by Lynda Engler
He wasn’t hurting her but the mutant’s strength was enormous and she was powerless to move. There was no chance to escape. Peering around the dark hand for some recognition or understanding, she said, “Let me go.”
When the hulking man partially relaxed his grip on her, Isabella attempted to move but her muscles felt as if they had turned to sand and she slumped back to the ground. She mustered the strength to scoot on her backside two or three feet away from him but he just stared at her when she did. If she ran, where would she go? She had no hope to outrun the mutant so retreating to the airlock was pointless and she couldn’t risk revealing the secret entrance. And she was sure no matter how fast she ran he would be faster.
“Who are you? What tribe are you from?” demanded the big mutant. His voice was deep for a teenager and it was definitely the same one she had overheard in the yellow tent.
“My name is Isabella Bellardini. Please don’t eat me!” she pleaded.
“Why would I eat you? Do I look like a cannibal? Did you drop the food and book? Where’s the rest of your tribe? Why’re you garbed in such strange clothes?”
Isabella felt her breathing slowly return to normal but her heart and thoughts continued to race. The mutant said he was not going to eat her but she was still scared. He asked about her tribe. Did he think she was a mutant? Her head was spinning. Oh, why did I come out here?
“I don’t have a tribe. I have a family. We live here.” Isabella moved her arms to encompass the whole area that surrounded them without indicating an actual location.
Malcolm shifted to a cross-legged position on the ground and folded his hands in his lap. He looked relaxed, but she knew that like a wild animal, he could pounce on her the second she tried to get away.
“I’m Malcolm Calloway and I won’t hurt you. But I need to know some things about you. Why are you here in my camp? How many others from your family are with you? How far away is your shelter? You can’t expect to walk into my camp to spy on my tribe and think you can do it without my seeing you.”
“You are on my family’s land,” said Isabella.
“And how many of your family are hiding in the bushes watching us right now?”
“No one. They know you are here, but I’m the only one who came to your camp tonight.” Isabella was taking a big risk admitting she was alone in the woods. Her eyes darted about trying to pick out objects in the darkness, but she could see nothing beyond the man in front of her. Although afraid, she assumed a posture of superiority and continued, “Okay, I’ll answer your questions. But how about some light first?”
She leaned forward and stood her flashlight on the ground, the high intensity LED illuminating a tunnel a hundred feet into the leafy branches beneath the inky black sky.
Malcolm gasped. “You have torch light! Where’d you find working batteries? Did you come from Ewr too? I’ve found lots of torches, but just dead batteries.” He gazed at her through the clear faceplate of her soft fabric helmet. Between the darkness of the night and his dark skin, she couldn’t see any of his features until he got closer to the light, then she was surprised to see his green eyes and how attractive his face was.
“We have rechargeables, though their use is strictly rationed. Only Papa gets to use the flashlight and the chem-rad suit.”
“Then why’re you wearing your father’s suit?”
“My father’s? I never met my father; he was gone before I was born,” Isabella told him. “Granpapa is my mother’s father.”
“Your grandfather? No one acquaints their grandfather!” The big teen looked shocked.
Isabella found Malcolm’s speech odd but understandable. Mutants had more generations since the Final War than humans, so their language must certainly have changed, maybe even into regional dialects.
“Well, I do and so do my sibs. We live with our grandparents and the rest of our family.” Isabella was purposefully careful not to give him too much information. She wanted him to assume her family was much bigger than it was. A little misinformation seemed like a good thing at that moment. He spoke sincerely and it was easy for her to trust him but she didn’t want to fall into some kind of trap in case he wasn’t everything he portrayed.
“What are sibs?” he asked.
“Siblings. You know… brothers, sisters, or kind of anyway. We’ve all got the same father but some of my brothers and sisters have different mothers so we’re kind of halfway sisters and brothers from our father, and halfway cousins from our mothers. It’s complicated. ‘Sibs’ is just easier to say.” Isabella fidgeted in the chem-rad suit. It was uncomfortably warm in the helmet and its face mask was starting to cloud up from the moisture of talking and breathing.
“Oh.” She could see Malcolm thinking that over for a moment before going on. “You don’t look much younger than me. My father died four years ago. How old are these grandparents of yours? The oldest person I’ve ever known was twenty-three. I’ve never heard of anyone surviving the poisons long enough to acquaint their grandchildren.”
Isabella was starting to sense that he was asking her questions because he was truly interested, and not just because he was guarding his tribe. He had obviously thought she was a threat when he “captured” her, and who wouldn’t? In the chem-rad suit she must appear to him like an alien just dropped out of the sky. And he had no way to know that her whole “huge” family didn’t all have suits just like it; that the Bellardini “tribe” wasn’t going to come into his camp with weapons drawn and annihilate the lot of them. Wow, she was so blind! She had been so terrified of him, thinking he could hurt her and never thought that he might feel exactly the same way about her!
Suddenly answering his questions took on a whole new meaning. He really did want to learn about her. “My grandparents are both seventy. My mom is forty-one.” And I’m not going to tell you how they survived this long, she thought. She wasn’t that comfortable with him just yet!
