by Bob Howard
The boredom started to set in again, and Olivia wondered why the kids hadn't checked in. The Chief had told them it would be a good idea if they at least just dropped in on Olivia from time to time. He had explained to all of them that time was the maker and breaker of all deals. If something was going wrong with them, checking in periodically was one way to make sure that it didn't go wrong for too long.
Kathy showed Olivia that there were cameras inside as well as outside, but from what they could tell, they weren't on inside the lower level storage areas. Kathy had said that was an issue they planned to explore when they had the chance, but it was a back-burner issue for now. When they were done with connecting new power to Mud Island, they would fully explore the Fort Sumter shelter which had clearly dwarfed their own shelter in size.
Olivia switched on the interior cameras and started scanning each floor to spot the kids. She was sure they were just enjoying their new responsibilities, and she had never known a kid in their age group who wouldn't have wanted to explore the rooms and floors below.
She found one camera that showed the stairwell the kids had used, and the angle showed a door with a big W on it. She didn't know where they were yet, but she knew where at least one of them had been.
The button for that camera was in a row that had numbers on them, and when she pressed the next one, she saw a big letter P. So, Whitney had been on the fifth floor down, and Perry had been on the Sixth floor down. She hit the next button, and there was another W. She thought it would have been an S, but maybe Sam had teamed up with Perry, boys against the girl.
She just happened to still have her eyes on that monitor when both of the doors flew open almost at the same moment. Whitney came flying down from above while Perry ran right under the camera. There was no sign of Sam, and Olivia quickly punched the button for the next floor in time to see it closing behind Perry, and there was a big P on it. Whitney sped by it as it closed, and Olivia brought up her view as she was marking the door.
Whitney and Perry both looked fine, but she couldn't help thinking something was wrong. Just as she was having a hard time believing she had been rescued, she had a hard time believing the nightmare was over.
Olivia started pressing the buttons one at a time going lower and lower down the stairwell. She wasn't sure what she was looking for because all she was seeing was blank doors. She froze when she reached the last door. Kathy had been wrong about the lower level cameras. They were at least working in the stairwell if not inside the rooms of each level, and the last door, the door to sub-level eighteen had a big S on it.
Olivia didn't know why that could be bad. She just knew it was. She watched the unmoving door for a moment, unsure of what she should do. She checked the view of the harbor and didn't see anyone returning yet. She couldn't see far enough to tell if they were on their way back, but judging by the time, they should be. She knew the Chief had a time limit before he would be stuck on the other side of the bridges, but she wouldn't know if he beat that time limit or not until he showed up at the dock.
The elevators were right down the hall from the control room. All she had to do was ride down to the bottom floor, find Sam, and then give him a piece of her mind. Olivia didn't know she was that nervous and that afraid of what she might find, but the thought of going down there made her feel ill.
Olivia forced herself to get out of her chair and walk. Her feet felt like they weighed a ton, and by the time she reached the elevators, her heart was pounding.
"Oh my God," she thought. "If I'm this scared just walking to the elevators, what good am I going to be if there's something down there?"
The elevator doors looked just like any she had seen in any lobby in the world. Stainless steel, up and down buttons, and numbers over the doors. The first two had the number one illuminated. The third door had the number eighteen illuminated. She tried to remember if it had always been like that, but she had to admit, she was only impressed by the fact that the shelter had elevators. Then when she saw the rooms they would be staying in, she forgot all about the elevators. When it became obvious that Chase was going to be staying in her room, she forgot there were other levels. She knew all she needed to know.
She didn't really know what she hoped to accomplish by pressing the elevator button. It was just something you did when you wanted the elevator to come up. And she had expected that eighteen to change to seventeen. She almost jumped out of her skin when the other two doors opened, and each elevator sounded its own little “Ding".
Determined to make a difference, she pressed the down bottom again. This time the eighteen went out, and the number seventeen lit up. Before it made it past three floors, the other two elevator doors closed, and they started descending. She wondered at first, but then it dawned her that someone had summoned an elevator just seconds after she had.
"What's going on?" she asked herself out loud.
*****
Eighteen floors below, Sam circled through one corridor after the next. All he wanted to do was find the stairs or the elevators, he didn't care which. The problem was they were right near each other, and he didn't have a clue where either was.
There was a “Ding" up ahead, and the nearly silent smooth sound of the elevator door shutting. Then he heard the hum of machinery. Disregarding what else might have heard the same sound, he ran in that direction.
When Sam rounded the corner and saw the elevator doors, he also saw the infected dead that had been stalking him. It had gone in search of him and had gone by the elevator doors and then the stairwell. It had almost made it to the end of the long corridor when the elevator dinged. The good news was that it was the same one he had seen earlier and not a new one. The bad news was that it was already coming in his direction. Sam made a dash for the elevators and saw that the door to the stairs was not an option. The infected dead was only a few feet from the door as it stumbled toward him.
