The Buried

by Melissa Grey

  (Take your sister and run—)

  Sleepwalking, Baba Olya had called it.

  Night terrors, Mrs. Correa proclaimed.

  Memories, Dr. Moran said. Of a time best left forgotten.

  Sash hadn’t forgotten it. Not one painful second. She held the memories close, turning them over in her hands, making sure they were still sharp enough to cut her palms.

  It was just a dream, she told herself. Nothing more.

  “What do I have to roll to convince the king to abdicate his throne and hand me his crown?” Yuna asked.

  Gabe blinked at her over the game master’s screen. It was really just three pieces of scrap they’d hammered together with a bunch of rusty nails they’d found in a long-forgotten storage space deep within the bowels of the bunker, but it did its job and it did it well. “Diplomacy, I guess. But also like … don’t?”

  “Why not?” Yuna asked.

  “Because.”

  “Because is not a reason.”

  Gabe huffed out a frustrated sigh. It was not his first of the night. It would not be his last. “It is when the dungeon master says it is.”

  “I’m a bard.” Yuna shrugged. “I do what I want.”

  The chalk snapped in Gabe’s closed fist. “That’s not what a bard does!”

  Yuna chewed the wooden, eraserless end of her pencil. “That’s what a chaotic bard does.”

  “Rules exist for a reason, Yuna.”

  “Oh, forget the rules.” Sash fought the urge to dramatically flip the table as she said it. It would have made for excellent theater but poor sportsmanship. Though it would have been extremely in character. Her paladin was a bit hotheaded too. Life imitates art, or in this case, tabletop gaming imitates life. “We’ve been playing by the same stupid rules for ages. It’s the same game, over and over. Don’t you ever get tired of it?”

  This was easier, so much easier, than rubbing the pads of her fingers on the sharp edges of a memory—or a dream.

  Roll the dice. Play the part.

  “Are we playing this game or what?” Gabe asked.

  “Or what,” Yuna said.

  “Yeah, or what,” Sash agreed.

  With an incoherent sound of frustration, Gabe slammed the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook shut. Like everything else in the bunker, it was a relic of another time, though this one to a world that never actually existed. Its dark cover was cracked and faded. The toothy, jewel-eyed demon that grinned out was barely visible anymore. “Why is it that we never do what I want to do?”

  “We’re a democracy,” Yuna quipped. “And our votes just happen to align with alarming frequency.”

  “You’re insufferable, you know that,” said Gabe, piling his papers and character sheets together and tucking them into the Player’s Handbook. The hardcover copy was ideal for protecting their treasures, fictional though they might be. “I have to pee.”

  “Aw, come on, Gabe,” Sash said. She didn’t even bother trying to sound anything other than cajoling. Gabe hated cajoling. “Don’t storm off in a huff.”

  Gabe stormed off in a huff, the Player’s Handbook tucked under his arm.

  Sash and Yuna watched him go. They waited in silence for him to realize his error.

  Twenty-five seconds later—Sash counted—Gabe stormed back in, his scowl even darker than before. With nary another word, he stuck the book back on the shelf, sliding it between a battered copy of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and a July 1984 edition of Reader’s Digest. With another glare tossed their way, Gabe turned on his heel and stormed out. Again.

  “Bye, Gabe,” Sash called to his retreating back.

  He replied with a rude gesture, entirely unfit for polite society.

  Moments passed in silence between them. Warm, comfortable moments.

  Yuna canted her head to the side. Her hair slipped over her shoulder. Sash balled her hands into fists so she didn’t reach out and push that disobedient lock of hair back.

  “You weren’t really talking about the game, were you?”

  “I …” Sash paused. “No. Not really.” She sighed. “Aren’t you sick of this place?”

  Yuna laughed. When she smiled, the crooked tooth on her bottom row of teeth—the one she was achingly self-conscious about—showed. Sash had only the warmest of feelings for that crooked little tooth. It was perfect somehow in all its imperfection.

  “Of course I’m sick of this place,” Yuna said. “Any sane person would be.”

