The Stranger (26 page)

Using the arrow keys she brought the cursor down to the box then hit
ENTER
.

“We might have something,” I said as the screen changed. “See this column of letters ALA, ARK and so on right down to WYNG?”

“Abbreviations of state names?”

“They appeared at the bottom of the screen when Phoenix was showing us what was going down at those other bunkers.”

“You want to see more?”

“It couldn’t hurt.”

“Which one?”

“Try TXS. Phoenix showed us the Texas bunker launching an attack on the hornets.”

“OK.” She selected TXS. “You’ve got a choice of around fifteen.”

“Each TXS letter code is followed by a number code. It must represent different bunkers in Texas. I can’t remember the number code.”

“I’m pretty sure it was TX-o-three.”

“OK, go for it.”

“Computers.” She hissed the word in frustration. “It’s giving me a whole list of camera locations. Interior and exterior.”

I rubbed the back of my neck. “We can’t have much time left. Take pot luck.”

She brought the cursor down at random before clicking on one marked
11. INT
. The screen had an appetite for frustration. It flashed up another menu of options.
Select: Night Scope. Daylight. Sound On/Off
. She didn’t select any; she merely rapped
ENTER
with her thumb.

I looked up at the booster screen. The identification popped up in white print along the bottom, but otherwise the screen was dark.

“It’s bust,” I snapped. “

It’s also dark. We might be seeing the canteen or some warehouse in darkness.”

“Or a bedroom. Hear that?”

“I hear something. It sounds odd.”

“Someone breathing?”

“Could be.”

“I’ll try another.”

“Go for another interior camera. It’ll still be nighttime in Texas.”

She returned to the camera menu and plucked out
01. INT
. “Might as well go for numero uno,” she said. She grunted. “Oh, no . . . that doesn’t look right.”

The image was black and white. “It’s in nightscope mode,” I said. “But I don’t understand what we’re seeing. Have we got the same bunker as we saw yesterday?”

“According to the reference it’s the same. But look at that . . . oh, crap . . . oh fucking, fucking crap . . .”

She sighed. I heard disappointment as much as anything in the sound. Thing is, when I looked up at that massive screen I felt it, too. There, from wall to wall, was an image that could have been subtitled
Abandon Hope
. We were looking at what could have been some garage in the bunker. The nightscope showed everything either in inky blacks or blazing fluorescent whites. In the center of the bay sat a tank; beyond that were two massive steel doors. They lay part open. Spilling in through the opening came desert sand. It had flowed across the garage floor to bury the tank’s tracks. Tumbleweeds had rolled in. Bleakest of all were the number of bodies—or what were left of bodies. Skeletons, some with dried husks of faces attached to skulls, lay all over the place. Some were partially covered by sand. A corpse mummified by the dry air sat in the tank’s turret.

“Wait, do you see that?” Her voice was a hiss. “Something’s moving.”

Through the doorway glided twin points of light, like two little stars that moved together across the garage floor. For a second I stared at the two lights, trying to figure out what I was seeing. Then it moved away from the camera.

“A rat,” she said. We’d been seeing the meager light reflected from its eyes, which had been amplified into twin burning points by the nightscope lens.

“I have a feeling I know what we’re going to see, but try the other cameras, Michaela.”

“Yeah, what you see might be of a disturbing nature . . . to use the old TV phrase. So, ladies and gentlemen, look away now if you’re of a nervous disposition.” Quickly she worked through the camera menu. This time she knew what to do and activated the nightscope lens on each camera. The first camera we tried when we heard the rasping sound revealed a coyote asleep in the corner of a room that could have been a clone of this one, complete with TV screens. Other cameras revealed rooms that had been trashed out of all recognition. Mummified corpses lay in army uniforms all over the damn place.

Michaela spoke with a flat voice. “Something went wrong during the attack. The hornets overran them in the end.”

I shook my head. “This makes no sense. Phoenix showed us live images of the attack yesterday. This bunker was overrun weeks, if not months ago.”

