Infection Z: The Apocalypse

by Gary Chesla

  “I think you’re right Doc,” Rogers said as he ran his hand across the picture, making the picture move. “You know Doc, in all the spy movies I’ve ever watched, they always had a safe behind a picture on the wall.”

  “With all the files encrypted, why would they need a safe?” Davis asked.

  “To keep the encryption key?” Rogers replied.

  “I bet there isn’t a safe behind this picture,” Davis said.

  “I bet you one cherry pie MRE,” Rogers replied.

  “I can’t believe I’m going to make a wager for a damn MRE,” Davis laughed. “MREs are what you get if you lose, but what the hell, you’re on.”

  Doc looked on curiously as Rogers grabbed the edges of the picture.

  “Anyone else want in on this bet before I move this picture?” Rogers asked.

  Chervy laughed, “I hate MREs, but right now they are too valuable to risk. I think I’ll sit this one out.”

  Rogers took hold of the picture and slid it off the wall.

  Behind the picture was the two-foot square door of a wall safe.

  “You got lucky Rogers,” Davis said. “Did you spot that safe behind the picture before you made that bet?”

  “Hell no,” Rogers laughed. “You want to go double or nothing on what’s in the safe?”

  “Maybe we should go double or nothing on whether or not any of us can get that damn thing open,” Doc grinned.

  “I saw a sledge hammer and some chisels down in the machine room this morning. How about one of you guys run down and get them and let’s see if we can get this thing open?”

  Davis and Rogers went to look for the hammer and chisels the doctor had seen and returned a few minutes later.

  They worked for an hour, often debating whether or not to use a grenade to blow the safe, but decided that would probably do more damage than good.

  Finally, they were able to break the pins that held the hinges together and slowly began to pry the safe door out of its slot.

  When the door fell to the floor, all four men stared into the one-foot square, three-foot deep safe.

  Doc grabbed the long cardboard tube that was in the safe and ran over to the desk.

  “Here, hold down the top end,” Doc said to Davis.

  Davis grabbed the top of the rolled paper that was in the tube and Doc began to unroll it across the desk.

  “It’s a blue print.” Chervy said excitedly.

  When Doc had the blueprint completely open, they all stared down at it.

  “How long is that tunnel out there?” Doc asked.

  “I’d say about two hundred feet,” Chervy replied.

  Doc pointed to a notation on the right side of the blueprint.

  The number .25 was written in between two lines that extended from one end of the diagram to the other end.

  “According to the blueprint, the vault is a quarter of a mile long,” Doc said.

  “Maybe that was what it was supposed to be but they never finished it,” Davis replied. “The end of this tunnel is a solid wall of granite. There is debris and chunks of rocks laying around everywhere at the end of the tunnel. You can see the gouges in the rocks where they stopped digging. If this is the blueprint for the survival vault, I have to believe they never finished it. Who knows, with budget cuts they might have decided they couldn’t finish the job and just sold what they had finished to the Mormons.”

  “But this would have been a black opts project, they don’t have budgets,” Doc replied as he ran his eyes over the blue print. “They are usually just given a blank check and told to fill it out when they have completed their project.”

  “Maybe a rumor was all this place ever was,” Davis said. “It might have started out as some grand scheme, but like most government BS, it was all hype and no substance. You know like Regan’s Star Wars project. Just the idea of it scared the Russians so bad, they drove their country into bankruptcy, afraid we were really developing something that would render their missile system obsolete. We still aren’t anywhere close to having mastered those technologies, but the Russians didn’t know that at the time. Maybe when this project started, information on it got leaked before they got anywhere close to building the damn vault, so the government just said to hell with it.”

  “Yeah, it was a good idea,” Chervy said. “But with all the other things the government needed money for, maybe finishing a doomsday vault just didn’t seem as important as someone thought it would be at one time. Besides, if a nuclear war destroyed the world, what the hell good would a vault like this ever be anyhow. There would be so much radiation in the air, whoever was in the vault would be long dead before the environment would be able to support any life again.”

  Doc looked at the blueprint, disappointment clearly written all over his face.

  “I guess you could be right,” Doc replied. “I guess we’ll just have to find some other way to survive. I really thought we were on to something here.”

  “Does that mean I can start hunting goats tomorrow?” Rogers asked.

  Chervy laughed, “Unfortunately yes. It looks that way.”

  “I hear goat meat tastes like shit,” Davis added.

  “That wouldn’t surprise me one bit,” Rogers replied. “But I think I will shoot a few anyhow. Who knows, maybe it will be something that you need to acquire a taste for.”

  Chervy looked out the door, the light that had been coming in through the entrance of the facility had faded and it was now almost dark outside.

  “Connors, Reynolds, secure the door and come on back,” Chervy yelled.

  “Yes Sir,” came the reply from down the tunnel.”

  “I guess we should get a good night’s sleep,” Chervy said. “Tomorrow we learn how to live off the land.”

