She turned to Tom and Bus and went back over basic hand signals we had used before. Then she took the lead as we started down the tunnel.
It was a long tunnel, but the floor was totally dry, and there was no moisture in the air. It didn’t smell as if anything had died in the tunnel, so we didn’t expect to have anything lurch out of the darkness at us. I felt the walls with my fingertips, and it felt like we were inside a big stainless steel tube. It was probably one of the most expensive tunnels ever made, and it was intended to save the lives of important people, but from the looks of things, it hadn’t saved anyone.
It wasn’t long before Kathy gave the hand signal to stop, then the signal to get down. We didn’t know if there was someone up ahead in the tunnel or if she was just being cautious. She shined her light into the distance then stood up and signaled for us to join her. She was standing next to something that looked like an oversized golf cart.
Bus said, “Of course, why didn’t I think of it before. This tunnel is really long, and they wouldn’t have wanted important people to walk all the way.”
“It’s electric,” said Kathy, “which means it would be relatively quiet.”
“Not quiet enough the way sound carries down here,” I said, “but I’d rather ride than walk.”
“Me too,” said Tom. “Why don’t we use it most of the way then walk in the last bit? We could be there in no time.”
It wasn’t much of a vote since all four of us were in favor. Bus was the designated driver, and the rest of us kept our weapons pointed forward just in case we were being incredibly stupid. The tunnel was illuminated by widely spaced lights, but some were burned out, so we couldn’t see well enough to go full speed. We still covered the distance from the tunnel entrance to Fort Sumter in no time, and we didn’t stop until Kathy held up her hand again. She hopped out while the cart was stopping and strode forward into the darkness to look more closely at something.
We all walked up to stand beside her and found ourselves facing a door just like our main door on Mud Island. I let out a low whistle.
“What?” asked Kathy.
Tom interpreted my low whistle by asking, “There are two doors like that?”
Bus cleared his throat and said, “Thirty-two doors would be a more accurate assessment, Tom, and maybe more. Some of the shelters had a main door and a secondary door. This looks like the secondary door to me.”
Bus continued as he walked up to the combination lock, “Each door has a unique combination. I may be one of the only survivors who knows all of the combinations. That’s why I gave them to the Chief. If something happens to me, at least you guys can locate the other shelters and get inside.”
Bus dialed in the combination, and we pulled the handle. The door swung open on totally silent, polished steel hinges.
The first room beyond the huge door was much the same as the decontamination room on Mud Island, but it was clearly designed to accommodate more people. There were more hooks with SCUBA gear hanging from them, more showers, and there were rows of lockers. It was obvious from the start that the people who had set up camp in Fort Sumter had not gained access to the hidden shelter because there were far too many supplies in racks along the walls. Everything was neatly stored and appeared to be untouched.
The lighting in the room was bright, and they didn’t know if it had come on when they opened the door or if it stayed on. Either way, this shelter clearly had power.
“Shouldn’t we wait for the Chief to get back?” I asked.
Kathy looked at Tom for any sign that he was thinking the same thing. He was clearly weighing what would be best, but in the end he was too curious to wait.
“We still have a long time before the Chief is due back. Let’s take a quick look around and then go back to the beach,” he said.
Bus went over and opened several of the lockers and checked the boxes of supplies. Our hesitance gave way to curiosity, and we all joined him checking the labels on packages. There were medical supplies, ration packs, and a variety of useful items. I didn’t know what the others were thinking, but figured this shelter would be an excellent backup to our already large cache of supplies.
“This may be premature to ask,” I said, “but do you guys think this would be a better place to live or a good place to just visit when we need supplies?”
“It’s too soon to say," said Tom. "For one thing, we need to find out what the situation is like up above."
"I'll second that," said Kathy, "and we need to think about how exposed Fort Sumter is. As long as people can see it from shore, they're going to think it's a safe place to be."
Bus added, "Fort Sumter may have been occupied several times by now. Whether the occupants died from within because someone was bitten or they were attacked and defeated, someone else will try to use it like our houseboat. It's just too visible from the mainland."
We finished checking the treasure trove of supplies and then gathered at a second door. It wasn't exactly like our shelter, but we fully expected to find the next room on the other side of the door to have its own wealth of things we could use. Kathy opened the door slowly and peeked around a corner.
"Another hallway," she said.
She stepped through the door, and we followed her single file. There were three more doors set in stainless steel walls, and each door was closed. For some reason it didn't feel like anyone had been through those doors in a long time, probably not since the place had been built.
"Did you say the people who were supposed to use this shelter died trying to get here, Bus?" I asked.
"So I heard when everything started to happen," he said. "Shortwave radio sources started checking in as shelters were occupied, but no one heard from this one."
The closest door was logically the first one to check, so Kathy opened it. The interior was a theater that could seat about three or four hundred people. It wasn't what any of us had expected, so three of us looked at Bus for an explanation.
He shrugged his shoulders. "Your guess is as good as mine," he said. "My guess would be that important people need a stage to stand on, and they need people to make speeches to."
The realization hit me that this shelter would have some of the more sophisticated communications equipment if it was going to be some kind of command and control center. I squeezed past Kathy in the doorway and hurried down an aisle that had a slight downward slope. I passed rows of empty seats that had never been used until I came to the steps that led to the stage. A row of switches were on the wall by the steps, and I put them all to the on position.
Lights came on around the room and curtains parted from the center of the stage outward. There was a podium set off to one side of a massive TV screen, and I was sure I would find the power button in the podium.
