The Buried

by Melissa Grey

  “You know very well what happened, Alexandra.”

  “It’s Sash.”

  Moran’s smile tightened.

  And then, because Sash was fueled by pure fearless adrenaline: “I know what you told us. But I want to know the truth.”

  “Sash,” hissed Gabe from his seat.

  But she ignored him. So did Moran.

  With an amused little snort, the doctor set the piece of chalk down on the lip of the blackboard and dusted her palms together. “I had a feeling this day would come. It’s only natural, you know.”

  That … was not the response Sash had been expecting.

  “What is?”

  Moran inhaled through her nose, as if steadying herself to have a facts-of-life conversation. “This questioning of authority. It’s perfectly normal. In the old days …”

  And now, they were all holding their breaths. So rare was it for Moran to discuss the time Before in anything other than high-minded proselytism.

  “In the old days,” she repeated, knowing she had their full, captive attention, “you might have snuck out of the house …”

  Sash went still. She didn’t even blink. She dared not breathe.

  “Or perhaps gotten a tattoo. Or passed the time with unsuitable companions.”

  The snare that had begun to close around Sash’s throat loosened, just a hair.

  “Maybe you would have imbibed alcoholic beverages or experimented with illicit substances or dyed your hair hot pink.”

  Nastia snorted at that. It earned a small, tight smile from Moran.

  “But none of those rebellious options are available to you now.” Moran held a hand over her heart. “And I sympathize. I do. I was a teenager myself once. And I understand what it’s like to buck at what you think are shackles holding you in place.”

  The photograph flashed through Sash’s mind. That young girl with her dark hair and her darker eyes, shuttled off to some Swiss boarding school, perhaps to atone for whatever her rebellion had been.

  “But I assure you, I have never lied to you.” Her eyes were steady on Sash’s. Steady and open and raw, as if to say, Gaze into my depths. See what lies beneath. “Not once.” A sad shake of her head. “A part of me wishes I could. It would be easier, to peddle pretty lies and easily digestible half-truths.” A soft, wistful sigh. “But that would do you no favors. Everything I have told you is the truth. The hubris of man. His greed. His selfishness. His hunger for more. More wealth. More power. More blood and death and toil led us here. Underground. Buried, so that someday, like seedlings, we may grow again. That is what happened.”

  A masterful performance. Beautiful words strung together, saying absolutely nothing at all.

  Moran turned away, pivoting toward the blackboard. As far as she was concerned, the conversation was over.

  It was not.

  “How did my father die?”

  Gabe’s head swiveled so he could catch Sash’s eyes and glare. She could actually feel her own eyes gleaming with determination. It was an odd sensation, that internal gleaming.

  Like a dog with a bone, teeth baring down harder and harder. Unrelenting.

  Moran turned back to face Sash, her head cocking to the side. She blinked.

  “How should I know?”

  Sash pressed on. “You know so much about what went on up there. You say you know what the atmosphere would do to our bodies, how the air would burn our lungs, that the rain would fall like acid, melting the skin right off our bones.” She shrugged. “Thought you might have an idea.”

  Moran was quiet for a long moment. Then: “Trust me when I tell you, Alexandra, that you do not want to know.”

  Nastia shifted in her seat, her gaze locked on the burnished aluminum surface of the table.

  Sash spared her sister a glance.

  Of course, her father wasn’t just her father. He was theirs. Nastia may not have remembered him, but he belonged to both of them all the same. She had lost him too.

  And that was why she deserved the truth.

  “I do,” Sash said. “I do want to know.”

  “Do you?” Dr. Moran asked, her voice taking on an odd lightness in its tone. “Do you really want to know what happened to him? Do you want to hear the gory details? Do you want to know how his skin crisped on the outside while his organs liquefied? Do you want to know that it happened so quickly that he was probably conscious the entire time? Do you want to know that he felt the skin sliding off his bones?”

