Fear Nothing

my condition, no judge will sentence me to prison for this minor offense. And I can afford the ten thousand bucks if it comes to that.
        One night, eighteen months ago, shortly after Wyvern officially closed forever, I used a bolt cutter to breach the chain-link where it descended into the drainage channel. The opportunity to explore this vast new realm was too enticing to resist.
        If my excitement seems strange to you - considering that I was not an adventuresome boy at the time but a twenty-six-year-old not man - then you are probably someone who can catch a plane to London if you wish, sail off to Puerto Vallarta on a whim, or take the Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul. You probably have a driver's license and a car. You probably have not spent your entire life within the confines of a town of twelve thousand people, ceaselessly traveling it by night until you know its every byway as intimately as you know your own bedroom, and you are probably, therefore, not just a little crazy for new places, new experiences. So cut me some slack.
        Fort Wyvern, named for General Harrison Blair Wyvern, a highly decorated hero of the First World War, was commissioned in 1939, as a training and support facility. It covers 134,456 acres, which makes it neither the largest nor by far not the smallest military base in the state of California.
        During the Second World War, Fort Wyvern established a school for tank warfare, offering training in the operation and maintenance of every tread-driven vehicle in use in the battlefields of Europe and in the Asian theater. Other schools under the Wyvern umbrella provided first-rate education in demolitions and bomb disposal, sabotage, field artillery, field medical service, military policing, and cryptography, as well as basic training to tens of thousands of infantrymen. Within its boundaries were an artillery range, a huge network of bunkers serving as an ammunition dump, an airfield, and more buildings than exist within the city limits of Moonlight Bay.
        At the height of the Cold War, active -duty personnel assigned to Fort Wyvern numbered - officially - 36,400. There were also 12,904 dependents and over four thousand civilian personnel associated with the base. The military payroll was well over seven hundred million dollars annually, and the contract expenditures exceeded one hundred and fifty million per annum.
        When Wyvern was shut down at the recommendation of the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission, the sound of money being sucked out of the county economy was so loud that local merchants were unable to sleep because of the noise and their babies cried in the night for fear of having no college tuition when eventually they would need it. KBAY, which lost nearly a third of its potential county-wide audience and fully half of its late-night listeners, was forced to trim staff, which was why Sasha found herself serving as both the post-midnight jock and the general manager and why Doogie Sassman worked eight hours of overtime per week for regular wage and never flexed his tattooed biceps in protest.
        By no means continuous but nevertheless frequent major building projects of a high-security nature were undertaken on the grounds of Fort Wyvern by military contractors whose laborers were reportedly sworn to secrecy and remained, for life, at risk of being charged with treason for a slip of the tongue. According to rumor, because of its proud history as a center of military training and education, Wyvern was chosen as the site of a major chemical-biological warfare research facility constructed as a huge self-contained, biologically secure, subterranean complex.
        Given the events of the past twelve hours, I felt confident in assuming that more than a scrap of truth underlay these rumors, although I have never seen a single thread of evidence that such a stronghold exists.
        The abandoned base offers sights that are, however, as likely to amaze you, give you the creeps, and make you ponder the extent of human folly as anything you will see in a cryobiological warfare laboratory. I think of Fort Wyvern, in its present state, as a macabre theme park, divided into various lands much the same as Disneyland is divided, with the difference that only one patron, along with his faithful dog, is admitted at any one time.
        Dead Town is one of my favorites.
        Dead Town is my name for it, not what it was