The Bunker

Paranoid by nature, Jeb Woosley of Rock Springs, Montana built his fallout shelter in September 1945 at the age of twenty-five. He knew early on that if we could develop the bomb so would other nations. So he prepared. He built a large bunker five yards below ground with three foot thick concrete walls. He had a fully stocked pantry. He had a pump that pulled water from a subterranean spring and filtered it for him. He had a pedal powered dynamo for electricity and exercise and more fuel than one could imagine needing just in case. The entertainment room had a reel-to-reel player, a projector, a small library of music and film, a shelf of how-to books and novels. In time, he made the bunker more comfortable than his own home, and for added safety, hid the entrance beneath a large plastic boulder.

Every time a crisis arose, he would warn the town that the end was night, mock them for not preparing, and then retreat until his secret safehouse. The Berlin Blockade, the Korean War, McCarthy, Sputnik, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Apollo moon landing, Vietnam, the death of Mao Zedong, Afghanistan, the Berlin Wall, the Gulf War, 9/11, the Gulf War again, Afghanistan again, the Arab Spring, and every election since Carter. By the time the big one came, he had long since become the boy who cried wolf. The blast leveled the near by cities and the fallout slowly killed whoever was left standing in the small town of Rock Springs.

But not Jeb. He had enough food to feed a man for ten years, clean running water, and seeds to start a farm when everything settled. What he didn't have, however, was time. He died of old age two weeks after the war went hot. In the irradiated aftermath, people scoured the country side, bandits and families alike, looking for safety, for food, for a way to rebuild, but none ever found Jeb's hidden treasure trove beneath its large fake rock.

- Originally mailed to J. Knight from Pascagoula, Mississippi