The Perseid Collapse (17 page)

“Good. I could use a beer before swimming around the basement,” said Alex.

“You’re still planning on going down there?”

“Unfortunately, I don’t see any other option, unless you want to ride to Limerick with a shotgun.”

“No thanks. You still need a shower, by the way—not that I can smell you over myself.”

“The whole neighborhood is going to smell ten times worse in a few days. This crap isn’t going anywhere,” he said.

“Good thing we won’t be here.”

Chapter 17

EVENT +09:57

Scarborough, Maine

Alex sat on the top stair and splashed his feet in the pitch-black water, desperately trying to convince himself that he didn’t need any of the equipment in the basement. He could think of twenty good reasons why he shouldn’t submerge himself in the darkness below, most of them safety related, some of them purely irrational. His overly active imagination had swept the worst sea creatures conceivable two miles inland with the tsunami, to be deposited through the basement window.

He wore a blue swimsuit, tight-fitting polyester running shirt, and swim fins. A diver’s mask and snorkel, which he’d taken from the boat and stashed in his rucksack, sat on his lap. He’d gotten lucky with that decision. Since the Maine coast wasn’t exactly renowned for its crystal-clear waters, the rest of their snorkeling gear was in the basement, where it waited for a trip to Florida or the Caribbean. They’d always carried at least one snorkeling kit onboard the sailboat for practical reasons. Over the past five years, he’d gone over the side more times than he could count to clean seaweed from the propeller or disentangle a lobster pot line from the rudder.

His biggest fear was the electricity. What if the grid was restored while he was submerged? He knew this wouldn’t happen, but the thought dogged him. The waterline was well above the breaker box, exposed directly to the house’s external utility feed. He pushed this thought as far away as possible, focusing on the more immediate, tangible challenges he’d face underwater. Breathing always came in at the top of his mental list.

From what he could tell, the water pushed up against the basement ceiling. He might find a pocket of air between ceiling joists if the water level was a few inches below the floorboard, but the air would be limited. Using the snorkel to access the air presented a few risks. With only a few inches of dry space, he would have to be extremely careful not to tip the snorkel and inhale water. Low on air deep inside the basement, a panicked moment could kill him. This assumed he could find a few pockets of air. If not, he’d have to take the entire operation slowly, making multiple trips to unlock doors, safes, clear debris—all culminating in a few long, unobstructed trips to haul out his perceived bounty. Fortunately, everything he needed was clearly labeled and conveniently located in one place inside the “bunker.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to attach a line or something?” asked Kate.

“Are you coming in after me if something goes wrong?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Then I’m definitely not attaching a line. One of us has to survive this,” he replied.

“I think I’m capable of swimming twenty feet and dragging your ass out of there. I’m a better swimmer than you,” she pointed out.

“Then maybe you should be the one making the dive,” he said, raising his eyebrows.

“I’m not familiar enough with your system down there.”

“Having a line attached is just one more thing I have to worry about. I’ll be fine. If I’m having trouble, I’ll come right up. Promise.”

“All right, but I wish we had a way to communicate,” said Kate.

“I’ll check the first few joists for an air pocket. If I don’t find air, you’re going to see me back here every thirty seconds or so. If I find air, I’ll try to use the snorkel to clear the whole path in one trip. You can sit in the water with your goggles and watch my light. The water’s pretty warm,” he said.

“You always say that,” she said, taking a transparent pair of goggles off the kitchen island.

“It’s at least ten degrees warmer than the beach water. Probably heated up over land,” said Alex.

He heard a knock from the mudroom, followed by Charlie’s voice. “You guys here?”

“Come on in, Charlie,” Alex called. “I’m about to take a swim.”

Charlie walked into the kitchen with his AR suspended at chest level by a one-point tactical sling. Alex noticed that he had completely rearranged the attachments on his rifle since he’d last seen him. Instead of a long-range scope, the rifle now featured an EOTech holographic sight with flip-up magnifier, a laser/flashlight combination and a bipod. Alex’s rifle lay on the recently cleaned granite island, along with the rest of his tactical gear. Charlie’s eyes immediately diverted to the rifle.

