Chapter 0 - Life In the Bunker

Marie had been living in the bunker for as long as she could remember. Her father used to tell her stories of the world outside, of a house, by the river and a garden filled with tulips and daylilies, and a huge oak tree with a tire swing that he’d always intended on replacing with a real swing, and a treehouse that remained unbuilt but that he’d intended especially for her. “After all,” he always would say about it, “I lived for nothing but giving the absolute best life for my little girl.”
 
He told her she’d lived with him and her mother in that house for a few years before coming here; before everything had changed, but she remembered none of it. She’d been four when they’d come to live in the bunker with all the other families, and she only remembered the vault. Her father rarely talked about her mother. It made him sad. One day when she’d come home from the bunker’s school to ask why she didn’t have a mommy, he told her what had happened. His voice hadn’t had its usual cheer and love that it always did when he told her other stories. Instead, when he told her the story, he seemed pained. He told her that her mother had been out to work that day, when the news report came on the television (a device she’d never seen but always assumed must be like the old computer screens that the teachers told them to do their homework on) that the country was under attack. Some sort of missile strike from what the history teacher, Mr. Throckett had said, but no one else would talk about it, and she never wanted to see that look on her father’s face again, so she’d never asked him about it. He, with Marie in his arms, and several other families rushed to the bunker to get in. He’d spent all day going through the people that arrived trying to find her mother, but she had never arrived. She had been outside the bunker when they closed the door, he’d never gotten to say goodbye or even grab a picture of her, so he could remember her face. By the time he’d finished telling Marie the story, his face was soaked in tears. He’d told her he’d be all right, but all that night he’d cried in the other room, thinking she couldn’t hear him. She never wanted to see her father cry like that, so she never brought it up again.
 
When she was little and going to the elementary school near the bunker’s grand hall, she’d always thought boys were gross. When she got a little older, she started thinking differently. She’d found herself staring at a boy named Chad all day in her class when she was 6 and thought about him all night when she went home. She wanted to go up and kiss him when they were at recess, but that was before she’d asked her father about her mommy. After that story, she didn’t want to kiss him or talk to him or look at him ever again. If love had made her father that sad, she never wanted to love anyone.
 
So, she busied herself in listening to what Mr. Throckett told the class about the world before the war. He was a big man with a big voice and listening to him talk about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln was the most fun she ever got to have in school. Science and Math were boring, and she didn't like Art; because she'd never been good at drawing. Mr. Throckett also taught English, which she was always good at. She wrote poetry in a diary her father gave her, and one day when she was 14 she got the courage up to ask Mr Throckett to look at it.
 
When he was done reading her poems, he said to her, “You have a gift for language, Miss Winstead. Your gift will need some polish and a few more years to mature, but your work is certainly not dull or poorly written. I quite like it. Keep at it.” 
 
And she had. She filled her diary that year and showed it to him again, and again he’d liked it. He even asked her to read some of them in class, and it was then that she began to feel something in her again. Another boy, Derrin, caught her attention. After Mr. Throcket had asked her to read her work to the class, he came up to her and asked her to look at an old composition notebook he had. In it, he’d written stories about Knights and Dragons and Elves and Barbarians. He told her that he’d grown up reading his uncle’s small collection of Conan the Barbarian comics and an old book of Grimm’s fairy tales his mother brought with them when they arrived in the bunker. He would read and reread them for hours, finding them much more interesting than the books Mr. Throckett had them write essays about like The Great Gatsby or To Kill a Mockingbird. When he told her about these, she asked him to show her the comics and the book. So the next day at school he brought them, and she went home reading them all the way through the night and returned them to him, finished, the next day.
Talking with him about the stories he wanted to write, and what he liked about the comics he’d grown up reading, she slowly grew to think of him as a friend. Her father didn’t like him, but never forbade her meeting with him, and over the next few years, she and Derrin grew close. When they turned 17, he told her he loved her on her birthday. 
 
And fearing what she’d seen of her father’s love for her mother, she told him she didn’t love him. And then he stopped talking to her. When they talked afterward, it was always brief and cold. He never turned mean, but he never smiled, and never talked with her about his comics or stories.
 
