Chapter 3

Adam had not been born in the shelter, but it was all he’d ever really known and the thought of leaving frankly terrified him. He awoke five minutes before his alarm in the morning, dismissed it, then after a bathroom visit geared up and tiptoed as well as he could in hiking boots through the empty corridors. He met the other four men by the armory and the tunnel leading out. When he found himself staring up the metal ladder which had led so many others to their deaths, his legs turned to rubber. After actually climbing it, pack and all, they felt like chewed gum. Dick unscrewed and threw open the hatch at the top, they waved a last goodbye to the security camera and then it was up and over!

The hatch opened into the pitch-black side tunnel of a cave, formerly the path of their now underground river. Its inaccessibility had been a major advantage against roving gangs. Now their party snuck out, flashlights glossing rock walls, and trudged ledge by groove toward the cave mouth. The immediate vicinity was free of radioactive dust, so masks were considered unnecessary. It took a careful sweep with the binoculars before Johnson declared it safe enough to go out. They filed out silently. Adam stepped into a painfully bright overcast day.

He was dizzy. He sneezed, and couldn’t stop sneezing. His lightheadedness grew until they had to stop. He felt like hugging the ground to keep the air from spinning around him. Gradually, the sensations diminished. They walked on in silence. Only after a safe couple of kilometers did they allow themselves full conversations. But Adam was still overwhelmed. He crunched leaf litter underfoot, pricked himself on pine needles, giggled like a maniac at birds flitting overhead, turned his head into every breeze, stared at the clouded sun and blinked back tears. They left him to his drunken ambling, occasionally reminding him to keep up. They knew the feeling, especially his friend Peter who had gone through the same experience only a couple years prior. It was a harder and harder readjustment to surface life every year, as they brought up men who had spent more and more of their lives underground. Soon they’d be trying it on ones who’d never even known Adam’s brief childhood glimpse of pre-war skies, who had lived their every minute below crushing thousands of tons of sheltering rock.

That sky looked clearer than expected though. A lucky day for foraging, a slack in the eternal dust cover welcomed their ascent, autumn winds teasing a landscape more lush than Adam had imagined. They had gradually stopped taking pictures of the surface years ago, as demand for the same landscapes had diminished, their depressing quality outweighing their hopefulness. Now the grass, the trees, even the sky all looked more colorful than they had in the old photos. Johnson and Peter began showing Adam which shrubs bore edible berries, which nuts were ripe. Time passed quickly.

Adam only gradually registered the peace which surrounded them. He had climbed up from their chthonic demesne pumped full of adrenaline, only to find no danger against which to throw himself, no gangs of thugs, no killer robots, no clouds of radioactive ash, no mutated animals. Only wind, bugs and birdsong challenged their advance. Once, late afternoon, Peter whispered an alarm signal and Johnson pulled them down behind a fallen log, after a while handing Adam his binoculars. Far off beyond the tree line, a zombie lurched painfully, alternating between hobbling on its broken legs and surprisingly energetic dashes. A couple scraps of antique fabric still clung to its shoulders and hips. Even its skin was in tatters, its hair gone except a few strands dragging over its torso. The miserable creature was trying, and largely failing, to slap its hand down on insect or rodent motion in the grass, alternating with shoving random leaves and seeds into its gap-toothed mouth.

“Wish Johnson would’ve let me put that thing out of its misery” confided Peter that night when they both stood watch over the dying campfire, pulling blankets around themselves and leaning on their hunting rifles while a sparse late-year predawn chorus twittered all around.

“Why didn’t you?” asked Adam.

“No point” the older boy shrugged “they’ll...” he caught himself, searched Adam’s face, then switched his tone “the noise might attract more.”

They’d known each other all their lives. Adam wasn’t fooled, but neither could he get anything more out of his friend. Whatever veil of secrecy had fallen between them when Peter started going on foraging expeditions remained still in place, despite Adam now being officially a man, and much to the latter’s resentment. Were they not brothers in arms? Was he not now sharing in their risks? What more need he do to earn their trust? To earn Kitty’s?

But work did not let him stew over it too long. Morning found them stuffing acorns into their already swelling rucksacks. They were to return to the shelter. Peter managed to shoot a couple of squirrels and after several tries Adam winged a pigeon, then got a quick, disgusting lesson in gutting carcasses for transport. Johnson and Dick split off, and after a couple of hours and several distant shots returned hauling a gutless, footless, headless deer. Danger snuck up on them only about a kilometer to home.

“What the hell do you keep waving that around for?” asked Willy, annoyed at Adam repeatedly taking aim at seemingly nothing.

“There’s some kind of big squirrel or little deer off in the trees, but it keeps hiding whenever I try to sight it.”

“What?” they took notice and stared.

“There might actually be more than one...?”

“Shit! Get away from the trees, get to high ground, now, now, now!”

A dark, hunched, whip-tailed form scritched its way halfway up a trunk then leapt at Adam’s face, missed, and scampered back into the underbrush. The men ran for the nearest hillock, dropped their packs and stood back to back training their guns on any motion. Adam had seen old videos of mutated rats, but not until a red-eyed head popped up level with his knee did he recognize them. Peter and Willy’s rifles thundered. The vermin screeched, gurgled, then fell and fell silent and was soon dragged off by its fellows.

“That’s a hit. Couple more, boys, stay alert. Give them some carcasses to eat besides ours.”