He practically slid past the elevator buttons, but started jabbing the up button as hard as he could. He was too scared to even think that there was no down button on the bottom floor, but he wasn't too scared to notice what floors the elevators were on. Two were on their way, but they were only passing two, three, four...too far away. The other was going up past ten, nine, eight...
Sam couldn't wait for the elevator, so he turned around and ran again. This time he was paying desperately close attention to every detail of every corridor. When he came to the dark rooms again, he eased past the open doors, not knowing if there were more infected inside, but feeling the hair standing up on his neck again was enough to make him believe the dark room was full of the infected.
Once past those doors, he started trying to figure out if there was a way to reach the stairwell from the other side. If the infected followed him, then he would have to find a way to loop around behind it. Sam figured his reasoning had to be good because the infected had somehow gotten around on the other side of him.
He mentally kicked himself when he realized he could have been marking walls to know where he had already been, but then he calmed down and accepted that he had only been afraid. Being scared can make you do exactly what he had been doing, and that was running around like an idiot. He had spent a long time dodging the infected in Charleston before being rescued, and they were everywhere. So far he had only seen one in this place, so he had the upper hand.
Sam drew an arrow on the wall to show which direction he was going at this given spot. If he came to this same spot again, he would try a different direction. He kept going for about thirty more minutes, finding corridor after corridor and room after room. Some of the doors were open and some were shut. Too many were dark. He kept expecting to find one of his arrows written on a wall, but to his surprise he found the door to the stairs.
He put his hand on the panic bar of the door and started to push, but his curiosity got the best of him, and he had to check. Sam went over and looked at the three elevator doors, and they were all on the bottom floor. All three eighteen
buttons were illuminated. He didn't know why they were all on the bottom floor, but he would get back to the safety of the top floor a lot faster by riding up, so he pressed the button.
The bell dinged on each door as they slid open. He jumped into one and pressed the button for the first floor and pressed the button that said Close Door just for good measure. Those buttons never seemed to speed things up, but just as the door slid shut he caught a glimpse of the infected dead moving toward the elevator. He preferred to think that this time the Close Door button had worked.
*****
Olivia rode the elevator all the way to the bottom floor. Somewhere around the tenth or eleventh floor it occurred to her that she could have at least brought a steak knife or something with her, but she could have done even better because there were guns in the shelter. She asked herself what could she be thinking by rushing off with nothing but her fists. She suddenly felt naked standing inside the well lit box with nothing in her hands. Part of her was saying it was just nerves, but another part of her was becoming more and more scared.
When Olivia had been six years old, she had gotten mad a her parents and run away from home. Just like all kids that age, they only make it so far before they turn around go home. They usually think they have been gone long enough for the parents to be worried sick, but in reality the parents don't even know they're gone yet.
Olivia went far enough to not recognize the neighborhood anymore, and before she knew it, the sun was going down. She was brought home by a policeman after an elderly couple saw her standing on a curb with tears streaming down her face. Standing in the elevator, she felt like that six year old again. She was afraid, and there wasn't going to be an elderly couple or a policeman this time.
The numbers arrived at eighteen sooner than she wanted, and she wished she had hit the big red STOP button. Until she figured out a way to go back up from wherever it stopped, she would have been content not the reach the bottom floor. When the bell dinged her arrival, and the door slid quietly open, the shape that stood there didn't rush in, but she screamed anyway. The shape wasn't really there because it was just the way the light came down the hall. Not all of the lights were on, so there were some odd shadows here and there.
After she screamed, Olivia felt really embarrassed because she had let out a good one. She hoped the kids were far enough away that they didn't hear that scream.
"Wait a minute," she said out loud. "I hope they heard me loud and clear."
Olivia peeked around the corner into the corridor and didn't see anything, but she did smell it. Something was definitely overripe. She couldn't tell if the smell was coming from the left or the right, but she could see she wasn't far from the stairwell door. Just to be sure she was in the right place, she went and checked to see if there would be a big letter S on the door. There was.
She let the door swing shut as she stepped back inside.
"Sam?"
As soon as she called his name she felt stupid. She didn't know why, but she didn't think that was the thing to do.
"Is it because there's something down here, and you don't want it to know you're here too?" she asked herself. "Better yet, if there's something down here, then why am I down here?"
Olivia decided if she was going to be part of this group, she had to do her job. If Sam was down here, then he could use her help taking the pictures of the supplies. If he wasn't down here, she had to at least make sure he was okay. On the other hand, if he wasn't down here, she needed to be back up top watching the outside of the fort through the monitors.
She decided she would just take a quick look around before going back up. There was a corridor up ahead that looked like a main area of some kind. There were rooms with the lights turned off, but she told herself Sam might have turned them off himself. Then she told herself kids don't turn the lights off.
Eighteen floors above her, Whitney and Perry had arrived together only moments before in one of the other elevators. Worried because they had not seen Sam or doors marked with an S, they had decided to go up and check to see if Olivia had seen him. They checked the control room and saw that Olivia was gone, and there was no sign of Sam. Whitney glanced at the monitors and saw that one of them was on in the stairwell. It showed the door to the bottom floor, and there was a big letter S on it.
