by Melissa Grey
Moran’s voice came out of the dark, from everywhere and nowhere.
The creatures in the shadows brayed at the sound of it. Their frenzy made the hair on Sash’s arms stand on end. But so far, they hadn’t noticed her.
“I’d say I’m surprised to see you make it this far, but that would be a lie.”
Where was she? How could she see Sash?
“You always were my favorite, you know.”
Sash put one foot in front of the other, taking short, cautious steps. Something brushed against her leg, and she bit her lower lip so hard, holding back a scream, she drew blood.
The smell of blood drives them wild.
How much of what Moran said was truth? How much was false? More lies, more and more, to make them—to make Sash—afraid. To make her doubt.
Sash held her breath.
The thing sniffed at her. A hand—too human, the fingers too long, too nimble to be anything but—wrapped around her calf.
Frozen, Sash waited.
“I always did like your fighting spirit.”
Moran’s voice distracted the thing. Person? It peeled away from Sash, seeking, it seemed, the source of that sound.
Click, click.
Skkkritch.
The beasts—best to think of them like that, anything else was too unbearable—followed the voice calling to Sash as if summoned.
Bodies, warm and wet and pungent, flowed past her in the dark. She remained rooted to the spot. An obstruction, nothing more.
When the last of them passed her by—she could hear them walking, crawling, dragging themselves ahead of her—she followed.
“It’s a shame things ended as they did.”
Moran’s voice led Sash through the manor. Some hallways she’d seen before, what felt like a lifetime ago, with Gabe and Yuna. Most of the path she treaded was new. It led her toward what she thought might be the rear of the building. Through a room crowded with what looked like boots in the limited moonlight. The Moran family’s forgotten shoes. Some were large, but others heartbreakingly small.
What had happened to them? Had they been left to die by a member of their own family, exposed to a sun that betrayed them?
“The initial experiment was a success. More so than I could have dreamed.”
Against the wall, a rack of what looked like very large hammers rested above small U-shaped objects with sharp ends. Sash vaguely recalled that they were meant to be thrust through dirt.
Above the objects, a black-and-white sign was just barely legible.
THE FAMILY THAT CROQUETS TOGETHER, STAYS TOGETHER.
“It was the sun, you see. I knew what the chemicals would do when exposed to fresh air outside the lab, but I hadn’t accounted for the sun. Such a powerful thing. A giver of life. Isn’t that just poetic, Alexandra?”
My name is Sash. The thought was reflexive, like a leg twitching into a kick when the knee was struck just right.
Knees.
Struck.
She had an idea. And she found she rather liked it.
As quietly as she possibly could, Sash toed off her sneakers. One of them hit the ground with a soft, barely perceptible thud, but it seemed impossibly loud to her ears. She went still, listening.
A moment passed. Then another. Nothing.
She’d need to be quiet for this to work. Quiet as a mouse. Quiet as a shadow.
Her hand closed around the shaft of the mallet, the polished wood cold and hard against her skin.
This would do, she thought. This would do just fine.
Sash followed the creatures through the house, up a flight of stairs, always staying far enough behind that she could run if she had to.
But the farther she traversed the stairs, the more that felt like a lie.
The last step opened up into a hallway she recognized. Sash could barely make out its outlines in the dark, and she could definitely hear it. Could hear how close the walls were, how expansive the ceiling was. How loud the beasts were. How numerous.
Her labored breathing cut through the darkness, each harsh pant sending a fresh stab of fear through her heart.
There were too many of them.
She couldn’t fight them all, not with any hope of surviving. And she had to survive. Yuna and Gabe and Nastia and Lucas and all the rest—they were depending on her. If she died, so would they.
And so, Sash did the only thing she could think of. She knew where to find what she needed. She’d been in this room before. She and Yuna had plundered its wardrobe. Had unearthed its secrets.
She’d ignored the light switch the first time she saw it. There was no electricity left. Not in a world that had collapsed, had ceased to exist.
But Moran lied. For years, she had piled lie upon lie, burying them beneath a mountain of falsehoods. Those lies had held them captive for a decade. But now, Sash was counting on one to save them.
