Bunker 9 - a short story by Steve Cook

Fiction on Freedom Plaza

“I’m sure it’s around here someplace...” Dot Torrance said, trying to feign a confidence she did not feel. She was working from memory: her HandHeld was dead: presumably damaged when they crashed. They were on their own: forced to rely on their own wits and resources, God help them.

“We could be ruddy miles off.” Mikey told her. There was a whiney note of despair in his voice, his usual self-confidence conspicuous by its absence. He acted like he had been damaged in the crash too, although there was not a mark on him.

She reflected, with an irritation that bordered on bitterness, that it was when the chips were down that you really got to know someone. The universe had a way of winkling out your weaknesses and in adversity, when you were really up against it, there were aspects of a man that surfaced, which you rather wished would remain hidden.

Mikey, she had discovered, was not good in a crisis and Dot was in danger, if he kept this up and did not snap himself out of it, of falling out of love – provided she lived long enough that is. She liked men to be men and Mikey’s response to their predicament thus far had been to revert to being a lost little boy, and a snivelly one at that.

“It’s around here.” She told him, firmly, through gritted teeth. “We just need to keep going.”

“I vote we stop for a breather.” He suggested, as if they were a small democracy. “We’ve been walking for hours.”

“You do what you bloody well like. I’m pushing on.”

They were struggling up the side of a long, exposed hillside, in the starless dark, the only light provided by an horizon that, for some reason, glowed as if it were radioactive. A strong, bitterly cold wind moaned across the bare, desolate landscape, preternatural in its unwavering constancy. It blew in their faces, resisting their progress like an invisible hand.

Dear God, Dot Torrance wondered, is there ever going to be an end to this ruddy hill and that monotonous ruddy wind?

For some reason it seemed that God Herself had it in for her. It was not enough that She had crashed Mikey’s ship, the pretentiously named Victoria Resplendent, She had crashed it in a corner of the Earth that was as desolate as the surface of the Moon, complete with craters, and then added for good measure a wind that howled like a banshee hour after hour after flaming hour.

The piece de resistance, of course, had been to take her boyfriend away and leave in his place a spineless ninny with the courage and fortitude of a hamster.

Dot pushed on, Mikey Lennox trailed after her dispiritedly, like a squaw, apparently unaware that his manhood had been compromised. Okay, so maybe they were going to die, of exposure or malnutrition or whatever, but they had a choice: they could die grizzling or die shaking their fists at the heavens. Dot knew which she preferred.

An hour later, the wind and the incline remained unchanged, the dark remained unchanged and Mikey sat down. “That’s bleedin’ it.” He said. “I’m knackered. Just five minutes to catch our breath and then we’ll be on our way.”

Oh so now he was giving the orders! She had half a mind to keep on walking and leave him behind just to spite him but the truth was she desperately needed a breather too and she knew that in the featureless dark they could become separated forever and both die alone. Any company was preferable to none, even Mikey in his current mood.

“You got any of that chocolate left?” he asked her as she huddled next to him, for warmth.

“You ate the last of it two hours ago. I told you to go easy.”

“I thought we’d have been rescued by now. Where the hell is the rescue ship anyway?” He peered at the blank heavens through slitted eyes that were teary from the wind – at least she hoped it was the wind.

“They’ll not be here for two days at least.” She said, for the umpteenth time.

This was not Tasmania or even South Island. This was the other side of the god damned planet. Assuming their distress signal had been picked up at all, and assuming too that anyone thought a long and expensive journey into the Wastelands was worth it on the off-chance of finding them alive, a rescue expedition had to be kitted out and then scrambled from Darwin or Canberra: it was going to be a couple more days at the bare minimum before anyone reached them. In the meantime they had to survive and survival hinged on them finding shelter; they had no food and their parkas, while stylish, were too thin for the climate.

“We never should have left the ship.” Mikey complained. “I don’t know what possessed us.”

Dot was not sure either. The Victoria was a Cairns Class airship, a yacht buoyed by helium tanks and propelled by turbo props. It could go long distances but was slow and although appropriate for sightseeing tours or even scientific surveys, it was not completely suitable for the kind of journey they had undertaken, a sponsored sail to the North Pole and back most of it over the Wastelands whose desolation covered half the planet.

Mikey had been full of bravado and confidence before they embarked on their misadventure and had insisted his ship would be fine: a confidence born of jaunts around the Oz coast and expeditions across the Banda Sea to Maluka and an ignorance of just how different a proposition was this trip into the Wastes.

There was a very good reason few people travelled this far from home, and certainly not in a glorified pleasure vessel but Mikey had not been listening. All he could hear were the plaudits when the Hero and his best girl returned home from their adventure, the rapt audiences at parties and his vacuous mug in the local papers.

Well, so much for the brave adventurer, she thought as her Marco Polo hugged his knees and regaled her with stories of how much his feet hurt.

She could not for the life of her recall why the hell she had listened to him but back then she had not had the wisdom of hindsight and, in the relatively safe and unchallenging environment of home, he had carried himself with such easy confidence she had assumed he knew what he was doing.

There were two types of confidence, she reflected: the confidence born of genuine ability and that born of the miscalculation of the terminally stupid.

Finding himself suddenly torn from the cosiness of Oz and civilization, Mikey Lennox was a duck out of water, in the manner of a large cocky duck torn from the placid waters of its pond and unceremoniously dumped in the Simpson Desert by a very large tsunami. But then so was she. The only difference was, she had never been the big “I am” to begin with, took the reversal of fortunes better and refused to let it knock all the fight out of her.

She had trouble remembering too why it was they had left the ship and struck out across country. The logical thing would have been to stay with the crashed vessel. She supposed it must have been the turmoil of their crash landing, memory of which was something of a blur, that they must have been stunned or disorientated because the next thing they knew, there they both were: struggling across inhospitable terrain in the dark. There was no going back to the ship now because they would never find it again in the dark, in a land bereft of landmarks – or indeed everything else for that matter.

It would have helped if the HandHeld had been working: there was an awful lot crammed into the little device’s memory, included navigation and a satellite link to civilization. The HandHeld, unfortunately was dead. She held onto it though and kept trying it, even shaking it on occasion, in the hope that it might suddenly spring back to life with as merry beep and a chirrup, jauntily winking lights and an eagerness to share with the needy the gigabytes of information stored in its memory.

As it was the HandHeld was about as useful as cell phone in Medieval Europe and Dot had for guidance only her memory of what she had seen on the ship’s screens before they crashed, while she was feverishly searching for information about the terrain below them and Mikey wrestled vainly with the helm.

Fortunately, she had a good memory and the ship’s computer had pinpointed some kind of ancient installation just to the north of where they came down. She still had the data in her mind’s eye. It was a preternaturally clear recollection, standing out from her other memories of the past few hours like a lighthouse looming up out of the mist. It was an installation that, according to prior surveys of the area, had survived the Wipeout and would afford them shelter.

She was reasonably sure that they were headed in the right direction, although her own confidence was gradually eroding the longer they walked. The ship’s maps had suggested an hour’s walking tops, but they had been trudging now for six.

“Is that useless piece of crap still not working?”

“Nope.” She banged the HandHeld with the heel of her hand, as if trying to jog its memory but, in her frustration, hitting it hard enough to scramble whatever wits the machine may have had left.

“I wish you’d stop hitting the ruddy thing. How is that going to help?”

“About as much as you telling me how much your feet hurt.”

“Well, they do. I reckon I pulled something when we crashed.” He lifted his leg and waggled his right foot. “It hurts when I do that.”

“Well don’t do it then.”

“Where did you say we are?”

“England.” She said.

“Never heard of it.”

Mikey, actually, was not a bad pilot and navigator, at least in and around the relatively safe, familiar regions of Oz and its colonies and he was a decent surveyor and photographer but had evidently never read a history book in his life and slept through History at college.

“It’s an island off Europe. There were sixty odd million people living here at one time. Even Oz used to be one of her colonies.”

Mikey stared at her blankly, having trouble visualising Oz being anyone’s colony. Oz was Civilization, an Empire in her own right, the only inhabited continent on the planet (unless you counted the southern tips of Africa and South America) whose three hundred million people comprised eighty five percent of the world’s population.

“Sixty million? On one island? That’s the entire population of New South Wales isn’t it? How did they survive? It’s a ruddy dump!”

“It wasn’t a dump before the Wipeout,” Dot, the History Major, told him. “Although its inhabitants thought it was. Guess they found out the hard way what a real dump is.”

“Along with most of the rest of the planet.” Mikey said, forlornly, remembering the relentless tracts of desolation they had seen from the air on their journey here.

“There used to be forests, cities, growing things...” Dot said, wistfully, attuned to the great tragedies and sadness of man’s past. “And people.”

“Well there has to be somebody around. A village or settlement or something....”

She shrugged. “Not according to the database. It’s been a desert for four hundred years and probably will be for another four hundred. Nearest known settlement is in Cyprus...”

“Well, can we walk it?”

“Not unless you feel up to a six month hike.”

“I’m all hiked out. You’re sure this wotsit place is just up ahead?”

She nodded: “Should be.”

“Should be? You don’t sound very confident. ”

“What the hell do you want from me? I’m not your ruddy mother, Mike. The computer threw it up and I memorised all I could before...before we came down. I did the best I could. If you can go one better, don’t let me stop you!”

“Yea, alright. You don’t have to take it out on me! If you say it’s there, doll, then I’ll take your word for it. How much further?”

“Not far. Other side of this hill.” she saw no point in mentioning they should have reached it hours ago and she could not understand why they had not. Mikey was not in the right shape to withstand more bad news at that moment.

“What sort of place is it? A house or something?”

“There are no houses. Hardly anything survived the Wipeout: our ancestors did their level best to turn the planet into a billiard ball. Good job they never were able to finish a job properly, otherwise Oz would have gone the same way.”

“Well what is it then? A friggin’ wombat burrow?”

She sighed, having explained it to him twice already. He was not retaining information too well, probably because his mind was too busy computing how sorry he felt for himself. So she explained it again.

Back in the early twenty-first century whatever government had been running the area at the time – Britney or some such – had had some kind of army. The army had had a few bunker complexes dotted around the landscape. Being bunkers, some of them had survived the Wipeout and one of them was just up ahead (she hoped).

From time to time, expeditions into the Wastelands had been mounted in centuries gone by, primarily in the hope of finding settlements of some kind. The last of these had been two hundred years ago, before such organized forays were abandoned as a waste of time and resources. The universities and governments of Oz saw little to be gained from sending out expensive missions that did little but chart useless desert and confirm what the other equally expensive expeditions had already established; that there was nothing there to amount to a hill of beans.

Exploration – if you can call it that - was left thereafter to the hit-and-miss efforts of amateur “adventurers” like Mikey Lennox: young, with more money than sense, who were trying to impress their girlfriends.

The very last professional expedition, sent out to verify rumours that there might be human habitations in the far north (but finding none) had however included in its search the aforementioned bunker. The expedition had dutifully logged its location, spent a few hours exploring its empty catacombs and made a brief report, although being clearly derelict, the small underground complex had not been of great interest. A record had been routinely entered into the Oznet data base from whence they had been available to the computers aboard Mikey’s yacht. Thus the record surfaced when Dot had entered a search for possible places of safety or refuge. In fact it had shown up as the only place of possible refuge within a hundred miles.

“According to the records, it’s pretty much intact.” she finished. “We should be able to get out of the wind, maybe find stuff to make a fire. The explorers found stores in the complex with tinned food, tools, you name it. If the tins are still good, the food inside them might be too.”

“Don’t much feel like eating.” He said.”Especially tucker that’s four centuries past its sell-by date.”

“Me neither, but I guess we’re gonna get hungry sooner or later...”

“Pity our own stuff got burned up in the crash.”

“Did it?”

“I thought you said it had!”

“I don’t recall.” She felt slightly disorientated, had continual trouble remembering much about what had happened.

“Well, why the hell else are we out here hiking through the friggin’ desert trying to reach some half-buried pile of prehistoric concrete?”

That was a good question. One to which she did not at that moment have a clear answer. She guessed they must have both been more shaken up than she realised. Shock maybe? Concussion? Anyway, it was too late to turn back now. They would never find the ship again. There was nothing for it but to press ahead and find that bunker – and pray to God that what awaited them was indeed more than just an empty concrete shell.

