Breathless: Chapter 1 The Bunker
The Post-apocalypse during a Great war.
The metal stairs groaned and screamed in retaliation from my progress down. The landing grate was slightly rusted from the dripping water from the valves that ran in this stairwell. I looked up to the air pipe. No frost. I pressed my hand to it. Still warm.
This was my job for the week. Check the pipes and blast doors for leakage. It sucked. There were at least a couple thousand valves between the different pipes. We had air, water, and steam. The water was for drinking and reactor coolant, the air was used to open and close the huge blast doors and several of the valves and for breathing, and the steam was the byproduct of the reactor that we used to heat this hole in the fucking ground that I called home.
As I made my way to the lower north tunnel, my fur bristled the entire way down. It was always colder here than elsewhere. Both because it was the lowest point in the compound and because it was close to a natural cave that led to the surface. It constantly leeched heat from us and required searching for leaks every day of the week. So that had me coming down here for the last five days.
I uncapped the oxygen sensor and began my readings. 87%. That was odd. It should be over 95%. We couldn't keep the air entirely sealed in, but we could at least keep most of it. I wrote it down in the log book before heading back up to the upper north tunnel. I'd have to tell Heather and Karlson about it. Report the issue to Pretty. Talk it out with Chief. This was gonna be a long day.
Continuing my rove, I ran past the South blast door, one of my main checkpoints. The door was massive and made of what looked to be solid steel. It sat flush with the bulkhead, meaning that I was never going to run into it if the lights went out. My checkpoints here were to look for corrosion from the water in the atmosphere. No major rusting, no weak looking spots, No oxygen leaking out. Good.
I decided to inform Chief first and foremost, then tell the others. I headed back to the office to report. I rapped on the door, then entered. I pull a salute immediately. "Good afternoon, Chief! Fireman Zerroch, reporting!" The room I had entered was Chief's office. It was rich in books, coffee paraphernalia, and various artifacts from his days out in the fleet.
"Good afternoon, Fireman. Report." Chief Kells was a short cat from New York. His fur was blacker than the coffee he drinks, but with a couple of white spots here and there. He always wore his NSUs, with all his ribbons pinned. He had so many damn ribbons. Too bad they don't matter anymore. He just wears them for the hell of it at this point.
I was never good at speaking to the higher-ups. It always made me nervous to just walk in and report. Was that way before, now, and probably forever. "Chief, o-on my rove, I-I found a suspected air leak in th-the north tunnel, Chief." I stammered a bit. This was much better than last time, but then again, I was a damn mess after the whole shebang with Marvin's death, so this was bound to be better.
"Which one?"
"U-upper tunnel, Chief."
"Again? Wait here for a minute." He got up and left the room. I was stuck there trying not to look into the mirror on the far wall. I knew my coveralls were dirty as fuck and my fur was not well trimmed. It was oily and dirty. I had been working on the oil purifier before my rove, so it made sense. Nevertheless, I was not looking good.
I thought about all the bullshit that happened recently. It was too much. We had gone from twenty to ten in two weeks. Lost four the next week. Last week we lost Marvin to a bonnet-liftoff in the main steam header. All I heard was the sound of the bonnet hitting him in the chest and the scream of superheated steam. He never stood a chance. We could only identify him by his name-tape on his NWUs.
Chief walked back in and said, "Don't worry about fixing it, yet. You go take a god damn shower and trim yourself up. Can't hold a standard around here with you looking like shit."
"Aye aye, Chief!" I did my formal facing movements to leave.
"And find and tell Pretty that he's helping.
"Aye aye."
After my shower and trim, which always took fucking forever with my long ass fur, I finally felt presentable enough to look at myself in the mirror. I saw a handsome young fox with long and luxurious red fur and jet black hair. My ears and the tip of my tail were a dark brown. My eyes were a deep blue with a sense of infinite depth. I wasn't very muscular, so my lean physique lended itself to the maintenance jobs I'd been doing.
I sighed. Pretty was gonna be outside fiddling with the long range radio antennae and our comms array. I'd have to get suited up for this and that also took absolutely forever. Charging the airlock would take some time. With the thought of how long this was gonna take, I walked to the gear locker.
