The Alt Apocalypse: Books 1-3 Page 14

  Even Keri might have done a more effective job. She was pretty forthright and didn’t take a lot of crap from people. Michael rubbed the top of his head with his palm. He sighed. The light turned green.

  “Are you there, Michael?” asked Victor. “Do you copy? I asked if you are healthy. My friends and I down here are doing well. I hope you are too. Over.”

  Michael cocked his head to one side like a curious dog. Down here? He pressed the PTT and brought the radio to his mouth. “I copied it, Victor. Good to hear you are healthy. We are too. Trying to avoid fallout as much as possible. Over.”

  He hadn’t asked a question that time. Intentionally. He wanted to hear where Victor would take the conversation, as he clearly had some agenda in mind, asking about numbers, location, and health. The light turned green.

  “That’s good to hear, Michael. The fallout makes it dangerous out there. Down here, we stay out of it as much as we can. Thankfully we’re pretty well stocked. What about you? Over.”

  Michael thought about his previous interactions with Nancy. He wondered if this was the same group that had talked with her, the cult. An involuntary shudder passed through his body. He swallowed hard and then pressed the PTT on the side of the radio.

  “Do you know K6XMA?” he asked. “A woman named Nancy? Over.”

  A full minute passed before Victor responded. When he did, the transmission was short. “Yes. Over.”

  Michael puffed his cheeks and exhaled. He felt like he was playing chess with an expert or poker with a blind man. There was no way to tell, no hint of what Victor wanted from the conversation. Before he could respond, the light switched from red to green.

  “We’ve spoken with Nancy several times,” said Victor, “but she wasn’t interested in our offer.”

  This was the cult. These were the strangers who, in every way, sounded odd. They clearly had a bunker; they had rations. They had a group of people who had not only survived the attack but were healthy. They’d planned for a doomsday scenario. A cult. A freaking cult. Of all the people out there who might have heard Michael’s transmission, it had to be a cult.

  A rush of nervous adrenaline coursed through his body and, without thinking about the consequences, he turned off the radio.

  CHAPTER 10

  Friday, August 8, 2025

  DAY FORTY-EIGHT

  Pacific Palisades, California

  Danny Correa stood with his hands in his pockets, staring at the collection of art along the plastered walls of the Oasis. He’d walked past it countless times in the month he’d spent here, buried under the Pacific-facing bluff that held the Getty Villa. Until now, he’d never paid attention to their significance.

  The collection was three similarly sized photographic prints. They were matted in white and framed in black. They hung on the wall, equally spaced, under protective non-reflective glass.

  The first featured a collection of rocks and boulders that bled into a vast mountainous desert. In the center of the frame was a pair of trees and a thin trail of meandering water. It was labeled with a placard beneath the frame.

  OASIS IN THE DESERT

  FRANCIS FRITH

  HAND-COLORED ALBUMEN SILVER PRINT

  1856–7

  The next print, the one in the middle, was dominated by a cloudscape across the top. In the center, framed by a thicket of trees and bushes, was a fabric tent pitched in the dirt. In front of the tent were camels and a man dressed in traditional Middle Eastern garb. He was a nomad, perhaps, who was looking into the camera without expression. He was crouched by one of the camels. It too had an identifying placard beneath the frame.

  FAIYUM OASIS

  UNKNOWN

  TINTED ALBUMEN SILVER PRINT

  1860–1880

  The last of the three prints was more modern art than photograph. It depicted a white, four-legged table in the middle of a desert. Atop the table was a grouping of three trees growing upward. At first blush, it didn’t fit with the other two pieces. Then Danny read the placard.

  L’OASIS

  RENÉ MAGRITTE

  GELATIN SILVER PRINT

  1925

  “Pretty cool, right?” said Ritz. He’d snuck up behind Danny. “All three of them were in the Getty Museum until this place was built. Then they were moved.”

  “All of them have oasis in the title,” said Danny, stating the obvious.

  “Yep,” said Ritz. “There are other pieces here too. All of them are a variation on the same theme. The designers thought art was an essential part of humanity. That’s why they included them here. It wasn’t just about subsistence, you know?”