She decided not to tell Mikey that those explorers of two centuries ago had also found the personal effects of some of the soldiers who had once been stationed there, and which had been left behind when the place was abandoned. Among those odds and ends were various journals and letters and these showed that the complex had in fact been abandoned at least ten years before the Wipeout. The precise reason for the abandonment of the complex was not clear but one thing was clear: the soldiers living there had reported the presence of ghosts. The place was haunted.

Dot however, was not about to be deterred by ancient superstitions. She had more pressing things to worry about, such as getting out of this wind before exposure killed them.

She was beginning to wonder whether the cold was getting to her already. She felt kind of numb, an almost pleasant floating sensation, and her memory was foggy. The odd thing was, although she could feel the wind and knew it was cold, she did not feel cold, was not even shivering. She did not feel hungry either and she was sure she should by now: it must be nine or ten hours since she last ate. Was that normal? Was she displaying the first signs of exposure? Could one even get exposure from a few hours in temperatures that were actually a few degrees above freezing? She did not know.

The problem was, Dot was a city girl. She had grown up in the great conurbation of Bicheno in Tasmania, spent four years at University in Melbourne and that was about it, apart from a few jaunts with her new boyfriend, Mikey “Magellan” Lennox in his yacht up along the mainland coast and across the Arafura and Banda seas. She had never really been anywhere and certainly nowhere further than a HandHeld call away, should she get into trouble.

She had never even been to New Zealand for heaven’s sake, New Zealand having seceded from the Empire just before she was born and still as yet rebel-held territory. She had barely lived and now she was going to die out here so far from home it defied the imagination. She would die because she did not know anything, had not experienced anything and her degree in History now seemed in the face of her adversity to have been a stupid and pointless waste of her short life. She certainly had no practical use for all those nights spent with her nose in ruddy books. She did not even have the books with her. If she had, she could have at least used them to make a fire.

Mikey was really no better off than her. Sailing blissfully in the azure sky above the clouds in his little airship might have made him think he was Fergal Donal (the first Oz explorer to establish links with post-Wipeout Fuega, the South American civilization) or Jo “Crocodile” Pearson (the first Oz adventurer to establish that there was nothing alive north of the Equator) but his yacht had central heating and a drinks bar! The greatest hardship he had experienced thus far on his adventuring was running out of ice crossing the Bass Strait fifty miles short of Devonport. And having been with him at the time, she recalled he had not taken that setback too well either.

“What we need, is adventure!” he had told her expansively while talking her into this stupid trip to the far Wastelands. His brilliant idea was not exactly original and had been done before: a sponsored sail in his airship from Oz to the North Pole and back, to raise money for charity, its avowed purpose belying a less altruistic motive: to spice up his CV and impress girls.

“I wanna do something Big, something Different, something we’ll be able to tell our kids about some day.” He had told her, somewhat tipsily in the Wombat and Wallaby pub in Port Melbourne Tower, which overlooked the estuary where the Yarra flowed into The Bass. “.....And something that will raise a shit load of doe for the Orphans.” he added, almost as an afterthought as he waved his beer glass like an orator and spilled its contents over a passing waiter-droid.

Well, Mikey bloody Lennox should be careful what he bloody wished for. And she should know better than to have listened to an airhead poser just because he had muscles and a nice haircut – and all her friends fancied him.

It was clear to her now that he had not really considered the trip dangerous, merely long and somewhat depressing. His airship was about as safe a means of travel as Oz science could dream up. All they had to do was stay aloft above the turbulence and safely out of the reach of any trouble: not that thousands of miles of barren desert really had a lot to offer in the way of trouble; there were not even any birds around to foul the props!

To underscore that, Dot had done a little research of her own, research that had pretty much clinched her on going with him. She had discovered that of the three hundred and ninety recorded official and unofficial expeditions into the heart of the Wastelands, sponsored charity gigs included, over the past four hundred years, only three had never been seen again. Three out of nearly four hundred were odds she could live with, especially as the three that had not made it home had all done the trip the hard way, going overland rather than by air.

But the thing was, the attraction to the likes of Mikey, was that such forays sounded terribly dangerous to the uninitiated. The very name “Wastelands,” given the cataclysmic nature of their provenance, coupled with their distance and the way that in photographs they looked like the surface of another planet, conjured up a sense of godless menace. It enabled the would-be adventurer to cut a dashing and fearless figure and get his name in at least the local papers.

Mikey had never even intended to land, merely photograph things from the air, do the obligatory “survey” and “check for signs of habitation,” then return home when they sighted the ice fields of the Pole or they ran low on toilet paper – whichever was the sooner -and bore his friends with slide shows of “dun hills seen from the air” or “sterile lake foreground, dun hills background” or “glass flats with fissure, that hazy blob right foreground is Dot’s elbow.”

Well, now Mikey was getting an adventure for real and he was not enjoying it. He did not even have his camera so if and when they got rescued he would have nothing to show for his trouble – unless you counted the inevitable bill from the Imperial Search and Rescue Service, which was less a trophy and more a badge of shame.

Even the manner of their calamity was somewhat inglorious: the propane-fuelled cooker in the galley blew up while she was cooking his jacket potatoes, sending a hotplate through the wafer-thin aluminium of the hull and through overhead buoyancy tanks that were over-stretched due to Mikey insisting on flying at an altitude somewhat more rarefied than the ship and its tanks were designed for, it being more suited to low-altitude island hopping. The consequent ruptures caused them to lose helium explosively and come to Earth hard.

And here they were, stranded and miserable in the most God-forsaken terrain imaginable.

In fact, if anything, it was more godforsaken than it had a right to be.

“Shouldn’t the sun be up by now?” Mikey asked, glaring at his chunky explorer’s watch, which had stopped around the time they had crashed.

“Soon, probably.” Dot replied, having to shout above the wind. In truth, the lack of sunrise was bothering her. It must be six hours since they set out and they had crashed around three in the morning, just as Mikey was getting up to stand his watch at the helm. It should be dawn by now but it was still dark, except for that eerie glow on the horizon.

“I thought that glow on the horizon was the sun coming up but it hasn’t changed since we set out.” Mikey said, echoing her very thought. “What do you think it is?”

“Aurora Borealis” I think, she said, not sure whether the Aurora was visible this far south.

“The what?”

“Aurora Borealis. You’ve seen the Aurora Australis right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well the North has one, only it’s called the Borealis.”

“Oh. Doesn’t look much like the Australis to me....You don’t think this area is still hot do you?”

“Why do you keep asking me? I’m not the ruddy Encyclopaedia Australasia dammit!”

“Alright, alright, keep your hair on! I was only asking your opinion! I’ve got enough ruddy problems without you going all premenstrual on me!”

She would gladly have hit him then, except he would probably have started blubbing.

“Naff off Mike! Just ruddy well naff off. It’s your fault we’re in this mess, you and your ruddy Vasco de Gama act and your ideas too big for your pea-sized brain!”

“Vasco de what?”

“Oh shut up! For Christ’s sake if you haven’t got anything intelligent to say, shut your trap and save your strength for walking.”

He did, for a while. In fact he got decidedly moody, which was an improvement on whiney, and he doubled his pace and stomped ahead of her, as much as a man can stomp on a slope of loose rock and coarse ankle-deep dust. For ten minutes he set up a blistering pace and she struggled to keep up – he was quite fit, physically – but then he slowed, either through fatigue or satisfaction that he had made some kind of point.

“Strewth! This ruddy hill goes on forever, like ruddy purgatory!”

“Well, slow down a bit.”

He was staring at the glow on the horizon again: “Jeez I hope to Christ this area isn’t still hot.”

“It hasn’t been hot for a century or more. Radiation levels are quite safe.”

“And you know that because...?”

“Because I read more than comics. Because I took the trouble to bone up on all the tourist guides before we set out. Because I never would have come with you if I thought I’d glow in the ruddy dark when I came back!”

“So why’s the horizon glowing then?”

Dorothia Torrance thought that if she killed him then, they would never find his body. She could hit him with the HandHeld and say he fell down a ravine or something. No-one would ever pin it on her and God surely would sympathise.

His life and her sanity were saved then by their arrival, at last, at the top of the hill. She stood at the crest and surveyed the surrounding landscape undulating featurelessly into the dark on every hand, shadow-on-shadow under the wan glow of the horizon.

There was not much to see that proffered hope. Overhead, there was neither star nor Moon to be seen in the black, featureless bowl of the sky. Where were the stars? Where was just one? She assumed it must be cloud cover running uniformly from horizon to horizon but when they crashed, they had come down through mere wisps of cumulus drifting like ghosts in the moonlight and she had never seen cloud cover this thorough before.

She thought maybe the region had freakish weather conditions or something, some lingering climatic distress that was a legacy of the ancient turmoil of the Wipeout. Indeed, the reports she had downloaded from the Oznet spoke of violent electrical storms and flash floods but nothing as......eerie...as this.

Mikey came and stood beside her, like a dark question mark in the half light bereft of any real hope of an answer.

“Bloody hell.” he said. “Just more of the same nothing in every bloody direction.....We should have stayed with the ship.....”

She looked about her desperately, beginning to feel some of his hopelessness seep into her own soul. She was sure they had headed in the right direction but with no landmarks and nothing to steer by, could they have missed their objective in the dark? Or even been walking around in circles? She was not even sure what they were looking for exactly. What would some ancient complex of bunkers look like? Would there be anything above ground that would help identify it? She simply had no experience of such things, was used to streetlights, the night-time glitter of the great metropolises of the Empire, running water, electricity, parks, road signs and the great monorail and canal systems that criss-crossed a tamed and verdant continent where there was always habitation within ten miles in any direction. And she was certainly used to the sun coming up when it was supposed to, reliably and on schedule.

“Oh Christ,” Mikey was saying, “We’re screwed, we’re totally screwed. We’re gonna ruddy die out here......”

She was beginning to think he was right as the little cocoon of unreality that had sustained her for the past six hours began to shred and evaporate and the weight of the trouble they were really in descended on her. In the back of her mind had been the notion that sooner or later there would be a passing car or the lights of a village, a road, something: there was always something! All they had to do was just kept walking........Stupid.

She felt close to tears then, thought Mikey had been the sane one all along, the realistic one, because he had known the moment they had walked from the wreckage and wandered off into the endless wilderness that they were done for. If only she had given up, as logic dictated she should, at the very start, she could have at least saved herself six hours of pointless trudging and blisters on her feet.

She sat down heavily in the dust, hugged her knees and Mikey flopped down beside her, as if all the strength had gone out of him. The dark crowded in upon them, towered over them as if they were ants crawling across the cold marble floor of a darkened mausoleum.

This was a horrible, lonely place to die – like some astronaut adrift in the cold, bottomless abyss of space. Dot found herself longing for home, for her parents and her sister, her friends with an intensity and futility so strong she thought it would stop her heart right there and then. It would have been a mercy if it had, because their death when it came was going to come slowly.

“We gotta think this through.” Mikey said, as if making a desperate attempt to rally and he went through their options, which were not many and all brought him back rather rapidly to the inescapable conclusion that they were totally screwed.

When he started in on how unfair it all was, she snapped. A rage boiled up inside her then, a volcanic mix of all her anger and frustration and fear that could vent upon but one target, for there was no other target within a thousand miles: Mikey.

She turned her head, felt her own face contorting like a demon, energy coalescing inside her like living lightening that would lash out and take his stupid craven head clean off and silence his despicable whimpering once and for all. God how she loathed weak men!

She opened her mouth to scream a tirade that would have felled a rhino but then stopped. Something caught her eye as she turned her head, something out there in the dark. Perhaps it was a small movement, or a flicker of light; certainly it was tiny but out there in the interminable shadows, the smallest glimmer could be seen for miles.

She did a double-take and stared, squinting her eyes against the sting of the wind.

“What?” Mikey asked. He had blenched as she turned towards him: the look on her face had been terrible to behold, and was now merely spooked by the abrupt change and the new look that had descended on her face just as suddenly. “What?” He thought perhaps her mind was beginning to unravel. She had been moody and irritable since the crash, downright hostile, as if she blamed him for everything. She had not helped keep his spirits up and he guessed women did not take stress too well.

She raised a hand to silence him. “Shut up!” she hissed at him. She had merely wanted to stop him prattling; she was trying to concentrate but he took it to mean there was something out there, an animal perhaps, something dangerous. He scrambled to his feet, ready to run, kicking up dust as he did so, which did not help her any.

“For God’s sake, will you keep still!”

She peered again into the dark, trying to scan the terrain as if her eyes were radar. What had she seen? Where was it?

