Bunker by Bradley Garrett;

Author:Bradley Garrett;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-07-08T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Miller showed me energetically around the site: the solar panels and inverters for converting electricity, battery storage, propane generator backup, and a shortwave radio system. He pointed out black walnut and peach trees, brick ovens, a greenhouse, firepits, and wells. Overlooking us were tree platforms where snipers could fire on intruders, and these currently doubled as zip-line platforms; the fortifications I’d failed to notice earlier also acted as family fun park features.

“I like dual-function architecture,” Miller explained. Walking up a sheer bulldozed hill drenched in a solid gray river of spilled concrete, we stepped onto a building pad and through a missing piece of wall into a log cabin that was still under construction.

“This is how I like to build shelters,” he said. “It’s a country club model. Upstairs you have a comfortable space with lots of light; downstairs you’ve got the underground rooms with separate air leading to the fallout shelter. You’ve got two inches of wood, a metal pan, eight inches of concrete, and three feet of earth.”

He would cap each ranch population at five hundred people, because any more than that would be hard to defend, and to control. “In an emergency situation, people don’t make sensible decisions,” he told me. “We will be making decisions for them. That’s in their best interest.”

“What if someone wants to leave?” I asked.

“Then they’re not coming back in,” he replied brusquely. “I’m not having the ranch infected because someone wanted to go on a supply run. So, anyway,” he moved on briskly, past the unspoken question of what would happen to the excluded resident, “you’ve seen the spartan shelters. This is the economy model down here,” he said, looking around. “If you want a luxury membership, you get to sleep upstairs in the log cabin.”

On the far side of the rooms downstairs, currently framed by LED lights dangling from the ceiling, another door led to a large concrete box—the fallout shelter, which was currently awaiting a roof. It all looked a long way to completion. There was one other worker there, a guy chain-smoking in a sleeveless shirt, doing what looked to me to be preternatural woodcrafting, but Miller was doing much of the work himself—often, as I would find, late into the evenings.

It was all a bit of a letdown. As with xPoint, the vision and plans, as well as the representations of the community in the media, were out of joint with the reality of the preparations. This isn’t to say Miller didn’t believe what he was telling me, or that what he’d built wouldn’t work as planned. But there was a vast discrepancy between media depictions of a sweeping cultural zeitgeist metastasizing into a “second doom boom,” of a kind that would match early Cold War preparations, and the material realities of these places. Miller’s dream, optimistically depicted online, of twelve ranches dotted around the country that could be used as resorts for recreation and family staycations until the collapse hit, seemed a long way

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.