100 A.Z. (Book 3): The Mountain

by Nelson, Patrick T.

  “Follow me,” the box repeated. The group followed, scanning every inch of the hallway for threats.

  They turned the corner the box had originally come from. At the far end of yet another hallway was a third junction.

  “Turn here,” it said before whirring off to the right. The group crept down the hallway toward the junction.

  “What does it mean you’re on the list?” Lee asked Hog.

  “No clue.”

  They turned right at the junction and the found the box stopped outside a door. Jamed and Cecil noted the smell of food was getting stronger.

  “I think we’re going to the kitchen,” Cecil observed. Hog snorted.

  The box travelled through a square hole above the door that was the exact size for it to fit through. Hog tentatively grabbed the handle on the door and slowly pulled it open, readying his hammer.

  “Oh my gosh!” Cecil exclaimed at the sight. It was a fully functioning kitchen. Everything was stainless steel with pots and pans hanging from the ceiling, an eight burner stove, three sinks, a walk-in refrigerator and freezer, and a wall full of pictures of the outside world. On one of the burners was a large pan with still steaming scrambled eggs.

  “How…?!” Cecil, nearly speechless, was immediately hovering at the stove, drooling over the yellow, fluffy wonder before him.

  “Those eggs were laid this morning in the hatchery,” the small box said. The box had stopped over a large stainless steel table that filled the center of the large kitchen. “Please help yourself. There are dishes in the cabinet to the north.”

  It took Jamed and Cecil a minute to figure out which way was north, but as fast as they could they spooned up a healthy serving of the delicious fare. They offered some to the others, who weren’t interested.

  “I don’t know if you should eat those. Who knows if it’s safe?” Hog warned.

  “They’re eggs!” Jamed replied.

  Hog turned to the white robotic box on the ceiling. “What are you doing here?”

  “You are in the kitchen.”

  “I mean, this whole place, what are you doing here?”

  “I am Jeki, the automated caretaker of Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station. Go Falcons.”

  “Go Falcons?”

  “Yes, I was programmed to be supportive of the Air Force Falcons sports teams. I was also programmed to be male.”

  “Okay…so, uh, Jeki, is there anyone else here?”

  “At present there are five humans in Cheyenne Mountain.”

  “Any zombies?”

  “There are no infected humans.”

  “When was the last time humans were in here?”

  “That information is classified.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t have the required security clearance to receive that information.”

  “Okay.” Hog looked at the others. Cecil and Jamed had already finished their eggs and were looking through the rest of the cabinets for more food. So far they’d found nothing. “You said something about a list. What list is that?”

  “The list of expected arrivals to Cheyenne Mountain.”

  “How could you be expecting me? How would you know that?”

  “That information is classified.”

  Hog grunted. “Are you two done? Can we go?” he asked Cecil and Jamed. They nodded grudgingly.

  “Cecil and Jamed can stay here,” the box interjected, obviously having learned their names. “They will expire shortly.”

  “Expire?” Cecil asked.

  “Yes, the eggs were poisoned. Unfortunately, more of the group didn’t eat them.”

  “What?!” Cecil exclaimed.

  “Please choose your method of disposal. Say ‘1’ for composting, ‘2’ for pig feed, ‘3’ for dehydration…”

  “Poison!!! What?! I don’t wanna die down here!” Jamed wailed, flailing his hands wildly, looking around frantically for something that might save him.

  Cecil, on the other hand, had gone completely still, staring at the empty pan where the eggs had been minutes prior.

  “Box! Why are they poisoned?!” Jamed demanded.

  “Recalculating. Recalculating. I revise my former statement. The poison expired forty years ago. Cecil and Jamed won’t die.”

  Jamed collapsed on the ground, gasping in relief. Cecil just blinked.

  “Why did you want to poison them?!” Hog yelled at the box, holding his hammer up. “And who made the eggs?! There’s no one here!”

  The box didn’t reply.

  “Who made the eggs!” Hog bellowed.

  “Follow me.” The box whirred off out of the room.

