Secure Facility

Nick set down on the helipad, using the distant light of still-burning Denver to help guide him into position. The light dusting of snow on the helipad blew away as Nick hovered and then landed. His skids bounced once on the concrete pad before he powered the craft down and hopped out. In the winter moonlight, the snow on the mountainside reflected upward as pale as a funeral shroud.

He cursed to himself. He should have remembered to look for footprints before he landed, any sort of clue that anyone had been here. He was praying to find survivors, but if those… things that had swarmed over the world were here, he wanted to know that, too. Flying over Denver, he’d seen dozens of the monsters that used to be men, women, and children hurling themselves into the flames, trying to attack the movement and dancing shadows. The thin Colorado air smelled of ash and flame. Nick thought he could detect another smell, almost like burnt pork, but he forced himself into believing it was only in his imagination.

He looked around the mountain outcropping where he’d landed. There was little to indicate that a vast network of tunnels and blast doors lay beneath his feet. If curious hikers clambered up to this point, forging across trailless wilderness to do so, they would only see the concrete helipad, a reinforced metal door set directly into the mountain’s stony walls, and some cleverly hidden ventilation shafts.

Standing perfectly still, Nick strained his ears. But all he heard was the low moan of the wind sweeping through a rocky pass. He yearned for a gruff voice to ask what the hell he was doing here or to demand he get on the ground so he could be searched. He feared he would hear the groans of the infected and frigid, brittle limbs scuttling brokenly across the rock toward him.

Somewhere, ice cracked and popped. Nick jumped. He let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding, and it floated away as a pale mist. He scratched his unshaven chin and cursed again.

Nick was a ghost, a high-level operator used to moving in the shadows and dropping in on all manner of restricted spaces. He’d deployed all over the globe, doing field work in every type of terrain. He’d been recuperating from last year’s mission, out by himself, when he first heard about the virus sweeping the world. About the infected roaming the streets. About collapsing order and fallen governments and the upending of civilization.

Most of his adult life had been spent as a singleton operative. Reclusivity had long been his shield against prying eyes. Now, it had probably saved his life. His life, but maybe not his sanity. He hadn’t found a single survivor, and he was running out of places to look.

All his contacts were silent. Gone. Toast. He’d visited a few of his old haunts. Some of them were like Denver. Burned and haunted by things that used to be people. Others were blasted wrecks, burping radiation out from miles-wide craters. Some looked almost normal, and those were the ghastliest of all. A single wrecked car sitting on a now-shaggy lawn, one door flung open. A baby stroller tipped over in a ditch. A dark shape in a window, rocking spastically where it stood, waiting and waiting and waiting for prey to scurry past its line of sight.

Nick had not seen a single person in his travels across the transformed landscape. Not human people, anyway.

He was increasingly desperate to find someone, anyone, else who was still alive. He checked his list. He’s searched military bases. Every CIA safehouse and bolt hole he knew of was empty. Special forces black sites held only the bones of the dead and the animated bodies of things that weren’t quite alive. Nick checked the list again, even though he already knew what was left of his dwindling options.

The only places he had left were a handful of government bunkers. Places meant to ensure continuity of government in the event of all out nuclear war, their locations codeword-protected. Nick was one of maybe two hundred people who knew this place existed. In the event the world fell apart, the very top of the federal government would retreat underground and reemerge to take charge of whatever scraps of the country remained.

Well, the world had truly fallen apart. If anyone survived the plague of murder and madness that had descended over humanity, they would be here.

Nick eyed the supplies he’d brought. Jugs of fresh water, canned food, a few books ranging from survival guides to trashy romances, and a box of medical supplies. Nothing fancy. The hidden bunker would have its own cache of supplies. Enough to last for years. But these might buy some goodwill. It was the thought that counted.

Looking around one last time, Nick walked up to the recessed metal door. A yellow ABSOLUTELY NO ENTRY sign was bolted to the metal. Feeling a bit dumb, he knocked. The steel was cold, and the space behind the door swallowed up the sound of his knuckles against the metal. He glanced around, taking note of the cameras trained on him. An intercom panel was wedged into the rock next to the door. Nick tapped the speaker. Nothing happened.

Nick waited another full minute, hoping against hope that some walking crewcut in a Secret Service suit would open the door and tell him to get the hell off the president’s lawn. Nothing of the sort happened.

Feeling his heart sink a little more with each passing moment, Nick eyed the carefully concealed ventilation shafts. They were quite large, supplying air to the vast chambers below. They had to be, for the size of the space below. He knew they could seal shut against an explosion or radiation cloud, but it was still possible to bypass the various grates and metal shutters with enough patience and the right tools. Nick once managed to sneak into the bunker beneath a South American dictator’s presidential palace through the same type of American-supplied security guardrails.

Nick pulled a length of climbing rope off his belt and secured it around the edge of the ventilation shaft. Checking that the connection between his rope and harness was secure, he took a deep breath. Then, he shimmied into the vent headfirst and paused a moment.