  A rueful grin tugged at Sash’s lips. “You realize that discounts like … half of our combined families, right?”

  Yuna snorted a tiny, soft laugh. The sound made something deep in Sash’s chest flutter. But in an instant it was squashed by the memory of the other night.

  “I saw something weird the other night.”

  “Did you walk in on Gabe acting out scenes from the old G.I. Joe comic again? You know he hates it when we acknowledge he does that.”

  “No. Not that.” Sash sat upright, plucking at the loose threads in the rug. “I heard a sound. Like a banging noise. I got up and went to go investigate. It sounded like it was coming from the hatch, so I—”

  Yuna bolted upright. “Please tell me you didn’t open it.”

  “I didn’t!”

  Maybe you should have.

  Breathing a sigh of relief, Yuna sagged. “Good.”

  “I just … peeked out the window.”

  “What did you see?”

  Sash tried to remember. She did. But it had been so dark and her heart had been pounding so hard she hadn’t been able to see anything else. She could practically taste her pulse. “I don’t know.”

  Yuna made an inquisitive noise at the back of her throat.

  Silence fell between them as Sash tried to give what she had seen, what she’d felt, shape. But she came up short.

  Then the door banging open made them both jump.

  Gabe froze in the doorway, eyebrows raised. “What’s the matter with you two?”

  Thrusting a finger at Sash, Yuna said, “Sash heard noises the other night.”

  Gabe paused, blinking. “What kind of noises? And when?”

  There was no shock in Gabe’s tone. No surprise. Odd, Sash thought.

  She squirmed, settling herself a fraction of an inch farther away from Yuna. Not out of shame—Gabe never cared if they touched—but from habit mainly.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t check a clock or anything. It was late.”

  “How late?”

  “I don’t know! Just … late.”

  Gabe’s lips thinned when he was thinking a little too hard about something. “It might have been me. I was in the air vents a few nights ago.”

  “What?” Yuna blurted.

  Sash shook her head. “Couldn’t have been you, Gabe. I saw you sleeping.”

  Then, she added: “But why were you in the air vents?”

  “I thought …” His words trailed off as he swept past them—insofar as anyone could sweep in a tiny space like that—and plunged into the trunk of old books and outdated atlases they used as a table, upsetting their tabletop game in the process.

  For Gabe to sacrifice an expertly laid out game of Dungeons & Dragons, it must have been serious business indeed.

  He emerged with a flattened roll of blueprints in his hands. Knocking a battalion of handpainted miniatures aside, Gabe laid them on the top of the trunk. “Look.”

  Sash stared down at the blueprints, but they were just monochromatic lines and numbers to her. “What am I supposed to be looking at?”

  Gabe sighed, rolling his eyes. “They’re the bunker.”

  “Okay and … ?”

  “And they’re not the same. They’re different here”—Gabe pointed to one of the diagrams, and then another—“and here. Leaving a gap”—another finger thrust at a bit of negative space on both—“here. I thought it was odd because the air ducts follow through both in a way that doesn’t make sense. At first I thought that maybe there was an
unnecessary redundancy in the system, that air was being wasted on a space that wasn’t used, but …”

  He shook his head, eyes alight.

  “But what?” Sash prodded.

  “But it wasn’t an unused space. Not really. I mean, we don’t use it but—”

  “Gabe. The point. Get to it.”

  “There’s a hatch.”

  A resounding silence met his words.

  “A hatch,” Sash said.

  “A hatch,” Gabe repeated.

  Yuna’s gaze swung between them. “A hatch as in …”

  “A door outside,” Sash said without waiting for Gabe to answer.

  He nodded. “Like the one out front.”

  Sash wished the source of the booming sound had been Gabe. That would have been so much simpler. So much more comforting. But regardless of its source, Sash wanted—no, needed—an explanation. For the noises. The hatch. The secret door. There were too many strange things happening in too short a span of time. They had to be connected somehow. They had to be.

  “Okay,” Sash said, “this is bananas, but hear me out.”

