Tasha’s relief was mixed with a sinking feeling. This was her fault. “If I hadn’t panicked and left the pod...”
He pulled her in for an embrace, his arms warm and solid around her as he tucked her head beneath his chin. “It’s not your fault. I should’ve realized you’d freak out when the lights went off but then I didn’t appear. And then when you saw the rifle and thought...? What? I was dead or dying or...?”
She nodded as she held onto him even more tightly, as he held her even closer to his heart in return.
“I could’ve taken the extra minute to tell you what I was doing.” His rich voice rumbled in his chest. “Yeah, the men following me would’ve lost me, but I could’ve caught up to them, led them away from the pod. So don’t beat yourself up, because I messed up, too. This isn’t just on you. I wasn’t thinking about your feelings—only about protecting you. Taking care of you—without your input, which is all kinds of wrong. I also... miscalculated... just how... intensely you care for me.”
Tasha couldn’t help but laugh even as her heart did incredible somersaults at his quiet words. She lifted her head to look up at him. “That was the most Spock-inspired way of saying I didn’t realize how much you love me.”
He smiled down at her, but his amusement didn’t hide the vulnerability in his eyes. “I spent years talking myself out of you and... discounting your feelings. I’m afraid it’s gonna take me a while to catch up to reality. This still feels surreal. Yeah, like, Spock’s-got-a-beard surreal.”
Tasha laughed again. But it was important that she tell him: “When I grabbed the rifle—when I cowboyed up and left the pod, I don’t really know exactly what I thought I was going to do. And when you weren’t bleeding out, outside the pod, I just stood there in the cold, clueless and... and useless—”
“Not useless.” He jumped all over that, cutting her off. “Nuh-uh. Just in possession of a vastly different skillset.”
Her heart really couldn’t get any bigger in her chest, and yet somehow it did.
Thomas kissed her then—swiftly, sweetly—before he released her and essentially set her off to the side. “Let’s see where this door goes.”
He sat down on the concrete floor in front of the open cast-iron door, and using the force of his powerful legs, he kicked the shallow metal back of the little closet. His boots hit with a crash that turned into a clatter as, sure enough, the piece of metal was dislodged into a larger, darker, shadow-filled space.
“Hoo-yah!”
Tasha moved closer to look at what was, undeniably, the entrance to the original bomb shelter’s escape route.
“We need a flashlight,” Thomas said, in near unison with Tasha’s “I’ll get a flashlight.”
“Grab a candle while you’re at it, and your lighter or some matches,” Thomas added.
“Don’t you dare go in there without me,” Tasha called as she hurried into the pod’s living room to grab their jackets, too.
Tasha came back wearing her winter jacket, with her towel hat securely over her head, fastened by the clip under her chin.
“I really don’t think it’ll be that cold in there,” Thomas pointed out as she held out the blue raincoat, the rifle—smart woman—the flashlight, the candle, and Ted’s lighter. He took everything, but put down the raincoat, “at least not until we get closer to the surface. And we’re not going that far. No point in hiking it twice.”
“Bats freak me out,” she said, and when he blinked at the seeming non sequitur, she pointed to the towel. “Bat protection.”
“Ah.” He hadn’t considered that the tunnel might be home to bats, but then again, he didn’t have hair for them to get entangled in. He slipped the rifle over his shoulder, its weight familiar against his back.
Tash pointed to the candle and Ted’s lighter. “Is this because you want to conserve the batteries in the other flashlights?”
“Nah,” he said. “Your freaky thing is bats, mine is hypoxia.”
It was her turn to laugh her lack of understanding. “Oh-kay...?”
“See, anytime you travel through a cave or a mine or an underground passage that hasn’t been used in a while, you want to test for bad air,” he explained. “Easiest way is the Bic test.”
Although Ted’s lighter wasn’t even close to a cheap, plastic Bic. It was heavy and well-made—a twenty-four-karat piece of jewelry with an inscription in what looked like French and, yeah. Those were definitely large diamonds studding the sides and top.
Thomas flipped it open and lit the candle, then stretched out his arm to put the brightly burning flame into the shadowy room beyond the open cast iron doorway, testing the air. The candle didn’t go out, so he squeezed himself through the little door, too, turning on the flashlight to get an even better look around. The space was smaller than he’d first thought—closet-sized, about two meters square—with another of those solid blast-proof doors, like the one at the bottom of the stairs at the pod’s main entrance. This door, however, was tightly shut. Sealed.
“Whoa,” Tasha said, joining him. “It’s a bomb shelter mudroom.”
She was right.
“There are hooks on the wall,” she realized. “To... hang your hazmat suit, after going out to survey the atomic wasteland?”
Thomas laughed. “Probably.” It was entirely possible that had been part of the original early 1960s sales package. Like there’d be an imminent return to normal after nuclear annihilation.
He handed her the candle and the lighter as he turned his attention to that sealed door. It was identical to the one in the main pod, only this one likely hadn’t been opened in years. Possibly not since Prince Ted the First renovated the place.
Nah, he was wrong about that. It opened easily, as if it had been kept well-oiled and maintained. Which made sense. The only thing better than a private sex-pod—for someone who regularly made use of a private sex-pod—was a private sex-pod with a super-secret backdoor.
Thomas hoped this boded well for the tunnel itself—that it, too, would be in equally good repair.
But unlike the front landing and stairs immediately outside of the other blast-proof door, there was no sensor in the escape hatch tunnel to pick up his movement and turn on lights. Probably because there were no lights to go on.
The beam from Thomas’s flashlight bounced off the curved walls of the pipe, fading into the distance until the darkness swallowed it up.
“Whoa,” Tash said again as she followed him. “You were right about the pipe.”
Yeah, this was the exact type of escape exit he’d guessed this era shelter would have.
The pipe was larger in circumference than he’d imagined, though. If he stayed in the very center, he could stand straight and walk tall. Made sense, since both Prince Teds Uno and Dos were above average height, too. Don’t want to make a crown prince crouch.
Tasha held the still-burning candle up and out as they started up the slight incline. Its flame burned merrily, much to his relief. “In theory,” she said, “if there’s a lack of oxygen, the candle will go out...?”