Contain (36 page)

I’m not so sure.

* * *

There are six of them, three men, two women, and the baby, a year
old according to Hannah but it seems too small. They tell us how
they defended the complex as long as they could after our arrival,
pushing the initial wave of Wraiths back, killing them when they
got too close. According to their orders, they were supposed to
wait for the second bus to arrive, though it never did, of
course.

The Wraiths kept coming, and in
desperation the band took their refuge inside the
mountain.

“
There were originally more
of us here,” the man, whose name is John, tells us. John Nash. “We
lost three a couple days later. The other half of our crew, seven
more, got cut off from us and ran for the petrol station on the
other end of the dam.”

“
What happened to them? Did
they survive?”

“
After a couple days had
passed, we were growing frantic for supplies. We had no food or
water, so we sent three men over to scout. They never came back.
Meantime, Alli over there—” He points at the other woman. “She got
lucky, went down below and managed to catch the attention of
someone inside the bunker.”

“
The driver of the bus that
brought you all in,” I say. “Mister Gronbach.”

John nods, and coughs again. “Alli had
camped out at the door hoping someone would come by. She kept
tapping on it at regular intervals.”

“
I don't understand,” I
say. “There was more than enough room inside for all of you, enough
water and food to spare. Why didn't he just let you in?”

“
Allison begged him to, but
he was insistent that we'd be safer hidden away in the tunnel. He
kept saying we'd die inside the bunker.” A wet, wheezing rasp rises
from his chest, and I realize he's laughing. It's a chilling sound,
without humor. “He promised to bring us food and water, and he did.
At least for a few days.”

“
Safer?” Bix asks. “Safe
from what?”

The woman with the baby clears her
throat. “He tell us there is man inside, mean man. He will try to
find out who it is.” She has a thick Latino accent, and her words
are barely more than a whisper. “But he never did.”

John nods. “Allison's boyfriend,
Tommy, went down to beg him to let us in. He was at the door,
banging and shouting, when suddenly the panel popped open. He was
stabbed in the eye, barely made it back up to us. He said the
attacker asked him if he was alone and threatened to come and kill
everyone else. We were terrified, of course. But he never came. A
couple days later, more food and water showed up.”

“
That first man gone. Only
little girl bring us food.”

“
Hannah,” I say.

“
Yes, our little savior.
She was clearly terrified of us, of doing something wrong. She told
us we had to stay quiet or it would get worse. She said if she got
caught, she wouldn’t be able to bring food, so we hid and were as
quiet as we could be.”

The child cries out, and the woman
stands and begins to rock.

John sees me looking at her. “Three
months old.”

I frown and glance over at Hannah at
the discrepancy.

“
We had another, born just
over a year ago. But she became sick and died.”

“
I'm sorry,” I
whisper.

“
What did the man who
stabbed Thomas look like?” Mister Blakeley asks.

The others exchange glances. One
shrugs. “We don't know. Poor Tom fell unconscious soon after we
found him. He bled to death before he could say anything
else.”

A terrible thought enters my head.
Could this be the secret Jonah has been keeping? Could it have been
him or Jack who stabbed Tom?

But no. Hannah insisted Jonah hadn't
known about the people until recently.
Still . . . .

“
Do you know what happened
to the other members of your team?” Kari asks. “The ones you send
out to scout.”

One of the other men stands
up. His skin is slightly darker than the others, and his eyes are
Asian. The patch on his chest says
NAMI
, though I can't tell if it's his
first or last name or the organization he worked for.

“
About six weeks after we'd
been holed up in here,” he says, “Kevin and I volunteered to go out
and check. We had just made it to the filling station and seen what
had happened when those things started coming after us again,
slipping out of the trees and from holes in the mountain.” He
shivers visibly. “They moved like smoke and were just as quiet.
They were nearly on us before we knew it.”

“
I started shooting,” the
guard named Kevin says. “Big mistake. As soon as I did, they did
that thing where they change from being quiet to being insane. They
charged us. Nami and I barely made it back. I twisted my ankle and
fell. If it wasn't for him, I wouldn't have survived.”

Nami shrugs. “The windows of the
petrol station had been shattered, the door was completely
destroyed. There was blood everywhere, corpses. Most of the flesh
was pecked away by carrion birds or torn by wolves. We think they
shot themselves to avoid being infected.”

“
I'll never forget that
scene,” Kevin says, shivering.

“
We pretty much locked
ourselves inside here after that. We figured as long as the food
showed up, it meant it wasn't safe for us to leave, so we didn't.
We've been basically just surviving from one meal to the next,
keeping guard at the tunnel gate. It's the only way we know how
much time has passed.”

I wince. What a horrible way to live,
completely dependent on people who refuse to help you beyond
providing basic sustenance, and that only in secret.

