The table lamp had come alive overnight and hovered over the table, mocking Newton’s Law of universal gravitation, and the curtains danced to a multi-colored tune streaming from the radio.
What the … ? I got out of bed, fully dressed in combat uniform, boots and all, and pulled the window shut. The curtains stopped dancing, but the lamp still floated in thin air. The radio must have seen me, for it began crawling towards the door.
I stomped the psychotic little bugger to death with my heel.
Undaunted, the lamp wiggled and smiled.
Motherfucker. Using the back of my hand, I whacked it across the room. It exploded against the wall and spread like yellow candy on the floor.
Ouch. Dude. It’s a radio. It plays music. Chill the fuck out. You’re on something.
I took a breath to calm my nerves. Whew. What a weird day. I sat down on the bed, watching TV.
No, I didn’t. The TV was in the mess hall in Barrack Three, and I was here in Barrack One, stoned out of my skull.
But, how? It couldn’t be …? Oh, man. I stared at my hands. My fingers turned to snakes. Not good.
Worse. The room spun and began stretching out towards infinity. I’d be squeezed to death in a second.
Heart pounding in my chest, I bolted for the door, yanked it open and jumped into an alternate universe -- looking like the corridor outside my room, but for a few odd details.
The walls were covered with beautiful glass flowers, and the lamps in the ceiling were made of dying stars. If it weren’t for the river of blood splashing around my ankles, I’d say this was an improvement. Still, something was missing, and for the life of me, I couldn’t remember what it was.
In a bondage and discipline berth like this, a misplaced item could spell trouble.
Wait … it was me. I was partial, sketchy, inadequate. Imperfect. Aha. The uniform I wore wasn’t complete without my MP5 submachine gun and bayonet.
Should I go back and fetch it?
No. Under these extreme circumstances, I’d be better off without such dangerous doodads.
Good thinking. Rational brain. Good thinking.
Sucker.
My heart fluttered as a rang, dang, dang fire alarm sang a singalong ding-dong in the ceiling … I hit the floor.
Calm down. This isn’t real. Think. It has to be the EA-1729. Someone must have found it and set it off.
If the Air Base was still there, and the barracks hadn’t moved since yesterday, corporal Tojo Roy would be in Barrack Two, next to mine. Good God, if it was this bad up here, what was it like in downtown Oslo?
The corridor twisted and whirled, but I forced myself to march bravely, straight ahead in a disciplined, military manner towards the emergency exit.
Eyes front. Left, right, left, right, Die Fahne Hoch, shut, the, fuck, up, left, right, left,…
It worked. I opened the door, and stepped into a Jurassic world I had never seen before.
Lianas in all colors of the rainbow hung from trees without leaves, sucking up sun-blinks from a purple sky. A T-Rex flew by overhead, roaring like an F-35.
Awesome. Those things could actually fly. Slack-jawed, I gazed.
Zap, zap, snapping in and out of it, I sidestepped a wild-eyed orangutang, caught my sleeve in a thorny vine, jerked myself loose and continued into barrack Two.
Almost there. I slammed the door behind me and marched steadfast towards salvation.
Three doors down, I found it.
357 Tojo Roy, corporal, conscripted.
I knocked, opened, and heavenly angels carried me inside, warbling in Tojo’s voice. “I am Lord Shiva, the Witness of the Creation, the Master of the Self, and the Tantric Bodhisattva of all eras.”
Lord Ganesh, the Elephant God, had descended upon the Earth.
But why did He call himself Shiva? And why did He speak in Tojo’s voice?
I shook my head, rubbed my eyes and squinted.
Aha. It wasn’t Lord Ganesh, the Elephant God, after all. It just looked that way to the untrained eye.
I had finally found Tojo Roy -- conscripted, drafted, shanghaied by his nation to be robbed of his youth like the rest of us, but he was a corporal. Two stripes, hence my boss, even though my father was richer than his. Hopefully, he was also smarter, because this demented tangle was not going to extricate itself easily.
