21 November 2004

Me and another guy were the launch control people in a nuclear missile silo. We had fired our missiles quite a while ago-- weeks at least, more like months-- and were now just living in the silo waiting for someone to give us the all-clear. The first indication that maybe nobody was ever going to come relieve us of duty was when the dinosaurs started breaking in.

I guess they'd been working at it a while; eventually they had tunneled down to our sprawling underground complex. A vaguely stegosaurus-like beast busted through the wall of one of the upper level hallways, and then a bunch of carnivores came in. They seemed to be working together, not fighting each other. The carnivores were pretty big, a mid-sized monster between a raptor and the truly big upright hunters like a t-rex, like eight or ten feet tall. They were pacing back and forth in the hallways, aware that were were below them somewhere. We watched them on closed-circuit TV monitors.

Then we realized there were probably other people in other silos, including women. Apparently the missile command system had been co-ed for a while, and I realized that the people in charge had expected the possibility that only deep-hardended missile-silo crews would survive the War, and would have to repopulate the planet. I was a little irritated initially that I'd been stuck on my shift with another guy, but then we realized that must mean there was some silo somewhere with two women in it.

So we went to the armory, where there were racks and racks of rifles and shotguns, and we loaded ourselves up, ready to clear out that hallway. We went up to the airlock between our lower levels and the top-most, dinosaur-overrun one. "You ready?" Nod, hand on the OPEN button. "One... two... THREE!"