EPISODE FIVE

“I told you they will not abandon us, Professor Jada and Astra aren’t like that so unless if they had no other choice but to flee, Astra never leaves anyone behind”, Jamie said, looking at professor Jada with a facial expression that exposes his reverence for her, especially having just saved his life.

“No you didn’t say that!” Rhoda objected.

“what do we do now?” Astra asked Jada, walking around the dark area surrounding the small light that the screens on the door showing the entrance to the shelter behind he door.

Jada picked out a pen torch from the breast pocket on her shirt and turned it on, shooting a small stream of light through what they all realize is now a large open area that sits in the cover of the darkness.

Jada walked to the left of the gate, using her pen torch to light her way through the darkness, followed from behind by all of the students.

“Now we settle in, check the integrity of the shelter’s life support system and look for food, if my assumptions about what is happening are right, we will be here for a while and it will be in our best interest to make sure we have the basic necessary survival items in here. If the government is not lying about how well it takes care of the bunkers, we should have full supplies of protein bars, powdered carbs and the oxygen tanks should be full and all the equipment should be functional. Aha, this should be it” Jada said and pulled a lever hanging from the large door.

Instantly, a flash of bright light blinded all of them, then slowly faded out as their eyes adjust to the sudden change in the amount of light. As their vision slowly return to normal, one by one they begin to realize how massive the inside of the bunkers are. From all direction, the space they are currently looking at measures up to how large half a standard football field will be.

Astra and Tim walked around the area, finding scattered all around the large space they are in, large wooden boxes with the government seals on them, some of the boxes are about the size of a small cargo containers, scattered all around the floor while next to each large box, are smaller ones with the same seals on but painted red.

From behind them, Jada and the rest of the students have followed.

“what are these boxes? What is in them? But even more importantly, how did you get the password that opened the door?” Astra asked, looking at Jada dead in the eye with literal curiosity oozing out of her.

“I may as well tell you about this since there is no going back now. The government has mandated that every first class citizen be told about the bunkers and made to cram the keyword to open them, this is the same all over the world so I would have been able to open any other bunker in the world, of course we were made to sign a non disclosure agreement so as to keep it secret all this time” She responded.

 Astra heard something from behind the nearest large box and turned, placing her hand on the pistol on her hip and drawing it out.

“what are you doing?” Rhoda asked, having seen her suddenly looking alert with a pistol in hand. But Astra paid no attention to her, she walks past Tim who was in front of her and aimed her gun at the direction of the large box.

“I know you are there, whoever you are show yourself before we start shooting at you!” Astra shouted.

At first even professor Jada was in surprise of her adopted daughter’s odd behavior, the rest of her colleagues were bewildered at how she is suddenly pointing her gun at an empty space and talking to herself, but all of them suddenly pulled out their guns and pointed at the same direction as Astra, having seen three strange persons dressed in blue overalls with protective helmets on, two men and one woman coming out from behind the containers.

“please don’t shoot, we are from restock units of the defense headquarters, we decided it is best we stay after we entered the shelter to restock oxygen tanks that have leaked out and service the ventilation fans stationed at the top of mount chrome. All of a sudden we heard through our transponders that the invasion has begun, Chrome city has been wiped out and all over the world, people are rushing to the shelters to the bunkers to hide from some monster of alien origin that is killing indiscriminately. After hearing that, we realized it would be best to stay here until more people arrived”, said the woman among them.

Rhoda quickly stepped forward and pointed her gun at the three.

“how did you get in here then and why didn’t you open the door for us when we approached the entrance to the shelter?” she asked them. Then turned back at the rest of her colleagues and said.

“if what Professor Jada told us is true about a handful of people knowing how to open the shelters in case of emergency, then they must have someone like that with them since they don’t seem to have gotten in through the door we came through”.

“she is right, if they have gotten through the main entrance, we shouldn’t have had to activate the sequence fro the scratch, if they have, we should have been buzzed in by them. Even if there are other entrances, those entrances must have some sort of encryption as well so without a first class citizen, it will be impossible to get in”. Jada responded.

“she is right, we were four when we came in here, there is our supervisor Mr. Edgar, he is a first class citizen”, one of the men said.

“where is he now then?” Rhoda quickly asked.

The three looked at each other with visible dread on their faces, then the other man said.

“he is dead! At the time that the monolith landed in chrome city, the shockwave compromised the integrity of one of the pillars supporting the inner bunker. Unfortunately it fell on him and killed him”.

Jada looked at them for a moment, then turned to turned to look at Astra.

“Astra, you keep aim and shoot any of them that tries to run or do anything apart from what I tell them to do. Tim and Khan, search them for weapons and restrain them with these” she said, throwing three hand cuffs in front of them that Rhoda and Lawrence just cant get their hand around how she just magically produced three cuffs seemingly out of nowhere; but Tim on the other hand knows exactly where she got the from, she collected them from him a few minutes ago when the lights were turned on and she noticed something reflecting light from his hip. She knows that he has made a habit of carrying them with him to make booby traps to prank his class mates.

She looked at the three people standing with hands in the air, “get on the ground, face down and hands on your head, if you move or resist you will be shot” she yells at them with a commanding tone that emphasizes how serious she is about what she is saying.

Without resistance, they all slowly put their hands at the back of their heads, knelt down and proceeded to put themselves on the ground face down. Khan and Tim slowly approached them, searched them for weapons and found none; then proceeded to cuff all of them.

“now, if you would please take us to the place where Edgar died, I have to see for myself to believe that he really died the way you said he did. I have known him for more than twenty years so you better be goddamn right about the way he died or I will personally feed you to the alien monster outside” Jada said angrily.

Tim and Khan helped them get up and have them lead the entire group inwards into the inner sections of the bunker.