The Buried

by Melissa Grey

  But he wasn’t laughing now. No one was. He spotted Yuna and Sash sitting with their families. Sash briefly caught his gaze, but Yuna refused to look up, her own eyes locked on her twisting hands, safely encased in gloves he recognized as her mother’s spare pair.

  Taking a seat by his own parents—his mother’s hair still had the telltale misshapen muss of sleep on it—Gabe looked toward the woman standing at the front of the room. She stared at them all, stoic. Imperious. Unflinching.

  “Do you know why I’ve called you all here this morning?”

  Silence met her query as they looked at one another, wondering who had committed the sin that had summoned them from their beds at this ungodly hour. Gabe didn’t have to look very far.

  “There has been a death in the family, as I am sure you all know.”

  Olga.

  Dr. Moran bowed her head. The others followed suit. Gabe lowered his but kept his eyes raised over the frame of his glasses. Mrs. Eremenko’s face was even stonier than usual.

  “Olga Eremenko was our stalwart companion for years,” Moran intoned. “She was a constant in our lives—”

  Everything in the bunker was constant, Gabe thought.

  “—and she will be missed. May she find peace in the embrace of the blessed dark.” Moran sighed softly, as if in mourning. “A moment of silence, please.”

  “How did she die?”

  The question was so frank, so sudden.

  Sash was the only one not bowing her head. Ironic, perhaps, since she had loved Olga more than anyone in that room.

  “Excuse me, Alexandra?”

  “You heard me,” Sash said. “How did my grandmother die?”

  “Sasha.” Mrs. Eremenko’s voice was as hard and sharp as cold steel.

  “No, Mom. I want to know.” Sash looked back at Moran, steady and composed. At least, if you didn’t know where to look. Beneath her chair, the toe of one sneaker dug into the soft bit of flesh behind the opposite ankle. A nervous tic. “What happened to my grandmother?”

  “Heart failure,” Dr. Moran said without missing a beat. “She passed in her sleep.”

  “If it was just heart failure, why weren’t we allowed to see her?”

  Dr. Moran studied Sash for a moment. She took one step down from the dais at the front of the room. Then another. And another. Until she was standing before them with an intimacy she rarely exhibited.

  “Because I had reason to believe her flesh was contaminated.”

  Gabe’s pulse felt like it stuttered and stopped.

  Sash stared up at Moran, for once absent a retort.

  “Why?” Yuna’s mother asked. “What happened? Are we safe?”

  “For now,” Moran said. “But I do believe someone is trying to poke holes in that safety.”

  She turned in place, gazing at each person in turn. “Who among us has broken our most important rule?”

  The silence in the room thickened into a nearly palpable sludge. If he breathed in too deeply, Gabe was certain that it would flood his trachea and fill his lungs to the point of bursting.

  Dr. Moran’s sharp gaze traveled from one individual to the next, as if she could divine their secrets with a hard stare alone.

  And maybe she could.

  “They did.” Nastia’s arm thrust in Sash’s direction, her finger pointed in accusation. “My sister and Yuna and Gabe.”

  Sash flinched in her seat as if struck. “Nastia, what the—?”

  Then Moran issued her order, her tone as solid and unforgiving as steel. “Grab them.”

  Misha’s hand landed on Gabe’s shoulder with a heavy thud. Nastia had one of Sash’s arms while her mother took the other. The older woman’s expression was unchanged from their moment of silence. Like nothing could penetrate whatever fortress walls she’s been fortifying for the last ten years. Yuna didn’t try to stand. Her mother’s hand wrapped around her upper arm while her father sat silent, his hand on Yuna’s shoulder in an echo of Misha’s on Gabe.

  “Wait!” Desperation grappled its way up Gabe’s throat, spilling from his lips in the form of the worst words he could have possibly chosen: “What proof do you have?”

  Victory flashed through Moran’s eyes.

  Oh.

  When it took visible effort to restrain the satisfied smile tugging at the corners of her lips, Gabe knew he’d made a terrible miscalculation.

