Apocalypse (The Wasteland Chronicles, #1)

The Wasteland Chronicles, Volume 1

By Kyle West

Smashwords Edition

When a citizen of Bunker 108 turned sixteen,
he or she was deemed old enough to start reconnoitering.

Reconnoitering was dangerous work – not so
much because of the Wastelander bogeymen that had kept me up at
night as a kid. There were a ton of ways to die out there –
windstorms and cold not being the least of them.

Always, when you went out of Bunker 108, you
never knew if you were coming back.

Michael Sanchez drew lots with me that day.
Michael, a seasoned vet, was all hard muscle and an Officer to
boot. I looked like a pencil in comparison – five foot seven, and
one hundred twenty-seven pounds. I’m sure we looked like quite the
pair as we walked down the long tunnel to the exit of Bunker
108.

I was nervous as hell. I had never been
allowed into the Wasteland before.

Yesterday had been my sixteenth birthday.

As we walked, I felt as if I were in a dream
– or a nightmare.

I just hoped I didn’t have to use my AR-15,
even though I knew how. Everyone was mandated an hour’s practice
each week at the firing range, minimum. Chief Security Officer Chan
wanted everyone ready – for what, I didn’t know. We were told
Wastelanders would kill for anything.

So we had orders to kill them first.

Conflicts with Wastelanders were rare, but
Chan liked to keep a close eye on things. A “kill first” policy
prevented anyone from running away and letting others know that we
were here. It was how we had survived so long – unlike the
others.

And
that
was what I was most nervous
about – not the cold dry wind, the dead world, the red hazy sky
stretching above, or the lack of a sun dimmed out by layers of
meteor fallout. No – I was scared that we would find someone
outside
,
and I would have to shoot him.

We paused at the vault-like door. Large bold
numbers,
108
,
pressed into the thick metal. For my
entire sixteen years, that door had served as the barrier between
safety and danger, known and unknown, fake and real. And now, I was
about to go outside for the first time in my life.

Michael, the person I was partnered with, was
twenty-four: tall, good-looking, with coppery skin. He went to the
sun rooms often, because Officers were allowed longer light baths
than civilians. Officers had other perks and signs of status:
cushier apartments, more meal credits, and more days off. Chan did
everything to incentivize the people who kept him in power.
Everyone wanted to be an Officer.

Michael twisted the wheel, his muscles
bulging beneath his desert camo. It was cold and dry out here in
the entrance tunnel; we had left the safety and warmth of Bunker
108 behind. I hopped up and down a few times, trying to get some
blood flowing. My own desert camo hoodie bounced up and down on my
head. The cold had killed a recon caught in a dust storm, two years
ago. It paid to be careful.

The wheel groaned as it gave, little by
little. Finally, Michael opened the door with a clang, pulling it
slowly inward until the Wasteland outside was revealed.

The natural light, though dim, still blinded
me. A cold rush of dry wind blasted my face. I raised my hand to
shelter my eyes from the dust. As they adjusted, I could first make
out distant red mountains, like upside-down, bloody teeth. I
discerned, nearer than the mountains, crimson dunes that looked as
if they should be on Mars rather than Earth. A dilapidated, rusted
crane lay half-buried maybe half a klick out, where it had been
since December 3, 2030 – Dark Day, the day when most of humanity,
and most of life, died.

“Welcome,” Michael said with a sardonic grin,
“to the Wasteland.”

I followed Michael down the gravelly slopes
of Hart Mountain, pulling my hoodie forward over my head to keep
out the cold as best I could. Late September in Southern California
meant freezing temperatures every night.

Though I had seen countless pictures of the
Wasteland before, I could not help but take it in with numb shock.
All vegetation was short, squat, clinging for its life in the
sandy, cracked earth. Most everything was dead – truly dead. Life
had fled long ago. I often imagined Old Cali, like in the movies I
watched in the digital archive. I dreamed of a hot, sandy beach,
the blue ocean and sky, the bright, heavenly sun without a cloud to
bar its light. I loved watching those movies, and spent hours in
the archive living in a dream world and wishing I had been born a
hundred years ago and not in 2044.

We had been walking five minutes when Michael
spoke.

“You’re quiet, Alex,” he said. “I thought
you’d be excited about your first recon.”

Michael was right. I
didn’t
talk much.
I just didn’t see the point. I’d always been this way. Well, not
always. My mom died when I was seven, which might have been the
beginning of it. Then my little sister died, a few minutes later.
My mom had been giving birth. In a harsh world, death came
often.

We were out of sight of home by now. I
shivered as a particularly chilly wind blew. We passed a metallic
trailer shimmering in the late afternoon haze.

“That trailer’s for dust storms,” Michael
said. “You never want to be caught in one. It’ll be the last
mistake you make.”

We stopped in front of the trailer.

“Let’s wheel around the mountain,” Michael
said. “We’re taking the long route today.”

“What’s the long route?”

“Finally, some goddamned curiosity. The long
route goes all the way around Hart Mountain. It’s about a five-mile
course, total.”

He walked on, and I trudged behind him.
Michael was alright, for an Officer. He had a wife and a kid, and
like me, he had never seen Old Earth.

My father had. When he was ten, the
government had put him and his dad, my grandfather, in Bunker 108.
My grandfather, Lorin Keener, was a brilliant immunologist. The
government took only the brightest, the highest-ups, and the people
with the fattest wallets into the Bunkers. I hated to think of all
those people who died, but in the end, it came down to whoever
wrote the largest check, had the biggest brain, or the prettiest
face. Well over 99.9 percent of the nation was left outside to fend
for itself when Ragnarok crashed down.

These survivors were called Wastelanders, and
we did what we could to avoid them, and to keep
them
avoiding
us
.

