Page 12 of Bait
“Stick it in here.” For some reason that made me blush harder and I didn’t know for sure, but I thought I heard Torch cough in the front. After a couple of attempts—my hand kept slipping—I was able to get it.
“Thanks.” Candela patted my shoulder and offered me one of those pirate leers before she crawled up to her seat.
“Don’t get up unless the vehicle has fully stopped.”
I wanted to tell Torch to go fuck himself, but instead I gave him a thumbs up before gripping the sides of my seat hard enough to make the leather squeak.
The rumble of the engine was loud, and it made the entire thing thrum. It wasn’t hard enough to throw me, but it was a continuous vibration. Without any ceremony, Torch got it moving and soon pulled out of the wooded area. The rig was not moving very fast, but even that motion made my stomach turn. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying not to think about the fact that I might never see the bunker again. That I was leaving the place that had been my only home.
I always thought it would feel so freeing, but I was frightened. Biting my tongue to keep from begging Torch to let me out. I stayed like that for a while, listening to the thrumming of the rig as it moved and letting my stomach settle. Working hard on not crying. When I opened my eyes again again, I noticed we’d left the wooded area and were now in terrain that looked more like what I expected the desert to look like.
“Is it normal to have such dense green areas out here?” I spoke a little louder than necessary, which made me feel stupid, but when Candela turned around, she didn’t seem bothered by it.
“It’s a new thing, from the last five years or so.” She pointed to a spot in the distance that seemed green. “They’ve cropped up here and there. The biggest one is around the bunker.”
“Is it from the volcanic ash?” That is what my dad would’ve said. Volcanic ash is supposed to be like a super-fertilizer and every inch of the world was covered in it for almost thirty years. Candela nodded, with a wistful expression on her face, like she knew I was thinking about my dad.
“That’s the theory.” She sent a glance in Torch’s direction, but he was fully focused on the road. The vehicle lurched a bit as we climbed up elevation and the movement made another wave of nausea roil through me. It was so bad I covered my mouth, just in case it just came out.
“Take a breath, Brains.” A hand landed on my shoulder, warm and reassuring. Candela.
“I’m okay,” I croaked unconvincingly. I counted to fifty, and then I opened one eye. My seat faced a small window that made everything bright. Bright like the light of the sun, not the artificial kind I’d seen my whole life. My eyes hurt from it.
Then I saw it. The wide-open expanse of the land. The volcanic ash had drifted here. There was a coating of that dark dust everywhere, but the mesas and the mountains in the distance were like what I imagined, better than that. Despite the coat of ash, the land looked surprisingly lush.
“There’s so much green.”
“Nature came back with a vengeance after The Burst,” Candela said, eliciting a rare grunt of what sounded like agreement from Torch. “The combination of all volcanic ash, a lot less humans running down resources and virtually no air pollution has put Mother Nature in overdrive.” My father had talked about this very thing so much. Even Becker had promised that we could see this if we were patient and waited for the world to come back to life, but I don’t think he ever intended to let us out of there.
“Who else from the bunker is out here?”
I finally asked, ready to hear what happened.
ChapterFive
The question was for Candela, but Torch answered.
“There are a couple hundred of us that were pushed out.” That didn’t add up to all the people who had disappeared, not accounting for deaths. There had been quite a few deaths and mysterious illnesses in the last few years, a lot more than normal.
“A lot of people they got rid of, like Gregorio,” Candela tells me, as if she can read my mind. I’ve had time to grieve for my brother, and I was able to see his body. But now that I know it wasn’t an accident, the wound I thought was healed felt raw once again.
“It started with Candela.” My stomach dropped when he said that. To think it was my actions that began all of this. God I was a monster.
“Was it because of…” I started to ask, but Candela cut me off.
“Don’t blame yourself, Brains.” She waved her hand like she wanted to shoo away my frown. “The best thing that happened to us was getting pushed out of that place. And it wasn’t you.” She said that now, but I could see the scars on her shoulders. It could not have been easy. “A lot of lower levelers were staring to ask questions.” She ran her finger of the edge seat as she talked, her eyes unfocused. “People were wondering if we were being told the truth. I think Becker was testing it with us, if he could just get rid of people who were ‘disruptive’.”
“Is your dad still alive?” I asked in a small voice.
“Alive and well,” she said with a grin. I let out a breath I’d probably been holding for the last ten years. “The air was still iffy when we came out,” she shook her head like she wanted to dislodge whatever memory was in her head. “Hell, it was more than iffy, it was foul, but they let us take one of those filtration masks we could share between us.” One mask for both of them when we had thousands. Becker was a fucking monster. “But we managed, my dad was always good at the survivalist stuff.” Her dad had been a world-renowned geologist before The Burst. I’d heard stories of him living off the land for months at a time as part of his research. At least Candela had him. “Becker let us bring our go-packs too, he always does. You’re the first one they sent out with nothing.” That was not a surprise. He hated Gregorio and probably hated me too. Everyone in the bunker had an assigned backpack that lived in their rooms. It was for the event of an evacuation and had enough water and supplies to keep us alive for a few days. “We got lucky and found some folks who took us in. A lot of the peoples whose ancestral lands are in this area have come back and are trying to rebuild in the old ways. We made community with them. Dad’s still there. He got himself a woman.” That made me grin. Candela’s mother had passed away shortly after she was born, and he’d never remarried, despite probably being pressured by the council.
“Is there a town or does everyone live in trucks like this?” Torch coughed at that, and Candela laughed.
“No one else has a truck like this.” I liked seeing her cockiness. It was something I’d always loved about Candela. She was so confident. “There is a little township about two days’ drive where a lot of the bunker folks have settled.” She lifted a hand and waved it in a “more or less” gesture. “Pre-Burst times, it would’ve been more like ten hours, but roads are not as easy to navigate, and we stop to scavenge where we can. It’s an old ski lodge. It’s high in the mountains close to where Flagstaff used to be.”
“How long has it been safe to be outside?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer.
“From what surface folks say, it’s been a good fifteen years now.” Candela’s voice lost its usual lightness then. It was right around the time they’d really ramped up the Population Revitalization Project, basically forcing women to be bred. That was when they started cracking down on what we could read. Access to electronics. I opened my mouth to ask if the council knew but decided to spare myself.
