Ch. 11 - Dust

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"Dad!"

Until the moment that Kathleen Nolan threw herself into the arms of a rather scruffy looking man with a beard down to his chest and a leather vest reminiscent of an old western - Duck Dynasty in the flesh - Danny didn't actually believe that this guy was her father. After all, four years had passed since the man told Kat to meet him here. Unless Papa Nolan was coming from the other side of the world, that was a suspiciously long time to be missing even with the world gone to hell.

"Katie." The man's voice was thick with emotion, and his red eyes quickly gave way to actual tears. He placed his hands on each side of Kat's head, holding her still while he looked her up and down. "You've grown up."

"It's been six years, Dad," Kat replied shortly. "And nobody calls me Katie anymore. It's Kat."

Six years? The Red Flu only hit four years ago. Danny glanced at Slattery, wondering if the other man noticed the discrepancy. Upon Kat's arrival they had quizzed her about her father - anyone who knew where this base was located had to be considered a risk - but nobody had thought to ask the girl when the last time she saw him was, apparently.

Danny tried to remember Duck Dynasty's name, but the information was lost somewhere in the recesses of his brain. Obviously it hadn't seemed important at the time. Now, every detail felt critical. The timing of the guy's appearance was suspicious, showing up days before the Immunes began beating the bushes but, then again, the same could be said about Eddie. And the guy's emotional reaction to seeing his daughter certainly felt genuine. Plus, he had basically carried Captain Chandler into the camp, the CO having taken a shot to the leg at some point during his sojourn. Rios was currently bandaging the man up in the corner, after his demands that Captain Chandler follow him to the camp hospital were ignored. Still...

One mistake. Sending Alisha back for the radio equipment. Taking his eyes off Debbie. Letting Frankie run down the stairs.

Clenching his hands into fists, Danny forced the memories, the faces, away. He needed to focus on the present, or else more people would die.

"Kat, huh? Guess I'll have to get used to that." Duck Dynasty smiled, his entire focus still on his daughter. "I'm so sorry about your mom."

Kat froze, pulling away to stare up at her father. "You found her?"

For the first time, the man appeared uncertain, one hand moving to stroke his beard. "Weren't you there with her?"

"No, I was at summer camp when people started getting sick. Mom called and said to stay put until she came to get me. Cort was going to stock the farm and we were going to wait out the Red Flu there. Then you called to say I should come here. When Mom didn't show, I knew that something happened but I was still hoping..." Kat trailed off. "Anyway, when she didn't come to get me like she promised, we came here instead."

"Who is we?" Tex demanded.

"The kids with me at summer camp," Kat rushed to explain. Her case flickered to Ray, who was standing uncomfortably to the side, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Holding out her hand, she intertwined her fingers with her boyfriend. "Ray, this is my dad, Ken Nolan, but everyone calls him Tex. Dad, my boyfriend, Raymond Diaz. We were at the camp together. We came up here together. That's when we ran into Captain Chandler and everybody."

Tex's eyes widened, then narrowed. "You came here alone? Except for that...boy there?"

Kat rolled her eyes. "No, Dad, there was a group of us. Kids from the camp."

"Seemed too risky to go home, sir." Ray's eyes were darting everywhere except for Tex, clearly out of his element, but he didn't let go of Kat's hand. "I'm from Miami, and you said to stay away from cities. We figured this place was our safest bet."

Stay away from cities? That sounded like something that Doctor Scott would have said, as opposed to something that a former jarhead would know.

"You said that you found Mom?" Kat said quietly, interrupting the interrogation. Tex's face softened, and Danny sensed that Nolan was struggling to find the right words. Not that any of them really thought Kat's mother might still be alive. There was very little that would tear a mother away from her child, and given the circumstances, death was a pretty solid bet. Still, the details were never pretty.

"I'm sorry, sweetheart. Took me almost a year to get out of Cuba," Tex explained.

This time Danny caught Slattery's gaze, raising an eyebrow. Cuba? That had to mean Gitmo. Terrorism central. Who was Tex Nolan? Naval intelligence? CIA? Some other black ops group? Or just a really good liar?

"My first stop was Tampa. I figured that I could restock and check the house in case you left a note or something. That's where I found your mom. Looked like a break-in. No sign of you or Cort, so I figured two of you made it out and came up here."

"I haven't seen Cort since I left home for summer camp." Kat looked away, brushing away the tears on her cheeks with the back of her hand. "Do you think he left her there?"

Tex seemed surprised. "Cort? Nah. He was a good man. And your mom, if there's better place, she's in it. That woman was a saint..."

"For putting up with you," Kat finished, a giggle escaping her.

Slattery cleared his throat, interrupting the family reunion. "I can appreciate how happy you are to see your daughter again, Nolan. But we're got a few other pressing concerns. We're getting ready to evacuate this camp so any intel that you and Captain Chandler can share about what the Immunes are up to would be pretty damn useful right about now."

