Re-Start Ready – Episode 2 – Even After All This

Trina burned some sweet grass, and smudged herself.

Her computer confirmed that it was tomorrow, not yesterday, or even worse, tonight.

The lights would automatically turn on when you walked through a room or hallway. The lights would turn off after twenty minutes of stillness. And although the people down below turned their desk lights on religiously at 8 am, and off at midnight, Trina always checked her computer. As long as there was electricity at IGSD 14, her computer would tick off the hours, days, and seconds. The computer would always tell her when it was.

But that was all her computer would tell her. There was no Weather (omnipresent dark grey cloud cover.) There were no Sports (off season now, for everything, forever.) There were no Stock Market results (bearish, long, medium, and short term.) Sure, there might be News some day. There had to be other places far enough underground, pre-stocked, with a few survivors.

If they had been underground when the blast hit, that was.

And Trina was pretty sure the News would come by carrier pigeon now. She didn’t know if any pigeons had been below ground Before Blast though. Sure, Todd said the satellites were probably mostly still running, so communication with the outside world was possible. But how many people were alive today, a month after the blast?

None of the people down below knew where the meteor/comet/asteroid had hit the Earth. Nobody knew if the entire planet was buried under ash, or half of it, or just the tri-state area. Although once again, Todd and Judy were not hopeful, with the perma-grey skies above. The clouds were thick, dark, and unmoving. It was all one cloud, really, no “s” involved. The heavens were a solid mass of grey.

Tina’s computer told her that inventory, at current rates of consumption, was good for 54.2 years. And that was at current population levels. The consumption model did not take deaths into account. There would be one or two fewer mouths to feed in five years, a handful less in ten, and a respectable chunk fewer in twenty. Total people living below ground would be really dwindling at 30 years. By the time 40 years rolled around, Trina figured remaining food stock would feed whatever ten or fifteen people remained, well, for as long as they could rip a packet open and stir it into a pot. Water seemed continuous, clean, and re-cycled, although Trina had no clue how. Probably some kind of infra red (?) ultra violet (?) thingy in the basement, with the robots, behind the huge, closed doors in the arena.

Whatever. It was serve-yourself in the cafeteria now. Clean your own dishes. And speaking of serve yourself…

In one of the huge storage rooms, the lights clicked on when Trina swung the door open. She hadn’t brought the inventory label scanner. Why? Because she was not here to open one of the metallic foot lockers, stacked row upon endless row, on black metal shelving. She had a different mission. She was here to catch a mouse.

Food storage rooms here were like a movie she had seen when she was a girl. The movie had Nazis chasing adventurers in fedoras, everyone in classic cars, down the isles. She knew it was foolish for her to try to catch the mouse down here with a single live-trap, and a chunk of reconstituted cheese. It was too much territory, and these doors sealed pretty tight. The metal footlockers seemed impervious to mice. So why would the mouse show up here, instead of eating whatever bugs it could find, and drinking a few scant drips from government issued plumbing?

Cheese.

It might be re-constituted, it might be hard to get at, but as far as cheese went, it was the only game in town for the mouse.

Then again, there might be thousands of mice down here, with the people under the ground. Mice had evolved long before people, indeed, had probably been the ancestors of most mammals, after what Judy called the Fifth Extinction. But guaranteed, as long as there had been people, here in Turtle Island, there had been mice living with them, unobserved, quiet, taking only what they needed. And breeding like mad. Trina was unromantic about that. She knew her job was to monitor for mice, not a single mouse. Because a furry horde would not be good for anyone. And there were (probably) no garden snakes, or owls, cayotes or predators of any kind here in IGSD 14, hundreds of feet under the earth. Trina didn’t know who she would miss more, the crow, or the coyote. They were both clever brothers and sisters to have along with you, in the story of life.

Once again, the cheese sat undisturbed in the silvery live trap. There was no mouse puckey around.

Wise mouse, Trina thought. It would live free, on scant rations, rather than taking a chance on Trina’s mercy, and a jury-rigged cage for it to live in. It might or might not submit to being patted, fed, and talked to by an old lady in her office. For now, it might be the last mouse around, and it would be quiet, wise, and still, as its people had always been.

Andy Bunkowski sharpened the table knife.

At first, he wasn’t sure it would work, sharpening a dull “knife-and-fork” piece of silverware. It was just standard, flat-top table ware, a bit serrated on one edge. Just a checkered edge, for cutting through chicken or fish, in small amounts. Maybe pork chops. Definitely not steak.

But Andy had found a bit of cinderblock, holding a door open in one of the endless sub-sub-basements here at IGSD 14, and he had put it in a paper bag, and carried it back to his room, unchallenged, undiscovered. He supposed the cinderblock itself would do the job, if it ever needed doing. But a chunk of cinderblock would be a slow, clumsy weapon. Andy wanted this job done quick. Fast and efficient. He had never really thought about this sort of thing, except when reading stories-for-boys, (books and comics) as a child. Cutlass or rapier, club or hatchet, the mechanics of killing had never really been a thing for Andy. Now, it was a bit different.

Sure, that fucker Jeff might just be a joker. Hail-fellow-and-well-met. But Andy didn’t think so. In the back of his mind, some atavistic remainder slunk, telling him things like “Get it in between the ribs, Andy…” With both hands. And if you shove the knife all the way in, and it goes “kerplunk” into some human chasm in there, so much the better. Andy didn’t want a fight on his hands. He didn’t want to wrestle over a knife (or cinderblock) while dramatic music played.

He wanted to put Jeff down, hard and quick, and forever. If he had to.

Maybe like a velociraptor, just slash him deep and good, Andy thought. Then slam a door and let the fucker bleed. Maybe finish him off when he was too weak to resist. Like the English archers had finished off the exhausted French knights at Agincourt. Get the job done while they lay helpless, although in a pool of Jeff’s own blood this time, rather than the prepared, churned mud of a battlefield. His one military history class in college had been a bit of a revolting eye-opener for Andy, years ago. Before he had become Andy from Communications. Andy, never-say-an-unwise-word, stay-on-message, chubby, affable Bunkowski.

Andy had also seen a prison movie once, where the good guy killed the bad guy with a glass knife. Impractical. Unnecessary. This knife he was working on would do the job, he knew now. His other prison movie tutorials suggested stabbing the neck, or the stomach, many, many times, because you couldn’t fix that in the hospital. Perhaps impractical. Definitely unnecessary. One deep slash would do the job, let Jeff bleed, then go to work on him a bit later. No hospital down here. No 911.

Andy should have been shocked at his own thinking. He should have tried to befriend Jeff, or stay out of his way. But Andy knew there was no staying out of the way, down below ground, here at Inter Governmental Storage Depot 14. And he didn’t trust Jeff could even make any real friends. Sure Jeff was friendly. Like he was recruiting. Join the Army of Jeff. Be the last one to live.

Yeah, sure Jeff, he thought.

Andy made certain the tip of the blunt old knife got extra attention. It had to be sharp, but still substantial enough to drive through skin, and guts and maybe even bone. The dull, back edge of the knife got some sharpening on the cinderblock, as did the serrated, cutting side. The handle, wrapped and wrapped in masking tape, was thick enough to really grip now.

Dull dinner knife was now sharp and long as a commando weapon, ready to go, set in a home-made paper sheath Andy could slip in the back of his pants.

Who’s going to be last, Andy? Who’s going to be last?

Not you, Jeff. Not you.

Well this IS really annoying, thought Jeff.

Judy Hong Kong Chong is sitting there two rows down and ten seats over, talking to Dr. Blackmathnerd, and I can’t hear what the fuck they’re saying.

Jeff didn’t figure they knew anything more than he did, but you couldn’t always tell with these people. First time he’d ever met a black mathematician, so old Toddsky BlackMan might know a thing or two. And the Koreans, the northern ones, had held up the world back in the 50’s. The entire fucking world. United Nations. A grand policing action. AKA The Korean War. Sure the Chinese had played big brother, but still, those crazy North Koreans were wiley. Wiley enough to slink back across the DMZ line, and point over their shoulders to the Chicoms. Sure, MacArthur, you can drive us back north again, and even use those nukes you wanted, but China has nukes too. So no North Korea for you.

There weren’t so many people in the basement arena seats now. The robots had built the… thing… the machine. And one of the robot guard dogs had led some of them on a merry march to the surface. But it had come back down to the basement again. And so had the people.

And the machine didn’t do anything. The four dogs just sat there guarding the machine. As long as you didn’t hit it with a hammer, the dogs let you be. And nobody had done that since he had. Bunch of pussies. Although note to self: get somebody else to do the dirty work next time. The pilot could do it himself. Or that old fuck Walter. You ain’t got that long left anyway, Walt. Go fuck with the machine. Stick your dick in it, and tell us all what it feels like.

Fucking Chong, Jeff thought to himself. Head Bitch in charge, are you? Fuck that. You and Nerdo the wonder Nerd think you’re leaders down here. You ain’t shit. If it comes down to it, old Jeff has a bullet for each of you. YOU get a bullet, and YOU get a bullet… And that would leave him four more if anyone else felt like making a federal case out of it.

Still, better to hold his temper for awhile, Jeff told himself. He really wanted to know what that machine could do. Why, it might turn out, the machine was more powerful than the last gun on earth, and the last six .357 magnum bullets. Maybe it was an atomic wood-chipper, and spat out golden elixir. You just needed to throw Judy and Todd in there and turn the crank. The Chong Chipper 6000. Also good for Pain in the Ass Toddskys.

Jeff walked down to take a closer look at the machine again, careful not to disturb the sitting dogs around it.

“Careful around the machine,” Judy Chong said.

Fuck you, you useless cunt, Jeff thought. I’ll kill you the fuck last. And make you watch while I eat your friend. But he gave her a game wave, and even did a little pantomime of getting an electric shock again. She was wise enough to shut the fuck up at that point, which was good. If she had said anything, Jeff wasn’t sure he could have stopped himself. He would have just grabbed her head, and banged it on the handrail in front of her seat, over and over again, until her blood pissed down the steps, and she would finally, FINALLY shut the FUCK UP.

Jesus Christ these fucking people were due for a lesson.