Tojo sat on the floor in Lotus position, wearing a gas mask. “Welcome, Evan Zander. Please, join me in meditation,” he rumbled in his mask, leaving a trail of twinkling stardust in the air as he traced the Sanskrit name for the Path to Enlightenment with his hand. “Let the words of the Dalai Lama guide you. What is important is not so much how long you live as whether you live a meaningful life. This doesn’t mean accumulating money and fame, but being of service to your fellow human beings. It means helping others if you can, but even if you can’t do that, at least not harming them.”
Guilt and suffering flushed through my mind and made me weep. I sniveled. “Corporal Tojo Roy, I know my greed is the cause of all this. I’m a rich, entitled asshole who spits on the destitute and never gets enough. Please forgive me, and help me make amends.”
He put his finger to his air intake. “I am as guilty as you are. This whole Air Base is tripping balls, and if it’s this bad up here, you can imagine what it’s like in downtown Oslo. Find a gas mask. That will keep the EA-1729 from entering your airways. Then sit down. We need to figure out what to do.”
With tears in my eyes, I fetched a mask from his locker, put it on, and sat vis-à-vis, observing, sniffing, speed-learning how to meditate.
Satisfied, I folded my legs, put my my hands on my knees the same way he did, with three fingers together, invoking the Holy Trinity.
“Focus on your breathing,” he blared. “Wait until you’re one with Shiva, then let’s go through yesterday’s events.”
With the gas mask going ka-choo, ka-choo, ka-choo in my head, my heart rate slowed. I could think again. God bless Corporal Tojo Roy.
Tojo began chanting some powerful, magical Indian song, pulling snakes out of the wallpaper and combining them into a mesmerizing beanstalk to Heaven.
Freaking me out in the process. I hollered. “Tojo, please don’t sing.”
His eyes glared inside his mask. “What? You don’t like the muffled gas mask acoustics? You should have thought of that before you booby-trapped the top of an elevator house. Shut up and find your center. That’s an order.” He chanted again.
Bullshit, corporal Roy. Bullshit. I never booby-trapped anything. Bloody snakes. I shut my eyes.
My body began to levitate. First a few centimeters, then my spirit soared through the roof and shot like a missile to Heaven. Whoa. Too much.
I kept my eyes shut. Now I was in space, hovering over the space station. I spun around the Earth in a counterclockwise motion, zoomed in on Europe, Norway, Oslo, north to Guard Moan Air Base, then west towards the decommissioned cold war weapons storage area.
There I was, patrolling the area with my MP5 and bayonet.
Tojo patrolled next to me.
It was yesterday, around thirteen hundred hours. The world was normal. Except for Captain Hanson, Tojo and me, the base was deserted. Everyone had gone to town for the weekend.
Captain Hanson had told us that come Monday, the decommissioned weapons would be buried under fifty centimeters of concrete, and until then, they could look after themselves. If we checked all seven bunkers before our watch was over, we could go and get wasted in town with the others.
Wasted. Ha, ha. I opened my eyes.
Gas-mask-Tojo was on fire. Burning worms crawled out of his ears. They’d probably continue doing that for at least five more hours, and only if I kept my gas mask on. If I took it off, even for a minute, I’d have to start counting from zero.
Don’t slip. Stay concentrated. I closed my eyes again, focused on my breath, and my mind whirled off back to yesterday’s foot patrol.
Yesterday. In addition to our standard gear, we had been issued flashlights and Geiger counters. Armed with this equipment, we had completed our inspection of missile bunker six without incident, making sure that the apocalyptic dreamware still looked like a stack of five-meter long pointless darts -- courtesy of our friendly cold war psychopaths.
When fate reached out and grabbed us, there had only been one shit-locus left to visit before we could join our friends in town. The last bunker lay next to the airplane graveyard at the end of an overgrown, winding footpath. Orders or not, had I known this would happen, I would never have gone that way.
