The people of Hewego and Last Haven lived, worked, loved and developed their special gifts, wondering if similar abilities would be passed down to the next generation. Seven months into our internment. my mother gave birth to a baby boy with a star-shaped birthmark near his left eye. We welcomed him with open arms. Everyone called the child Junior, but he had been baptized in the name of his father, Redmond Wakeland.
My mother eventually remarried. Jacob Fade was an okay guy, I guess, though I found myself spending more and more time with Red, Jr. As little Red grew up, he got more fun to play with, and we became true pals. After Elizabeth and Jacob had two sons together, Barrett and Bryce, little Red and I were pushed further away by our step father. He wasn’t a mean man, just cold.
Over the years, the children of Galatians Bunker studied hard and did their part to keep the bunker going—most of them anyway. We amused ourselves with basketball, video games, watching the movies, pranking one another, the Fight Club, and a few activities I cannot mention for fear of incriminating the guilty.
As we matured, we pursued careers, found love, and started families of our own.
My brother, Red the Second, had been blessed with many special charismas early on. One in particular had been building a long time, causing him a lot of distress, but it hadn’t ripened yet, and he was at a loss as to how to use it.
One night, he came to the door of my unit, knocking lightly. He had grown into a tall man, lean and strong, like his father. He even got himself elected as mayor of the bunker without having run for office.
“Hey,” I said quietly, answering the door in my underwear, not wanting to wake my wife and my brood of children. Red stood there in the corridor, where the lights were dim to mimic the night. His family’s unit was two stories up, so I knew he hadn’t just happened by. “What’s up?”
“Dad’s ghost paid me a call tonight.”
“What did he say this time?”
Besides his wife, I was the only one who knew about the ghost of Red the First. If the story had come from any man other than my brother, I’d have written him off as a liar, but my younger brother was beyond reproach. I trusted him without question.
“Let’s go for a walk,” he said.
First, I slipped into a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, and then we navigated the vast network of hallways to Red’s favorite biosphere, the one that pretended to be a rocky beach on the Pacific. There were big boulders for climbing. Machine-generated waves slapped the shore. At the push of a few buttons, the fake digital image of the sun began to set in the distance.
Red had never known any world except the bunker, but I had. Therefore, I appreciated the thought that had gone into the place, but sometimes it still felt like a cage. Bunker Psychosis had been a common condition in the earlier years. The community had endured a dozen suicides on account of it.
Red and I took a seat together on a boulder. His gray eyes stared across the pseudo-ocean’s horizon, the way they always did when something serious was troubling him.
“So…” I really wanted to know. “What did Dad tell you?”
Red picked up a stone, squeezed it, turning it into powder. Bursts of physical strength were one of his abilities. I looked at his curled fingers with envy.
He glanced up at the illusory, computer-generated sky and took a deep breath. “He said, together we will form a new nation, you and I. And one day the people will rise up against me.”
“What?”
“They will call for my blood.”
“Not me!” I gasped. Red was not only my favorite brother, but my best friend in the world. The thought of betraying him made me sick. “I would never hurt you—not on purpose!”
He didn’t reply, which made me feel somehow guilty.
“Are you still having those dreams?” He turned the questions on me. This time I was the one who didn’t reply. I swallowed hard and looked for the exit.
“Don’t ignore my question. Are you?”
“Yes.”
“And what have you seen, Mike?”
“I don’t understand them; I can’t explain. We’re at war, but not down here, up there. I’ve seen you and me, Nate, Veronica, others, all as we are now, on the planet’s surface, but I recognize nothing. Yet somehow I know it’s Ohio, right over our heads. You know how things seem in dreams.”
“Were we fighting the Celeruns?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I keep seeing mountains and forests, horses and swords. Pretty strange—eh?”
“The computer simulations say the surface won’t be habitable again for generations. There’s no way either of us will see the surface again.”
“I dreamed what I dreamed.”
“Are earthquakes part of your dream, brother?”
I knew why he was asking. The rumblings had started two years ago and were getting closer and closer together. Yesterday, a strong tremor had shaken the bunker, knocking everything offline. Part of the theater room had come crashing down, injuring several of the children. There had been a scare that the life support systems wouldn’t come back up, but thanks to Veronica, our computer guru, her team had gotten them back online. Next time, Veronica said, she might not be so lucky.
