Entombed (7 page)

The shower room was a small, ugly space. It smelled faintly of mildew and unidentifiable chemicals, despite the fact that the hotel staff (myself included) had cleaned it once a week ever since tours of the bunker began. The showers themselves had been disconnected years ago—the pipes and plumbing cut off. Now they were just exhibits. There had been rumors among some of the employees that the room was haunted. Supposedly, people occasionally heard the phantom sound of water dripping, or heard disembodied footsteps. Once, a tourist from Wisconsin asked her tour guide who the little girl standing under one of the shower nozzles was. When the tour guide didn’t see anyone there, the tourist had insisted that she’d seen a little girl. I don’t know if there was really a ghost or not, although it occurred to me that if I didn’t think of something quick, my spirit stood a good chance of haunting these halls. Maybe we all would—a different kind of dead from the ones outside. Ghosts, rather than zombies, our spirits haunting those who had experienced a different kind of life after death. The thought gave me chills. My skin prickled.

Personally, I never saw or heard anything weird in the shower room—unless you count the drunken tourist who passed out in there once and cracked his head open when he fell—but the décor alone was enough to give me the creeps. The walls, floor and ceiling were covered in small, faded-yellow tiles, many of which were cracked or chipped. The overhead lights were weak, and their radiance had always seemed washed-out and sickly to me. The space was devoid of furnishing, except for the showerheads, a drain in the slightly-sloped floor, and the burn chute from which I’d just climbed out of. A rack was affixed to one wall. It displayed several coarse brooms and brushes, which would have been used to scrub any irradiated survivors upon their admission into the bunker. On the floor beneath it sat an empty canister of delousing agent. The brooms and the canister were nothing more than museum pieces now. I’d gestured to them a hundred times while giving tours, droning on monotonously about their intended usage while secretly wishing the work day was over so I could get home to Alyssa. It had never occurred to me at the time that I’d one day be using them as weapons, but that’s exactly what I did next. I grabbed one of the brooms from the rack, twisted off the broom itself, and then snapped the handle down over my knee. I was weak enough from hunger that I had to do this three times before the handle snapped, and I got a big, purple bruise on my knee in the process. I stared at the jagged lengths in my hand. Now I had two spears. They were crude, yes, but they were better than nothing, and if Chuck and the others weren’t armed, they might make all the difference. Just holding them made me feel better and more confident. My panic subsided a bit, and I paused long enough to consider my options.

The shower room had one exit, an open doorway that led directly into the decontamination center, which, while a much larger space, had the same depressing décor as the shower area. The only difference is the tiles were blue rather than piss-yellow. Like much of the rest of the bunker, the decontamination center had been left as is in order to show visitors what it would have been like if operational. That appearance could be summed up in one word—boring. The only furnishings was an empty metal desk, a chair, and a row of rusty, gunmetal-gray filing cabinets, all of which were also empty. At one point, the lower drawer in the farthermost left filing cabinet had contained one of my fellow tour guides’ vintage porn magazine collection, but that had been discovered by my fellow survivors weeks ago and promptly disseminated—complete with pages stuck together from previous viewings. I didn’t care. Having come of age by looking at porn on the internet, the magazines had always struck me as kind of kitschy. They were something my father would have looked at.

My thoughts turned to him. He’d been gone four years now. He’d suffered a massive and sudden brain hemorrhage while mowing the lawn. Both my mother and myself had always been after him to let me do it, but my father had vehemently declined all offers of assistance. My grandfather had been the same way. At the age of ninety, he’d climbed a ladder and replaced some missing tiles on his roof, adamant that he could still do it himself—and he had. My parents had put him in a home soon after, which had broken his heart. It broke my parents’ hearts, too. My mother had passed on two years after my father, after a short battle with advanced lymphoma that hadn’t been caught in time. In her final years, she’d fervently hoped that Alyssa and I would give her a grandbaby. We never did, though, and I was glad for that now, for a number of reasons, the first and foremost of which was the zombies. Who in their right mind would bring a kid into this shit? I was glad that my parents and my grandfather weren’t around anymore. The state of the world would have broken their hearts more than the old folks home or the lack of a grandbaby ever had.