  Danny liked Ritz. He was an affable guy who always had a smile on his face. Despite the circumstances, he was remarkably optimistic. Danny found that all the people in the Oasis were optimistic. Ritz was on another level though.

  Ritz motioned with his head and led Danny along the corridor. It was early in the morning according to the clocks inside the Oasis, and it was time to eat breakfast.

  “You haven’t eaten yet, right?” asked Ritz, moving effortlessly along the hallway.

  Danny shook his head. “No. I was headed to the kitchen but got sidetracked by the art.”

  “Where’s Maggie?”

  “She’s sleeping,” said Danny. “She had a restless night.”

  Ritz frowned. “Sorry to hear that.”

  Maggie hadn’t adjusted as well as Danny. There wasn’t a lot of room to run and jump. Not for a dog. There was a gym for human use. Danny had tried walking her on the side-by-side manually powered treadmills. It hadn’t gone well.

  “I think she’s depressed,” Danny said.

  “Sorry to hear that,” said Ritz. “We’ll have to figure something out. I’m sure she misses the outdoors, like all of us.”

  Danny followed Ritz into the kitchen. There were two others already there. They were eating flatbread with jam and drinking black coffee.

  One was a woman named Barbie. She was blowing on the coffee, which she’d brewed in a French press. Next to her was her husband, Hal, who was spreading preserves on his bread. Both smiled at Danny and Ritz and greeted them warmly. Danny repeatedly reminded himself not to refer to Hal as Ken, given his nickname for the people whose home he’d used as a refuge before coming here.

  “This batch of raspberry isn’t as good as the last one,” Barbie lamented. “I tried, but this one isn’t as sweet. And it’s too chunky. At least it’s edible.”

  Barbie had been a caterer in her pre-attack life. She’d jarred the vast supply of preserves on hand and had also canned vegetables and waxed large wheels of cheese. She was her own worst critic and never had a positive thing to say about her own cooking. Hal was her biggest fan.

  “I think it’s delicious,” he said with his mouth full. Crumbs from the bread sprinkled his salt-and-pepper beard. “No complaints from me.”

  Barbie lovingly rolled her eyes at her husband and took a tentative sip of her coffee. She held the mug with both hands like a child sipping milk from a cup. Hal watched her adoringly.

  As Danny had come to learn during his time in the Oasis, the vast underground complex was the brainchild of a Getty. A distant cousin whose ties to the family were tenuous, he’d ascribed to the belief that the end of the world wasn’t a question of if but rather a matter of when.

  As such, he’d gone about forming a secret society of friends and acquaintances who’d called themselves the Order of Apocalyptic Survivors In Sync: OASIS. The group spent decades financing the construction of the complex and recruiting new members.

  The original OASIS members, all of whom had long since died, had passed along their beliefs and detailed preparations. While secretive, they weren’t exclusive. Often, the group would scour social media sites for like-minded people in Southern California and invite them to join their collective.

  Of the fifteen people living in the OASIS, only Barbie, Hal, and five others were members before the attack. One of those was the concierge. Another was a
doctor. A third was the technical expert. There was a sociologist. And there was a botanist. They’d happened to be the experts in their fields on their monthly rotation when the attacks occurred. Had it been a few weeks earlier or later, a different physician, techie, and scientist would have been on hand. It was the luck of the draw, so to speak. The others in the OASIS had been last minute invites or, as in Danny’s case, found an invitation that led them to the site. Ritz was one of the last minute invites. He’d lived next door to Barbie and Hal in Brentwood.

  The bunker had a capacity for more than fifty people and had the ability to sustain them for twenty years. In truth, it was possible that with fewer people, they could stay inside the bluff longer. But the idea of the OASIS was mankind’s survival. For it to thrive, the members believed they should open the doors to anyone willing to contribute.

  Of course, they didn’t want violent or mentally ill people inside the complex. When Danny had arrived, the first thing he’d done was undergo a battery of tests with the doctor and the sociologist. Despite being told he suffered from low self-esteem and was malnourished, he’d passed the entrance exam and been allowed to join the others.

