Long Live The Dead Read online

  PROLOG

  Surrounded by the inky blackness of night, far from the artificial light of man, the little blue sedan raced along the dirt road. Not quite in control behind the wheel Robert Howard glanced frantically back-and-forth between the rear view mirror, the GPS mounted on the dashboard, and what little he could see of the road ahead.

  “Everything will be okay, we’ll be okay.” He said, as much to himself as to his wife beside him and their daughter in the back seat.

  Despite her seat belt Etta Howard slid around a lot as the car jostled back and forth over the uneven road. She should have still been in a booster seat but hers had been taken out just the day before, when the car was being cleaned and it hadn’t been put back. They had had to leave so suddenly that it had been left behind, abandoned along with everything else that they owned. Anything that couldn’t be grabbed in what short notice they had been given and shoved into a bag.

  She was small for her age, at nine-and-a-half, any one of her classmates would have fit more comfortably into the cars restraint unaided, but Etta had always been small and the doctors said she probably always would be.

  It wasn’t that she was sickly, just small, but despite her diminutive stature she was very brave – she hadn’t cried, not once since this had begun. Not at any of the confusing images on the TV that she wasn’t supposed to have seen, not when she had been kept home from school because so many people had gotten sick and not even when she was woken from her bed in the middle of the night and made to go outside to the car.

  She looked at her mother in the front seat, who turned to look back at her, trying not to show her own fear and not quite succeeding.

  Etta bounced in her seat when they ran over a rock in the road and tried not to let her rising uncertainty turn into fear. She looked at her faint ghost self reflected in the window and wondered what kind of adventure she might be on. Her mother had told her many stories of the Trickster Anansi and while she didn’t really think that he was real… she wondered if perhaps the little Jamaican spider-man might not be behind tonight’s events and whether she might meet him soon.

  All around them the night was an all-powerful wall of darkness that appeared to defeat any challenge their headlights made against it. In front of the car everything seemed to just end - vanish into nothing as if the world ahead of them was being created right there and then as they drove, as if they were racing towards a colossal precipice, a cliff overlooking a black ocean – only they were on a treadmill, burning gas and never getting any closer.

  “One point five miles to your destination.” The GPS chimed in calmly, oblivious to the fact that the world was ending.

  Robert would have switched off the sound but he couldn’t afford to look away from what little of the road he could see, more than once the artificial female voice had guided them around sudden dips and holes in the road that he would have run right into if he had had to navigate on his own.

  He whispered a silent, mental prayer of thanks for the private, company owned navigation system. A commercial GPS would have been lost as soon as they had left the paved road but this one knew exactly where they were going and guided them perfectly with it’s annoyingly calm and regular verbal prompts.

  Back in his native Jamaica Robert had been an artist, but after immigrating to the United States painting did not pay the bills.

  He had taken whatever jobs he could while he navigated the legal minefield of the immigration system and luckily he had been with Greene Global Enterprises for a few months when a simple clerical error had lead to threatened deportation.

  After getting the letter in the mail Robert had tried to handle things himself but it was overwhelming and he had become distracted at work, his supervisor took notice and talked to him about it. A month later at their court hearing a GGE Lawyer represented the entire Howard family and within a couple of months the case was closed and they were all legal.

  Like most GGE employees he had never actually met Graham Greene face-to-face but he swore, if he ever did he would shake his hand vigorously and hug him like a beloved uncle. “If I weren’t immediately tackled to the ground by security” he thought, “Are you allowed to hug billionaires?”

  Despite what people said about him from time to time in the newspapers or on TV, Mr. Greene was a good man. Robert didn’t know if Bill Gates or Richard Branson took as good care of their employees – especially those as menial as him, a simple janitor.

  Yes, Robert Howard thanked God for Graham Greene. The man looked after his employees through good times and bad. And they didn’t get much worse than this.

  Even though he didn’t know what was really going on – the news was filled with strange stories of worldwide sickness and death – he knew that something was happening and he trusted his employer. When the call had come in the middle of the night telling him to pack just a few bags and take his family to a location that would be downloaded into his GPS, he complied, knowing that they would be safe.

  Once again the ground seemed to disappear out from in front of them as they crested another rise then suddenly, without warning they passed through an open gate in a chain link fence.

  Bernadette looked at her husband, Robert trusted in his heart and let it guide him, she had known him since they were children and it was that that had made her fall in love with him, he was always calm and never panicked. She had always loved him but it was in times like this, when the world seemed like it was going mad that she loved him even more, she didn’t know any more then her husband about what it might be happening, nobody did. “Well” she thought, that probably wasn’t true, somebody had to know something and it seemed like Graham Greene was one of those people.

