Wrong Password

Have you ever driven over the ocean? It’ s something else.

The two-lane skyway before us went on and on. When we left Huntington Beach the road was some sixty to seventy feet above the ocean as it departed the edge of the continent. Now, two hours into our four hour drive west over the great Pacific Ocean, we must have been over three-hundred feet above the rocking mass of water. Swells surged beneath us, waves collided into each other. We drove past billboard after billboard, advertisements in numbers that paralleled the norm we were used to. Every so often, large digital numbers flashed on them simultaneously, telling us how long until disaster struck.

By we, I mean my wife, Ray, and two children, Sage and Ty. We were driving this road in an old beat-up and heavily packed electric wagon, because we had won a lotto ticket. Any other person driving this road, unless rich, would have sacrificed their life savings and God knew what else.

Where were we going? Pacific World, they called it. Others called it the Pacific Bunker, Pacific Campus, or, my favorite, Peck & Peck’s Pod, named after the two brothers designated as leaders of the bunker. It was a super structure nineteen years in the making, out in the middle of the ocean, floating, ready to sink to the deep depths of the ocean. It had concrete filled metal walls sixty feet thick and five hundred feet high. The whole thing, which you could easily see by satellite, had a circumference a quarter the size of L.A.

It wasn’t the only bunker. Of course, there were many; land bunkers, other ocean bunkers, lake bunkers, mountain bunkers, satellite bunkers, arctic bunkers, and so on. Whatever your budget, there was something suitable. And for those without money, well, just as it was for us, it was either good luck or bad luck.

After AR12N-34.3 made impact with earth, somewhere in Alaska, Pacific World would remain protected by sea water. We would stay hidden until earth conditions permitted our presence once again. It would be months to years.

The electric wagon beeped at us. “Time to charge,” it said.

I pulled over at a charging point. They were placed at ten mile intervals with short side parking bays. I stood at the side of the car near the charge point and Ray took the chance to change the boy’s diapers and feed them.

The charge was barely three quarters when a fast moving red car shot past us. It was traveling so fast I couldn’t make out the manufacturer of the vehicle. It must have been doing over two hundred miles an hour.

“Dear sweet Jesus!” I said to Ray. “That would have hit us had we not pulled over.”

Ray, still giving me the silent treatment, was furious, helpless and still in shock that we hadn’t been able to bring her mother, Ginger. We had left her back in Visalia, with our cat, Sammy. Ginger and Sammy. I mused: If Sammy was a ginger cat (she’s a Ragdoll), the harmonious match of the color and Ginger’s name would have provided some sort of magical sanctity from what horror was to befall us all in two hours.

Ray had been an only child. Her father was unknown to her. That Ginger was alone made it all the more awful. My parents and sister had offered to drive up from L.A., to be with Ginger, but the lady with the cat doth protest. The mighty strong willed Ginger had spoken, and that was that. For what it was worth, I thought Sammy was good company.

As the charge neared completion, I heard a sputtering engine in the distance. I could hardly believe it. It looked to be something old, vintage. As it neared, I could see it was an old gas-run VW Beetle. “Ray,” I said. “You’re not going to believe this.”

She still ignored me as she fed the boys.

Excitedly now: “Remember the Beetle’s from more than a hundred years ago?”

Ray took no notice.

“Not the British band. I mean the car.”

She shrugged, more an affirmation sort of shrug.

The Beetle came past, yellow, slow, whining.

Then Ray did say something as she peered up and twisted to look at the passing car. “Hey at that speed they aren’t going to make it to the bunker.”

I performed a rough estimate of their staggeringly slow speed and the remaining distance, and agreed with her.

Ray said, “We can’t even offer them a ride. We’re too full. The kids. We can’t.”

“We can get to the bunker ahead of them,” I said. “And get Pacific to send someone out to them.”

I calculated how long it would take us to get there if I increased our speed to what was still safe. My calculations were that we could do the last two hour leg in one and a half. That also meant we should have exactly the right amount of charge in the car.

I instructed the car’s computer to do the exact speed we needed, and we shot forward. I was careful not to hit the old car on our way past. They must have thought we were hooning like wild kids on a Saturday night out. I thought of the red car we saw earlier. We had nothing on that missile.

“I’ll get the updates,” Ray said.

I thought this new little adventure to race ahead of the old car was, on top of our escape from world doom, lifting her spirits.

The screen on the center console brought up live feed from ABC. They had NASA—from the NASA bunker in Florida—providing live updates on AR12N-34.3. “… time to impact, two hours and five minutes … integrity of mass of object unchanged … speed unchanged …” and before long they were turning over feeds to different bunkers around the world, checking in on times until gates and doors were closing. The bunkers in the arctic and Rocky Mountains had already closed. I wasn’t surprised at this. They had given two years worth of notice this would be the case. I wondered if they had locked anyone out. They weren’t saying.

