Gated (9 page)

We walk to the stairwell that runs the length of the cylindrical shelter. We have all started calling it the Silo because that’s exactly what it looks like—a farm silo buried underground. Below us are six floors of communal living spaces in the main cylinder along with twenty personal compartments poking out from the two middle floors like the spokes of a wheel. The main cylinder includes a common meeting area complete with a large library and music space, a medical center, a hydroponic garden and fitness track, a theater, and a storage area; in the wheel spokes are bunks, tiny kitchens, and sitting areas—everything we need while we wait for the world to become safe to be in again.

I know that there are definitely worse ways to wait out the destruction that’s coming. Some people have prepared small one-room bunkers in other parts of the world—tiny shelters behind their houses. Our Silo is like an underground city compared to those, but still it has walls, and every time that I’m in it, they seem closer together. I should be happy to be inside now, grateful that we’re safe, but the tension I felt outside hasn’t gone away. In a strange way, I feel like I’ve merely traded one death sentence for another. How long can any of us really survive down here away from the sun and the wide-open spaces of the prairie? I guess the only answer is for as long as we have to. We have no other choice.

We go down one level before Pioneer stops us at the door to where the meeting area, library, and music rooms are. He opens it. Beyond the door are the rest of our family and friends, their faces streaked with tears and full of concern. At first there’s silence as we stare at each other, but then someone cries out and our families rush at us and everything blends into a tangle of hugs and kisses and more tears.

My mom and dad sandwich me between them. They’re shaking and their voices are thick from crying. I nestle deeper into their arms. My mom’s shirt scrubs back and forth across my face, giving off the scent of her favorite lavender soap. I inhale it in tiny sniffs, my breath hitching as my own sobs start. Being here now is almost enough
to make me hysterical all over again. I was so sure that I would be lef [ woobs t outside.

The room is loud with the sounds of reunion. It’s strange to think that we’ve only been separated for an hour or so. The Community surrounds the four of us, patting our backs and crying along with our parents. I look over at Marie and she grins at me, her face beaming with all the attention she’s receiving. Will and Brian look embarrassed by the sheer volume of love coming at them, as if they would wipe off their cheeks—moist with everyone’s kisses—if they could manage it without hurting someone’s feelings. I can’t decide how I feel. Awestruck, maybe? I can’t quite believe that I’m safe, that we all are.

Pioneer speaks only after we’ve settled down some. “Brothers and sisters, sit.”

The room quiets quickly and we all move to the rows of armchairs and sofas spread out across the space in groups. My mom won’t sit in a chair of her own. She perches on mine instead. She puts her hand on the top of my head. Will’s family hovers around him as well, and Marie is practically wrapped in her mother’s arms like a butterfly in a cocoon, both of them squished into the same armchair. I bite at my fingernail and try not to cry. Now that we’re safe, our punishment for sneaking out has to be imminent. What we’ve done is so bad that I can’t even imagine what it will be. I just know that it will be horrible.

I look over at Pioneer. He’s calmly watching us settle
in, his face smooth and still. He’s the only one who seems to know what’s going on, what will happen next. I grip the arm of the chair and try to brace myself for the bad news that has to be coming. Does this mean we will be living underground longer than we originally thought? The space around me is wide enough to hold the Community comfortably. There are five more floors of living spaces besides this one, but I’m still breathing shallowly like somehow it is no bigger than a clothes closet.

Pioneer paces the length of the room, eyes on the floor and hands clasped behind his back, before he clears his throat and speaks.

“For months now I have been plagued every night by concerns over the last days, about our preparedness to face them. I have begun to fear that we are not ready.
Complacency
has settled in among us, friends. Our commitment to survival has faltered.” He pauses here and looks into all of our faces, his eyes suddenly glistening. “My heart breaks when I think of how far we’ve come, how much we’ve done to survive, only to have it jeopardized when we are so close to the end. Tonight, I tested our readiness, hoping that somehow I was wrong, that we haven’t grown indifferent to the doom this world will face, that we are still on the right path, but deep down I feared that you would fail this test. And these fears were realized this evening.”

His eyes bore into mine and I’m convinced that he
knew the exact moment that we snuck out. From the corner of my eye, I catch Marie squirming slightly in her chair. She knows it too. The alarm went off because of us.

No one talks, which only accentuates how quiet it is down here, how insulated. Pioneer’s eyes close and tears start to streak his face. “If today were truly the last, we would have lost four of our own. Four.” His face contorts with pain and he hides it in his hands. My mom lets out a small sob and I pat her hand. We wait as he struggles to regain his composure. “A few months are all we have now. There is no room for complacency. For
rebellion
. Not here, not anymore.” His lips pucker around these last words like they carry a bitter taste.

“We didn’t spend the last ten years planning, building, and sacrificing to lose Community members on that last day. And as much as I would love to tell you that I have the time down to the exact hour, I don’t. None of us are sure when we will move in here for good—when the Silo will become the only safe place we have left.”

“So you’re saying that this was all a
drill
? You let us think we lost our children for a
drill
?” says Mr. Wallace, Brian’s dad, and his face reddens. He leans forward in his chair like he’s having a hard time staying put.

The rest of us back away from him almost on reflex. Questioning anything that Pioneer does is practically unheard of, and the few times that anyone has tried, they faced one of his more intense punishments—sometimes in
front of the rest of us. I’ve never actually done something bad enough to warrant one of these punishments myself. That is, until tonight.

I wince and try not to think about what punishment Will, Brian, Marie, and I face now. Sneaking out is even worse than questioning Pioneer. The hardest part is knowing that whatever it is, we deserve it.

