Entombed (6 page)

Adapt or die.

Things didn’t work out with Hannah. Distraught over the divorce and riding an emotional rollercoaster, I’d shown up drunk at her apartment, crying in the rain. She’d invited me inside and dried me off, and when I told her what had happened, she’d done her best to console me. We ended up having sex. I can’t call it making love, because it was anything but that. It was just sex. I lay there in the darkness after it was over, shivering and thinking about Alyssa. Her words, her accusations—her truths—echoed in my head. I turned over, looked at Hannah, and told her it had been a mistake. Then I got dressed while she sat there in the bed, a sheet wrapped around her breasts, staring at me with hurt and confusion. She asked me to stay, and I told her that I couldn’t. I told her we’d talk about it more later, but we never did. I went out of my way to avoid her at work. I stopped taking her phone calls and blocked her email address. Two weeks later, she quit the Pocahontas. I don’t know what happened to her after that. I’d like to think she found someone who treated her the way she deserved, and that she was happy, if even for a brief while before the world ended—but I just don’t know.

I don’t know what happened to Alyssa either, ultimately. Since becoming trapped in the bunker, I’d tried not to let myself dwell on the possibilities—whether she was still alive somewhere out there, or had instead joined the ranks of the walking dead. In either case, she was gone. Out of reach. In truth, I’d lost her long before the zombies came. Our story was over before this one began. A good friend of mine had told me—shortly after Alyssa and I split up—that divorce was like a death without a corpse, and that I had to grieve and mourn just like I’d have had to do if she’d died.

Thinking too much about Alyssa’s possible fate only led to more heartbreak and frustration. Late at night, I told myself that she’d escaped. I imagined her somewhere else, maybe in a police station or an Army base or maybe on a boat, out to sea and out of the zombies’ reach. I imagined her happy and alive, and maybe missing me. Somehow, that made my sense of loss much more profound.

***

I sat there in the incinerator room, overwhelmed with remorse, battered by my guilty conscience and sick to my stomach over everything from the way I’d treated Alyssa to the murder I’d just committed, and wondered again why I even bothered. What was the point in all this? Why keep struggling, trapped beneath a mountain with a bunch of madmen and slowly starving to death? Why not just end it all right now? Just start the incinerator up and climb inside, or poke my head outside and offer myself up as a snack to the zombies. Not that I’d be much of a meal for them, not with all the weight I’d lost.

I thought about the people we’d lost in the first few days of the siege—folks like Annie Leavell, a very kind, generous and gregarious woman who had worked in one of the Pocahontas’s shops and had passed away from a heart attack on our third day here, and Ryan Burack, a tourist from Wisconsin who’d been staying in the hotel when the shit hit the fan and died our first night in the bunker, passing quietly in his sleep. We never figured out the cause. We hadn’t even known Ryan’s name until we pulled out his wallet after his death. We knew that Annie had a daughter, Chesya, who she’d talked about all the time. It felt wrong, not being able to inform her daughter of her death.

We’d put Annie and Ryan and all the others into the incinerator, because it was the only way to dispose of their bodies. It had been a solemn, if gruesome task. We’d treated them with respect—offered words of peace and mumbled prayers before we sent them on their way, reducing them to ashes. Had they been the lucky ones? Annie had, quite literally, died laughing. At least she’d gone out relatively happy, despite the circumstances. At least she hadn’t died on an empty stomach. Would I be able to say the same? At that point, it seemed like it would be a lot easier just to give up and give in.

But I didn’t. I didn’t think about it. I didn’t have to. It was instinct. Pure, primal instinct. When Chuck and the others knocked on the door a moment later, I forgot all about Alyssa and Annie all of the things that had gone wrong in my life, and went right back to doing what I had to do to survive.

FOUR

“Pete?”

I held my breath. My heart pounded in my throat and I heard my blood rushing through my ears.

“Open up, Pete.”

It was Chuck. I recognized his voice, even through the thick walls. The door clanged as something hard and metallic was rapped against it. The sound repeated once. Twice. Then Chuck called out again.

