Vice Bunker 46 (Patreon)

Vice Bunker

Chapter 46

-VB-

Alan Marris (Yal’Manus)

I worked hard to make Brockton Bay liveable again. It was partially my gift to my people and an experiment to see just how much I could stress all of my systems and production lines. After all, changing the microclimate of a city in this winter apocalypse had to be pretty significant enough of an effort, right?

What began as a surface expansion into the desolate city had changed to become a personal project of mine.

Though my girls asked and got more of my attention every day, I still dedicated quite the number of hours per day to see this completed.

And to my surprise, I was not just more than ready but outscale even what I had thought was possible.

Because Brockton Bay was now host to a thousand fusion plants that I had created in under three months, and they output so much heat that the average temperature of Brockton Bay had struck 1 degrees Celcius, and this was just in time for my children to be born.

The future that I thought was inevitable, to be forced to live underground for centuries to come, had not come, and had been changed by my own hands.

“... It’s a sore sight for my eyes.”

I glanced to my right and saw Danny Hebert standing next to me.

One of my most ardent, if begrudging, supporters in the bunker for what I had done and what I continued to do, he was instrumental along with Kali when it came to wrangling and keeping the bunker’s population in check. He stood next to me without a thick winter coat but something closer to a lumberjack’s overall and jacket to keep the cold out. It was an outfit that both of us would have seen in Brockton Bay’s winter. His outfit, out here on the surface, spoke much about how the city had grown warmer.

“It is,” I told him. “But I’ll need to either expand or start having to filter the atmosphere.”

“Filter the atmosphere,” he chuckled. “I never thought I’d hear those words together. You talk about it like governments talk about building dams.”

“Considering what I did…”

“Yeah,” he muttered while looking at the fusion pillars dotting the landscape of the city, standing just a few stories above the skyline of the city. “Yeah, I think you can do it. Turn back time for our planet.”

“There are things out there that are only being held in check by the cold, however,” I added. “I’m not sure if I should start the clean-up before I at least get to check those out.” The Machine Army alone was a threat that I needed to take out. No one knew what was happening with all other quarantine sites, either. I would ask Alexandria, but the woman was busy with a new bomb tinker in her city. Even in the apocalypse, egos still stood above the needs of humanity’s survival. Figures.

He grunted. “Figures. There’s always something cockblocking us, isn’t there?”

“There is.”

“... What are you going to do about the PRT?” he asked me.

I really didn’t want to think about it. On one hand, they were still unaware of the changes in condition on the surface, mostly because their access to the surface had been destroyed by their little civil war. Even if they worked their hardest to clean the rubble to reestablish that access, they would need at least a month of constant work, assuming that there were no complications and accidents.

Meaning.

MEANING!

It would be completely my choice to let them out or not.

This, of course, had two issues.

If I didn’t let them out when the surface was somewhat habitable again, then I would be imprisoning them. Now, I might not like them, but I also didn’t hate them enough to forcefully imprison them in an underground bunker.

Letting them out, however, would definitely lead to problems because they will try to re-exert the control they previously had as a government authority. They also had a lot of the influential people of the city like the mayor, prosecutors, lawyers, and more among their numbers than we did. Because of this, they would also be more likely to try and usurp my control over the city.

There was also the problem of Sophia having become my maid/cumdump that would enrage the PRT and the Protectorate, regardless of the fact that they had thrown her my way to have less mouths to feed during their starving pre-civil war days.

Honestly, I didn’t want to let them out.

“I’ll think about it a bit more,” I replied. “... Also, what do you think about Taylor’s daughter being named Rose? After her mom’s middle name?” I glanced at him.

He looked at me with wide eyes and then looked away quickly.

“... Sounds good to me.”

I snorted. “If you want to cry, then go back in the bunker and tell Taylor yourself. You know she’s still upset that you’re not talking to her as much as you used to when you entered the bunker. She’s very sad about that. Hates the fact that you two went back to what it was like before the apocalypse.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I should go talk to her.”

“Good man.”

“Oh, shut up. You took her when you shouldn’t have.”

I shrugged. “I love her. She’s mine. She’s gonna have a daughter of mine and going to keep having babies with me. What? Mad?”

He punched me.

Yes, I deserved that. Taunting a father by talking about how much I was fucking his daughter wasn’t ever going to end without a punch being thrown. It's not like it hurts me. Danny was punching a literal pile of nanites.