by Melissa Grey
“This is nice,” Sash said, her voice so soft Yuna could barely hear it over the Victrola’s scratchy lullaby.
Yuna nodded, dropping her own gaze. She didn’t have to look at her feet. She trusted them not to embarrass her. But she didn’t quite trust her expression the same way. It felt like her face was doing something she hadn’t agreed to but was powerless to stop. Especially when Sash looked at her like that. Like that was dangerous. Like that made Yuna’s face do all sorts of unpredictable things.
A strange sound—an aberration, definitely not part of Tchaikovsky’s grand plan—cut through the moment with none of the grace of the man’s score.
Yuna froze. “What was that?”
“It was just the record. Probably had a scratch on it.”
Yuna shook her head, dropping her arms from around Sash’s neck. A flicker of hurt passed over Sash’s face, but it was gone as quickly as it had appeared. Regret zinged through Yuna’s chest, hot and tight, but it was chased away by something greater.
Fear.
“It wasn’t the record,” Yuna insisted.
“Then what—?”
Skkritch.
Sash closed her mouth with such force, Yuna actually heard her teeth clack together.
The sound was most assuredly not emanating from the Victrola.
“Turn it off,” Sash whispered. “Turn the music off.”
“I’m trying!”
But fear—thick, cloying, suffocating—made Yuna’s fingers feel too large, her hands too clumsy, the flashlight too slippery. She fumbled with the Victrola, trying to find a way to silence it, but without success. After several pounding heartbeats, she settled for yanking the record right off its rotating seat. It dropped from her grasp and landed on the hard tile with a crack as loud as lightning. No, louder.
Yuna stared at it, her breath harsh in the ensuing silence. It was split in two, neatly divided into broken halves, as if she’d meant to do just that.
She hadn’t. Oh God, she hadn’t.
Her lips started to form words, an apology maybe, to account for the ruination of the single most perfect moment of her life. Then she raised her eyes and saw Sash put a single finger to her own lips.
Be quiet, that gesture said. Make no sudden moves or sounds. Don’t even think too loud lest something hear us. The gesture brooked no argument and neither did the steely look in Sash’s eyes. Yuna clapped her jaw shut so hard it hurt.
They went still in the silence and waited.
Something—or someone—was in the manor with them.
And Yuna knew, deep in her gut, that it wasn’t Gabe.
“Yuna,” Sash whispered. “Run.”
But Yuna didn’t run. She stayed, rooted to the spot, her eyes wide, her breathing choppy and fast. A fine tremble worked its way through her body.
I’m panicking, Yuna realized in a distant way, like she was an observer watching this happen to someone else.
Something clicked out in the hallway, closer this time than it was before.
They didn’t have time for panic.
Sash grabbed the poker in one hand and Yuna’s with the other. They ran.
Moran was right.
Probably not the most opportune time for the thought, but it couldn’t be held at bay, not when some abomination was hot on their heels. We were wrong, and Moran was right.
Yuna tripped as Sash tugged on her arm, urging her to go faster. Thankfully, Sash was strong enough—or scared enough—to keep them both upright as they fled in the opposite direction of that awful, awful sound.
Oh my God, Moran was right.
Splitting up was a bad idea.
The thought occurred to Gabe seconds after he left Yuna and Sash plundering sequined monstrosities from the closet of someone probably long dead. Not that he had a problem with sequined monstrosities—or dresses, really. He’d left because he wanted to give the two of them a minute alone together. They’d been dancing around each other for years, either too stupid or too scared to do anything about their painfully obvious mutual crush. He wasn’t going to say anything about it either.
We shouldn’t have split up.
But when were they going to have a moment like this again? Alone in the world. Free to do whatever they pleased, even if those two idiots couldn’t seem to figure out what it was they pleased. He didn’t blame Sash and Yuna for their lack of forward progress toward what seemed painfully obvious to him. It was hard in the bunker to have even the slightest moment of privacy. And when you did get what passed for privacy—an illusion in the bunker, always—the threat of losing it was always there. Even more prevalent was the specter of the rules by which they lived. No touching, no skin-to-skin. No direct physical contact. No hugs. No kisses. No hand-holding, even through gloves.
They were oppressive, those rules. But now, he and his friends were free of them, even if only for the most fleeting of moments.
Yuna and Sash were his friends. He wanted them to be happy, even if their happiness didn’t include him. Even if it did hurt a little to be the odd man out. But Gabe could live with that.
What he couldn’t live with was the thick layer of dust that coated everything in this godforsaken place.
He scrunched up his face and held in a sneeze to the best of his ability. The sound he produced was more of a half-aborted chirp than a true and proper sneeze. It wasn’t satisfying, but at least it was quiet. If there was anything lurking in those shadows, he didn’t want to meet it.
Gabe wasn’t scared. Well, he was. A little bit. Especially right now with the old bones of the house creaking with every step he took, and the baser parts of his brain lurching at every shadow. He cranked his flashlight a few more times when the beam started to tremble and fade.
