The Buried

by Melissa Grey

  Instead, she had left Yuna (Yuna had left her) and found a quiet spot to read. Not the hideout, though that would have been the obvious choice. But she hadn’t wanted to be found. She’d wanted to be alone. She wanted no distractions. No more shouting. No arguments. No more idiotic gestures, like confronting Moran in front of half the bunker’s residents.

  All she wanted to do was read.

  There was a disused electrical supply room in the far-west corner. Whatever mechanisms it had been connected to were either broken or severed or never finished in the first place. As far as anyone could tell, it was utterly useless. For a few years, it had served as a closet for old clothes, but as those piles were worn down under the demand of growing children and threadbare fabric, the closet had ceased to have much of a purpose. Now, it housed a few old sweaters and one jersey of some kind, blue and orange, for a team called the Knicks.

  A basketball team, Misha had told her once, a long, long time ago. On the back was written the number 33 and above that, the name Patrick Ewing. Sash had no idea who he was, but Misha had insisted on keeping the stupid jersey intact all these years.

  She sat on it as she read. And read and read. Absorbed in a book in a way she hadn’t been in years, even after everything they’d been through, everything they’d seen. Everything they’d done.

  But solitude had worn its way through her, and eventually she was forced to set the book down. She needed someone to talk to. Someone who wasn’t Gabe or Yuna. Who wouldn’t glare at her with recrimination or disappointment or anything in that general family.

  Sash glanced toward the tiny room where her grandmother liked to sit, rocking herself as she muttered in Russian to her knitting. Always the same length of thread she’d been working and reworking for years.

  But the rocking chair was empty.

  That was odd. Olga Eremenko was nothing if not a creature of habit. Every day at two o’clock on the dot, she took her tea in her room, away from the doctor’s watchful gaze, her own eyes distant as she went through the ritual she’d brought with her from a far-off land. Warming the pot. Steeping the leaves. Laying out a single, crumbly, stale biscuit. Breathing in the aroma of tea as she poured it into her chipped cup, another relic of the old country that had survived countless wars, a trip across the sea, and a panicked flight underground. And when the tea had run out, she’d maintained the ritual of heating water and serving it out of her ceramic pot. She still called it “taking her tea” even when the leaves were nothing more than a memory.

  “Hey, Mom?” Sash called out. She tried to squish down the sickly seed of worry blossoming in her gut. It was nothing. Maybe the elder Eremenko simply wanted a change of scenery. Maybe she was off with Misha, haranguing him about the length of his hair or the American accent he could never scrub from his Russian or some other trait she decided to fixate on that day. “Where’s Babulya?”

  “She’s in her room,” came her mother’s response. Her nose was buried in a book. An autobiography of Rudolf Nureyev that Sash knew for a fact her mother had read cover to cover approximately nine thousand times. The spine was cracked and the pages hopelessly soft from years of dog-earing.

  “No, she’s not.”

  With an exasperated sigh, her mother set the book aside—facedown, adding a fresh crack to the spine, something that would have driven Gabe up a wall. She stood. Even standing was a production for her. Her long, lithe limbs unfolded with the grace of a swan spreading its wings to take flight across the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House. Or maybe the Mariinsky Theatre, or the Palais Garnier, or any of the countless venues that were as real to Sash as Narnia and Terabithia. She had never seen them in her life. And she never would. For a brief, delirious moment, she wondered if any of those buildings were still standing. She imagined red velvet seats covered in years of dust and heavy curtains riddled with cobwebs. Gilded ceilings collapsed, allowing the wicked rays of the sun to filter in, lighting a stage that was never meant to bathe in their warmth.

  Her mother waved her hand at Sash to get out of the way. Sash stepped aside so they didn’t brush against each other as her mother passed. Even that bit of contact was forbidden. Too risky to accidentally touch skin to skin.

  A warm hand in hers as they swayed to the music, fresh air in their lungs, and solid ground beneath their feet.

  Pausing in the door, her mother frowned. “She’s not here.”

  “That’s what I just said.”