Inside the door were row upon row of thick, white and grey suits. On the far wall were helmets with thick double paned glass as the visors. I ran my hand on the fabric on the surface of the suit. It was a tightly woven metal and plastic mesh on the outside that was almost smooth to the touch. They were airtight, fire resistant, corrosion resistant, and electrically insulating, but that said, they aren't so good at keeping the radiation out. Teresa found that out day 1.
I donned my suit and inspected my helmet. No telling how many times one of us had thrown up in it from working too hard, the heat, or the sweeping sicknesses the first week. I took a sniff and recoiled from it. Deciding it was better this than having my eyeballs sucked out or suffocating, I rubbed some peppermint under the tip of my snout before putting the helmet on. It worked. Just not as well as I had hoped.
I stepped to the airlock door. I pressed the button on the wall, like I had done several times before. This released the locks on the lever that controlled the hydraulics on the huge door. I forced the lever to the open position. The air pumps stole the air from the room, depressurizing it so I didn't explode when I walked out into the near void outside. I sang 'Blood on the Risers' whilst I waited for the air to vent back into the compound.
After a minute or two, my voice stopped echoing off the walls, meaning that I had successfully vented the airlock. My personal headset played a soft static. That was why Pretty was out here. He was fixing our comms systems. Without it, I couldn't communicate with someone more than five feet away from me.
I grabbed the huge lever at the far side of the airlock and pulled it towards me. It grated against the gearing below me, probably groaned in anguish at my moving it, but, no air meant no sound. There was a very slight rush of air leaving the airlock, but it was just enough to move a bit of dust. The light was blinding. It was approximately 1530 and, as such, the sun's beams were in just the right place to hit me right in the fucking eyes from under the rocky overhang. My temporary blindness led me to cover my face with the tail of my suit. Once my eyes adjusted, I looked out over the devastation outside. The grass was yellow and dead. The remains of the houses on the street below looked to have lost their ashiness from the most recent drizzle of what remained of the rain; the fires from the war since stilled from the bombed out corpses of the once near-sacred living spaces. The bunkers and barricades that remained unmolested by the bombs and artillery looked like grave funeral-goers, stood over their fallen comrades like silent sentinels, guarding against the Soviets from the West and the Nazis from the East, long past the day the artillery and bombs stopped falling.
It had been like a torrential downpour of death and destruction for over three and a half years. My brothers had all fought in the war, as had my best friends, and even my father brushed off the old gun and got to work killing the invaders. Dad was a bit of a mental case, but that doesn't matter now. They are all dead. The Nazis, the Soviets, the Occupied French State, the British Empirical Commonwealth, the Australian Liberation Front, the Japs, all were dead. At least, it seemed like they were. If they weren't, they did a good job hiding. From my position, I can see several corpses in varying states of damage and very slightly decayed even though they'd been dead for almost two months. These were from all sides of the conflict.
I walked out from the shelter and moved up the thin catwalk to the top of the hill. I walked on the bridges over the trenches. There were thousands of miles of trenches covering the entirety of the country. In these trenches were the dead or the previously dying nearly frozen for the rest of eternity, or until the sun explodes, or until the water in the oceans had completely evaporated, if they hadn't already. There used to be guns down in those trenches, but we'd already scavenged all of them for a square mile. We had our armory overstocked with more guns than we had use for. Not to mention the sheer tonnage of bullets and explosives.
I carefully picked my way across the broken landscape towards our comms array. I saw a familiar red suit. Pretty had a nasty habit of coloring all his shit, thus the moniker Pretty. I pushed my way through the rubble, stumbling over shattered bricks, busted boards, and gravel between me and the Comms array. About five feet from Pretty, I heard the static clear and his voice played over the headphones.
"Damnit, Charlie! You scared me half to death!" He turns to face me. I was always struck with just how sickly he always looked. He was a 20 something year old Panda. What was supposed to be the black portion of his fur was grey, while the white portion was more yellow. It looked like he'd never showered and that he was really sick. His brown eyes were sunk into his head and he had bags under them from the many days of not sleeping. He had a nasty scraggly beard that he refused to trim. I'm sure he'd have looked better if he'd been in the Navy like the rest of us, but he was a computer programmer that had broken into the compound a few days before the world ended. "What do you want?"
"Chief told me to come get you so we can fix the air leak in the North tunnel."
