The Buried

by Melissa Grey

  They were not alone.

  Moran was wrong, Moran was wrong, Moran was wrong.

  Each word slammed into him with the force of a brick swung around in a burlap sack.

  The man stepped into the pantry. Gabe’s tongue was too large for his jaw suddenly, like it was trying to suffocate him. His mouth opened and closed like a guppy choking on air.

  A squeak from the corner of the pantry made them both freeze. The man went still, his head twitching in the direction of the sound.

  The rat. The one from the rice.

  As if summoned by Gabe’s thoughts, the rat darted out from the bottom shelf, aiming for the door.

  But the old man—was he that old or did he just look that way?—was more spry than he appeared. Arms outstretched, he lunged for the rat. It shrieked as his claylike hands closed around its body.

  And then, the man bit it.

  He bit the rat.

  Blood spurted around his jaw as his eyes closed in ecstasy. Under his layers of mismatched rags, his body trembled as if in the deepest throes of pleasure.

  Bile rose high in Gabe’s throat at the sight.

  A thousand questions ran through his head, but none he could articulate in the moment.

  Why?

  How?

  What?

  What?

  What?

  The rat struggled in the man’s bandaged and bloodied hands, its tiny, hairless legs kicked in a futile attempt to escape, its tail twitching as those hands tightened their hold.

  With the man distracted by his feast, Gabe did the only thing he could think of.

  He tucked the radio under one arm and ran.

  They could have been hiding for minutes or for hours.

  Time had lost all meaning to Yuna, huddled in what felt like the belly of a tauntaun. (They had a copy in the bunker of an old Star Wars novelization. Its mass market paperback pages were yellowed and thinning, but it was still good reading.)

  It wasn’t actually a tauntaun (they weren’t real), but a closet full of fur. Coats, to be exact, of different textures and colors. Yuna assumed the last bit. It was too dark to see anything. Sash had snatched the flashlight from Yuna’s hand and switched it off as they ran through the manor’s twisting corridors until they’d found this place. This dark, horrible, fur-lined place.

  It was also hot and musty, especially with the two of them crammed into the small space, knees knocking together and legs all tangled up.

  She wanted to whisper something to Sash. To ask if she was okay. To check if the coast was clear. But she was too afraid. Too afraid to speak. Too afraid to move. Too afraid to breathe, really. She tried to hold her breath, but as it turns out, the body overrides the brain when it’s suffocating from sheer stupid terror. So she breathed, but quietly, and in no way that felt satisfying to her lungs.

  Her hand—still gloveless; God, where were her gloves?—fumbled in the pitch black for something to hold on to, something that wasn’t a dead animal transformed into a garment for whatever rich lady had filled this closet with wearable corpses.

  Fingers collided with hers before twining around them, joining their hands. Sash, too, had apparently been seeking out human contact.

  It was silent now, but Yuna imagined she could still hear it. That awful noise.

  Skkkrrritch.

  Like nails on a chalkboard.

  Or claws against marble.

  “What was that?” Yuna dared to whisper.

  Sash pressed a hand to the girl’s mouth, shaking her head.

  I don’t know, said that shake of the head.

  Don’t speak, said that shake of the head.

  I’m sorry, I was an idiot. I never should have suggested we come up here, and I hope we don’t die, was a little too complex to be conveyed with a single shake of the head, but Yuna thought she heard it anyway.

  She buried her face in her knees, focusing on the Herculean task of taking air into her lungs via her nostrils and breathing it out slowly through her mouth.

  In and out.

  In and out.

  In and out.

  Her heart was beating so loudly in her chest, she was sure that whatever was out there could hear it. It would sound the alarm to the monsters lurking in the shadows and summon them to their location, to this closet. It would stain the mink coats red with their blood. It would—

  Something yanked the door open.

  Yuna let out a strangled scream before a hand—Sash’s—clapped over her mouth, sealing the remainder of it behind a sweaty palm.

