by Sabina Green
We repeated our guardian game. I was hurriedly moving our things into the shelter as Ruby kept vigil. When everything was all safely down there, I reached for my granddaughter.
“Okay, come on, we’re going to hide.”
As soon as she climbed in, I put the missing shelf back in its place and returned all the books to their places. It was a lot harder from the inside. I was clumsy and slow, but in the end I managed. I secured the panel with hooks on the inside I hadn’t noticed before. I’d be surprised if anyone discovered the entrance.
It started growing dark. There was a torch somewhere in the pile of stuff, but there was no time to look for it, so we ended up closing and locking the sturdy basement door almost in the dark.
“We’ll be safe here,” I told the transfixed girl and hoped that I could believe that too.
Ruby finally went to sleep. She refused to decide between the top and the bottom bunk bed, for seemingly silly reasons–It’s too high up there, what if I fall down? Not down there, the tentacle monster would be able to reach me!–but I understood her unwillingness. It was unbearable for her to have the single person she had left in the world out of sight. No wonder, after everything she’d been through? Suddenly she didn’t have a Mum anymore, she quite possibly watched me dig a grave for the people who were hosting a dinner party for us just a few days ago, and she was in a foreign country. She had also watched me cry, listened to children’s stories about death, caught a strange man stealing in our house, and then she was forced to descend into this underground tomb with no view of the outside.
I took both mattresses from the bed and laid them down next to each other into an empty corner. All I had to do was lie down next to her, and she calmed down. There wasn’t enough light to read her a bedtime story. Maybe she wouldn’t have wanted one anyway, after all the ones she’d heard today. So I was humming a few melodies until her eyelids became heavy. She pressed the elephant to her face and put her thumb in her mouth again.
Even if I had some candles or lanterns around, I wouldn’t have used them. What if someone saw the light coming from the roof windows and came over to investigate? Since there wasn’t enough light, I decided I might as well stay in bed too. I thought I would be tossing and turning for hours, but in the end I fell asleep soon after the girl. The sleep deficit and mental strain used up my last bits of energy.
When I opened my eyes in the morning, it took a moment to remember where I was. It was getting light and I started to make out the outlines of our shelter in the gray light. There was so much for me to do, but I couldn’t find the motivation, so I stayed in bed and watched our new home and Ruby breathing heavily.
Surprisingly, I felt a wave of anger. Not that I’d always been the best at everything, I made mistakes just like everyone else, but I liked to be the master of my own destiny. I couldn’t stomach the fact that someone had made some very serious decisions on my behalf–even though they meant the difference between life and death–and that they’d thrown me into this prison.
I understood that Connie was only trying to keep us safe, but even so, I desperately wanted not to be here. What would happen if I ignored their instructions and walked out? Lived on my own, travelled around among the dying population? I let the vision of that overwhelm me, but after a while I realised one important thing.
I understood why The Collective wanted all the adult survivors to have a child with them. Not only did that natural instinct to protect their young kick in, which meant they were ready to do things they might not normally think of doing. But there was another reason, or at least I thought there was. Watching the suffering and pain of the end of mankind would be incredibly difficult for every one of us. I myself was tired and aching. I felt like all The Collective had done was open all my old wounds, especially the notional, mental ones, and pour salt into them. The thought of ending it all forever was within reach.
But I couldn’t. Because of Ruby.
Children. That was a damn smart move. I snorted, and because these thoughts had managed to make me miserable, I threw away the duvet and got up.
Ruby still slept and I used this free time to have a look around and start sorting through the mountain of things I’d hastily moved here last night.
I used the free metal frame of the bunk bed as a shelf and stored things there to make space in the room. I put all the food onto the kitchen counter and soundlessly opened cupboards and shelves to inspect the equipment. All the dishes came in two pieces. I walked into the pantry again and decided that I’d do inventory right away and write it all down.
When Ruby woke up, I made us some breakfast of oats with raisins, banana and long-life milk, and then with her help sorted through the toys and games. We laid them out on shelves so they were visible. They made the place at least a little bit nicer and I decided that we’d spend some time this morning drawing pictures to put on the walls.
I still held bitterness at our enforced stay here, but I couldn’t pass it onto Ruby. I made the shelter into an adventure den, and our primary task was to decorate it, make it into a home. Since my granddaughter was very creative, she threw herself into it with gusto. The dining table turned into a workshop area. I was helping her a lot and suggesting things to draw…
“Easter eggs,” Ruby laughed. “Grampa, you’re silly. We’ve already had Easter!”
“Ah, what does that matter! We are the masters of this castle!” I threw my hands in a grandiose gesture. “We can have Easter every day if we want!”
But she also spent a lot of time on her own, coming up with ideas and then executing them in silence for fifteen, twenty minutes. That gave me time to sort through more of our stuff.
I was taking things out of the suitcases and bags and putting them away on shelves and wardrobes. Before I knew it, it was dark again, and then came another morning.