Pioneer stops pacing. His face pales and his eyes go from glistening to hard and flat so fast I wonder where the rest of his unshed tears have gone. Out of nowhere, he pounds the podium in front of him with the flat part of his hand, and we all recoil. He moves until he’s right in front of Mr. Wallace, staring him down until the poor man squirms and looks away. Brian and his mother shrink into their seats. I silently will Brian’s dad to be quiet. The last thing any of us needs is for one of our parents to be punished too.

“Yes, I made you think your children were gone! God knows I didn’t want to, but I had no choice. You needed to feel what it would be like to lose them in order to truly understand how dangerous this time is. We are hanging onto the very edge of a cliff here! Your children dangle from the safety ropes that
we
provide them—this Community, this shelter. If you don’t keep the ropes in your hands at all times, they will plummet into the abyss with the rest of this forsaken world and there is absolutely no getting them back then! Did you know where Brian was when the alarm went off? Did you have any idea where
to look first? No! None of you knew. You trusted that they were where they were supposed to be.
You
somehow made it into the shelter.
You
made sure that
you
were safe. Then you sat here blubbering, wringing your hands and begging me to open the door.” Pioneer stabs his finger at the ceiling to the place where the Silo’s front door would be if we could see it. “You put the whole of their survival in my hands, where it cannot be, because on that last day I will not be responsible for anything more than shutting the door and locking it tight. And I won’t open it back up for
any
reason next time. Do you understand?”

He says this last part directly into Mr. Wallace’s face and then hauls back and slaps him. Hard. I gasp; I can’t help it. It always shocks me when he does something like this in front of us. My mom shushes me. I watch as Mr. Wallace’s family moves a little farther away from him as if their proximity will bring Pioneer’s wrath down on them too. Mr. Wallace gulps like a fish and nods.

Pioneer’s shaking now, as mad as I’ve ever seen him. His salt-and-pepper hair, normally smooth and neatly combed, is sticking up in a dozen different directions where he’s raked his hand through it. Even his eyes have taken on a frustrated glow. Maybe he has a right to be mad. He can’ [He direction;t take the burden of all of us on his shoulders, not when they’re already heavily weighted down with running the Community and preparing the Silo. He had the courage to step up and buck the disbelievers, to gather us here to save some remnant of humanity. If not for him, we
would be as doomed as the rest of the world. He’s our only hope for a future.

Around me heads dip and eyes study the floor—including my parents’. My mom rubs her thumb across the tops of Karen’s shoes—which made it into the shelter even though I didn’t. My parents avoid looking at me. What made them come here without me? Did they stop to look for me at all or did they just run for the shelter and trust that I would somehow be there, knowing that there was at least a chance that I might not? And worse, would I have done the same in their shoes? I wish that the answers to these questions were automatic. I want to say that I would never do what they’ve just done. I’ve always believed that they mean more to me than my own life ever could … but after this past hour, I can’t say that for sure. When the siren went off, I didn’t think about anything but surviving. They were only on my mind when I realized I wasn’t going to make it. And it’s this realization—that we are all one panicked momen
t away from cutting the bonds that tie us—that chills me to the bone.

“Go home,” Pioneer says. He doesn’t soften the edge of disappointment in his voice as he talks. My parents wince at this. “Get your minds and hearts right, because in a few hours we start preparing in earnest.”

When we first moved into Mandrodage Meadows, the grown-ups hardly mentioned the end of the world to us at all. I can’t remember ever sitting down with my parents, Pioneer, or anyone else and discussing just why we were way out in the middle of nowhere digging the largest hole in the earth that I had ever seen. What I
do
remember is roaming the prairie and the hills beyond them with Will and the others. I remember picking wildflowers in the summer and sledding in the winter. I remember feeling like New York was a million miles away and that all the darkness that came before we moved here was no more than a fading nightmare. If it weren’t for Karen’s shoes still sitting by our front door, I might’ve chosen to forget that before time altogether.

When I turned ten, that all changed. That was the year that Pioneer sat all of us down at school and showed us
the taped newscasts our parents had seen but we hadn’t. He brought out charts and maps of space and taught us how to decipher them. I started to realize that the sky hid dangers far greater than I had ever imagined. Asteroids. Solar flares.

He read us the story of Noah. He said that we were just like Noah and his family. Their god had told them that something was coming, something most of humanity wouldn’t survive, and so Noah prepared his people. He braved the chiding and disbelief of the rest of his community, gathered those few who did believe to him, and built them an ark to ride out the coming storm, ju ^He di and st as Pioneer had us build the Silo. When Noah’s flood finally came, the scoffers finally saw the hand of Noah’s god on him and fought to enter the ark, but by then it was too late and they were lost, just as the people beyond Mandrodage Meadows would be one day.

“You are all chosen, specially selected by the Brethren, the higher beings that have watched our planet’s progress since before humans occupied it. They chose me, gave me the visions of what’s coming, so that in return, according to their instructions, I could choose you, the people most worthy of surviving. My Community.”

I had lots of questions, we all did—about the mysterious Brethren, about what Pioneer saw in his visions, about how our families were picked. Pioneer laughed, his deep booming one that always made us want to laugh too—even when we weren’t sure why he was laughing. He laid
one of his hands on my shoulder and the other one on Will’s. Then he told us stories about the aliens that waited for us across the universe. He showed us drawings he’d made of their slim bodies and large black eyes, pointed to the galaxy where they lived on a map, and described how wonderful their world is. He said that he’d seen it all in visions the Brethren gave him. He spent th
e better parts of weeks and months showing us how to search the Bible for the messages that they had embedded inside for those clever enough to recognize them.