Page 54 of Trade
I sleep like the dead, sprawled in the middle of our bed. Bennett takes the sofa. I spend the next few days while he’s at work poring through Dad’s books, dog-earring the pages with plants and animals I identified Outside. Based on the flora, the bunker is likely located somewhere in the Alleghany Plateau of Appalachia. Every hour, I take fifteen minutes to stretch and exercise as best I can with my ribs still so tender.
I’m not sure what I’m doing, but I have a new energy, a restlessness that keeps me up at night rewalking every mile I hiked with Dalton, traveling the neural pathways over and over so every step and sight is seared into my memory. I stop imagining Dalton breathing. It deflates my drive, and I need this sense of purpose to do—whatever it is I’m going to do. Come up with a plan, first and foremost, but every idea I have hits a wall almost immediately.
Sneak out.
How? Past the dozens of guards in the corridors leading Outside and then through the bay and its massive metal doors that need two men to open? There’s one exit from the bunker. That fact was drilled into our heads from day one of fire safety.
Fight my way out.
With what weapon?
Take Neil captive and force him to let me go?
In my condition? When he’s never alone?
One day, when Bennett grudgingly tells me he’ll be late with my lunch—he’s been bringing it home from the cafeteria—I duck out of our quarters as soon as he leaves for work and pry open the access hatch we used to climb to the vents.
The access tube is narrower than I remember. The graffiti we carved in the walls is still there, covered by the scribblings of other kids who’ve passed through since. John loves Brenda. Fuck Safety and Compliance. The letter A in a circle. A circle with three lines like a trident. A cross. Symbols we learned from the older kids and doodled in the margins of our books, even though no one knew what they meant. The adults hated it. That was good enough for us.
I crane my neck. The ladder goes much, much higher than I remember.
Well, wasting time won’t make the climb any shorter. I step up the first rung, then the second. I make good time for the first two floors, but as I get more winded, my ribs ache worse and worse, and I have to rest between each five rungs, then each four, then each three. Time slows. I can’t look up because the tunnel that leads to the vents isn’t any closer.
I take longer and longer rests, my arm hooked around a rung so if my knees give out, I won’t plummet to my death. Bennett and I used to do this climb in about ten minutes. He’d chase me up, and we’d be laughing all the way. That was a long time ago.
I almost ask myself what happened to him, but it’s no mystery, not anymore. What happened to him is what happened to me—we believed what we were told. We believed the people in charge instead of the evidence in front of our eyes and our common sense and the compassion in our hearts.
The only reason I know the truth is I got lucky and they turned on me.
And that isn’t okay with me. I don’t want to only be lucky. I want to be brave.
I make it to the top, and my thighs and calves are so overworked that I have to lean against the tunnel walls to prop myself upright as I walk the final yards to the huge vent bolted into the wall of the bunker. The closer I get, the less stale the air, though it still smells like dust and age. Forgotten items litter the space—a pencil stub, a shoelace tied into a hair bow, a pair of boxer shorts.
Pale gray light filters through the cracks between the huge black rubber slats. It’s daytime Outside. I collapse on the concrete floor by the vent and pry the levers as far apart as I can get them, pressing my mouth to the gap, drawing in air like I’m sucking a thick shake through a straw.
The vent doesn’t open directly to the Outside. There is another tunnel beyond that goes for about ten feet, and with the angle at which it’s designed, you can’t see anything but shadow at the end. I stare and stare, trying to pick out shapes in the gloom, but it’s hopeless.
I slump against the wall, lean my cheek against the cold slat, close my eyes, and breathe, tears streaming down my face.
The vent is bolted to the wall with screws the size of my head. The steel plate is an inch thick. Despite generations of kids doing their best to dislodge them, the levers are perfectly in place. There’s no escape here.
I knew it, but I had to come anyway. Dalton fought eight armed men. He had no chance of winning, but he fought like he’d known me his whole life, not just a few days.
I don’t know how to get out of here—it’s impossible—but I think it wouldn’t be the worst thing to die trying.
I inhale and fill my lungs with air I thought was sweet when I was sixteen and knew nothing. It isn’t. The little freshness that makes its way through the vent is saturated by the smell of rubber. There’s something else, too. Something I don’t remember from when I was a kid. A faint trace of something familiar.
Is it rosemary, lavender, and cedar?
Is it my imagination?
I breathe deeper and harder until my head swims, and still, I can’t tell. It can’t be. The vent must open high on the mountain. The peak was almost a sheer vertical, dense with trees and undergrowth.
I concentrate, trying to unwind the notes, but it’s like being so tired that you’ve reread a passage so many times the words blur into an indecipherable mess.
I fall asleep breathing deeply, and when I wake up sore and stiff on the ground, all I smell is bunker and my own dried sweat.
It takes me twice as long to climb down to Level C. When I limp into our quarters, Bennett is sitting on the sofa, seething. Two trays are on our two-person table—my lunch and dinner.
