THE DOG HUNTERS (completed)

39 - BUNKER THEORY

And of course I didn't find anything, because it was a nonexistent bunker, invented by a mad, suicidal fool.

I gave respect to the Big Clock, and found some bracken or something,and crouched down, and tried to act like I wasn't there. Then, as these things go, I instantly had to pee, and since I was also suddenly worried about attracting mountain lions, I had to move to a different location, which turned out to be even scratchier bracken or whatever, which was where I stayed until dawn, unable now to sleep.

Then I wandered, trying to come up with another mission, feeling that walking would help me think. The whole time I was still keeping my eyes on street signs, which is why I noticed one planted back aways from the road, and on the wrong side of the street, the north side, which otherwise just appeared to be forrest. The street was Bluntith.The bunker address.

Another windy dirt road, hidden by overgrown branches slapping me in the face. I half expected that I'd come upon a corn liquor still, and then some attack dog would jump on me, and that would be that. And that made me wonder what Tinto and Lulubelle would think about getting ripped apart by wild dogs. Was that the way a Dog Hunter wanted to go out?

There were no dogs, and then the road narrowed into a clearing of sorts. It looked like there had once been a house, or at least the idea of a house. Maybe it had been torn down, or was never started. A large,wide concrete slab, surrounded by the sort of junk you see around construction sites; clumps of rusted rebar, clumps of rotted drywall, piles of stones, and bits broken bottles everywhere (mostly Rolling Rock for some reason) – this appeared to be a place whereteenagers would come to drink. Next to the slab was a squat cinder block hut, about three feet high, with a heavy steel door. The sides of the hut had been painted with purple psychedelic swirls, now faded. It looked like the sort of place where a garden gnome would drop acid.

Didn't take me long to find the keypad at the base of the slab, embedded in the corner, buried in dirt and gravel. It wasn't broken or otherwise fouled up. As soon as I reached my hand out, my fingers started shaking and wiggling as though my wrist had been hit with a steel pole. Deep breaths didn't work because I hadn't slept all night, orhad breakfast, or dinner, or any water. I waited and after a while my fingers were under control. The first time I typed in the numbers from the back of the photo nothing happened, as I expected. The first six times nothing happened, and I gave up. Then, because I had nothing better to do, I tried one more time, using my thumb to press on the number buttons differently, and I heard something click on the inside of the door. Magnetic locks?

And just like that, I was in the nonexistent shelter.

The door opened to a ladder, taking you about six or seven feet down, to a crawl space, then to a hatch, which, as I discovered, was pretty easy to open. Down through this hatch to another ladder made from rebar, built into a concrete wall, taking you down about ten feet into the main room of the bunker.

Motion detectors activated lights.

It was four or five times the size than my Skid Row apartment, and smelled like vanilla and cinnamon. There was a grand bed, this big oak thing, with a thick headboard, baseboard, all that. There was an area for cooking, and another area for having a shower and doing your other business, privacy provided by a slight lilac shower curtain.There was a table on a Persian rug that felt delicious against bare feet (I'd taken my shoes off when I touched down). On the wall opposite the bed hung a massive older model TV with a cabinet under it holding a VCR and DVD player, and various components I never figured out. The place was big enough you could be in one part, say the kitchen and not feel like you were in the other.

Also, three little corridors snaked off into three different directions,all of them sort of deep storage closets. One for food stuff, stocked with cans and freeze-dried packets, big jugs of water, and also a huge assortment of different kinds of wine and beer. Snaking off opposite of this were housing supplies, bedding, pillows, hammers,screws, a washing machine, then a rack containing collections of instructional manuals explaining how the stove or the little fridgeworked, with replacement parts in adjacent bins. Racks of clothes hung in a shallow closet, all very colorful and sporty, in triples of small medium and extra large, both for men and women. Under the clothes were at least twenty pairs of sneakers, stacked in their boxes and still smelling like factory rubber. The third corridor was all communication gear, radios and more TVs, and mini satellites. I suppose, all the sorts of toys a person would want if they were trying to figure out what was going on with the rest of the world after a bomb blast, or whatever might create immense destruction.Also computer gear, and internet stuff, which didn't work. The corridor also held an impressive Video and DVD library.

Some sort of dream come true.

All electricity seemed to come from sort of solar thing, hidden outside(not the best way to do it when you're dealing with a potential nuclear explosion, but that wasn't my problem). The fridge and stove both worked on propane. The air circulated off of some system connected to the lights, and there was an extra fan you turned on in the kitchen that efficiently sucked up grease and stink and smoke,and shot it out through a vent.

The toilet flushed and didn't seem to back up. The shower however could get pretty nearly – it recycled the water and there were chemicals in an adjacent bucket you were supposed to add to the tank, which I never got right, and then gave up on, so I only took a shower when I absolutely needed to.

The packaged food still had another five or so years on the expiration date.