Moments later, she was off with purpose in her step. Her destination: the bridge that would take her across the river and into the forbidden Frost Zone.
A smile took over her lips. It came out of nowhere, pushing through the stress of the day.
Only one more block to go.
Then she’d be inside the abandoned building across the way. A building that protected her favorite place in the entire world—an abandoned bookstore called INFINITE READS.
CHAPTER 4
“Damn it, Summer. I don’t have time for this,” Security Chief Krista Carr muttered to herself, her military boots pounding at the metal floor of the silo.
Her brisk jog continued, taking her around the outside of the circular, eight-story hydroponics bay. The lights inside the underground chamber beamed on all levels, blinding her vision with brilliant, momentary flashes as she passed a string of observation windows around its circumference.
The lights inside the bay fed an array of hanging garden beds from top to bottom with UV light, something Edison said all plants needed.
Rich garden soil was a tough find, so they’d rigged the system to produce food using sand and gravel—or whatever else they could scavenge or acquire at the Trading Post.
Fruits, vegetables, and herbs hung over the edges of the various platforms, cascading down under the force of gravity. There were also a few dozen cannabis plants being cultivated—for medicinal purposes, of course.
A good fifteen years earlier, her boss, Stuart Edison, known to most as simply The Professor, began his quest to retrofit this Titan II Missile silo for his new society.
Krista didn’t understand the science behind everything inside the old launch bay, but it was impressive. It seemed logical to assume there weren’t many scientists on the planet who could have turned a subterranean military facility into something useful and life-sustaining. But the Professor had, elevating his world-renowned genius to a new level.
Edison’s new underground society, codenamed Nirvana, was top-secret—not because it had been deemed ‘classified’ by a government or some military branch, but rather because Edison himself declared it so.
He wanted its location kept a secret from the outside world, a world that had become desperate and lawless after The Event ended society a decade before.
Krista made it to the central freight elevator, but the platform was already in use, the hydraulic gears of the fifty-year-old wire-mesh lift clanking away. A change in plan was needed.
She reversed course, passing one of the spring-loaded platforms that formerly supported a fuel control station for the nine-megaton warhead back in the day.
A pair of metal ladders waited just beyond the station. She passed the first and went to the second, where her hands made quick work of the rungs, taking her upward.
Experience had taught her to ignore some of the ladders on this deck. There were several. Some went nowhere, leading a climber’s head into the bottom of the next floor.
The first time she noticed the goof, she laughed so hard she couldn’t breathe. Initially she thought the government contractors messed up, misreading the schematics during the build.
However, that’s not what had happened.
The mistakes were a result of what the Air Force called “concurrent engineering,” an old term used during the construction of the silo.
The phrase gave the impression of something sophisticated and well-planned. But in reality, it meant the facility was built from bottom floor up, one level at a time, all while the rest of the complex was still being designed by the engineers.
Plans are usually complete and vetted before a project of this scope is started. But not this place. It had been built using a hasty “design on the fly” approach.
She imagined some of the conversations that took place in the logistical meetings, focusing on one statement . . . “You work on sublevel 8, while I design the next floor up. It’ll all work out. Trust me.”
The concurrent processes had led to sudden plan changes, yielding ladders that went nowhere, useless beams sticking out of the walls at odd angles, and spring-loaded contraptions serving no purpose.
Krista stepped onto the deck two levels up and cruised past a parade of bunk beds with sheets and pillows in disarray, then found the long cableway that connected the missile bay to the control complex.
Two of her guards stood at the entrance, their faces tight and eyes fierce. They gave her a quick salute, pulling their trigger fingers free from their rifles to do so.
She skipped her half of the response, passing the men clad in full tactical gear.
The paint in the tunnel gave off an eerie green hue. It was almost a neon lime color, something she’d never expect the Air Force to choose, not with its official color palette revolving around some vainly-named version of blue.
Wild blue yonder was her favorite.
Oh, and air superiority blue was another.
Yet, the green did offset the heavy runs of black cables stuffed into the recesses of the ceiling. Each was a couple of inches thick and tucked beyond the metal struts and steel support beams, maximizing the space available to thread them from end to end.
Perhaps the offset nature of the paint was the reason for its use. Not that it mattered anymore. Nearly everyone involved in the military was long gone after The Event. Starvation, resource shortages, and Ice Age level temperatures can wipe out even the stoutest of armed forces.
Every time Krista walked this tunnel, she felt a sense of awe. The sheer amount of work that had gone into constructing the straightaway was impressive.
There had to be thousands of miles of electric and hydraulic cables across the silo, all of them flowing through this central point in the complex.
Unreal was a term she’d first used to describe this section after factoring in the hefty number of pipes and endless electronics. Fifty-four heavy duty shock absorbers hung evenly along both sides of the cableway, each responsible for keeping the tunnel intact in the event of a nearby nuclear strike.
In fact, the entire installation had been built on huge springs to cradle everything that might be sensitive to shock. Even the former occupant of the missile bay—a 330,000-pound liquid-fueled monster, capable of obliterating a thousand square miles clear across the globe in the blink of an eye.
The number fifty-four seemed to have a special meaning to the Air Force. Not only did it cover the number of industrial grade shock absorbers in the cableway, but it also represented the number of Titan II silos commissioned across the USA.
Silos had been built in three groups of eighteen, each cluster centered around a strategic city. She wished she knew the significance of the number 54, another one of those odd military designations, like her service specialty in the Army: 88K.
The multi-story Command and Control facility was just ahead, beyond a series of bank vault-type blast doors guarding the entrance from the surface. Nothing was getting through those mammoth bulkheads, not without a MOAB being dropped first to loosen the hydraulic hinges and crack the heavy steel security rods that locked into place.
Krista zipped past a metal placard that featured the same symbol she wore on her necklace—an infinity symbol. The sign also had the word NIRVANA stenciled underneath it.
The same community marker hung in every hallway and nearly every room, and had been there ever since Edison first transformed this facility. None of that surprised her. However, the handwritten sign next to it was new.
Tragedy lies in having no goal to reach. ~Benjamin Mays
“Old men and their magic markers,” she mumbled, recognizing the handwriting. It was the Professor’s. “Looks like he found a use for all that extra cardboard.”