Guilt - Andrew Vanderbeek

He knew, with every heartbeat, the full weight of what he'd just done as soon as the door closed. Guilt dripped down his brow with every chilly bead of sweat. The anger which had completely engulfed him only moments ago was now replaced by a seemingly debilitating weakness. Forcing his legs into a walking motion was a mental chore causing a shambling, almost drunken limp.

Leaning his forehead against the icy concrete of the hallway wall, he paused to pull himself together.

 “Get it together John.” He whispered to himself.    He was certain he was in the early stages of shock.  He was walking the razor edge between pushing on and giving up.  He watched, detached from the moment as his right hand, shaking like a leaf in a storm moved from his mud covered hip to his cheek to wipe away a bead of sweat.   He noticed his knees were shaking almost as much as his hands, and considered the fact that the icy cold wall was in actuality essential to his upright position.

His mind went back to what he had just done.  Never in his life had he ever considered himself capable of committing an act that was so definitively evil.   The others would argue he had no choice, it was necessary for their survival.  Even now, mere seconds after the act, a war was raging between his heart and mind.  His mind was screaming that this assessment was true, but his heart was constructing monuments of self-loathing for both the act and his minds acceptance of it.

True the exact situation was forced upon him, forced upon everyone, but his code of ethics were broken and his years of work, his life’s work, were now nothing but a sham, an exercise in theory unable to uphold the touch of reality.  He was a hypocrite, a label he had wielded like a sword against his opponents and detractors for decades.  He was the betrayer, the Judas to what, merely moments ago had been his absolute moral code.

There were so many of them; men, women children, young and old.  They had sensed hope in John, hope that they had all abandoned days ago.  They had followed him, wanting what he had; ignorant of what it was, wanting it anyway.  When he had opened the door they had rushed him, realizing he was not going to share any of his hope with them.  Their desperate pleas, the almost insane looks on their faces, the mad rush that demanded his acquiescence to the mobs will, had both broken his heart and enraged him.  It was the anger that had won, born of primal need to survive, carried on the unquenchable fury of self-preservation. 

Still, when the latch had snapped, and the door sealed, John had felt a part of himself die.  What part was it?  Was it his naïveté of the nature of life, or the previously inextinguishable spark that had always driven John to better and higher purposes.   Time would tell, but what would the narrative of that story be?

On the other side of the door, there was screaming.  How loud must the sound be that it could penetrate the steel and concrete?  There was a hollow pounding, and John could imagine a piece of rubble being used to pound on the steel frame, vainly attempting to breech the vault door or compel an opening in the name of mercy; mercy that would never be forthcoming. 

The disaster had happened so fast.  When it was first mentioned it only made the periphery of news.  As the information become more and more evident terms like “extinction level event” and “end of the world as we know it” started to get passed around; and no longer as the crazy theories of societies outliers.  Then the first actual pictures leaked to the public and all hell broke loose.  The last ten days had been one nightmare after another, survival dependent on one’s ability to dodge the violent prologue to the inevitable devastating event.

The screams clawed through the door, and drilled through John’s ears into his exhauseted and tortured brain.

“Go away.”  John barely got the words out.  But as he stood there, barely finding the strength to fight off the shock that threatened unconsciousness, the words came again. 

“Go away!”  Stronger now the words came again and again, a repetitive sob, not just of sorrow but of the utter emotional release produced by the varied range of the reaction of the human soul to such unmitigated tragedy.  John vomited the exhaustion and terror of the last few days and the panic and desperation of the trip to the vault with each syllable.   The guilt and shame for closing the vault door and the anger and hatred at himself for doing it leapt from his mouth with the spittle of each enunciation.  Now he was screaming at the door.

“GO AWAY!” 

The force of the last scream was more than his knees could take.  He fell facing the wall that had been supporting him, his lips almost touching the floor.   His screams completely ineffective in quieting Hell’s cacophony on the other side of the vault door.  With all that was undoubtedly happening on the other side of that steel plating, he was certain his voice was not only completely unnoticed but utterly inconsequential. 

Time passed.  John stared at the floor, flitting in and out of complete lucidity. 

The sound and the shaking of the vault from the first heavy explosion jerked him back to complete consciousness, and without knowledge of the effort or the motion he was standing, his back to the same wall he had leaned against earlier. 

The mob of people outside the door had gone silent.  John had no idea how long ago that had happened.  The artificially lit hallway had not changed at all, his surroundings offered no bearing in time.  His watch was gone, a casualty of the mad dash from his home and through the ruins of the city.  He wasn’t certain time measured by a watch was any longer of any value anyway.  A second heavy explosion shook the vault, louder this time, and even behind the concrete and steel it was nearly deafening. 

A renewed emotion sprang to the forefront, fear; more than fear, mortal terror.  He realized he was still in the entry hallway.  He had more distance to cover, more tasks to accomplish before he was safe, before all of the others were safe.

Ears ringing he ran away from the door where he had betrayed everything he ever held dear and turned the corner where the hatch going down to the next level was waiting. 

It was closed.  His heart dropped. 

