Chapter 17

Welcome Wastelanders to the Post-Apocalyptic Joe in a Cinematic Wasteland Audiobook Podcast! My name is Joe Gillis, and I’m the writer and narrator of this Serial Fiction Series. We’re in Chapter 17 this week, but there are more chapters headed your way, so be sure to subscribe.

Also, if you stay until the very end, you’ll get a peek behind the page with a quick tidbit about this chapter.

The story so far…

Stuck underground after what was most likely the destruction of Earth, Joe discovered he wasn’t alone anymore after his tennis ball “came to life” and began talking to him. They quickly became BFFs and everything was great until Bally rolled into the hole and disappeared.

Let’s find out what happened next…

Chapter 17

There I was, sitting on the floor with my head down and tears pouring out after losing my best friend. I was a broken shell, but eventually I came to my senses and realized that there was a bigger problem. “How could Bally even disappear into a hole?”

That's when I noticed something odd about the wall. I wiped away my tears and then knocked on the wall. It sounded and felt like wood, not concrete. “What the…?”

In a fit of frustration, I began to take out my feelings on the wall. I kicked, punched, and threw my body against it. After some time had passed, I broke through, revealing what must have been some sort of secret government facility.

"Holy cow, Batman."

I always joked that my missile complex was my Batcave, and here I was, staring at something that would truly fit the bill. Instead of a tunnel, there was a bridge that led over to a platform in a massive hangar, complete with multiple levels throughout and lined with computers. The monitors and computers were both on, along with a ton of blinking lights that reminded me of the TOS-era Enterprise bridge.

And when I say it looked like the Batcave, I mean the walls were rock, with only the floor and equipment lining the walls being man-made, complete with other platforms at different levels. Heck, I think I could land a Batwing on the platform attached to the bridge. What’s amazing was the power was still on, even though I’m pretty darn sure we didn’t route anything to help with that, so this place must have been built with its own power supply.

The bridge appeared to be extremely sturdy, but I treated it like a rope bridge with rickety boards at first, taking it slow while tiptoeing onto it. The bridge had runway lights leading across, so I could see just fine. After building up enough confidence, I walked over to the left-hand-side railing to see if I could spot where Bally would have fallen.

“BALLY?” I called out as I gazed down.

My plea echoed throughout the deep, dark void that swallowed up my pal. All I could see was a whole lot of nothing, and all I could do was give Bally a moment of silence after I realized I might never see him again. I guess I could try to half glass full this situation: I didn’t find Bally, but I did discover a secret government facility.

After I grasped the fact that I wasn’t going to find Bally, I took the time to do the things I should have been paying attention to already. I sniffed the air before taking a deep breath in, “Hmmm?”

The air seemed mighty fresh and clean for a place that had been abandoned for who knows how long. There must be an air purifier somewhere, which was a good thing since I didn’t have a gas detector with me, and hopefully the ventilation helped keep dangerous gases from building up anywhere in the Batcave. Another good sign was that my alarming dosimeter hadn’t gone off.

“Well, here goes nothing,” I said to myself as I ninja-walked my way across the bridge into my new Batcave, keeping my head on a swivel because I didn’t know what was going to happen, or if I was alone anymore.

What was I going to do if there were other people here? If there was anyone in here, they could easily overtake me since I was a thinker, not a fighter, before the apocalypse. I really doubt there was anyone here anymore, but you never know. This had to have been some sort of a black site that the government used back in the day, and maybe they had forgotten all about it.

The U.S. Government would have never left all this gear here. They removed all the equipment before selling the missile silos, so I didn’t think the government would have sold me the complex if they had known about this place—especially with all these computers.

But why was everything still running?

I decided to bypass my curiosity and first do a quick sweep of the place just in case, which meant leaving the Batcave area and entering the double doors at the other end of the platform. Before I went through the doors, I quickly peeked through the window to see if there was anyone there.

There didn’t appear to be anyone inside.

My heart was racing as I placed my back against the wall. As I stood there, trying to get the courage to enter, I realized that me sneaking around was silly. If there was anyone here, there was no reason to hide from them. Building back up my confidence, I pushed both doors open and entered.

The secret facility hallway didn’t have the same look or feel of the missile complex. It had flat edges versus the round tunnels and had more of a sci-fi vibe than government-boring. I couldn’t even speculate what they did there because it wasn’t like any government building I had ever seen.

“Hello?” I called out.

