Salvation: Secret Apocalypse Book 5 (A Secret Apocalypse Story) (19 page)

We run over to
it.

But something is
wrong.

Kenji shakes his
head. “No. This is not the right door. This is the wrong door!”

The trapdoor is
locked with a padlock. A rusty old padlock.

I’m guessing
Kenji hasn’t used this particular entrance.

The monster is
finished destroying the warehouse. It knows we are no longer there. It turns.
We feel it turn. We feel it come towards us. The ground is shaking. The entire
arena floor, the entire chamber, the entire labyrinth is shaking.

“We don’t have
time for this,” Ben says.

He raises his
shotgun and pulls the trigger and destroys the lock. The shotgun blast is
deafening. The lock is completely destroyed, as is a huge section of the door.

Ben flings it
open.

Kenji is shaking
his head. “Too loud. We’re being too goddamn loud.”

“No choice,” Ben
says. “Let’s go. We’ll worry about the noise if we get a chance, if we’re still
breathing.”

Down we go.

Into the catacombs.

Just before I
run down the stairway, I sneak a look over my shoulder. I see a large and
powerful and dark shape moving towards us at speed.

The speed of the
thing scares the hell out of me and causes me to trip and fall. I fall head
over ass and tumble down the stairs. Kenji helps me to my feet. The others are
standing there, at the foot of the stairway, in a narrow tunnel, wondering
which way to go.

We have come to
another fork.

“Which way?”
Thomas asks. “Left or right?”

“It doesn’t
matter,” Kenji answers.

Before we can
make a decision on which way to go, before we can move deeper into the
catacombs, before we can move away from the stairs, a massive, monstrous arm
appears.

The monster has
made one last effort to seize its prey. It is reaching out for us. It is
getting closer.

It takes me a
few seconds to figure out what the hell is going on. The monster is too big to
fit through the small trapdoor. But this fact has not stopped it from shoving
one of its massive arms down the stairway.

It is reaching for
us, searching for us.

The arm is fast
and powerful. Its claws smash into the walls. Giant black talons, slice into
the rock with ease.

Kenji pulls me
out of the way just in time.

The monster’s
hand is thrashing around wildly. Eventually it begins destroying the walls and
the walls begin to crumble.

Eventually the
monster causes part of the narrow tunnel to collapse.

I am lying on my back in the dark. I am breathing hard and so is Kenji. We hear
the footsteps of the monster moving away. The noise and vibrations fade. The
monster has given up.

Kenji switches
his torch on. “Are you OK?”

I sit up slowly.
“Yeah, I’m fine.”

Kenji shines his
torch where the stairway should be. But it is completely destroyed. It has
totally collapsed in.

The others are
nowhere to be seen. Kenji and I have been separated from the rest of the group.

He walks up to
the pile of rocks. “Jack!? Ben!?”

“Yeah,” Jack
says through the rocks. “We’re all still here.”

“What the hell do
we do now?” Thomas asks.

“Do you guys
have a torch?” Kenji asks. “Can you see?”

“Yeah,” Ben
answers. “Got the torch on my shotgun.”

“Good. On the
wall you’ll find an arrow, a directional arrow.”

“An arrow?”

“Yeah. A small
arrow etched into the rock. Can you see it?”

“No.”

“It should be
there.”

“I don’t know
what to tell you,” Ben says. “There
ain’t
no arrows
here.”

“What are you
talking about?” I ask Kenji.

He shines the
torch on the wall. Sure enough, carved into the rock, is a small directional
arrow. “Someone has come through here and mapped the way out,” he says.

“Who?”

“Not sure.”

“Wait,” Ben
says. “We found it.”

“Good.”

“Now what?” he
asks.

“Follow the
arrows. Stop when you get to the central burial chamber. We’ll meet you there.”

“Burial chamber?”
Jack says. “How far away is that?”

“Not far. About
an hour’s walk. And keep an eye out for the infected. This place was deserted
earlier, but you never know.”

“Infected?”
Thomas says. “Down here? Goddamn it.”

“Understood,”
Ben says. “See you in an hour.”

Kenji and I
begin walking.

“Infected?” I
ask. “I hate to say it, but we’re unarmed. And what did you mean, when you said
this was the wrong trapdoor?”

“There are
multiple entry points to the catacombs. They are spaced out around the edge of
the arena. The entry point I had been using was not locked.”

