Madness Rules - 04 (29 page)

Zeb nodded, his eyes wide with fear.

“I’m going to be stopping in here from time to time, and so help me, if Carolyn or any of your kids are missing or hurt in any way, I’ll put you down. You hear me?”

Zeb nodded again.

“Say it.”

“I hear you.”

He holstered the pistol.

“We’re all hurting. Your pain’s no worse than anyone else’s. You’ve got a cabin full of kids who need their father, and right now, you’re failing them. Mose is filling in for you, but he isn’t going to be around forever. You know that.”

Zeb looked down at his feet.

Mason reached up and straightened the man’s collar.

“You get yourself together. These kids deserve better.”

Zeb nodded, wiping at his eyes.

“I just hurt, that’s all.”

“So let that pain remind you of what it’s like to still be alive. And if that’s not enough to keep you straight, you put a shotgun in your mouth and pull the trigger. Better that than shaming your family the way you did tonight.”

Zeb nodded again. “I’ll try, Marshal. I will.”

Mason turned and started back toward the cabin.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

CHAPTER

20

Tanner swept the headlamp’s beam through the almost impenetrable darkness. Dozens of cubicles with computers, tables, and chairs filled a large bullpen measuring perhaps eighty feet on a side. There were no bodies in sight, and the only smell was that of damp stale air.

He leaned back and called up the ladder.

“It’s clear.”

Samantha carefully climbed the rest of the way down.

“Where are we?” she asked.

Tanner shined the light on a brass plaque mounted on the wall.
Deep Underground Command Center
.

“I think we found your duck.”

“What do you think it was used for?”

“I suppose to monitor dangerous events—a situation room of sorts.”

“Shouldn’t there still be people here? The country is definitely in the middle of a situation.”

“True, but with the loss of electricity, they wouldn’t be able to do much more than play shadow puppets on the wall.”

Samantha looked back up the ladder.

“I hope those men don’t find the trapdoor.”

“They won’t. But just to be safe, let’s get out of here. There must be another exit somewhere.” He swept the light around the room.

“There’s a door over there,” she said, pointing to the left wall, “and another one over there.”

“And two more on the other walls.”

“It must be like a maze under here. How do we know which way to go?”

“What’s your favorite color?”

She furrowed her brow. “Blue. Why?”

“Because each of the doors is painted a different color. Blue is the one to our right.”

“We’re going to base our survival on my favorite color?”

“You got a better idea?”

“No, but—”

“But what?”

“Well, I kind of like red too.”

He laughed. “Just stay close.”

Samantha latched onto his arm, and he led the way through the darkness to the blue door. It had a keycard reader, but the door was partially ajar. He pushed it the rest of the way open and shined the headlamp down a long hallway. Surprisingly, the stone floor was dimly lit by a trail of faint lights.

“How can there be lights if power is out?” she asked, squatting down and touching one of the tiny LED bulbs.

“They must be on an emergency backup system. But from the looks of it, the batteries are about dead.” He clicked off the headlamp. “Still, better to save our light for when we really need it.”

Tanner started down the long hallway, and Samantha followed close behind, occasionally glancing back to make sure that no one was sneaking up behind them. A heavy metal door stood at the end of the hallway. There was no handle or knob, but a dark keypad hung on the wall beside it.

Samantha pressed a few buttons on the panel.

Nothing happened.

“I think the controls are dead,” she said.

He studied the panel to see whether there might be some way to get it open, not that he had any idea what he would do with the complex electronics if he did manage to get inside.

“The door feels solid,” she said, pushing against it with both hands.

Tanner stepped forward and tapped it with his knuckles. It was as sturdy as a bank vault. He squatted down and bumped on the floor panel directly in front of the door. It sounded hollow.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m looking for a manual override.”

“What makes you think there’s an override?”

“Whoever built this place obviously understood that power might be lost. It makes sense that they would have put in a way to open the doors without electricity.”

“Ah,” she said. “So that’s why they left the headlamp by the ladder.”

“And installed emergency floor lighting.”

She squatted down next to him and studied the floor. There was a small semicircular notch cut in the corner of one of the tiles.

“Is this it?” she asked, sliding her finger into the notch and pulling up.

The panel lifted out. Beneath it was an operator’s manual and a pneumatic valve with a bright red handle. A yellow tag hung from the handle that read “Pressure Release.”

He reached for the valve.

“Hey,” she said, “shouldn’t you read the book first?”

“Bah. What could possibly happen?”

She stood up and took a couple of steps back.

“If it explodes, I’m going to be very disappointed with you.”

He turned the valve ninety degrees clockwise, and a soft hissing sound came from underneath the door.

“What’s that?” she asked in a worried voice.

“Oh crap.”

“What?”

“I’ve let the snakes out.”

“Snakes!” she squealed, rising up on her toes.

He started laughing, and it took her a moment to realize that she was the victim of his twisted sense of humor.

“That wasn’t funny.”

“Oh, it was a little funny.”

She squinted, sending imaginary death rays toward him.

The hissing quieted and then stopped. Tanner stood up and pressed lightly on the door. It opened with an ominous creaking sound. On the other side was a long set of stairs leading down. No emergency lighting lit the way.