  She didn’t quite trust the eccentric philanthropist, all of the strange things he did that she saw in the news; the airplanes, the spaceships –- the spaceships for God’s sake! She remembered that once when asked why he had wanted to go into space Mr. Greene had jokingly said that he was a “hand’s on” kind of guy and that he wanted to inspect one of his cell phone satellites in person.

  Their cell phones, the GPS, the computer in their home, they were all subsidized services from GGE, sometimes it felt too much like he controlled their lives and she didn’t like that very much. But Robert trusted him and she trusted Robert so that was good enough for her.

  Her uneasiness rose as they approached a chain link fence, with armed guards. They were on more even ground now and what looked like a tank blocked the road ahead. She glanced at her husband again and wondering what he had gotten them into.

  When one of the guards raised his hand to them, Robert slowed the car and stopped. He recognized the guard from the building where he worked, one of the security supervisors. He was wearing body armor and a semi automatic rifle hung across his body, a far cry from his usual casual business suit. Despite his intimidating appearance when he approached them and recognized Robert he smiled.

  “Good morning Mr. Howard – you’re late.” He said firmly but still smiling.

  “I-I-I’m sorry I had to get – ”

  “Don’t worry about it, just follow us in, we’ve got to close the doors.”

  “The doors? But I don’t understand.”

  The guard had already turned and was leaving, Robert couldn’t remember his name and he didn’t want to just yell after him so he quietly rolled up the window and watched as the man climbed into the passenger side of the military style Humvee and it started to drive away.

  He followed and after they had passed through the opening in the fence an automatic gate rolled across sealing them in.

  The GPS was eerily quiet now, wherever their destination was, they were there. None of them said anything, they just rode in silence and tried to keep up wi
th the widespread tail lights that looked like they were following some kind of big rig truck rather than a utility vehicle.

  There was nothing around for miles but the flat desert scrubland that made the Mojave desert famous and Robert couldn’t tell where exactly they were supposed to be going but suddenly the Humvee was gone, the taillights sank down as if the sand had swallowed the colossal truck whole. When he arrived in the same spot just a few seconds later he understood why – in the middle of nowhere there was a cement ramp down that led to a pair of large metal doors. The same guard was already standing there, waiting for them to get inside to close the door.

  They were in a small underground parking structure, already full with a collection of civilian vehicles in a myriad of colors and makes as well a couple of the same type of Humvee. Robert parked the car in the only space left and quickly got out.

  By the time he got around to the back of the car Bernadette was there, they clasped hands while Etta clung to her mother’s side, still doing her best not to be scared.

  There was a loud klaxon going off that made it hard to think but Robert had finally remembered the guard’s name – “Mr. Corben, what is going on here!?”

  The conversation that followed was lost on Etta, she just held as tight as she could to her mother’s waist and watched the night sky as the doors slowly slid closed and yellow lights flashed and span on the walls around them. She watched the waxing moon for as long as she could until the doors came together with a metallic screech and final, decisive thud. The lights stopped spinning and the siren stopped wailing and she thought to herself – What have you done this time Brer ‘Nanci?

  I

  Etta Howard was 107 when she died, she was the last of the old ones, those who had actually seen and walked the surface of the earth before The Cataclysm. She lad lived almost all of her life inside the bunker that Graham Greene had built, she married and had a son and then went on to outlive them both.

  But whilst she may only have had one child of her own she was a mother to dozens of children, every child ever born inside the bunker. In turn she had over 100 grand-children, 47 great-grand-children and 5 great-great-grandchildren when she died.

  For her funeral they had to hold several services over a 24 hour period in order for everyone to have time to say goodbye and mourn her, some came several times and others only once, but they stayed for hours. It was the biggest funeral they had had since Mr. Greene himself passed away.

  Several of the younger children and even some adults took turns sitting with her and reciting to her their favorite Anansi stories, just as she had once sat in the library, or at their bedsides and told them.

  Robert Howard the Third stood in the chapel and watched as the last of the mourners left. Alone, he went and sat by her again himself, soon they would come and take her body away to be cremated. He cried a little at the thought of it – the last tears, he promised himself. His great-grandmother wouldn’t have approved of him wasting so much water. He smiled at all of his memories of her, she had been the one to spend so much time with him and taught him to read, helped sew in him his love of books and stories.

  “Well Nanna… you’ve done your part to “Make room” but there’ll be no Soylent Green here – except in the library ay?”

  Etta would have appreciated his word play if not his morbid sense of humor. When they came to take her away out the back he left by main door.

  Outside in the main hallway, leaning against a wall trying to look not only busy but as if he should be there, Tommy Sterns pretended to study some papers on a clipboard.

  “Hey Tommy, you want something?”

  “Huh, wha- me? No. No. I was just checking the lights, running the list”

  Tommy motioned to the over head lighting and the clip board as if they hadn’t both walked the entire complex countless times before watching for dead or dying bulbs.

