by Tom Isbell
“Rise and shine,” one of them called out. He had bright-red hair and a lean, pointy face. He ran his knife across the rebar to make a loud, clattering sound.
I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and realized this was Day One of Thirty Years. Only 10,949 days to go.
“Where’s your friend?” I asked one of the guards as we shuffled through the cell doors. “The one who captured us.” I wanted to know why he’d lied to Goodman Nellitch.
“Not here. I get the honor today.” He said it like it was anything but.
We were led to a small chamber, where we were given new clothes. Faded gray pants, T-shirts, long-sleeved shirts over those. Not all that different from what we’d had before except actually clean, like they’d been washed a million times.
Once more we were blindfolded and led down a series of tunnels. This time, I could hear us being split up, each prisoner forking off into a different passageway. Soon, it was just me and the red-haired guard.
Farther and farther we descended into the bowels of the cave, the explosions getting louder with each step. The guard abruptly yanked me to a stop, then ripped off my bandanna. We stood on the edge of a precipice, looking down into an enormous cavern. Branching off from it, like spokes from a wheel, were at least twenty tunnels. Hundreds of workers scurried in and out like ants.
The guard turned to me. “Hope you’re not afraid of hard work.” He snickered and led me down the rest of the way.
My boss was a big, burly man with a thick, bushy beard. His cheek bulged with a plug of tobacco.
“So you’re the spy, huh?” he said matter-of-factly.
“I’m not a spy,” I said.
“Yeah, right,” he scoffed, then turned to the side and spat. “Makes no difference to me. Labor is labor.” He and the guard met eyes. “I got him from here.”
The guard gave me a threatening look. “I’ll be back for you at the end of the day,” he said, then retreated back up the slope.
“Welcome to the Wheel, boy,” my boss said, then turned to get a better look at me. “What happened to your leg?”
“Born this way. Radiation.”
“Those damn politicians. Had no right firing off nuclear weapons. Had no right building them in the first place.”
His candor surprised me. I’d heard only one other person speak so openly about Omega or against the government, and that was Frank.
“What’s your name?” I dared to ask.
“Why do you want to know?”
“If you’re my boss, I should know what to call you.”
He thought a moment, then answered gruffly, “Goodman Dougherty.”
“So your name is Goodman, too? Just like Goodman Nellitch?”
“All the men here are Goodman, and all the women are Goodwoman. It’s our way of creating equality.”
“But there was a judge. . . .”
“Sure. That’s his task. Chief Justice. Just as I have a task and the woman who keeps the torches going has a task and the men who plow the fields have a task. We all have our jobs; no one is greater than anyone else.”
A very different structure from what we’d experienced back at Camp Liberty, where we were just Less Thans. Where we had no more identity than a number . . . and even less value.
“Enough talk. It’s time we got you to work.” He hawked up what sounded like a hairball and told me the basics: the Skull People were expanding the Compound, digging deeper into the earth, carving out more caves.
“Where do they lead?” I asked.
Goodman Dougherty smiled, revealing a mouth that was missing teeth. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” The clanging bell sounded twice, followed by an explosion and then the final bell. “Well, don’t just stand there,” Dougherty said. “Go get those rocks.”
He thrust two large white plastic pails into my hands—pickle buckets, he called them—and led me into a cave where the dust was just now settling. My job was to fill the buckets with rocks and dump the rocks into a cart. Simple.
But backbreaking. Within fifteen minutes I had sweat through my shirt. There was also the limestone dust coating my arms, my nostrils, the back of my throat. Even when they let us take a break and fed us lunch, I mainly tasted rock and grit and sand. Yum.
Goodman Dougherty slapped a meaty hand on my shoulder. “How’s that limestone tasting?” He threw back his head and laughed.
“Is it always this way?”
“Always. Why do you think I keep a mouthful of chaw?”
He hawked up another enormous glob of black phlegm and shot it to the side. Explosions rocked the ground, my lower back ached, I was choking on dust and exhausted to the point of collapse, and even as his laughter filled the air, one looming question rattled around in my brain: how was I ever going to endure thirty years of this?
Four Fingers dug irrigation ditches, Flush tended solar panels, Hope and Scylla were assigned to the kitchen, Diana to the laundry; and Twitch was placed in a mechanic’s shop, where he sorted nuts and bolts. Someone even went to the trouble to carve Cat a wooden arm so he could be placed on a painting crew. Cat did the painting, but he refused the arm.
“Don’t need it,” he grumbled.
“But it’d make your life easier,” I said.
He just grunted and left the artificial arm lying on the cell floor.
As for Argos, he was taken away from us. They wouldn’t tell us where to.
When we returned to the cells each night, we shared what we’d seen. The one thing we agreed on was that the Skull People had created a highly functioning society.
“And the thing is,” Flush was saying, “these people are smart. They get all their energy from the sun and wind—and they’ve created a grid to store the excess. It’s amazing.”
All the Sisters lined up at the front of their cell, just as we were lined up at ours. All except Cat. He sat off to one side, picking at his stump.
“There’s still something I don’t get,” I said, trying to rub the limestone off my arms. “How can these tunnels support all these people? Where do they get the oxygen?”
