Intervention | NaNoWriMo 2018

Chapter 38 - The Dining Hall

Lincoln woke up and sat straight up, breathing heavily, his heart-rate through the roof. His fingers closed around a metal pipe next to him on the bed as his eyes darted from left to right, checking every part of the room for threats. Something had stirred him from his sleep, but the dark shadows of the early morning hours refused to yield any clues. The place was as quiet as it had been when he closed his eyes the previous night, as empty as it had been when he arrived a few days ago. No-one was there; no-one had been for a very long time.

He swung his legs over the edge of the cot, rubbed his face and let out a long groan, then stood and stretched. Instinctively, he reached for the light switch for the lamp on the nightstand but then remembered that there was no power. For a moment, he considered taking his flashlight but decided that there was little point. The batteries were on their last leg, and the sun would be up before long. Assuming the clouds had dispersed. The rain was wearing on him.

Four other people once shared the room Lincoln had slept in. He had discovered it on the day he arrived at the airstrip as he explored the structures clustered around the runway. He guessed that it had been a dorm for the workers of the base. The communal entertainment and eating areas supported that theory, as did the dozen other bedrooms like this one.

Lincoln walked through the living areas and directly into the cavernous inside of an abandoned hangar. A dissected jet and a small passenger plane with no wings were parked on the one side. A truck with broken windows and shredded tires lay on its side towards the center, and various work areas on the other side of the hangar were in shambles. The two halves of the sliding doors at the front of the hangar had long ago lost their proper place, one of them stuck half-open, the other hanging precariously from the rail at an impossible angle. The wind alone should have knocked it down decades ago.

To avoid the impending disaster involving the hangar doors, Lincoln used a side door to exit the building. He took shelter under an overhang and watched as the rain fell with a quiet smattering on the concrete outside. A low cloud ceiling hid the nearby mountains from view, and unless Lincoln had known better, he could have sworn there was nothing but flatlands around him. So much for sunshine.

A sigh escaped his mouth as he glanced in the shelter's direction. It was close by, not far. Within walking distance. It had been five days since he arrived, five days of excuses and self-inflicted delays, preventing him from approaching the shelter. He knew exactly why too. As much as he hated to admit it to himself, he was afraid; afraid that what he would see would be more of the same; afraid that nothing had changed; afraid that he'd lost Marie forever.

He ran his fingers through his hair and closed his eyes tightly as he felt his chest tighten. Waiting wouldn't help; he knew that. Regardless of how long he camped at the airport, the changes they had set in motion when Marie returned to the past had happened. They were history. Nothing he did or didn't do could change that.

"Ok, ok, ok," he said to himself in exasperation, went back inside and slammed the door shut. There was no point in delaying the inevitable. She either made it, or she didn't. Might as well get it out of the way.

Half an hour later, with a raincoat that smelled like old rubber over his shoulders, he trudged towards the shelter while the rain continued to fall. It had changed from a smattering to a misty fog-like substance that soaked his face and hands as he walked. Within minutes, his pants were soaked by the rain and clung to the skin of his legs, chilling him to the bone.

As he approached the shelter, a thought that had been nagging him since he returned to Earth resurfaced. Now that he was at the shelter, would he be able to get inside? He was painfully aware that Marie had used a combination of a code and a DNA scan to unlock the entrance to the shelter. Sneaking a peek at the code as Marie had entered it had been easy, but Marie's DNA, there was no way for him to fake that. In any normal circumstance, that should have been enough for anyone to give up and dismiss the possibility of entering the shelter at all. For Lincoln, there was no other option. At the very least, he had to try.