FORTRESS: A Post Apocalyptic-Dystopian EMP Attack Thriller (Reckoning Book 3) Read online

  “Sure. So much for privacy,” said Nancy with an eye roll.

  Brett took the few paces to the locked door. A cool breeze pulled through the room when he opened the office to the rest of the floor. The fresh air quickly replaced the stale air of Nancy’s office.

  Marvin walked into the office. “I thought I heard voices over here. I was in my office looking for new reading material. Nothing worse than being in a disaster without a good book.”

  “Come in. We were just hanging out,” said Brett. He opened the door a little wider for Marvin.

  Marvin sat cross-legged on one of the upright chairs facing them. Finally he said, “I hate to admit this, but I don’t think I should go with Joe and Meg to look for the camp. I may be more of a hindrance than help. They might be able to move faster with fewer people. Besides, it would be way easier for just a few people to hide than it would be for a whole group of us.”

  Nancy tried not to smirk. The size of the group had nothing to do with why it moved slower with Marvin around. The elderly Marvin had slowed the group down at every turn during the trek to their home, nearly getting himself and the others caught on numerous occasions. However, despite what everyone knew about his athletic ability, Marvin seemed to believe that his presence did not impact the group. She knew everyone had a version of himself or herself that they clung to despite evidence to the contrary. Marvin’s comical version of himself, rooted in an unseen past when he had run faster, lightened Nancy’s mood.

  “We were thinking the same thing. It’s best if they go with a smaller group, not including any of us,” said Brett.

  “That’s a relief to hear you say that. I assumed everyone would want to stay together. I’d hate to bail out on them, but I’ve had enough running for a lifetime.”

  Marvin seemed to relax in his chair. The afternoon light shone on his face, making him look much older than his chronological age. Deep lines crisscrossed his strong features—crevasses forming strikes against the beauty of a once handsome, younger man.

  “I feel the same way. We’ve been through a lot together. I just need a break from running for a little while. Even if that break is in a dark tunnel,” said Brett.

  “We talked about wanting to find the resistance. Maybe in a few days we’ll all feel up to venturing out to find your masked friends,” said Nancy.

  “Maybe we will. Though I’m not sure where to find them. Going back into the city isn’t an option. By now the entire thing should be surrounded by concertina wire. Other than sending up a flare, I wouldn’t even know where to begin to find them,” said Marvin.

  Nancy could tell by the sound of his voice that Marvin would likely be content to wait on the sidelines of the battle. Perhaps he had the right approach. Stay safe, keep your head down, and let the more capable people fight. Her body felt old and tired after everything they had been through. She certainly could not help the cause in her current physical condition.

  “You might be right. I agree that we can’t go back. Perhaps they also left the city and are operating outside it?” said Brett.

  “That makes sense. Why would they stay inside a barred-off city? Eventually they’d be caught. It’d make way more sense for them to leave and fight against the military from the outside,” said Nancy.

  “But where would they go? We don’t even know where they’re based. That’s what we need to figure out. Then we can join them and help in any way possible,” said Marvin.

  Nancy’s mind swirled with possibilities. She envisioned the resistance camped located in a revolutionary-style fortress the likes of which would be the envy of any third-world grassroots activists. Just an inkling that such a place existed in their now cruel world filled her with hope.

  — 4 —

  Ed Camp had been a professor at the university for nearly fifteen years, serving as the chairman of the Sociology Department for most of them. He never aspired to the position of chairman, so when his turn came, he approached the job with quiet resignation, counting the days until he could turn the reins over to the next person. However, something changed once he began making decisions. Soon he learned that leadership came naturally to him. The other professors in the department must have agreed, because year after year they unanimously voted for him to continue in the post.

  Originally from the northeast, Ed had left his blue-collar home in search of answers to the big questions in life. All five of his brothers and his three sisters were scattered around New England, far from the university. The number of nieces and nephews produced by the original Camp brood grew to dizzying numbers. Ed stopped counting at the birth of the tenth child. During family visits to his childhood home, he witnessed his siblings struggling with unhappy marriages and runny-nosed children. Every time he returned to the university, his decision to forego the comforts of hearth and home for the life of academia had been underscored with a dignified certainty.

  Early in his career, Ed had worked with another professor to test the hypothesis that the use of mind-altering drugs would create harmony in a group. The large pharmaceutical company that funded the research sought a drug that would render its users blissed out—but not numb. Such a drug would allow people to work in groups without dissent. Although the goal of the research seemed dubious to him, he couldn’t dismiss the money they contributed to his department.

  Year after year, the company pumped millions of dollars into the work. During the last year of the study, they came close to perfecting the practical pharmacological use of the drug. The tests demonstrated that group dynamic worked best with a small daily dose of Wondra, the name the company gave the mind-altering drug. However, before they could turn over their findings to the company, the U.S. government swooped in and shut down the lab.

