Almost able to hear the hum of flies swarming around the dead, Sam's horrified eyes went over row after row of destroyed cooking, sleeping, and laundry areas. A junkyard of cars stripped of everything usable or tradable, more than a few obviously used as shelter. She raised her goggles, unable to stop the tears. No. Not one of them. These people had been desperate, dying. They would have overrun the guards the second the door was opened.
This was something the government had planned on doing nothing about, and those running things inside had probably watched the slaughter with relief. Well, probably, until just one compassionate soldier or unwilling "draftee" had opened the door to help, unable to watch his own people, maybe even his own family, be murdered, and the compound had been breached.
Sam settled deep in the cover of the flower-dotted brush, sheltered from the sharp wind, while she waited for the fires to burn out. It could have happened that way. Then again, these people might have just been the bait to get the doors open. That also had a ring of truth to it and she looked at the battle scene with new understanding.
Blackened, smoldering piles of debris highlighted dead bodies lined up on the compound's huge front steps, mostly men with gunshot wounds. The women and girls were gone, obviously taken. She pushed away the thought of how bad their lives must be now.
Sam wasn't sure if she could see anything moving, her view blocked by huge mountain slopes of constantly swaying spruce trees, but from this vantage point, she might be able to see their campfires tonight, she decided.
The thick layer of clouds overhead threatened rain, or worse, by morning so she began setting up her small shelter - a painstakingly tight-woven roof made of rubber bands around straw and leaves, and lashed over a wooden frame. Tomorrow she would go down. She was dreading it, but hoped there would be little bits of food and maybe, just maybe, the location of another compound she could go to.
2
Early the next morning, with the smoke mostly gone from the front doors, Sam went to see what remained of the facility.
She had a very hard time forcing her feet to pass through the blackened, bloody entrance to the bunker. She tried hard not to stare at the dead, but again, she couldn't help crying for them as she moved over and around hands outstretched for mercy that hadn't come. Another two hundred American lives, gone.
Footsteps echoing back eerily, Samantha slowly entered the tall, concrete tunnel with wide, nervous eyes, as sharp, glittering pieces of glass crunched loudly under her boots. Thin clouds of smoke still lingered above her head, and snapping flies tried unsuccessfully to invade her long trench coat and gloves as she walked.