. Her hand, freckled like the rest of her, patting his leg in time with the music as they drove to the lake that last week before the nanites swept everything else aside. The fleeting sensation of that day overcame him for a moment as he made his way through Gold Level toward the central Atrium. His breath hitched in his chest and the air wheezed weakly past his tightening throat.

  A panic attack. He could feel it coming. It wasn’t the first.

  He sank into one of the deep chairs in the Atrium, lowered his head between his knees, and fumbled for the little packet of pills in his pocket. Pills were the one thing they had plenty of in this shelter that he could also have his fair share of. It wouldn’t do for anyone here to succumb to panic, and it was bound to crop up now and then, given their situation. He swallowed the tablet dry, working up a measly slug of spit to help ease it down.

  After a few minutes, his breathing began to even out and the shakes subsided enough that he thought he might be able to stand without falling straight over again. His face was wet with sweat and his coveralls stuck to him like he’d put them on without drying off after a shower. What he really needed was to lie down and get a grip, maybe take an hour to let his feelings sort themselves out. But time was another one of the things he wasn’t permitted anymore.

  Levering himself up from the deep leather took effort, real arm-shaking effort. At the railing surrounding the stairwell, he leaned over the gap and faced the darkness below, letting the breeze that funneled up from the levels cool the sweat on his face and tease loose the last, lingering filaments of anxiety threading through him.

  He knew Paul would be radioing him again any minute if he didn’t show up, so he pushed away from the railing. The elevator was strictly for emergencies, even for the fully paid up members of the shelter, so he took the stairs, winding upward to the Main Level and the Gathering Hall there.

  As he rounded the second spiral, a Bronze Level couple sauntered through the Atrium, heading for the stairs. Both were dressed in swimsuits, the woman wearing a fringed wrap around her hips that swayed as she walked. They were probably headed for the gym and the tiny pool down below the Platinum level.

  He hurried his steps, wanting to avoid them if possible. He was meant to have been a Bronze Level resident himself, and he’d met these two during the walk-through tour all residents were permitted. It was supposed to be an annual event, a time when residents could see for themselves that their investment was being maintained and get a feel for where their hefty dues were going. It turned out that they’d only had two such events.

  If only the nanites had waited another year, or rather, if only those who created the nanites had waited another year. Just one more year and Gordon would have been paid up in full. Maybe by then he would have seen the light and started paying for a berth for Sarah, if there were any available or for sale by owners that had lost interest. Or maybe he might have seen a different kind of light and started looking for a different group, or even decided to invest in a piece of property for a shelter of his own. Another year and it might be him sauntering across the Atrium without a care in the world except for the desire for a swim to clear his head.

  But life hadn’t waited that extra year.

  “Gordon, where are you? I haven’t got all day,” Paul said over the radio, his voice quick with impatience.

  He clicked the button on the radio without unclipping it, leaning over a little so that his voice would carry toward the microphone, and said, “One level away.”

  There was no answer. That alone smacked of rebuke or correction.

  At the Main Level, the logo of the shelter gleamed under the glow of recessed lights around the perimeter of the room. Inlaid into the shiny brass—brass he and Violet had polished just the other day—the tagline of the project ran in slanted letters that bespoke motion and movement.

  Somehow the irony of a dynamic looking script being used for a shelter meant to keep people safe by burying them under the ground had been lost on him before. He’d noticed it only after he struck the bargain that would save his life, but only at the cost of his freedom.

  Vindica

  Shelter in Style

  Luxury at the End of the World

  Across the Gathering Hall, past the precisely placed leather couches and chairs that created a deceptively open and casual air, lay the dim hallway that led to the restrooms and the service areas beyond. Paul stood with his back to Gordon looking up at a vast stylized diagram of the Vindica shelter. His posture was that of a person who has gotten what he wants out of life and expects to keep on getting it.

  At the squeak of Gordon’s work boots on the shiny, marble-tiled floor, Paul turned around. He was wearing clothes more suited to a day at a tennis club than an underground shelter where the sun never reached, but unless he was dressed in a tuxedo, he always looked this way. He seemed to have shirts in an endless array of candy and pastel colors.

  Paul’s frown as Gordon approached was overdone. His expression was far different from the oily, overly friendly smiles he’d worn while he was selling the units inside Vindica. Even a Bronze Level accommodation—a shared room with four bunks—had cost as much as a house would in some parts of the country, and Paul had worked hard to sell each one. Now, the salesman smiles were gone and it was the frown of an overseer he wore.

  “Took you long enough,” Paul said, arms crossed and his mouth drawn down, lips thinned in displeasure.

  It was too much, that frown. “You keep pulling your face down like that and you’ll get wrinkles,” Gordon snapped.

  And that was too much as well.

  Paul’s immediate look of affront was quickly replaced by a sort of satisfied smile. “If you don’t like it down here, you can always leave.”

