Years After Series | Book 1 | Nine Years After

by Clary, LeRoy

  Radiation. We hustled past. You can’t see, smell, or know when it’s around. There was no way to test. The growing vegetation said it might be safe. The bomb might not have even been nuclear.

  Lower down the side of the mountain, we crossed a stream and the land became more level. The nearly hidden road intersected with another, one wider and in better repair. Not that anyone was going to drive on it. There were broken places like where the bomb had exploded on the other one, but also trees seemed to send down roots, and they ripped apart the road as the trees grew.

  “I want to walk beside the road,” Mayfield said suddenly, warily.

  “See something?”

  “No, but we’re too exposed out there in the open. It’s easier walking on the road, but we need to be thinking of defending ourselves. Staying hidden.”

  “From what?” I asked as I moved to the right side of the road and started fighting my way through the thick underbrush.

  “Everything,” she said. “If the birds, squirrels, deer, and mosquitoes flourished, what else has? Until we know far more about the world we’ve entered, we need to stay low, as Sarge used to tell us during training.”

  She was right.

  The morning warmed. Tiny insects flew in small clouds around our heads. Now and then one of us breathed one into our mouths and a fit of coughing and laughter followed. Sweat coated my face and neck, which seemed to attract more bugs. We peeled off clothing.

  That seems a small thing, but it was more of my forgotten past that slowly emerged. In Deep Hole, there were no insects and the temperature never varied enough to cause us to sweat. The bland colored walls and all the shades of beige, the tile floors, and cream-white ceilings gave no variety. Our cubicles were large enough to change our minds in but small enough that holding out my arms would touch opposing half-walls.

  Awareness of the world around us crept into my mind on little padded feet, a step at a time. In a clearing about the size of my cubicle, I came to a halt without intending to do so. Without conscious thought, I made a slow turn, examining every nearby branch, the underneath side of leaves and the top, the variety of colors and shapes of them, and the sheer magnitude of numbers on a single tree. The textures of the various bark fascinated me. An insect crawled along the surface of a leaf. I put my finger in front of it, sort of acknowledging the two of us as inhabitants of the same world, a gesture of friendship.

  It bit me.

  I’d been lost in my world as I sucked on my injured finger for perhaps two minutes when Mayfield said softly, “What do you see that is so interesting and why are you holding your finger in your mouth?”

  “Shapes, colors, variety, and designs. There is more variety here in this small clearing than in all Deep Hole. I could spend hours here just looking, and more smelling, hearing and touching. It’s telling me how bare and senseless our lives were down there. And a bug bit me.”

  She came closer, ignoring my comment on the bug bite. “For me, it’s the sky. How the birds remain aloft, how the air moves and feels so different in the chill of the morning until the heat of now. I think we’re saying the same thing. We were deprived of the variety of the natural world down there.”

  “I think it’s part of why I didn’t fit in. Some days, I argued over nothing. Others didn’t understand my frustrations. My constant questions annoyed people. For the last few years, I picked at people like an aging scab. Inside, I knew things were missing in my life. Like my colors and your air. Like my stars and moon.”

  “Maybe it was just not enough for you down there,” she said.

  I turned to her. “You missed the sky, even if you didn’t know it. How did you handle that?”

  She drew in a breath and closed her eyes for a moment. “You rebelled to some extent and probably got us thrown out. Me? I always felt there was something wrong with me. A discontent. To resolve it, I threw myself into my classroom studies and later my work. I hated you for acting like you didn’t care enough, then half the time you outscored me on tests when you never even studied.”

  I looked at her and remained as serious as I’d ever been when talking to her. “We had the same problems. We just handled them differently.”

  “The ones that stayed below?” she asked. “What about them?”

  “Some are like me. Not as belligerent, but much the same. Then others are just going about their lives in a daze, doing whatever is asked without questioning. They never seem to get excited or depressed, you know what I mean?”

  In something of a surprise, she nodded her agreement. “The rate of people killing themselves has always been a warning sign. The older people, those who lived as adults on the surface remember. They also know they are lucky to be alive while millions died. Survivor Regret Syndrome or similar. Because they lived and so many died, they feel they have no right to complain.”

  It was interesting to know that Mayfield had figured out part of it. I said, “They say that three hundred of us made it down below. Three hundred-seven, to be exact.”

  “I know that.”

  It was time to add a few more cracks to her beliefs. “Do you know the actual number was three-hundred-forty-one? I found that in the archives while snooping.”

  “Thirty-four more people? What happened to them?”

  “In the first few weeks, it was chaos in Deep Hole. There was no leadership set up. People vied for different roles. There was a mini-revolt and about thirty were eventually put to death.”

  Her face was white. “The other four?”

  “Convicted by our leaders of crimes. Two tried to return to the surface and were going to open the outer door, which endangered us all, one was crazed and attacked others until he murdered someone and was then put to death.”

  Mayfield screwed up her face in mock anger. “That is not the heroic tale of our people, Danner. Not the stories they teach us. They never talk about those abandoned on the surface and were sacrificed as the bombs fell. Do you know what I expected to find when we pushed open the outer door?”