“You sprang for an ACOG? Dammit. Now I feel like I cheaped out on this,” he said grumpily.

“I think that EOTech combo costs the same. I almost went with that,” said Alex.

“But you didn’t,” said Charlie, still staring at Alex’s rifle.

He finally broke the attachment-envy-induced trance and joined them at the basement doorway.

“Christ, it’s dark down there,” Charlie remarked. “Did you open the bulkhead door?”

Alex looked up at Kate and shook his head. “We’re fucking idiots.”

“I’m not saying another word,” said Charlie, winking at Kate.

Five minutes later, the underwater world below looked vastly different. With mostly clear skies and fierce sunlight penetrating the southeast corner of the basement, he could see the outlines of the bottom stairs and a few of the shelves along the submerged facing wall. He felt better about the situation, though it did nothing to alleviate the oxygen situation.

“You think I should be able to find some air?” said Alex.

“Definitely. I’ve been marking the water progress on the wall next to my stairs,” said Charlie. “It’s dropped at least six inches in the last three hours. Before that it didn’t move. There has to be a pocket of air. You could always wait until later.”

“We don’t have another three hours. I need to know if the gear is part of our plan or not. It’s almost three. We’ll get everyone together when I’m done with this.”

“You could always use one of the garden hoses to breathe. I assume it’s still connected to the house,” said Charlie.

“I’ll take my chances holding my breath. That hose has been there for fifteen years.”

“How about I stick around while you go swimming—just in case?”

Alex nodded and activated the LED light attached to his mask. He’d used over a dozen rubber bands to tightly affix the waterproof flashlight. He had the option of using several head-mounted lamps scattered throughout their rucksacks, but couldn’t convince himself that they would continue to work submerged. He knew for a fact that this light would work, and in the environment below, he needed one-hundred-percent reliability. The light from the bulkhead opening would illuminate his path to the bunker door, but the area inside the bunker would be pitch black. He wasn’t taking any chances. He fitted the mask and adjusted the light to face directly forward.

“I always wanted to go cave diving,” he said and slid into the water after a deep breath.

The first thing he noticed was the cut on his forehead, which burned like someone held a match against it. A dozen other cuts and scrapes sounded off for a moment, but nothing could compete with the exhilaration of swimming through salt water in his basement. The cuts were a distant memory by the time his feet touched the concrete flooring.

He propelled himself forward, glancing around for a moment. He was surprised by the clarity of the water, which allowed his LED flashlight almost unlimited range in the basement. It made sense. The basement had more or less been a closed, undisturbed system for the past eight hours, giving most of the sediment time to settle. Alex propelled himself upward, just under the lip of the ceiling, and searched the area between the first two joists. He pressed the mask lens as high as possible, finding a three-inch pocket of air. Craning his neck backward, Alex grabbed the joists and attempted to bring his mouth above the waterline, but found the position to be too unstable. His lips barely breached the surface, which wasn’t enough.

He put the self-clearing snorkel in his mouth and used his hands to align the top of the snorkel with the floorboard between the joists. Once nearly flush with the ceiling, he expelled the air in his lungs, purging the snorkel through the valve below the mouthpiece. He tentatively sucked air back into the snorkel, encountering little resistance. Alex breathed deeper, bringing nothing but air into his lungs. He took several breaths, alternating the position of his head and snorkel, until he was comfortable using both hands to steady himself on the joists.

Nothing to it.

He popped up in the stairwell and gave his audience a thumbs-up. “I found air. Three inches at least. No problem. I’ll be done with this in ten minutes. Why don’t you start gathering the troops, Charlie. Is Ed’s house any cleaner than ours?”

“His and mine. We’ve been moving slop for hours,” said Charlie.

“Let’s go with Ed’s. That way Kate and I can sneak around back so it doesn’t look like we’re having a big meeting. You’ve been going back and forth all day. Linda needs to be there. Can you leave the girls behind?”

“I sure as shit have no intention of leaving my house unguarded. They can hold their own.”