  And that was the key to all of this, wasn’t it?

  Gordon wouldn’t leave and both men knew it. He couldn’t leave. The world outside these walls was dying and doing it quickly, making a great deal of mess in the process. If he left, he would die just like everyone else. Either that or turn into a monster like everyone who didn’t stay dead.

  As it was, Gordon had made it to Vindica with only hours to spare before the shelter closed its doors on the last couple of dozen members. And all of those left out had been fully paid up members, too. Paid up status didn’t matter once the deadline for closing the big door was past. You got to Vindica in time or you got left outside.

  If he’d ever been tempted to call Paul on his bluff and walk out of that airlock, watching the couple that showed up on day fifteen had put that temptation entirely to rest. They had banged ineffectually on the blast doors for hours, yelling and screaming into the camera placed high on the outside structure. They’d banged long enough for the noise to draw some of the afflicted.

  And once those revived dead people had shown up, it was all over but the blood and screaming. The man—Gordon couldn’t remember his name and didn’t want to look it up later—had emptied his gun into the first two. One of those two had gone down with that bizarre, stuttering jerkiness while the nanites inside worked to fix their host’s body, but the others had plunged onward toward their prey. And after a few minutes, long before the other
s had finished their meal of the two Vindica members, the downed one had stopped jerking, sat up, and made it to the pile of bloody bits in time for dessert.

  They had been Gold Level members.

  Gordon saw it all from his watch station at the security monitors. It had been a horror played out in vivid color. What had been worse was the clinical way Paul examined the pair through the monitors, the glow of the screens picking out the glints of intellectual curiosity in his eyes. Interest he’d had plenty of, but of concern or compassion there had been not the slightest hint.

  So, no, Gordon wouldn’t be walking out and Paul knew it.

  “What happened to every member contributing to the operation of the shelter, Paul?” Gordon asked. It was a serious question. He held up his work-roughened hands. Bright red cracks seamed his palms and fingers from too much time spent wet and cold as he scrubbed, washed, and shined the vast facility. “Was this your plan all along?”

  Paul didn’t so much as bat an eyelash at the first question, but the second one stiffened his spine. He apparently didn’t mind using people as slaves, but he certainly did mind anyone thinking he planned to use them that way.

  “It’s not my fault you didn’t pay off your berth. Everyone else did. Should they pay for you as well? As I see it, you owe them your keep here,” Paul said.

  “Really? This place was supposed to take a few hours of work each day from every resident to operate. How exactly is it that five people now do the work of one hundred and fifty?”

  Paul snorted. “Don’t exaggerate. The work requirements were simply a contract number, a just-in-case agreement. It doesn’t take nearly that much labor to run this place or you couldn’t do it. And, if your work is good, eventually you’ll be paid up. Try to think of it that way and you’ll be less unhappy.”

  Gordon examined Paul’s face, looking for that hint of something that would tell him the other man knew what he was saying was complete crap, but it wasn’t there. Paul actually believed his own hype. That chilled Gordon right down to his bones.

  It also made him very sure that what he planned to do was the right thing to do.

  “Besides,” Paul continued, warming to the subject, “others do help out. It’s not just the five of you. That’s another exaggeration and it makes it very hard to take any complaints seriously.”

  Gordon nodded, not in agreement, but because he understood that Paul was guarding his carefully constructed mental justification for what amounted to enslavement of five paying—though not completely paid up—members of the shelter. He would have had to build that construct to sleep at night, Gordon supposed.

  “You’ve got Steel Level members taking a turn on the security monitors and taking readings on the systems up top. When is the last time anyone else picked up a broom or a mop besides a Shortie?” Gordon asked, but he could tell his words weren’t even sinking in. That glazed look of disinterest had fallen over Paul’s features and he glanced down at his watch as if he had some important meeting to go to.

  “Like I said, you can leave,” Paul said and waved a hand down the hallway toward the bathroom where some drunken woman’s puke needed cleaning up.

  Gordon stepped past Paul, reached for the knob on the supply closet door, and said, “Yes, you did say that.”

  Paul didn’t see the little smile on Gordon’s face as he walked away.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Are you sure?” Gordon asked again as he adjusted and checked the biohazard suit encasing Violet’s enormous frame.

  She turned around at the pat on her shoulder so that Gordon could check the front once more, and he saw her deadpan expression though the plastic face shield.

  “I’m sure,” she said, her voice sounding a little muffled and far away inside her protective cocoon of plastic.

  Gordon looked closely at her face while he checked the seal around her face shield, making sure the tape around her air supply was perfect. She didn’t seem even the slightest bit nervous or hesitant. Violet acted like she was going outside for nothing more dangerous than a trip to the corner market for a carton of milk on a normal Sunday morning.

