Vice Bunker 35 (Patreon)

Vice Bunker

Chapter 35

-VB-

It took a while for me to understand what had happened.

The first two floors of the bunker, which had been renovated from regular living sublevels to defense sublevels, had been utterly crushed by a cave-in, and it happened because a meteorite the size of a car had landed close to my bunker. Not directly on top of it but just three hundred yards from the entrance was very close.

… But that disaster was mitigated by the fact that the real outer layer of the bunker, my slime-like body, absorbed some of the kinetic impact. Something I thought I only kept for extraneous use (recycling “organic” matter) proved to be of defensive value, like bullet-resistant gel.

Well, that portion of my body’s gone so I needed to regrow everything.

Worse, it ruined all of the defensive structures and tinkertech our bunker used to keep the likes of the Cannibals out. Even worse, it was letting the cold air in.

Normally, people would be more concerned about the ruined infrastructure and the cannibals than the cold air, and they would be right to think that.

However, I was not exactly a human with a limited quantity of resources and manpower but a pseudo-cybereldritch cloning and tinkertech walking factory capable of processing thousands of tons of materials every day and have been doing so for the past months.

If only for now, I quickly threw up a makeshift cover that could be used, if only once, as an attack by blasting everything outwards.

And now that I spent the last hour putting that up, it was time to go outside and survey the rest of the city’s remnants.

Well… Actually, that’s the second thing. The first thing was to call our local PRT.

“Hello?” I spoke into the landline phone (something we installed prior to the collapse).

“{Who is this?}”

“This is Yal’Manis.”

“{Ah. What do you want?}”

Whoever was on the other side of the line was rude as hell and completely ignored the actual power difference between our two bunkers.

I had half a mind to tell him to fuck off and get his superior but … well, I wasn’t feeling too particularly happy with the PRT still. If one of their own fucked them in the ass, then they couldn’t complain, right?

“Our bunker experienced a small problem with the latest meteorite strike. I just wanted to know if you guys are alright.”

“{... We are fine.}”

“Alright, then. Bye.”

I put the phone down, my mood a little worse off than before, but I still had a job to do.

So instead of walking out of the bunker myself, my ever-growing true body just pushed a tendril through the rocks like they were dirt and dropped off a biomechanical survey drone. If it looked like an anime supermodel, then that was okay because there was no one in my bunker to see the drone and question my taste.

And if I got to test a few of the more esoteric tech, then it was all for the better.

-VB-

Kelly was a scavenger.

She survived the Apocalypse by doing whatever she had to do to survive. It meant that she had to head down south from her home in Maine when the cold became too much. It meant she had to let strangers fuck her for food. She killed to get away from cannibals.

Unfortunately, she arrived at Brockton Bay and found herself stuck here. Why? Because the meteorite rain was intense between here and New York. Radio calls from Boston made it clear that the biggest city in the Northeast was doing alright, but anything southwest of Boston and Brockton Bay and northeast of New York was a devastated land from multiple large meteorite strikes.

So she ended up in frigid, cannibal-infested Brockton Bay. Or what remained of it after most of the people left.

And then a meteorite strike within the city fucked over the part of the city she was in.

Even so, she was hungry and tired. She needed to find scraps to either burn or trade for food.

But even Brockton Bay was sparse in scraps and trash. Everything was covered in snow and …

She sniffled while searching through the frozen garbage pile next to the overturned dumpster. When was the last time she ate? She sighed as she tossed a can.

Clunk.

Clunk?

Kelly looked up and froze.

Just yards away from her, a faceless pitch-black figure stood at the entrance of the ruined alleyway that Kelly was in. The figure had a woman’s shape but it was … too sexy. Her hair was also floating gently upward when the winds around them were hissing and roaring.

This … this was a cape or a product of one.

“L-Look, I don’t want no trouble,” she quickly spoke up as she backed away. “I just wanted to find something to eat, okay?” Her calloused and dirty hands scraped against the frozen asphalt as she quickly crawled backward.

The figure didn’t say anything. It just … stared at her.

It looked around before looking back at her.

“Do you know the state of the surface city?” it asked her with a deep melodic voice. Like … it wasn’t deep enough to be a man’s but it was deeper than any other woman’s voice Kelly’s ever heard.

The surface city?

Was this … a cape from a bunker?

Could she possibly get into a bunker? Or get some food for info?

She gulped and her stomach growled.

“Y-Yeah?” she hesitantly replied.

The thing tilted its head before it paused mid-motion. It turned to look at its left and then stepped away from the entrance of the alleyway. “Cannibals. Odd, there’s only a few.”

Kelly needed a moment before the word settled in and what they meant. Her entire body shivered … before she realized that there was a cape in front of her who just spoke the word with disdain.

“Do not move. I will be back.”

She didn’t move as the thing left the mouth of the alley and out of her sight.

And what followed…

Kelly tried not to flinch violently at the sound of bones breaking, flesh tearing, clothes ripping, and the gurgling of the unfortunate few that didn’t get killed immediately. She knew it had to be worse from how it sounded.

She sat frozen in fear as the sound of death and dying came to an end, and the thing appeared back at the mouth of the alleyway.

And it was dripping from head to toe in blood.

‘Maybe I shouldn’t try to negotiate with this cape…’

“Would a warm place and food for the night be sufficient price for your information?”

Or maybe not.

“Yes, please,” she squeaked out.

-VB-

A/N: Not a new waifu but a look into the situation at hand on the surface. Number of cannibals are low, not even dumpsters have anything tenth-decent, everything is cold, and etc.