Here it is, my post-apocalyptic subterranean harem! This is the first chapter.
The second chapter can be found here.
I will be posting the rest of this chapter-by-chapter on my Patreon for the 3$/month Patrons. This one will be going a bit slower as I’m taking more time on it.
The Passageway that connected Refuge to Wayport was said to be difficult to traverse, but not necessarily dangerous.
As the vast, dented front wall of Wayport finally came into sight at the far end of the Passageway he had been enduring for the past forty hours, Ethan breathed an immense sigh of relief and reflected bitterly that it was not just difficult and dangerous to move through, but also devastating.
He peered back the way he’d come and grit his teeth sourly as he spied what was very likely a trading caravan in the distance. Where had they been all this time? Where had anyone been all this time?
Up until now, Ethan thought that perhaps he had awoken to another apocalypse, this one inflicted on the subterranean world he and all other survivors of the first called home. He turned back to face the gate and began making his way towards it, careful to stick to the light, keep his weapon down and his movements slow.
Gate Guard could be a harrowing job and it wore on a person’s nerves. Back at home, he’d nearly shot some poor trader or traveler more than once because he was convinced one of the many lethal creatures that lurked in the shadows had come around for a visit.
How wretched would it be to survive everything that he had over the past two days, only to finally get to where he was going and end up with a bullet in his head from a nerve-worn, paranoid guard?
The great wall that sealed off the Passageway and separated Wayport from what some men and women referred to simply as the Vast or the Void, sometimes both, was riddled with bullet indents and had a few doors and windows built in.
Ethan got within about fifty feet of the wall before one of those windows opened up and a long gun barrel poked out.
“All right, that’s close enough! State your name and your business! You’re unscheduled!” a voice called out.
“My name is Ethan Lumos! I’m from Refuge! I seek sanctuary!” he called back.
A long pause. Though the barrel of the rifle remained unwavering, he imagined a frantic conversation happening on its other end.
“Is it true then?!” the voice called back. “Is Refuge gone!?”
“Yes!”
“And you’re the lone survivor?!”
“As far as I know!”
Another pause, this one even longer than before. Ethan felt more fear boiling around in his gut than any other moment over the past two days. There was absolutely nothing that said they had to let him in there. Theoretically, they could turn him away, and there wasn’t a single thing he could do about it. And anything might prompt them to.
If the gate guards were in a bad mood, if they’d had some kind of disaster or emergency of their own, if they were feeling especially paranoid, or any other of a dozen reasons why a bastion might decide to impose a quarantine, he could be screwed.
And the next nearest bastion was a hell of a lot farther away than Wayport was from Refuge.
He’d survived the underground due mostly to luck and whatever skills he possessed and it had gotten him this far. Unless he had some massive stroke of luck, he wasn’t going to make it to the next safe haven and what began in Refuge would catch up with him.
“All right, come on! Nice and easy!” the voice called suddenly, and then the rifle disappeared and the window closed.
Ethan let out a heavy sigh of relief and began walking again, this time moving a little faster.
He wasn’t out of danger yet, although that was more or less true at all times. Danger came in degrees with life today, but he was at least out of the Vast. There were any number of ways he could get screwed over, injured, or straight up murdered within Wayport, but he was too tired to care. All the tension and anxiety had exhausted him.
He reached the huge steel wall and came to stand a careful distance from the much smaller door that had been cut into it. It opened up as he approached and a pair of grim-faced men with machine guns waited for him.
“Come on,” one of them said.
“Thank you,” Ethan replied as he hurried inside.
“Don’t thank us yet,” the other said as they sealed the door back up, “Captain wants to talk to you, and he’s been in one of his moods lately. Little piece of advice: best behavior for Captain Donovan. He tends to take things personally.”
“Noted,” Ethan muttered.
Great.
Now that he was beyond the entrance wall, Ethan took the opportunity to have his first look at Wayport. Being that Refuge was perhaps a quarter of the size, (less now that he was actually here looking at it), and being that Wayport was the nearest bastion for quite a ways, he had often heard of it.
Typically there would be a journey to Wayport about once every few months. The braver and more seasoned souls would form a caravan and take the most valuable things the handful of scavengers who lived among them had discovered in the tunnels or been holding onto, finally ready to give them up, often out of desperation.
They came back with, among other things, stories.
Given how entertainment was a bit sparse in the modern day and humans had largely reverted back to telling each other stories as a primary form of it, Ethan wasn’t sure what to expect now that he was actually here.
