Entombed Read Online Free PDF Page B

the room with their harsh brilliance.
    I glanced around, looking for a weapon or a place to hide. The incinerator room was a large, gray-cinderblock area. Despite its size, there wasn’t much room inside because the incinerator itself dominated the space. It was a big, metal beast with a large, hinged iron door. A ventilation shaft ran from the top of the unit up into the ceiling. A second shaft ran from the ceiling down into the incinerator. This second shaft was a burn chute that went to the bunker’s decontamination center, one floor above. In the event of a nuclear war, survivors could have shed their irradiated clothing, which could then be sent down the chute and burned. The other ventilation shaft acted as a chimney. It exited somewhere atop the mountain, far away from the hotel. I knew there was no way I could escape through it, though. We’d tried that early on in the siege, only to learn that the ductwork narrowed steadily the further it went. A human being wouldn’t have been able to fit through it. I glanced down at my skinny frame, wondering if maybe I could chance it now. Then I shuddered at the thought of getting stuck. Facing down the mob in the bunker was better than slowly starving to death while trapped in a tube.
    Of course, I was starving to death down here, too.
    Still, either option was preferable to facing down the dead, and even if I did make it out of the tube, I’d still have the zombies to contend with. I knew they were still sequestered around the blast doors, even without opening the doors to check. We’d been able to hear them milling around out there. The dead aren’t quiet. They’re anything but. They moan and growl and bump into things. They’d remained at the blast doors. Could they be gathered around the chimney pipe, as well? I didn’t know—and decided the possibility of getting stuck in the tube wasn’t worth the risk of finding out.
    You might be asking yourself why the dead hung around for so long? If they couldn’t get inside the bunker to eat us, why didn’t they just move on in search of easier prey? Well, it’s because they’re stupid. Their bodies may be reanimated, but their brains certainly aren’t—at least, the part of their brain that solves problems and figures things out via logic and thought. Sure, they have their basic motor skills. They can walk and grasp and bite like a motherfucker, but they have no deductive reasoning. They saw us go inside the bunker, so they milled around the blast doors, waiting for us to come out. More zombies arrived and joined the others. Sooner or later, the first group of zombies probably forgot that we were in here, but by then, there are so many of them crowded around the doors, they mimic each other. If one zombie sees another banging on the door, it does the same. And they stay there until they rot away, or something else distracts them.
    In the first few days of the siege, we tried to do that very thing—distract the zombies that were waiting on the other side of the blast door inside the hotel. We sent two volunteers, Rachel and Milo, to the bunker’s other exit. Rachel ran for her high school’s cross country team and Milo was a personal trainer who worked in the hotel’s gym. Both of them could run, and were in good shape. The plan seemed so simple. They’d sneak out of the bunker via the other blast door, make their way down the mountainside and through the woods, and then let the zombies inside the hotel see them. When those zombies began to follow them away from the blast doors, Rachel and Milo would run back to the other exit and get inside before the zombies could catch them. Then the zombies would lose interest and leave. Except things didn’t quite turn out that way. There were more zombies in the woods than we had originally planned on. Rachel and Milo hadn’t made it twenty-five yards past the exit when a corpse shambled out from behind a tree and made a grab for Milo. The personal trainer—this