by Natalie Reid
Jessie did as Jason had instructed her, and found herself inside a building with a tin roof. It appeared to be used for storage, for there were stacks and stacks of bedding and boxes of assorted sundries. When she stepped in, a woman holding a large pile of folded blankets nearly dropped them in shock.
“Who are you?” the woman asked.
“I just got here,” Jessie said, gesturing back to the door as if that would prove her point.
“Do you have a name?” she asked, making Jessie feel like a child.
“It’s Chance.”
The woman shook her head. “That’s not the name your mother gave you.”
“No,” she admitted, but did not hang her head in shame as a child might have after being scolded. “Jason said you could show me to a place to stay the night.”
The woman frowned and went over to a table in the corner to drop off her blankets. Turning back around, she shook her head in annoyance. “Well Jason has to realize that I have enough to do than to go gallivanting off to show the newbie a tour of the city!”
“Oh no, you wouldn’t have to do that,” Jessie called out, seeing an opportunity to search the city by herself. “Just tell me where to go, and I can find it myself. I have a good sense of direction.”
The woman bit the bottom of her lip. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a large ring of keys. It took her a moment to search through them all before she wrestled one of them from the loop.
“Here,” she said, tossing the key through the air.
Jessie caught it with one hand.
“Just go up this street, take the first right. The building you want is six or seven down to your left. Just match it with the number on the key. There should be a man already inside. He’ll show you to your room.”
Jessie held up the key and nodded in a sign of thanks. She turned to leave, but stopped herself and asked the woman, “Why do you use keys? Isn’t it just Resistance down here?”
The woman seemed perturbed at being asked another question. “People have their personal space, and they like that respected.” She grabbed the blankets back from the table, and added, “Is that such a crime?”
Jessie looked down at the key and then stuffed it in her pocket. She made for the door, leaving the woman in peace. When she got back outside, she saw that a man was watching her from across the street. She ignored him and started up the road. The first street on the right came and went, but she did not take it. She was looking for a building that could house a prisoner, and figured they wouldn’t put it right in the middle of a residential district.
She continued going up the same road for several blocks. There weren’t many people walking around, especially since it was already late in the night. The few that she did pass on the street, however, would turn their heads to stare at her, and a couple even stopped in their tracks. As large and impressive as Bunker City was, it still seemed that its people looked upon any new arrival as a fresh curiosity from the above world. And she wasn’t just from the world above; she was from the world above that.
However, she found that the attention she was drawing to herself made it hard to properly search any of the buildings for signs of prisoners. She might never be left alone if one of the Resistance caught her snooping around on her first day.
She finally turned down a street to her right with the express intent of circling back to the building she was to stay at. She hadn’t gone far before a man stopped and stared at her. Like all the others, she planned to ignore him, when suddenly he called out her name. The voice sounded so familiar that she froze and spun around.
“Jack?” she called out.
The older man waved and jogged across the street to meet her. At first she was happy to see a familiar face, but then something dawned on her, and she gave him a reproachful stare.
“I can’t believe you!” she exclaimed. “You knew there was going to be an attack on Division Bank, but you sent me out there anyway! What did you want to do, get me killed?!”
Jack held his hands up defense. “I knew you could protect yourself. My hope was that you would protect others as well. I was having second-thoughts about our plan, but having you over there made me feel better.”
“So you used me?” she asked, starting to feel as if everyone she knew was lying to her in order to get what they wanted.
“Hey, I paid you. You never returned my money,” he pointed out.
She shook her head, smiling sarcastically. “Yeah, Jack, I’m sorry I didn’t return your money. I was a little busy being hunted down like a Bandit.”
Jack reached into his jacket pocket. “Well, I heard you were here, so I brought you a peace offering.”
He brought out a tall bottle of water, and Jessie’s whole body cried out for it. Though the thirst had not been as great as when Tag had first injected her, the ache for water was still a constant presence in her mind. Unfortunately, being on the run didn’t allow her much time to scavenge for water.
Jack handed her the bottle, and she tipped her head back to let the water flow down as fast as it could. It was all she could do to keep from choking on it. But the feeling of the clean, crisp water felt so good, she wouldn’t have even minded if it had suffocated her.
When she lifted it away from her lips to gasp for breath, Jack smiled proudly, commenting, “Still as thirsty as ever, I see.”
She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. “I’m always thirsty.” Holding up the empty bottle, she gave it a shake, saying, “Thanks.”
“Are we good?” Jack asked
She shrugged. “I’m one of you guys now, so I guess so.”
He smiled broadly at her, and the two started down the street at a slow easy pace like two old friends rambling home. As they walked, she asked what he was doing here, why he wasn’t in his apartment in the east end. He explained that he had decided to live down here full time. It was too dangerous to show his face above ground ever since The Thirty were taken.