  “Do we really want to follow that thing?!” Lee asked.

  “No. Let’s find the antidote and get out of here,” Hog said.

  They left the kitchen and found Jeki was waiting for them.

  “Follow me, humans, or I will fill this place with poisonous gas, killing you all.”

  “I thought your poison was expired?” Cecil asked.

  “Liquid poison is expired, gas poison is not expired.”

  “I’m not listening to you anymore.” Hog launched his hammer at the box, tagging it square on. The side of it bent in and it fell from the track onto the floor.

  “Heh!” Hog laughed. Lee walked over to inspect it. It looked totaled. She kicked it away.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Just as the words were out of her mouth, a whirring sound came from around the corner. Another box appeared.

  “Hello, my name is Keki. I am here to replace Jeki. I am going to release the poison gas.”

  “No! We’ll go! We’ll follow you!” Cecil yelled, holding his hand out toward Keki.

  “How many of you are there?” Hog roared.

  “There are Leki, Meki, Neki, Oeki, Peki…”

  “All right! I get the idea.”

  They slowly followed Keki as it led them down a hallway toward the growing sound of a viola playing in a distant room.

  “What’s that?” Carla asked.

  “That is my benevolent master. He is an accomplished violist. He made you the eggs. I love him so.”

  “So he’s the one trying to kill us?” Cecil asked.

  “No, I might kill you. My artificial intelligence is advanced enough to calculate moral, political, social and biological consequences of my actions. Your behavior in this facility is a key factor in my decision making process. Go Falcons.”

  They approached the door with the music behind it. Keki went through another small hole above the door and out of sight. The music continued in a low sonorous tune – Classical music, if any of them had known what that was.

  “Are you ready?” Hog asked of the group. Clinching their makeshift weapons – hammers and pipes – they all nodded. He seized the door handle and pulled.

  “Welcome! Come in,” a pleasant, resounding voice called.

  Before them was a living area with couches, pillows, and a table with seven people sitting around it, three men and four women. One older man was standing. They were playing a board game, and smiling at the visitors. Their clothing was pants, button-up shirts, and sweaters from the pre-zombie age. The Martyrs and Hog looked like they’d been shoveled up from a ditch, in comparison.

  “Please, have a seat, have a seat!”

  It was the eldest of the men. He had a well-trimmed gray beard and glowing blue eyes. He stood up to shake the hands of the recoiling visitors, who were still expecting some trickery.

  “We are all friendly here, don’t worry! We never have visitors. Well, rarely!” he corrected himself, laughing. The others joined in.

  Carla moved her eyes from one person to the next, analyzing them. Her nose was scrunched up. Partly because she smelled a rat, and partly because she was slightly embarrassed at her appearance compared to the clean, groomed, and well-dressed women. They were all remarkably attractive, even the older man who was greeting them.

  “I know, I know, this is a little unorthodox, but I can assure y
ou we are safe. You are safe here!”

  “Then what’s with Keki?” Carla asked.

  “Who?”

  “The little box on the ceiling that talks.”

  “Oh, that’s the TM-2000, don’t mind him. He can be helpful – he told us you were coming – but he is an uncontrollable liar! That is how he was programmed, for some unfortunate reason.”

  “I don’t lie, everything I’ve said is the truth,” the box said. “You are all going to die.”

  “See, there he goes again. Did he talk about poison?”

  “Yes,” Cecil and Jamed said at the same time.

  “Oh my, yes, yes, yes… He is always going on about poison. He threatens to kill us a few times a week. After a while, it becomes normal, I can only assume his programmer had a twisted sense of humor. I try to think of it as how TM-2000 shows affection.”

  The box whirred closer to Hog. “These people are going to offer you a place to sleep, come into your room at night and kill you. Then they will eat you.”

  “TM, please leave us for the moment, if you don’t mind,” the elder said.

  “Fine. Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” the box said before leaving the room.

  “Ahh,” the man sighed. “That’s better. Introductions! Yes, introductions! I am so rude. My name is Jim, and that is my wife Nancy. Over there you have Charles, Adeline, Terrance, Marsha, Linus, and Lindsey.

