The Secret Bunker Trilogy: Part One: Darkness Falls (3 page)

This office is like nothing you’d see at home - these are not laptops and
screens that you would buy in your High Street store. This is something completely different - almost as if they came from a
different world.

It is clear that this visit is not yet over for the woman.
But in three hours’ time she will wake up in her local hospital with no
memory of these events. Her husband will be on his way to see her after she passed out when
giving blood. That doesn’t feel strange to her at all, she has no memory of what took
place earlier. Except there’s a lingering feeling that makes her feel uneasy.
She can’t remember having given blood in the past 12 years.

The Holiday Highlight

David and Harriet didn’t really care what we did on holiday, they were
just happy that we were all together, Mum was not at work and the
garden seemed to be a place for great adventures, even in this terrible
weather.

As part of the holiday prize we had a special visit organised. We didn’t have to pay for it, but we did have to turn up at a special
time, so that they were expecting us. Mum and Dad were really excited about it, I wasn’t really sure what to
expect and David and Harriet really didn’t care anyway. We were going to an old nuclear bunker which lay hidden in the
Scottish countryside. According to Mum and Dad, it was a relic from something called the
Cold War, when countries didn’t get on as well as they do now. From what I could see in the news, countries still didn’t get on that
well.

Apparently, it was a huge concrete warren of tunnels buried under the
ground, the size of a football pitch.
At one time it would have been used as a shelter in a nuclear attack.
These days, we didn’t need it any more.

A Glimpse in The Darkness
I wish I wore a watch, because I have no idea how long I’ve been here
now. Never in my life have I known such impenetrable blackness. I used to be scared in my bedroom at night after Nat died, but even
then, I could clearly see the objects in my bedroom, even though you’d
describe the room as ‘dark’.

Something has been bothering me.
I’ve been distracted by fear, hunger and the silence. But I keep thinking back to those last moments before the huge iron
doors swung shut. David was right at the end of the long, concrete corridor, behind as
always. Dad had propelled Harriet along the dimly lit concrete tunnel when
he’d seen what was happening outside.
And as I stood in the mouth of the doorway, glancing up towards Mum
who was rushing towards the closing doors, I’m sure I saw something
else. I’m doubting myself because I know I’m exhausted. But I’m certain she was with a child.
The child was my kind of age and height, and had a familiar look.
Like I’d known them once, but we hadn’t seen each other for a while.
I’m
sure
it was Nat.

Chapter Five
The Unusual Holiday

Looking back, the holiday in Scotland was a bit suspicious from Day
One. But things always look clearer when you know how they turned out. It’s like flicking to the end of a book to see what the ending is.
It all seems so obvious when you know how the story finishes - but
when you’re there, in the thick of real life events, it’s not always so
clear.

That’s how it was with our free holiday to Scotland. I think the fact that we’d won it out of the blue, rather than having to
pay for it ourselves, made us much more willing to go along with what
they said. After we’d got the ‘Congratulations’ email, we just took it as a fact we’d won a holiday and we’d soon be on our way.

It’s amazing what we accept on the strength of an email. If it looks official, has a nice logo and comes from an address that looks
okay, we’ll just happily embrace it as we would a phone call or a faceto-face conversation. But all sorts of deceptions can lie behind an email and a fancy website
and we’re all too willing to be fooled. And so it was with our family. I think I was probably the only one to notice it, and I can’t even
remember if I pointed it out to Dad at the time. He called me over to take a look at the email on the morning that it
arrived.
Mum was at work already, David at school and Harriet at playgroup.
Just me and Dad.
It looked just like you’d expect any holiday company email to look. A big banner packed with images of wonderful scenery and happy
people. A signature at the bottom of the email that looked like it was real, but
which was really an image. A big, red ‘Congratulations’ sign at the top of the message.
An 0800 ‘Call us if you have any queries’ telephone number in case of
problems. Why would anybody be suspicious about that?

