The Pit (The Bugging Out Series Book 4) (20 page)

And this man had been the foreman of the project. It was difficult to see that sort of responsibility handled by the man who sat before us, but the wasting world had worn even the best men and women down to shells of their former selves.

“They left me here,” Cranston said distantly. “Just left me.”

Schiavo shook her head at the clear idiocy of the operation. It stank of bureaucracy gone mad, if there could be any other kind. Operation by committee. Someone in a bunker somewhere had set this all in motion without involving those on the front line. People like Earl Cranston.

“The cold, you know,” Cranston said, his gaze wide and weary, almost shell-shocked. “The blight doesn’t do well in the cold. The spread was slower in the northern climates, so...”

He looked out at us. Elaine, Schiavo, and I met his gaze. There was surrender in his eyes. Defeat. Failure.

“The cold has nothing to do with it,” Elaine said.

He nodded an acknowledgment, then quickly shook his head, unwilling to let go of what his purpose had been based upon.

“No, the scientists, they have it figured out,” Cranston protested, swiveling his chair to face the design on the wall behind. “This will save everyone. It will save... It would have...”

I stepped past the desk, Schiavo joining me to study the collage of blueprints.

“It’s underground,” Schiavo said.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “And big.”

“We bored it right under the slope of a mountain,” Cranston said, some vaguely fond memory of the process bringing a bare grin to his face. “Just outside of town.”

I pointed to the scale on one of the drawings.

“This is a thousand feet across on the short side,” I said.

“Twice that on the long,” she said, doing some quick mental math. “Two million square feet.”

We looked to Cranston and found his blank stare angled up at us.

“They have seeds,” he said. “They’ve been in a vault. Once everybody is sealed in they’re going to grow in the greenhouses down there. There are skylights to let in the sun. Then everything will grow. And when enough grows, it can be planted outside, because the cold up here...the cold won’t let...the blight can’t...”

“Sunlight,” Elaine said, looking to me.

“Long nights,” I said, keying in to what she was suggesting. “It probably did progress more slowly up here that fall and winter.”

“This confirms what we saw in Cheyenne,” Elaine said.

I nodded. Schiavo noted the exchange between us.

“Am I missing something?”

I didn’t answer the lieutenant. But I did look to Elaine, seeking some concurrence in what I was considering. What
we
were deciding.

“We should talk,” I said to Schiavo, the implication in my manner and tone that I was seeking some privacy. “Later.”

“About what?” the lieutenant asked.

“Saving humanity,” Elaine said.

Schiavo let the grandiosity of that that rattle around in her thoughts for a moment. Her rumination ended, though, when a grim Sergeant Lorenzen came into the trailer and shook his head at Schiavo.

“No sign of the garrison,” the sergeant said.

“The soldiers?” Cranston interjected, explaining almost matter-of-factly. “They’re dead. The Russians took them out in fifteen minutes. They were firing rockets from their boat as the
Vensterdam
sailed in. That drew the soldiers’ attention. Then five, six of them came out of the hills and ambushed the hell out of our boys. Killed every last one.”

Cranston thought in quiet for a moment, his face suddenly pained.

“Then they made everyone gather up any supplies that weren’t already in the pit,” Cranston said. “They cleaned out what was left on the ships, even from the
Vensterdam
. Then they locked themselves in there with...”

“With who?” Elaine pressed.

“All the supplies and...” Cranston hesitated, then let it out. “And the children.”

Krista...

“They’re the insurance policy that we wouldn’t try anything,” Cranston explained. “As long as we left the Russians be in the pit, they would keep feeding the kids. Keep them alive down there with them.”

Cranston stood suddenly and pointed to something on the blueprint collage. Three letters, SSC, at the top of one page, crossed purposely out with a stroke of black ink, a now familiar term scrawled beneath it—The Pit.

“It’s the Subterranean Survivor Complex,” Cranston said, trying to rub the offending gash of ink from the trio of letters. “One of my lead guys, one day he comes in here, and he does that, and writes that, and then he goes outside and blows his brains out.”

Cranston stopped his attempt to erase the indelible mark.

“I think his name was Joe,” Cranston said, then turned to face us again.

