VIII #6
Erik meanwhile headed toward the buildings on the right side with some intention and, having nothing else to do, Tomi and Nick soon joined him.
Approaching the nearest doors, Erik studied the plastic tapes and the wax seal in the middle and, after a short hesitation, tore it all onto the dusty floor.
The tearing sound surprised the friends, who until then had enjoyed the relative silence of the enormous space.
Erik looked at them as if apologizing, but then grabbed the handle and opened the door with an eerie screeching sound.
A heavy darkness descended on them, because the building had no windows.
The air seemed ancient, musty, full of stone dust, so they hesitated to go in. Suddenly Tomi spoke up:
"Stone is crushed here. I think concrete was produced here for building the shelter." Tomi abruptly headed down the passage between two buildings and pointed at a parked loader. "Here, this is where they took the stone from."
Nick followed him and soon, in the gloom of the cave in front of him — but still lit enough by the floodlights — an enormous wound in the rock appeared.
Several plateaus, tens of meters high, probably obtained by blasting the rock, marred the gray of the stone before them.
At the base, on a heap of slag, stood a massive excavator that seemed to lean its metal arm against the rock and support the massive machine.
It was obvious the excavator had loaded the stone and slag produced by blasting and sent all that stone material via a conveyor belt into crushers that now probably gaped empty and unused inside the building.
Otherwise, apart from the excavator and the pile of stone material, the space contained nothing more interesting, so the two of them returned to the platform in front of the buildings.
With his newfound knowledge, Nick now more carefully studied the system of buildings connected by material-conveyor belts.
He could only imagine crowds of workers busying themselves in the unimaginable clamor and noise of the space when it was in operation.
The crushing of stone mixed with the work of the ancient excavator while, on the other side, forklifts carried piles of metal products to the entrance of the shelter, from where everything was further arranged and transported.
Nick could only imagine in awe the monumental efforts around building such a project.
It could literally compare with the construction of the pyramids in Egypt.
Metal material was in abundance, from beams, pipes, coils of copper wire, to enormous pieces of aluminum wider than a man.
All of it had once had its purpose and all was relatively well stored.
You could see that whoever had put into practice the storage of so much material had thought about the problem of moisture and rust.
Everything was neatly arranged on wooden pallets that lay on the clean rock of the floor, keeping any contact of the sensitive metal with possible moisture on the rocks.
Again he looked deeper down the space, which could hardly be called a cave.
And his gaze stopped at the security booth and the vehicle parked beneath the high-raised barrier.
That didn't fit the picture. He couldn't help but ask.
"Where did that come from?"
Erik looked at him questioningly while Tomi amused himself kicking a pebble with his foot. Nick pointed at it with his hand. "The truck, where did it come from?"
Tomi stopped kicking the stone and looked with new interest at the truck Nick was pointing at.
Finally, Tomi was the first to move and headed at a quick pace back into the shelter.
Erik and Nick just looked at each other, but it was already clear to everyone that Tomi was working on some plan of his own that he'd sooner or later reveal.
Soon after, Tomi came out of the lit shelter, stopped at the approach lamp, fiddling with something, and a portable lamp came on.
Nick almost hit himself on the head, because it hadn't occurred to him to go get a lamp to better light the space.
Tomi came up to them with an uninterested expression and asked:
"Shall we go?"
Without waiting for an answer, he headed toward the distant barrier and the vehicle left beneath it.
Minutes later, the three of them examined the vehicle, which on a quick inspection they determined had no keys and probably wasn't in running condition.
Nick took the lamp and entered the security booth.
The small space was coated in dust; a small chair and a table with a radio had settled beneath a dusty window through which you could barely see anything.
A few bunches of keys hung on one of the walls.
An ancient poster from START magazine showed the ample bust of a blonde in pieces of a uniform, while the layers of decades of dust gave the whole poster an added retro look.
Nick approached the table, opened the drawer beneath the top, and took out a large notebook.
"What's that?" asked Erik, who was just entering the booth.
"Looks like a log of entries into the complex, with dates and notes. Here, the last entry is October 7, 1985. It says TAM vehicle, delivery of metal columns."