In the end, Jeff was too angry to learn anything from looking at the machine again. His blood pounded in his ears, and he was just smart enough to stay away from Todd and Judy while they talked. Wouldn’t due to kill them while they were still useful. They would get their fucking lesson, no doubt. But at a time and place of Jeff’s choosing. Whether it was messy and public, to show everybody else what the fuck was up, or private, deniable and all the sweeter for being stretched out, well… he hadn’t quite decided yet. And with these thoughts, Jeff’s heart slowed a bit, and his blood pressure dropped. Jeff’s in charge now, ladies and germs. You fuckers might not know it, not yet, but Jeff’s in charge. No rules now. Just Jeff. Jeff’s rules. Jeff Rules. Jeff.

Don’t clean the rabbit, this time, Jeff thought. And besides, Daddy’s not around. Not this time. Only Jeff’s around.

Judy was getting worried about Todd. As they sat and stared at the machine, she thought there was something missing in the mathematician. Ever since he had talked about his wife doing laundry, back in his office. That had almost broken Todd, with a grief you could feel when you looked at him. But since they had come back down from the surface of ashes up above, the man was completely flat. No, incurious. That was the word. He didn’t start conversations, or ask questions. Not about anything. They were sitting, staring at the machine, and Judy had tried several times to get Todd’s opinion. What was the machine for? Why had the robots built it underground? Why had they built it at all?

Todd had shrugged a couple of times, said a few things like “Perhaps…” and “We don’t really have enough…”

And then he had just stopped.

“Dr. Mason, A.B.D. PhD…” Judy said. Todd eventually looked at her, surfacing from some dark reverie.

“It’s not just my wife, Judy… And then he was silent, until Judy prompted him again.

“What…”

“It’s all gone.” Todd Mason said, like he was finally able to put the idea into words for the first time.

And Judy Elizabeth Chong knew he was right. If any country had survived, any shred of civilization, any large pocket of humanity, they would have heard something by now. Wouldn’t they?

The planet’s surface was floating lazily around in the sky, Judy Chong knew. She had seen it, standing beside Todd and the others, on the ashy skin of a once-beautiful world.

They had walked the slanted tunnel in the dark. More than ten storeys up they had stepped out on to the ground, drowned in ashes. Miles above, over the missing gates to IGSD 14 was the filthy, dead sky.

Temperatures dropped swiftly, after the surface had burned off. There was no strong shunshine anywhere in sight. Not a plane had flown by, not a single cell phone had picked up any signal, and radios taken to the surface found no stations. And yet… surely a jet engine would clog and die in the dirt-filled cloud that had replace the sky. And with the amount of unmoving DIRT up there, maybe that was all this great silence was. Like the Icelandic volcanoes that had once grounded all flight, temporarily.

Or maybe there were no jets left to fly, no helicopters, no skyscrapers, no people. Just ash, and sorrow. Sorrow for a handful of underground survivors.

Judy watched as the man named Jeff, the one who had been shocked by the robot guard dog, approached the machine again, on the arena floor. She was so worried about Dr.Mason’s sudden silence, that she absently called out to Jeff, worried that he might be hurt too.

“Careful around the machine,” she said. Judy was not able to help Todd Mason. Judy was not able to talk to her dead wife. Judy did not want to see even one more human hurt or killed. When Judy called out the warning, Jeff made a joke of it, and mimed getting a shock. She thought “That’s good. Looks like he’ll be alright. He’s funny. Even after all this.”

Walter was making an MRE.

Meal (Ready to Eat.)

Awful stuff, really. But there were treats, for when you finished. Or when you needed them. It should have offended him professionally, as he had been a cook in the Army. He had run huge kitchens, in “emerging economies.” Translation, he kept the Army fed, even in countries where they fertilized crops with human excrement, leading inevitably to parasites. And nobody had gotten parasites on his watch. Not from his kitchens, anyway.

One bonus about the end of the world… no more tape worms. Or worse.

Sure, tapeworms might exist, they might come back. Any time a rat ate a flea, or however that happened. Some hellacious awful things, parasites. Made a fella think there was no grand plan, after all, just life in all its tenacity, taking myriad violent, beautiful or disgusting forms.

If they ever got around to farming again, maybe long after Walter was dead, he sure hoped they skipped the whole ‘fertilize with human waste’ mistake. Needs must, when the devil drives, as his Daddy would have said. But tapeworms? Come on.

Whenever he got back to the States, he had always marvelled at how safe everything was, how clean. Sure, you could get parasites, and you could get shot or stabbed, but compared with overseas, you had to really work at it. Well, for most places, anyway. Sure, there were plenty of lunatics around with assault rifles. Walter wasn’t really a big fan of that, and he thought there should be some basic background checks, at least for the kind of rifle he had briefly trained on in the Army. But he was also pretty sure he would be one of the survivors, in any kind of mass shooting. Run. That was the answer. Yes, run from cover to cover. Yes, even run from concealment to concealment. But run. Run slow, run fast, it didn’t matter. In the chaos of being attacked in a civilian environment, running was the way to go. Don’t get trampled, but don’t stick around to get hunted.

In a bombardment, or an attack by a real military force, the rule was different. Taking cover was the only way to survive a military attack. Sure, get your M4 if it made you feel better. Make sure the safety was on, though, so you didn’t shoot yourself in the face. Or the dick.

Walter had never married, having given his life to the Service. It had been harder work than any civilian could imagine, the heat of the kitchens, the miserable bastards you had to work with, and sometimes under. Sure, he’d had some girlfriends, some even long term. But deployments put paid to that. And any time he worked state-side, he’d just been too tired. Nobody worked harder than an Army cook. If and when you ever got home, you really needed to sleep. Or watch tv. Or both at the same time. Not really conducive to a happy home life, even if his pockets were full from the mediocre pay of a high-level NCO.

Yes, after retirement he could have worked himself to death in some civilian kitchen, maybe started his own restaurant. Or cafeteria. He could have done some contract work on the private side, in deployments around the world. But the truth was, he was just tired. Wrung out. A full thirty years in the Army was enough. He had seen the world, and maybe because of the places the Army went, he hadn’t been impressed. Yes, Germany had been nice, but that was two years out of thirty. The rest was bosses screaming, and boredom, and bombardments. Thank God it was over.

If he’d been a rich man, he wouldn’t have joined up, that’s for sure. But the old economic draft got you every time.

Walter finished his MRE, eating the candy and snacks last, savouring them. He supposed, relatively speaking, he was a rich man now. Not with money, as all of that was gone (if it had ever been real at all.) But he had a warm, dry, safe bed to sleep in at night. He had a purpose, to keep this place running, at a basic maintenance level, anyway. And mostly, he wasn’t ashes, blowing around on the surface of the planet.

He once read that Versailles had no plumbing, back in the old days. What good was it, he wondered, to be the King of France, if everything smelled like shit all the time? And dysentery killed soldiers and civilians alike, rich and poor, without discrimination. Yes, he had visited Versailles once, posted next door in Germany. Fortunately, there was indoor plumbing now. And endless tourists.

Or there had been, anyway. Walter imagined Versailles was flattened by the blast. If the gates of IGSD 14 had been blown off or cooked away, how could there be a Versailles?

He’d joined the Army after the whole Cold War thing, and so had never really feared nuclear war. Even though he’d had CBRN training, even though he’d done “defecation drills” where you had to take a mock-shit in overalls and a gasmask and gloves, without contaminating yourself with imagined chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear elements. But now here they were.

Nuclear winter was coming. Todd Matheson and he had discussed it. All that dirt in the air, blocking the sun. The planet would drop to winter temperatures and stay there for a good, long while, no matter what the calendar said. If there was any topsoil left, any clean water, any seed of a useful plant, it would be awhile before it bounced back. Todd said something about the Earth being covered in mushrooms for a long time. Some ferns, maybe. And not many kinds of animals for a million years. Or would it be ten million? Perhaps there were still rats and bigger rats, some opossums, and seagulls or something. Anything that could squeeze underground, away from cooking heat, then frozen ash. Pigeons, maybe. Walter supposed he could do something dish-wise with a pigeon. But he didn’t savour the possibility. See his earlier thoughts about parasites.

Funny, Todd Mason made everybody call him by his first name. Guy like that, all the brain power in the world, and he was “just Todd”. Hadn’t finished his Doctoral Thesis, or some damn thing like that. Doctoral Thesis in Math, for fuck’s sake.

Walter wasn’t sure what rank “Mathematician” was (or civvy equivalent) here at IGSD 14. If Todd was a boss, he sure as hell didn’t act like it. He talked to anybody, at their level, and asked their opinions.

The fella sure was taking his wife’s death hard, though. Walter sometimes ruminated over longer-term women he’d been with through the years, but the nagging had always gotten to him in the end. You couldn’t be nagged all day by your co-workers and superiors, then come home and do it again at night. So he hadn’t been able to pull off the wife thing. He guessed Todd’s work, which seemed to be paper, computer, and white board, was different enough from cooking and cleaning at home, that the nagging hadn’t mattered much.

If only his hard-ons would stop, Walter shook his head. Not that he minded them, his body practising hard-ons, at night, while he slept. God knew why, there was nobody down here that would be interested in a retired Army cook. Hard-ons just made it inconvenient to have a leak in the middle of the night, or if somebody knocked on your door while you were sleeping.

I’m sixty-two years old, for fuck’s sake. Can we cool it with the stiffies?

But life will out, if you believed Judy and Todd when they talked about the planet. And if the Earth could eventually grow trees again, and then re-create large animals (mega-fauna, they had called the animals,) then Walter guessed he could put up with some useless boners. Not a million years of boners, he didn’t think. Maybe twenty more years, good lord willing and the heart attacks or cancer don’t rise.

Walter took the plastic MRE bag to the recycle room, and stacked it on top of the rest, for eventual disposal. He wasn’t sure recycling had ever been a real thing, anyway, despite the blue trucks that came to take the stuff away. He’d seen too many burn pits in his time overseas. Maybe there was recycling state-side, but he suspected a lot of plastic ended up being buried in land fills. Or sent overseas to be sorted by people living on garbage heaps. Or just dumped in the ocean.

