The Buried

by Melissa Grey

  With slow, deliberate steps, Moran approached. When she was close enough for Sash to make out the fine lines crowding the corner of her eyes, she spoke. “Perhaps you need a reminder of the dangers of skin-to-skin contact.”

  “I—what?”

  Before Sash could say much more, Moran gestured for Misha. His strong hands—gloved now—closed around Sash’s arm. He yanked her forward, ignoring her yelp of surprise.

  But their forward progress was stalled by another hand on her other arm. Sash looked down to find Baba Olya’s knobby knuckles whiten with the force of her grip. The old woman fixed Moran with a stare that would melt steel.

  “If you lay a finger on my granddaughter, I’ll make sure to cut it off.”

  Moran’s lips twitched into what could almost be called a smile. “I have no intention of harming Alexandra. I merely wish to educate her.”

  Olga spat on the floor, her grip tightening even further.

  The act sent a ripple of shock through the room. Even Sash’s feet felt rooted to the ground.

  She had never seen anyone treat Moran with such blatant disrespect.

  Moran simply arched a single eyebrow. “Misha. Take Alexandra to the dark room. Perhaps she needs some time to reflect on her actions.”

  Misha pulled on Sash’s arm, ripping her away from Olga’s grip. Sash bent her knees, putting all her weight into resisting.

  “No, please.” Her voice inched higher and higher with every word. “Not the dark room. Please. I’m sorry.”

  The rambled pleas tumbled from her lips one right after the other. Fear sang through her body, heady and sharp.

  The dark room was the worst part of the bunker. Nothing penetrated it. Not light. Not sound. Nothing. There was only a blackness so overpowering it felt like it would crush you. It felt like it would pour in through your nose and your mouth and your eyes and drown you.

  Sash had been locked in there once. She’d been caught playing hide-and-seek with Gabe and Yuna without her gloves on, and Moran had sent her for a time-out in the dark room. For two days, she’d been left there, without food, without water. Without sound. Without light. She’d been eleven years old.

  She never wanted to go back there again.

  Her legs failed her. She sagged to the floor, her knees slamming into the hard metal. She’d have bruises later. But now, she barely felt the pain.

  “I’m sorry,” Sash said. “I made a mistake.” Her words were thin and reedy. Her chest rose and fell in short sharp breaths.

  Panic, her mind distantly supplied. This is what panic feels like.

  Moran tilted her head as she stared down at Sash.

  Get up, whispered a voice at the back of her head.

  But she couldn’t. The thought of being left in the dark room was too much to bear. It was the one thing Moran could lord over her, and they both knew it.

  The doctor’s expression softened as she approached Sash. The sound of her long skirt whispering against the textured metal of the floor grated Sash’s ears.

  “If we aren’t punished for our sins,” Moran said, “how will we ever learn?”

  Sash shook her head, closing her eyes. For a brief moment, it felt like she was already there, drowning in darkness. “It was a mistake. I won’t—It was a mistake.”

  Moran hummed thoughtfully. After an achingly long moment, she said, “Very well. See that you do not make it again.”

  And then she swept away, her long skirt slapping at Sash’s face.

  The doctor settled into her seat, a beatific smile on her face. “Now, shall we get back to our dinner?”

  Hours later, Yuna still felt sick.

  She’d said nothing as Sash had pleaded on her knees not to be sent to the dark room. She hadn’t followed Sash after she’d fled the room, her hand clasped to her mouth. She’d stood back and let her friend be punished for something they had both done.

  Moran was like that. Singling people out. Sash always seemed to be a particularly enticing target for the doctor’s ire.

  And Yuna had said nothing in her defense.

  Shame sat heavy in her chest. She should have done something. Anything.

  But she hadn’t. She’d been a coward, as quiet and compliant as her mother and father were whenever Moran decided to pursue one of her punishing whims. Now, she stood between them as she watched Moran prepare to do what only she could.

  Leave the bunker.

  Go to the surface.

