Spare Parts
Part Ten
The final two floors of the bunker were really one massive induction chamber with catwalks and a single second story control room. The door leading to the plant was painful to the touch leaving Garrett no choice but to take off his shirt and use it to help open the door. What waited on the other side was beyond all belief.
The Tumor Queen’s bunker had been powered by the atom, the nuclear reactors that powered it eventually failed on their own, one by one, leaving the place a partially irradiated wasteland with the AI and a few sub systems tucked away and barely powered by a single remaining faulty unit.
This bunker was powered differently, using geothermal technology that harnessed the power of the volcano it was build into. Everything besides the control room was sizzling hot and even inside it was unbearably humid and stifling. Garrett only dared a peek at the room but the single, blinking light on the console was wonderous and promising.
“It’s awful, did we find the well? Is this really where evil comes from?”
Garrett shook his head when they both cleared the small hallway and got back to the door leading to the power plant.
“No, it’s how the power for this place was created. It…well it might still work. I need to find a protective suit though before I could tell you.”
“Power? You mean those bulbs you pointed to before?”
Garrett couldn’t help but smile at the promise of it all, if only a moment before remembering his entire reason for the trip, his only reason for being anymore, “The artificial lights yes, but more besides, far more. Let’s see what we can find in any cupboards or lockers around here.”
The silver suit that looked and felt like little more than a few sheets of tin foil stuffed between two layers of old sticky cloth was in the same sorry condition the orange suits in the other bunker were in. Would it help? Maybe. Was it going to protect Garrett like it was meant to? Probably not. As he gingerly pulled the thing on over his clothes he motioned to the palsied girl. “I’m going to go back in and see if there’s anything I can do in there. I won’t be long but I want you to stay out here with the torch and stay alert.”
“Even if they dared to cross the threshold of this place, the Believers wouldn’t delve into the dark. We always stay indoors when its dark.”
“Just humor me, please. I’ve been in too many situations where I thought I was safe and I wasn’t.” The girl didn’t say anything more but she nodded as he attempted to re-enter the power plant.
Machines of this magnitude required years and the earning of advanced degrees to master. If nothing else it no doubt required a complicated sequence to power up and down and back again. A binder of some kind, full of badly needed information and no doubt long ago turned to worthless wrinkles by all the head and humidity.
Garrett opened the door to the control room and stepped inside. There where no ancient binders full of wrinkled paper, no aged clipboards secreting away illegible brilliance. There was a single chair, something that looked like 3-d printer from what he knew of the late stage technology of those who drank it all up and a single, solitary console. The console had two screens built into it, a keyboard, and one, singular button that currently blinked a dull yellow color.
The screens on the console were blank and there were no lights on or near the keyboard. Garrett considered the power of the volcano and likelihood of disaster as he pressed his thumb, ever so lightly, on the dull, blinking yellow light.
The screens came alive in green text on black screens, the dull, blinking yellow light came over pale green. The machine spat lines of useless information at him but the end result seemed definitive. The power plant worked via a system of vents that Garrett could only imagine were woven internally into the bunker eventually feeding out through ducts leading above ground. The system immediately confirmed his assumption as it listed out its diagnostics during the start up phase. The vents had been closed except for emergency venting. The “well of ghosts” mystery was likely solved by the occasional emergency venting of gas and heat to the surface. Otherwise the system relied largely on manual adjustments of its vents to bleed excess energy.
To put it simply, the place had power and could keep it, but someone had to be here to maintain it. The Heatherite’s put the place on autopilot when they took their shit and left. The place had been slowly burning up, cooking itself to death while it waited for someone to return. The end dates on the system put that last recycle of vents at nearly a hundred years ago. As could be imagined the entire place groaned as Garrett pushed the button. Vents overgrown with mushrooms and molds heaved open, other vents at the surface struggled against generations of vegetation. Some struggled open, others came back inoperable.