  She caught him looking and seemed to recognize that he needed something more. Violet’s gloved hand came up and rested on his forearm, pulling his hand away from her hood as she did. “I’m sure. What’s going on here isn’t right and leaving won’t change a thing. It’ll just be someone else who takes our place, probably someone from Steel.”

  He nodded, knowing she was right. Steel Level, the least expensive of the accommodations offered here in Vindica, had members housed in two large open bay rooms, one for men and the other for women. While very nicely appointed, there was no escaping the fact that they were in a different class than the Platinum, Gold or Silver Levels. Even the rooms in Bronze came with perks not enjoyed by the Steel residents. Steelie food was served lunchroom style, with no menu of choices they could select from, and while hearty and wholesome, it wasn’t fancy.

  And yet, Steelies treated the Shorties no different than anyone else. Some of them were worse. Gordon thought it might be because they were so low on the ladder, so low that they needed to artificially extend the distance between the Shorties and themselves.

  Anyone who could justify what had been done to the Shorties would have very little trouble justifying one more step in that direction and take a few Steelies for the hard labor if there were no Shorties. It was already moving that direction, really. There had never been any intention to have room service or housekeeping inside Vindica. That had been right up front during the sales pitches. Everyone would have to maintain their quarters in a livable condition. It hadn’t taken long for that to change once they had Shorties.

  First it was the Platinum Level, then after a few weeks, the Gold Level got that same privilege on a weekly basis. When the burden simply became too much for the five Shorties, Steelies had been put onto the roster for security monitoring and technical rounds. How much longer before even that pretense fell away and they became nothing more than Shorties that slept on another level?

  Violet squeezed his forearm, bringing his eyes back up to her face and disrupting his reverie. She smiled at him and squeezed again, letting him know with that small gesture that she understood and that they were in agreement. As always, the change in her face that simple expression made startled Gordon and made him unable to look away or do anything other than return her smile.

  When Violet smiled, it transformed her face entirely. She was still six inches taller than he and had shoulders as wide as a pro football player’s, but when she smiled, she was breathtaking. Her curiously delicate nose, sharp cheekbones, and large, dark eyes with lashes so long they looked false, were matched by lips as generously proportioned as her biceps. She reminded Gordon of Sophia Loren during her prime. Only taller. A lot taller.

  Lowering his arm and breaking contact, he gave a small head shake, and asked, “You remember where they were? The targets?”

  “Precisely. Approximately one hundred and fifty yards southwest of the solar array, near the gully,” Violet answered.

  “Exactly,” Gordon confirmed and picked up her tool box. Made of plastic so that it would survive the decontamination process without rusting, he opened it and showed her the bag folded neatly inside. Next to it lay a folding saw, a funnel, and the small hatchet he’d added to the assorted tools. And finally, several pint-sized plastic bottles with lids. “And the box is bigger so that the…uh…”

  “Objects?” Violet offered as his voice faltered and he couldn’t find the word.

  “Yeah, objects,” Gordon answered. He could feel himself going pale and a vague lightheadedness came on at the mere thought of the “objects”.

  “And the sealant?” Violet asked, poking the box with fingers made awkward by the thick plastic of her gloves and the three pairs of nitrile gloves beneath.

  Gordon plucked up a tube from the open box and said, “Here. I took the cap off already and just plugged it with some silicon. You don’t
need to unscrew it, just yank the plug right off.” He put the tube back and pulled out a small bottle. “And spray this all over the bag once you’ve got it sealed. This stuff will kill anything and creates static. That should deactivate any nanites.”

  Violet nodded, making her suit crinkle and crackle. Then she looked up at the clock in the ready room and said, “Time to go. You know they’re watching. Let’s not give them any reason to wonder what we’re up to.”

  “Don’t worry. So far we haven’t done anything we haven’t done before,” he answered, careful not to obey the impulse to look behind him at the camera mounted on the wall.

  Violet took the toolbox from his hand and gave him a wink. “Then we’re good. Ready?”

  “Ready,” Gordon answered and opened the airlock for her to enter. He sealed the door behind her, then turned around to the camera and gave it a thumbs-up. There was a microphone, but Gordon had done his part and made sure it was broken before today’s events. They couldn’t hear anything said inside the ready room or airlock up at the security monitoring station.

  The speaker worked fine, even if the microphone didn’t, and Gordon could hear Paul talking in the background as Ramon spoke. “Door seal confirmed. Outside is clear. Go ahead.”

  Gordon slapped the big button and a red light immediately began flashing over the door, the thunk of the locks reverberating loudly in the entry room. He couldn’t open the door now even if he wanted to. Vindica was designed for safety, of that there was no doubt.

  He watched the airlock brightening as the outer door opened. Sunlight streamed in as the door retracted in a widening rectangle of beautiful, yellow light. For a moment, Gordon wanted that light badly and his fingers tightened on the door’s wheel, the temptation to spin it strong. It wouldn’t have budged because of the locks, but the temptation was there all the same.