  They seized all of the data derived from use of Wondra. Years of work showing how the drug changed group dynamics vanished overnight, along with the pharmaceutical company. Inexplicably, the company contacts never returned calls or emails from Ed or his colleagues. In all his years in research, he had never experienced a total collapse on the scale of the Wondra debacle. Overnight funding ended, leaving Ed without working capital or a project. He even started to wonder if the pharmaceutical company had been a fraud all along. A government entity disguised as a private start-up.

  The government officials would not disclose why they had ceased the research. They would only say that the work had been deemed top secret. The Sociology Department became alive with conspiracy theories. Most believed that the U.S. government ended the project to prevent the Chinese-invested pharma company from obtaining the results. Others believed the government wanted the findings so that it could dose the American people with the drug through the water supply. Once the citizens were too drugged to rebel, it could do anything, unchecked. Ed didn’t really care about the various conspiracy theories. Instead, he focused his efforts on finding a new project. Then his turn at the helm of the department began, and he never looked for another research project. He chose to lead the department instead.

  Ed walked quickly through the tunnels. Before the lights went out, he never had a reason to enter the tunnel system. Like everyone else, he had been given a tour of the campus when he started working at the university. The tour included a glimpse into the tunnels, along with an explanation of their purpose, but nothing more. He had no concept of the vastness of the tunnel system. After the lights went out, no one thought about entering the tunnels. The need to hide hadn’t presented itself yet. However, as reports about troops rounding up civilians started to hit campus, he knew they needed to find a safe place to hide.

  He’d taken several volunteers into the tunnels as an exploratory mission. Armed with flashlights, a map of campus and sticky notes, they entered the dark maze. The group walked in one direction at a time, marking their slow progress with the sticky notes. Without the sticky notes acting as breadcrumbs, he doubted they would have found their way back through the vast darkness. The expedition into the tunnels reminded Ed of the early Aztec I
ndians who charted underground waterways and tunnel systems. They bravely went below the ground’s surface into a dark unknown world, which they believed to be a gateway to the underworld. His admiration for these ancient people grew as he too tried to plot a map of an unknown underworld.

  Once they plotted the tunnels on a map, he felt comfortable sending more people belowground. They quickly moved couches, mattresses and anything else they could handle into the tunnels. He wanted to be sure they would be comfortable if they needed to hide for long periods of time. Until the soldiers started coming with more frequency, they didn’t need to test the system. Now he feared they were doomed to spend most of their time below the ground’s surface in order to evade discovery.

  Despite having all the resources they needed, he knew living in the tunnels would not be optimal as a long-term survival strategy. Eventually, the need for sunshine and fresh air would exceed the perceived need for stealth, leaving them open to accidental discovery as people sought the comforts of the natural world.

  They also brought food and water into their now robust bunker system. Despite taking large amounts of supplies from the campus, they tried very hard to make things aboveground look untouched. He feared that if it became clear that the campus had been cleaned out, perhaps the troops would take a closer look. So far, his fears had not come to pass. The troops merely conducted superficial searches of the campus. Their efforts seemed to be mostly focused on the people located at the facility.

  Ed managed to keep everyone who chose to stay on campus safe. They even settled into a sort of dark rhythm, knowing exactly what to do if trucks arrived. Everything seemed fine until the other night. Several people had been aboveground enjoying the evening when the men arrived. The people retreated swiftly into the safety of the tunnels. Unfortunately, a foreign exchange student did not get inside quickly enough. The troops murdered him in plain sight as he fled. The man’s death weighed heavily on Ed. He wondered if he could have done more to prevent the killing.

  “Hey, Ed! You getting hungry?” said one of the kitchen volunteers.

  “Only if you’re making pizza!” he said cheerily.

  Ed made it a point to check in with everyone once or twice per day. As a result, he spent most of his day moving from one work party to the next. He saved the kitchens for last, usually around mealtimes.

  “Pizza? That’s it? Here I pegged you for a steak and beer sort of guy,” said the man.

  “I’ll take anything not poured out of a can at this point!” said Ed. “Beer excluded.”

  “You and everyone else.”

  “How are we fixed for food?” he asked.

  “After tonight, I think we could use another run. I can head over in the morning with Marta. We’ll grab some more cans. Who knows, maybe we’ll find some hidden gems in the main kitchen’s supplies.”

  “You want help? I could divert a few people. Those not on watch are mostly drilling to get better at handling emergencies,” said Ed.

  “No. We’ll be fine. I found a cart we can use to haul everything over here. It’s not a big deal. Just a long walk.”

  “Sounds good. Thanks for your hard work. Mealtimes help everyone feel better. You’re doing a great job given the circumstances.”

  Ed meant what he said. Bob and Marta managed to make decent meals out of the canned food they had at their disposal. The two would grab enough food from the campus’s main cafeteria to feed everyone for a few days at a time, moving the food to the small kitchen adjacent to the windowless conference room. The location gave them quick access to the tunnels if the need to flee arose.

  Although moving the supplies slowly seemed like more work than necessary, Ed knew they would be safer with less evidence of a disruption on campus. As people came and went from the university, looking for relatives, Ed heard news of the outside world. Without exception everyone reported that nothing in the rest of the world had been touched.