"AGAIN?!" He smashed enter on his computer and yanked the cord from the comms array. There was a screech from the headphones. I could hear Chief calling out on the radio for anyone within range. I could hear Heather humming to herself. And I could hear Karlson yelling at the reactor plant. Then all at once, they cheered. I tuned the frequency on the radio tuner so that it was just me and Pretty.
"Yep. Its at 87%. Probably less now, but that's not important. We need to get there and figure this shit out."
He sighed and said, "Alright. Let's fucking do this shit, so I can go to sleep."
We walked together to the cave leading to the north tunnel of the compound. We always carried a sort of epoxy to seal the air leaks, either in our suits or in the compound. It dried slowly, but due to the extremely low atmospheric pressure, the water in the epoxy boils off almost immediately, hardening the epoxy almost immediately. It lasts a while, but the little atmosphere left was slightly reactive to the epoxy. I had maybe two cubic feet of epoxy left, so most of this was going to go to Pretty. I'd have to get more the next time I visited the armory,_I thought to myself. We got most of the way through the job and I decided to hurry back to the blast door and report the findings to Chief. I got over halfway there when an earthshaking BOOM! rocked the ground, throwing rocks and rubble skyward from exactly where Pretty was. I saw the rush of air leaving from the compound. I only noticed it by the disturbance from the giant cloud of dust.
Fearing the worst, I ran to the big house by the tree and retrieved my Mosin Nagant. I took off sprinting to the site. I fixed my bayonet and continued my charge. It was probably the Nazis. They had rocket planes, and long range rockets. This was hardly out of what could be expected.
I arrived on the scene to see the wall blown to bits. Pretty was nowhere to be seen. There was also no more overhang. And a giant fucking crater about five feet from the wall. I looked inside and saw that the pipes had all frosted over. I ran inside and saw no one. Everybody had piled up by the pressurized gear closet, hoping to grab a lungful of that sweet, sweet oxygen. I was the only one left. I'm all alone, I thought to myself. I strolled back outside and inspected for clues on what had happened. Turns out that an unexploded bomb detonated right there. I choked back the tears that only just now started to flow. I looked around hoping that Pretty had managed to get out in time.
I found him. Or what was left of him. I followed a small trail of red fabric shreds, nearly invisible from the dust covering.
Pretty was in a mangled heap. He had been flung back about fifty feet, where he was impaled by a tank trap. His left leg and right hand were missing entirely, his right arm hung by a single thread of skin that threatened to give way at any moment. His left leg was bent in odd angles. Well, I mean, So were mine, but that's just how my legs are. His was bent forward and to the side. As if crowning this macabre scene, he had a piece of metal shrapnel sticking from his head. His blood was everywhere. I broke down into sobs, while simultaneously vomiting profusely. This entire ordeal had happened and I was alone. Three fucking minutes.
I thought about ho I would survive now. The thought of being alone left me breathless.
"FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!" I screamed into the void. Nobody could have heard me for miles and miles. Nobody. But-
"Hello? Is anyone out there?" I heard over my comms. I must have accidentally switched the channel while running. "If anyone can hear this head to the following latitude and longitude: 40.7128° N, 74.0060° W. I have shelter, food, water, and air. Just come quickly. And please respond to this before you just start walking here. I'll accept anyone who can work." I hurriedly ran in and hooked my radio's jack into the port and hailed the guy on the other side. "Come in, Come in! This is Charles Zerroch! Answering your call for people." The line was dead for a minute and I had begun to think that this was just an automated message when he came back.
I won't go into details on the conversation, but we had hit it off and he introduced himself as Ferrous Klint. I had begun packing all that I'd need for the journey. I was on the other side of America from this guy.
I don't have much time left here before its time to drive the reactor to meltdown, so I'll make another journal on the road, when I take stops.
October 14, 1995.
FN Zerroch, USN.
This book was found among the dead at the Perdido Beach Nuclear Powered bunker. The rest of the place is a radioactive hellhole from the sabotaged reactor in the bunker. All the guns except for two on the inventory list had been thrown into the reactor compartment before it had been sent to kingdom come. The bodies were buried in nice and marked graves. Our hero moves East to New York. the next journal will be somewhere in Nevada, likely.
Thanks for reading. This being my first story published online, I'm not very good at writing. I'd love to get some critiques on this.