As we pondered another crisis, the ground beneath our feet began to vibrate. We waited for it to stop, but it grew stronger until large cracks began to form in the glass sky. My first thought was my sleeping family.
I knew Red’s concern was for his family as well, but being the mayor, he had to think bigger than that. I chased after him through the exit.
“This is the big one!” I screamed, having played this out in a dream a dozen times over. “The main control room is on fire, Red. Nothing can stop it.”
I didn’t smell the smoke yet, or see the flames, but I knew the earthquake had pulled the bunker apart at the center. The plumbing was broken. Sprinkler systems would fail.
“What did I do in your dream?” Red asked me, as we headed to the upper sleeping chambers.
“You led and we followed!”
“Where do I lead you?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“You can’t or you won’t?”
I had learned the hard way that it was best to keep prophetic dreams to myself. A person shouldn’t know too much about his or her future. As a youth, before I had learned the art of discretion, I had watched people come undone over what I had told them about my dreams. Although I had often confided in my brother, I had chosen to keep my dreams concerning his destiny to myself alone.
“Your charisma, Red,” I offered one little hint. “The one that refuses to be contained. The one that’s kept you up at night since we were children. I think it’s time to use it.”
The alarms began to blare. The shaking stopped, but smoke started to fill the hallways. The emergency lights had gone on, so I knew we’d lost the main power grid.
“Get my family, Mike, and head to the hatchway.”
Red knew that he could count on me—at least I hoped so, because that’s how I felt about him. I loved him. I loved his family like my own.
My wife, Jessica, and the children were waiting at the door, looking pale and afraid, but our practice drills had prepared them for this precise moment. They were dressed in layers and already had their backpacks strapped across their shoulders. I heard Red’s voice come over the intercom, blasting through the entire bunker.
“The outer shell of the bunker has been compromised. The life support systems have failed and will never come on again. Fire has already consumed the three bottom stories. I am ordering a full evacuation. Starting now.”
“A full evacuation?” my wife said, gripping the front of my T-shirt. “Oh, god, Mike, we’ll die out there!”
My youngest daughter clung to Miss Buttercup.
“The radiation, the cold, the…” Jessica’s voice trailed off like a ghost into the fog.
“We must trust in the power that has brought us this far,” I said.
I swooped up t
he bag that I had prepared for this moment, and swooped up my youngest daughter, while my oldest son filled a duffle bag with food, flashlights, batteries, and other odds-and-ends. My six children followed behind me, while my wife took the rear, making sure we didn’t lose anyone in the madness.
The halls were filled with crying children and panicked parents, single people of all ages, all heading up to the hatchway. We stopped at Red’s family unit, where his wife was waiting with her little ones, all bundled in layers of sweaters, each holding a bag.
I should have known Red had prepared them for going topside. I’d been talking about it since we were children; how he would someday see the real sun, the real stars, and feel the real wind against his skin.
Red was already at the bottom of the truck ramp. I squeezed through a sea of people to join him there.
“The future begins now,” I told my wife.
“What’s left of it,” she replied. “I suppose you’re going to play the part of the captain and stay with the sinking ship?”
“We will all be together soon. Everything will be fine. You’ll see.”
Part of me worried that my optimism was misplaced. How could Red possibly pull this off? What could he possibly do to cure the world of the Armageddon that had destroyed it? Not even Red himself understood the nature of his gift. Perhaps I put too much stock in my dreams.
“I’ll see you at the top of the world, Mike,” Jessica said, looking at me with tears running down her sooty face. “Love ya.”
“And I love you. Now, up you go,” I said, urging her to continue up the ramp without me.
Jessica and Red’s wife ushered the kids between them and disappeared into the crowd. My god, I felt like a pirate sending my family down the plank, into shark-infested waters. What would they find up there? The crowd was growing thick. People were shoving. Red and I were crowd control, keeping order to prevent people from getting crushed. The hatch was programmed to stay sealed until the surface was habitable again, but Veronica was in one of the secondary control rooms working on overriding it. When the crowd began to move, I knew she had succeeded, but would Veronica and her team make it out alive?
The smoke was getting thicker. People were coughing and hacking, but other than that, they were eerily quiet. The lights were flickering on and off. The generator room was probably engulfed in flames by now.