“He lied to us. He showed us archive footage. See the archive icon there?” She tapped the screen. “If we were to access that I’d wager we’d find what Phoenix claimed happened yesterday.”

“But why? Why go to all that trouble to deceive us?”

“Maybe he wanted to give us hope. That everything wasn’t as bleak as it seemed.”

“Jesus, I think he’s just made everything seem a good deal worse. Try the other bunker installations. The one in Wyoming.”

“Do you remember the identification code for the bunker?”

I shook my head, sighing. “I don’t think it matters now, do you?”

Face grim, she worked through the bunker codes. Within ten minutes we must have looked at a good dozen or so. All showed the same thing. Every bunker had been overrun at some point. Bunker teams lay dead in kitchens, in bathrooms, in lounges, at workstations. Total devastation. Absolute annihilation. Even the one on the Hawaiian island lay with its doors gaping open; skeletons picked clean by seagulls gleamed in the sun.

“So there you go,” I whispered. “Not one left intact. So much for Phoenix telling us that the government was still in control.” I nodded at the screen, which carried the words
BUNKER COMMAND ONE
with a room that duplicated the Oval Office in the White House. Smoke stained the walls. Rats gnawed at a figure wearing a business suit that sat in a slumping position beneath a portrait of George Washington. “I doubt if you’ll find as much as a single senator or army general still alive.”

Michaela shook her head. “But we’re able to access the cameras by remote control, so who’s maintaining the bunkers?”

“My guess is they have automatic self-maintenance systems. Computers will run what’s left of them for months before the generators’ fuel runs out.”

Michaela’s eyes glistened as she stared at the screen. “So it really is over. All of it.”

I put my arm ’round her shoulders. “We’re still hanging in there, buddy. There’s Zak and Tony and the rest. There’s bound to be more like us out there.”

“But for how long . . . those hornets . . . they’re like a disease we can’t cure. They’re going to kill us all one day. Every last one.”

“No, they won’t, Michaela. We’re going to make it, just you wait and see.”

“For what purpose?” Tears bulged over the rim of skin beneath her eyes, then trickled in glistening balls down her cheek. “For what purpose, Greg? Answer me that. To live in rags, drinking ditch water. Slowly starving to death. Getting so old and so tired that you can’t run from the monsters anymore. So you sit down in the dirt and wait to die.”

“Listen, you’re going to live. And you’re going to do it in style.”

“What the hell for?”

I crouched down beside her and stroked her face lightly with my fingertips. “Who else is going to have my babies?”

The sound that came out like a hiccup from her lips was a cross between a sob and a laugh. “Idiot, Greg. Babies? If I thought you could spirit us away to a tropical island I might take you up on it.”

Then she did start to sob. She put her arms ’round my neck and drew herself in tight against me. The sobs shuddered through her thin shoulders. I felt her tears wet my throat. It was like a dam had given way, releasing months of pent-up grief in a tidal wave of weeping that paralyzed her. I felt her body sag against mine as the convulsions of emotion ran through it. I stroked her hair and whispered over and over that I’d do every-thing I could to make it right for her. That I wouldn’t let her come to any harm. Just when I thought she’d never stop weeping, she did stop. That iron will of hers that had carried her through the madness and murder reasserted itself. She caught the sobs in mid-flow and stopped it just like you or I would switch off a TV.

“I’m sorry, Greg. I shouldn’t have let myself go like that.”

“You had every reason to. You can’t carry that kind of grief; it’ll eat into you like—”

“No. I’m OK now.” She loosened herself from my arms to turn back to the keyboard.

“Michaela, leave it now. We’ve seen everything we need to.”

She spoke crisply. “No, we haven’t. There’s one bunker installation we haven’t looked inside.” The cursor sped down the screen.
“This one.”

Thirty-nine

Surviving isn’t just avoiding being swamped by events. It’s about avoiding being swamped by your own emotions to the extent that you can’t function. I watched Michaela snap her runaway emotions into line and return to work at the computer keyboard as if nothing had happened.

“Let’s see what’s really happening in the main bunker.”

