Lara said, “It’s bright in here.”
“Only at first, but you get used to that, too.”
She glanced up at the lamps above them. She couldn’t imagine ever getting used to that level of brightness. “What kind of lights are those?”
“Special ultraviolet lights. Or so they tell me. I don’t really know, to be honest with you. They’re supposed to mimic the sun, I guess. I didn’t even know they existed until I came down here. I used to rely on the sun itself, but hard to do that nowadays.”
“Do they work?”
“Proof is in the pudding, as they say. We turn them on for just half the day. They’re quite the resource hog, I’m told.” Rose bent and twisted something free. “Here, catch.”
She stuck out her hand, and the object miraculously landed in her palm. It was beets. Brown and slightly reddish, about the size of a walnut.
“Not nearly as big as I had hoped,” Rose said. “But I guess they’ll do for now. Maybe the next batch will come out better.”
“Do you take care of this room by yourself? It’s massive.”
“Yes, it certainly is. Much, much bigger than my garden back home. But I have a couple of helpers — asleep at the moment, I’m sure. I suspect it was either this or wander around the place bored out of their minds. Or they could always go up top, and we all know what’s going on up there. You came with the others earlier today.”
Lara nodded.
“We’re glad to have you. Always nice to have some new blood.” Then, with a crooked smile, she added, “So to speak.”
Lara smiled. “What did you do before all of this?”
“I was a librarian. Before that, I was a schoolteacher. And before that, housewife. All in that order. Though most of my time was spent in my garden doing exactly this. I wouldn’t be here if not for Ben. God bless him.”
“Is everyone down here from Starch?”
“Yes, most of us have lived in Starch all our lives and have known each other since we were young children. It’s the end of the world, and we find ourselves down here. Still with the same people we’ve known for most of our lives.”
“Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.”
“It could be worse, as they say. You’ve lost people, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” she said quietly.
She thought about her parents. About her disapproving mother. Her gentle, overly approving father, who showered her with affection mostly to compensate for her mother’s lack of it. She thought about Tony, who kept her alive in those early days. About Tracy, her roommate… God knows what had happened to her.
“We all have,” Rose said.
“Your husband?” Lara asked.
“He passed away a few years ago. Thank God. I don’t know what I would do if he suddenly came back and… Well, you know.”
She nodded. She knew pretty well. They all did.
“You planted all of this? In less a month?” she asked.
“Oh gosh, no,” Rose said, amused by the idea. “They were already growing. This Harold Campbell had them planted long before we got here. This room was a big mess then, but we’ve straightened it out.”
“It must have been a lot of work.”
“It was, but idle hands are the devil’s workshop, as they say.”
Lara spent the next few hours with Rose in the Green Room, listening to her stories, watching her work diligently on one trough, then another. She seemed to have twice as much energy as Lara did despite their age difference and wasn’t the least bit bothered by the bright UV lamps above them. Or maybe, like Rose had said, she was just used to them.
Lara found the UV lamps too bright, and they stung her eyes unless she shielded them with her hands. After a while, Rose took pity on her and found a straw hat in a closet. Lara put it on and instantly felt relief.
After that, the lamps became an afterthought, though they never really left Lara’s mind completely…
CHAPTER 31
WILL
They had to get more silver. That was the most important thing. That meant runs on the surface for Will and Danny to look for the precious metal, while at the same time looking for supplies to stuff the facility’s coffers.
But the silver was always priority, and Ben agreed.
Will found locating a ghoul was now much harder. It was more difficult to know if there were creatures inside a place regardless of whether there were coverings over the windows or not. They were constantly adapting, constantly changing their modus operandi.
Dead, not stupid.
There wasn’t a whole lot of silver to be found in Starch, Texas, though they built up enough of a reserve of silverware, jewelry, and everyday home items to start making more ammo. After their encounter at the bank, he decided the shotgun shells were more valuable, and they concentrated the bulk of their silver production on that. Ben deferred to his experience.
Days became weeks, and weeks became months. Before they knew it, winter had come and gone, and spring had arrived. Christmas, once on every adult’s mind and every kid’s lips, passed without any recognition. The leaves changed colors, as did the grass in the clearing. The only people who noticed were the ones who went topside with Danny and him. Life in the facility moved on, one day identical to the previous.
Will saw Kate intermittently, though not for lack of trying. She had stopped responding to his visits, and she seemed to be purposefully timing her comings and goings to avoid him. Eventually, Carly became his only contact with Kate. She still opened the door for Carly, though even that was becoming rare. Kate didn’t just avoid him; she avoided all of them, and had begun to take her food back to her room.
Those were just some of the many troubling signs that he was losing her. Not that he felt he owned her, but they had something once, and he was hesitant to let it go without a fight. It was becoming increasingly difficult not to believe it was a one-sided affair.
All of it crystallized one day, almost three months after they arrived at the facility, when Carly sat down across from him in the Cafeteria, where he was catching a quick bite. The rest of the big room was empty. Not a surprise, given that no one had set timetables and people regularly came and went as needed. The facility had no clocks to punch, no work schedule written in stone, and though everyone had their own contributions to make, only the Turbine Room really required 24-7 supervision.
Harold Campbell had the Cafeteria fully stocked with crates of bagged prepackaged meals called Meals Ready to Eat, as well as Number 10 metal cans, each one the size of a gallon of paint and filled with food designed for a long shelf life. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner involved a process of mixing and matching salads and vegetables from the Green Room with canned food, though he, Danny, and Ben usually settled for MREs when they could, having grown used to them from their Army days.
Carly looked across the table at him now, watching him pick at mashed potatoes and slabs of slightly hardened and overly salty turkey from a recently procured bag of MRE.
“How is she?” he asked.
“I’m worried,” Carly said.
“That bad?”
“I don’t think she’s eating anymore. I tried bringing her food, but she just stares at it and then goes back to writing in her journal.”
“She’s keeping a journal?”
“She started about a week ago. Have you tried talking to her again?”
“She won’t answer the door.”
“Oh.” Carly frowned. “I didn’t know it had gotten that bad between you two.”
“I think she’s avoiding me.”
“She barely talks to me, Will. Most of the time I sit there talking and she just listens. Honestly, sometimes I don’t think she’s even listening. Whenever I get up to leave, I think she’s relieved. It’s not exactly fun times in there for me, you know. It hasn’t been for a while.”