[Writing Prompt]You are part of a team of five survivors making the best of the apocalypse by infiltrating top secret government facilities to see what you find
Treasure Hunters
This was the best find so far.
Greg had stumbled upon their first find months ago: The super-soldier grow room. He and the rest of the gang went from glass vessel to glass vessel peering into the murky fluids at the slowly decomposing remnants of the soldiers, each a muscle clad Hercules of lab grown military might.
The second find was all Layna’s handiwork. A top secret aircraft testing facility. None of the five could fly any of the airplanes, although Max said he had flown a small single engine prop once. Even still, they walked around that asphalt strip and inside the gargantuan hangars and gaped in awe at some of the amazing things the government had been working on.
To be fair, there was a flying saucer there, along with some complex reading material no one could make heads or tails of. So that was a pretty high bar, but this place still did one better.
The third find was the alien laboratory – super cool, but also super freaky. Alex and Mary flat out refused to go deeper inside once the gang saw the first alien corpse behind Plexiglas. Greg couldn’t blame them, although the idea that anything was still alive down there was ridiculous. It had been over two years since the nukes fell and no matter what planet you’re from no multi-cellular lifeforms could survive two years without any water or food.
Greg, Layna and Max plumbed the depths themselves. They stumbled upon their fair share of bizarre, long dead creatures, and even more bizarre and terrible odors wafting in the halls. The freak show quality was pretty cool to be fair, but the coolest thing in the place was the memorandum that led them here.
It was typed out and signed by some Army general. Something about needing further resources to be sent to “Base Alpha” for construction efforts. Then it gave a set of coordinates. Layna, the resident cartographer, did some sleuthing and came up with the middle of the desert out in nowhere Nevada.
It took about three days to break in, including burning through a dozen plasma cutters and no small amount of high explosives. Luckily, when almost everyone in the entire world is dead, this kind of stuff is pretty easy to come by.
Once the five of them got inside they knew it had all been worthwhile.
Apparently whatever torture or interrogations they were carrying out at the other facility paid its dividends, because this facility was nothing but awesome, unbelievable prototype weapons and other technologies.
There were guns of every shape and size – guns that fired plasma and bright foot wide lasers that could dissolve a car in seconds. There were guns that turned trees to liquid mush and sonic waves to destabilize the atoms of boulders until they poofed into dust. There were even hand grenades that exploded in green orbs and consumed everything in hot plasma.
The gang toyed around with those for hours. But it was Alex who found the real deal.
It didn’t look like much – a small white object, with a trigger and handle, and a small aperture at the end. It was labeled only with a scrawled hand written note. “The manipulator. Danger!”
Alex didn’t touch it of course, but Max sure did. He picked it right up, looked around in for buttons of any kind, found none, pointed it at the wall and pulled the trigger.
Nothing shot out of the little gun, but across from the five of us, on the wall, an ovular space appeared, the shape and size of a large mirror. Except this was no mirror. Looking into the space the five of them saw the lab, but not themselves. Instead it was filled with living scientists again, all wearing clean suits and going about their business.
Max stared at the space for a long time, as did the rest of the five and then it closed shut.
But before it did, Max through a pebble at it and the five of them watched as the pebble flew straight through the space and into the other space, landing with a clank on the floor. The scientists all looked up at the sound, first at the pebble and then at the five of them, through the space, right before the portal disappeared.
The five Armageddon explorers turned to one another and then collectively at the manipulator in Max’s hand, each of them struck at the same time with the same idea.
The next day they drove to the Las Vegas. Max shot the manipulator at a broken wall of the toppled MGM Grand hotel and another portal formed. In that portal people walked to and fro, happy as fat pigs, the Las Vegas skyline gleaming in the background.
The five explorers looked at one another and, without a word, each jumped through, one after the other.
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