"That's, it seems, this truck in front of us." Erik pointed at the stopped vehicle, in whose dusty cab you could make out Tomi's silhouette maniacally turning the wheel. Erik then said: "Look at when they started with the deliveries."
Nick leafed through dozens of hand-filled pages of the notebook to the initial entries.
"Here, the first entry is in June 1978. It says, delivery of machinery." He leafed through the papers and commented: "That month a mass of things was delivered, all machinery and related to the construction."
Erik nodded, then looked at the truck in front of the booth, out of which the somewhat winded Tomi was finally climbing. Then he looked at the complex behind their backs, and then at the parking lot in front of the booth. Then he asked:
"You say deliveries?"
"That's what it says in the notebook." Nick was still leafing through the papers.
"And from where?" Erik looked at him seriously.
Nick stopped leafing, looked at his friend and, understanding, immediately looked into the thick darkness ahead of them and the barely visible stone road that led somewhere into the dark.
"Look, that's true." He put the notebook back in the drawer, which he then carefully closed. "The trucks came from somewhere."
"And that means," Erik suddenly added, "that there's another entrance."
"At least one," Nick agreed. "And that can only mean one thing…"
"Radiation!" Tomi loudly cut in, having just reached the entrance and now leaning against the doorframe. "You two aren't exactly quiet."
"Exactly that, but it can also mean survivors. People who need our help," Nick declared in one breath.
"Or mouths to feed," Tomi added pragmatically, while Erik nodded in agreement with that statement.
Nick looked at them reproachfully. "If there are more entrances, it's our duty to help people."
Tomi shook his head and cleared his throat.
"Nick, listen. Even if there are survivors, Zagreb is burning at this moment, everything is either destroyed or in flames. Not to mention the radiation that would melt the flesh off your bones. Come to your senses — even if there are survivors, it's almost certain they're not near Zagreb.
Anyone with half a brain would head off into nature, where there are still some resources, before the temperature drops too far and the world freezes in the nuclear winter."
Tomi's words sounded sincere and considered, and Nick was beginning to grasp that. But he didn't intend to give up just like that.
"It's our duty, for the shelter's safety, to check those other entrances."
"There I agree," Erik cut in. "We should think about it and organize an expedition."
"You mean, with the council's permission?" Nick looked at his friends, a little disappointed.
"What did you think? To set off now, the three of us and one lamp, without any supplies or a radio?" Tomi replied sarcastically. Nick looked at him sheepishly.
"Well, something like that." He smiled and shrugged in a gesture of surrender.
Tomi shrugged and left the booth, grumbling something. Nick looked at Erik, who twirled his finger, saying with it that he was crazy, and headed after Tomi. Nick called after them:
"You're not up for action. Shame!"
He got no answer, so he too headed toward the lit entrance of the shelter, where a small group of people had already begun to gather, and a few bold ones were already exploring the nearer surroundings, trying to stay in the floodlights.
Arriving at the platform in front of the landing and the shelter entrance, Nick noticed the hidden cranes above the entrance doors.
They looked like two folded metal arms, and with the two floodlights above them and the open doors, they irresistibly resembled a scowling face with a mustache.
The cranes were tied with chains, and their function was completely clear.
They served during the loading or unloading of heavy cargo, which would then be transported deeper into the shelter via the aforementioned rails or forklifts.
Nick stopped when he noticed a three-story-high tower on the left side of the door, at the top of which was a room with a large glass wall.
It reminded him of prison films, because the tower entirely resembled one of the guard towers that would appear in such films.
Without thinking, Nick headed toward the tower's closed door and, approaching, noticed it was, like all the buildings, pasted with yellow tape and a large wax seal by the lock.
He wondered whether anyone would punish him, because he was obviously breaking the rules as he removed the seal.
He wondered whether any of the shelter's builders were still alive.
Because if they were, the irony would be immeasurable.
To spend so many years of life building something so monumental and then perish in the fire of a nuclear war, knowing that somewhere there was a place that made survival possible.
Those thoughts swirled in his head as he climbed the spiral stairs toward the room at the top.
The staircase was bare, just the gray of concrete and a yellow railing you could lean on while climbing.