Days were flying past us and I was marking them dutifully in our calendar. Ruby and I started to develop routines around cooking, playing, working, exercising, bathing. Sometimes we could hear distant sounds from above, when the desperate came to Darlene and Hugh’s farm to look for food and shelter. In those moments we were as quiet as a mouse, because what if they heard us too? Other than that, we acted as if we were the last people on Earth.
Of course, I had a lot of time to think. Either about Wyatt’s family and my own and how they were doing, why weren’t we given some other fresh vegetables along with the sacks of potatoes, when and how did they even move all those provisions here through that small opening, or how was it possible that we still had electricity. Did the farm have solar panels or its own generator? I was wondering where the regular faint vibration was coming from, before figuring out it was the hood, which must have been set on automatic somehow. Probably because of fresh air?
Days and weeks blended together, each of them indistinguishable from the rest, apart from the occasional sounds of uninvited visitors upstairs, and a few other things.
One of them, more of a nuisance than anything else, was that the door next to the pantry couldn’t be opened. I suspected another storage area behind it, but none of the keys from Connie fit the lock and I hadn’t found any more keys in the shelter. The door was sturdy, couldn’t be taken out of the frame, kicked out or broken into. There weren’t any tools for that here. Soon enough I gave up any further attempts and let it go. Clearly The Collective hadn’t thought everything through that well, otherwise they’d allow me to somehow enter that mysterious room.
Since trouble often came in pairs, there was another thing. The hood above the stove might have been successfully filtering out all the fumes from fried meals, but the fan was replacing them with a faint odour of something which had nothing to do with our food. I remembered moving the dead bodies of the farmers to the freshly dug out grave, the smell of their rotting bodies was just as repulsive, so I had an idea of the source of this new smell. I was trying to think about it as little as pos
sible, most times it wasn’t hard, because the smell was either becoming more faint, or we were getting used to it.
And then there was the second letter written in my daughter’s hand. Billy. Who could it be? I didn’t know anyone with that name and didn’t remember Connie ever mentioning it either. Although the letter wasn’t addressed to me, what did it matter? Who was there to tell me off for opening a sealed envelope and reading other people’s mail?
Billy,
My name is Connie. You don’t know me and I don’t know you, and yet you mean so much to me. The fact that you made it among the survivors means that you are a good, honourable person, that your heart is in the right place, you love life and respect it.
By the time you’re reading my letter, you will have gone through six months of quarantine in a shelter far from everything and everybody else. Being with other people again must be such a relief, but it can’t be easy either. Creating a new society and keeping it running must be a lot of work, no doubt about it. I firmly hope that all the good personalities that made it to the end of the old world as we knew it will actively work to enrich the new community. To create a home, a safe base.
It’s natural to seek rest, relaxation and entertainment after work. What better way to wash away a hard day’s work than to listen to beautiful music? And what could be more satisfying than to teach that music to others?
Everyone will bring something unique to your new community. You have a special task–to bring smiles to the faces of both children and adults, to allow them to lose themselves in another world, a world full of melodies. I wish I could be there and see all those smiles, I’m sure they will be wide, bright and enchanted.
Good luck, Billy. Take care of yourself and others.
Don’t forget, there is strength in unity.
Best wishes,
Connie
What was that supposed to mean?
So this Billy must be another survivor like I was. If he was supposed to bring music to the new community, what was my contribution? Surely not the thing I’d been busy doing the last two years, drowning in depression? I snorted.
Why the hell didn’t Constance send the letter directly to him, or handed it over in person? Why did it end up with me?
However angry I was with my daughter, I knew perfectly well where it was coming from. I wanted this second letter to be for me as well, I wanted her words to belong to me. I could have added it to the collection of treasured family photographs. In the end, I did in fact find a few more words meant for me and Ruby, although it was just a quick, short note rather than a letter.
Penny’s recipe book. I was going through my wife’s recipes, looking for inspiration. We were getting sick of canned food after several months and I needed to give things a new spin. Ruby and I had attempted most of the savoury dishes, as well as baked and raw cakes, pies and desserts. Thank goodness for Connie’s obsession with veganism, as she had taken the liberty to write out alternatives for yogurt, cow’s milk and eggs under every recipe. Who would have thought that I’d be grateful for soya, almond milk and chia seeds that The Collective remembered to prepare for us?
Either way, I was often flipping through the recipe book, as if it was my Bible. Sooner or later I had to discover Connie’s note on the last empty page.
Forgive me!
I love you more than anything in the world!
C.
At the beginning of quarantine I’d left Hugh’s fishing rod by the door, since it wasn’t in our way in that spot, but after a few weeks it ended up in the pantry. On the ground below the lowest shelf, tucked behind water and oil containers to keep it out of sight, because it reminded me too much of the freedom I’d lost. Despite that, I did sometimes see it, while moving the containers around or when looking for a place to store something else. Sometimes I quickly looked away, other times–the last two months more and more frequently–I sat in front of it, staring. I missed fishing as much as fresh air and nature, and maybe a bit more. Ruby and I hadn’t had any fresh meat for almost half a year and I was sometimes woken up from a dream in which fish were jumping into my boat of their own volition. My mouth watered thinking about a fried fish–any fish! I wasn’t trying to suppress these dreams, on the contrary. I was lying in bed, awake, staring into the darkness, imagining myself casting a fishing rod again and again. The telling tug of the line. Ground covered with fish scales. And fillets sizzling on a pan.