  Blinking against the half-light of the otherwise empty hallway, Yuna choked back the rest of her scream. In the open doorway stood Gabe, his chest heaving as it rose and fell with a series of strained asthmatic breaths.

  “We … have …” Each word punctuated by another labored breath. “To … run.”

  Sash moved so quickly that the unfolding of her legs made them both tumble out of the closet and onto the floor at Gabe’s feet.

  Gabe circled Yuna’s upper arm with his free hand—the one not clutching a weird black box against his chest—and hauled her to her feet with a strength she hadn’t ever realized he possessed.

  Once they were all upright, they wasted no time.

  They ran.

  As quietly as they could, through the manor’s labyrinthine corridors. Past empty rooms and empty frames and empty chairs and tables.

  Yuna was too turned around to know where she was going. Too afraid for her mind to make any sense of the manor’s bizarre geography. She could only trust—and pray—that Gabe’s eidetic memory would save them from …

  From what?

  Yuna hadn’t seen anything. She was fairly certain Sash hadn’t either.

  But something had been there. Something that wasn’t the three of them. Something that sounded distinctly inhuman.

  Her mind was still spiraling when they trampled back into the ballroom. Their footsteps felt too loud against its black-and-white-checkered floor, but eventually they made it to the hatch. It had been cleverly disguised by the pattern in the flooring, if not for the piece of rotted wood they’d wedged inside, holding it ajar. That piece of wood was all that prevented them from being sealed outside, in this horrible place with its horrible ghosts skkkrrrritching at the floors.

  Sash reached the hatch first. She dropped to her knees and wrenched it open, knocking their makeshift doorstop aside. Her hair—loose now somehow, how had that happened?—whipped around her face as she turned to Yuna. The girl’s eyes were wide, her complexion pale with fear.

  “Go!”

  Yuna went.

  She dropped through the hatch feetfirst, landing on the metal grating beneath with a dull thud that reverberated up her calves. The shock subsided as she scrambled out of the way. Gabe fell through after her, followed by Sash, whose swinging feet nearly decapitated him. As she fell, she pulled the hatch shut behind her.

  The metal door slammed closed, knocking ten years’ worth of dust from its hinges. It was the loudest sound Yuna had ever heard.

  The silence that followed in its wake was somehow worse.

  She panted, doubling over, hands on her knees. Her hair had fallen loose of its bun during their mad dash to the hatch. A cascade of it blocked the others from her sight. She squeezed her eyes shut, but that proved to be a mistake. All she could see then were the horrible creatures her mind concocted to go with those sounds.

  After a long, terrible moment, Gabe broke the silence:

  “I saw someone.”

  Yuna and Sash both stared at him. Except he wasn’t looking at them. He was inspecting the thing he’d held so tightly in his arms the entire time they were running. It looked like some kind of old electronics, maybe even older than the Betamax (they had a bunch of those in the bunker).

  “That’s not possible,” Sash said.

  It was so unlike her, Yuna couldn’t help but notice.

  Sash was the sort of person who always wanted to believe in the impossible. It was her im
agination, her absolute unshakable faith that the world was not what they’d been told, that had led them topside in the first place.

  Maybe even Sash can have doubts.

  It was an odd thought. Not one Yuna wanted to welcome into her mind. Not at all.

  But Gabe was shaking his head. “I did. I saw someone. I swear.”

  “Like …” Yuna swallowed, forcing the words up her throat, phoneme by painful phoneme. “A person?”

  It was probably a stupid question, except in how it wasn’t.

  Gabe nodded, too rapidly, like one of those bobblehead dolls her older brother had once kept on the dashboard of his new car.

  Don’t.

  Those were thoughts she did not think.

  If she thought them, she would be lost.

  Lost was something she couldn’t afford to be. Not now. Not when Gabe had seen someone.

  “He ate a rat,” Gabe whispered, staring at the device in his hands. “It was still alive.” He swallowed thickly. Once. Twice. He looked up at them, his eyes curiously distant, as if he were seeing something they couldn’t. “There was something wrong with his skin.”

  Yuna dropped Sash’s hand—when had she taken it again?—and stepped away from them both.

