The Secret Bunker Trilogy: Part One: Darkness Falls (7 page)

Her husband is on his way.
For the man who accompanied her to the hospital, this is over for now.
Without speaking to the woman or the hospital staff he leaves the
building. He has been in this hospital before, with this woman, three years
before.
Nobody even notices him driving off in the black car.

Earth looks calm from space, but within the darkness, there is
inevitable devastation.
This was unavoidable.

Planes start to drop from the skies, their pilots so surprised that they
barely have time to register what is going on before they are
overcome by the blackness.

Vehicles hurtle off roads, trains fail to stop when they reach their
destinations, ships sail on aimlessly at sea. All over the planet there is death, destruction, carnage.

It had to be this way.
Thousands, maybe even millions of lives will be lost today.

Conditions were set up as well as they could be to avoid as much of
this as was possible.

There’s really only one thing that could have made this the preferable
option.
And that’s the annihilation of all human life.

He’s thinking about Trudie again.

Unseen by him, there is a faint, pulsing glow from a device that has
been placed in his neck. As if recalling a memory that was locked deep down in his mind, he
suddenly knows what to do. Like he has received instructions from another place.
He has been trained for this, this equipment, this entire workstation is
familiar to him.

He is not aware of what just happened - it is not painful, there is no
sensation at all. It is just the seamless fusion of thoughts that are not his own with his
own consciousness. He can’t even tell that it’s happening.
He knows however that he must activate his screen and check the
outside perimeter of the bunker.
This is simply a routine activity, at this stage of the operation all life on
the surface will have been placed into stasis. He doesn’t question or challenge this, he just knows it to be so. He must now perform this routine security operation.
Standard military procedures.
Secure the perimeter. He doesn’t expect there to be anything on the screen of course.
After all, how could there be?

The only life on the planet is in this bunker.
This is the base from which the entire operation will be managed.

It is impossible to avoid the effects of the darkness, all life has been
subsumed by its force. So why is it that there are two human life forms showing up on the
screen and they’re just outside the main blast doors?

I’m not sure if the food really was amazing or whether I was just so
ready to eat that I would have devoured anything at that time. I was just as ready to devour the information that Kate was about to
give me. I decided to eat and listen.

Sometimes, there’s just so much that you want to know, that the only
way to satisfy your thirst for the knowledge would be to just dump
that information into your brain. That’s not possible just yet - though I’m sure somebody in Silicon
Valley will figure it out one day! So I let Kate talk, enjoyed my food, and resisted the urge to interrupt
and take her off at a tangent. And let me assure you, that was a real breakthrough for me.
‘I know you’re desperate to know what’s going on Dan,’ began Kate,
‘And the best thing I can do is to work down the list in order of
priorities and try to reassure you as much as possible.

She was good at this. She took control, but not in a bossy way.
She was kind and reassuring, and that’s exactly what I needed. I remembered Dad talking in similar terms about somebody in HR
who he was dealing with when he left his job. Only
his
description ended with the words ‘Except he turned out to be
a viper!’ Still, at this moment in time, Kate was the best chance I had of moving
forward. I’d reserve judgement on the ‘viper’ bit.

‘The first thing I need to let you know is that your dad, brother and
sister are absolutely fine,’ she continued, ‘Nobody was hurt when the
sirens went off, they were with us all the time in complete safety.’
I breathed an internal sigh of relief. Three down, Mum to go, and then we’re all accounted for.

‘I know you must be really worried about your mum Dan,’ she said
with a concerned look on her face, ‘We didn’t know there was another
member of your family, and at this moment in time, I’m very sorry, but
we do not have enough information to be able to tell you what
happened to her.’

The feeling of hope that I’d had moments earlier suddenly subsided.

‘In fact, we were really lucky to have found you Dan, you’re a very
lucky young man,’ she went on, ‘It’s a good job your dad was able to let
us know your exact whereabouts after the lights came on.’

Somehow, I wasn’t feeling very lucky. Lucky is when a visiting relative draws a tenner out of their pocket
and gives it to you as a gift, no strings attached. Lucky is finding that your brother and sister - and mum and dad come
to that - have managed to leave that last chocolate biscuit in the fridge
for you. Lucky is not getting to spend 24 hours alone in complete darkness in
the long, cold entrance to a Cold War bunker. And having to pee in the corner too. Thank goodness it was dark at the time, I hope they didn’t have night
vision on the security cameras. Lucky is not having to watch your mum disappear as sirens wail for
some crisis outside and the only doors that might offer her sanctuary
are going to close tight before she can reach them.
I kept my thoughts to myself, but I certainly wasn’t feeling very lucky.

‘Now, I’m sure you’ll want to know what’s going on Dan?’ Kate asked.

I nodded and attempted an answer with a mouth full of burger.
Not a good move. Kate noticed the mess I was making and thankfully carried on.

‘Dan, I have to tell you that you and your family got caught up in
something very high level.’
‘This is not even a national situation, I can confirm that this is an
internationa
l situation.’

I swallowed the lump of burger, but having heard what I’d just heard,
it was not an easy swallow to make.

‘Dan, all of the people working in this bunker were specially trained
and recruited for this mission - but even
we
do not know exactly what
is going on yet.’

This was not sounding very reassuring.

‘We know three things,’ she continued, ‘Firstly, the situation beyond
the bunker is not life threatening to the people outside.’ More relief.
I could tell already that my emotions were going to get a real workout
in this place.
At least this sounded like positive news for Mum.

‘Secondly, as I said earlier, we have all been specially selected and
recruited for this mission, but we have been trained individually to
maintain the integrity and the security of the task. We do not yet know
what’s going on and we will not receive a full briefing for another 8
hours.’

