Two Sides

A line has two sides.

The line we know best, here, is the one between the sky and our safety. Our safety is warm, dark, and dirt-speckled. Our stars run in long metal lines along the ceilings of the bunker. The dirt under our feet is the same shade of safe as the one above our heads. So long as we are under, inside, we are safe. The other side of that line, above ground, often means death.

But there are other lines.

Our bunker, burrowed warmly under the ground, sits a few kilometers across from another. That line is anything but safe, as it is drawn in the very sand the surface of which kills us. The line itself may very well kill us one day.

We are not belligerent people. I don't think we are. We do what we have to, really, to protect ourselves, and if that means striking first, well, that's the price safety has cost us in the past ; but you know what ? We are and have been safer for it. This other bunker, we haven't interacted with yet, but it worries me. My dad, who is part of the decision-making committee, has explained it to me: Any resources between us and them are resources they could get to first, and might be willing to kill for first.

So we have no choice but to shoot on sight. It makes sense, and though bullets are scarce, corpses offer them up willingly - it's rare not to make back what you lost, especially if you're a good shot. I hope I'll be a good shot one day. For now, I sit in the common room, or in the tunnels, and I hold my hands out in front of me like I'm imagining the weight in them, and I mimic recoil best I can. I want to be ready.

The adults say I play well. So well in fact, that I might be taken out and about soon. I'll be given something heavy and unloaded (or almost, one bullet for emergencies), to go scouting outside with a group.

A month ago, my dad and the committee sent out someone. His name was Bart, and he did some jobs in hydroponics, some errands on the wasteland, some supply runs. We made small talk at mess hall, but I think they picked him because he was decent, good with a gun but not too good, and fast at his work.

He's been gone for a few months now. The updates he sent back to us trickled, then stopped. My dad, and the others, said it was a reconnaissance assignment; we sent him there to give us intel on that bunker on the other side of the line, to get among its people and return their weaknesses, their conflicts, their habits, back to our home base where we could plan a good attack from the data. Preventative measure, really, before they do the same to us.

At first, that was what happened : an entrance in the side of a hill which weather collapsed, a crowded common room where people slept by the dozens on mats, a scarcity of water due to the pollution in the underground river they pull from – were all bits of precious intel Bart gave us. But then, pauses stretched, and now silence persists.

We worry that something happened, or worse, that he turned on us. It won't be pretty for him when we catch him, if he did turn. Sometimes I think it should have been me. No one suspects a child on the wasteland the way they do an adult, and I'm brave, and dedicated. I could have done a better job, if they' picked me. Even if my dad hadn't allowed it, but the others had been convinced, I wouldn't have deflected. I'm too headstrong.

I hope we find out what it was. A few more days of wondering and aiming at hallways, and I'm given the opportunity of an assignment. It's me, my dad, and three other people on a covered quad, simple perimeter. I'm disappointed and excited all at once. Disappointed, because it's heavily babysitted, and I feel like a much littler kid than I've been told I am. But so excited for the metallic weight of my responsibility and the chance to prove how evidently made for this I really am.

There is always slow minutiae to anything done in the bunker. This is part of why I wouldn't say we're violent people ; every execution of a task is so meticulous, that what is necessary remains self-evident from eye to finger to trigger. Or at least, that's how it's been in training, and how it's been described to me of the real thing, too. The others outside, from what I've been told, have a messy haste to everything they try to do to survive, that's choppy, illogical, and violent. I know we're not like that on the hundredth time that my dad adjusts the buckles of my respirator, of my holster, of my boots. It's too tedious to be offensive.

Minutious too is the work of exiting. Unlike other bunkers I've heard of from our raids, we're fitted with an actual elevator. It feels like a relic now, but its pumps and pistons still push us surely up towards the ground line, mathematical and slow. I can hear the whirr of machinery taking apart the airlock from the inside, rhythmic, until it opens just so and we push forward, pause, clicks again a thousand clicks until it closes. We wait for it and stand guard at the door of our safety, then, when silence reclaims the vast wastescape, we move again.

I'm jostled by the quad, and the elbows of my teammates around me. It’s warm, in spite of the tarp cover that protects us from the sun’s radiation, probably because the five of us are crowded on there in the middle of the day. Through the sweat that’s falling in my eyes, I’m drinking in sights of the surface like I’ve never seen it before - which, in fairness, I haven’t since I was much younger. My pupils scan the landscape, shrunken to pinpricks, eager for recognizable landmarks, things described to me by others from their trips up in the wasted world that I hunger to put a face to.