Walter wondered if there were oceans, anymore.

Eventually, Walter would get some help from the other people under ground, and they would carry all the plastic up to the surface, only to bury it again. Like they were already doing with the organic waste. There wasn’t too much of that though. People were eating what was put in front of them now, even if it was freeze-dried. No bones or peels to deal with. No pits, or seeds you couldn’t eat. And meals were small enough that bread didn’t go stale (beyond microwavability,) or go to mould much.

When would they run out of clean water? Walter pondered. No giant buffaloes here, big tanks brought in from somewhere else, for soldiers to use, strutting around like they could survive anything. Walter didn’t care how far Army Rangers could run, or how tough Delta were. No buffalos full of clean water, you’re starting to die in three days. Quicker in some of the shittier sand-heaps he’d been to.

Yes, he knew where all the giant filter tanks were, and the systems they used to recycle, clean, and even somehow collect artesian water close by. But he didn’t understand how to fix them, or even run them correctly. He knew where the manuals were, and he had gone through them as much as he could, but he was no engineer. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. He was not about to dump bleach into a complex ecological system of recycling, and poison everybody underground. His speed was more change-the-lightbulbs in the infra-red water purifiers, if they ever needed changing. Flush the toilet every time, and clean everything well. Including your hands. That would go a hell of a long way.

“I am no longer a unicorn.” Todd Mason said aloud, alone in his office. But that wasn’t exactly right.

“I am one unicorn in a small herd of unicorns.”

A black man with two graduate degrees in Mathematics (ABD on the PhD, of course,) working for the government for more than a living wage. It had not been common in Before Blast America. What the hell, Todd thought. I might even finish up the PhD thesis. He had oh… probably twenty years of nothingness in front of him. Only problem was, there would likely be no peer review. There probably were no more peers. And there was the rub.

Now all of humanity, whatever the head count was, were unicorns. Extremely rare. Mythical creatures, living in caves, deep underground.

“Even the pinks are rare now.” Todd concluded.

His wife, whiter than snow, a Malmberg from Sweden, had often called herself a Pink. Todd was pretty sure she got it from the Andorians on Star Trek, but her point was well made. She wasn’t really ‘white,’ any more than Todd was really ‘black.’ And she also had no time for white supremacists. She figured “pink” was more reflective of skin-colour reality, and “Pink Power” just didn’t have the ring most neck-bearded fools wanted when racializing others.

“We need to maintain the purity of the pink race,” she would often say to Todd. To which he would inevitably respond “We’re all pink on the inside, baby.”

“I need you to look and make sure, Dr. Matheson.” She would say. It was her way of telling him she was horny. And she had been horny a lot. Perhaps it was part of the job. Graduate school for library science must have been… an astounding place. Todd often joked he would go interdisciplinary, just to hang around with well-read women, with their hair pulled back and glasses ready to be put on a sturdy- legged table, out of the way for wild abandon.

“We’re all just one or two drinks away from being inter-disciplinary…” Dr. Malmberg liked to say.

“I miss you, Malmberg,” Todd said “And I hope to see you soon.” Not from walking out, he had decided. Not from anything dramatic. Because there was a need for him, here, at last. Walter needed him to chat with, over coffee.

Yes, coffee with Walter. Maybe Karen would drop by too. Walter, it seemed, was the only one curious enough to go exploring IGSD 14, and even the ashen world above, and not get freaked out. Walter was definitely keeping this facility running, as best he could. Walter needed Todd’s ear, pretty much every day “to get an Officer’s perspective.” Todd was never sure that wasn’t a veiled insult, somehow, but one acknowledging his periodic usefulness. Todd didn’t really see how he was “an officer,” as he had no rank or power here, in Storage. He was literally just on secondment here, working on various obscure mathematical tasks the government wanted done. Nothing fascinating. It had just been steady money, more achievable than tenure, and no teaching requirements. Especially no undergraduate teaching. Glorified high-school students with a bone to pick. Undergrads were either being forced to do a math course for their unrelated degree, or they were vengeful mathematical would-be prodigies. Well, Todd had to admit, he had probably been exactly the latter in his early twenties. Vengeful no. But scornful of others? Guilty as charged. Luckily, he had grown out of that. He guessed most people did. Your early twenties were for taking on the old bucks, trying to drive them out of the herd, or down in importance. Your thirties were for consolidating your power, and realizing what an idiot you had been in your twenties. Forties were coasting, all right with the world. Your fifties, well, that had been all about trying to hold on, enjoy what you had accomplished. Unfortunately, whatever your sixties had been about in the old days, it looked like Todd wasn’t going to find out. Everything was different now.

He was getting to be an older man now, although he knew it was a bad idea to call yourself “old.” But “middle-aged” didn’t seem to apply anymore. Wife dead. World dead. Stuck underground.

Todd never suspected that Walter was using some anti-suicide training on him.

The military was full of people who had been forced to take a human life. Or human lives. Sometimes dozens, sometimes scores, even hundreds (if you were Air Force, or Artillery,) of human lives. And for all but a small, hidden percentage, this was a huge problem. Humans were not made to kill other humans, not without consequences. Hence the suicide rate, even the homeless and mental illness rates among veterans. It was a rare person indeed that could kill another person, up close, or even far away through a screen, and not pay a price. Walter had lost far too many military friends to suicide. Eventually, he talked to a suicide prevention worker, both to watch over other service people, and maybe even to protect himself, although he had never felt the urge to commit suicide.

You had to get the potential suicidal person to find one reason they would be missed. Maybe it was a person they spoke to at the bus stop every day. Maybe it was the next-door neighbour, who was too old to take the garbage out. You really had to dig for it sometimes, but the smallest thing was a good start. It helped avoid the application of a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

Suicide prevention strategy: Walter needed Todd’s perspective on the systems of IGSD 14. And to share a coffee with. And to figure out what was probably going on up above. And it was true. Walter really did need an egg head, who loved his booky-books. Todd came up with some different stuff. And Walter seemed to have a knack for eventually finding a “so what?” connection between ephemeral ideas and cold, hard reality.

Malmberg would have to wait a bit, Todd finally admitted, for their ghostly re-union. There was coffee to be drunk with Walter, there were toilets to keep flushing, and there was a nuclear winter to be calculated.

Todd and Karen and Walter sat, looking at the mouse.

It was back in Todd’s office, no doubt because of the sunflower seeds James Edwards had given it.

“What was his name again? Its name? Her name?” Karen asked.

“Fred.” Replied Todd, throwing Fred the Mouse a little bit of terrible, reconstituted muffin. Fred did not complain, however. Perhaps it was better than dusty cockroach.

“And we hadn’t thought to check the genitalia,” Todd said “Although I suppose that could be very important.”

“First things first. I had an idea.” Walter said, and produced a piece of cardboard from the small gym bag he was carrying.

Walter put the cardboard down next to Fred the Mouse, who promptly froze in place. He didn’t run. Was he used to the humans, Todd wondered, and their strange but welcome habit of throwing him food? Or was he just obeying millions, perhaps billions of years of evolution, and freezing when a predator approached, in order to remain unseen? Perhaps both, perhaps one a higher priority, with the option to defer to the secondary consideration.

“We gotta know if this is really Fred.” Walter said, just before he dropped a handful of sunflower seeds on to the cardboard.

“Don’t think we can grow more sunflower seeds from these, can we?” Walter asked.

“I don’t know,” admitted Todd.

Walter didn’t think so. There was no sunlight, and he didn’t know if the infra-red lights used to sterilize the water could also act as a substitute for sunlight, down here, deep under the earth. And were the seeds sealed in plastic, salted, and maybe baked, still good to go? Some information just wasn’t on the Local Area Network, and Walter had hoped Todd would know.

“You don’t know?” Walter asked.

“I’m a mathematician, not a horticulturalist…”

“That’s what she…” Walter started.

“Really?” Karen said.

“Sorry.” Walter said finally, after a few more moments watching the mouse.

And miracle of miracles, Fred went for the sunflower seeds on the cardboard.

“I could try to grow some sunflower seeds in a pot” Walter whispered, half just to see if the mouse would bolt when he talked. When Fred the Mouse didn’t run, Walter reached down, slowly, carefully into his gym bag.

“What are you doing?” Karen asked, in full voice. The mouse froze. Walter flinched. Todd watched the tableau, in fascination, perhaps in horror. What was Walter going to pull out of that gym bag? A cage? A flyswatter? A carving knife? What?

Quick as you like, Walter pulled out a can, and sprayed blue paint on the mouse’s tail. Or the tip of the mouse’s tail. Or perhaps just the cardboard where the mouse had been.

“I think I got the end of his tail.” Walter nodded, in self satisfaction.

“Fred the blue-tailed Mouse.” Todd concluded.

“If it ever really was Fred at all.” Walter said.

Behind the wall, the mouse ran and ran until it found stygian darkness, and safety. It didn’t like the taste of the wet stuff on its tail much, but later, when it dried, the mouse was able to lick and nibble it away. Mice tried to be clean animals, as much as they could, after all.

Carrying the shovel, James Edwards thought, was the real bitch here.

Up the stairs.

It was a good day’s work-out, no question. And then there was swinging the shovel in the cold. Finally, to top it all off, insult to injury, you had to walk back down the stairs again. Ten flights. Knees clicking and clacking the whole way. You definitely had to pace yourself. And take a lot of breaks.

Edwards was alone in his quest to dig out the top of the stairwell. Kris had volunteered to help, but James Edwards was a little leery of the thirty-something non-binary. They (James Edwards believed he was using the correct word for Kris) just babbled about science fiction sometimes. And James Edwards was from a time where how you were treated was determined by whether you were a man or a woman. Yes, M’am, no Sir. It was just confusing. He figured Kris had been male, but was pretty feminine. Although he wasn’t a hundred percent. There was still a good chance that Kris was just a bull… ah… no. That was not the correct word. That was a “hate” word, unless you were in the group. And that was fine by him. He didn’t really hate anybody. Or more accurately, he hated people on a case-by-case basis. Like a normal fucking person. Not hating entire groups. James Edwards also thought Kris could also be a masculine woman.

Oh well, there were stairs to climb, and a bit of crumbled concrete to pry out of the way.

