The Secret Bunker Trilogy: Part One: Darkness Falls (10 page)

Most flights were grounded, but you can’t account for everything, in
matters like these you can’t save everybody. What else can you do if you need to whole world put to sleep for a
while, some lives are bound to be lost?

All in all, it was as well executed as you could hope for.
So that when the global freak weather patterns turned from grey
skies, to black and then something much, much more sinister, most of
the world had pretty well stopped itself.

When the final surge of blackness came there was just enough time for
the internet to go crazy with conspiracy theories, religious predictions
and apocalyptic scenarios.

If only they had known before they slipped into that deep slumber, the
biological stasis that the darkness brought with it. This was no Doomsday scenario.
The darkness had been unleashed across the planet precisely to
prevent
the destruction of the Earth.

Loyalty can be a funny thing. It can change in the blink of an eye.
He’d never before questioned the work that he was doing or the tasks
that he was asked to do.
He understood that Governments have to act for the ‘common good’
and that sometimes people had to do things that might make the
‘ordinary’ man or woman uncomfortable. But being responsible for the death of a child?
That can
never
be justified.
So on the day that he drove away from that desperate scene, his
loyalties changed. As the sight of a crowd gathering around a dying child at the roadside
grew smaller in his rearview mirror, his conscience kicked in. He knew that he could not question his orders or challenge what had
just happened.

He couldn’t even explain it.
Asking questions, making waves and prying into the mission outcomes
would not get him any closer to the truth. He would need to maintain his cover, keep his poker face on.
But he was
not
a child killer.
And he was not going to let the loss of a child’s life go unchallenged.

Nor was he a fool.
The machinations of the shadowy figures in his organisation
sometimes took years to play out. So it would be with the death of this child.
He was a patient man, he knew the importance of the long game. So he would wait and watch.
But the death of this child had not gone unnoticed. And he would make sure that the young life that he had just helped to
end would not go unavenged.

Kate looks as much troubled as she does annoyed. She can’t explain how I got in here, but she knows that she’s going to
have to think of something quickly. And I must have the same look on my face that I did when Mum caught
me hunting in her wardrobe for my birthday presents.
That guilty look of somebody who knows that they’re just been caught
red-handed and knowing that they have some serious explaining to
do.

Fortunately, Kate speaks first. ‘Dan, we’re really disappointed to find you in here,’ she begins.
Darn, she used the ‘disappointed’ word.
I remember everybody wheeling out that one when I was having my
problems at school. ‘The incredible thing is that you seem to have full clearance across the
bunker,’ she continues. ‘So you
are
in fact authorised to be here.’
Phew, advantage Dan.
She doesn’t want me here, she doesn’t like me being here but it
appears that there’s not much that she can do about it.

Time to go on the offensive, but she gets in before me.
‘We need to explain what’s going on Dan, I’m sure you must be
shocked to find your family like this?’ she says.
Kate is good. In fact she’s
very
good.
She has this knack of seeing what’s going on in my head, then dealing
with it in a way that answers all of my questions. Yet it leaves the biggest questions unanswered still.

How does she manage that?
I think back to Dad and his rants about the HR people at his work. ‘People must make a living out of this,’ I think to myself, ‘Of saying one
thing, then meaning another thing entirely.’ Maybe politics will eventually make sense to me after all.
‘Your Dad and your brother and sister are in stasis,’ Kate explains, I
decide to let her say what she wants to say uninterrupted. I hope Dad can’t hear this, I wouldn’t want him to think that this ‘not
interrupting’ thing was going to become a habit anytime soon. ‘They were exposed to the darkness beyond the blast doors when the
sirens went off, you were all caught in the corridor,’

‘So was I!’ I interject.
‘Here’s the strange thing Dan,’ Kate continues.
She’s doing that ‘Dan’ thing again. It works every time with me.
‘We checked you out thoroughly in the MedLab and you’re absolutely
fine,’ she explains raising another mystery rather than solving any.