The place sure seemed busy enough, and big enough, but he could tell right away some of the rumors he’d heard were outright fabrications.
Or maybe they had been true years ago.
“You got hearing problems, kid,” the gate guard asked, forcibly returning Ethan’s attention to him.
“What?” he replied.
The man’s hand was out. “Gun.”
“Oh.”
He thought of trying to explain that he was basically dead on his feet after surviving out there in the tunnels, but the man didn’t look like he’d actually care to hear it. Gabe reluctantly passed his pistol over to the guard.
The man inspected it, then slipped it into his belt and seemed liked he was considering something. Probably trying to shake him down for more. Something decided him against the idea though.
“Come on,” he grunted, and he began leading Ethan on.
The ingress point let on a large, busy area within the vast cavern that Wayport was built into. The area was clearly a marketplace and it made sense that they would keep it so close to the entrance. In the decades that had passed since the great destruction overhead, humans had only become more insular, and outsiders were only reluctantly let into settlements.
Beyond the marketplace, he could get a sense for the size and rough layout of the bastion. Two general pathways drifted away, one to the left slanting down, the other to the right slanting up. Beyond that, he saw tiers in the earth, rings of structures built on higher ground running most of the periphery of the cavern.
The concept seemed simple: the higher the tier, the more influence the people had.
Or at least that was his impression, given the higher up houses and buildings looked of much nicer and sturdier make.
Ethan was being led towards what looked to be a reinforced pillbox structure to the immediate left of the gate. Atop it were a pair of old but very functional looking machine gun nests, just one of them being manned by a bored-looking bald guy.
He was brought to a heavy metal door set in the center of the bunker-like building. The guard banged on it twice and a slit snapped open.
“What, Murph?” someone groused from inside.
“New meat the Captain wanted to see,” the guard replied.
A grunt was the reply and the slit snapped shut. There was a heavy clank and then a squeal of metal as the door opened up. Like meat, Ethan was transferred from one guard to the next. This man was older, half his face scarred from what looked like a fire, and he seemed about as irritable as he was intimidating.
He said nothing as he led Ethan across a small entryway, through an open door at the back, down a dimly lit corridor all the way to its end, where he knocked on another, thinner metal door.
“Come!” came the reply.
The guard opened the door and stepped back. Ethan walked in and the door was shut firmly behind him. He found himself in a cramped office mostly taken up by a desk scattered with a random assortment of objects, a few chairs, and a shelf also packed with items. A healthy-looking rat was crawling around on the topmost shelf.
The man behind the desk looked somewhere in his fifties, grizzled and gruff like most everyone else. His head and face were buzzed, covered in a layer of graying stubble, and he had a scar down one cheek.
“Have a seat, son,” he said.
Ethan sat in front of the desk and for a long moment the man seemed to be taking a measure of him. Ethan waited and tried not to fall asleep in the chair.
“I’m Captain Donovan,” he said finally. He spoke with the ease of an authority not used to being questioned. “For all intents and purposes, I’m the one who says whether or not you get accepted into Wayport. My men tell me you came from Refuge. That true?”
“Yes, sir,” Ethan replied.
“What happened? We lost contact, but that’s nothing new. Had a merchant come through yesterday who said it was gone.”
“It is. Raiders attacked while we were sleeping. We fought them. That drew the attention of a big group of Strays. That escalated the fighting, which in turn started a fire. When it became obvious that the situation was screwed, we who were still alive ran through a back tunnel. We came back a few hours later, to see what could be salvaged, but all the chaos triggered a cave-in,” Ethan explained, seeing the horror replaying as he explained it listlessly.
“I see,” Donovan murmured quietly. He leaned back in his chair. “And the others?”
“They didn’t make it. Some died from their wounds. Most died in the attack and the fire. I did what I could to help with the others. We formed a group trying to make it here, but we kept running into problems on the way. Another Stray attack killed two. A Hornet killed another. And we ran into a Death Bot. I was the only one to make it out of that one.”
Donovan looked unhappier with each thing he said. “What’s your name?”
“Ethan Lumos.”
“Lumos...I think I remember your father. Peter?”
“Yes, sir.”
Maybe that’d buy him some points in his favor. Nepotism seemed to be just about everything. A connection to someone like Donovan, even a thin one, could be a significant boost. He waited in the quiet office while Donovan chewed over the information, at one point picking up a tablet and activating it. As he navigated it, the rat scurried down the shelf, across the floor, then up the desk and onto the man’s shoulder.
He reached up and pet it absently with his fingertips in between navigating the tablet.