Captain Chandler smiled, a real smile, the kind that Danny recalled seeing in the Arctic, back when the mission was temporary and Danny's worst fear was that he and Kara would get caught kissing in a closet. Danny tried to remember the last time that Captain Chandler smiled that way. Months definitely, years probably. Whatever the CO was about to share, it was good. "Don't worry XO, they don't know where we are. They're out there beating the bushes looking for Tex and me but I'm confident that we gave them the slip."

Tex chuckled. "Left them a nice trail leading right through a grove of poison oak before circling around south."

Slattery's eyes narrowed. "Then why tell us to prep for evacuation?"

Captain Chandler stood despite Rios's protest. "Turns out that this Camp was built here for a reason. It was the cover for an underground bunker being constructed less than fifteen clicks southwest. Back during the Cold War, Congress apparently got it into their heads that they wanted a bomb shelter for them and their families in case of nuclear war. Totally secure space with room for a thousand people."

Captain Chandler's announcement was met with dead silence. The news seemed too good to possibly be true. An underground bunker. A secret underground bunker. One that could house almost all of them, hidden deep in the woods where the Immunes would never find them.

And pigs could fly.

"You sure that it's there?" Slattery asked, his voice cautious.

Captain Chandler nodded. "After we lost Ramseys' men, Tex and I checked out the entrance. As far as we could tell from the outside, the place is intact and empty. We tried the intercom but no answer. Of course, that could go two ways. Figured that we better wait for your team to clear it."

Two ways. Either the bunker could be the shelter that they so needed - or it could be a deathtrap, filled with the dead and infected.

"Actually, we made some progress on that front while you were gone," Slattery replied, his words carefully chosen.

Captain Chandler's head snapped up. "Doctor Scott has a vaccine?"

Slattery gazed pointedly at Tex, drawing a mulish look from Chandler. "He saved my life, Mike."

"That doesn't mean we can trust him," Slattery replied shortly. He glanced at Tex. "No offense meant, Nolan, just being careful."

Tex slung an arm over Kat's shoulder. "Hell, you can say what you want about me. You kept my little girl alive. Nothing I can do to repay that."

Encouraged by Slattery's caution, Danny threw in his own question. "Even if the bunker is empty, wouldn't it be better to go north now that the Immunes are getting closer? Once we're inside, we are sitting ducks. All they need to do is surround us and then they could starve us out or pick us off one by one. Illinois is safer."

But was it really? The logistics of moving over a thousand people safely across multiple states and around an unknown number of hot spots, all the while running the risk of tipping off the Immunes, were staggering. Danny's mind flashed back to the hundreds of people waiting, even now, for word of whether they were about to start evacuating - Kara and Frankie among them. Which was safer - running or hiding?

"The Immunes don't know about this place," Captain Chandler replied confidently, grinning at Tex.

Slattery looked between both men and when he spoke there was a definite edge to his voice. "You two want to fill me in?"

"That's how I met the Commodore here. We both decided that it was a good time to break into the new presidential palace," Tex explained, his eyes dancing with merriment. "Captain Chandler's pretty quick with his gun, I'll give him that. We had ourselves a Mexican standoff for a bit. But once we got to talking, we realized that we were on the same team. Got rid of a few pieces of paper and here we are."

Danny stared at the man, wondering whether he really was insane. He almost sounded like he was having fun. As though this was all a lark, rather than life and death. But it was something else that Tex had said which caught Danny's attention. "Presidential palace?"

Captain Chandler sobered. "Immunes have this guy named Jeffrey Michener set up as the President of the United States. He was the Secretary of the Interior before the Red Flu hit and, according to Ramsey anyway, he was next in line for succession."

The President of the United States was an Immune?

"Is he legit?" Slattery demanded.

Chandler nodded grimly. Danny felt a chill spread through his limbs. "What does that make us? Fugitives?"

"No. We have to assume that the President is being coerced. Once the civilians are safe in the bunker, rescuing him should be one of our top priorities," Captain Chandler said firmly and, for the first time, Tex seemed to disagree, his gaze dropping to his toe scrapping across the floor. "Besides, we aren't the only people who rejected the Ramseys' bullshit. There is full-fledged war raging in Europe and they are facing strong resistance from local groups in New England and California. Immunity gave the Ramseys the upper hand. Without that, they don't stand a chance."

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Ninety minutes later, Danny was picking his way through the thick foliage behind Tex, Captain Slattery's final command still ringing in his ears.

Watch him.

The words rattled around his head as Danny scanned the path before them, hoping like hell that he wasn't leading his five-man team into an ambush. That at the end of the day there wouldn't be more blood on his hands. Of course, if they were moving into an ambush, chances were good that he would be dead by the end of the day too. So, at least he wouldn't know how badly he screwed up.

