VIII #3
"And what world is that of yours?" Ana snapped.
"Dijana, ENOUGH!" Vlasta cut into the squabble. "What the hell's wrong with you?"
The argument became just another of the sounds of the waking shelter.
Nick breathed out. He didn't like being nearby when an argument was going on among girls; they'd quarrel, each with her own arguments, but usually they'd need someone to judge.
And that judge, if he wasn't completely vocal, would almost always end up in trouble.
So he was glad Vlasta was now in that situation, because both girls respected her.
"Just barely — we got out in time," Erik suddenly spoke up.
"Yeah, there's too much bile at that bar," Tomi agreed, surprising them both.
"Wow, Tomi, I didn't notice you," Nick greeted his friend.
"Ha, that's because you were too busy tucking your tail between your legs during the retreat."
Erik laughed at Tomi's quip. There was a lot of truth in those words. Anyone who knows women knows that once they grapple, the best thing is to vanish in a puff of smoke, and afterward inquire about the results of the conflict.
"You've got a point, and I see you retreated too," Nick replied.
"Drama doesn't interest me. Women arguing is best watched on a screen. Like cats."
"What do you mean, cats?" Nick was curious.
"Well, if you get close to cats while they're fighting, in a hundred percent of cases you end up scratched. It's the same with women," Tomi wisely replied.
"You know, you're not the ignoramus you make yourself out to be, friend," Nick praised him.
"There are layers to me — even you don't know all the levels of my wonderful persona."
"Come on, cut the crap now." Nick laughed. "We're not in a cartoon."
"Anyway, where are you two headed?" Tomi suddenly asked.
Nick knew his friend. Tomi often changed moods and intentions.
Maybe because his brain worked on some other level.
While all normal people would go on joking at the expense of the quarreling girls, only Tomi could turn the conversation to something completely unrelated, because, to him, the discussion was over, whatever they'd been talking about.
Nick knew his friend and didn't hold it against him, so he explained seriously:
"I want to know what's behind those red doors, and Erik will help me with that mystery."
"You mean the chained doors in the machine room? I'm coming with you," Tomi concluded the conversation.
Since on one side he had the silent Erik and on the other Tomi, who no longer considered he had reason to talk, Nick just sighed and headed down the staircase toward the machine room.
On the sixth floor a crowd already reigned, because people were hurrying to be among the first to get breakfast, so the trio gave up on the idea of breakfast, at least until that initial crush settled.
Nick didn't want to be in the shoes of Mirela and her team.
They slept last and woke first, all to manage to feed the shelter.
Mirela acted like a general and strictly but expertly commanded her troops in the ceaseless battle with food and the shelter's hungry population.
Though they'd started work two nights ago, Mirela's team managed without problems to prepare two meals for the entire population.
Namely, it had been agreed to make only two more substantial meals to begin with, to economize on supplies, at least until the farms were functioning.
Since the shelter's population consisted mostly of students, who were used to such an eating system, that decision created no problems.
If anyone was hungry during the day, they had to wait, unless they were a medical case, like Goran, who had to put something in his mouth every so often to maintain his blood insulin level.
For such cases Vlasta had already written approvals with which they could report to the warehouse or the kitchen for a bite or a candy.
The system worked and no one objected. Luckily, such cases were relatively few, at least for now.
Arriving at the machine room, in which for now only a few employees moved, the three stopped on the platform, still surprised by the impressive size of the room.
The question was whether the shelter's designers and builders could ever have imagined that the grand structure in the foundations of Sljeme would ever be used in this way.
Shelters began to be built back in the distant sixties of the last century, during the reign of Kennedy and Khrushchev.
Because of the Cuban crisis, it became very popular to build some kind of shelter in one's own yard.
From those basic metal containers without utilities, to the later, huge converted tanks of ATLAS missiles with complete utilities and an enormous artificial pool with imitations of open space.
The point was that everyone wanted to have a shelter at first, and it even became popular to hold parties in one's shelter, or to present the newest version of some part of an instrument, like an air filter or a ready-made meal.
