Raven didn’t bother looking back.
EcoSpark stood silent behind her, stripped to its bones and littered with corpses. The wind tugged gently at her coat as she crossed the cracked pavement of the parking lot. Cameras gone. Bodies cooling. No alarms left to ring. And in a matter of days, the world would stop caring.
“Let the rats deal with the corpses,” she muttered.
The Ironhowl X4 loomed ahead, its heavy silver frame shining under the pale winter sun. Raven slid into the driver’s seat without a sound, the engine humming to life with a low growl. She glanced at the time January 6th 1:06PM tapping her finger against the wheel.
NYU.
It was time for some of her final preparations.
One of the richest universities on Earth. Even before the world collapsed, its buildings held more than just ignorant kids in need of an education. They held plant research. Pharmacology. Mechanical fabrication. Exotic materials from international tech grants. Every lab, every basement, every locked cabinet, exactly the kind of treasure - trove a prepper queen like Raven salivated over. And best of all? No one was home.
“Robery is king when everyone’s inside their homes, scared of the breathing the air.” she said.
Thanks to COVID, the NYU campus was a ghost town. Classes canceled. Professors remote teaching. Guards dismissed. No students. No faculty. Just a billion dollars worth of unguarded infrastructure waiting to be looted in broad daylight. No one would expect someone to rob a university at one in the afternoon.
Which was exactly why she is doing it.
The Ironhowl rolled to a smooth stop in a side lot near the main mechanical engineering building of NYU. Most of the snow was undisturbed. Raven stepped out onto the parking lot, felling the icy air brush past her cheeks, she stretched her arm slightly, touching her SUV.
The Ironhowl shimmered and vanished into the system space.
“Safe and secure just the way I like it,” she said.
She didn’t head toward the front gates of NYU like moat people would expect but instead stayed in the parking lot.
Raven crossed the parking lot and knelt in front of an old sewer manhole cover. Her hands gripped the edges and pulled. A moment later, the heavy metal lid lifted with a groan. She lowered it carefully to the side and peered down into the darkness below.
A rusted ladder disappeared into its depths.
“Time to go sewer diving,” she said.
Raven swung her legs into the hole and climbed down the ladder, boots landing with a quiet splash in a shallow runoff of water. The tunnel stretched in both directions around her.
Beneath the surface of New York, these tunnels felt ancient and forgotten. She walked forward slowly, her hand brushing the wall for orientation as her thoughts drifted.
People always laughed about the mole men in New York. A supposed urban legend about entire cities existing beneath the surface of the city. But Raven knew better.
New York was made of tunnels. Sewers, subways, steam lines, Cold War bunkers—half the city was hollow. Back in the 1950s, universities like NYU built their own nuclear fallout shelters beneath campuse buildings, just in case Russia decided to blink first.
Most were sealed. Some were re-purposed.
But a few?
A few were never listed officially.
Her boots splashed lightly through the shallow runoff as she moved forward. The air thickened with the scent of rot and rust around her.
The reason she knew all of this is because of the existence of a mysterious and powerful organization known as the Light House.
A name she hadn’t spoken in years. An organization so old and secret most people thought it was a myth. But Raven had proof it exists.
In the apocalypse, they became legends.
While warlords and cannibals fought for land and bodies, Light House fought for the children. They built shelters in ruins, fed the starving, and taught the youngest how to survive. They didn’t lead armies or take cities. They guarded the future of humanity the children.
They didn’t help everyone. Just the ones the world had abandoned those under the age of fifteen.
“The government helps the children,” Raven whispered. “Light House helps the forgotten.”
She paused at a junction, water flowing between her boots as she scanned for markings. There an old maintenance plaque half-worn by grime. She rubbed it clean and read the faded letters.
NYU Cold Reserve Bunker – A9 Entry Node.
Found it.
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