‘Your family and the bunker staff from the cottage may have got
caught by the darkness as they made their way into the bunker when
the sirens went off. It’s essential that they remain in the pods for
BioFiltration, it’s for their own health - and safety’ she added at the
end.

‘Health and safety,’ I thought, ‘Even at the end of the world we have to
do a risk assessment!’ I keep my thoughts to myself and ask, more intelligently I hope, ‘What
is BioFiltration?’
‘Great question!’ Kate replies, she knows she has won this exchange by
engaging my curiosity. Have you ever noticed how brilliant you feel when someone says
‘Great question?’ It happened to me at school quite a lot. I’d put my hand up, ask something like ‘Were the Lion and the Witch
actually
in
the wardrobe?’ Or ‘Does a chessboard always have to have 32 white squares?’ And the teacher would enthusiastically reply with a ‘Great question!’.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I knew it
really
wasn’t a great question.
It was a diversionary technique I’d mastered many years ago. Be proactive with questions that you control, that way the teacher will
see that you’ve participated in class.
And when it comes to them asking questions over which you have
no
control, they’ll pass you by. After all, you already contributed.
Diligent student that you are.
But the ‘Great question!’ reply always worked on me. It always made me feel like I’d just done something amazing.
When I knew I hadn’t. I mean, a lion and a witch in a wardrobe? More than 32 white squares
on a chessboard? Come on, really?

So while I was patting myself on my own back for my great ‘What is
BioFiltration?’ question, Kate gave me the answer.
‘We don’t have full information yet about what’s happening outside
the bunker as you know Dan, but we do know from the medical teams
that the darkness itself is not harmful.’

Okay, so far so good once again. She’s very skilled at this reassurance lark. ‘However, all of the people in this room were
partially
exposed to the
darkness, when they’re supposed to be either
fully
exposed, as with
the people outside the bunker, or not exposed at all, as is the case of
all of us who were inside all of the time.’ ‘These BioFilters are removing the contaminated elements and
restoring all vital signs to normal levels.’ Wow I actually understood all of that. Maybe I am cut out to be a futuristic bunker worker after all.

‘So in summary Dan, your family are fine, all of the people in this room
are fine.’
‘They just need to stay here for a little while longer while the process
is completed, after that we’ll wake them up and you’ll all be able to
chat.’

‘Great news!’ I think to myself, and to be completely honest, although
everything that’s going on here is completely unfamiliar to me, I’m still
not unduly worried. What Kate tells me all adds up.
What I hear and what I see makes sense, I’ve no reason to doubt it.

We’ve all been standing still while we’ve been having this
conversation and at that moment the movement-sensitive lights turn
themselves off again. It’s only a moment until somebody moves and they’re back on again.
But for the few seconds that the lights were out, I caught a glimpse of
something. Like a faint light where Kate’s neck was in the darkness. Unusual, because it appeared to be pulsating. I couldn’t see it as clearly when the lights came on, though I was pretty
sure that I’d seen it in the darkness. A pulsating, faint light just at the side of her neck. It was red.

He stood up at his terminal and walked towards the exit. Nobody seemed to notice him. They saw him moving, but they were unable to detect the significance
of what he was about to do.
It was an unusual situation in the control room. They just seemed to be waiting. They
were
waiting of course. The full mission briefing was coming in the next few hours.
While the events unfolded beyond the bunker doors.
They knew that the mission was connected to that. They knew that their loved ones beyond the doors would be fine.
They’d had the advantage, they had been able to engineer things so
that their families were at home when it began.
Their initial instructions were simple.
Just like they’d practised in training. Familiarise yourself with your work station.
Perform the routine tasks on your initial work schedule. Basic things like ‘Check the perimeter’ and ‘Ensure all terminals are
operating correctly’. Then, use the time to familiarise yourself with the bunker layout and
other team members. It was a simple holding pattern, prior to the full briefing taking place.

