by Tarah Benner
This isn’t home, I remind myself. You’re never going to see Sawyer again.
That fills me with new desperation as we make our way down the emergency stairwell.
I brace myself for the flood of questions and protests we’ll get once people realize we don’t belong there. But when we step into the medical ward, I’m shocked to see that this level is dark except for the glowing red “admittance” sign.
“What the hell is going on?” Celdon asks aloud.
He moves his head so the beam of his interface can travel over the deserted waiting area and the vacant nurse’s station.
A shiver rolls down my spine at the sight of all the empty chairs. I’ve never known Health and Rehab to leave the nurse’s station unattended. And it definitely shouldn’t be dark.
I walk toward the exam rooms and nearly fall headfirst into something metal. It rolls away and bangs into the wall, and I realize it’s a gurney. My heart is beating wildly in my chest.
I grip the metal frame tightly to calm myself down, trying to think.
It’s okay, I tell myself. Everything’s fine.
I push the gurney out of the way, but it clangs into something else.
“Celdon!”
The blue beam of his interface shows he’s already right behind me. It moves over the gurney I ran into and down the tunnel, where more gurneys are pushed together in a row.
I squeeze between the wall and the first one and peer into the nearest room. It’s empty, and the bed has been stripped of its linens. There’s no chart hanging on the bed and no patient.
I keep moving down the tunnel, peeking into the next room, but it’s just as empty as the first.
It doesn’t make sense.
“Hello?” I call.
My voice disappears in the darkness.
No one answers.
“Something’s wrong,” says Celdon. He sounds genuinely scared. “Where is everyone?”
I don’t answer him. I just wander into the next room and stare at the cabinets against the far wall. They’re wide open, and it looks as though they’ve been emptied.
“What the —”
Celdon is putting it together, and I rush down the tunnel toward the supply closet. It’s in the same place as the closet Sawyer pulled me into back home, and being in the darkened replica of our medical ward gives me a chill.
I throw the door open. Sure enough, these shelves look depleted, too.
There’s something sinister going on here. I can feel it in my bones.
I bump into Celdon on my way to the waiting area and nearly lose my shit. He’s breathing as hard as I am, and I grab his arm and pull him back toward the emergency stairwell.
My urgency to find someone has morphed into panic.
Where is everyone?
As soon as we reach the door, I hear footsteps climbing up the stairs on the other side. I shake my head at Celdon and drag him into the shadows behind a fleet of electric wheelchairs.
He ducks down and clicks off his interface just as the door to the stairwell bursts open.
Part of me is worried about being discovered, but the other part is so anxious to see another human being that I’d gladly brave a night in the cages.
The stranger is also wearing an interface, which casts just enough light for me to see that it’s one of our Operations workers from the train.
My heart starts to beat faster. What is he doing up here?
His expression is set, which tells me he’s not at all surprised to find the medical ward deserted. He doesn’t bang into the gurneys or call out for assistance. He just moves toward the exam rooms with purpose.
I wait with bated breath as his footsteps fade down the tunnel, and Celdon gives me a puzzled look.
After several minutes, I hear footsteps again, and the man returns holding a small box. I can’t tell what’s in it, but I’d bet it’s full of the remaining medical supplies.
That’s what the empty crates were for. But why are they looting from 119?
He yanks the door open again and disappears down the stairs. I let out a sigh of relief and wait a couple minutes until I’m sure he’s had enough time to make it down a few flights.
Celdon flips his interface back on, and his eyes look wild in the artificial blue light. He’s just as suspicious as I am.
I motion toward the stairs, and we follow the man at a cautious pace. I don’t know where he’s going, but I want to check the main hall. It’s one of the few places in the compound that could fit thousands of people.
There must be some reason everyone is out of their beds in the middle of the night. It’s probably the same reason the power is out and why one of our Operations workers was in the medical ward.
Maybe the workers received word that people had been hurt somewhere in the compound. Maybe there’s been a terrorist attack.
As we pass the Ag Level and hit the first landing for Waste Management, I get a nasty whiff of something I missed on the way up.
