Chapter Two................Beneath The Ruins

[moonglum]

During the last years of the wars, the government had made plans for an elite group of people, to be placed in suspended animation for twenty years. Time enough to let the ‘dust settle’. Time enough for them to emerge and re-establish government and order. They utilised the government bunker buried deep below the city. It was large enough and well-provisioned to enable five hundred people to ride out the storm of nuclear war. A small fusion reactor, buried miles below the surface would provide power for hundreds of years. Four hundred people; politicians, scientists, and military personnel, were to be guinea pigs for this latest development in scientific research. They decided, no, she had decided, that one person should oversee the ‘tucking-in’, as she called it, and activation of the pods. She would also be the first one to wake, so she could activate the other pods in an orderly fashion. Having assured herself that all was well with her four hundred charges, Helen Rasterne, head of the governments Scientific Research Establishment, settled herself into her own separate pod in the control room and prepared for her twenty-year sleep. The year was 2020.

Helen awoke slowly and painfully. Dust and dirt covered the pod, so she couldn’t easily see out. She could just make out the pulsing red light overhead. She carefully wiggled her toes and fingers and then winced from the exertion of trying to raise her arms and legs. A small display inside the pod showed her heart rate and breathing appeared to be normal, but in her disorientated state of mind, she did not understand why the machine had awoken her. Surely twenty years could not have passed already. It felt like only yesterday that she had seen the last of the ‘Saviours’ closed up in their pods and the machines had taken over. The last of the three indicator lights on the small display changed to green and the glass cover swung open. She lay there, still, for a while breathing in the fresh air. At least the filtration system was working she thought, as she stared at the blinking red light above her head.
It took her a while, her muscles had atrophied somewhat, but eventually, she swung her legs over the side and sat up. The supplements fed into her body, and the vibromatress, had helped stave off the effects of her sleep. After a while, she disconnected the tubes and wires from her body and tried to stand. Her legs buckled under her and she fell to the floor. Slowly she crawled over to the control console and levered herself up and into the chair. Scanning the instruments, she looked for the source of the pulsing red light and what she found shocked her to the very core of her being.

[moonglum]

Helen switched on the display for the cameras in the Cavern, that huge underground chamber where the four hundred ‘Saviours’ slept. The screen remained blank. She set the control to rotate between the 15 cameras. The screen stayed dark, until the last one. The picture was dim and ‘grainy’, but she could see the pods were still closed. The overhead lights were not working. She switched the camera to night mode and panned it around. The end wall of the Cavern had collapsed inward, crushing over a third of the pods. When she zoomed in on the ones closer to the camera, she could just make out the shrunken and withered corpses inside. She turned to the display section that showed the vital signs for her ‘Saviours’. The computer ran through a diagnostic and, after ten minutes, reported all were dead.
Helen sat there immobile, digesting this information. Every few seconds her eyes looked up at the time display on top of the console. The display was linked to an atomic clock. The clock was driven from the reactor and was accurate to one second every one hundred million years. In short, it was exceptionally accurate. It was the thing that had shocked her the most when first she awoke. She sat there watching the seconds tick relentlessly onward, but it was the numbers in the end panel that confounded her. She was supposed to have woken up twenty years in the future. She glared at those four white digits at the end of the display. 2403.

[moonglum]

Helen returned the weight bar to its rest and, sitting up, she swung her legs onto the floor. Reaching for the towel, she mopped the sweat from her face and neck. A month of exercise was slowly returning her body to normal. She had to walk with sticks for the first few weeks, but the cycle exercises had restored her mobility, and now together with the weight training, she felt much fitter. An inventory of her supplies showed she was good for a few months still. The rockfall, caused as far as she could tell by an earthquake, had destroyed a majority of the bunker, but she had salvaged what she could. She had plenty of water, the underground spring was still supplying her pump, her air supply was fresh and the power plant seemed to be unharmed. At first she had laid awake at nights wondering why her? Of course, she knew the answer to that; she was head of the DSR for goodness' sake. Her pod system was on a separate circuit from the others. No matter how many times she told herself though, she still found it difficult to sleep. Was it guilt she asked herself repeatedly? At first she refused to believe that. She was a professional and although she had the final say; she based the decision upon informed information, from her teams, committee's and forums. No, she realised finally; she wasn't feeling guilty at her decision to remain apart from the group. She actually felt guilty about sleeping! She laughed out loud at the realisation that she was frightened of sleep. From then on she slept like a baby.

