Dad locked himself inside his bunker at the start of 2020. He was sure the world was ending. When we didn’t agree, he snapped at us—told us to wake up. Everyone else, he said, was asleep. Blind. Trapped in a lie. It was raining the day he disappeared underground. I remember the water tapping on the windowpanes like fingers, rhythmic and cold, while my sister begged him to reconsider. I didn’t bother. I knew it was pointless. Once Dad latched onto something, nothing could shake him loose—especially not the voices he followed online. The World Health Organization had just declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Dad took it as proof. He said we should come with him. When we said no, he didn’t try again. He just looked at us one last time and called us brainwashed.
He bought the land before I was born, drawn to the crumbling military facility that came with it. It had been abandoned sometime in the sixties, I think. My sister was there from the beginning, even before Dad’s obsession drove Mom away. It's hard to picture what he was like back then. Mom says he used to be a gentleman. But they married young, and people can change a lot in those years. Dad certainly did. Most of what I remember from my childhood are the weekends at the bunker. We spent them renovating the place, hauling supplies, stockpiling everything he thought he would need to survive once the world fell apart.
We couldn’t stop him. He hadn’t been the best dad, not even a good one, but it was still sad to watch him disappear like that. He seemed almost thrilled, even as he talked about the collapse of civilization. I guess that’s what happens when you spend your entire adult life getting ready for the end. To stay in touch, we set up an old radio at home. He didn’t trust mobile phones. We didn’t hear from him often—maybe once a month, sometimes not even that. The last time he made contact, he said he had found a hidden door. He was going to see where it led. That was three months ago.
“Do you think he’s okay?” my sister asked. “He wasn’t in great health. I told him.”
We were in the car, heading out to check on him, the heat wave pressing down on everything.
“Maybe his radio broke,” I said, wiping the sweat from my forehead. “Let’s not assume the worst.”
But I was worried too. There was something unsettling about that hidden door, and his voice during the last transmission had carried an edge I hadn’t heard before. It stuck with me. Still, maybe it was just the heat and the empty desert stretching around us, playing tricks on my mind. I couldn’t be sure.
It was dark when we arrived. Dad’s truck was still there, parked where he had left it, half-covered by a tarp flapping in the cold, sand-laced wind. We switched on our flashlights and made our way to the cliff overlooking the bunker. The steel door was built to withstand a nuclear blast. Fortunately, I had the only spare key. Before unlocking it, I pounded on the door with both fists and shouted for Dad. I was afraid he might mistake us for intruders and shoot. In the dark, if he was disoriented, it wasn’t impossible. I hit the door again, harder this time, and raised my voice as loud as I could.
“Dad, are you there? It’s me, Josh! Eveline is here too!”
“I don’t think he can hear you,” Eveline said.
I gave a quick nod. “Dad! I’m going to open the door now!”
The last time I stood here, I was seventeen. Back then, it was the Muslims who were going to bring down civilization. Before that, it was the Russians. Now it was the Chinese. Something was always coming for his freedom, but he never seemed to have any real freedom at all.
Just as I turned the key, my sister touched my wrist.
“You know,” she said, “maybe we should call the authorities after all, and—”
“No,” I said. “He’ll fight them.”
I unlocked the heavy door. A rancid smell drifted out from the darkness. It was the stench of death. I recognized it from the time Dad tried—and failed—to teach himself how to hunt, leaving a deer carcass to rot on the property for weeks. Eveline had already stopped visiting by then. I didn’t tell her what the smell reminded me of. She pulled her shirt over her nose as we stepped onto the creaking spiral staircase and began to descend.
At the bottom, I flipped the light switch. The click echoed down the corridor that led to the living quarters. Nothing happened.
“Hm.” I hesitated. The batteries must have drained. He charged them with an old exercise bike. If the lights were out, he probably wasn’t pedaling anymore. “The generator could be broken,” I said. “But maybe you should wait here, just in case. You know.”
I aimed my flashlight ahead. The beam was too weak to reach the end of the corridor. On the way here, I had felt ready. I had felt sad, the empty sadness I assume you must feel after the death of a parent that was never any good, but I hadn’t felt afraid. Now, staring into the same dark hallway I used to race through as a child, fear settled in. It was the same fear that used to visit me during my night terrors. Back then, it started the same way, creeping in from the corners, growing alongside the twisted shadows on my bedroom wall.
“I’m not letting you go in there alone,” Eveline said. “We stay together.”