  “Yuna …” Sash’s voice was so soft. So hurt. She thought Yuna had withdrawn from her. That Yuna believed touching Sash was a bad thing.

  “No—I …” Yuna didn’t know how to verbalize what it was she felt. “What if I … ?” She looked down at her hands, half expecting her unmarked flesh to erupt in boils, for pus and blood and bile to come streaming out of her pores. Tearing her eyes away from her bare—bare!—hands, Yuna said, “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “If you’re infected, we’re all infected.” Gabe’s voice was coming back to his body, like he was pulling himself inch by painful inch out of a memory. He looked so haunted. Maybe he would be for the rest of his life, Yuna thought. However long that was.

  Oh God, what had they done?

  “Go, wash your hands. Find another pair of gloves. I’ll give you a pair of mine if you need them.” Sash pulled hers out of her back pocket (a much more sensible place to have stored them). She held them out to Yuna, who could only stare dumbly at them. “Take these.”

  Yuna shook her head. “No. You need them.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “But, Sash—”

  “None of us are going to be fine,” Gabe blurted. “You didn’t see him! He was—”

  Sash clapped her hand—her bare hand—over Gabe’s mouth. He mumbled something, but it was effectively smothered by her palm.

  “Keep it together,” Sash said, her own voice oddly steady considering the circumstances. “And for the love of all that is holy, keep your voice down.”

  Gabe narrowed his eyes at her over his palm. After a long, mutinous glare, his face softened and he nodded.

  Slowly, Sash lowered her hand. That she wiped it off on her jeans did not escape anyone’s notice. But no one remarked on it. They were all trying their best, considering the circumstances.

  “What are we going to do?” Yuna asked. She hated how her voice sounded. Young and scared and tremulous. But she was young and she was scared and she was fairly certain she was about to start shaking like a leaf and never, ever stop.

  Considering the circumstances.

  Sash turned so she was facing them both. “We’re going to do the same exact thing we always do.”

  “How can you—” Gabe shook his head, cutting himself off. “After what I saw, how can you expect us to go about our business as usual? Oh, hey, still nothing to see out there!” His voice rose in pitch with every word, amplified by his burgeoning hysteria. “There was something! And I did see it! And it was a person. A whole, living person! On the surface! Where there are supposed to be no people! None!”

  “Gabe.”

  Sash grabbed his face in both hands—her gloves were back on, and Yuna hadn’t even noticed her don them. How odd. She leaned in close, not close enough to touch but close enough.

  She spoke in a low, soothing voice. “You cannot lose it right now. Do you understand me?”

  Gabe tried to shake his head, but the movement was limited by Sash’s grip. “But—”

  “No buts. You absolutely cannot lose it.”

  Squeezing his eyes shut, Gabe drew in a long, shaky breath. After a moment, he opened his eyes and met Sash’s. Then he nodded.

  “Okay.” Sash released him and turned to Yuna. “I don’t know what was up there. I don’t understand what you saw.” She stepped back so she could address them both. “But what I do know is that we cannot tell anyone. Not yet. Not until we find out more. Not until we know the truth.”

  “But how?” Yuna asked. “How are we going to do that?”

  Sash squared her shoulders. The look on her face was one Yuna knew well. It was determination and ferocity and an unwavering commitment to whatever absurd nonsense she was about to pull.

  “I’ll figure something out. I promise.”

  Act normal.

  Sure.

  No problem.

  Just act perfectly normal as if nothing life-altering had happened in the dead of the night.

  As if the fabric of their shared reality hadn’t been fundamentally torn wide open by the sound of claws in the shadows, or the ghost of a man haunting the hallways of a long-abandoned manor house.

  It had been so easy to say that to Gabe and Yuna. Act normal. So easy to be the one to reassure them, to hold the pieces together in the cupped palms of her hands as if she knew what she was doing.

  She didn’t.