There was an atmosphere of hesitant expectation in the building, but
assurances had been given, training had been thorough and all was as
it was supposed to be. Except for James. Or ‘Roachie’ as his closest friends called him.
He now had a personal mission which had to be completed secretly. This mission hadn’t been communicated via his terminal or through
any of the routes that were considered ‘normal procedure’.
James’ actions were taken as a consequence of the device that was
faintly pulsating beneath the skin on his neck. Barely perceptible unless you were looking for it.
Its blue light seemed to suggest that information was being
transmitted in some way. Unknown, invisible, undetected.
James knew what he was doing, but he didn’t understand the
implications of the solo mission that he was about to carry out.

Had his consciousness been entirely under his own control, he would
have known to alert his control room colleagues as to what he was
about to do. He would have registered his whereabouts on the staff rota terminal
as he left the Control Room.
And he certainly would
not
have disabled the surveillance cameras
and the alarm systems connected to the main bunker doors.

If you could see through this blackness, you would view the lives of
millions of human beings paused as if somebody had just stopped
time. The darkness is impenetrable though.
It’s neither liquid nor gas, yet it crept across the surface of the Earth
like a dense cloud and it sits in the atmosphere as if it were a heavy,
oil-like liquid. If you ran your hand through it you would feel nothing, but neither
would it would be displaced as if you’d moved though smoke through
smoke. It is dry to the touch, even though the atmosphere around it is not
devoid of moisture.
Most striking of all is how black it is. You cannot see anything through it.
It is all consuming, there are no gaps, no chinks of light, no areas
untouched. And it just sits there, awaiting the moment when its purpose will
become clear.

She’d barely had a career in the Army before she was made redundant.
It came fairly quickly after the incident. So whilst the HR people called it ‘redundancy’ she
knew
that there was
really another reason why.
Probably because she disobeyed those instructions.
What else was she supposed to do?

She was a pretty new recruit, she’d had very limited training and to be
honest with you, she’d received very little in the way of guidance from
her superiors. She reacted on instinct. An ordinary, average person doing extraordinary things in a situation
that they’d never encountered before. Most people would have been given a medal for what she did. But whatever it was that she’d done wrong, it must have caused a lot
of trouble higher up. And look at the personal price she’d paid on that terrible day 15 years
ago.
Not that it mattered of course, just look at her wonderful family now.
Still, in spite of what happened and all of the fallout afterwards, at
least there was one great result from that day. One thing that she’d
never
regretted, in spite of it all.
She’d saved a man’s life that day. James was still alive
because of her
.

I wasn’t sure what the red light meant, but once I’d spotted it in the
darkness, I found it really hard to keep my eyes off it. With the lights on, knowing it was there, I could see just beneath the
skin on Kate’s neck. Interestingly, the two guards also had the same thing.
I needed to get to a mirror quickly. Did I have one of these things fitted?
Was it part of whatever was going on in the bunker?
Unusually for me, I decided to keep my mouth shut about it. Kate seemed unaware of its presence, and like so many other things in
this unusual environment, it may just have been something that
all
the
staff had. I resolved to keep my eyes open to see if
everybody
here had one
fitted.

I was ready to excuse myself and head for the bathroom facilities
along the main corridor so that I could check out my own neck.
But Kate had other things in mind. She’d explained what was going on here, but I’d still been discovered
in a Red Zone. Okay, I had clearance, but she’d explicitly asked me
not
to enter these
areas.
‘Dan, I need to make a very special request of you, is that okay?’ she
asked.

Interesting way of phrasing the question.
Was ‘No’ really an option here?
‘Yes, of course,’ I replied. What a sucker.
‘Although you have Red Zone authorisation
at the moment,
I need to
ask you to stay out of those areas for your own safety,’ I didn’t like the sound of those words ‘At the moment’. She clearly saw this as an anomaly, a temporary thing.
‘We’re only a few hours away from receiving a full briefing, and what’s
going on beyond the bunker lies entirely in our hands,’