Apocalypse: The Savior with System

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“Seriously, Rahu, this is the only way into your lair?!” Paul snapped, panting onto Rahu’s booted feet as he crawled on his belly and forearms inside a carved out tunnel. He wanted to look back and see if Judith was all right but the cramped space wouldn’t even allow him to turn his head properly.

As if reading his thoughts, he felt Judith tap his shoe.

“Yes,” Rahu answered calmly, leading the belly crawl. For a man his size, Rahu didn’t seem to be having a hard time. Paul was feeling a little bit cranky with his new friend.

Prior to them ending up in their current positions, Rahu told them how he had secretly carved out a tunnel in the side of a hill adjacent to his land. To keep it secret, he did everything on his own, the entire exercise taking up more than a year. He admitted that his paranoia contributed to the desire for an escape tunnel.

Paul expected a tunnel that could at least stand as high as an adult human being and as wide to accommodate a Peugeot…not a dog’s tunnel.

Hell, even a dog wouldn’t want to pass through here!

It was lucky that they haven’t encountered snakes and an assortment of tunnel-dwellers like rats and bugs.

Yet.

“We are close to the end,” Rahu stated, crawling faster.

“How would you know?” Paul growled at the man though he knew it was a stupid question to ask of the same man who built the object of his complaint.

“I feel cold wind on my face,” was the reply he got.

Wind was okay and a light. Though a different, more corporeal light at the end of a tunnel was preferred.

Surely, in minutes, Paul was climbing out into a starlit space. He pulled out Judith from the tunnel, which was cleverly concealed behind a wall of thick ivy and brambles. The undisturbed state of the ground at their feet proved no one else had ever been to this spot.

With a hand signal often used in the military, Rahu told them to be quiet and get back on the ground.

“We’re crawling again?!” Paul complained with a sign…and much glaring.

Rahu rolled his eyes and grabbed Paul by the collar, half-throwing him out of the shelter of the trees.

“Navigate and move!” Rahu whispered harshly.

“All right, all right!” Paul whispered back, signing for Rahu to calm down. The man was obviously anxious to return to his old house.

Paul opened his navigation panel and zoomed in for a clearer and larger view of the compound. In addition to navigation, the system also provided zoomed in laser layouts of a target location, allowing Paul to see the compound’s layout. There were five buildings in total inside the area, the largest of which was probably Rahu’s old headquarters and factory.

“There’re five buildings here,” Paul said. “Which one do we go to first?”

“The house.”

“The one south of the HQ?”

“No, the one on the east side.”

Which, Paul noted with incredulity, was the smallest of them all.

He reserved his comment seeing the harassed look on Rahu’s face. With a sigh, Paul led the way forward, alternating with Rahu, carbines up and ready to shoot at anyone who comes at them. Behind them, Judith half-crouched, half-sidled in the semi-darkness, pistol out and just as ready to shoot.

It took them quite a while, hopping, jumping, and squeezing into every dark corner and spot, careful not to get noticed by guards.

Suddenly, Rahu stopped as did Paul. Paul made Judith stay in the shadows with a hand signal.

“What?”

“That’s strange,” Rahu muttered to himself. “It’s quiet.”

Paul perked up his ears. All he could hear was the soft rustling of the leaves and crickets. Maybe a bull frog among the bushes.

But he agreed.

He tightened his hold on his gun.

It was too quiet.

Judith looked at them questioningly. “Not good when you expect to be attacked and have planned for that attack,” Paul explained, motioning for her to quickly cross to their side. She shivered beside him but Paul couldn’t help her there, not until they were out of the elements and inside shelter.

They moved again and finally reached the old residence, which was nothing bigger than the cabin the government used to hand out free food.

Carefully, Rahu went to the door and found it already ajar. He entered followed by Paul and Judith.

When minutes ticked by and they realized no one was going to attack them, they eased their weapons.

“They just left the old place, then,” Paul commented, finally getting a good look around after Rahu opened the lights.

It was not a simple loghouse kind of cabin structure as Paul assumed it was on the map. It seemed small and quaint on the outside, with walls built of brown stone, arched French windows and red-tile saltbox roofing. But appearances can be deceiving as he gawped at the tall ceiling and the area inside. The space was, well, spacious.

Above them, the ceiling probably rose fifty feet or so, with skylight windows that would have let in natural light if it was daytime. From where Paul stood gawking at the thick-timbered ceiling, he could see the moon and stars. Wooden stairs led up to a half-loft, half-room. In the center of the space, Paul made a slow 360-degree turn, marking the living room with brown leather seats, the fireplace, the ultra-modern kitchen, the dining area that can seat six people, and a hallway that led to the back of the house.

Even Judith looked quite impressed with their lodgings albeit temporary.

Rahu was both designer and engineer. His Architectural Digest-worthy house was proof of that. Paul wouldn’t put it past the man either if even his place of residence was full of secret rooms, caches, or other nooks and crannies built to house his very secret blueprints and prototypes.

In the time it took Paul and Judith to look around them while standing in one spot, Rahu had gone to the back of the house, up the loft, and back down again to tell them, “My office and bedroom upstairs has been ransacked. Obviously they’ve been looking for things they thought I hid here.”

“Pretty much as expected,” Paul said with a shrug. “Question is, did you really hide it here in the first place?”

Rahu shook his head. “I already lived twenty steps away from my workplace. If there’s one thing I learned from doing this business, it’s to never take the business home.”

Given the side-eye Judith gave Rahu and her pursed lips, obviously she did not believe him.

