“It worked the very first day you guys got here?”
“Campbell ordered the turbine be tested out as soon as the facility was finished, but there hasn’t really been a lot of need to use up the juice over the previous two years. In fact, when I opened the Door the day after the shit hit the fan, it was only the third time in the entire two years I’d been working for Campbell.”
“What happens if the turbine goes?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Ben shrugged. “Peter’s a science teacher at the local high school. He’s also an ex-Army guy, and we usually met up for drinks on Tuesdays. So when this whole thing went down, he was the first one I called. Without him, I wouldn’t have a clue how to even start the thing up. Peter keeps trying to tell me how it all works, but it’s all Greek to me. He says Campbell had this entire facility designed to be operated by laymen, so a lot of the work is push-button stuff. I’m not sure if that’s comforting or insulting, to tell you the truth.”
“Probably a little of both,” Will said.
“Follow me, I’ll show you what happens if the turbine craps out on us.”
Ben led him farther up the hallway, about twenty meters from the Turbine Room. There was another steel door at the end, but this one didn’t have anything that looked like a lever, only a long rectangle of glass on the right side that was big enough for a person’s hand.
“Palm reader?” Will asked.
“Yeah, but it works with this, too.” Ben fished his pendant out and waved it in front of the glass display.
The door slid open to reveal metal stairs leading down into a dark room below.
“After you,” Will said.
Ben led him down the stairs. Halogen lights along the walls flickered on automatically as they moved down into a subbasement level. Behind them, the door slid closed.
“This place was designed for 100 survivors,” Ben said, “but obviously we’re not anywhere close to capacity. So we can’t use up all the electricity the turbine generates even if we tried. That’s where these come in.”
They were at the bottom of the stairs now, surrounded by large, rectangular-shaped silver metallic boxes that reached from the floor of the basement almost to the ceiling. They looked like big shelves, each one containing an LED display in the center that was hooked up into the wall behind them. Will counted twelve in all.
“Power cells,” Ben explained. “Everything we can’t use up goes down here and gets stored in these containers.”
“Emergency generators?”
“Yup. And I’ve timed it. The generators take exactly eleven seconds to kick in if the turbine shuts down for whatever reason.”
“Eleven seconds exactly?”
“To the second.”
“What’s the capacity?”
“It can only hold so much, but Peter says one month of uninterrupted usage, at full power. Longer, if you conserve.” Ben walked over to a computer screen hanging by a steel bracket from the wall. He touched it and the screen turned on, showing graphical images and scrolling readings of all twelve fuel storage containers. “Not quite at full storage, but it shouldn’t take long to build up.”
“What then?”
“Then they stop storing and go into hibernation mode.” Ben touched a red button on the screen and the images faded to black. He turned back to Will. “So what do you think?”
“I think we’re lucky we got here in one piece.”
“Good. I’m going to need you and Danny to help me out here.”
“On what?”
“Everything.” Ben gave him a hard look, and for a moment he couldn’t help but feel as if they were conspirators inside a dark room, discussing traitorous plans. “I’ve been holding these people together by myself, but I could use a hand. Who we kidding? I could use two hands. It’s dangerous out there, and I’m not just talking about the creatures. What do you call them again? Ghouls?”
“It sounded appropriate at the time.”
“It’s not just the ghouls we have to worry about now,” Ben continued. “We ran into a couple of survivalists a few weeks ago. They started shooting as soon as they saw us. Lost one good man.”
“What happened to the shooters?”
“They weren’t very good at being survivalists. It wasn’t that hard to track them down.”
Will told him about the Sundays.
“The doctor?” Ben asked.
“Yeah.”
“She’s handling it well.”
“She’s tough.”
“Pretty, too.”
“I guess.”
Ben laughed. “Right. You guess.”
Will wasn’t sure how to take that. Before he could respond, the radio on Ben’s hip squawked, and they heard Rick’s voice: “Ben, it’s ten minutes till sundown.”
Ben unclipped his radio and spoke into it: “On our way.” He looked at Will. “Come on, I’ll show you what we’re dealing with when the sun goes down.”
There was something oddly terrifying about what he was seeing on the monitors inside the Control Room a few minutes later. It was hard to tell how many of them there were, because they darted on and off the screens with almost serpentine speed, and it was difficult to predict their movements.
There had to be more than a dozen. Maybe two dozen. They emerged out of the woods, moving silently, and even the camera’s microphones had a hard time picking up the sounds of their bare feet against the soft dirt ground. They scampered around the open clearing, begrimed features camouflaged almost perfectly against the thick woods behind them and the nearly moonless night.
“That’s all they do,” Rick said. “Every night. They come out and move around the Door. Then — poof. They’re gone.”
“How long do they stay?” Will asked.
“Sometimes a few minutes, sometimes a few hours,” Ben said. “We can’t figure out what they’re doing.”
“They’re doing what they’ve always been doing,” Will said. “They’re probing.”
“Probing what?” Rick asked.
“The Door. Looking for signs of weaknesses since the last time they probed. It’s what they do. You’re looking at their forward soldiers.”
“Recon?” Ben asked.
Will nodded.
“Command and control,” Ben said. “What you were saying earlier. There’s a hierarchy in place. Leaders and foot soldiers. And we’re looking at the foot soldiers.”
“From every encounter we’ve had with them, they’ve always shown a remarkable ability to strategize. And there’s something else.”
“What?”
“You probably won’t believe me.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because I wouldn’t believe me if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.”
“What?” Rick said, tilting his head back, anxious to hear it now.
“I might have already seen one of their commanders when they attacked us at the bank. It had blue eyes…”
CHAPTER 30
LARA
She spent most of her first day underground in the Infirmary. Not as a patient, but as its new caretaker. Ben said as much when he showed her the place.
“Will lied,” she told him. “I’m just a third-year medical student.”
Ben grinned at her. “Still three more years than any of us’s got.”
That made her feel better. Not that she was angry at Will for embellishing her credentials. In a way, she was flattered. It also made her determined to justify his confidence. Besides, she was at home here, back in her environment surrounded by things that she understood.
It felt right.
The Infirmary was fully stocked with enough supplies to take care of all the facility’s current occupants and still have plenty left over. Most of the equipment and inventory were still in boxes or shrink-wrapped in drawers and on shelves, with the exception of some aspirin and ibuprofen pills that had been opened and left on counters. She spent most of the day unwrapping and putting everything where it should be. She catalogued everything in one of the bulky laptops that looked twice as big as anything she had ever owned. It had a handle that made it look more like a suitcase when closed.