So, she asked her father about her mother again. What was she like? Why had they gotten married? And they talked all that night. Her mother was, he told her, a kind, gentle woman, and never said anything bad about anybody, but she always laughed at the wickedest jokes and had a dark sense of humor. She painted houses for a living and painted canvases for a hobby. She’d come from a family of religious people, like the Watsons next door who always went to chapel on Sundays, and always had believed in God, in stark contrast to her father, who had been an atheist from a family of atheists. She’d always warm up a room with her presence, though she had deep, dark eyes and a raven black mane and a smile that spoke of her sharp and wicked humor. They’d gotten married after only four months of knowing each other, and those were the happiest days of their lives. He never knew why she’d loved him. They’d been so different as to be night and day, but he never questioned it through all that time. After a year, Marie had come into their lives, and they bought the house on 1645 Morel Drive, which rested not seven miles east of the bunker to this day, with its single oak tree overlooking the creek behind their house. And they’d worked to grow a garden and make the house their own.
  
When her father was done talking, he wasn’t crying like Marie thought he’d be. He was smiling contentedly and remained that way until he fell asleep on their couch. 
But this, despite all that she’d learned of her mother, didn’t answer her questions. Or at least, the answers didn’t satisfy her need to know more. But she’d exhausted her father’s stories. He had nothing else he could give her about her mother. He couldn’t even show her what she'd looked like, or the house they’d lived in before the missiles. He couldn’t satisfy her questions about love and why it hurt so much.
 
And so, on her next birthday, she began to plan. She told no one what she intended to do, and the thought scared her, but she had to know more.
 
She started exploring the parts of the bunker she’d never been to. She went to the bunker door and the access control room that kept them sealed in. The man that worked there as a guard, essentially a menial, unnecessary and perpetually boring task; Chuck Watson, her chapel going neighbor, was glad to have the company. He told her about how it all functioned. How the door she saw from the inside was simply the first door to the airlock, and how, when the time came that they might be able to survive outside without having to deal with radiation, the door would be opened. He showed her the control panel that would open the door, and told her the proccess of testing the radiation levels outside. They would open the first door, seal it, and then open the second door to let the men in the hazmat suits out with their Geiger counters.
 
Then she went to the sciences lab to find Paul Hammond, the man whose job it was to go outside every three months to measure the radiation levels and return with his findings to let people know how much longer they’d have to wait. She asked him how he put on his hazmat suit, and he, looking at her in ways that made her uncomfortable to be around him, showed her how it was done. He even let her try one on, telling her that to be really comfortable in it, she’d have to strip down to her underwear. She knew he wasn’t telling her this because he was concerned about her comfort, but she did it to keep him from telling anyone about it.
 
She waited and thought for several weeks and thought long and hard about how she would get outside without breaking the airlock so the others wouldn’t be exposed to the radiation. She knew Chuck wouldn’t let her out and she didn’t want to be alone in a room with Hammond when Chuck’s work shift was up. Eventually, her thinking came to a conclusion.
 
So, one night, she snuck into the bunker apartment that housed Derrin’s family. She told him what she wanted to do and why and asked him if he would help her. For a moment, she feared he would say no, that he was still hurt by her rejection and wouldn’t want anything to do with her. But to her surprise, though he didn’t like it, he told her he’d do it. He’d open the air lock for her. And for the first time since they’d known each other, she kissed him. It was her first kiss.
 
A few nights later, they snuck into the science lab, stole one of the hazmat suits, and quietly made their way to the bunker door. Watson had gone home for the night, and the nightshift guard, Randy Noonan, was asleep drunk in his quarters again as usual, so the door and the control room was unguarded and unmanned. She showed Derrin how to use the panel in the control room to open the airlock and then the door, gave him another kiss, and went to wait by the door for him to open the air lock. She started stripping her clothes off, put them into a pack she would carry on her back through the wastes, and put on her hazmat suit. From the platform leading to the airlock, she saw him in the control room behind the panel and gave him the ok with a thumbs up. A few minutes passed, and she thought he wouldn’t be able to go through with it, that she wouldn’t be able to go through with it; that they’d stop what they were doing, laugh about how stupid this was, go back to her apartment, cook dinner together, and fall asleep together on the couch. And then, the process started. She saw stale, dusty air rush from the door as it was released, and she knew she had gone too far now to go back. The door slowly and loudly opened. She thought the noise might alert people to what was happening, and that they might rush in, stop them and they’d be in serious trouble, but no one came. The door ground and slid its way open, and beyond, she saw the door that would take her out of the bunker.
 
