by T M Edwards
“It’s not an easy thing, to be forced to kill…”
I held up a hand to stop him. “I just, I don’t want to think about it right now. Can we just finish our job and get back? I’m sorry, I just…”
“It’s okay.” He smiled in a way that was probably supposed to be encouraging. “You’re right.” He stood, and extended a hand to help me to my feet. I stepped out of the sleeping bag and picked it up one-handed, since Sam was still holding my other.
“Sam, Zena might see,” I whispered.
“So?”
Since I didn’t have an answer for that, I allowed him to walk alongside me toward the van with our fingers intertwined.
As we loaded our stuff into the van and Sam drove us away from our little spot near yet another city park, I leaned my forehead against the window and watched with unfocused eyes as the city sped past us. I forced myself to see nothing...to imagine nothing...nothing but the gray streets and multicolored buildings. I would not think about yesterday. I did not have the energy to think about tomorrow. I could not give into the emotions that surged beneath the numbness. They would have to wait. Contemplations of what I had done would have to be put off until we were no longer in crisis.
All too soon, Sam drove us into another parking lot of yet another store. As he slowed the van to a stop and pushed the gearshift up, I stared through my window into the interior. This one looked normal. There was trash tossed everywhere, and one of the sliding doors had been pushed off of the track so that the top corner leaned outward.
“Sam?”
“Hmm?”
I looked over at him. “What if…” I didn’t have to finish the sentence. I could see that he understood.
“Wait here. I’ll check it out, then we can all go in.”
“No, that’s not what I meant. I…”
But Sam didn’t listen. He swung his door open and hopped down, and was walking into the store before I could stop him. He disappeared into the gloom, leaving me and Zena alone in the van.
I heard rustling in the back, and Zena flopped into the driver’s seat. She stared at the doors, and I stared at the gash on her beautiful face, deep red against her ebony skin.
“Are you okay?”
She wouldn’t meet my eyes, but that was nothing unusual for Zena. “He almost killed me.”
I nodded.
“Why would he do that, Deidre? Why didn’t he just tell us that it was his water, and to leave him alone?”
I rubbed my face wearily and let my head fall back against the headrest. “I don’t think he was very well.” The image of the man, his hair greasy and matted, his bare feet black with dirt, flashed into my head. “He didn’t think we would listen to him.”
“But how did he know, if he didn’t know who we were?”
“Because people are afraid of things they don’t know or understand.”
“Like people are afraid to talk to me because of my autism.”
I gazed at her sadly. If only she knew. “Yes, just like that.”
Zena folded her arms and put her feet on the dashboard. “People are stupid sometimes. They think I’m hard to understand, but they’re the ones that don’t make sense.”
I couldn’t argue with that one, so I just resumed watching the door, waiting with a knot in my stomach for Sam to return. After a moment, he appeared in the doorway and walked around to the driver’s door.
“Oh, hey, Zena. There’s no water here. We might as well move on.” he met my gaze in a way that seemed significant, but I couldn’t decipher it. Zena got out of his seat, but I was thankful when she sat in between the two front chairs rather than retreating to the back. She might still not be quite herself, but at least she wasn’t isolating from us completely.
“Don’t you think what we’ve got will be enough to last for a while?” I asked, looking at the stacks and stacks of bottled-water flats and the rows of gallon jugs. “They wanted us back by noon, anyway.”
“For two hundred people, this won’t even last a day.” Sam turned the key in the ignition, and we were moving again.
“But if it takes us more than a day to find a day’s worth of water, how is that even helpful?”
“I don’t know that it is. But maybe Dalen thinks people are less likely to panic if they think they’re being helped.”
“Or maybe he just doesn’t want us at the bunker,” Zena remarked in a caustic tone.
“What does that mean?”
She shrugged. “I’ve been there for weeks now. I just don’t feel like he’s trying very hard to solve anything. I don’t trust him.”
Even though I didn’t agree that Dalen just wanted us out of the way for some nefarious reason, I had to agree with Zena that he was a slimy man that didn’t exactly exude trustworthiness. After a few more moments of discussion, it was decided that our wisest course of action was to return to the bunker rather than keep searching farther afield for grocery stores.
We spent most of the drive back to the bunker in silence, except for when Zena managed to convince me to play a card game with her. Even then, I barely spoke. Every word felt like it was pounding against the mental walls I’d constructed to protect me from my emotions. Each time I opened my mouth, I was afraid of what words might come tumbling out. Would I tell Zena to “go fish,” or would I confess to the brutal killing of a man who was only trying to defend his means of survival?
By the time the van bumped up onto the concrete near the bunker door, Zena had crawled into the back and fallen asleep. Her arms were draped over water bottles in what looked like a very uncomfortable position.