It wouldn’t be very long now, according to the calendar we had less than a week to go. Compared to how easily time flew past at the beginning of our stay here, the end was impossibly slow and dragged-out. We were sick of canned food, and all indoor activities had become dull by constant repetition; this place was giving us cabin fever, although each of us in a slightly different way. I sometimes wondered if it was really necessary to stay in the shelter for half a year, after the first three months we heard much fewer visitors from upstairs, and after the fourth there were none at all. I stuck to this instruction solely because of Connie.
At first, Ruby would ask several times a day when we could go outside again, for a walk or to the playground. Gradually, these questions became less and less frequent, until they stopped. As if she was getting used to this new life, even accepting it as normal, and that made me uneasy. Because for me this was just an intermezzo before our life truly began.
Every day after dinner the girl and I ticked off another day in the calendar. I had no idea whether she really understood why we were doing it. But I didn’t dare to bring it up in conversation so as not to inspire another wave of questions about when we were going to go play outside, because there was nothing I could do to speed things up. Why constantly remind ourselves that we were locked away from the world here? When we only had a few more days left to go, I waited until she made a big black X in the calendar, and pointed out the red circle.
“Just three more sleeps and we can go outside.”
What must have all these changes been like for her? First someone takes all nature away from her and locks her up in a basement, only to kick her out of it again and chase her out into the world. People could be trained, could adapt to anything, sure, but I was getting sick of somebody else showing me the way. I wanted to make my own damn way.
The day prior to the red mark, I was getting ready to leave. I had no idea what to pack for our journey to the upside down tree–how long would we stay there? Would we be able to come back here?–, but some things seemed obvious. Food, plastic bowls, cutlery, a water bottle, matches, a pocket knife. The elephant and a small blanket for Ruby, in case we had to stay out overnight. A letter for Billy, both brass keys. The fishing rod I’d taken out of the pantry and with a lot of relief put back by the door. A few tea candles that were left over, just in case.
I almost didn’t sleep that night but even so, I didn’t feel tired when the morning came. I got dressed, had breakfast, brushed my teeth and rearranged the contents of my backpack before Ruby even started stirring. As soon as she opened her eyes, I chased her out of bed, although normally she was free to take her time getting up. Her breakfast, personal hygiene and getting dressed were a matter of minutes.
“Ready?” I asked. Ruby yawned and nodded.
I hurried to the door like I was trying to escape from a house on fire. Every movement I made suddenly seemed so monumental, almost symbolic. As if by unlocking the door of the shelter and moving the bookcase panel out of the way I was announcing our new freedom.
The house was in chaos. Not only was there a faint smell of bodies just like down in the basement, the furniture was turned over and wind had blown leaves and dust indoors. Objects in various states of disrepair were thrown all around the room from where people were going through them. The kitchen was completely emptied out, which was no surprise of course.
I squeezed my granddaughter’s hand and we walked out onto the patio. The stench of rotting bodies was much stronge
r there and I knew that it certainly wasn’t because of the farm owners. It reminded me instantly of what we were smelling in the basement, but this outside version was much more intense. Was it the heat? Or maybe the hood with the fan had something to do with it? Perhaps some special filters, taking the edge off the smell? Whatever it was, I shivered and tried not to think of the ones who didn’t survive the virus.
There was no sight of Darlene’s dog, but their cattle had somehow got out of the enclosure and were grazing on the garden beds around the house, along the lengthy driveway, by the forest, among the trees of a nearby orchard. Sounds of nature were coming to us so much louder than before, buzzing bees, singing birds, all of this hitting me with a new intensity.
“Alright, let’s go,” I told Ruby who was silent, and set off towards the upside down tree that Connie took us to half a year back.
I felt like Alice in Wonderland. I had no idea how many years had passed since I’d been on a walk without bumping into another person; there were so many animals around though, it was like walking through the wilderness.
Summer was in full swing. The first thing we did was visit a nearby orchard where we stuffed our pockets and stomachs with apples. The trees were full because there had been nobody around to pick them. Birds had pecked a few of them, but the rest were waiting for us. Who would have thought that fresh fruit would taste like the most delicious thing in the world? After all the cans and somewhat successful cooked meals, the juice coming out of these apples felt like a little bit of heaven, and even had medicinal effects. I took a moment to recover from my ecstasy and told myself I would never touch canned beans again.
“We won’t have to go back there again, Grampa, will we?”
To Australia? To Darlene’s farm? “Where?”
“To the basement.”
Never. Not for all the tea in China! “We won’t honey, don’t worry. We can be outside now.”