The Murdered World 20

The vault door shut behind them. The room lit up, electronics flickering to life. And a TV switched on, blaring a jaunty tune.

“Hello again, Angel Mercador and cherished guests. Welcome to the Titan Aegis 9000 shelter system, your home away from home in case of nuclear, biological, or chemical attack. Thank you for being a Platinum Star member and please enjoy this personalized message specially recorded by me, Mitch Campbell, CEO and founder of Titan Survival. I’d like to thank you once more for choosing our company and being part of the Titan Survival family. Now let’s take a moment to refamiliarize you with the Aegis 9000. After all, we sell peace of mind—if we’ve done our job, you haven’t thought about us since you made your purchase. But now that you are, there’s probably a mass-casualty event in progress, so first things first.”

“Christy, what is this?” Emma asked, wiping her runny mascara from her face.

Christina hitched up her dress. “The one good thing Angel ever did in his life, that’s what it is. It took three years to built this damn thing. I had to stay in a hotel—there were trucks and power tools going every hour—”

“Quiet,” Frank told her. He stared at the scene. Glamour shots of what looked like a four-star hotel were interspersed with footage of a florid, loud-spoken man, composited onto a beach for some reason…

“Right now, you’re in the decontamination room, part of an airlock system included free with every Aegis 9000. That’s right—this isn’t even the shelter. It’s the first layer of defense for you and your loved ones. See that second door? It’s red, in case you forgot which one you came in through. It’s alright, you’re stressed right now. I would be too.

“Did you get an early warning? It’s alright if you didn’t. But just to be on the safe side, let’s assume you were exposed to something nasty before you got inside. Just place your clothes in the bins on the wall—our built-in Geiger detectors will go over them later. Get inside the privacy units and have a good scrub while I say my piece. Don’t worry—I won’t peek! And there’ll be clean clothes right inside the bunker, free of charge.”

“Christy, what do we do?” Emma asked. “We weren’t exposed to something, were we?”

“It’s alright. It’s just a precaution.” Christina stroked her cheek. “Let’s just—”

Frank had already stripped down. Both women stared at his body—a mass of scars and muscles. He was a rusty nail of a man, a junkyard dog on two legs, yet there was something alluring to the sheer threat of him.

Emma remembered Christina saying that it would turn her on for him to kill Angel. She wondered if her sister meant that. For some reason, it seemed as likely to be the truth as something said to spite Angel. Hell, maybe it was one because it was also the other.

Frank shut the ‘privacy unit,’ becoming just a pair of bare feet on a tiled floor, and water began raining down on him.

A sign on the wall told him how to wash himself to be considered thoroughly disinfected. It seemed self-explanatory. He set about soaping himself off, hearing the showers starting up next to him as Christina and Emma joined in. A surge went through his groin at the thought. He’d only seen them naked briefly, but it’d been a good time while it lasted. A shame that Angel wasn’t a big enough pervert to tell Mitch that he could leave off the walls in this place. Maybe he had, and Mitch had convinced him that he’d be better off this way. If you couldn’t see someone, they couldn’t get radioactive material on you.

Hard to say it wouldn’t be worth it, though.

Mitch’s brash voice droned on: “Despite our name, we know you don’t come to Titan just to survive the end of the world, but to thrive! That’s why our premium shelters are optimized for safety, comfort, and fun! You’ll find that all five hundred square feet of your Aegis 9000 unit is tastefully furnished and decorated, completely outfitted, and fully stocked. There are food, clothes, toiletries, linens, medicine, a one-year supply of fuel. Not to mention the NBC filtration system, deep water well, geothermal heating, and just about anything else you may need to ride out this fracas with very little loss of quality of life.”

Hot water pressed in on Frank’s body, easing him out of the berserk serenity that was his paradoxical legacy, his meaning in life, his skill and curse. It still had not hit him what had happened aboveground. Maybe it never would. An act of murder unparalleled in human history, claiming who knew how much of the over two million people living in Miami-Dade Country. An unprovoked attack that had in one fell swoop raked up more victims than Pol Pot or Kim Il Sung.

Frank wondered why he was still alive. He’d always assumed he would be killed by a bullet, a knife, a hand grenade. Some anonymous criminal who got lucky when he was unlucky or smart when he was stupid. He’d fully expected to die to some punk with a Saturday Night Special and a thumbs up from God. Now here he was. Unburnt in a funeral pyre two million strong. What sense did it make? None whatsoever. His survival seemed to be entirely a sick joke.

He had set his guns, knife, and ammo in a separate bin. Christina and Emma could probably get their hands on them if they really wanted. Might shoot him dead just as a precaution. One man and two women at the end of the world. He wouldn’t like those odds if he wore his genitals on the inside.

But if his life was a sick joke, the universe hadn’t finished telling it yet. So he washed and Christina washed and Emma washed, their water streaming out from under them and joining together and circling down the drain.