The secret base raid: seventeen floors under the woods west of Rosewood

On the night of 25 September 2026 (Day 95, Monday 11 October 1993 on the game clock) a crew of survivors went to the bottom of the secret military base in the forest west of Rosewood: seventeen floors down, deeper than anyone on ZA-Z had ever been. The next night six of them went back, found the survivor camp at the far end of the cave, and raised a door every note in the place said to leave shut. Four of them died within 36 seconds of each other. Two made it back to the car park.

#Where is the secret base?

In the forest about 2.5 km west of Rosewood, at the end of a single dirt track that no road map shows. Above ground it is modest: a fence, a car park, one building and a helipad painted on the roof. Below it, a stairwell drops twelve floors before it reaches anything, then keeps going.

#What was waiting down there?

The base had been quiet a long time, and it was full.

• 1,905 dead stood in the compound that evening: 228 on the surface, 241 on the barracks floor, 237 in the dormitories, 354 in the cafeteria, 335 among the labs and 503 on the deepest level, with a handful on the roof and in the shaft. 171 of them were sprinters.
• By the time the crew arrived, a fifth of them had gone quiet for good, leaving roughly 1,500, and the county's sprinters had slowed from one in ten to one in a hundred for the night. Nobody wants a sprinter in a stairwell.
• Armed guards. The military and security dead at the gate and along the driveway still carried their kit: rifles slung on their backs, pistols in holsters, spare magazines, sometimes a box of rounds, a radio, a nightstick or a torch. It all came off them when they went down.
• The tunnel dead had been stripped of everything. Their corpses carried nothing.
• 148 doors stood shut. The stairwell doors were locked and no key existed. The camp's garage door was barricaded with metal bars.
• The gun room on -16 held twelve military lockers with 252 items: four experimental M16s, four military shotguns, two experimental Desert Eagles, two ghillie suits and a great deal of ammunition.
• Every container from -13 to -17, 534 of them, was packed to the brim: 13,511 items.
• Notes lay everywhere: three copies of each, never two in the same place, and one of each outside. None of them can be written on.

#Night one: 25 September, Day 95

The crew went in at 21:30 SAST and went all the way down, the first survivors ever to stand on the seventeenth floor below ground. They brought a boombox and twenty-eight cassettes; the barracks floor heard AC/DC before it heard anything else.

The building was waiting for them. When the crew reached the deepest level, the lights flickered and died, came back, and died again, and 217 of the base's 259 bulbs burst at once to the sound of the whole grid going down. Eight minutes later one of the crew died in the stairwell in the pitch dark.

The lower floors did not stay empty either: over 500 more dead rose on the bottom levels as the night went on. The crew put down at least 1,185 of them before they climbed out at 01:44.

#Night two: the door, 26 September, Day 96

Things turned up at the base that evening that nobody saw arrive. A Huey helicopter stood on the roof pad with a full tank and the key in it, and a second sat on the ground pad below. The gun room lockers had gained new rifles: AK-47s, M4s, M16A3s, SR-25s, MP5s, suppressors and bayonets, 84 pieces in all. Three hundred more dead filled the labs and the cave. A heavy metal door now closed the only way into the cave, a second roller door crossed the tunnel beyond it, and behind the camp's roller door, the barricade quietly gone, waited 665 of the county's worst.

Six went down. At eleven on the game clock they raised the camp door.

Two Molotovs went in, seventeen seconds apart, and the first landed at the front of the crew's own line. The horde caught one of them and dragged him back into the fire. Inside a minute the fight was over for four of the six. The last two climbed seventeen floors in the dark, the lights failing twice more on the way, a storm hammering the roof above, and reached the car park just before midnight. They sat in the van in the rain and did not start the engine.

#What is down there now?

The notes are still scattered through the levels, and they tell most of the story: read them before you go down. Whatever came out of the camp was never counted back in. And since the raid, a chamber at the far end of the cave, just short of the camp, has been sealed behind a heavy roller door, and the key thrown away.

For the Huey that started all this, see flying the Huey. For where the raid sits in the server's history, see Server timeline.