  “What?”

  “Bones. The remains of those people we locked out those first days. Those not lucky enough to reach the safety of Deep Hole because we closed and locked the door. I thought their bones would be there.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  We’d wasted enough time. I said, “We better go. Standing here and reminiscing all day will get us nowhere.”

  “It’s not me that’s been doing all the talking,” Mayfield chuckled as if we were back in class talking trash to each other.

  At least we were not fighting or competing anymore. Not too much, and the little vying that existed seemed in good spirits without bitterness. The road leveled out, widened as it joined another, and followed the general flow of the river to our left. The road became gray concrete instead of black pavement. I suddenly remember whizzing down roads in cars with my parents. What now took us an hour to walk had been covered in a minute or two.

  The number of trees at the bottom of the hills seemed greater, also thicker and larger. They were a type, wide branches filled with small vegetation at the bottoms, and narrowing at the tops, sort of like cones. Green cones. Other species spread out and were rounded at the tops, usually filled with large leaves.

  Mayfield pointed.

  To one side, a low pile of rubble was different than the rest of the forest floor. We went to it and found evidence of civilization. Various metal items were strewn around, and a few wrinkled sheets of metal, constructed in a wave pattern of hips and valleys. Rusted bits of iron sat with cracked pieces of plastic.

  Mayfield kicked aside a rotten log. Insects fled by the hundreds. “This was a house, once. Or a cabin. People lived here. Maybe a whole family.”

  The outline of the foundation was clear. Blackened and charred wood indicated a fire at some time. Little else was recognizable and in a few more years the forest would reclaim it all. A passerby would never know people had lived at the spot. In a few more years it would blend in with the rest of the forest
.

  We walked past several more similar places. A few had a wall or two standing upright, one had an intact stone fireplace chimney, but little else. We had somehow forgotten to walk in the forest where we were out of sight as planned. In the solitude and quiet of the area, we strolled down the center of the concrete walk as if we were the only people on the surface and there was no danger.

  Some boulders had rolled from above and come to rest on the road. There were dead trees that had fallen across the road, and new growth sprouted everywhere.

  I asked, “Did you believe it was barren up here like they told us?”

  She snorted softly. “Yes. That was more of their lies, or to be generous, mistaken information. The trees around us are at least a hundred years old. I’m guessing, of course, but they are certainly older than nine years.”

  The road came to a bridge, a stone and concrete affair that spanned the river. We stood at the edge in wonder and fear. Our ancestors a generation ago had built the wonderful thing in front of us. They had used concrete, rocks and probably iron to cross a river that was a hundred feet wide. The bridge was probably two-hundred feet long.

  There was no thought of it being unsafe. Our speechlessness centered from our complete amazement that such a wondrous thing could ever be built.

  I could dig a tunnel with a little help. I understood that. However, the bridge construction was beyond conception. It confirmed we’d lost so much information. So many skills.

  I glanced at Mayfield, waiting for a magnificent pronouncement we would always remember. She had a flair for the dramatic. Instead, she said, “Let’s go.”

  We did.

  Across the river and over the next series of hills were more remains of many small houses, until we reached the summit of one hill and looked out over the tops of the trees into the flat bottom of another valley. One thing stood out above all the rest. A thin column of gray-white smoke. More smoke gathered in a haze near the tops of the trees where the column originated.

  We saw no flames or people, just the smoke.

  There had not been any rainstorms the previous night, so the fire was not from a lightning strike. Odd that I remembered some fires are caused by lightning. As Sarge had said, we remembered more than we knew.

  As each hour progressed, there were new things to see and experience, but also reminders of a life that was long past. If asked to describe the experience, I’d probably choose the word, snippets. There was not a gestalt of the last time we were on the surface, but tiny snippets of recalled information.

  “People are there,” Mayfield whispered as if they could hear from the distance to the smoke from where we stood. “It must be people down there.”

  It would take a half-hour to walk that distance. We moved slowly and our legs were weak. Any distance of travel hurt. I suddenly felt bare and exposed while standing on the top of the hillside. If we could see their smoke, they could see us standing on the high ridge in the center of the road. “Move,” I ordered quietly, ducking as I did.

  Without questioning me, she did the same and we melted into the greenery to the side of the road where the brush concealed us. The small trees immediately surrounded us like the forest that had wrapped us in the safety of its arms near the door to Deep Hole. We couldn’t see ten yards, and people out there shouldn’t be able to see us either.

  In my entire life, at least since age seven, I’d never seen a face I didn’t recognize. I knew the faces and names of everyone in Deep Hole. I’d grown up with them. Only three hundred of us down there, so even those who worked at jobs where we didn’t encounter each other often, were intimately familiar.

  The smoke ahead told me I was about to see a new face, the first in nine years.

  The idea caused words to remain in my throat, unspoken, my mind at a standstill. I’d always been so slick with words. Now they utterly failed me.

  “I can’t believe it,” Mayfield hissed. “There are people outside. What are we going to do?”

