The day the air-raid sirens sounded across the county seat, I was dragging my bad leg as I reinforced a load-bearing wall in the basement.
My neighbor screamed, “M-country missiles are coming!” But I only stared at the yellowed blueprint in my hands and sneered.
The day before our “sham divorce,” my ex-wife, who worked at the housing and construction bureau, had secretly slipped me a map of the city’s civil defense facilities.
While everyone else rushed frantically toward shelters in the suburbs, I pried open the fire exit to our apartment complex’s basement.
Beyond the rusted iron door lay an underground bunker built during the Cold War, complete with an intact water-recycling system and a three-defense filtration unit.
Using the field rations I had hidden when I left the military, I grew the first batch of mushrooms in an abandoned air-raid shelter.
Then, one night, a missile really did hit the plaza, and a fleeing crowd pounded on my iron door.
A bloodstained note was slipped beneath it:
“Stay in contact. Behind-enemy-lines mission codename: ‘The Cultivator’, ex-wife Lin Wan”