Ah! There it was again! Something gleamed, something reflected the light, she assumed, of the glowing horizon. It was only faint and the slenderest straw to clutch at but........

“There’s something out there!” She did not know why but she whispered, as if her voice might scare away the last slender shred of hope they had left.

“Oh, bloody great!” Mikey said, mistaking her meaning entirely and figuring that if there was “something out there” it could not possibly be good, given where they were.

“Something shiny.” She said.

“Is shiny good or bad?” he asked, nervously.

“Possibly good. Shiny suggests man-made doesn’t it?”

“Or water.”

Trust him to deflate her nascent hope. Mind you, even water was not bad, it meant they might not die of thirst. But she thought that in this wind the surface of a lake or river would ripple or something and the light it reflected would probably glimmer like a star. This light however, was steady: weak but steady. To her it said “metal” and metal meant “man-made” in a landscape from which almost all the works of man had been utterly expunged, so thoroughly expunged a visitor from Mars would conclude no civilization had ever existed here.

It was not much but it was something and something was definitely better than nothing. Maybe her logic was flawed, as logic can be when the data on which it is based is scant, but if there was hope, however unrealistic, she was damn well going to cling to it.

She got up and started walking.

“Where are you going?” Mikey asked her.

“There’s something over there. Hell of a coincidence that it happens to be right in the area where the bunker thing is supposed to be.”

Mikey could think of a millions ways to shoot down her logic; women could be so naive at times, but on the other hand he had nothing better to do than sit in the dust and wait to die, so he followed her, hardly daring to let her get his hopes up lest they be cruelly dashed again.

They walked for an hour, but at least most of it was downhill now and their course lateral to the wind so the walk was easier.

At first the little glimmer in the distance did not seem to get any closer: it seemed to move away from them tantalisingly, but without reference points and without knowing how big the whatever-it-was happened to be, it was hard to judge distance.

So they kept walking.

At the bottom of the hill the ground levelled off into a flat boulder-strewn plain, with further hills some indeterminable miles away on the far side of it. The gleam seemed to grow a little stronger as they approached it.

They were almost on top of it before the object took on a discernible shape. The thing stood in the dark like an abandoned lunar vehicle.

“What is it?” Mikey asked her.

She thought it was bloody obvious. “You’ve got eyes haven’t you?”

“Looks like a truck” he said, just to prove that he had.

“Top of the class, genius.”

It was indeed a truck of some sort, some kind of rugged-terrain vehicle but all rusted to hell and sagging pathetically to one side as if being slowly sucked into the Earth.

It was a very ancient design and it had clearly been stood there rusting away for centuries, perhaps since before the Wars of Unification that finally re-united Oz and formed the continent into its modern-day empire under the victorious dynasties of the Queensland Oligarchy. There was not much shiny metal in evidence and Dot realised that what she had seen was the glow of the horizon reflected in one of its large wing mirrors.

“What’s it doing here?” Mikey asked and she wished he would stop doing that.

“Not a lot apparently.” she said but she was elated. There was something to be said for doing your homework after all. She knew what the truck was.

Mikey walked around the vehicle, cautiously, as if expecting to find a skeleton or worse still inside it but it was empty. Completely empty, as if it had been stripped of anything and everything useful. He poked the nearside wing with his finger and his hand went straight through. The thing was almost pure rust.

“Well it’s just an ancient friggin’ relic. Not much bloody use.”

“You really are a total bonehead Mikey.” she informed him. “This truck means we have found our bunkers....”

“Yeah?” he looked around, saw nothing.

“They’re here someplace.”

“And you know that because....?”

“I know it because I read up on the report made by the expedition that found the bunkers. They found this old girl standing here just as we have, although it’s rusted another couple of centuries since then. They deduced it had been abandoned here by an even earlier expedition. Probably broken down or something and left for dead. The Oznet lists the make and model as early second-century Adelaide, when Adelaide was still an independent city state. Figured there must have been an expedition from Adelaide – or at least someone using Adelaide trucks – that never found its way into the records. The Adelaiders or whoever they were camped here for some time apparently, using the old bunkers as their base and then moved on, leaving one broken down truck behind. The truck was how the later expedition from Queensland University found the bunkers: it showed up on their scanners so they detoured to investigate. Ipso facto the entrance to the bunkers has got to be around here somewhere......”

“Well I don’t see it.” Mikey said, looking about.

“We must be right on top of it.....If those ancient explorers found it easy enough.”

“Who knows what equipment they had – and maybe it was daylight.”

“Well, I suppose we could both just sit here like a couple of sedated wombats and wait for the entrance to the bunkers to come up and introduce itself. Or alternatively we could actually make an effort...”

“I was only saying –“

“Well don’t ‘only say’ anything. Save your breath and start ruddy looking.”

She fished a small pocket flashlight out of her parka and switched it on. She was relieved to discover it was actually working, unlike her HandHeld and both their watches.

“How long have you had that?” Mikey asked.

“How long do you think?”

“Well you could have told me.”

She was not sure what the point of that remark was but was too fed up to argue. She had been keeping the little flashlight in reserve, for emergency use only, because she was unsure how long the battery would last. She panned it around the immediate area.

It was a ridiculously inept device, more the sort of thing you used to look for your keys in the dark when you dropped them trying to unlock the car. Its weak, pencil-thin beam did not exactly throw back the night and bathe the area in luminance but it was better than nothing. Just.

The torchlight sort of flicked over the shadows like a plastic rapier, making little impression but she persevered, walking slowly back and forth over the ground in a widening sweep, the way she had seen it done in movies. Mikey stood and watched her, hands in his pockets.

She was not really sure what she was looking for, what the entrance to four-hundred-year-old military bunkers would look like. A dome, perhaps, that might in the dark be mistaken for a low hill? A little turret? A hole in the ground? Would it still be here, considering it was two centuries since the last explorers found it and, for all she knew, seismic activity, landslides or floods or some such thing could have buried it or moved the derelict truck miles from where it had originally stood. Or it might have collapsed, finally expiring of old age.

Half an hour later she was still searching, her sweep extended to a hundred yards or more and her spirits began to sag. She turned to see Mikey still standing there.

“You could at least help, you big useless lump.” She called to him. The wind was a lot less here in the lee of the surrounding hills and her voice fell flatly into the night’s abyss. She was starting to feel on edge. The place had a creepy feel to it, more creepy that is than the rest of the landscape through which they had trudged hour after hour. The feeling that they were not alone belied all the evidence of her senses and her reason and gave her goosebumps.

“Without a torch? I ain’t moving. I ain’t falling down no ruddy hole in the ground.”

“Who says it’s a hole?”

“It’s underground isn’t it? Stands to reason the entrance will be a shaft or ruddy great rabbit hole of some kind. You want me to break me ruddy neck?”

At that moment Dot thought that was such a good idea, she would gladly do it for him and save him the trouble of finding a hole to fall down.

“Why don’t you make your way back to me and I’ll spell you with the torch? But bloody mind where you put your feet.”

She thought, why not? It would not hurt him to make himself useful and maybe he would have better luck than she had had, spot something she had missed. She began making her way back to him, panning the fading torchlight over the ground, having now become paranoid about falling down a shaft.

Mikey said something which she did not catch.

“What?”

“I said, this place gives me the creeps. Don’t you feel it too?”

“No.” But she did. And somewhere in the back of her mind she was dimly aware that what they were doing was somehow not quite right in the head. They were desperately looking for shelter when they were not even really all that cold. They had walked away from the shelter of their crashed ship in search of shelter that might or might not exist, when common sense would have dictated they stay with it. How were their rescuers, if and when they came, supposed to find them? What the hell were they doing out here in the ruddy Twilight Zone? Where had this obsession with finding some old bunkers come from? Had it been Mikey’s idea? Hers? Well one of them was one pastie short of a full tucker bag for suggesting it. And the other equally thick for going along with it.

What was wrong with them? The thought fought its way to the surface and she tried to focus on it but it danced away from her: it was like trying to catch a fish with your bare hands.

And then she was distracted in any case because she put her foot forward into what she thought was shadow but was in fact empty air and before she knew it she was falling.

“Dot!” Mikey yelled as she and the torchlight suddenly vanished from sight, like a candle flame pinched out by the night’s black fingers.

“Ow!” Dot said. And then: “Bollocks!”

“Where are you, I can’t see you!”

“I’m down here!” She had fallen down stone steps that descended into the ground and fetched up against a doorway, had felt every step on her way down and was sure she must have broken something. He heart hammered and that horrible falling feeling was in the pit of her stomach. The torch was still working, undamaged by the fall, so she pointed it at the sky and waved it about.

“Can you see the torch?”

“Yeah. But I can’t see you. You fall down a hole?”

“What do you think?”

“Are you hurt?”

“No.” She said, amazed to find as she moved her limbs gingerly that nothing was broken. Not even a bruise!

Bloody hell, that was lucky! She moved into a sitting position and looked up. Her torch picked out a concrete stairway that descended between smooth concrete walls, above her the faint glow of the horizon etched an oblong of wan light against the shadows of the recess into which she had tumbled. Behind her, pressing into her back was the metal frame of a small doorway whose metal door had long since fallen from its rusted hinges, revealing beyond it the utter dark of a tunnel.

Suddenly Mikey was there at the top of the steps, in silhouette against the glow behind him he look like a Yeti.

“Looks like we found our entrance.” He said.

We?

“I think it found me. You coming on down or what?”

Mikey hesitated, clearly not liking the idea of descending into the bowels of the earth but being as there was not much topside to keep him he began to pick his way down the steps. She shone the torch for him so he could see where he was putting his feet. Joining her in the threshold, he helped her to her feet, began dusting her off with his hands, which she found immensely irritating and batted him away.

“You’re not hurt?”

“I told you.”

She turned and shone the torch over the doorway and then down a long uninviting corridor with flat concrete walls and a flat concrete ceiling from which hung the rotting tendrils of displaced ducts and piping. There were no cobwebs, for nothing lived north of the Equator.

“Well, it’s a bunker alright.” she muttered.

Mikey peered down the corridor nervously and wrinkled his nose. The place stank of rust and other, less identifiable, decay.

“You’re not proposing we go in there?” he said and his voice echoed down the corridor, cannoned off the bare, implacable walls and came back to them like a distant shout.

“No,” she replied, sarcastically. “I’m proposing we leave a note saying we called but no-one was at home.”

“Best idea you’ve had all night. This place is pretty grim, Dot. I don’t think much of their taste in decor....”

“It was built by the military. Not the ruddy Imperial Arts Guild. Anyway, I’m going in. At least we’ll be out of the wind. And we might find stuff we can use....”

“Such as?”

She was not really sure. Something to build a fire maybe? Tins of food that was still edible ...and a can opener of course? “I dunno ‘til we look. The old reports said that the people who abandoned the base left stuff behind.”

“I’d settle for a radio so we can call for help. Better still, a couple of hover-bikes and enough fuel to get us back to Oz.”

“They didn’t have hover-bikes back in the P.W.” she told him, meaning the “pre-Wipeout.”

“I was just being sarcastic. I don’t expect God to do us any favours. A can of beer though and I might not lose me faith.”

She stood aside, making it obvious she expected him to go first. He did not look too keen, peered down the dark corridor that stretched away into stygian blackness like the ingress to a Pharaoh’s tomb, as if expecting something fanged and hellish to come bounding out of the shadows.

“Ladies first.” He said with a nervous laugh.

“Ladies first!” A chorus of echoes boomed back at him, followed by a mockery of his laugh, distorted into a demonic chuckle.

Dot simply stared back at him, shaming him into being a man.

“Alright, alright I’m going.” He told her, like a man preparing to leap into an abyss. “Give me the ruddy torch then.” She handed it to him. Its beam was already growing weaker, its light yellowing like dead skin. “Jeez, I don’t like this......Are you sure we need to go in there?”

“No, I think we should go find a ruddy cafe and order coffee and pancakes.” she retorted, sarcastically, her sarcasm hiding her growing unease. The more unsettled she became, the more she took it out on Mikey, and she knew she should not because it was not helping. She needed her man to rediscover his equilibrium but she could not stop herself. She needed to hit back at a vindictive universe or become the effect of it, but hit back at what? Mikey was the only live target for thousands of miles. “Are you in the mood for more walking?”

“Er... that ‘s as negative.”

“Then at least we have shelter and maybe we can make a camp and make ourselves comfortable.”

He peered down the waiting corridor again. “I don’t think this place was comfortable even when it was alive.”