  “My first instinct is to run away.” Even to my ears, my voice sounded hoarse and scared.

  She ignored that and continued, “I never really believed there would be people up here. Not real people like us. Especially after all the horror stories we heard. Monsters with three eyes that are more animal than human, yes. Not people who build campfires.”

  “There might only be a few of them left,” I said almost hopefully.

  She playfully punched me on my shoulder with her balled fist. “Get serious, Danner. This is our first day outside and we already found people. Logic says there must be thousands.”

  I don’t know which surprised me more, her revelation or the power in her punch.

  “Could they be other survivors of sanctuaries?” she asked, bringing up an entirely new idea.

  “No. If so, they’d be near theirs and not ours. On second thought, maybe they are and just wanted to get away from their sanctuary and ended up here.”

  Her voice now held a slight quaver. “What are we going to do?”

  I resisted the impulse to punch her shoulder before speaking. “I will tell what we’re not going to do. We are not going to rush down there waving our arms and calling out to our fellow humans that we’re here to save them, and let them shoot us, or worse. Like that bug back in the clearing, they might bite.”

  “Tell me more,” she cooed as if she had already thought that was what I was going to do—or making fun of me. It was hard to tell which.

  On reflection, she had every right to think I’d do something silly like that. I had always been rash and foolish. Act, then apologize. However, now we didn’t get to make but one mistake and it could be our last. “Information is what we need. We need to sneak up on them and watch to learn. No contact.”

  “We have binoculars.”

  Good idea. I should have thought of them.

  She said, “How close do we get?”

  “Not close. Not at first. I think we need to work our way through the trees to where the fire is and try to find a place where we can observe from a distance great enough that one of us accidentally clearing our throat won’t give us away.”

  “We have our guns,” she said bravely.

  “Can you shoot a person?” I asked.

  She shook her head as silently as a mute.

  We moved in the direction of the smoke, or where we thought it was. Twice, when it came into view, the fire was not where we had believed. Moving slowly through the thick forest is not like walking a straight line. Each time, our destination was more to our left and that puzzled me. I don’t like puzzles without solutions.

  Wondering at that coincidence, I noticed my instinct when encountering an obstacle, be it a tree, boulder, or depression, was to always move around it to my right. I’m right-handed. The answer seemed obvious. Our path gradually veered to the right. I then chose to go around half of them to the left. Easier said than done.

  However, the smoke now remained in front. Still, we managed to reach a slight rise without being spotted. Ahead, the trees had been thinned, the stumps revealing where they had grown. A stack of firewood, cut and split into lengths covered the entire wall of a cabin. More rounds waited to be split.

  Nobody was in sight.

  The scent of food cooking drifted up to us.

  The smoke coming from the stone chimney was less than earlier. The fire must be dying down. It had to be near the middle of the afternoon, and we hadn’t eaten all day. The smell of the food caused my stomach to growl.

  Mayfield slipped out of her backpack and rummaged around until her hand came out with a pair of wrappers that indicated they were power bars. I ripped mine open with my teeth and found a small slab of dark granular filling without scent. Or taste. It resembled sand in my mouth, and we had to open a pouch of water to get the sticky substance to slide down our throats.

  It did the trick. I was no longer hungry, and my energy seemed boosted.

  The door to the little house opened. An animal raced out. A dog. We knew
of them but had never seen one.

  A man twice my size followed. He had to duck to clear the top of the door and almost had to turn sideways to get out because of his girth. His head was bald. Dressed in oversized, baggy pale blue and filthy pants, he wore a long-sleeved shirt open halfway down his hairy chest. He paused to stretch in the sunshine.

  The dog darted off to one side and lifted a leg on a log. When finished, it began to return to the man, paused and put its nose into the air. It was sniffing. Then it barked.

  The man spun and looked at the dog, then turned to face where the dog barked. Right at us.

  He ran back into the doorway and that couldn’t be good. “Let’s go.”

  “Follow me,” Mayfield said as she grabbed her backpack in her hand and ran, the pack bouncing against her leg.

  I still wore mine and hung back a little, giving her a good head start. I was at the very edge of the ridge and still able to see the cabin. The dog had its nose to the ground, working back and forth. Then it seemed to catch a scent of us again, and it looked our way as it went into another fit of barking.

  The huge man rumbled from the house with a rifle clutched in his fist.

  He might be big, but he couldn’t run like us. Fear makes a person fly through the trees—and we did.

  The dog started barking in excitement. The chase was on.

  We ran faster.

  Mayfield found a wide path and followed it as it turned to our right. Without the fallen logs, clinging vines, and boulders getting in our way, we were able to speed up even more. Our breath came in gasps, but the dog still barking behind us spurred us along. My legs were beginning to burn. My breath came in pants. We were not used to running.

  In a flash, near a puddle, a footprint drew my attention as we raced past. It was a shoe or boot. A person had used the same path. Maybe recently. If we continued running along it, we might run into the person who had left the footprint.

  “Mayfield, turn,” I panted breathlessly and pointed to a smaller trail.