The Infected Dead (Book 3): Die For Now (35 page)

He decided going backwards was most likely the right choice, but when he went that way, he found himself standing directly outside one of the open doors of a pitch black room...and he was sure something moved in there.

Sam backed away from the open door wanting desperately to close it, but to do so he would have to reach inside and grab the handle of the door. He couldn't see a thing inside the room, but whatever was in there had to be able to see him, and he wasn't about to go in there with it.

He kept backing away, keeping both eyes on the door, hoping to put some distance between himself and that dark rectangle before something came out of the room. His main hope, though, was to find the elevators again. He would even be happy with the stairs at this point. Sam didn't realize that he had begun talking to himself out loud, and that the sound was able to carry as far as it did.

The thing that Senator Harold Thornton III had become didn't know anything about what was happening in the world, and it didn't really know the difference between a room with the lights on or off. What it did know was that there was something alive nearby. There was something that made noise when it walked, and sometimes it made other noises that drew it in that direction. Above all, there was this deep urge to bite into the flesh of the thing moving outside of the room.

Sam's eyes widened as he saw what was coming out of the dark room. He didn't know if it was one infected dead or twenty. He just knew it was coming out of the dark room he had backed away from moments ago. Sam suddenly recognized that smell, and knew he just hadn't expected to find it here.

The thing he feared the most stepped into the hallway, and Sam didn't know if it could see him, smell him, or was just aware of him being a living person, but it started in his direction just as he had seen them do for almost a year. All Sam knew to do was run.

*****

Olivia became bored watching the monitors. When the Chief had explained her role to her, she had accepted quickly. If she didn't have to go outside, it was all fine with her. The first couple of hours were sadly interesting to her because she was able to sit and study the inside of the fort. It was an ugly sight. Flocks of seagulls were landing on the bodies, and some much bigger black birds. She had seen her share of vultures, both human and birds, and she didn't care for either.
 

As the day passed, there was no other activity out in the harbor, and she could only sit and watch the birds feeding on the bodies for so long. She didn't want to think about what those men had done to her, nor what they would have done if her new friends hadn't come along.

Olivia thought about the group of people who had saved her and Chase. Up until the moment they appeared out of the darkness, she wouldn't have believed there was any chance she was going to live.

She rotated one of the cameras a few degrees to see if there was anything on the harbor that was moving. Nothing was there, so she went back to thinking about her rescuers. Her feeling was that it was all too good to be true, but she couldn't help the fact that she was already starting to trust them completely. She wondered how long it would be before she quit waiting for the other shoe to drop.

If she was wrong about them, she knew it would be an awful surprise, and a worse price to pay, but she was starting to think she would make all the same choices again. After all, they had not only rescued her and Chase, they had rescued the kids, and then they had kept her safe by giving her this job instead of dragging her along.

They had explained everything to her about Mud Island, but she still didn't see why they couldn't just stay where they were at Fort Sumter. There were enough supplies to last for years, and there was so much room she didn't think they would even have to bump into each other if they didn't want to. She wondered for a moment how they would feel if she asked to stay behind when they went home. Of course, she wouldn't mind if Chase wanted to stay too. That brought a smile to her lips. The thought of the two of them being all alone in a perfectly safe underground hotel was inviting.

The boredom started to set in again, and Olivia wondered why the kids hadn't checked in. The Chief had told them it would be a good idea if they at least just dropped in on Olivia from time to time. He had explained to all of them that time was the maker and breaker of all deals. If something was going wrong with them, checking in periodically was one way to make sure that it didn't go wrong for too long.

Kathy showed Olivia that there were cameras inside as well as outside, but from what they could tell, they weren't on inside the lower level storage areas. Kathy had said that was an issue they planned to explore when they had the chance, but it was a back-burner issue for now. When they were done with connecting new power to Mud Island, they would fully explore the Fort Sumter shelter which had clearly dwarfed their own shelter in size.

Olivia switched on the interior cameras and started scanning each floor to spot the kids. She was sure they were just enjoying their new responsibilities, and she had never known a kid in their age group who wouldn't have wanted to explore the rooms and floors below.

She found one camera that showed the stairwell the kids had used, and the angle showed a door with a big W on it. She didn't know where they were yet, but she knew where at least one of them had been.

The button for that camera was in a row that had numbers on them, and when she pressed the next one, she saw a big letter P. So, Whitney had been on the fifth floor down, and Perry had been on the Sixth floor down. She hit the next button, and there was another W. She thought it would have been an S, but maybe Sam had teamed up with Perry, boys against the girl.

She just happened to still have her eyes on that monitor when both of the doors flew open almost at the same moment. Whitney came flying down from above while Perry ran right under the camera. There was no sign of Sam, and Olivia quickly punched the button for the next floor in time to see it closing behind Perry, and there was a big P on it. Whitney sped by it as it closed, and Olivia brought up her view as she was marking the door.

Whitney and Perry both looked fine, but she couldn't help thinking something was wrong. Just as she was having a hard time believing she had been rescued, she had a hard time believing the nightmare was over.
 

Olivia started pressing the buttons one at a time going lower and lower down the stairwell. She wasn't sure what she was looking for because all she was seeing was blank doors. She froze when she reached the last door. Kathy had been wrong about the lower level cameras. They were at least working in the stairwell if not inside the rooms of each level, and the last door, the door to sub-level eighteen had a big S on it.

