L - Deep-Bunker

The door to McMully's office hissed open with a pneumatic sigh, admitting a shaft of cold, recycled air that carried the perpetual tang of desalinated seawater and refined hydrocarbons. The general sat hunched behind his temporary desk—a bolted-down steel affair bolted to the deck plating—surrounded by the detritus of command: status tablets showing red across multiple sectors, a half-empty coffee cup that had gone lukewarm hours ago, and an unlit cigarette balanced precariously between two stacks of reports he'd been meaning to read.

He looked up sharply, deadly gray eyes narrowing behind the permanent crease of his frown. The furrows on his forehead had become as permanent as the rust stains on Platform 47's pylons.

“You're late, Hunter” McMully growled, crushing the unlit cigarette into his ashtray with more **** than necessary. He didn't rise, didn't gesture to the chair across from him. The space was too cramped for formality anyway. “Thought you'd be here twenty minutes ago when the alarm went off.”

His gaze flicked past Officer Hunter, to the tactical display mounted on the wall behind them. The screen showed the same thing it had been showing for the past hour: a terrible beauty spreading across the North Atlantic—a massive plume of obsidian ash and sulfur dioxide that looked like a bruise across the planet's skin, blooming outward in grotesque fractals as it devoured everything in its path.

McMully leaned back in his chair, the springs protesting with a metallic squeak. His fingers drummed once on the desk—a rare tell of his anxiety—before he stilled them deliberately.

“The Icelandics are dead,” he said flatly. It wasn't a question. Not anymore. “Reykjavik Deep-Bunker went dark at oh-three-hundred. Four thousand souls bought themselves a few extra years with concrete and steel, and now they're a memory.”

He tapped the display with one blunt finger, watching the plume pulse and writhe like something alive. "Here the news from New York":