Sam pushed the gear-shift into park, but he didn’t immediately get out. He stared at the steering wheel in front of him, then sighed and looked up at me. “There’s a reason why I didn’t let you girls go inside that last store.”
“What do you mean?”
There was a haunted look in his blue eyes. “There was a family in there. They didn’t make it. They had little kids.”
He didn’t offer any more detail, but I could imagine. “So was there really no water, or did you just say that?”
“There was a little, not much. I didn’t really look.”
My mouth fell open in shock. “But why?”
“Even though you may not fully realize it yet, you were both traumatized yesterday. You didn’t need to see that.”
“Yes, but the people need…”
Sam smacked his hand on the steering wheel. “Damn it, Deidre! We were almost out of space anyway! One shelf of water wasn’t going to make any real difference to the people here. But seeing that...it would have made a difference to you. To Zena.” He was already speaking in a strident whisper, but now he lowered his voice even more. “A few hours’ worth of water was not worth you having to see that image in your head for the rest of your life. Trust me on this.”
I didn’t know whether to be angry with him or to fall in love with him even more. “But what about you?”
He shrugged, and looked out the front window. “I’m used to it.”
“Can you ever really be used to stuff like that?”
He threw a glance at me which I could not interpret. His eyes looked almost pleading. “No,” was all he said, before he threw his door open and jumped down.
As I watched him stride toward the door to the bunker, wondering why we’d wasted a night in the city with very little to show for it, I realized that at least it had been a night of freedom. A night when we weren’t forced to face our deepest insecurities by sleeping in a tent full of strangers.
Day 56
Sam and I sat together at breakfast, his shoulder and elbow touching mine, when an unfamiliar alarm blared across the bunker. I looked around, trying to figure out the reason for the sound, but everyone else seemed just as confused as I was. A few seconds later, Dalen emerged from the blue tent with a man and a woman in his wake. The man was comforting the woman, whose hysterical crying was audible all the way over here.
Dalen’s suit jacke
t was unbuttoned, and he was walking so quickly that the edges of it fluttered around him. He didn’t need to demand our attention, he already had it. He reached the edge of the meal area just as the last peals of the alarm faded away.
“It appears that we have a missing child.” his voice was strong, and carried across the space as if he had a microphone in his lapel. From what I knew about the man, he very well might. “Little miss Lana, our child Resistant, was not in her bed this morning. Her parents,” he gestured at the frantic people behind him, “would greatly appreciate the help of the community in locating their daughter. If you all could kindly finish your meal as quickly as you are able, we will begin the search immediately. We are sure she is just playing hide-and-seek somewhere in the bunker, and we would like to find her before she becomes frightened. If everyone will please search their own tents first, that way we will not excessively invade each other’s privacy.”
As a group, we all abandoned our food without even bothering to finish eating. I grabbed my cane and set off in a random direction. Sam waved at me, and mouthed something, but I didn’t hear him over the din of the chatter. Then he followed the group that was heading to the dorm tent.
I figured they had enough people in one tent. I limped in the wake of everyone else, searching for a tent that nobody else was searching. I might as well, since I didn’t have a space of my own to look through. There was one, dark green with straight sides, that nobody else had entered. My cane tapped out a rhythm as I walked toward it. All around me, I could hear people calling to each other and telling each other to make sure and not forget to look in specific places.
I pushed the green canvas aside and entered the tent. Inside, there was a single cot, a desk with a lamp and closed laptop, and a clothing chest. A string across the back held several expensive-looking suits on hangers.
Dalen. This must be Dalen’s tent. Feeling like I was snooping on our leader, I crouched down and searched under the bed and desk, then inside the chest. No child, just a few folded blankets and items of clothing. I braced one arm on the chest and one on my cane and tried to push myself up, but I stumbled and fell toward the back wall of the tent with my arms outstretched.
Instead of encountering corrugated metal behind the canvas, as I had expected, the fabric parted on either side and I continued to fall through a gap in the wall, until my hands and knees hit the concrete with jarring force.
For a moment, it was all I could do to fight for breath and try not to scream from the unexpected pain. They would all come running to find me, and I would disrupt everyone’s search.
I coughed a few times, and finally managed to take a deep breath. My knees and ankle were throbbing where I’d fallen, and my hands felt like they had friction burns. More carefully this time, I pushed myself to my feet using my cane, and looked around.
Catching sight of a rolling office chair, I hobbled over to it and sank down onto the plush leather. The wheels rattled and the chair tried to roll away, but I caught the edge of a table to keep the chair in place.
