The Buried

by Melissa Grey

  Her body purged and purged and purged until there was nothing left for it to expel. But even then, it tried.

  The smell was noxious, but at least it wasn’t blood. At least it wasn’t poor Winnie with her black feathers, soft, so soft—

  “Yuna?”

  For a moment, the voice sounded so much like Sash that Yuna wanted to cry. She wanted to fling herself into Sash’s arms and scream and sob and claw at her eyes.

  But when she forced them open, it wasn’t Sash she saw standing before her, heavy bucket dangling from both hands.

  Nastia blinked down at Yuna for a long silent moment. Then she lowered the bucket—gingerly, so as not to spill the water—and knelt by Yuna’s side.

  The hand brushing Yuna’s hair from her face was gloved but nice and cool.

  “What happened? Are you sick?”

  That gloved hand paused, as if the possibility of sickness hadn’t occurred to her until that moment. But once the thought was there, it was impossible to uproot.

  Nastia retracted her hand and leaned back, just enough to feel like an insult.

  “I’m not sick,” Yuna said.

  That she knew of. She could be.

  Her hands, bare in the unknown atmosphere of the manor.

  Her gloves, left abandoned in a library long forgotten.

  Her lungs breathing in a decade’s worth of air, ignorant of what particles it contained, what dangers it held.

  “The chickens—”

  That was all Yuna managed to choke out before another wave of nausea assaulted her.

  With a swear that would have made Baba Olya blush, Nastia sprang to her knees and went into the chicken coop.

  “No.” Yuna retched again. “Don’t—”

  But it was too late.

  After a long, silent moment, Nastia emerged again, her face entirely blank. In her hands, she cradled a small, feathered body. Black feathers. Like a swan. Like the color of a midnight Yuna couldn’t remember.

  “Did my sister do something?”

  Yuna’s body seized up so swiftly her retching stopped.

  She rolled her eyes up at Nastia and her stone face. “What?”

  “My sister.” Something in Nastia’s jaw twitched. “Did she do something?”

  She had.

  Sash had done something.

  She had opened a Pandora’s box.

  She had led them to the surface.

  She had broken the rules.

  And Yuna had followed.

  “No,” Yuna lied, fresh tears stinging at her eyes. She’d already been crying—vomiting did that—so it all blended together. One big lie.

  Nastia studied her for a moment.

  Holding that gaze was a touch too painful. But looking at the dead chicken in Nastia’s arms wasn’t any better. Winnie looked so small, feathers still. She would never cluck again. She wouldn’t ever tilt her head at the sound of Yuna’s approaching footsteps. She would never lay another egg. Her eyes would never drift shut when Yuna scratched the spot on her back that she liked so much. She would never ruffle her feathers in delight or displeasure ever again. Heat stung at Yuna’s eyes, and she squeezed them shut so no moisture would escape.

  After a moment Nastia said, “I don’t believe you.”

  She turned away and stalked down the hall, Winnie’s broken body in her arms, leaving Yuna crumbled on the floor, soaked through with blood and tears and things far, far worse.

  In the bunker, paper was scarce. More than scarce. It was precious. It was finite. Once they ran out of paper, that was it. There were no mills left to manufacture more. They could recycle their own—and they did. But it wasn’t the same. Their bunker-made paper was thick and bumpy, clumsily pulped and pounded into submission. But fresh paper with a smooth surface? That stuff was priceless.

  And the things Gabe drew couldn’t be tossed into the pulp pile once he filled up the page. He didn’t want others to see his drawings, much less talk about them. Explosions. Scarred flesh. A sky on fire.

  The Cataclysm, as Moran liked to call it.

  The day the world ended outside.

  The day life began down here.

  Gabe peered down at the page. It was blank. That in and of itself was a rarity. A luxury. Every other page of his sketchbook was filled from edge to edge, corner to corner. Every valuable spot of real estate was occupied by pencil. Not one single centimeter went to waste. It gave his drawings an almost surreal quality. Like something Hieronymus Bosch could only dream of. Everything Gabe knew came from the stack of moldy old art books tucked into the bunker’s library. The ones with religious art had been spared Moran’s recycling purges. He wasn’t sure why those were worthy of survival when Isaac Asimov’s collected works hadn’t been, but oh well. What could you do?