What the hell would it have mattered
if they'd been brought into the bunker?

“
When was the last time you
were outside?” I ask.

“
Three weeks ago,” Kevin
answers. He nods toward Jonah. “After he started showing up
insisting those things you call Wraiths were gone.”

“
How far from the bunker
have you explored?” I ask.

“
Not very. There's nothing
for miles. We've instead been focused on getting the bus fixed and
running again.”

“
How close is
it?”

Kevin waits, but Jonah just sits there
and stares at the chambers walls.

“
The worst was the oil pan.
During the gun battle, the day you arrived, a bullet pierced it and
drained the oil out. We managed to remove the pan. Jonah took it in
to have it patched.”

I give Jonah a jostle, and he blinks
at me several times before his face tenses with
awareness.

“
Is the bus fixed?” I ask
him.

He reaches into his bedroll and
extracts the repaired oil pan. “Oil?” he asks, looking over at
Kevin. His voice is barely a whisper.

Kevin nods and walks over to one
corner of the room where he picks a bottle up off the floor. In the
dim light, I recognize the dark golden hue of the oil Jonah must
have been siphoning out of the barrels on Level Nine for the past
several weeks. It explains the stains on his hands I'd noticed on
several occasions. “Almost twenty liters.”

Eddie abruptly slaps his knees. His
face is shiny, smooth. It's not so frightening to look at, now that
I’ve gotten used to it. “Then we had better be moving,” he
announces. “I fear the threat behind us is much more immediate than
the one ahead.”

Danny Delacroix and Kevin agree to accompany Jonah while he
reattaches the repaired oil pan and replaces the oil. Kevin dons a
hip holster and hands another to Danny. “Don't shoot, if you don't
have to,” he warns.

“
How many bullets do we
have?”

“
Three each. But that's not
why. Shooting triggers the change.”

Jonah shakes his head. “They're gone,”
he insists. “You won't need the guns.”

Now that he's moving again and has
something to do, he seems to be back to his old self, and in that
regard, he reminds me of his father. Well, almost his old self. He
doesn't make a snide remark when Bix offers to help, or when Mister
Blakeley tells Bix no.

While they're gone, the rest of us
prepare what little there is to take: a few more pistols, all of
them edged in rust, a couple bags filled with clothes, also
recently rescued from out of the bus.

My eyes slide back over to the
mother — Jasmina — and to my old tee shirt. The irony of
how we used to joke about the apocalypse isn't lost on me. She
looks up and sees me staring, and I quickly turn away, blushing. I
hadn't realized she was breastfeeding.

I'd actually been wondering
what it would be like to wear clothes that fit,
clean
clothes that don't have any
holes in them. Then I feel a pang of guilt for being even the
slightest bit jealous of these people. What they've suffered here
in the dark for so long is so much worse than what we've had to
endure inside the bunker.

Once more, it forces me to ask myself
if leaving is the wisest thing we can do. Maybe it might be better
to go back. Surely between us all, we could eliminate the threat
that is Mister Abramson. And it would give us more time to
prepare.

But then I look at the others, and
they all seem eager to get away from here, even the new people.
They move slowly, deliberately, like they're brittle and might
break if they're not careful. I suppose they are. But there's
something else coming off of them, a sense of excitement. For them,
this is an even greater release; their imprisonment has been so
much harder than ours.

Hannah has been eying the baby. As
have been the rest of my group. I'm sure most are wondering how
we're going to survive out there with a child. Who knows what
challenges await us?

But Hannah's look is different. There
is only concern in her eyes for the child, and it swells my heart
to know how she's kept it a secret from everyone else for all these
years. She truly represents the best in us all.

I wander over when I'm sure Jasmina is
finished feeding and I ask her the baby's name. She tells me it's
Jorge. “Chorge,” she enunciates, attempting to give the English
equivalent. She pulls aside the fabric so I can see his face. He's
surprisingly healthy-looking. I want to ask what happened to the
first one, but I suppose that might be too much prying so
soon.

Danny returns and tells us that
Jonah's managed to get the pan back on the bus. “They're filling it
with oil now.” He looks around and asks if we're ready.

He sees my hesitation and tells me
there’s nothing to worry about. “No sign of Wraiths. And Jonah's
pretty sure the bus will start.”

But to me,
no sign
and
pretty sure
aren’t the
absolute assurances I crave.

They all turn to me, waiting for my
cue. But putting aside three years of dread and complacency isn't
that easy. It recalls to me every single day of my life before the
outbreak, and makes me wonder if this is what I'll have to look
forward to for the rest of my life, this fear of the wide open
world and all its uncertainties.

Bix comes over and places a hand on my
back. “We can do this, buddy. Together.”

I nod and say, “Let's go.”