  “Don’t get smart with me, Sasha.”

  “It’s Sash.” At her mother’s glare, she added, “Sorry, reflex.”

  Rolling her eyes, her mother went back to her chair and picked up a new book. It was the second in a series of Regency romances, though they had no others in the series. It was one of the more popular tomes in the bunker with the adults. The children were forbidden from reading it, so naturally they’d stolen it once, in a particularly daring heist that still brought a smile to Sash’s lips. Gabe had acted as a lookout as Yuna and Sash had crawled on their bellies toward the book, even though no one else had been in the room with them. It just felt more dramatic that way. They’d read it aloud in the hideout, Gabe blushing furiously every time two characters kissed.

  “I don’t know where your grandmother is,” her mother said without looking up. “Probably in the kitchen, complaining about bare shelves in the Soviet Union again.”

  Baba Olya was not in the kitchen. Sash had come from there after deciding that she wasn’t in the mood to clean its pantry.

  Sash stood there awkwardly, the angular heft of the book tucked into her pants digging into her spine. Her sweatshirt was thick and loose enough to hide it, so long as no one touched her. And no one was going to touch her. It was forbidden.

  Don’t touch me.

  “Hey, Mom …”

  “What?” A turn of the page. Not a single glance upward.

  Would your mother save you?

  Sash swallowed thickly. Then she shook her head. “Never mind.”

  She turned to go without another word, following her footsteps back to the place where she’d hidden before, curled up with a book, both so like and extremely unlike her mother. Her limbs were less graceful. Her muscles less flexible. Her every moment less studied.

  Her book far more illicit.

  She tucked herself away in the closet, closing the door behind her. Her only illumination was one of the small hand-cranked flashlights—the same one she’d taken topside—but it was more than enough to read the words.

  Her fingers brushed against the title, though they’d already memorized the feel of the raised text, the architecture of that title.

  1984.

  She opened the book and picked up where she left off, reading aloud to herself in that small, dark space.

  “ ‘Nothing,’ ” George Orwell wrote, “ ‘was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.’ ”

  Gabe was the one who found her, lying there in front of the chicken coop beside a puddle of her own sick.

  He hadn’t said anything. He’d checked to make sure she was still breathing and then stepped over her legs to peek inside the coop. When he came back out, his face was several shades paler. But he’d only helped her to her feet and to the bathroom, where he got her cleaned up. Then he ushered her to their hideout and put a warm cup of water between her trembling palms.

  The last bag of tea had gone to Grandma Olga three years ago. All they had now was water that was just short of boiling.

  “I did something.”

  That was how Gabe broke the silence.

  Yuna peered at him over the rim of the cup.

  “What?”

  He told her.

  And now she knew what it felt like to spill scalding hot water all over her thighs.

  “You did what?”

  Gabe shook his head, rising to pace the small area once more. He’d done that seven or eight times by this point. He was going to wear a hole in the floor paneling.

  (“You’ll tunnel
straight through to China,” Mr. Correa liked to quip whenever anyone paced in the bunker.)

  (Except Yuna had looked at a globe once—an out-of-date globe, but still—and directly opposite their location was the middle of nowhere in the Indian Ocean.)

  “I have to tell Sash,” he said, sitting down and then standing just as abruptly.

  “Wait, Gabe—”

  But he was already at the hatch.

  And the hatch was already swinging open before he could touch it.

  Sash poked her head through the door, her gaze racing from Gabe to Yuna. Then, with a pained expression, back to Gabe.

  “My grandma is missing.”

  “I sent out a transmission on the radio I stole from the manor.”

  “The chickens are dead.”

  A heavy silence descended on them all, weighed down by the heft of their revelations.

  “I have to tell Moran,” Yuna said, putting the now mostly empty tin cup aside. “I mean, if Nastia hasn’t already.”

  Sash stiffened. “My sister was there?”

  “Of course she was there. We do the chicken coop together. You know that.”

  “You can’t tell Moran,” Sash said. It wasn’t a request. It was an order. As if Sash was really the person to be delivering those.