  From the folds of her dress she pulled out a tome.

  A mass market paperback, the kind with the cheap paper that yellowed and started to smell musty sooner than more expensively bound books.

  On the cover, Gabe just barely managed to read the title: 1984 by George Orwell.

  “I’m glad you asked, Gabriel.” She set the book down on the table in front of Sash. “Do you recognize this, Alexandra?”

  Sash didn’t look at the book, which was damning in its own right. “No.”

  “That’s odd,” Moran said, “As I found it among your belongings.”

  “Why were you looking in my belongings?”

  Wrong question, Sash, Gabe thought but didn’t say. What would have been the point? She was determined to dig her own grave, and theirs along with it.

  “I had reason to believe someone close to Olga brought the contagion into this place. This safe haven that we have defended—that I have guarded with my life—for years.” Anger—true and blazing hot—laced its way through each one of the doctor’s words. “That someone put every soul in the bunker in danger.”

  She set one gloved finger on the book’s well-worn cover. “I know everything that happens within these walls. I know everything they contain. Every tool, every light, every grain of rice. Every book. And this one”—she tapped the top whorl of the eight—“was never among their number.”

  Sash shrugged, or tried to in her mother’s and sister’s grasp. “I found it. You must have missed one.”

  Dr. Moran leaned over and whispered right in Sash’s face, closer than even her own rules allowed. “I miss nothing.” Then she stood and projected her voice for all to hear. “You went outside. You and perhaps your friends.”

  Gabe’s internal organs curdled.

  “But I have only proof that you did, Alexandra. Not the others.” Dr. Moran turned to Yuna, who trembled like a dry leaf in a winter gale. And then to Gabe, who felt about three seconds off from vomiting all over his hand-me-down shoes. “Unless they would like to speak for themselves.”

  “We did it,” Yuna said softly. So softly that Gabe thought that maybe he’d misheard.

  But from the way her mother crossed herself, mumbling in rapid-fire Korean and the disappointment shuttering her father’s face, he hadn’t.

  If Yuna could be so brave …

  “We all did,” Gabe said, words coming fast, too fast for his fear to stop them. “We went outside.”

  “Gabriel!” Beside him, his mother recoiled as if struck. His father stared at him in dumbfounded shock.

  “It wasn’t their fault!” Sash’s voice rang out over the rest, clear and resonant and strong. “I made them do it!”

  Moran paused, one dark eyebrow inching upward ever so slightly.

  “What did you say?”

  Sash swallowed thickly.

  Don’t do this, Gabe thought. But he didn’t say it. Because he wasn’t as strong as she was. None of them were. Not him. Not Yuna. Not their parents. No one.

  “I said …” Sash had to swallow again before she could get all the words out. Maybe she was scared. But she didn’t look it. She just looked angry. Angry and righteous, like something out of the book of Greek myths Gabe had read from cover to cover so many times, he could scroll through its text on the back of his eyelids if he tried hard enough. “I made them do it. It was my fault. Blame me. Not them.”

  Yuna twitched, as if to move forward but Gabe’s sharp gaze stopped her. “Sash—”

  But Sash only shook her head. “They didn’t want to go. I forced them to.” When she delivered her coup de grace, she made sure she
was looking Moran right in the eye.

  Gabe loved her a little for that.

  “It’s like you said. The others look up to me. I was supposed to set a good example, and I didn’t and I’m sorry.”

  But when she said the last few words, Sash turned her attention away from Moran. To Gabe and Yuna.

  “Are you so determined to fall on your sword?” Moran asked.

  Another thick swallow. And then, a nod. Singular and sure.

  “I am.”

  No, Gabe screamed inside his head. Don’t do this! Not for us. Please!

  But he kept the words to himself. Silent. Complicit.

  “You will take her away,” Dr. Moran said, nodding to Misha.

  Misha released Gabe’s shoulder, but another weight settled on Gabe, even more burdensome than the last.

