Broken Mirror: Apophis 2029 by Michel Savage Page B

rifle to me.
      "Here, you and Serena will need my scope to keep an eye from the rooftop, and you two can trade shifts until we get back." he offered as an assignment.
      "I'll go with you guys; I can handle myself." I stated firmly, as I handed Thorn ’ s rifle over to Serena in kind.  All the men just stared at me for a moment, a hint of unwillingness to argue with a 6 ft tall woman glinting in their eyes.  Thorn seemed as though he was about to disapprove, but eventually shrugged his shoulders in surrender and waved Serena off to her post.  The five of us looked down the dark stairwell, wondering what we might find in the depths below.
      A moist heat rose through the narrow shaft as we descended the tight switchbacks; all the while, trying to keep as quiet as possible.  We were completely oblivious to the motion sensors we had triggered which were deftly hidden on the landings between each set of stairs.
      There was no hint of what type of structure this was, if it was either civilian or military made.  There was always the chance it was a private complex, but that was highly unlikely.  In my travels, I had stumbled across more than a dozen civilian made underground bunkers.  They called them bug-out shelters, which were usually poorly designed and not much more than the old bomb shelters reproductions from back in the dawn of the atomic age.  It was ludicrous thinking, as most of those vaults where nothing more than glorified storm shelters, which might have been sparsely useful for protection, from say, a tornado, but undoubtedly useless from an actual nuclear blast or radioactive fallout. 
      It was beyond foolish to outright crazy how people would think they could hide their entire family in such tiny boxes underground.  I had guessed they gleefully imagined they would all sit there smiling while they eat ate their cans of beans and read a pleasant book as they waited for weeks to months for the death and chaos raging above to subside. 
      Some of these 'preppers,' as they were called, had poured their life saving into these faulty shelters that were nothing more but claustrophobic death traps.  There were actually companies that sold these family sized coffins where they would basically do nothing more than just dig a shallow hole and plop it into the ground to be covered with nothing more than loose dirt.  Little to no reinforcement or insulation whatsoever was ever installed; and in most cases, they even failed to pour a foundation. 
      After the asteroid impacts, when the earthquakes rattled the terrain and vast ocean flooding poured inland to submerge the coasts; those tiny confined shelters would bury their occupants alive during an avalanche or mudslide, and could fill with invading sea water in a matter of minutes.  Barricaded in a little hold like that with water point in through cracks and air vent, would be a horrible way to die.  Tsunami or leaking rainwater would end up drowning their victims as their sleeping bags and cans of food floated around their heads while they gasped for breath in their last seconds of life, wondering where they had gone wrong in their planning.  They didn't think to prepare for that eventuality.
      I had seen this with my own eyes, passing across back yard shelters with putrefied bloated bodies floating among dank water.  Even when someone had taken the effort and foresight to build a proper refuge, none of them took the time to disguise their white candy cane air filters sticking up from out of the ground like a sore thumb or the obvious access hatchways they left in full view above. 
      I found several such shelters that had been forcibly entered and ransacked.  Looters would stuff the air filter to the bunker with a rag and simply waited for the armed occupants inside to either open the door or suffocate.  With great effort, the doors would be broken in, and what was once a family of survivalist were now nothing more than a rotting pile of