Apocalypse (The Wasteland Chronicles, #1) (2 page)

The cold wind never abated, blowing on my
already numb face, stinging me with particles of sand, cracking my
lips dry. At long last, flashlights crested the rise behind us.
Voices signaled the arrival of reinforcements.

Four men approached, their faces lost to
darkness.

“Where is he?” asked the one in charge, whose
voice I didn’t recognize.

“Down here,” Michael said.

Two men pointed their guns into the darkness.
Everyone else, myself included, lifted the body, one person to a
limb. Together, we lugged the man back to base.

Michael explained everything on the way, but
I kept silent. I was thinking of the woman. They asked me several
questions about what had happened. I answered in monosyllables,
echoing everything Michael had already said. There was no use in
telling them about the woman now. If I did, at best I would be
severely disciplined for not speaking up earlier. At worst – well,
I didn’t want to think about that. Now that I was sixteen, I could
be tried as an adult, and the holding cells in the Officers’ Wing
were mighty small.

I felt relieved when we finally reached the
vaulted door of Bunker 108. The outside of the door, though
metallic, was the same dull brown as the terrain. Unless you were
right on it, it was almost indistinguishable from the mountainside.
A small camera was hidden in the rock to the right of the door,
allowing the Officer on duty to see anyone coming.

The door was opened from the inside,
revealing an Officer. The Officer’s eyes widened as he watched us
pass the Bunker’s threshold into the rock tunnel. After we had
passed through, he hurriedly shut the door and twisted its lock
wheel behind us.

We were safe. I had finished my first recon;
but for good reason, I didn’t feel all that proud.

Lights in the entrance tunnel flashed on
overhead, illuminating the six of us carrying our burden inside. We
left the rocky tunnel and entered the atrium. The receptionist’s
desk was empty – Deborah had either gone home, or was at the
Caf.

Next to the half circular desk stood my
father, Steven Keener, waiting with a gurney and a nervous orderly
at his side. His disheveled brown hair was streaked with gray, and
dark circles underlined his hazel eyes. It looked as if he hadn’t
slept in days.

He shot me a worried glance as we put the man
on the gurney.

“Dad…”

“Not now, son. Go eat. We’ll talk later.”

My father and the orderly started wheeling
the patient toward the medical bay, flanked by the Officers.

My father was always busy. Between his duties
as senior doctor and his own pet project of researching the
xenovirus, I could hardly find time with him. He sometimes put in
over a hundred hours a week at the lab, all while caring for
patients. I didn’t see how it was possible.

After handing off my rifle to the
quartermaster (a small armory stood near the front desk), I headed
to the commons to kill time before dinner. In the corner, several
Officers and a few civilian women were watching a movie on the big
screen. A couple of kids played Ping-Pong in the corner. I sat in a
chair in another corner, and watched some of my classmates play
basketball.

In a community of about four hundred people,
you knew everyone, and everyone knew you. Not enough to be your
friend, per se, but enough to have a sense of who you were, who
your friends were, and what you were about. It was hard to imagine
what life had been like in the cities – like Old L.A., where the
population had reached into the millions. A world where you didn’t
know everybody seemed strange and unreal to me. Maybe it had been
for them, too. Only the old ones in Bunker 108 remembered those
times, and most of them were gone. A lot went crazy, living
underground – or so I’d heard. But I’d never heard of anyone born
underground who went crazy.

I didn’t find Bunker living that bad,
especially considering the alternative of living on the surface. I
had the archive teaching me, and someday I would be a doctor here,
too, like my dad. Maybe even sit on the Citizens’ Council like him,
though he rarely attended because of his duties.

As for me, I was no one special – scrawny,
quiet, and a little too smart for my own good. That was what my dad
said, anyway – that last bit, not the scrawny and quiet thing. My
goal: to exist and survive and not get in the way. When you got in
the way, other people made trouble for you. There was only one true
friend I could claim, and her name was Khloe. We’d known each other
from the cradle, but we’d been growing apart lately. I didn’t know
whether it was just that we were getting older or something else
entirely.

