I followed her line of vision. Bolted to the wall was a closed circuit TV camera.
“Let’s hope they’re not watching us now.” I searched the menu list on the screen again. “Try this.” I pointed at a box. “The one marked Installation Directory.”
Using the arrow keys she brought the cursor down to the box then hit ENTER.
“We might have something,” I said as the screen changed. “See this column of letters ALA, ARK and so on right down to WYNG?”
“Abbreviations of state names?”
“They appeared at the bottom of the screen when Phoenix was showing us what was going down at those other bunkers.”
“You want to see more?”
“It couldn’t hurt.”
“Which one?”
“Try TXS. Phoenix showed us the Texas bunker launching an attack on the hornets.”
“OK.” She selected TXS. “You’ve got a choice of around fifteen.”
“Each TXS letter code is followed by a number code. It must represent different bunkers in Texas. I can’t remember the number code.”
“I’m pretty sure it was TX-o-three.”
“OK, go for it.”
“Computers.” She hissed the word in frustration. “It’s giving me a whole list of camera locations. Interior and exterior.”
I rubbed the back of my neck. “We can’t have much time left. Take pot luck.”
She brought the cursor down at random before clicking on one marked 11. INT. The screen had an appetite for frustration. It flashed up another menu of options. Select: Night Scope. Daylight. Sound On/Off. She didn’t select any; she merely rapped ENTER with her thumb.
I looked up at the booster screen. The identification popped up in white print along the bottom, but otherwise the screen was dark.
“It’s bust,” I snapped. “
It’s also dark. We might be seeing the canteen or some warehouse in darkness.”
“Or a bedroom. Hear that?”
“I hear something. It sounds odd.”
“Someone breathing?”
“Could be.”
“I’ll try another.”
“Go for another interior camera. It’ll still be nighttime in Texas.”
She returned to the camera menu and plucked out 01. INT. “Might as well go for numero uno,” she said. She grunted. “Oh, no… that doesn’t look right.”
The image was black and white. “It’s in nightscope mode,” I said. “But I don’t understand what we’re seeing. Have we got the same bunker as we saw yesterday?”
“According to the reference it’s the same. But look at that… oh, crap… oh fucking, fucking crap…”
She sighed. I heard disappointment as much as anything in the sound. Thing is, when I looked up at that massive screen I felt it, too. There, from wall to wall, was an image that could have been subtitled Abandon Hope. We were looking at what could have been some garage in the bunker. The nightscope showed everything either in inky blacks or blazing fluorescent whites. In the center of the bay sat a tank; beyond that were two massive steel doors. They lay part open. Spilling in through the opening came desert sand. It had flowed across the garage floor to bury the tank’s tracks. Tumbleweeds had rolled in. Bleakest of all were the number of bodies-or what were left of bodies. Skeletons, some with dried husks of faces attached to skulls, lay all over the place. Some were partially covered by sand. A corpse mummified by the dry air sat in the tank’s turret.
“Wait, do you see that?” Her voice was a hiss. “Something’s moving.”
Through the doorway glided twin points of light, like two little stars that moved together across the garage floor. For a second I stared at the two lights, trying to figure out what I was seeing. Then it moved away from the camera.
“A rat,” she said. We’d been seeing the meager light reflected from its eyes, which had been amplified into twin burning points by the nightscope lens.
“I have a feeling I know what we’re going to see, but try the other cameras, Michaela.”
“Yeah, what you see might be of a disturbing nature… to use the old TV phrase. So, ladies and gentlemen, look away now if you’re of a nervous disposition.” Quickly she worked through the camera menu. This time she knew what to do and activated the nightscope lens on each camera. The first camera we tried when we heard the rasping sound revealed a coyote asleep in the corner of a room that could have been a clone of this one, complete with TV screens. Other cameras revealed rooms that had been trashed out of all recognition. Mummified corpses lay in army uniforms all over the damn place.
Michaela spoke with a flat voice. “Something went wrong during the attack. The hornets overran them in the end.”
I shook my head. “This makes no sense. Phoenix showed us live images of the attack yesterday. This bunker was overrun weeks, if not months ago.”
“He lied to us. He showed us archive footage. See the archive icon there?” She tapped the screen. “If we were to access that I’d wager we’d find what Phoenix claimed happened yesterday.”
“But why? Why go to all that trouble to deceive us?”
“Maybe he wanted to give us hope. That everything wasn’t as bleak as it seemed.”
“Jesus, I think he’s just made everything seem a good deal worse. Try the other bunker installations. The one in Wyoming.”
“Do you remember the identification code for the bunker?”
I shook my head, sighing. “I don’t think it matters now, do you?”
Face grim, she worked through the bunker codes. Within ten minutes we must have looked at a good dozen or so. All showed the same thing. Every bunker had been overrun at some point. Bunker teams lay dead in kitchens, in bathrooms, in lounges, at workstations. Total devastation. Absolute annihilation. Even the one on the Hawaiian island lay with its doors gaping open; skeletons picked clean by seagulls gleamed in the sun.
“So there you go,” I whispered. “Not one left intact. So much for Phoenix telling us that the government was still in control.” I nodded at the screen, which carried the words BUNKER COMMAND ONE with a room that duplicated the Oval Office in the White House. Smoke stained the walls. Rats gnawed at a figure wearing a business suit that sat in a slumping position beneath a portrait of George Washington. “I doubt if you’ll find as much as a single senator or army general still alive.”
Michaela shook her head. “But we’re able to access the cameras by remote control, so who’s maintaining the bunkers?”
“My guess is they have automatic self-maintenance systems. Computers will run what’s left of them for months before the generators’ fuel runs out.”
Michaela’s eyes glistened as she stared at the screen. “So it really is over. All of it.”
I put my arm ’round her shoulders. “We’re still hanging in there, buddy. There’s Zak and Tony and the rest. There’s bound to be more like us out there.”
“But for how long… those hornets… they’re like a disease we can’t cure. They’re going to kill us all one day. Every last one.”
“No, they won’t, Michaela. We’re going to make it, just you wait and see.”
“For what purpose?” Tears bulged over the rim of skin beneath her eyes, then trickled in glistening balls down her cheek. “For what purpose, Greg? Answer me that. To live in rags, drinking ditch water. Slowly starving to death. Getting so old and so tired that you can’t run from the monsters anymore. So you sit down in the dirt and wait to die.”
“Listen, you’re going to live. And you’re going to do it in style.”
“What the hell for?”
I crouched down beside her and stroked her face lightly with my fingertips. “Who else is going to have my babies?”
