Coal stood for a moment longer, frowning back the way we’d come but he soon followed on too.
Each of the consoles had a bunch of wires rising from them that connected together and ran along the ceiling in a thick braid, leading the way onwards.
“These should lead to the super computer," Alicia said, pointing at the wires.
We moved on, following the twisting path between consoles that headed further and further into the depths of the bunker.
"It must be pretty important if they felt they needed to hide it away down here," Laurie commented.
“Seems a bit excessive to me," I replied.
Movement in the corner of my eye made me turn to look at one of the small desk areas but the shadows didn't shift again as I scrutinised them. I took a step towards the console curiously as I tried to figure out what had caught my attention.
"Ah ha!" Alicia announced in triumph and I turned back to face her and see what she’d found.
She was standing before a huge doorway built into another smoked glass wall, where the wires disappeared inside a darkened room. We proceeded inside carefully. The emergency lights weren't working within so the others flicked their flashlights back on and pieced the room together with the combined beams.
It was massive. Row upon row of black pillars, lit with little lines of flashing blue LEDs, filled it in every direction. The nuclear power source must have had its work cut out, keeping that thing going for all those years. I ran my fingers along the bumps and grooves on the front of one of the panels wondering how we would tell where to plug in the transmitter.
“It's programmed to light up green when we're at the right console," Alicia said, holding up the transmitter as if she’d read my mind.
We started pacing up and down the aisles, our footsteps echoing loudly in the open space. A slight rustling drew my attention back to the room we’d come from but the dim emergency lighting didn't show anything out of place.
Paranoid much?
Around the twentieth aisle, I started to drift behind Alicia who was still striding forward purposefully holding the transmitter in front of her. Laurie was by her side and they were chatting away about something, words like 'transmission' and 'break-horse power' floating back to me as my attention wandered.
"What's going on in your head?" Coal slowed to walk with me.
“I was just thinking, there must have been hundreds of people who worked down here."
“And?"
“And, where did they go? Why did none of them ever come back?"
“I guess they went to find their families."
“And the fact that there are beds, showers, some sort of power source and a massive computer capable of god knows what all tucked away safely down here didn't draw any of them back?"
Coal shrugged.
“It just seems strange that no one would come back, or at least tell someone else about it who would want to come here," I said. “The world had just gone to shit, it seems like a huge underground bunker would be the perfect place to hide away from everything out there.”
“Maybe it's because it's Creeper country. Who knows how long those monsters have ruled around here? Hell, the people who live here could have become the monsters. Or they just ran out of food and had to leave. Even if they intended to come back, the world was in turmoil, anything could have happened to them."
I nodded, though it still seemed odd to me, like we were missing something here.
“Found it." Alicia's voice echoed across the room. She’d disappeared from view with Laurie while we were talking and we moved on quickly to locate them.
Something rattled across the floor and hit the side of my boot and I stilled as I looked around at it.
“What's that?" Coal asked, bending down to retrieve it. He held up a rusted metal drink can with a frown.
“Where did that come from?" I asked.
We looked down the row we stood in as a shiver danced down my spine.
At the far end, a silhouette was outlined by the dim red light of the next room through the smoked glass beyond.