Kathy, Tom, and Bus were all trailing behind me, but instead of coming up on the stage, they filed onto the first row as if they were going to sit in the front row of a movie.
I went around behind the podium, and like a true computer geek, I was immediately in my element with the controls. I pressed the familiar button with a partial circle on it, and I could hear a hard drive spinning up. At the same time the huge monitor began to glow with a faint bluish tint. I was so excited that I didn't realize at first that the image forming on the screen was a panoramic view of Charleston harbor. The others stood transfixed by the beautiful sight of the Ravenel Bridge that connected the peninsular city of Charleston on the left to Mt. Pleasant on the right.
From the bridge, tourists would point at Fort Sumter and marvel at the sight of the first shots of the Civil War. From the ramparts of Fort Sumter, tourists would marvel at the beauty of the Arthur Ravenel Bridge. Even now there were probably people with binoculars on both sides eyeballing each other suspiciously.
The others all came up onto the stage and stood right in front of the screen. It was so big and so high resolution that it was like standing in front of a big plate glass window. I pointed over to the left side of the screen. It was partially blocked from view because the camera feeding this big screen must have been hidden somewhere along one of the walls. There was a piece of a wall in the foreground.
"Isn't that where your cruise ship was docked, Kathy?" I said.
"As a matter of fact, Eddie, it is." She stared at the spot remembering that frantic day when she had coordinated the efforts of a few people to help her put up a blockade along the dock that led to the cruise ship terminal. Then came the escape of the Atlantic Spirit from the terminal and out of the harbor to the open sea.
Kathy remembered passing by Fort Sumter and how the infected dead were walking off of the walls that now stood directly above her. Thousands upon thousands of people had died on that ship and in the city, and she had survived because of sheer, stupid luck. She had met the Chief and Jean on the Atlantic Spirit, and then she had met Ed when they had been forced to abandon ship. Now she stood with Ed and two new friends looking at the place where it had all begun for her. The difference was that there were no signs of life. There were no cars or people moving on the bridge or at any of the familiar landmarks of the city she had called home.
As a Charleston City Police Officer, Kathy had been along the waterfront areas to her left many times. She had crossed that bridge and visited the Patriots Point Maritime Museum where the World War II aircraft carrier, USS Yorktown, was parked. She stood there just soaking in the beauty of it all, totally unaware of the speck that had entered the view in the upper right hand corner of the screen.
"What's that?" asked Bus, as he pointed at the speck.
It was so small at first that standing too close to the screen made it look more like a fly walking across the panorama spread out before us. We instinctively stepped back from the screen to get a better view, and the speck grew a little larger.
There are some days that you never forget, and for those people who were standing in front of their television sets watching as the second plane hit the World Trade Center in New York, one thing many of them had in common was a feeling that they weren't watching something as it happened. It was slow to sink in that they were not watching a replay. We experienced something similar to that.
As the speck grew larger we could see that it was a plane, and not just any plane. It looked like the Chief's de Havilland DHC-3 Otter. I couldn't speak for the others, but they were all staring at the screen as if it was a movie. None of us was speculating out loud about why the Chief's plane was flying straight into Charleston harbor.
It wasn't coming toward Fort Sumter. It was on a course straight for the State Ports Authority over by the cruise ship terminal, and as it started to pass closer to Fort Sumter, we could see smoke trailing out from behind it. It was not coming in for a controlled landing on the water. It was on a collision course with the city, and it looked like the Chief was aiming at the patch of water between the bridge and the docks. We watched in open mouthed horror as the plane tilted to the right, showing us its bottom side. It was also missing one of the landing pontoons.
The piece of wall sitting in front of the camera kept us from seeing what happened, but the plane did not emerge from the other side of the wall. Maybe that was the best way for it to happen. I don't know if any of us could have dealt with the sight of our beloved friend crashing into the water.
I looked at Kathy, and tears were streaming down her cheeks. She wasn't making a sound, but her eyes were big and round, and she was just trying to hold it together.
Tom's face was a mixture of confusion and pain. He kept looking at his watch and then back at the screen. It finally dawned on me that he was trying to decide if the Chief had been returning to Fort Sumter on schedule. That would mean Allison was safe back on Mud Island. He would eventually figure out that the plane was returning too soon. The Chief couldn't have flown back to Mud Island, gotten Allison to the shelter almost a mile inland, returned to the plane, and flown back to Charleston in such a short amount of time. Something had happened, and the Chief had tried to make it back to Fort Sumter.
It was Bus who brought us all back to reality. He had been as stunned as any of us by seeing his good friend die in a plane crash, and Allison was Molly's mother. Whatever else happened, it was unbearable for him to think Molly had lost her mother.
"There's still plenty of daylight left," said Bus. "If there's any chance of finding either of them alive, we're going to have to get moving. We need to see what we have running around on top of Fort Sumter, and then we need to find a boat."
That snapped us all back into motion, and we followed Kathy as she turned on her heels and ran for the door of the theater. She didn't worry if there was anything behind doors two and three. She just wanted to get to the Chief like Bus had said.
We went through the door into the hallway at a full run, and Kathy didn’t even slow down as she ran through the second door. I felt like I was back in Guntersville…not at the shelter in Green Cavern, but at the country club.
A corridor went to the left, and there were doors on both sides. The floors had plush carpeting, and there were ornate decorations. Bus had a different impression.