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Chapter One
Present Day…
A vast expanseof nothingness loomed above me. I waited for my eyes to adjust and for the twinkling lights of the stars to pop into existence, but they didn’t.
Even after all these weeks, or maybe it was months now, I still dreamt of the life Adam and I used to have. I missed fresh air and the stars. I missed my relationship with Adam.
Rolling to my side, I tried to make out his bunk in the darkness. It was unlikely he was in it since I was in mine. But just in case, I whispered his name softly.
“You awake, babe?” he called from somewhere else in the bunker.
“Yeah.”
“We’re low on juice. I had to turn off the non-essentials until sunrise.”
“Okay.” Knowing what that meant, I carefully got out of bed and felt my way to the shelves that held my clothes.
The battery bank handled the load we put on it reasonably well, thanks to the small wind turbine behind the barn and the solar panels on the house. But the recent winter storm had hit us with a mix of snow and ice, and based on the depletion of power, the panels and turbine blades were still covered. We’d hoped the mess would’ve melted by now since I wasn’t a fan of heights and Adam wasn’t a fan of leaving me on the ground out in the open.
I dressed and felt my way down the hall to the bathroom. The complete silence inside the bunker registered as I reached my destination, and I realized Adam had not only turned off the lights but the aquaponics and the radio as well. Blind, yet familiar with the space after living here for so long, I used the bathroom then headed for the control room.
Adam had one monitor displaying four of the cameras his uncle had set up. My stomach twisted with worry.
“How much longer until sunrise?”
“Another forty minutes.”
“Can we wait that long?”
“We’re not going up there in the dark.” He stood, kissed my forehead, and steered me into the chair. “I’m going to gear up. We’ll be ready for first light. Let me know if the screen goes out.”
I nodded, understanding what he wasn’t saying. We were dangerously low on power.
As soon as I was seated, he left to prep our gear, and I focused on the monitor’s split video images of the main barn door, side door, cattle pen, and the hall leading to the bunker. Had I not been staring, I would have missed the fingers that wrapped around the edge of the side door.
“We have a dead one on screen,” I said.
Adam swore, and I heard him coming down the hall before the beam of his flashlight flooded the control room. I pointed at the screen.
“It hasn’t moved yet.”
When it finally did move, I shivered at the creepy way it leaned in and peeked around the door. The woman’s scalp was missing clumps of hair, and a bit of her chin was missing. Yet she moved fluidly, like she was alive.
“It’s a runner,” Adam said. “I don’t like this, June.”
“I don’t either. But we both know we can’t wait another day. Maybe we’ll get lucky and it’s just one scouting.”
“Maybe.” He squeezed my shoulder. “Keep watching.”
He left the room, and I watched the dead woman peek into the barn twice more before its hand disappeared. The woman’s hand reappeared several minutes later on the main door where she repeated her peeking move.
I switched the camera over from night to day as the sky lightened.
“She’s a little less creepy in daylight,” I called to Adam.
He chuckled. “Unless the patches filled in and she grew a new chin, I doubt that. You ready?”
I checked the hall camera one last time.
