A Perfectly Logical Guide to a Superhuman Apocalypse: Chapter 24

A Perfectly Logical Guide to a Superhuman Apocalypse: Chapter 24

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Wordcount: 2500

Commissioned by Arksoul

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Despite the fact that I lived in a bunker for a long time, I don’t like being trapped underground.

The reasons for that are obvious.

In my bunker, I lived with my dog, and enjoyed having the run of the place. Every little piece of security, every piece of equipment, and every gigabyte of entertainment in my bunker complex were mine. In contrast, I was now in the middle of India, surrounded by many enemies, and cut off from the AI that got me into this mess. A lot of hostiles in a place where I’m not supposed to be, versus a comfy domicile where I could spend time with my dog.

So, no, I’m not in my element and ready to have the run of the place just because I lived in a bunker.

Not only that, but the bunker was filled with superhumans and deadly technologies that I didn’t completely understand.

Just a week or two ago, I’d been trapped in Indian by energy fields and held at gunpoint for negotiations. Needless to say, I wasn’t looking for a repeat of the experience, and I wasn’t stupid enough to believe it couldn’t happen again. I had credible evidence that I could be suppressed and even killed in this country, therefore I had to be careful.

Therefore, instead of storming the complex with a series of attacks via teleportation, I committed myself to the safest and most logical course of action.

Using my incredible, superhuman ability to run away and hide.

What?

I’ve seen what happens to superhumans who go out guns blazing at every problem they encounter.

They don’t last, and I haven’t lived this long acting like they do!

…

The last place secured during emergencies is the cafeteria or dining hall. When the alarms went off, lunch got cancelled, and everyone returns to their shifts. The Chefs and their assistants turn off their cooking equipment, lock things up, and go to their rooms to get their actual uniforms on. Soon enough, the place is a ghost town, and it’ll remain abandoned until the alarm is called off.

So, reasonably, I started looking for the place after leaving the AI room.

It wasn’t easy.

The whole base was crawling with power-armored troops the moment I left the room and I didn’t like the look of them. Most of them were carrying heavy energy weapons in their usual hands, while two pairs of mechanical arms either carried sensor equipment or smaller weapons, and they were well protected by both armor and energy shields.

I didn’t know the output of the energy shields that they had glowing around them, but if I couldn’t touch them and teleport them, I certainly couldn’t create a mish-mash of teleporting fields that could slice through them with any guarantee of success. Failure meant getting blasted by far too much energy. In this case, attacking them would be the same as popping up next to someone with a gun with a knife… and hoping my knife worked.

Not the sort of risk that I wanted to take.

I hid in the shadows, making use of my ability to just be wherever the shadows were, and avoided conflict until I reached the cafeteria.

As I suspected, the place was clear and there was a walk-in fridge that was locked up.

I jumped into the very, very cold environment and let out a sigh of relief.

“Well, what the hell am I going to do now?” I busied myself with looking at the food stuffed in the fridge. Most of it was packs of frozen vegetables and there was some fresh meat in the form of chicken and lamb. Beef wasn’t a thing in Indian and that hadn’t changed even with the apocalypse. It was kinda like being in a grocery store, so that let me calm down a little. “Think.”

I did my best to bring up the diagram of the base, which would normally not be a problem, but I’d focused on the mission objectives instead of taking in the entire underground complex.

When my head came up with a lot more blanks than I wanted, I decided on my first course of action.

“I need a map first.” In situations with patrolling guards and security systems, I had to be careful with my ability. Even though I could appear anywhere there was space, that didn’t mean that I could appear without getting myself in trouble. If the base wasn’t already looking for me, then a wrong jump would reveal me, and that would just make their job of finding me that much easier. “Then, I need to turn the shields off and escape.”

As far as plans went, it was simple, but its simplicity made it difficult to mess up.

I started stretching and preparing to move, while keeping an eye on the solid door locked from the outside.

“Damn, I’m rusty.” I couldn’t recall the last time I fought people without having an out. In the last two years of my active years as a smuggler, I barely fought against anyone with the ability to retreat. Since I’m a coward at heart, I’d done my best to make sure that I wouldn’t get cornered and killed out of principle. “Well… can’t let them have all the initiative.”

I steeled and readied myself to infiltrate the base, search for a map, and turn off its shields in order to escape.

However, before anyone of that happened, the sound of clattering outside came drew my attention and so did the door to the fridge starting to open. A normal person would get caught, but I just left it and placed myself in one of the far tables of the cafeteria with a clear view of what was going on. The noise was made by the kid technicians who’d I’d seen working as maintenance and power armor crews when I first came to the base.

They had sacks, which they were using to fill up with the supplies.

However, what caught my attention was the fact that they were taking the frozen meats and vegetables and ignoring the canned foods.

Either they had a fridge of their own at the base, which could be searched by guards and get them jailed after this, or they had a way to smuggle it out.

Logically, I knew that I should go with my original plan, but my gut told me to shadow the young technicians and see what they were going to do.

While I usually valued my brain’s opinion, with the alarms continuing to blare and the possibility of being cornered in a hallway and suppressed by energy weapons, I chose to follow my gut.

If things went wrong, after all, I could just go back to my makeshift safe-room in the walk-in freezer and go back to my old plan.

…

The leader of the group was Amar and had a solid head between his shoulders.

Surprising for a teenager, but desperate times made kids mature quickly.

“Hurry up!” Amar hissed towards his companions as they carried sacks on their backs. Between the clean, white walls and halls of the facility and their own maintenance suits, the burlap sacks they carried looked out of place, especially as the bald, brown-skinned kid held a scanner of sorts in his hand. “The next patrol is almost here!”

