Unnamed Club

CHAPTER 8

‎‎ ‎‎ ‎
‎‎
「NICO」
‎‎

　“Why are we going to sneak it out if it's already trash?” I asked. Trying to make sense out of it. Even with advanced technology, we still use paper for official documents.

There are two reasons why they're gonna shred it. One, the paper has no means of use, thus, will be recycled through shredding first. Two, it contains sensitive contents that can compromise one's safety, thus, it has to be shredded too.

Either way, it'll go through the shredding machine.

The president shook her head before speaking. “Yes, it's trash—for them. Not for us. More than a year ago, do you know why did they chased us out in the middle of the class and right after it, an earthquake occurred and they signalled the loud siren in our area?”

I was in the middle of my Literature class when miss Ravado, our literature teacher, dismissed us and told us to go home. I was happy that time since her lectures were quite boring. I hurriedly got home and saw my panicked parents. Soon after, a loud siren instilled fear in us. The loud siren is a signal that it is a first-rate danger which means that the whole island will perish. Everything went too fast that I forgot how did I got inside our old bunker and survived.

Every building on our beloved islands has bunkers. History told us it was used for emergencies before and since then, it was never used again, not until a year ago. The seven decades inactive volcano erupted for more than 10 months. It was a short time but the area of the eruption was wide enough to swallow our island. It took more than 2 months to clear the debris on the surface.

The isolated islands where we live was abandoned by incompetent former government officials. The former president of the country we belonged to had neglected the islands and declared the people who lives here before as dead and was unable to excavate the corpses because they lack "funds" and manpower since the neighbouring countries they signed a treaty with were also going under war. They also declared that the boats borrowed from the foreign countries cannot even get closer because the heat emanating from the whole island were deterring them from getting close.

Scientists of the Philippines had determined that the volcano in our island which belongs to the Pacific Ring of Fire, were the deepest one that was connected to the liquid core of the Earth and it was the reason why it swallowed our islands for three years that the former government officials lost their hope that a human could survive the long years of tragedy.
‎‎ ‎‎ ‎‎

They never knew that bunkers existed.

‎‎ ‎‎ ‎‎
It was built for that reason, to test if the government were competent enough to survive the upcoming world war. But to our ancestors' dismay, it was contrary to what they hoped for—though they expected it to happen; for the government to abandon them and declare the islands as a separate country that does no longer belongs to the PAR or Philippine Area of Responsibility since they can't support it.

The governor of our island from seven decades ago was residing away from the island at that time so she was one of the island inhabitants that got away from the tragedy—that was what the citizens of the Philippines believed, no inhabitants survived or evaded it aside from her.

Of course, they're wrong, everyone survived and I am the proof, the descendant of that old lineage.

The governor knew about the bunkers because she's the one who funded and ostracised them. She was aware that there would be no casualties other than destroyed buildings. After the eruption stopped, she landed here on secret and later on, rebuilt the surface of the islands from scratch. Even though we only had a few islands, the resources were abundant. And what's amazing about it were the advanced technology we had accumulated over several decades.