Disclaimer: The following chapter is the non-edited draft of what was written during NaNoWriMo 2018. My apologies in advance for plot holes and other inconsistencies.

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Marie's mouth gaped open as she stared at the Great Hall with horror. What had been designed to give arrivals a sense of greatness and hope for the future was a wreck. The large wall that had featured a massive map of the world had collapsed on the floor in a piles of rubble. The informational displays setup to provide those just arriving with the basic information about the shelter were toppled over on the floor, glass displays shattered with the remaining glass fragments strewn across the floor.

"What happened here?" Lincoln said with wonder in his voice as he noticed the tears streaming down Marie's face.

"I don't...I don't know," Marie said before stating the obvious. "This isn't the way it's supposed to be." She turned and followed the wall around the edge of the hall until she reached a door. Without hesitation, she tried the handle and then disappeared inside. Lincoln, a few steps behind, caught the door just as it was about to close and stepped inside, then froze.

"What is this place?" he asked as he pointed towards banks of computers and several rows of computer stations. Every single chair was precisely pushed in towards the table, as if the room had never been used or it had been left in an orderly fashion.

"It's the control room for the immediate area. Here, they kept track of new arrivals and workers that came and went as the shelter was being constructed. From here, the main gate into the shelter could be opened and closed. In theory, it still can."

"What are you looking for in here?"

"I'm hoping to be able to get a better status read of the shelter form in here. If the Great Hall is in shambles, what about the rest, you know? Going deeper into the shelter may not even be safe."

Marie walked over to one of the computers, sat down and powered it on. At first, only a little green light came on but then the screen came alive and flooded the room with its bright light, illuminating Marie's face with its white light. She began tapping away at the keyboard in front of her. Lincoln could tell that she knew exactly what she was doing. A few moments later, programs appeared on the screen, charts came alive and a series of indicators, some red, some green, appeared on screen. Lincoln had no idea what they meant, except that red likely wasn't good.

"So what are you seeing?" he finally had to ask.

Marie turned and looked at him with a tears forming in her eyes, her face white as a sheet.

"The shelter is empty," she said with a quiver in her voice. "They're gone. They're all gone, Lincoln."

Lincoln blinked and stared at Marie, then at the screen. "What do you mean? Who's all gone?"

"Everyone that came here to take shelter," she said and put her face in her hand as she began to sob.

Lincoln put his arm around her as he sat down next to her. "Marie, I'm sorry, I know this is hard, but I don't understand. Wasn't the point of the shelters that those that stayed in them would eventually leave and rebuild?"

Marie nodded and looked up at him. "Yes, of course but that's my point. There's no record of them ever leaving."

It was then that Lincoln understood. The shelter had been filled with people at some point. They had entered with the hope of one day emerging to rebuild the world outside. Now, they were gone and they never left. Yet, in itself, that didn't make sense to Lincoln. How could the shelter be empty if it was never opened for its residents to leave. Did the trashed Great Hall have anything to do with that? Had there been some sort of fight? Was it possible that someone had managed to break in? Or, had the shelter simply never been populated? Marie had, after all, not been there towards the very end. There was only one way to find out.

"Marie, come on, we need to check out the rest of the shelter. We need to know for sure. Maybe we can find out what happened."

Marie shook her head slowly as she wiped her eyes with her sleeve. "What's the point? They're all gone. There's nothing to see, Lincoln."

"How can you know that for sure just from looking at a computer? Don't you think we should check everything just to be sure?"

"THe data on the computer tells me that the cryo pods are offline," she said and gestured towards the screen as she looked up at him, tears forming again in her eyes. "Do you understand what that means? Either the people in the pods are gone, or they're all dead."

"So let's go find out for sure."

"If they're still there, they're dead. If they're not there, what's the point in looking? If they were here and alive, they would have found us long ago."

Lincoln knew that Marie had a point. Regardless of what had happened, it was unlikely he would find anyone alive in the shelter. That wasn't strictly the point anymore though. To Lincoln, understanding what had happened was just as important.

"Well, if you're not coming, I'm going by myself."

"Whatever you wanna do, Lincoln," Marie said without looking up.

Lincoln sighed, nodded, then turned and walked out of the control room. He glanced over his shoulder before shutting the door but Marie hadn't moved. Her eyes were trained on some invisible distant spot and her mind was obviously elsewhere. He shut the door quietly and retraced their steps back to the entrance they had arrived through.

They cryo pods seemed to be the obvious destination. If they were offline, and they should clearly not be, something had happened with them that needed to be checked out. Maybe he could find a clue to what actually had happened.

As he walked around the Great Hall, several corridors branched off into the depths of the mountain. He saw signs on the walls next to each. He dismissed several corridors until he saw one that had the word CRYO painted on the wall in large, white letters. That had to be it.

Lincoln passed several other entrance doors on each side of the corridor, each associated in one way or another with the cryo pods. Maintenance, research, administrative office and more. At the end of the corridor, he countered another circular room with three corridors that branched of in other directions. One was straight ahead, behind the reception counter, then one each to his left and right. Just like in the Great Hall, the furniture was a mess and a variety of debris covered the floor and the knocked over desk. Paintings that once had covered the walls were in pieces on the floor, the canvas ripped and shredded, the frames splintered. It all seemed to be the product of extreme violence and Lincoln had a hard time understanding why and how.