You shouldn’t be doing that, whispered a voice at the back of his mind. Light is danger. Darkness is good.
But it was a pain in the butt to walk around a decrepit old manor in the dark, and so he cranked that light up.
There’s nothing here, he whispered back at that voice. (Internally. He wasn’t an idiot.) Just me and Yuna and Sash.
He repeated those words like a mantra as he wandered the halls. His meandering led him deeper into the belly of the house, past a massive dining room (complete with chandelier), a parlor (with cushions so plump and pristine it was clear no butts had ever indented them), and a room devoted entirely to death (with mounted animal heads on the walls and racks of what looked like very old hunting rifles alongside them).
The dining room led to a kitchen, though to call it one felt like a gross understatement of what it actually was. Gabe had never seen one so large. The cabinets were made of what looked like a lightly stained wood. The countertops were granite, cool to the touch, even through Gabe’s glove. The stovetop range had more burners than Gabe would ever know what to do with.
This kitchen was vast.
It was the only word to describe it.
A wide space, full of industrial-size appliances. A chrome refrigerator with two massive doors. An island worthy of the name.
Tall open shelves, long since picked clean of anything useful. The shelves hung off the wall by the remaining will of a few rusty nails. Cobwebs crowded the empty spaces, blending with the thick coat of dust on the rotting wood.
Above the gargantuan island hung rows and rows of copper pots and pans, gleaming like metallic roses under the moonlight that filtered in through the broken window. Fragments of glass were still scattered beneath the empty panes.
Blown inward, Gabe thought.
A shudder ran through him, somehow both cold and hot all at the same time.
Don’t think about it.
But telling yourself not to think a thing was exactly like thinking about it, a futile position to take, really.
Gabe trailed his hand along the edge of the island as he walked deeper into the kitchen. On the other side of the room a heavy wooden door stood closed. It matched the rest of the room’s rustic decor, save for one salient detail.
Odd.
Cranking the flashlight a few more times, Gabe approached the door. He shone his beam on the keypad and his tongue went dry in his mouth.
The numbers weren’t dusty. Well, a few of them weren’t.
Everything in the manor they had thus far encountered had been covered in a fine layer of dust. Every surface, every windowsill, every doorjamb. But four numbers on the keypad stood out in stark relief.
Two.
Three.
Eight.
Zero.
Gabe swallowed thickly. These buttons had been touched recently enough for the dust not to be able to collect on them.
Someone has been here.
Those words zinged around in his head, bouncing off the interior of his skull like deranged pinballs.
Someone has been here. And recently, from the look of things.
Gabe’s breath rattled from his lungs. His hands twitched for an inhaler that wasn’t there. Like so much else, the bunker’s supply had run short. That was why he didn’t have to take Mrs. Eremenko’s physical education classes. Too much stress on his poor lungs. Too much—
Someone has been here.
That singular thought overrode everything else his brain could concoct.
The who and why and how hardly mattered. Well, they did, but they didn’t. They couldn’t. Those questions—and their answers—were far-off things. Hypotheticals. Unreal.
What was real was the door and the keypad and the curiously dust-free buttons.
Gabe’s hand trembled toward those buttons entirely of its own accord. His gloved fingers traced the rectangular contours of each button, savoring even that dulled sensation.
Four numbers.
Twenty-four possible permutations of those numbers.
The chance of guessing the right order: 1 in 417.
That’s assuming the lock allowed for some amount of human error—but not an infinite amount—far fewer attempts than that to get it right. Ten on the outside. Three if the lock’s designer was particularly unforgiving.
Don’t do it, one part of his brain cautioned.
But another, louder part, shouted, Do it.
And so … Gabe did it.
His hand shook as he punched in the numbers, first in the numerical order in which they occurred.
Zero. Two. Three. Eight.
The lock beeped once. From beneath its dusty cover, the light above the keys flashed a dull red.
No dice.
Another combination, then.
Eight. Three. Two. Zero.
Beep. Flash. Red.
Gabe drew in a tremulous breath. If he was designing a lock like this, he would show no mercy. If you couldn’t get it right on the third try, you had no business opening it. You clearly didn’t know what you were doing. You clearly weren’t meant to be trusted with whatever secrets it sheltered.
Zero. Two. Eight. Three.
Beep.
Beep.
Flash.
Green.
The flashlight tumbled from Gabe’s fingers, landing on the tiled floor with all the subtle silence of stampeding bulls.
He didn’t bother scooping it up. The lock was open, which meant the door could be opened.
And so he opened it.
Inside was a pantry. Shelves—metal and utilitarian, so unlike the warm welcoming wood of the kitchen—lined the walls.
Something on the topmost shelf drew his eye, like it was calling out for him—specifically for Gabe and no one else. He reached up, but his hands were just short of being able to reach it. After a cursory glance informed him that there wasn’t a stool or ladder or anything of the sort in the pantry—and he wasn’t about to leave, not with such delicious bounty right there—he set one foot on the lowest shelf and pulled himself up. The shelf groaned, unhappy to be burdened with the weight of a seventeen-year-old boy, but it lasted long enough for Gabe’s outstretched hand to reach for his prize.