“I must have passed out and the others locked the door.”  It was calm conversational comment, very matter of fact.  It was the proscribed procedures after all, get inside and seal the entrances.  If he had moved on once he had gotten through the door, if he had not given into his shame, he would be inside the vault even now.  Instead, like Lot’s wife he had turned back, and now he was just as doomed as if he also had been turned into a pillar of salt. 

Now he was trapped.  No way in, and no way out.  Unlike the people outside, there would be no sudden violent death in this unadorned hallway.  No desperate last moments to attempt to flee, no fleeting hopes of salvation.  No last instant of human contact.  All that remained were solitary hours of dehydration and then death, alone in this timeless concrete hallway; alone with the memories of his life and the guilt of his final heinous crime.

“Maybe I am already dead?”  John pondered aloud, looking from side to side as if for a sign this might be true.  Purgatory would be horrible like this; trapped alone hating yourself, living in fear of the coming painful death in the dark.  A death that perhaps would not come until the sin of your life was paid in full through the powerful expiation of your suffering.  John thought about the people who died at his hands outside that steel door and for the first time in his life knew a kind of despair reserved for only the most wretched of souls.  If this was purgatory he was going to be here for a very long time.  If it were not purgatory, his death, a few days from now from dehydration would only be a door to that future penalty.

He sat.  His legs straddled the hatch that covered the ladder that led to the promise of life with the others below.  A life now forever denied by a round lid of solid steel over a hole in the ground. 

John was only here because of a college friend.  Without that one connection, that one moment in time where his life had crossed with Bartholomew Grant, he would be dead right now alongside the rest of humanity.

John spent some time thinking about his college friend.  Bart had always been odd.  John had met him first day of his freshmen year when they were assigned the same dorm.  Bart was an engineering major, while John was at the time enrolled as pre-law.  From day one they had hit it off and been close friends ever since. 

Fifteen years after graduation Bart had come to John and disclosed his plans for the vault project.  Something had Bart scared, something he wouldn’t share in detail.  Whatever it was Bart was convinced the vault was essential.  He didn’t want anything but advice, so John had agreed to give his opinion.  John was pretty sure his friend was crazy, but he had to remind himself, Bart had always been more than a little crazy.  Bart’s penchant for insane thinking had a habit of being not only uniquely out of the box, but apropos to the point of being nearly miraculous.  Bart intentionally kept a low profile, you would never see his face on a magazine cover; but rest assured all of the giants in the industrial world knew him and they paid him enormous sums of money for his analysis.  The paid Bart even more money for the rights to use his inventions.  So talented was John’s friend Bart that almost everyone in the world owned devices at least partially designed by Bart Grant.  To say Bart had made a fortune was merely mentioning the tip of the iceberg.

Five years almost to the day from the first mention of the vault, and John had been invited by Bart to tour the completed vault.  John could only guess at how many millions of dollars it required but the vault was finished to Bart’s exacting standards.   The lengths Bart had gone to build and equip what he had dubbed, “Last Chance” bordered on unbelievable.  The tour had begun and ended by the main entrance which was covered by a huge electrically powered door. 

Bart looked at John and said “I am going to drive my truck through that that door, press the button and that will be that.”  That had turned out to be a little disingenuous.  As it turned out the main door was just that, the main door.  There were four other “rabbit” holes that were intended as emergency exits.  Bart had a select few individuals that he had showed where these doors exited and how to operate them as alternative entrances.  Each of these people, John included, had been issued magna-cards that would allow entry, and each one had been given instructions on what to do once inside.

John pulled the magna-card out of his pocket.  It had opened the now thrice hated exterior John had slammed in the face of the desperate mob.  The next portal was the hatch and the ladder that went down thirty feet.  The final door was in a small chamber at the bottom of the ladder and it too would again need the magna-card, granting John entry to the actual vault.

John considered the magna-card for a moment.  He considered breaking it in half.  He considered throwing it across the room.  In the end he simply set it on the floor between his legs and let his thoughts drift. 

Another explosion, far more massive than the previous two rocked the room, the noise and force of which made John cry out in fear.  Perhaps he would escape the slow death of dehydration and be mercifully crushed by the collapse of the surface structure.  The lights in the hall flickered and went out.

As he fell prone on the floor, he noticed something far more important than his imminent death.  Hope. The force of the explosion made the hatch door shift and light had peaked through.  Properly locked it would not have moved at all.  Could it be?

Rising to his feet John pulled on the hatch door.  It came open simply and easily, it had never been locked.  Light from the passage below shone up onto Johns face.  The force of the initial explosions had merely caused the hatch to swing shut.  Snatching up the magna-card John jumped into the hole and climbed down the ladder.  Not a moment too soon.  Another explosion rocked the ground and portions of the hallway collapsed.  The hatch closed again, this time with thousands of pounds of debris on it.  Regardless, John spun the locking wheel and then climbed down into the safety of the vault.

Rising to his feet Bart watched as his friend entered the room.  “Glad you made it John.  You okay?”  A dozen other men and women turned to face the new comer.  Most of them appeared washed and rested.  Some like John looked as if they had just arrived from the hell outside.

John didn’t respond. 

“Everybody say hello to my friend Father John Hart.”