The Vault

 

'There's no reason all four of us should travel to the island,' said Jane. 'I'll take Punch for company.'

'I should go,' said Ghost. 'I know the bunker.'

'No point,' said Jane. 'My plan, my trip. Let me achieve something for once.'

Ghost drew a map.

'All right. The explosives are five levels down in a storage vault. You'll pass plenty of side tunnels. Ignore them. Stick to the main passageways. I spent two days down there exploring the bunker. Seemed like there was no end to the place.'

Jane folded the crude treasure map and tucked it in her pocket. They were sitting in the observation bubble. It was late January. A faint azure tint to the southern sky.

'Spring is coming,' said Ghost. 'We should have our first real sunrise in a couple of months.'

'Hyperion will float free. What little is left of it. Probably sink like a stone.'

'All those guys who died. None of it is down to you. They made their own luck.'

'How much explosive do you reckon we have stored in the bunker?'

'We used up the grenades. Used some C4 out on the ice, but there's still a bunch left. Couple of cases at least. Thirty or forty kilos. Enough to put an office block on the moon. You'll need a backpack.'

'I'll take the flamethrower as well.'

'I doubt you'll have much use for it. Most of the infected crowd from Hyperion fried aboard the ship. The rest seem to be succumbing to the cold. As long as you keep running, you should be okay. Once you reach the bunker you'll be home and dry.'

 

Jane and Punch dressed in the airlock. Ventile over-trousers. Heavy snowboots secured by ankle latches. Triple-seal parkas: zips, toggles, Velcro.

Jane shrugged on the flamethrower harness. Punch unsheathed the shotgun and chambered rounds.

 

They stood on the platform lift and descended the south leg of the refinery. They halted the elevator two metres from the surface and slid down a rope to the ice.

They walked across the frozen ocean.

'Ghost says avoid blue ice,' advised Jane. 'It's fresh. Looks pretty, but you could drop through it like a trapdoor. You won't get any warning.'

The sky was pale pink. They had a clear view of Hyperion. It was a scorched shell. The cabins were burned out. The decks were buckled and black. The funnels had collapsed.

She could smell it. Burned plastic. Cooked meat.

They could see a handful of infected passengers out on the ice. Black dots on the slopes of the island like sheep on a distant hillside.

'Let's make this a quick trip,' said Jane. 'Smash and grab. Hopefully, this will be the last time any of us leave the rig. The last time before home, anyway.'

A woman in a gold ball gown stood alone on the ice, slump- shouldered and forlorn. She saw Punch and Jane. She staggered forward, arms stretched towards them.

Jane checked the little blue igniter flame at the mouth of the flamethrower barrel.

'Let's see what this thing can do.'

Punch stood clear.

Jane braced her legs, took aim and pulled the trigger. She fired. An arc of burning fuel spat twenty metres. The woman was engulfed in fire. She stumbled. She fell to her knees. A second burst. Clothes and hair seared away by a typhoon of flame. She crawled on her hands. She fell forward and slowly melted into the ice.

 

They hurried across the frozen sea to the shore. They climbed on to the jetty and up concrete steps to the bunker entrance. Two infected crewmen were slumped in front of the bunker doors. Officers in brass-button dress uniform. Ice crackled as they struggled to their feet.

Punch kicked their legs from under them, and pulped their heads with the butt of his shotgun.

'The chain is gone,' said Jane. She tugged at the doors. 'They seem to be tied shut from the inside. Do you have a knife?'

Jane took off her glove, squirmed her fingers through the gap and sawed through the rope.

'Do you think someone made it off Hyperion?' asked Punch. 'Well, I can't picture any of those zombie fucks tying a reef knot.'

They entered the bunker. They swung the heavy doors shut and propped them closed with a snowmobile.

Punch examined the campfire. He kicked the burning planks. Burst of sparks.

'Fresh wood. Someone was here a moment ago.' 'There's a bone. A rib.'

Jane stood at the tunnel mouth and shouted into the darkness.

'Nail? Gus? Hello?'

'Must be Nail,' said Punch. 'Anyone else would come running.' 'Hello? Anyone?'

Jane released a puff of fire down the dark passageway, a rolling burst of flame. Brief glimpse of cracked concrete. Tunnel walls receded to vanishing point.

'Let's get what we came for,' she said.

Punch checked the map.

'Five levels down, then keep heading straight. Be all right as long as we don't deviate.'

'Don't creep,' said Jane. 'Let him hear us coming.'

They trudged down a passageway wide as a subway tunnel. Their flashlights lit damp concrete archways Bedrock ribbed with reinforced pillars.

'How much further?' asked Punch.

'Quite a way. Ghost hid the explosives in one of the deeper galleries. Can't find it by accident. You have to know where to look.'

They approached something blue on the tunnel floor. A snow- boot. Jane crouched and examined the shoe.

'Size ten. There's blood in it. Blood on the floor.'

Her flashlight lit a trail of drips.

They kept walking.

The tunnel terminated in a massive lead door. A skull etched above a cloverleaf radiation emblem.

Jane wiped away stone dust.

 

ФnacИOCБ/Danger

PaДИЦИra /Radiation

 

Beneath it, written in blood:

 

HELLBOUND

 

Jagged letters. Splatters and drips.

'This place stinks of madness,' said Punch.