What the h…. My jaw was probably hanging open, but I didn’t notice. This room had tables full of electronic equipment just like the blue tent...but there, the similarities ended. Where that tent was filled with devices that were utilitarian and all a few years old, this place was sleek and sophisticated. The room was square, maybe twelve by twelve feet. It was hard to tell without overhead illumination. The far wall was completely covered in screens. Desks lined each side wall.
I used my uninjured leg to roll the chair until I was sitting in to the front of the screen wall. I waited for the many moving pictures to resolve into something that my brain could make sense of. It looked like a movie where some government agency has a group of surveillance cameras, and the security person can sit and watch all of the feeds at once. But I had never seen a fictional surveillance wall that had any comparison to this. Floor to ceiling, wall to wall, full of screens. Screens showing the common area. Screens showing the concrete outside. Screens...in the tents? In the bathroom? What was this place? Was Dalen watching all of us? The camera in the bathroom was obviously in the ceiling, and had a clear view of the interior of each of the shower stalls.
I was already feeling sick to my stomach, like my skin was crawling, like I wanted to run from the room screaming. What a pervert. What a filthy, disgusting….
I nearly jumped out of my skin when I heard a sound. It was coming from beneath one of the desks, which held a mass of equipment that I couldn’t begin to make sense of. A single computer monitor on it showed multiple angles of what looked like video footage of the black egg, taken from ground level. I squinted my eyes in the gloom, until the little shadowy shape under the desk resolved into the form of a child.
“Hey,” I called. “It’s okay, you can come out. I won’t hurt you.”
The little girl crawled out from under the desk. In the glare from the screens, I could see that her eyes were red and her cheeks were streaked with tears. Her chest jerked with hiccuping sobs.
“Hey, honey. Did you get lost?”
She nodded. “I...I was just exploring…”
“Your mommy and daddy are worried about you! What do you say we go find them?”
She nodded again, so I used the cane to push myself to my feet, and I reached my free hand out. She put her tiny fingers in mine, and together we walked from the room, into the tent, and out into the common area.
Someone saw us emerge, and a cry went up. People threw tent flaps aside and ducked out to see what was going on. The girl’s parents separated themselves from the rest and came sprinting toward us with their arms outstretched. Others were approaching, too, smiling and clapping. I saw Sam, weaving toward me through the crowd. The girl let go of my hand and ran towards her parents, who both knelt and enveloped her joyfully in their arms.
Behind them all, with a deep frown on his face, I could see Dalen. His expression chilled me to the core. The charismatic smile had been replaced with a look of pure hatred. He knew. He knew what I had seen, and nowhere in this bunker was safe for me anymore.
When Sam walked up to me, I grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the door to the ramp, remembering that our spot along the wall had been invisible to the cameras.
“Deidre, what’s going on?”
“I need to talk to you. Not here.”
***
“Sam? Sam, say something.”
Sam was gazing out into the desert, his eyes unfocused. I felt like I couldn’t breathe as I waited for his reaction. He hadn’t said a word as I had relayed my description of the surveillance room.
“I...he…” he shook himself, and turned to me. “You’re sure?”
I raised an eyebrow. “No, Sam, I just imagined it all.”
“No, I…” he shook his head. “I just mean...surely not? Surely there’s a reasonable explanation?”
“Reasonable for him to be watching us in the bathrooms? In our own tents?”
“You...you’re sure? You’re sure it wasn’t old footage?”
I’d never seen Sam nearly speechless. It would have been cute, if the situation wasn’t so serious. “Yes. I could see Dalen in the common area, standing by the tables. Right where he was when we came out. I could see all the people in the tents, looking for the little girl.”
Sam scrubbed at his face with his hands. “But why?”
I remembered another detail from the room. In my excitement, I grabbed Sam’s sleeve and shook his arm. “Sam, he had live feeds of the object!” That equipment on the table, all the switches and buttons… “I don’t know what’s going on in there, but we have to get back in.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. We need a distraction. Make sure he doesn’t catch us.”
Sam engulfed my hand in his and stared down at it, absently tracing the lines on my palm with his fingers. “We need something that will keep him occupied.”
Focus, Deidre. Focus. “Yes.”
He leaned back against the wall. I wo
ndered if he realized he hadn’t let go of my hand.
“We should tell Zena. Maybe she can help.”
“How could she help?”
I wracked my brain for ideas. “What about...Zena works in Hydroponics. A malfunction there...Dalen would have to be called…”
“Maybe.”
For several moments, we debated ideas. Sam still seemed like he couldn’t quite believe what I’d told him. I wasn’t sure I believed it myself. Completely ignoring the issue of the surveillance, he was using a significant amount of the electricity that he told us was so incredibly precious. We’d been lectured about all of our resources, and instructed to conserve them. Only use them when necessary. What, exactly, was necessary about watching us every second of the day?
