“I’m sorry, people. We’re out of time.”
He was going to step inside the vault but couldn’t look away from the much larger vault door set toward the front. It was large enough to allow trucks to fit through; a door of such size might be required to survive what was coming.
Why hadn’t the bad guys already closed it?
In a moment of fatalism, he realized the enemy was made up of soldiers and technicians who weren’t always operating at peak efficiency. They came to America and tried to work on the same level as the US military, but he had a laundry list of examples of their forces dropping the ball. They couldn’t protect their airfields. They didn’t know how to check IDs consistently. They couldn’t track down him and Emily to save their lives, at least until the last fifteen minutes.
Now he had to rely on that same second-rate army to close a simple blast door.
“We’re dead.”
NORAD Black Site Sierra 7, CO
Tabby ran with Victor, but the uniformed men in the tunnel seemed uninterested in them. Many held tablets close to their faces, or scurried between groups, as if watching a nail-biting sports match.
She traveled the paved road, going up a gentle incline, feeling strange to have a rock tunnel carved over her head. As they neared the sun-drenched entrance, she had to shield her eyes after so much low light and darkness. “We did it,” she said, trying to look into the light.
“I told you we would,” Victor exclaimed. “Now we can sneak away and hide.”
“Thanks, I guess,” she said, wondering if she’d judged him wrong. Tabby strode up to the rim of the entrance, expecting to see wooded mountains. NORAD was located in a bunker in the Rockies. They’d seen the rugged terrain on the way there, when they broke down in the milk truck prison van. However, what she saw outside was…
“Where the hell are we?” she murmured.
“NORAD,” Victor replied matter-of-factly.
“No, this can’t be NORAD. There’s nothing out there. Look.” She held out her hand in a “don’t you see?” pose.
The ground was flat as glass from where she stood to the horizon. It was also covered in prairie grass rather than pine trees. She took a few steps outside to try to get some bearings.
It didn’t help.
The tunnel was inside a mound of rocks at the edge of a dirt-paved airfield. Stout shelters, like little bunkers, housed military jets in one area. Near those, dozens of giant gray cargo planes were lined up edge-to-edge. Further down, massive planes had been parked out in the fields, each with six giant propellers and strange disc-like fuselages. From her perspective, they mimicked the appearance of black wings lined up front to back, in formation. She guessed there were about ten of them.
The buildings of a town sat beyond the long airstrip.
While she was rubbernecking, a man came up behind Victor and cracked him over the head with the butt of his gun. When she spun around, the bloodied guard pointed his rifle at her face. “Try me!”
Victor was down, but he wasn’t as injured as the sound implied. He rubbed his head while crouched. She put her hands up, if only to prevent the guy from doing it again.
The guard yelled to some of the men nearby. “Hey, help me get them back inside.” He then glared at her. “David warned if a girl wearing a gray skirt appeared at the front door, I was to toss her and any accomplices into the David Cube, then throw away the key. After I woke up on the floor, I had a good idea who knocked me out, and where you went.”
He shoved the gun in her gut to get her moving.
Still with hands up, she tried to fight back the only way she could. “This is a case of mistaken identity. I’m not wearing a gray dress.” She pointed to the makeshift skirt. “I’m wearing a gray blanket.”
“Nice try.”
Tabby walked inside but was troubled by the fact she’d let everyone down. Where was David? Was he rounding up Peter and Audrey already? Would he give Victor a break? If not, she was going to feel bad about getting him tangled up in her affairs.
Through the doors, she heard one of the men watching the tablets.
“They’re nuking NORAD!”
The heavy weight of bad luck settled in her stomach. The guards continued walking them toward the elevator, with hardly a care in the world. Looking over her shoulder, no one had bothered to close the vault door after they’d come inside.
“Uh, don’t you want to close that?” She pointed back. “If there’s a nuke coming?”
The bloodied guard bared his teeth. “How did you survive as long as you did, American? We eliminated your people. Took over your cities. Hijacked your technology. You expect to resist us, yet you don’t even know where you are. You don’t even know the secret places created by your corrupt government. Places like this bunker.”
He shoved her hard into the elevator. Tabby almost went face-first into the back wall, but Victor grabbed her arm. She looked at him when he got her standing. “Do you know where we are, Victor? Where is this bunker?”
“When I came in the first time, they said the town was in Colorado…Lamar, I think. They told me this bunker system was built after nine-eleven. I wasn’t really paying attention back then.”
They weren’t at the main NORAD facility, after all.
Tabby couldn’t be faulted for not knowing there were multiple bunkers.
It did make her wonder, however,