“How do you know which one it is out of all those?” I nodded at the bunker directory that listed three hundred facilities like the one we now stood in, either as guests or as prisoners.

“Easy. The bunker reference is printed on everything. It’s even stenciled on the chairs, in case any go missing at stock taking.”

“Thank God for government bureaucracy.”

She tapped in the code, her fingers blurring with speed. “I’m in.”

“Stick to the interior cameras.”

“Here goes.” She picked one at random from the computer screen. Immediately the big booster screen showed the image of a gloomy concrete corridor that could have been anywhere.

“Next,” she said, hitting a key.

“Ah, the torture chamber,” I said as the screen showed the room where we underwent decontamination.

“And just as we thought. Phoenix watched us as we stood there in the dark.”

“Then got his perverse cookies seeing us undress and getting sprayed with disinfectant. I’m really starting to have my doubts about that guy.”

“Me, too.” She accessed the next camera. It showed the kitchen where we’d cooked popcorn. One of the faucets dripped into the sink.

“Can you up the sound?”

“I’ll try . . . yes. Oh . . . there’s a volume control, too.” She pointed to a slider switch that popped up on screen.

“Turn it up full.” I watched the dripping faucet in the kitchen as a glistening pearl of water fell into the sink. Using the cursor, Michaela increased the volume. Instantly the drip of water on stainless steel filled the room. It sounded like ball bearings dropping into a metal pail. “So old Phoenix boy could watch and listen to us whenever he wanted. It makes you wonder if he even watched us taking a shower.”

“I guess that’s the least of our problems now. Take a look at that.”

Michaela had accessed another camera. This showed a room that was a duplicate of this one. “That must be the command center across in the main bunker. See the red lights flashing on the screen?”

“An alarm?”

“I guess so.” She shook her head. “The bunker computer’s trying to tell people across there that someone’s trespassing in their backup center in the annex.”

“But where is everyone?”

“I’ll keep trying the cameras. . . . Wait . . . that looks like their kitchen. Jeez, what a mess.”

The kitchen in the main bunker, just fifty yards or so away from the annex we now stood in, shared the same layout as ours, only it was around twice the size. Used microwave cartons had been carelessly stacked on worktops, chili sauce and dried rice smeared the plastic containers. Around twenty dirty cups littered the table.

Michaela wrinkled her nose. “Ugh. They’re not house proud across there, are they?”

“Maybe you don’t notice after you’ve been sealed away here for months . . . but wait . . . can you zoom into the table . . . those things in the middle? I thought they were plastic spoons. Can you make out what they are?”

“Wait a minute. I have to go back to the main camera menu. Ah, got it. I’ll enlarge the image a hundred percent. Wow.”

I looked at what littered the table. “Those people aren’t relying on caffeine for a high. How many hypodermics do you see?”

“Hell, around a dozen or so. You can even see blood on the needles. I hope those guys haven’t been falling into bad habits and started sharing.”

“So, it
has
sent them kooky in there. They must have raided the sick bay for the happy potions. Check out all those empty Demerol cartons.”

“Well, I haven’t seen anyone yet.”

“They’re probably sleeping off their narcotics party.”

“And that might explain why no one across there has picked up the intruder alarm.”

“Vigilant bunch, aren’t they?”

Michaela ran through shots from the closed-circuit cameras. Image after image burst on the booster screen. I saw storerooms, bathrooms, corridors, a sickbay (with some naked-looking drug cabinets).

“Say cheese.” Michaela nodded up at the big screen.

There were the two of us, looking at images of ourselves on screen. The next image revealed the recreation room Phoenix had shown us soon after we arrived. Then there had been people playing pool or sitting reading or watching TV. I expected to see at least a couple of dope heads sleeping on couches.

“Hell . . . they’ve let the place go in the last twentyfour hours.” I looked up at the screen that showed the big room in a generally crappy state. Spent microwave cartons all over the floor. Empty wine bottles strewn across the pool table. There were more hypodermics, along with empty phials on the coffee table. It looked as if someone had thrown a handful of shit at the walls, then smeared it into big looping circles.

