Chapter 1

Technically Adam had not been born in the shelter, but it was all he’d ever known: concrete walls, filtered air, filtered water, filtered news from the outside, dim fluorescent lights, digging the caves out and down for more room. Hydroponic rice, canned or rehydrated food for breakfast, lunch and dinner, with fresh meat or fruit when foraging expeditions made it back. He had been three years old when the other refugees found him, his parents dying of radiation poisoning and desperate to secure this salvation for their only child before they breathed their last. He knew a better world had once existed, could even remember glimpses of sunlight and fresh breezes, but hardly ever thought of them on a day to day basis.

He also knew a much worse world existed now, up above the layers of rock and soil and plague-ridden, radioactive dust. The thought of braving the wastelands chilled him but another warmed him again, and both thoughts could be summed up as one: today, he was a man.

He hadn’t been able to predict the exact moment when it would happen. Throughout the past years he’d watched the foraging parties go out, asked questions, alternated between avoiding the topic and hesitantly asking to be taken along. He’d listened to the older men’s tales of the surface so often, memorized all the danger zones so attentively, that at times it seemed he knew those places better than they did without a single visit. His closest friend, Peter, was two years older than him and had started going about two years ago, but Adam had still been surprised when Dick, one of the expedition leaders, had pulled him aside after breakfast to ask if he was ready.

Adam knew the correct answer, the brave answer, the answer he was meant to give. The shelter needed food, fuel, clothes, replacement parts for machinery, detergent, new old DvDs and books to keep the cabin fever at a minimum and every other imaginable form of supplies. Even now several babies could be heard having a shouting match in the nursery, and every year brought more mouths to feed. Every available man, once he was deemed of an appropriate age, had to man up and risk life and limb for their shelter’s women and children, as men had done since the dawn of the species. World War 3 had only strengthened that status quo. So Adam looked Dick right in the eye (white blinking rapidly) and stammered out in his cracking sixteen year old voice:

“Ummm, y-yes? I mean, yeah. Yes. Sure. Of course I want to go!”

Dick looked him up and down one last time, then nodded and clapped the boy on the shoulder. Adam managed to retain his dignity until the older man left the room then dashed to the corner of the dining hall and sidled onto a bench next to Peter.

“He asked me to come!”

“I’ll bet!” the older teen grinned at some mysterious joke.

“I mean Dick did. Just now. With your team. Tomorrow?”

“I think we’re going the day after but yeah man, that’s great.” He didn’t seem at all surprised.

“So what should I do, like, to get ready, you know?”

“Go talk to Willy and Johnson to get kitted out. Hope you still remember how to shoot.”

“Sure!” Adam bounced off the bench again like he was spring-loaded. The dining hall sat midway along their shelter’s main tunnel, half concrete-reinforced for a hundred meters and half mined out of bare rock for another hundred. When the babies had started multiplying a decade ago, so had the need for more space. Mining gave them all a daily purpose beyond wondering if humanity would ever live aboveground again. Near the entrance he found Willy laying out equipment for their next foraging expedition.

“Willy! Hey, ummm, like, I just talked to Dick.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. He said you guys need my help.”

“I’m sure those were his exact words too” the former auto mechanic grinned. “Well, come on, let’s get you a shooter and some travelling clothes.”

They spent the next half hour trying on different sized weatherproof apparel until finding something that fit Adam’s elongated, bony, recently growth-spurted frame. Then hunting knife and backpack. For a gun, Willy saw the boy heading for the automatic assault rifles, scoffed and handed him a compressed-air hunting gun instead.

“The newest one on the squad’s the last one to shoot at anything. What’ve I been telling you all these years about shooting?”

“Only when you gotta!”

“Damn straight. World was full’a hillbillies and gangbangers takin’ potshots and look at where that got us.”

