He propelled himself forward, glancing around for a moment. He was surprised by the clarity of the water, which allowed his LED flashlight almost unlimited range in the basement. It made sense. The basement had more or less been a closed, undisturbed system for the past eight hours, giving most of the sediment time to settle. Alex propelled himself upward, just under the lip of the ceiling, and searched the area between the first two joists. He pressed the mask lens as high as possible, finding a three-inch pocket of air. Craning his neck backward, Alex grabbed the joists and attempted to bring his mouth above the waterline, but found the position to be too unstable. His lips barely breached the surface, which wasn’t enough.
He put the self-clearing snorkel in his mouth and used his hands to align the top of the snorkel with the floorboard between the joists. Once nearly flush with the ceiling, he expelled the air in his lungs, purging the snorkel through the valve below the mouthpiece. He tentatively sucked air back into the snorkel, encountering little resistance. Alex breathed deeper, bringing nothing but air into his lungs. He took several breaths, alternating the position of his head and snorkel, until he was comfortable using both hands to steady himself on the joists.
Nothing to it.
He popped up in the stairwell and gave his audience a thumbs-up. “I found air. Three inches at least. No problem. I’ll be done with this in ten minutes. Why don’t you start gathering the troops, Charlie. Is Ed’s house any cleaner than ours?”
“His and mine. We’ve been moving slop for hours,” said Charlie.
“Let’s go with Ed’s. That way Kate and I can sneak around back so it doesn’t look like we’re having a big meeting. You’ve been going back and forth all day. Linda needs to be there. Can you leave the girls behind?”
“I sure as shit have no intention of leaving my house unguarded. They can hold their own.”
“Good. I’ll haul some extra ammunition and magazines up for everyone,” said Alex. “If we have time later, I’ll fetch your thermal scope.”
“You won’t be disappointed with that thing. It’s unbelievable. Can’t see through walls, but it can pick up heat signatures inside windows, which more or less accomplishes the same thing,” said Charlie.
“Infrared reflections or ambient shadowing,” Alex corrected. “Unless the windows are closed. IR signatures can’t transmit through glass.”
“Snipers don’t typically fire through closed windows,” countered Charlie.
“You guys are out of your minds. Can we get on with this?” Kate snapped, descending the stairs into the water. “Warm water, my ass,” she added.
“What a lovely couple. We’ll start making our way over to Ed’s in about thirty minutes,” Charlie said and disappeared.
“Ready?” Alex asked.
“Play it smart. I won’t be able to see you very well in the bunker,” she said, illuminating her own waterproof flashlight.
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.”