Kathy steered the SUV around the grounds and up the slope.
As soon as they stopped moving, Chloe said, “Kill the engine.”
Kathy did so.
Chloe held out her hand. “Keys.”
Kathy pulled them out of the ignition, her hand shaking slightly.
“Don’t be nervous. You’re going to be thanking me soon enough.” Once Chloe had the keys, she said, “We’ll be outside for a few minutes. It’s going to be cold, but it won’t be for long.”
“You want your coat back?” Kathy asked. She had taken it off once she warmed up, so it was sitting in the front passenger seat.
“No. You can use it.”
Instead of donning it, Kathy handed it to her daughter. “Honey, put this on when we get out.”
“Okay You all out first,” Chloe told them. “You can run, but as you saw, we’re not close to anything. You’re going to want to stick with me.”
After the Gardiners exited, Chloe opened her own door. She leaned into the front and engaged the door locks in case the others had plans of jumping right back in once she was out. A moment later, she came around the front of the car and found them huddled together.
“Wh-which way?” the doctor asked.
“Follow me.”
She led them through the woods to the emergency tunnel entrance. The hatch opened right before they arrived and Miller stuck his head out. “Wondering when you’d come back. Success, I assume?”
“Yeah,” Chloe said.
“Come on in and get warm,” he said, giving them all a wave before he disappeared back down the hole.
The doctor and his family looked at each other, their expressions uncertain.
Finally Gardiner said, “I’ll go first.” He lowered himself through the opening. A moment later, he called up, “It’s okay. Send Emily down.”
The daughter passed through the opening, but before Kathy stepped into the hole, she looked at Chloe. “If anything happens to my family, you will be the one who pays,” she said. She climbed down into the tunnel without waiting for a response.
As soon as Chloe was inside, Miller closed the hatch and led them down the tunnel.
“How is he?” Chloe asked, hoping they weren’t too late.
“No change,” Miller said.
She allowed herself a brief, relieved smile.
“What is this place?” the doctor asked.
“We call it the Bunker,” Miller told him. “The whole property’s known as the Ranch. We try to keep it simple around here.”
At the end of the tunnel, they stepped around the large, thick, blast-like door into the true Bunker.
“What the hell?” the doctor said, as the Gardiners all stopped in the middle of the hall.
The Bunker was a labyrinth of well-lit corridors and rooms that served as the Resistance’s underground control facility. Despite the lack of windows, its new, clean look made people quickly forget they were underground.
“Come on,” Chloe said. “There’s no time to waste.”
The doctor and his family stayed where they were for another moment before they caught up.
“How big is this place?” he asked.
“Big,” Chloe said. “You can take the tour later. Right now you need to help my friend.”
They navigated to the medical area. Even at this early hour, there were over a dozen people moving around. The door to the patient room was closed. Through the window, Chloe could see Josie Ash sitting next to her father’s bed, asleep.
Lily Franklin looked up from the desk where she was sitting. “A doctor?” she asked, hopeful. In the wake of Billy’s death, her nurse’s training made her the ranking medical officer.
Chloe pointed at Gardiner. “Him.”
“The others?”
“His family.”
Lily glanced at a woman across the room. “Vicky, we need three inoculations.” She turned back to Chloe. “Unless you already took care of that.”
“I didn’t have any vaccine with me.”
“Vaccine? What vaccine?” Gardiner said.
“The Sage Flu.” She looked into Ash’s room. “I’ll get Josie out of the way.”
“Hold on.” Gardiner grabbed her arm. “You have a vaccine for the Sage Flu?”
“Remember when I said I was going to save your lives? I wasn’t lying.”
“No one has a vaccine.”
“We do.”
“How do you know it even works?”
“It works.”
Vicky approached them, three syringes in her hand. “Which arm do you prefer?”
“No one is sticking anything into any of us until I know what’s in there,” Gardiner said. “Who knows what you might be putting into us.”
Lily grabbed one of the syringes, stuck it in her own arm, and depressed the plunger. The whole time she kept her eyes locked on the doctor. “Worse case, it’s not going to hurt you. Best, we’re right, and we’ll have saved you from being one of the billions who are about to die. Or would you rather take your chances outside?”
“How can you have a vaccine?”
“Because we knew it was coming,” Chloe said.
“Then why didn’t everyone else know?”
“People didn’t want to listen.”
“Brad,” Kathy said. “Maybe we should take it, just in case.”
“Either do it or don’t,” Chloe said. “I don’t care. But you need to get in there and help my friend.”
Gardiner looked into Ash’s room, then at his wife. Finally he gave Vicky a nod. While she administered shots to the two women, a fourth syringe was retrieved and the doctor was inoculated.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s see what’s wrong with the patient.”
6
Nolan and Wendy Gaines had been looking forward to this day all year. Last Christmas, their daughter Ellie had not been quite old enough to grasp everything that went with the season. This year, Ellie had fully bought into the idea of a pudgy old man riding through the sky in a sleigh pulled by reindeer, and that he would visit their house on Christmas Eve and leave presents to be opened first thing Christmas morning.
In fact, Ellie had been asking when Santa would be coming nearly every week for the last three months. Instead of being annoyed by it, Nolan and Wendy were totally into it, and had even gone as far as sending Ellie several “update” letters from Santa, telling her how things were going at the North Pole.
When reports of the biological attack began to appear, Nolan and Wendy had been as concerned as everyone else, but they made sure to only watch the news when Ellie was asleep. While their daughter was up, their TV played a continuous loop of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town, and the other holiday classics they’d enjoyed when they were young. Ellie already knew most of the songs by heart, and had no problem singing them at the top of her lungs.
“Come on, sing with me,” she’d say.
And they would.
After Ellie had fallen asleep on Christmas Eve, they’d decided not to turn on the news, and instead listened to Nat King Cole sing about chestnuts and Jack Frost and mistletoe as they filled their daughter’s stocking and arranged her presents in front of the Christmas tree. When they turned in a few hours later, they could almost believe the world was going to be fine.
It was Ellie who woke them on Christmas morning.
“Daddy,” she whispered.
Nolan’s eyes parted. Ellie was standing next to the bed, a grin on her face. “Hi, sweetie,” he said.
“I think he’s been here,” she said, her exaggerated hush laced with excitement.
“Who?”
“Santa.”
“And how do you know that?”
“Presents. In the living room.” She put a hand on his. “Get up, get up. I’ll show you.”