Anno Zombus Year 1 (Book 3): March (2 page)

mid-morning

Again we went to the left, once we found the bottom of the stairs, and almost immediately came across a circuit breaker, which Archer promptly tripped, turning the lights on and blinding us all again.  In the distance we heard other machines powering up, and by the time we could once more see, we also heard a low hum, almost beyond the edge of perception.

According to the map Redbeard had made of the upper level, this one veered off to one side dramatically.  “Looks like we're under the lake,”  Archer pointed out, “I wonder why?”  We continued down the hallway, idly wondering why it was we hadn't come across any doors leading off of it yet.  Eventually we came to a corner, turning right, and followed it around.  This led to another hallway, seemingly longer than the previous one, also doorless.  Redbeard assured us that the hallway was exactly as long as the one before, once we reached the end, coming to another corner, though the rest of us remained skeptical.

noon

This time, two doors along the hallway, which seemed to continue onwards for an age before making a right turn, which if Redbeard was correct, should lead back to the stairs up.  The Twin ran off ahead to check while the rest of us sat in the hall between the massive double doors leading into the square we had been circumnavigating, and a smaller, locked, wooden door directly opposite.  Archer broke open the supplies, and we had a light lunch.  While chewing on jerky I spotted The Twin running back towards us.  When she reached us, she told Redbeard that his cartographical skills were spot on.  There was another stairwell hidden away just behind the corner leading down, as well.

After we had all eaten, Archer asked Redbeard if he would like to open the door for us.  The giant of a man replied that it would be his pleasure, and promptly rammed his shoulder into the door, shattering it into splinters.

The room was empty.  Completely fucking empty.  Well, there is now door fragments in there, but nothing else at all.  Dejected, we moved on down the hallway, as it appeared we would need, at the least, a keycard of some sort in order to get past the double doors.  As The Twin said, there was indeed another stairway leading downwards, which we followed.

The low hum grew slightly as we descended, gnawing at the edges of consciousness.  This floor was of a similar layout to the previous, a large square around a massive central chamber, with one exception.  There were hundreds of doors on the outer walls of the square.  So many that we didn't bother to do more than open the door, glance inside, and move on unless we saw something particularly interesting.  Most of us went left, The Twin deciding to go right, just to scout the level and see if the layout was indeed the same and set off at a full run.

late afternoon

The Twin caught up to the rest of us before we had even finished the first hallway of four.  She had reported that the layout was indeed exactly the same, another stairway down at the same place as the upper floor.  It seemed to go down a lot further though, she told us.  Even the double doors we had discovered earlier were replicated.

We kept on with our room to room glancing, discovering that the door opposite the double metal barrier was locked on this level also.  This time Archer just simply raised a boot and kicked outwards, connecting with the door just above the handle.  It flew inwards to reveal a room exactly like that directly above it in every way but one.

A desk sat upon the floor.  Upon the desk, however, lay a briefcase which Apocalypse Girl promptly grabbed and began fiddling with.  Though it was locked, she had it open in seconds.  The contents were ancient, and putrid.  What had once been an apple, and the remains of a sandwich wrapped in plastic.  A smudge of black that might have once been a banana.

A shiny badge with a photo of a bespectacled flat-topped man with the name William Foster.  Turning the badge over, Apocalypse Girl discovered a thin magnetic strip.  Putting two and two together, she tried the card on the massive double doors lock.

It opened instantly revealing a small chamber with another set of doors on the other side.  We entered and the first set closed tight.  After a moment, the second set opened.  Walking through, we stepped out onto a metal catwalk encircling an enormous square-edged pit.  Looking up, we saw another catwalk, and above it what looked like a solid wall of water.  Looking down, nothing but blackness descending deeper into still more blackness.

Directly before us, however, stretching down into infinity, a rocket of impressive proportions.  The warhead itself was neatly placed at our level, showing the all-too-familiar symbol for radioactivity.  Archer pulled out the page we had discovered earlier, and sure enough the words “Neutron warhead” were featured prominently.

“We should be pretty safe from radiation, but it's up to the rest of you.  We continuing down?”  Archer asked us.  I agreed, as did the others, unable to tear my eyes from the missile until Apocalypse Girl pulled me into the airlock once again.

evening

We continued searching each room as we went along, stopping only when we reached the stairs down.  There we camped, in a room next to the stairwell, planning our next move while eating.  The Twin was right, these stairs seemed to go a lot further down than expected.  Apocalypse Girl's phone jangled, signifying a message from one of The Smart Couple, but as she pulled it out of her pocket it died on her.  Blaming me for it, as I had used up a significant portion of the phones battery life for light so I could write, she smacked me playfully across the back of the head as she plugged her charger into a wall socket overnight.

March 4
Year 1 A.Z.

morning

Making our way down the stairs, we ate on our journey.  Lighting was now sporadic, flickering occasionally, whereas above our current level it had been steady.  In time, we descended to a corridor running directly away from the stairs, but by now we had become so turned back on ourselves that there was no way of determining which direction the hallway led.  However, as it was our only option, we started to walk along it.

After a good several hundred metres I began to feel a chill.  Apocalypse Girl asked if anyone felt a draft, and Archer stopped, cocking his head to one side.  He quietly told us to hang back, which we did a little, while he went on ahead.  He drew his .45, and carefully we moved onwards.  The chill became far more evident as we went along, the light becoming more stable, as well, though not for the ancient bulbs that flickered overhead.  No, there was, for want of a better term, a light at the end of the tunnel.

noon

The Twin ran off ahead while we sat and ate a light lunch.  We had gone through a little more than half the food and water we had brought along, so we needed to be heading back up to The Think Tank soon, so she had offered to scout out the light in the distance.  I was just washing down the last mouthful of jerky with water when The Twin returned, puffing slightly from her run.  Her facial expression was one of deep concern.