Dozens of dark brown shapes swarmed through the grass, huge and obviously smart enough to understand the danger of firearms, screeching signals between each other, coordinating in pushes and retreats, flanking and circling to catch their monkey prey unaware. But, ultimately, the monkeys won the day. Two more losses and the rats retreated, dragging off their own dead, presumably not for burial. The foragers delayed their return to the shelter a couple of hours to ensure they weren’t being followed.

“Maybe they were roving and maybe there’s a new warren nearby. We’ll have a devil of a time finding it if there is” said Dick. “And it’d be a long day’s work clearing it out. Have to load up the old flamethrower, and that damn thing eats up fuel just when you look at it. Maybe the other two parties have seen something.”

“Other than that this was a light patrol though, wasn’t it?” mused Adam. “The dust clouds didn’t come close and we didn’t run across toxic spores or anything either to need the breathers. We even had direct sunlight through the clouds a few times! You guys had it much worse last time, with the storm and all.”

The men gave each other a few meaningful looks, until Willy cleared his throat.

“Ah, that is, Adam ... I was exaggerating a bit when I told the story, bundling up and diving through it, throwing away the dusty radioactive tarps afterwards. We did that for rougher storms in the past, but last time we just hunkered down inside a rusted old car, covered a broken window and waited it out, washed our boots afterwards.”

“People expect a better story when something like that happens though” said Peter. “Once in a while we jazz it up just a bit.”

“News from above help morale” said the elder, other heads nodding around him. “So long as nobody dies. It breaks up the monotony, like varying work projects or keeping movies or games out of use for a while so they feel fresh. Don’t be afraid to tell a good story, even if you don’t measure every rat’s whisker down to the last millimeter.”

Adam considered this as they dove back into the darkness of their cave, throwing one last look over his shoulder at the forest’s twilit glory. It was true. There had been tears and gloom for many days when, several months past, old Nob had failed to return from a patrol, as in years past for the Guptas’ lost brother, Peter’s uncle or Kitty’s father or the many other men they had lost especially in earlier times. Usually though, the women and children thrilled to the men’s report of each foraging run, gathering around a returning band in the cafeteria in celebration of their safe return. He himself had sat in rapt silence through many a war story growing up.

By the time they clambered down the metal ladder with their root, nut and berry laden packs, passing the bloody sacks of meat from hand to hand, the usual crowd had gathered by the armory, cheering welcomes and congratulations on a safe return. Kitty had tears in her eyes as she hugged Adam close and buried her face in his chest, and even Dana favored him with a warm, ropy, gropy hug.

“Down, girl, you’ve made very sure his buttocks are safe” whispered Asmee, who then began organizing a few women to inventory and store the men’s haul. A few others helped the men clean and store their weaponry and other gear, prepared a quick, no-fuss dinner snack while shooing away curious children. Finally, exhausted but proud, Adam shuffled off to his room.

He was somehow surprised to find it identical to the room he’d left behind. It almost didn’t seem right, after his recent escapade, for it to have the same bed, same chairs and desk, same shelves on the walls. On the other hand a bit of cozy familiarity settled his nerves. He shuddered, now, at the memory of the rats screeching past his face and legs, belatedly realized how close he’d come to, if not death, at least debilitating injuries. He hit the nearest shower, letting hot water smooth some of his tension away, being deliberately wasteful for once. When he stepped back across the hall in a bathrobe with his clothes slung over his arm, he did a double-take at finding Kitty’s mother waiting for him, dressed in form-fitting exercise pants and a tight t-shirt in the middle of his room, just stepping away from his bookshelf.

“Hi, Adam. Hope you don’t mind my letting myself in while you finished up in the bathroom.”

Adam did mind. Maintaining sanity in their colony’s enclosed environment mandated a heavy emphasis on privacy. Private rooms, opaque doors, soundproofing, designated meeting areas, work schedules allowing separation until tempers cooled, no internal surveillance cameras, and a general refusal to intrude on each other, children picked it all up as basic politeness while growing, and soon learned to take privacy for granted. Connie’s ‘letting herself in’ to someone else’s private chamber was almost unheard of. Even Kitty or Peter would’ve waited for him in the hall, not presuming on their much closer relationships. Yet here she was, caught in the act of thumbing through his possessions. Adam found even his incipient outrage undercut by her sheer brazenness, the indifferent entitlement with which she’d transgressed the unwritten rule putting him in his place before the conversation ever started.

“I ... hi? Why? Are you here? Mrs. Stevens?”

“Oh come on, you don’t have to call me that any more. Call me Connie, since you’re officially a grown man” she said, albeit in the same condescending tone she used to tell him and the other kids to pick up their toys. Adam might otherwise have missed the similarity to Mary’s phrasing a few nights before, but his libido still remembered what had happened next and further tamped down his rising anger.

“Umm, okay, Connie. Soooo ... whyyyy?”

The thirty-eight-year-old blonde made a big show of slowly eyeing him up and down, making him acutely aware of his naked body under the bathrobe, and paced around him to nudge the door shut. Stepping uncomfortably close teased him with a strange, floral scent. Perfume? He’d rarely smelled it in his life. There wasn’t much left these days.

“Well, being as you are the hero of the hour, I thought I could arrange a little celebration of your first safe return?” Connie took advantage of his moment of confusion to edge even closer and fill his visual field with her cleavage bulging into the t-shirt’s collar, being as endowed in that department as her daughter was yet not. She flipped her blonde hair forward to scatter across the bare skin, at which Adam blinked, gulped and tore his gaze away, stammering.