Survival Bunker System Developer

Designing the Bunker System

It was noon by the time Caleb woke up. He slept through all his alarms and groaned at the headache he was having. Jeremy wasn’t very pleased with his owner and gave Caleb an attitude when the man came to the kitchen with a stubbly chin.

Mindlessly, Caleb searched for the packet of cat food and poured a generous amount for Jeremy who immediately pounced on it. Caleb felt bad for neglecting his feline friend. It didn’t happen often but every once in a while, Caleb would experience some kind of jet lag after working on a project intensively. He calls it entering a hibernation mode from overusing his brainpower. Calling out that system and understanding it took a lot more out of him than Caleb expected.

“It’s going to be another long day,” he sighed then looked at the calendar and crossed out another day.

There were only four more days to the 1st of May. Caleb didn’t know if he would be able to complete the quest of designing a good bunker system by today but he was determined to do it by tomorrow so that he had more time to test out the creation of his very first basic bunker. A hundred square feet wasn’t enough to cover the entirety of his apartment much less the apartment building that he was in. Also, Caleb was ambitious. He needed the bunker levels to be upgraded so that he could include the furnishings inside. It defeated the purpose of setting up a bunker in Rockfeller University and not being able to include any lab equipment.

Once again, Caleb turned to the internet to print out a more detailed map of New York City. If he was going to design a bunker system, Caleb had to also take the city’s resources into consideration if he wanted to save humanity. Surviving in a bunker alone wasn’t good enough. After the surviving the apocalypse, it was also important to be able to recover from the losses.

“The first thing I have to do is secure strategic places in the city so that humanity can pick itself back up after the ghoul extermination. I also need to think of a plan to create ghoul-free zones for safe travelling between bunkers. Perhaps some kind of defence systems would be required at a later stage. However, the main focus would be to secure food, water, power and medical attention for the wounded. Helen would also require a lab but won’t happen too soon.”

Looking at New York City’s Map, Caleb also did a little research about the places that would provide what he required. Food was easily settled for now. If he could secure a huge Target Store, he would have enough things to last for a long time. Target didn’t just sell food. They also had furniture, clothes and even gardening supplies that can come in useful at a later stage.

Power was slightly tricky. Many power stations still burned fuel such as crude oil or natural gas. There were very few options that could supply electricity without requiring non-renewable resources. However, after digging up a lot of things, there was one power station conveniently situated in Astoria near the East River. The power plant was rather new and only been there for the last five years. It ran on hydropower so the source is renewable. Caleb circled that on the map in addition to the Target store in Manhattan and Rockfeller University.

Briefly, Caleb wondered if he should pick Rockfeller Hospital as the base for their medical supplies. It would be convenient if the location of the targeted supply bunkers can be close to each other. He didn’t think that travelling between locations infested with ghouls was a good thing. However, he wasn’t sure if Rockfeller Hospital would be equipped with the necessary supplies for an influx of wounded warriors and sick civilians. Hence, he poured the next hour into research.

As expected, Rockfeller Hospital wasn’t well equipped for handling many special cases. The best-equipped hospital for any case would be the hospital a little further away from Rockfeller University along the East River bank. The name of the hospital was rather long but it was Presbyterian Hospital that happened to have deep funds on top of its good reputation. Caleb circled that as well.

With the first four out of five criteria fulfilled easily, Caleb sighed at securing a water supply. After pulling out maps and researching about New York City’s water supply, he could now understand why the government chose to cut the supply to the city. Firstly, none of the water from the East River or the Hudson River could be used for drinking. It was simply too polluted with all the factories and sewage treatment plants dumping into it. New York’s water came from a long way. Croton was the old water system that supplied Manhattan’s population. The new water system received their supply from a very massive aqua duct coming from more than ten reservoirs in the outskirts of the city. The water treatment facility was in Westchester, an hour’s drive from the city. That was simply too far for Caleb and if anything went wrong with the only water supply, Caleb couldn’t fix it as quickly as he wanted. The civilians would suffer and Caleb wondered if there was a way to set up a water filtration plant in the city and distribute the water from a closer source instead. It wasn’t difficult to build a water filtration system, Caleb just didn’t know how he was going to connect them to the water pipelines and distribute them to the individual bunkers created by the system.

