The Island Ch. 09

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I suppose it would come as no surprise to anyone to learn that Liz was right. Our group of intrepid survivors spent a lovely night under the starlit skies, warmed by the pleasantly temperate air - and each other - before heading out as a group to the eastern mountains.

Tom had spotted the first bunker long before anyone else. I will be honest; I didn't really see it until we were almost on top of the damned thing. Tom had pointed it out, Liz had bounced excitedly on the spot, Louisa had given Tom the kind of kiss that made me seriously consider dragging one of the girls off for a quickie, and then the group ran down the hill towards it. Ray and I just looked at each other, shrugged, and followed.

Even from only a few dozen feet away, it looked like a green protrusion of land. It was so overgrown from the moisture-rich sea air that barely a few inches of concrete were visible without moving vines aside. It was so overgrown that the foliage had actually shielded it from the worst of the weathering. The bunker looked as strong now as it must have done when it was built.

"Where's the gun?" Ray asked the group as we all pulled down enough of the vines to reveal the gun port. "I mean, if there was no battle and if the island was never taken, what happened to the guns? Or all the other, you know, military stuff?"

Liz opened her mouth to answer, frowned, and then closed it again. "That's... a really good question. I have no idea." she finally said after apparently thinking about it for a second. "Hey, there is a tunnel back here!"

That pretty much ended the issue for all of the girls, but Ray flashed me a confused glance as we climbed through the square hole in the concrete and into the bunker, and Tom immediately started kicking away the sand and dust on the floor of the fortification to examine what little that remained of the aiming mechanisms. Basically, a series of semi-circle tracks in the ground on which the gun could be turned to aim. Maybe it was a guy thing, maybe it was a Goddess thing, but the three of us seemed to be the only ones concerned with the fate of what must have been a fucking huge piece of military hardware.

It was not a mystery we were going to solve anytime soon, at least not by staring at the floor of the now-empty bunker. I turned my attention to the others as they pulled down some of the drier, older vines, wrapped them around sticks to form rudimentary torches, and then lit them with the lighter.

"Aww, you're not going to pull off your clothes and use those?" I teased as Hayley handed one to me.

"Nine naked women walking around for you to feast your eyes on, you'd like that, wouldn't you?" she grinned back.

"Errr... Yeah. Yes, I would." I laughed.

"I wouldn't mind either," Ray grinned.

"Nor me," Hannah grinned at us from the tunnel door.

Hayley just giggled and thrust the torch into my hand. "Maybe later."

The tunnel was not like the tunnel I had expected from watching shitty World War II movies. It wasn't a hole in the ground scratched out of the mud and propped up my logs. This was an honest-to-god underground bunker, or at least the entrance to one. Both walls, the floor, and the ceiling were lined in what looked to be incredibly strong and durable reinforced concrete. I could make out the patterned bulges of the rebar frame beneath the surface as their shadows danced in the firelight. It would have taken an unimaginable amount of work to carve all of this out and reinforce it with this much concrete, especially considering it must have almost all been done by hand.

Fuck, those Japs were industrious little fuckers, weren't they.

I could see the overhead rails dug into the roof or the tunnel from which shells could be slung and transported, old lights were screwed onto the walls close to the ceiling, and loose lines of wire hung from one to the other. After only a few dozen feet, doors started appearing on either side of the corridor. The first one was jammed shut. Ray winked at his girls and then slammed his shoulder into it.

"STOP!!" I yelled at him, my voice reverberating off the walls and carrying much louder than I expected in the confined space before echoing off into the darkness. Everyone froze and looked at me.

"What?" Ray asked in confusion. "It's just rusted shut."

"You don't know that. If the ceiling above the door has deteriorated, the weight will be resting on the door frame. For all you know, that door is load-bearing. If you bust it open, the whole damn thing could cave in on your head." I answered harshly. "Look, if a door isn't already open, or at least easily openable, leave it alone, at least until we get the lay of the land in here."

Ray cast a nervous look at the top of the door, nodded, and took a step back. From that point onwards, each door that we passed had its handle tried, was given a little bit of a push, and, invariably, left alone. Structurally, the parts of this tunnel closer to the surface would be the most likely to suffer from collapse. Less and less groundwater would penetrate into the deeper sections as most of it would run down the mountain. But these rooms, only a few feet below the surface, didn't have that luxury and may have succumbed over the decades. Ray may have been right; it may have just been rust, there certainly didn't appear to be any signs of water ingress in the tunnel itself, but it wasn't worth the risk.

The further we ventured into the bunker, the quieter everyone became. After a while, only the muted sounds of footsteps on concrete and shallow breathing could be heard. The air smelled old, not stagnant - there was at least one other opening somewhere in the facility, and a soft but steady air current was drifting past us, enough to recycle the air - but it was evident that no human had stepped foot in these tunnels for a very long time.

Finally, we came to an open door. "Hey, looks like we have a winner," I said as I stopped to peer inside. Nobody answered; they just kept walking straight past the opening and further into the bunker. "Errr, earth to... well, anyone. We have an open door here." I glanced inside at the bank of ancient-looking communication equipment lined against the far wall and then back again as the rest of the group kept ignoring me and wandering forward. "HEY!!!" I shouted after them. With a few shrieks of surprise, all of them spun around to look at me, their faces a mix of irritation at being scared and shock at me being the one to scare them. "Why are you ignoring me?"

"What?" Hayley frowned, "You didn't say anything."

"The fuck? I just told you all there was an open door here."

"Really? Did you? Where?"

"Errr, yeah? What the hell is wrong with all of you? It's right here!"

"Um, Dan, it's a solid wall. What are you talking about?" Ray said carefully, looking at the opening.

I squinted at him, then squinted at the very obvious open door and the room beyond. "Sorry?"