Wastelanders weren’t like citizens. For one,
there were more of them. Wastelanders were brutal, barbaric, and
did anything they could to survive. Like animals, they killed not
just for supplies, but for fun. Sometimes men became lost on
recons, and their bodies would be discovered weeks later, riddled
with bullets and half-buried in red sand. I’ve known of four deaths
in my lifetime due to Wastelanders. Sometimes, when Wasteland
Raiders camped too close, Chan ordered them eliminated in the dead
of night. Losses sometimes happened.

The U.S. left the Dark Decade with one
hundred and forty-four Bunkers. Some perished due to internal
breakdowns, sure. But some were overrun by scared, starving people
who wanted the huge stash of food and supplies the Bunkers held.
Now, in the year 2060, only four Bunkers remained: Bunker 76,
Bunker 88, Bunker 108, and Bunker 114. Bunker 114 was not far from
ours – maybe fifty miles. It was sheer luck that it was so close
and still running. During the Dark Decade, the U.S. built a lot of
Bunkers in the Mojave because of nearby L.A., San Diego, and
Vegas.

If there was a reason for secrecy beyond
safety, I didn’t know it. Bunker 108 was a center for
xenobiological research, which might have justified keeping its
location under wraps. If such research were seized or destroyed, it
would completely frustrate our efforts to understand what was going
on at the Ragnarok impact site, over a thousand miles away in
Nebraska and Wyoming.

I was glad to be a citizen, living in a
Bunker. We had warm beds, hot showers, and a safe life. Bunker 108
had a digital archive where millions of books, recordings, and
movies were stored. I spent a lot of my off time there, listening
to the music of the Old World, watching the movies, reading the
books. We had a commons with a pool and a basketball court, among
other amenities, including the sun room – fifteen minutes of pure,
lighted bliss, giving all Bunker residents their daily dose of
Vitamin D. Everything was warm, everything was in its right place,
and people were happy – for the most part.

Bunker 108 had a population of four hundred –
there had been five hundred when it was filled to capacity in 2030.
Chief Security Officer Chan was in charge of operations. He was a
little harsh, but he kept things in order. I just tried to dodge
him when he walked the corridors.

Michael and I arrived at the north face of
Hart Mountain. As we walked, I stared at the distant red peaks. I
was used to the confines of the Bunker, and seeing so much open
space was surreal.

“Jesus…” Michael said.

I stopped short. “What?”

Face down in front of us, hidden by some
wispy scrub, lay the body of a man, stabbed several times in the
back. Small traces of purple slime oozed from the wounds. He wasn’t
moving.

Michael knelt beside the man, placing a hand
on his neck.

“There’s a pulse…”

I wondered why Michael was checking for a
pulse, and not shooting him. That was standard protocol: if you
found a Wastelander, he was killed, end of story. But after looking
at what the man was wearing, I saw why.

The number 114 was emblazoned on his
sleeve.

“Is he from that other Bunker?” I asked.

For some reason, my eyes drifted up, focusing
on a distant boulder. Something was off about it.

Then I realized what it was. A woman’s face
was peeking around its side.

I knew exactly what I was supposed to do –
tell Michael about the woman and have her eliminated.

It was so simple, and yet I kept my mouth
shut. She was a Wastelander. She could tell people where she had
seen us, compromising the entire security of Bunker 108.

And there lay this man from Bunker 114 on the
ground before us, stabbed. She might have been the one to do
it.

Yet I didn’t say a word. Feeling like an
idiot, I just stared out at that giant red rock as the evening’s
shadows stretched. By now, the woman had long disappeared. I was
beginning to wonder if she had been there at all. I could only
remember her face, pretty, even with the distance, framed by long,
black hair. For some reason, that made it more difficult. Deep
down, I knew she was human, like me. Who was I to kill her, even if
she had attempted the same with this man from 114?

Michael’s voice snapped me back to
attention.

“Alpha Patrol to Base – do you have a copy,
over?”

“Base to Alpha Patrol, what is your status,
over?”

“We found a man, stabbed several times in the
back. He’s unconscious, but there’s a pulse. I think he’s from that
other Bunker, over.”

The handheld radio went quiet. I took my
attention off the boulder, and looked at the man.

“If he’s from Bunker 114, what’s he doing out
here?” I asked.

Michael didn’t answer as I thought over the
possibilities. If he was here, it had to be for a very important
reason. Did CSO Chan know he was coming?

The radio crackled to life.

“Alpha Patrol, what is your location,
over?”

“Two miles onto the long route. Do you want
us to extract to base, over?”

“Negative on that for now. Give a description
of the man, over.”

“Male. Age: 35-45 years. Ethnicity: white.
Short of stature, black hair. He carries nothing – no ID, no gun,
no pack. God knows how he made it this far.” Michael sighed. “He
may have been attacked and robbed. There are three deep stab wounds
in the back – one on the lower right side of the back, and two more
to the left of the spine. There’s blood and dark pus oozing through
his clothes, over.”

The wind blew cold and dry, covering the
man’s pale face in a thin layer of red dust. The sun-glow faded
behind hazy clouds above the distant red mountains. Night had come.
It was high time to get back.

“Alpha Patrol,” a voice said, icy and clear.
It was CSO Chan. “We’re sending a team to extract the man to base.
Remain where you are, and keep an eye out for hostiles. There may
be Raiders in the area. Do you copy, over?”

“Copy that,” Michael said.

“Good. Over and out.”

Apparently, Chan hadn’t known about this. I
looked at the spot where I had seen the woman. With the setting of
the sun, the boulder was left shrouded in shadow. The woman, if she
had even been there, was long gone by now. Whether right or wrong,
the sick feeling in my gut wouldn’t go away.