Chapter 15: Don't Think Twice, it's All Right, Pt. 2

When the storm finally broke, the merciless downpour drove them off the road and into the forest. The trees provided little relief, and Lily was soaked to the skin and the rain had turned to hail by the time they found the bunker.

Lichen speckled the pitted face of the unassuming concrete structure. The ground in front of it was churned and studded with broken trees, but grass had healed the scarred earth and the logs were practically decomposed.

Never enter old world ruins. This had been impressed upon Lily from the cradle. But rain sheeted down in a solid wall of water and pellets of ice ripped through the sparse canopy, thumping their flesh and the soft earth like little missiles.

They bolted for the shelter of a recessed doorway choked by determined ivy. Lily ducked behind the convenient windbreak of Michael’s body as he peeled greenery from from the wall.

She knew what would be there even before he found it and went still: a small pane of blind black glass, waiting dormant.

Michael regarded it like a dead animal.

“Wait,” she began, but he’d already slapped his hand down.

The panel immediately flashed red as a familiar inhuman voice spoke from everywhere and nowhere, clear even over the howling wind and thumps of hailstones: “Scanning.”

Close as she was, Lily could feel Michael’s tension as he waited, watching the light flash red, green, red, green.

“You don’t have to,” she told him, but it was lost in the storm.

There was a deep, final clunk from within as green light cast a sickly pallor over Michael’s face.

“Operative Echo 1074”, the machine announced. “Access granted.”

Ancient metal ground against stone as the door swung open, and a host of failing lights blinked on to greet them as they stepped warily over the threshold.

“Good,” Michael said, into the silence.

The half-burned flag hanging down the wall was an obscene marriage of Coalition and Union regalia — greyscale stars and stripes with a superimposed screaming eagle. Despite some words printed in a curving half-circle above and below the image, it was very plainly the insignia of the Coalition.

The entry hall echoed the destruction outside. Cracks shot through the concrete walls, and ceiling panels lay shattered on the floor or hung from their framework by bundles of wire.

Not all the dark stains on the tiles were fire damage. Not all the dusty lumps were debris. Lily took comfort from the fact that no one had been left to remove the bodies.

The door clanged shut with terrible finality.

“United States Defense Coalition,” Michael said. His voice echoed in the chamber; both were empty, hollow.

Rain trickled off Lily’s coat, making a miserable puddle around her feet. “Where?”

“On the flag.” The dark mouth of a wide hallway opened on the far side of the chamber; Michael looked at it like it was his own grave.

“We don’t have to go in,” Lily said. “We can camp right here.”

Michael paused. “Do you want to?”

“Don’t put this on me, make a decision.”

She couldn’t tell if he looked amused or annoyed. “We should make sure it’s empty.”

Lily shivered in her wet clothes. “Lead on, then.”

Lights in the corridor sputtered to life as they walked and extinguished in their wake. Here the walls were scored with deep, uneven gouges, and in places the ceiling had been torn open to expose a gridwork of pipes and wires. Water dripped.

It was very unlike Quebec Station. They walked a long time with no sign of stairs or lift banks, until it seemed the hallway might slope eternally down into the guts of the earth.

The glass partitions at each T-shaped junction were unexpected. Each unlocked and opened itself at the touch of Michael’s hand, and each time he made a face.

“Have you ever been inside Alpha Base,” Lily said, as they stopped before the latest.

Michael made a different face. “Yes.”

“Did it look like this?”

He touched the panel, which lit up red around his palm before beginning its sequence. “No. It’s white.”

Lily watched the lights instead of him. “Were you stationed in Delphi?”

“Yes,” he said, slowly. “Why?”

Because they might’ve been there at the same time. They might’ve passed each other on the street; the thought made Lily feel oddly queasy.

“I’m making conversation,” she told him instead. “It’s what people do.”

A green light flashed. The flat machine voice welcomed Operative Echo 1074, and Michael flinched minutely as he took his hand away.