Each of the three doors that branched off from the reception room were closed. Warning signs with large, red lettering admonished visitors that entry was only allowed by authorized personnel. All others risked expulsion from the shelter. It just as well could have said that unauthorized entry would be punishable by death. Lincoln resolutely walked up the closest door. He hesitated momentarily, then pushed the handle down and pushed open what turned out to be a thick metal door. He braced himself for what he was about to see. It was unlikely to be good, that much he was certain about.

As the door swung open, he took a deep breath, exhaled forcefully and stepped in. Automatic lights flickered on and greeted Lincoln. As the lights came on above him, he gasped. In front of him, row after row of cry pods stretched from just yards in front of him to the rear of cavernous hall. A variety of wires reached from each pod up to the ceiling like spaghetti, connected to outlets of some kind mounted in the ceiling. Slowly, he walked down the isle between two pod rows, his eyes locked onto the pods in front of him, his footsteps echoing around him.

The pods were all tilted backwards at a 45 degree angle. They were all painted white with a semi-transparent cover about the size of a human being. Lincoln stepped up to the first one in the row. He leaned in towards the covered and gazed through the glass. A pair of white orbs and a white toothy grin stared back at him, causing him to take swift step back. He tripped on a cable on the floor and almost fell backwards on his back before he was able to catch himself with his hands.

Breathing heavily, he sat down on the floor as he looked down the row of pods. Were they all like this one, full of corpses? He exhaled forcefully and got back to his feet. With a half a dozen steps, he reached the next pod, which he confirmed contained similar remains.

He ran to the next one, and the next one. They all contained the remains of those that had anticipated their pods to simply be a stepping stone to survival. Instead, they had become a one-way ticket out of this world. Marie had been right. They were all dead, every single one of them.

Lincoln turned and fell to his knees, fighting against the nausea that overwhelmed him, eventually giving in and throwing up on the floor. Breathing heavily, he rolled over onto his back and wiped the remnants of his stomach fluid from his lips. There was no doubt Marie was right, but why? Why were all the residents of the shelter dead, entombed in their cryo pods? Had something malfunction that caused them all to be affected at once? Was it possible that someone had made it inside the shelter to sabotage the whole cryo array?

Lincoln sat up and got up on shaky legs. One thing he was sure about. There wasn't much he could learn from here. He didn't know the systems well enough to even know where to start looking. He needed Marie.

With one last glance at the macabre scene, Lincoln turned and ran out of the chamber and jogged all the way back to the Great Hall and the control room. He burst through the door, slamming it against the wall behind it and stopped next to Marie, hands on his knees as he allowed his breathing to settle down. Marie got up from her chair, a frantic look on her face and put her arm around him.

"Lincoln, are you ok? What happened?"

He shook his head forcefully and gestured in the general direction of the cryo chambers. "No, Marie, I'm not alright," he said between breaths. "You were right, you were right."

Marie took a step back and gasped as her hands came up to cover her mouth. "What do you mean?"

"They're dead. All of them. Back there, in the cryo chambers," he said and pointed again, wagging his finger.

For a moment, Marie looked at Lincoln in disbelief. Tears once again began to stream down her cheeks as she collapsed on the floor, sobbing uncontrollably. Lincoln knelt down next to her and held her tightly as she cried. What else could he do? There was nothing he could really say. Everything she had worked for, all her hopes and all the dreams of the people she had been tasked with leading, all of it had been in this shelter. All of it was gone. Lincoln couldn't hold back the tears as the emotional significance of his discovery hit him and soon they were crying on the floor together in each others arms.

Ten minutes later, their tears had dried up and they sat in silence. Marie had drawn her knees up close to her body and wrapped her arms around them as she rocked back and forth, staring absently at a distant point somewhere across the room. Then, suddenly, she turned to face Lincoln, a new-found determination in her eyes. She got to her feet and stomped over to the terminal and sat down. Her fingers danced over the keyboard as filed opened and closed on the screen.

Lincoln slowly got up and peeked over her shoulder. "What are you doing?"

"Someone was here. Someone did this."

"What do you mean?"

"The cryo pods were built with fail safes. There's no way they would all have failed like that without deliberate outside interference. Someone meant for this to happen and I'm going to find out who."

"How?"

Marie nodded towards the screen. "The access logs. All access into the shelter and all departures were recorded. If someone entered the shelter when they shouldn't have, there will be a record of it."

She scrolled through pages of data, stopping now and then to scrutinize one entry or another. When she gasped and jerked backwards away from the screen, Lincoln knew she had found something.

"What is it, what did you find?"

At first, Marie didn't respond. She just stared at the screen.

"Lincoln, I have to go back. I have to go back right now," she finally said as she got to her feet.

"Back to where? What are you talking about?" Lincoln said and put his hands on her shoulders.

Marie locked eyes with Lincoln. "I need to get back to my time, I have to make sure this doesn't happen."

"I don't get it. We don't even know what happened."

"Maybe not but I know one thing. Someone accessed the shelter after everyone had entered their pods. The pods were shut down not long after."

"Killing everyone?"

"Exactly."

"Who was it?"

"That's the thing that I don't get. Based on the logs, the person that accessed the shelter was my father."

~~~

And the plot thickens! Those that took shelter in the shelter are dead and the perp is Marie's father?? Or, is there more to the story? What do you think?

As always, leave a comment and vote if you like what you're reading!