Secretly, James Edwards was a little curious about Kris. That was another reason he didn’t hate, or tried not to hate, groups of people. In the old days, you could have checked James Edwards’ browser history. Back when there had been porn on the internet, he had looked at men you could swear were women. And to be honest, he had found that a bit of a turn on. Although not one single person alive had known that.

James Edwards wondered how many secrets had vanished in the blast. But Kris wasn’t really interesting, because ‘they’ didn’t wear panty hose, and lipstick. None of his pilot friends, nor his former military colleagues had a need-to-know that James Edwards found drag queens a turn-on. He had tried to repress it, early in his life, but then the internet had fed his thirst for it. And lastly, that same internet had revealed the Masters and Johnson research from eighty or ninety years ago. Turned out, about four percent of the general population were completely gay, couldn’t be with the opposite sex, and about four percent of the general population were completely straight, and couldn’t be with the same sex. Everybody else was on a spectrum. Although James Edwards never flew the rainbow flag, didn’t really think of himself as bi, and was still secretly a bit ashamed of his (adults only!) browser history, he gradually became more progressive in his thinking. And before the blast, it seemed most people were cool with the LGBTQ thing. James Edwards had even clapped at a few pride parades, but never marched. Despite the fact that bisexuals (God what a word) were the vast majority of humanity, he thought his penchant for men that looked like women, or whatever, was nobody’s business but his own. After all, he also loved women that looked like women. Well, he guessed the mind could wander when you were taking a break, walking up ten flights of stairs, after the end of the world.

James Edwards thought maybe they could eventually dig out through the elevator shaft, since the stairs just ended in crumbled, almost melted-looking concrete.

Am I taking a chance, digging away at this, when the wreckage at the top of the stairs could collapse and crush me?

As a younger test-pilot, James Edwards had taken some fantastic chances. Trying to land something he should have bailed out of, going bingo for fuel and trusting a tiny reserve. Volunteering for any flight. Had he been flirting with death, battling self-hatred, because of his… well, his bisexuality? It was only when he realized he was what he was, and was just on a spectrum with most others, that he had stopped taking such terrible risks.

Unless he was doing the same thing again? How badly had going to the dead surface with the others messed with his head? Was he risk-taking at an unreasonable level again? After everything he’d lived through, everything the world had learned?

But there was no more world, he didn’t think. And maybe that had affected him more deeply than he cared to admit. Even if we have enough to eat, how many of them would not be able to make the transition to post-apocalypse?

Fuck it, he thought. My reserves will probably hold out. But in the meantime, why dig around up here at the top of the sealed-off stairs?

Walking slowly back down the ten storeys, James Edwards put the shovel back where he found it, and decided to just coast for awhile. Let’s see what there is to see. Be good to the other people under the ground. You never knew what kind of a race they were running.

Carrying the shovel, Walter thought, was the real bitch here. Yes, the bag full of smaller plastic and foil bags was awkward, but you couldn’t really call it heavy.

He walked up the slanted tunnel, with one giant bag over his shoulder. Not much of a load this time.

And should they really be burying plastic bags? Yes, the foil and plastic packets were piling up, yes they had traces of food on them. But who could say what use they might be put to, years from now. IGSD 14 was full to the brim with supplies. But since manufacturing was probably just… over now, should they not keep the bags? Become a lost colony of hoarders, living in their own filth, thinking it somehow intrinsically valuable? Well, by the time people were digging up old food packets again for re-use, Walter hoped to be long dead. Plastic bottles they washed and kept. But there were limits. Food packaging had traces of food on it, which went bad and attracted all kinds of things you didn’t want to live with.

As he got to the surface, Walter zipped up his parka, that he had lately been wearing up top. He staggered, when he got outside. It was dark. And it was freezing. Good thing he had gloves in his pocket, although they were poor insulation against this kind of cold. They were just leather work gloves, but better than nothing. Next time he would get the winter gloves he had. He didn’t have mitts, but… surely it couldn’t get that cold, could it?

Walter got over to where he had been burying the bits of trash he humped up to the surface, mostly light stuff, mostly just to keep it sanitary underground. People re-used almost everything now. Throwing something away just made the people under the earth edgy, like they were doing it wrong, and the blast had been a final warning. Well, a reminder, anyway. A reminder after the disaster, which had put an end to all the final warnings.

Chak, went the pointed shovel, not piercing the earth at all anymore.

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The ground was frozen solid. The shock of hitting frozen dirt traveled up the yellow plastic of the shovel handle, and seized up his spine. Ten thousand, thousand trays of food, carried to hungry solders, sailors, airmen and marines had done for his back, long ago. But he had kept going, because, well, that was what you did.

It took him awhile, but Walter found some rocks, and was about to start piling them on top of the garbage bag, when he thought he saw it move.

He would have jumped a bit, retreated a step or two, only his back thought it was better to just stop, and further assess just what the fuck was going on.

Yes. There it was. Definitely movement. Inside the bag.

Walter stood back and watched. It for all the world, looked like something small was moving around in the bag. Something about the size… of a mouse.

Well now what the fuck do I do? Walter wondered.

At first, he’d had a pretty strong startle reaction to the rustling in the plastic. No doubt jumping back had saved many a cave man in the long grass, and many a soldier on patrol. But most of those soldiers, if they had lived to be old men, got shmucked by a giant rock from the sky. Probably. Goes to show you never can tell.

It was still freezing up here, above ground. Walter didn’t have long to make this decision. He was already starting to shake. What if it was somehow a rattlesnake, that holed up underground, and made its way to the garbage room of IGSD 14? Walter took a few steps back towards the gaping hole in the side of the hill, with the melted or missing gates. And then he thought: mouse or rattlesnake, can I leave it up here, in a bag? What if it’s the last mouse, or the last rattlesnake?

Tough luck, Mr. Rattlesnake. And yet, he couldn’t just continue walking away.

He hadn’t spun around and around like this since basic training. Damned if you don’t, damned if you do.

What a stupid, horrific way to die, by insidious snake poison, after escaping a wall of fire, and then starvation or dysentery.

And what if it was Fred the Mouse?

He certainly wouldn’t have cared, back in the old days. Overseas. Before the blast. Hell, two months ago, he would have shrugged. Maybe opened the bag and walked away. And surely a mouse could chew its way through a black plastic garbage bag?

And then what? What would Fred the Mouse do, covered in ashes on a frozen planet?

Keep spinning, fucking new guy.

But that wasn’t right, was it? He was a fucking old guy. His back and knees told him so. Getting up at least once in the middle of the night for a leak, and then waiting for the damn leak to start, all that told him he was no FNG. Except maybe as a survivor on this wasted world. He guessed he was new at that.

Should he carry the bag back to the entrance with him? What to do, what to do? When you live in a shoe?

Fuck it.

He carried the plastic bag back into the tunnel with him.

Goddamn it, he had forgotten the shovel. He put the bag down, went back for the shovel, then came back to the tunnel mouth. Spin, spin, spin.

He walked all the way back to the blast door, open a human sized crack, with his little note taped (thoroughly) to the wheel you spun to close the door.

DON’T LOCK ME OUT PLEASE! – WALTER

And now what? Carefully, carefully, he put his plan into action. In the crack of light coming out of the blast door opening, he began to untie the bag.

Why the fuck had he double knotted it?

God forbid some garbage get loose, and blow into the ashes that had been the world and all its people. He might be the old, retired Sergeant now, but he could still remember corporals ripping into him for not tying garbage bags correctly, when he’d been barely more than a skinny teenager. And then the bags went into cancerous burn pits anyway.

He held the bag away from himself. With the shovel inside the blast door, leaning against a wall, Walter continued the dangerous, perhaps deadly task of opening the garbage bag.

There was no rattle, no hiss, no rustle.

The first knot gave way.

The second loosened, while Walter’s heart boomed in his ears. Those Delta boys would have told him to look left and right, to break the tunnel vision coming from stress. Maintain situational awareness. Just like in a hot kitchen, full of boiling things, scalding surfaces and the odd nineteen-year old with wicked sharp chopping knives.

But the Delta boys weren’t here now. They were all dead.

Unless there were other Inter Governmental Storage Departments. From the name, IGSD 14, Walther thought there might be 13 others. That wasn’t a lucky number was it?

Or the 14 might be mere maskirova, as the Ruskies had called it. Misdirection and camouflage. Like Seal Team Six. Had there been five other Seal Teams? Maybe not in the beginning, back before Special Forces became the garbage men of world policing. Before they had to do everything. Walter stopped and mopped his forehead, wet with sweat, despite the slightly less-freezing temperatures near the bottom of the slanted blast tunnel exit.

He bet there had been dozens of Sea Air and Land Teams in the end. Before the blast. Too bad they hadn’t been riding a satellite with some shoulder-fired nukes, to stop that goddamned asteroid.

Finally, the knot gave way. Walter opened the bag, and left it sitting in the crack of light outside the blast door. He tripped and fell on his ass, inside the blast door, trying to keep his eye on the bag.

Nothing came out.

Walter got up, grabbed the shovel, chiding himself for taking his eye off the bag for a micro-second.

He readied the shovel to kill any snake that had the temerity to emerge and try to slither past him.

Saint Walter, in his heroic last stand at the gates of IGSD 14, shovel at the ready. He waited, and he waited. Just as he stepped forward through the gap in the blast door, a mouse shot out of the garbage bag, back into the halls of Storage, and was gone.

Walter hadn’t been able to get any kind of a look at its tail. Had it been blue? Was it Fred the Mouse? He kind of hoped it was Fred the Mouse. Not one of hundreds, or even thousands, waiting to re-start the Black Death in the tunnels of IGSD 14.

Yes, he hoped it had been Fred the Mouse, coming back inside. Back home.

“Full fucking astronaut.” Walter said, quoting James Edwards involuntarily.

After a second of catching his breath, Walter gently patted down the rest of the bag with the flat of the shovel. There were no hisses, or squeaks. Nothing but plastic and foil packaging made any noise.

Walter tied up the trash bag, and walked hundreds (or was it thousands?) of slanted steps back up to the surface. This time, he left the shovel behind.