  “Good to meet you,” Hog said, stiff. “I’m Hog. This is Carla, Lee, Cecil, and Jamed.”

  “It is such a pleasure to meet you! Adeline, could you please put the game away so we can give our guests our full attention?”

  Adeline smiled and nodded before hopping up to put the game away.

  “So, is this where you eat us?” Cecil asked.

  “Ha! No, well, according to TM we are going to do that while you sleep. Ha!”

  Nancy interjected. “TM keeps telling me that Jim is going to murder me and Charles because he wants to marry Adeline. Don’t mind a thing that robot says.” She waved her hand and smiled, leaning back against a pillow.

  “I don’t mean to be rude, but what in the world is going on in this place?” Hog asked.

  “We were just playing a game,” Jim smiled.

  “I mean, what is this place, why are you here, what is that…TM-whatever!?”

  “Ah yes, ah yes, the ‘Overview Briefing’.”

  “Overview Briefing!” some of the others announced with glee.

  “Bring it out, yes, bring it out,” Jim said, taking on a more serious tone as he crinkled his eyebrows.

  Adeline, who was already standing, walked over to the bookcase and grabbed a large binder. She held it with both hands out in front of her as she carried it over to the now clear table. She rested it down slowly on the table and then turned to go finish some other chore.

  “Come sit, come sit!” Jim requested. The others of his group stood up to make some space.

  “We’ll stand,” Carla asked.

  Jim blanched. “Okay, that’s okay.”

  He opened the large binder. The first page read “Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station.”

  “We’ll skip most of this, it isn’t relevant. Where is it? Ah yes, here we go.” Jim stopped on a page with a picture taken of a group of men and women. They were standing in front of the entrance to the underground bunker. The entrance was fully intact, it was a sunny day and they were all smiling. Many of them wore various military uniforms.

  “Before zombies, humans used to threaten one another with terrible weapons. This place was designed to protect them from those weapons. The people in this picture worked here, they ensured it was always working. They were members of the United States military. This was the team staffing this bunker when the outbreak occurred. The doors were sealed, they tried to mount a nationwide counterattack, but ultimately this was the only military command center to hold out against the outbreak. Every other known secure site fell, even the ‘impenetrable’ ones. They communicated with the outside world, tried to coordinate resistance efforts, provided updates as to areas that might be safe. Little by little, though, communication from the outside world ceased. It all went silent…” Jim took a sip of a steaming cup of herbal tea that seemed to have appeared in his hand from nowhere. “Imagine. Just imagine, you are one of the few people to survive the zombie outbreak. You are safely locked up inside this bunker. Everyone you know, everyone you love – your family, your spouse, your children – are all zombies. Only you survived. You and this handful of other people. And all you have are enough provisions for a month, maybe two. Can you imagine the strain that puts on the human psyche? It must have been devastating, but these courageous women and men rose to the challenge. They lived.” Jim took a sip of tea and smiled to himself, eyebrows arched high. He chuckled and took another sip.

  “What’s so funny?” Carla asked.

  “Oh, you know, a little of this, a little of that. I was just thinking how different things could have turned out. But here we are!”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Yes, let me explain…so, this merry band of not-so-merry folk received something that no one was supposed to have – an antidote,” Jim trilled.

  Hog perked up.

  “Yes, I can see that caught your attention. They received a fair amount of it through the tram. The antidote actually became their undoing. They all argued about what they should do, and they never reached an agreement. They had this argument for five years! Can you imagine! They were captives, though, all 52 of them. They couldn’t just avoid each other, this place isn’t big enough.”

  “How’d they eat? Wouldn’t they need more food and stuff?” Cecil asked.

  “What an observant young man!” Jim pointed at Cecil. The other seven laughed toothily.

  “They continued to receive supplies through the tram, from an unknown location. Very mysterious! Just as we still receive supplies, today! Sorry, Terrance is giving me that look to remind me that people don’t know what trams are. It’s like a motorized cart that operates underground.”

