The line of prisoners she’d seen go into the box were now lined against the wall of the auditorium. They all sat next to each other, hunched over with hands over their heads, as if participating in a tornado drill.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“There’s no time!” the guy shouted. “You have to get against the wall!” He rushed her to the end of the line. On the way, she passed Peter and Audrey.
Audrey glanced up and smiled when she heard Tabby’s voice.
Tabby tried to stop and hug her, but the guy yanked her rudely to the rear. “You’ll understand in a second. A voice on the PA system said we don’t have much time. Were you the last one or was there one more in the line after you?”
She was fairly sure it was only her and Victor. “Victor’s the only one in the gym, but he was in a fight.”
“Sit down!” The guy showed her where to go, waited for her to sit, then flung himself into the next spot. He tapped his tablet once he was down.
Tabby craned her neck to see up the line. She was so happy to see her friends. It also surprised her to see the man with the bird already sitting next to her. He cradled his green-and-red friend in his arms, as if protecting it.
“Good to see you again,” the man said, sneaking a peak. His sores seemed to be gone.
“Uh, yeah, you too. What’s going on?”
He laughed and touched the Macaw on his shoulder. “My bird is real now. I think we died...”
People had lost their marbles.
A woman’s voice came on a speaker system as the man had said. “WARNING: NUCLEAR STRIKE IMMINENT.”
“Seriously? We’re in a nuclear strike?” Tabby looked up, intending to get feedback from the bird man, but the lights flickered off.
In the same instant, the floor seemed to drop out from below her, leaving her hanging a foot off the ground. She bounced off the rear wall, then dropped back to the hard floor. A thunder-like clap reverberated around the giant room.
Red emergency lights blared from several fixtures near the doors.
“What the hell!” she screamed, falling out of crash position. Everything vibrated. The walls. The floor. Her teeth.
In the middle of the chaos, Victor appeared inside the cube. A white beam of light illuminated the dark room for a split second. Before it went dark, she saw a snapshot of the boy’s shape on the floor of the machine.
Tabby crouched in fear as four more impacts shook the foundations. Each one was felt as much as heard, making her wonder if David’s fortress had, in fact, been targeted. Those men at the exit of the bunker acted like there was no threat. Maybe her people had outsmarted them after all and sent a nuke right in those open front doors.
She waited a full minute to see if a sixth impact would happen. People seemed to claw their way back to the wall from wherever the vibrations had moved them. It seemed funny to think tucking her head would do the slightest to help her survive an actual nuclear blast. It was the rock above her doing all the heavy lifting.
The PA system woman came online, somehow with less stress in her mechanical voice. “ADVISORY: Outer door offline. Inner door secure. Early warning systems online. Zero incoming airborne threats. Reminder: Radiation protocols recommended.”
“What the heck is going on?” she finally asked.
“Tabby!” Audrey called out.
She jumped up and went over to her teen friends. “Do you know what this is all about?” There was no one in charge, as best she could tell.
Audrey shrugged in her frumpy white prison suit. “I have no freaking idea what’s going on here, but I see you’re still looking good in your hot pants.”
Tabby sensed her cheeks light up. “I’d be happy to trade with you.”
They hugged again.
She hugged Peter, too. “Nice to see you.”
“Same. Are we free from those guards?” He kept one arm wrapped around his girl but had the look of someone who’d been crying a lot.
Tabby shrugged. “The guards are gone. I say we make a break for it, unless that radiation warning is for us.”
Audrey and Peter shared a look, then started walking toward the front door.
She went over to the cube to collect Victor. Several men were already standing around the box when she arrived. The man with the tablet saw her approaching. “I’m so sorry. Your friend didn’t make it.”
“He wasn’t my—” she started to say, before seeing Victor’s bullet-ridden body inside the machine. A small note with the word ‘traitor’ had been attached to his shirt. “—friend,” she finished glumly.
Tabby’s feelings were as unsteady as the shaking room had been. She hated that the two of them had been forced together, but she couldn’t quite muster the energy to hate Victor anymore. In retrospect, he’d been on her side almost from the beginning. He went out fighting against men with guns like he was in a movie; that was how much he wanted to prove himself to her.
“Thank you, hero,” she whispered.
She caught up to Audrey and Peter, who watched her come over.
“Did you know him?” Audrey asked, looking around Tabby to see Victor.
After a brief pause, she told the truth. “Not really. But I kind of wish I did.”
Minutes later, after a walk up a few flights of stairs and a stroll down a big tunnel illuminated by those same red emergency lights, she came to the conclusion she didn’t know where she was. It wasn’t the same layout as David’s base. “Um, something isn’t right. There should have been an elevator outside the room with the white cube. We should have been able to use it to get to an exit door…”
“Well, where the hell are we?” Peter asked.
“And what the hell is that?” Audrey added, pointing ahead.
A huge, metal, three-story office building sat inside a cave-like vault. It wasn’t built on the ground, however. The entire edifice sat on top of
