The Man in the Vault

“The Man in The Vault”

In 2051, humanity put the world into a nuclear holocaust and for the next 300 years we spent our lives in government made fallout shelters all across the United States. It has been ten years since the release of humanity back into the world from these shelters, and I was among the first. In these ten years I have explored the wasteland of North America, seeing all of the relics of the old world I had only read about, hoping at least some of them are still existent. Many of these North American landmarks have changed since the hibernation of man. The Grand Canyon is an even grander canyon now. The Smoky Mountains are less smoky and more ashy. My personal favorite is Disneyland, which without previously reading about it, an uninformed onlooker may think it was a kingdom dedicated to a tyrannical mouse, whose reign ended in fire.

On my shelter's library room computer, I took a fascination towards reading about the thousands of people who didn’t get a spot in the government fallout shelters, and how they took matters into their own hands by making their own home made vaults. This made me want to go and explore the thousands of bunkers across America people spent their final days in.

Amateur vaults were made for fifty or fewer people to live out the rest of their lives in. Today, there is nothing more than skeletons and the faint echo of death in the air. Of all of these shelters I’ve seen, only one has stood out to me. It’s not extravagant like Post Malone's vault which had an irrigation system for growing marijuana, and to a lesser extent, food. It is also not a dump like ones I have found made out of school busses buried only under about 5 feet of dirt and sporting confederate flags. It is expensive, but not flashy. Quaint would be a good way to describe it.

The vault is in a place formerly called Bethlehem, Indiana, a middle-of-nowhere hillbilly town right off of the now-dried-up Ohio river. It lies beneath the ruins of an old brick schoolhouse.

To get into the shelter, there is a sewer grate in the basement labeled “Bethlehem Fallout Shelter”. When one opens the grate, there is a slanted metal tube with a sign saying to cross your legs and arms over each other. Right next to the tube is a ladder. Before jumping in for the first time, I tossed a rock down to get a better sense of what lay beneath. After several long moments, the rock hit something metallic with a thunk.

The tube seemed to be a slide. I had never seen any other bunkers do this, but frankly, it was smart, because if they had to get down fast, they could. So obviously I took the slide. I was not going to miss out on something as fun as that. I slid down for probably a half mile with only my flashlight in the dark, and it was both exhilarating and terrifying.

At the bottom is a small square concrete room, with a huge circular bank vault door. I shined my flashlight on the right wall, and saw the words, “Vault will unlock on January 1st, 2351”, the same day the government vaults were opened. It seemed as though no one had been down here since. I decided to open up the door and trust there were no booby traps or anything.

Inside is a 100 foot long metal hallway with 5 doorways on each side going off into equally sized 20’ by 10’ rectangular rooms. Nearly every wall of the hallway is lined with polaroids and art, and on the floor, an antique rug. Each of these rooms is also equipped with a soundproof door, which is smart because if you’re going to be stuck in a metal tube for the rest of your life, you will want at least the illusion of privacy. There are ten rooms in all: a library, kitchen, living room, bathroom/showers/water filtration/waste management/air filtration room, small greenhouse/cemetery, storage room previously packed high with everything anyone could ever need, even now, still half full, and the other four rooms are bedrooms set up like the capsule hotels were in Japan. All of it is decorated with antique furniture and gives anyone who walks in a homey feeling. So, yes it is lavish, like living in a mansion with the ability to house 40 other people. Though, I only counted 19 used cremation urns and one skeleton.

Only about 10 percent of all bunkers found had worked, meaning the occupants lived until they died of old age. This 10 percent does not include the 20 government-made vaults, only the ones made by people who did this on their own. These 20 people who lived in this shelter had to be rich and smart to do this sort of thing and do it correctly.

They not only had to be book smart, they also had to be smart emotionally to be able to live amongst each other for that long, solving problems through talking. These people must also know how to keep busy too, and they came prepared with a collection of thousands of books, not only physical, but also digital on pedal-powered computers.