  “But first, I feel a demonstration is in order.”

  This isn’t real, argued the insipid, optimistic part of Sash’s brain.

  But it was. It was very real. And it was undeniably happening.

  Misha held her as her own mother and sister dragged a large metal barrel to the center of the room, in front of the dais from which Moran issued her sermons and edicts.

  “Nastia, would you get the other books please? As we discussed.”

  With a nod, Nastia leaped to her feet (Too enthusiastic; what was wrong with her?) and left the room. She returned a moment later, arms laden with books, some from the bunker’s communal library. But others were from the hideout. The comic books. The encyclopedia. The penny dreadfuls and the trashy sci-fi.

  The doctor flipped a switch in the corner that activated the exhaust fan above. It was meant to stop them from suffocating in the event of a fire, to suck away the smoke.

  Sash had never imagined it would be used like this.

  “Mom, what are you doing?”

  But her mother said nothing to her. It was like Sash had ceased to exist. Into the barrel, her mother threw a few used rags and then proceeded to squirt a bit of clear liquid from a squeeze bottle onto them, filling the room with the acrid smell of lighter fluid.

  “No!” Sash struggled against her brother’s hands on her shoulders. She managed to get free of one, but Misha wrapped his forearm around the front of her torso, trapping her against his chest. She elbowed him in the gut as hard as she could, but it earned her only a pained grunt in response. He held fast, keeping her from lunging at Moran. “Stop this! You can’t do this! Mom!”

  Mrs. Eremenko angled her head away from her daughter. Something in Sash’s chest seized.

  She hates me.

  A part of her had always known. She’d seen it in the resentful glances. Heard it in the reproachful silences. Felt it in the detached, fleeting moments of contact as Sash grew up in the shadow of a dead man, whose ghost her mother saw every time she looked at her.

  “I can do this,” Dr. Moran said, her voice a cold, calm contrast with the crackling maw of the furnace behind her. “And I will.”

  She picked up the book on the top of the pile.

  Audubon’s Birds of America, with its faded stork illustration and elegant lettering on the cover.

  “Please,” Sash begged. “Please don’t.”

  Something akin to pity flitted across Moran’s face. “I’m doing this for you, Alexandra. For us all.”

  And then she tossed the book into the flames.

  Sash let out a fractured scream.

  They’re just birds, insisted a voice at the back of Sash’s mind. It was the voice that cautioned her to stay quiet, to not ask questions, to fade the way her mother had. It sounded like Moran. Not even real birds. Fake ones! Flat ones! They’re just drawings. A bound pile of drawings. Paper and ink and glue.

  But they were so much more than that.

  And Moran knew it.

  She met Sash’s gaze and smiled. Sickly and sweet.

  “Tell me,” Moran said as she picked her next sacrifice off the table and flipped through its pages. When she looked up, there was something in her eyes that chilled Sash to the bone. Malice. Pure and simple. Straightforward. Cruel. “Are you proud?”

  With that, she fed Louisa May Alcott and her Little Women into the flames.

  Moran shook her head, making a tsk-tsk noise that grated on Sash’s nerves like fingernails on a chalkboard. “If only you had learned to trust in the safety of the blessed dark.”

  She tossed books in one after another.

  A Prayer for Owen Meany.

  Kurt Vonnegut.

  Wide Sargasso Sea.

  Philip K. Dick.

  Great Expectations.

  Dorothy Parker.

  Call of the Wild.

  An entire set of Jane Austen.

  All of it, consigned to the flames.

  Tears stung Sash’s eyes, mingling with the smoke and the ash. Hate, pure and potent, bubbled up inside of her with an intensity she had never known before.

  Dr. Moran saved the best for last.

  She picked up the book, the one that had caused all this trouble, and held it between two gloved fingers as if it was dirty.

  And it was. At least, nearly everyone in this room believed that it was. And that was good enough.

  George Orwell’s 1984.

