Twisting Topeka

by Lissa Staley

After that final, fractured memory of her siblings, Cora only felt peace—like she was encased in velvet. She felt herself rise, quickly at first. When above the man’s reach, she hovered there. She felt light—as if air had replaced the marrow in her bones. She’d felt a similar feeling at the county fair a few months before. She’d stood on The Wheel of Certain Death. It was a circular carnival ride whose floor, by design, dropped out as it spun fast. Riders were held in an upright position by centrifugal force as they rode pressed against the walls. The children around Cora screamed and cried when the floor dropped away, even much older ones. Not Cora, she loved the sensation. She laughed the duration of the ride until her stomach was sore. She would have ridden it again had she not run out of money. She’d started saving pennies she found in hopes of making it to the next year’s fair. In the air above the man, she had experienced that ride’s exhilaration again—only magnified. She giggled full out. The levity she felt unhinged all the places where confusion and terror had been anchored earlier in the day.

  She became aware of pressure at two places in her back. It was not painful, but distinct enough to make her turn her head over each shoulder to look. She saw peaks protruding from the skin on her back. Two feathered appendages emerged. Her eyes widened, and she gasped in delighted recognition. Wings! They were the same mint green as her best Sunday dress. She flexed her shoulders and watched the expanse of each wing broaden and slowly flutter. More giggling. She rose higher and looked down to see the clothes on the body on the ground were splattered an irregular red. She stared, feeling no connection to the body below, even as the man completed his horror, dropped the axe handle, and drove from the field.

  Cora flew back to Meemaw’s house. The road in front was full of cars. Some she recognized as belonging to family or church folks. There were two sheriff’s cars, their lights flashing. She scrunched her face at the sight of them. It was taking a lot of people to decide her punishment for whatever she’d done wrong. The people entering and exiting the house looked very serious. She decided the sky was a good place to be for a while. She hoped they’d soon miss her enough to forget what her wrongdoing had been.

  She decided to fly over favorite places: her school playground, the library, her best friend Mae Anne’s house. She saved one place for last--the woods behind Meemaw’s house. Her most beloved haunt, it would become a new home for her.

  A week later, she flew back to the field where the man had murdered her. Sheriffs were there searching for her body. She fluttered happily around the grim men, eager to show them that the body was no longer hers. But, despite the warm wind she swept toward their faces with her aerial acrobatics, those men left that field sadder than they came.

  At her long funeral service, she flew from one family member to another. No longer having any understanding of sadness, she cocked her head at their weeping. Merdel and Dettie, usually in competition for the squirmyest, were strangely still. Cora hovered above the chancel when they began to roll out the closed wooden box with a spray of pink carnations atop it. She’d heard someone say it would be taken to the cemetery. What Cora recalled most about cemeteries was their lack of playgrounds. She opted to return to her woods.

  The killer was soon caught. Meemaw attended every day of his trial sitting in the section allotted for coloreds. Carlotta fervently prayed he would be hanged. Not Meemaw. She didn’t want death for him, she wanted his sentence to be a long life of having to live with himself and what he had done.

  “That will be worse than any prison sentence or death,” she told everyone who would listen. She didn’t believe what he testified—that he didn’t recall anything about kidnapping and killing Cora. She stared at him and caught his eye one day as he looked up while being led from court. She saw that he remembered everything before he quickly looked away from her.

  He did remember Cora— every day of the rest of his life. Memories of what he’d done to her made him pray to die. He dreamt of death countless times; but in every dream, the Grim Reaper was turned back by a small brown girl.

  Simon Says don’t forget me.

  He lived to be ninety-seven.

  *****

  On the summer morning that he was buried, the sky was as only a Kansas sky could be. Cora, still seven, reveled in the blue. Meemaw was with her now. They spent their days in airborne adventures. As it suited them, they would head back to their Heaven. The air was soft there and smelled of a grandmother’s embrace.

  Underground Ark

  Reaona Hemmingway

  May 2013

  The door to the old bomb shelter groaned as seventeen-year-old Ken Crawford heaved it open. After listening to Grandpa Willard talk about how Great-Grandpa Ellis conducted air raid drills back in the 1950s, he had searched and found the abandoned bunker on the family ranch in the Flint Hills west of Topeka, Kansas. Flashlight in hand, he peered into the depths of the concrete manhole. A switch near the ladder turned on a series of lights that seemed to descend into the ground forever.

  “Cool! It’s hooked up to the grid.”

  “Let me see.” His girlfriend, Alicia, shoved in next to him. “Ew! I couldn’t live in such a dark, cramped place?”

  “You could, if your life depended on it.” He handed her the flashlight and swung his legs into the hole. “With the way Iran and North Korea keep messing around with nukes, we might need to use this thing someday. You should come down with me and check it out.”

  “No, I’ll stay here in case you yell for help.”

  The ladder descended seventy feet before he reached bottom. The entry chamber contained clothes racks filled with military-style chemical and radiation protection suits. Helmets, gloves, and boots lay on shelves. The whole room was set up for decontamination after returning from the outside. He opened an airtight door that led into a shower room. In the next chamber he found clothes closets.

