Vanished (18 page)

“Logan Darby?” I look up and Celia is standing three feet away, her arms crossed over her stomach in a sharp line, a gun strapped over her shoulder.

“Hi Celia,” I say.

Collin returns to my left side, “I told you it was her.”

“Logan?” Celia says, her voice brimming with rage.

“Yes Celia?” I say, looking back down at the man.

“Can you please get your gun off my dad’s head?”

“This is
your
dad?” We didn’t really go out long enough for me to meet her parents. I had no way of knowing and I doubt I would have acted differently if I had.

“Yeah, and if you had questions you could have just asked.”

I inhale deeply and release the barrel from his temple. I take a step back and keep my gun trained on his chest, “Actually, I was busy dodging bullets.”

She tucks her hands behind her back. “Thank you. I am sorry” she shrugs, “We’re a little jumpy around here. You’re bleeding.”

How is she so calm?

Celia is about a foot shorter than me and half a foot taller than Trin. She’s wearing a white t-shirt under a green jacket, a Kevlar vest and camo cargo pants. Her light-blond hair is tied up in a ponytail, her face is longer and her cheek-bones are more pronounced than I remember. Her grey eyes are a little harder.  “Why don’t you put the gun down and let me clean up that cut for you?”

“Them first,” I say, gesturing towards the crowd of kids, their weapons pointed in our general direction.

She nods at them and they lower their weapons. “Let me get this straight, you’re in charge here?” I ask her.

She walks up and puts her hands on her father’s shoulder. He flinches and she helps him to his feet then pushes him behind her putting herself in front of my gun. Her dad looks everywhere but at me.  She shrugs, “Sort of.”

“But you’re…you’re just a kid.” Jasmine says.

Celia’s dull grey eyes cut over to Jasmine. “Do you think that matters here?” Celia asks her, gesturing around us, “No. This is all that matters here,” she puts a hand over her shoulder and touches the gun.  She turns back to me, “Come inside, I’ll stitch you up and tell you what I know.”

“And we’re free to leave when we want?” Collin asks.

She looks over and smiles at him. “Sure. You can even bring your guns if you want, but you won’t need them.”

“Come on,” I say and holster my gun.  Considering the puddle of liquid I have to step over and the strong smell of urine, it doesn’t surprise me when Celia’s dad doesn’t join us as she leads the way down the dark street.  

Chapter Fifteen

Trin

              The stairs are so narrow that our shoulders graze against the walls as we descend into the bowels of St. Raphael’s.  I’m not sure how long we’ve been moving down when Zayn comes to an abrupt stop in front of me. I run into his back and Madison stumbles into mine. “What is it?” I ask, my vision completely obscured by his brown corduroy jacket. 

              “A door.”

              “Well open it, I’m squished,” I tell him. 

              I feel Madison take a step back to give me some room. I step up one stair so I can see over Zayn’s shoulder.  His flash-light beam illuminates a security key-pad in the wall next to the door, “I can’t. It’s locked.” He says.

              “Oh great,” Madison moans, “Guys, I don’t even think I can turn around.”

              “Does the key-pad work?” I ask, shining my flashlight on it so Zayn can slide the cover up.  He hits ENTER and a red light flashes on the screen. Simultaneously a big round light, also red, starts flashing above the door.  The words: RESTRICTED ACCESS, SECURITY CODE REQUIRED flash on the LED screen. 

              “It works but we don’t have a code,” he says, dropping the cover, and glancing up at me.

              It doesn’t make sense.  Why would dad tell me to come here and not give me the code?

I try to imagine what must have been going through dad’s head when he scribbled the note on the post-it to me.  If anyone else would have read it they wouldn’t have known what he meant by
go to the place I always wanted you to go
.  He phrased it in a way that only I would understand.  I close my eyes and a number flashes in my mind. I remember the long random number printed on the sheet of paper in the envelope the note came in.  Fortunately, my back-pack with the envelope is hanging on my back. “Madison can you open my back-pack and get out that envelope from my dad?”

              She sighs and I feel her tugging on the bag, her flash-light beam dancing over my shoulder occasionally as she shuffles through it, “Here,” she says, handing the envelope to me over my shoulder.  I open it and remove the tiny piece of paper. 

              “Try this,” I tell Zayn and recite the number out-loud while he types it into the code box. The light above the door flashes green, the words on the code-box read ACCESS GRANTED.  The heavy door slides open.  I can’t believe it.  It worked!

              Our flash-light beams dance around a small stone chamber on the other side of the security door.  The code-box starts beeping and the light above the door flashes yellow.  Words print across the LED screen: DOOR WILL AUTOMATICALLY SEAL IN TEN SECONDS. “Shit,” Zayn says and steps across the huge black hole in the floor and onto the stone floor beyond. He reaches back for my hand and I jump over, followed by Madison.  The door shuts behind us and we are trapped in the pitch-black chamber. “Guys, I don’t like this,” Madison whines.

              “There’s a door here,” Zayn says and shines his light on the door.
Level B1 – Surveillance and Communications
, is printed in fading red box letters on the door.

When Zayn touches the key-pad a mist spray extinguishes from tiny, round nozzles in the ceiling.

              “Eww, what is this stuff,” Madison says, touching her sleeve.

              “Probably some kind of iodine mist,” Zayn offers, “This must have been an underground bunker built to withstand, and sustain people, in a nuclear attack.  There was a ton of these built back in the 50’s and 60’s during the Cold War. The iodine is probably to neutralize any radioactive particles people might be carrying in on their clothes and skin, from fallout. Essentially this room is designed to decontaminate people passing through.”

              “How do you know all of this?” She asks him.

