Reborn (Alpha's Claim 3)

He’d seen it with his own eyes. Leslie Kantor was right.

Access to the Premier’s Sector had not been a straightforward turn of a knob or a shifting bookcase hidden in the library of some neighboring house. In order to reach the second entrance, there was a series of tunnels, ladders—an ant farm sandwiched above the Undercroft and below the city’s foundation. From the look of them, those dusty, unused crawlspaces had been untouched for years.

Shepherd’s men had not left boot prints in the dirt; they had not unsettled the cobwebs.

Was that because they knew the virus lay at the end of the path? Or, could it be that the tyrant did not know of this secret passage?

If Leslie was right, if what they hoped lay in wait, it almost seemed too good to be true.

The woman knew her way, though once or twice she’d paused and listened to the dark. Both of them had crouched silent as the grave, but noise could be heard: the whining of buried pipes, the distant clank of metal. Not once did she seem unsure, but she was extremely cautious.

The crawl took less than an hour, though every passing minute felt like a lifetime.

One final turn in the path, and a pressurized door adorned with a crank wheel waited. The design was clever, one that would not be affected by electricity, or a lack thereof. The Callas family had exercised caution in the design of their home.

Not that it had saved them...

Between the two of them, the Beta straining and an Alpha small for her dynamic, they barely had the strength to turn the rusted crank. One would think it had been decades since a soul had used this passage by the way the gears stuck. It took the pair longer to unhinge that door than it had to manage the difficult path to it.

On the other side, once the portal swung in, waited more darkness, more dust, and stale air. When they stepped over that threshold, Leslie suggested they seal their entrance, whispering that should she be wrong, the airborne virus would have little chance to escape and potentially infect the population.

It seemed even darker on the other side of that terrifying door.

A shoddy flashlight between them, Leslie and Corday were forced to press themselves together in the confined space; both inhaled and exhaled air that might kill them. After ten ordinary minutes, Corday actually smiled.

Leslie smiled right back, reaching forward to embrace him in their triumph.

His clothing was still stained from his encounter with Senator Kantor’s corpse, he smelled vile and was laden with dust, but she didn’t seem to care. Leslie pressed closer, thanked him in repeated sweet whispers at his ear.

He could not help but hug her back. “Let’s remain vigilant. We still don’t know what waits inside.”

Enthusiastically, she pressed a kiss to his cheek, a happy tear running through the dirt on her own. “But there is no virus here. We’d both be coughing by now if there were.”

It was a victory Corday sorely needed.

The deeper they got into the mansion, with its private gardens and warmth, the more they realized this segment of the Dome was still intact. There were no cracks, no ice. Trees in the atriums bore fruit in the environment’s false summer.

Surrounded by thriving plant life, Corday reached for an orange, stared at the overripe fruit’s dimpled peel. At his feet were its rotting brothers, each one having been wasted with no one to tend the garden or gather the produce. In those fallen fruit, he saw a parody of the resistance, the waste of lost souls, and the foolishness of almost a year of inaction.

How many good men and women had died while Senator Kantor had been extolling caution?

They had only grown weaker...

Leslie claimed he’d known of this place. Why had the old man been so afraid of a door he must have recognized would not have led to the infection of civilians... not when it was underground and difficult to approach. Teams could have been sent, communication via radio established, and a cave-in organized should the volunteers fall ill with infection.

Walking through those silent, elegantly appointed rooms, Corday begin to feel the stirrings of anger towards the old man. Why had he been so afraid of this place?

Claire was also there in his thoughts, her timid smile and faith. How much more had she suffered because Senator Kantor had refused to open a single door?

Room by room, hall by hall, Corday and Leslie found more than fruit.

There were decomposed bodies that had sat so long in the heat, they had putrefied, then mummified. The elite Enforcer guard of the Premier, every last one of them lay dead. But, it was the way they had died that was most unnerving.

No virus had been there.

Not a single guard had drawn their weapons. Yet, many had broken necks, their heads completely turned around—as if one by one, a shadow had crept up upon them and laid them to waste.