A Wolf's Heart

Chapter 16

*Dedicated to nmcco999. Happy belated birthday!

Dani sat at the dining table, the satellite map of the region laid out and marked by bunkers. The only light came from a single overhead light as she contemplated which bunker they would head to next. They were reaching the end of what they could travel in a day and luckily hadn't encountered any more villages, but that had to change soon. That one village couldn't be the only one, not with the acid fog Mount Weather deployed. It seemed like a waste of resources for only one town. When you considered their watchers, too, it stood to reason that more villages were out there. Why these villages weren't showing up on the satellite map in front of her didn't make sense. There should have been something showing up, but there was nothing outside of some irregular clearings. It just didn't make sense.

A soft throat clearing drew Dani out of her thoughts, and she looked up to see Charlotte hovering on the other side of the table.

"Charlie is everything alright," Dani quietly asked, concern etching her face.

"Couldn't sleep," Charlie replied, rubbing the side of her head. "Dreams."

Dani nodded, softly smiling, "Yeah, they can be a real pain sometimes."

"What about you," the young blonde asked, pulling out a chair and kneeling on it, looking at the map.

"Couldn't sleep either," the older teen said, tapping the side of her head. "Too many thoughts running around up here."

Charlotte cautiously asked, "Is it Atom?"

Dani looked at her in surprise, then shook her head, "No. No, I think I've made peace with that. It hurts, but I don't regret it. Atom was in so much pain that it was wrong to let him continue to suffer. Especially since there was nothing, we could've done to save him."

"Are you figuring out which bunker to go to next," Charlie asked, not pushing about Atom and changing the subject?

"Kinda," Dani relented and tapped a circle next to a lake. "This is the last one within a day's walk, but I'm not sure about it."

Charlotte leaned closer to see what she was pointing to, "Why?"

"It's supposed to be a Homeland Security Emergency Response Bunker," the brunette said, "but it's odd to put it next to a lake."

The young blonde leaned over to peer closer at the spot Dani had tapped, "What's Homeland Security?"

"It was a department of the old government," Dani explained. "As the name suggests, they dealt with anything that could be a domestic security risk. Terrorist attacks, disasters, human trafficking, transportation security...stuff like that."

Charlotte nodded, "So...they'd have places set up in cities and towns in case they needed to act quickly?"

Dani nodded, "Yeah, which is why this placement doesn't make sense. Unless...." Dani unrolled another map over the one, and going back and forth; she let out a small, "Ah-ha."

Charlotte looked at her curiously, "What?"

Dani rolled the map back up, "The bunker used to sit on the outskirts of a town. The town is exactly where the lake is now."

The blonde preteen frowned, "How can a town become a lake?"

"A couple of things," Dani explained. "There could have been a dam that broke and flooded the town. Or maybe there was a water reservoir underneath the town and seismic activity caused the water to rise or drop the town. Or a bomb impact and water filled the space over time."

"Damn."

Dani chuckled, "Yeah." Then she sighed. "Unfortunately, any of that could have also affected the bunker. Most of these places were built decades before the bombs but after the Second World War, then reallocated or abandoned. The integrity could have been compromised long before the nuclear bombs."