Survival Bunker System Developer

Ghoul Hunter Society

A week passed and the city’s water and power supply were finally cut. Survivors who applied for the recruitment and didn’t make it panicked. Stores were raided, people were trampled on and ghouls were attacked out of sheer rage. The situation outside was a mess but the situation on the inside wasn’t any better.

Caleb was already receiving many complaints from some troublesome bunker residents about having to share breathing space with others. Caleb didn’t dismiss anyone yet because he had yet to assign them any real work to prove their worth. Alan was still working hard to create the prototype of the delivery drone, travelling to and fro from the power plant and Caleb’s apartment.

Caleb didn’t ask about Alan’s progress. He also didn’t give the gentlemen working in the power plant and water plant any signal to provide any assistance to the city burning with flames of desperation. He had to wait for the completion of the delivery drones to introduce salvation and the establishment of the Ghoul Hunter Society.

The blog was on fire once more with people complaining about their dire situation with the lack of resources. Many begged Caleb to share some tips before their phone batteries died and Caleb did just that. He wrote two lengthy posts about creating a power generator from salvaged motors and how to create a simple water filter using charcoal to get safe drinking water. As a bonus, Caleb also introduced the idea of farming food so that people can get fresh produce after the harvest in just six weeks.

The gardening enthusiasts jumped on the train and shared their gardening tips in his blog comment section but nobody commented on his posts regarding creating water filters and an electricity generator. Sometimes he wondered how humans weren’t extinct earlier. Even in times of crisis, people are still not asking the right questions.

Levelling the system to level three gave Caleb a new type of bunker to unlock on top of receiving a new slot for automated assistants. Caleb studied the features of a farm bunker and was impressed by how it worked. Thanks to the sewage plant that he had, Caleb didn’t have to worry about fertiliser. The system was also efficient enough to maintain the watering and minerals required to grow the crops. However, Caleb still required labour for planting and harvesting the vegetables. For now, he could only unlock vegetable farming. He needed to work towards upgrading the system to level four to afford animal farming features and a special upgrade ability for all farms.

There was a new kind of meter called the Happiness Meter. In order to unlock level four, Caleb had to keep the general happiness level in New York 75% and above for a solid week. The Happiness Meter directly affected a speed boost on arm production rates. The higher the Happiness Meter, the faster the farms will be able to produce food. If it took six weeks for the vegetable farms to produce a harvest, Caleb would only require one and a half weeks for harvest if the Happiness Meter was at 100% the entire time. At 100%, the production speed was quadrupled. At 75%, the production speed was tripled. At 50%, the production speed was doubled. Anything below 50% didn’t amount to any special boosts or penalty.

While he designed and built the farm bunkers, Caleb gave every bunker resident a capability assessment test. Residents were tested in four areas – physical abilities, skill set, character and information they knew about ghouls.

To test skill sets, Caleb prepared a special quiz questionnaire to test the knowledge of individuals for various fields including agriculture, water technology, logistics, security, engineering, social welfare, healthcare and more.

Caleb modified the Army Physical Fitness Test (APFT) standards to test residents for strength, stamina, reflexes and accuracy with a gun. As it will take a while to complete the test, Caleb assigned each bunker a temporary manager to oversee the test result recording. Those who did well in the fitness test will be prioritised to lead ghoul patrols and hunts. Those with decent strength and stamina will be posted to the farms for now.

The last part of Caleb’s test was to judge character and the resident’s knowledge about ghouls to see if what they knew tallied with what Helen knew. This was the part that made Caleb dizzy. He stole several large monitors from Target to install it. Every room in every bunker had a system security camera and Caleb had to review the footage of every room individually. The footage was a week long and Caleb couldn’t skip anything. He didn’t want to miss out on any good individuals that he could promote to become the bunk manager and cluster manager. In addition, Caleb was looking for special individuals among the bunker residents. He was looking for a doctor to work in the hospital, a research assistant to design his next automated assistant alongside Alan and himself, a logistic manager who was able to coordinate distributing supplies to shelter survivors and managing the farm production.

Caleb sat through six hours of reviewing when he spotted an unexpected talent within his bunkers. Curious about this raw gem, Caleb pulled out the bunker files.

Name: Zephyr Teak

Skills: Mixed Martial Arts

History: Wife and daughter killed by a ghoul that broke into their home when he was out gathering resources, came back to find them dead and have been wandering alone during the apocalypse without joining shelters to kill ghouls. Joined the recruitment to put his skills to better use. Claims to have single-handedly killed 258 ghouls till date.

After reading the information file, Caleb tried to search Zephyr’s name on the internet. Unexpectedly, the results were numerous. Caleb gaped at how many martial art competition awards Zephyr had under his belt. The man was in his forties but he was still in top form. Before the apocalypse, Zephyr owned a mixed martial art studio and with some more digging, Caleb found out that Zephyr funded the studio’s money by participating in illegal underground matches. If he was doubtful about the number of ghouls Zephyr killed before, those doubts were now blown away.