"Dan, you are standing next to a concrete wall, love. Are you okay?" Hayley said as she stepped closer.

"What is wrong with...? Are you winding me up? Can you not see this?" I waved my hand through the doorway. Hayley just kissed my cheek, frowned at the door, shrugged, took my hand, and slowly pulled me after the others. I narrowed my eyes at the others and looked back over my shoulder at the room.

What the fuck is going on?

"Oh yay, I've found the end," Liz announced, pulling my attention forward again. "Oh my God, it's huge!"

"Oh, wow." One of Ray's girls said as she followed behind her.

"Dan, what do you think of this?" Ray asked, looking back over his shoulder as Hayley's hand dropped into mine.

"Oh, this you can see?" I muttered as I followed them in.

"What was that, babe?" Hayley asked, smiling as she looked around the room.

"You all just called me nuts for spotting the room back there?"

"Oh baby, look at this place. This would be perfect, don't you think?"

I narrowed my eyes at her. Something strange was going on. Even a cursory glance back down the passage was needed to spot the very obvious opening in the wall. How the hell were they able to pretend it wasn't there? I sighed and shook my head; I would have to think about that later.

The room that had everyone so excited was, to be fair, pretty damned impressive. At least fifty feet long and half as wide, it looked to have once served as the barracks for the men who operated the guns in the batteries on this part of the mountain. Rows of dilapidated and rotten bunk beds lined the far wall, some of them still holding up the remains of what looked to have once been straw mattresses. The walls on either side of our tunnel were lined with equally aged tables, chairs, and stacks of equipment boxes.

As impressive as that was, I was more interested in the ceiling. Two parallel walls, pretty close to each other as they had been in the tunnel, were a fairly sturdy engineering concept. The less space between two supporting walls, the less chance there was of the roof between them being undermined by the weight and collapsing. A room like this, however, had walls sometimes as far as twenty-five feet away from parts of the load-bearing ceiling. If this structure were to collapse, this is the first place it would happen. There were ways to offset the risks; angling the top of the concrete slab that held up the earth above it pushed the weight toward the walls, it made the center thicker, and, therefore, heavier, but it redistributed a lot of the load it was carrying. Without drilling into it, or digging it out, however, it was impossible to tell if that's how it had been constructed. To the careful eye I was casting over it, though, it not only looked solid, but seamless. Somehow, it had been built as a single solid construction rather than smaller sections being joined later. It made the whole thing significantly stronger. There was no water ingress, no signs of dampness, no cracks, no vegetation or roots growing through it. It was in remarkably good condition.

I couldn't help but admire the craftsmanship. Modern construction techniques had concrete blowing pumps that could spray the walls with as much concrete and cement as was needed. But I had absolutely no idea if those techniques were available in the late thirties or early forties when this place must have been built. Doing all of this by hand, especially to this standard, would have involved a truly eye-watering amount of work.

"Yeah, this looks like it would work nicely. We would need to clear all this stuff out," I said, happy with my cursory inspection and nodding to the old beds and tables. "That is good for little more than firewood. We would also need to sort things out like lighting and bathrooms, but the room itself looks about perfect."

"Do you think it's big enough?" Hannah asked, giggling as her voice echoed loudly around the room.

"Well, it's a damn sight bigger than anything I was going to build, and my guess is that it isn't the only one. It would be good to explore those to see where they go." I pointed out the yawning tunnels leaving the three other walls of the room."

"This one seems to go to another gun emplacement," Amy said, looking down one of the corridors. "I can see the light from outside."

"This one is dark," Katie said as she looked down the tunnel opposite our entrance.

"So is this one," Ray said, peering into the last one. "I'll be honest, it's giving me the creeps," he finished with a shudder.

"Pussy," Tom's voice echoed perfectly around the room. There was a brief moment of astonished silence before first Louisa, and then everyone, burst into laughter.

"Cold, man. Cold." Ray laughed, clapping the young man on the shoulder.

"Alright," I said as the laughter finally died down. "Let's head back outside and start gathering some kindling to make more torches. These ones aren't going to last much longer."

"Yeah, I agree," Liz said with a nod. "It would be worth sleeping in the bunker itself until we work out a way to get permanent lighting in here as well. Torches or a fire would be great, assuming there is proper ventilation, but I'd hate to get lost down here at night when there is no light from outside if a fire went out unexpectedly."

The rest of the group took only a few seconds and a quick glance at their diminishing torches to agree wholeheartedly. We made our way back down the tunnel we had entered through.

I went first, stopping outside the open room and looking inside again, but this time I watched the others more carefully. Not a single one of them cast so much as a cursory glance at it. I frowned again. Something was seriously strange about their refusal to acknowledge the room I was now standing in.

I shook my head and was just about to leave when something on one of the tables caught my eye. It was an old-style reel-to-reel voice recorder. I had seen one once before; my grandfather had been some sort of journalist back in the war and had kept a lot of his reports. He had been more than happy to show them to my elementary school class when we had studied the greatest generation.

What was more interesting about this one, however, was the piece of paper hanging above it, on which was written, in perfect English, "Play me!"

It couldn't possibly still work, could it?

Letting my curiosity get the better of me, I stepped forward and pressed the play button, and listened as a voice echoed out of the speaker.

"My name... My name is Dr. Simon Walker. United States Army Medical Corps. If you are hearing my voice, your life is in grave danger..."

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And that's a wrap for chapter 9.

Dum Dum Duuuuuuum... Yes, I like a cliffhanger. I hope you are enjoying the story. The rest of the story will continue next week. I look forward to seeing you then.

Thank you for your comments and feedback. It never ceases to amaze me how supportive and receptive my readers can be. I look forward to hearing what you think of this, and my flagship story - NewU - in the comments or on the Discord Server.

Stay Awesome.

Nova