The bunkers' lavishness, the fact that they died of old age, all of this stuff is not entirely surprising. It’s rare, but not surprising. These things are not what I found the most merit in. Instead, the thing that surprised me the most was dweller Ollie Casp. He was the previous owner of the skeleton that lay in decrepit sheets with a bronze locket around his neck, inside one of the bedrooms, surrounded by polaroids of him and the other dwellers.

Ollie was a bald man and is in many of the polaroids they had up in the bedrooms and lining the hallways. He was a man of average build, bald, not above 6 feet, but certainly was not a short man either. He always had a kind face about him; a sense of peace twinkled in his eyes in every picture that is displayed in the bunker. The youngest picture I could find of him was a picture of him in his early 40’s and the oldest is when he was in his early 80’s.

At the very end of the hundred foot long hallway is a collage that goes from the floor to the ceiling. Here in just a movement of the eye you can watch the lines in his face deepen, but the tranquility in his eyes never ceased. He was always happy. I even started to tear up watching this man's friends dwindle away around him in each photo. This seemed to be where they posted the New Year’s Eve party pictures from every year. No one was younger than 40 in these photos, even in the first one, and there are 42 New Year’s Eve photos in all.

The final year is Ollie by himself, just him sitting in a collared button down blue shirt, black slacks, a glass of champagne, a small brown notebook, and the locket around his neck. Despite him sitting there drinking alone, there still emanates a sense of peace. I looked at it again and realized the notebook had to be there somewhere since the vault wasn’t opened until I got there. I searched every room until I found it sitting at a Cherrywood desk in the library. What surprised me about the notebook was the fact that despite it being an entire notebook full of pages, the first few were the only ones written in. This is what they said:

“To whom it may concern,

Greetings to someone who was born long after me. I write this note in the hopes that someday, humanity will find our home and find this letter. Maybe this will be useful to someone. Although I sit here alone with the world in shambles, the trees grow far and few, and the roosters now crow in caves and crevices, I find myself with a heart full of thanks.

To you, the onlooker, it may seem sad that I have lived 42 years in the same place with the same people spending my final years in a cave away from the sun. However, I can only cherish these moments that I managed to gather in my time in the old world and this one.

Perhaps the greatest moments of my life on earth were spent with the love of my life in my youth, a beautiful happenstance who, when we were still dating, handed me a heart shaped locket and told me never to open it.

“Why never open it, it’s a locket, that’s what someone does,” I asked.

She then looked at me, a smile on her face and confusion on mine.

“If you open it, it is something… if you don’t, then it is anything.”

This sentiment perplexed me for years, until a dark month in November three days after she passed.

I stood on a bridge late that night with a winter breeze caressing my head, locket round my neck, and my heart in the ground. Before I take my final step, I remember the locket. I feel the warm metal on my breast. I take it out, and open it…

I don’t have the heart to look.

Knowing full well she cannot know that I would have opened it, I can’t break her trust. The locket leads me to think of her words and wonder what may be in this locket. Maybe it’s a picture of her and me on one of our early dates, maybe it’s a poem she wrote, maybe it’s a note of encouragement because she knew, even then, I had my dark hours and that if I do decide to die, I would look only in my final moments when everything matters to you the most. Of course, maybe, it’s nothing at all. In the end I closed the locket, stepped back from the ledge, finally realizing what she meant, and went home.

Those words stuck with me until this day. I will leave this earth happy. Happy for the 15 years of love and passion she gave to me until she passed. And I'm grateful. Grateful for the lifetime of wisdom, hope, and peace her words brought me.

Despite my time here in this cave, I am happy to have been loved, surrounded by friends, and had moments in life, unforgettable, and all my own. To this day I wear my gold chain round my neck, and it could still be anything.”

By the time I finished reading the note, I was balling alone in an ancient library from the short few words that Ollie gave me.

Today, weeks later, I managed to track down where Ollie’s wife had been buried using records Ollie had kept. She was buried in the Bethlehem cemetery, not more than a mile away from the schoolhouse. I brought his bones to the cemetery, next to where his wife would have been, dug a hole around 6 feet deep, and laid his body in it’s final resting place, along with the locket. I never opened the locket; it could still be anything.