Deprived

Chapter 30

Maize had heard stories of the desert god sending spirits from Creet to help his people. But the man standing and talking in front of her was not a spirit. She had touched his arm. He was flesh and blood. But he was dead and had been dead for over seven years.

As a child, Maize had meditated on his image hanging on her living room wall a million times. She had searched his green eyes for life. Thought his nose was too slim for his face and mimicked his gentle smile.

And as confident as she was that her name was Maize Leeland, she knew that the man communicating with her in the room was President Benji Roman in the flesh.

He continued to tell Maize that the way things turned out in the land of Wisteria was not his vision.

"When Eric Aberdeen, a young man working at my organization, came to me with what he knew, I saw the urgency in it all. My businesses had taken a hit because of the oncoming war, and from the intel we were getting at the time, things were only going to get worst. The republic of China had continued to threaten the United States. Their choice of weaponry, a nuclear bomb attack. And things were only getting hotter between the two."

He poured her a drink from the carafe on the table, and continued. "Eric came to me one day and handed me secret information that told when and where China was going to hit America, It was on the East Coast. He said if we prepared ourselves, we could shield our families from certain death. He came up with a plan to create underground bunkers. There was a vast amount of land in the area. The plan would cost multiple billions of dollars to develop, and that is where I came in. I talked to my colleagues in the business world whom I thought would be interested, and they all agreed to invest. They had seen what was coming too."

President Roman stopped pacing the floor and sat on the chair opposite Maize.. "So we bought the land and began construction. It would take us four years of non-stop work to create the underground city. We wanted to make the bunkers as comfortable as possible because we had no idea how long the war would last. At the end of the fourth, we all got our business' in order and moved underground. We didn't want to wait until things got too bad before heading to the bunkers."

He took a deep breath and stared into space for a moment—remembering. "We had everything we needed for everyone to live ten years down there. We knew after a nuclear bombing, high radiation would be a huge problem. My team was already on that. We had the best scientist, the best tech guys, the greatest minds. We moved them all into the underground city. We knew if we were the only people who survived, we would need the best minds to rebuild our world."

"And what about everyone else?"

"Before we started construction on the underground city, I had taken my plan to the president, President Milken. I showed him that if he put a mandate in place encouraging the one percent of the richest people in the world to contribute to the operation, we could build more underground bunkers and save almost all of the population. He laughed at me and told me it was impossible, that I was too wealthy to be so naïve. He said China would never conquer the great United States of America. He refused to jump on board. And so I left, and a few of us got things started to protect our family and ourselves."

He shook his head. "Milken was a fool. We hadn't been in the bunkers for a year when the first bomb hit the US. We had a satellite feed showing us the war as it was waged above. It was horrible. The country I loved was under attack. We watched the bombs destroying the world until the satellites were compromised, and we were cut off from the outside world. Things were most comfortable in the bunkers, we had nothing to complain about, and most of us didn't. Civilization was ruined up above, but we were prepared."