Helen started talking to herself during the second month. It started with the sounds. Every sound of settling sent her scurrying off to investigate. Calling out and convincing herself she was not alone. She had tried to open the vast steel door to the Cavern, but it was hermetically sealed against the contaminated air inside. In the event of contamination, they designed the system to seal the door. Alone and slowly going mad, she convinced herself she could hear voices in there. She returned repeatedly to her one image of the Cavern, calling out names into a dead microphone, hoping for an answer. The one camera still working, that showed the outside world, was hidden above a small passageway leading on to a ruined square. So far she had refused to venture outside. Her instruments told her the air was breathable and safe, but Thomas told her not to trust them. She kept both screens on all the time, waiting for signs of life from either. Word would have been left and rescue would come soon. They were out there looking for her, she was certain, Thomas would not lie to her. He was sitting on her cot right now, with his back against the wall, smiling at her.

[moonglum]

Helen and her twin brother Thomas were academic genius’s. They were inseparable, so much so that their classmates joked that they must be joined at the hip. Throughout their schooling, they traded A’s and A plus’s. At university, they achieved their respective doctorates at the same time and afterward they were both snapped up by government departments dealing within their chosen fields. Then, for the first time in their lives, they went separate ways. Helen moved to Hampshire with the DSR, while Thomas headed north, with the DOD, to a naval base in Scotland. It was there that the accident occurred whilst testing his new missile guidance system. Prior to it being tested at sea, they carried out land-based tests. During one such test, a missile exploded prematurely in its launcher. Thomas was on the firing platform carrying out some last-minute adjustments. At 27 years old, Thomas Rasterne died instantly. It devastated Helen. She threw herself into her work and shunned all else. She had cultivated no friendships, her work colleagues were just that, colleagues. She didn't socialize; she had no romantic ties, nor did she crave any. At 39, she became the youngest-ever head of the DSR; respected, alone and emotionally barren.

Helen awoke and carried out her usual morning routine. Thirty minutes in the small gym next to the control room, shower in cold water, breakfast and then check the systems.
"Helen, I've been thinking. Perhaps you should take a look outside." Thomas was sitting on her cot as usual, back against the wall and pillow behind his head.
Helen turned in her chair and gave her brother a stern look. "You said it was dangerous, Tom."
“You’ve been watching for weeks now. Have you seen anybody out there?”
“Well no, but you were most insistent.”
Thomas laughed. “Just cautious sis, just cautious.”
As if to vindicate her caution, Helen, still staring at the screen, saw two figures enter the square. She squinted and looked around. “Where are my glasses. Have you hidden them, Tom?”
“No. Look they are in front of you.”
Helen fumbled with her glasses and then studied the screen. She saw the figures were men dressed in leather jerkins and jeans. Both men were armed with crossbows. As they got closer, Helen saw one of the men had markings, or scars on his face and a shaven head.
“They don’t look very friendly, do they?” Thomas was standing behind her, looking over her shoulder. “Better forget what I said about going outside.”
Helen nodded and murmured, “Yes.”

[moonglum]

The incessant buzzing awoke her. What was that noise? Just let me sleep, she murmured, pulling the pillow over her head. Old memories stirred, slipping their icy fingers into her mind and filling her with a sense of dread. Her eyes snapped open and she sat up. The red light was pulsing in time with the alarm. Alarm?
“Tom, what’s happening?” There was no reply. Helen went to the control panel and scanned the instruments. The seal on the Cavern door had failed activating the quarantine protocol. All other internal doors had automatically sealed shut. She whirled around frantically searching for her brother. He was nowhere to be seen. He must be trapped somewhere in the rest of the bunker. She couldn’t lose him, not again. Again? Not for the first time, Helen laughed out loud. Some semblance of reason told her he was never here. The laughter caught in her throat and tears formed, running down her cheeks. She lowered her head to the desktop and sobbed. Cut off from her food and water, Helen was once more alone and frightened.