The second I smell it, I can’t believe it didn’t stop me before. The odor is so pungent and so horribly familiar that it’s enough to make me instantly nauseated.
It’s the dead level.
Last night, I’d had my face crushed into the warm dirt, yet all I’d smelled was damp earth and the slight hint of decay. The stench here is much too strong.
Alarm bells go off in my head, and I take a step toward the door without thinking. Everything inside me is screaming to back away, but my hand is already on the handle.
The door shouldn’t be unlocked, but the handle turns easily.
Celdon rounds the corner onto the landing and smells what I smelled a second too late.
“Harper! Don’t —”
I open the door, and the putrid odor hits me like an avalanche. I gag and stagger backward, but the smell sears the inside of my nostrils and sticks to the back of my throat.
Celdon chokes loudly and turns to wretch on the bottom step.
“What the fuck?” he yells.
This isn’t the stench of a reasonable number of corpses in various stages of decomposition. This is a mass grave.
In a trance, I pull my shirt over my mouth and nose and step inside. The odor is still suffocating, and I have to hold my breath to stay standing.
Celdon coughs and scans his interface across the field, and the bottom drops out of my stomach.
Mounds and mounds of the dead are crammed together as far as I can see. In the distance, the ground slopes upward where bodies are stacked two or three deep.
There must be thousands of people recently buried here. The sight is overwhelming.
Stumbling sideways, I bump into Celdon, who pulls me back out onto the landing with a clammy hand and slams the door shut.
As the sound reverberates in the narrow stairwell, we both exchange a look of pure despair. Neither one of us says anything because the truth is too horrible.
One-nineteen can’t be our new home. Everyone here is dead.
Author’s Note
Thank you for reading Exposure. If you’ve made it this far, it means you’ve already read Recon and possibly the Defectors Trilogy, and I’m extremely grateful that you’ve followed me along my journey as an author.
This year, I was able to take a big leap to become a full-time writer, which wouldn’t have been possible without the support of readers like you. I’m hoping to have much more time to devote to writing books in the near future, so please keep reading them, and tell your friends!
The Fringe series has grown so much in scope since I first envisioned it. It was one of those ideas that takes hold and refuses to be ignored, but I had no idea just how big of a playground the compound would be when I first created it or how real these characters would become.
Eli, for instance, has truly taken on a life of his own. I knew a little bit about his past in book one, but Exposure was when I discovered the horrors he faced as a child and, simultaneously, his remarkable capacity for goodness.
His flaws
, his willingness to make sacrifices for Harper, and his general “don’t fuck with me” attitude make him one of my favorite characters that I’ve written.
I’m very excited to get to know Owen in book three. Both Parker brothers are intense, stubborn, and natural-born leaders, and I’m interested to see how their different upbringings have shaped them as people. They’ve spent half their lives apart, and I expect their different paths in adulthood will lead to some interesting ethical disagreements.
Harper also had the chance to show a wider range of emotions in Exposure, and taking that ride with her was tough at times. As I wrote, I often had the impulse to rush her through those emotional hurdles, but I had to be patient as she struggled with her fear of the Fringe and the trauma of taking a human life.
Still, I got my badass Harper fix during her fight with Marta. The illegal fight circuit was something I was very eager to revisit in book two because boxing and martial arts have become a personal obsession of mine in real life.
In the past few months, I’ve been learning the fundamentals right alongside Harper, and I found myself going back to write in cool combinations I’d learned and incorporating some elements of MMA. (I’ve also become addicted to The Ultimate Fighter.)
The style of fighting Harper and Eli use isn’t purely kickboxing or MMA. Elbows, knees, and below-the-belt kicks are allowed. It’s three rounds like most MMA fights — and the fighters can go to the ground — but I wanted the majority of the fighting to be stand-up because I think it’s much more dynamic.
Keep in mind that these are illegal bouts, so more dangerous maneuvers would be allowed for novice fighters. Plus, fighting styles are always evolving.
