Sarah looked at the other door, frowning as she stared at the words stenciled on the wall beside the door.

CIV SHELTER 9B
AUTH PERS ONLY
NBC PROOF
(TRNG SITE)
HOMETOWN, OK
SHLTR POP: 80
NO OVERSIGHT
NO LCL CNTRL
NO OUTSIDE COM
YOU ARE BEING GRADED

"What do you think this means?" Charlie asked, tapping on the stenciled letters.

Everyone gathered around, frowning, as they looked it over.

"Hometown, okay?" Richard guessed.

"Oklahoma," Don put forward. He looked around. "We think this was an island they did training on, right?"

Everyone nodded and murmured their assent.

"This might be some kind of training location? Maybe to teach leadership in a nuclear shelter?" Don guessed. "This is old Cold War stuff, so it could be training these guys to survive and recover after a nuclear war."

"Then we need to be very careful," Sarah said.

"I'm not going any further," Lori said, her voice quavering slightly. "It sounds like this place is dangerous, I'm not sure we should be in here."

Renee scoffed. "It's not dangerous in and of itself, but it's dangerous if we wander around acting like idiots. The first thing we need to do," she tapped the stenciled words on the wall. "Is to pay attention to these signs."

"Which might as well be written in Egyptian Hieroglyphics," Richard said, shaking his head. "I mean, some of it is English, and it's put together like words, but what the hell does it mean."

Sarah turned to Richard as Renee opened her mouth. "Which part doesn't make sense?" she asked.

"Any of it," Richard said, throwing his hands up. He pointed at the military door. "Neither set seems to make sense."

Sarah shook her head. "It makes sense if you realize they designed the letter groupings to have a certain shape that is quickly and easily identifiable at a glance," she reached out and put her hand on the stencil. "This tells us that the shelter, the whole town, is based on a town in Oklahoma that they decided to use as training for nuclear warfare. The shelter holds 40 people for civilians and that the military guys training in this part are being observed, which means teachers and graders."

She turned. "The military part is probably a lot bigger," she chewed her lip for a moment. "The last time this was used was 1985, over ten years ago, but if nothing else," she held her arms out, her hands raised toward the vent in the ceiling. "It's warm in here. We aren't going to freeze to death."

"Well, shall I see if I can open it?" Renee asked.

Sarah handed the baby off to Lori. The baby didn't object, just patted Lori's shoulder without opening her eyes. Sarah looked up at the concrete ceiling, then at the walls, then closed her eyes and estimated the number of steps they'd stepped down.

Forty-three steps. Average step height for America is seven point five, because as little as a half inch can throw off a lifetime of muscle memory. Twenty-six point seven five, say twenty-five feet total depth. The town would need to be built at least twelve feet above sea level so water at high tide and sewage lines aren't flooded by tides. Add in a few feet for a comfort zone, take into account that the water from the ocean is currently storm driven so is higher than high tide.

Sarah could practically smell the dry dusty musty smell of the classroom, almost feel the paper of her textbook, and taste the orange slushie she always had before civic planning class.

"Be careful. We're below the ocean level. It might be flooded," Sarah said. "Not by much, maybe five or ten feet, but still, we might open a door and get greeted by a wave of salt-water," she turned to Lori. "You stay here with Don."

Renee watched Sarah think her way through it all, keeping her face blank.

At least there's one other person who's brain is engaging, the young woman thought.

"All right. Tell me when," Renee said, moving over next to the civilian access door. She grabbed the red handled bar and looked at everyone.

Don gave her a thumbs up, still panting, his face still grayish but looking better. Raincloud stood back by Don, standing between the door and Lori. Richard moved up next to Renee and nodded. The baby started snoring softly. Mike and Kevin both moved out of the way, Mike near Don and Kevin near Lori.

"Three, two, one," Renee said. She pulled the lever up, flinching slightly.

Red lights kicked on and a klaxon cut loose, blaring three times before falling silent for a few seconds and blaring again, then repeating it. The baby shook her fist and yelled something that was lost in the noise of the klaxons. The air shivered, feeling like it was vibrating, and the thumping sound could be felt again as the door slowly opened, pulling to the side.

To reveal a hallway with the lights flickering and coming on with a loud clack as the solenoid stuttered then tripped, charging the tube of gas.

"All systems in maintenance mode. Supervisors, please consult checklist. Maintenance to Environmental. Facility Manager report to your office. All systems in maintenance mode," A woman's calm and pleasant voice sounded out.

"Someone's here!" Lori blurted.

Sarah shook her head. "No. You've heard her before."

