"Hey!" I shove at the debris in my way. "I think I found something." Kicking at a sheet of plywood, I manage to jam the edge of a metal cart into my side. I groan, press the spot with my hands and breathe out slowly. The tender spot throbs.
"Are you all right?" My mother comes up behind me and touches my shoulder. I nod and straighten, hoping I didn't hit it too hard. I rub at it furiously and point toward the door I'd been uncovering.
"See that? A metal door. Looks like it could lead to the same place as that one we saw outside. What do you think?"
She helps me move the last of the debris—metal poles, boxes and a dresser—out of the way, seemingly random junk clearly arranged to hide the location of the door. It spikes my curiosity as I reach out to touch the cool, streaked metal. I hope it opens. The other door on the outside of the cabin had been locked, with no visible way to get it open. Trying the door latch, I find it locked, but a small green light turns on to my right where a keypad is hidden under a small metal cover. It's slightly opened, as though whoever used it last didn't bother to close it all the way.
From the looks of this place, it hasn't been used in a long while. Maybe it's a safe room, a panic room of some sort. Whatever is in there, no one has come to check on it in a very long time.
The cabin stands in a hidden alcove, just atop a small hill in the mountains of the Mt. Charleston area surrounding the west side of the Las Vegas valley. We used to come here during the winter to slide down the snow-covered hills and build snowmen as the flurries floated softly down onto us. We'd play until the cold became too much to bear and our fingers were downright frozen.
It was the one area there are no people, at least none that we've yet run into. It seems we're the lucky ones to make it out of the city alive. Those who make it to the highways, die off soon enough, infected or incinerated in the daylight, even chewed up by their family members. It's horrifying to pass by their wrecked cars, metal twisted and blood everywhere.
Fortunately, not a lot of people live in their Mt. Charleston cabins. These are for summer vacations or winter snowboarding trips. In the middle of fall, no one is around.
Lucky for us, I guess.
"Let's check upstairs. Maybe there's a code written down somewhere." My mother turns around and heads swiftly back upstairs to look. Jeremy is sitting at the top of the stairs, too scared to be in the cabin alone. He jumps up and joins her as I follow behind. I hope she's right. To find a reinforced room to live in during the night would be a godsend. Our chances for survival would jump a thousand fold from what we have now.
I find my mother pulling out drawers, shoving the contents around before closing them quietly. I'm pretty sure she would be slamming them if she wasn't afraid it could attract people, or worse. She's still upset about losing Randy. We'd had no choice but to leave when we started finding scratch marks on the outside of our house. I wish we had left sooner, but that's how it ended up. Mom waited for him. Then, at the break of dawn one morning, she'd herded us into the van, pulled out of our house and left it behind, probably forever.
"Here." She pulls out a notebook and a dangling key attached to its spiral wire. "The code is in here plus a checklist of supplies inside the bunker." She looks up at me, tears glistening in her eyes. "It's a bunker, April. A real life bunker we can use and be safe."
I nod, and we scramble back down the stairs to punch in the numbers. I guess whoever owned this place never thought they wouldn't make it back. They would be in there if they had.
This thought jerks me back into action, and I pull the gun from my holster as Mom reaches over toward the keypad to punch in the numbers.
"Mom, they could be in there, the owners."
She glances at me and nods, then steps to the side to give me a full view of the room when she opens it.
"Ready?" she asks.
"As we'll ever be."
She punches the numbers in, and the green light flashes. A low but audible click hits our ears. My heart is pounding furiously, knowing that whatever greets us from within will determine our future.
Mom pulls at the handle and yanks it open, hiding behind it in case we get bombarded. Dust bellows out in small puffs, but not enough to obscure my vision. I grip the gun, my finger ready on the trigger as I creep forward into the darkened room before us.
"Flashlight, Mom," I whisper, and she pulls the flashlight out from her belt loop and flicks it on, peering around the corner and sweeping the room with its cutting beam of illumination.
My chest tightens as I enter the room with her behind me. She continues to sweep the room, but it looks like a good-sized place, so we explore it further. A desk with monitors sits dusty, but the console is lit up. As we step farther into the room, motion sensors detect us, and the overhead lights flicker on, flooding the area with bright, artificial light.
My mother flicks the flashlight off, and we stand in the center of a large room with a door that leads to what looks like a bathroom. There's a small storage area toward the rear of the room. Another metal door to our left must be the one we'd seen before, leading to the outside. There are two metal beds with mattresses, a TV, a small coffee table near it with a sofa lining the wall. A kitchen runs along the rest of the wall, and a small breakfast table with four chairs sits in the middle of the room.
I move on toward the back and flick on the light of the bathroom. A mirror faces me, and a shower to the right with a curtain drawn stands next to one toilet. The wall next to the door is piled with toilet tissue rolls, all wrapped in plastic. Cleaning supplies sit under the sink area but are left in the open.
Turning the light off, I move to check out the storage room to the left of the bathroom. It's piled high with canned goods, nonperishable items, and bottles of water along with drums full of it, too. There are even toiletries and large boxes filled with new and used clothing. After doing a round through the room, I walk back to where my mother and Jeremy are standing, watching me.
"It's good. It's got all we need."
"It has electricity, too, and even a filtration system. Where's the electricity coming from?" My mother peers up at the ceiling and studies the lights and electrical cords plugged into the wall.
There's a generator hum nearby, but it's faint enough to not be noticed much. I wonder where it is and hope it's not noisy enough to attract people, or worse, ferals. "I'll find the generator, but I think I saw solar panels on the roof of this place, too."
I check the metal door at the side of the room and try it. A beep sounds off as I open the door, but it doesn't alarm. The cool, mountain air trickles in, and I take a wide breath of it before I set out to find the generator. I find it, buried under several concrete breezeblocks with a small fan ventilating it out through a tube that goes all the way to the roof of the house. It's virtually silent and must run off pure solar electricity from the looks of it. I hope so. I'm not sure where I'd be able to find enough gas to keep it going.
I head back to the opened door to the bunker and step in, shutting it behind me.
"It's outside, buried but ventilated. I think it's all solar, but I'll have to check out where the batteries are kept. I don't really know much about a system like this."
My mother nods, and we both turn toward Jeremy who is turning the TV on and is all giddy at finding a video game system hooked up to it.
Meeting my mother's eyes as we face each other, I see something new in her expression, something that makes me smile again. Hope.
"Let's unload the van."
I agree and follow her back out to grab our supplies, then hide the van in the cabin's garage.
Evening arrives, and we settle into our new beds. We've dragged another frame out from the basement and used one of the mattresses from a twin bed in the cabin for a third bed. We make sure to lock the doors and set the alarms as the notebook specified.
I lie in my bed and study our small sanctuary. Cameras kept eyes on the perimeter of the cabin, but nothing moves in the stillness of the quiet night. Outside are the monsters, down in the city where the virus has pretty much decimated the human population by now. Inside here, we're safe, cocooned in our own tiny world.
This only brings the questions I've suppressed back to the surface as I lie here, listening to Mom's and Jeremy's soft breaths while they sleep. How long will this last? Will we become infected and turn into those crazy, vampire-like ferals out there? Will they come and get us eventually? Will we die of something sooner or later?
When the answers don't come to me, and sleep finally takes over my senses, I hope only to dream of nothing. Not the nightmares surrounding us. Not the end of the world. If this is it, then it is the end and there's nothing left to figure out. If it isn't, well, tomorrow will be there, no matter what comes our way.
***
Like this prequel?
Continue this series with:
Reign of Blood (The Vampires of Vegas Book I)
Disarming (The Vampires of Vegas Book II)
Amplified (The Vampires of Vegas Book III)