by Howard, Bob
When the crowds became mobs, the doors were attacked with crowbars and hammers. When the doors fell away, there was nothing on the other side except shiny, stainless steel walls that had no seams at the tops, bottoms, or sides. They were doors to nowhere.
When no way could be found to open the steel walls, some people rammed them with cars, and some tried to shoot them down. All of the attempts failed, and there was nothing left to do but to try to escape.
Some of the first to die were not the people who were bitten. Those would come later by the thousands, but the few who died at the very beginning were the surface-citizens who had lied for no apparent reason about a shelter that could save them all. As the infected began stumbling into the streets where thousands of people from neighboring suburbs had been lured by false hope, the crowds were already turning on each other so much that they weren’t even aware the infected dead were among them. The people who worked in downtown Columbus were caught in between.
******
The first squad of soldiers to enter a dimly lit corridor was surprised by the contrasting surroundings. Dim overhead lights allowed them to enter rooms quickly and then move on. Some rooms were well furnished offices that were ready for their occupants to begin work. Others were ravaged by bloody attacks of the infected on fellow workers, and some of the workers were still falling over wastepaper cans, bodies, and other debris to reach the soldiers. In those rooms the smells were nauseating.
If not for the fact that POTUS was possibly in the shelter, they would be able to just mark the rooms as hostile and move on to the next. Unfortunately, they had to eliminate the infected and examine all of the dead in the rooms to see if POTUS was among them.
The squad was told to extend the clear zone outward for thirty minutes and then return to the dining hall. Barricades of heavy furniture were then carried to the new limits of the clear zone where guards would be stationed while a new group began moving forward.
Two hours later the corridor where they had begun searching produced few meaningful results. They learned that the infected had been trapped in rooms, and only a few had been found in the corridor. An internal email that someone had printed for others to see had proclaimed a national emergency and announced the lockdown of the entire shelter. All workers were to remain inside their spaces, and prepare for the arrival of the President.
The corridor ended at an elevator that wouldn’t open, and all efforts to pry the doors apart failed. A barricade was erected outside the elevator, and soldiers were left to guard it.
The second corridor provided an even more useful document than the email about the emergency. Actually, it was more than a document. It was a binder about four inches thick that had a directory of the levels and the rooms in the entire shelter. The most exciting column next to each room was the internal telephone number.
Captain Miller and the Chief were sitting at a table going over the individual pages to find anything that would tell them how to navigate the shelter. So far there was nothing about the operation of the elevators or where to find stairwells. The assumption was that the President would be in a part of the shelter separate from the staff, and the binder was not about to tell the holder how to find the President.
“How many rooms are there?” asked the Chief.
“If the numbers are right, about two-thousand.”
The Chief had a hard time holding back his surprise.
“That’s about three times the size of the hotel above us.”
“Then we need to get started with the calls. The squad that cleared the first hallway said there were dial tones in the offices. We can put them to work dialing numbers while second squad clears the next corridor. Who knows, there could be people surviving on other levels.”
“I can vouch for that theory, Captain.”
Cassandra Gibbs had walked up to the table with her M-4 and a machete. She was obviously getting restless.
“When I was hiding on the parking level of the Mercy ship, I listened in on an interior communications radio as the decks were overrun one at a time. Some of the crew tried to hole up in cabins, but if the dead didn’t get to them other survivors tried to. There could be people holed up all over this place.”
“I’ll take that as firsthand intelligence, Ms. Gibbs.”
“Any chance I can go with your squads, Captain? I’m ex-military, and I know my way around my M-4. I’m just getting more and more restless.”
Captain Miller nodded his agreement. He had seen all of the Mud Island people in action, and he knew we could handle ourselves when there was trouble. Cassandra could be lethal when she had to be.
“See Sgt. Marino and tell him I said to assign you to a squad, and don’t let him put you in first squad. They’re going to be busy making phone calls, and I don’t think that’s what you had in mind.”
Cassandra snapped to attention then pivoted in place as she left. Captain Miller smiled at the Chief. Old habits were hard to break, and the military had plenty of old habits.
The first squad went back to the offices that appeared relatively untouched. They each got comfortable and started calling phone numbers on their lists. They had been ordered to let each number ring at least ten times in case someone was trying to get to a phone before it stopped ringing. There were some unexpected results.
Of the six soldiers dialing numbers, two of them got answers by the fifth ring, but not the answers they had expected. The phones were knocked from their cradles, and groaning could be heard through the headsets.
Captain Miller immediately sent a runner after the second squad to have them hold their positions while he had the rooms in the second corridor called. Six rooms had the same results, so they knew which rooms were hostile before the doors were opened. First squad was told to update third squad before they began their search of the next corridor.