  Nastia stood up so quickly, her chair tipped backward. It clattered to the floor with a horrible, cacophonous sound. Her eyes were rimmed with red, and pink splotched her cheeks. She retched, drooping over the table. Clamping a hand to her mouth, she ran, knocking the chair out of the way with her shin.

  A prolonged minute of stunned quiet followed in her wake.

  That was when Sash noticed that Nastia had left without her shoes.

  They were sitting there, one on its side, small and lonely. Discarded. Forgotten.

  That was cruel, whispered one half of her brain.

  That was necessary, replied the other.

  Sash drew in another breath and immediately wished she hadn’t. A stench, wicked and bright, filled her nostrils. Rotting flesh, crisping and burning. Boiling under the light of a merciless sun. It was an illusion, that smell. But that didn’t make it feel any less real.

  “What if there are people still out there?” Sash asked.

  From the corner of her eyes, she could see Yuna and Gabe lock eyes from across the room.

  This was the opposite of laying low. This was the opposite of pretending nothing happened. This was the opposite of exactly what Sash herself had advised them to do.

  The question landed like a lead balloon.

  “I think that’s enough for today.” Moran had her eyes on the door through which Nastia had fled. “You all have chores to attend to. I suggest you do them and think about how your words, how your actions, might impact other people.”

  The others filed out slowly, like prey animals trying not to draw attention. Sash lingered for a moment.

  “You should make sure your sister gets her shoes back,” Moran said, her back to Sash. “She’ll hurt herself walking around in just her socks.”

  And that was that.

  Sash wanted to ask more. She wanted to press. But she wasn’t sure she could stomach it. And Moran clearly wasn’t going to give her anything.

  Stupid.

  Impulsive.

  Rash.

  All the things she’d warned Gabe and Yuna not to be.

  She picked up Nastia’s sneakers (ladies size 6, once-white Reeboks, popular in the mid-1980s) and left.

  In the hallway stood Yuna.

  Sash blinked at her stupidly, Nastia’s sneakers tucked under one arm.

  “Hi—”

  “What was that?” Yuna blurted.

  With a glance over her shoulder at the closed door separating them from Moran, Sash said, “Not here.”

  She walked away, Yuna following close behind. Anger radiating off the other girl in waves.

  No, not anger. Fury.

  When they reached a relatively quiet spot, Sash pulled Yuna into the bend of a hallway that went nowhere.

  Yuna flinched at the contact.

  Sash let her go. It hurt to do so, but the sight of Yuna recoiling from her touch hurt even more.

  “Why are you doing this?” Yuna asked.

  “What do you mean, why? You know why!” An answering hiss, just as forceful, just as quiet. “You were there, Yuna. You heard what I did. You know what Gabe saw.”

  “Yeah, and how is this going to accomplish anything? How is antagonizing Moran going to help us get answers?” Yuna stepped away.

  Sash wanted to follow her, but she didn’t. In her heart, she knew Yuna was right.

  Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  Another step from Yuna, away from this conversation, away from Sash. “You’re going to get us all in trouble.”


  Sash blinked at her. The words coming out of the other girl’s mouth made her own go dry. “There are worse things than being in trouble, Yuna.”

  A tiny wrinkle formed between Yuna’s brows as they pinched together. It wasn’t a look that sat well on Yuna’s face. It was a fine face, but it didn’t look like her.

  “Yeah,” Yuna bit out. “Like whatever happened to that guy up there. The one Gabe saw. And whatever would have happened to us if Gabe hadn’t found us. If we hadn’t run. Is that what you want to happen?”

  And now that didn’t sound like her either.

  “Yuna, that’s not going—”

  “Stop.” Yuna held up a hand, silencing Sash. “Whatever it is you’re going to say, don’t say it. You can’t make any promises. You don’t know anything. None of us do.”

  Sash sank her teeth into her lower lip hard enough to hurt. It wasn’t wrong. She wanted to argue, but she couldn’t.

  “But what I do know is that there are consequences to our actions.” Yuna crossed her arms, hugging them to her chest. “She could force us out.”

