Greg Strandberg
Dulce Base
Prelude — Level 2
Reggie Copeland hated Dulce Base, hated being underground, and hated being away from his trailer with its TV and fridge full of cold beer. He hated Mount Archuleta and meant to get out the first damn chance he got, and had been meaning to since he’d turned 18 nearly two decades earlier.
He frowned and slumped over the steering wheel of the large dump truck, one with tires fifteen feet high. What the hell else am I going to do?
As usual, Reggie had woken up about an hour before his 9 PM shift started, or more appropriately, came-to from passing out on the floor the night before, which was his typical evening procedure, although it took place before noon. After pulling himself together, finishing off a Coors, and dragging a comb through the tangled mat he called his hair, Reggie’d climbed into the cab and gotten onto U.S. Route 64, passed the one motel and one gas station that the small, sleepy town of Dulce (pop. 900) afforded, and drove the 2.5 miles to the base.
Everyone knew Reggie, and the gates in the barbed-wire fence were opened to him and he rumbled on in, headed down the road, and reached the large tan and featureless garage. They were waiting for him — or at least that evening’s shift change — and he trundled the truck right on in the open garage doors, which were large enough to accommodate a Boeing 747.
The garage was just that — a large garage where everyday base vehicles were repaired. It was a huge floor measuring more than 100,000 square feet, or about the size of two football fields. The place was currently full of vehicles being serviced, as it always was, though Reggie knew that sometimes it housed more. That’s why it was often call the port, a name given to ships, even though it was in the middle of the desert.
Further back there was another set of garage doors, these much thicker and with an additional set of guards stationed at them, each with a loaded machine gun in their hands. They were the HUB doors, or what Reggie typically thought of as nuclear blast doors, and it was here that he slowed down and had a scanner put over his face, which was nothing more than some red light that passed over his face in a long narrow strip. It fed something back to the two guards and the small hand-held calculator-like thing they had, and then Reggie was waved through, just like the hundreds of times before, maybe thousands now. It wasn’t that they needed the thing — the small, black teardrop tattoo on Reggie’s right cheek set him apart from everyone else on the base — but it was just formality, just the necessary precautions they had to take with a base like Dulce.
There were no other trucks for some reason tonight and Reggie shrugged and didn’t think much of it, just turned around the guard station and toward the right-most wall of the huge entry port and kept going, for there really was no way he could hit it, as became clear when his truck started to descend down a concrete ramp set into the floor, one no one could see from the outside of the garage or even in the first work area.
Reggie put his foot to the gas and got moving, now that the theatrics were over. He had a good twenty miles of tunnel driving ahead of him once he made it down the ramp, most just crisscrossing this way and that as he drove deeper into the depths of Mt. Archuleta and the massive underground base it held, all 1,700 paved miles of it, not counting the 800 miles of tunnels that led to Los Alamos.
There was the first level located 200 feet below the surface, where he’d normally check in and out and have lunch. The steel-covered cavern walls were 7 feet high and provided a sense of protection. This area was safe, for humans, and a place Reggie felt the most at ease at while at work, although he could never truly feel fully at ease. He passed the empty work buildings and cafeteria and offices and saw not a person, but kept on, for he remembered what his boss Aaron had said the day before, how today would be different.
A sign up ahead on the concrete walls told Reggie he’d be heading to Level 7 eventually, but he knew that, having been there many times before. It was there that the long trains and shuttles were, the ones that zipped about under the surface of the earth, faster even than the supersonic jets now flying to Paris and London and called Concorde’s. It was also here that the large tunnel-boring machines were, the devices the aliens had used to make the massive and worldwide transportation network. There were also maintenance hubs for the UFO crafts that’d helped them ferry the necessary supplies and personal to get them operating.
Reggie pressed the gas and started along. The underground base was massive, more so than even Reggie could probably comprehend, and he didn’t mean to dilly-dally — it’d take him a good forty-five minutes of circuitous driving through the ramps to get their. But while his truck might not be moving so quickly, his thoughts were. They continued on, down to Level 3, taking the same round-about and twisting tunnel turns at the end of each level that the truck would be taking soon enough. The ceilings down there rose to 25 feet high when he’d get out into the cavernous highways and turnoffs that led all over place, and then the world. But by staying on the main turnout and ramp he’d have no problems making it the 45 feet to the next level down.
Reggie’s thoughts traveled, for there wasn’t much else for them to do. No radio was allowed in the base, not even a simple 8-track player. He’d already traveled more than a dozen miles and had barely begun to move past the faceless rows of government offices that rose up on each side of him. The vast amounts of propaganda and misinformation they produced, and where it was directed, he could only guess at, if he ever wanted to. He drove on, again wondering where everyone was at on this day, but again not really wanting to know.
Level 4 would be upon him eventually, and it was here that the research work on humans was done, but it was so much more than that as well. Hypnosis, telepathy, and even the manipulation of dreams were all practiced. Brain chips were implanted in ‘subjects’ and Delta Waves were used to manipulate the heart rate and brain activity of those they chose. Reggie often shuddered to think of the number of people around the world that were already being manipulated. He was positive he was one.
The buildings rising up on either side of that level’s smoothbore tunnels were featureless, and none offered a single piece of evidence as to what they were or what was inside. Reggie had a pretty good guess from what he’d gleaned from other workers, both human and alien. One that always stuck with him were the specially-made rooms made of lead, covered in magnetically-coated steel, and then covered yet again, this time with copper. Such measures were necessary to hold the living aural essences, or souls, of those cosmic beings that didn’t require bodies. Reggie also knew that those rooms had been twisted and warped and now did unspeakable things, acts only reserved for God. Sometimes Reggie wondered if God wasn’t enslaved somewhere down in the deepest levels, however, the ones even he didn’t know existed.
The place was dead at the moment, something he’d never seen before. Glancing down at the odometer, Reggie knew he’d travelled twelve miles already and hadn’t seen a soul. Normally he’d be checked and rechecked again before being allowed in here. But not today, and maybe never again.
Level 5 would come after Level 4, and as Reggie steered the truck toward the first curves that would take him to Level 2, he felt a cold come over him as his thoughts raced ahead, one not of temperature but of guilt. It always came when he thought of Level 4, for beyond it was Level 5, and where the vats were.
He’d never forget the first time he saw them upon rounding the turn and coming onto the level for the first time, rows and rows of them as far as he could see, a forest of them stretching to the far and distant walls of the cavern that was that level. How many humans were there Reggie had no idea, but if he had to guess he’d say thousands, tens of thousands. Although he knew that wasn’t quite right — many of the things in those vats couldn’t be called human anymore. Many of them never were.