“What about your children? Have any survived?”
“Children? I’m only sixteen! I’m too young to have children.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Malcolm, sounding incredulous. “I’m seventeen and I’ve had plenty of children, even one that has survived to three years old – Shia. I had two others before her, but they didn’t live of course. Then the poisons killed my mate. And at my age, I’m probably sterile from the poisons, so there won’t be any more children for me now.”
“Wow!” exclaimed Isabella. A dead wife and kids already at 17. She just couldn’t imagine the life that these mutants lived, so very differently than her shelter. Intellectually, she had always known “the facts.” They didn’t live long. They lived in poisons. They caught diseases. Those were facts. But actually meeting someone her age that had already been through life events she hoped never to experience, at this age, made it all too real for her emotionally.
Malcolm told her more about his tribe. As leader, he was in charge of pairings. He knew a lot about genetics. His father had passed information down to him, knowledge that had been passed down to him from his mother. In this knowledge was the unavoidable reality that Malcolm’s seventeen-year-old genes were far too damaged to safely father any more children. But he would further his tribe. He had already planned to pair up Kalla with Clay very soon; and next year he would find someone for Maxi. He wasn’t sure whom yet. He had hoped to find other, less-mutated people out in the ’burbs, but hadn’t yet.
Completely changing the subject, Malcolm suddenly asked, “Were you the one that left the book?”
Isabella nodded.
“Where did you get a history book anyway? Did your family hail from Ewr? Are you Jet Believers?” Malcolm had as many questions for her as she did of her strange new acquaintance.
“We have a library in our… settlement. We’ve got quite a few books. My grandparents collected them years ago. I don’t know what ‘Ewr’ is or a ‘Jet Believer.’ I’ve always lived in this area.” Isabella was still thinking of planned genetic coupling b
etween mutants. Somehow it didn’t seem all that different than her grandfather allowing his daughters to “mate” with Johnny Appleseed. He knew those pairings would produce healthy offspring.
Malcolm’s eyes followed the flashlight beam into the sky, as if searching for something far away. “Ewr is the city my tribe left to come here. Its ten days walk to the east, near the wide river. If you’ve always lived in the ’burbs, I guess you wouldn’t know of it. Some of the people in Ewr live inside the big jet planes at the old airport. They accept as true that someday those planes will fly again. We call them Jet Believers.”
“Sounds a bit like my Granpapa.” Isabella grinned. “He thinks the government is coming back someday to fix everything. He’ll get his beloved technology back and everything will go back to the way it was before all the wars.”
“Do you believe him?” asked Malcolm, turning his gaze from the star-filled sky to Isabella’s face.
“Honestly? I don’t know what to believe. Look, I’ve got to get back to my family. I’ve been gone too long and if anyone wakes up and finds me missing, they’ll panic.” She didn’t know how she was going to get back to the hidden airlock without revealing its location.
“You aren’t supposed to be out here all alone, are you?” he asked.
Isabella shook her head sheepishly.
“I know what your white suit is now. It keeps the chemicals and radiation from poisoning you. Without it you’ll mutate – like me. I guess you snuck out from your underground shelter. I’ve seen the door to your dwelling.”
Isabella’s breath caught in her wind pipe and she exhaled in sudden panic.
“And you don’t need that suit inside, do you?”
She shook her head.
“You need to get back before you are missed then,” Malcolm stated plainly.
Isabella wondered why she had been so worried about keeping the shelter’s entrance a secret. This boy – no… man, he may be her age, but he was a man – had seen the door to her shelter long ago. He was experienced Outside. How could he not have seen it? She had been under the impression that mutants were so dumb… how wrong she had been!
Before Isabella could reply, Malcolm chuckled. “Don’t worry. I’m the leader of my tribe. I don’t need to tell them anything until I am ready. Your secret is safe with me. Go back to your underground home, girl. Maybe we’ll acquaint again another night. Good bye for now.”
Malcolm went back to his tent, crawled in and zipped up the flap. Just like THAT, she had been abruptly dismissed. Isabella ran to the airlock and began the cycle.
* * *
At family time in the great room the next evening, their grandmother asked, “What’ll it be tonight? Music or a story?”
Luke asked for the story about their father and their grandmother once again launched into the tale of how the civilian government had sent out healthy men from their headquarters in the underground city at Mount Weather to find groups of survivors and carry on the species.
“What’ll we do when we are adults, I mean, about carrying on the species like you said? We all know that intermarriage for the four of us isn’t the best, genetically speaking,” Isabella said. Besides it’s totally disgusting! Isabella just wanted to puke every time she thought of “pairing” or “mating” with Mark or Luke. Her face crinkled and a shudder ran up her spine.
Their grandfather interrupted. “The government at Mount Weather has data on where all the healthy family units are now. They also determined that based on the capacity of our living and growing space and our water and air filtration systems, our shelter can’t hold more than ten people. That’s one of the reasons why we get supplies but no other visitors. But they’ll come when you all turn eighteen. So in 15 months, more government representatives will arrive.”