“We know you’re in there, Pete. Come on out.”

I didn’t say anything. I scrambled to my feet and quietly moved away from the door. I clenched my fists so hard that my fingernails dug deep into my palms.

The knocking returned, this time faster and with more force. It stopped suddenly, followed by a muffled, angry curse.

“Come on, Pete. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can talk about it if you want. I don’t know what Drew told you, but—”

“Save it, Chuck.” My eyes widened in surprise. I hadn’t meant to speak out loud. Then, deciding the damage had already been done, I continued. “Drew told me exactly what’s going on. Even if he hadn’t, Krantz sure as fuck verified it for me. Have you lost your goddamned mind?”

“Me?” Chuck sounded genuinely offended. “You’re the one whose lost his mind, Pete. You killed Krantz.”

“Only because he would have killed me. It was self defense.”

“That’s not true,” someone else shouted. I couldn’t tell who they were for sure. A male, certainly, but the speaker could have been one of many people.

“Shut up,” Chuck told the other person, loud enough that I could hear him through the door. There was a moment of silence and then Chuck spoke again. His tone had changed, his voice now tinged with anger and annoyance. I was messing up his plans. I wasn’t going along with the group vote. I was making him look bad in front of the others. The thought made me grin.

“Let’s face facts here, Pete. You’re unarmed and alone and trapped in there with no other way out. There’s more of us than there are of you. It’s over. You know that. Face it like a man. Come on out.”

“Fuck you. I’m staying right here.”

“Pete, you—”

“Did I stutter, Chuck? Go fuck yourself.”

“I know it’s not easy, but you need to face facts. None of us likes this. You think we’re animals or something? Of course we aren’t. We didn’t come down here just to turn into cannibals, man. But that’s the hand we’ve been dealt. If it’s any consolation, I didn’t want it to go down this way. Drew sort of ruined everything by telling you. I swear, we meant to take you in your sleep. You wouldn’t have felt a thing. You wouldn’t have even known.”

“That’s very kind of you.” I said it loud enough so that he could hear me through the door, hoping to distract him and keep him talking long enough for me to escape. Chuck was right about one thing. I was outnumbered and overwhelmed. I didn’t know how many people he had out there with him, but even if it was just three of them, I’d have a problem defending myself in this small space, with only a fire extinguisher and my fists to use as weapons. Hunger had physically weakened all of us, but three against one was bad odds no matter how strong a person was.

“We’re coming in now,” Chuck said. “My advice to you is to not fight it. You’ll only make things harder on yourself. I give you my word that this can happen peacefully. You won’t even be aware of it. We’ve got enough painkillers and stuff that you can still go in your sleep. We can knock you out. But if you want to go hard, Pete, then so be it.”

“Come on in,” I challenged, raising my eyes toward the ductwork above me. “See what happens.”

There was another brief pause and then the iron bar wiggled as they tried to open the door from the other side. My blockade held fast. The door didn’t budge. It thudded as something was forced against it from the other side. Then I heard somebody groan as if in pain.

“It’s locked, and now I hurt my damned shoulder.”

I recognized this speaker as a man named Phillips. I didn’t know much about him, other than he had been a sales rep for some kind of foam insulation company, and he’d been here on vacation when the zombies attacked. His wife and kids had apparently been topside when the zombies attacked, and hadn’t made it down into the bunker with him, but Phillips had never seemed too upset about that. I hadn’t liked him very much to begin with, and the fact that he was now intent on joining in with the others to murder and eat me didn’t improve my disposition toward him.

“Try it again,” Chuck ordered.

The iron bar rattled as they hammered on the door, but once more held fast. Blows resounded through the small room as they hit the door faster and harder. Their curses grew louder. I heard Chuck tell someone to get the cutting torch. Two acetylene torches had been left down here by a maintenance crew before the siege. We’d held onto them, like everything else in the bunker. Drew had mentioned at the time that we could always use them to cut our way out of the bunker, should the blast doors become inoperable. I’d had my doubts about that. The cutting torches weren’t powerful enough to cut through twelve feet of solid steel.