  No one needed to specify who.

  Moran.

  “She can’t kick us out of the bunker.”

  “She could,” Yuna said with a note of panic. “I think if she convinced the others it was the right thing to do, she could.”

  Sash shook her head. “No. She could try, but they wouldn’t let her. Our parents wouldn’t let her.”

  Yuna’s lips pressed into a hard, sad line. “Are you sure about that?”

  “Of course I’m sure.” She scoffed with more confidence than she felt. “Your parents would never let Moran hurt you. Neither would Gabe’s.”

  “And what about yours?” Yuna asked softly. Like she didn’t want to. Not really. “Would your mom stop her? Would Misha?”

  She didn’t wait for Sash to answer.

  Shaking her head, Yuna said the worst thing she could have: “Maybe Moran was right.”

  Backing away, she added a final twist of the knife. “This isn’t about you. You’re not thinking. Not about me. Not about Gabe. And not about your poor sister.”

  “Yuna, please—”

  “No.” Yuna held up a hand. “I can’t talk to you right now.”

  With that, she turned and walked away, leaving Sash standing in a hallway to nowhere, a dirty pair of shoes clutched in her hands as if they were the only thing keeping her afloat.

  Anger was one of Yuna’s least favorite emotions.

  It was hot and unwieldy, like a heavy metal tray plucked straight from the oven.

  It was sour in her mouth, sort of the way her breath tasted (and probably smelled) first thing in the morning. But it didn’t go away when she brushed her teeth. It lingered. It clung. It fermented.

  It followed her, persistent and awful, all the way from the hallway in which she’d yelled (sort of) at Sash to the chicken coop.

  She’d yelled (sort of) at Sash.

  It was the kind of thing Yuna simply did not do. And yet, she had done it. It was done. It had happened.

  And she hadn’t regretted it one bit.

  Act normal, Sash had said.

  And then Sash had done that. And what was worse, she hadn’t seemed to understand why it was so bad. It wasn’t a slap on the wrist Yuna feared. It was something much worse.

  Exile.

  Isolation.

  A punishment to fit the crime.

  “So much for normal,” Yuna grumbled to herself. She popped onto her toes to reach for the bucket on the top shelf outside the coop. The handle flopped as her fingers brushed against it, sending it an inch deeper into the shelf space. With a bitten-back curse (much like anger, so very unlike her), Yuna strained for the bucket. She usually left it on the lower shelf so it was easier to reach, but someone—probably Misha, he was criminally tall—kept putting it back on the highest shelf, out of reach for the arms of mere mortals. She extended her arm as far as she could, but the bucket was now too far for her to get a hold on it. Her gloves made matters worse, their surface too slick for adequate purchase.

  “Oh, for crying out loud,” Yuna muttered.

  With a frustrated sigh, she glared up at the bucket, willing it to fall.

  She waited. It didn’t.

  “Fine. Be that way.” She glanced around for something to step on. A stool or a ladder. They had a couple of them in the bunker, but they were never where she needed them to be. Now was no different.

  The only thing Yuna could use to reach the bucket was the bottom shelf. With just the toes of her left sneaker, she pressed down on it. It groaned a little unhappily but it seemed sturdy enough to hold her weight. It wasn’t that much. Mrs. Eremenko always said she had the body for ballet (if there were any ballet companies left in the world, which there weren’t).

  She placed her foot on the shelf and hoisted herself up with one hand on the top shelf. The other reached for the bucket. Her fingers closed around the handle.

  “Finally, victory is mi—”

  The bottom shelf cracked under her weight.

  She had the slimmest moment to think Oh no before the shelf collapsed, sending her sprawling to the floor in a graceless lump of flailing limbs.

  The air fled her lungs with the impact. Ears ringing, she lay there, staring up at the recessed lighting—tinted the slightest bit red—and tried to blink the pain away. Astonishingly, it did not work.

  She sat up, rolling her spine gently as she rose, taking stock of each vertebrae.

