Condemn (BUNKER 12 Book 2) (16 page)

Billy and Luke turned out to be surprisingly good workers, toiling
away without complaint in the hot sun, their shirts off and their
backs burning as all six of them struggled to get the framing up
for the new structure.

They were all business when they
needed to be, but as soon as a break was called, their antics
resumed right back where they'd left off. Finn and Bix learned soon
enough to just play along, and the jokers eventually lost interest
in teasing them.

There seemed to be some disagreement
about what to call the building and its precise function. Billy
insisted on calling it a barn, which caused Adrian to roll his eyes
and shake his head. "That boy is as simple as they
come."

"I thought it was to be a church,"
Finn said.

"It is. Billy just calls it a barn
because that's what it looks like," Luke said.

"Because that's the only kind of
buildin Adrian knows how to build," Jennifer told them. "Four walls
and a big slidin door. Slap on a coupla sloped roofs and call it a
church, but it's still a barn."

"Jesus may have been a skilled
carpenter," Adrian said, "but the holy Father did not see fit to
endow this son with the same abilities."

Everyone laughed.

The frames had already been assembled,
and except for a quick break when a stack of sawed boards collapsed
and left a gash on Adrian's forehead, which Jennifer quickly
bandaged, they went up very quickly.

By lunchtime, the walls were all
secured in place. The horses had been employed to help tilt them
up. When they weren't being used, the animals simply grazed on the
grass nearby.

Bix and Finn sat beneath the shade of
a lone maple tree and looked out over the lake as they ate lunch.
Bix lamented that they couldn't go swimming. Luke guffawed. "Not
unless you wanna be fish food!"

"Itty bitty fish food pieces!" Billy
added.

They started chasing each other,
disturbing the horses and making Adrian shout at them to stay on
the trails or in the clearing or else they'd end up being itty
bitty fertilizer.

"We've buried mines in the forest,
too," he told the boys.

"Why are you building this all the way
out here?" Finn asked.

The clearing was nearly a half mile
away from the house, along a well-marked path running through the
wood parallel to the shore. Both the house and the animal barn were
well out of sight and earshot.

"The noise," Jennifer replied. She
glanced meaningfully over at Adrian, and he shrugged.

"My sermons have been known to raise
the roof."

Finn had been watching Billy and Luke
sprinting through the woods. They seemed exceptionally nimble for
their age. A sudden suspicion came over him. "You said you're
trying to cure the Wraiths. Have you ever succeeded?"

As if sensing his thoughts, Adrian
turned his own gaze to the boys. "Not entirely," he replied
enigmatically. "We think we've come close."

A chill passed through Finn's body. He
suddenly didn't want to be there.

Troubled, he stood up. The apple he'd
been eating felt like a rock in his stomach. "Mind if I feed the
rest of this to the horses?" he asked.

"Go right ahead."

After finishing their meal, the older
adults excused themselves. "Regular chores ain't gonna do
themselves," they said, urging the boys to rest a bit longer. "Not
good fer the digestion to work so soon after eatin."

Bix chuckled from his seat at the base
of the maple tree as he watched Father Adrian and Jennifer leave.
"They make a cute couple," he said.

"Just a feeling I get, but I'm not so
sure they are," Finn answered.

He gathered up the loose wrappers and
uneaten food. It was a strange thing for him to see leftovers.
Nothing had ever gone to waste in the bunker.

"You know, I think I could live here
forever," Bix said, sighing. He patted his stomach and
yawned.

"You've already forgotten about your
father?"

"I'll send for him. They can all come
here. This place is large enough, don't you think? And no silly
rules. It'd be like one of those hippy communes."

"My father made those rules.
Remember?"

"Not what I meant."

"So we'll all just sleep in tents and
sing kumbaya."

"Chillax, bro. Just enjoy the
moment."

Finn shook his head. He didn't agree
at all with Bix, but he kept his mouth shut. On the surface, the
ranch did seem like an improvement over the bunker. They were
outdoors again, protected, eating fresh food. But they were still
trapped, still living in fear. The lake and the fields were mined,
the barrier surrounding the compound was electrified.

And unlike the bunker, there were
Wraiths inside the walls.

How many?

Billy and Luke eventually ceased their
adolescent antics and resumed work. They seemed to know
instinctively what needed to be done, as if they'd done it all
before. They showed the boys how to apply plywood over the studs,
then they worked on framing the roof.

Once more, they used the horses to
help lift the materials to the tops of the walls using a series of
pulleys and booms that Billy rigged up. The men were quite adept
with the tools, and their muscles rippled with the exertion and
glistened with sweat. Their faces contorted in
concentration.

It struck Finn as odd how both Billy
and Luke seemed to have two polar opposite modes, like they had
switches inside their heads.

By late that afternoon, the building
began to resemble something functional.

They were all beyond tired when Luke
abruptly announced that it was time to stop, as if the switch in
his head had been flipped off. They were right in the middle of
nailing the last set of roof supports into place. They balanced
precariously on the walls, and the possibility that it might fall
didn't seem to have crossed his mind.

He and Billy climbed down a
hastily-constructed wooden ladder, then challenged the boys to a
race back to the house.

