How can you know? My inner voice loved to make me second-guess everything.
My foot slipped in that instant of lost focus. A memory from a past life, or a story I'd heard, or whatever. The voices of doubt gnawed at me at every opportunity. I fell a few inches, but my hands prevented a larger disaster.
“Phew,” I said to myself.
Desperate to stay in the present, I put my finger into the faintest of cracks on the red rock face and dragged my sorry butt another six inches up the final exam route. The top rope moved up with me, pulled by my belayer below. It was a final test in our week-long study of rock climbing. If I had the energy, I could have looked over my shoulder to the other end of the hall. I was as high as I'd ever been, and only a few feet from victory at the top.
Many of my classmates had given up already and belayed back to the bottom. Not everyone was cut out for this kind of activity. The strongest boys made fast progress to start but lacked the endurance to survive the difficult middle and the cranky parts near the top. The most muscular girls had many of the same problems, though two of us made it to the last segment. Me and Reba. We weren't the strongest by any stretch of the definition, but we were wiry and compact. It helped give us what Mr. B called a perfect strength-to-weight ratio. I hated the implication: that my success was dictated by factors other than my own sweat and tears of training. Even so, my arms were shaky, and my skin seemed to buzz with nervous energy. I'd made it higher than any of my previous climbs, and touching a victory bell on the roof was something only a handful of boys had managed to do before today. I wanted to put us girls on the map.
"I can't do it, Elle." Reba was a body length lower than me, and off to my left side.
She'd made it higher than her previous record, too, but she'd complained endlessly the last fifteen minutes. I could see the beads of sweat on her face, and her black tank top was drenched with it.
"We can both touch the sky, Reba. Hang with me, and we can do it, I promise." The roof of the immense room was also holographic. The azure color was as breathtaking as it was counterfeit.
To her credit, she shimmied up a couple of feet along her route, but I knew by the steady increase in cursing she was getting worse.
As much as I wanted to help Reba, I wanted to hinder Alex. I didn't need to look at him to know he was smiling just beyond the reach of my right hand. Though we all hung around together, he was the one boy I liked less the more I got to know him. Everything was a joke, a story, or a brag. And, as expected, there he was ruining our moment in the proverbial sun.
"She can't make it to the top, L—" he always said my name like the letter, and never with the proper "ee" sound at the end. One of his many annoying habits. “I think Mr. B lied when he said you girls were better suited to climbing than us boys.”
He was the guy always interested in my girlfriends. With a swish of his light bangs, they'd fawn all over him, and he'd be smug about it if he and I crossed paths—like he did it just to get a rise out of me. Over the past few months, I'd learned to control my reaction on the outside, but on the inside...
Hanging there, I couldn't ignore his strong forearms and chalk-covered, vein-strewn, powerful hands. My hands, by contrast, seemed to hold no power. I began to doubt how I was even up that high with him. He made hanging on a rocky wall fifty feet in the air look easy, and I admit to a fantasy where I punched my teacher for seeding the discord between boys and girls about which sex was more capable of climbing the wall.
Focus, girl.
“We can all make it up, even you.” I felt deceitful. As unsure as I was about Reba, I knew he'd make it to the top. He'd done it several times over the past week, and I'd studied his routes to try to help myself break this rock ceiling above me. It wasn't cheating, just good research. Of course, I would never admit that to him.
He chuckled under his breath. "Yeah, well, you've got the best route, L. I'm going up on a new line."
Dang. He watched you, too.
"Let's get there, and we can discuss climbing routes over a root beer." I didn't mean it the way it came out. I mentally slapped myself. Whatever he said in reply, I didn't want to hear it. I think it had to do with me and the teacher. An old joke if ever there was one. I needed to concentrate on the final pitch. I could see it in my head. Hand here. Foot there. And a long stretch to touch my prize. It could be done. But I was at the end of my rope as far as my endurance. It was, I justified to myself, the reason why I'd even opened my mouth to Alex. It gave me a reason to rest.