  See what was left after … whatever it was that drove them down here like moles.

  A deep and implacable yearning filled Yuna, coursing through every vein and artery in her body, as she watched Moran prepare. It was strong enough to chase out all other feelings, including her shame. The sense memory of sun warming her skin had long since faded into something abstract, distant from the realm of physical possibility. It was like the taste of her grandmother’s kimchi bokkeumbap. A flimsy recollection, divorced from its finer details. A thought that existed only in theory. A memory without flavor.

  Misha stepped up to help Moran put on her suit. It was a cumbersome thing, like a costume out of one of their comic books. Like an astronaut, Yuna mused, from those dog-eared issues of Popular Science that Gabe loved so dearly.

  The suit was an industrial shade of light green, topped with a helmet that looked like a soft-sided tank. Moran held out her arms as Misha slipped a pair of heavy straps over them, settling them on her shoulders.

  A hazmat suit, Yuna thought. Hazardous materials. That’s what’s out there. That’s all that’s out there.

  Even so … Yuna’s jealousy was so profound, she could taste it. She could roll it around on her tongue. She could bite into it. She could chew on it.

  Moran turned to them, her face obscured by the clear front of the helmet. Her voice carried through the layers of respirator equipment rigged into the suit. Mr. Correa’s ad hoc solution, Yuna was fairly certain. He was good with that sort of thing. And he was teaching Gabe to be as well. One day, Gabe would take over.

  Which would mean that at some far-flung point in the future, they would still be down here, living off powdered gruel and the withered fruits of a sun-starved garden.

  No, whispered a voice at the back of Yuna’s head. Don’t.

  Yuna shook herself to dislodge the thought. Her mother’s gaze cut to her, sharp enough to draw blood.

  Moran’s breath left her besuited body in a tinny rush of air. Her words reverberated against the inside of the hazmat gear, echoing against her frail bones.

  “Though the surface is cruel, the shadows of night will keep me safe.” Moran’s gaze drifted to each person in turn, not the least bit diminished by the filter of see-through plastic that separated them. “For this, I thank the blessed dark.”

  A chorus of mumbled, “We thank the blessed dark” rose up from those gathered around Moran.

  It was never formalized, this call and response. Dr. Moran had never asked them to do it. They had just started doing it. Yuna couldn’t remember who the first was. Probably Misha or Sash’s mom. They seemed like the types. Maybe Gabe’s mom, Mrs. Correa, on one of her bad days. She had them sometimes, when the cloud slid over her eyes and she wore calluses onto her fingers tracing her rosary beads over and over and over again.

  Misha wrapped his large hands around the hatch and turned the wheel. It squeaked loudly in the deafening roar of silence that enveloped them. It swung open under his palms, its thick metal body taunting them—or maybe just Yuna—with the possibility of a world beyond it.

  What’s out there? Yuna wanted to know. She wanted to know it more than anything. Sometimes, she was better at silencing that question than she was right now. But every time she saw that hatch swing open, she couldn’t help but think it. Of all the things we left behind, what’s left?

  Yuna’s feet shuffled. Her mother rested a hand on her shoulder. In comfort or in warning. It was hard to tell. So often, those two were indistinguishable down here, hidden away from all the things that might
hurt them.

  Yuna sighed without even realizing she was doing it. Her chest hurt. It was best not to think about why.

  Moran’s heavy boots clomped up the stairs, one by one, with painstaking slowness. When she reached the hatch, she turned to look at them.

  “And into the blessed dark, we go.”

  Always we. Never I. As if all of them went out there with her. As if she carried each of their hopes and fears and prayers with her as she went.

  One boot lifted, arced. Crossed the threshold. Then, the other. Yuna’s heart clamored inside her rib cage; the muscles in her calves twitched with the urge to go, to run, to leap and lurch and fling her body through that open door. If she perished, so be it, so long as she did it with sky above her head and fresh air in her lungs.

  But she didn’t do any of those things.