  Yuna frowned. “She’s going to notice if all the chickens are dead, Sash. There won’t be any eggs.”

  Sash brushed her hands against the thighs of her jeans. She did that when she was nervous. Her palms had a tendency to sweat.

  “Wait, hold on,” Gabe interjected, holding up a hand. “What about your grandma?”

  Sash’s head jerked back to him. “I can’t find her.”

  “We’re in a bunker,” he said. “Where could she possibly have gone?”

  “I don’t know, Gabe! That’s the problem. I thought she was just breaking her routine, and I left it for a while, but then I went to look for her again and she’s not anywhere. Not in the kitchen. Not in the bedrooms. Not in the common area. Not in the supply closets.”

  “How would Grandma Olga fit in a supply closet?” Yuna asked.

  “She can’t. And she hasn’t.” Sash exhaled a shaky breath. “Something happened to her.”

  “We have to tell someone,” Yuna said again.

  They all knew she wasn’t talking about just the chickens. Or Grandma Olga. Those things wouldn’t stay secret for long, if they were at all.

  Because there was a reason all these strange things were happening. There had to be. Mysteriously dead chickens. Missing grandmothers. Foolish messages to whatever ghosts haunted the toxic afterlife aboveground. For ten years, life in the bunker had proceeded without change. Every morning, the same routine. Every day, the same. Until they’d broken the pattern. Until they’d done something to smash through all that sameness.

  Until they went to the surface.

  Them.

  They did this.

  They were the anomaly. They had to be the cause of every anomaly that followed.

  Sash’s eyes cut sharply to Yuna. The look stung, as if her gaze was a real, palpable slap. “Are you out of your mind?”

  “No,” Yuna said. “I’m not out of my mind.”

  Gabe released his breath in a tired exhalation. “Sash …”

  “What?”

  “Maybe Yuna’s right.”

  Now Sash looked between Gabe and Yuna as if they’d both lost their minds. But Yuna was feeling distinctly sane. Keeping this to themselves—that they’d gone to the surface, that they’d brought something back with them, something that was deadly, was already killing—that was the senseless choice.

  “We have to tell someone,” Yuna insisted. “We have to. We can’t not.”

  Sash laughed. It was jagged at the edges, cutting up her throat on the way out. “Tell who? Dr. Moran? Oh, I’m sure that’ll go well.”

  “Okay, not Moran, but somebody?”

  Sash sputtered, throwing her hands wide in exasperation. “I ask you again … who? My mother? She’ll tell Moran. Misha? He’ll tell Moran. Your parents? They will definitely tell Moran. The Correas—?”

  “Something chased us in that house, Sash!” Yuna shouted.

  She clapped both her hands over her mouth. Yuna could count on one hand how many times she’d raised her voice in anger at someone. And never with Sash. Never, not ever.

  “It could have been dogs … ,” Sash said, but her voice was soft. Tentative in a way it almost never was. “Maybe they survived, like that one guy …”

  “If they were like that guy, then they probably weren’t regular dogs anymore,” Gabe said softly, pushing his glasses up his nose. He pulled his lower lip in between his teeth. “He was messed up. Like, really messed up.”

  Yuna thought about the chickens, killed by something that defied explanation.

  About Grandma Olga, missing in this small, finite space.

  About the way her skin itched and itched and itched when she got back, no matter how much she scratched.

  “I’ll say it again: I think Yuna’s right,” Gabe added.

  The betrayal etched across Sash’s face burned itself onto Yuna’s retinas. “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe you two—”

  “Winnie’s dead!”

  Yuna could feel her voice inching higher, her tone getting more and more frantic with each word. “We brought something back into the bunker, and it killed her! It killed all of them! What if it—”

  A hand wrapping around Yuna’s wrist stopped the rest of the words in her throat. “Don’t tell her.”

  The look in Sash’s eyes was so raw, so scared, that Yuna almost agreed on the spot.