The cheers below were encouraging. I kept hearing them say the number three, which I assumed was either how far I had to the top, or that we three were the only ones left on the wall. As if in answer, a lone voice shouted above the others: "You have three minutes to end this spectacle."
That was our gnarly old teacher, Mr. Bracken. He once lived outside the bunker before humanity retreated into our vault to survive. And he looked like it. His white and brown beard was long and unkempt, along with the rest of him. He called himself a hippie sometimes, though never with pride. His job was to teach us everything he knew about the old ways, which apparently included climbing rocks. It made some sense, the more I thought about it. If I lived outside of this place, I’d want to climb into the heavens, too. Even the fake sky above me was beautiful.
“Three minutes, Elle. I can’t do it. I have to drop.” I used some of my carefully marshaled energy to turn to her. My smile wasn’t enough encouragement.
“I know,” she continued after seeing my look. “I’ll see you at the bottom. You’re killing it, girl.”
The whine of the line through her carabiner confirmed her retreat down the face. It was just Alex and me. I didn’t have anything left to suffer even one more word from him. He, however, had something for me. “Let me give you a hand.”
As if.
Helping other climbers wasn't against the rules, but it wasn't done. I might be willing to help Reba if she asked, but there was no way I'd ever work with Alex.
My reply was curt laughter.
I had just enough slack in my line to free climb the last few feet. Because we were indoors, our belay point was on the holographic ceiling, where my rope passed through a metal circle seemingly hanging in the sky. The braided line then fell to the ground behind me. Some helpers at the bottom held our ropes to keep us from dropping if we lost our grip. I spent a long minute visualizing those last few hand and foot holds; then I made my move.
The first placement was going to be the hardest. I had to cross my right hand in front of my body while my left hand remained wedged where it was. It required both dexterity and strength—which had drained out of me like air from a collapsed tunnel.
I slipped from the top grab and I almost lost my hold completely. In the few minutes of rest, the sweat on my hands had been profuse. My chalk had rubbed away. Maybe I wiped my forehead a minute ago. I couldn’t remember.
All I heard were oohs and aahs from below. Waves of disappointment followed by polite clapping.
They thought you'd given up, my confused inner voice declared.
I held on.
Ignore that blood.
My hand slid in the crevice, but I didn't let go. I was rewarded with a small but deep cut. It was really painful.
My back was to Alex as I hung sideways on the rocks, which I thought was entirely appropriate. I had no interest in watching him succeed again and then gloat about it.
I rubbed my chalk bag and reached again for the hand hold. I tilted my head to throw back my wild locks, intent to see it without distraction. This time I stuck it. With both arms, I lifted myself up. I grunted like a diesel engine, but I didn’t care. There was no shame on the wall. In a moment my foot found the same crevice I’d been holding with my bloodied hand. My left foot hung freely, but I didn’t need it for the last bit.
With every inch of my body, I stretched upward. I knew I was still a little short, so I jumped. For the briefest of instants, I thought I touched the bell. It was an inch from
my gnarly fingertip.
My next sensation was of movement. My route had taken me off center, so when I fell I whipped from side to side for a few seconds in mid-air, which got some cheers from the gallery below. Once I came to a rest hanging directly underneath the anchor point, it hit me.
I'd failed.
Getting down gave me time to reflect on the climb, and await the “You did great,” with the implied “but...” congratulations. Even then, and I hate to admit this, the one thing that lingered under my helmet was whether the bell was still going to ring. I assumed Alex was at the top, waiting for me to notice so he could ding it and gloat. I knew it was stupid—he would get what he wanted—but I halted my glide down so I could double check.
Nope, he wasn’t up there.
My light shoes hit the mat, and I sloughed off my gear like it was all made of lead. I had a moment to bask in the polite cheers, and I was just about to ask about Alex—I had to know what happened—when Mr. Bracken’s aged face cut through the class like Death’s scythe.