Walter walked back to the rock pile he had started, and began to bury the bag.

When he looked up again, past the furry fringe of his parka hood, a robot guard dog was sticking its nose in the dirt.

"Jesus!” Walter yelled involuntarily.

This was the worst horror movie ever. The trope of the mouse rustling, only to be replaced by the real danger, the robot guard dog, making movie goers jump. Even though they knew it was coming. God he hated those movies. Sure, he would miss theaters. And people, and trees, and grass and everything. But he could do without horror-movie startles. The world had been horrible enough.

Strange, the things that ran through your mind, while you watched a robot guard dog try to stick some kind of nose tube into frozen dirt, then withdraw it after three to five attempts.

The robot guard dog sniffed the air a few times, then tuned back and trotted… well… glided like a spider… back into the tunnel and back down below. At least Walter hoped it went back down below. He hoped it wasn’t going to keep him outside while he froze to death.

“Let me back in!” he would plead to the robot guard dog.

“I can’t do that, Walter.” It would no doubt reply.

Walter made his way back to the jagged tunnel entrance in the side of the fake hill, ashes blowing across his path. It wouldn’t do to get out of sight of the tunnel entrance. Landmarks were few and far between here. Would he freeze to death before someone noticed he was gone? Would they send up a search party, or would they think he was a walk-out? And then there would be fifty.

At the jagged tunnel mouth, Walter tried to peer in, and let his vision adjust. He couldn’t see any light. There was no glowing single eye, going back and forth, back and forth.

He stepped into the tunnel, careful not to cut himself on the hinges where the gate had been, before the blast.

After a solid three minutes that felt like half an hour, Walter wondered if his eyes had adjusted enough to spot a black robot guard dog, lurking in the blackness, maybe with its eye in guard mode. Maybe the robot had some kind of passive infra-red, or heat signature camera. Maybe right now the robot was taking aim at Walter, taking aim… maybe for a chest shot, but then again, maybe right at his balls, for the height differential. Very consciously, Walter put a hand in front of his crotch, and a hand in front of his teeth, although a bit away from his mouth.

“Good boy,” he said “Good boy. Uncle Walter is just going back downstairs to clean up. Keep things running. Good boy…”

No dart on a wire shot out. No robot dog bounded forward to lick him, or knock him over. Or shoot him. Or stick that thing in its muzzle into him.

After a couple more minutes of inching forward into the darkness, Walter began to relax again. His eyes were as adjusted as they were going to get. And when he saw no robot guard dog, he switched on the tiny cellphone light again. He could see where he was stepping, in a slightly less thick trail of gray ash. He couldn’t see much more than that. The light was more comfort than a way to scan his surroundings.

“Good boy… good boy…” he said, now and again. He was just about gasping for air by the time he made it back through the open blast door.

“A coward dies a thousand deaths, a Walter only one…” he panted as he shook the ashes off his feet, and used the broom to brush off his pantlegs.

What a huge mess they had made, trooping back from the surface in the past. The broom and an oversized dust pan and ash can kept the blast-door area reasonably clean inside. Walter only mopped it once a week. Now that he was trying to keep an eye on essential systems all the time, he let a few cleaning things wait. For a bit.

Actually, not much ash had stuck to him this time. Seemed a lot of it was frozen solid now. How long would that last? he wondered.

“Take me up to see it.” Belinda said to Kris.

Kris looked at Belinda’s hooded eyes, and thought again how she needed to sleep more. The woman looked like she was ready to fall over.

“Why, Belinda? Nothing’s changed.” Kris said.

“I just want to go out.” Belinda said, a little louder now.

“It’s freezing up there.” Kris answered.

“I have type two. Diabetes. If I don’t move, it’ll get worse.” Belinda explained.

Kris doubted going to the surface was a healthy choice, for anyone. They couldn’t really fault Belinda’s desire to go, but she was no doubt remembering walking in a park in the summer, or even trying not to slip on ice after Christmas. Now the surface was ash, who-knew how full of toxins. Probably not germs, though. Not yet. The surface had been at a healthy boil for quite a while, Kris believed.

“If you promise not to get upset, I’ll go with you.” Kris said.

Belinda brightened.

“Oh, I know it’s bad. I remember. I remember some things, you know.”

What did that mean? Kris wondered.

The two bundled up, but kept their coats unzipped, and started the long trek to the surface. As they slipped out the blast door, Kris said “Hope they don’t airlock us.”

“I’ve seen the original, you know.” Belinda said, while turning on her cellphone light, and zipping up a winter coat they had scrounged for her. It wasn’t a great winter coat, whoever had been in charge of winter gear had ordered a paltry, ineffective lot of coats. Enough to give you an hour of surface time, before the shakes started. And who the hell didn’t order flashlights? If it was good enough for the famous seventy-two hour kit, why hadn’t IGSD 14 gotten more flashlights?

“The original?” Kris asked.

“The original Battlestar.” Belinda smiled, although you couldn’t see it in the slanted, dark tunnel. “This is kind of like the Viper launch tube. Except darker, and slower.”

You could have knocked Kris over with a feather. Suddenly they had a new-found respect for Belinda.

“So which do you like better?” Kris asked, like a parched person in the dessert. They were still using present tense to refer to Battlestar Galactica, original and new. You could plop the nerd down in the middle of real-life sci fi, and they would still talk about pretend sci-fi.

“Hard to beat Edward James Olmos.” Belinda said.

Succinct. A near-perfect summation. Except…

“Only the rag-tag, scale model, fugitive fleet of the first series could do that.” Belinda concluded.

Ok, Kris thought, this woman was next level. They had been worried Belinda would say Starbuck being a woman was weird, or the 1970’s special effects weren’t as good. Or worse, that the new effects weren’t as good. Apples to oranges, Kris thought, and to everything, there was a season.

“All in all, not bad for a Star Wars coat-tail rider.” Kris said, trying to bait Belinda into a more extensive conversation.

But Belinda kept things practical, coming back to how the topic had come up in the first place.

“And you’re right. Anybody closes that door behind us, we’ve effectively been thrown out the airlock. Although we might live days, instead of seconds.”

Kris nodded. They had been up to the surface many times, to look around, while temperatures went from summer, to winter, to Hoth. Much as they wanted to see the grey sky, and watch for any changes (or hellicopters, or Mother Ships,) it was still depressing and risky to climb the slanted tunnel.

Belinda and Kris turned off their cellphone lights as they came up to the glowing grey hole near the surface. It was daytime, which you only knew because it was all dark grey, instead of pitch black.

The wind bit them, and howled.

Some areas were actually clear of ashes, because the wind was so strong. Underneath was blackness, burned earth.

Belinda and Kris were both shaking violently now. As one, they stepped back into the tunnel mouth, to get away from the wind. It was still freezing in the tunnel though.

They turned their cellphone lights on and headed back down under the Earth.

“It’s so much colder now…” Belinda said.

“I think you’re right.” Kris agreed.

When they got back to the blast door, thankfully no one had airlocked them. Kris was glad. Not the way they wanted to go out.

Trina made the long trip to the surface again.

The other people down below were talking about how cold it had gotten up there, so Trina decided it would be a good idea to go see for herself. When you were a grandmother, you knew that younger folks were prone to… what would Judy or Todd call it? Hyperbole. Yes, that was one of their words. Useful word. It meant exaggeration for effect, not meant to deceive. Even the middle-aged could fall prey to it. Elders, by and large had learned not to waste the effort. There was only so much time in the day. If people weren’t going to listen to the elders, it was not the responsibility of the elder to jump up and down, for effect. Listen or don’t. Survive, or don’t. Your choice. She had seven generations to think about, not just her own power and position. She lived in Wasichu culture, she knew she had absorbed some of it. She was not as wise as the ancestors, nor as tough. But she had to try.

It was time to see how cold this winter was. Even though it wasn’t supposed to be winter now.

Trina found the walk to the surface hurt her feet, at first. She walked slowly in the near-total dark, her cell phone lighting her footsteps. Swish, swish through the ash, as she kept on up the punishing grade. And as she walked higher, the ash stuck together more and more, until it was hard-frozen. Luckily the people below ground were making regular trips up now, to see what was going on. Their footsteps had cleared a bit of a path. Even near the top, where the ash was frozen solid, she was able to find a safe way forward.

But it got colder and colder, the closer to the surface she got. Her feet and knees felt a bit better from the steps, although her lower back was a little sore.

Again, she missed the days of her youth, when the girls ran the pathways they knew so well, racing each other, reveling in the way their legs churned, and their lungs burned, and their dark hair flew behind. Now she scrabbled like a crab, and did her best to make it up above ground. TV news doctors often said that women presented differently for heart attacks. Presented, they said. Again, it seemed like a useful, but strange word. Like people were pretending to be sick. Especially women.

Where are my sisters, now? Trina wondered, as she stepped through the blasted gates, into a hellish windscape outside.

Her skin, which was loose with age, and covered in sweat from a walk up the buried road, shrank against the howling, freezing air. She gasped, and stepped back, after only a quick look at the grey sky, and the frozen mounds of grey ash.

Trina turned and trotted back inside. She did not know it, because she could not see herself, but her gait was a real run now. Exactly the same mile-eating steps she had hammered out as a girl, then as a young woman. She lit up the cellphone again, when she was out of the wind. She didn’t keep up the run for long. She couldn’t. No matter how much the pace came back to her, it wouldn’t stay.

Well, nobody gets out alive, Trina knew. What did Todd say? Everybody wants to go to Heaven, nobody wants to die. A wise observation, that.

Was she headed for the happy hunting grounds soon? TV doctors sure had thought so. Lower back pain. Very bad. Nausea. Even worse. Presenting with cardiac symptoms.

Hello, I am Trina, and I present you my back pain, and my sick feeling. I’m a goner for sure.

Except she wasn’t, was she? She was still here. Her sisters, the TV doctors, the government men, the nurses, the tourists. All the peoples, from the four directions, they were mostly gone now.

This was not a winter it would be easy to survive.

Even if the people below ground at IGSD 14 had enough, there couldn’t be many places like this. So deep, with so much freeze-dried food, and magically self-cleaning water. Deep enough so the earth was warm again, after the world above had burned, and now frozen solid. Storage had miles of pipes, so the poisons of the lower body were taken away, and clean water brought back in their place.