She looked past him into the darkness.

“That looks incredibly spooky.”

“We either go this way or back to the control center to try another door.”

She turned and looked back over her shoulder.

“That way doesn’t feel so good either.”

“I suppose we could stand here until I grow a beard like Santa Claus,” he said, hoping to lighten her mood.

Samantha didn’t laugh. Instead, she turned back and stared into the darkness.

“What do you think is down there?”

“Other than zombies, you mean?”

“Yeah, other than zombies.”

“Only one way to find out.”

Tanner clicked on his headlamp and started down the long flight of stairs.

They stood on a stone landing, staring at a long dark tunnel that led in both directions.

“Where in the world are we?” she asked.

“I’m not sure. We’re too deep for the Metro.”

“Maybe this is the throat of a giant worm thingy, you know, like in
Star Wars
.”

He walked over to the edge of the landing and leaned out to feel the tunnel wall. The rock was painted with something black and shiny.

“It feels solid enough to me. Definitely not alive.”

Samantha nodded. “Better to check though, right?”

“Always.”

“Where do you think it leads?”

“Someplace safer than where we were ten minutes ago.”

She stared at him, still weighing options.

“The way I see it,” he said, thinking out loud, “is that they dug this as an escape route for the president and other important officials.”

“Makes sense, I guess,” she said. “That way they could escape if someone attacked the White House.”

“Or even all of Washington.”

“You think it leads out of the city?”

“I do.”

She moved up next to him.

“Okay, but which way takes us out?”

Tanner hopped down from the landing into the tunnel. Unlike the walls, the floor was paved and as flat as a racetrack. There was a single set of metal tracks in the middle. He held out his hands and helped Samantha down. Without explanation, she immediately knelt down and put her ear to one of the tracks.

“What are you doing?”

“Shh,” she said, holding up her hand. “I’ve seen this done in movies. It tells you how far away the train is.”

He waited quietly until she stood back up.

“Well?”

She shrugged. “Can’t tell. The metal is too cold.”

They both chuckled.

“Come on, let’s go this way,” he said, turning to the left.

“Are you sure?”

“No, but you got to decide on the blue door, so I get to pick the tunnel.”

“Wait a minute. I didn’t pick anything,” she said, hurrying after him.

They walked for ten long minutes without hearing or seeing anything more than the black tunnel walls. It felt as if they were descending deep into an abandoned coal mine.

“Maybe we—” she started.

Someone screamed further up the tunnel. The cry was followed by several short bursts of automatic gunfire.

Tanner slipped his arm around Samantha and shut off the headlamp.

More gunfire and more screams sounded.

“Do you see anything?” she whispered.

“No, but they must be around the next bend.”

“Who do you think it is?”

“The military.”

“How do you know?”

“Listen to the gunfire. The bursts are controlled. Three rounds with each pull of the trigger. Two, maybe three soldiers firing.”

“Soldiers are good, right? They can get us out of here.”

Tanner didn’t answer.

“Right?” she repeated.

“Let’s just be careful.”

Once the gunfire subsided, they waited a couple of minutes before continuing down the tunnel. Despite broadcasting their position, Tanner had no choice but to turn the headlamp back on. Without it, they were completely blind. They traveled another hundred yards before coming across a second raised landing. The unmistakable stink of human decomposition filled the air.

He shined the light onto the landing and saw a set of stairs on the far wall.

Samantha saw them too. “Stairs,” she said, pointing.

“Let’s see if they’ll lead us out of this pit.”

Tanner hauled himself up onto the landing, and as soon as he did, he saw the source of the awful stench. Twenty or thirty bodies lay scattered across the floor. Another dozen were piled at the base of the stairs. A sign on the wall read “Eisenhower Executive Office Building.”

“Lots of dead up here,” he warned.

“It’s okay,” she said, extending her arms.

As he pulled her up onto the landing, they heard another long series of screams from further down the tunnel. Without saying a word, they hurried toward the stairwell, occasionally having to step from body to body like stones in a river. The bottom stairs were completely covered, piled two or three bodies deep. It looked like people had died fighting to escape. Tanner used his light to flood the stairs, and both he and Samantha groaned in unison.

A hundred tons of rubble blocked their way out.

“Why would anyone do that?”

It took Tanner a moment to come up with the answer.

“Look,” he said, shining the light on the bodies nearest them.

“What?” Before he could answer, she saw it. “They’re all zombies.”

“Someone blew the exit to keep the infected in here.”

“That means there are more of them down here,” she said, looking back toward the tunnel. “Maybe thousands of them. What are we going to do?”

“We do the only thing we can. We continue to the next exit.”

“But what if that one’s blown up too? What if they’re all blown up?” She started to sound a little panicked.

Tanner looked at her and frowned.

“Really? After all we’ve been through, you’re going to let a dark tunnel and a few dead bodies scare you?”

She took a moment to calm herself.

“Sorry.”

“What was that?”

“I said sorry. It’s just that the last time we were in a tunnel, you nearly got killed.”

“But I didn’t.”

“No, but you almost did. You don’t think…”

“What?”

“You don’t think there are any Backsons down here, do you?” she asked, using the term she had coined to describe the huge mutated creature in the East River Mountain Tunnel.