We cruised fast along the skyway. Not fast enough to catch up with the red missile, but fast enough.

The one and half hour dash felt too long. Sage and Ty were getting restless and when one cried it wasn’t too long before the other joined in. By the time we neared Pacific World, Ray and I were running on adrenaline.

The decline of the skyway brought us upon Pacific World’s magnificent structure. I was in disbelief at the sheer enormity of it. Ray was speechless.

As we neared two giant roller doors that were on wheels the size of a three story apartment, I noticed we still had ten percent charge remaining. Our wagon was European, working on the metric system, and I could only surmise the metric-imperial calculations had been a little screw-ball. It brought back memories of NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter disaster.

We were greeted by two men that we had no difficulty pinning down as the Peck & Peck brothers. They were friendly, but anxious. I could tell their patience was being tested with our late arrival.

They spoke in turns: “The lotto winners!”

“The last to arrive—”

“We’ve been waiting for you—”

“Welcome and please do drive in and take the road to the immediate left—”

I interjected: “Gentleman, thank you.”

They seemed mildly annoyed, eyebrows raised.

I said, “There is one more person, or family, on the way. We passed them a while ago.”

Ray and I gave them the rundown and to our relief, they listened carefully and offered to send somebody out immediately. Then, on second thought, they decided one of them would go.

Peck & Peck said (alternating): “I’ll take the R.T.1—”

“No wait, you just got here, I’ll go this time—”

“You sure—”

“Oh yeah, sure.”

One of the brothers disappeared around the corner and emerged in the red missile we had obviously seen earlier, and shot away into the distance. I looked at Ray. She was looking at me. We were both thinking the same thing, but we didn’t say anything.

The Peck 1 with us looked at his watch and said, “About half an hour until … ” He looked past me at our kids in the car, and thought it was okay to finish his line with, “impact.”

I asked, “How long until these doors need to be closed?”

“Oh. Should’ve been closed already. We still need ten minutes to completely fill the ballast tanks. We will make it.”

I parked the car around the corner. Alone, I rejoined Peck 1 at the door opening.

He was looking at his watch frequently.

I was anxious too. Ten minutes had passed and my hands were still shaking. Despite the cool air coming out of the giant walls, I could feel beads of sweat trickling down my back.

“How many people inside?” I asked.

“Four million, two hundred and seventy two thousand,” Peck 1 said. “Plus how ever many arrive in that old car.”

Then another ten minutes passed.

Peck 1 was perspiring just as I was. He pulled out a phone from his pocket and called Peck 2. There was no response. He tried again, but still no answer. Then he brought up a black and gray application on his device, looking undecided. “I can’t close these gates without my brother. It’s a password security function that we agreed to.”

In a flashing instant my mind played out visuals of the asteroid impact and the tsunami wave rushing at us while we stood here, unable to close these giant doors, millions of us—

“Dear Jesus,” I said, pacing. “We need to close them now then, don’t we?”

Peck 1 turned to me, and I could see mild disgust and disappointment, perhaps even resentment on his pale face.

“Can’t we just start rolling these doors shut?” I asked. “Screw the password!”

“Yes,” he said, and as he turned we heard his brother arrive. Oh the relief!

“Password!” Peck 1 shouted at his brother. “Now!”

Peck 1 and I helped an old lady from the passenger seat. I took her past the doors.

Then both brothers thumbed their respective passwords into the device. They stood huddled in silence, and eventually both looked at each other, despondently.

“Wrong—”

“Password.”

“Roll the doors!” I yelled. And they immediately jumped to action. One brother went left, the other right, and they did something or other to release locks.

The brothers heaved and moaned. Gradually the tall doors began rolling.

They finally boomed shut, and the brothers hung on a long lever to engage an air seal.

A loud countdown sounded from thousands of voices in all directions.

“FIVE!”

“Jesus, Pecks,” I said. “Please tell me we have time to fill the—”

“FOUR!”

“THREE!”

“Flood the tanks!”

“TWO!”

“ONE!”

“Now! Now!”

We stood in silence. I looked back at my wagon, with Ray and the kids still in it. I looked at the Peck brothers.

I could not register than there had been an asteroid impact—

“Water filling—”

“Looking good—”

“Submerging good!”

We waited, in silence.

Ray signaled me to come over, and I slowly brought the old lady with me. It was as though I was bringing the wrong old lady to my wife. It should have been her mother. Well, this lady had a locket and chain that she clutched to, and we understood her pain.

Ray said, “Look,” pointing to the center console screen.

NASA: “ … we can confirm a near miss … AR12N-34.3 has missed earth … ”

The lights went out in Pacific World.

“Wrong password?” one of the brothers protested. “We need a password for the generators?”

NASA: “… metric error … earth is safe …”

We sank to the bottom of the ocean, in darkness.