How many would emerge under the blue sky of spring? And when would that be?

Traditional knowledge was not deep enough to survive… this. The blast. It had burned up all the animals, all the plants, all creatures. It had burned up the seasons themselves.

In spring, in the old days, the ancestors had come out to weep with joy, and dance, and feast, to celebrate making it through the harsh winter, the stories said. Before they had been forced away from their green homes. And now, maybe nobody had green homes. Maybe it was the trail of tears, for the red, white, black and yellow directions. Only the tears froze, and so did the trail. Nobody was taking from anyone this time. Winter would take them instead, and all equally. Maybe Custer couldn’t slaughter you, because he and all his horsemen were ashes. Maybe small-pox, and all the diseases that had come across the ocean to Turtle Island were gone now. But so were all the people. All the survivors of those horrific things. And the perpetrators.

But in the now, the government had dug a Storage place, and that’s where the people left below ground cowered.

Now is the winter of our discount-tent, Trina thought to herself, humour keeping her alive, at least a little bit. She pondered the past, as she supposed was the way with older people.

Maybe the distant ancestors had danced to celebrate being free of confinement in small spaces, after a long winter. Yes, smaller warmer spaces were good just to survive. But they couldn’t have been very much fun. Dancing in the joy of spring didn’t mean as much when you had central heating, instead of small fires and buck skin. When you had Winchester ammunition, and rifle scopes, and knives so sharp they glowed. When you could pipe in water from endless miles away, and grow corn with machines so big they did the year’s work of a family every five minutes. Trina wondered just how soft she had become. Well, however soft it was, it was still tougher than the Wasichu. She was somewhere between them, and the ancestors. She just hoped it was a little closer to the ancestors. Only time would tell. She had gotten lucky. Or had she? Was she the last of her people now?

She guessed that was weighing on them all. All of the people under ground. Everybody was from somewhere. Everybody had people. Family. Tradition.

Except now, maybe those were all gone.

Maybe the last dance would not be one for spring. Maybe the last dance would be the halting, painful steps of an old one. Maybe the last song ever sung would be one of mourning.

What had that poet said? Not with a bang, but with a whimper?

Well, he had gotten that wrong. There had been one hell of a bang.

In a bang, with a gang, they got to catch me if they want me to hang. Wise words also, from her college days, when she had run track, and left everyone gasping in the dust. The memory made her smile, below the ground, and put a tiny little spring back in her step.

Kris looked down at their feet, and almost went ass over tea kettle on the wet floor. What the hell?

They walked around the corner, and looked down the hall. There was at least a centimeter of water on the floor now, and the water seemed to be moving, creeping forwards. Dry floor behind Kris was disappearing, water was flowing towards them.

One more turn of the corner, and Kris was at the blast door. As usual, it was open enough for a human being to squeeze through. Unusually, there was water slopping through, coming faster and faster.

Some kind of instinctive panic seized Kris, and they started to run towards the blast door. And then almost slipped again. So they slowed down to a walk. Kris remembered running in a changing room, about to go to the pool, and slipping on a freshly mopped floor. They had lain there for a few seconds, unable to move, wind gone, shocked senseless. It had been a powerful lesson about running on wet floors. Luckily, the memory came back in time to stop them from repeating the lesson.

Kris spun the wheel like a mad DJ on crack.

Spin, spin, spin. And then nothing. Not a clank, nor a clunk. The door closed silently, until the wheel simply stopped turning. What if I spin it too far and it sticks? Kris wondered. Would they be stuck in here forever? No, surely not. Two or three people, wearing work gloves, could easily undo whatever labour Kris had done. The blast door was closed, but not forever.

The immediate danger of flooding was over, and Kris breathed a sigh of profound relief. Now what? Who should they tell? What should they do?

Kris found Walter ten minutes later, cooking something in the cafeteria. Or cleaning up after he ate, it seemed.

“Walter, we have a problem.” Kris said, trying to keep their voice calm. And failing.

“What’s up kid?” Walter asked. It was a strange thing to call Kris, in their thirties, but Walter was sixty-two, and his tone of voice was warm and friendly. And Kris had their mind on other things. Like slow, slopping death, waiting for them just outside the blast door.

“Water. Coming in the blast door.” Kris said, and then Walter was moving. Kris had never seen the old man do that before. This must be the way a French bulldog felt when its lazy person ran to catch a taxi. What the fuck is this?

Kris tried to catch up, and eventually did, as Walter stomped purposefully, and quickly, through the standing water in the hallway.

“I closed the door…” Kris called after Walter, as the maintenance man turned the last corner before the blast door.

Kris turned the corner, and there was Walter, standing there, in front of the blast door, hands balled into fists, down at his sides.

“You closed the door.” Walter said.

Kris nodded.

“I closed the door.”

“That’s good.” Walter said.

“What do we do?” Kris asked.

Walter looked around, making sure there was nobody around. He waited for a minute, then said “I don’t know.”

Walter walked over and tried to turn the wheel a bit more, but it the blast door was as closed as it was going to get. The wheel would spin no further.

“How much water was there?” Walter asked.

Kris shrugged.

“About like this. But coming in steady. Slow and steady.”

“That’s bad.” Walter said, dreamily, low, almost to himself.

Kris started thinking about the Watcher in the Water, grabbing Frodo. Walter started to think about a horrible submarine movie he had seen as a kid, called Grey Lady Down. Drowning sailors. The worst kind of nightmare you could ever imagine. Probably why he hadn’t joined the navy.

Kris wanted to say something smart. Something about the Poseidon Adventure. Nope. Too horrible to contemplate. Or something about how this had never happened to the Winchesters, safe in their angel-warded bunker. And having been around the block a time or two, talking to non-nerds, Kris decided once again, to shut the hell up.

Walter just stood there, and unclenched his fists. He was breathing in long, slow, chest heaves.

“You ok?” Kris asked.

“One, two, three, four…” Walter said, breathing out. He made a weird, Tree-beardy kind of voice, breathing in, counting to four again. Then he nodded four times in a row, holding his breath.

“Whatcha’ doing?” Kris asked, in a low, conversational tone.

“Combat breathing.” Walter answered.

Kris nodded, like this was a reasonable thing to say, like they were waiting for the bus.

“I know, I know, I was only a cook,” Walter seemed to be explaining to some critic who wasn’t there. “But we got mortared and shelled too. You still had to think. Plan what to do.”

Kris watched the man count to four on the inhale, hold the breath for four nods, then blow it out for a four-count.

What if the whole place flooded? Kris wondered. And where was all this water coming from? Wasn’t it freezing up there? Was there some kind of underground flood? What the fuck was going on?

Kris decided to breath along with Walter. It sounded like the most boring pod-cast ever. They laughed a bit to themself at this, and Walter looked at them. Kris counted with Walter, out loud.

“One, two, three, four… one, two, three, four… one, two, three, four…”

The water was a bit lower know, going from over their toes, to a centimeter or two high.

Eventually, the water was all gone.

Kris wondered where the water went. Probably down the stairwells. Or somewhere it could get through. Maybe into the rooms on this level. But nobody came running around the corner to scream or complain or panic.

The floor was a bit wet now, but not flooded. It was almost like it never happened. The dirt from a bit of ash seemed to have washed away.

“I won’t have to mop up the ashes today…” Walter said. Kris hadn’t realized Walter was doing that. Of course. Every time somebody went up, they tracked ashes back in. And there was Walter, cleaning up after them all like a bunch of children.

“Thanks for doing that.” Kris said, trying to keep calm. “Maybe we should tell the others now…”

Walter nodded.

“Yes. I guess so. I just wonder…” Walter foundered “what’s happening… out there…”

“Maybe it’s raining.” Kris offered, feeling a bit panicky themself.

“But the drains should take care of that…” Walter said to himself. He listened at the door. He didn’t know what he was hoping to hear, through a thick underground blast door. Groaning, of tons and tons of water trying to get in, to drown them all? What a horrible thought. What a horrible, horrible thought.

“We need to get Todd. And Judy. Right now.” Walter said.

“We can put everybody in the stair well…” Judy ventured.

“But the water might rise there, too.” Walter said. Never the less, the four of them trooped over to the main stair well, and opened the door.

It was dry as a bone.

Everyone had been up there, at least once, to see the flat rocks and steel at the top of the stairwell. There was no way to get up there now. There was no more building sitting on top of IGSD 14. There was no building, no Mundy the retired Air Force security guard, and no way out.

“We need to run.” Todd said.

Nobody said “That’s the best you’ve got?” or anything counter productive like that. They were all feeling it. Get out, get out, screamed their subconscious minds. Instinct had saved their ancestors for millions, if not billions of years. They stood on the shoulders of giants. They were the top of a pillar of survivors, stretching back to the first primates, to the first vertebrates, to primordial ooze. They had paid the price for standing here, on the Earth. Or under it.

“We get ready to run.” Agreed Walter “Right now. Everybody brings a parka. Some food and water.”

All fifty-one survivors stood in front of the blast door. Yes, there were other blast doors. But this was the one they all used, this was the one they chose. It had taken an hour for people to assemble here, ready to run. And none of them were happy. In fact, the crowd was near panic. People tried to keep their voices low, and watch the door. Some of them were sure they were going to die. Not tomorrow, not in two weeks, but here and now. And badly.

Jeff had his big, stainless-steel revolver in his belt, at the back of his pants. Shirt untucked, parka open. Just in case. Just in case.

Andy had the sharpened kitchen knife in a paper sheath in his pocket, just in case.

Judy and Todd stood with Kris, and James Edwards, and Walter, near the door, ready to spin the wheel, to pull the door open, to help people escape. Or, as Walter had said, to help everybody push the door closed again, to keep the water out. He wasn’t at all sure they shouldn’t wait, let the drains in the slanted tunnel do their thing. But in the end, the group had decided that if enough water built up over a long time, they would all drown. Escape was now. Or never.

Belinda clung to Trina. The two women vowed to help each other, come what may. The buddy system, they called it. Karen stood close to these two other women, watching over both of them. In reality, it was just something to do, some way to cope with the fact that when they opened the blast door, they might all die. They might drown, or make it to the surface, to freeze to death. It was better to focus on helping your neighbor. That, and getting ready to roll.

