Steven Konkoly - The Perseid Collapse

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.

“Back down. You don’t have to keep an eye on me. I think I’ve got the technique mastered at this point,” Alex said.

“I can handle seeing a dead body,” Kate said, “and you missed hitting your head on the doorframe by about a centimeter. I can’t rescue Ryan, Alex. You’re the only option we have.”

He kissed her forehead and dove into the water to retrieve the mask. Ten minutes later, he had returned with four sealed ammunition cans, an M4 carbine and a 9mm HK USP pistol. One of the cans contained a pair of generation two, head-mountable dual night vision goggles, a small, rifle-mountable generation two, night vision monocular, and a dual-beam IR aiming laser. The other cans contained ammunition and magazines compatible with his rifle and pistols.

He was surprisingly tired from the brief underwater foray. “This should do it.”

“I’ll start hauling this stuff up,” Kate said.

“I’ll get the body out of there. I think it might be better to leave it inside the bulkhead doors. Tie it to the stairs or something. I don’t like the idea of it sitting in the sun where the animals can get to it.”

“I’m not sleeping in a house with a dead body in it. I’ll help you drag it to wherever they’re putting the rest of the bodies.”

“Fair enough. I’ll get it out of the house and have Charlie help me move it. You don’t want to see this one, Kate. It’s someone’s baby.”

Kate’s face softened, and she held him for a minute. “They’re all someone’s baby,” she whispered.

EVENT +10:47 Hours

Scarborough, Maine

Alex sat in the empty seat left for him at the head of the kitchen table. Ed sat directly across from him, in front of the missing slider door. He was slightly concerned with privacy, since all of the windows had been blown out, but none of their options were optimal. He needed a table to lay out a few maps, which limited them to the dining room or kitchen. The dining room faced the street, exposing their conversation to anyone passing in front of the house.

He took a sip of ice-cold beer and observed his team. This wasn’t going to be an easy journey . They were probably thinking the same thing about him. He knew he looked worse than all of them combined. The slash across his forehead was held together by a butterfly bandage and slathered with antibiotic ointment. The cut wasn’t deep, but it was surrounded by a mean-looking bruise and could easily become infected if ignored. Several smaller, less urgent looking bruises had developed on his arms, face and neck, giving the impression that he had been worked over by a bar mob.

The bruise on his right tricep muscle was by far the worst. Partially hidden by his gray T-shirt, the deep purplish-red contusion drew stares from everyone. His arm had felt markedly better since taking ibuprofen and applying ice, but he strongly suspected that tomorrow would be a rough day. He could shoot right handed or left handed, but there was no comparison between what he could do with the right versus the left. He’d have to deal with it the best he could. That’s all he could ask of himself and the ragtag group sitting around Ed’s kitchen table.

He glanced at Kate and winked. Her normally lustrous black hair, now matted and dull, was hidden under a light blue ball cap. Despite the added trials of the Fletchers’ day, she exuded a confidence that he didn’t see in Linda or Samantha. She’d changed since the pandemic. The Sig Sauer P228 seated in the drop holster on her right thigh was one of many testaments to her sharply honed commitment to the Fletcher way of life. She would lead the women and children to his parents’ farm. God help anything that got in their way.

The Thorntons and Walkers had readily accepted his offer to weather the storm in Limerick. Charlie and Linda owned a fully stocked camp on the Great Pond near Belgrade, Maine, but didn’t have any way to get there. With Charlie accompanying Alex and Ed to Boston, it made sense for Linda and their twin seventeen-year-old daughters to travel with Kate. Running water would fail shortly, and electrical power wouldn’t be restored for months, turning their homes into little more than three-thousand-square-foot tents.