Companies in America very quickly recognized the value of building all sorts of shelters, and it all became very popular during the sixties and seventies of the last century.
You could order a one-room shelter with just basic amenities, or huge multilayered structures, all in the comfort of your own garden.
It all depended on the depth of one's pocket.
During the eighties and nineties, as the Cold War cooled more and more, construction stagnated as the danger of nuclear war fell.
Only in the former buffer zones, like the former Yugoslavia, did construction of such structures continue.
Whether because of cheap labor or cheap materials, which in those years of inflation were almost worthless, all along Yugoslavia, in certain places, massive underground concrete structures were built, all with the idea of the elite's survival.
The largest complexes were built in the country's two biggest cities, while an impressive military shelter was built near the airport in Biha?.
Into the shelters of those early eighties flowed a mass of infrastructure and materials, and hungry workers could always be found in the villages of Bosnia or Macedonia.
With the arrival of the nineties and the war in the territory of Yugoslavia, the projects died down and literally came to the point where the grand plans of their construction gathered dust in some drawers or filing cabinets.
The Belgrade shelter was used as a waste dump, and its deepest part, which as many as four elevators reached from the surface, was called Club Hell and for a long time served as a zone where illegal fights or wild parties were held.
The third enormous finished complex near Biha? served during the war as an underground warehouse, and its huge entrance doors even hid a runway for the war planes of the Yugoslav army.
The runway was damaged by explosives during the war, while the base was abandoned and left to decay and oblivion, with only the odd modern explorer daring to venture into the dark, unlit depths.
The second shelter was near Zagreb and was conceived as a military-research center capable of housing the ruling clique of the country's second-largest city.
Dug into the rock of Sljeme, which provided a natural barrier against any kind of attack, and with a cleverly hidden entrance on the western slopes of Sljeme, the shelter remained a secret even during the war.
Only the occasional passerby or recreational hiker would stop in wonder at the old rickety fence that read "Military facility, no trespassing!"
During the renovation of the technical museum and during the cataloguing of an endless heap of unnecessary documents, the shelter's construction plans were found, and the engineer in charge of reviewing the papers stopped in surprise at the words, handwritten in blue marker,
"Project finalized and sealed."
In the plastic wrapping were sealed tubes with plans, as well as some bureaucratic material.
Having opened the boxes and studied the plans, the man was surprised by the quality of the work done and, still somewhat unable to believe that such a monumental job had gone completely unnoticed, he decided the next day to inspect the site where, according to the plans,
the massive complex had been built.
Arriving at the place, he found an old rusty gate and a yard where, over the past decades, someone had dumped piles of construction waste, and a space that had obviously been used as a dumping ground for waste oils.
In places the heaps of trash were so high that he almost missed the wide entrance dug into the slope of Sljeme.
Lighting a kerosene lamp and driving away the superstitious fear of the dark, pushing through the bushes and trash, he soon discovered the remains of asphalt on the ground, as well as the fairly well-preserved concrete of the structure, marred by damp stains,
which according to the blueprints stood before him.
The wide passage led to massive metal doors that looked as if they offered a welcome after so many years of disuse.
In front of the massive doors were two wire gates.
The engineer, sensing something, cautiously approached and heard the familiar quiet hum of electrical voltage.
For a moment he wondered where that power came from, but then he noticed cables leading to an exit into some probably well-hidden power station that drew power from the city grid.
In any case, deciding not to risk too much and having lit the space behind the double gate well, the engineer decided to withdraw from the location, believing the site was sufficiently secured by the electric fences and, most importantly,
believing that everything else he could see in the blueprints was completely true and that the site was there, decaying, completely unused.
Later, as he settled into the comfort of his armchair, an idea occurred to him that wouldn't leave his head.
Even as he got ready for bed it swirled through his mind deep into the night, when, finally exhausted, he fell asleep.
It was the early two-thousands in Croatia, and privatization was gaining steam, and the state didn't have completely regulated laws, so dubious deals sprang up like mushrooms after rain.