For a brief moment, I considered trying to unscrew one of the metal legs from the desk, but I decided against it. I didn’t have any tools and attempting to do it with my fingers would take too much time. What I needed to do was find some place safe to hide out, and then I could plan my next move. Surrender was out of the question, but fighting everyone in the bunker didn’t seem like a realistic option, either, especially when armed only with a broken broom handle.

The decontamination center had a small restroom that was still functional. We’d kept it closed and off limits to tour groups, but me and the other guides had still used it from time to time, mostly to sneak a cigarette or when we had to go really bad and wouldn’t be able to wait until we’d reached the other side of the bunker, where the public restrooms were. The door to the restroom was open, and although the light was off inside, I was certain there was nobody hiding in there and waiting for me. I ducked inside, knelt, and raised the toilet seat. Then I cupped my hands, dipped them into the water, and took several deep draughts. I wasn’t grossed out by the thought of drinking from the toilet. I’d long since given up caring about such civilized niceties. Besides, dogs drank out of toilets, and dogs were the best creatures on the planet. The only thing I did mind was the room-temperature water’s faint chemical taste. I grimaced as I drank. I gorged myself, unsure of when I’d be able to drink again. Who knew how long I’d have to be in hiding, or how Drew would find me—if he was even alive to find me. I felt very guilty over the possibility that Drew might pay the price for my actions, but that didn’t stop me from continuing on. I splashed some water on my face and then stood up.

It was at that point that I noticed the sink. I mean, I’d known it was there before, but for some reason, my mind had totally blanked out, and I’d gone to the toilet instead. A brain fart, Drew would have called it. I chalked it up to fear and stress. Both were weighing on me. My mind had just had a little blip. That was all. After wiping my face and hands with some paper towels, I left the restroom and looked for a place to hide.

I emerged into another hallway and found myself at a crossroads. If I went left, I’d walk down a gray concrete four-hundred and thirty-three foot long tunnel that led to a dead end—the bunker’s mountainside blast door. A right turn would take me deeper into the bunker via the facility’s sprawling power plant, which was still operational. I could hear the distant roar of the power plant’s generators from where I stood. Beyond the power plant was a stairwell that led down to the lower level, where Chuck and the others were. I didn’t want to risk running into them, so I turned left and hurried down the tunnel. I walked briskly at first, but then panic took over and I broke into a jog. My shoes slapped against the concrete. The sounds echoed off the walls, and I hoped the hum of the generators would drown them out.

I caught a whiff of myself as I ran. The smell made me grimace. I stank—the unfortunate effect of weeks without showering or washing my clothes, with the added effect of the ketosis ravaging my starved body, and the puke I’d spewed all over myself in the incinerator room. My faded jeans, long-sleeved black shirt, socks, and boxer-briefs with various DC Comics superheroes on them were all stiff enough to stand up by themselves. My hair felt stiff, too, long past the point of just being greasy. The whiskers on my face itched and made my skin sore. I’d never had a beard until we came underground. I’d washed in the sink as often as possible, but that didn’t really get me clean. We’d gone through the restroom’s meager supply of hand soap in the first week, and other than some bottle of hand sanitizer, none of us had any other soaps or cleaners on us when we got stuck down here. I longed for many things—food, a decent night’s sleep, toothpaste, a cold beer, someone to hold—but more than any of these things, with the possible exception of food, what I wanted most was to take a hot shower. I wanted to stand under a scalding, forceful stream of water and just close my eyes and not move.

Right after I ate something, of course.

The corridor seemed to stretch out before me, as if the end was racing ahead, always out of reach. I’d walked it so many times, but it had never seemed longer than it did at that moment. It was silent, save for my echoing footsteps and the background noise from the power plant. The overhead lights glowed brightly, casting their stark, fluorescent radiance over everything. There were no shadows to hide in. No dark corners to duck into. The gray concrete walls were featureless except for stenciled signs advising me of where the exit was located. Water supply pipes ran overhead, along with ductwork and electrical conduits. There were several sewer grates in the floor. I paused over one, debating whether to duck down into the sewer and hide out there, and then decided against it. I’d choose that as a last resort.