“What can you do, Ethan Lumos?” he asked finally.
“What most other people can, I imagine,” he replied. “Cook. Clean. Move things. Harvest plants. Stand guard.”
“Nothing special?” Donovan asked after a pause.
Ethan shifted uncomfortably. “I’m good at staying alive out in the tunnels,” he admitted reluctantly.
“I can see that, if you made it here on your own with the way things are nowadays.” Donovan paused and lifted himself up a little, studying Ethan. “You made it here without a gun?”
“No, I had one. Your man at the gate took it.”
“Did he now? What was it?”
“Silversmith.”
“Six or eight?”
“Six-shot.”
“You must be strong, those have a hell of a kick.”
Ethan shrugged. “I did a lot of hard labor digging out a new tunnel.”
“Well, we could always use another tunnel crawler. There’s a lot to be done and a lot more to be found out there,” Donovan said.
“I appreciate that fact, but in truth, I’d much rather find work within the bastion if it could be helped. I’ve...really had my fill of it out there,” he replied uncomfortably.
Donovan let out a bitter chuckle. “I can’t fault you for that. Did twenty years as a crawler myself. It’s brutal out there.” He lost his half-smile and checked over his tablet again, his grizzled face bathed in its pale blue glow. With a sigh, he shook his head. “You’ve come to Wayport at a bad time, I’m afraid. Times are tough and we’re in a rough patch right now. I appreciate your situation and your father once saved my life.
“I can’t do much to help you, and what I can do is going to cost you. There’s a shack I can set you up with. It doesn’t have power or water right now, but you’ll have to talk to Smith and Wexler about that. As for jobs, unfortunately, if you aren’t willing to crawl, there’s not much that can be done. We’ve got a strict three-month waiting policy for new residents. You go three months without causing problems and then you can start being considered for work in the power core or hydroponics or patrol,” he explained.
He finished up what he was doing on the big tablet and then switched over to a smaller one, typed rapidly on it, then passed it to Ethan.
“Fill this out. Accurately.”
Ethan just nodded and did as he was told, feeling relief tentatively beginning to take hold within him. He was being let in. He was being made a resident and given a place to live. He answered the questions as they appeared on his screen.
His name. Birth date. Physical dimensions. Skills. Knowledge.
He passed it back when he was done and Donovan looked it over, grunted once, and typed something into it.
“All right, now comes time for resettlement fees...I’m afraid I’m going to have to clean you out in exchange for entry into the bastion and a place to live. As I said, times are tough.” He tapped a relatively clean spot on his desk. “Everything you got but your clothes.”
Ethan repressed a sigh as he got to his feet and began emptying the pockets of his survival suit. He’d found it, and a few other things, out there in the tunnels. He set down a handful of bullets, a combat knife, a blue crystal, a canteen mostly empty of water, a few nutrient bars, and a handful of coins.
“Thought your people didn’t use currency?” Donovan muttered, picking up a silver coin and studying.
“We don’t. Found those in the Passageway,” Ethan replied.
“You understand how it works?”
“The bigger they are, the more they’re worth is what I heard.”
Donovan laughed softly. “Yeah, more or less...this is it?” he asked.
“This is it,” Ethan replied, patting his pockets. “Everything I had on me.”
Donovan looked at him for a moment, then passed him back the silver coin. Ethan took it tentatively. “Wex is going to give you some shit when you ask him to turn on the water. He’s supposed to give new residents alpha level rations, which isn’t great, but it’s better than nothing. If he does, hold out for a bit, then bribe him with that.”
“Thank you,” Ethan replied, unsure of what else to say.
The rat hopped off the man’s shoulder and landed on his desk as it sensed him preparing to move more significantly. It scurried around a bit as Donovan stood and walked over to a battered old locker. Opening it up, he rummaged around inside until he came up with a metallic card. He sat back down and passed it to Ethan.
It had a faded 26 on it.
“That’s how you get into your shack. Don’t lose it. It also serves to prove you’re a resident of Wayport. There’s a board in Market Square where jobs get posted. You’re flagged as an alpha level resident, and that means shit jobs unless you want to crawl,” he said, adding a bit of emphasis to that again.
Ethan simply nodded, not wanting to respond.
He really didn’t want to crawl in the tunnels again.
“Your shack is left of the Market. Down. In the pit.” Donovan regarded him as Ethan stood up and pocketed the coin and his card. “Don’t expect any help beyond this...good luck.”
Ethan just nodded, thanked him again, and left the office.