We draw small circles around the base at first, then we take the wider patrol route. Part of the goal for today, and the reason we’re taking the wider route, is because it puts us within spying distance of the neighbor bunker. Spying for us, that is, not them. They couldn’t see unless they were outside, but we get to look at their entrance, and the mill that guards it like a tall white dog. It will be my first time seeing either when we crest the hill, but I know we are approaching from the other side. First, we will pass the hospital, and use the decrepit structures of ground exploitation behind it as cover, driving under the tall metal jaws of what once upon a time was machinery digging the quarry behind the hill.

The quad thunders and shambles under us on the uneven ground, and then, so sudden I almost get carsick, the road smooths to concrete. Peeking behind my dad’s towering shoulder, I see the decomposing industrial grounds coming up. The heat abates as we drive through gored, torn open warehouses that are scarcely more than cement arches and weave around jet-black spikes tearing up from the ground towards the sky. Bowled-over forklifts like dead cows which I’ve heard so much about, and the sky opens again from metallic overhangs to the quarry.

It may be one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen, with its pooling water at the bottom and its sparse growth, its deformed animals skittering around at the bottom, startled by our car’s rumbling echo. I see little in it, though, that is worth attention. The water, I’ve been told, is poison to the healthy, and the clay serves us no purpose when our expansion rather needs bullets to carve our safety or shovels to carve into the earth our home.

My eyes drift away fast. We are now behind the hospital, which is important, and which I’ve ached to see. An important strategic landmark, swarming with the animated bodies of the infected, those who have succumbed to the radioactive sun and become violent shells of what people should be, guarding what could be medicine, bullets, a watchtower… The infinite, wishful possibilities of what the hospital could be.

My heart drops in my chest in abject horror.

The first thing I notice is the unthinkable : our neighbor bunker has seized control of the hospital. No hordes of undead, only their hateful ranks, clearly visible milling inside and at the entrance. Secondly, to do so, they’ve near completely destroyed it, leaving it a shell of the fortress it could’ve been.

Thirdly, and perhaps worstly, a small group of them, in white coats, operate a contraption outside. I see them fuss around, plug and unplug things, light a test fuse. It looks like some sort of cannon. Then, they urge another person, carrying them, helping them up, to get into the gaped metal mouth of the thing. And when they do so, the real fuse gets lit.

There’s a moment.

Then, there’s blood.

Raining down on all of us. I can only assume it was a malfunction, who in their right mind would ever–; I can’t even picture it, the kinds of people it would take to build a cannon for the sheer purpose of shredding one of their own into a rain of gore. I feel like I’m going to be sick.

The explosion’s sound reaches us faster than the blood, but slower than the stomach-churning sight. It matches in scale with the blast of light and red we just witnessed, and our quad swerves around, and the sound convinces me that I really think I’m about to die – then we’re back on the road and peeling off towards the base.

I’m shocked, and I hold myself together as we careen back through the wasteland. We are still following our loop, our long arch around that other, wretched bunker. I don’t think I could ever stomach to see it again, hell, think about it again. This solidifies in my mind that Bart couldn’t have defected, not for these people, if he ever was one of us, with our values. I shudder to think what they did to him, then.

We roll to a stop. The air feels cooler, and I surmise we are under the overhang before the airlock. A thousand clicks, and I almost cry in relief. My dad’s hand is on my shoulder, and if I didn’t know better, it could almost embolden me to ask for a hug, some comfort. But I’m too old for that now, so I bite my tongue instead and wait for the quad to roll forward once more, take its stop in the rickety elevator, and start to sink into our home.

My home. My warm, safe, underground home. The cold reaches up to cradle us and it’s everything I didn’t know I never wanted to leave. I get a sudden, scared impulse to check myself all over, that I’m still whole, that no blood reached me. On my shoe, there’s a fleck. I gag. I hold it back. I feel okay again. I look at the polished walls of the elevator and count its whirrs and clanks. It starts, then stills. We’re home.

I unfold myself from the back, knees creaking, guts sloshing inside of my belly like everything still wants to come up my throat. Then I get ahold of myself, and try to take my leave.

“Hey,” interjects my dad, “you did good out there.”

“I didn’t do anything,” I reply, lilting.

“Yeah. Those were your orders.”

I nod, and turn away. I try not to stumble where the others can see. I find the coldest, most isolated hallway in the bunker, and I sit.

I hold my hands out in front of me, palms facing outward. Clean nails, clean knuckles. I make the shape of a gun. I pretend to aim at the wall, then at myself, and then, I let my hands fall and hold the cold floor below me. I let the cold hold me back.

In the hallway, I fall asleep, and I dream of no wastelands.

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