  All intact. Well, that was solid.

  Her head, however, throbbed. Her fingers probed at the back of her skull, wincing when she touched a particularly sensitive, swollen spot. A wet, sensitive, swollen spot.

  That’s no good.

  Her fingers came away, streaked red.

  Her vision swam as bile rose in her throat. She’d never been good with the sight of blood. Especially blood of the unexpected variety. Some blood was okay. It followed a pattern. But this blood was the sort of blood that should stay in the body where it belonged.

  She rubbed her fingers together, smearing the blood. That was worse, somehow.

  But there was something else wrong. Something that wasn’t her own blood splattered against her skin and the metal of the floor paneling. Something not quite right.

  Maybe it was the head wound.

  Maybe she banged her skull harder than she thought.

  Maybe—

  The hair on the back of Yuna’s neck rose.

  It was a loud noise, her fall. The chickens would have hated it. Or, they should have. But they were quiet. The only thing Yuna could hear was the shrill ringing in her own ears.

  Maybe they hadn’t heard.

  Grasping for the bucket—it had skidded several feet across the floor—she scrabbled to her feet.

  It’s fine. They’re just sleeping. Chickens sleep. Especially Winnie. She’s the laziest. The best eggs, but the laziest.

  Swallowing past a curious lump in her throat, Yuna turned the combination for the lock—like the greenhouse and the water-filtration room, the chicken coop had one of those—and pushed her weight against the door.

  It swung open on silent hinges. She kept them well-oiled, or as well as she could, considering how low their oil supply was. The chickens hated the screech of rusty metal. Yuna stood in the open doorway, the bucket dangling from one hand, while the other clutched at the wall for support.

  She took one step into the room. Then, another.

  At this point, the chickens should have been clucking happily to see her.

  Their little feet should’ve been pattering over the soft lining of their enclosure, their feathers whispering as they fluttered them in anticipation of being fed.

  But there was no clucking.

  No pattering feet.

  No rustling feathers.

  The chickens were dead.

  Not just one chicken.

  All of them.

  The handle of the bucket slipped from Yuna’s now nerveless
fingers. Little food pellets spilled to the ground at her feet as she stared at the coop. The feed crunched under her shoes as she took one step forward, then another.

  Maybe they were just sleeping. Or maybe they were sick and Dr. Moran would know of some way to make them better again.

  Both lies, and Yuna knew it.

  Yuna dropped to her knees beside Winnie. Her favorite. Her black swan.

  “Winnie … ?”

  She reached for the bird. But when her fingers brushed her feathers, Yuna knew it was a mistake.

  They were lifeless. It seemed like a stupid observation, but seeing it and feeling it were two different things.

  Winnie was cold. They were all cold.

  They looked so small lying there. Unmoving. Winnie’s black feathers reflected the UV lights like an oil slick. Her head was resting against her hay at an odd angle. Necks weren’t supposed to bend like that. But her wings were askew too. As if she’d fought something off before dying. Or as if the throes of her death were so traumatic, she’d contorted herself trying to escape them.

  Bile rose thick and sour in Yuna’s throat. She got up and turned, her shoes skidding against the floor’s metal plates.

  When she reached the corridor, she collapsed, her knees striking the hard metal with a painful thud. Her stomach heaved. She fell forward onto her hands, squeezing her eyes shut.

  But that only made it worse. All she could see against her lids was the birds—her birds, she loved those birds—littering the ground.

  She drew in a deep breath, and that too was a mistake.

  All she could smell was blood.

  The first retch caught her by surprise. The meager breakfast she’d choked down under her mother’s eye surged up. Her stomach emptied its contents on the cold metal floor. Her body kept trying to purge itself of what she’d smelled and seen and felt, even after there was nothing left to purge. Her abdominals cramped with the force of her heaving. The sweat of her palms made her slip, nearly collapsing into her own sick.

  She didn’t know how long she was there, her knees aching against the hard floor, the rivets holding the metal plates together digging into her tender flesh.