I reached for my sketchbook in my pack.
Drawing was one of my ways to blow off steam, and I had a knack for
it. As I sat in my chair, I just let the pencil move across the
page, not really paying attention to what I was creating. Ten
minutes later, without realizing it, I had finished a sketch of the
woman I had seen in the Wasteland. Her face was shaded with dusk.
She had long, black hair and fierce eyes. I was amazed by the
amount of detail I’d captured; she had been awfully far away.

It was the face of a woman who might have
killed. Someone I might have
had
killed. And now, I was
drawing her.

I ripped the sketch out and tore it to
pieces. My heart raced for no good reason – as if someone were
going to see the sketch and know exactly what had happened. I
looked up to see that everyone was leaving the commons, heading for
the Caf.

I wondered what was happening in the medical
bay – the stabbed man, my father – and even what Chief Security
Officer Chan was doing.

But all that would have to wait. I got up and
headed for the Caf.

I ate alone at mess. My thoughts were too
heavy for casual conversation.

People walked by, their faces questioning.
Word had gotten around that something had happened out there. I ate
my potatoes and vegetables in silence, never looking up.

“Sitting by yourself. As usual.”

I felt my heart miss a beat as Khloe plopped
down on the metal bench next to me. Out of the corner of my eye I
could see her shoulder-length black hair. I turned to meet her
bright blue eyes.

“Khloe! What are you up to?”

“Just hanging out, I guess,” she said, with a
smile. “Eating some food, as I’m wont to do. You?”

“Much the same.”

As I took another bite, I felt her staring at
me.

“So…” she asked. “How was it?”

I swallowed. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t play coy with me, Alex Keener. I know
you came across a dead body.”

“Right to the point, huh?”

“I’m a busy girl. So what happened?”

“Well, he wasn't quite dead, actually. He’s
in the medical bay with my dad. Three stab wounds.” I ate another
mouthful of food, and swallowed. “It was pretty bad.”

“Yeah, I know all that, but you’re my inside
source.”

“Don’t you mean ‘outside source’?”

She smiled at my lame joke. “Who is he? Where
did he come from?”

“I don’t know. If anyone does, it’s Sanchez
or Chan, or…” I paused. “What’s with all these questions,
anyway?”

She smiled. “You know me. I’m curious.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “If you’ve been asking
around, you probably know more than me, actually.”

She laughed. “Yeah. Right. Well, if you’re
not saying anything, you must be hiding
something
.”

I couldn’t help widening my eyes a
little.

“Hit the nail on the head, huh?”

“Yeah, maybe a little.”

“Well, what happened? Spill the beans.”

“Nothing happened. We went out, found the
body, and called for some help. Now we’re here. Eating beans.”

I looked at her and smiled, but she seemed
unconvinced.

“Funny,” she said. “I’m not letting you off
that easy. Alex, how long have we known each other?”

“I don’t know…since we were kids?”

“Yeah. Our whole lives. And who would you say
your best friend is?”

“I don’t have to answer that…”

“I want to hear it, anyway.”

“You, of course.”

“Okay,” she said. “Something’s bugging you,
and I’m going to pry it out of you if it’s the last thing I do. You
saw
something. And
you’re
going to tell me what it
was.”

I thought of the woman I had seen. I didn’t
answer Khloe for a while, and not because I distrusted her. I knew
she’d keep a secret. But what I had seen weighed on me, and it
didn’t seem fair to lay it on her. What if she got in trouble?

“Still not talking, huh? Whatever happened,
you can’t pen it up inside. You need someone to talk with. I’m
here.”

“You're persistent, aren’t you?”

She shrugged. “I know you, Alex. You’re too
quiet. It’s okay to let your feelings out. Really, it would do you
good.”

I was about to protest the “feelings” bit,
but decided it wasn’t worth it. In the end, I decided that she was
right. But this was not the place for telling her.

“Alright, but you have to promise not to
tell. And I can’t tell you here.”

“That serious, then?”

I nodded, not saying anything else. All
around us, people chattered, silverware clanked on trays, chair
legs squeaked against the linoleum.