I shook my head. “Phoenix has been fooling us again. That place never got into such a state over the last few hours.”

“He must have showed us archive shots from months ago.”

“So what’s his game? Why is he deluding us?”

“Maybe there is no reason. Other than what’s in those phials he’s been injecting into his veins.”

“You mean he’s delusional?”

“Maybe even downright insane.” She shook her head. “Greg, I’m starting to get the feeling that there is no specialized bunker team here.”

“So the guy’s here alone.”

“And probably has been for months. No wonder he has to sweeten his life with all those chemicals. He probably hasn’t talked to another human being since society took a flip. Come to that, he probably hasn’t seen daylight since last year.”

“Jesus.” I felt a prickle of unease. “I think our priority should be to get out of here. If he’s one sick kiddo then he might try playing some of his pervert tricks on us.”

“Get out? How?” She looked ’round. “We’re in a building with walls three feet thick and steel doors without handles.”

“There must be some other way of—”

“Shit.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I think those alarms have got through to someone.”

It was hard to see where the figure came from. Maybe it had been sleeping in an armchair turned away from a camera, but suddenly it came lumbering into view.

“Christ almighty.” The figure—a man, I guess—had a huge mane of black curling hair; its face was painted white and the eyes had been lined with thick black kohl. The whole effect was of some Gothic Egyptian pharaoh who had suddenly quivered back to life. Its eyes were glazed but puzzled-looking, as if that
someone
had been woken from a deep sleep by an unfamiliar noise.

Michaela nodded at the screen. “If that’s Phoenix he’s going to know where we are soon enough.”

As the figure passed out of sight I said, “Try to get back to the camera in the main operations room. That’s where he’ll be headed.”

“What now?”

“We try to talk to him.”

“From the look of him I don’t think he’s going to be in a sweet mood.”

“We might be able to reason with him.”

“
Might
is the key word. He looks pissed to me . . . got it.” She hit a key. Once more the image of the room that was a duplicate of this one flooded the screen. There were the banks of TV monitors, computers. A vast booster screen filled the end wall.

Michaela let out a breath of air. “Here he comes.”

We watched as the burly bear of a man with the Goth pharaoh face and tumbling black locks lumbered into the room. For a second he stood watching a dozen computer screens all flashing the same red disk. Michaela turned up the volume, and a repetitive pinging sound filled the room. The man ran his hands through his hair in a way that suggested what he was thinking right now was
So what the hell’s happening?

He shook his head, no doubt trying to shift a drug-induced purple haze from his head. Then he froze.

“I think that’s the moment of realization,” Michaela murmured.

Suddenly the man turned to look up at where the camera must be fixed to the wall. That white face appeared as a vast skull floating there, with its kohled Egyptian eyes surrounded by a mane of Goth hair. The drowsy expression flashed to one of fury. Clenching his fist, he slammed it down onto a computer monitor. The man’s animal snarl rumbled from the speakers.

The next moment his fingers stabbed keys at one of the computers. That was when the screen behind him flashed into life. It showed Michaela and myself there in the center of the room.

When the man shouted I knew it was Phoenix. Only the softspoken burr had gone now; rage blasted the voice at us. “You were told not to enter rooms that were off limits! You have trespassed on restricted areas!” He glared up at the camera, his huge eyes blazing out at us from the booster screen. “You know what the penalty is for willful destruction of government property? This is a state of national emergency!”

“Phoenix—”

“If you do not return to your rooms immediately I will order in the guard. You will be shot, do you hear that? You will be executed by firing squad for—”

“Phoenix!” Michaela’s clear voice cut across his rant. “Phoenix. There is no guard. You’re alone in there, aren’t you?”

“The bunker personnel are asleep in their quarters. If you don’t leave that room immediately I will wake up the guards. Man, will they be pissed. They’re gonna bayonet you two in the guts. I tell you guys, you are fucking dead. Fucking dead, fucking buried, fucking history, fucking . . .” His voice rose to a scream.

“Phoenix!” I shouted. “There’s no one else in the bunker with you. You are alone. There are no marines, there are no engineers, no doctors.”

