She walked across the room toward the huge, silver chrome freezer, the size of a small closet. It had three sections, each with its own pullout drawer. She went straight to the bottom one and pulled it out, looked in at the backpack with the hand inside.
Then the fingers strained against the backpack’s fabrics and tried to climb over the side of the drawer, carrying the backpack with it.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
She picked up the backpack by the strap and flung it viciously into the side of the fridge. The backpack was half-frozen and she almost expected it to break into little chunks upon impact, the hand inside right along with it.
But it didn’t. Instead, it went slack, and she held it in front of her and waited. She felt a slight movement, but nothing aggressive.
“Good. You’re learning. I don’t want to have this talk again.”
She fell asleep with her forehead resting on the laptop’s keyboard and woke up panicked. It took her a moment to calm down, to remind herself that she was underground, in the facility, and safe.
Safe…
It was such an odd concept, and seemed…wrong somehow. She hadn’t felt safe in a long time. Not in Houston when it all began, not even during those days leaving the city with Tony. Then the Sundays entered her life and threatened to choke it out of her. Finding Will and the others was a godsend. Then this underground facility of Harold Campbell’s.
Safe…
She was safe down here. Or as safe as she was ever going to get these days. The concrete walls were cold and gray and monotonous, but they kept out the undead things outside. No, not outside. Topside.
Up there.
What were they doing up there right now? Searching for her and Will and the others, probably. Maybe even the same ghouls that attacked them at the bank, led by the blue-eyed ghoul.
She believed Will when he told her he had seen a ghoul with blue eyes outside the bank. He wouldn’t lie about something like that. There was no point. Nothing to gain. And in the short time she knew him, he had proven to be trustworthy.
She yawned, stretching on the stool. When was the last time she had actually gone to sleep in a bed without worrying about surviving the night?
She turned the laptop off and made sure the hand was still in the freezer before she left the Infirmary. Not that she thought the hand could possibly open the drawer from the inside while still trapped inside the backpack. That was an absurd notion, wasn’t it? Still, spending the extra few seconds to make sure cost her nothing.
What was that Will said about the ghouls? “Dead, not stupid. Just keep that in mind and act accordingly.”
Good advice.
It was quiet in the hallway, but she heard voices from the Cafeteria as she walked by. She considered stopping in to say hi, introduce herself, but she was tired. Too tired. The last month was finally overcoming her, threatening to crush her under its weight.
She fell on her small, uncomfortable cot inside her room and went straight to sleep.
She woke up sometime in the middle of the night, in the darkness, and for a moment struggled to breathe. Then she remembered she was still safe, still underground in the facility, and she was able to catch her breath again.
She lay back down on the small cot and willed her heartbeat to slow.
Slowly, slowly…
She tried to go back to sleep, but that proved fruitless after an hour of lying in the darkness staring up at the ceiling, listening to the hum of the turbine engine through the walls, the floor, in the tips of her fingers. She wondered how long it would take before she got used to the sound.
She finally surrendered, climbed out of bed, got dressed, and went to wander the hallways.
Lara found the Gym near the back of the Quarters area. It was a large room, big enough for a decent track that looped all the way around and a boxing ring in the center. There were treadmills, bicycle machines, and mats stacked high in one corner, though none of the machines looked as if they had gotten much use in recent weeks. The place smelled of disinterest, and didn’t have that strong odor of sweat and exhaustion that usually accompanied every gym she had ever been to.
She warmed up, then tried walking on one of the treadmills for a few minutes, more into the idea of doing something than actually working up a sweat. After a while, the quiet in the Gym began to get to her, and she cleaned up and found herself back in the hallways.
Voices came from the Cafeteria as she neared it. She listened for a bit but didn’t hear anyone she recognized, so she kept going. Eventually she would have to get to know everyone in the facility, but that was for later.
She walked the hallways listlessly, with no real destination. She pressed her hand against the wall and felt the slight vibrations. The sound of the turbine, vibrating through every inch of the facility, was slightly hypnotic. Could she go to sleep touching the wall? She’d have to try it out.
Somehow, she ended up back in the Operations area. She thought she would eventually end back up in the Infirmary — she was comfortable there, and there were a couple of beds in the corner…
But on the way she got sidetracked by a steel door — all the doors in Operations were reinforced steel — marked Green Room. The door was open, and bright lights flooded out into the hallway. The facility’s halogen lights were already bright, but the light coming out of the room was on another level entirely.
Curiosity got the better of her, and she entered, immediately overwhelmed by the size.
It was almost half as big as a football field and just as wide, and she found herself standing in front of rows and rows of plants growing in large troughs, each at least two yards wide and over thirty long. Vegetables, fruits, and plants whose names she didn’t know were growing in their own little parts of the room.
Industrial-sized lamps hung from the rafters directly above the troughs, and their light was so bright she had to blink every few seconds. There had to be over two dozen, enough to illuminate every one of the troughs. Interspersed among them were smaller halogen lights, the kind that dotted the rest of the facility’s ceiling.
A woman in her fifties, crouching next to one of the troughs near the center of the room, looked over and smiled knowingly. “Couldn’t sleep?”
She looked grandmotherly, with luxurious white hair and soft, patient gray eyes. Dirt and soot spotted her clothes, and she was running a silver trowel through the trough.
“You, too?” Lara asked.
“I don’t usually clock out until midnight,” the woman said. “Then it’s back up around six. I guess I don’t need as much sleep as I used to. So I come here, do a little tinkering. The name’s Rose.”
“Lara.”
“Looking for a little late night snack, Lara?”
“I was just walking around…”
“Ah. That old thing.” Rose gave her a compassionate smile. “It’s this place. It’s hard to get used to it at first. You’re thinking about them, up there scampering about right now.”
She nodded and smiled.
“It takes time,” Rose said. “You have to first accept that this place is safe before you can allow yourself to close your eyes and stay asleep. It was the same with me. It’s the same with everyone, I suspect.”
“But it happens? Eventually?”
“Yes, eventually.”
Lara walked around the room. Carrots, peas, and stalks of corn grew along one trough. There were other vegetables and maybe some fruits that were mysteries to her. Some grew as high as the ceiling, wrapped around sticks that had been stuck into the soft dirt for that purpose. Where did they get all the dirt?