The Secret Bunker Trilogy Read online

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  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book was inspired by a family visit to Scotland’s Secret Bunker which is located at Troywood in Fife, Scotland, UK, however, it is entirely fictional. If you get the chance, please check out the real ‘Secret Bunker’, it’s an amazing place!

  Index

  Part One: Darkness Falls

  Part Two: The Four Quadrants

  Part Three: Regeneration

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  The Secret Bunker: Darkness Falls

  Part One: Alone

  Chapter One

  In The Beginning …

  Beyond the great iron doors, I can hear the ghostly wail of sirens. I'm familiar with this noise from school when watching old films about World War 2 and the Blitz. Only this is here and now, and I'm on holiday in Scotland with my family. Surely this must be part of the exhibition? I've never seen Dad so scared. He's terrified and has grabbed Harriet around the waist to get her away from the doors. He's pushing David along at his side. His face is grey - I swear, it's grey. I know from the decisive way he moves that this is no joke, he's genuinely frightened by what's happening outside the bunker.

  Standing by the entrance I can see it's overcast and oppressive out there and at first I assume it's just bad weather. But the darkness in the skies has a solid, dark quality. It's like nothing I've ever seen before. As the blackness sweeps through the sky, it shuts out all light. I can't understand what's happening. Even at night there's a glow thrown off by street lamps or passing cars. But this has a finality about it, it's not to be questioned. Suddenly, the heavy iron blast doors, which at first seemed set and fixed, begin to groan and close very slowly. I call out to mum to run faster; they're going to shut before she reaches me.

  Dad propels Harriet and David down the long concrete corridor - a combination of pushing and almost throwing them. But this is the action of a man who is the most petrified I've ever seen anybody in my life. It's funny how you notice these things at times like this. In movies, people act alarmed and make all sorts of shouting and screaming sounds. But in real life being scared is a feeling, a terrifying sensation that is played out in silence, inside your head.

  As the blackness dominates the sky and casts its deathly shadow over the entrance of the bunker, I call out to Mum as she runs towards the closing doors and I know it must be too late. I hear her calling ‘Dan!’ but her voice trails off. She's been shut out and we are trapped underground. I have become separated from everybody in the panic. I'm alone in this strange place. Something terrible is happening outside this bunker and mum is caught out there with no way to escape.

  April

  I can’t really remember why we decided to holiday in Scotland. Things have a habit of coming out of nowhere when you live in a big family. One minute Dad has a great idea and then David knocks something over at the dinner table. Dad curses, Mum tells him off (does she really think that we don’t hear those words at school?) and Harriet gets covered in whatever it was that just went flying. And, out of the brawl and mayhem that follows, somehow we manage to discuss Dad’s great holiday plan, and before you know it he’s on his laptop entering the competition.

  Yes, this wasn’t a conventional holiday for the Tracy family. We couldn’t afford a normal holiday. Dad had given up work two years ago, ‘Because I’m so old!’ he’d joked with us at the time. In actual fact, it was all my fault. I’d had what the teachers referred to as ‘difficulties’ at school. These ‘difficulties’ involved hushed conversations among teachers, worried chats long into the night between Mum and Dad, and regular visits from a very unusual man called Doctor Pierce. I remembered him because he wore a brightly coloured tie which had a curious metallic logo embossed on it at the bottom. That struck me as rather strange for a man who was called ‘Doctor’. It all ended with me staying at home to be educated.

  ‘Home ed’ they called it. Basically it meant that, for me, everything that I’d experienced between the ages of five and fourteen was now over. I got up after Mum had gone to work and, when I did get up, Dad was there. Dad, who’d gone to work before I left the house for ever since I can remember. Usually he was in his pyjamas with a cup of tea at his side and working on something at his laptop. Most days I joined him at the kitchen table about nine o’clock. They let me sleep in later because I lay awake at night. I don’t know why that was. I was tired, and I wanted to sleep … but I couldn’t. So I was awake until well after midnight usually. I enjoyed the world at that time of night, it was quiet and demanded nothing of me. I love my family, but sometimes, in the middle of the night when the rest of the world is asleep, there is a silence I could inhabit forever.

  I preferred home ed because I got to see more of Dad, but I still missed Mum being about during the day. Home ed was funny because very little education took place. I just did what I felt like doing most of the time. And I got along fine like that. All that anger from being at school just seemed to go. In fact, sometimes it was hard to remember what had caused me to get into trouble in the first place. I could remember the rage and the fury – I could recall lashing out at those kids – but I couldn’t remember how I’d got from how I am right now to that state where I was so out of control. And I was out of control at school. It’s scary to feel that way. But now I feel totally calm, and I can’t picture what would make me get that way again. So most of the time during the day it was just me and Dad in the kitchen. And Nat of course, but Nat wasn’t actually in the kitchen with us.