Caleb sighed. Both options were terrible. He couldn't make such a risky decision. The more time survivors spent outside the bunkers, the higher they were at risk of getting attacked. If it took an hour to drive to the nearest water treatment facility on a normal day, it would be extremely dangerous to get there without a vehicle in an apocalyptic condition when gas stations run out of fuel.

Caleb frowned. There weren’t any water treatment plants that he knew about in New York City either and he wondered if the system had a way to resolve his problem. He could design a system for water treatment within the city but he didn’t know if the system would be able to build such a massive thing in a short time. There was less than a month before the start of the apocalypse. Caleb didn’t have the spare money, time or manpower to build a system capable of supporting New York City’s survivors. With close to ten million people living in the city, Caleb had to plan for resources enough to take care of at least a million survivors when the apocalypse started even though that was him being optimistic. By the end of the three-month mark in his previous life, there were only about a hundred thousand survivors remaining in the city.

Instead of fretting about what he couldn’t handle, Caleb included his concern in his proposal for the bunker system. If he could develop a water filtration device that could be easily manufactured and distributed to households and re-channel the water from the rivers to the pipelines, there wouldn't be a need to take over any water filtration plant. In the worst-case scenario, Caleb could get some help from the survivors to build a new water filtration system with the existing sewage treatment plant’s facilities because he could turn the sewage treatment plant into a bunker.

Once he knew what sort of resources he required, Caleb turned to the search engines and forums to look up theories about the most ideal apocalyptic bunkers. The information he found online was rather similar to his thoughts. After securing the basic supplies, Caleb read about how systems should be implemented within the bunker for patrolling, resource gathering, information gathering and researching for a vaccine or cure. Having a defence system to deter attacks from was good for a beginner bunker. However, the more advanced bunkers that decided the fate of humanity often consisted of overpowered weapons that can hold of hordes. Caleb took that into consideration.

How could he design a weapon for the bunkers to fight against ghouls and kill the intelligent ghoul? PXE22 wasn’t going to stop evolving and without information and weapons to fight against the unknown, humanity can only spend the rest of their existence in self-sufficient bunkers that wouldn’t last forever. Caleb knew that the system was able to create safe shelters but how many could he make without the ability to gather resources and venture outside? That was impossible.

In his report, Caleb added the map of New York and highlighted the estimated number of bunkers he needed to create to save the people of New York City if there were as many survivors as he predicted. Again, a million survivors was him being positive. In his previous life, he didn’t see more than ten survivor camps and he was positive that more than half of them were wiped out within the first week after the government pulled out. Not many of the camps were doing well after the power and water sources were cut. There were a few lone warriors who didn’t belong to shelter groups and Caleb didn’t bother them too much because he didn’t think they would live long enough to befriend them.

The resources in the city were still plenty even after two months simply because too many people were already dead. The dead don’t need resources and not all the survivors could get those resources. Many were sick from the poor living conditions and some died from their illness. Caleb was one of the fewer and luckier ones who were able to benefit from living in a less populated neighbourhood with plenty of convenience stores and supermarkets in the vicinity. The fact that he lived alone helped and Caleb didn’t remember seeing any survivor camps in Windsor Terrace. Most of the camps were set up in the heavily affected areas such as Manhattan, Brownsville, Jersey City and Astoria. Most of those survivor shelters were underground in the abandoned subway systems in Manhattan or institutes like high schools and universities.

Caleb didn’t want to do the same thing. Subways and schools were not good bunker shelters even if there were sufficient space and facilities for the survivors. Firstly, these locations were too close to populated areas that would have been heavily infected by ghouls. The survivors wouldn’t be able to go out to source for resources and many would die or turn into ghouls when they failed.