“Are you going in or what?”

“Alright, alright, don’t push!”

He stepped inside the threshold, and Dot followed, keeping close behind him, her hand on his back, for comfort. She stumbled somewhat over the collapsed door that was lying askew in the shadows. The metal door groaned.

“Sssshhh!” Mikey told her instinctively, what was left of his nerves frayed ragged.

“What in the blue buggery are you shushing me for?” she snapped, but she did so in a whisper as they went deeper into the corridor inch by inch, their feet snagging and crunching on unidentified rubbish that lay under foot like the myriad carapaces of dead cockroaches.

“Just in case...” he said.

“Mikey, there’s nothing down here. Nothing. There’s been nothing alive in the north for four centuries. Everything and everybody is long dead.”

“You’re sure of that are you? Just ‘cos a ruddy book says so don’t make it true. I prefer to keep me options open.” Then he added: “Besides, it’s the friggin’ dead I’m worried about.....”

“Oh, come on!”

“You’re not telling me this place don’t creep you out too!”

“It’s a dead bunker buried under the Wastelands, like the basement of ruddy pyramid, thousands of miles from the next living soul, not my first choice for somewhere to spend the night, granted, but get a grip for Christ’s sake.”

“I will if you will.” he said, almost gratified to hear at last the involuntary tremour of fear in little-miss-superior’s voice She wasn’t as tough as she made out. Spooky was spooky and no-one was immune to bad vibes, with which this godforsaken hole was generously endowed.

What Dot was struggling with at that moment was not merely the “bad vibes” of the place, it was the fact that she had made the mistake of digesting the gist of its history from the sparse notes the ship’s computer had downloaded in those precious last moments before they crashed and their link with the Oznet was terminally severed.

Two hundred years ago the exploration team that had found the bunker, under the leadership of a retired Imperial Guard officer named Johansen had found a few clues as to its probable history and précised these in a couple of paragraphs of notes that later were filed in the Imperial Library and from there were available via the Oznet to anyone who might find a use for them. She vaguely remembered the entry:

“GridRef something-or-other, Underground Structure blah, blah. Possibly military bunker built during the Middle War similar to the one found in North America, but smaller,” the Middle War being what had once been known as World War Two, the dress-rehearsal for the Final War that came just under a century later, “by the region’s ruling Sham Democracy as part of the island’s defences.” Sham Democracy was the modern classification for a type of government that was in vogue during the final centuries of the Pre-Wipeout era, an oligarchy operating behind a thin pseudo-democratic veneer and utilising covert rather than overt means of controlling its populace. “Variously utilised by the military over the next eight or so decades, occasionally in dis-use, it was finally abandoned about a decade before the Wipeout, reasons unknown. In its final years it appears to have been utilised as a secure repository for military files and records and possibly as a military “listening post,” although the erasure of whatever topside installations that may have existed and the removal of whatever servers and other computer hardware it may have housed, make this difficult to determine.

“Possibly of historical/research interest. Should be tagged as a viable place of emergency refuge/shelter. We estimated two or three miles of intact tunnels, chambers, barracks and stores and a complement of up to a hundred and fifty personnel. Evidently a few personal effects were left behind by its final inhabitants and among these we found some letters and a page from a diary of someone know as “Lance Corporal “Pitbull” McLaren. These we photographed (attached) and have bagged for return with us to Oz. The diary segment suggests that a number of soldiers had been dismayed by ghostly sightings and apparitions within the complex and the bunkers had developed a reputation for being haunted. We do not know whether this reputation caused or precipitated the base’s abandonment. We ourselves witnessed nothing out of the ordinary during our two-day encampment there.”

Ghostly sightings and apparitions, she thought, just bleedin’ wonderful! Given their situation and the plethora of things already thrown up by a hostile universe to assail her equilibrium, this was information she could gladly have done without.

Once again she was tempted you share it with Mikey, out of sheer vindictiveness, but bit her tongue, knowing it would avail nothing but to give him the terminal jitters.

Speaking of which, at that moment Mikey stumbled over something in the dark that clattered loudly under his feet. The clatter and Mikey’s invective cannoned away down the corridor. The noise and the surprise triggered his flight reflex and he turned to run, colliding with Dot who was standing close behind him, her own flight reflex just as overwhelming but a tad slower to engage.

Both of them screamed and fell to the dusty, rubbish-strewn floor in a tangle of arms and legs.

Dot recovered her equilibrium first; “For Christ’s sake will you calm down?” she hissed at him as she struggled to her feet, elaborately batting dust and dirt off her parka to hide the fact that her hands - and just about everything else – were shaking.

“What say we forget about this whole stupid idea and go back and look for the ship?” he said, desperately.

She was seriously tempted but, hell, she was tired, weary of her own flesh and just longed now for somewhere to lie down and sleep, somewhere with walls and a ceiling. She did not want to go back out there and endlessly wander like an ant wastelands that were as infinite and featureless as deep space.

She did not much want to stay here either but caught between a rock and a hard place, some instinct compelled her to stick with the rock.

“Don’t be such a ninny. Here, give me the torch...”

She grabbed it from him without waiting for him to comply and shone it around on the floor, quickly found what Mikey had stumbled over and picked it up. It was a gas-powered lamp, centuries old judging by the design, and covered in dust but apparently otherwise in good working order. There was no rust on it and she recognized the plasteel alloy of its casing, which told her the device was of post-Wipeout, Oz manufacture. There was a yellowed piece of paper stuffed into the casing and she gently prized it out and read the faded message that was written on it.

“To whom it may concern. Thought this might come in handy. Please leave it where you found it when you leave. Yours, IG Capt. (ret’d) J.S. Johansen, 3^rd Queensland trans-European expedition. 24.4. 209pw.”

Mikey read the little note over her shoulder. “R-e-t-d?” he said “Retarded?”

“Retired, you idiot. Captain Johansen, retired Imperial Guard officer. And the date: 209 pw!”

“Ah!” Mikey said, theatrically. Then: “And all that means what exactly?”

“Two hundred or so years ago Johansen led the expedition that found this place.”

“Good for him. I imagine he was as thrilled about that as we are.”

“Show some friggin’ appreciation. He left this oil lamp for us!”

“He knew we were coming then did he? Two hundred years into the future. Must have had special bloody powers then.”

“He left this oil lamp for anybody who might stumble in here and have need of it. Now that is one thoughtful cobber.” She told him, suddenly overwhelmed by the humanity of such a gesture, a helping hand reaching out to them across time.

“Yeah.” Mikey replied, having trouble imagining such thoughtfulness. “But does it work? It’s a ruddy antique!”

“Basic design hasn’t changed much for centuries. Where I come from every home has one in case of power cuts and such. Didn’t you have one on the ship?” She dusted off the lantern’s glass, examined the base and found there was a gas cylinder inserted; a full cylinder would keep the lamp burning with cold white light for several days.

“If I‘d had one, I’d have brought it with me wouldn’t I?” Mikey was saying, defensively. She ignored him and set the lamp on the floor, pressed down hard on the top, felt it give with a little mechanical click. It was, more or less, a giant gas lighter and the little click was followed by a hiss and the filament glowed red, then quickly turned white. She lifted the glowing lamp by its handle and let its light flood the corridor.

“That’s better!” she said, switching off her little torch and putting it in her pocket. “Bless you Captain Johansen I.G. retired!”

“Ditto.” Mikey said, with somewhat less conviction and a lot less romance in his soul.

The stark light of the lamp illumined the corridor, which was as plain and angular and uninviting as a prison basement. Overhead, dead, dust-caked fluorescent lights hung from the ceiling, moving slightly in a draught that came from somewhere and ducting had rusted and sagged like the carapace of a giant caterpillar. There was nondescript rubbish and various pools of fetid water on the floor and some dusty crates stacked against the wall inscribed with faded serial numbers and regimental insignia, which on closer inspection turned out to be empty. The lamp threw long shadows, that flexed insidiously like fingers as Dot moved the lamp.

With an eye for irrelevant minutiae, Mikey bent and picked something small and crumpled off the floor, un-crumpled the red rectangular packet and peered at its faded legend.

“Marlborough.” He read, pronouncing it as “Marlboroo, for the language, while recognizable, was antique. “Smoking-can-seriously-damage-your-health...” he turned to Dot, held up the packet as if he had just discovered the Rosetta Stone, “C-sticks!” he said, meaning cigarettes, “Did they used to smoke cigs in the olden days?”

She shrugged. “Guess they must have. Pity their governments didn’t come with the same health warning.”

The lamplight was helping in some respects, but in others, it was not. They could see where they were going and it pushed back the dark so that it no longer seemed to crowd in upon them with the anonymous menace of a sealed tomb but the long, moving shadows and preternatural detail made the place feel, if anything, even more eerie, made it feel no longer as if it resented their intrusion but had instead been lying there through centuries waiting for them.

The corridor was some twenty yards in length, with recessed doorways at regular intervals, and appeared at first glance to be a dead end. However when Dot moved deeper into it and moved the lamp she could see that at the far end what looked like a blank wall was in fact the far wall of another corridor intersecting theirs at right angles. She remembered that Johansen’s party’s notes had mentioned a small complex of tunnels, although the tone of it suggested they never made a thorough exploration.

She wondered if the first explorers to breach the ancient corridors of the Pyramids, their guttering candles - or whatever they had used for lighting the olden days - held aloft to scatter like startled rats shadows that had remained sequestered for time unimaginable, had felt much as she felt now. Were they as terrified out of their wits, yet as mesmerised by the deathly stillness of time’s unmoving finger as she was?

The Pyramids were all gone now, expunged by the Wipeout like almost everything else. The museums and libraries that had held their treasures were gone, even the interlinked servers that held the trillions of gigabytes of racial memory were gone and with them almost the entire repository of human experience. All that had remained when the radioactive dust had settled were whatever fragments had happened to reside in the only continent to survive the devastation: God’s own Earth, Oz.

“Check this out!” Mikey said, still whispering instinctively as if afraid to rouse something from its slumbers.

She held up the lamp to get a better look at it. On the concrete wall someone, or several someones, had daubed messages, variously in charcoal, red chalk and what appeared to be white paint.

One said: “Jimmy woz ere 4.8.12,” which date she guessed was from the pre-Wipeout and almost meaningless to her. Another said: “W.O. Spence is a poof.” and another “ManU rools,” which was utterly meaningless. And yet another: “Britain is closing down. Would the last person to leave please turn out the lights.”

There was another legend, though, which she could understand: “3 trans-Eu exp. 25.4. 09.” Followed by a rough rendition of the flag of the Empire, the Southern Cross constellation, made up of five white stars – one small star and four larger stars. It was Johansen’s expedition again, leaving another terse memento of their passing.

Next to it was another message, centuries older, that had been daubed by someone else in what, on closer inspection, appeared to be red crayon. It was the emblem of the old City State of Adelaide, which had thrived as an independent state for two centuries before incorporation into the empire: a crudely drawn three-masted tea clipper, and under it the city motto: Ut Prosint Omnibus Conjuncti, which meant, "united for the common good." Dot recognized it from her studies of post-Wipeout history. After the motto someone had written in the same hand: “J. Corry Adelaide 10.7.114. We came, we saw, we buggered off again.” She assumed that must have been the group that had abandoned the truck close by the entrance to the complex, over three hundred years ago! Which was all very fascinating, yet at the same time rather depressing: it served but to press upon her the transience of human existence, that the lives of men were but brief, futile breaths in an indifferent eternity.

“What are you doing?” she asked Mikey, who was rummaging in his pockets.

“Looking for something to write with,” he said. “You got anything? Thought we’d leave our own message.”

“No I haven’t.” she said, without even checking. “What would be the point?”

“I dunno. Seems a shame not to. Kind of freaky to think that three hundred years or whatever from now, long after we’re gone, some archaeologist could be standing here, wondering who we were and what we were doing here.”

Dot thought that she was wrestling with much the same puzzle right now and the unanswerable enigma of her short and pointless existence was a bleak legacy to leave for some future stray visitor. If you’ve nothing to say, say nothing, as her father used to tell her. Whereas Mikey seemed to operate on “If you’ve nothing to say, keep jabbering.”

Maybe he was right but, well, who cared? She did not have anything to write with anyway.

She moved on down the corridor and reached the first door, which was firmly shut, a blank facade of peeling paint just begging to be opened.

“You’re not going in there are you?” Mikey asked.

“Do you want to sleep in the corridor?”

“Er....no.”