The scanner was a jumbled mess of wires and mechanical parts that led into a pre-apocalypse smart phone. Not one of the newer one either, but one of the old ones barely larger than someone’s palm, and could fit into a pocket. The little piece of kit, according to my eavesdropping, was what let the kids evade the power-armored patrols in their own base.

I could use something like it, but I knew better than to try and steal anything from this place, after the last batch of equipment they gave me liquidated themselves.

So, I just kept an eye on the kids/technicians while they pulled off their heist.

They were doing pretty well, and avoiding places where there were cameras, but it was obvious they were running out of luck.

“Amar, how much further?” One of the kids whispered, while covered in sweat. They were wiry and muscled, but they were too thin. If these kids ever had more than one meal in a day their entire lives, they didn’t look like it. “The younger ones are already too tired.”

“Just a bit further. The shield’s active so we can’t use our usual routes.” They spoke to each other in hushed tones and quickly too, but I’d operated long enough in Indian to pick up on everything they were saying just fine. My gut feeling looked like it was paying off, as they seemed like they were talking about leaving the base. “My brother told me that he’s on the other side. This is our best way out, so tell them to keep moving, unless they want to work here forever!”

The fact that the Indians were using these kids as technicians wasn’t news to me. Mad scientists took them young to teach them everything they needed to know and kept them around as maintenance crews. Some of them understood what they were doing. Others just followed the motions. Then, of course, there were those who found themselves to be superhuman scientists too. It was common before shit went before downhill.

However, it was surprising that it was happening with the last remnants of the Indian government.

If they wanted legitimacy, they should’ve kept their policy against using them.

But that was beside the point now.

All that mattered was that I kept shadowing them, while they evaded the guards and revealed the path that they planned to smuggle the food out of.

“It’s just a little farther, everyone. Let’s go!”

They kept moving and I followed them by appearing just as they skirted corners. It would’ve been impossible to track a trained group of specialists wary of ambush, but their average age was fourteen, so that fact didn’t matter. Technicians and budding smugglers weren’t that aware if people were following them or not.

So, unsurprisingly, they were almost spotted by some guards not wearing power armor as they crossed an intersection.

That could’ve spelled their doom, as the man moved to report them, but I was present.

And, the guard wasn’t covered in anything that could stop me.

I appeared beside him, and with a tap on his communicator and shoulder, sent one to a passing room and him into one of the sealed-off rooms.

Then, I went back to shadowing the kids as they trundled with their loot.

As far as I was concerned, I was earning every right to get out of this place.

…

The kids went up several flights of stairs and avoided most of the security, while I got rid of what they couldn’t. There were a lot of military police finding themselves in perfectly-sealed rooms without their communications equipment, but since we were making progress away from those places, I didn’t find any issue with what I was doing.

Eventually, the kids and their somewhat-soggy bags of frozen food reached an abandoned section of the complex that connected straight to some earthen walls. It lay behind a bulkhead that looked like it’d never been used, but it swung open for the kids with just a bit of effort on their part, and they closed it behind them.

Thankfully, I got a good look inside and found a shadowy alcove to pop myself into, while they turned on some electric torches in the room.

I checked if I could get out once I was in, but my power refused to work.

The shield was some sort of curtain, or maybe a series of nodes embedded around the earth of the base, which made sense. If someone intended to invade them by burrowing into the base, or sent burrowing explosives through the ground at them, it was better for their shields be away from the underground complex, so that structural damage wouldn’t be an issue.

I just wished that they didn’t think of it, so that I could’ve gotten out already.

Amar stood tall, while the rest of his group fell onto their asses, panting from carrying kilos upon kilos of food for a few kilometers. He seemed like a decent leader, especially for a kid. The bareheaded kid kept standing and checking for any power-armored people coming their way, even though he was tired.

I would’ve been on my ass with the rest of them.

Anyway, he started fiddling with his device for a bit and looking around.

For a second, I thought he was looking right at me.

Instinctively, I covered myself up with my power, and he looked confused as the device beeped. He looked my way some more, before looking back at the screen, and turning it off.

Huh, it probably had different sensors for detecting regular people.

Neat.

If it had a production model, I’d want one.

My thoughts were cut off when the room began to rumble and the earth walls of the room began to shake, until suddenly sloughing and becoming sand, as someone entered the room holding out some sort of glove.

A sonic weapon?

Maybe a disintegrator?

Or, maybe some fabricator part that just got overcharged into a weapon?

I put those thoughts aside, as I realized how the man got through the shields.

He had his own form of energy shielding around him, which probably let him slip through the existing field by some scientific bullshit that I didn’t understand.

Which was bad for me, as the man looked at the kids and nodded at Amar.

“Put these on and stay close behind me.” He took his bag and gave the kids some sort of emitter on a strap. They all took it and after putting it on, they moved towards him with their bags on their back. The unnamed inventor shook his head and took the bags himself, with whatever exoskeleton he wore under his clothes whining as he did. “We’re going to be burrowing through this and sealing the area behind us. Stay close, because we’ll be slowed down if we must dig you out.”

The kids all nodded and agreed with the man.

I consigned myself to not getting out, but getting a decent place to stay safe in for the meantime, when the man checked something on his wrist.

I thought that I’d be fine, until he held the tool he’d used to get in here right at me.

“Who are you!? Show yourself or I’ll shoot!”

Well.

This was going to be interesting.

Usually, people shot first before asking questions which made just leaving an option, but since the guy might be convinced to come back with one of those nifty shield-bypassing gadgets… I might get more out of this than I thought I would!