  Initially, Danny was wary of the others. It wasn’t the entrance exam that kept him distant. He was, in a strange way, comforted by it. Those in the OASIS were nice enough, but they were too nice. On top of that, he questioned the sanity of anyone who had spent the better part of the last century building an underground ark beneath an oceanside hilltop under the premise the world was going to hell.

  If they’d truly wanted to include outsiders in their grand humanity-propagating scheme, why had they built the complex in secret? Why not let the world know about it?

  The whole place was a contradiction: buried and hidden but open to anyone, designed by preparedness devotees but populated with people who were unprepared and desperate, inviting yet somehow cold.

  He pushed these things, constantly swirling around in his head, to the back of his thoughts as he took a piece of naan bread from the counter and ripped it in half. He rolled up one half and popped it into his mouth.

  “You’re funny,” said Barbie, peeking at Danny from above the top of her mug. She was still holding it with both hands.

  Hal’s eyes danced brightly between his wife and Danny.

  Danny crinkled his nose, drew his eyebrows together in a sharp V, and shrugged. He was chewing the dry bread and didn’t want to talk with his mouth full.

  “You eat like a child,” she said and used her hands to mimic what he’d done to the thin, round piece of bread. “Tearing off little pieces to eat and stuffing it in your mouth like a chipmunk.”

  She’d said it sweetly enough, but Danny flushed nonetheless. He swallowed what was in his mouth but held the other piece in his hand.

  “Is he a child or chipmunk?” asked Hal. He chuckled and winked at Danny.

  “He’s cute, whatever he is,” said Barbie, affecting a maternal tone. “There’s a sadness in you though, Danny.”

  “There’s a sadness in all of us,” Ritz piped up. He had a glass of watered-down orange juice. All the juices had been mixed fifty-fifty with water. “Think about it. We’ve all lost loved ones and friends. Millions of people are dead.”

  It surprised Danny to hear Ritz admit to being sad. He was the happiest person he knew. He was always smiling and always positive, annoyingly so.

  “We don’t know it’s millions,” said Hal. “Thousands, sure. Tens of thousands, likely. Hundreds of thousands, maybe. But millions?”

  Hal took a bite of his naan. A bit of the preserves clung to the corner of his mouth. Barbie took a hand from her mug and gestured to him. He wiped it clean with a napkin.

  “It’s millions,” said Ritz. “I’ve heard the chatter. It’s not just LA that got hit. It’s—”

  “We know this,” said Hal. “New York, Miami, Houston, and Washington.”

  “And Chicago,” added Barbie. “Can’t forget Chicago.”

  “It’s other places too,” said Ritz. “It was at hundreds of thousands from the initial attacks. The fallout only adds to the numbers.”

  “We still don’t know who did it, do we?” asked Danny. He still had half of the naan in his hand, though he rolled it up.

  “Nobody has said for sure,” said Ritz.

  “It was the Russians,” Hal stated.

  “Maybe,” said Ritz. “Maybe not. We don’t know. Somebody probably knows. But we don’t.”

  Danny got the sense this was an oft-repeated conversation and that Ritz and Hal didn’t see eye to eye. They both made sense to him.

  Barbie sighed and blew on her coffee. “It’s neither here nor there. It doesn’t matter who did it. It was done. It doesn’t matter how many died. They are dead. We are here. We are safe. And we have coffee.”

  She took another sip and smiled at Danny. He liked her. She was maternal and sensible. He liked Hal too. Even if Hal and Ritz didn’t agree on the particulars of the attack and its aftermath, both men seemed good-hearted.

  “Who did you lose?” asked Barbie as Danny popped the rolled bread into his mouth. She noticed this and apologized. “You’re next, then. Ritz, who did you lose that makes you sad? I don’t think we’ve discussed it.”

  Ritz finished his allotment of watery juice and grabbed an apple slice from a cutting board on the counter. He eyed Barbie warily and then apparently decided she was being sincere.

