Faith (Soul Savers Book 7) (27 page)

“I don’t
blame you,” I said quietly. “Dorian … when he’s
determined to do something …”

“He’s like
his mother and Mimi,” Charlotte finished.

I let out a small
chuckle. “Yeah, exactly.”

She grasped my upper
arms and pulled away enough to give me a good once-over. When her
gaze fell on my belly, she frowned.

“You lost her,
too?” she asked.

I blinked back tears as
I nodded, but at that exact time, the new life inside me fluttered.

“I’m
pregnant again, though.” I tried to sound chipper to lift the
mood as I placed her hand over my stomach. The baby kicked again, but
Charlotte didn’t react, except to look at me with her brows
raised expectantly. “I guess you can’t feel it yet. I’m
surprised I even can.”

Tristan had felt the
movement the first time, too, but maybe our heightened senses
explained it. I could only be about two months along anyway, at the
most.

“Well, that’s
good news,” Charlotte said, pulling me into a hug again before
we finally let go. She leaned against a table that was one of four
set up in a U-shape, facing a wall of whiteboards. The room could
have easily been a basic conference room or classroom, but the charts
marking the whiteboards made it feel like a command post. “So
what happened to you? Where have you been?”

“To Hell and
back,” I blurted, and Tristan gave me a sideways look. I
flipped my hand in the air. “You know, that hell up there on
the surface.”

“How many times
do you want to tell your story?” Vanessa asked, her arms
crossed over her ample chest and her light-blond brow lifted.

“Oh, of course,”
Charlotte said. “Let’s get you processed so you can see
everyone.”

She went over to a row
of long, low cardboard boxes full of four-by-six-inch index cards.
She stopped at the first box in the row and fished out two cards from
its front.

“I’ve been
optimistic,” she said, waving them in the air. My eye caught
Tristan’s name on one and mine on the other. “This is how
we keep track of everybody and know who’s here, when they go
out and come back. Everyone gets their own card when they first
arrive, but I made yours in the beginning. Normally we ask new
arrivals if they have any family or friends they’ve been
searching for so we can see if maybe they’re already here, but
I already know who you’d like to see.”

While she used a pencil
to jot down something on the cards and put them back, I reached my
mind out across the sea of others putting off a signature in my
range. A few hundred of them were scattered for what felt like a mile
or two away, all underground. My heart did a little flip each time my
mind landed on a familiar signature.

“New arrivals?”
asked a deep, male voice. A vampire strode into the room—tall,
barrel-chested and thick-armed, a ramrod spine and his
strawberry-blond hair cut short, screaming ex-military. He handed a
folder to Char, his eyes barely flitting to Tristan and me at first.
But then he did a double take, dropped to a knee, and bowed his head.
His voice came out softly, embarrassed. “I’m sorry,
ma’am, sir. I’m new to this.”

“Please, don’t
worry,” I said as I looked over at Char. A small smile played
on her lips as she eyed the man. “You don’t need to bow.”

He stood up and then at
attention, his hands clasped behind his back and his eyes staring at
a point straightforward on the wall. “Sorry, ma’am.”

“Relax, Brogan,”
Charlotte said, amusement still alit in her eyes. “I told you.
She’s not like that.”

Brogan’s green
eyes cut over to Char and then down to me. I nodded and gave him a
small, but encouraging smile. His body relaxed. If you called a
slight drop in the shoulders relaxed.

“Alexis, Tristan,
this is Brogan,” Char introduced. “He used to own this
place.”

“
Used
to own it?” Tristan asked.

“I’ve given
it over to the Amadis,” Brogan said without the tiniest hint of
remorse. “I’m not a good leader since being turned, and
Charlotte … the Amadis can do more with it than I could on my
own.”

“What
is
this place?” I asked once again.

“We’ll tell
you on the way to get the others,” Owen said as he moved for
the door.

Char held up a
walkie-talkie. “I could just call them.”