  A half-remembered line from the book flitted through Sash’s mind: “The best books … are those that tell you what you know already.”

  Dr. Moran is evil. She is a liar.

  And now, she’s making me—making us—pay for discovering the truth.

  “You’re right. I went to the surface. And I didn’t die. My skin didn’t melt off my bones. My blood didn’t boil in my veins. My lungs didn’t burst in my chest.” Fresh tears welled up, clinging to her lashes. “Mom.” Her mother angled her face away, avoiding Sash’s gaze. “Mom, look at me. I’m here. I’m still here.”

  But her mother refused to look at her. So did her brother. And her sister. And everyone who wasn’t Yuna. Even Gabe’s eyes were riveted to the fire, enthralled in the most horrible way by the destruction of all those words. Of all that knowledge.

  “Don’t you see?” Sash’s voice climbed several octaves as their blank faces stared back at her. Uncomprehending. Disbelieving. Some downright hostile.

  Like Misha.

  His blue eyes gleamed with cold fury when they finally settled on her.

  With hate, she realized.

  The knowledge that her brother—the one who’d tucked her into bed at night when her mother’s wounds had been too raw, who’d bandaged the burns on her arms, who’d read her every children’s book the bunker could boast of and then made up his own stories when he’d ran out of those—could look at her with such hate slammed into her so hard it stole her breath.

  I’m dead to him, she thought. Or as good as.

  But still … she had to try.

  “Moran is lying to you.” Her voice broke over the words as she pushed them out, each painful syllable at a time. “She’s been lying to you—to us—for years.”

  “Shut her up, Misha.” The words were almost startlingly informal coming from Moran. But he did as requested. His hand clamped over Sash’s mouth with merciless force, silencing the rest of her plea, futile as it was.

  Flipping open the book, the doctor glanced at the pages, shaking her head sadly. Then she tore out the first page. And then the next, and the next, feeding each one to the flames with deliberate slowness.

  Moran made sure to capture Sash’s gaze when she spoke, a satisfied smile tugging at the corners of her lips. She quoted from the very book that she was burning, page by terrible page:

  “ ‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.’ ”

  Sash wanted to weep. To scream. To claw Moran’s eyes out of her skull with her bare hands, to feel soft tissue raking free under her fingernails.

  But Sash couldn’t do any of that, even if she somehow managed to break free from her brother’s punishing grip, because at that moment, the lights went out.

  Red safety lights flooded t
he space, bathing them all in crimson shadows.

  A fragment from one of her comics floated through her mind. One about a group of people on some colony in outer space. One that was burning on a pile with all the rest.

  This is not a drill.

  “Danger, Will Robinson.”

  A loud bang sounded from the ceiling.

  But there was nothing up there. Nothing but a mile of dirt.

  Sash tried to yank herself away from Misha’s grasp but his fist only tightened.

  No one was paying attention to her. All eyes were on the woman still holding a mangled copy of 1984.

  “Doctor, is this—?”

  Moran snapped the book shut and tossed its remnants into the fire. Just like that, it was gone. She held up her newly free hand, silencing Mrs. Correa’s question.

  “Everyone, you know what to do,” she said, her voice solid with authority. “We’ve practiced for this.”

  They had practiced for this.

  But in that singular moment of chaos, none of those hours spent running drills seemed to matter.

  What the drills hadn’t accounted for was a break in the routine. A calculated moment of cruelty. A fire, blazing bright like a signal beacon in the darkness.

  They scattered away from it like cockroaches when a light’s been turned on.

  Light is danger.

  Light is poison.

  Light is death.

  The words went through Yuna’s brain over and over as she fumbled away from the group in the middle of the room, away from her parents who she did not recognize, away from the sick glee emanating from Moran as she destroyed the things that had kept them alive—and not just surviving—all these years.

  The dark was a blessing. And chaos was an opportunity.

  She slipped away from her mother’s sharp-nailed grasp and threw herself into the shadows. They all did, seeking safety in the one thing they knew they could trust. The darkness.