7/13/4015
ICE Shelter 214
North America
[Transcribed from the notes of Vic]
The worst thing about disaster shelters is the food. I honestly never thought I’d collect a recipe from one of these stifling cement cubes, but I think this one is worth sharing, if only as a testament to the enduring human spirt during the most trying of times.
I found this scrawled on the back of a boxed cake mix in a family dwelling inside one an ICE shelter. These ICE (In Case of Emergency) shelters are really a sight to behold, especially the pantries. They are carved out of the bedrock all across post-2054 North America, some extending more than 150 feet underground. In the middle there is a manual elevator and every ten feet down there are catwalks wrapping around the entire room. The shelving is accessible from both the catwalks, for smaller errands, and the central elevator, for bulk orders. As I descended into the pantry, the air started to feel cooler. A layer of near-freezing water under the wire-grate floor of the tall skinny room kept the bottom of the pantry about as cold as a freezer. The shelf-stable foods were kept higher up, the food that needs refrigeration in the middle, and anything that needs to be frozen down here at the bottom.
I will say that these shelters are no joke. They each have a complex hydroponics system to provide the residents with fruits and vegetables, and there’s several acers of artificial ranchland carved out below the living quarters. The people here keep chickens for eggs, cows for milk and beef, and sheep for wool. Under the protection of my cloaking band I toured these man-made underground farms, and I was impressed. Artificial sunlight, real grass, water pulled from the nearby aquifers, a couple hundred chickens and 45 cows and sheep all living together in a carved-out cave. While I was there I watched the scientists carefully monitoring all the livestock and the farmers taking care of the land. All this for some eggs and milk.
The fresh food wasn’t nearly enough to sustain the population of 20,000 people living in this shelter, so they relied heavily on shelf-stable foods that had been amassed in the years before the fallout. The pantries held enough food to feed all 20,000 people for 50 years, but there was no replacing it once it was gone. When these shelters had been built and stocked, the government considered fifty years long enough for the issues on the surface to get sorted out. They never anticipated that the entire surface of the Earth would be uninhabitable for over 250 years.
I didn’t take anything from the first few years of the shelter, I mostly just wanted to see how it ran. This recipe is from the last years, when it was one of the only things left. I did go back to watch the transitional panic, however. About 10 years before the food was going to run out, there was a meeting of the shelter Congress. The surface was not getting any safer. It would probably take at least a hundred years for the radiation to clear and the air to be clean again, so moving back up there was out of the question. They were trapped.
Many of the people who had entered the shelter were no longer alive at this point. An entire generation of middle-aged adults, including some of the people on the council, had been born underground. They had never even seen the sun. Congress dropped the child limit from two to one, and started moving families in with each other to make room for more farmland. The ranchers increased the number of animals per square foot, and the farmers started growing more soy and corn. The rate of depletion of the stored food decreased, but they were still going down. A couple decades after the shift, people were cramped, poorly nourished, and hopeless. A couple more decades and even the children had sunken eyes and cold hands. They did as little activity as possible to conserve energy. The schools and recreational areas were converted into hydroponics space. An atmosphere of utter despair chocked out all light.
And in the middle of all of this hopelessness there was a small girl, maybe eight or nine, who kept this cake mix under her bed. It was long expired. She had found it wedged under a plank on one of the pantry elevators, and hid it away. She would take it out sometimes and just read it, never opening it, just slowly tracing her fingertips down the damaged cardboard. Eventually she showed it to her mother, who gave her a soft, sad smile. It was the mother who wrote this recipe on the back.
The girl was promised she could have the cake for her tenth birthday, as long as she stayed utterly silent about it. She had never had cake before. The shelter was long out of baking soda and did not grow wheat. I jumped to the birthday to see the young girl have her first bite of cake, but when I got there she was gone. The entire shelter was completely empty, and the cake mix sat unopened under her bed.
In the years between the discovery of the cake mix and the tenth birthday, the heavy iron doors, sealed so long ago, finally opened. Apparently the world had finally become safe enough about fifty years back, so what remained of the American government sent a highly specialized team out to rebuild society, restart the infrastructure and the above ground farms, in preparation for the return of the hundreds of thousands of Americans that had lived their entire lives underground. The girl celebrated her tenth under the warm yellow sun, her simple treasure of a single boxed cake long forgotten. This little box was a symbol of hope, and that hope was fulfilled.
Box Cake Alterations
Ingredients
- Any boxed cake mix
- Butter
- Eggs
- Milk
Procedure
- Read the instructions on the back of the box
- Instead of the listed amount of water, use that same amount of milk
- Instead of the oil, use melted butter
- Add one more egg than it calls for
- Otherwise, prepare and bake as directed