  She stood in one spot, rooted to the artificial metal ground beneath her feet, watching as Misha swung the hatch closed behind Moran and her hazmat suit.

  When the doctor returned the next morning, she’d have the same look on her face that she had worn every morning for the past 3,627 days.

  She shed the protective layers one by one, bequeathing each into the waiting hands of Misha and Mrs. Correa.

  When her face was bare, she turned to the crowd that had assembled once more. Her lips pressed into a hard line. Dark circles smudged the skin beneath her tired eyes. She sighed. Everything they needed to know was contained in that single, sad exhalation. The truth hardly needed to be verbalized, but she gave it to them anyway.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She was always sorry. Every time this happened.

  “It still isn’t safe.” It never was. It was a fact that never changed. It was as constant as the metal walls that cradled them underground. As constant as the darkness pressing in around them on all sides. As constant as the dozens of feet of soil crushing them slowly, slowly, slowly.

  “We’ll have to stay down here just a little bit longer.”

  Just a little bit. As a lie, it was the most constant of them all.

  Dr. Moran had given him permission to go spelunking in the air vents, so as far as Gabe was concerned he was doing absolutely nothing wrong.

  He kept repeating this thought to himself over and over as he crawled through the ducts, bony elbows banging against ancient metal plating. (Well, more like several decades old.) The ventilation system smelled like something from a movie he’d seen as a kid, way back when in the Before times, about the least stodgy archaeologist Gabe could possibly envision having adventures in far-flung lands. Indiana Jones, that’s what it was. The smell wasn’t bad per se. Not like something had crawled in here and died. It was just old. Old and undiscovered. Someone had built it, many moons ago, but it had been forgotten, this passage. Left waiting for someone else to find it, to unearth its secret. Waiting for someone like Gabe.

  Gabe, who was doing absolutely nothing wrong.

  (Okay, so the doctor hadn’t exactly agreed to a spelunking expedition, but he hadn’t seen fit to bog her down with details. And she’d said, “Do what you have to,” which was as much permission as Gabe needed quite frankly.)

  He was doing this for all of them. Not for himself. Not for his own curiosity. The bunker was old. Falling apart at the seams. If there was a way to improve the airflow, to keep them alive (buried) down here longer, he had to figure it out. He had to twist and turn the problem over in his hands until he could take it apart and put it back together again.

  So, really, he was doing nothing wrong.

  Why, then, had he felt the need to wait until nightfall to go about his task? Not that there was ever truly a “night” down in the bunker anyway, just a time they all agreed to go to bed in complete darkness. Why had he not told anyone save Moran that he’d discovered something on the blueprints? (Not that he’d told her specifically what he’d discovered, but he’d put them on her desk. So really, she could have seen it plain as day if only she had been inclined to look.)

  And an even bigger question: Why had he not told Sash and Yuna? Why hadn’t he brought them along? Why was he not clambering through these ventilation shafts with Sash on one side of him and Yuna on the other? Why were their voices not filling out this accursed darkness as he labored forward, into the unknown?

  Okay, so that was more than one question, but all of them still stood.

  And Gabe didn’t really have any answers. He just had a feeling. Something deep in his gut that told him to march forth, into the shadows, to see what there was to see with his own eyes and no others.

  Maybe there was nothing to see. Maybe he was just a little fool overwhelmed by wishful thinking, driven batty by the monotony of their lives, day in and day out, spent in the same place with the same people doing the same things, following the same rules, eating the same food until one day there would be nothing left.

  That’s it, isn’t it? a voice at the back of his mind queried. It’s fear that drove him into this duct alone. Fear that made him search it out in the first place. Fear that kept his mouth shut.

  Sash was so brave. Yuna was too, in a completely different way. Gabe didn’t want to be the only one who wasn’t. He didn’t want to be the only one who was afraid.

  And he was. Constantly. Every morning he woke up, fear was the first thing to greet him at the door. Its insistent fist pounded at his rib cage, demanding to be let in.