The rest of his gear was much easier. Binoculars, notebook, Geiger counter, water jug, first aid kit, some two decades’ old honey nut bars for food just in case there was nothing to hunt. It would all be waiting for him when they left. Willy ushered him back out of the armory with a cryptic:

“Make sure you take a shower and wash up well before bed tonight.”

Adam’s heart skipped a beat. That warming thought returned but he brushed it off, not daring to entertain it for more than a few seconds for fear of jinxing it: today he was a man.

It was already lunchtime. Peter had already broken the news to the rest of the shelter’s teenage contingent, and as he recounted stories of the men’s daring encounters with zombies and killer robots, Adam found himself the target of much welcome attention from the girls. They seemed in competition all of a sudden, giggling, touching his hand, leaning in close as they chattered away for hours in turns. Dana, a muscular nineteen-year-old black girl, even cornered him in the hall afterwards and pinned him to the wall for a deep sloppy kiss.

“I’ll see you tomorrow. Mary’s got you tonight.”

Almost hyperventilating, Adam tried very hard (and failed) to avoid imagining what that might mean. Even Kitty Stevens, his unrequited love for the past three years, got in on the act. Kitty was a skinny, pale blonde one year younger than him with whom he’d shared quite a few quick kisses in the shelter’s emptier tunnels. She’d even allowed him to put his hands on her thighs and her bony young buttocks, and more grudgingly permitted him to caress her tiny little A-cups through her shirt. Yet any attempt at getting under her clothes had always prompted her to storm away fuming, slamming him down with the retort: “you’re not a man yet!” Now she cuddled up against him in her room, which was in itself a change of pace. About the time they’d both gotten their own living spaces two years ago she’d started giving him the cold shoulder. She’d refused any unsupervised visits to his and had acted appalled at the mere notion of his spending any time in hers with the door closed. A pity, since he had so many vague notions of activities appropriate to such a place. She gave him no chance to put them into action even now, breaking their newest, longest, most breathless kiss and prying his hands away from her waistband, edging towards forbidden territory. She locked him with her sweet, humid blue eyes and bit her lip demurely. He would’ve done anything for her in that moment.

“Mom says we can’t do anything yet. You should go back to your own room.”

He choked back his frustration, then stood and waddled off with his hard-on straining against his underwear. He sulked for an hour in his room, considered jacking off then held back, hoping still against all hope for something to happen. That “yet” was full of possibilities, and Dana’s earlier words kept ringing in his ears while he marched off to the men’s showers, re-considered jacking off and held back again, letting the water ease his aching testes a bit. Another hour later, he was entertaining himself with a newspaper from thirteen years ago when his door rattled slightly, followed by a polite knock.

“Adam?” He recognized Mary’s voice from the long hours the middle-aged matron had tried (with mixed success) to teach him and the other youths basic algebra or history. Locks didn’t seem necessary in practical terms in their very small, under one hundred person community, but any symbolic measure of privacy counts for a lot in a closed environment. His jaw dropped on opening the door. Mary’s braided black hair was looped forward to droop into her generous DD-cup cleavage exposed by a low cut silky red dress. A far cry from her usual baggy jeans and blouse, as were her bright red high heeled definitely-not-sneakers or her artificially reddened lips. The youngsters had glimpsed all of the shelter’s dozens of women in such attire before, but only for a few moments traveling between bedrooms late at night or convening behind the closed doors of a “grownups only” party.

“Um, hi...” he tentatively addressed the swollen hooters, uncertain as to their intent. Or the barely concealed nipples they were wielding without a permit. From somewhere above them Mary’s voice sought his attention.

“Can I come in?”

He stood aside, feeling himself blush to the point of incandescence. She closed the door behind her and latched it again. The heavy frame scavenged from some topworld building had been fitted perfectly into the rough tunnel stone under Johnson’s guidance as a former home repair contractor to make for a soundproof windowless one-room apartment. Privacy was indeed a grave concern. Mary sat on his bed, took his hand and sat him next to her. Absentmindedly playing with her braid with her other hand, she looked around the predictably messy room and sighed.