  “Everyone,” he said and popped the apple slice into his mouth. “My parents, my girlfriend, my pets. I don’t know where any of them are.”

  Danny watched Ritz as he spoke. His shoulders, usually pulled back and confident, curled inward. He slouched. His chin trembled. His eyes glistened.

  Ritz sighed. “It would be easier to tell you who I didn’t lose.”

  Danny sensed Ritz had said as much as he wanted to say. He swallowed his bread and rejoined the conversation.

  “Same here,” said Danny. “Except for Maggie. Funny thing is, I lost everyone before the attack. When it happened, I don’t know. I didn’t feel anything. I still don’t. Not really. Maybe that’s why I’m sad. I have nobody to miss.”

  A silence draped the room. Nobody was chewing or sipping. Everyone was still.

  Barbie lowered her coffee mug and set it on the table in front of her. Using Hal’s shoulder, she pushed herself to her feet. Her chair scraped against the stone floor, and she eased her way across the space to Danny. She put her warm hands on his shoulders and rubbed them and then slid them up to his face, cradling it as a mother would a child.

  Danny noticed a tear had streaked the faint layer of powdered makeup on her cheek. She ran her thumbs along his cheekbones and held his gaze with her dewy eyes.

  “That is the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” she said. She glanced over at Ritz and smiled weakly. “No offense to you, honey, but all of us lost people in the attack. It’s sad. But nothing approaches a man having nothing to lose because he’s already lost it.”

  She closed her eyes and drew herself into Danny’s body, wrapping her arms around him. He smelled the coffee on her breath. She held him, and he, not sure what else to do, hugged her in return.

  He closed his eyes to avoid the stares of Ritz and Hal. He felt them watching him, pitying him in a way his wife had done the last time they’d seen one another. His throat tightened, and he fought the swelling urge to cry.

  “You have us now,” Barbie said sweetly as she pulled away, dragging her hands along his back, “and we have you.”

  Danny opened his eyes and cleared his throat. “Thank you.”

  He glanced at Hal and then over at Ritz. Surprisingly the look in their eyes didn’t resemble pity. It was something more akin to empathy, as if in some way they understood how he felt or, more accurately, how he didn’t feel.

  Danny drew in a deep breath and exhaled. He chuckled. “That was a bit heavier than naan bread and coffee. I think I’m full.”

  The others laughed. Barbie wiped her eyes with the tips
of her fingers, and Hal helped her back into her seat. Danny took another piece of bread from the counter. I’m going to feed Maggie,” he said. “I bet she’s hungry.”

  He said goodbye to the group and wound his way back through the hall, retracing his steps. The stone floors were uneven. They tended to slope from the entry toward the back, or bottom, of the compound. It felt like one level but was in reality many. There was a slight curve to the hallways. If seen from above, Danny imagined a corkscrew of passages with rooms jutting off here and there.

  It got colder the closer he got to his room, which was about halfway between the kitchen and the end of the corkscrew. Most of the living quarters were deeper in the mountain. Danny guessed this was because it was easier to store all the heavy goods toward the front/top of the compound.

  Danny reached his room and turned the knob. He opened it to a shooting sound as the warmer air in his room met the cooler air in the hallway. The compound had power through a hydroelectric generator that pulled water from the Pacific. That same generator also worked as a desalinator that provided potable fresh water. It supplied the toilets and showers, but Ritz had advised Danny not to drink it. They had no way of knowing how much sulphur had leached into the water from the flotsam of ash that coated the water.

  As soon as he stepped into the room, Maggie bounded from the bed and jumped to greet him. She planted her paws on his hips and licked at the air. Her tail wagged. When she saw the bread in Danny’s hand, she whimpered.

  He greeted her and kissed the top of her head. Then he held up the bread and she dropped to the floor on her hind legs. She sat stoically, patiently, her dark eyes fixed on the bread like heat-seeking missiles.

  “You’re a good girl,” he said, and she shifted her weight anxiously from one front paw to the other. “Here you go.”