He could now hear the faint hum of a generator somewhere deep inside the facility. That gave him a glimmer of hope. Someone was here. Or had been. The Cold War-era communications systems were bouncing data off satellites and trying to connect to allied capitals and military outposts. He hoped their little silicon dreams would come true, and they would establish a connection somewhere. Because that meant there was hope for him, too.

Grunting and sliding downward, Nick disabled one shutter and then another, making his way lower and lower into the darkness. He felt the rope unspooling from his belt harness as he eased himself downward. The sound of the generator grew louder.

Nick was beginning to wonder just how far down the shaft went when he caught a glimpse of metal below. Twisting around, he maneuvered himself into position and came to a rest at the bottom. Dim light was visible down a cross-shaft.

He could feel warm air now, slightly stale from being trapped under layers of rock and stone. Somewhere, Nick knew that there would be a blinking screen flashing a security message that the vent shutters were malfunctioning. But no one came to investigate.

“C’mon,” he breathed, crawling over to a mesh grate, following the light. He peered through the grate. Harsh fluorescent bulbs gleamed off concrete walls and floors. The place was designed to be sturdy, not aesthetically pleasing. He spotted a climate control panel that looked like something Doctor Frankenstein might operate, studded with levers and oversized buttons. However, he didn’t see anyone manning it.  

“Anybody?” The words came out quiet and desperate, the gasp of a man bobbing alone in dark and stormy seas.

There had to be someone here. There had to be. The whole world couldn’t just be gone. He couldn’t be the last one left. The very thought was dizzying. The notion had occurred to him before, but it had just sort of bounced off his brain. It was too big for his thoughts to really wrap around it. But if even a Code Dagger Ten-level secure facility was empty…

Throwing caution to the wind, Nick shoved the grate out of the way. It crashed to the cement floor, thunderously loud in the enclosed space.

“Hello?” Nick shouted. Stealth be damned.

He heard a noise from deeper in the facility. It could have been the grinding of automated machinery. Or it could have been something else.

Nick’s mouth went dry. He felt a prickling sensation all over his body as his skin broke out into goosebumps. The noise came again.

Scritch.

Nick scooted ever so slightly back deeper into the vent.

Scritch.

“Hello?” The word was soft this time, but it seemed to hang in the stale air like a dark cloud over a picnic.

ScitchScritchScritch

The sound grew closer. And frantic.

The Secretary of Defense burst into the room, her graying hair matted with blood and covering her face like a veil. The ugly scraping noise came again as the exposed nubs of bone in her shattered left arm rubbed together. She swung around wildly, looking for the source of the noise. Her pulverized arm dangled and flopped like a limp dishrag.

Nick, higher up in the vent and above her immediate sightline, recoiled. Another, smaller figure appeared behind the thing that used to be the Secretary of Defense. The president’s younger daughter, Andrea, stalked into the room, her face streaked with dried gore. Her teeth were broken and jagged from chewing on bones.

Nick made a little involuntary noise deep in his throat.

Andrea’s eyes shot up and locked on him in the vent. She charged forward and threw herself against the wall, trying to reach him. The Secretary of Defense followed, doing her best to snatch at him were her one functional arm.

Nick worked himself backward as the sound of running feet from deeper in the facility reached him. More were coming. He didn’t think they could reach him up here, but he didn’t want to be proven wrong in this confined space. The image of those things crawling through the vent toward him, teeth gnashing, flitted through his mind, and he began scuttling backward faster now, not caring how much noise he made as his feet and knees banged around in the narrow vent.

He followed his rope back to the main shaft and began hauling himself upward, hoarse screams echoing through the vent like the devil’s chorus line. He barely even felt the harsh, vertiginous climb back to the surface. His mind was focused on the awful sounds gurgling out of the hell pit below. He leaned against the side of the vent, suddenly aware of the sweat covering his body as the cold winter wind blasted him.

Breathing hard, he listened. He could still hear the ugly, inhuman noises echoing up the ventilation shaft, but he didn’t hear anything scrambling toward him. So, he sat down on the edge of the helipad, lowered his face into his hands, and screamed. Screamed until he was lightheaded. Then, he fell silent, except for the occasional sob.

After a few minutes, one of the reindeer nuzzled his shoulder. Nick sighed and composed himself. He pulled out his list again. He checked it twice. This was the final area he thought to search. He began to cross names off, nice and naughty alike. Andrea’s name was the last one he drew a line through.

With a grimace, he stared at the supplies he’d brought. The bag should have been full of toys, not emergency supplies. He debated simply leaving the sack here, just in case anyone came along. He certainly didn’t need the gear at the North Pole. But in the end, he lifted off with the sack in tow.

He knew no one was coming. He’d known even before he set out from the workshop, though he hadn’t been able to believe. Not without seeing it with his own eyes. The list of names on his list had shrunk from millions to thousands to a few dozen. And then to none at all. There were no stockings hung by the chimney with care. No visions of sugar plums. No cookies or milk left by the tree. He was the only one left, alone and forsaken in the icy wastes of the North Pole.

Nick wept as dawn lit the horizon, shaking like a bowlful of jelly. Wept for the little girls and boys who would grow no older. Wept for the final Christmas.