“I thought we’d
surprise them and give Alexis and Tristan a tour at the same time,”
Owen said. “They’re probably starving, too.”

“Definitely.”
Tristan rubbed his stomach with one hand while he slid his other arm
over my shoulder. “We
all
need to eat.”

I nodded. “Drink,
eat … a bath and bed would be amazing.”

“We can take care
of the first two,” Owen said from the doorway. “The other
two … well, we have them, but they’ll have to wait.”

Char eyed us. “That’s
right. You two owe us a story before you get the good stuff. And it
better be impressive, considering everything we’ve been
through, looking for the both of you. I’ll be here when you get
back.”

We followed Owen and
Vanessa out the door and to the left, farther down the tunnel. About
ten yards down, it opened up into another, much larger space. Owen
pointed at the wall at the corner of the junction where a gridded,
upside-down egg shape had been etched into the limestone.

“This place is
huge and can be a maze if you don’t know where you’re
going,” he said. “So I put maps up. You can see how the
entire space is divided into sections. We use the section numbers as
part of addresses, so to speak.”

He indicated the orange
signs hanging from the ceiling next to the lights, each numbered and
spaced about fifty yards apart. The map engraved into the limestone
wall reflected the section “addresses” that appeared to
be numbered like a hotel’s rooms—the bottom row where we
were was in the 100s and each row up the grid incremented by a
hundred. The Intake area and the room where Charlotte was, at the
bottom center of the egg, were Sections 104 and 105.
What happened
to 101-103?
I was already confused.

“We pretty much
have everything we need here,” Owen continued as we walked past
the section marked 106. This section and the next consisted of row
after row of floor-to-ceiling metal shelves holding boxes and large
plastic buckets and containers.

“Not everything,”
Vanessa muttered.

“No, I guess not
everything,” Owen admitted. “But enough to keep us
surviving, as long as we’re careful and keep working.”

“All of this was
already developed?” Tristan asked as he craned his neck to look
around. “Before you found it?”

“How
did
you find it?” I asked. “And so quickly?”

“You’re
going to love this,” Vanessa said, rolling her eyes. “Your
friend James was holding out on us.”

“He wasn’t
my friend,” I snapped, my teeth on edge at the mention of the
hunter’s name. Tristan had tensed next to me, as well. “More
like my punching bag.”

Tristan relaxed and
even smiled. Neither of us had fond feelings for James. He’d
been one of the last people I’d trusted and been betrayed by as
a teen, leading me to punching him in the nose when he called my mom
a whore. Of all the people who could have shown up, he’d been
with Carlie’s group as one of the supernatural hunters.

“Well, he
certainly won’t be your friend now.” Owen turned to face
us, walking backwards. “He’d known about this place all
along. Shelter, food, a water supply, weapons …”

“
What?
”
I demanded. “
How?
And he never mentioned it to Carlie?”

“Claims he
thought it was too far away for the group to reach safely,”
Vanessa said. “Which, you have to admit, it probably was for
the Normans. We’re in Kansas, of all places. James didn’t
know about Owen’s portals, and probably wouldn’t have
used one anyway because of his whole issue with the supernatural.”
She snorted. “So it would have taken weeks for them to get here
from D.C. They would have never made it with the gangs and Daemoni
out there.”

“When he had no
choice, James finally spilled, though. He knew about the place
because Brogan’s his uncle,” Owen said. “Although
Brogan won’t have much to do with him anymore. He agrees with
the rest of us that James is an ass.”

“So who is Brogan
exactly, and what is this place?” I asked one more time.

Owen stopped walking,
and so did the rest of us. We stood among shelves stacked with
fifty-gallon plastic boxes marked “FLOUR” and “RICE.”

“Brogan was a
general in the Army, and when he retired, he started The Prepper’s
Stash House,” Owen started.

“
The
Prepper’s Stash House?” Tristan interrupted as though he
knew what that was.