“What do you mean, The Thirty?” she asked. She had heard someone mentioning it when she had been on the run, trying to avoid Task Force, but she hadn’t known what it had meant. She had been too preoccupied with trying to keep Tom alive to want to find out.
“You don’t know?” he asked. He shook his head in understanding. “No, I suppose you wouldn’t. It happened soon after our attack on Division Bank. The government claimed that thirty people were killed, so to punish us, they grabbed thirty east-enders from the street. They claimed they were all working for the Resistance. In reality, only a handful of them were.”
“What did they do to them?”
He shrugged. “We don’t really know. They just rounded them up and escorted them inside Task Force headquarters. They haven’t come out since then, and no one’s said a word about what’s being done to them. Some people report hearing screams coming from beneath the building, but we don’t know if that’s true or not. The government’s trying to scare people by keeping it a mystery, and those accounts could be nothing more than paranoia.”
They turned the street, and Jessie stayed silent, wondering if anyone she knew from the east-end had been taken. They were now in the residential district of Bunker City, and a few more faces appeared in the windows and stared out at them as they passed.
Jack noticed, and motioned to the faces, saying, “That’s why we’re all so glad that you decided to join us. With you on our side, we might have a chance at getting those thirty out of there.”
She studied the faces in the windows. They looked wary and afraid, yet something lit up in their eyes as she passed, some lingering hope from better times, as if a long forgotten promise had been brought back and marched through their streets.
“They’re looking at me like I’m some kind of savior,” she said, growing uncomfortable under their stares.
She had been stared at in such a way once before. It had been on the bus to BLES after the Resistance attacks, when people learned that she had survived the Bandit. Complete strangers
had looked at her like someone they knew and had been waiting for—like someone to place their trust in. A hero. That was what they wanted.
“I’m just a soldier,” she told Jack. “I’m not some kind of hero.”
“For them you are.”
She looked out to the houses again. In the corner of a small window, she saw the face of a young girl smiling triumphantly at her. Jessie stared back, feeling a tremendous sense of dread dropping into the pit of her stomach.
She knew that little girl’s face. It had changed. Aged probably a couple years. And her hair was much longer than it had been in her picture. But she was, without a doubt, the girl she was there to find. And Ritter’s daughter smiled and pointed, and had no idea that she was there only for her.
Jessie was far from the hero everyone wanted her to be. She wasn’t there to save all of them. She was there only to save one girl, and it turned out that she didn’t even need saving. Jessie had counted on Ritter’s daughter being locked away. All she would need to do would be to find a way to get her out and reunite her with her father. But this girl looked happy. She was smiling and waving, and was certainly no prisoner of the Resistance. Despair gripped at Jessie’s chest, for now the possibility of ever seeing her mother again seemed slimmer than ever. If she wanted her mom back, she would have to kidnap this girl.
Jack noticed her mortified expression and said, “Don’t worry. They don’t expect you to save everyone right away. They know you’re human.”
She nodded, but did not speak again until they had stopped in front of the house with the number that matched her key. A strange sort of plastic grass had been planted on the lawn, and the tin walls of the house had been white-washed so that, at first glance, it looked like a normal home. No faces poked out from the front windows of this house, but she knew there should have already been a man inside.
Before Jack left her to her new home, she called out to him, asking, “Everyone down here wants to be here, right?” He turned around to face her, and she added, “You don’t hold any prisoners.”
He chuckled. “Jason didn’t hold you prisoner when he invited you down the first time.”
“No,” she admitted.
“Then does that answer your question?”
“Yeah. Night,” she said, waving him off.
When she got to the front door of the house, she unlocked it with her key and stepped inside. She called out, saying hello, but no one stirred to greet her. She looked around. The front room she had entered was a living room with sparse, home-made furniture. There was a rough looking couch, a frayed rug that covered the floor, and a few tables with lamps and several objects on them that looked like tools of some kind.
She walked a little further into the house and found a small kitchen. There was no oven, just a stove. She assumed that their location in the cave meant having smoking chimneys was a luxury they couldn’t afford. In the middle of the kitchen was a wooden table with one chair seated next to it.
The hallway led further back into the house. It was a small building and only housed three more rooms. One, she found, was a bathroom with a rather primitive looking plumbing and sanitary system. The toilet was nothing more than a raised tube that jutted out from a hole in the ground. She immediately closed that door to keep the smell from getting out, and looked to the next room on her left. This one was a bedroom. It showed signs of occupation, for there was a small picture by the bed-side stand, and a few objects carefully positioned on a desk in the corner of the room. However, the man that she was supposed to meet was nowhere inside.
She closed the door to this room just as quickly as the last, for she didn’t want to be caught snooping through this man’s things. Coming to the last room, she found a bedroom much like the last, only this one was bare of all signs of living. The bed had a mattress, yet no sheets, pillow, or blankets. There was a closet off to one side, and a desk and chair off to the other.