It was a long day of calling, updating, and searching, but by the end of the day every corridor on the level had been searched. The infected had all been eliminated, and the President was not among them. There were several bodies with Secret Service credentials in their pockets, and the others had a variety of badges that identified them as analysts, clerical, communications, and other personnel.
Once the corridors were secured, the kitchen was opened. Cassandra felt like she was going back in time when she stepped through the swinging doors and saw a huge aluminum door that had to be a loading or delivery bay. She didn’t have to tell anyone it was a bad idea to open the door because there was a random banging on the other side. When she listened closely, she could hear the accompaniment of groans through the heavy metal door.
“Has anyone found a map of this place yet?” she asked the squad leader.
He was a short but really broad shouldered young man, and he answered with politeness that was typical of all of Captain Miller’s soldiers.
“No, Ma’am. Private McCarthy is trying to decipher something in code that might let us log into one of the computers. First squad says they power up, but they have passwords. There might be information in them about the layout.”
She scowled at the young man.
“Please don’t call me Ma’am again. You can call me Gibbs, Cass, or even Sarge, but not Ma’am.”
He started to say Ma’am again but caught himself in time.
Cassandra wandered around the kitchen checking out the supplies that were stored in different cabinets and on shelves. She couldn’t help but wonder about why everything was a wreck in the dining hall, but the kitchen was still largely intact.
She caught my attention and asked for my opinion since I had seen so many different places since the infection began.
“We’ve tried to reverse engineer settings plenty of times,” I said, “but a hundred different things could have happened here. My guess is that the explosion over the main entrance was so massive that it rocked this place. No one knew what it was, so they panicked and ran for the rooms where we’ve found the infected.”
When I said i
t, it made me realize why some rooms were empty, and some rooms were overcrowded. People trying to escape would have known where the exits were located. Either they were running to designated shelters or running for designated exits. Since they were already inside a shelter, the odds were in favor of exits.
“Cassandra, you’re a genius,” I said before running off to find the Chief and Captain Miller.
They were still at their table trying to make sense of the room numbering system so they would have some idea how many levels there were, and where the connections were between the levels. There wasn’t a clue about how to get the elevators to operate, but they would settle for stairs.
When I explained to them my theory about the dining hall being populated at the time of the explosion, and the people evacuating to specific rooms, they couldn’t have jumped up and headed for the first corridor any faster.
The rooms had been cleared of the infected, and a group of soldiers had moved the bodies to storage closets. It seemed like an unnecessary task at first, but the Captain had explained we would need to search the rooms more than once, and we didn’t need to be stepping over bodies every time.
The three of us burst into the first room where the infected were found and eliminated. We moved as if we had entered a crime scene. We didn’t want to disturb anything more than it already had been, and we needed to see the room through the eyes of frightened people who were trying to escape.
“I wonder how the infection got into the shelter,” I said as we stayed glued to a small patch of space just inside the door.
“We may never know that for sure,” said the Chief, “at least not until we find out if the infection made it to every level. I’m still hoping it was confined to this level.”
“I didn’t learn what it was like to be an optimist until you guys showed up and rescued us at Fort Jackson,” said Captain Miller. “If you think there are still safe levels in this shelter, I’m willing to believe it too.”
From where we stood we could see most of the large office. It was laid out in cubicles down the center, and the surrounding walls all had private offices, presumably for management.
The obvious choice for a hidden exit would be one of the private offices, so we agreed to start our search in them.
“Imagine yourself being employed to work in an underground shelter,” said the Chief. “You report for work just like any other job, but the shelter would need tremendous resources in order for all of the workers to live in it.”
“They would have to work in shifts just like any other big business,” said Captain Miller.
I added, “And some of them wouldn’t even know what this place really was. They probably were given a cover story when they were hired.”
“Right,” said the Chief. “The people who work in the CIA cafeteria have background checks done before they’re hired, but no one is going to tell them any secrets.”
We each went into the first three private offices and started checking for anything out of place. I knew something was different about the one I entered immediately. It appeared normal, but it didn’t feel normal. The desk was positioned off to the left and was facing the entire right side of the office. It didn’t feel like a personalized private office.
“Hey Chief, Captain Miller. Do your offices have family pictures and other personal items?”
Rather than answer, they both showed up at the door of the office I was checking.
There was a computer on the desk with the back of the monitor facing us, but it was the rectangular device next to it that drew our attention. It had a slot on it like a magnetic card reader for laminated badges.
We all began concentrating on the wall to the right, and we weren’t surprised when we found that a panel of the wall opened easily when we pressed on it. What we didn’t expect was the stainless steel wall behind it. There were seams in the shape of a door, but there was no handle, and it didn’t budge.