Jane examined the blood. It was black. It crumbled and flaked to the touch. The letters had been daubed by a gloved hand.

'You know what?' she said. 'Whatever happened down here simply isn't our problem. I'm just not interested. We get what we want then leave.'

The vault was big as a church nave. The walls and ceiling were lagged with lead plate. The chamber was built, Jane supposed, to house the decommissioned reactor core of a Soviet submarine or a nuclear ice-breaker. Relics of the Northern Fleet. The sleek hunter-killers that operated out of Archangel, prowling beneath the polar ice cap, waiting for their comms to flash red and chatter launch codes and target coordinates. The crusted, corroded reactor would be towed down the tunnel on a freight wagon and parked at the centre of the vault. The vault would be filled with salt and the doors sealed for a quarter of a million years.

The vault had been used as a temporary store for excavation equipment. There were picks and shovels, a jumble of hard-hats, and a couple of pneumatic drills propped against a wall. Hard to know why construction suddenly ceased. But the mining teams downed tools one day and didn't resume.

Tin mugs and plates. A broken welder's mask used as an ashtray. A bottle of Stolichnaya long since evaporated dry.

Punch pulled off his gauntlets and began to load his backpack. He pulled ammo boxes from the shelves. He flipped the latches and removed patties of explosive wrapped in brown paper.

Jane explored corner shadows. A scoop-digger with a broken track.

Something smelled bad. She lifted the edge of a tarpaulin. An emaciated hand. She pulled the tarpaulin aside.

'My God,' said Jane.

'What have you found?' Punch kept packing.

'A body.'

Jane crouched over the body. The corpse was jammed in the digger scoop. Thighs, calves and buttocks were gone. The upper arms, belly and chest had been flayed. Slow decay, despite the cold.

'Who is it?' asked Punch. 'Can you tell?'

Jane trained her flashlight on the bearded face. Sunken cheeks.

A rictus grin. Scraps of neck flesh. Fragments of a barbed tattoo.

'Gus. I think it's Gus. It looks like someone ate him.'

Punch stuffed a tin of detonators into the side pocket of his backpack.

'Ate him?'

'He's been butchered. Someone used a knife. Did a thorough job.'

'Let's get off this fucking island.'

'Punch,' shouted Jane. She trained her flashlight on the vault door. A figure in a red hooded parka was struggling to heave the door shut. 'Don't let him lock us in.'

Punch hurriedly shouldered his shotgun. He shot wide, and blew a crater in the lead wall. He fired again. The impact scoured a deep trench in the closing door. He threw the gun. It skittered across the concrete floor and jammed the vault door just as it closed.

He dived for the gun and grabbed the butt. He wrestled for the weapon with an unseen adversary. He pulled the trigger. Muzzle-flash. Blast like a thunderclap. A scream of rage.

'Punch, get out of the way,' shouted Jane.

Punch rolled clear. Jane fired the flamethrower. Screams. She ran across the room. Second burst. The walls and door dripped flame. Lead rivulets like lava. The chamber filled with smoke.

Jane kicked the door wide with her boot. A puff of fire from the flamethrower lit an empty tunnel. Scraps of smouldering fabric on the floor.

'Run, you fuck,' she shouted, her voice turned metallic by the tunnel walls. 'Keep running.'

Punch picked up his smouldering shotgun.

'Think it was Nail?' he asked.

'Who else would it be? Fetch the backpack. Let's go.'

 

They trudged upward, counting the levels. Jane turned round every few paces to check they weren't followed. Brief burst of flame at each junction. She inspected every crevice in case Nail was crouched waiting to launch a second ambush. He was injured but desperate enough to attack.

A distant wind-rush turned to an oceanic roar as they approached the bunker entrance. They leaned into the hurricane. The doors were open and a storm was raging outside. Jane's torch lit swarming snow particles.

'Where the hell did this come from?' Punch shouted to be heard over wind-roar.

'We can beat it.'

'Maybe we should wait.'

'No. Got your radio? Call Ghost. Tell him to switch the refinery floodlights on full and hit the foghorn every twenty seconds. That should guide us home safe and sound.'

They set off into the storm. They descended the concrete steps and walked out on to the frozen sea. They bent double against the gale. Snow furled around them like thick smoke. They couldn't see the floodlights of the rig, but they could feel the foghorn every twenty seconds, a deep rumbling throb that pulsed deeper than incessant wind noise.

Jane turned to Punch. She lifted her ski mask.

'We're making good time,' she reassured him. 'We should see the floodlights any second.'

An infected passenger stumbled out of the blizzard. A man in a blue tracksuit. Jane fired her flamethrower at close range.

The man was blown from his feet like he was hit by a fire hose. He skidded backward across the ice, burning, flames whipped by the wind. He tried to sit up. A second blast put him down for good.

A sudden blow to her back sent Jane sprawling, face down. She slid into the burning man. Her arm caught alight. She slapped to extinguish the flames.

She scrambled to her feet. Punch was gone. His shotgun and backpack lay on the ice.

She shouted into the squalling wind.

'Punch?'

She fired the flamethrower straight up. Flickering flame-light. She looked around.

'Punch? 'Where are you?'

She thought she heard Punch call her name. She ran in pursuit, ran headlong into the blizzard, but found nothing but darkness and driving snow. She wanted to search but was fighting hypothermia.

Jane headed for Rampart, a lone figure struggling through the storm.