Chapter 5: Morning

She was cushioned on soft pillows and downy blankets. The room felt very clean and sterile, very dark and gloomy, but not all together completely dark. Opening her eyes she found herself in an unusual surrounding. There were boxes, supplies, and such strewn and stacked about around the room, it being only about the size of a dorm room. A quaint door took up the wall to the front of her, wooden and ceiling height.

With small amounts of strength feeling overwhelming, she touched her exposed left shoulder coming to a patch of gauze taped to an injury. Injury? What? When did that happen? Poking it lightly, she gasped at the pain she did not expect, and proceeded to observe the rest of herself. She will probably have to purchase a new, stock, ISOO suit later, since the necessary actions needed to tend the wound required her left shoulder and sleeve to be ripped off. Nevertheless, the raccoon did not have any recollection of that ever happening, let alone how she got in this bed and room that are her world right now.

Using careful movements, Sam finally found herself out of the comfortable bed, needing to avoid the thoughtlessly placed cardboard boxes on the ground. Two, small, high windows allowed a tiny bit of light to come through the blinds, giving her enough visibility to find herself around each of the boxes. Then, halting at the end of the bed staring at the door, Sam remembered being in a large, metallic room and being stabbed by a skeleton shaped robot.

Knock knock! The door interrupted Sam's thoughts. Making no reply, her response was only to open the door. The coat-clad figure sparked something within and she remembered everything! Joe Porc stood in the doorframe, hands in big pockets, "How are you feeling?"

Sam's first word of the day was his name while wrapping her arms around him and resting her head on his right shoulder. Her porcupine friend put his hands at the small of her back.

She whisper-said, "Can you tell me… where we are?"

The pair stood at the entrance of their bunker in the middle of nowhere, it was morning. Flat terrain spread out in all directions for miles and miles. To their right, north, there was a mountain range over twenty five miles away. Clouds of all types lined the sky, making a desert-like snack, with frosting, to gorge upon. Other than this, not a whole lot featured their surroundings. Inside the underground, L-shaped bunker a room was the first you came into after descending a bit of stairs from the three-bolt lock, iron door. From the fifteen by fifteen foot room there was a hall to the left, which extended ten feet to Sam's door. Generally, boxes of supplies and belongings filled the bunker, along with various items tossed about with the occasional garbage item.

Neither Joe nor Sam had said a word since Sam came out. She simply followed him up the stairs and out the door.

"When I woke up," Joe started, "I was in that room. I checked the room you were in and found that you were sleeping, so I went back to sleep on the ground," they kept their gaze toward the unusual scenery, Sam listening intently to her spike-haired comrade, "So I woke up again and checked out the bunker and found that a key had been put into my pocket, apparently to unlock that gigantic door."

"Why didn't you come sleep in the bed?" Sam put simply.

"I would have been to much a disturbance. If you woke up and flipped out at where you were and how you got there– especially with me in the bed with you," Joe added, faintly glancing at her, "It would be too much for me to handle."

A few moments of reflection passed like honey dripping from a small container, sweet, slow, and sticky. The unnatural quiet of everything around them felt oppressive, and as if a giant baseball glove was pushing her to the ground, Sam leaned against the wall of the bunker and slid to a sitting position in the hard, orange pebbly surface, sighing.

"Any breakfast?"

Joe didn't wait before answering, like he anticipated the question, "I'm not sure, I'll have to go back down and take a look," he went back through the still open door, venturing down the narrow passageway to the bunker's innards.

Further indulgence of the dull scenery made her as if to feel sick to the stomach, as if you'd feel if you saw a whole other cake in front of you after painfully eating five slices of one before, so she got up on her feet to walk around a bit. Coming to the back of the roof of the bunker where it tapered into the rocks underground, Sam noticed a loose material like a mesh or blanket covering the bunker's concrete surface. The orange thing presented itself as a type of camouflage device, and didn't seem to have anything holding it down besides its own weight. Tugging it lightly, Sam concluded that it wasn't held down by anything, and in doing so decided to pull the whole thing off.

About this time, Joe was exiting the construct with two, brown paper bags. Looking from left to right, he found Sam to be missing. Joe, uneasily, called her name a few times, still standing from the doorway. Then, without warning, one of his head spikes received a sharp tug by some unknown energy from above, causing the porcupine to jump in shock. Spinning around he looked up and found a sly faced Sam grinning from ear to ear, "Ha ha! That looked so hilarious from up here! Hehehehe!"

Joe put on a smirk at the playful raccoon's antics, "So, what are you doing up there?" Joe asked sarcastically, folding his arms and hooding his eyes in a dignified manner.

"Come up here and take a look for yourself," the girl giggled.

Sauntering over to the back of the bunker, he went to the lowest part of the decline of the roof and put one large step onto the concrete. He then effortlessly climbed up to stand in the middle of the concrete platform, "Hmm…"

In faded, large white block letters, the word Crypt spelled itself on the grey, coarse concrete. Joe went to sit beside his partner, "I wonder what its supposed to mean."

"Your guess is as good as mine," Sam said, pausing, "You find something?"

"Actually, however-we-got-here left us something to fill our appetites. A banana and a bologna sandwich in each bag," he said, tossing a bag to his friend, "Now, we should probably find ourselves a means home."

"I already got that covered…phoned the agency to send a plane in our direction…transferring our GPS coordinates through the wrist phone," Sam explained through bologna sandwich.

"Then I guess it's just a matter of minutes before we're outta here," Joe stated, and the eerie silence that followed was perfectly proper with the surrounding wasteland. Without speaking more, the pair enjoyed their breakfast like a picnic sitting on top the shelter's roof. Joe had not noticed, even though he'd been gazing across the horizon for what seemed like hours, the tiny plants that stuck out of the ground, scattered around the earth, only about half a foot high. Perhaps he could only see them now because of the tiny increase in altitude. Vegetation, even tiny plants, meant a lot for the porcupine since it meant the planet's earth was still fertile and habitable. The Storm appeared so powerful that it was acceptable to foresee no regrowth of plants in the prolonged future, and widespread, this was the truth for everybody on Angel Island for a long while.