“I’m not good at it,” he said.

“I’ve noticed.”

They walked on a bit longer, footsteps echoing off the walls. The deeper they went, the less extensive the damage became; judging by the thick dust no one had been down here in centuries. Lily wanted desperately to find out if the plumbing still worked.

“Do you want me to?” Michael asked.

She frowned at him.

“Make conversation.”

Lily almost laughed. Or maybe it wasn’t laughter making the back of her throat burn. “Well, yes.”

He considered this for eighteen paces. “Then I have a question.”

For some reason this made her heart thump and shift uneasily in her chest, as if it were a stone. But she nodded, and motioned for him to ask.

“What happens after you get to your city on the hill? What will you do there.”

Lily let her breath out in a rush. “I guess I don’t know. Depends on what kind of place it is. I’ve done a bunch of different work.”

“I’ve always been an Operative,” Michael said.

“Until now, you mean.”

Something happened to his face, an almost-smile she hadn’t seen since the Wasteland. It faded as they approached yet another barrier; this one had some signage bolted to the wall behind it.

Michael read it aloud. “Barracks to the left. Mess hall to the right. Up ahead, the control room, med bay, and armory.”

He unlocked the barrier, wincing as his old designation blared from unseen speakers.

“What’re you going to do when we get there,” Lily asked.

“See the ocean. I think I’ve been on a boat.”

“You…think?”

Michael wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Yes. That’s the control room.”

He pointed. Ahead, the endless hallway split in two to circumvent a floor to ceiling wall of frosted glass. A few inorganic outlines and vague shadows sat within.

Lily wrapped her damp coat tighter around herself, shivering as he wiped dust from the scanner beside the door. He braced himself before laying his palm against it.

“You ok?”

He nodded, watching the lights. Red, green, red again.

She leaned on the glass wall. “This place is so old, but it knows you.”

Green. The usual announcement. The control room door popped free of its seal with a rush of stale air, and Michael wiped his hand on his coat. “I don’t know why.”

“Doesn’t it bother you?”

He looked at her, finally, with an unguarded weariness she’d never seen on his face before. “I didn’t ask to be what I am.”

“What you were,” Lily corrected, holding open the door. “Come on. This thing’s heavy.”

The corpse faced a giant glass screen displaying the USDC logo. The Coalition’s logo. His withered fingers were still curled around the pistol.

Blood and brain matter from the jagged hole in his skull stained the chair, but he’d been dead so long there wasn’t any smell. Just a skeleton with paper skin wrapped in a dusty blue uniform.

Michael took a scrap of paper from the desk. Its edges crumbled away in his hands as he read aloud:

“The door is closed now. It’s too late for anything but regret. We only wanted to build a better world, but I understand now that we don’t deserve to see it. Please forgive us, we thought it was the only way.” He set the note down. “It’s signed Col. Marcus Lambert, USAF. Commander, Sierra Outpost and Testing Station.”

“At least he didn’t finish this,” Lily remarked, hefting a mostly empty bottle of amber liquid.

Michael awakened the computer. It displayed an array of surveillance footage, and after some trial and error he began flipping through it, magnifying it.

She uncapped the bottle, jerking her head back at the fumes, grimacing as images flashed across the massive screen: devastated rooms, many of them in the same condition as the entryway. Others apparently untouched.

Lily choked on the first burning sip. “Is this now?”

“I can’t access the history,” Michael sighed. “I can’t see what happened.”

“Lambert went crazy, killed everyone, and torched the base.” Lily prodded the screen with her fingertip. Distortion rippled over racks of gleaming rifles bathed in red emergency lights. “Let’s care about this instead.”

Michael sighed again, deeper this time, and sat down on the edge of the desk. He looked at her.

Suddenly Lily felt better about the Coalition flag, her wet socks, the bundle of bones staring down eternity in a plastic chair. Her cheeks warmed as she held the liquor out, wiggling it until Michael accepted. “I have an idea.”

