Dr. Shield's Arc

Chapter 10 of 13

Shield closed the last crate and climbed out of the bunker. She left the door open behind her, the shaft still visible beneath the broken concrete. The garage looked different now—less like a place she was using and more like a place she owned. But ownership brought a problem she hadn't faced before. Sherrie would send another patient eventually. When she did, she'd arrive with guards and questions, and the first thing they'd see was a garage floor torn apart with a bunker full of pre-war supplies underneath. Shield couldn't seal it back up—the concrete had fractured too badly, and she needed access to the equipment. She needed a different solution: a surgical space that looked legitimate enough that no one would search the building or ask why she'd stayed. She found the medical van two blocks away, rusted through but still recognizable with its faded cross on the hood. She dragged it back with a chain and parked it outside the garage entrance, angled so it blocked the view from the street. Then she hauled the canvas tent from the van's cargo bed and set it up inside the garage directly over the bunker shaft. The red cross on the tent's side faced the door. Inside, she arranged a wooden cabinet she'd salvaged from the veterinarian office and filled its glass shelves with the pre-war instruments—scalpels, clamps, retractors, all visible and orderly. She set up a table with sterile boxes stacked beneath it and positioned the headlamp overhead. It looked like a field hospital, the kind that might have operated during the war and survived into now. She stepped outside and looked at the building again. The van out front. The tent visible through the open garage door. The cabinet gleaming behind glass. It didn't look hidden anymore—it looked like exactly what it was: a surgeon's practice. That was the trick. If Sherrie's guards saw a legitimate operation with equipment too valuable to abandon, they wouldn't question why Shield had stayed or what she was protecting. They'd see a doctor with resources, not a woman hiding a cache. Shield locked the garage door and pocketed the key. She'd built her cover from the bunker itself, and now she could work without looking over her shoulder every time someone knocked.