“Don’t close those doors, Sam,” Hart told the man in the booth. “We’re coming back inside in a minute.
We proceeded through the middle door, the one with the white line painted on the floor behind it and then the green line just beyond that, where our weapons were stored in the plastic bin.
Hart turned around to address Hines, who was still watching us from the waiting room.
“Don’t close the doors,” Hart pleaded with him. “Please.”
“Good day, gentlemen,” Hines said. The door behind us began to close. As it did, I saw the lights in the waiting room where Hines was standing suddenly turn red. He looked up at them, a confused look on his face. An alarm sounded, a low buzzing that repeated every two seconds.
Then an automated female voice said, “Automatic safety lockdown will begin in ten seconds. Ten. Nine. Eight.”
“Run!” Hart shouted. “We have to get out of here!”
From behind us, I could hear screams coming from within the bunker.
“Seven. Six.”
We sprinted for the outer door. There was no time to collect our weapons from the plastic bin so Tanya grabbed the bin itself and dragged it along behind her.
“Five. Four.”
The door behind us closed completely, cutting off the sound of the screams. I heard the locks slam into place with a metallic finality.
“Three. Two. One.”
We made it through the shrinking gap in the door and out into the quarry. The outer door closed and locked.
Zero, I thought to myself.
18
We lifted off from the quarry and soared into the air. Through the visor of my flight helmet, I watched the quarry recede into the distance below us. With the camouflage netting back in place, it was impossible to tell there was anything out of the ordinary down there yet Bunker 53 was now a tomb.
With Vess running around in there, anyone who wasn’t already dead soon would be.
All because an army sergeant who knew he was about to die had tried to do his daughter what he thought was a favour. His misguided familial loyalty had cost many people their lives, including the daughter he’d thought he was helping.
“You see, Lucy,” Sam said through his headset. “That’s what I was trying to tell you. It doesn’t matter how safe you think you are, when your time is up, there’s nothing you can do about it. Those people down there thought those big doors were keeping the nasty stuff out but now they’re locked inside with Patient Zero. Kind of funny if you think about it.”
“It isn’t funny at all,” Lucy said. “They only wanted to survive.”
“I’m just glad the place is sealed,” Hart said.
“Are we just going to leave Vess in there?” I asked him.
He shrugged against his harness. “What else can we do? The place went into automatic lockdown. We can’t get in and he can’t get out.”
“Maybe Marilyn will have a plan,” Hamilton said.
“Like what?” Hart asked him.
“I don’t know. Maybe if we flooded the bunker’s ventilation system with poisonous gas or something to make sure Vess is definitely dead. It would be a mercy for anyone left alive in there as well. Better to be poisoned than to get ripped apart by that monster.”
“We’ll see,” Hart said. “Personally, if I never see that place again it’ll be too soon.”
We fell into a thoughtful silence and I watched the landscape below. Zombies shambled across fields and along roads. They huddled together in towns and villages. This was the world the people in Bunker 53 had tried to keep out but in the end, they’d fallen victim to it just the same as everyone else.
I wondered if there were other bunkers in different parts of the country. It would make sense that they’d be spread around and the title Bunker 53 suggested there were at least fifty-two others somewhere. If the people inside the other bunkers were as short-sighted as the people we’d just met, I didn’t hold out much hope for the future of the human race.
We’d been flying for almost an hour and the landscape below had given way to sea when the pilot addressed Hart over the headsets. “Sir, we have an incoming transmission from a Brigadier James Gordon.”
Hart let out a sigh that crackled in my headphones. “What the hell does he want? All right, patch him through.”
Gordon’s voice came through the static. “Mr Hart, I’m contacting you because you have something that was taken from me. I know you’ve removed it from the island. Don’t ask me how I know, I just know.”
“What the hell do you want, Gordon?”
“I’m asking the questions. Do you still have my item on board your chopper?”
“Why the hell should I tell you anything?”
There was a slight pause and then Gordon said, “Have you read my notes? Well, you haven’t read them of course, you’re just a grunt with a gun. So let me rephrase that. Have you been told about the contents of my notes?”
Hart frowned. “Yes.”
“Then you know that I have a certain device in my possession that can change people into something quite unpleasant.”
“Yes, I know that,” Hart said.
“I’ve been looking for a place to test it out. My scientists are very specific about their needs for the initial test. It has to be somewhere isolated, they said. How about a building tucked away on an island? I asked them. That will do nicely, they told me.”
Hart’s eyes widened. He covered his microphone with his hand and said to us, “He’s planted the biological weapon at Site Brave One.”
Despite the covered microphone, Gordon must have heard him because he said, “That’s right, I have. Congratulations, you’ve figured it out. I wonder of you can figure out what will happen if you don’t deliver Patient Zero’s body to me.”
“No, listen, we don’t have it.”
We were over the island now, descending to the tarmac. “Maintain present altitude,” Hart told the pilot. The Chinook hovered fifteen feet from the ground. Through the open tail section, I could see the big boxy building with its silvered windows. Had Gordon really managed to plant his device in there?
“That isn’t the answer I wanted to hear,” Gordon said.
“You don’t understand,” Hart said. “It’s locked away.”
“You think I won’t do it,” Gordon said. “Very well.” His voice was replaced by static.
“Gordon?” Hart asked. “Gordon, are you there?”
“The channel has gone dead, sir,” the pilot said.
We all watched the Site Alpha One building. It seemed quiet enough. Maybe the Brigadier had been bluffing.
Then I realised that even if there was any noise coming from the building, we wouldn’t hear it. The Chinook’s rotors were too loud and the flight helmets were designed to block out any sound other than what came through the headset.
“Patch me through to Marilyn MacDonald’s phone,” Hart said.
“Yes, sir.”
I heard a ringing in my earphones. Marilyn answered the phone immediately.
“Listen to me,” Hart said. “Get everyone out of the building. Immediately.”
“Sorry, Ian, I cant’ hear you very well. There’s something going on just outside my office.”
In the background I could hear loud bangs, shouts, and screams.
“Marilyn, get out! The airborne virus is in the building!”
I heard Marilyn make a small coughing sound and then her voice rose in pitch to a blood-curdling snarl. She’d obviously dropped the phone because the next thing I heard were her footsteps walking across her office. She must have opened her office door because the noises from the corridor suddenly became louder.
Hart said, “Marilyn,” one more time but it was obvious his heart wasn’t in it. He knew as well as we all did what had just happened.
It was impossible to see anything through the silver reflective material on the windows but through the glass door, I could see people running. Then a gout of blood sprayed onto the
glass, obscuring my vision.
“What do we do now, sir?” the pilot asked.
Hart sighed and turned his face away from the building which was now full of killing machines that had once been people. If the airborne virus worked as Brigadier Gordon’s scientists hoped it would, most of the people in there would kill each other savagely.
Any survivors would be killed off by the virus in a few days.
We all looked at Hart. What could we do to help the people in the building? We all knew the answer. Just like Bunker 53, Site Bravo One was lost.
Hart took a long breath and said, “Get us out of here.”
THE END
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Survival- Revenge of the Living Dead Page 10