A radio. Compact and coated with dust, but a radio nonetheless. One of those CB radios with the mic to speak into and everything.
Click.
Skkritch.
Sounds. Not his own. Coming from outside the pantry. Maybe even outside the kitchen. It was hard to tell. He was so used to the confined space of the bunker, the exact manner in which sounds bounced off of those tightly packed surfaces, that he was having trouble judging how sound behaved in the open. In the wild.
Click.
There it was again.
A noise, like something small and solid tapping against stone.
Gabe froze, his hands an inch from the radio.
He held his breath, straining his ears to see if the noise would come again. But his heart beat so loudly in the silence he could hear nothing else.
“Hello?”
No response came. Not in the form of an answering voice or another weird clicking sound.
It took several tries for Gabe to find his voice again. It had fled to some well-hidden depth within him.
“This isn’t funny, guys.”
It’s probably just Sash being an idiot. She and Yuna are playing some dumb prank. One day, we’ll all have a good chortle about it, once I stop hating them.
Gabe brushed his hands on his jeans. That was pointless, since his jeans were also dusty. All he managed to accomplish was to introduce one layer of dust to another layer of dust so they could make friends.
His flashlight roamed over the room as he methodically pointed it at each corner.
Nothing there.
He inched forward, closer to the door.
Swallowing the sour clump of fear lodged in his throat, he debated the merits of calling out for Yuna and Sash again.
On the one hand, if they were there and he confirmed it, he could yell at them at his leisure for being such unbelievable hell spawn.
On the other, if that wasn’t them making the noise, it stood to reason it was something else—or someone, an even more terrifying thought. Making any more sound himself would be the equivalent of drawing a nice big target right on his face.
If there was something—or someone—out there, he didn’t want it to eat his face. He desperately did not want that.
But no other sound came.
It was just his mind, playing tricks. Minds were good at that. Fiendishly good, some might say.
He clutched the radio to his chest, closing his eyes at the wondrous sensation of its hard plastic digging into his ribs.
A radio. One he might be able to get working. There might be no one in the universe left to talk to, but it was new. It was exciting. He had dismantled and reconstructed practically every gadget and device the bunker had to offer. He had grown bored of their electronic innards. He knew them too well. But this? This was unknown.
With the radio cradled in his arms, he cast another glance around the rest of the room. His earlier fear might have blinded him to other treasures waiting to be discovered by his curious eyes.
The rest of the shelves were mostly bare save for a few sacks of what looked like rice.
Rice.
Actual, honest-to-God rice.
Like a sailor drawn irrevocably to the sound of a siren’s melody, Gabe went for the bag.
Rice and beans.
Arroz con gandules.
Arroz con pollo.
The soft, comforting taste of the rice porridge—arroz con leche—his grandmother had made for him whenever he got sick. It wasn’t the sweet kind you’d eat for the dessert but the gently bland kind, good for settling upset stomachs.
As soon as he neared the bag, he knew something was off. The smell. It wasn’t right. Rice wasn’t supposed to smell like that.
He peered closer. There was a hole in the bag, its fibers raw and uneven, as if something had chewed straight through it.
Squinting in the dark, Gabe drew closer to the bag. Maybe some of the rice was still salvageable. It was dry, after all. It should have kept? Maybe? He didn’t know enough abou
t rice to be sure but—
Something jumped out of the hole in the bag.
With a startled cry, Gabe leaped backward, knocking an empty cardboard box off a shelf.
With one hand, he grappled at the shelves for purchase, and they clanged against the walls under his weight.
He had to run. He had to, but he could hardly breathe, how was he supposed to—
The thing scrambled across the floor, tiny feet tripping over stray grains of rice.
It was a rat.
Just a rat.
Gabe sighed, leaning against the shelf. The hard dig of the wood into his back grounded him, reminding him that he was just a stupid, jumpy idiot and there was absolutely nothing to be afraid of. Nothing at all.
It’s just me and Yuna and Sa—
“Who are you?”
The voice sliced through Gabe’s frenzied relief, hot and sharp.
It was a new voice. Not one of the same cadre of voices he’d been listening to exclusively for nearly a decade.
A new voice.
A new sound.
A new person.
An old man stood in the open doorway, his features shrouded in shadow. What Gabe could see was this:
A long gray beard, scraggly and unkempt.
Oversize clothing, hanging off the man’s frail form like too-large rags.
A hatchet, clutched in one hand.
Mottled skin, oddly shiny and hairless in some places.
What he could smell was this:
Filth.
When Gabe failed to answer him, the man banged a fist wrapped in a soiled bandage against one of the shelves. “Who are you?”
But how could Gabe possibly answer him? How could he gather the letters that had fallen out of his scattered brain and slap them into something resembling words? He was being confronted with the one thing that should not have been possible.
The mere presence of this man meant only one thing. That thing spat in the face of the most fundamental truth the residents of the bunker held sacred. The one thing that went unquestioned, even by Sash at her most contrarian.