Spare Parts
Part Eight
The first suite of rooms to the left were all ruined. Not merely burnt or smashed up but both. There were no skeletons or old weapons left to gather dust. The place had been deliberately smashed up and set fire to by parties unknown and that was that. Beyond and on the other side of a long hallway were the first of many living quarters. These were the suites built for those families deemed too important to live closer to the loud machinery below. Unlike the living quarters of the Tumor Queens bunker though these looked barely lived in at all. Pulled open cupboards still held ancient yet freshly folded blankets and towels. Old world, sealed rations still stuck in place in their carefully labeled shelves.
With every room they looked through and passed the scene made less and less sense. The place spoke of order, years of it. Appliances and tools looked used, well used, but not suddenly destroyed or abused like that first suite of rooms were. People had lived in this bunker for a while, quite a while. They lived well enough with supplies left for decades and then something happened.
The light failed entirely by the time they reached the first set of stairs leading down to the second and descending stories. The Tumor Queen’s bunker had six of them all told and the girl was already breathless and flagging. “Let me find something to make a torch out of and I’ll let you know what I find.”
She stood tall and winced as she put weight on her bad leg. “I’ve been a cripple all my life. Slow isn’t stopped. You go ahead if you need to, but I’ll be behind you the whole way.”
Garrett managed a crude torch and just barely got it to light before he trudged on, always worrying of eerie blue lights before him and the possible sounds of the Believers behind. The second and third story were more of what they had already seen. Living quarters, lived in but not ruined. All used but still with plenty of everyday necessities. The fourth story down finally started to spell out some of what must have played out. A single line of old bullet holes was carelessly sprayed along the wall next to an old, empty swimming pool. The old blood stains spoke of executions from long ago but there were no moldy bodies or skeletons left behind. Beyond that area began the much smaller accommodations made for the crew for the bunker and those sections spoke volume. Empty cupboards, bare beds, piled up refuse long since recycled by time.
Ants and grasshoppers, the haves and the have nots. The multitudes just barely getting by for the sake of a handful with more than they could ever use. The story is hardly new. Economic class and strata seemed to be the one single underpinning of every work of ficiton Garrett had ever read. It was the one constant part of every book on history or religion or philosophy he had ever read in his Aunt’s massive collection. Afterall, the bombs and the fires and the severe global changes, everything that eventually drove people into bunkers like this was their own doing and all of it was because of the all-consuming need for a few to have even more.
There was no clear evidence left in the Tumor Queen’s bunker beside the library there of what had happened in its final “civilized” hours. Having the experimental AI go mad and decide the human stock was hardly worth keeping around was only part of that story. That bunker had plenty of its own rigid class dogma before that.
That ridiculous dogma seems to have been what had the inhabitants willing to leave it behind and live like primitives up on the plateau above. The cultism besides, Garrett could hardly blame them as he past rows of what amounted to simple cells with bunks and steel toilets.