I was so close.
Things got quiet. Everyone wanted to hear what came next.
“That was pretty stupid. A little cut like that could kill you.” He pointed to my bloody hand. I looked down as if remembering it. There were drops of blood dotting my gear. It called out one of his more memorable mantras. I knew he was about to repeat it.
“Blood is life. Lose blood. Lose life.” His look was totally serious, though I searched for any sign he was proud of how close I'd come. A fingertip from becoming the first girl in my class to ring the bell.
“Well? You gonna stand there looking stupid, or are ya gonna git to the infirmary?”
Just like that, what should have been the best day of my life had been tossed into the trash chute.
2
A week later I was still getting an occasional “good job, girl,” or “nice try” as I walked to and from class. The only thing that made my failure bearable was that Alex failed that day, too. But in that same period, I'd been reminded many times by Mr. Bracken about how dangerous it was for me to rip open my hand. Oh, he didn’t come out and say it like that. He was too smart for mere repetition.
We showed up to class one day surprised to see an extra article of clothing wrapped around his neck. The dull-gray length of cloth was about six inches wide and who-knows how long. He made no mention of it. His Loop Tracker—a type of necklace we all had to wear—was hidden from sight.
“We'll jump right into the lessons this morning,” he said in his typical seriousness. “Today we're going to talk about blood.” He looked right at me for a long second. “But this lesson is about the end of the Old World.”
Mr. Bracken had us near the far edge of the climbing wall in the Great Hall. It gave us a quiet place to chat, away from everyone else.
“I want someone to tell me how civilization ended.” His tone had an implied finger pointing at us. He was daring us to give him the wrong answer.
I raised my hand, but Reba’s was up a split-second faster. She flashed a toothy grin at me.
“Sun flares,” she replied with confidence. “The sun entered a ten-year cycle of vicious solar winds, which made the surface of the earth too hot for most plants and animals. Only when the planet cools can we once again go up there to live.” She ended with another smile at Mr. Bracken, though we all knew he wouldn’t return it.
“Congratulations. You’ve remembered my earlier lessons.”
Reba beamed.
“But let's pretend it was something else; let's call it a fantasy,” he deadpanned.
Her smile remained frozen on her face, as if unable to decide if he was joking. Eventually, it faded. Mr. Bracken never joked.
He leaned in and spoke quieter than normal. “This is called a what if?”
After a quick scratch under his scarf, he kept going.
“What if something else ended the world? Maybe, oh, I don't know, something went wrong with people's blood. Like Elle here,” he pointed to me, and not in a good way, “getting herself bloodied. The world got good and bloodied. Yes, something terrible went wrong with people’s blood because they weren't careful. It made them do … horrible, terrible things.”
His baby blues were bottomless pools of sadness, but his face remained placid as he spoke of his alternative history. He, alone among us students, saw the Outside with his own eyes. He knew what happened and had spoken of the sun flares many times since classes began, which was why this journey into fancy was so strange. “The human race had poisoned blood. It wasn’t done by the sun. It was from within.” When finished, he leaned away and against a rock, letting it sink in.
No one knew what to say. Reba’s smile had evaporated, though she still wore the face of someone not quite sure if a joke was being pulled on them. I guess I felt the same.
“Sir. This is pretend, right?” I had no reason to doubt him, but he was contradicting a lifetime of one of the most basic teachings about why we were living in a glorified cave. Sure, we had fake sunlight, fake sky, and even fake sunsets. But we could never for a second overlook the fact solid rock surrounded us on all sides. To suggest we’d been put in this place for reasons other than a broken sun was hard to believe.
His eyes hardened. “This is what if. Don't you get it, Miss Elle?” He used a formal tone to dare me to say it again.