  When Nat Died

  I was thirteen when Nat died. I don’t really recollect it as an accident. I remember what people did and how they reacted. And I remember the funeral most of all.

  Nat was such great fun and the funeral didn’t seem to capture any of that life at all. Mum and Dad remember exactly what happened. I can see it in the sadness when they look at pictures of our family as it was. It comes in an instant, usually when a random photo flashes up on a laptop screen as it switches to screensaver. Then, one minute later, it’s almost as if Nat was never in our lives, like that place at the table had always been David’s.

  But dead people leave a space. It’s not a physical space. It’s a part of our life that remains in a vacuum. And the smallest thing can let the air rush into that vacuum, filling it with life, memories and feelings, as if the person has never been gone. All it took was a photo and Nat was back at the table with us.

  We were twins. I don’t think you’d know it now because we weren’t identical twins or anything like that. Mum and Dad say ‘You were so alike’, but we look like two different people to me in those photos. And if Nat was alive now, I’m sure we’d be so different. For a start, our personalities were opposite. And we wore our hair differently, even at that age. I left mine as it was, Nat was much more adventurous. We were different even then. But always, we were twins – until Nat was killed in an instant by that black car and our lives changed forever.

  Chapter Two

  Twenty-three Hours After The Darkness Fell

  I’m so hungry. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced hunger like this before. At home we always ha
ve snacks around. Dad nags us about eating our five-a-day or Mum has a go about ladling too much jam onto our bread. But most of the time, whenever we get peckish, there is food around.

  I’m so scared now. I don’t know how long I’ve been here. It’s completely dark and there’s no sound at all. I don’t know where Dad and Harriet are - they were somewhere near David last time I saw them. I’ve shouted, but there’s nothing, just an empty echo from the long concrete corridor. All I have is a half-drunk bottle of water.

  If we got lost when we were young, Mum and Dad used to say, ‘Find someone with a uniform or wait by the ticket office.’ I was by the entrance when the darkness fell. If I had my mobile phone with me I could use the torch on it to see. I’ve tried feeling my way along the wall, but it’s terrifying walking into complete blackness where you can’t see anything, not even shapes or outlines. So I did what Mum and Dad said. I waited by the entrance. If anybody comes, that’s where they’ll go. If only I’d remembered my mobile phone in the car, I’d have some light now. And Mum wouldn’t have got caught outside when the darkness came.

  Holidays

  Somehow we moved from a glass of lemonade getting spilled at the dinner table to a holiday in Scotland. What Dad had been trying to say when this strand of conversation had taken its first breath of life the previous month is, ‘Who fancies winning a holiday to Scotland?’ Within the mayhem of the spillage, a general consensus of opinion had been reached that Scotland might be a bit of fun and we’d never been there together as a family.

  Since Dad had stopped working, money had been tight. It’s funny, nobody tells you these things when you’re young, you just pick it up from the strands of conversation and what you see going on around you. One minute you’re eating your favourite ice cream, the next minute you’re stuck with own-brand vanilla flavour. One minute Dad’s going to work in a suit, the next minute he’s showing you an online video of a funny dog, while he’s sitting at the table in pyjama bottoms and a T-shirt with a band’s name on that I’ve never heard of before. Apparently they were great in the 80s.

  We used to go on holidays abroad, and we’d all sit and look at the brochures together. We’d fly in planes to places that were far too hot for me and once, we even went on a ferry. Nat loved that ferry …

  See – Nat again, always with us but never there.

  Losing Nat

  I’m not sure if I even saw the black car at the time. In my memory it’s there, but I’m uncertain if that’s just because I’ve heard so many people talk about the accident.

  I even have a newspaper cutting hidden in my old laptop case upstairs, but I haven’t actually looked at it since I put it there. I know that if I look at that faded cutting it will instantly transport me back to the day of the funeral, when that great, empty, immovable void opened before us.

  When the final person leaves the house after the funeral, that’s when it starts for real. The silence and the coping – that’s when it really starts, not when the person dies. There’s too much going on after they die, you know they’re dead but there’s just too much happening. It’s only when silence finally descends that you’re alone with death. It’s only then that you find out how you’ll be.

  As a thirteen-year-old I never even thought about death. Why would you when you’re thirteen? I’m not sure I’d even think about it much now if it wasn’t for Nat. Of course, I’d see it in films and cartoons, I’d read about it in books. But that’s not really my life and it seems so far away. Always so far away until the final moment of innocence when my twin’s blood spattered across my favourite T-shirt and I heard the last gasp for life as Nat's limp body hit the concrete in front of me.