“You guys need to see this,”  She began, “Just be quiet as you can, just in case, but it should be safe enough.”

We followed her another couple of hundred metres down the hallway, and came to a large, rusted grate over the end of the tunnel.  Whoever had designed this place had put a back way in, but had neglected to do more than cover it with a simple steel grate.  The Twin pushed on it slightly, and it moved easily, though noisily.

Looking through the grate, however, all we could see was Dead.  Thousands of Dead.  A vast carpet of Dead stretching as far as the eye could see lay no further than a kilometre away, shambling along in a westerly direction.  Now that we could see enough of the outside world, we could make a guess as to where we were, and the orientation of the tunnel.  It stretched out behind us, also to the west.

Apocalypse Girl's phone jangled urgently at her, and she whipped it out as we moved back inside.

“Oh shit.”  Was all she said, showing me the phone.  Two messages awaited our attention. 
Emergency situation, need to discuss, return at once.
  That was the first.  The second we didn't really need, not now. 
Massive horde approaching in Family's wake, RETURN URGENTLY!

I took the phone off her and replied with
Two days out, will return ASAP
then we marched back down the corridor, and back up the stairs.

evening

We had to stop once we reached the top of the stairwell, going up stairs being that much more difficult than descending.  Close to collapse from exhaustion, we camped in the same room as the previous night.  Another message had arrived during our climb, this one reading
Family is three days away.  Horde another four behind them, by best guess.  Need to plan defence NOW. 
The phone rang, then, Apocalypse Girl handing it to me.  The Colonel was on the other end.

“That psychotic Mother and her Family are closing.  We have time enough to prepare a solid defence, but we need to know if you found anything we can use down there.”  I told her that we found something interesting, but it wasn't particularly useful in this instance.  She asked what it was, and was silent for a good minute after I reported the neutron warhead on the missile.  “Yeah, that won't help us now.”  She said.  “Though I will need to check it out myself.  I might be able to find a use for it.  Maybe for the Dead?”  Then I told her of the stairs to the corridor and grate, where we had seen the horde firsthand.  She suggested that it might be a good idea to secure that grate, make sure we have a working back door.

We might need it.

March 5
Year 1 A.Z.

morning

Awakening to the sounds of approaching footsteps, I snatched up my .45 before I was aware enough to realise that it was a crew from The Think Tank coming to investigate things further.  Foreman poked his head through the door, nodding with satisfaction when he saw us, though the glare he gave me left no doubt.  He blamed me for the deaths of his companions at The Farm.  Fair enough, really, because so did I.  Vanishing back up the passage, he barked to somebody that he had found us.

A few seconds later, The Colonel almost flew into the room.  It was pretty clear she hadn't slept in a while, perhaps not since we made it back from Melbourne.  As our little scout group gathered ourselves together, she told us that she had inspected the missile we had discovered.  A neutron bomb it was, indeed, and though the arming system was still intact, there was no targeting system available, having been stripped when this part of the facility had been abandoned, perhaps twenty or more years ago, by The Colonel's estimate.

Foreman bolted past the doorway, a few others that I vaguely recognised as being newcomers following in his wake, and we heard them marching down the fucking long stairs to the fucking long corridor that led to the grate from which we had seen the fucking large carpet of Dead.  They carried with them a few spare doors, that they had clearly torn from their hinges on this level.  The Colonel told us to get back up to The Think Tank and wait for her in the main computer lab with Smart Girl.  Smart Guy was busy inspecting the interior of the missile silo itself, in an effort to figure out why exactly the lake was just hanging up above the warhead, rather than flooding the entire place.

noon

We made our way up to the top of the silo, hearing the muttering from Smart Guy as he obliviously wandered out from the catwalk at warhead level.  I could make out little, something about pressure differentials, but nothing that made any sense to me.  I am hardly a scientist.  As it was, Redbeard very nearly trampled him, and would have if not for The Twin yanking him out of the way at the last instant.

The Smart Guy accompanied us to the elevator, and while we awaited the lift's imminent arrival, he mentioned that the only thing he could see that the nuke could be used for was to “sterilise” The Think Tank.  Apocalypse Girl asked him why on earth he would even think of such a thing, to which he replied that the Dead might get in, or The Family might overrun us.  There were no doubt any number of other possible scenarios that might result in such drastic action, but The Smart Guy assured us that he was in no particular hurry to detonate the thing.

Eventually the elevator descended, the doors opening to allow ingress.  The ride up was interminably slow and painful, I just wanted to get the fuck upstairs to the computer labs, in order to see the situation I had created for everybody here.

evening

Firecracker sat in the main computer lab with The Smart Girl, Sister and Junior joining them.  Apocalypse Girl, Archer and I sat down with them, Apocalypse Girl asking one half of our resident geniuses to bring up the satellite view of the approaching army, and horde of Dead.  The smudge that I had spotted exiting Melbourne the last time I was in this room had actually been the leading edge of what seemed to be every shambling corpse left in the city and surrounding suburbs coming out to meet, greet and eat us.

Firecracker looked at me with a worried expression, asking what, if anything, we could do about the oncoming mobs of approaching trouble.  I shrugged, as I really had no fucking idea at all.  Dropping into a chair, I slouched, Apocalypse Girl seating herself much more delicately beside me.  The Smart Guy told Firecracker and his female counterpart about the limited potential of the warhead.  He even went on to state that it must be activated manually.  Whoever did that was most certainly not going to survive the experience.