I remembered how the sun hid behind a cloud as we meandered through rows of old F5 Freedom Fighters, destined for exportation to the Sudan, Nigeria and the Philippines, where they would presumably help the degenerates commit more effective massacres.
Yesterday’s Normal-Tojo nudged me in the side. “What do you think is in the seventh bunker?” he said.
“Old missiles, like in the others?”
Tojo shook his head. “Warheads. That’s why nobody goes in there.”
“You’re shitting me?” I bowed to avoid a wingtip.
“Let’s say you were married. When our military service is over, you decide to take your gun home with you. What do you think your wife would say?”
I sneered. “If she were a rational person, which I hope she will be, she’d throw it in the garbage.”
“Right. Now, for the purpose of this illustration, let’s assume she was a total idiot, but not stupid enough to let you keep a machine-gun in the house. What would you do?”
Aha. “I’d put the ammunition somewhere else. Then, I’d tell her that the machine gun was totally harmless without ammunition.”
“And of course, you’d promise never, ever to insert that clip. Well, we’re the obtuse wives, and our military is our devious husband.”
“You’re joking.”
“Check your Geiger counter.”
I yanked the apparatus from my belt and switched it on.
An eerie series of ticks emanated from it.
“This is bad.” I pointed it left and right. The ticks slowed down. I pointed along the path. The ticks sped up.
“Never marry a stupid girl, Evan. Children inherit eighty percent of their intelligence from the mother.”
I grabbed Tojo’s sleeve. “We’ll just verify that the bunker is still there and piss off.”
He smiled. “I agree. Only a lobotomized idiot would step inside B7. However, that’s exactly what we’ve been ordered to do, one last time before they fill it in with concrete. Welcome to the military, Evan. We’re a band of brainless brutes.”
“You and I will be the last two people to see the inside of Bunker Seven, then?”
“Yup, but don’t get melancholic. It’s not a place you’ll miss.”
As we approached the bunker, the Geiger counter quickened. Tick, tick, ticktick, tick, ticktick …
I cringed. “When was the last time someone was down there?”
“Ooh, that was back in them days of nineteen hundred and bow and arrow, mate.”
“Cut it out, man. I’m nervous enough as it is. When was the last inspection? Last year?”
“Nineteen ninety-two, according to the log.” Tojo pulled a keyring from his belt, jingling the keys to the unstable rhythm produced by my Geiger metronome in an ominous, low-volume cacophonia.
In a radioactive cellar six feet below Hell, a clown-faced demon cackled.
The end of the world lay before us in the shape of a hole in the ground. Two bulldozers had already been parked near the rim, ready to fill it in.
A red sign said ‘Mortal Danger. Stay away.’
Ew. Tojo was right. This was definitely not a place anyone would miss.
A rusty metal staircase led down to a three meter high, ten meter wide concrete wall with a spotted door. This version of Hitler heaven has once been painted in blue and white, but over time, corrosion had eaten the blue out of the metal. Wind and weather had flogged the white off the concrete, turning it into a grody sinkhole in brown and gray.
Tojo took point. For each step, our boots clanged against the metal, making the aging structure vibrate and moan, drowning out the Geiger counter. Dust and decay snowed down like dandruff, and half the steps didn’t look like they could hold my weight.
Happy that we made it to the bottom, I beheld the letters B7, faded, but still legible.
Tojo kicked a scrumpy cat cadaver out of the way, then shook a can of industrial lubricant, sprayed down a padlock dangling from a rusty iron bar and inserted a key.
The padlock sprang open with a click.
“They don’t make them like that anymore.” I chuckled to keep my mind off the ticking Geiger counter, but it didn’t help. “This isn’t going to cook our testicles, is it?”
“Not if you’ve wrapped them in aluminium foil like you’re supposed to.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“You think?” Tojo pulled the bar aside, sprayed the door lock, inserted another key and turned it. With a grimace, he thumped his shoulder against the door.
It didn’t budge.