Michael and I were directing traffic when the crowd parted to let our mother through. My heart sunk when I noticed that our other brothers, Barrett and Bryce Fade, were nowhere to be seen. They were big strong men, so I tried not to worry about them. Mother, on the other hand, was a concern. Her limbs were shaking. Exhaustion reflected in her bloodshot eyes. Arthritis had bent her spine over the years, but her mind was still sharp. She indicated that she wanted Red to help her up the ramp, but he said his duty was to all the Galatians, not just his family. Mother argued with him. I offered to take her up myself, but she only wanted Red. That stung, but everyone in the bunker knew that Red was her favorite. Hell, he was my favorite too. The crowd finally convinced Red to help his mother up to the surface, if it meant saving their beloved matriarch and resuming the smooth flow of traffic up the ramp.
“All right, everyone!” I hollered. “Women with infants and young children first!” I hoped my chivalrous efforts weren’t sending them to their deaths. Veronica, her youngest daughter—a pretty teenager with short black hair and bright blue eyes—and one of her grandchildren appeared on the scene, gagging and coughing from all of the smoke.
While Mother’s hair was gray, Veronica’s was still blonde, but it had been singed off in places. She was holding her arm close to her side as if in pain. Her daughter rushed to her side, and helped guide her up the ramp.
“The fire has consumed everything,” Veronica informed. “There’s no going back.”
“Can you climb?”
She nodded and began the steep ascent.
The lights went out for good, but trucks were still coming up the ramp with their headlights on. It was still too dark to see if anyone else had made the bottom of the ramp. I bellowed into the darkness. “If anyone is down there, follow the sound of my voice!” That ushered a few stragglers up the ramp. I yelled one more time, choking off the smoke as I did so, but the heat of the flame began to burn my skin. I had no choice but to climb.
As I exited the portal, I was assaulted by a wall of swirling yellow and green fog. The air smelled like a mix of vinegar and decay. This was not the world I had left forty years ago. I shivered against a biting wind. I hadn’t felt intense cold like this for a long time. It was very bad luck to emerge in what must be the dead of winter.
Families huddled together in groups, but I could barely make them out through the thick mists. If I lived a thousand lifetimes, I’d never get the sounds of my people’s wailing out of my head.
The acid air burned my throat. I started coughing. My head felt woozy. I called out for my wife. Her voice came back, weak and frightened. Then, through the fog, a bright light burned. Someone shouted and pointed. The tainted mists parted long enough for me to see Red struggling to climb up a steep hillside, and the barren wasteland all around us, rolling on and on without end.
We wouldn’t last much longer, but I knew of my brother’s secret gift, so I hadn’t abandoned all hope. I watched as Red reached the top, turned in a circle, then stretched his hands toward the sky.
In a voice like thunder, he screamed to the heavens. “In the name of my father!”
A burst of energy radiated from his body like ripples from a stone thrown into a pond, pushing away the tainted green mists and the mustard colored clouds. The pulse went right through me, setting my nerve endings on fire. For a moment white light blinded me. The next thing I knew my wife was standing beside me, holding my hand. Our children stood around us in wonderment. This was the first time any of them had seen the real world. Blades of grass burst through pale dirt, flowers burst from stems, and the world instantly brightened all around us.
When Red was done, the land had changed from burnt brown to lush green. A rainbow arced in a turquoise sky.
I didn’t realize that this was the beginning of a life I could never imagine, full of hardship and sorrow, but also full of beauty and purpose. And that was barely the beginning of the great things Red’s son with the star-shaped birthmark would do. Under his direction, we would travel this alluring new world and rebuild human civilization, but that's another story.
~ ~ ~
Note from Author
If you enjoyed Red the First, please consider leaving a review at your favorite online retailer, on your blog, or anywhere you enjoy discussing books. Reviews are the lifeblood of authors, so even if you leave only a sentence or two, your opinion matters. Thank you for the support.
Sincerely,
C. D. Verhoff
~ ~ ~
To find out what else is in store for Michael and his people,
check out these other titles from the Galatia Series:
PROMISED LAND
Book One. Already Released.
SEEKER OF THE FOUR WINDS
Book Two. Expected. Release Date, December 2013
EXILED
Book Three. Expected. Release Date, Mid-2014
~ ~ ~
About the Author
C. D. Verhoff grew up in the Midwest. Indiana University is her alma mater. She has worked in retail, education, insurance and finance. Currently, she lives in rural Ohio with her husband, two children, a dog, a kitten, a goldfish and a colony of dust bunnies.
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Red the First Page 17