  “Ahuh”

  Although Tommy was almost a year older than Robert he had always been the shorter of the two, and now in their twenties he always would be by a few inches, even if stood up on his toes – which he frequently did.

  “What? Do you want to come with me or something?” Tommy asked, feigning innocence.

  “If you want me to come with you - you could just ask.”

  “Well I didn’t want to impose.”

  Smiling Robert took the clip board from him and they started off down the hallway, staring at the ceiling and making notes as they went. If nothing else this simple distraction was a positive step, getting back to work was good, if he grew too maudlin they might pull him off of the expedition and he had worked too hard to be selected to let that happen.

  Maybe if he talked to Pennebaker they would let him take Nanna Etta’s ashes up to the surface with them and he could scatter them into the wind. It seemed somehow fitting to him, she had been born on the surface and that is where she should spend her afterlife.

  It used to be that everyone was born and lived their lives above ground before they died and were buried. For everyone born now, here in the bunker from the day they were born they were already buried, living and dying without ever seeing the sky except in pictures or videos.

  But hopefully that would all change soon – If all went to plan the expedition to the surface would find a new haven for everyone here. Preliminary tests had shown that the ground above the bunker wasn’t viable; it was an inhospitable place where even weeds struggled to grow – which was why Mr. Greene had built the bunker here, far from the public eye.

  Mr. Greene had died before he was born but Robert’s name sake, his grandfather had and had told him stories about who he was as a man and some of the great things he said. Apparently Graham – after The Cataclysm he insisted that all of his peers call him that – had talked to everyone about what he had done and why, answering any question asked of him. “Complete transparency” he had called it.

  The bunker had been built as a prototype using technology originally developed under military and aerospace contracts. It was essentially a subterranean space station, completely self sustainable with a well for water, a hydroponic garden and enough seeds, freeze dried rations and supplies to theoretically last for decades, so far they had made it last almost a century.

  Eccentric and strange were two of the more polite things that Graham Greene had been called and that was without anyone knowing about the secret bunkers that he wanted to build. The original plan had been to build several such structures all over the world so that should he ever be traveling when some catastrophe struck – it didn’t matter what type, they would all be capable of weathering nuclear or biological war – he and as many employees as possible would be safe.

  Lists would be prepared of GGE Employees for all buildings and installations near the bunkers so that should a potentially genocidal or world ending event take place, even if he himself was not threatened, he could at least try to save as many people as he could. In the end no one could have predicted what happened and it was only sheer luck that the first bunker was stocked and operational when The Cataclysm struck.

  Still nobody knew exactly what had happened, for months afterward they had monitored communications from around the world and slowly, one by one, every news station stopped broadcasting in every country around the world.

  They knew that it was a virus, The Final Plague some called it, others “The Rapture”. They knew that it had a 100% fatality rate but other than that they didn’t know much. There were a few pictures of it from under a microscope but no samples, and whilst there were rumors of what it did there was little hard fact to back it up. One thing that the Scientists in the bunker were sure of: whatever it was, it wasn’t airborne and without living hosts it would be long dead by now.

  Two kids came running down the corridor laughing and playing, Tommy stuck out his hand to stop them.

  “Whoa there guys, you seem to have a lot of excess energy… maybe you two should head down to the generator room and run it out on a couple of treadm
ills?”

  The two boys looked at each other and then at their shoes.

  “No sir, we have to… meet our parents… in the… Library, Sir.” One of them managed without looking up.

  “Ahuh, is that so? Well I’ll be sure to talk to your parents later and apologize for slowing you down then” Tommy said knowingly.

  The boys looked at each other again and shared a moment of panic before replying “Yes sir” in unison and walking slowly away.

  After the boys were gone Robert and Tommy shared their own look, they’d been caught doing the same thing themselves more than once at about the same age. Neither one of them knew if the guards then had reported them or not, if they had they hadn’t heard about it.

  Still smiling Tommy turned his attention back to the ceiling lights.

  “Okay, where were we? Ahhh… 1ff46a – okay… 46b – okay…”

  “I should have known I’d find you two defectives holding hands.”

  They didn’t have to look to know who had spoken, but they did anyway just so as to not give him any more of a feeling of superiority, he generated enough of that on his own.

  John Greene was the rotten apple that had fallen very far from the proverbial tree. As a direct descendent of the Greene family he walked around as if he owned the air they breathed, which everyone knew he never would. One of the things that Graham Greene made perfectly clear from the start was that nobody here was indebted to him, this place belonged to everybody here, he renounced all ownership. His only stipulation had been that a governing body would be established to ensure the safety and survival of all.

  Robert was sure that one day John’s plan would be to join the council and somehow usurp power from the other members in some underhanded plot.

  “What’s the matter – are you both afraid of the dark?”