The man had found the edge some time ago, it seemed, and was teetering very close to it, some personal abyss ready to swallow him without warning.

“It was a mess,” Cranston said, in response to no one, just some admission rising from the foggy doubt that seemed to rise and fall like some tide within. “I mean, something that big, you can’t rush it. It wasn’t ready. Whole sections are unusable.”

“How much food is down there?” I asked the man.

Cranston scratched at his cheek as he considered my question. A red patch there, the skin warn almost beyond raw, pointed to the nervous tick having afflicted him for some time. Nails clawed slowly, methodically, until his gaze rose to meet mine.

“Years,” he said. “Years. That was the plan. Everyone stays there for years while the plants grew in the greenhouses.”

I looked to Schiavo, doing my own mental math.

“Years for all those people brought here,” I said. “Kuratov and his men could grow old on what’s in there.”

“While everyone out here dies,” Elaine said.

Cranston sat and quieted, the manic push and pull between insanity and reason easing for the moment.

“Sergeant...”

Lorenzen looked to his leader.

“Get all the food still on the boat and set up some kind of distribution,” she instructed.

“There’s got to be five, six hundred people in town,” he said.

“Eight hundred,” Cranston corrected. “Eight hundred and eighty two. I think. Unless someone died. Someone always dies. Like Joe.”

Lorenzen eyed the odd man, but only briefly, his attention shifting back to his commander.

“We can’t feed everybody,” Schiavo said. “But get food to the weakest, any pregnant women, and anyone who’s sick. Work with Hart and Doctor Allen to prioritize.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Lorenzen said, then headed out.

A trio of individuals passed him on their way in. There was a weary officiousness about them.

“Lieutenant,” one of the three, a woman said.

“Schiavo,” she said in introduction. “Lieutenant Angela Schiavo.”

She offered her hand, and the woman looked at it for a moment before accepting the greeting and shaking it.

“Sue Reinhardt,” the woman said. “Administrator of the Edmonton group.”

“Good to meet—”

“What the hell are you going to do to fix this?”

The interrupter was one of the other two men, small and taut. There was a fiery distaste about him. A bitterness that bled into the room from his very presence.

“And you are?” Schiavo asked calmly.

“I’m Earl Perkins, head of the Yuma group. Now answer my damn question.”

It would have been easy for Schiavo to exert some authority, much as she had done when the question of transport arose on Mary Island. But she didn’t. It might have been that she’d learned from that exchange with us. Or it could have been that she realized that Perkins’ fuse was already lit, and she could either wait for him to blow, or try to snuff it out.

“We’re going to talk about a plan,” Schiavo said. “I promise you. And we’ll keep you all involved in the discussions. But we’re going to need to move fast, so I hope you’ll understand me needing to stay focused on my mission. Fair enough?”

Perkins didn’t explode. But he didn’t calm, either. His fuse seemed to stop and smolder just inches from setting him off.

“I’ll expect answers,” Perkins said. “Soon.”

Schiavo nodded to the man, then turned to the other who’d come in with him.

“Dave Danforth from San Diego. I was appointed our leader just before we were evacuated.”

Schiavo shook his hand, but didn’t chance to offer the greeting to Perkins, who stood with arms folded across his narrow chest.

“I have one question that needs answering before we can figure out what to do,” Schiavo told the representatives. “How many children did they take with them into the pit?”

“Thirty three,” Reinhardt answered. “Every child ten and under. Boys and girls.”

“Almost every parent let them go,” Danforth said, a deep sadness rising. “They knew they would eat down there.”

Schiavo looked to me, uncertain, then back to the representatives.

“We’ll get them back,” she said. “That’s our first priority.”

“Excuse me...”

It was Elaine, some sudden sparkle of confusion about her.

“What is it?” I asked.

She didn’t answer me directly, instead focusing on the three who’d joined us in Cranston’s trailer.

“You’re each the leaders of your groups,” she said.

“More or less,” Sue Reinhardt said.

“Yes,” Earl Perkins added, with certain vigor to his affirmation. “Duly elected by the Yuma Survivors Council. I didn’t just fall into this.”