“Good. I’ll haul some extra ammunition and magazines up for everyone,” said Alex. “If we have time later, I’ll fetch your thermal scope.”

“You won’t be disappointed with that thing. It’s unbelievable. Can’t see through walls, but it can pick up heat signatures inside windows, which more or less accomplishes the same thing,” said Charlie.

“Infrared reflections or ambient shadowing,” Alex corrected. “Unless the windows are closed. IR signatures can’t transmit through glass.”

“Snipers don’t typically fire through closed windows,” countered Charlie.

“You guys are out of your minds. Can we get on with this?” Kate snapped, descending the stairs into the water. “Warm water, my ass,” she added.

“What a lovely couple. We’ll start making our way over to Ed’s in about thirty minutes,” Charlie said and disappeared.

“Ready?” Alex asked.

“Play it smart. I won’t be able to see you very well in the bunker,” she said, illuminating her own waterproof flashlight.

Alex sank into the water and swam toward the bunker door. He arrived several seconds later and questioned why he had been so worried. He had two locks to open, which shouldn’t take much time. He considered trying to open the door before his next oxygen break, but decided against it. Before committing to any kind of task, he needed to verify that another pocket of air existed above him. He’d do the same when he reached the gun safe.

Repeating the process used near the stairs, he relaxed and breathed through the snorkel, flooding his system with oxygen. Kate floated lazily underwater near the bottom of the staircase, pointing her flashlight in his direction. He smiled with the snorkel in his mouth and gave her another thumbs-up sign. She broke for the surface and returned several seconds later. When she returned, Alex used one hand to retrieve the keys from the zippered pocket on his right thigh. He had removed the keys from his larger key chain and put them on a separate ring, wrapping duct tape around the base of the deadbolt key for quick identification. The third key on the ring was the circular gun safe key, which was easily distinguished from the traditional flat keys used to lock the bunker door. With the duct-taped key in hand, he descended a few feet and unlocked the deadbolt. A few seconds later, he had opened the doorknob lock and gained entry to the bunker, which was pitch black as expected.

The sole window to the backyard was blocked by mud, and the light from the bulkhead door barely penetrated more than a foot or two into the abyss. His flashlight cast a bluish-gray beam across the room, spotlighting the oil tanks, which he suddenly suspected were leaking. Another thing he hadn’t anticipated. He swept the beam over the room, taking in the eerily monochromatic scene. Unlike the first floor, the water must have filled the basement slowly through the single one-foot-tall by two-feet-wide window in front of him. Aside from the packages of dehydrated food, MREs, and medical supplies bobbing between the joists in the far northwest corner of the bunker, very little had been disturbed by the tsunami.

He turned to his right to face the gun safe and nearly bit his tongue. All of his air vacated in an attempt to scream, and he bolted out of the dark chamber, swimming as fast as possible toward Kate. He scrambled past her and surfaced, grabbing hold of the handrail and ripping the mask off. He coughed violently as the mask drifted away toward the bottom of the stairs. Kate enveloped him, turning his face toward her.

“What’s wrong?” she asked urgently.

He coughed a few more times to clear his airway. “There’s a body down there. I wasn’t expecting it, and I panicked. It was a little girl, or boy—I couldn’t tell. Ripped apart pretty bad—fuck.” He exhaled.

“You don’t have to go back down there.”

“I’m going back down. That won’t be the last body any of us sees close up. It was just bad timing. Like a horror movie. One second I was surveying the room, the next I’m staring into a dead child’s eyes. It’s all good. At least I didn’t drop the keys,” he said, showing them to her. “I’m fine.”

“You don’t sound fine.”

“I’m good. Seriously. Seeing that body gives me all the more reason to get the shit I need out of there. Ryan needs me to have every advantage possible entering Boston. That’s what I’m doing down there,” he said, glad that the salt water gave him an excuse to continuously wipe his eyes.

“All right. I think you should move the body to the bulkhead. Get it out of your way and up so the authorities can find it. Someone will be looking for that kid,” said Kate.

He didn’t want to break the bad news that nobody would be looking for the kid floating around in their basement. At least nobody in her immediate family.