"Cuba, huh?" Danny asked when Tex took a sip of his water, which required the man to stop talking for a full ten seconds. Tex's running commentary had covered everything from Kim Kardasian to his feelings about the various Bond girls. But despite the non-stop chatter, Tex had managed to avoid saying a single thing about who he was, where he was from, or what his plans for the future were. Ken "Tex" Nolan reminded Danny a bit of Smith, actually. Loyal to a fault but perfectly willing to bend the rules to get where he needed to go. The problem for Danny was that he didn't know Tex's end goal, and whether their interests aligned or conflicted.

"Yup. I was at Gitmo when the world went to hell," Tex confirmed. "You in the Arctic with the Commodore?"

The Arctic. Funny how long ago that felt. A different life. A different man. One who still believed that people were fundamentally good. "Yup. Didn't know anything was wrong until we tried coming back."

"You got family at the camp?" Tex's voice didn't change, and Danny wasn't sure whether to be annoyed or grateful that the man asked the question in the same tone he used to discuss the absurdity of Denise Richards portraying a nuclear physicist.

"Wife and daughter," Danny replied. "Rest of my family was in Connecticut."

"Lucky you found them," Tex replied, and Danny wondered whether he was thinking about Kat's mother.

He nodded, his mind wandering to his own parents, his siblings, searching his memory for the last time he spoke to his mother, his younger brother. Sometime before leaving for the Arctic, certainly, but the details were lost in the haze. Danny forced his attention back to the present, to the task at hand. "Kara was in the Arctic with me."

Tex gave a wolf whistle. "You dog! I wouldn't have guessed you for a rule breaker. You seem more like the stick-up-his-ass kind."

"I can't believe I'm working with you," Danny muttered, about to throw in a few additional choice words when Tex abruptly stopped.

"There's the door."

Without someone pointing it out, Danny never would have found the small entrance, hidden as it was in a small hill between the trees. For the first time, Danny allowed himself to believe that this place might just be what they needed - a safe place to hide. "This place better be what you're promising."

Tex cleared the overgrowth away from the door, allowing him to push it open just enough for a single person to slide through. "Time to see if that doctor of yours is all she's cracked up to be."

"She is," Danny replied. At Tex's curious look, he added, "If she wasn't, I'd be hacking up blood right now."

After giving directions to his team to set up a perimeter, Danny took a deep breath, squeezing through the small space into a narrow corridor, Tex on his heels. As they approached an interior door - this one opened without protest - Danny couldn't help but wonder at the lack of security.

"Bomb shelter, remember?" Tex commented, reading Danny's mind while he scanned the walls for a light switch. The florescent lights flickered to life, the buzzing drowning out the sound of their footsteps down the long, empty hallway. "They figured that everyone outside was dead anyway."

"Still, you'd think there would be some sort of passcode," Danny began, only to be cut off.

"1950s. Long before electronic locks were the thing."

At the end of the hall was another door, one that squealed when Tex pushed it open, the bolts rusted from lack of use. Moving through the entrance, Danny began coughing, the stale air and decades of accumulated dust practically choking him. After locating the light switch, Danny determined that they were in a large space filled with shelves and tables. The room appeared to be a cafeteria of some sort and, as Danny took a step forward, he realized that the shelving was stacked with what appeared to be industrial size food cans. Tex grabbed one of the cans, tossing it in his hand as they moved towards the door directly across the space.

"Fifty year old creamed corn," he noted. "Think it's any good?"

Still coughing, Danny glowered at Tex. "Did those plans you found mention how big this place was?"

"About 20,000 square feet," Tex said, whistling. "Hope you brought your walking shoes."

Two hours and roughly forty rooms later, having found nothing but dust, dust, and more dust, the question that had been on the tip of Danny's tongue since the moment Tex arrived slipped out. "What took you so long to get here?"

Tex paused, and Danny wondered whether he would answer. "How old's your girl?"

"Almost four."

"That's a good age. Katie was the cutest thing back then, running around in a tutu claiming to be a flamingo." Tex smiled, lost in a memory. When he looked up, his eyes were dead serious. "Guys like you and me, we aren't the kind of dads who are going to be home every night for dinner. We aren't good with homework or remembering not to swear in front of the kids. The one thing we can do is make sure that our kids are safe. So that's what I did. Made sure that none of those assholes would ever find my little girl."

And, just like that, Danny understood why Captain Chandler trusted Tex. Not because Tex saved his life, but because they were both fathers, and he knew. He knew that there was no limit to what Tex would do to keep his daughter safe. "You really destroy everything showing that this place existed?"

Tex smirked. "Oh, Connecticut, you wouldn't believe me if I told you."