Midnight by Anna Dove (books for new readers .TXT) 📕

Now, in the midday haze between drunkenness and a hangover, he watched. A woman, red trousers, a man, blue suit. French, English, and there was some Farsi too. Jabbering on and on, incessant phone calls. What could these people possibly be caring so much about? Their heads down, their eyes fixed on the ground before their feet, studiously avoiding eye contact with other human beings. A bus roared by--a metro bus, its red and yellow sides gleaming in the sun. Jack squinted his dark eyes.

The movement of his facial muscles, the glare of the bus, the reflection of the sunlight too bright to bear--suddenly his mind jolted to another scene that arrested his mental process and scattered all other thoughts. His body tensed involuntarily.

There, in front of him as clear as day, was a long stretching desert, a sand expanse with rising and falling red dunes that met the pale blue sky hundreds of miles away. The glare--the merciless sun beat into his eyes, he squinted, and wrinkles around his eyes deepened, crevicing into the thin skin stretched over his high cheekbones. Heat rising from the sweltering dunes danced in the air, blurring the lines around him.

His gun, tucked in the back of his belt, bore into his back. The heavy linen shirt he wore, meant to protect him from the sun’s rays, only trapped the heat closer to his skin, and the sweat dripped down the nape of his neck and down his back and chest.

Then, the desert vanished just as soon as it had come, its sweltering heat and rolling dunes disappearing into thin air, and in its place were the passing metro bus, and the woman in red trousers and the man in the blue suit. Phones pressed to their ears, eyes on their feet, they passed Jack as he sprawled on the bench, purposefully avoiding looking at his grimy clothing and long, thin frame.

A woman and a child, a young child perhaps two years old, were on the other side of the street, and Jack watched with bloodshot eyes as the child clung to its mother’s hand. The child could barely walk. Perhaps it had only learned a few months prior. It tottered and stumbled but clung with a death grip to the hand of its mother. The mother knelt down by the child and wiped a bit of dirt off its cheek. The child resisted, but the mother prevailed much to the chagrin of the child.

“Never had a kid,” said Jack to no one in particular. “I wish she could have.”

Those within earshot glanced his way and scuttled a little farther from the bench, and soon the mother and the child across the street rounded a corner and passed out of view.

Jack, his head spinning, closed his eyes again after staring up at the blue spring sky. He was close to falling asleep when a series of crashing sounds awakened him.

He sat up immediately, his senses alive instantly from many years of training. Scanning the street, he immediately found the source of the noise. A Prius had wrapped itself around a pole. An instant later, as he watched, the other cars began to crash into each other, and screams echoed up around him. He watched calmly as pedestrians began to run frantically. As the chaos set in, Jack sat on the bench, quietly observing, his dark eyes absorbing the surrounding madness as if he were the eye of a hurricane.

10.  900 Down in Chimaugua

“To understand why and even how this bunker was built — right under the noses of America's vacationing aristocrats — you have to go back to the mid-1950s, when a whole industry built around the construction of fall-out shelters started to take off.”

—

NPR news article, The Secret Bunker Congress Never Used, 2011

Chimaugua bunker was a grim space reminiscent of wartime eras. Sunk nine hundred feet below the surface of Chimaugua, Virginia, it stretched half a mile in length. It comprised a labyrinth of rooms and passageways, leading toward one giant conference space.

The walls were five feet thick of solid steel, cool to the touch. White granite slabs covered the floor, over a steel base, and occasional piping ran up the sides of rooms. There were four huge water tanks that drew from an underground spring, and whose pipelines ran throughout the bunker, distributing water for drinking or bathrooms. A deeper cellar as large as a warehouse stored massive quantities of nonperishable foods, as well as dehydrated food packs. A massive, gas-fueled generator pulsed electrical current throughout the lighting system, and the system, being encased in steel, was protected against the effects of the EMP. Along corridors there hung evenly spaced lightbulbs about forty feet away from each other; the bedrooms, bathrooms and meeting rooms each contained one glaringly bright overhead light. The entire structure was designed with the greatest economy of organization. In all, the space measured fifty thousand square feet, smaller than its predecessors.

From the tunnels below the White House to the bunker in Chimaugua stretched a highly classified and protected train route. The entire system was encased in metal and could withstand nuclear electromagnetic pulses.

Once anyone exited the train, they would find themselves in a preliminary bunker, lined with armed guards. Each passenger would be identified and screened, stripped of any weapons or hazardous materials, and then allowed one by one onto an elevator. This elevator, powered by a traditional pulley mechanism, lowered the individual four hundred feet, and then stopped for forty seconds to allow for pressure adjustment, then the remaining five hundred feet. The individual would then be screened again by more armed guards, and would finally find themselves allowed into the bunker entrance, provided that they were unarmed at this point. If the second set of guards did not believe the individual fit for entrance, the individual would be sent back up the elevator shaft, stopping at the same points for