“So we’re lost?”

“No, we should
be fine.”

“And what about
the infected? What if…”

“We run.”

Once again,
speed and stealth are our only weapons.

We continue to
move through the narrow tunnels of the catacombs, following the arrows. We walk
for what feels like a long time. Hours. Days. The tunnels are dark and narrow.
In some sections we have to turn sideways to squeeze through, in other sections
we have to get on our hands and knees and crawl through.

We are
constantly on guard, constantly in a state of high alert, waiting for the
monsters and the infected to appear from the dark.

We walk in
complete silence.

After a while,
we round a bend and Kenji says, “We’re getting close.”

“How can you
tell?”

He points to the
walls.

Built right into
the walls are the tombs. They are stacked up like bunk beds. They contain
bodies, corpses. The resting dead. Some are more decomposed compared to others.
Some are just bones. Skeletons.

I walk past the
tombs and the dead, trying to keep my distance from the walls, trying to stay
right in the middle of the narrow tunnel. “What the hell? Why are there tombs
down here?”

“These are the
people who built this place,” Kenji says. “The people who died building it.”

“How do you know
that?”

Kenji points to
a plaque on the wall.

To
the brave men and women who gave their life for the pursuit of scientific
progress and the search for a better tomorrow. You will never be forgotten.

“So these people
were construction workers?”

“I guess so. And
probably research scientists. Maybe some of them are military.”

“And they all
died?”

“Apparently.”

“So why weren’t
they given proper burials? Why weren’t they sent home?”

“Because this place
was top secret. When these people started working here, they signed their lives
away. They became property of the military and the company. They were assets.
Expendable assets. Nothing more.”

We arrive at the
central burial chamber. It appears to be empty. Branching off the central
chamber are other, separate rooms. And these rooms are not empty. These rooms
contain piles and piles of dead bodies. There does not appear to be any order.
There is no respect. The dead are just piled up and left to rot.

“These are the
victims of the labyrinth,” Kenji says. “The victims of the military’s training
regime.”

“What are you
saying?”

“My guess is
that these people were prisoners. The
baddest
of the
bad. They were trialed, found guilty. Thrown in here. They were hunted. They
may have even been armed.”

“Hunted?”

“Yeah. Live
enemy targets. Dangerous targets. Targets that shoot back. Targets that think.”

Kenji is shaking
his head as he explains this to me.

“How do you know
all this? Who told you?”

Kenji is staring
at the piles of dead bodies. The torch is shining at his feet. His face is
blank.

“Kenji? What the
hell happened at the outpost? Where did you go? How did you get away? Who told
you about this place?”

Kenji remains
silent. No response.

And I feel like
I am losing him all over again.

“Kenji, what
happened? You just… you just disappeared!”

He finally looks
up. He keeps the torch pointed down. “I was taken,” he whispers. “I was…”

He trails off,
shaking his head because maybe he doesn’t really know what happened, or maybe
he doesn’t want to talk about it.

“I was knocked
unconscious,” he continues. “I think. Or drugged. I’m not sure.”

“You’re not
sure?”

“The outpost.
That’s the last thing I remember. I was on the gun tower. I had the infected
lined up in my sights. I had the sun behind me. I had the perfect vantage point
to cover you guys. I must’ve taken out thirty. Maybe forty. I was in the zone.
And then all of a sudden…”

All of a sudden
he goes missing and Maria was shot and all hell broke loose, and the goddamn military
outpost was set to self-destruct and it self-destructed in a massive thermo
baric explosion.

“What happened?”
I ask.

“Darkness. I
woke up in the dark. I felt tired. Lethargic. I could barely move. I thought I
was alone. But I wasn’t.”

“Who else was with
you?”

“Tariq.”

“Tariq?”

“Yeah. He said
he had saved me. Dragged me inside. Got me to safety.”

“How did you
survive the explosion? It was massive. We barely got out in time.”

“We survived in
the safe room,” he answers. “It was deep underground. Underneath the outpost. I
guess it was like a panic room.”

“So wait just a
damn minute. Back up. Did you accidentally shoot Maria?”

“What? Maria was
shot?”

“Yeah. Right in
the goddamn chest. She would’ve been killed if she wasn’t wearing the NBC
suit.”