"Last ones back hasta clean the pig
pen!" Billy shouted, and they took off running.

Finn rolled his eyes. "Those two make
me feel like an old man."

"You are an old man," Bix replied.
"Compared to me, anyway."

"Gee, thanks."

"Do you think we're supposed to bring
the horses back?"

Finn looked over. "I don't
know."

The animals had wandered over by the
water's edge, where an old dock jutted out over the still lake. The
sun was still hovering above the horizon, silhouetting the animals'
heads. Crane flies and gnats swarmed over the reeds. Dragonflies
buzzed the water, dipping their tails in to lay their eggs and
creating the illusion of a light rain.

Bix flashed him a mischievous grin.
"Come on."

"We're not going in the
water!"

"No, dummy. You want to be mucking out
the pig pen? We'll ride those horses back to the house and beat
those losers."

"But they're not saddled!"

"They got reins!"

Bix helped him up onto the back of one
of the horses, then used a paint bucket to mount the other. "Clamp
your legs onto the horse's sides. Hold onto the mane. Let's
go."

"This is just one big game to you,
isn't it?" Finn said.

"Less yakking and more riding. I'm not
slopping pig crap!"

The horses seemed to know exactly
where to go. They immediately turned down the path, picking up
their pace, as if they were eager to get back to the barn. Pretty
soon, they were trotting along at a decent clip.

Finn tried to tell Bix that the others
were probably already back, but he bit his tongue on an especially
hard jolt and tasted blood.

"Hold on!" Bix shouted, and leaned
over, digging his heels into his horse's sides. In a flash, he was
gone. Not wanting to be left behind, Finn's horse followed
suit.

The trees flashed past. Finn gritted
his teeth, afraid of being thrown off, and held on for dear
life.

The horses raced up the path until it
forked. Bix expected to turn left and leaned into the curve. With a
shout of surprise, the horse went right.

"I'm slipping!" Finn cried.

"Hold on!"

"This is the wrong way!"

"I know! I'm trying to steer, but this
damn horse is stubborn!"

The trees ended abruptly, and they
entered a new clearing. In the center of it was another barn,
although its walls were crumbling.

"Whoa!" Bix said, pulling back on his
reins. The horse trotted over to the structure and
stopped.

Finn's kept on going around the
corner, where he finally fell off. Thankfully, the ground was
covered in grass.

"Told you this place is huge," Bix
said, lowering himself off his horse. "You could build a whole
other house on this clearing big enough for three
families."

"Wonder if this is Adrian's old
church."

This side of the barn had crumpled
into itself, and the roof had partially fallen. Finn made his way
over the rotting timber, drawn by a low buzzing sound.

"What'd you find?" Bix
asked.

Finn turned back, covering his mouth.
He wanted to run away, but Bix pushed past him.

"What's that noise— Oh,
crap!"

Three of the walls were still
standing, and the insides were splashed with blood. More stained
the straw strewn on the ground. Chains dangled from the rafters
over a large metal cage made of chain link.

The humming came from a dark mound at
the far end of the barn, partially buried beneath the collapsed
fourth wall.

"Jesus Christ," Bix whispered,
throwing his hand over his mouth. "What the fu—"

"You boys shouldn't be here," Jennifer
said. She emerged from the darkness inside the barn carrying a
small blue box. "You shouldn't be wanderin about."

"The h-horses," Finn stammered. "We
couldn't stop them. They brought us here."

"What happened to this place?" Bix
asked.

"The roof collapsed during an
experiment." She shook her head. "All but two ferals
died."

"You worked on them here?"

She nodded. "Kept them and treated
them."

"And what's all that
equipment?"

Jennifer flicked on a flashlight and
swung the beam into the depths of the barn. It came to rest on a
portable generator. The bright yellow of its diesel tank shone in
the gloom. Thick cables extended out of it, branching like giant
veins. Some reached up into the rafters, where several lights had
been strung, while others snaked across the ground toward a cart
piled high with electrical devices of one sort or
another.

"This is where we're trying to find a
cure." She shut off the flashlight and turned back to the boys.
"Now take them horses back to the other barn and get yourselves
ready for dinner. Supper's gettin cold."

Bix was considerably quieter that evening at dinner than he had
been all day, and his mood did not improve by the next morning. But
if any of the others besides Finn noticed his gloominess, they did
not remark on it, despite ample opportunities to do so.

The rest of the next day passed
without much conversation. The boys finished nailing on the plywood
panels, then spread dry straw onto the ground so it wouldn't get
muddy.

Luke and Billy continued bracing the
roof, although they left it open for light. Not once did any of
them bring up the ruined barn or the corpses the boys had found
within it the night before.

Finn tried a few times to get Bix to
talk, when he could get his friend alone, but he wasn't very
responsive. Finn couldn't tell if he was merely distracted or if he
was feeling somehow betrayed.

A few hours after lunch, Finn noticed
that Billy and Luke were gone with the horses. They reappeared
twenty minutes later with the cart piled high with the equipment
from the ruined barn, as well as several rolls of unused eight-foot
chain link fencing. They circled the clearing, finishing with the
cart situated just outside the opening that would become the new
barn's door.