  People had simply left their homes intact, without taking anything with them. The citizens did not pack large amounts of stored food to take with them. In addition, no looting had occurred in the city. Ed knew if the soldiers searched the campus and found the food missing, their interest would be piqued. He concluded that making everything look untouched would keep them safer than if they merely ate in the main kitchen or hauled all the food to the small kitchen.

  “Mr. Ed!” yelled a woman with a heavy accent.

  “Flora! I was just heading in your direction. How are things?”

  Flora Valendez had worked on campus in the housekeeping staff for the past ten years, eventually working her way to the position of day-crew manager. Her constant presence and dedication to the job endeared her to the professor, who formed her extended family. Despite her success, Flora lived alone near the university—the rest of her family still in Mexico.

  “Everything is good. We cleaned the entire first-floor bathrooms in this building but not the hospital. No one wants to go into the hospital area anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “The smell has gotten really bad. I’m not sure what we can do about it.”

  “Smell from what?” said Joe as he joined the two.

  “The campus hospital is a teaching facility. Meaning that students who are studying to become physicians can shadow working doctors as part of their education. When the electricity went down, we quickly lost our ability to safely handle the patients.”

  “That doesn’t sound good,” said Joe.

  “It wasn’t. Many left with family members. However, the sickest of them died as we helplessly looked on. Without electricity, many of our normal modes of treatment were unavailable to us. We simply had nothing to offer them but our prayers.”

  “What did you do with the bodies?”

  “That’s the problem. The university’s morgue is located in the basement level. It opens to the tunnels. When everything is working properly, a body could be transported to the morgue very easily. Now that we’re living down in the tunnels, the last thing we needed was a bunch of cadavers rotting in the system. Without refrigeration, things get messy very quickly.”

  “I see where this is going. So you buried them?”

  “Not exactly. We moved all the patients who died, along with the existing cadavers—”

  “Wait a minute. Sorry to cut you off, but did you say existing cadavers?”

  “Yes. Part of medical school training is done on cadavers. If a person donates their body to science, that body will usually find its way to a university facility like ours, either for research or to train future doctors.”

  “Wow. I didn’t know that. Remind me not to donate my body to science. Last thing I’d want is a bunch of students poking around at me.”

  “They do more than poke around, that’s for sure,” said Flora with a disgusted shake.

  “We moved all of the cadavers to the top floor of the hospital.”

  “Why? Wouldn’t burying them be a better idea?”

  “No. If the troops saw fresh graves, they’d know we’re here. So far we’ve done everything possible to make sure that we leave everything undisturbed topside. That way, it looks like the entire place just emptied out, which should be consistent with the way other uninhabited buildings appear around town.”

  “That’s what the city looked like. It was as though people just walked out of their homes and businesses. It was the oddest thing I ever saw.”

  “Exactly. That’s what we’re going for. Actually, I think that’s why when they search, their searches are very limited in scope. To them, everything looks as they’d expect.”

  “Yeah, but now the stench of rotting flesh is starting to reach the ground floors, and I can’t get my people to go anywhere near the hospital,” said Flora.

  “Too bad you can’t make them into mummies. That’d solve the problem,” said Joe jokingly.

  Joe’s comment stopped Ed in his tracks. He stood for a moment considering the idea of making the cadavers into mummies.

  �
��That’s perfect! Why didn’t I think of that! Excellent idea. Thanks, Joe!” said Ed as he bounded off excitedly.

  — 5 —

  Dr. Sal Lordes reclined on one of the lounge couches in the main section of the tunnels, mindlessly flipping through a magazine. Boredom accompanied him everywhere he went like a heavy dark cloak draped over his mind. Despite being at a university with unlimited supplies of reading material, he couldn’t get settled. Nor could he shake the boredom.

  Some days he could not be certain if the thick sluggish feeling he experienced came from depression rather than boredom. His guess was depression. He had watched his entire critically ill patient population die under his care. Saving them would have been simple under normal circumstances. Modern medicine made it possible for people to live well beyond their natural physical capacity, even beyond their societal utility. Unfortunately, modern medicine turned out to be more dependent on electricity than medical science—or his skill as a doctor.

  “Sal! There you are! I’ve been looking all over for you!” shouted Ed.

  Ed ran to him from the east tunnel. Prior to the emergency, he had never met Ed. Now he relied upon the man to make critical decisions involving his safety.

  “How are things topside, Ed?”

  “Great! The weather is perfect. You should come out once in a while. It’d do you some good to get out of the tunnels and into the sunshine.”

  Sal knew fresh air and sunshine would do wonders for him. However, he couldn’t muster the strength to leave the tunnels. Besides, the recent killing of a student gave him a handy excuse to stay safely tucked away.

  “Why were you looking for me, Ed? Is someone hurt?”

  “No. Not at all. The bodies are starting to stink, even on the lower floors.”

  “We knew that was inevitable, especially with this heat. Maybe we should consider moving them deep into the forest? The soldiers won’t find them if we put them really far out.”