Vice Bunker 53 (Patreon)

Vice Bunker

Chapter 53

-VB-

I laughed in Alexandria’s face after looking at her deadpan look she sent my way after I asked if I could set up an internet cable.

Too bad for her, I set up that internet cable anyways. 

Communication went back and forth rather quickly both between the PRT ENE and PRT New York as well as between Brockton Bay civilians and New York City’s civilians. I learned extremely quickly that the situation over there was even more dire than I surmised from a superficial glance. The most critical of their situation was their food: their ration was barely 1,300 calories for the average person. Even soldiers and police officers didn’t get 2,000 calories per day when before the apocalypse, the average soldier got anywhere from 2,400 to 3,000 calories, if not more depending on what operation they were on.

On the other hand, my extensive hydroponics and synthesized meat production meant that the average person who wanted to eat 2,000 calories a day could eat that much and more, though this didn’t extend to the PRT ENE’s bunker.

I didn’t notice this immediately. 

No, I learned it after the first wave of desperate immigrants began to trickle into my city. Because I didn’t think that I needed to pay attention to the internet. There were bigger concerns, after all.

Except that had been a mistake.

The trickle of hungry and dirty immigrants soon became a flood. 

… the internet was a mistake. 

Kind of.

-VB-

I didn’t interact with the first group of immigrants who made their way into New Brockton Bay. Instead I let Kali be the one to interact with them and tell them the rules of the place. 

For one, she was a beautiful woman. Two, she possessed keen skills in administration and negotiation, which I have come to value more than her beauty in the year or so we’ve been together. Three, I wasn’t not with her; I just wasn’t seen by people who didn’t know about me. 

“I see. Thank you for telling me about the situation from the south,” Kali said with a downcast look as she sympathized with the refugees. This was the fourth group that she was meeting, and I kept my hands off of direct interactions. 

Hmm, I see. Because many of the southern states weren’t as hard hit as the northern states, people flooded into their states at the start of the winter apocalypse. But because those states weren’t agricultural powerhouses capable of sustaining millions of people and militarily powerful individually to protect them from falling moon chunks, the south was on the verge of collapsing into anarchy.

Hell, if Alexandria couldn’t keep LA alive, then what chance did regular states, military, and parahumans have against the end of days? She was here over in New York City, not San Francisco, Los Angelos, or even Phoenix. Yes, according to one of the survivors who clawed their way to New York City and then to my city, even the Navajo Desert was a blizzard hellscape when there wasn’t a freshly steaming crater frm the still raining moon pieces, though the rate was slower these days.

But it didn’t change the fact that the situation was still bad across the globe. 

Enough that the immigrants talking to Kali was the fourth group we’re accepting but according to the immigrants themselves, there should have been at least ten other groups aside from the four we’ve accepted.

This or more less made it clear that outside of immediately protected areas like New Brockton Bay and New York City’s downtown, the rest of the region was still hostile and dangerous. If the blizzard didn’t kill you, then cannibals and bandits would. 

But this just meant that I now had a good casus belli to go on an expansion spree. 

“So it’s true?” the leader of this group, an elderly woman in her late sixties, asked warily. “We’ll be fed here?”

“Yes as long as you keep to the law,” Kali replied. “Yal’Manus is generous but he is also very strict and a little fickle. There was actually a group of people who thought they could try a democratic process to take over. Yal’Manus kicked them out instantly.”

“Ah. I see. So as long as we don’t poke him…”

“He won’t kick you, yes. He doesn’t care, actually.”

“Hmm? Doesn’t care?” she asked as Kali led her group in. 

“Yes. He doesn’t care. A lot of what he does is because he feels generous. Nothing more, nothing less. He didn’t have to build a bunker where he did most of the work but he did. He didn’t need to invite more people or contact other bunkers, but he did. And he doesn’t have to provide facilities for hydroponics but he does. And most of it has to do with his wives.”

“... Wives.”

“Yes, wives. I’m one of them.”

The elderly looked up at Kali’s animal ears. “He, uh, has wives, huh?”

“Oh, these are natural,” Kali said as she made her cat ears flicker. “He is a good husband but not exactly sympathetic to the crowd, if you will.” 

I left her to talk with them. In the mean time, I focused my attention of my amorphous blob bodies outside of the city and far beyond. I wanted to know what happened to those ten other groups.