“That’s the most incredible part. They’ve built these air shafts with enormous fans, so there’s constant circulation.”
Okay, so they were intelligent. Then why were they wearing those animal skulls the day we first encountered them?
People began drifting off to bed until it was finally just Hope and me at the front of our cells.
“Did you recognize him, too?” she asked.
“Who?”
“The prosecutor. Goodman Nellitch. He was the mayor of the Crazies back in Bedford. The one who talked to the Man in Orange.”
That was it! Although he was all cleaned up and his white toga was a far cry from the cowboy hat and boots, she was absolutely right.
“But why would a Crazy be here with Skull People?” I asked.
“Or a Skull Person with the Crazies?”
Yet more questions we had no answers to.
When we were sure no one was looking, we stretched our hands forward through the bars until our fingers touched. We let them linger there as long as possible, holding on for comfort, for reassurance, for the desperate hope of not just a future, but a future together.
By day we worked; by night we shared notes. Not only were our lives passing before our eyes, so too was any chance of rescuing those Less Thans back in Liberty. Each day meant they were one day closer to the Rite, to imprisonment in the bunker, to being sold off to Hunters and shot down like prey.
I began taking on more responsibilities at the Wheel, even assisting with the explosives. Soon I came to understand the basics of dynamite and C-4, how to use fuses and blasting caps, how to mold the explosion based on needs.
But I knew I wasn’t put on this earth to help dig tunnels for the Skull People. I had to get back to Camp Liberty.
“So how’re you going to stop the Brown Shirts?” I asked my boss one day at lunch. We were seated on the ground, backs against a wall.
Goodma
n Dougherty gave me a funny look. “What do you mean, stop ’em?”
“I mean, what happens when you’re discovered? You can’t very well just pick up and move somewhere else.”
He leaned to one side and spat. Bits of brown chew got stuck in his thick beard. “Don’t you worry. Those soldiers ain’t interested in us, and even if they were, they’ll never find us, not with our camouflaged entrances.”
He had a good point about the door; it had been nearly impossible to see.
“So you’re fine with the Brown Shirts?” I asked.
“I didn’t say that. It’s just . . .” He searched for the right words. “They’re like a bunch of wasps. You don’t go bothering them, and they won’t be bothering you.”
Was it really that simple? I wondered.
“But if they did find you—”
“Which they won’t.”
“—how would you fight back?”
His beard pendulumed from side to side as he shook his head. “We don’t fight back.”
“You mean you haven’t yet?”
“I mean we won’t need to. That’s why we got escape tunnels.” He swiveled his head to me and explained, “Besides, we’d rather put our efforts into educating and feeding folks than building weapons. Just makes a lot more sense to us.”
He was right, it did make sense . . . unless you had firsthand experience with the Brown Shirts.
“And you’re fine with their policy?” I asked. “The Final Solution?”
He poked a couple of stubby fingers into his bushy beard and pulled out some tobacco and crumbs—from what meal I had no idea. “The final what?”
“The Final Solution. You know, how the Republic intends to eliminate all the Less Thans and Sisters from the face of the earth.”
Goodman Dougherty looked like the kind of guy who might be a first-rate poker player—his expression veiled behind a tangle of beard and facial hair—but at that moment there was no hiding his shocked expression.
“Eliminate? What do you mean, eliminate?”
“Wipe out. Murder. Kill us all.”
He gave his head a shake. “That ain’t right.” He paused in disbelief. “Where’d you hear this?”
“Read it in a letter from Chancellor Maddox.”
“That beauty queen.” He spat as he said it, and we went back to our tasks.
Watching him that afternoon, I couldn’t help but notice he spent much of the time engaged in hushed conversation with his friends. I had thrown the bait out there. Whether the fish would bite, I didn’t yet know.
30.
HOPE LIES IN THE back corner of the cell, thinking of Book. She remembers their shared smile and can still feel the caress of his outstretched fingers. In all her life, Hope has never felt so vulnerable and so alive.
The sensation is both thrilling and scary as hell.
She daydreams and then chastises herself for it. Why am I getting my hopes up when we’re going to be separated by metal bars for the next thirty years? Her fingers rub the tiny locket that dangles from her neck.
She hears a tiny click as her fingers glide along the locket’s edge, and she realizes that she’s accidentally opened it. She’s about to snap it closed when she notices a slight bend in one of the photos—her father’s—bulging his face outward.
She’s not surprised. The locket’s been submerged in water, roasted by fire, baked by the sun, shot at, sat on, you name it. It only makes sense it’s starting to warp and buckle.
But when she places the tip of her index finger against the photo, trying to push it flat, she finds more resistance than she expected. She sits up and pinches the photo free from its chamber . . . and sees there’s something behind it. A tiny scrap of paper.
Heart pounding, she removes the folded slip. It is yellowed and tattered, with a series of permanent creases. She is careful to iron it out. The crumbled edges waft to the stone floor like snowflakes. When she’s unfolded it, her breath catches.