Except that company logo was troubling me.
Where had I seen something like that before? It wasn’t a perfect match, mind you, but it was almost as if it had been
copied from somewhere. It took me a day or two before I figured it out.
I’m sure that with some problems your mind works away on it in the
background and then - at a completely random moment - you just get
the answer. My moment of realisation came while I was cleaning my teeth with my
electric toothbrush, my mind idly skipping from thought to thought.
I realised where I’d seen that logo before. Not exactly the same, but not far off it.
It was just like the metallic logo on Dr Pierce’s tie.

Remembering Nat

Memory is a funny thing. Sometimes I can remember thoughts, events and feelings with
absolute precision, like all five senses captured and recorded every
aspect of an event. Other times I wonder if I was even there, my recall is so hazy.
Even though I was only nine at the time, I can remember certain
elements of Nat’s accident with remarkable clarity.

Bear in mind that I was processing the world through the eyes of
younger child, not a twelve year old. So many of the things that happened, although I didn’t fully
understand them at the time, have taken on a new significance as I get
older. Three things happened that day that I still remember very clearly.
On the day itself, and in the weeks and months that followed Nat’s
death, these didn’t seem to have much significance. But now, when I re-run those events in my mind, things don’t seem to
quite add up.

It’s a bit like a complicated jigsaw puzzle. You can know where the corner pieces go, where all the straight edges
line up and how colours, lines and shapes need to cluster together to
create some sense of the main body. But until that final part slots into place, there is no standing back and
seeing what you’ve got, the picture is incomplete until you have that
last piece in place.

There were three pieces of this puzzle that I was unable to slot into
place - like they belonged to a different jigsaw. First of all, I’m pretty sure that black car was coming for me and Nat.
It was only because I stepped back to look at a bug on the floor that it
missed me.
Secondly, Mum had been distracted by somebody talking to her, so she
wasn’t watching Nat and I as carefully as she would normally.
That’s the only reason that the car got anywhere near us, Mum’s
attention was completely elsewhere at the time. And last of all, I’m pretty certain that I saw Nat moving as the
ambulance doors closed and we were parted for the last time.

Inside The Grey Office

Although she will be unable to recall these events, just like those
who went before her, the woman is all too aware of what is going on before her
memory is erased. To somebody watching from the outside, it would be clear that she is
nervous, uneasy, concerned - but she is not being coerced or forced to
be in this room.

She is here of her own free will, but she would rather not be.
It is like she has had to make a choice, and this is the best of a series of
bad options. Where there are no good options available, it’s amazing how the
human mind can make the best of a bad thing. All of a sudden, a thing that in any other situation would look like
madness, suddenly becomes the right thing to do. That’s how it was for this woman. Whatever the other options that she’d been given, it was better for her
to be in this plain office.

It was a sensible thing to have been injected with a device that she
didn’t understand, by a man she barely knew in a place she’d never
heard of. If this was the
best
choice, somebody observing these events would be
forgiven for asking how bad the alternatives were.

Holiday Arrangements

The logo on the holiday email didn’t trouble me so much at the time.
I think I saw it more as a coincidence than a clue.
With hindsight, it was a very strong clue. To be honest, it was a bit careless, almost like an in-joke that could
have given the game away. But without being able to fast forward to the end, it didn’t seem
significant.

How many times have you seen something or somebody that
reminded you of something else? There’s nothing
completely
original in this world.
So if one logo looks fairly similar to another, it’s not a big deal.
Unless you get caught up in the events that we did of course.

Chapter Six
Connection
I can’t be sure if the sirens have stopped or if it’s just that the doors to
the bunker are so heavy that I can no longer hear them. That last view of Mum running towards the doors is troubling me.
That can’t have been Nat, I
must
be imagining it.
Anyway, Nat would be completely different now, three years older,
just like me. I’d certainly changed in the past three years.