She looked to Derrin in the control panel, full of fear and anxiety at what she was about to do, and he looked back at her, eyes full of fear and worry. He didn’t want her to do this. She didn’t want to do this. But she turned away and walked out into the airlock. And after a few moments, the door sealed shut behind her and everything was dark. There were no lights in here. No windows. Just an empty, metal room with two immense steel doors on mechanical hinges. And then, with another loud metallic groan, the door in front of her began to open. And as it slowly began to reveal the outside world, she was awestruck, and her breath was taken away as, for the first time she could remember, she saw the stars.
And when the door had stopped moving, she walked out into cold, barren night.
 
The first thing she did was to look at a map of the area and a compass she’d stolen from the wilderness survival class to get herself oriented. She figured out which way east was and began her long trek to what she’d come to think of as her ancestral home. She’d learned to think that way from Derrin and his comics. Derrin was a bit of a romantic when it came to things like heritage. He’d told her he was descended from Scottish Highlanders whose ancestral home was in a castle and town he’d never have been able to point at on a map. He thought of himself as a Clansmen, a kilt wearing warrior from a land he knew almost nothing about. She’d never much understood her own family history apart from what her father had told her about her mother’s family and his own. She just thought of herself as a good ol’ born and bred American. But she had loved hearing Derrin talk about Scotland.
All this thinking about Derrin was already making her homesick, and she wasn’t even 20 yards away from the bunker. She’d have to make this quick. A seven-mile trek wouldn’t take her too long. She might even be back before dawn. 
 
As she walked downhill from the bunker, she looked around her at the landscape. It wasn’t like her father’s stories. Some things were green, but for the most part, everything was dead. Grass had sprung up from the concrete and asphalt and grown long, but in the moonlight, it looked dull and brown, not green and vibrant. The street was only barely still visible underneath it all, and the yellow and white lines she had remembered seeing in pictures was so faded and worn away that it was almost absent. Dead trees lined the side of the road on both sides, leading off into a long, mostly dead forest. There wasn’t a single tree that looked like it still was alive, let alone healthy. Fortunately, the road essentially led due east from the bunker, so she didn’t have to hoof it through all that dark, sinister looking forest.
 
Eventually, she came to a large parking lot filled with cars that had long ago broken down and rusted to death. She weaved her way between the cars, looking at them as closely as she could as she marched on by. Not a pane of glass was left in a single vehicle, and ugly, deformed, and spiny weeds were springing up from holes in the upholstery inside them. One or two of them had toys in the back seat and moldy, ruined books resting on the dashboards. At one point, there was even a worn and torn suitcase resting on the pavement, with clothes and tooth brushes and other things still inside. 
 
The parking lot came to an end as she continued her path, and one of the roads leading away from it was still going east, and so she followed that for a few hours past more dead forest, which eventually gave way to cleared fields on either side of the road. Here she finally realized how hilly this country was. The forest treeline had ended just as the road began to lead up another hillside, and because of the incline, she couldn’t see what lay beyond the hilltop. This made her a bit nervous because it meant she didn’t know where she was going or what the road might lead to.
 
She’d been told in science class that people could live on outside the blast zones, and possibly even survive fallout. She knew she did not want to run into people out here. Things were terrible out here. She’d never needed to be told that. Any student of history knows how desperate people can get after a disaster, and they certainly know how bad people can be even without that desperation. And because she was now past the treeline, she would have nowhere to hide if she did run into people.
 
She crested the hill shortly and stopped. Beyond, toward her destination, she saw several more, less steep hills below. The road would lead right through these, and still in the direction she was traveling, so that was good. Beyond that, she could just make out what looked to be houses. Maybe even what Mr. Throckett had called suburbs when they were studying America’s development in the 30’s and 40’s. She checked her compass to confirm she had not gotten off track, pulled out the map to get a sense of where she was going, and then set off beyond the hilltop.
 
The rest of the walk was largely uneventful. The area between the bunker and the suburbs had not been developed much, and there was only grass and hilltops for her to look at. So she marched on, paying little more attention to the environment.
 