There was no secret underwater spring feeding their generators.
There was power flowing through this house. Into the microcosmic world beneath it.
Sash flipped the light switch, heaving the mallet up for a charge. One good blow. That was all it would take to put an end to Moran once and for all. Just one good swing, aimed straight for the head.
She had the barest second to see Moran standing in front of her desk, frowning into an open drawer, surrounded by what she called her pets.
“What happened to my notes?” Moran asked.
And then the ground erupted.
* * *
You think you know what an explosion will feel like.
You’ve read enough comic books, ingested enough science fiction, enough adventure, enough fantasy.
You think you know what the concussive force will feel like.
You think you know how hot it’ll be.
How loud.
How terrifying.
You are wrong.
* * *
Sash’s back slammed into the far wall, her head following a fraction of a second later. Her vision sparked with lights only she could see. She slumped to the ground, stunned. The world passed by in slow motion.
How long did she lie there? It could have been seconds. It could have been hours. Her limbs refused to function the way they should.
Dust clouded her vision, but as it fell, she could see the hole torn open in the floor.
Moran was gone.
The room was collapsing around her.
The velvet curtains on the four-poster bed had caught fire. Even now, with the frame of the manor house groaning under the weight of its own fall, she could see them.
Beasts. People. Animals. Twisted by the whims of a cruel and pernicious woman more monstrous than they could ever be. Hurtling themselves toward the fire.
Like lemmings off a cliff.
A woman’s scream brought Sash back to herself. With all the strength she could gather, she pushed herself away from the wall.
The scream had come from the crater in the floor.
She inched forward, peering over the edge.
Hands, bloodied and dirty, clung to a piece of fragmented wood flooring.
From below, Dr. Moran’s face stared up at Sash, eyes wide and fearful.
“Help me.”
Sash couldn’t help it. Her throat—sore, raw, aching—burned with each hiccupped laugh. This hadn’t been her plan at all. But she would certainly take it.
Moran grabbed at one of Sash’s hands, her fingers digging into the flesh of her wrist.
Sash stopped laughing.
Past the doctor’s swinging body, Sash could see them. Moran’s pets. Driven wild by blood and fire and terror. Clustered on the debris below, snapping at the woman’s heels.
Even a beast will turn on its master when the pain is bad enough.
The fire around her burned brightly, heat beating down on the back of Sash’s neck. Moran’s hands clasped her wrists, dangling just above the pit.
“You wanted us to believe you were a god.” Sash’s voice sounded
both clear and distant to her own ears, like it was coming from someone else. Or maybe someone she was becoming, whoever that might be.
Moran’s fingers tightened on Sash’s arm in twitching desperation. Her eyes were wild, desperate. If even a single shred of pity had survived all those years in the bunker, Sash might have been tempted to pull the wretched woman up. She wouldn’t have. But the temptation would have been there nonetheless.
Sash leaned in closer, so her next words could be heard over the clatter of metal tables toppling into the crater. The creatures below clambered atop them, their twisted limbs reaching up, craning for Moran’s feet. “But you’re not a god. You’re not a savior. You’re not a hero. You’re nothing.”
“You can’t do this, Alexandra.” Moran’s eyes darkened, her head jerking side to side as her lips curled into a sneer. “You don’t have it in you.”
Sash spoke her next words right into the doctor’s face, close enough that she could count her eyelashes. “My name is Sash.”
With that, she let go.
Gabe’s legs burned as he took the stairs by twos. Up and up, past the emptied picture frames, past the emptied rooms, past the places where people used to be.
She was here. He knew it. She had to be.
He had set the timer, checked the rooms. Scoured the bunker with the precious minutes he had left. Tripped over Misha’s body. Felt not the slightest ounce of remorse for it.
Sash was nowhere to be found.
In the manor, his mind hollered. She’s in the manor.
The manor, which was directly above the bunker.
The bunker he had rigged to explode.
He’d almost made it to the top of the stairs when it did just that.
* * *
Hands held Yuna back as she watched the manor burn.
“We’re here to help! Stop it!”
The hands did not belong to her family or her friends.