“We all function in some leadership capacity,” Danforth said, shooting a fast, icy glance Perkins’ way before fixing on fully on Elaine. “What is your point?”

Elaine turned to me, a serious and specific wonder about her.

“Where’s Martin?”

Her curiosity reminded me instantly that we hadn’t seen him yet, when, by all rights, he would have been one of the first to greet us.

“He’s not here,” Reinhardt said. “It was his turn.”

“His turn?” I asked. “His turn to what?”

T
wo dead tree branches had been lashed together and propped up in the middle of the dirt road, forming an X to warn any who might think of venturing past. This was the point of no return.

“Stop here,” Reinhardt said, putting an arm out to hold us back. “You can’t go any further.”

But Schiavo did. She pushed Reinhardt’s arm down and walked right up to the X, leaving Elaine and me behind with the woman who’d volunteered to guide us to this spot.

“Don’t go past it,” Reinhardt warned. “They could be watching right now.”

Schiavo didn’t cross the boundary marked by the leaning branches. She just stood there, M4 slung against her chest, and looked to the road beyond, the path disappearing as it followed a bend through the dead forest.

“Kuratov said if anyone approached the access to the pit, he’d...”

Reinhardt didn’t finish. To be honest, I didn’t want her to, or need her to. Just knowing that the man had made such threats against absolute innocents made it abundantly clear that we had to get Krista, and the others, out of there. Before Kuratov showed that he was more monster than man.

“Once a day at nine in the morning he said we could send one person to see that the children were still alive,” Reinhardt explained. “That’s where Martin is. Back there. Kuratov has his men bring all the children into one of the greenhouse areas so we can see them below. Through the skylight.”

Reinhardt began to choke up.

“Then we have to leave,” Reinhardt continued, forcing down the emotion that had bubbled up. “That’s the only time anyone can see them. Some of them just look up into the sunlight and cry.”

“Do you have someone down there?” I asked.

Reinhardt nodded, then turned away and buried her face against Elaine’s shoulder.

“I’ll be back,” I said, leaving Elaine with Reinhardt as I joined Schiavo right near the X. “Did you hear that?”

Schiavo nodded.

“How far back there do you think it is?” she asked.

“A hundred yards or so,” I said. “I’d have to look closer at the plans.”

She looked away from the thinning grey woods and fixed on me.

“You know plans and construction,” she said. “It’s what you used to do, right?”

In the casual conversations we’d had on our journey north, we’d learned a bit about each other. That I had once owned and operated a thriving construction business had seemed like the most mundane of facts I’d shared about myself. Now it appeared it was turning out to be a most salient revelation.

“Right,” I said.

Schiavo stopped for a moment and reached for the X, grabbing hold of one of the long, dead branches, gripping it for support.

“Are you okay?”

She managed a smile that was at least partially a grimace.

“I’ve been better,” she said.

“You need rest.”

“That’s not a luxury I can afford right now,” she said. “And those kids down there definitely can’t afford to wait for me to heal up fine and dandy.”

“Is that where she is?!”

I knew who was shouting the challenge before I’d even turned. When I did spin and look behind I saw Neil charging past Elaine and Reinhardt, AK in hand, not slung.

“Hold it,” I said, putting my hands out to stop my friend.

“Is she in there?” Neil demanded. “Is she?!”

I planted my palms against his shoulders and gripped his jacket. Elaine came up from behind and put a hold on one arm.

“You can’t go back there,” Elaine said.

“Is Krista there?! Dammit, answer me!”

I eased my grip from my friend and looked him in the eye.

“She is,” I told him. “With a lot of other children.”

He absorbed that, a crazed and helpless look in his eyes. Then he tried to push past. Elaine and I grabbed him, with Schiavo stepping in front to block his advance.

“We’re going to get them out,” the lieutenant said. “But we can’t do it just rushing in there.”

“How do we even know she’s alive?” Neil almost begged.

“She’s alive.”

Again, it was a voice I knew without laying eyes on the speaker. Martin approached from beyond the X. He stepped past the barrier and stood close to Neil.

“I just saw them,” Martin told my friend. “Krista is there, and she’s okay.”