  The final portal led to living quarters furnished in the mid-century modern style popular when Great-Grandpa Ellis built the bomb shelter. The main living area offered kitchen, dining, and lounging space. Three doors on the far wall led to bedrooms. He opened a door on the other end of the kitchen.

  “Whoa!”

  Ken stared at shelving racks laden with supplies from fifty years ago; all left behind after Great-Grandpa Ellis died in 1964. Bookshelves contained manuals on building construction, farming, and every topic needed to survive and rebuild a community after a disaster.

  The food supplies were old and no doubt unsafe to eat, but in enough abundance to last Ellis’ family of six over a year. He wondered if the fruit and vegetable seeds would still grow.

  “What are you doing down here, son?”

  Ken jumped. His dad stood in the hatchway with his arms crossed.

  “We should refurbish this thing and restock it.”

  “Why would we do that?”

  “To save our lives when Iran and North Korea mess up and blow up the world.”

  His dad laughed and shook his head. “You sound like Grandpa Ellis. Only he worried about Russians blowing us up.”

  “How can you laugh? You’re the one who joined the Kansas Patriot Responders. Their whole mission is to help defend this country, if we get attacked by foreign or domestic enemies. This would be a great place to use as a base of operations should something happen.”

  His dad, who had served thirty-five years with the Army’s Corps of Engineers before retiring two months ago, glanced over the supply racks. He looked over his shoulder at the living area before refocusing on Ken.

  “You’re right. But counting the members of my unit, their spouses, and children, there’s not enough space for everyone. We’d need to purchase the missile silo across the road and build enough living pods to house, feed, and support over four hundred people. We’d also need to make accommodations for livestock. Not to mention planting hydroponic gardens, finding a power source, and filtering breathable air and safe drinking water.”

  Ken grabbed a shovel from a wall hook. “Let’s do it.”
>
  That night at dinner, his mother’s jaw dropped. “You’re doing what?”

  Ken looked at his dad. “We’ll blast through the rock and make living pods just like the one Great-Grandpa Ellis made when the military built the silo across the road. It will be our underground ark for surviving nuclear disaster.”

  “James Crawford, you’ve warped this boy’s mind with all your survivalist talk.”

  “There’s nothing warped about him. He’s talking sense. I researched underground cities this afternoon and it can be done with enough concrete and steel to protect against ground shifts. And purchasing the silo will cut down on some of the digging and construction work needed.” He reached over and took her hand. “Face it, Carol, with the way things are going, even if there isn’t a nuclear Armageddon, we may need a place to hide our families from those committing genocide.”

  She threw up her hands. “Fine, but where will you get the money?”

  Seven Years Later

  Ken stared up at the gigantic windmills. Transforming the Crawford Cattle Ranch into a wind farm had not only generated revenue to finance building the underground ark; the huge turbines also powered the community.

  He walked to one of the windmills and entered a door in its base. Inside, a ladder went up for maintenance and a hatchway opened down into what insiders called New Topeka. He climbed down into a decontamination chamber and passed through to a corridor where an underground stream ran through a covered trench in the center. The portal he entered next led into one of ten hydroponics gardens where fruits and vegetables grew.

  Alicia stood in a row, picking ripe strawberries. He kissed her on the cheek.

  “How’s the harvest going?”

  “Great! We’ll have plenty of food for our wedding banquet.”

  He wrapped his arms around her. “I still wish we were having the banquet below ground to help christen the ark.”

  She stiffened. “We’re holding the wedding topside like normal people.”

  “I know. Besides, Mom is ecstatic that we’re holding the ceremony in her flower garden and Dad already has the barbeque in the smoker.” He touched his nose to hers. “And…I’m happy we won’t have far to go to start our honeymoon.”

  She frowned. “I wish our first home together wasn’t a living pod in New Topeka.”

  “We talked about this. Living in our pod will help us save money for a down payment on our own house.”

  “We could live in the apartment above Dad’s garage.”

  “And I’d have to commute to the ranch every day. Besides, once the satellite dishes I ordered arrive, I’ll need every moment I can get each day to get our rural Internet service off the ground and running.”

  “You’re right. I’ll do my best to get used to it.”

  Ken gave her a reassuring kiss before leaving the garden. He walked further down the stream corridor and entered the underground pasture, which was built to support enough livestock to provide residents with enough milk, eggs, and protein for a healthy diet. He bent down and felt the five inch tall pasture grass. A week ago they started keeping a small herd of inside to see how well the animals assimilated to underground living. So far the cattle and horses seemed content to roam around the huge cavern, which received sunlight through a lead glass designed to stop radiation and chemical leakage. A rooster crowed and pig squealed, the sounds echoing through the manmade cavern.

  As he listened to the familiar barnyard sounds, he wondered how noisy a second animal habitat built near the missile silo entrance would get. Like Noah, they arranged to house several varieties of animals, which would transfer in from the Topeka Zoo in the event of an emergency. The underground zoo offered the animals the same environments they lived in at Gage Park, but would require a full zoo staff to maintain compared the few ranch hands who would take care of the animals in the pasture chamber.

  “There you are.”

  Ken stood and joined his dad in the corridor. “How many families do we have on the roster?”

