Condemn (BUNKER 12 Book 2) (32 page)

Finn was shaking.

"How did you know he was there?" Byron
asked.

"You had a man named Micheal Williams
with you. He showed up at our front door, Bunker Eight, about two
weeks ago. He said he was from Bunker Two. Right before he died, he
recognized me. Or, rather, he thought I was Harper."

"Williams?" Byron echoed, his face
tightening.

"Yes."

"What did he tell you?"

"That there was a breach and Wraiths
got inside. He said he barely made it out alive."

"There was a breach." He let out a
deep breath. "But they didn't."

"I don't understand. He said a lot of
people were infected."

"They were, but not by Wraiths coming
in. The infection was already inside."

"What?" both Bix and Finn exclaimed at
once. "How is that possible?"

"I don't know. It swept through the
community like wildfire, starting deep in the mine. It was Charlie
who saved us." A tear slipped down his cheek. Little Jerry buried
his face in his father's shirt.

"What happened to Harper? What
happened to my brother?"

Byron shook his head. "The infection
came from his end of the complex. No one from there got
out."

Eddie had grown to appreciate his newfound abilities. They enabled
him to scale walls, jump higher, and run faster than normal. They
significantly improved his senses. But if there was one thing they
didn't help with, it was picking locks.

He threw the paperclips down in
disgust and straightened up in the darkened hallway and glanced
toward the front door. He kept expecting one of the two men who
occupied the office, Cheever or Wainwright, to return.

Cheever had come and gone for most of
the day, but Wainwright had ventured out for only a few minutes
here and there.

"Guy needs to get himself
a frikkin life,"
Eddie had
decided.

Finally, about an hour after sundown,
the colonel left the building, locking the front door up
tight.

Eddie had been waiting all day. He'd
slipped into the building soon after it was unlocked early that
morning, but rather than knocking on the commander's office door,
he'd headed up to the dusty unused attic, and there he'd stayed,
hiding directly above the office, listening to the two men talk.
The attic was hot, and he was drowsy, as he'd gotten no sleep after
leaving Jonah to prepare.

He heard the man in charge of his duty
assignment come in midmorning to report that he hadn't checked in.
Eddie hoped both men would leave to investigate his absence,
perhaps to go searching for him in the barracks. But all Cheever
did was tell him to check with the guards at the gate. "See if he
left on his own."

"That group from the bus has been more
trouble than they're worth," he complained to Colonel Wainwright
afterward. "They have no interest in fitting in with the rest of
this community. If they want to leave, I say let them."

"That would not be
advisable."

"We lost a man because of them. And
what do we get for thanks? The guy they saved just ups and leaves.
A bunch had to be put in the infirmary, straining our limited
supplies."

"And two of them have
died."

"Yes."

"You know how it is anymore, Grant.
The sooner the weak ones drop away, the stronger the rest of us
become. They'll either realize how much they need us and settle in,
or they won't."

Eddie did not like the sound of
that.

"Patience. Maybe something positive
will come out of this."

Eddie had warned Hannah at breakfast
about his plans. He didn't tell her about finding Jonah out in the
desert or that he'd seen Bren leave with the bus. He simply told
her that he wouldn't be around for most of today and not worry.
"You may hear rumors that I've left, but know that it's not true.
I'd never leave without you."

"Where are you going? What are you
doing?"

"These people aren't telling us the
whole truth. I need to find out why. If anyone asks, you haven't
seen me. You don't know where I am. I'm telling you so you won't
worry."

She nodded and hugged him. "I
wouldn't, Daddy. I know that you'll be okay. You can do anything
now."

His daughter's words echoed in his
mind as he stood before the locked door. "Anything except pick
locks," he grumbled.

He checked the front door once more,
then reached into his rucksack and extracted the roll of duct tape
he'd relieved from the supply closet a few days before and began to
cover the glass in the door with it.

When he was done, he pressed his palm
against the surface until the window began to bow. It soon broke
with a muffled series of cracks. Some of the pieces still fell away
and tinkled to the floor, but it was a lot quieter than the sound
of an entire pane shattering.

With the broken window held in place,
he cut a hole in the tape and stuck his hand through it until he
found the knob on the other side. Ten seconds later, he was inside
the office.

The room was dark, but it proved to be
little problem for him.

A week ago, it wouldn't
have been
any
problem at all
, he thought,
remembering the ease with which he'd been able to move about inside
the bunker despite the near complete darkness at times. He could
still see clearly enough to get around now, though not with quite
the same ease.