To Faith and Hope
Dear girls. Either you get this or you won’t, but if you do. Know that I love you. Know that I believe in you. Either way, your mom and I have been so proud to raise two such amazing daughters who don’t give up. Remember your mother and do what’s best.
Dad
Hope has to force herself to breathe. She knew nothing about this note, despite the fact it’s been dangling around her neck all these months. She doesn’t know when her dad wrote it, or why, or when he expected his daughters to find it.
The realization that Faith isn’t around to read it brings tears to her eyes. She tries to fight them—it was her father, after all, who taught her: Live today, tears tomorrow. But the tears come anyway, racing down her cheeks.
She tucks the note into its chamber and lies back down, her face away from the others. Her mind races as she picks absently at the cell’s limestone wall, its grains pebbling on her fingertips.
And that’s when she gets the idea.
The next night, after the guards have taken away their dinner trays, Hope announces she has a surprise. As everyone looks on, she reaches into a pants pocket and produces . . . a spoon. Its curved shape catches flickering torchlight.
“Where’d you get it?” Flush asks.
“Washing dishes.”
“I don’t get it. What’s the big deal about a spoon?”
“Not a spoon,” Hope corrects him. “A shovel.”
Flush’s expression shows he still doesn’t understand.
“It’s how we get out of here,” Hope explains. She scrapes it against a wall. Granules fly.
“You’re going to use that little thing to dig a tunnel?” Flush asks.
“We’ll get more silverware later on, but this is where we start.”
“And you really think it’ll work?”
“We did it before. Why not now?” Diana and Scylla nod their support.
“But the guards? Won’t they hear?”
“Not if there’s noise to cover it.”
As if on cue, Cat begins singing, a sea shanty he’s picked up from somewhere.
“Come all ye young fellows that follow the sea
To me, way hey, blow the man down.”
Hope looks at Book. It matters that he approves—that he wants to escape. She needs to know that he wants to be with her as much as she wants to be with him.
“What do you think?” she asks.
Book hesitates only a second. “What’re you waiting for? Start digging so we can get the hell out of here.”
Hope ventures a smile and begins scraping the wall as the others join Cat in song.
“I’m a deepwater sailor just come from Hong Kong.
You give me some whiskey, I’ll sing you a song.”
31.
I’D JUST FALLEN ASLEEP when I heard my name.
“Book.”
My eyes blinked open. Two guards stood outside our cell.
“Come with us,” one of them said. Nothing more.
I scrambled to my feet, casting a glance into the Sisters’ cell. Hope’s eyes were open, her face stroked by the orange flames of the wall candle. I felt her gaze long after the blindfold was slipped over my eyes.
As the guards led me through the tunnels, panic started to set in: Where was I being taken? Was I going to be one of those political prisoners who mysteriously “disappeared” in the middle of the night?
My blindfold was whipped off, and I found myself in a small chamber. Sitting behind an oaken slab was the leader of the Council of Ten. I hadn’t seen him since our trial, weeks earlier. The guards pushed me into a chair and marched out.
I looked around. It was a small room, maybe fifteen feet square, its only hint at opulence an enormous fireplace where flames licked the limestone black.
“It’s silly, I know,” the Chief Justice said, his eyes never wavering from the document he was writing, his quill pen scratching paper. “It’s not for pride I requested the largest fireplace in the Compound. I just get so chilled in this subterr
anean world. I hope you don’t mind.”
Confusion overtook me as sweat trickled down my sides. Why is he talking to me in this way?
He slipped the pen into its holder, pushed the paper to one side, and looked up. His eyes met mine. “Book, huh?”
“That’s what they call me.” I wondered if he was going to get all chummy with me. Colonel Westbrook had done that back at Liberty, trying to get me to rat on my friends. Fat chance I was going to fall for that again.
“So you read?”
“I did.”
If he picked up on my sarcasm, he ignored it. “Favorite book?”
I shrugged. Why should I confide in him? He was the reason we were imprisoned. “A Tale of Two Cities is good,” I said.
“Ah, yes, who doesn’t like a story of selflessness, even if it means one’s own death in the process? And all set against a backdrop of revolution.” He sat back and stared at me. “You don’t like me much, do you?”
“Why should I?”
“Indeed, why should you? What convict approves of his sentencing judge?”
“We’re not convicts. And we’re not spies either!”
“Now, now,” he said, calming me with his hands. One of the guards looked in, and the Chief Justice merely shook his head. The guard disappeared.
“Like me or not, the fact remains: you were found guilty of spying. The Council of Ten had a duty to do.”
“I don’t know anything about your ‘Council of Ten,’ but my guess is you’re supposed to provide justice.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, I assure you that we’re innocent, so this is injustice.”
“And that map you had?”
“I told you. We never saw that map before the day of the trial.”
He regarded me for a long moment, absently tugging at his earlobe. A log exploded in the fireplace.
“Tell me about the Final Solution,” he said.
So. The fish had taken the bait. “You’re telling me you’ve heard of it?” I asked.
“That depends. There was a Final Solution many years ago, long before you were born, but I doubt that’s the one you’re speaking of.”
I explained what I knew about Chancellor Maddox’s intention to kill us all off, all the Less Thans and Sisters.