cheney's bunker revealed!

Turns out Dick "the Dick" Cheney doesn't live in a bunker. He lives in a meat locker in the Virginia suburbs. Warrior Ant Press obtained this maquette of Cheney's bunker from members of a geo-caching group who found it during a foray into an area of suburban Virginia, long thought to be haunted.

The haunting stems from the mysterious case of what is often locally referred to as "the cannonballs in the roadway" event. No one knows the exact date of the event, but apparently it began when a group of second graders got lost returning from a field trip to the Arlington National Cemetery. The bus driver, a Mr. Jack Gleason, substituting for the regular driver, apparently decided to take a short-cut on the return trip so that he could make it home in time for his regular 5 o'clock Wednesday bowling game. Somewhere along the way, Mr. Gleason took a wrong turn. After driving for several hours the group took a turn that led them eventually down a country road. Thinking this was the shortcut, Gleason continued forward. However, eventually the road narrowed into a single lane, and Gleason was unable to turn around for fear of getting the bus stuck in the ditch and stranding the school children miles in the middle of nowhere. With no room to turn around, the flustered bus driver continued onward, the road continued to narrow, the day got later, and the children began to get bored and restless.

Mr. Gleason would later state that he thought the road "looked familiar" and was certain that if he continued down the lane, eventually he would return to the main highway and "civilization". He did not know that "civilization" just over the next rise.

Eventually the bus crested a small knoll and it was here that they
encountered the roadway littered with what at first appeared to be boulders, but upon closer inspection appeared to be cannonballs. The bus driver and the teacher, a Ms. Poppins, were dumb-founded, as were the children who wanted to investigate this strange phenomenon up-close. Fearing for their safety, the children were kept on the bus, and in an attempt to distract them, Gleason and Poppins began to entertain the children with a series of song and dance routines

About this time that a large black sedan pulled up behind the bus. A man, who was described by one of the survivors as a middle-aged, dumpy, white man with a disheveled appearance and a dour attitude approached the bus and rapped loudly on the doors. He was not happy with seeing a school bus in the middle of nowhere and a couple enacting vaudeville routines at taxpayer expense. The man, who identified himself as Mr. Rove, told the bus driver to "get the hell out of the way and get these child back to the basics where they belong". When the bus driver protested that he was unsure about moving the cannonballs, the Rove explained that this was a common occurrence in this part of the country, that his "nutty" friend liked to shoot his toy cannon for pleasure, which in reality wasn't a toy at all, but a civil war cannon that he'd liberated from the Shiloh National Historic site.

The man was so belligerent and insistent that the bus had to be moved and that forward was the only direction allowed that Gleason and Poppins decided to move the cannonballs to the side of road. When they asked the man for his help, he claimed his "bad back" prevented him from helping and suggested instead that they enlist the children. "What good are they on the bus?" he apparently asked.

Gleason and Poppins thought using child labor inappropriate, but Rove assured them that the cannonballs weren't armed and began to yell and curse and accuse them of leaving children behind. By this time, the children had been on the bus for much of the afternoon and were growing increasingly noisy, so Gleason and Poppins eventually relented and allowed them to help.

Even with the children's help, it took almost an hour to move all of the cannonballs to the side of the road during which time, Mr. Rove stayed inside his sedan with the windows rolled up. As soon as the road was cleared, the sedan whipped around the school bus narrowly missing several children and sped off into the distance.

Unbeknown to the driver and teacher, two boys decided to keep a cannonball as a souvenir. When Gleason discovered this during a head count, he demanded the child give it to him, whereupon he, Gleason, threw it out the window. The cannonball exploded when it hit the ground sending shrapnel flying in all directions. Gleason was killed instantly, one child was blinded in his left eye, and several other children sustained minor injuries. Poppins, who had no drivers license, was forced to drive the bus.

The bus was later found in parking lot of a Walmart where it was spotted after an Amber Alert was issued. Ms. Poppins had no memory of how they got there, never spoke publicly about the event, and never taught again. A police report on the incident mysteriously disappeared and the exact location of the event was never determined until the geo-cachers stumbled upon during a weekend foray.

elsewhere:
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