  “We’re up to forty-five families and thirty-one singles. We still have fifteen family pods and twenty-one studio apartments available.”

  They walked along the corridor to a landing where the stream turned into a waterfall to fill a pond in a park area below. Ken looked down and watched the fish swim while his father reviewed the latest enrollment information with him.

  “A few Patriots don’t think living underground is for them. They’d rather be up top helping survivors get to medical care and safety.”

  “You’d think with how the hate groups are killing innocent people without reason, they’d at least want their families in here safe from harm.”

  His dad nodded. “We can’t force anyone to live down here. The most we can do is make room for them should they change their minds.”

  Ken watched as construction workers continued to create what in essence amounted to a utopia. In the town square, a library held not only how-to books like those Great-Grandpa Ellis had collected, but also biographies, fiction, poetry, music, movies, and a school. An infirmary equipped to handle radiation and chemical poisoning was built with a direct access elevator from the outside. Around the town square waited chambers where residents could set up shops and cafés.

  “Do you think we’ve planned for every need?”

  His dad put an arm around his shoulder. “We’ve accommodated for people, plants, and animals. And until the time comes when we need to live here, members can use their living pods for vacations and weekend getaways.”

  “Alicia doesn’t want to live down here.”

  “You’re more than welcome to live in the ranch house with Mom and me.”

  Ken shook his head. “I can’t explain it, but I feel called to help others adjust to living underground. And to do that, I need to live here to understand how living below ground affects our psychological well being.”

  “So that’s why you minored in sociology while majoring in computer science and multi-media communications.”

  Eleven Months Later

  “Push!”

  Ken wiped sweat off Alicia’s brow as she bore down and gave birth to their son. Dr. Wilson cut the cord and handed him the child. He looked down at the little red, slimy, squirming infant in his hands and laughed.

  “You did it, Babe. The first child born in New Topeka.”

  “Let me…see him,” she gasped.

  He laid their son on her stomach and she cradled her hands around him. “He’s beautiful.”

  A siren sounded and the nurse switched on a radio. Amid the bustle of cleaning up their son and the birthing room, they listened to news reports about how an accident in the Middle East released not only radiation, but chemical nerve agents into the jet stream. Millions of people were dying in the Mediterranean and Asia. In retaliation, North Korea launched its nuclear arsenal on the Middle East and claimed missiles exploding in Europe, Asia, and Africa were targeting accidents.

  “Ken, we need to get the animals moved in, now,” his dad yelled.

  He kissed his wife. “I’ll be back. We have to get everyone inside before that deadly air passes into the United States and over Kansas.”

  Although she looked frightened, she said, “Go! Little Noah and I will be fine.”

  Ken rushed to a decontamination chamber and put on a protective suit. From there he went to the underground pasture and saddled his horse. Half the herd already lived inside, but the remaining animals ranged outside. The long tunnel they went through provided mass entry through three air-locked, lead-lined, steel doors. Before each door opened, the previous one closed to prevent contamination of the underground ark.

  “How much time do we have?” Ken asked.

  His dad shook his head. “Not long. Twelve to fifteen hours. The accident only happened six hours ago and the Japanese estimate that nearly half their population was affected. According to the weather reports, the jet stream has several abrupt direction changes and is moving rather fast. If the air jets don’t break up,
this catastrophe could potentially affect every nation on Earth within a day.”

  Herding the livestock into the underground pasture took eleven hours since they ran each animal through a dip bath to rid them of parasites before releasing them into the meadow. They checked in with the south entrance and learned that the job of settling the zoo animals down took just as long.

  When they finally finished cleaning up in the decontamination chamber, Ken’s dad walked to the end of the stream corridor and checked the gauges on the water filtration unit.

  “Colonel Crawford.” A Patriot sentry stopped and saluted. “All members are present and accounted for. What do we do about the extra people who have asked to join us?”

  “How many?”

  The sentry held out a clipboard. “Ken’s in-laws and relatives of Patriots make up about two dozen. The rest are outsiders.”

  His dad studied the list. “We can only take forty-two more people without risking over population. There are over a hundred people on this list.”

  “I know, sir.”

  Ken watched his dad put checkmarks beside forty-two names. He breathed a sigh of relief when Alicia’s folks received approval. As the sentry scurried off, he stared at this man who just made such a life and death decision.

  “Do I dare ask how you chose?”

  They walked to the landing and looked down over the harried activities of people locating their pods and moving in boxes of personal belongings.

  “Noah from the Bible was only allowed to bring his family and two pairs of each animal. Like his ark, New Topeka is being colonized to help rebuild a whole civilization. Other survivors around the world will find shelter, but there will be those who will die suddenly from the nerve agents like those in Asia. Others will get radiation sickness and die in a matter of days, weeks, and months. There’s nothing we can do about that. All we can do is keep those inside this community safe and healthy. What I did to avoid overcrowding is take care of our own first and our future second. Relatives are a no brainer. They’re blood, you can’t turn them away. Next, I chose those important to our future; teachers, ministers, and medical professionals. At that point, I had three spots left; so I picked a fitness instructor, an artist, and a poet.”