“How do you know that? Hey, how do YOU know!” He paused, suddenly looking edgy, as if a thought had occurred to him. A thought he didn’t like one little bit.

“Hey. Have you two hacked into the computer?”

“We found a code. We’ve been able to access the closed-circuit TV cameras at the other bunkers.”

“Shit!”

“We know that you’ve been feeding us old footage. We know that hornets have overrun the bunkers somehow.”

“Bastards . . . you interfering bastards . . .”

“Phoenix, we know that all the personnel in those bunkers are dead. That there is no government any more, or even any kind of emergency military command. It’s all been smashed.”

For a moment he paused, staring up at the camera. A look of horror distorted that weird-looking face. He seemed to be thinking through what I’d just told him.

“Admit it, Phoenix,” I said. “You’re alone in the bunker, aren’t you?”

He chewed his thick red lip, considering. Then: “OK, OK . . . I wanted to make things look good for you . . . hell, guys, I just wanted to be
nice
, OK? This is a shit world now. I just wanted . . . hell . . . it makes me feel good to see people enjoying themselves again.”

“What now?”

“Now?” He shrugged. “Stay longer if you want, guys. Enjoy the facilities. Eat as much food as you want. Hey, you can even walk around naked, I don’t mind.”

“I bet he doesn’t,” Michaela muttered under her breath.

“And what I said still goes. Bring your friends into the bunker. We can party, huh? Your tax dollars bought nice things here. You can forget all that crap outside those walls. In here it’s safe, you can relax—”

“Get high on stuff from the drug cupboard?”

He looked stung. “Hey, you’ve been across here? How did you get in?” He looked ’round, as if to see if anything had been disturbed.

I played it cagey. “We’ve seen enough, Phoenix.”

“What have you seen? Did you access the cameras?”

I shrugged, and saw my image shrug on the booster screen behind Phoenix.

“Phew . . .” He playacted a big OK-so-you’ve-found-me-out shrug. “So what’s your reaction?”

“We’re hardly going to sit here in judgment,” I said. “What you do across there is your own business.”

“Yeah, got to pass these long hours somehow, haven’t I?” He smiled now, relaxing. “So just leave those rooms alone. That’s my only condition. Then bring your people here and we can really . . .” He made a show of flicking his hair back with those white, spidery hands of his. “We can really let our hair down— right, guys?”

Michaela nudged me with her elbow. Then hissed so he wouldn’t hear. “It’s not the drugs he was worried about. He’s hiding something else.” Then, in a louder voice, she spoke to Phoenix. “Things must have been tough on your own.”

“Oh, I spent a lot of time alone as a kid.”

“Oh?”

“I stayed in my room and listened to music. Other kids always thought I looked weird. . . .” He flicked back his hair again and jutted out his face so it filled the screen. “I can’t imagine why, can you?” He laughed at his own sense of humor. “I mean, what’s wrong with a guy wanting to look different from the rest of the herd?”

“Nothing, Phoenix.”

“You’ve heard that old Kinks song with the lyric that goes: ‘I’m not like everybody else.’ ”

“I’ve heard it, Phoenix. Neat song.”

“That’s my anthem . . . the soundtrack to my life, if you will.”

“Individuality is fine.” Michaela smiled, then talked to him in a friendly, chatty way. “What kind of party have you planned when we bring our friends here?”

“Hey, whatever you want. I’ve got some stuff in here that makes you feel as if you’re vacationing in the Milky Way. If you want to get horny I’ve got pills that get you as horny as a timber wolf in the rutting season. You get me?”

“Sure.”

“All I require from you guys is to keep out of that room. There’s sensitive equipment in there. It’s easily damaged.”

“Why worry about that, Phoenix? From what we saw, it’s redundant now. There’s no government to sue us for trespass.”

“I know, guys, but . . . well, you know how it is? I kind of feel responsible after all this time.”

She hissed again. “He is hiding something . . . watch him, watch him,” she warned in that low whisper so he wouldn’t hear. “He’s trying something.”