“Ready?” Walter asked.

Every last person was looking at him. Jesus, how had it come to this?

At least Fred the Mouse wasn’t there, staring at him with beady, accusatory little brown eyes.

“If it keeps coming in fast, we run. Run up. Or swim. Swim up. If it comes in slow, we walk up. See what’s going on.” Walter said. It was what they had all agreed. The way they had decided to die, part of him thought.

Well, most people hadn’t gotten any choice. How lucky they were, here at the last, in Inter Governmental Storge Depot 14.

Walter spun the wheel.

The door opened a crack.

Everyone watched the door, waiting for a wall of water to roar in and kill them all.

The door slid open, as Walter spun the wheel.

Wide eyes watched him do it.

But there was no water.

The people under the ground looked at each other, shocked, surprised to live another day. Every one of them had envisaged their own slow, boring death from old age, or starvation, or sickness. It was almost the unofficial hobby of every last person in Storage. How will I bite the big one?

And now the blast door was open to its usual human-sized crack.

Still no water.

Walter stopped spinning the wheel and stepped out. He stepped back in a second later.

“Drains must be working.” He said, and the people hugged, quietly, gasping out what they had thought was their last breath.

By popular demand, the door was spun all the way open, so everyone could see. And to check that the door was working properly. That it could be opened all the way.

The tunnel was clean. There was no more ash.

Walter didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. Neither did Todd or Judy, or Kris, or James Edwards.

“Maybe the ash will clog up the pumps…” Andy from Communications whispered to Walter.

“Maybe there ain’t no pumps. Just drains.” Walter countered, wondering if the ash would clog up the drains. Or the pumps.

“I feel like a goddamn hamster.” Said Jeff. “No fucking control of any of this shit.”

Todd had to agree. This might not be the time or place for such an outburst, in front of all the people below ground, but he supposed everyone had their own way of letting off steam. Especially since they had all been ready to die a few minutes before.

Jeff marched angrily up to the surface, with James Edwards, Todd, Judy, Andy and Walter following. A few others straggled after them. Kris went last.

On the surface, outside the long, slanted tunnel, there was a light, steady rain. The sky was still grey. A solid, slowly weeping, grey. It was a freezing rain, and nobody stayed long outside the tunnel. The grey ash was still everywhere, and it was too cold to stay outside.

“Everybody should have a go-bag.” Jeff said. “So we’re ready if this shit happens again.”

After awhile, Trina said “Yep.”

And so it was decided. Everyone in Storage kept a week’s worth of provisions, and some basic survival tools, apportioned out to them. They could survive as individuals for a short time, and as a group a bit longer. Everyone had a go bag.

To go where? Kris wondered, but didn’t say out loud. They imagined it was on everyone’s mind, but how would Kris know for sure? The mysteries of the binary, non-nerd mind. Kris could only do their best to emulate, if not really understand. Best to stay quiet, unless in proven, safe company. Belinda had won Kris’s trust with Battlestar Galactica. Trina with her respect. The rest bore watching.

“I checked the streptomycin,” said Trina “and the last of it will expire in a year.”

Judy, Todd, James Edwards and Kris took this in, calmly. After all, they had been ready to drown like rats last week, or freeze to death, bedraggled on the surface. Tuberculosis and even sepsis seemed like secondary concerns right now, deadly or not. They were all starting to realize how close to the edge they were, down here in Storage. Death up Above had taken away the real safety nets of other people, and the natural world itself.

“Well, I guess that’s it then,” said James Edwards “no more miracle of medicine, in a year or three. People will die of sinus infections. Dumb shit like that. The clap for everybody.”

Crudely put, Todd thought, but he’s not wrong.

“Can we make penicillin again?” Judy asked, just spit-balling, trying to avoid panic. When you were in trouble, you marshalled your resources. Get your team to work. It just wasn’t practical to give up. After all, humans had come so far…

“S.M. Stirling would say we don’t have the tools to make the tools.” Kris said.

“Who is… never mind. Sci-fi.” James Edwards concluded.

Kris found James Edwards was watching them more these days. It was like the man was waiting for Kris to reveal themself, or to do something masculine, or feminine. Kris wondered why it was so important to James. But then again, early hatred from some of their peers had taught Kris a hard lesson. Even though their gender didn’t affect anybody else one way or another, it could trigger violence in some. Yet James Edwards didn’t seem like that. Yes, he was a bit of a superior jerk, but the man had been a test pilot, after all. He just seemed… interested. Not overly so, just a bit curious. Maybe… disappointed.

“Maybe for awhile, we won’t have to worry about communicable diseases. There’s just the fifty-one of us here… and I don’t expect contact with any other populations… uh… for quite some time…” Todd trailed off.

“It’s not the people gone that worry me,” Trina said “It’s nature.”

She had everyone’s attention.

“All this stuff in storage. We got water, we got food. We got heat, even hot water. But when will we see any ground cover again? Real things to eat? Plants. And the animals…” Trina stopped, almost embarrassed she had brought this up, a taboo subject. All the different peoples of the earth, four footed and two. All gone. Unless there were a few more places like this. And even then, there would be no more animals.

“Belinda talks about her cats, sometimes,” Judy said “And I wonder if they were the last cats… or dogs… will anybody tell children about them in the future?”

And there was the other taboo subject. It didn’t look like IGSD 14 would be producing hordes of non-related, genetically viable human children in the future.

“Same genre, same lack of brackets around my sources” Kris said “It would take a minimum population of about five thousand to continue the human race…”

“What are you talking about? Sci fi again? Is that what you mean by genre? Can you ever just say a plain sentence Kris?” asked James Edwards, testily.

“Brackets meaning peer-reviewed citations. Proof of data. Kris is saying that the minimum of five thousand is a hypothesis, not a fact,” Todd said, slowly, absent-mindedly.

“Well thank you for mansplaining that, Mason,” retorted James Edwards.

You asked, Todd Matheson thought to himself, but didn’t say out-loud. He had learned to hide his mental processes from others, long ago. In the neighborhood he grew up in, showing you were smarter could be seen as an attempt to assert dominance. And you definitely did not want to do that. Not unless you were the biggest, the baddest, or very well connected with those who were. Society had wanted young black men in jail, more than it wanted them in college. A young black boy who was good with numbers learned to be very, very quiet, and go his own way. Sometimes he would get some respect for it, but mostly it was easier to hide. Killing the SAT had been his ticket out of poverty, but you still had to walk home after school.

The group sat quietly for a few minutes.

“Used to be we could go no faster than sail, or horseback,” James Edwards said, trying to start the conversation again, after shutting it down hard “But I don’t think we’ll make sailing ships for a long, long time. And horses…”

“You could see their souls. When you looked in their eyes. Horses. That’s what Sitting Bull said.” Trina said “I wonder who will ever see that again. Or is it just a story in a book now? In the Local Area Network.”

“My point is,” James Edwards said, seemingly annoyed at being interrupted by this non-sequitur “we can’t reach any surviving human populations at anything faster than a walk now.”

“And that’s too slow.” Said Todd.

“That’s too slow.” Concluded James Edwards.

“So what can we do?” asked Judy, trying to re-focus the group.

Nobody had an answer for that one. Die slowly, and in comfort, seemed to be the answer to that question.

“Perhaps we sputter out, like so many civilizations before us, on worlds too distant to ever see or hear.” Todd ventured “The great filter. I always thought it would be a nuclear exchange, or self-replicating AI. Or most likely just using up all the resources, and not being able to survive whatever black swan came sailing in.”

“Maybe that’s just what happened.” Said Kris.

“Cheery fucking thoughts, all,” finished James Edwards. Being a pilot, and a former leader of men, he had to bring the meeting to an up-beat close. “At least we didn’t drown or freeze to death last week. Let’s keep up the good work.”

There’s always next week, thought Kris, again censoring themself in front of the beefy straight white guy.

And it’s a shame you don’t have any panty hose, thought James Edwards, looking at Kris, censoring himself, just in case the other straight white guys in Storage found out. Although statistically, James Edwards knew, it didn’t look great for that power group in IGSD 14.

Thank god, he thought to himself. It was exhausting to be disapproving and dominant all the time. Sometimes he thought it would be lovely to say “The girls are fighting!” in the middle of a meeting like this one. Just to defuse the tension. Just to relate to others on an honest, human level.

I guess Judy wouldn’t mind, James Edwards reflected. Judy had had a wife, he remembered. In fact, James Edwards found himself a bit jealous of that. He had never had a wife. And he had never… done what he wanted to do to men that were really women… he knew he wasn’t saying that right. Those LGBTQ people had marched. They had been brave, he gave them that. Flanked on all sides. Marching in column. Nobody to depend on but some queen next to you, or some lesbian that had unrealistic ideas how good she would do in a toe-to-toe bar room brawl with a two-hundred pound man. Brave as hell, actually.

And there was the mansplaining word again. He always heard it when other said it now, but couldn’t quite make himself stop. He might avoid the word, but he couldn’t stop interrupting.

If he’d died in a fiery crash long ago, he wouldn’t be suffering through this now. How embarrassing, to be repressed, after the end of everything, in a bunker underground.

I am a joke, James Edwards realized. And it’s all punchline, from now on.

Well, hell.

Still, could be worse. Could be raining.

Walter checked the corridor again. He thought maybe someone was going up and down, in the middle of the night, but there was no more ash in the tunnel to make it obvious.

Except this morning, when he gave the floor a quick mop, he thought he saw something. A strange, segmented shape in the dirt and dust. Squares and rectangles. He’d only seen it once before, mixed in with all the footprints of people coming back in from the long, slanted blast-door tunnel.

Robot guard dog tracks. And what’s more, there seemed to be two sets, if he was reading them right. He had a vision of himself, on the floor, pinching a bit of dust between his fingers, and listening beside the tracks.

One, maybe two robot guard dogs. Some time last night. They went that-a-way, up the tunnel.