  “Sash, this is bigger than us.” Yuna glanced down at Sash’s fingers looped around her arm. The nails were jagged and short, chewed down to the pink parts. Not normal for Sash. None of this was normal. “People are dying.”

  “Not people,” Sash said. “A chicken.”

  The hand on her arm didn’t feel quite so warm anymore. It felt stiff and cold, but maybe that was just Yuna’s brain projecting.

  “She was special to me.” She tugged on her arm, freeing her wrist from Sash’s grasp none too gently. “And I don’t think she’s gonna be the last.”

  Without waiting for Sash to say anything—to beg, to plead, to apologize—Yuna pivoted on her heel and left, crawling through the hatch. She didn’t look back. Not even once.

  Gabe rolled over on his pallet, clamping his thin pillow to his ears. To say sleep had been elusive in the days since their outing was an understatement of epic proportions. But how could he sleep? How could any of them?

  Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the man.

  Rags wrapped around the open sores on his weeping hands.

  One eye nearly swollen shut from some kind of bulbous, leaking growth.

  The rat, kicking its back legs frantically in a vain bid for freedom.

  Blood spilling between the man’s fingers.

  The guttural moan that Gabe would never, ever forget.

  Flopping the pillow down, he stared up at the bunk above him. Lucas had asked for the top bunk for his birthday last year. It was such a sweet, humble request that Gabe had given in readily. A soft snore drifted down from above.

  Lucas could sleep without a problem. He didn’t have any guilt to lug around. Any secrets to carry. Just a small life in a small world.

  Gabe sat up and looked over to where his parents slept, three feet away, in bunks of their own. His mother’s hand hung down from her mattress. They weren’t allowed to touch skin to skin, like anyone else.

  But sometimes he caught his parents shucking off their gloves and holding hands, late at night, when they believed both their sons were asleep.

  Gabe knew. Lucas knew. No one said anything. It was a minor infraction, really. And no one had died from it yet.

  My grandmother is missing.

  Winnie’s dead.

  Hauling himself out of bed, Gabe slipped his sneakers on and tiptoed out of
the room. It was too early for chores, but he couldn’t just lie there, listening to his brother’s soft breathing.

  (And wondering when and how it might stop.)

  Sash and Yuna weren’t talking. And honestly, he couldn’t stand to look at Sash now. Yuna was always tapping her toes to Tchaikovsky in a way that seemed more anxious than absentminded, and she’d withdrawn from them both. For the moment, he was on his own.

  It was odd, feeling lonely in a place where you were never truly alone. And yet here he was, curled up with the messy wires in what they called the generator room but was actually a tiny closet overstuffed with equipment that could easily explode in the wrong hands.

  The wires were getting old. It was all getting old. For the past six months, the motor had been making an odd sound it had never before produced. The complicated network of machinery that connected their generator to a power source (the underground stream Gabe had never seen but the existence of which he’d never had reason to doubt) was showing its age. Rust was held at bay through years of careful, dedicated maintenance, but there were only so many things one could do to halt the flow of time.

  A loud bang on the door made him jump, nearly electrocuting himself—and, potentially, several other people in the bunker—in the process.

  “What the he—?”

  The door was yanked open by a figure whose bulk blocked the low lighting in the corridor outside.

  Misha towered above Gabe, their positions making him look even more oppressively tall than he already was.

  “Family meeting.”

  He grabbed Gabe’s arm and yanked him to his feet, none too gently.

  “Hey!” Gabe barely had time to put his tools down as Misha marched him forward. “Watch it.”

  Misha merely grunted and released Gabe’s arm. He didn’t need to look to know that a ring of finger-size welts was probably marked on his arm.

  They were the last to arrive in the all-purpose dining-room-classroom-meeting-hall.

  Family meetings. Laughable. A joke. That was what they called these things. Normally, they consisted of an airing of grievances, the likes of which could go on for hours. Too many people in too small a space. Reallocations of chores to keep people from getting bored enough to dash their skulls open against the wall paneling. Or impromptu sermons from Dr. Moran, whose meditative musings were delivered to them in half-baked ramblings Gabe never really listened to.