  Gabe’s pencil hovered over the blank page, nearly touching the paper but not quite.

  This wouldn’t work. Simple graphite wouldn’t work.

  His hand hovered over the box of pastels. They were even more precious than paper. Crayon nubs could be melted down together to create bigger, weirder crayons (the colors of those always blended together into an incoherent mishmash, but Gabe normally didn’t mind). The pastels though … those were truly irreplaceable.

  But he needed color for this. It needed to be right. It needed to be vivid.

  He had to commit exactly what he saw to the page before it faded from memory, like so many things they had already lost.

  Gabe swiped red against the paper in a long, dark gash. The crimson was lurid against all that white. Vulgar even.

  Good. Vulgar is what it all was. Going to the surface. Breaking the seal on a hatch that had been closed for at least the past ten years. The man. The rat.

  His skin, putrid and peeling. Patched with inflammation. Scarred by a life misspent on survival.

  How did anyone live like that? How could anyone live like that?

  He didn’t have any answers. All he had was one of the last few pieces of paper in the bunker and a precious set of pastels that would be gone by week’s end.

  And so he drew. His hand darted across the page, frenzied, wild. For once, his fingers moved faster than his mind, guided to give form to the image in his head before he could overanalyze it out of existence.

  He didn’t hear the hatch to their little hideout open. Didn’t hear the soft footsteps of someone approaching. Didn’t notice that he was no longer alone until a figure leaned over, blocking the meager light from the bulb overhead.

  “What are you doing?”

  Gabe jerked his head up to find his brother blinking at him owlishly.

  “I’m, um …” He looked down at his pastel technicolor hands, stained with the evidence that he’d wasted one of their most precious possessions.

  Lucas furrowed his brow as he leaned in closer to see what was worth such a tremendous sacrifice.

  Gabe didn’t realize how badly cramped his hands were until Lucas reached for the drawing and slipped it from Gabe’s soiled fingers. Said fingers were too slow to respond, to stop it from happening, to stop him from seeing what none of them were ever meant to see.

  “What is this?” Lucas asked.

  Gabe wanted to snatch the drawing out of his brother’s hands, but he couldn’t. The paper was too fragile. It would tear. And so he pried Lucas’s fingers free, one by one, as gently as he possibly could. The boy hardly resisted at all.

  “It’s nothing,” Gabe said.

  “You wouldn’t use the pastels for nothing.”

  Twelve-year-olds shouldn’t be that astute. There were so many stupid rules in the bunker. Why couldn’t that be one of them?

  “It’s a monster,” Gabe said. And that was true. “It’s just something I made up. Nothing for you to worry about it.”

  That was a lie.

  “Looks scary,” Lucas said, tilting his head at the picture, as if trying to reason his way through its jumbled parts.

  It was, Gabe didn’t say. It’s the scariest thing I’ve ever seen. An
d I barely even saw it.

  Him, his mind corrected. Barely even saw him.

  Because the man was a person. A human being. Even if his humanity seemed like something left by the side of the road many moons past.

  What had happened to him?

  What made him like that?

  How did he survive?

  And the most terrifying question of all: How many others did?

  But Lucas was unplagued by those questions. Unburdened by doubt. He merely shrugged and hopped up to sit on one of the old trunks that held a stack of board games, most of which were missing several key pieces. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small panel full of wiring. Gabe recognized it as his father’s. It was a minor thing, a tiny bulb at one end, connected to a series of wires. He’d used it to teach Gabe about electrical engineering. And now, it seemed, Gabe would use it to teach Lucas. Just like that, a trade was passed along family lines. Just in case something happened to one of them, there would always be someone who knew how to rewire the bunker’s mechanisms.

  We’re going to be in here forever, Gabe thought. But then, the thought amended itself. We’re going to die in here. We’re going to die in here or out there.