“Fine,” Khloe said. “The chapel, at twenty
hundred?”

The chapel would work. No one went there much
anymore, so we wouldn’t be discovered.

“Alright,” I said.

I was really doing this. I was going to tell
Khloe something I had intended on taking to the grave. Maybe it
wasn’t
that
serious, but it definitely seemed like it. If
anyone found out besides Khloe, I would be in big trouble. Telling
a secret, even to someone you trusted, always carried risks. Even
with the best of intentions, people had a way of becoming their own
worst enemy.

Khloe wasn’t thinking about any of that,
though.

“Finally, I get some time with you. Now that
you're reconnoitering and everything, I guess you’re too cool for
me.”

“Khloe, you know that's not true.”

“Hey,” Khloe said, touching my arm. “It’ll be
fine, whatever it is. Just trust me.”

I looked at her for a second, trying not to
focus on how good her hand felt on my arm. I stopped trying to
figure her out years ago. There were feelings there, at least on my
part – but for some reason, nothing had ever materialized. She
always seemed to be with some other loser.

Okay, maybe that was a bit harsh. All the
same, I always found myself playing the part of friend, and that
was the biggest reason for our distance. It hurt to be around
her.

“Alright,” I said. “I’ll meet you there.”

Khloe smiled. “Good.” She jumped up, and half
turned from me. “Twenty hundred, the chapel. That's almost two
hours away, so be ready.”

Khloe went back to her table, and I returned
to my food. I didn't know if I had made the right choice. But I
knew Khloe – if she knew something was bothering me, she wouldn’t
let up until I told her. Besides, she was right – seeing her would
be good. Maybe this would lead to something more than
secret-swapping. Maybe, we could finally…

I didn’t let that thought form. I didn’t want
to hope too much. Hope was dangerous. If you let it grow, it only
became more painful when it was crushed like a bug.

Alright –
that
was dark, even for
me.

Well,
hopefully…
telling Khloe would
get this off my chest. Maybe it would make me feel better.

Maybe.

After dinner, I went to the medical bay,
entering by the double doors. In my right hand I held a container
of vegetable stew, still warm, from the kitchens. When I told the
cooks it was for my dad, they weren’t surprised.

The medical bay was shaped like a giant
square, with four operating tables set up in each quadrant of the
room. All were empty. The mystery man wasn’t here, but I had
expected that. He would be in the back room, which was used for
extreme cases.

The air was cold, stinking of medicine and
metal. It held a frigid humidity that clung to my skin and clothes,
and caused my boots to stick to the gray linoleum floor. I felt
chilled as I walked across the bay. I never liked this place. It
felt soulless and bare – colder than the rest of the Bunker. I
didn’t understand how my dad could work here.

The door to my dad’s office was ajar; he was
in. I found him alone at his large, wooden desk – a desk that had
stood in that office ever since the Bunker was filled, back in
2030. He squinted with bespectacled eyes at his computer screen,
his lab coat wrinkled and dirty.

He didn’t notice me at first. I set the
container of stew on the corner of his desk, causing him to jump
and look at me. Upon recognizing me, he relaxed.

“Alex…”

“You missed dinner.”

“Oh.” My father frowned, looking at the soup
as if it were something unfamiliar, as if he had forgotten that
this thing called “dinner” existed.

“That’s funny,” he said. “I’m not even
hungry.”

“It’s alright. How is he?”

My father sighed. “Not good. He’s not dead,
but he’s dying. And as far as
who
he is…we don’t know. Not
yet, anyway. Comm lines with Bunker 114 are still down.”

This was not a warning sign in and of itself.
Communication with Bunker 114 was always spotty, especially
recently. Communication satellites were notorious for acting wonky,
due to going thirty years without maintenance. Eventually, time
would leave the Bunkers in complete silence.

“Did you stay up all night again?” I
asked.

“I’m getting close, Alex,” my father said,
ignoring my question. “Very close. And this man might just have the
key I’m looking for.”

“What do you mean?”