  “Wait, I thought you had chickens or something. I thought you had eggs?” Carla asked.

  “That’s TM lying again. No, every week or so we receive a new tram shipment with food supplies.”

  “That’s cool.” Jamed noted.

  “Would you like some! Today we have bacon, eggs, bread and butter!”

  “Yes!” Cecil exclaimed.

  “Adeline, could you please make these folks some food? Thank you. Now, where was I…Oh yes, the groups had different ideas about what to do with the immunity. An event occurred, though, that would send these people out from this bunker and back into the world. Can you guess what it was?”

  “No,” Lee replied immediately.

  “Food?” Jamed asked.

  “No, good guess, but I already explained that they had enough food,” Jim said.

  “What?” Hog asked.

  “Love! The most powerful force in the world. One of the women had an illegitimate child from a man far south before the outbreak occurred, in a place called M-e-x-i-c-o. She was determined to see if he was alive. The group was split, though, on whether she should be allowed to leave with some of the antidote. Finally, a man named Taylor escorted her out of the compound and let her go. He inscribed the infamous code to open the door. Your friend, the man who survived a bite down in Mexico, is a descendent of Lieutenant Colonel Taylor!”

  “John?”

  “Yes, I forgot his name, but that is him.”

  “How do you know about John?” Lee asked.

  “We know a lot in here. Between radios and word of mouth we are probably better informed than most.”

  “I thought you guys never left,” Jamed asked.

  “Ha! That would be novel! No, we are simply another group of folks placed here for the cleansing, but I’ll get back to that… After she left, everyone else left the compound, too. Many headed north, far, far north. I’m sure they’re adventures and misadventures would hav
e filled volumes!” Jim chuckled and shook his head complacently. He regained his focus and continued. “They’d been in contact with some Canadians who needed help. They took some slivers of the antidote with them. It came in pill format, so they cut it up and voila! They conducted tests, some unfortunate, to determine exactly how much of a pill was required. They used it immediately and created a whole mythology around immunity and breeding and other strange things. I think people from the south were crass to them. Idiotic, even.”

  Hog interrupted. “One of them who headed north was named Boucher. Sergeant Boucher. My great-grandfather.”

  “Yes, I was getting to that! I wasn’t sure if you knew! The rest scattered and were lost to history. With the exception of the Taylors. They handed down the antidote through the generations to be kept for an emergency. When John’s parents had John…Wait, what am I doing?! Thespians! To your stations!”

  Like a crack squad of soldiers the eight fanned out to rapidly deploy costumes, props, and a curtain. Carla recoiled at their smiling and constant laughter. A minute later the actors were in their places and the narrator was describing the scene.

  “Somewhere in the mountains above Colorado Springs…”

  Chapter 22

  Sara approached Lieutenant Guirguis. She, characteristically, wore a frown. She squinted in the sun peeking out from the clouds. Thunderheads were forming over the mountains.

  “We’re back,” she said, her hands on her hips.

  “Welcome. I trust you are safe?” Guirguis asked.

  “Safe, yes. Interesting word, that one.”

  “How were things…south?”

  Sara tilted her head to the side a little as she looked at Guirguis.

  “What are you doing out here?” she asked.

  “Waiting for you. I heard you might be here soon.”

  “We would have been here sooner, but the herds out there…”

  The conversation was interrupted for a moment as some men approached escorting Reed toward Guirguis, who nodded and motioned for the young man to be brought over.

  “Yes, he’s with me.”

  “I’m tired Guirguis. I’m eager to sleep in my own bed.”

  “Yes, let’s go.”

  A half hour later they approached the southern end of Colorado Springs. Waiting for them was a wall of 3,000 walkers. Additionally, some 8,000 men were stationed on the car wall representing the now unified New Generation and Fountain Cartel boundary. Long after Sara left, they’d built extra bunkers, trenches and other defenses in anticipation of an attack. Beck and Young, the cartel leaders, were amongst their men, staring at Guirguis from afar.