Zelda Verada's Arc

Chapter 12 of 13

The last wounded soldier went up on a stretcher. Zelda wiped her paws and faced the containment panel. It stood scorched but whole behind the dead tank robot. This was the switch that would close Levels 5 and 6 for good. Logan crouched at the station, reading the dials, his two-fingered hand steady on the controls. "Binder said sequence first, then seal," Logan muttered. He pulled the technical binder from his pack and set it open on the console. "We feed the panel the codes in order. Any step out of place and the fungus gets air." He glanced at Zelda. "No second try on this one." Zelda knelt beside him. "Then we don't miss." She read him each line while Logan keyed it in. The display cleared its old errors one by one. Red turned to amber. Amber held. Logan flipped the master guard and pressed the final switch. Deep below, bolts drove home. The floor shook once and went still. "Lower two levels sealed," Logan said. He checked his watch. "Four hours start to finish. Faster than I figured." He let out a slow breath. "Honestly, I expected it to fight us." Zelda stood in the quiet. The thing they had feared for months was shut away. No fungus. No oxygen reaching it. The top four levels were theirs to build on. She let herself feel it for one breath, then moved to the next job. Sinclair's voice crackled over the radio clipped to her belt. He was still laid up upstairs with his broken leg, running coordination by radio. "Tell me it took," he said. "It took," Zelda answered. "Levels five and six are sealed." "Good gal." A pause. "Then you've got a working building and nothing to put in it. Mary pulled the storage inventory an hour ago. We're short. The salvage from level three won't stock a ward this size." Zelda climbed to the lab on level three. Mary Long met her at the door, scrubs still neat, the medical folder clutched to her chest. She pushed her glasses up and opened the folder without wasting a word. "Antibiotics, penicillin, pain drugs, wound packs," Mary read. "We have enough to run four beds. The plan calls for twelve." She looked up. "A sealed vault this size kept more somewhere. Looters never opened these levels. We just haven't found where." Zelda took the folder and studied the gaps. The ward was finally safe to open. But safe and stocked were two different things. She thought of the towns waiting on supply routes she had promised, the beds she could not fill with empty shelves. "Then we search," Zelda said. "Every locker, every back room on four. Supplies are in here. We just have to reach them before anyone needs them." Sinclair listening on radio says,”There is the storage room on the southeast side that was slightly radioactive, should be safe now that the reactor area is locked down. Just take some backup in case there are rats or something in there.” Tomorrow morning they’ll go in, tonight they get ready.