Renee nodded. "She's done like every recorded voice ever. I wonder who she is or was?"

"Katherine Howard," Sarah said. Everyone turned and looked at her. "She was the Deputy Civil Defense Administrator under Eisenhower and she believed that a mature woman's voice would be calming to people who were injured and frightened and tests in the 1950's showed that even hardened combat soldiers suffering from shell shock would respond without question to a calm mature woman issuing instructions over a radio or loudspeaker."

"How would you know that?" Raincloud asked.

"Civil engineering degree trivia," Mike guessed.

"It was a question on the test," Sarah shrugged.

"Well, let's go," Renee said, looking in the hallway. "Huh, it looks weird," she looked at Sarah. "Your education cover fallout shelters like this?"

Sarah shook her head. "No, nothing like this."

She moved up next to Renee, moving with her into the hallway. There was a desk bolted to the floor, with alcoves on either side of the hallway.

"That's weird looking," Renee mused.

"Security forces?" Mike guessed.

"You can almost taste the testosterone," Raincloud muttered. "This was a waste of taxpayer money."

Renee snorted. "Was it?"

"Well, yeah. It isn't like it was ever used," he sneered. "All of this was just paranoid waste."

Renee shook her head. "Hurricane Andrew and Hurricane Hugo say you're wrong."

Raincloud snorted again. "How?"

"During both hurricanes my family allowed the workers at our factories to shelter in the fallout shelters if they could not evacuate. All six shelters allowed the workers to escape without harm and FEMA used our shelters as focus points for rescue efforts and relief. Ask not and all that," Renee said. "But then, what would I know, I'm just, like, a totally space cadet rich girl," she laughed the last part.

 You don't have to be a bitch about it, Raincloud thought, frowning. God, you're such an egotistical bitch.

"Look. Directions," Sarah said, pointing at the floor and at the wall.

Environmental, Living Quarters, Medical, Supervisor, Recreation, all of them in different colors with lines of the same color below them on the wall and on the floor.

"Which should we try?" Sarah asked.

"Supervisor," Renee said.

"Of course," Raincloud answered, rolling his eyes. "How about finding food? Look for the dining area."

"Supervisor will have a map and an inventory of stock," Sarah said. "We don't know where the food is. I doubt it's stored in the diner."

Raincloud flushed. This was outside his experience and knowledge, and it somewhat bothered him that the two teenage girls seemed to have all the answers and he kept making a fool of himself.

Maybe I should have stayed back with Don and Lori.

"We could split up," Kevin suggested.

"We don't know how big this place is," Mike said. "Splitting up is dangerous. We might get hurt, or open a door to a flooded area, or anything, and if we've split up, we can't help each other."

Sarah nodded, taking a left.

"This place is big," Renee said, looking down the hallway toward "Medical" and frowning. "Does anyone know which direction we're going?"

"What does that matter?" Kevin asked.

"Because the ocean would be the hard limit of how far this place could extend," Raincloud said. "It won't go too far in that other direction because that's the military section."

"I wonder what's in there?" Renee mused, visions of government secrets, weird superscience, and lab coat wearing rogue scientists dancing in her head.

"Probably just government furniture and other boring stuff," Kevin said.

"It's a training facility," Sarah said. "If you want to train someone, you include everything they might need to know about, even if a single facility wouldn't have all of that stuff there."

"Makes sense," Mike mused.

The thought of prying open a government bunker and seeing what was inside made Renee's hands twitch with eagerness. Despite her family's lofty ideals she wasn't about to throw away any advantage handed to her, and any way to turn the disaster to her and her family's advantage was welcome.

What would daddy say if I came back with something cool? Something worth way more than the ten million I lost on the stock market, she thought to herself.

"Here it is," Sarah said, breaking into Renee's thoughts of familial glory. She tapped on the door marked "Facility Supervisor" and looked at Renee. "Got the key?"

It was the third key and the bolt stuck for a moment before opening.

When the door opened Renee gave a little scream and jumped at what was inside. Mike swore, backing up, and Raincloud swallowed thickly.

A man in a brown suit sat at the desk, his head hanging forward. Blood and worse shined on the wall behind him, and a pistol was held in his mouth.

"He's not real," Sarah said, shaking her head. She gave a forced laugh. "Training, remember," she snapped her fingers. "No oversight. No local control. That's what that meant."

"A practice scenario. War games," Raincloud muttered.

Renee giggled, flushing slightly at the fact she'd screamed when she'd seen the 'dead man', and moved into the room. The light came on automatically with a clack, brightening the room.

"It looks so real," She said, shaking her head.