“N-no. It’s just that—”
“It’s what you’ve been taught. The party line. I know. I'm the teacher,” he chuffed. “But even teens from the Old World made it to the edge of adulthood clueless about how the world really works. You’re old enough to know the birds and bees.”
That time I swore he chuckled, though I couldn’t fathom what was so funny. We knew all about the animals that flew in the sky and tended the flowers. Because we have no books, our whole lives were built around verbal tales from our elders about life under an open sky. That magical time when everything was perfect before the world came crashing down.
“The birds,” he began with a touch of melodrama, “soared high in the bluest skies you can imagine. Their numbers were infinite. Some were as big as cars. Others were the size of your thumb. Most flew. Some lived in the ice and waddled around with useless wings...”
He continued, describing all kinds of birds until it became tedious. I was drifting, as were the others. I caught Alex watching me like a hawk from the far side of the circle. Get it? A hawk? See, bird-theme daydreaming means I was trying to listen, at the very least.
Mr. Bracken broke my flighty thoughts with a deep cough. “There's the official version. And the truth. I'm trying to help you understand the difference.”
He continued to speak so as not to be overheard by any of the blue-smocked workers lounging nearby. “Did it ever occur to you why, if the sun was going berserk for a few years and we were moving into a bunker like this one, no one bothered to bring in a single bird?”
“We have chickens,” one of the boys replied. I wished I'd thought of that. The smelly cave with all those chickens squawking and pooping was one of the places we were sent when we did something really bad. Not me, of course, but some of the boys had been sent there. They came back with nothing but horror stories of their penalty time.
Mr. Bracken nodded. “Good catch. But chickens are food. I'm talking about rescue for the sake of being a decent human being. In my day,” he began with that distant stare, “it wasn't unusual to see someone ignore a fellow human in trouble so they could save an animal. That didn't happen when we lined up for survival here. Why?”
I furtively raised my hand, as did Reba, but we were both beaten by a girl on the other side of our group—Nellis. “Because there was no time to rescue anyone or anything but ourselves.”
“Hmm, interesting hypothesis. But I assure you there was plenty of time. Caverns like this don’t just appear. It took lots of planning...” He drifted off, as if remembering being there. Many of us seemed to hold our breath for his reply.
But he didn’t continue.
I didn’t know if I should share my opinion. Most of the time, especially on matters of the Outside, our opinions didn't matter to him.
“It, uh, means the animals are still walking around up there.” I’d ended my statement as if it were a question.
“See. That's how what if works. Give climbing girl an extra bottle cap. She’s rung the bell this time.”
Bottle caps were slang for money. No one knew what it meant. But at that moment I was ecstatic to be acknowledged, even in a backhanded way, for doing well on the climb. It took much longer for the implications of my answer to sink in. When it did, the world got a whole lot larger.
3
“But sir,” I added without prompting, “why are you telling us this? Is the truth that there were sun flares or is your story really true?”
We'd been told the sun killed the world, and there were strict rules about it. The first, and most important, was that anyone caught in the sun would get sick—just like our predecessors up on the surface. The second rule was designed to keep us from accidentally stumbling into the sunlight. The hallways to the exits were heavily guarded by ugly old men with big clubs. None of us kids dared go in search of the doors, and up until this second, I'd never even thought to consider it. All that was fine, but the last rule was the worst. If you got caught in the sun, and by implication found outside the bunker, you'd never be allowed back in. The sun sickness was contagious. On that point, Mr. Bracken's new theory seemed to agree with the official version. Whatever it was, almost no one on earth could shake the disease once it got started. Running deep underground and separating from those already sick with it was the only solution.
“Everyone learns the truth when they graduate,” he said without expression.
We still had another year until we left the mentor program. Each pod of students would train for a year under each of the Old World mentors, then rotate. Mr. Bracken had been my mentor for a year that seemed to stretch to eternity. I could barely recall the other teachers or students, something I attributed to endless repetition of sports and hard labor assignments.
Sirens of the Zombie Apocalypse Page 12