The blows on the door intensified. Then they suddenly ceased. I heard the sound of squeaking wheels, like a cart being hauled down the hallway. Then another man shouted. I recognized the voice as that of Jim Mars, one of the many who had urged me not to wait for Mike when this whole thing started and the zombies attacked. I’d liked him up until now. He’d been kind and soft-spoken and talked a lot about his wife and kids and how he hoped they were still alive. When we’d started to run low on food, Mars had always been willing to share his with others. He’d joked that he needed to lose weight anyway. Apparently, he’d since changed his mind about that, seeing as how he was with Chuck and the rest of the group on the other side of the door.

“Here,” he yelled. “I’ve got the torch!”

“Fire it up,” Chuck said. I’m certain he raised his voice so that I’d hear him.

Trying to move as quietly as possible, I opened the incinerator door and peered inside. The interior was full of ashes and darkness, and smelled
heavy
. There was no other way to describe it—just a thick, weighty odor. I stuck my head inside and gazed up into the shadows. At the top was the drop chute which led to the shower room one floor above us. Designed so that survivors of a nuclear war could dispose of their irradiated clothing, it was now my best—and probably only—chance at escape.

I hunched down and climbed inside the incinerator. It was big enough inside for me to crouch on my hands and knees, but doing so stirred up clouds of swirling dust, which got into my throat and sinuses. I wondered how much of it was the ashes of the people we’d burned in there. Was I inhaling Annie? Coughing, I made my way toward the chute. Something crunched under my feet. I looked down and saw that it was a half-charred bone. I wondered whose it had been. Outside, I heard the hiss of an acetylene torch being lit, and moments later, the room began to fill with the stench of scorched metal. It was strong enough that I could smell it over the odor of the incinerator. I reached out, grabbed the incinerator door, and pulled it shut behind me.

“Won’t be long now, Pete,” Chuck hollered. His voice was muffled. “You’ll be sorry you made us do this.”

“Not half as sorry as you’re going to be.”

Even though I’d whispered, my voice seemed to echo in the shaft. I pressed my back against one wall and my knees against the other, and then wriggled up the chute like a snake, hoping that there was nobody waiting for me on the other side. I moved quickly but as quietly as possible, fearful that Chuck and the others would hear me through the ductwork and discover what I was doing, despite the noise they were making. The inside of the shaft was black with soot, and I focused on breathing through my mouth, choking off sneezes that would have certainly given away my position. My eyes watered and my throat felt raw and scratchy. My breath began to sound harsh and loud, and I wondered if they could hear it echoing through the shaft. The chute narrowed and the walls began to feel like they were closing in on me. Sweat beaded on my forehead and cheeks, and stung my eyes. I tried blinking it away, but to no avail. My eyes watered and my vision blurred. The cloying smell from the cutting torch grew stronger, even inside the shaft. My muscles began to cramp, but I pushed on, determined to get away.

When I reached the top, I paused at the chute door and listened. I was far enough up that the sounds from below had faded, and although I could still smell burning metal, the stench wasn’t as overpowering. I didn’t hear anything from the shower room, and was fairly certain it was unoccupied, but I was still concerned that Chuck and the others would be able to hear me through the ductwork. By this point, the pain in my muscles and joints had grown excruciating. My body was starting to tremble and my vision was blurred to the point of blindness. I opened the chute door very slowly. When there was no reaction, I thrust my head through the opening. The air in the empty shower room felt cool upon my face, and I sighed with relief. Wiping the stinging sweat from my eyes, I slowly crawled out of the chute and plopped down onto the floor. A quick glance around confirmed that I was alone. Either the searchers hadn’t reached this level yet, or my escape hadn’t been discovered. I wondered how long it would take them to cut through the door to the incinerator room. At least a few more minutes, judging by how long it had taken me to climb up the chute. That bought me a little precious time, but once they’d broken into the room and figured out where I’d gone, that time would run out. Despite the danger, I sat there for a few moments until I’d caught my breath and the pain in my muscles had subsided. Then I scrambled to my feet and tried to figure out what the hell to do next.