This was the man Caleb didn’t know he wanted until he saw him in action. Zephyr would be great as a bodyguard for Alan who had to travel frequently. Also, Caleb wanted to tap on the man’s skills to teach the other residents some basic combat skills, especially the patrol team. Helen has been asking for new ghoul samples lately as her experiment came to a stale, so Caleb was also considering sending the man to help Helen out.

With the first candidate found, Caleb became more motivated. He worked hard with little food and rest to review all the footage and found a few more outstanding individuals who have also written in to apply for a specific position they could contribute to.

The first candidate was a cowardly doctor by the name of Jason Thawley. Jason was a short Englishman who was an infectious disease specialist who works with internal medicine. According to his application form, he wrote a very honest reason for applying. Jason clearly stated his intentions to exchange his medical skills for a safe place to live. He was, in his words, “sick and tired of living in flimsy bunkers with a bunch of losers”. Caleb had to admit, he didn’t dislike such a character so he put Jason’s name on the list of people he wanted to promote and created an access for the doctor to work and live in the hospital he acquired. He would give Jason the first task of putting together a medical team from the bunker residents.

A very important person for his plans was an ex-Navy Seal man who claimed to also be an expert logistics manager. The African-American worked for a large shipping company and coordinated stock movements, planned the inventory and assigned shifts to hundreds of workers daily before the apocalypse. Caleb was a little torn between assigning Lewis Foster to the patrol team and the logistics team so he called the man to find out more about why he left the Navy Seals. In the brief conversation, Caleb’s opinion of the man became favourable.

Lewis was a Seal for five years and even went to the frontlines to fight in Afghanistan where he took a bullet to his shoulder, ending his career. He pursued his studies and joined a shipping company working his way up over the years before the apocalypse. Lewis shared a very similar history to Caleb’s previous life. In the past life, Caleb killed Jeremy to spare him a painful death. Lewis shared that he had to kill his beloved dog because she tried to save him from a ghoul and became infected. Lewis described how he held William in his arms and watched her transform into a snarling ghoul canine before putting a bullet to her head with his revolver. Ever since the death of his female German Shepherd, Lewis had been living in the nearest subway shelter where he learnt about Caleb’s blog and started sharing the information with others to help improve their lives. Caleb did ask about why a female dog would be called William and Lewis laughed it off explaining how he had her when she was just born and thought she had a wiener until it dropped off. It turned out that William was actually a girl and what he thought was man bits were just the umbilical cord. By the time he wanted to change her name, William already recognised that as her name and refused to acknowledge another name so it stuck till her untimely death.

Caleb put Lewis’ name on the list of people to promote and decided to make Lewis the head of logistics. Like Jason, he was going to task Lewis to put together a team for the Target store and a team for the farm bunkers that he had yet to build.

The last person that Caleb found most interesting was a university student. Although he hasn’t met Timothy McCallum in person, he knew who the young man was.

Timothy was a university student studying Business Information Technology and a pro-gamer during the day but at night, Caleb knew him as a promising hacker new to the scene about two years ago called Ambrosia.

In Timothy’s application, he stated that he applied for the recruitment with two reasons. The first was out of admiration for the bunker owner who he knew was the owner of the popular survival blog. Caleb didn’t bother to hide his tracks as a blogger so it wouldn’t be hard for Timothy to find out. The second reason for applying was because Timothy was curious about those automated assistants with the Wall-E design running about outside. Caleb didn’t know when it happened but Timothy claimed that he tried to catch and pry open a robot previously but was unsuccessful. Caleb didn’t know if he should be impressed that the twenty-four-year-old man was able to try something so bold or take it as a threat. Eventually, after considering all options logically, Caleb decided to keep this dangerous man close to him and hire him as his assistant.

Naturally, Timothy’s first task would be different from Lewis and Jason’s. He wanted to ask Timothy for help to design his third automate assistant with Alan. Alan asked him if he was ever going to create a ghoul-killing automated assistant and Caleb agreed. It was good to have a patrol-bot with the ability to kill ghouls and hold off the awakened ghoul for long enough so that humans can escape.

With the list of people to be promoted ready, Caleb called the new bunk cluster managers to pass the word and call for the four unique individuals to be escorted to a pick-up point where Caleb would meet them in person. Of course, that would only happen after the delivery bots were ready for deployment.

Right now, Caleb looked at the list of projects he had to manage. The farm bunker design was coming together nicely and he did everything he could. Alan was still busy with the final touches to the delivery bot prototype so Caleb could only wait until his foster father was ready. He knew that Alan was working hard but sometimes Caleb wondered why ghouls existed and not human clones. It would have made life a lot easier for people like him and Alan who simply had too much to do and were expected to do even more.

Caleb sighed. Setting up the Ghoul Hunter Society was exhausting. In a few weeks after things stabilised and his system unlocked the features to level four, Caleb had to plan a personal visit to sort out troublesome issues with some of the problem bunkers. He dreaded it but as the bunker owner, it was his responsibility to put people in their places and create rules to establish a new system.