Something gave way, little ice chips sprinkled down into the grating. She stumbled off her feet into the wall again as a hydraulic whine took over and the wheel spun itself counter-clockwise with a hiss and a purr, rolling the vault door inward on unseen hinges. Mist sheeted up as the warmer, stale air inside the shelter puffed out.
Sophie ran into the tiny entry. The narrow inside there smelled sterile, a mixture of rubber and cleaning solution and dead air. Clang. The door thudded and clanked shut behind her, seals pressurized. Something electronic beeped twice and gave a stuttering whirr, then clicked back into place. Sophie barely registered a frantic thought — How do I get back out? — and the wheel spun itself back in the other direction.
Echoing tremors of metal on metal. Silence.
As Sophie’s eardrums popped and she worked her jaw, new noises swirled up in every direction. The noise was sudden and jarring, unmuffled generators humming, fuses flitting click-click as light banks began to spark, plastic streamers somewhere fluttering where a vent was spilling out new air, and something metal like a wrench or a screwdriver was clattering up on one of the utility shelves. Whatever it was, it fell off a vibrating surface and clanged onto the concrete floor in the farther room.
Warmth began to puff in tangible currents around the shelter. There was the whisper of whirring air, a bitter taste of dust, the shunting of power and twinkling of lights in aluminum cages as Sophie’s entering spun a hundred things into motion.
Air, light, oh thank God…
Sophie hugged herself, bent over as the first cramp of nausea crawled through her belly and down into her legs.
I remember now.
Some.
There’s beds, beds for three, three of us…?
No. I. Me.
And how long?
How long will I be alone here?
She fought to regain herself, to understand. Something was still happening. The floor rumbled.
Stone dust peppered down from between the plates in the low and claustrophobic ceiling just above her head. She heard her father’s voice again, “Hon, don’t you dare look at the sky!” so loudly that she covered her ears.
Breathing in furtive gasps of barely-controlled panic, Sophie followed the narrow entry tunnel. It edged off to the left, its angle engineered by Tom so that the vault door could be defended if need be. There were submachine guns in here, somewhere. Hunting rifles. Assault rifles. Despite Tom’s repeated urgings, she had refused to ever learn just how to fire them.
She passed through the second angle of the passage, a lead-sheeted narrow which Tom had called the radiation trap, and came to the shelter’s true entry at last. She pushed through a doubled veil of hanging strips of lead, plated tiles locked away in a thick plastic curtain. Beyond the lead curtain was hung a second tapestry of translucent vinyl strips, and the welcoming ice-blue light of sanctuary glowed out from behind it.
There was a deep niche in the concrete wall, with another strip covering its hollow. Sophie peered into the niche and saw an red aluminum flashlight, socketed in its charger. Despite the ceiling lights and the assurance of the shelter’s many automated systems, Sophie reached in, grabbed the chilly flashlight, and flicked it on. She leashed its plastic ribbon onto her wrist, just as Tom had taught her.
Because what if the lights go out?
Something made her think, “Grid priorities,” but she could not remember what that might mean. She knew only that she was hyperventilating, freezing despite the warm gushes of air, and close to shock. The terror-drone in her mind was filtering the mantra Get to the shelter, get to the shelter into Don’t get caught in the dark, and that was all.
Don’t. Calm. You need to think, Sophie.
Time refused to accelerate. She seemed to drift, to release herself into a thin fleshly resonance of activity of response.
Think!
She did not know how many of the shelter’s systems were automatic, or what more she would need to do to survive. She only knew that all of Tom’s emergency manuals were stacked in the binders on the utility shelves by the entryway, where they could be quickly accessed if the light had failed to come on. The racks of shelves loomed over her, bolted into the interior-facing wall.
One of the ceiling lights just above the left-hand bank of shelves refused to stop flickering. It strobed fluorescent washes of ice-light down over Sophie’s glistening face. She stared at it, then gasped as a keening squeal announced that the vault door behind her had finished pressurizing.
What if I never get out of here?
She looked up at the walls of the cluttered entryway, up at the aluminum shelving filled with the binders and CD-R spools, over the fuel barrels all stacked beneath their oily tarps. Shivering, hugging herself and biting her lower lip to keep from crying out, Sophie edged her way beyond the claustrophobic entry and deeper into the shelter proper.
She had not seen the “great room” since her last tour with Tom, three years ago. She could see where the thousands of labored hours had gone, hours she had complained about more times than she cared to remember. Over the years Tom’s weekend hobby had quickly become an obsession. Whenever he came back home from working in Virginia or in NORAD, he had been here. When he came back to “the mountain” he always invited her to come along, and nine times out of ten she had refused to join him. Now, regarding all of his accomplishments and standing there in a haunted nothingness of sanctuary, Sophie could hardly recognize the shelter she had once endured and secretly despised.
The great room was fifteen feet wide and thirty feet long, an “underground mansion” according to Tom. The reinforced ceiling with its interlaced girders was new to her. She cringed, fighting the urge to cower beneath the rectangular grids of light. The girdered reinforcement, with all of the plastic water cylinders and canvas bundles stacked up there in netted rows against the roof, made the great room’s ceiling seem even lower than before. The room stood filled up on every side with plastic-covered stacks of supplies lined up in labeled and fluorescent containers: generator fuel, meds, glo-sticks, flares, matches, recycled paper.
And what was that strange contraption, an iron spider-like thing standing inside a square concrete tub that looked like some kind of shower-stall? Some kind of advanced water pump? What was the purpose of the two-by-two square of aluminum sinks set into the concrete floor?
Time was speeding up again. She had a sense that precious seconds were ticking away.
Away to what?
But her shivering selflessness would only let her think: Don’t make me stay, stay so long in here, that I learn everything before the end. Sophie balled her fists together in an effort to stop her fingers from shaking. Don’t make me.
She could hear the main generator humming away in the back room. Two ceiling fans were whirring, casting geometric shadows across the metal shelves. The translucent plastic seal over the doorway into the next room beckoned her further on, but there was a disturbing alien cast to the light that was glowing from inside that pressurized chamber, as if its seal were some kind of spider-web or the mouth of a Venus flytrap, its interlocking plastic fingers beckoning her to come inside.
Forever.
Alone. I could alone here, forever.