“Well let’s see what’s in there. Maybe Johansen’s expedition left behind stuff we can use.....”

She reached out and turned the rusting handle, shoved and the door opened with a creak of rusting hinges, then sagged askew in the portal as if that had been the last straw and it had finally given up the will to live. She thrust the lantern into darkness of the room within, then – nervously – her head.

There was nothing much in there. It was a square, featureless chamber containing little more than some old metal racks that suggested it might once have been a store, although whatever it had once stored had been thoroughly cleaned out, probably when the base was finally abandoned. Water seepage had turned the floor into a giant puddle.

Well that was an anti-climactic start. She moved along the corridor and tried the next room. This was another empty store almost exactly the same as the first, complete with brackish puddle.

The next chamber was empty and so featureless it contained no clues as to the purpose it might have served in life, although the floor was dry and soot on the ceiling, probably from a camping stove, and discarded wrappers and tins of rations, plus more graffiti on the walls suggested that Johansen’s expedition or the earlier Adelaiders had camped there.

She tried the next room: again there was evidence that someone at some time over the centuries had camped there and that it too might once have been used as a store and thoroughly cleaned out.

It was the same story with each of the rooms along the corridor: nothing much to see, nothing they could use or which might provide them with a modicum of comfort or encouragement. Aside from the lamp, Captain Johansen had left them nothing else that might assist them. She was not sure what she had hoped for. Some blankets maybe? Some tins of food? A radio so that they could call home and let would-be rescuers know they were alive? It was all a bit unrealistic she knew and it began to dawn on her that all they might find here was an empty, decaying shell with nothing in it whatever.

It bothered her too that the people that had camped here sporadically over the centuries had all camped close to the entrance, close to their means of escape and not deeper into the complex. Maybe it was instinctive, the desolate strangeness of the place was disturbing, its creepiness if only supplied by one’s own imagination was daunting: one would naturally baulk at entering too deep into its bowels.

She reached the intersection where another equally grim and featureless, equally dead corridor stretched away to left and right. To the left it advanced ten yards or so to a true dead-end, to the right it travelled for perhaps twenty before it formed a “t” junction with yet another corridor.

She turned right, her heart pounding, the hairs on her nape rising, fought down her flight reflex and forced herself to proceed. She headed for the first of the corridor’s many doorways.

Mikey was close behind her. Very close. ”How far are you going?” he asked, still whispering. “We don’t wanna get lost in these tunnels.”

“Maybe we can find something we can use to make ourselves comfortable.”

“This is a military bunker not the bloody Sidney Tower Hotel.”

“It would be quicker if you checked the rooms on that side and I checked the rooms on this instead of breathing down me bloody neck the whole time.”

“You’ve got the lamp.”

She fished the torch out of her parka, switched it on and gave him the lamp. “Fine. You take it and I’ll use this.”

He took the lamp reluctantly, robbed of an excuse, then said: “We should stick together. Don’t wanna get separated down here.”

“The corridor is six foot ruddy wide. Who’s talking about separating? You check those rooms, I’ll check this side. Shout if you find anything.”

“You’ll be the first to know.”

Thus they moved along the corridor, opening the doors and checking the rooms one by one, Dot on the left, Mikey on the right.

There were ten rooms in all. She began to find it strange that every door was shut. Who bothered to shut doors in an abandoned building with nothing in it? What was the point? At first she instinctively shut the door after she had checked a room and she noticed Mikey was doing the same, even when the rusted old hinges made it hard work, so then she began deliberately leaving the doors open, as if making a point.

They reached the end of the corridor and the next intersection. All they had found thus far was one virtually featureless empty chamber after another, all devoid even of any sign someone might have camped there, some with evidence that they had been used for storage. One had had some very rusted old filing cabinets in it, which were empty with bits and pieces of files scattered about the puddled floor that were too rotted away for them to have read even if they had had a mind to. One was locked or the door was too jammed to be opened.

“Nothing,” Mikey said. “Place is ruddy empty.”

“Okay so we keep looking. The computer record hinted there‘s more here than just empty rooms.”

“Junk.” He said “The best we can hope to find here is some old junk.”

“You give up too easy. Let’s try this corridor.....”

It turned out that Mikey was wrong. The rooms along the next corridor had clearly been more than mere stores. Occasional bits and pieces of old furniture, faded posters and bulletin boards attested that they had been offices and accommodation for the soldiers who had once been stationed here.

One room was larger than the rest, a long low-ceiling chamber that was empty but for an old rotting wooden desk at one end and some odds and ends and trailing electrical fittings and signs of elaborate air conditioning that evinced it had once housed banks of computers or similar electronic apparatus.

In one room Dot found a metal bed with a mattress still on it and a pile of neatly folded blankets on a chair beside it. Aside from a liberal coating of dust, the blankets and the mattress were in good shape and one did not even have to worry about bugs or mould north of the equator because north of the equator the Earth was deader than Mars.

She ducked out of the room and called Mikey in the loud whisper she had not yet been able to steel herself to drop.

“Check this out!”

“Cosy.” Mikey said, without enthusiasm. One old metal bed, one rickety chair and three army blankets olive drab, sleeping-for-the-use-of did not exactly make it the Grand Hotel. But it was at least a start.

“The room is dry.” Dot said, clutching at the sparse positives. “We got ourselves somewhere to crash.”

“Please do not use that expression, given the circumstances” Mikey told her but he was slightly more chipper. They had found...something...to give them hope, that meant they would not have to sleep on the floor in the dirt, that they would be warm, something prosaic that, along with the fact that they had been here half an hour or more and had not yet been bushwhacked by ghoulies or ghosties, slightly – just slightly - took the edge off the sepulchral eeriness of the place.

Dot held the lamp while he examined the bed and the mattress, unfolded the blankets and inspected them.

“Aside from the dust these are all in good nick,” he reported, surprised. “They must have been here centuries.”

“A dry, sealed room....who knows? Maybe Johansen’s people left them like they left the lamp...”

“They just happened to have a steel-framed bed and a mattress with them did they? And a chair? And that would still make these things two hundred years old. Look at them, no rust, no rot and...” he sniffed the blankets. “I’d swear these blankets still got the smell of the laundry on them.”

She sniffed the blankets too, smelled nothing, not even age. “You’re imagining things.”

“You don’t suppose there’s actually somebody still living here do you? Survivors of the Wipeout, mutant descendents kind of thing....”

“Don’t be such a bloody idiot.” She told him, a little too forcefully.

He shrugged. “It could happen.”

“In your deranged imagination, yes. In the real world, no.”

“We left the real world behind us on the other side of the planet. You proposing we cr- sleep here then?”

“You got a better idea?”

“Not off the top of me head, no. But shouldn’t we look for food or something? Water? If there’s a bed and a mattress, there’s a good chance we’ll find –“

“I’m exhausted Mikey. We walked for hours, miles. I wanna sleep. I’m not hungry or thirsty, are you?”

“No, guess not. You’d think we would be by now....”

“Yeah, well I’d have expected the sun to be up by now, only it isn’t....”

“Like I said, we left the real world behind us.”

“If there is anything here, it will still be here after we’ve slept a few hours. If you want to go exploring on your own, don’t let me stop you.”

“Er....no. You’re probably right.

They did their best to make themselves comfortable. Dot unfolded the blankets and made the bed. Mikey took the chair and propped it against the door, wedging it up tight against the handle.

“What are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?” he said, “You’d rather I didn’t?” His face looked ghostly in the lamplight, all white flesh and shadow, his silhouette towered over them with ursine menace.

“Nah. Leave the chair where it is, if it makes you feel better.” She told him, but it made her feel better too. She would not admit it but fear was on her soul like an indelible stain, as permanent as life itself. This was a nightmare that would not end, that would still be here when she woke up: a darkness had swallowed them whole and was slowly, remorselessly digesting them.

They cuddled up together on the single bed under the olive drab blankets, providing one another with meagre solace, and the blank face of the room stared back at them, waiting for them to fall asleep. It was utterly silent.

She had placed the lantern on the floor by the bed, reached down to switch it off.

“I, er...was kinda hoping we could leave the light on.” Mikey said.

“We gotta conserve the gas. Who knows how long we’ll have to wait before we’re picked up.....”

“You think anyone got our distress signal?”

“Bound to. There’ll be a ship on its way by now,” she said, trying to believe her own words. “Here in a couple of days.”

“Jeez, we could be stuck here for bloody ages!”

“Which is why we can’t waste the gas. In case we don’t find anything else we can use...”

“Yeah. Tomorrow I’ll go topside and make a big SOS sign out of rubbish and stuff that can be seen from the air. You know, like they do in movies when they are stuck on a desert island.”

“Good idea. Maybe we can find stuff to make a fire – like a beacon with lots of smoke and heat that will show up on the scanners.” She said, thinking that if the truant sun still was not up they would need something that did not depend on daylight.

“It will keep us busy.” Mikey replied and she thought she heard an improvement in his tone, as if he was slowly starting to rally. “Go on then. Switch off the ruddy light.”

The darkness was horrible, as absolute as blindness itself, a tangible presence, a sentience that loomed over them. The absolute silence was just as bad. Dot could feel panic rising in her, the desire to find sanctuary from reality in the embrace of screaming madness. Next to her, she could feel Mikey was tense in every muscle and knew he must feel the same. Tears tried to fight their way to the surface but she fought them down too. There was nothing left for them but to hang on. She wondered how either of them were going to sleep.

In the end though weariness got the better of both of them, a weariness more – and worse – than mere physical tiredness: it was a weariness of the soul, of the mind reeling under the onslaught of a relentless universe that had turned on them with silent, infinitely patient menace. It took an hour or more of listening to the dark, of imaging distant creaks and rustles and whispers and echoes that could only be the wind finding its way into the tunnels, before they both fell asleep.

It might have been an hour, or minutes, before Mikey was nudging her awake and she came to with a start, emerging from nightmares into nightmare. The knowledge of where she was came crashing in on her, snatching the life from her soul.

“What?” she could feel him shaking.

“Did you hear that? I thought I heard something.”

“Heard what?”

“A shout. Somewhere far off but it was a voice.”

“You must have dreamed it. Stands to reason our minds are gonna play tricks.”

“I thought I heard someone walk down the corridor, past the door.” His voice trembled and she could feel him panting, feel his heart pounding

“Mikey, please don’t do this.....” she said, trying to keep her own voice level. The tears that came into her eyes were unstoppable though and she was glad he could not see them in the dark. She could not even find it within herself to scold him. “This place is dead.”

“Oh jeezus. “

“Try to sleep.” Under the circumstances it was a stupid thing to say but Dot was right out of ideas, of reasoned responses.

Mikey sat up in bed. She felt his body go rigid. He was silent for ten seconds, as if too paralysed to speak.

“What is it now?” Dot asked him. She turned over and realised she could see his silhouette, that the room was no longer totally dark. Light was coming in from somewhere. Unable to speak, Mikey pointed at the door.

It was still shut, with the chair wedged against it but light was seeping under it, from the corridor outside.

Dot swore and they both huddled together for a long while, staring with terrified ayes at the pencil thin line of light beneath the door.

“But...but that’s not possible....” she said.

“Tell me again that I’m imagining things.”

“There has to be a logical explanation.”

“Well, if you’ve got one, you’ve no idea how glad I will be to hear it.”

Grasping at straws she said: “The place must have some sort of automated system that comes on automatically. On a timer or something.”

“After over four hundred years? How could anything still be working?”

“Well I don’t know. I think pw tech was pretty advanced towards the end and these bunkers were built to withstand god-knows-what for god-knows how long...”

“I think there’s somebody living here underground.”

“Johansen’s party would have noticed. They searched the place for several days. I think they would have mentioned it in their report.....”

Mikey snapped at her then, as if his nerve ends were starting to tear loose one by one. “Well maybe Johansen had his head up his ass or he and his mates were too busy getting pissed or doing hypers to notice anything. But there’s a light on in the ruddy corridor that has no right to be on.”

“I told you it must be an automated system. But there’s only one way to find out.....”

“If you think I’m gonna go out there and take a peek, you’re more stupid than you look.”

“I suppose you want me to do it?”

“I don’t want either of us to do it.”

“Well we can’t stay barricaded in here forever. Sooner or later we got to open the door so we might as well get it over with.”

Even Mikey had to agree she had a point and, to his credit, he rose, albeit shakily, to the occasion and took on the duty himself, after first making her hide under the bed, “just in case.”