Isabella breathed a sigh of relief. She and Abigail wouldn’t be stuck with Luke and Mark as mates. She should have known all along that they wouldn’t have to do that. She knew deep down inside that there had to be a plan. “But Granpapa, we still don’t have any more space than we did last time. If Abigail and I are to marry those male visitors, how will we have space for them or any new babies?”
“And what about us?” asked Mark. “Are they sending girls for us?” Luke snickered. The boys had been looking at pictures of naked women in books in the library section that their grandmother had forbidden them access to until they were seventeen. Abby had found both of them in the great room one afternoon while everyone was supposed to be studying and their aunts and grandparents were either in the kitchen, laundry or the hydroponics garden. She had grabbed the books violently from them, scolded them, and returned the illicit reading material to the library without anyone finding out. When she told Isabella the story, both girls knew that their cousin-brothers were more than just a little bit curious about “mating.”
“That was something I was going to discuss when you got closer to eighteen, but since you’ve brought it up, we can talk about it now. When your father came here, almost eighteen years ago, we discussed the ramifications of children in a small shelter like this. For the human race to carry on, the government created a plan to send out young men, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five from all 96 of their underground FRCs and exchange them with both the small shelters like ours and the larger, private shelters where rich survivalists had purchased apartments before the wars.”
The Federal Relocation Centers were set up by the government in the mid 1900’s so they could save some citizens in the event of nuclear war or other national emergency. Thirty or so apartment building size luxury shelters were also built by real estate developers at the beginning of the 21st century. They were designed to hold about 200 people (but many of the wealthy people who purchased them could not get there when the world fell apart), so it had not been known how many people were actually in them until about a decade after the Final War. By then they figured out that all 30 large shelters were over capacity due to the birth rate, and they started moving young adults out of them when they came of age. Most of them were moved to Mt. Weather, which had expanded further underground to make room for a growing population. What was left of America’s population now consisted of a few thousand small shelters, the underground cities of Mt. Weather, Cheyenne Mountain, the rest of the FRCs, and a few dozen military bases.
“When the young men from the other shelters arrive here, two of them will stay with Bella and Abby and you two boys will leave with the visitors,” finished their grandfather. He leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling.
Luke yelled out, “You mean we get to go to Mount Weather? Awesome!” Mount Weather was in Virginia. It was a self-contained, underground city where the civilian government had been located since the Final War. The President and all of his staff, plus about 6,000 other people lived there in safety. Luke had dreamed of going there since he was little.
“Probably not. They’ll take you to another remote shelter like ours where there are young women in need of husbands. You will live there, replacing some other young men, who will be resettled elsewhere.”
“It’s like a giant game of musical chairs,” said Aunt Mari softly.
Silence blanketed the room. Part of Isabella was pleased that she would be getting rid of her annoying brothers, however she felt sad for the boys at the same time. They would be traveling to a new place that they knew nothing about, leaving their lifelong home behind probably forever. They would have to live with another family and wouldn’t see their mothers, grandparents or even the sisters they didn’t care for.
Being paired up with a strange man sent to her by some government repopulation planner wasn’t exactly a comfortable thought either.
Isabella took out her harmonica and began to play a sad melody that had been a favorite of hers since she was a little girl. She didn’t play it often, but it was what came out of her heart that moment. Soon Abby joined in on her flute and the girls moved on to happier songs. Together they entertained the family for half an hou
r or so. Their grandmother had taught the children to play instruments that they had stored in the shelter. Isabella’s mother was musically talented on all the instruments, especially the piano. As Isabella played, she saw her mother’s eyes encouraging her, but in her heart she knew her mother was disappointed in her only daughter. She had hoped for a talented child, but all she got was a girl with marginal talent on the simplest of instruments.
Musical talent ran in their family, starting with her grandfather, who still often complained that he missed his guitar, since his last spare string snapped ten years ago. Apparently guitar strings weren’t considered “essential supplies” by the government. Too bad, because Granpapa could have really helped this awful duet!
The group broke up after Isabella and Abby finished playing, each going back to their own room for the night, except Isabella. Full of questions, she went to her grandparent’s room and sat on the edge of their king-sized bed. “Granpapa, what will happen to the mutants in fifty years when we move above ground?”
“Why are you suddenly so concerned about mutant movements above ground? I realize this is the first group you’ve been able to watch for any length of time, but your grandmother and I, and your mother and aunts have seen signs of them come and go for years. Nomadic mutants aren’t new. I thought you’d be more concerned about the fate of your sibs and about who is coming here.” He shifted on the bed, his old frame suddenly strong and youthful.
Answering her question with another question was no answer. Isabella sat silently, looking at him expectantly. He finally continued. “It’s really pretty simple. The mutants either do what they are told and stay where they’re told to, or the government will just exterminate all of them.”
Isabella gasped. “Kill them?! They wouldn’t kill innocent people!”