They walked along a steel grating until they came to an open blast door, which in fact had been blasted right out of its casement by the asteroid impact. The door itself was now embedded in the concrete on the far side of a twenty-by-thirty-foot living space. The room was scattered with the charred remains of unidentifiable items and a few partial skeletons that lay among the ash.
“Blast wave,” Marty said. “This place imploded and they were incinerated instantly.”
They found another blast door, also blasted from its casement, and stepped into a perfectly round room filled with scorched and flattened electrical appliances. The remains of a concrete island were in the center of the room, with exposed plumbing sticking up through it.
“That was a sink,” Emory said. “This was a kitchen.” She pried open a smashed metal cabinet to find little more than ash and some melted glass jelly jars.
They checked the entire level and every room was the same. All of the doors were blasted from their casements, and the rooms were scattered with incinerated remnants of what had probably once been furniture and human beings. In all, they found between fifteen and twenty partial skeletons.
Sullivan kicked a scorched skull across the room. “Our two cannibals must have been living here when the rock hit.”
“But how did they survive?” Emory wondered. “All these people were cooked.”
Sullivan shined his light on Marty’s face. “What do you think, Mr. Shock Cocoon?”
Marty thought for a moment. “Where’s the missile silo?”
Sullivan pointed back the way they had come. “The silo was at the other end of that tunnel we came in through… vaporized on impact.”
“Well, so much for that idea,” Marty said. “Okay, so the blast wave was moving laterally through these tunnels, following the path of least resistance… which means if our two psychos from last night were in here at the time of impact… they must’ve been beneath this level. So we’re looking for a hatch in the floor, probably one that opens up.”
After another quick search of the facility, they located a round hatch in the center of the floor near the island in the kitchen. They hadn’t noticed it the first time because it was hidden beneath a piece of scorched sheet metal. Sullivan turned the round wheel and pulled the hatch upward to open it.
“And voilà,” Marty said, shining his light down a red steel ladder.
“Think you’re pretty smart, don’t ya?” Emory said, hitting him in the arm.
“Simple physics,” he replied. “Who’s first?”
“I volunteer you,” Sullivan said.
Marty shrugged and stepped forward, but Sullivan grabbed him and pushed him aside. “If you got killed, Princess would never let me hear the end of it.”
Emory smiled as he climbed down the ladder. “Careful, John.”
“Yeah yeah.” After twenty feet he stepped onto the floor at the bottom and shined his light down a short tunnel into intact living quarters. “Bingo!” he called up. “Cocoon Boy was right. It smells like ass down here, but it didn’t catch on fire.”
He found a battery-powered lamp on a table and switched it on, filling the room with light as the other two descended the ladder.
The twenty-by-twenty-foot living space was a proper mess and smelled of body odor and excrement. A quick look in the lavatory explained the sewer smell, and Sullivan shut the door. “There’s no water to flush with… they’ve been shitting in a bucket.”
Emory kicked around in the trash on the floor, many empty food cans and wrappers, scattered books and magazines. Sour smelling blankets and clothing.
“Only took ’em five months to turn into animals,” Sullivan muttered.
Emory picked something up from the floor. “Check this out.”
The men came to stand on either side of her as she flipped through a pamphlet advertising a company called Survival Estates. It showed the renovation process of a decommissioned minute man missile silo and advertised the sale of individual condos within the newly renovated complexes, all of them sharing a common kitchen area and living room.
Sullivan grabbed the pamphlet away from Emory. “Lemme see that fuckin’ thing.” He stood paging through it. “You gotta be kidding me. Listen to this: ‘Feel secure in the knowledge that no matter what happens to the world above, you and your family will be safe and sound in your own personal Survival Estate.’ Survival Estate!” He smirked and gave the pamphlet back. “Those sorry fuckers upstairs deserve a goddamn refund.”
Emory paged through the pamphlet, shaking her head. “Fucking twenty-twelvers. My God, how stupid. Get this… this little room right here… it cost them a hundred grand!”
Sullivan looked at Marty. “And I thought you were stupid.”
“Oh, it gets better,” she went on, turning the page. “‘We offer round-the-clock security, state of the art telecommunications, and guaranteed technical support in the event… in the event of any malfunction.’” She laughed and tossed the pamphlet aside.
Sullivan chuckled. “I wonder where the repair crew is.”
“I’m wondering something else,” Marty said.
They looked at him.
“Where are the missing arms and legs?”
“That’s right!” Emory looked at Sullivan. “The bodies in the tent.”
“Let’s get the fuck outta here,” Sullivan said, heading for the ladder. “We must have missed another hatch someplace.”
Emory was following him closely up the ladder when she heard a pistol shot from above. Sullivan’s full weight crashed onto her and she nearly fell from the ladder with him as he dropped to the concrete below. The hatch slammed above them, and Marty jumped off the bottom rung, shining his light to see a stream of blood running down Sullivan’s face from beneath his helmet.
“He’s hit, Shannon!”
She scurried down the ladder. “Watch the hatch!” she told him, dragging Sullivan clear. “If it opens, shoot!”
She grabbed the lamp from the table, set it down beside Sullivan’s head and pulled off his helmet to get a look at the wound.
“Is he dead?”
“Not yet.” Her fingers trembled as she probed his matted hair. “John, can you hear me? John!”
She found the bullet wound, and to her utter surprise, the bullet had not penetrated his skull, but was lodged in the bone just above his hairline. “He’s gonna be out of action for a while… but he’ll live.”
“Thank God!”
“Thank Kevlar, Marty. His helmet slowed the bullet down.” She decided to leave the bullet where it was for the moment, knowing it would help stanch the flow of blood, and got to her feet. “Any ideas?”
Marty took off his own helmet and stood scratching his itching scalp. “We’re rats in a barrel… and the idea man is out cold.”
“Can they lock us down here?”
He shook his head. “It’s not that kind of hatch. It’s geared in a two-to-one ratio on this side. That means we only have to turn it half as hard as they do to unlock it. The trouble’s going to be fighting our way up out of here… and that’s your department.”
“We need a goddamn grenade,” she said.
“What about the launcher?”
“There’s no way to open the hatch wide enough to fire it without getting shot, and we don’t— Hold on a second!” She took a knee beside Sullivan and pulled a yellow-tipped high-explosive grenade from his harness, remembering something she had learned in basic training. “Something about a centrifugal fuse.”
“That’s what arms it?”
“Yeah, I think.”
“Is the launcher barrel rifled?”
“Yeah, the grenade has to spin in flight to be accurate.”