The Secret Bunker Trilogy: Part One: Darkness Falls (12 page)

‘Okay, move on Dan,’ I think to myself.
I press button 3.

When the woman had done it earlier, there was nothing.
No sound, light or movement. But when
I
press button 3 there is an instant response and the lift
starts to move down to the next level.

Beyond The Blast Doors

There are two people beyond the blast doors. That’s what the monitor says.
It identified them both as human.
It would not make any sense to open the doors to the bunker cat in a
situation like this, so it’s important to know who - or what - is out
there.

One female - age 37 and one male - age 48. The female is sitting, with one of her arms out-stretched as if she has it
wrapped around somebody. Unusual, it must be hard to keep it up like that all this time.
The woman and the man cannot be connected.
He’s standing at a distance from her. They can’t be talking or linked in anyway.
He’s clearly keeping his distance. Having disabled the monitoring in this area, he will be able to open the
doors to let the two people in.
Although he won’t question where the information comes from, the
woman must be retrieved safely and concealed in the bunker.
She is crucial to what is about to happen. The man is useful, he will serve as a cover for James.
They will want to know why he didn’t follow protocol. James will hand over the man and make him available for
BioFiltration. He’ll just be a member of the cottage staff who came here when the
sirens went off.
Lucky - or unlucky- depending how you look at it.
That will act as a cover for the woman. He’ll be able to get her safely in the lift before he distracts everybody
in the control room with the man’s arrival. She’ll be going down in the lift where they won’t find her.
Somewhere that he doesn’t even know exists in the bunker at present. He’ll be guided there via the blue device in his neck.
Level 3 is where the woman will be able to play out her part in this.
Chapter
Fourteen
Deeper

I’m pretty stunned when the lift starts to move downwards. I’m nervous that moving to Level 3 may have alerted Kate and her
team in the control room.
I don’t want to get into any more trouble so, rather ridiculously, I
press the button for Level 2 again, as if it’s going to conceal what I
have just done.

I step out into Level 2 and just wait in the corridor. I assume that I’ll be joined at any moment by Kate and her security
team. They
must
know what just happened.
But nobody comes. I walk up and down the corridor and nip into the loos for something to
do.
A few minutes later I emerge. Nobody comes.
They can’t have known what I just did.

I head back for the lift, feeling a little more daring now.
I press the button for Level 3.
Down it goes again.
The doors open. The corridor is similar in size and layout to the ones on Levels 1 and 2,
but it is coloured differently. There is a thick, red stripe going along each side of the wall.
It looks more serious here, like the red line leads somewhere.

The doors close, and I decide to try Level 4.
I press the button.
Once again, I go down a level. The doors open, and this corridor looks different once again.
The corridors are black this time, once again with those thick red
stripes running along them. Both corridors are completely silent, there were no bunker staff there.
I’m beginning to wonder if the lady was telling the truth earlier. Or to be more precise, she was telling me what she
believed
to be the
truth.
I’m not sure what to do.
I feel like somebody who just got away with something they’re not
supposed to do. I expect to hear alert sirens or something similar.
But there are no sounds and nobody comes.
Kate and her security team do not come.

Regardless of that, there can only be so long until they realise that I’m
not showing up on any of the cameras on Levels 1 or 2. For a moment I feel completely stuck.
I’m desperate to explore these two new levels, but I
really
don’t want
to get any more negative attention from Kate. Every part of me wants to stay here, but I can’t risk getting into any
more trouble, Dad, Mum, David and Harriet are relying on me.
I’m the only one who can look out for them at the moment.
So, I press the button for Level 2 and decide to stick to my original
plan.

Rather annoyingly, the lift heads for Level 1.
Somebody must have called the lift before I pressed the button. For a place that’s so hi-tech, you’d think that they’d be able to sort the
lifts out. It turns out to be a lucky break though.
The lift arrives at Level 1 and the doors open automatically.
A man gets in, presumably the chap who called the lift in the first
place. But it’s not him who catches my eye. It’s the man who’s walking intently along the corridor towards the exit
who now has my complete attention. I haven’t seen him before and he looks just like everybody else down
here.

Except for one thing that’s different.
There is one of those faint lights in his neck. It’s pulsating furiously, but you’d still have to be looking carefully to
notice it. However, there’s something very interesting and different about this
one. The faint light in
this
man’s neck is glowing blue.

Mission Failure

She had not known Roachie prior to the mission taking place as he
was much more experienced in Army life than she was. After completing her basic training, and what seemed to be a very
large number of psychometric and aptitude tests, she was summoned
to a meeting at a barracks that she’d never been to before, let alone
heard of. She called it a barracks, but the soldiers that this place housed wore a
uniform that she’d never seen before, certainly not Army, Navy or Air
Force - or even SAS come to that - but definitely military in nature.

You got used to doing what you’re told in the Army so she didn’t
question it when she was asked to sign an E-Notice. She’d already signed the Official Secrets Act as a standard part of her
military life, but she’d never had to sign an E-Notice before nor had
she ever heard of one. Rather than reading the text thoroughly, she’d skimmed it just to get a
sense of what she was doing. But really, did she have much choice in the matter? She trusted the Army, they had her best interests and the interests of
the country at heart, right?

There were sentences referring to ‘injections and implants’, all pretty
standard practice in Army life, where you may get posted anywhere in
the world and have to take your ‘shots’ to protect you from whatever
nasties were out there. She’d never seen this before in any of the documents that she’d signed
during her short military career.
In outlining the types of threat that she might encounter - including
via air, sea and land - this E-Notice made mention of ‘off world’
threats. She just assumed that this was one of those legalese ‘cover all’
statements.
Like ‘Acts of God’ in the home insurance policy. It’s the sort of statement that the lawyers can use to weedle their way
out of anything. ‘Could apply to meteorites and bits of fallen space stations I guess,’ she
thought, and moved on without further reading to the signature area.