He retreated five meters, then sprang forward, pranced and Kung Fu-ed it with his heel. To no avail.
“Stuck?” That wasn’t a very helpful thing for me to say, but it was the best I could come up with. I certainly wasn’t going to tell him that the Portal to Hell was locked because Satan was fucking our futures and didn’t want to be disturbed.
“Seems that way.” Tojo scratched his head, mumbling. “This needs more than a thump. It needs a series of sharp blows to loosen the corrosion on the other side.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Shoot the mādāracōda,” he said, chambering a round on his MP5.
“The what?”
“Get back,” he commanded.
Doubtful, but obedient, I took up position behind him and covered my ears.
Kaka, daka, daka, daka … the sharp, dry detonations from the MP5 concussed my chest and spiralled to the skies. Star-shaped cracks appeared in the gray-painted iron door as the bullets slammed into it, before they fell like swatted flies onto the concrete.
The silence rang in my ears.
“I think that does it.” Tojo leaned against the door.
It creaked open, scaring the crap out of my Geiger counter, which began to palpitate.
Ticktickticktick
“We’d better not linger in this place.” Tojo disappeared inside.
Reluctantly, I followed him down another flight of stairs.
The place smelled like a wine cellar, cold and dry, but the wines in here would burn a hole through the gut and wheeze their way down to Chile.
“I thought Norway was an atom-free zone,” I whispered. My preposterous asseveration echoed off into the murk.
Tojo laughed. “Without atoms, we’re nothing.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Of course. There are no nuclear weapons in Norway.”
“Then what’s my Geiger counter counting?”
“Euphemisms, Evan. It’s counting euphemisms. Slight increases in the natural background radioactivity due to storage of classified spare parts that could, theoretically, be assembled into nuclear weapons, but that are not, in fact, nuclear weapons as specified by the SALT agreement. Husbands and wives.”
It took a while for me to get the ‘Eureka’ experience, but finally, I was able to ask, “So, if the warheads in here were mounted on the missiles in the other bunkers, we could nuke Russia, China or the USA?”
“No. Only strategic missiles can go that far. These are tactical nukes.”
“What are tactical nukes used for, then?”
“Nuking ourselves.”
“Why on Earth would anyone do that?”
Tojo tilted his head. “Are you being deliberately obtuse?”
“No. I just don’t see why we would vaporize ourselves with atom bombs. It doesn’t make sense. To what end?”
“To keep Russia, China and the USA safe during nuclear wars, of course. What else?“
“To keep Russia, China and the USA safe during nuclear wars, of course. What else?“
“Let’s not linger like you said.”
Tojo shone a flashlight at five yellow barrels in a corner, then at a paper on his clipboard. “Okay. That’s the excess plutonium. Now, where are the W80s?” He let the light beam wander towards a stack of shiny cylinders the size of fire extinguishers. “Count them,” he said.
“One, two, three, four, …” I counted fourteen. Every word I spoke seemed to wander off into a dark tunnel, covered with rotting boards.
“Good. We’re done.” Tojo folded up the clipboard and hung it in his belt.
A faded sign above the boarded-up tunnel said, ‘Military Intelligence Only’.
I pointed at the enticing oxymoron. “What’s in there? Captain Hanson’s brain?”
“Nothing. Everything is accounted for. Let’s go.”
Not so fast. There was something about the way it had been sealed off -- hastily, as if whoever did it expected to come back. That, and the fact that it had been undisturbed since long before 1992, made it an irresistible enigma. I broke loose some boards and stepped inside.
The geiger counter slowed.
What could be so secret, they had to hide it in a nuclear bunker? “Hey, Tojo. Listen. There’s no radiation here. Maybe we can get out on the other side?”
“There is no other side.”
“Aren’t you curious?”
“Aren’t you thirsty?” Gas-Mask-Tojo’s voice pulled me from yesterday’s adventure and back into today’s reality.
Reality might not be the correct term, given that he hovered 20 cm above the floor.