  “You were mumbling in your sleep last night.” Lucas kicked his heels against the trunk, creating a weird echoing thump that bounced back at them off the walls.

  Oh. Oh no. Gabe swallowed thickly before he trusted himself enough to speak without saying anything overly incriminating. “What did I say?”

  Lucas merely shrugged. “Don’t know. I couldn’t really hear you. I hit you with my pillow and you stopped.”

  A sickly sort of relief swept through Gabe.

  He had no recollection of this happening, but he was glad it did. Never had he been so relieved to be so deep a sleeper that he could sleep through an apocalypse, which he had.

  He hadn’t given anything away. Nothing but the drawing, but even that, Lucas seemed not to question. But then, the boy’s entire diet of extracurricular reading had involved the same dozen issues of the Uncanny X-Men they’d all read cover to cover more times than they could count. Lucas was no stranger to two-dimensional violence.

  It was all he knew.

  “What do you remember,” Gabe began, settling the stubby remnants of the pastels back in their tin, “about Before?”

  Lucas’s face screwed up in concentration as he tried to focus on the task at hand. His tongue peeked out from between his pursed lips. “Before what?”

  The question slammed into Gabe’s chest with the force of an expertly thrown fastball.

  Before what?

  Before was such a gargantuan concept to Gabe. To Yuna. To Sash. To pretty much everyone in the basement, it was safe to assume.

  But not to Lucas.

  He’d only been two. He’d been old enough to totter around after Gabe on chubby toddler legs, stalking him from room to room with the sort of starry-eyed adoration younger siblings typically grew out of somewhere between the ages of four and six. Gabe wiped his palms on his jeans. They had been his father’s before Gabe had grown into them. Now they were his. One day, they would belong to Lucas if they were still in the bunker then.

  They would still be in the bunker then.

  “Before the bunker,” Gabe said softly.

  Lucas glanced up at him. He blinked for a moment, considering the question. Then he shrugged and turned back to the clock.

  “Nothing really.”

  “Nothing?”

  Another shrug. “What? I was almost a baby.”

  “Yeah.” Gabe’s stomach clenched. Lucas had been so small, but he’d had these pudgy little hands Gabe could wrap one of his around entirely. “Fat hands.”

  Lucas glanced up at Gabe. Briefly, because 90 percent of his attention was still on the wiring panel. “What?”

  Gabe shook his head. “Nothing.”

  With a frustrated, wordless noise, Lucas flung the panel toward a pile of raggedy blankets in the corner. Gabe fumbled for it, but it landed safely on the soft mound of fabric.

  “Lucas!”

  With all the petulant force of someone nearing their early teens, Lucas said, “What?”

  Cradling the panel, Gabe shot his brother a look. “This is the only one we have. If this breaks, that’s it. There’s not another one.”

  But there could be.

  Shamefaced, Lucas looked down at his hands and nodded. “I know. I’m sorry. I just—I don’t get it.” Peering back up at his brother, he added, “You and Dad always make it look so easy, and I just don’t get it. I must be stupid or something.”

  And just like that, Gabe’s irritation dispersed.

  “You’re not stupid. Here. Look.”

  Bringing the panel back over to Lucas, he showed him how it was done. Which wires needed to be rerouted and where. Which small switches needed to be flipped. What elements needed grounding.

  Under Lucas’s hands, the bulb lit up. A tiny red glow.

  Red, weeping sores.

  Blood splattering against cold stone.

  “Go,” Gabe told Lucas, giving him a gentle shove toward the hatch. “Get out of here and show Dad what you did. He’ll be proud.”

  Still smiling down at his little red light, Lucas grabbed Gabe into a one-armed hug, pressing the side of his face into Gabe’s collarbone. “Thanks!”

  Before Gabe could react, before he could hug him back the way he should have, Lucas was gone.

  * * *

  This is nuts, whispered a traitorous little voice at the back of Gabe’s head. It was his voice of reason, his voice of caution. A voice he was staunchly ignoring right now.