Besides, as a young 22 year old hungry for adventure, why wouldn’t
she be up for this mission? It was like an opportunity to play at being James Bond, a bit of
espionage. For some reason, she and this other guy had been selected entirely on
the basis of their psychometric profiles. A random pairing, of no significance it had seemed at the time.

Of course, they had to be trained to a certain level of military
competency, but it was
their minds
that were being sought for this
particular job. It was a safe mission they’d been assured of that from the start. A 1% casualty risk apparently.
Some boffin will have modelled it on a computer somewhere and
come up with that figure. In military terms, that risk is fine.
In fact, in a simple office risk assessment, that’s probably fine. No more than a knocked over hot coffee or a trip over a waste paper
bin. Annoying, painful for a short while but not in need of a hospital visit.
With both of them in hospital only 48 hours later, one of them on life
support, that particular boffin might have wanted to double-check that
figure of 1%.

Selection

It’s interesting to hear the objections and concerns that people have
when they’re going to become a part of something special. It never fails to fascinate him, human beings are such complex, yet
predictable, things. They just want to know that their families will be fine and that the
outcome will be good.
They have been chosen specifically on the basis of detailed
psychometric testing. This testing process had been pioneered many years earlier, and had
been proven to work time and time again in live simulations. In all respects these are just average people.
Of course, they have certain basic parameters of health, fitness and
intelligence. But these are not the defining qualities for selection.

Every person selected for service in the bunker has been specially
screened to ensure that they will act in exactly the same way in a
simulation process. There are key indicators in their personality profile which ensure that
with 99.9% accuracy, in moments of stress, they will behave the way
that they need to. And most importantly, they have a predisposition to accept the
concept of ‘the greater good.’ Not everybody gets that one.
If you had to die to protect a person that you don’t know, to do
something that would help other people, would you sacrifice your life? Many people say ‘No’ without hesitation.
Others say ‘Yes’ but simulations show that they won’t follow through.
There is another profile group which would only do so with further
qualification and much more information. But in the blink of an eye, faced with sudden and overwhelming
information confirming that you must give your life for the good of
others, would you do it?

It turns out that you can select a specific group who will say ‘Yes’
without hesitation, because in an instant, they can see the logic of one
death to save many lives. It takes a very unique mix of empathy, intelligence, bravery, logic,
decision-making … he’d isolated over 57 key factors in this process.
But he needed to be sure - with 99.9% accuracy - that when these
people who’d been gathered in the bunker learned the terrible truth
that they would make the right decision for the greater good. The future of all humanity.

Stillness

The world is still and waiting.
Like it knows that this is only the beginning. Not a creature moves across the entire surface of the earth.
All is still, and even within the darkness, there is no wind, the seas are
calm and nature is at rest. It must have been like this at the beginning of the world, when there
was no life. Only the life that inhabits this planet is sleeping - in biological stasis living, breathing, sleeping, still.

It is the same for the birds, the insects, the fish - even the ants have
stopped work and succumbed to the unstoppable power of this
darkness. Its blackness could suggest that it is a force of evil, something that has
been created to annihilate life on this planet.
But it is here because Man made it so.
It is here because without it, this would be humanity’s final grave.
It is here to breathe new life into this planet, to help it to live again.

Chapter Fifteen
In The Shadows
This has really got my interest.
How come this guy has a
blue
light in his neck and everybody else that
I’ve seen so far has a red one? Why do I seem to have more access to this bunker than anybody
else that I’ve met here so far? Including Kate.
I wouldn’t describe myself as unlucky, but neither am I a magnet for
massive good fortune. So the thought that I might be the only person on the planet to be able
to access virtually all the areas of this secret facility is preposterous.
I’m twelve years old for goodness sake.
I still don’t have access to all areas on the internet let alone a top
secret military facility. Something is going on here and I’m getting more intrigued the more I
learn. I’m desperate to take a look around Levels 3 and 4, but I want to know
what this man is up to. He seems pretty intent, whatever it is, but I suspect that this blue and
pulsating light must single him out as being different in some way. Maybe he’s a different rank.
Or perhaps he has different access in the bunker. Who knows?
But I’m going to postpone my visit to the newly discovered levels and
see what he’s up to first.

But not before I do a quick test.
‘Excuse me!’ I shout to him as the lift doors open to reveal him walking
along the corridor.

‘I’m trying to get to Level 3 and the lift doesn’t appear to be working.’
‘Level 3 doesn’t exist,’ he relies, ‘It’s there in case they expand the
bunker in future.’
‘Okay, thank you!’ I reply and pretend to head off the other way along
the corridor.

Scooby Doo and Shaggy would be proud of me.
I double-back and follow at a safe distance along the corridor. Whatever is going on with Levels 3 and 4, the bunker staff certainly
believe
that they don’t exist.
Or
, they’re forbidden to share that information. However, that lady who did the demonstration earlier certainly
couldn’t operate the lift beyond Level 2.
I wonder if this chap with the blue flashing light in his neck could do it.
I wonder if that’s what the colours signify? No time to debate this now though, he’s heading at some pace along
the corridor.

It looks like he’s making for the bunker entrance, but that
can’t
make
sense, there’s nothing to be done out there for now.
According to Kate, we have to wait here until we get mission
instructions. And then I notice something as I walk quietly behind him in the
shadows. Ever since we committed to heading out towards the bunker entrance,
I’ve noticed something different about the surveillance cameras.
Beforehand, they were constantly showing signs of life via their
whirring lenses and flashing LEDs. But
these
cameras are lifeless, they don’t appear to be powered up.
Whatever this man is up to, it is going on unseen by anybody else in
this bunker.