  It was still there now, humming at the back of his skull. But it wasn’t the only thing insistent in there. There was a louder thrum, a deeper urge driving him forward.

  Curiosity.

  His knees ached with every inch gained. But that thrum got louder and louder as he followed the lines of the blueprint he’d committed to memory, deeper and deeper into the bunker until he felt that seismic shift inside him, that crossing of a dotted line that signified he was officially off the map.

  There was something illicit in what he was doing.

  You must always tell the truth.

  That was one of Dr. Moran’s irrevocable, unbreakable rules.

  And he hadn’t broken it. Not really.

  He just hadn’t told the whole truth. And that wasn’t a lie, was it?

  (Yes, it was.)

  Because it wasn’t just efficiency in air filtration Gabe was chasing. It was something else. Something bigger.

  Something unknown.

  The details in the blueprints didn’t add up. He’d done the math, the geometry, the scaling more times than he could count, and it never added up. There was something there that wasn’t covered by one set of blueprints. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  When Gabe was twelve, he’d stumbled on his father’s stash of papers, the ones Moran had given to him when he took on the lion’s share of work to keep the bunker running.

  To keep them all alive—

  There had been two documents that looked very similar. Similar, but not identical. They’d reminded him of the picture books he’d loved as a very small child, the kind where you had to compare two nearly identical wild hodgepodges of imagery and find the tiny differences between them.

  “Dad, why are they like this?”

  A shrug before the papers were removed from his hands. “Cornelius Percival Moran was a nutjob.”

  A light smack on his father’s arm from his mother. “Cornelius Percival Moran is the reason we’re alive. Show some respect.”

  Gabe continued his forward trek (crawl) through the darkness. The flashlight hanging around his neck—powered by a small hand crank on the side—flickered in and out, casting broken shadows against the metallic walls of the air vent. It was shoddy lighting, but it was bright enough for Gabe to just make out the three-letter symbol stamped near the seam of every panel.

  CPM.

  Cornelius Percival Moran.

  The man who had ordered the construction of this bunker decades prior to anyone ever needing it. The man who had died long before he’d ever get the satisfaction of knowing his endeavor would eventually save lives.
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br />   The light flickered out once more, plunging Gabe into total darkness. But this time, it didn’t flicker back on. He reached for the flashlight, fumbling against the cord around his neck.

  It’s okay. Darkness is good. Darkness is safe.

  (“And for this, we thank the blessed dark.”)

  Gabe adjusted his weight, moving his center of balance from one hand to the other, trying to grab the handle of the flashlight.

  And that proved to be a mistake.

  The change was too much for the rickety air vent paneling. One minute, his knees and palms were resting on cold, hard metal. The next, they were resting on nothing but air.

  Falling, Gabe knew, was a thing that happened fast. The laws of physics demanded it thus. And yet, it felt as though he were collapsing in slow motion, suspended in a merciless, unmitigated field of blackness.

  Then he landed. Hard.

  Everything hurt. His shoulder hurt and his knee hurt and his face hurt and, most of all, his hip hurt. It had borne the brunt of the fall. Better than trying to catch himself with a hand and breaking his wrist but …

  “Ow.”

  He groped at his neck for the flashlight, but it was gone. Slipped off in the fall. With the arm that stung less, Gabe felt around for something solid. He inched forward, fear so high and thick in his throat he thought he might choke on it. Maybe this was it, this was where he died. Maybe this was why they said curiosity killed the—

  His fingers brushed something. Cold, hard metal. Right under his palm.

  Hastening forward, Gabe’s foot caught on something, nearly taking him out (again). The flashlight. He dropped to his knees—“Ow”—and with shaking hands, he cranked the power on.

  The beam of light sliced through the darkness, searing Gabe’s eyes. He squinted against the brightness, tears blurring his eyes (from the glare and not from the pain, he lied to himself) as they alighted on the thing in front of him.

  A hatch.

  A door.

  Smaller than the one out front but nearly identical in every other way.

  Same wheel handle.

  Same locking mechanism.