Jessie figured this was where she was supposed to stay, so she closed the door behind her and walked over to the bed. There was a light hanging from above, but she did not turn it on. A window was cut into the wall near her bed, and enough light from the purple stars came through so that it lit up the room in a soft, colorful glow.
She laid down gingerly on the bed and slowly spread out. She didn’t think to go back and ask the busy lady she had met before for blankets and a pillow. This was the first time in days that she had slept on a real bed, and it felt better than she had remembered. Out on the streets she had begun to lose herself. She was a fugitive, a thief, and a wanted Bandit. But on this bed, she was beginning to feel a little more human again.
In a small act of mercy, sleep found her quickly that night and gave her a reprieve from the deafening troubles of the city above.
Chapter 7
Life, Death, and Knitted Caps
When Jessie woke up the next morning, she heard the sound of creaking floor boards towards the front of the house. Her head rose from the mattress, and she blinked away the sleep from her eyes. In slow movements, she stretched her body and tried to calm the pounding thirst in her throat. From outside, she heard the thud of something being placed on a table. She figured that the man she was sharing the house with must be up and eating his breakfast.
Going over to her door, she walked out and headed towards the kitchen. When she got there, she found a man a little older than Jason sitting on the one chair at the table, eating something gray and lumpy from a bowl. This man had dirty blonde hair and the whisper of a beard forming on his chin. His eyes were gray and hard, and the very manner in which he held his shoulders and shoveled food into his mouth told her that this was a man that had lived a tough life.
His eyes hardly registered any change when she walked into the room, though she knew that he could see her. Since he wasn’t making to introduce himself or welcome her in any way, she did not feel compelled to say anything to him. So, for a few moments, she stood there, studying the kitchen and the lines on the wood of the table.
Then, in between bites of food, the man opened his mouth and said, “You can use the chair when I’m done.”
Well, that was at least something, she thought. But it was by no means an introduction. And if she was going to have to stay here for a little while, she figured they were going to have to do better than that.
“Thanks,” she said, taking things slowly. She took a step further into the kitchen. “They didn’t tell me your name.”
“You don’t need it,” he said gruffly. “You won’t be seeing me much.”
Jessie lightly tapped her knuckle on the edge of the table. “Well, you’re letting me stay in your house, so I’d like to know who to thank.”
“You could show your gratitude by stop asking questions.”
She closed her tired eyes and spread her fingers out on the table to give her more support. Jessie didn’t have much of a temper, but at the moment she was finding it hard not to get upset at this man.
Keeping her mouth shut, she stepped to the side of the kitchen where the stove and refrigerator stood. The fridge was stocked with very little. There were a few jarred and pickled foods, and some containers that she couldn’t see through, and wasn’t entirely positive if they held food inside at all. The only other items were several rows of water bottles. She nearly shouted for joy when she saw this, yet was careful not to make a sound, figuring that her roommate would take extreme exception to her screaming in joy in the middle of his breakfast.
Taking a bottle from the fridge, she walked over to the kitchen counter, leaned against it, and downed the water at the quick rate she had now become accustomed to. At the corner of her eye, she saw the man shifting back to watch her, but by the time she was finished, he had gone back to his breakfast.
“You know what,” she said, setting the bottle down on the counter. “I’m not hungry. I’ll just eat later.”
Then, running as quickly as she could, she went through the kitchen, past the living-room, and out the door. She wa
sn’t sure how long it took her to do this, but she knew that it would have looked like some strange feat of speed to her roommate. Her intention, however, was not to show off, but to startle him into giving her at least a little respect. If he didn’t even give her his name, she knew it meant he didn’t respect her at all. At least now she might get a nod of recognition from him.
Out on the streets, she saw people were already out and moving around. It was impossible to tell what time it was, for Bunker City looked the same through all hours of the day and night. The lights above shown in the same intensity, and there was no beam of sun that reached this far down to give them even a hint of the time. A thought occurred to Jessie that the people here could mess with time all they wanted. They could say it was twelve noon, when up in Aero City it was really two in the morning. Either way, it wouldn’t make a difference.
Like the night before, the people that passed her on the streets seemed excited by her presence. Something in their characters kept them from going up to her, but they would still whisper as she passed. It wasn’t as if they were shy. In fact, Jessie suspected that it had something more to do with personal space and privacy. So many people in the Resistance were down here because they didn’t like the government poking its head in their personal affairs. She figured respecting a person’s privacy was a social must within Bunker City.
Keeping to herself, she headed towards the neighborhood where she had seen Ritter’s daughter. She didn’t want to accept her role as kidnapper, but she wasn’t about to abandon her mission all together without gathering a little more information first. When she turned the corner onto her street, she spotted her in the distance. She was wearing a black skirt and blue jacket, and was standing out on the plastic green grass of her lawn. An older woman stood behind her, reading something from a book. As the woman read, the girl looked up at the lights on the cave ceiling and spun her body so the ruffles of the black skirt swayed around the shins of her legs.