We walked into the darkness. The foul smell grew stronger with each step, and so did my heartbeat. I was glad my sister hadn’t stayed behind. The bunker felt smaller than I remembered. More confined. The mismatch between memory and reality made everything seem wrong, as if we had stepped into a replica rather than the real place. But it wasn’t a copy. I had just grown up.
The Confederate flag greeted us at the end of the corridor, draped across the concrete wall. It looked pale in the flashlight's glare, almost like a phantom. And in many ways, that’s exactly what it was—a ghost from a time long gone. Or maybe a corpse dragged back from the grave. An abomination. It reminded me of Dad more than anything else.
“You have to be seriously confused to praise freedom as much as Dad did and then hang that symbol of lesser freedom on your wall,” Eveline said.
“He wanted so badly to protect his freedom that he built a prison for himself.” I turned the flashlight away from the flag, letting the darkness swallow it. “You bet he was confused.”
We stepped into the main chamber. It was crammed with litter and junk. Empty cans—some from food, others from beer—were scattered across the sticky floor. We had to take long strides just to avoid stepping on them.
“That’s weird,” Eveline said, shining her light toward the small dining table. “Look.”
The hair on my neck stood up before I even understood why. The table was set for three. I didn’t speak at first. I just stared, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. Before I could say anything, my sister cut in.
“Who the fuck was here with him?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe he just left the plates out from before. It might not mean anything.”
Then a noise came from deeper in the bunker—a faint clatter, like something falling to the floor. I turned my flashlight toward the sound, but the beam didn’t reach far enough to show what it was.
“Dad!” I shouted. “It’s me, Josh! You there?”
No response.
“Something isn’t right,” Eveline whispered.
I barely registered her voice. My eyes were locked on something at the far end of the room, something on the wall.
“That’s not supposed to be there.” I stepped forward, slowly. “That must be what he was talking about on the radio.”
For some reason, Dad had chipped away the concrete and revealed a rusty metal door hidden behind it. It was slightly open. A lukewarm, musty breeze drifted out. As I carefully pried the door open with the back of my flashlight, my sister came up beside me. My heart pounded in my chest. Behind me, I could hear her voice shaking as she pleaded with me to leave. She was nearly in tears. But I had to see what was inside. I had to understand what had happened here. I needed answers. I needed closure.
“What in Heaven’s name,” Eveline whispered, peering over my shoulder. “Why is this here?”
Behind the door was a room no larger than a broom cupboard. It was bare, except for a circular hole in the center of the floor. I pointed my flashlight into it but couldn’t see the bottom. Just as I realized it was wide enough for a person, my sister spoke.
“Do you think he fell?”
Sweat dripped from my forehead and vanished into the darkness below. A wave of dizziness hit me. I stepped back, afraid I might lose my balance and tumble in. My sister grabbed a can filled with what looked like rotting beans and dropped it into the hole. It bounced off the sides with a metallic clatter that grew fainter and fainter until it disappeared completely. I reached out and held my hand over the opening.
“It’s warm,” I said. “The air.”
“Maybe he fell.” Eveline took a step back, almost as if she believed it now. “Can we please get out of here?” She reached for my arm. “We can come back with the police. Please, Josh?”
“It wasn’t dark when Dad found this,” I said. “He would have seen the hole.”
“Josh? Please.”
“Just give me a moment to think.”
I turned and walked toward the hallway leading to the other rooms, still hoping—desperately—that I’d find him. For some reason, it felt important to see him with my own eyes. I couldn’t leave and keep wondering. I needed to be sure. I needed to know he was dead.
“I just want to—” I stopped midsentence.
My flashlight had landed on something. A pair of feet, motionless in the middle of the hallway.
“I think I found him!”
I ran toward the body.
“Wait!” Eveline shouted, then hurried after me, clearly torn between fear and concern.
It wasn’t Dad. I screamed as the realization hit me. My mind refused to accept what I was seeing. I spun around, panicked, and ran straight into my sister. She caught me, holding me in place, and as she looked past me to the body on the floor, her hands began to shake against my arms. She started to cry.
“Oh my God,” she said. “How . . . how is this possible? It’s you!”
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” I said. “Move!”
Nothing could explain what we had seen, and the more my mind tried to make sense of it, the more the dread took hold. My thoughts spun in circles, getting nowhere. I had only glimpsed the body before panic took over, but my sister was right. The half-rotten face was mine. There was a bullet hole in the center of the forehead. We stumbled through the living area, knocking over chairs, kicking cans across the sticky floor. Just as we reached the edge of the clutter and neared the exit, a voice echoed from the hallway behind us.