  Yuna propped her head on her chin, baleful as one could be. “Don’t mention bananas. I don’t remember what they taste like, but I remember liking them.”

  “Fine. This is bonkers,” Sash said. “We’re sitting here playing at fake quests when we could be on a real one.”

  Gabe frowned, affronted. “But I like D&D.…”

  Yuna simply canted her head to the side, waiting for Sash to formulate her thought. Waiting for her to breathe her heresy into the air.

  And so, she did: “You know what I think?”

  “I have a feeling I do,” Gabe replied.

  “And I have a feeling it’s insane,” Yuna added.

  Sash couldn’t have fought the smile that tugged at her lips if she wanted to. And she didn’t. “I think we should go through that door.”

  In the greenhouse, Yuna could pretend she was somewhere else.

  And she wanted to be somewhere else right now, very badly. Sash and Gabe had argued about the merits of exploring the heretofore undiscovered door until it was late enough that the dimming of the bunker lights ended their conversation. Yuna had mostly stayed out of it. Conflict had never been her thing. Their exploration had an air of the inevitable about it. They were going to do it, no matter how much caution Gabe advised or how brazen Sash’s plans. One way or the other, the door was theirs.

  The thought should have filled Yuna with excitement. A new thing to do. They hadn’t had a new thing to do in years. But the joy of it, the unbridled pleasure in the pursuit of the unknown she’d always dreamed of experiencing, was drowned out by fear.

  Fear that opening the door would kill them and the people they loved.

  Fear that going through it would bring damnation upon their heads.

  Fear that it would lead absolutely nowhere at all.

  Yuna shook herself as she worked her way through the greenhouse, trying to dislodge those thoughts. That fear.

  Calling it a greenhouse was perhaps a rather generous massaging of the definition, but it fit somehow. It felt right. It felt good. Banks of specialized UV lights shone down on the rows of plants, casting them in a soft, purple glow.

  There was basil and peppermint, rosemary and thyme. Three modest fields of spinach, especially designed to survive underground, according to Dr. Moran.

  Yuna walked through the room, a lightness to her step that she staunchly refused to succumb to dark thoughts. Her conversation with Sash the other night had been …

  Well, Yuna wasn’t sure what it had been, but it had been something.

  The two of them, alone.

  “I think we’re alone now …”

  The fairy lights fading in and out, their brightness left to the whims of the bunker’s unreliable electricity.

  “There doesn’t seem to be anyone around …”

  Sash, opening her mouth and spilling out secrets and fears and fragile precious things she trusted Yuna not to break.

  “I think we’re alone now …”

  The broken record player emitting the ghost of music, if not the music itself.

  “The beating of our hearts is the only sound.”

  Yuna had read the liner notes of that Tiffany record so often, she could project them onto the insides of her eyelids. She didn’t know what the title track sounded like, but she was positive it was a good song. A great one. A phenomenal one.

  The soundtrack of her own design accompanied her through her chore list. She hummed under her breath, mentally checking boxes as she went about her business caring for the denizens of the greenhouse.

  Yuna liked the greenhouse. Well, she liked it as much as she could like anything in the bunker. The air smelled different in here. It was still pumped through the same vents, still filtered through the same ventilation system, but it was different somehow. Cleaner. Fresher.

  It was the plants. It had to be.

  They took in carbon dioxide. They breathed fresh, unfiltered oxygen back out.

  Oxygen was their most precious currency. Water was a close second. Food, a very tight third.

  The greenhouse was largely responsible for keeping them all fed. Without the fruits (both literal and metaphorical) it bore, they’d have all developed scurvy and died ages ago.

  She hummed what she thought Tiffany’s song might sound like under her breath as Misha rotated out bulbs in the overhead UV lights.

  “Must you?” His voice was gruff, but without any real fire behind it. They’d shared greenhouse duties for the past eighteen months. He was accustomed to her ways by now.

  She nodded sagely as she leaned in to check the nearest plants. “I must.”