  A Lucky Win

  So, Dad was entering another competition to win us a holiday. ‘Somebody has to win,’ he’d say, ‘and it might as well be us!’ Then Mum would chime in with some wise catchphrase like, ‘You’ve got to be in it to win it!’ Honestly, it was as if they wrote the script before each day started. How did they come up with this stuff, seemingly off the top of their heads?

  Usually we entered competitions in magazines or on the back of cereal boxes. Sometimes we even crowded round Dad’s laptop to figure out some daft question in an online contest. But I remember this one because it was different from usual. It came via email, directly to Mum.

  Now, this is where I should explain that we’re a modern family and we all love our tech. Who doesn’t? This is the twenty-first century after all! So when Mum got the email, she forwarded it to Dad. ‘Hey Mike, I’ve got some holiday competition from one of my websites, do you want it?’

  ‘Can you forward it to me, Amy?’ asked Dad, and after a few taps from Mum on her keyboard I knew that the transaction was complete because five minutes later Dad said, entirely out of the blue, ‘Thanks’. The funny thing is, we all knew what he meant by this stray acknowledgement. An onlooker from a hundred years ago would wonder what on Earth had just happened.

  This is just how modern families operate - the unspoken fusion of tech and relationships when human interaction can slip seamlessly from words to typing, to reading, and back to words again – and everybody’s still in the loop.

  Now, Mum was always a deleter. It was virtually the only time that she’d cuss. I think it was because she’d taken on more responsibility in the office since Dad had stopped going into work and she was sick of emails by the time she was back home. So, about ten minutes after she’d returned from work every night, she’d sit down with a cup of tea, open her laptop, scan her emails, cuss a bit then whack the ‘delete’ button much harder than was required. ‘She’s going to wreck that button!’ I’d think to myself.

  ‘Sorted!’ she’d announce, and then she’d relax and become ‘Mum’ again, as if deleting those personal emails was revenge for everything she’d had to do at work all day.

  That’s why I noticed this email in particular. At the time I just assumed that she’d had a better day at work. But now I can see it was something more than that. Anyway, Dad got the email and within seconds of him opening it and asking if we all wanted to go to Scotland we were tapping away at our keyboards trying to find the name of a disused Cold War nuclear bunker in the south of Scotland. David got there first, and he messaged the link to Dad to check it. Dad announced, ‘That’s the one, never heard of it!’ and that was the holiday sorted. Well, almost – until Mum nearly ruined everything by ending up in hospital.

  The Empty Ward

  The woman sat on the bed with a briefcase at her side. She was browsing something on a digital reader, but it was obvious that she was just distracting herself because when the man entered the room she closed it immediately. She was expecting him and, although she knew him already, she was clearly uneasy about something.

  This was a strange place. It had the feel of a hospital, but it didn’t seem to have any patients. There was an antiseptic, clinical feel about it. The beds were neatly made and in rows, but there were no curtains between them, no radios on the walls, nothing extra or decorative.

  As the man pressed the pen-like gadget against her neck and the tiny device entered her bloodstream, it struck her that this was almost the same as a military hospital.

  A Last-Minute Panic

  I didn’t even know that Mum gave blood. Not until we got a phone call saying that she’d fainted and they were keeping her in hospital overnight. Dad went into a bit of tirade at that stage. The funny thing about Dad is that he would rant away as if something had bothered him, when it was obvious to everybody in the room that actually he was just very concerned and worried about whoever was involved.

  So, while Dad was moaning about Mum’s great timing and how it was going to mess up the packing and our early morning departure, me, David and even Harriet really knew that he was just worried sick about Mum. It was that script thing again, as if nobody would finish off his lines if Mum wasn’t there.

  ‘I’m going to have to leave you guys here for an hour,’ he started. ‘Nat, can you look after ...�
� There it was again. A simple mistake, but Nat was back in the room.

  Leaving Nat

  Hospitals always meant bad news to me. Of course, in most cases they’re places of healing. People who have the most terrible illnesses and problems enter those buildings and most often leave them cured, healed or in greater comfort.

  It was the hospital chapel that I particularly noticed when Nat died. I didn’t know that hospitals had chapels. My thirteen-year-old self thought that they were made up of wards, lines of beds and filled with doctors and nurses. So much of what we think of these places is from TV and books. A chapel in a hospital makes perfect sense, I know that now.

  After all, it’s where I first watched my parents crying helplessly as they clung on to each other trying to comprehend that Nat was dead. It was the first and only time in my life that they completely shut me out. It was as if they had to go to each other first before they could come to give me comfort. I know now that the chapel is the most important place in a hospital. It’s where people go to pray and beg for help, even if they believe there is no God. It’s where people who are ill go when they must come to terms with the end of life. And it’s where those who know loss must go, before returning to a home that is missing a child.

  Chapter Three

  A Late-Night Visitor