  “I thought I was going to shoot goats?” Rogers asked.

  “That’s what he meant asshole,” Davis replied.

  Doc grabbed the blueprints and the two file folders that were in the safe and the men returned to the main administrative office.

  Everyone found their spot and made themselves comfortable.

  Soon everyone was asleep, except for Doc.

  Doc sat and began to read the information in the file folders.

  Late into the night, as everyone slept, Doc continued to read.

  Doc read through every piece of paper in the files.

  They were mostly technical information that didn’t make a lot of sense to someone not trained to be an engineer, but Doc continued to read.

  Even to the untrained mind, something started to make sense or at least made some kind of sense to Doc.

  It made him wonder if there wasn’t something he was missing.

  What Chervy had said about the vault being a good idea but a project that had never been completed made sense, but he didn’t want to give up hope.

  He studied the blueprints over and over and kept coming back to one item on the blueprint.

  It was something in the machine room.

  Since Doc couldn’t sleep, he decided to go see if there was such a place or if it was just another part of an unfinished project.

  He didn’t know what to expect, but according to the blueprints, a lot of arrows and lines all led to this spot in the machine room.

  Again, he didn’t know what it was, but it looked important. It reminded him of a diagram of the human circulatory system with all the veins and arteries leading back to the heart.

  Whatever this was, if it had been built and was in the machine room, Doc felt it should be important.

  Doc looked at the men sleeping around him.

  He wasn’t comfortable going out in the tunnel by himself, but they had been in here for an entire day and had been safely able to move around in the tunnel.

  Chervanak had seen to it that the entrance had been secured and of course the doctor was curious.

  He quietly went to the door and looked outside into the tunnel.

  The soft lights glowing in the top of the tunnel didn’t reve
al anything moving as far as he could see, so he stepped out of the room and quietly closed the door behind him.

  The doctor felt more comfortable as he walked down the length of the cavern.

  He went into the machine room, then opened the blueprint and found on the blueprint what he had been looking at before.

  He studied the machine room to find his bearings and finally was able to line up where he was in the room with what was on the blueprint.

  Following the blueprint, he navigated his way through the machine room, finally arriving at the back corner of the room.

  He studied the corner until he noticed a small panel on the wall.

  The panel was the same color as the wall and had very few markings or shapes that would attract anyone’s attention.

  If he hadn’t been looking for it, he doubted he would have ever found it.

  At most it reminded him of where a plumber had cut into the wall to get at some water pipes so he could repair a leak.

  He had seen something like that a few times at the base. A plumber had cut into the wall, made the repairs, then placed a plastic plate over the hole.

  When painted, it almost looked like the hole had never been there.

  Doc rubbed and pushed at the panel until he finally noticed some movement.

  When he pushed the far right middle of the panel, he heard a soft click.

  When he removed his hand, the panel swung open to reveal a lever inside about the size of a syringe.

  Doc looked at the lever.

  The lever hand hinges on the bottom end.

  The top end had two posts protruding out from the wall, that held the top end of the lever in place.

  Below were two more of those posts that looked like where the lever would end up when opened, possibly completing some type of circuit.

  Doc studied the switch, then looked around the room.

  “If I move this lever, I might shut down all the power to the facility,” he thought. “But, If I don’t move the lever, I will never know what it is for. How much do I want to know what it does?”

  Doc looked again at the blueprint, studying all the lines that ran to this point from all the areas shown on the blueprint, most of the areas as far as everyone believed, were part of the facility that had never been completed.

  Doc thought for a minute about the Z virus and everything it had done to the men at the base, everything it had done to mankind.

  Then he thought about how he had been one step behind at every turn, when he should have been able to recognize what was happening long before he did.

  His mind was telling him to trust his instincts for a change.

  Doc reached up and pulled the lever down.

  When the end of the lever met the two posts at the bottom and snapped into place, Doc jumped back at the sound of a loud click.

  Then a loud rumbling sound started, it sounded like the entire mountain was beginning to crumble around him.

  “Oh shit! What have I done!” Doc thought.

  Chapter 36

  Early Thursday morning, May 13th. Granite Mountain

  Chervy’s eyes shot open as the granite floor below him began to shake.

  “What the hell is that?” Davis shouted.

  “I think it’s an earth quake,” Chervy replied.

  “Should we be in a cave in the middle of an earthquake?” Rogers shouted.

  “How the hell would I know,” Chervy replied, “You know we don’t have earthquakes in Tennessee. Reynolds, you’re from California, are we safe in a cave during an earthquake?”

  “I don’t know,” Reynolds replied. “We don’t have any caves in California where I live.”

  “What do we do Cherv?” Rogers pressed on. “Do we just sit tight and ride it out?”

  “Let’s get out in the tunnel and go down near the entrance until we see if this place is going to cave in or not,” Chervy said. “Grab your packs and your rifle and follow me. Just stay close to the sides of the tunnel in case any rocks start falling out of the ceiling.”