When she finally got to the houses she’d seen from the hilltop, she was beginning to get tired and her feet were getting sore. The houses for the most part, looked pretty much the same. Single story, cookie cutter things that had fallen into disrepair, with windows long shattered or fallen out and plaster and stucco beginning to crack. A few houses had two stories and seemed to her to have slightly more dignity than the others as they stood defiantly against the night sky, daring the elements to try and finally collapse them. 
 
She pulled out her map and began to examine the streets. Apple Street crossed Mandarin Avenue and Orange Boulevard divided Date Road, and Oleander Drive broke off from Parsley Court, and Coriander Lane led off into the hills from which she had come, et cetera et cetera. It hurt her head to puzzle through the map. Eventually though, she found Morel Drive, which broke off from one of the side streets past the main road, and eventually led off into more forest beyond the town. So, she oriented herself, found a street sign that said Orange Boulevard, and decided her path from there. It led through the town, and she passed by all the ruined homes. Every once in a while, she saw one that had its roof collapse in on it, or had a wall fallen out, and she wondered what state she would find her ancestral home in. Would it still be standing? Would there be windows? Would the door still be on it’s hinges? Would the tree have fallen on the house and destroyed it?
 
These questions flooded her mind as she filed past the houses beginning to imagine scenarios in which the house wasn’t even there anymore and the whole journey had been for absolutely nothing and she’d be in so much trouble and her father would be so angry at her and so on.
 
Finally, there it was. Exactly like she’d imagined it. A few windows were fallen out here and there and the front yard had long overgrown, but there it was. The two-story house with the oak tree overlooking a creek in the back yard that her father had described: 1645 Morel Drive. 
 
Excitedly, she ran up to the front door and tried the handle. It came off in her hand and the door lazily swung open before her. The house wasn’t in good shape of course. Windows had broken, and rain had poured in, soaking into the floorboards, leaving the wood soft. The furniture was covered in various molds, and here and there weeds sprang up from the soft floor. Pictures had fallen off the walls and a shelf had fallen on its face and was propped up by the molded and ruined books that had fallen from it. In the kitchen food had rotted away in the cupboards and rats and cockroaches had taken up residence and fled from the disturbance of her presence. The basement door was locked, though it wouldn’t have taken much to break the door down, but Marie doubted what she was looking for would be down there, so she didn’t bother. The hallway that led from the kitchen ended in three rooms. The one that was straight ahead was a bathroom, with its likely long kaput toilet and sink. The other two rooms were more fascinating. One was an art studio with several antiquated canvases, brushes, paint cans and tubes strewn about chaotically, and a single empty easel in the center of it all. This must have been her mother’s she thought to herself. The other room was filled with bookshelves and lounge chairs and against the far wall a desk rested beneath an old and cracked wilderness scene painting depicting a green valley with a lake at its center, and among the few trees depicted in the painting, she saw animals, mostly what appeared to be elk. A study for her father? She wondered at this room as she meandered on in. She went up to the desk and started opening drawers. There wasn’t much inside beyond office supplies until she got to the bottom most one. Inside was an album. Picking it up gently, she found it was well preserved, and had not had much water seep inside. She opened it, and there her father was on the first page, younger than she’d ever seen him, beaming that big, bright, proud grin that he’d always had. Next to him, with his arm around her shoulders, with a smile that spoke of her sharp and wicked humor and deep, dark eyes, and a raven black mane, was her mother. She was beautiful and something about her image in the photo stirred some distant memory in Marie’s mind, and her face at once seemed both old and familiar to her, and entirely new and strange. In her mother’s arms, there Marie was, just a baby in a funny red felt hat staring at the camera in puzzlement. She looked a long time at that photo, and then flipped through the pages of the rest of the album. The photos in the album showed a happy family that seemed so alien to her, even though she was in many of the photos. Her father was a cheerful man, but the man in these images was more than cheerful. He was content. And her mother seemed even more so, as though in every smile there was a risk that she might burst out laughing in joy. It must have been a good time in their lives. Marie wished she could remember those days. 
 
After a long time of looking at the album, she took a deep breath, turned back to the first page, took the first picture of them all together with her as a baby in a funny felt hat, and tucked it securely away in her pack. Satisfied that she’d found what she was looking for, she walked out the front door of the house, not bothering to explore the upstairs or try the basement again. And she began the long trek back to the bunker.