He fished in his pockets and retrieved the penknife that was his only weapon. It was a tiny, ineffectual looking thing that would barely have protected him against an irritable koala, but it gave him some comfort.

It took him an hour to pluck up the courage to remove the chair from the door, then another half hour for him to steel himself to open it. In the end, he took one last deep breath, muttered a desperate prayer and took a firm grip on the door handle. Then, with the air of a man telling his executioner to get it over with quick, he yanked the door open in one sudden movement.

The corridor outside was pitch dark, just as they had left it. Mikey slammed the door again and stared then in disbelief at the thin pencil of light that seeped in under it.

“What?” Dot hissed at him from under the bed. “What did you see?”

“Er.......”

“Well, what?”

His mind was reeling, trying to process the impossible. There was light coming in under the door but the corridor outside was pitch dark.

“WHAT?” Dot snarled at him, angered and frightened by his silence. She clambered out from under the bed.

“Th....there’s nothing out there!”

“Well, of course there isn’t.”

“You don’t understand...the corridor is dark!”

She looked down at the light under the door and then up at Mikey’s face, which bore an expression she could not even put a name to.

“Don’t be daft. That’s not possible.”

“Did you notice any light flood in when I opened the door?”

“I...wasn’t looking.” Dot said, unwilling to admit that while her man was braving the unknown, she had her eyes shut.

“Try it again.” She told him, figuring that if he had not been dragged screaming from the room by something unseen and feral then she could risk not hiding under the bed this time. “Let me see.”

Mikey grabbed the handle, took a breath and yanked open the door again. Shut it again fast. The corridor had been utterly dark as before but now that the door was shut, there was the light again.

Dot shook her head in bewilderment. “I don’t.....” she said, but could not finish the sentence.

“Me neither.”

“Let me try.” She suggested, as if having someone else open the door would make a difference.

Mikey was only too happy to stand aside and go slump on the bed while Dot flung the door open.

The corridor was dark. She shut the door and there was the light seeping in from the corridor. She tried it again, with the same result, and again, and again. In the end she became hysterical, flinging open and slamming shut the door in rapid succession and always with the same result, no matter how fast or violently she did it.

When she grew tired and the hysteria had passed leaving in its wake a preternatural calm, she wedged the chair under the door again and came and sat on the bed next to him.

They sat in dazed silence for a long while, staring at the door and the light under it, until perhaps an hour later the light went out.

Dot lit the lantern.

“Tomorrow,” Mikey said, “we’ll see if we can build a beacon or something, find some food, then I’ll go find the ship. I don’t want to spend another night here.”

She did not argue.

They tried then to sleep: partly because they were beyond exhaustion, partly because they did not know what else to do and partly because they both wanted to put off venturing from the room as long as possible.

Mercifully they managed to doze for several hours. Dot awoke first, disentangled herself from Mikey’s limbs and sat on the edge of the bed, trying to put her thoughts in some semblance of order. The light was back on under the door again.

It was then that she heard footsteps in the corridor, the sound of heavy boots tramping past the door.

Her frightened squeal awoke Mikey, the look of terror on her face had him bolt upright in an instant. Now it was his turn to say:

“What?”

“There’s someone out there in the corridor! I just heard them!”

“Oh jeez, I knew I heard something last night!” Then he noticed the light under the door. “Oh Christ, what do we do?”

“We keep bloody quiet.” she said.

For a long while there was no sound and Dot began to convince herself that maybe she had been hearing things after all, in that twilight zone between sleep and waking where the mind can play tricks on itself. In her thoughts though were the rumours mentioned in Johansen’s reports, that the bunkers were haunted and she was fast losing the battle to disbelieve them.

Then they both heard footsteps again. They were faint at first, then grew louder, the steady clump-clump of booted feet – two pairs of booted feet -approaching along the corridor.

The clump-clumping stopped outside the door. Dot and Mikey tensed, frozen by a terror greater than anything they had ever experienced. The door handle twitched, then turned but the chair was wedged tightly and held even when someone – or something – on the other side pushed hard against the door and jiggled the handle vigorously.

There was a momentary silence and then the handle jiggled again and something heavy thudded against the door. Then silence. Then the indistinct murmur of voices followed by the sound of footsteps marching briskly away.

Dot and Mikey both exhaled.

“Like you said,” Dot whispered, swimming in a sea of unreality, the sense that none of this was really happening. “We’re not alone.”

Mikey found no comfort whatever in having been right.

“Oh God, oh God, oh God.”

Dot was trying to think. The sound of the footsteps had clearly been the sound of people wearing boots, which meant human beings, people, not creatures of some kind, or ghosts or flesh-eating mutants. And the voices the other side of the door, though muted, had been human, the tone almost conversational.

Okay, okay, so they were dealing with people. Somebody was still using this underground complex for....something-or-other; it was not as derelict as they had thought, as all the evidence of their own eyes, and Johansen’s two-hundred-year-old notes suggested. Okay, good, made sense, kind of. It meant they were trespassers here and there was no knowing what kind of people ran the place, what manner of human beings lived here beneath the Wastelands, their presence unsuspected for nearly half a millennium, nor how they would react to finding two intruders on the premises. Not so good...

It was a tenuous line of logic at best but, hell, any port in a storm, and it made some kind of sense of their situation. It did not however explain the light under the door, not why the hackles on her neck refused to lie down and she had goose bumps like a permanent rash.

It did however explain why she said:

“We’re getting out of here. Now! We’ll take our chances topside.”

Mikey nodded agreement “Before I wet meself would be good.” Then he muttered, “I don’t know what the blue buggery possessed us to come here in the first place.” as he pulled himself together with an effort.

He stood up, took a deep breath and tried to steady his face, which looked as if there was seismic activity going on beneath the very pale skin, and to not let her see how much he was shaking.

“We’ll make a run for it.” he said, then waited for her to shoot him down in flames as she usually did, but Dot thought it was as a good a plan as any. Running, running away very quickly, would be good.

They stood by the door and Mikey grabbed the chair while Dot held the lamp.

“I’m gonna remove the chair.” he said. “Open the door a crack and have a peek. If the coast is clear, we’ll leg it to the entrance as fast as we can. You remember the way? Turn first left, then first left. Or was it right?”

“Left.”

“Left. Good. Ready?”

She nodded. Mikey braced himself and she put a trembling hand on the door handle. The metal felt ice-cold to her touch. “On three. One...two...THREE!”

Mikey whipped the chair away and she turned the handle; her heart was pounding as she opened the door just wide enough for a quick look up and down the corridor.

She ducked her head back into the room almost immediately and Mikey needed no signal from her to wedge the chair against the door again. Dot sagged back against the wall, then slid down it to sit on her haunches and bury her face in her knees.

“What did you see?” Mikey asked, alarmed by her obvious distress. Dot merely shook her head, a gesture of silent despair.

“Is there somebody out there?”

Again the shake of the head and he could tell that she was crying.

“Some thing?”

She flapped a hand at him, as if trying to bat away something buzzing around her head, shook her head again.

“Talk to me babe.” Mikey persisted. “I’m not in the ruddy frame of mind for Twenty Questions.”

Again, all she could manage was as hand gesture. Under normal circumstances her loss of the power of speech might have been a small boon but not then. Dot could be a bitch at times, but she was as feisty bitch and it was one of the things he adored in her. To see her like this was to witness the woman he loved coming apart at the seams and it filled him with horror.

Yet it sparked in him something else too, the desire to protect her, to ignore his own fears and rise to the occasion.

Mikey swore and threw aside the chair, yanked open the door and stuck his head into the corridor.

He was so dismayed by what he saw that he stood wide-eyed in the doorway, transfixed, all need for caution momentarily forgotten.

Then he shut the door, very calmly and with motions as slow and deliberate as a meditating monk, wedged the chair behind it again and came and sat down beside her. Dimly, he was aware that he was in shock but it was a welcome sensation, a detached, floating numbness.

After ten minutes, Dot put her arm in his and he remembered to speak:

“I guess that’s not good is it?” he said, his tone unnaturally matter-of-fact.

No, it was not good at all.

The corridor had changed. Where it had been pitch dark, it was now brightly lit because all the fluorescent lights were working. By their stark luminance everything was etched in preternatural detail: the overhead ducting that had been rusted through and sagging away from its mountings was now pristine and freshly painted, as were the walls and all the doors, which now had numbers on them. The floor was devoid of rubbish or pools of water and itself painted in some kind of grey industrial floor paint; it was freshly mopped and scrubbed too. At the far end of the corridor, where it intercepted yet another, as yet unexplored, corridor large, bold lettering had appeared on the left-hand wall, which said: “Section 3.”

The place was eerily silent, Mikey heard nothing to attest to the presence of inhabitants, yet it was as if a crew of phantom decorators, plumbers and electricians had transformed the place in the few hours since Dot and Mikey had last opened the door of their room – an impossible feat.

It was the same corridor but as it had been four hundred years ago, before the underground complex was finally abandoned.

“Maybe...maybe we were asleep a lot longer than we thought.” Mikey suggested. “That business with the sun not coming up and now this.....it’s like there’s something wrong with time or our perception of it...like what seems like an hour to us is actually just minutes or something.” It sounded wild even as he said it, but it was no wilder than what was actually happening to them.

“Captain Johansen reported that this place was haunted.” Dot said flatly, drying here eyes on the sleeve of her parka.

“Wonderful. Now she tells me! Why didn’t you mention this minor detail before?” but Mikey was beyond being angry.

“I.....” She was going to say: “I didn’t think you could handle it.” but changed it at the last moment to, “I forgot.”

He sighed, squeezed her hand.”Doesn’t matter. It probably would have just freaked me out anyway. I’m all for not being freaked out until it is absolutely necessary. Anyway, maybe it’s better we are dealing with ghosts rather than something real and solid. Ghosts just play with your head and scare the shit out of you but they can’t hurt you....”

She looked at him, wondering how he got to be such an expert on the paranormal but realised from the stricken look on his face and the fear in his voice that he was not really convinced by his own argument: he was just saying it for her benefit, trying to talk up their game.

She got up, took a breath. “Let’s get the hell out of here. Now! Two minutes or less and we can be topside and away from this place. I’m sure we can find the wreck if we really concentrate....”

“Okay. You ready?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be.”

He kicked the chair away from the door and flung the door open. The corridor was still as they had last seen it, brightly lit and thoroughly redecorated. They paused to listen and found only utter silence: no distant voices, no footsteps, no hum of generators, nothing. The complex had the feel of something that hung suspended in time, like the Marie Celeste bereft of every living soul – or, hopefully, dead one.

They ran, wanting to reach the exit as quickly as they could, before the ghosts were awoken by the sudden flurry of their dash for freedom.

They reached the first left turn and pelted into the adjoining corridor, only to find it was dark and untouched by phantom renovators. Both of them were forced to slam on the brakes and proceed cautiously, to stifle the urge to run for fear of falling over something in the dark and injuring themselves and thus perhaps making further flight impossible. Dot remembered every movie she had ever seen: this was the moment that the heroine would fall and sprain her ankle with hell itself breathing down her neck and she was not about to make that mistake.

They began picking their way carefully, keeping to the left wall for orientation because they had left the lamp behind.

“Didn’t you bring the lamp?”

“Didn’t you?”

“Bollocks! Never mind we are nearly th –“

At that moment the overhead fluorescents came on, one-by one with a “clunk” that sounded loud in the enveloping silence, sending light marching down the corridor ahead of them: “clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk.” As they did so, the corridor materialised out of the shadows in segments, each segment as pristine and untouched by time as the corridor they had just left. It was if the complex were a beast that had been dead and was now piece-by-piece coming alive. And they were inside it.

“Run!” Mikey shouted but Dot was already running.

They turned left at the next intersection and there was the final corridor ahead of them, dark. Somewhere up ahead, lost in the shadows was the doorway by which they had entered, its stout metal door fallen from its hinges and lying askew. Dot looked for a rectangle of light that should have been there: either of daylight if the sun had finally decided to show up or of the paler glow given off by the inexplicably luminous horizon but she had barely time to focus her eyes before the corridor lights came on clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk just as they had in the last corridor.

They ran. By the time the last light came on they could see the doorway clearly, the concrete steps leading up into the interminable night, the faint glow of the horizon. There was still no sun then, but what the hell, twenty or thirty yards up ahead lay escape and that was all she cared about.

They flew like the wind, given wings by their own terror. Mikey was a lot faster than she, having played wingman for the Melbourne Uni Ozrules Footy team for three years, and got to the doorway five or six yards ahead of her, was through it and up the steps seemingly in one bound and vanished into the night.