  “I don’t think they would have built this facility here if it would all collapse during an earthquake,” Davis said as he rounded up his gear. “Isn’t a granite mountain just one big rock? There aren’t any rocks to shake loose and fall.”

  “I don’t know and I don’t want to sit here and find out,” Chervy replied. “Let’s just get down to the entrance to play it safe.”

  “Where is Doc?” Davis asked. “Anyone see Doc?”

  “I don’t know, maybe he went for a walk,” Chervy said. “Let’s get the hell out of here. I’m sure we’ll run into him out in the tunnel. There’s nowhere else he could be.”

  After the men threw their packs on their backs and grabbed their rifles, they all ran out into the tunnel.

  Doc quickly rolled up the blueprint and ran for the door.

  Before he reached the door to get out of the machine room, he heard shouting coming from out in the tunnel.

  The shouts were loud at first, but before he reached the door, he heard nothing but silence.

  Doc ran out through the open door and turned towards the entrance.

  Doc had only taken a few steps out into the large tunnel where he stopped when he saw the men standing and staring in his direction.

  The men stood with their mouths hanging open as they stared at Doc.

  As Doc looked at the men, he realized that the men weren’t looking at him, but at something behind him.

  Doc nervously began to turn, dreading what might be coming his way.

  Then he saw what the men were looking at.

  The granite wall at the end of the tunnel had disappeared, rocks and debris covered the floor in front of where the wall had been.

  The large metal doors that had been behind the wall of granite had parted in the center and slid into the sides of the tunnel, revealing what laid behind the granite wall.

  For as far as Doc could see, the tunnel went back into the mountain, probably for the quarter of a mile shown on the blueprint.

  The tunnel glowed, lit by the same soft burning lights in the ceiling as the front part of the facility.

  Large garage style doors lined the walls of the large cavern for as far as the eye could see.

  “I don’t know what the hell you did Doc,” Chervy said, “but I think you just found the survival vault.”

  “Now that’s what I call a tunnel,” Rogers said. “I can’t even begin to guess how long it took to carve this place out of solid granite.”

  “How the hell could the government keep something like this a secret for as long as they did?” Davis asked. “They would have needed an army of men and hundreds of pieces of heavy equipment for something like this, and where the hell did they put all the rocks they took out of here?”

  “You know Davis, I think you had it right from the start,” Chervy said.

  “Of course I did,” Davis replied. “What did I say?”

  “That the Mormon Records Facility was just a front for the government project here,” Chervy laughed. “I’m sure it didn’t start out that way, but with all the men and equipment needed to build this facility, someone eventually spotted what was going on up here. At that point the government probably made a deal with the Mormons here in Salt Lake City to say they were building a records facility for their church, in exchange for allowing them to use the front part for storing their records. It would then explain all the work going on up here and it was also the perfect diversion for what the government had planned.

  Shit, this place is amazing.”

  The men all started running towards Doc when they saw him starting to walk up into the new part of the tunnel.

  They walked for thirty minutes until they came to the far end of the tunnel.

  Each of the large doors on the sides of the tunnel were labeled, telling what was stored inside.

  A look in the rooms showed that the rooms were huge, each going back into the mountain two hundred feet or more.

  From
what the men could tell, the government had accumulated a little of everything in existence.

  At the end of the tunnel, they found two rooms that looked familiar.

  “This looks like a broadcast studio,” Rogers said as he walked into the room and looked around. “It has a microphone and everything. I wonder why this is here?”

  “I would imagine that they intended this to be used to hopefully contact anyone that had managed to survive whatever apocalyptic event that happened. It is to let them know that they aren’t alone and there was still hope,” Doc replied.

  “To let all the survivors know that someone was here at Granite Mountain?” Rogers asked.

  “I don’t know if they would do that, at least not at first,” Doc replied. “Could you imagine what would happen if all the desperate people out there realized this was here. Every gangbanger would be out to take over this facility for their own little kingdom.”

  “Well how would the people here be able to help the survivors if the people didn’t know where they could get food and supplies?” Rogers asked.

  “I think it was room number forty-seven,” Doc smiled. “Ultralights and small helicopters. The facility could broadcast where they would drop food. That way they could help people without starting a survivor civil war or putting the facility at risk. I would imagine for a time, it would be a difficult balancing act until the survivor’s desperation would subside and trust could be reestablished. Until they reached that point and the survivors came to understand the facility was here to help them and learn that in order to survive, that they had to protect the facility, it would be dangerous for anyone to know what was here. We are going to face this problem when we start to go out into the world again. It is not going to be an easy task.”

  “I could imagine what would happen if some roving gang managed to survive and discovered what was here and that there were only six of us to defend the place,” Rogers said. “It would be like being back at the base only the invaders would be the living.”