Kenji shakes his
head. “No. I didn’t shoot her. The last thing I remember is shooting the
infected. One by one. I remember the nano-swarm showed up. I was hiding from
it. And then Jack drove the Humvee away from the outpost to distract the
nano-swarm. You guys ran after him. I was covering you. I saw an infected man
chasing and gaining on Maria. I took him out.”

Kenji’s brow is
furrowed in concentration. He is trying to remember how it all went down. But
he can’t.

“This is the
last thing I remember,” he says. “But I definitely did not shoot Maria. No
way.”

I think about
what this means, because as far as I can tell, it can only mean one thing.

Tariq
shot Maria. Tariq tried to kill Maria.

“Tariq shot
Maria,” I say.

Kenji nods. He
is not surprised. “We should never have trusted him,” he says. “We should’ve
left him there to die. We were warned. But we didn’t listen. He is a liar. He
is evil. He is a psychopath. He knocked me out. While I was providing covering
fire. He drugged me. And then he tried to kill Maria. When I woke, I had no
idea if you guys had survived. I had no idea where I was. I had no idea what
was going on. It was torture.”

This is all too
familiar.

This is an all
too familiar scenario.

“How did you get
down here?” I ask. “How did you get inside the Fortress?”

I think back to
the ditch of severed hands at the Vehicle Access Point. And it makes me sick to
my stomach. Someone cut all those hands off. Someone who has no conscience.
Someone who is prepared to do what it takes to survive, and enjoys doing what
it takes to survive.

“Tariq brought
me here,” Kenji says. “I didn’t realize what had happened at first. I was so
confused. He kept me in the dark. He kept lying to me. The whole time. But it
boiled down to this; I was his protection. He had seen my skills with a gun.
This is why he wanted me around.”

“So you walked
from the outpost to the Fortress?”

“Yeah. I didn’t
realize I was his prisoner until it was too late. Until we were inside. He
threw me in here. Left me here to die. It was then, once I was behind bars that
he confessed everything to me. He told me who he really was. He told me
everything. He killed all those soldiers at the outpost. He was the one who set
the self-destruct sequence. He is a killer. A mass-murderer.”

He
is a psychopath.

“I honestly
thought I was going to die down here,” Kenji continues. “I thought I was going
to die alone. I thought I’d never see you again. Any of you. Ben showed up a
few days after I was put here. I’m not sure how long it was. I lost track of
time almost immediately. But Ben’s presence gave me hope that you were still
alive. He would pass in and out of consciousness. He would talk about you and
Maria in his sleep. I knew you were alive. I knew you were down here. I knew
that Tariq, or whatever his name is, lied to me.”

“He told you
that we were dead?” I ask.

“Yeah. He told
me that you had all died in the explosion at the outpost. Or that’s what he led
me to believe. So yeah, I thought you were all dead. It was this sick form of
psychological torture. He was breaking me down.”

He
is a liar.

“How did you get
out?” Kenji asks. “How did you find this place?” He takes a deep breath. “Where
is Maria?”

“We got away
just in time,” I say. “Just before the outpost exploded. We got away in one of
the Humvees.”

I tell Kenji
what happened at Daniel’s camp and how we left him there because he went crazy.
I tell him that Jack ran off to find Kim, and then Maria and I followed the
military here. And then we were captured by General Spears and locked up.

I tell him about
the man in the gas mask.

I tell him that
he injected me with a time-release nano-swarm. I show Kenji my watch, and I
tell him that in exactly twenty-four hours, the nano-virus will be activated
and it will eat me from the inside. It will eat flesh and bones and everything.

I tell Kenji
that the man in the gas mask has taken Maria. And that he is going to execute
her on camera and show the world. And that this public execution, will most
likely coincide with my death. I tell him I don’t know why. Most probably
because he is insane.

I say, “Maria
has been taken to the Control Center. This is where she is right now. This is
where she will be executed if we don’t do something.”

Kenji nods his
head. He is not surprised or shocked. He is not surprised to hear about a man
who has stitched a gas mask into his scalp. He is not surprised by any of it.

He has heard
this madness and madness like it all before.

“Who the hell is
Tariq?” I ask. “Who is he really? What was he doing there, at the outpost? What
is he doing here, in this Fortress, in this country?”

Before Kenji can
tell me who Tariq is, before I can put the pieces of the puzzle together, we
hear a gunshot.

It sounded like
a cannon blast.

It was Ben’s
shotgun.

The others are
in trouble. And we are all in trouble.