She glanced up from her running to see him go. The exit was perhaps ten feet from her by then and hope leaped into her heart. Just a few more strides and –

But then the very last door on her right, which had opened onto the very first room they had explored on their arrival a seeming eternity ago, suddenly opened and a figure appeared in the corridor right in front of her.

In that split second, she barely had time to register who or what it was, received a fleeting in-your-face close-up of a man dressed in a khaki tunic and a green beret, a face not much older than Mikey’s but fairer and blue-eyed, a face contorted by surprise.

She swerved to avoid a collision and caromed into the wall, bounced off, lost her footing and hit the floor hard.

She scrambled to her feet without waiting to asses her injuries and too terrified to register pain. As she did so she glanced back to where the man had been standing a split second before, knew that though she had swerved, there had actually been no way to avoid a collision, that she had passed right through him as if he had been smoke.

The man was not there.

Yesterday upon the stair, For some insane reason the ancient ditty began running through her head. I saw a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. I wish that man would go away.

She clambered unsteadily to her feet, her limbs seemingly turned to rubber, and turned once more towards the doorway and the last few paces towards freedom from this nightmare.

But the doorway had gone – or rather, it was still there but there was now a door in it. A freshly painted metal door that was firmly shut.

And it was locked and would not open. She wrestled hysterically with the handle for several minutes before she finally accepted the horrible reality of the fact that Mikey was gone and she was trapped.

The utter wretchedness and despair into which she descended then was beyond description. It was terror beyond emotion, tripping one mental circuit-breaker after another until there was nothing left of her but a tiny pinpoint of identity shining like a single febrile star in the infinite blackness of the cosmos.

Her mind shut down altogether for some indeterminable time and she awoke to find herself curled into a foetal position, like a mental patient, in the corner by the implacable door, unable to make her limbs work, unable to cry, unable to do anything but tremble violently in every muscle.

She remained thus for a long while. The now-pristine complex was utterly silent, as if holding its breath and waiting for what she would do next.

Still later, she roused herself and sat up, some spark of survival instinct driving her on through her despair to yet seek some escape. She knew that if she was ever to get out of here, she would have to find another door. There must be one, she reasoned, with numbed detachment. It was a large enough complex and the ingress they had found was small, a side-door perhaps, in what appeared to be mainly a storage area.

There was nothing for it: she was going to have to walk through the haunted complex alone, drift through its corridors like a wraith until she found another way out.

She started walking back the way she had come, her body moving, it seemed, without her having commanded it to do so, deeper into the corridor towards God-knew what visitations and apparitions awaited her in the labyrinthine tunnels.

She approached the first intersection again and she was perhaps five yards from it when a figure in the intersecting tunnel walked suddenly across the intersection like someone striding past an open doorway, and was gone. She heard the clump of boots striding away down the corridor.

The suddenness of it almost stopped her heart, almost snatched from her the last vestiges of her resolve but somehow she kept walking and reached the intersection.

She stuck her head nervously around the corner, afraid of what she might see, but there was nothing, no-one, just the empty corridor and the sound of footsteps fading into the distance.

She kept walking, on legs that barely held her up, her eyes darting this way and that, every sense and nerve-ending as sensitive as a hunted rabbit’s. She had no idea where she was going.

It was then that she heard whistling. A tune she vaguely recognised, but almost painfully flat and out of key, floated down the corridor, the source of it somewhere up ahead. She could hear a faint rumbling too, a muted undertone like distant generators.

As she continued zombie-like up the corridor, the whistling grew louder and she realised that it was coming from a room on her right, the large chamber she had seen yesterday, that looked like it might once have housed banks of computers.

The door to the room, which now contained the bold legend “IT Personnel Only,” which previously had been too effaced by time to be legible, was ajar and light and the monotonous whistling came from within. Her first impulse was to drift on by but something made her pause. It sounded so human, so normal, so harmless.

Without knowing why she did it, she pushed open the door. The room was brightly lit and spotlessly clean, filled by the faint hum of generators. Tall banks of computers stood in rows from one end of the room to the other.

Before them stood a man in military fatigues, writing notes on a clipboard. He had his back to the door but the door creaked slightly as Dot pushed it open and he stopped whistling, froze for a moment and slowly turned.

The two of them stared at one another for an instant. The man’s eyes widened in inchoative terror. It was hard to tell who was more frightened by whom: her or the ghost, but she did not linger to find the answer. In panic she slammed the door shut and bolted down the corridor. She half expected the door to open behind her and the ghost to pursue her but the door remained shut and the corridor empty.

Dot kept running, passed the “Sector Three” sign on the wall, took a left and a right into yet another corridor. By now she was disorientated and lost in the underground maze. There were signs painted on the walls, and arrows, “Sector Four,” ”Ordnance,” ”Quartermaster,” “Signals” and so on but they were meaningless to her and gave her no clue as to where an exit might be and she ran, and finally walked, pretty much at random.

She wandered, thus for hour after hour, mercifully suffering no more face-to face encounters with apparitions, but assailed by glimpses of movement within half-open doors that made her flinch, of figures striding past the occasional intersection, things seen from the corner of her eye. She heard snatches of voices from time to time, the rumble of machinery, a laugh, all of which seemed to jump out at her from the thin air. The place was alive, a hive of apparitions and spectres that for the most part seemed to skulk at the periphery of her shrunken consciousness. He expected at any moment to be thoroughly noticed, and all the manifold phantoms that haunted the place to home in on her and descend on her in one gibbering, shrieking horde.

She found herself in “Sector Five,” whatever that was, and yet another brightly lit but nevertheless drab and nondescript corridor. She might have walked it a dozen times already but in her daze she could not recall and did not care. All she knew was that if she just kept walking, then by the law of averages, surely, she would find a way out.

The sound of men singing became apparent, faint at first and far off but it grew louder as she walked, like theme music floating through her own nightmare. She would have turned away from it for it grew very raucous and was clearly the product of a dozen or more male voices, rowdy and perhaps drunk, which detonated off the stone walls and reverberated down the tunnels, but she kept going forward for she had seen a sign and an arrow that said: “Loading Area.”

A loading area meant, surely, some means of ingress and egress to the world outside and possible escape but it lay beyond the room from whence the singing came.

I put my finger in the woodpecker’s ‘ole.

The woodpecker said, ‘well, bless my soul!’

Take it out, take it out, take it out,

Reeeeeemove it!

The words were strangely accented, the language antique but the nature of it, a bawdy soldier’s song, was clearly recognizable.

It took every remaining ounce of Dot’s resolve to keep her walking towards the sound, past the door from which it emanated.

I pulled my finger from the woodpecker’s ‘ole.

The woodpecker said, ‘well, bless my soul!

Put it back, put it back, put it back

Reeeeeeturn it!’

The door was on her right and almost fully open. A sign next to it said “Sergeant’s Mess.” The sound of the singing was almost deafening. She hesitated, afraid to walk past the open door, for she could see movement within the room, the presence of many men –or the ghosts of many men.

She wondered then what could have happened here, for it to be so alive with so many ghosts, what manner of horror must have befallen the place, years before the vastly greater horror of the Wipeout. Johansen’s notes suggested the place had simply been shut down, but Johansen, working on scant information, must have been wrong.

Not that she particularly wanted to know the answer. All she wanted was to get topside and as far away from this place as her legs would carry her. But to get topside, she had to walk past that room.

So she put one foot in front of the other and kept walking, as if in a dream.

She drew abreast of the open door, forced herself not to look into it but to keep her eyes fixed straight ahead. From the corner of her eye she could see a room full of soldiers, flushed faces, uniforms, beer glasses raised aloft.

I put my finger in the woodpecker’s ‘ole.

The woodpecker said ‘well bless my soul!

Turn it round, turn it round, turn it round,

Reeeevolve –

The singing stopped abruptly, as if someone had thrown a switch. All motion within the room seemed to freeze.

Without wanting to, she turned her head as she walked past the door and met the gaze of a dozen pairs of astonished eyes.

Then she ran, screaming towards what she hoped was a loading bay and some means of reaching the world outside. Behind her there was a commotion, a babble of voices, a scrape of chairs, the rumble of booted feet. She sensed rather than heard a dozen or so men rush to the doorway of the mess, of startled eyes watching her vanish up the corridor.

She turned a corner and was lost from their view. The next corridor sloped upwards, towards ground level and another sign told her the loading bay was somewhere up ahead. She kept running, her legs leaden against the upward slope of the ground, her lungs bursting, her tank empty.

There was some kind of large chamber up ahead, parked trucks and forklifts, all of peculiar antique design. A draught came from somewhere, the air laden with the scent of forests in a land where nothing grew and nothing had lived for four centuries and she caught a glimpse of blue sky framed by a hangar-sized doorway.

She headed for the light.

And then someone large and solid stepped out in front of her, his arms held wide to catch her, called her name.

They collided. She struggled and tried to get away but the arms that held her were too strong and she was too tired. She became hysterical then, flailing her legs, screaming but he held onto her until the hysteria subsided.

“Calm down babe!” Mikey said. “It’s all right! It’s all right!”

“Mikey?” She could scarcely believe it: Mikey had come back for her, walked right back into the nightmare, into his own fears for her. She never knew he had it in him, had been sure that when he ran through the doorway in Sector Three and into the night, that that was the last she was going to see of him.

But she was still trying to break free of him, to keep running and could not understand why he of all people was trying to stop her. What was the matter with him?

“Let me go damn it!” she protested. “The ghosts! I saw them! Dozens of them! We got to get out of here!”

“Calm down, calm down.” he said. “They’re not ghosts.”

“I saw them!”

He cupped her face in his hands and stared into her eyes. “Look at me!” he said. “Look at me!” There was something in his eyes she had not seen before, as if Mikey was no longer Mikey, as if some part of him was missing, some part she had not particularly liked in the first place.

“They’re not ghosts. They can’t hurt you!”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ll let you know when I‘ve figured it out fully meself. Just calm down babe and look around you.”

She sagged in his arms and did as he told her. The place was dark again, the cavernous chamber, so far as she could tell by the faint glow of the horizon that filtered in through the barn-sized doorway, was empty, dead, long abandoned. There were no parked trucks or forklifts, only a scattering of nondescript detritus and centuries of wind-blown dust piled into small dunes.

The chamber’s large doors had sagged away from their rusted mountings and through the open portal there was no glimpse of blue sky, no scent of forests: just the dim glow of the horizon and the bleak winds of the Wastelands moaning their desolate paean.

Behind her the old bunker complex was silent and shrouded in millennial darkness.

She was shaking violently and he wrapped her in his arms and his parka to keep her warm.

“Get me out of here, Mikey.”

“Dot, there’s nothing to –“

“I SAID, GET ME OUT OF HERE. NOW!”

“All right, all right. Can you walk?”

She could, unsteadily and with his help. They crossed the empty loading bay, stumbling on junk that was invisible in the shadows, and made it to the doorway, passed under the high lintel between the sagging doors and into the night, or whatever it was exactly.

They kept walking until the entrance to the bunker complex was some distance behind them. Mikey led her uphill until they were standing on a small hillock with, she guessed, the entire bunker complex beneath their feet. From there they had a commanding view of the surrounding terrain, the dark rolling hills, eerie under the glow of the horizon, the sky overhead still a black, featureless dome.

If anything, the wind had picked up and was stronger than she remembered it. It plucked at her parka, and blew the dust of the Wastelands into her face.

“What are you doing? Why are we standing here admiring the view?” She asked him.

“I’ve got something to tell you babe.” he said. “But we gotta take this real slow.”

She looked up into his face. He looked like a ghost himself by the horizon’s steady gleam. (Was it her imagination or was that unearthly light getting stronger?) There was something there, in Mikey’s face, something different. He had the look of a man who had opened the lid of Pandora’s box and peered down into it.

Exhausted, Dot sat down in the dust and stared blankly into the distance, across the dark, dead hills to the horizon, which she was now sure, was brighter than it had been.

Could that be the sun coming up at last?

To Mikey she said: “I think we got our sunrise.”

Mikey stared at the horizon for a moment, as if trying to figure something out. He seemed sad, yet at peace, stunned maybe, but at least he was no longer terrified and that reassured her.

“I don’t think so.” he said.

“Huh?”

“I don’t think that’s the sun.”

“Oh. Well what is it then?”

“Good question.”

