"Nobody panic!" Timothy called, and lights from IPhones glowed to life. Faces reflaced pure fear as the teens around me looked for each other.
"Ginger, can I borrow your phone?" I ask my sister.
She, expectedly says no.
My best friend, Jackson, tells Timothy to keep everyone calm as he and I use his phone to get a look at the dark vault.
I see a grate with a fan, blowing fresh air.
"That's it." I say.
Jackson and i scan the grate. I realize that the best thing I can do is jam the fan and block the vent with something airtight.
The grate's slits are about half a centimeter think, and the thin slits stretch across the five inch by seven inch vent. "Anyone got a pencil!?!" I ask.
Emily hands one to me.
Feeding the pencil into the vent, I jam the fan, stopping it. The pencil bends, but doesn't break. Now for something airtight. Masking tape or duct tape would work, but i doubt Emily has that too.
"Shoot." I mutter. I think, what if I had paper? That would be a temporary fix.
Im incredibly lucky I brought a stack of post-it notes in my pocket.
Taking them out, i take sheet after sheet and ball them up. Jackson gets what I'm doing, and works with me, stuffing the paper balls into the grates slits. We spit on them, and mash them into a sealed block.
It worked. But...
I look at Jackson. I remember that we are now in an airtight room.
I do some math.
We have an three hours of air maximum if everyone stays calm. I explain the problem to Jackson. We return to the group , and again explain the problem to the teens around us quaking with fear. Ginger doesn't cooperate until Eric tells her to breath slow.
Three hours in counting.
Then the ground shakes will a devastating explosion.
YOU ARE READING
Storm Star
Science FictionNine teens, chosen for some mysterious purpose, the survivors of "the wipe-out" as that day was called. A post-apocalyptic world is all that left. And the aliens who came.
