Geoff North - How the World Ends

“This way, sir.” The soldier had already run around the front of the vehicle and was pulling Fred out of his seat. “There’s a secure area inside where you’ll be safe until this is over.”

“You’re throwing me in the clink?”

“Sir?”

“The only secure area inside there is the jail cell. It’s where we used to let the drunks sleep it off.”

The soldier pulled insistently at the old doctor’s arm. “It’s for your own safety, sir.”

He wanted to argue some more, but the screams and gunfire coming from the east end of town were getting louder, much closer. Let the army handle that , he thought. There would be time after to help patch up the wounded. “Lead the way, young man.”

They were met at the main doors by a rush of men charging out carrying heavy artillery. One soldier had what appeared to be a rocket launcher nestled in his big arms. Fred stepped aside before they could trample over him.

“Sorry about that, sir.”

The kid was nice, Fred thought—a whole lot nicer than many of the other soldiers occupying his town. “What’s your name, son?”

“Corporal Stevens, sir.” They rushed by the main reception area.

“Do you have a first name, Corporal?”

“Adam, sir.”

If any of them got out of this alive, Fred promised himself he’d put in a good word to the youth’s superiors. “How long have you served in the army, Adam?”

“Three months, sir. I just finished training.” He looked embarrassed.

“Hell of an initiation, hey?”

They rushed past offices and came upon the jail cell at the back of the building. To Fred’s surprise, there was somebody already inside, sitting on the single cot. “Joanna Hensky?” He asked incredulously. “What is Brayburne’s mayor doing locked up in jail?”

The middle-aged woman had a pinched look on her pudgy face. Her body appeared tense, her back ramrod straight. “I came here… it was suggested I wait here until whatever it is happening out there gets worked out.”

Fred wasn’t entirely convinced of that. He had a feeling she had come on her own; the local politician wasn’t known for her bravery, or for being a particularly good mayor either. The corporal opened the cell door and Fred went inside. He sat beside Joanna and looked at the soldier questioningly through the bars as he clanked the door shut again. “You’re locking us in?”

Joanna produced a ring of keys from the head of the mattress. “We can get out whenever we want. Whoever’s outside won’t be able to get in.”

“Why would they need to get in when they can just shoot us from outside?” He stared at the woman. “Joanna… what the hell’s going on?”

She placed the keys back on top of the flat pillow and set her shaking hands onto her lap. “They don’t have guns. I don’t think they have any weapons at all.”

Corporal Stevens had slipped back out of the holding area without Fred noticing. “No weapons? Then why is there so much shooting? Are those soldiers just shooting down innocents?”

Joanna shook her head, and when she spoke again her voice was shaking almost as badly as her hands. “It was two soldiers returning from the east. They’d changed. They were different.”

“I’m not following you… Are you saying they came back sick? Is it some kind of radiation concern?”

“I don’t know what it is. They came back different . They attacked a guard, one of them bit his throat out and the other tore into his stomach. My God, Fred… they’d eaten half his intestines before additional guards were even on the scene.”

Fred stood and moved in front of her. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Radiation sickness doesn’t do that to people, it doesn’t turn them into cannibalistic animals.”

“They aren’t people anymore. I saw them through the camera feed they have set up in my office. They were monsters… covered in gore and black slime. One of them didn’t even have a lower jaw, but he kept shoving guts down the opening in his throat anyway. It was… It was the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen.”

Fred Gill didn’t know of anything in the medical world that could cause such a thing. It just wasn’t possible. When he spoke again his voice was lower, calmer—as if the reality of what she was saying—or at least what she’d thought she’d seen on a video display—had actually begun to sink in. “If there were only two soldiers in this condition, what’s happened since? Why are they continuing to fight outside? I passed a man carrying a rocket launcher. What’s happening out there now?”

The mayor shrugged. “I don’t want to know. We’re safe in here. We’re safe in here.”

She continued repeating the words, over and over. The shooting continued outside. As the minutes passed it became louder. “We’re not safe in here, Joanna. We have to get out of this town.”

Joanna started nodding her head quickly, as if she were waiting for someone else to make the hard decision of abandoning Brayburne. She grabbed the keys back up again and went to the door. She tried unlocking it from the other side but her hands were still shaking too bad. The keys fell to the floor. “I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I’m too scared.”

Fred got on his hands and knees and reached for the keys that had landed two feet away from the bars. The old doctor had to lower himself even further, onto his stomach. He stretched his arm towards the keys and one finger caught the ring. He dragged it back towards him, grunting with effort. He finally got back to his feet with the keys in one hand and unlocked the cell door.

“We can’t go out onto the streets,” she warned. “Those things will tear us apart.”

“You know of a better place to hide?”

The woman was still terrified, but her eyes had started to clear a little. The terror was still there, but Fred could see something else there—purpose. She had a plan.

“Back in the thirties,” she started to say as they moved out of the cell and back towards the offices, “the bankers had built an underground escape tunnel… in case of armed robbery. There was a tunnel hidden in the main vault.”

“A tunnel? Where did it go?”

She had made it to her office. The officer that had commandeered it weeks earlier wasn’t there. No doubt he was outside, leading the charge against whatever the hell had invaded Brayburne. Joanna went to her desk and started rifling through one of the drawers. “The plans are here somewhere. Blueprints of the bank before it was built and additional plans made for the tunnel. They’ve been saved this entire time for history’s sake. We were going to have them put in the museum. I just never got around to it.”

A window blew in from the office next to them. Men were screaming, no longer issuing orders, but wailing for their lives. “Find those plans, Joanna. Find them fast.”

“Here!” She cried out, pulling the yellowed sheets of paper from a bottom drawer. She spread them across the desk, and the two studied the plans. Fred saw a long line leading away from a top-down view of the building. It was heading west, and according to the map’s scale, was over half a mile in length.

Fred pulled the top sheet away and studied the one underneath. It was in greater detail, zoomed in to the original building layout floor by floor, room by room. “Where was the goddamned bank vault?” He muttered.

The mayor’s hands weren’t shaking as badly now. She pointed a once perfectly manicured nail to a third separate image near the bottom corner of the plan sheet. “There, in the basement. The original bank vault was built into the ground in a foundation of concrete and inner brick wall.” Someone had scrawled a crude set of lines into the original plans using a pencil. The grey lines had almost faded into nothingness, but both doctor and mayor could see the lines leading west. “That’s where the tunnel was located.”