Olivia didn't know why that could be bad. She just knew it was. She watched the unmoving door for a moment, unsure of what she should do. She checked the view of the harbor and didn't see anyone returning yet. She couldn't see far enough to tell if they were on their way back, but judging by the time, they should be. She knew the Chief had a time limit before he would be stuck on the other side of the bridges, but she wouldn't know if he beat that time limit or not until he showed up at the dock.

The elevators were right down the hall from the control room. All she had to do was ride down to the bottom floor, find Sam, and then give him a piece of her mind. Olivia didn't know she was that nervous and that afraid of what she might find, but the thought of going down there made her feel ill.
 

Olivia forced herself to get out of her chair and walk. Her feet felt like they weighed a ton, and by the time she reached the elevators, her heart was pounding.

"Oh my God," she thought. "If I'm this scared just walking to the elevators, what good am I going to be if there's something down there?"

The elevator doors looked just like any she had seen in any lobby in the world. Stainless steel, up and down buttons, and numbers over the doors. The first two had the number one illuminated. The third door had the number eighteen illuminated. She tried to remember if it had always been like that, but she had to admit, she was only impressed by the fact that the shelter had elevators. Then when she saw the rooms they would be staying in, she forgot all about the elevators. When it became obvious that Chase was going to be staying in her room, she forgot there were other levels. She knew all she needed to know.

She didn't really know what she hoped to accomplish by pressing the elevator button. It was just something you did when you wanted the elevator to come up. And she had expected that eighteen to change to seventeen. She almost jumped out of her skin when the other two doors opened, and each elevator sounded its own little “Ding".
 

Determined to make a difference, she pressed the down bottom again. This time the eighteen went out, and the number seventeen lit up. Before it made it past three floors, the other two elevator doors closed, and they started descending. She wondered at first, but then it dawned her that someone had summoned an elevator just seconds after she had.

"What's going on?" she asked herself out loud.

*****

Eighteen floors below, Sam circled through one corridor after the next. All he wanted to do was find the stairs or the elevators, he didn't care which. The problem was they were right near each other, and he didn't have a clue where either was.
 

There was a “Ding" up ahead, and the nearly silent smooth sound of the elevator door shutting. Then he heard the hum of machinery. Disregarding what else might have heard the same sound, he ran in that direction.
 

When Sam rounded the corner and saw the elevator doors, he also saw the infected dead that had been stalking him. It had gone in search of him and had gone by the elevator doors and then the stairwell. It had almost made it to the end of the long corridor when the elevator dinged. The good news was that it was the same one he had seen earlier and not a new one. The bad news was that it was already coming in his direction. Sam made a dash for the elevators and saw that the door to the stairs was not an option. The infected dead was only a few feet from the door as it stumbled toward him.
 

He practically slid past the elevator buttons, but started jabbing the up button as hard as he could. He was too scared to even think that there was no down button on the bottom floor, but he wasn't too scared to notice what floors the elevators were on. Two were on their way, but they were only passing two, three, four...too far away. The other was going up past ten, nine, eight...

Sam couldn't wait for the elevator, so he turned around and ran again. This time he was paying desperately close attention to every detail of every corridor. When he came to the dark rooms again, he eased past the open doors, not knowing if there were more infected inside, but feeling the hair standing up on his neck again was enough to make him believe the dark room was full of the infected.

Once past those doors, he started trying to figure out if there was a way to reach the stairwell from the other side. If the infected followed him, then he would have to find a way to loop around behind it. Sam figured his reasoning had to be good because the infected had somehow gotten around on the other side of him.

He mentally kicked himself when he realized he could have been marking walls to know where he had already been, but then he calmed down and accepted that he had only been afraid. Being scared can make you do exactly what he had been doing, and that was running around like an idiot. He had spent a long time dodging the infected in Charleston before being rescued, and they were everywhere. So far he had only seen one in this place, so he had the upper hand.

Sam drew an arrow on the wall to show which direction he was going at this given spot. If he came to this same spot again, he would try a different direction. He kept going for about thirty more minutes, finding corridor after corridor and room after room. Some of the doors were open and some were shut. Too many were dark. He kept expecting to find one of his arrows written on a wall, but to his surprise he found the door to the stairs.

He put his hand on the panic bar of the door and started to push, but his curiosity got the best of him, and he had to check. Sam went over and looked at the three elevator doors, and they were all on the bottom floor. All three eighteen buttons were illuminated. He didn't know why they were all on the bottom floor, but he would get back to the safety of the top floor a lot faster by riding up, so he pressed the button.
 

The bell dinged on each door as they slid open. He jumped into one and pressed the button for the first floor and pressed the button that said Close Door just for good measure. Those buttons never seemed to speed things up, but just as the door slid shut he caught a glimpse of the infected dead moving toward the elevator. He preferred to think that this time the Close Door button had worked.

*****

Olivia rode the elevator all the way to the bottom floor. Somewhere around the tenth or eleventh floor it occurred to her that she could have at least brought a steak knife or something with her, but she could have done even better because there were guns in the shelter. She asked herself what could she be thinking by rushing off with nothing but her fists. She suddenly felt naked standing inside the well lit box with nothing in her hands. Part of her was saying it was just nerves, but another part of her was becoming more and more scared.