“They were sealed in just like the priests in the pyramids in Egypt,” said the Chief.
“That would explain the wrecked rooms. There must have been a crazy panic in here. Maybe the explosion happened first and then the infection got inside,” I said. “That would explain why the cafeteria got wrecked.”
The screaming and yelling caught us off guard, and even though it was far away, we felt the urgency. It was followed by the unmistakeable bursts of shots being fired in close quarters. We ran from the offices back to the common area just in time to see it all happening.
It was coming from the kitchen and from the area just outside the swinging doors where we saw Colleen go down under the weight of two infected dead. Our view was blocked by furniture, so we couldn’t tell how bad it was going to be, but it seemed like our nightmares and worst fears were coming true.
The kitchen doors burst open again, and Cassandra almost literally flew from the doors to the place where Colleen had gone down. She disappeared, and between the bursts of gunshots fired in the kitchen we heard the loud cracking of bones.
The Chief was the first to reach them, but we all saw one of the infected was now lying off to the side. Cassandra had her right forearm under the chin of the infected that was face to face with Colleen. She was pulling back as hard as she could, but this one was stronger than most and not as emaciated.
I thought the Chief was going to run straight through them, but when his left leg planted and his right leg came up in a long arc, I remembered in a flash that I heard a field goal kicker say that you kick through the ball. His size fourteen foot came in just above Cassandra’s forearm, and the head hit a wall at least six feet from them.
Cassandra pulled the body aside, and we all held our breath as she helped Colleen to a sitting position. It wasn’t like either of them to cry, but this was one of those times.
Hampton came over a pile of tables to get to them, and the fear was written all over his face. He wanted to ask her to say she wasn’t bitten, but he didn’t want to hear the answer. Colleen threw her arms around his neck, and it seemed like forever before she stopped sobbing.
While they were holding each other, Cassandra was checking her arms and neck. She gave us an expression that said she hadn’t found a bite, but she would need to be checked more thoroughly.
The shots inside the kitchen began again, and we realized something had gone wrong enough for the men inside to need help. We left Hampton to take care of Colleen, and went through the doors.
Someone had opened the loading bay door, and it had been standing room only on the other side. The soldiers had done a good job stopping the advance of the infected, but without our firepower, they would have been overrun while reloading. We joined in, and eventually we were shooting at the infected that had been at the back of the crowd.
We carefully stepped over what had been a horde of infected that had been a crowd of employees trying to get in the door when the infection had reached them from behind. The corridor behind them curved off to the left, and there were still shadows approaching the turn as we advanced. We waited until they came into view before shooting again.
“There’s something different about this corridor,” said the Chief.
I saw it, too. There was a slight downward slope to it as it curved out of sight. We started crossing the pile of bodies. Kathy, Tom, and Jean came in behind us and followed. None of them asked what had happened because it was obvious, but everyone was ready to do battle. A part of me gave in to the knot in my stomach, and I assumed it was because they had already seen Colleen outside the kitchen.
The knot seemed to move to my throat when I saw that Cassandra had joined us, and she was flat out furious. I thought I was going to be sick.
Someone sniffed behind me, and I glanced backward into Colleen’s face. She was being slightly supported by Hampton, but she was even more angry than Cassandra. Seeing her made me stop where I was.
We made eye contact, and she said, “I’m so sick and tired of running into those things.”
She had a
big lump on her forehead where she had slammed into something, but she wasn’t wearing any bandages.
“No bites?” I asked in a voice much higher than normal.
“No bites,” she said, and her voice was shaky.
When we started forward again, everyone showed in their own way that they were relieved to see we weren’t going to lose one of our family, but there was a feeling that the game was finally on. The corridor had no openings at all, and was definitely making a wide spiral downward. What we had assumed was a loading bay door was actually a door to a lower level. It might do nothing more than get us there and leave us with the puzzle of finding the next door, but it was better than sitting still on the cafeteria level. We moved forward with more anger than I had ever felt in our circle of friends.
******
Tunnels have a way of making people feel the weight of the world above. Whether it’s a tunnel under water or buried by the ground, if the tunnel is long enough, it will eventually cross a person’s mind that the only thing separating them from death was a man made ceiling.
Finding the way station wasn’t as good as finding the final destination, but to Garrett it felt close. His enthusiasm was contagious, and his quicker pace seemed to energize the crew of Executive One.
They began chatting with each other instead of just shambling forward on tired legs. It had gradually sunk in that the goal they had hoped to reach on the very first day of the outbreak was now within their reach almost two years later. It was really happening, and they were free of the airport that had been both their shelter and their prison.
