Sit Out the Apocalypse in Style

Image Source: Phantoms and Monsters.

Earlier this month, Phantoms and Monsters covered an underground luxury condo currently being built for millionnaire Preppers, fashioned out of an old missile silo in Kansas:

The 'Doomsday shelter' being built below Kansas prairie where millionaires will be able to sit out the Apocalypse in style.

When you buy a house, you end up feeling like you will be paying it off until the world ends. Well, how about one of these luxurious condos, which come with all the mod-cons, as well as a pool, a movie theater and a library - oh, and a guarantee that it will survive Doomsday if and when that fateful day comes.

For these luxury flats, deep below the Kansas prairie in the shaft of an abandoned missile silo, are meant to withstand everything from economic collapse and solar flares to terrorist attacks and pandemics.

Naturally, there will be no one around to phone if the guarantee fails - but at that point, the insurance will probably be the least of your worries.

So far, four buyers have thrown down a total of about $7million (£4.4m) for havens to flee to when disaster happens or the end is nigh. And developer Larry Hall has options to retro-fit three more Cold War-era silos when this one fills up.

Hall said: 'They worry about events ranging from solar flares, to economic collapse, to pandemics to terrorism to food shortages.'

These 'doomsday preppers', as they are called, want a safe place and he will be there with them because Hall, 55, bought one of the condos for himself. He says his fear is that sun flares could wipe out the power grid and cause chaos.

See the full original report at the Daily Mail. This home-away-from-home has all the charm of deck chairs on the Titanic. The setting would make a great sci-fi horror actioner about how undergound silo condo life after Armageddon could go horribly, horribly wrong. It could be a Millennial Prepper homage to Buñuel's 1962 Mexican film, The Exterminating Angel (which you can watch online here, here, here - and with English subtitles here). Wiki notes that the film was mentioned in the 2011 movie, "Midnight in Paris [in which] the main character, Gil (Owen Wilson), travels back in time to 1920s Paris and suggests a story to a perplexed young Buñuel (Adrien de Van) about guests who arrive for a dinner party and can’t leave. Buñuel asks, "But why can’t they leave? I don’t understand". After Gil leaves, Buñuel is still muttering to himself, '...what's holding them in the room?...'" What would keep the condo's owners in the silo, if the simple fear of Apocalypse, fed by the Internet, would prompt them to pay for quarters here in the first place?  Fear of the future?  Fear of life? Death? Survival? Fear of descending into savagery, in a closed vault, which would undoubtedly swiftly deliver them to that end?

Interested parties in this project include an "NFL player, a racing car driver, a movie producer and famous politicians." Fortunately for some investors, their down payment cheques are bouncing. One Prepper wants one whole silo all to himself, and as designer Larry Hall puts it, "I won't know [about] that until his check clears the bank." More material! What kind of novel could you write about the one guy who survives the Apocalypse, alone in luxury, trapped underground? Images below of Hall's designs are © L. Hall and from the Daily Mail piece.