Okay, so far so good, she still hasn’t mentioned anything like
‘imminent peril’ or ‘global annihilation’.

‘Thirdly and finally Dan,’ she said, as I noticed that the technique of
using my name a lot in sentences had a strangely reassuring effect on
me.

‘You and your family were not supposed to be here when the sirens
went off, only essential personnel had been tasked to be present at the
time the sirens sounded, and even
we
didn’t know that everybody else
in the bunker at that time was going to be part of the mission team.’
‘Here’s the strange thing that we’re trying to figure out though,’ she
said, sounding much more serious now.

‘We checked your biometrics when you were in the MedLab, and
although your family aren’t supposed to be here, you have full access
rights on the database. In short, you were
meant
to be here.’

Although many, many lives have been lost, this is not the worst it
could be. Just as many lives have been saved by the actions of governments
throughout the world. It’s not usual for the global community to work together in this way.
But the consequences of not doing so would have been unthinkable.

Even places like North Korea, where the leaders and politics are
caricatured every day in the Western press, and ostracised from the
international community, even
they
are complicit in this. Yes, this global action has already saved thousands of lives, possibly
even millions. And most importantly it will save
more
lives.
Not only now, but in generations to come.
Every military leader understands the term ‘collateral damage’.
Deaths, injuries, destruction … lives lost, lives ruined. It is
all
acceptable, so long as the final objective is attained.
When that objective is the survival of humanity itself, any military
leader would understand that any ‘collateral damage’ is going to be
pretty high.

She was supposed to have been gone for just a few minutes.
She had to be quick for Harriet’s sake, she was still a bit clingy for her
mum. But better to go alone, she didn’t want a scene from Harriet as they
passed the sweets and souvenirs in the ticket area.
For goodness sake, the car was only parked just beyond the innocent
looking cottage where they’d entered the bunker from the surface just
an hour earlier. 5 minutes tops.

She’d promised the kids that they could have ‘tech time’ in the bunker
cafe.
Thank goodness they had free wi-fi in the bunker.
Imagine, a holiday cottage with no wi-fi, who even does that these
days? She was supposed to be one of the ‘responsible adults,’ but even
she
was getting grouchy without the constant broadband speeds that they
all enjoyed at home. And to get a phone signal from the holiday cottage, you had to go
upstairs onto the landing and stand by the window. Sometimes even
she
had to do a double check to make sure that she
hadn’t been transported back to pre-Jacobite Scotland.
She
had
to remember Dan’s phone too, he’d specifically asked her.

At her age, and she was only in her late thirties, if she didn’t write it
down or keep chanting it to herself, she forgot it.
‘Laptop, Harriet’s juice and Dan’s phone,’ she kept saying to herself.
‘Laptop, Harriet’s juice and Dan’s phone,’ she repeated as she stepped
out of the cottage door into the car park. The first thing that struck her was how overcast it had become.
More than overcast, the sky looked thunderous.
She’d never seen anything like this before, the weather had been
pretty bad anyway in the last few days, but this was
really
something. Still, it must just be the Scottish weather.
As fierce as the midges.

She made for the car, which wasn’t too far away from the entrance and
fumbled for the remote in her pocket. As she looked up towards the car, ready to point the keys at the door
like she was some sort of harmless gun-slinger, she thought she saw …
no, she was positive, there was a kid in the car.
About the same height as Dan, same age or thereabouts she thought.

Had she had slightly more time she might have experienced a glimmer
of recognition as she moved up closer to the car to investigate what
was going on. But at that precise moment, where indignant anger had kicked in and
she’d begun to march towards this youngster like a bad tempered bull,
a blue light, almost imperceptible to the naked eye, had begun to glow
beneath the skin of her neck, and that momentary spark of recognition
was extinguished in the gathering darkness overhead.

For a task of this size and importance, absolute security was a ‘must’. That’s why those chosen had to pass over one hundred psychometric
tests before they even became a contender. And they didn’t even know they were doing these tests.
We so casually accept the role of the web and the internet in everyday
life … A Facebook ad here, a Google promo there, a ‘please tell us how we
did’ survey popping up out of nowhere … online lives could so easily
be hijacked and nobody was any the wiser. Most people got excited about data sharing and privacy issues.
If they only knew what his organisation was doing - with full global
consent - the occasional highly targeted advert from Amazon would be
the least of their worries.

So it was that he’d managed to invisibly deliver thousands of
psychometric evaluations and thus target his specialist team.
These people had to be
very
carefully chosen.
They weren’t the strongest, the fastest, the cleverest or the wisest. All of the things that society generally applauded or celebrated had no
currency when assembling this team. And there certainly weren’t any celebrities in there either.
Test after test had shown that the most remarkable people were often
the most ordinary people.
Sports stars excel at sport, film stars excel at acting, Professors excel
at being clever and heroes excel at heroism. But in the grave matter of saving the whole of humanity, it was a very
carefully selected group of ordinary people who were going to make
the final cut.

If it weren’t for the pulsing device buried beneath the skin on his neck,
he’d normally be inquisitive about these two lifeforms just outside the
blast doors. But instead, he calmly runs through a series of routines, just as he was
taught to do in training.
He is not an automaton in this task.
While he’s carrying it out, he still thinks about Trudie and the kids.

He is aware of his surroundings and he hears in the background the
‘getting to know you’ conversations of a team who are just getting
used to their new environment. They don’t know what their mission is yet, but their workstations are
familiar, just like it was in their training and orientation.
It is almost as if certain memories, feelings or emotions are
suppressed. As if a deft puppeteer were pulling his strings so subtly that you are
barely aware that it is actually a toy before your eyes.
So he just watches the life-forms on his screen and switches to
camera. Just blackness. Night vision mode.
Still blackness.
Penetration mode. There they are!
Two figures.