I don't usually call into shows like this, but what happened to me, I think people need to hear it. This was the summer of 1989. I was working in commercial real estate, had been for about six years at that point. Mostly industrial properties, warehouses, that kind of thing. Nothing too exciting. But that July, my boss handed me something different. Government surplus sale. A decommissioned missile bunker about forty miles outside Cheyenne. Now, this wasn't unusual, the bunker had just been decommissioned after the Cold War ended, and the government was selling off a lot of these facilities. I'd handled a couple of old military buildings before. Usually they went to private collectors, survivalist types, people wanting to convert them into storage or whatever. Standard stuff. But this one was different. This was a full Atlas-F missile silo. Three levels deep, reinforced concrete walls eight feet thick. The kind of place built to survive a direct hit. My job was simple, do a full property assessment, document the condition, get it ready for auction.
I drove out there on a Tuesday morning. July 18th. I remember because it was my daughter's birthday the next day and I wanted to get this done quick. The site was remote. Really remote. You take Highway 85 north, then turn off onto this unmarked access road that's basically just packed dirt and gravel. No signs, no markers. Just mile after mile of Wyoming grassland. The bunker entrance sat in a shallow depression, surrounded by a chain-link fence that was mostly rust at that point. There was an old guard shack, empty for years. The main entrance was this massive concrete structure, looked like a rectangular bunker half-buried in the earth, with a heavy steel door that had to weigh three tons. The kind of door designed to seal against a nuclear blast. I had the keys to the upper level, the access corridor and the control room. The previous owner, some contractor who'd bought it from the government years back and never did anything with it, had given me a partial set. I didn't have the keys to the lower levels yet, those were supposedly being sent separately. But I could at least get inside and start the assessment. The air that hit me when I opened that door, it was cold. Not just cool, but really cold, even though it was probably ninety degrees outside. And it smelled like concrete and metal and something else. Something I couldn't quite place. Like ozone, maybe. The way the air smells before a storm.
The entrance corridor sloped down at about a twenty-degree angle. My flashlight beam cut through the darkness, catching on moisture that had condensed on the walls. There were old warning signs, faded radiation symbols, stenciled numbers and letters that probably meant something once. The floor was metal grating, and every step echoed. I made it about sixty feet down that corridor when I noticed the light. Not from my flashlight - this was different. A faint blue-white glow coming from deeper in the complex. I thought maybe someone had left lights on, but that didn't make sense. The facility had been without power for years. I kept going. The corridor opened into what had been the main control level, a large circular room with old equipment consoles still bolted to the floor, stripped of anything valuable years ago. The glow was coming from the access shaft that led down to the missile bay. There was a steel staircase, spiral design, descending into darkness. Except it wasn't dark down there. That blue-white light was pulsing up from below, regular and rhythmic. Like a heartbeat. I went down to the lower level to get a closer look. silos are incredible engineering - Marcus' The staircase was narrow, maybe three feet wide, and it spiraled down about forty feet. The temperature dropped with every step. By the time I reached the bottom, I could see my breath.
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