He knew Trina would laugh if he said it. Or he hoped she would. She was the one he depended on most of all to keep this place up and running. Judy knew people, and was pretty positive. Todd was smart, but seemed to be off in dreamland sometimes. James Edwards was just angry, and that was no good. It made people nervous and jumpy. And nervous and jumpy was never good. He’d seen lots of kids limping through his chow halls over the years, from negligent discharges and even hand grenade accidents, to say nothing of fools jumping off of tanks and screwing their backs up. Screaming and anger did not produce good results amongst sleepy, underpaid soldiers who were already doing their absolute god-damndest. And then there was Kris. Smart in some ways, if you could figure out what the hell they were talking about.

But Trina was best of all. She knew, down to the last can of beans and freeze-dried vegetables, what IGSD 14 had left to offer them. They talked about the systems that kept the place running, not in the abstract, Socratic way that Todd used, but about where to find stuff, where the off/on switch was likely to be, and how to duct-tape it together again if it broke.

Nobody had appointed any of these people to anything. Judy’s suggestion of some kind of election didn’t feel right. They didn’t need a leader, down here in Storage.

When the place had flooded, Kris had shut the door, right quick, and that had been a good decision. From there, after the blast door was closed, they had all gotten ready to go, just from worst-casing things, and deciding as a group. But the people in Storage didn’t seem to have much of a purpose that demanded leadership. They just were. They just survived. Day to day. Sometimes hour by hour. Keeping yourself busy was a good way to do it, and Walter had to admit most people down here didn’t have the systems to watch that he did. It might help them keep it together if they did have assigned jobs. Still, he didn’t want to assign anybody to guard duty. Staying awake late at night didn’t seem to be a great thing for morale. A few people seemed to wander up here to the blast door at night anyway, when the body and mind ebbed down to nothing but exhausted fear. Four o’clock in the morning. Textbook time for an attack. Maybe it was why some of them staggered up here, to check for flooding, or fire, or lord knew what.

Robot guard dogs sneaking around two at a time, Walter thought, that’s lord knew what.

“Now what’re you up to, little doggies?” Walter wondered aloud.

Maybe they should close the blast door, at night. But now it looked like that would interfere with whatever the robot guard dogs were doing, and that didn’t seem wise. Ask that hothead Jeff, who had gotten tasered for hammering the machine the dogs guarded. Jeff wasn’t a total fool though, it was his idea for everybody in Storage to make a go-bag. It didn’t seem like it would make much of a difference in the long run; a go-bag on a dead, frozen planet. Congratulations. You’ve survived. Maybe you get three more days until your water runs out. Oh, you have a canteen? Let’s call it four days then. After that, you’re lapping at whatever frozen ash pond you can find. Soylent green ash puddles, Kris had called them. Again, whatever that meant. Certainly didn’t sound appetizing to Walter.

Should he wait around at night, to see what the robot guard dogs were up to?

Did they just go up and sniff? Stick their pro-boss-kiss (Todd’s word) in the ice, then go back down to guard the machine? The Mystery Machine (Kris’s name for it.) Kris would smile when they said Mystery Machine. And sometimes do air quotes. When Walter had asked what was so funny, Kris just said “Don’t worry about it Velma.” Or something like that. Was it Phelma, or Thelma? Seemed like Kris lived in a very, very unique world of sarcasm and inside jokes, that they only shared with a few. The rest of the time Kris was pretty quiet.

Walter went down to the arena to see what he could see.

As always, the four robot watch dogs sat at their corners. You would think they were statues, if you hadn’t seen them zap Jeff, or spider up to the surface, and sniff the air, and pro-boss-kiss the icy ground.

Maybe he would follow the dogs up above ground tonight. If he didn’t sleep right through. If he wasn’t in the middle of a long piss, and they just clunked by quietly. Still, he didn’t want to set up so much as a soup can on a string to warn him the dogs were passing his room. Didn’t seem prudent. Walter had never taken taser training himself (there wasn’t much call for it in the cook’s trade,) but well, he didn’t need to get shot to know getting shot was a bad idea. So the dogs would pass his place unimpeded. That was his word. Unimpeded. For though he’d been an Army cook, he’d also been a Sergeant, and liked to read in his spare time. Fell asleep with a book on his chest many a time, and it seemed like some of it had sunk in.

Kris’s Journal – Technical Writer – IGSD 14 - Entry One – Five weeks after the blast.

The dogs go up, the dogs come back down.

They don’t seem to have much of a schedule, maybe they go at night, mostly. Maybe they are trying to avoid bumping into people. Mostly they seem to ignore us.

I guess I should explain, since this is my first Journal entry. The dogs are not dogs at all, more’s the pity. These dogs are robots, and they guard the machine. I call it The Mystery Machine (ha ha!), after an old cartoon that maybe nobody will ever see again. Not important, I guess.

Back to the dogs. Walter, the maintenance guy around here, says the dogs mostly go up at night. He says, and I quote, “They pro-boss-kiss the ground, then they come back down. And guard the machine.”

It seems to me that Walter has no idea how profoundly poetic this is. He’s like a beat poet, only he’s an Army cook who retired to run this place. Well, Maintain it anyway. His boss, and his boss’s boss, never made it in the day of the blast. Well, I guess it serves you right, you white-collar motherfuckers. Try showing up for work, once in awhile, like the rest of us grinding it out.

And there goes my professional tone. Once again, I guess it doesn’t matter. No wait, what did I say up above? It’s not important. That’s what I said. I’ll try to stick to the script. Be cogent. Be calm, be cool.

We almost died when the tunnel flooded last week. Luckily, I closed the door, and we didn’t. Die, that is. We didn’t die. I apologize if I’m a little rusty at this, I haven’t put pen to paper in a long while, and I guess it shows. Lots of digressions. Too many sentence fragments. Like this one. I’ll try to do a bit better, I guess.

The tunnel didn’t flood, or not too much, anyway. Not enough to kill us all. We all got ready to swim to the surface. And I know what you’re thinking, dear reader, that those segments in the movies where they swim to the surface are all impossibly long, and you would die if you tried it like that. And the water would have killed us from cold water shock, like those poor Spitfire and Hurricane pilots not lucky enough to be shot down over land in the Battle of Britain.

That was a War, by the way, World War Two, to be specific. It was something we used to do, before the blast. Everybody would get together and build slow, crappy machines, and try to kill each other with them. And the machines just got faster and faster, and better and better at killing. First World War we killed each other, around ten million got smoked. Which made everybody mad, especially the losers, so we tried it again a generation later, same thing only worse. Like ten times worse. A hundred million people dead, and now, we had the best machine of all. The Atom Bomb.

So we used that, and for awhile, it looked like we would all die from that, just bombing the shit out of each other, back and forth, back and forth. But luckily we stopped. We just looked at each other, and nobody would use them because we got scared to. Because there would have been nuclear winter.

Only, SURPRISE, we got that anyway.

An asteroid hit the planet. Possibly I should call it a meteor. Or a comet. Like one of the eight tiny reindeer. But do you recall, the most wonderful reindeer of all? Probably not, because, well, you’re probably dead and not reading this. But let me continue, Dear Dead Reader, because I seem to be on a roll.

First the planet burned. Then it froze. Don’t ask me stuff like when, or how much, I pretty much stayed out of the whole thing. I learned, long ago, to keep a low profile. So people didn’t ask me things like “Are you a boy or a girl?”

I guess people get asked that when they are growing up, sometimes, and they get mad. I never did. I just would say “I don’t know.”

And that seemed to make the other people mad.

For awhile there, I had it good. We did pronouns, people paid their taxes, and it looked like we might hydrogen and solar our way out of the Almighty Shit Show that was Human History.

I got a job as the Technical Writer for the Intergovernmental Storage Depot 14, and here I sit. As you can tell, clocking in pays off. For there doesn’t seem to be a single soul left on the planet, but us. Not a creature was stirring, except Freddy the Mouse. Am I infringing copyright, anyone? No. I guess not. For there is no one left to infringe upon. I am the new Venereal Bead. Hear me roar.

Where was I? Oh yes. Nuclear winter. Planet gets smacked, they tell me there must have been earthquakes, tsunamis, lots and lots of volcanoes, and most (some? all?) of the Earth’s surface is now floating around up there blocking out the sun. So if you survived the cooking (which I personally don’t think anybody did, unless there are lots more places like this,) well, then came the freezing. And it doesn’t seem to be stopping. It’s an ice planet now, and there’s no Bantha to lightsaber your way into. Except for us, down here in Storage, it’s not looking good for old Planet Earth. You hear that Aliens? Will Smith has left the building. There’s no one here to punch (or slap) you in the mouth, so you might as well come down here and run the show. Please. I am literally begging you. Arthur C. Clarke this mother fucker, so we can have spring again.

How are we all doing?

Well, I have to say I am popular down here, for once.

I closed the door, I stopped the flood.

The water in the tunnel up to the surface drained, and we didn’t have to swim up and freeze to death on the surface. So yay for that.

Down below, we’ve got lots of food. Lots of water. Which goes with the freeze-dried food. Don’t even get me started on that. Poo me a river, I’m sure you’re saying, we don’t have any food at all. But I digress.

Nobody seems to know where all the people are that were supposed to stay here. We kind of guess that the planet got shmucked (if you forgive my technical term) while everybody was looking the other way. Bonus for the fifty-one of us down here. More for us. (Well, there were fifty-three, but two people walked out and never came back. So THAT happened.)

And that’s pretty much all we know. No contact with anyone else, (I personally don’t believe there is anyone else.) People are kind of reading, and watching something called DVD’s, and looking at the Local Area Network, which is like the internet for four-year-olds. Not even. Sorry, four-year olds, I’m not giving you enough credit. You would find it lame. Much as the internet could be, repository for all human knowledge and porn. And anonymously insulting each other with tones of voice we would never dare use IRL.

So we watch the Mystery Machine, and the Robot Guard Dogs, and eat lunch, and chat. Some people walk around on the surface. Spoiler: it’s still frozen solid.

All for now. There are drums, drums in the deep… We cannot get out… of the Castle Arrrrrrrgh…

Kidding. I’m a kidder. I’ll write again when I have more news.

-Kris

To Be Continued in Re-Start Ready - Chapter 3 : In Medias Res