“There’s a coke in the fridge.”
I pulled the fridge door, fumbled around in a nest of furry animals, found the sparkling coke bottle and opened it. Remembering my training, I took a deep breath, lifted my mask and drank.
A million angry spiders crawled down my throat.
I put the mask back on and burped. My mask fogged over. I was at sea.
“Give it here.”
I handed it to starboard.
Tojo drank, put the cap on the bottle and exhaled. “What were we before we became soldiers?”
Happy. “Students.”
“Where did we live?”
Home. “West side.”
“And what do west-side people never discuss?”
What? “I don’t recall. I don’t think it was ever discussed--”
Tojo raised his index finger. “What is the one thing we never think about?”
“I don’t know. The future and all that jazz?”
“Austerity.”
Oh. Austerity. Scarcity engineering. The thing we never talked about, for a reason. To those of us whose parents had inherited property and whose property we stood to inherit, housing shortages were a good thing. People would pay us their entire salaries in rent so their kids could sleep indoors during the ice cold Oslo winters. For them, it was better to starve than freeze.
Once I owned a couple of apartments, I was set for life. Like my father before me, I’d never have to work another day, and neither would my children, provided I didn’t have more than two. We’d live comfortably on the West side from cradle to grave, enjoying the fruits of the blood, sweat and tears excreted by the people living in our superfluous homes.
For us, the more who died, the more desperate the destitute, the more profitable the market became.
Being on the wrong side of that equation had to be hell.
Sincerely. My sympathies. “How could we have been so blind?”
“Yes, Evan. We should have considered the government’s austerity measures.”
Of course. The government incentives. “Hate spikes on park benches, making the poor sleep on the ground.”
“Rentacops in parking garages, kicking the poor out into the snow.”
Engineering fear. “The homeless have nowhere to go except places where no one should think anyone would want to be.”
“Exactly. Like a run down elevator house in a condemned building. Instead of sanctuary, the poor bugger found his death.”
No. Not that. Impossible. “I never booby-trapped anything, Tojo.”
“In your layman’s opinion, what do you think ‘impact fuze’ means?”
I slapped my mask. “You mean, some homeless wretch found it and dropped it on the floor? How can anyone be so dumb?”
“The Universe is finite, Evan. Stupidity is not.”
What else could it be? “We should get some chlorpromazine.”
“Antidote? Not now. We need to stay creative. Where were we?”
“In the tunnel.”
In the tunnel, I trod towards a thick, metal hatch.
Tojo shone the light on it.
A faded sign contained a string of letters.
“Lasciate ogni speranza, Voi Ch’entrate.” A shiver ran down my spine.
Tojo laughed. “Lavatory and spare diapers at the entrance.”
I wiped off the dust and read.
Access only in the event of a Soviet Invasion of Oslo.
“Like that’s going to happen.” I turned the wheel.
It opened with a hiss.
I stepped through and entered a small room. At the far end, what appeared to be a man-sized bomb lay on a workbench, partially assembled. The upper casing had been removed, or perhaps never mounted.
I pulled my flashlight from my belt and examined it.
The letters 500 LB M-43 led me to conclude that I was contemplating a 250 kg bomb designated M43. The letters BZ had been stricken through and replaced with EA-1729 (experimental). For an organization that didn’t value human intelligence, the military sure didn’t make it easy to figure stuff out.
I put the Geiger counter next to it, but the ticks remained the same. Chilled.
“Handle with care.” Tojo grinned to my right, shining his flashlight at the bomb itself. There was a gray and green band where the yellow band would be.
“Yeah. Keep away from open flames. Do not dispose of in fire.” I chuckled as I put the casing back on the bench.
“It looks flammable, all right.” Tojo pointed at the cylinders packed inside the bomb. Each looked like a bomb in its own right.
A cluster bomb. I pulled a drawer, revealing a manual.
The one at the top made my jaw drop. I picked it up.