He spent the next four hours looking over the maps and visiting Google Maps to verify the city street images before marking out potential locations for the bunkers he wanted to build in each neighbourhood within New York City. The system developer spent more time than he liked simply because he had a very strict checklist to abide by.

Firstly, all the bunkers must be able to accommodate at least fifty people easily and have amenities like a kitchen, water that connected to one of the city’s main pipelines, power that can be routed from the power plant he intended to take over and food stores within a ten-minute walking distance from the shelter.

Once those criteria were met, Caleb checked if the area had a high crime rate. If the area had a low crime rate, he listed that bunker on the lowest priority. Those areas would be difficult for him to work with before the actual apocalypse. The richer folks would also leave the city while they could so the number of survivors needing bunkers would be fewer. Caleb wanted to prioritise the number of people he could save during the first wave.

After that, Caleb would calculate the size of the bunker’s location and add them to a spreadsheet so that he knew a rough estimate of the resources he needed to collect for it. There were about eighty to a hundred proposed bunkers with thirty in the first priority level, forty in the second priority level and the rest in the least important priority level. In the first priority group of bunkers, Caleb already estimated a minimum of seventy-five tons of metals required. That was estimating four people to an empty hundred square feet room and a hundred people in each bunker building. A car was worth about one ton in metal and buying seventy-five cars to build those bunkers was out of the question. Caleb might earn a lot but he wasn’t rich enough to buy America.

Caleb groaned while he looked at the figures. The situation wasn’t looking good and the system developer started to wonder if he should stop being the good guy for once. Money didn’t mean anything when the apocalypse started so it shouldn’t matter if he stole a few scrap metals from the scrap metal yard or a cruise from the docks, right?

Caleb shook his head. For now, he would only prepare the proposal and complete his quest. It was nearly seven in the morning and the system developer spent the entire night simply researching more about the map of New York. His head pounded and Caleb decided to continue the rest in the afternoon after a decent sleep. In the afternoon, he would research about creating an eco-system within a confined space with green technology so that every bunker can be modified to be self-sufficient. It would be best if the women, children and elderly did not need to risk their lives leaving bunkers to get resources.

Caleb’s mind spun and he made a long list of things he wanted to include in the bunkers even though they sounded unrealistic for now. The system was given to him by God. Surely it could manage something as trivial as an ideal bunker, right? Caleb wasn’t against working hard to build an ideal bunker so that everyone could tide through the apocalypse. However, he wasn’t going to be satisfied with just an ordinary bunker that could defend against common ghouls. Once the awakened ghoul appeared, these bunkers might hold out against its coordinated attacks but it wasn’t enough to help the survivors last more than a week without being self-sufficient.

New York City might be full of resources with the abandoned shops full of food in their storage. Getting stocked isn’t as much of an issue as getting to the stock. Ghouls were very powerful, more so than humans and even a strong man would face difficulties facing more than one ghoul without risking an injury. Guns worked the best against ghouls but there were not many gun shops with ammunitions. Guns also didn’t work for the awakened ghoul who was able to regenerate at an insane speed.

Caleb wanted to include some sort of plans for a garage or a lab so that he could pull a group of engineers from the survivors to design ghoul killing weapons that even children could use. With the bunker system, Caleb wanted to plan for ghoul-killing expeditions to ‘clean’ an infected area to make it safe for walking and travelling. Wouldn’t it be great if something like a zone could be created like the bunker so that they could start a farm or something?

As Caleb thought about it and build his dream bunker, sleep claimed him silently until only snores could be heard from his room. Jeremy wasn’t pleased that his owner had fallen asleep and forgotten to feed him again but seeing how exhausted the human was, the cat retracted his claws and walked away despite his rumbling stomach. He would show mercy this time only because his owner had been very distressed lately.