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.”
“Was? It isn’t there anymore?”
“I’ve never seen the actual tunnel. I’ve only heard stories, you know, like old town myths that it was ever there. Hell, I’ve never even been in the basement.”
Someone was screaming retreat and fall back outside. “Well there’s only one way to find out.” Fred led them to the stairs and started winding his way down. The area that had once served as Brayburne’s money vault was now used as a storage area. He thought of Scrooge’s money bin again. There was clutter everywhere, boxes upon boxes of decades-old files, dusty office chairs with broken wheels and worn upholstery, fans with rusted blades that no longer spun, and every other piece of worn out, dated office equipment imaginable from the last sixty or seventy years.
“I really should’ve had someone come down here and clean this place out,” Joanna said.
“You and about a dozen mayors before you.”
They went to the west side and started moving garbage away from the wall. There was no inner brick wall that Fred could see. Once they’d cleared most of the clutter away, all that remained was a dingy-looking wall of old gyp-rock, painted a few times over. The old doctor thumped on the plaster with the side of his fist, listening and feeling for any change from behind. After a few seconds a hollow sound bounced back. “Here… I think I’ve found something.”
“What good does that do us? How are we going tear down that wall?”
It was a good question. Fred looked about the room, searching for something he could smash into the plaster. His eyes settled on an ancient fire alarm box on the north wall. It was one of those long glass enclosures with an emergency axe and bulky red extinguisher tank inside. He’d seen them a thousand times in a thousand different buildings when he was a younger man. “This place is already a museum,” he muttered heading towards it. He picked up a defunct fax machine from a pile of dead printers and computer monitors. Fred drove a corner into the glass and stepped back as the shards fell to the ground. He grabbed the axe and went back to the section of wall they’d cleared away.
“Are you sure you can—” Joanna started to say as Fred swung the axe back in both hands like a baseball bat. The sharp end sunk into the wall at a depth of less than an inch. Fred grunted, pulled it free, and swung again. Cracks appeared in the dry paint running a foot either way from the axe blade. He let it drop to the floor, his arms already aching, and his lungs on fire.
“I thought I could… used to split wood when I was younger.” He was panting heavily and leaning against the wall where the cracks had formed. “I can’t do this anymore. I’ll have a goddamned heart attack if I swing this thing again.”
He held the handle out towards the mayor and she took it grudgingly. “I’ve never swung an axe in my life. I’ve never even picked up a hammer.”