“The world’s
biggest supplier of survival gear and know-how,” Vanessa
confirmed, sounding as though she quoted a motto. It sounded vaguely
familiar to me.

“Supplier of the
goods
and
the knowledge,” Owen added. “Said he saw
the writing on the wall when he was in the military and knew
something was coming down, so he wanted to help people learn how to
survive the end of the world as we’d known it. He had no idea
supernatural creatures would bring it on, though, so he’d never
expected to be turned.”

“James thought
Brogan was dead, so he took off and left him.” Disgust colored
Vanessa’s tone. I thought she might despise James more than I
did. “Brogan got attacked by a Kansas City nest and woke up as
a baby vamp with nobody around to help. James brought us here at the
last minute when he saw the mushroom clouds, and we had to subdue
Brogan right away. He missed out on the first week of the apocalypse
while being converted.”

And now I fully
understood Vanessa’s contempt for James. His betrayal of my
trust when we were teenagers was nothing compared to what he’d
done when shit hit the fan. What a coward.

“So Brogan’s
one of those doomsday prepper guys?” I asked. “Like the
ones everyone used to make fun of?”

“The king of
them,” Owen said. “Started his business from scratch and
made himself millions, all of which he used to develop this place.”

“And what,
exactly, is this place?” I asked once again. “His bugout
bunker?”

“Oh, it’s
much more than a bunker,” Vanessa said. “I hate to admit
it, but even I was impressed when I first saw it.”

“Because this
is
The Prepper’s Stash House. And more.” Owen lifted his
hand to indicate the rows of shelves we’d stopped next to.
“Food, first aid, equipment, filled water tanks … His
company’s whole inventory was stored down here, enough to keep
him and several hundred people going for many months—years if
we can keep supplementing it.”

“But that’s
not all,” Vanessa said as she began walking again. I started to
feel like we were in a late-night TV infomercial. The kind that
didn’t exist anymore. “This was also his training
facility, where people would come on their vacations to learn all
kinds of survival and preparations for the worst. So he had a lot of
the facilities and space already here for that.”

“People spent
their vacations
here
? Underground?” I shuddered at the
thought. At least this place was large and somewhat illuminated,
rather than small like the rock island or pitch-black with screaming
souls, like Hell. But still—not exactly my first choice of a
vacation destination.

“Crazy prepper
people, huh?” Owen asked, sarcasm lacing his tone.

“I’d say
pretty smart, considering,” Tristan said. He took my hand and
gave it a squeeze. “Means there are a lot of people out there
who were prepared for the worst.”

I didn’t reply.
How many of them really expected how bad the worst would be? Had they
truly been prepared? Considering the fall of religion and the
declining number of people who believed in God before everything went
to Hell, I highly doubted they had been. But maybe, just maybe, there
were some who’d managed to survive anyway.

We followed Vanessa and
Owen around the corner of Section 107 with its rows of shelves, and
fifty yards farther, we came to a junction in the road that made my
jaw drop. Tristan let out a low whistle.

“It’s
huuuuge,
” Owen said, drawing out the word. With the
amount of pride in his voice, you’d think he’d built the
place himself. “Over three million square feet, with air
filtration, electricity, and some of it even has basic plumbing.
Dude, we couldn’t have
wished
for a better place. It’s
a gift from God.”

I’d have to think
about the God comment later. I was too stunned by the scene in front
of me to address it.

The lane we stood on
stretched out in front of us for at least a quarter-mile, the end
disappearing into the edges of darkness. The crossroad, for lack of
another word, intersected ours right in front of us, going a few
hundred yards to my left and a couple to my right. The ceiling stood
at least twenty-five, maybe thirty feet high, lined with neat rows of
pipes, cords, and fluorescent lights. Only every third light worked,
however, the others empty of bulbs, presumably for conservation.
After all, who knew when light bulbs would be manufactured again?