He drank, coughed, made a face. “Awful.”

“It’s not supposed to taste good, it’s s’posed to get you drunk. Want to hear my idea?”

He nodded, then took another sip.

Lily gently rotated the deceased Colonel’s chair. “We won’t find a better place to spend the night. I bet there’s showers. And beds. And in the morning we could take those guns.”

Michael drank again and looked like he regretted it, but he kept the bottle. “Fine.”

—

Water swirled around Lily’s feet and down the drain. Gallons and gallons, piping hot. Like every good thing that had ever happened to her, this miracle would soon pass and never come again. She watched, transfixed, until it ran clear.

Earlier she’d heard pacing footsteps and been consumed with anxiety; was it Michael, or a different Coalition ghost? The warm buzz from the liquor was gone now, though, and it had taken every other feeling with it.

Lily cut the water and stepped out. A row of smudgy mirrors reflected the echoing tile room. It made her feel surrounded, under siege.

She toweled off quickly and donned a blue jumpsuit she’d found in one of the lockers. It bagged at the waist and pooled around her ankles even after she cuffed the legs.

In the hallway, Michael sat against the wall in miserable silence. The empty bottle waited next to him. He’d kept his hair but shaved his face.

“It worked,” he told her.

“What did.”

“I’m drunk.”

Lily grinned. “Off that little bit? No way. Come on.”

She extended her hand and pulled him to his feet. He’d put his own clothes back on, instead of a uniform, and kept glancing at the USDC patch on her jumpsuit. She decided to cut it off.

They searched the base for useable supplies. Tipsy or not, Michael had gone quiet again.

In the infirmary Lily stepped over a mummy in a white coat, surrounded by collapsed shelves and a faint rusty stain. A tourniquet was still cinched around one mangled leg.

She gathered first aid supplies, then motioned for Michael to join her by a wire rack of medicine bottles.

“Antibiotics,” she told him, bracing as he stepped in. “And painkillers.”

He didn’t seem to notice how close he was standing. One by one, he selected bottles and dropped them into a sack she held helpfully open.

“You done talking to me,” Lily heard herself say.

Michael blinked. “No.”

“Ok. Just checking.”

He took the sack and shouldered it. “If you tell me what you want, I’ll do it.”

That was a huge problem, because Lily didn’t know what she wanted. She put her hands in her pockets. She took them back out.

“Let’s find someplace to sleep,” she said. “It’s gotta be late.”

By the time they reached the barracks they’d stripped the base of anything that would travel. Food, medical supplies, whatever would fit in their rucksacks.

Including liquor. Two full bottles, looted from the commander’s quarters; Lambert had his priorities straight.

All the while Michael had stayed close to her side, saying nothing. Much too close. But Lily found herself acclimating to it.

Outside of sparring she had touched him eighteen times. She remembered each one. The eighteenth had been in the hallway earlier, when she helped him up. The first had been in that ditch.

She wondered if it would be all that bad to stop counting. Then a rush of deep red disgust filled her from the throat down, and she wished she could flay herself and carve all weakness out.

Michael caught himself on the doorway of the barracks. Beyond, rows of bunk beds marched like soldiers into the gloom. “I’ll sleep out here.”

In her most frequent nightmare Lily found herself back in bed in the residence on Omaha, thick-headed and filled with a dull ache. In the dream the washroom door was ajar and light spilled out. In the dream he was whistling.

“Wait here,” she said.

Then she stripped two cots and trundled back with armful of blankets and pillows, shoving half at him. “Let’s camp in the armory.”

As Michael took the blankets her hand brushed his. That was nineteen.

Lily pulled away abruptly, pivoting on her heel and marching back the way they’d come. Over her shoulder, she said, “Did you grab some cups? For the whiskey?”

“No,” Michael said.

It hardly mattered.