“Josh!”
We froze. It was Dad.
“Is that you? Josh!”
“Dad!” I shouted. “What the fuck is going on here?”
“Don’t worry!” His voice echoed from the far end of the bunker, maybe from the storeroom. “I killed the son of a bitch. Put a bullet right between his eyes!”
“Come out of there!” I yelled. “We have to leave. It’s not safe!”
Silence.
“Something is wrong,” Eveline said. “I don’t think—”
“Dad!” I called out again. “Come out!”
“I can’t move!” he shouted. “I’m stuck under a shelf! I need your help, son!”
I turned to my sister. “Go back up. I’ll get that old bastard out of there. We’ll be right behind you, okay?”
“Think, Josh!” Eveline pleaded. “You really think he’s been stuck under a shelf for—”
I should have listened. But even after everything we had just seen, I couldn’t accept what she was suggesting. It felt too far-fetched, too unreal to break through the layers of belief I still clung to. Reality doesn’t bend like that. At least, that’s what I told myself. I turned back toward the hallway, shouting for her to go wait in the car.
“I’m coming, Dad!”
I only slowed down to step carefully over the corpse that looked like me. Maybe, I told myself, it was just a coincidence. A burglar who happened to resemble me. The body had already begun to rot. It clearly wasn’t me. I felt foolish. Maybe all of this was just my childhood fear of the dark coming back. That made more sense. I almost believed it. Then, as I passed the small composting toilet at the end of the hallway, I stopped. Dad was sitting on the toilet. His gun still hung from his trigger finger. His brain was splattered across the wall behind him. His journal lay open in his lap, soaked in blood.
“Josh!” Dad’s voice came from the darkness. “Help me!”
I stood frozen, gripped by fear and confusion. I couldn’t move. I didn’t know what to believe.
“Come on, Josh. I need your help, son!”
My mind raced. Dad’s voice kept calling out for help, but his lifeless body said nothing. There was no way to tell what was real. Fear echoed through every part of me. I reached for the journal resting in his lap, hoping it might explain something, anything. Just as I was about to open it, I heard my sister scream. I bolted back down the hallway, leaping over the corpse that looked like me, and found her frozen in place, staring at something in the corner of the main chamber.
“I thought I told you to—” I began, then stopped myself. “Are you okay? What happened?”
“It’s—” she sobbed, “it’s me.”
Curled up in the corner was her naked, lifeless body. Her neck was twisted at an unnatural angle, clearly broken.
“There’s something evil going on here,” I said. “Dad shot himself in the head. It must have happened a long time ago. But he’s still calling out for help. We need to get back to the car.”
***
We drove away from the bunker as fast as the car would take us, leaving whatever was still alive down there behind. My sister insisted on staying at my place for a few days. I didn’t mind. We had shared something no one else could understand, and we needed each other to begin processing it. It took me a full day to gather the courage to open Dad’s journal. It started the way I expected, filled with his usual rambling conspiracy theories. I flipped past them. Near the end, the entries grew shorter. Just a series of notes:
Found a hidden door.
Deep pit. Might be part of an old black project. Government? Military?
Eveline and Josh showed up. Said it was a surprise visit. I never heard them come in. Feels wrong.
Had dinner with them. Something’s off. They smile too much. Eyes are wrong.
It isn’t them. They tried to make me [illegible].
God help me. It isn’t them.
I shot the son of a bitch. Right between the eyes.
Hiding in the bathroom now. This is probably my last entry.
God forgive me.
Chills ran down my spine as I read the final lines, smeared across the blood-drenched page:
I never got the other one. She’s still out there. I’ve only got one bullet left. I won’t let her do that awful thing to me. Forgive me.
My sister had been cooking for hours. From the kitchen, she called out to me:
“Josh, come here! I want to show you something!”
Thanks for reading my story. If you're interested in something larger in scope but rooted in the same desire to peel back the surface of reality, I think you'll enjoy my novel The Cave to Another World. It begins with two university students stumbling into an alternate Earth—but instead of aliens or time travel, they find a world where we never made it. A world where Neanderthals and Denisovans have taken very different paths, building civilizations on the bones of our ancestors.
Want to keep in touch? Join me on my personal Substack.
Thanks again for reading. And if you do check out The Cave to Another World, I’d love to hear what you think.
— Tobias Malm