They belonged to strangers. People who shouldn’t exist. People who should have perished in the Cataclysm that had stolen an entire world from them. From her.
But of course, the Cataclysm hadn’t stolen anything.
Moran had.
* * *
Something closed around the back of Sash’s shirt.
“Sash, come on! We gotta go!”
A voice she knew.
A voice she loved.
“Gabe?” Her own voice croaked, burned and weary.
Whoever that voice belonged to pulled her along, dodging falling beams and crashing statues as the manor collapsed.
* * *
“They’re in there!” Yuna could hear herself screaming, but her voice was distant to her own ears. “My friends are in there.”
Another voice, obscured by a mask of some sort, a voice she’d never heard before. A voice that had, with so many other voices, come tumbling out of a green jeep with the words US ARMY emblazoned on the side.
“Nobody’s surviving that, kid.”
* * *
But of course, somebody had.
Two somebodies, as a matter of fact.
* * *
Gabe half carried Sash up the hill, toward the line of lights in the distance.
Headlights, his mind supplied, plucking the knowledge from a disused recess of his memory.
Cars?
Something clogged his throat as his exhausted mind put the pieces together.
He’d called for help, and someone had listened.
* * *
Sash laughed. She couldn’t help it. They were outside. There was light.
And they were alive.
They were alive.
* * *
When Yuna saw two figures crest the ridge behind the manor, not even the US Army could hold her back.
* * *
Three bodies slammed together, not from an explosion or an act of violence, but sheer, stupid, unadulterated joy.
They fell in a heap as boots surrounded them, heavy treads sinking into the mud. Gloved hands pulled them to safety, past the line of lights, into the waiting arms of their families, bundled into the back seats of jeeps.
* * *
They drove away from the manor and into the world beyond.
They drove past high fences and barbed wire and floodlights pointed inward.
“The exclusion zone,” Gabe whispered, one hand holding Sash’s. A medic worked on the other, peeling away his soiled bandages.
* * *
Yuna chucked off her gloves.
“Keep those on,” one of the masked soldiers said.
Smiling, Yuna wrapped her bare hand around Sash’s. The other girl met her eyes. That gaze held multitudes.
“No.”
* * *
For the first time since the bunker, Sash looked back. Through the rear window, she saw it.
A lie, destroyed.
A truth revealed.
A corona of light crested over the ruined bulk of the manor. It stung Sash’s eyes, it was so bright. But she didn’t close them. She wanted to see. She needed to see.
Her first sunrise in ten years.
The first sunrise any of them had seen in ten whole years.
Her vision blurred as tears clustered on her lashes.
“We did it,” Yuna whispered to Sash, her lips brushing against the shell of her ear.
Gabe tightened his hand in Sash’s, shaking so viciously she knew that the three of them touching, holding one another without gloves or lies or fear to separate them, was the only thing holding him together.
Sash nodded, watching the lie they’d lived for ten long years burn. “We’re free.”
When I started writing the first draft of The Buried in 2019, I had no idea that a global pandemic would soon fundamentally shift the way we interact with one another and the world. If I had known, perhaps I would have written a different book. A happier one. One not about people trapped behind closed doors, unable to reach out and touch the ones they love.
That was the reality of so many in 2020, and I was no different. Those circumstances made The Buried one of the most difficult things I’ve ever written. And I could not have written it alone.
I want to acknowledge the people who helped me keep it (somewhat) together. Gregor Mackenzie Chalmers, you fed me well and made me take breaks when I needed them. Catherine Drayton, you were always kind when I finally admitted I needed time and space to write. Zack Clark, you were patient when I desperately needed it. My family, who found ways to support me even from an ocean away.
What the world needed most in 2020 (and beyond) was kindness, and I was fortunate enough to receive it from so many, near and far. So for that, thank you.
Melissa Grey is the author of Rated, The Buried, and the Girl at Midnight trilogy. When she isn’t writing books, she’s designing video game narratives. She currently lives and works in Iceland.
Copyright © 2021 by Melissa Grey
Interior photos © Shutterstock.com
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First edition, September 2021
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