"Hey, Perry. Check it out. That little weasel, Sam, went all the way to the bottom floor so we couldn't claim it."
Perry walked up beside her to look just as the door with the big S on it opened. It was so unexpected that Perry and Whitney grabbed each other. Both of them let out a scream before they saw it was just Olivia.
"I won't tell anyone if you don't," said Perry.
"What scream? I didn't hear anybody scream."
Before they could even get around to asking each other why Olivia was on the bottom floor, the elevator outside the control room dinged again, and Sam practically fell out onto the floor. He really was screaming.
Besides scaring the hell out of both of them, it did at least scare them into motion. After almost a year of dodging the infected and staying alive on that ship, they weren't going to let Sam make them run and hide, despite the fact that was exactly what he was yelling at them to do.
Sam bolted from his prone position on the floor and ran for the control room, and he was screaming something about the infected being inside. He ran right by the two of them and shouted.
"Where's Olivia?"
Whitney looked at the stairwell monitor again and said, "She was right there a moment ago."
Sam turned completely white, as if he wasn't already the whitest boy Whitney had ever met. He started babbling and crying at the same time. There was something about being chased around by the infected dead, and then something about the bottom floor and the lights being off in some of the rooms. Three minutes later Perry and Whitney were loading hand guns, and three minutes after that they were back at the elevator doors.
They were tempted to take the stairs, but eighteen floors was a long way. They made a promise to each other that they would hold their fire when the door opened at the bottom floor just in case Olivia was outside the door. Perry told Sam to watch the monitors in case the adults came back. They couldn't tell from Sam how many infected he had seen, but it sounded like it had been an army of them.
Olivia eased past the same dark rooms Sam had. She found a better lit corridor and followed it past a dozen closed doors before coming to a turn that felt like it was taking her back to her starting point. She was surprised that it did no such thing. The hallway she turned into had a dozen doors along each side of the hallway, and they were all open. There was also that familiar smell.
She tried to backtrack, but the corridor ended in some kind of service room, and it wasn't hard to figure out it was like a hotel laundry. There were huge washing machines, dryers, and folding tables. There was an odd smear across one of the otherwise sparkling steel tables. This room had never been used, so that smear shouldn't be there.
The fine hairs on the back of Olivia's neck had a life of their own. For the tenth time she cursed herself for being too stupid to bring a gun. There was a change in the air, and even though it couldn't have been something she really felt, she could have sworn it felt like warm air. She swung around in time to see the infected dead moving out from behind some stainless steel equipment. It was watching itself move in the reflection, but Olivia gasped before she could cover her own mouth.
The infected dead groaned and started for her, and all she could do was run. Olivia was close to another door, and she didn't care where it went, so she went through. It was another hallway with too many doors, but something looked familiar. The soft light coming from around the corner ahead was like the light where the elevators were, but the stairwell door was even closer. She bolted through the door and started the long climb upward.
Before the door to the hallway had swung completely shut, the elevator door opened. Whitney and Perry were both in a shooter's stance ready to blow awa
y anything that came through the door. Perry held out a hand and cocked his head to one side to listen. He couldn't have known the sound he had heard was Olivia making her way to freedom as the door to the stairwell clicked shut.
"Cover me," said Whitney as she stepped out into the corridor.
Perry didn't know exactly what she meant by that, but he stepped out of the elevator facing in the opposite direction as Whitney. They kept their backs together as they moved down the corridor in the direction of the dark rooms. When they got to the first one, Whitney whispered to Perry.
"We need to know what's in there. Olivia could be hiding."
"I know," he said, "and we can't exactly yell her name."
"On three," said Whitney. "I'll step in the room and hit the lights. One, two, three."
She stepped inside and hit the spot where the switch should be, and the room lit up so bright it blinded them.
"Jeez," said Perry, "what were they planning to use this room for. The lights are so bright they could grow crops."
"She's not in here," said Whitney.
She turned slowly in a circle to see all of the room. Everything was so bright and sterile that the hallway behind Perry looked much darker than it had been when they came into the room, and it almost seemed like it was growing darker.
The bright lights inside the room had blinded her and robbed her of the opportunity to see what was about to happen in time to help Perry. The sound of the much taller infected dead biting Perry on the back right where the shoulder touched the neck didn't sound real, and then she couldn't hear anything except his screaming. His eyes were panicked and he'd shut them at first, but then they were wide open with pain as the fire in his skin spread.
Whitney had seen too much in the time they had been together. She and Perry had hidden under porches, in closets, and behind doors. They had climbed out of second story windows and jumped to the ground. They had outrun more infected dead than she could count, but in the quiet times, they had talked and made solemn promises to each other that if the time ever came that one of them needed the other one to end it for them, they would make it fast. There could be no hesitation, because if they hesitated, then they might not go through with it.