She sighed and the sigh became a sob. Everything seemed unreal. The hours since the crash, even the present moment were like a dream that held her with cloying tendrils and would not let her go.

“You came back for me.” she said, to fill the silence because Mikey seemed far away, so far he might not come back unless she anchored him. “I didn’t think you would. I thought you’d just keep on running until you reached the ruddy ocean.”

“You don’t have a very high opinion of me do you?”

“I didn’t mean that. I meant –“

“Yes you did. And I deserve it. But everything’s changed......”

“What happened to you after we got separated?”

Mikey hesitated. “Jeez, I don’t know how to tell you.”

“Start at the beginning and take your time. I don’t have anything else on right now.” she said.

Sooner or later they would have to start walking again, see if they could find the wreck of the airship or, failing that, walk the Wastelands until they died. But for now she was content to sit, to feel the wind in her face and the wide open spaces all about her, to wait for the shakes to subside and her strength to return, so long as she did not have to think, to remember what had just happened to her. She did not want to sleep either, for fear of the dreams that awaited her. She needed Mikey to talk.

So Mikey talked. And told her everything.

When he had reached the doorway and the stone steps leading to ground level, he was still flying like the wind. Reaching topside he did not even break stride but just kept on running. He had reached the old abandoned truck before he realised that Dot was not behind him and it was then that he stopped running, looked back, expecting to see her come haring out of the almost-dark but she did not come.

He hid behind the old truck and waited for her, nervously called and whistled for her, thinking she must have veered off in some other direction and lost sight of him. She could not have gone far and surely she must have heard him calling her, even above the bluster of the wind.

Slowly, reluctantly. He realised that she had not made it out of the bunkers, that she must still be down there somewhere among the ghosts, perhaps fallen and injured

He did not want to go back. His terror propelled him in the other direction with almost irresistible force but he overcame it and with every nerve and sinew screaming flight, he walked back towards the source of his horror.

He stood at the top of the stone steps and nervously peered down into the dark recess, expecting any moment for something hideously fashioned from glowing ectoplasm to leap shrieking out of the ground. But there was only darkness and the lamenting wind behind him. He had a right to expect a shaft of light from the open doorway but there was nothing and somehow, given the recent arbitrariness of the physical universe, he was not all that surprised.

He called down into the dark and only his own echo answered. Timidly, poised to run at any moment, to bolt at the first sound or movement in the shadows, he descended the steps.

Reaching the bottom he discovered why Dot had not followed him. Impossibly, a metal door now barred his way and the door was locked or bolted and would not move. Dot was trapped inside the haunted bunkers.

Oh God, oh God, oh God. What do I do? What do I do? He indulged in some hysterics of his own for a while, sat down on the steps and cried and when he was all cried out he came to a decision he really did not want to make.

He would have to find another way in and go back inside that horrible place and see if he could find her. Mikey Lennox fought and won – or lost, depending on your point of view - a brief civil war with himself.

Something inside him put up a very compelling argument for leaving Dot to her fate. She was done for. There was no point in both of them suffering... whatever fate one suffered at the hands of ghosts in a four hundred year old military bunker. The fact that he could not even imagine what that fate might be, what was happening to Dot or what might happen to him if he was daft enough to go back inside, made it that much worse. He could not go back down there. He just couldn’t. Besides, even if he did, how the hell was he supposed to fight demonic powers that could bring alive, seemingly with a snap of satanic fingers, some long dead ruins and people them with phantoms?

Besides, he probably would not be able to find another way in in any case so all he would succeed in doing was to waste time and energy that could have been better spent finding the wreck of the Victoria.

And another thing.......But it was no good. Try as he might he could not get around the horrible fact that he had to go back for Dot. If he did not, if he somehow managed to survive this nightmare and get home, what kind of life lay ahead of him, knowing he had walked away and abandoned the girl whom – despite everything –he loved? He imagined himself dying in his thirties, a human derelict bereft of any vestige of self respect, probably an alcoholic or hyper-head or something, consumed by self-loathing.

It would be better to die tonight (or today or whatever it happened to be, God rot the truant sun) doing something decent for once in his shallow, meaningless, insincere life.

Damn, damn, damn!

Mikey started walking. God he was sick of walking. As he walked, he worked out in his mind the rough geography of where the spread of the underground complex lay.

Right, so the entrance we found is back there.....that first tunnel must go in that direction and it looked like the bulk of the complex lay over there.....So logically that big hill to my left has the bulk of the complex under it. So if I skirt around the hill keeping it to my left, if there’s another entrance that hasn’t long since been wiped off the face of the ruddy Earth, I should see it. Or fall into it. God I wish we hadn’t left the ruddy lamp behind.

The hill to his left was perhaps a couple of miles across, probably a lot wider than the actual complex buried under it, so far as he could tell in the dark with little in the way or reference points and only a vague idea how long a mile was, which meant the circumference of it was six miles, maybe a lot more. And of course, the hill was not uniform and other hills got in the way, the idiot who designed planet Earth not being inclined to neatness or symmetry

The upshot was that Mikey walked, slithered, scrambled and trudged for miles, and several hours without seeing a blessed thing. Mercifully, the horizon seemed to be glowing brighter than previously so he had a bit more visibility, roughly the same as that given by the very early pre-dawn light in parts of the planet that still worked properly.

Eventually as he breasted a small hillock that formed a spur from the main hill that was the object of his reluctant quest, he saw something glowing faintly in the distance. He thought at first he must have come full circle and was seeing the abandoned truck again. But this was a definite glow, reddish like a still-smouldering ember.

He had no idea what it might be, but it was not that far from the main hill – a mile maybe? – and it was the only thing doing anything vaguely interesting in any direction he cared to look, so he headed towards it.

Half an hour later he was close enough to make out what it was. It was the wreck of the Victoria.

He realised then that he and Dot, utterly disorientated, had walked in a huge half-circle before stumbling upon the entrance to the bunkers. They must have walked twenty miles to wind up no more than three miles from where they had left the ship! And they had crashed almost on top of the bunkers!

So much for Dot’s confident: “It’s in this direction.” She must have been completely off her trolley or had simply mis-remembered or misread the data thrown up by the computer just before they crashed. He felt a stab of anger at her then, at himself for letting a ruddy woman navigate. But then he realised it was not her fault: she had done her best, given the circumstances and the fact that she must have been pretty shaken up and disorientated, and to be fair he had been even more clueless that she, his head so far up his clenched ass he had let her do all the thinking.

No use crying over spilt milk, he thought. There was plenty else to cry about.

He trudged on towards the wreck for the simple reason that he could not think where else to trudge towards. He thought perhaps there would be stuff that had survived the crash he could use or that maybe with luck the radio still worked. It was not clear in his mind why they had left it in the first place like a couple of aborigines gone walkabout in the Outback. Try as he might he could not recall why they had done it or even whose idea it had been. The crash itself was still a blur of terror, falling, impact and fire. He guessed they must both have been pretty dazed.

As he grew close to the twisted carcass of what had once been his beautiful little airship, he could see that she was still smouldering. She was gutted, her innards unrecognisable ash, charred lumps and smouldering embers within a crumpled shell of stained paper-thin aluminium. What could have caused the fire? He wondered. It must have taken quite some heat to burn out the ship so thoroughly. The buoyancy tanks were filled with inert helium but there were spare propane cylinders aboard for cooking and power when the solar panels were off-line and similarly there was fuel for the props. One of these must have ignited when they crashed and then set the others off. He vaguely recalled heat and flames and..........

Something cold and dreadful then gripped his soul. He walked around the wreck, picking his way over scattered debris, until he found the cockpit.......

“There wasn’t much left of it.” he told Dot. “But I could see our flight couches....”

Dot held her breath. Suddenly she knew what was coming next.

“And the charred remains of two bodies still strapped in their seats.”

Bunker 9, The Lake District, Cumbria, England. July 2012

Lance Corporal “Pitbull” McLaren of the British Army Intelligence Corps was something of a Samuel Pepys at heart but without, sadly, the spelling, grammar or vocabulary to match.

He had kept a diary for a long as he could remember, without ever really knowing why he bothered. The poet in him he guessed, the desire to leave his thoughts to posterity on the off chance that someone might be interested – and able to decipher his handwriting. In actual fact his career, which included tours in Iraq, Afghanistan and places one cannot talk about, provided him with some pretty interesting things to scribble down, but the Official Secrets Act and Army censors conspired to ensure that posterity, for the most part, would have to struggle on without his pithy insights into events that shaped, or failed to shape, the world.

It was by pure chance that the entry he wrote in the loose-leaf binder that served as his diary one Tuesday evening in the year 2012 would later become separated from his diary, then get left behind when Bunker 9 was mothballed nine months later and he was reassigned to Corps HQ in Chicksands, Bedfordshire.

The single sheet of lined A4 paper lay fading and forgotten on the floor of his now empty and sealed barrack room for four hundred years, the words inscribed thereon outliving their creator by many centuries and immortalising him in a modest kind of way. Fortunately that particular chamber of the Bunker 9 complex escaped the water seepage that afflicted many others and it was very cold so that when Captain Johansen (ret’d) of the 3^rd Queensland expedition found it during a cursory exploration of the old complex in the year 212 of the post Wipeout era, it was still legible and, atrocious spelling and the ongoing evolution of the English language notwithstanding, still comprehensible. Before carefully sealing the ancient curio in a polythene envelope and taking it back to Oz (where it found its way into the archives of the Sidney Museum of Pre-Wipeout Antiquities, where it sat in a drawer for a further three thousand years until Sidney was evacuated during the war with the Martian Colonies) Johansen read it with mild fascination and mentioned it in his log, which notes found their way via the Oznet into the computer aboard the airship Victoria some two hundred years later.

Lance Corporal McLaren’s immortal jottings were as follows.

“Corporal Bailey told me today hes herd a rumor that the base is bein shut down after crismas. Carnt say im sorre to here that. Bein stuk under grownd with a lode of files and stuf is no job 4 a proper soljer so im keepin me fingers crossed 4 a harf desent asinement.

“Wont be sorri to sea the back of this plase espeshully arfter toda. Looks like we got gosts hawntin the place. Lodes of blokes have sed they seen stuf, doors open and closing by themselfs espesherly over in sector 3. Corporal Goody down in IT swares blind he seen a gostly figure of a gerl standing in the doorway of the computor room and private Randall in stores ses he was comin out ov one of the file rooms this morning when a gost ran strait parst him an then just vanished.

Of corse i wuldnt of berleeved nun of it, wot wiv the drugs the psych boys iz giving our lads these days exep the entire sergents mess, wot woz havin a sing song to celerbrayt Color Sarnt Tomson’s berfday swearz blind they all saw the same femal gost drift parst the dor ov the mess and go howlin up the corridor towards the loadin bay.

The officers ov corse iz havin nun of it an is tellin the boys 2 gro up and not b such a lode of pansies but its got a load of blokes real jiteri i can tel u, tho i carnt say i seen nuffink meself. Bit of as larf reely coz the werd is big tuff badass Sarnt major Allsop iz now sleepin wiv the lite on and a gun under hiz pillow.

Arsk me i fink we all bin 2 long undergrownd and we iz goin a bit stir crazy. Cummin to sumfin wen u got her majisty’s finest all jumpin at shadoes. Wotever it is got into the lads i hope it aint catchin.”

Four hundred years later on the hill above the Bunker 9 complex, Dot Torrance got to her feet and dusted herself off and reflected that it was true what they said about the truth: it really did set you free.

She felt calm, a little empty in fact, but serene. It came as a shock to suddenly discover your own immortality, yet as shocking discoveries went, she could think of worse.

The only trouble with the after-life, or limbo or whatever the hell they had wandered into, was that it came without a guidebook or instruction manual. They were still here in the sunless Twilight Zone: what the hell were they supposed to do next?

She thought, guiltily of God and how many times in the last few hours they had taken Her name in vain. Dot hoped that God, in Her compassion, would not hold that against them, given the circumstances. After all, in their all-too-short lives they had hardly had time to accumulate too many sins and the purgatory they had just been through was surely payment enough!

But what were they supposed to do now? Sit here forever and be bored for all eternity?

But then she knew. Of course! It was bloody obvious.

She looked at the horizon, which was glowing stronger by the minute, a slow sunrise upon some unimaginable dawn.

“Guess we best be off then.” She said and she started walking.

Mikey watched her go, perplexed.

“What are you doing?”

“What we should have ruddy done in the first place.”

“And that is?”

“Walking towards the light. You coming or what?”