  * * *

  The day proceeded as normally as she could force it to. Breakfast was a quiet, sullen affair, but Sash being quiet and sullen in the morning was nothing new. Her rotation cleaning up after the meal was equally as mundane. She was paired with Nastia this time, who did as poor a job rinsing the dishes as she always did.

  Everything was normal.

  Perfectly normal.

  Absolutely positively normal.

  At least it was until class. Until she saw Moran’s smug face, smiling at them as they filed into the room, their assorted morning chores complete. She was wearing a burgundy caftan today, its tassels swinging with every movement of her arms. The loose black dress underneath it highlighted the hollows of her cheeks, the smudges under her eyes.

  The same girl in that photograph. The girl from the fancy Swiss boarding school. That’s who Moran was. Not some savior. Not a saint. Not what she pretended to be at all.

  “Blessed morrow, all.”

  Blessed morrow. God, Sash hated that. Why not just say “good morning” like a normal person? Why dress it up? Why bother, when none of their mornings were good or blessed?

  “Blessed morrow, Dr. Moran,” the class intoned, more or less as one. Even Sash. The habit was so firmly ingrained that she didn’t notice herself speaking the words until they had already escaped, free on the air.

  Nastia nudged Sash out of the way as she aimed for the best seat in the class. It was nearest the pipe that carried warm water from one end of the bunker to the other. If she put her feet on the right spot on the floor, she could feel a little bit of warmth seeping upward.

  “Move,” Nastia grunted unkindly. Normally, Sash would have rolled her eyes at this sort of behavior. Once she hit her tween years, Nastia had become a terror. Trying to assert herself, their mother would say. Being a brat, Sash would say. Sometimes even Misha would agree with her, and he was prone to let Nastia get away with anything short of bloody murder.

  Sash had asked once what Nastia remembered about the world above. About Before. Nastia had merely shrugged and shoveled another spoonful of watery gruel into her mouth, then said, “I remember a bird pooping on me once.”

  Now Nastia plopped down onto the chair, heaving out a dramatic sigh. With exacting deliberateness, she toed off her shoes. Her socked feet settled on the floor as her eyelids fluttered shut.

  For lif
e in the bunker, a heated floor panel was the height of luxury. And Nastia was willing to shove her own sister aside for that sliver of comfort. That one, slender moment of bliss.

  This is the only life she knows. The thought settled at the base of Sash’s stomach like cold sludge. And this life is a lie.

  That was what did it.

  That was what made her fling the very sound advice she’d given Gabe and Yuna (though it was more of a demand than advice) out the window. Metaphorically.

  This far underground, there were no windows.

  But maybe, just maybe, they didn’t need to be this far underground.

  Maybe, just maybe, Nastia could have grown up with sunlight on her skin and not just the poor simulation the UV lamps could provide.

  The others settled into their seats as Moran began to write out her agenda for the day’s lesson on the board.

  Yuna caught Sash’s eyes from across the room. Something must have shown on Sash’s face because the girl’s eyebrows pinched in that way they did when she was worried.

  She had every reason to worry.

  Sash was about to do something monumentally stupid.

  Once they were all seated, Sash thrust her hand up in the air. Without waiting for Moran to call on her (the woman’s back was still to her students as she wrote on the board), Sash opened her mouth and made what she knew was a mistake.

  “What really happened during the Cataclysm?”

  The chalk scraped against the blackboard with a terrific screech that made Sash’s teeth hurt. Her skin felt like it was fit to crawl right off her bones.

  Moran turned slowly, her usually quiet smile now a rictus scream of Why are you trying my patience?

  “What do you mean ‘What really happened’?” Moran asked, her voice drenched in sickly sweet honey. She was giving Sash a chance to take it back, to snag the question right out of the air, to stuff that impertinence right back in her pocket.

  Sash, of course, did no such thing.

  She spared a thought for their little hideout. She labored under no delusion that Moran somehow didn’t know of it. She had to. If they’d found the blueprints, she must have at some point as well. They’d all been trapped in here like sardines in a can for a decade. At this point, there were no secrets, just harmless omissions they wordlessly agreed to tolerate for the sake of their collective sanity.