  Misha said something pithy and probably unkind in return—that seemed to be his default—but the words didn’t reach Yuna. All she could hear was a sort of low, keening alarm at the back of her head as her eyes raked over a clump of spinach.

  “Misha.”

  He grunted in response, not really listening to her.

  “Misha!”

  “What?”

  “Come here.”

  Frowning, he hefted a bucket and came over, a wrinkle of annoyance forming between his brows. But when she pointed at the spinach, the wrinkle smoothed. Disappeared. Returned even stronger.

  Patchwork spots of white covered the leaves. The worst of them had worn clean through the green flesh, leaving jagged holes in the middle of each leaf.

  Misha set down the bucket. “What happened here?”

  Yuna hung back. “Misha, don’t touch it.”

  He shot her a withering glare over his shoulder. “I wasn’t going to.”

  She shrugged, covering her mouth with the excess fabric of her sleeve. There was a reason she liked baggy sweatshirts. The reason was honestly that she felt like she was being hugged all the time when she wore them, but they had their uses.

  Through a pair of thick work gloves, Misha handled one of the stalks with a milder case of the white rot. “What is it?”

  “Blight.”

  He cursed. Long and vicious and in at least two languages. Some of the Russian she recognized from Baba Olya’s occasional expletive-laced utterances when Dr. Moran did something to annoy her (which was often).

  “We’re going to have to burn it all.” Misha cursed again.

  Yuna’s mind felt slow. Sluggish. “But that means …”

  The reality of the situation hit her, not with any amount of subtlety, but with all the force of thousands of pounds of dirt bearing down on them.

  They were running out of supplies.

  It wasn’t exactly a startling revelation. The juice. Pear. The worst flavor. The porridge, thinner and thinner each month, as the water-to-grain ratio changed to favor the former.

  And now, the spinach. The greens. Their food. Their oxygen.

  Misha shoved Yuna back toward the door. “Get out of here. I’ll talk to the doctor.”

  Yuna let herself be manha
ndled through the door. In the long, dark corridor, her breath ricocheted off the metal walls. Too fast. Too loud.

  I can’t stay here.

  Her feet carried her forward while her mind lagged a half step behind.

  I can’t stay here.

  We can’t stay here.

  She found Sash in the kitchen, her blond hair tied back in a messy bun (messy but cute), her gloved arms elbow deep in the large metal vat they used to mix that watered-down porridge.

  “Hey,” said Sash, blowing out a puff of air to get the errant strands of hair out of her face. They fluttered upward only to succumb to gravity once more.

  Before she could stop herself, Yuna reached out and tucked the too-long bangs behind Sash’s ear. The other girl’s cheeks pinkened just slightly at the contact, brief and blunted by gloves as it was.

  “No touching,” Nastia said from the other side of the sink. She waved a soapy rag in Yuna’s direction, splattering her with renegade bubbles. “Them’s the rules.”

  Sash’s cheeks reddened further. “Shut up, Nastia.”

  In a higher, much more annoying voice, Nastia said, “Shut up, Nastia.” But with a roll of her eyes, she went back to scrubbing the tin plates. She wasn’t gentle with them. Yuna hoped she didn’t scrub the blue pattern off her plate.

  Turning back to Yuna, Sash asked, “What’s up?”

  Yuna glanced at Nastia, who was very studiously not paying attention to the conversation happening two feet to her left. So much so that it was abundantly clear she was hanging on every word. “Can I talk to you for a second?”

  “Sure, give me five minutes.”

  “We’re running out of food.”

  Sash blinked at Yuna, her hair sliding out from behind her ear and over her forehead once more. This time, she didn’t bother blowing it out of the way. After a long, awful moment, she glanced behind her at Nastia, who was still by the sink but had inched closer to where they stood. Brow furrowed, Sash jerked her head in the direction of the hallway.

  Yuna followed her out into the corridor. There were so few places to find privacy in the bunker. It was best snatched in stolen fragments, which they both knew was all they had in that moment.

  Safely out of Nastia’s earshot—for now—Sash said, “But we have the greenhouse …”