“So you really don’t have a secret basement stashed to the ceiling with guns, blades, bombs, and assorted weapons for enemy suppression?” Paul asked in a joking manner.

Then again, Rahu doesn’t joke and even if he understood one, would never answer it as any normal human being was expected to.

“There are two, actually. Yardley raided one. The other is still intact.”

So this Yardley was Rahu’s betrayer, Paul thought for a second until the other thing Rahu said registered. Paul didn’t know if he was glad they still had the means to defend themselves or that they were all standing above volatile and incendiary stuff. Paul sighed and decided to just trust that Rahu’s design savvy extended to making a fire and blastproof arsenal room.

“I don’t know if there’s still food in the pantry,” Rahu said as they all headed towards the kitchen. Tired as they were, they needed to eat first. Of course, there was nothing worth eating inside the fridge but a head of rotting cabbage. Judith looked into the cupboards and managed to find four packets of Korean noodles.

Fifteen minutes later, they were all three silently slurping spicy noodles and savory soup into their mouths.

Paul offered to do the dishes while Judith and Rahu cleaned themselves up. Judith came down from Rahu’s upstairs bedroom in a very large shirt that belonged to Rahu, looking like a loose dress on her. Clean and looking more relaxed than she had been since they first met at the institute, Judith Merkel looked less a doctor of biochemistry and more a college student. Upon seeing him, her eyes narrowed.

The Doctor was back.

Paul wordlessly went and took a long shower himself, so happy he could almost cry at the sheer joy of warm clean water and soap on his skin. Caring not, Paul took longer than he was accustomed to showering and stayed under the spray until his fingers and toes wrinkled. Like Judith, Paul similarly headed to Rahu’s closet and plucked out a shirt. Then he paused and looked at the array of shirts, underclothes, jackets, and pants.

Shirts and underclothes all white, pants all black.

Paul shook his head, chuckling to himself. Typical Rahu.

When he went down, Rahu—also dressed in the same black and white fashion—was being tended to by Judith. The tableau was striking more because he had lost hope of Judith ever leaving her prejudice behind when it came to Rahu. Sure, the man was a criminal, one who was never brought to justice by the people, but if Paul analysed the way Rahu’s life had been, he could safely say that judgement had been passed and Rahu had suffered his punishment…is still suffering the punishment.

After securing the trailing end of the bandages around Rahu’s torso, Judith spoke. “The wounds are starting to heal properly, possibly because of the serum. I think in another week you can do away with the bindings and let the wounds dry out naturally.”

“I hoped he can do away with them much earlier,” Paul said to Judith, walking over to them in the living room. He also noticed that all the windows had no curtains and that anyone outside could very likely see all the way through to the kitchen.

“Say, aren’t we too exposed with the windows like that?”

Rahu looked up as he buttoned his shirt. “All the windows here are privacy filmed. We could have all the lights open and no one outside would know we’re here. Unless…”

Rahu trailed off, a slight frown on his face. He suddenly rose and hurried to the back of the house. Paul and Judith shared a look and followed. Down the hallway to the back was a set of glass doors through which one entered into a space not unlike a library-c*m-office but one with large LED monitors, and a wide table filled with a mess of papers and other knick-knacks. There was a keyboard beneath one monitor and Rahu typed a jumble of letters and symbols. The monitor—all the monitors—lit up, illuminating the entire room with a garish blue light.

It was a CCTV room, with multiple cameras recording from all over the estate. Rahu silently looked at each frame, with Judith and Paul looking on.

So much for not bringing work into the house.

“Do you think they will come back?” asked Judith, peering into one recording from the front of the house.

“Yes,” was Rahu’s grave reply. “In my haste, I forgot that the passcodes for the security I installed here is shared between me and Yardley. He would have already known of my presence the moment I opened the door.”

“Then why are we still here?” Paul asked to no one, already thinking about and dreading the claustrophobic tunnel through they arrived.

“Because Yardley would never attack me in the way that you imagine,” Rahu answered in a cryptic way. At Paul’s shocked silence, he explained, “Oh, he will attack with guns and firepower. But Yardley has always been a cowardly son of a b***h. He’ll hide behind his people and make them do the dirty work. Only when it’s done will he reveal himself.”

“You don’t think he can do all that, say, in the next hour?”

“No,” Rahu calmly said, walking out of the room.

Paul looked at Judith disbelievingly. “He’s calm.”

Judith shrugged and followed out, Paul walking beside her. “If we trust that the security he has here is intact, we won’t really be caught off guard. There are alarms attached to those cameras and possibly trigger wires at specific areas. Also, we’re far safer here at the moment than out there. I don’t think zombies can enter the house, not when they cannot see or feel us.”

Paul did not want to come off as the anxious mother hen of the group and tried to maintain an air of forbearance. He was no tech expert like Rahu or a zombie expert like Judith. What he knew of their enemies, both living and dead, was limited. If Rahu and Judith could see the wisdom of staying here for the time being, he would defer to them.

The stash of weapons and bombs beneath the floor did not seem such a bad idea now.

When they got back to the living space, they saw Rahu had already gone up and was snoring—guns within grabbing distance—on a sofabed on the loft. Beside him, a low mattress, pillows, and a folded blanket was waiting. Before Judith can say a word, Paul plopped himself down on the mattress, grinning.

“I don’t like sleeping in another man’s bed,” he quipped, grabbing a pillow and pretending to sleep.

“Hmph!” Judith turned away and went to Rahu’s bedroom, closing the door with a loud snap.

With a soft bed instead of cold ground beneath him, and a pistol Rahu kindly placed under the pillow, Paul easily drifted into an exhausted, dreamless sleep.