I was much taller for a start, taller than Mum and almost as tall as Dad.
This seemed to excite Mum and Dad beyond my comprehension. They’d always be saying things like ‘I’m sure you’ve grown overnight’
or ‘You’re almost as big as me now’. Personally, I didn’t really notice, nor did I particularly care. My hair had got darker and I wore it shorter than when I was a kid
too. So, if the positions were reversed, would Nat recognise
me
now?
It would be like one of those photo-fits that you see on the TV, where
they age people who have gone missing. You take a look at the photo-fit and you can kind of recognise the
original person in there. But if you saw them in a crowded place, would you
really
be able to
spot them?

I couldn’t be sure, and anyway, it’s ridiculous, Nat died three years
ago, I was there. It must be my mind playing tricks on me, I’ve been alone in this dark
corridor too long. I’m scared, disorientated and exhausted. No, it wasn’t the sight of the person that was with Mum that made me
think that it was Nat, it was not a
visual
recognition. Nat and I were twins and we’d always had a connection.

The day I saw Nat carried away in the ambulance, that connection had
been broken, like a laptop losing a wireless signal and desperately
trying to reconnect. When Nat died the signal died.
I can’t be sure who it was outside those doors with Mum. One thing I do know with complete certainty though.
When I spotted that person with Mum in the distance, something very
strange happened. For the briefest moment, that connection came back online.

Twins

I can’t quite remember when I started having ‘difficulties’ at school.
After Nat’s funeral, Mum and Dad were keen to get everything back to
normal. Of course there was no ‘normal’ anymore, not without Nat.
It hit me hardest I think.
I may be wrong, but seen through my nine year old eyes, everybody
else seemed to adjust quite quickly.

I suppose you can’t cry all the time, at some point, you have to get
back to the things that you did before the death. Even though you carry that empty feeling inside you.
I knew Mum and Dad were sad, but it was hidden by the routines of
daily life. Piling dirty washing into the machine.
Putting the used plates into the dishwasher. Cutting the grass and weeding the flower beds.
Trivial, stupid things force grief aside and demand to be done.
And so it was in our house.

But I was struggling.
I don’t think we even had wireless broadband at the time, so I can only
see this now, with the tech that I have as a twelve year old.
But I can only describe it as ‘searching for a signal’. That’s how it felt without Nat.
When Nat had been around I’d been fine, I felt perfectly okay. But when Nat died, it was like I was searching desperately for
something that wasn’t there anymore.

I know all twins will tell you that. They’re incredibly close, they sometimes know what the other twin is
thinking and feeling. Amazing how humans work.
But this was different, it wasn’t just about closeness.
I didn’t have the words to explain it at the time.
Now I do. It really was like we were fused in some way, locked together,
dependent. ‘Symbiotic’ is the word I found in the online dictionary, it describes it
perfectly. And so when Nat died, it wasn’t so much one death, it was more like
two.

Trouble at School

I had real trouble adjusting to life without Nat. They handled me with kid gloves at school.
Or at least for a while they did. Just like washing, plates and grass, real life has a habit of getting in the
way. In a class of thirty kids, there was only so long I had to get over Nat.
The reality was that they needed me fully functioning as soon as
possible, there’s only so long that you can put up with a problem child
in a busy classroom. So all the time, I felt like I was desperately trying to re-establish this
connection.

It wasn’t just sadness, loss and grief. I couldn’t articulate it at the time, and I just thought it was what
everybody else in the family was going through too. To be honest, I didn’t cope with it very well at all.
Sometimes it would drive me mad, I just needed to get that connection
back with Nat and I’d be fine. So, if other kids caught me at the wrong time, I’d just go crazy with
them. A bit of stupid teasing, some playful pushing, a daft comment.
Sometimes, when I was struggling with my ‘disconnection’ with Nat, I
would just lash out.

Before I knew it the hushed conversations had begun.
Mum and Dad were being called in after school to chat with my class
teacher. When it gets really serious the Head Teacher is involved and Mum and
Dad are having those conversations during the working day. And before you know it, you’re being introduced to a man with an
unusual tie, called Dr Pierce.