  And he was ignoring it in the name of science. Or at least that was what he had convinced himself. Well, half convinced himself. Doing something in the name of science and doing something for the pure, unadulterated curiosity the mere thought of it inspired were close cousins, but they weren’t exactly the same thing.

  But how could anyone expect Gabe to have such a wondrous device in his possession and not use it? How? It was unthinkable.

  He stared down at the radio, hunkered amid a fortress of old dinosaur sheets and threadbare pillows. It looked ridiculous in their little cave, surrounded by ancient comic books and plastic figurines with peeling paint. Heavy and black and square. Out of place. Old but new. And newness was a rarity—an impossibility—in a life suffocated by the familiar.

  Two voices warred inside his head. The first, calm, rational, responsible: You shouldn’t be doing this.

  The second, louder, frantic, desperate: Do it. Do it, do it, do it.

  It wasn’t, of course, for science.

  He couldn’t not think about the look on Lucas’s face when Gabe had asked him about Before.

  Blank. Like there was nothing there at all. Like Before was a concept he’d read about in a book but never really experienced. Like it was an abstract notion, a thought exercise.

  But it wasn’t like that at all. It was that.

  This—the bunker, the scarcity, the constant fear thrumming in the background like the generators that kept them alive—was all Lucas knew.

  He could know more.

  It was a thought Gabe couldn’t stomach. That Lucas’s world was so small. That he couldn’t remember anything but these walls. Didn’t recall the feel of wind on his face or what the stars looked like.

  The first gift Gabe had given him the day his parents brought him home from the hospital had been stars. Fake ones, made of carefully folded paper and tied to string. A mobile to hang above the crib.

  You can give him stars again.

  If an incredibly disturbed rat-eating man had survived up on the surface, maybe someone else had. Someone who didn’t eat rats. Or at the very least, someone who cooked them first.

  And if people had survived, then maybe—

  No.

  It was a dangerous thought. Even more dangerous than what he was considering doing.

  Hope. Now that was dangerous. The only thing that
had gotten him through all these years, buried underground, was that this was the only life left to them.

  This was it.

  The bunker.

  To dream of anything more was folly.

  Real stars this time, not paper ones.

  Gabe licked his lips. They were oddly dry. Drier than usual. (They were always dry; recycled air had that effect on the skin.) His tongue flicked out to moisten them, catching on the chapped skin.

  His heart hammered in his chest.

  There’s no one out there, whispered a vicious little voice nestled at the back of his skull, like a poisonous snake hidden in high grass. You’re all that’s left. You and everyone in this bunker. Humanity’s last stand. What a pathetic sight. All those people hiding underground like rats burrowing in the dirt, clinging on to the hope of a world that doesn’t exist. Not anymore.

  But it didn’t feel true. It didn’t feel true when Moran told them as much, after the hatch closed behind them all those years ago, and it didn’t feel true now.

  Because it wasn’t.

  He knew that now. And knowing was half the battle.

  Gabe reached out a trembling hand and picked up the microphone. His thumb depressed the switch on its side. A burst of static crackled faintly before fading into nearly inaudible white noise.

  And then, he began to talk.

  Sash felt sick.

  Not as in fever, chills, and cough sick, but a worse kind. The kind you couldn’t flush away with medicine (not that they had any of that left, not after all these years). Her stomach roiled about like a turbulent sea.

  Don’t touch me.

  The way Yuna had said that.

  Another roil, this one particularly enthusiastic. Like a giant wave that could knock experienced sailors clear off a boat.

  Had she ever been on a boat? She couldn’t remember. Her father had one sitting in the garage of their old house, but did she recall ever being on it? He’d work on it on weekends, fiddling about with rudders and paint and other things Sash had been too young to understand.

  For the first time in however long she could remember, Sash skipped her chores. She’d been meant to clean the supply closet, but that was a depressing job, and honestly, it was done every day. It could go a day without. She just couldn’t look at their dwindling barrels of oats and rice. Their bare cupboards. Their empty shelves.