He went over to the desk
and saw that it was strewn with several large sheets of thickly
laminated paper. He recognized them immediately as military-issue
detail maps, busy with contour lines and other labels of strategic
importance. A stamp in the bottom corner said P
ROPERTY OF
Q
UANTUM
T
ELLIGENCE
.

On the map topping the stack, someone
had circled an area with blue wax pencil and labeled it with the
number 7. A green X filled it. Below the circle was a series of
letters and numbers:

AM — 5

AF — 7

JM — 2

JF — 3

He flipped the map to the side and checked the next one. Like the
first, it had a point circled with blue wax. It, too, was crossed
out in green. This spot was labeled with the number 2. As with the
first, a similar set of codes accompanied it:

AM — 2

AF — 1

JM — 0

JF — 0

The next was labeled #1; however, the X was in red this time, and
there was no associated alphanumeric column. Instead, there was an
ominous notation: D
ESTROYED
. The circle encompassed a
town named
HENGILL
, which he didn't recognize.

He thumbed quickly through the next
six maps, noting that some of them contained a single circled area,
though not all. Each one, however, had its own unique number. None
was X-ed out, whether in green or in red. Nor did they include a
coded column.

On one of the maps, his eye caught
several Chinese characters. On another, what appeared to be Russian
words.

Eddie slumped in the chair in
frustration. None of this meant anything to him at all. What were
these people doing with maps? Some of the areas they depicted
didn't even seem to be within North America. And as far as he knew,
overseas trips had become an impossibility since the Flense, a
relic of a lost technological past. There were no more transoceanic
ships, no airplanes.

Were there?

Of course not,
man
, he thought.

He remembered the last scenes of chaos
that had been televised before he'd snatched Hannah from her school
and making their way to the meeting site. The Flense had appeared
in all parts of the globe seemingly simultaneously and spread
quickly, leaving no time for governments to respond. Armies tried
to mobilize, but they were all in disarray. Civilization fell in a
matter of hours, returning to a state hundreds, if not thousands,
of years in the past.

So, what possible reason would these
people need with these maps, if they couldn't get to the places
they depicted?

On the wall was a whiteboard with yet
another map taped onto it. He stood up and walked over to look at
it, puzzling over the codes:

AM — 3 + 6 (+1?)

AF — 4 + 4

JM — 2 + 2 (+1?)

JF — 1 + 1

Below them were two extra lines, written in the same
hand:

1 MALE INFANT

13 STILL INSIDE

He stared at these last lines for several seconds, then his eyes
flicked up to the circle. It intersected a river and was labeled
with the number 8.

Recognition stole over him.
This was a map of the location of the dam, their bunker.
Bunker Eight.
And the
codes were an inventory of the people inside— or, rather, those
that had been inside
plus
those that still were. AM and AF stood for adult
male and female, respectively. JM and JF were juveniles. It was the
mention of the one male infant, Jorge, that had provided him the
key to decipher it.

He hurried back to the desk and
checked the top map again, quickly adding up the numbers in the
column.

"Seventeen," he whispered, and thought
back to the scene at the gate last night. He remembered seeing at
least a dozen people, though he couldn't recall exactly how many
more. The age and gender breakdown was certainly in line with what
was on the paper.

"Bunker Seven," he muttered. "Those
people last night were from Bunker Seven."

He quickly thumbed through the stack
again, looking for Bunker Two. It was marked along a branch of the
same river as Eight, about a hundred miles north of the Canadian
border. "Three adults," he whispered. "Two male, one female. And no
juveniles."

Was that all the
survivors? Were the three still here on base?

The map on the wall proved that
Cheever and Wainwright knew about Bunker Eight. But had they known
already? Or had Bren told them? The numbers were evidence that she
had shared at least that information. They added up too
perfectly.

Just as he had guessed, she was taking
them to the dam.

With his heart pounding against his
ribs, he checked the maps one last time. Notations printed beneath
the key in the corner — B1 through B10 — corresponded to
each of the ten bunkers that he and the other survivors had always
known existed.

It seemed, however, that the exact
locations of several wasn't known, just the general vicinity. Four
were in North America, whereas the other six were spread out
between Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa.

There was no Bunker Twelve.

Nor, for that matter, was there an
eleventh.

The sound of shouting roused Eddie from his thoughts. He dropped
the maps back onto the desk, stood up, and went over to the window
and nudged the blind away enough to peek outside.