As I approached the end of the tunnel, the blast door loomed into view. There was a small cul-de-sac to the left, right before the tunnel terminated at the door. Parked inside this little nook were two old forklifts, leftovers from when the bunker had been an active site. The hotel had inherited them and they’d sat here ever since. Occasionally, one of the maintenance staff would hop on one and ride it around, but they were only really used when it came to changing the fluorescent lights overhead. One worker would stand on the forks, balanced precariously along with a case of light bulbs, while his co-worker would raise the forks up to the ceiling. One forklift was a bright orange Toyota model. The other was a yellow Caterpillar. Both operated on propane, and both had full canisters strapped behind them. My fellow survivors had only used them once since the siege had started—Chuck had suggested a forklift race to break the monotony after several weeks. It had sufficed, until the exhaust fumes building up in the tunnel had started to make us sick.

Stacked behind the forklifts were three diesel generators, each still sitting on a skid and wrapped with plastic. Another skid was stacked with boxes of replacement fluorescent bulbs. A metal rack held a few spare propane bottles for the forklifts. Hanging on the wall next to it was a fire extinguisher. Although the lighting in the cul-de-sac was just as bright as the rest of the tunnel, there was a shadowy area between the wall and the skids. If I needed to, I could hide there. Chances were I’d be discovered if anyone approached closely, though.

“Maybe the zombies aren’t out there anymore,” I whispered. “Maybe they’ve moved on. Maybe I can sneak out right now before anyone finds me.”

Even as I said it, I knew I’d be wrong. It was wishful thinking, and nothing more. I might as well have said, “Maybe aliens will arrive and take me to the lost planet of Nibiru, which is populated by Sports Illustrated swimsuit models.” Sighing, I turned my attention to the blast door. Mounted on the wall overhead was a closed circuit television monitor. Since we still had power, the unit was still functioning. I stared at the grainy, washed out black and white image. Hundreds of dead milled around the door, pawing at the entrance. Most of them looked like they’d been out there a while. The ones closest to the door were in bad shape. One particularly fermented corpse seemed to be stuck to the door, as if the sun had melted him onto it like the syrupy remains of a popsicle left out in the sun on a sidewalk. Insects crawled all over—and through—him. Many of the zombies were missing limbs. One had been completely hollowed. The decay and damage were so bad that I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. All that remained of them from the neck down to their waistline was an empty, gaping cavity. Several zombie animals were in the group, as well. The most grotesque of all was a severed head. I caught a glimpse of it as the corpses momentarily parted. Its blackened tongue protruded from its mouth, and its eyes moved back and forth, desperately seeking prey even though it could no longer hunt.

Suddenly, I was overwhelmed with a desire to be outside with them. The urge was so strong that I had to stop myself from reaching for the wheel to open the door. On the other side of that impregnable steel was the sky and fresh air and green trees and grass. I wanted so badly to experience those things again. I wanted to feel the sun’s warmth on my skin, or to stand beneath the shade of a tree as the leaves rustled softly above me. I wanted to smell fresh-cut grass and honeysuckle and pines. I wanted to hear birds chirping and squirrels chattering at one another. I wanted to feel the wind. To taste it. To hear it. Hell, I’d have been ecstatic just to feel the bite of a mosquito or to hear the buzz of a bumblebee. All I had was the sounds of the bunker, and after being cooped up down here, those sounds had left me demoralized and depressed—and apparently, they’d driven my fellow survivors crazy.

On the screen, a human zombie repeatedly slapped the door with a severed penis he clutched in his fist. A dead dog licked the steel, slowly and methodically, as if trying to wear down the door with its tongue. Another zombie’s eyeball popped in its socket as I watched. The gooey remnants slipped down the corpse’s cheek like a squashed grey slug. A cloud of flies swarmed toward the hole and began to crawl in and out. Disgusted by what I was watching, yet strangely compelled to watch it anyway, I shuffled toward the blast door, my peril momentarily forgotten. I was thankful that the closed circuit system had no sound. Seeing them was one thing. Hearing them was another, and smelling them was even worse. As I got close to the door, I imagined that I could hear them. Despite the background noise from the power plant and the unbelievable thickness of the door itself, I heard their distant moans. The dead sounded hungry.