MMA is relatively new, and it’s extremely new for women. (The first major U.S. women’s event was in 2009, and the first UFC women’s match took place in 2013.) By the time the nuclear apocalypse comes, I’m confident we’ll have yet another new style.
This book also forced me to explore the political climate that could have led to Death Storm in depth. The prospect of nuclear annihilation was difficult for me to stomach because it’s been one of my biggest fears since I was a kid.
When I was in seventh grade, my teacher showed us a film about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which gave me nightmares for years afterward. (Thanks a lot, Mr. G.)
Ever since, I’ve dreaded the prospect of nuclear war, which made speculating on how it could actually come about that much more terrifying.
Before the compounds existed, the world’s nuclear status was well beyond where it is today. (As of this book’s publication, nine nations have nuclear weapons: the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel.) However, world powers suspect Iran is trying to build a nuclear bomb, so it follows that we have not seen the end of nuclear stockpiling.
The attack on Washington, D.C., described in the book would have been the inciting incident that provoked Operation Extermination against the United States’ enemies. This is the point where the first-generation extreme “preppers” (Paxton’s grandparents’ generation) and their compounds gained some mainstream acceptance.
Over the next twenty years, the political climate would have gone from bad to worse, culminating in a barrage of nuclear attacks on U.S. soil from multiple hostile nations.
You can think of the effects of a nuclear attack like a bull’s-eye, with the epicenter of the attack zone being annihilated and heavy damage spreading for miles around. The economy, supply chains, and major electrical grids would collapse.
Though the compounds were situated outside these hot zones, the surrounding environment would not be immune to the damaging effects of radiation. Radioactive material is very hard to contain because it can travel by rain and wind and get absorbed by plants and animals.
During and after Death Storm, people living in the U.S. would have migrated away from large cities that could become targets for terrorists. Since the compounds were designed to protect inhabitants from radiation, many people would have sought refuge there after Death Storm.
However, once they came close to reaching capacity, each compound’s board would have become more selective about whom they let in. Compound leaders would have been concerned with protecting the community’s long-term interests — not saving as many humans as possible.
Overcrowding or a graying population could cause the entire system to collapse, which is why the board experimented with the Fringe Program (more on this to come).
And speaking of a graying population, how about those dead people? In a self-sustaining system, you wouldn’t want anything to go to waste. That includes dead bodies.
I thought long and hard about what the compound would do with the dead. Traditional burials or cremation seemed like a missed opportunity for recycling, and neither of these methods is very good for the environment. (Remember, the health of the compound ecosystem is very important.)
So far, the most eco-friendly burial method is one that was developed by a Swedish company called Promessa Organic AB. It involves freeze-drying a corpse and using sound waves to dissolve it into a powder. After that, the powder is dried in a vacuum chamber and converted into soil within six to twelve months.
This is by far the coolest method I’ve read about, but it produces a byproduct that is, quite honestly, far less creepy than an entire floor of dead bodies in various stages of decomposition.
I wondered if there was any place in the world where they were already attempting to turn human bodies into compost using a more traditional method (think a compost bin). As it turns out, there is.
One woman in Seattle is working on a prototype of an urban death center, which will involve burying people together in a multilevel facility with wood chips and saw dust. Although the dead levels in the compounds are a slightly different approach, it’s the same idea: controlled decomposition resulting in nutrient-rich compost. Waste Management would be able to turn this into compost tea, which could be used in the compound’s hydroponic growing system.
If you’ve ever tried your hand at composting, you know overloading the compost heap (as they did in 119) is a very bad idea.
The reality of these concepts might be more than most people want to think about, but I believe it’s important to ask “what if?” Not only is that the question that leads to lots of great discoveries (and great books), but I think it could also help us avoid some of the really awful chapters of human history.
I hope you enjoyed Exposure and that you’ll help me spread the word about the series by leaving a review on Amazon and Goodreads. Reviews help readers discover books by independent authors, and I really appreciate them.
You can also sign up for my mailing list to be the first to hear about book three of The Fringe and receive exclusive reader perks.
And, as always, feel free to get in touch to tell me what you thought of the book. I love hearing from readers.
*****
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