              He shrugs, “Some of us actually paid attention in history class.”

              “I think
some of us
watch too much Star Trek,” she mutters.

              I feel the mist drying on my face and inhale a stringent odor. “Code?” Zayn asks. I pull the post-card out of my back pocket and read it out-loud again so he can punch in the numbers. 

              ACCESS GRANTED. The light turns green, the door slides open and back up lights in the next room flash to life. “That means there’s a generator somewhere.  It must be programmed to come on when someone opens the door,” Zayn explains.  

              We step into the room and take stock. There’s a table on our left lined with old-school telephones, the kind you have to turn the dial to call out on. Tons of black, green and white wires snake up the concrete wall behind the telephones, and disappear in holes cut in the ceiling.  In an alcove at the back there’s a table with control panel on top and bunch of buttons and dials. On the wall in front of it are at least twenty tiny camera monitors. A single chair sits in front of the table with a pair of ancient looking headphones on top of it.  Between the alcove and the table with the telephones is another door labeled
Level
B2
–
Research
.

              “Wow,” Zayn says inspecting the telephones, “I wonder if one of these calls the President.”

              “There isn’t a President anymore.” Madison reminds him, her fingertips trailing along the dust on the table, “And judging from this layer of dust, no one’s been
down here
in a really long time.

              I realize the pit forming in my stomach as disappointment.  This whole time I’ve been harboring a silent hope that my dad would be here, somewhere, waiting for me but that seems pretty unlikely now.  “Should we check out the next room?” I suggest, not ready to give up until we’ve seen the entire bunker.

              “Hopefully it’s not as boring as this one,” Zayn mutters.

              There is no security key-pad on this door, just a red button to the right.  I push it and the door slides open. This door is thinner but it’s reinforced with steel.  

              The Research room is a little bigger than the Surveillance and Communications room. The left side of this room is lined with file-cabinets and in the center of the room are two large conference tables surrounded by chairs covered in cracking black vinyl.  The right side is a library and in the center of the bookshelves that line the wall there’s a couple of comfortable looking chairs and a coffee table.   A lamp sits on a small shelf between the chairs. 

              One foot in front of the other carries me to the filing cabinets. My heart is racing and there’s a queasy feeling in my stomach.
This could be it
, I think. Inside of these cabinets the answers my father mentioned in his note could be waiting.  I can feel Zayn and Madison behind me, watching. I curl a trembling hand around the metal handle of the first cabinet and pull it open. “It’s empty, the files are gone,” I say with a sigh, slamming the drawer shut.  We check the rest and they’re all the same way.

              The books in the library, though a strange collection, don’t seem to hold the answers my father spoke of either.  Most of them are government handbooks about surviving a nuclear attack. There’s a whole shelf of books on unexplained phenomena and I brush my fingertips against the spines looking for any that might clue us in.  

              Zayn glances at his watch, “Let’s keep moving,” he says, “who knows how many levels this place has.”

              I look longingly at the other books on the shelves. I haven’t even had a chance to really peruse them yet.  What if the answer is here somewhere?  Zayn’s right, there may be even better clues further down.  No sense in wasting time searching through the books until we’ve checked out the entire bunker.  “All right,” I say, “Lead the way.” 

The next door is labeled
Level B3 – Training
. 

              Zayn hits the button and the door slides open to blackness beyond. The lights flutter on in the ceiling and we step through the door.  In front of us a large padded floor stretches out to take up the center of the room.  On the back wall there are three blue doors. Each door has a sign with a picture on it.  The door to the far left has a picture of a gun on it, the middle door a bow and arrow and the third has an image of a round ball with a fuse coming out of the top.  In the far left corner of the training level there’s a boxing ring and on the right there’s a gigantic in-ground swimming pool. “No water,” Zayn says, with a disappointed frown.

              On the other side of the pool are two doors displaying the universal signs for Male and Female. “Ohh,” says Madison, “I’ll be right back,” and she takes off toward the doors.

              I walk over to a rack of long, shiny sticks hanging on the wall.  “Woah,” says Zayn and I turn around to see him pull a real sword out of a wooden barrel on the floor and give it a few slashes in the air. 

The wall behind us holds about twenty lockers, older and bigger than the ones we have upstairs.  I turn and walk over to them while Zayn steps onto the padded floor and starts hacking at a wooden dummy with the sword.

              I investigate the lockers, going through each one meticulously unsure of what I’m looking for.  When I get to the last locker I’m feeling pretty dejected because the only thing I’ve found so far is a single diamond earring and an ancient pair of boxing gloves with the initials PD hand-written in permanent ink on the cuff. I reach up to check the little shelf inside the locker.  My hand brushes something that falls out on the ground. Bending, I pick it up, blow off the dust and frown.  My first thought is that it looks like a skeleton key except the metal is a shimmering metallic blue color and there’s an ornate spiral shape at the top. “What is this?” I turn to ask Zayn.

              Zayn takes it, turns it over in his hand and emits a low whistle, “It looks like a key but I’ve never seen metal like this before,” He hands it to Madison, who just returned from the rest-room, and she cocks her head, shrugs and tosses it back to me.  I drop the key into my pocket.    

              We check out the doors in the back of the Training Level first.  The door with the picture of the gun is an outdated shooting range.  Hanging on the wall to our right are guns of all different shapes and sizes. Beside those drape several pairs of protective goggles and some ear-muffs.  Zayn pulls a metallic blue ray-gun looking thing off the rack and aims at the yellowing paper target in the lane nearest him. He turns back and strikes a macho pose with the gun raised toward the ceiling, “Do you guys have any idea how much this thing would go for on ebay?”