No one answered.

“Hello… anyone else here?”

Nothing.

As I ventured slowly down the hall, I came across a door on my left.

“Here goes nothing.” I opened the door and immediately liked what I saw.

“Now this is a room I could have some fun in,” I said while admiring all the new toys.

The room must have been the science lab. It looked like a high-tech mad scientist laboratory, complete with the old school chemistry setup with beakers, test tubes, Bunsen burners—you know, the typical stuff you’d find in all the great science-gone-wrong movies. There were also three standing cryogenic stasis chambers to my left. The windows on the chambers were fogged up, a lot like what happens after you open a freezer door in a grocery store and then re-close it. The only difference was there were ice crystals forming around the window, too. I couldn’t make out what was inside of them, so I walked over and placed my hand against the glass, trying to block the light as put my face right up against the window of one of them.

“What the heck is that?”

I peered into the other two. They all housed the same thing—some sort of cryogenically frozen creature that was shriveled and burnt up. They all appeared to be holding Egyptian-like mummies, except someone had thrown some gasoline on these guys and torched them before tossing ’em in stasis.

“Why would you freeze burnt-up mummies?” I contemplated out loud.

Maybe they didn’t freeze them. Maybe they were in stasis when something went terribly wrong with their stasis chambers, burning up the bodies? I mean, this is tech that is pushing what we know in science.

That could explain why everything was still running, yet there didn’t seem to be anyone here. But as I contemplated all that, there was an elephant in the room that should have been the first thing that caught my attention—a massive stasis-like machine in the center of the room. The machine was enormous enough to fit two extremely tall humans lying down. It reminded me of a stasis chamber that might have been in a sci-fi movie like Aliens. The part the person (or thing) would lay down on was sheathed by a metal lid with glass windows lining the side, allowing me to see the whole inside of the chamber. I looked inside but there was nothing there.

Why is this one for lying down versus standing up? Maybe it’s not a stasis chamber. It seemed like the rest of the room was built around this one machine. That’s when I caught the name of the machine etched into the lid.

“The Genesis Machine… Hmmm, I’ve never heard of that before.”

I searched around for anything that would give me a clue as to what the Genesis Machine was. That’s when I spotted the mother lode: Technical Manual for Operation and Maintenance of the Genesis Machine. I picked up the manual and cracked it open. “What do you do, Genesis Machine?”

I skipped the Table of Contents, List of Related Manuals, and Safety Precautions and headed directly to the Introduction:

G.M. 47-CM85-1

Section I

Paragraphs 1-1 to 1-8

SECTION I

GENERAL DESCRIPTION

1. 1. INTRODUCTION.

1-2.    The CM85 Genesis Machine has all the equipment necessary to make a clone of a human being.  The Genesis Machine is capable of scanning the anatomy and mind to create an exact duplication of that individual.  The person’s cognitive and physical memory is mapped during the scan, allowing for imprinting into the new body as the cells are rebuilt.

1-3.    GENESIS TECHNOLOGY.

1-4.    ROSWELL INCIDENT

1-5.    In July 1947, the Army Air Force (AAF) recovered a flying disc that was of extraterrestrial origin from a crash near Roswell, New Mexico.  Both the alien remains and unidentified flying object were moved to an undisclosed facility for further examination.

“No. Freaking. Way.”

That concludes Chapter 17 of Post-Apocalyptic Joe in a Cinematic Wasteland. Written by Joe Gillis and read by Joe Gillis.

I’ve always heard that when one door closes, another one opens. Well, I guess that just might be true for Joe. What do you think he will do? Tune in next week to find out.

I have always been fascinated by the Roswell Incident. What really happened back in 1947? Who knows? Many people want to believe what the government said about it… well, the second time when they said it was a weather balloon, and there are many people who believe that it was a government conspiracy to cover up a UFO crash… which was their original stance.

Well, I totally get where both camps are coming from, but I got to say that it’s hard for me to buy that anyone in the military could mistake a weather balloon for something that they thought was a UFO.

Obviously, it makes for a way better science fiction story to have the government conspiracy angle, but you’ll have to wait until next week to see how all that plays out.

And that brings us to the end of another chapter.

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Thanks for joining me on this crazy journey! See you all on the flip side!

Post-Apocalyptic Joe in a Cinematic Wasteland copyright 2024, Joe Gillis, All rights reserved. This is a Jowagi Production and is distributed by Slacker Entertainment.