"It's supposed to. Otherwise, why bother," Sarah said. She thought for a second. "This is going to be a distance from the living areas, probably on the other side of the facility," She held up her hand. "For the same reason that your heavy police center is on the outskirts of the city. It's complicated."

"To make it harder for the civilians to bust in and do just this," Raincloud muttered.

"Exactly," Sarah said.

Renee stood in front of the computer and looked at everyone. She bumped the 'corpse' out of   the way with her hip, the chair moving to the side and the pistol falling to the floor. "Here goes nothing," she said, and tapped on the space bar.

"What?" she said when the screen lit up.

EMP DETECTED. SYSTEM IN PROTECTIVE LOCKDOWN. CONSULT MAINTENANCE AND INFRASTRUCTURE TECHNICIANS. WARNING! EMP DETECTED IN THE 5.5 MEGATON RANGE AT LESS THAN 25 MILES!
INITIATE WAR PROTOCOLS!
<HIT ANY KEY FOR MORE>

Morbidly curious, Renee hit the space bar and read quickly. Multiple nuclear detonations, confirmation from Civil Defense and FEMA and the Department of Defense. Massive casualties. Orders to lock down the facility and begin rationing.

"Are you OK?" Sarah asked, touching her arm.

Renee jumped slightly, licking her lips and nodding. "Yeah. Just, grim reading and easy to forget its not real."

Sarah squatted down, looked at the screen and nodded. "That's ugly."

"What's ugly?" Raincloud asked.

"Estimated sixty percent casualties to civilian population," Renee said. "Reading about the end of the world."

She tapped the space bar as Sarah picked up the letter opener.

Renee pretended she hadn't seen Sarah slide the pistol into her waistband, under her shirt.

The message only repeated itself.

"What are you doing?" Mike asked.

"The computer was stating part of the scenario was an EMP, an electromagnetic pulse," Sarah said. "The computer's useless as is any digital or solid state electronics. So files it is."

"How do you know?" Raincloud asked, his irritation surging up.

"Massive generators, like in dams, coal fired plants, and the like, produce electromagnetic fields as part of generating electricity, you have to take that into account when planning on where transformers, power plants, and switching stations go," Sarah said. She managed to pop the metal strip off the tracks. "Aha!"

"Look for inventory sheets," Renee said. "They'd have an inventory of their stocks."

Renee figured Sarah would have an easier time finding government documents with her college courses probably going in depth on government records and offices.

"Inventory, inventory, inventory," Sarah said, pulling open the drawers. She saw it and thumbed through it. "Aha, food storage."

She opened it up. "Um, wow," she said. She looked up. "It's a lot."

"What?" Renee said, looking over her shoulder. Sarah handed the folder to her and began looking in the drawers again. Renee looked at the table that Sarah had turned the folder to. "Oh, wow."

"What?" Kevin asked.

"According to this, the facility has, and I quote, at standard population expansion projection twenty two years worth the food accounting for spoilage, celebrations, and possible damage," Renee read off. Sarah had found another folder and set it on the desk, flipping through the pages. Renee looked up. "It's assuming an eighty person occupancy, a 200% capacity, forty adult women, fifteen men, and twenty-five prepubescent children at the start of operations."

"That's... a lot of women," Kevin mused.

"Found it," Sarah said, looking up. She pulled a handful of pages free and clacked the binder shut. She held the pages out. "Food storage, to our right, actually," she pulled open drawers and then tossed a ring of keys to Renee. "We'll need these."

"At least they're labeled," Renee grinned. Things were going good and she was filled with anticipation.

"Let's go," Mike said. His stomach took that chance to rumble and everyone chuckled.

Sarah led them to the food storage, following the map, stopping at a heavy steel door with stencils promising dire punishments if anyone who wasn't authorized went inside. It took a couple of tries to get the lock to disengage, but when it did Renee pushed open the door.

Shelves stocked with cans and boxes greeted them when the lights clicked on. Racks of cans, jars, and boxes.

"Fuck, he scared me," Renee said, pointing at a mannequin of a man dressed in a jumpsuit standing at one of the shelves as is he was taking inventory.

"Training," Kevin said. "Damn, I'm hungry."

Sarah stopped, looking at everything, a foreboding feeling beginning to well up.

"Training," she said softly.

"What?" Renee asked, reaching for a can of Spam.

"Training," Sarah said softly, remembering up above.

Renee picked up the can then stared at it google-eyed. Everyone else grabbed cans and stared at them, Raincloud and Kevin shaking the cans they were holding with disappointment.

"They're empty."

Sarah couldn't help it, she started laughing.