CONFIDENTIAL
July 3 1964 CRDLZl 3226
THE HUMAN ASSESSMENT OF EA 1729 AND EA 3528 BY THE INHALATION ROUTE (U)
by James S. Ketchum, George K. Aghajaidan, Oscar H. L. Bing
Clinical Research Division
What the hell? “Tojo, look at this.”
Tojo snatched it and leafed through it, mumbling, gasping, swearing, muttering in Bengali language, …
I remembered an old pop album from my father’s lame 1980s collection, aptly named ‘Keep you distance’. The band name was even more appropriate: Curiosity Killed The Cat. “Chemical weapons? Maybe we should get the fuck out of here?”
“These are non-lethal. Have you heard of project MK-ULTRA?”
“That spychedelic conspiracy theory from the 1960s?”
“One of the few conspiracy theories that have been backed by empirical evidence.”
I frowned. “Like what?”
“Like this manual, listing the effects of LSD when used on soldiers.”
Another manual, with the title CBU-5/B BZ had a picture detailing the innards as three stacks of nineteen bomblets containing BZ non-lethal gas for use in psycho-chemical warfare, or alternatively, psycho-chemical agent EA 1729. See appendix CRDLZ1.
It was a cluster bomb, all right, but in a very good way. According to the manuals, each of the bomblets contained two million doses of military grade LSD. At the modest price of fifty crowns per dose …
Oh, man. “Tojo, we’re richer than our dads.”
Tojo frowned. “You mean steal it? We’re not thieves.”
“We can’t steal something that doesn’t belong to anyone anymore.”
“So, we fill our pockets with M-138 bomblets and hide them in our lockers?”
“No. We can’t leave any of it behind. Imagine the environmental consequences if something happened. We have to take it all.”
“How?”
“Wrap it in a tarp, roll it to the exit and attach it to a chain.”
“Uh-huh. And how do we lift it?”
“We pull it up using one of the bulldozers topside. Nobody steals bulldozers. I bet the keys are in at least one of them.”
Tojo raised an eyebrow. “That could actually work.”
I was on a roll. “Then, we hide the bomblets far away from here, in places nobody would ever look.”
Tojo grinned. “We’re going to town anyway, and if we promise to stay sober, Captain Hanson will surely let us borrow a Volvo C303 All Terrain Field Wagon.”
Back in the real world, I sighed. “That’s when greed turned us both into thieves.”
Gas-mask-Tojo huffed and puffed. “We’re not thieves anymore. One or more of our bombs has gone off and created chaos, from downtown Oslo and all the way up here. Rest assured, as soon as the effect of the EA-1729 wears off, we’re terrorists. That is, unless we come up with something before the cloud dissipates, some time during in the next 24 hours.”
“Should we run?”
“If we run, they’ll know it was us. You know what they say about running and hiding. It’s not sustainable.”
“Should we call the cops and confess?”
“Are you high?”
I glanced at the space opera in the ceiling, playing in full 3D. “Fucked.”
“Then you know the answer to that. My suggestion is to take a Volvo C303 All Terrain Wagon and assess the situation. Once we know exactly what happened, we’ll find a way to blame it on IS, Al Qaeda or the Nazis.”
“Of course.” I slapped my mask. “We retrace our steps from yesterday.”
Tojo nodded. “Let’s go through the rules.”
I began. “Cars can hurt you.”
Tojo spread his wings. “You cannot fly.”
Good one. “It's never a good time to die.”
“Taking your clothes off will draw attention.”
“Keep mouth shut at all times in public.”
“Although you may see things that are not there, you'll still be able to see real things. In other words, cars that are present in the street will not become invisible.”
I let out a silent fart. “Don't forget how to burp.”
“No matter how fucked you think you are, you'll eventually come down.”
“That’s it?”
He nodded. “That’s it -- I think.”
“Have you ever driven on LSD? I hear it’s impossible.”
“The Volvo C303 can take a fender-bender. Besides, I’ve got you help me, and we’ll drive slowly.”
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