[moonglum]

Helen wasn’t aware how long she sat there. It could have been minutes or it could have been hours. She had cried herself to sleep, something she had not done since her brother had died. She reached over to turn off the alarm and noticed for the first time the door status lights. There was one door left open to her. In the corner of the control room, a small door led to an emergency escape shaft. A spiral steel staircase wound its way up to the surface. To the small passageway leading on to the ruined square. To the savages with their shaven heads and crossbows!
Helen sat there, staring at the small door, afraid to leave the comfort of her chair. She had no food or water, they were locked behind a sealed door. She had no weapons, the armory was buried under tons of rubble. Making her mind up was a slow torturous process. Eventually, she stood up and went over to a locker. She took out a radiation suit and slowly put it on. After nearly four hundred years there were people up there. Chances were good that contamination was very low if indeed there had been any radioactivity. The instruments told her the air was good, best not to take any risks, she thought. She sat down again, as panic gripped her. What if they are wrong? What if there had been a plague? Those people could be immune.
“You need to find out sis.” She looked up and Tom was standing by the door.
“You can’t survive down here.”
Helen took a deep breath and stood up. She walked over to the door, opened it, turned to the ghost of her brother and said. “Goodbye Tom.” With that, she closed the door behind her and started the long climb to the top of the staircase

[moonglum]

It was five hundred feet to the surface. The bunker had been situated well below any other underground facilities a large city required. Five hundred feet meant a lot of steps, and Helen was feeling the pain of each one. At a third of the way up, she realized it was a mistake to have put on the radiation suit first. She felt like she was boiling up. Stopping to take off the suit, she sat down to get her breath back and cool down. Her head was spinning and she felt as if the walls were closing in on her, threatening to strangle her. Helen had passed the ‘tank’ test. Six people locked in an isolation chamber for a month, to see if any one of them showed any signs of claustrophobia. All of the ‘Saviours’ had undergone that test. A few had gone crazy, but not Helen. No, her emotional detachment had allowed her to bury such feelings, hide them away within herself. But now she was alone and panicking. Panic, she laughed, that’s all it was. Panic brought on by her breathlessness. She slowly calmed herself, regulating her breathing. After a while she felt she could carry on. Carrying the bio-suit, she slowly resumed her climb to the top.

[moonglum]

It seemed to last forever. Helen slowed her pace down to ease her breathlessness. Eventually, she reached the top landing and collapsed, shaking in a heap on the rough concrete floor. She lay there, gasping in lungfuls of air and slowly, very slowly, her breathing steadied then finally returned to normal. She propped herself up against the wall and closed her eyes. Weariness seeped through her body, making its way upwards towards her head until, finally, she fell asleep.
Helen awoke slowly, refreshed but thirsty. Standing up, she turned the wheel and opened the steel door leading a room which housed some lockers and a small control desk. Closing and sealing the door behind her, she crossed to the desk and switched on the power. A screen flickered to life, showing her a fixed panoramic view out onto the square. It was empty. There was no sign of movement. No signs of life. Test the quality of the air first, she thought! Then decide what to do. Quickly, she donned the suit. In one of the lockers, she found an oxygen cylinder. Strapping this to her back, she took an air-tester from another locker and slid open a hidden door to the outside world. Helen stepped out of the passageway and blinked at the sunlight streaming through her visor. The first sunshine she had felt in almost four hundred years. She felt its warmth and wanted to tear her suit off. She laughed. “Not a good idea,” she said aloud.
Helen switched on the air-tester and waited while it went through its test procedure. The green light came on, telling her the air was good. She went back inside the anti-chamber and slid the wall shut behind her. Taking off the bio-suit, she sat down, with her back to the desk and tried to decide what to do next. There must be some sort of order somewhere, she thought. Those men she saw, maybe they were just armed for hunting! A small voice in her head asked, what would they be hunting in the ruins of a city? Wild animals, dogs maybe, she thought. So distracted was she, that she almost missed the muffled voices outside.
“Where indeed! This makes no sense.”
Helen spun her chair around and stared at the screen. Whoever it was must be in the passageway. She heard the muffled voice continue.
“Why build a doorway and not have a door?”
Helen stared at the screen. The voice sounded young. Aman appeared briefly at the entrance. He appeared to be listening intently. Then he disappeared back into the passage and Helen saw why. Over on the other side of the square, three savages appeared and walked across the square towards the passage. Helen made a swift decision. She went to the wall and slid it open. Outside she saw the man was accompanied by two young boys. “Inside, quickly!”