Page 4 of Bait
Air Quality Above Ground: N/A
Announcement #1:Lower-level dweller Torch Bernal was apprehended and captured after breaking-and-entering the rooms of Miss Alma Corvado and attempting to violently assault her. Bernal had served as the personal guard to Miss Corvado’s brother Gregorio. He is in hold.
Announcement #2:Showers are to be reduced to one per household, per week, until further notice.
Announcement #3:Leader Thomas Becker Jr has been re-elected as CBE, Chief Bunker Executive, unanimously.
Deaths and Live Births reports are provisionally suspended.
Those of us who remain will make the world anew. Community thrives in solidarity.
ChapterOne
Habrian Bunker
Former New Mexico Territory
Days since The Burst: 10,718
Population: 1,140
Air Quality Above Ground: N/A
“You’ve got another one,” Danika’s voice broke through the usual quiet of our small office in the library. I was working on returns and was too absorbed to register what she’d said. Once it did, I put down my papers and gestured for her to close the door.
“Who?” I mouthed as I carefully moved the bookshelf behind my desk and opened the latch for the small compartment where I kept my secret stash. Danika stared at me with those icy blue eyes thatwere so effective at communicating distress. She was in the mandatory blue tunic and white trousers we had to wear on the scribe floor. Danika had a pretty face, heart-shaped and with a delicate chin, but she was very tall. Her family was one of the few who came from Europe to enter the bunker. Like me, she’d been born on the scribe level.
“It’s Brenda A, from the kitchens.” She whispered it. Danika whispered everything. But I was surprised to hear Brenda A asked for my help. She had volunteered early for the Population Revitalization Project. She was younger than I was, probably not even twenty yet, but she’d seemed eager for her first breeding when her name was called at the assembly. That thought sent a prickle of unease through me, wondering if Brenda A was up to something. But then I remembered that she and Carolina, the breeder who had just died in childbirth, had been best friends.
I swallowed back a sigh and looked at the list I kept of all the eligible breeders participating in the experiment in our bunker. It was not like this information should be available to us. I’d read that before The Burst, medical information was closely guarded and very private, but the council made a point of announcing who was in the experiment and giving them preferential treatment. A lot of it was not exactly subtle. The majority of the women in the experiment were lower-levels who’d been cajoled with the offer of nicer rooms and bigger rations for their families.
But once they agreed, they realized they had very little say in who they were bred with. Some of them were bred by multiple men at once, which would’ve been fine it they were asked for their consent. They were not. It had not always been this way, but the dwindling birth rates and the aging of the original dwellers led to increasingly aggressive practices from the council.
We all understood it was our duty to keep the bunker alive. That those of us who survived The Burst were responsible for bringing the planet back—once it was safe to go outside again. It just seemed there were more and more rules around what we could or could not do. Initially, being part of the program was voluntary and only for women over twenty-one. Then they lowered it to sixteen and made it mandatory to do a screening. Now if you had a uterus, you would be bred if, and when, you were at peak fertility, it was only a matter of time. Increasingly life in the bunker was not much of a life at all.
My mother, a geneticist and the person who had developed the fertility drugs to enhance breeding, had grown weary of her contribution to a project that had become predatory. The drugs which initially were intended to make sexual intimacy more pleasurable for women had been corrupted and given to them in a dosage that essentially put them in heat. Once she realized she could not stop the council from doing what they were doing, she developed a fertility suppressant which she secretly distributed.
We didn’t have enough for all those of breeder age to take it indefinitely, but at least long enough to skip a few cycles. It wasn’t that my mother wanted to hinder the revitalization, she just wanted to give those who volunteered for it the choice to do it when they wanted.
There was still a lot we didn’t know about the long-term effects of the enhancer or whether it was actually helping with the population numbers. Technically those of us who were of breeding age were forbidden from interfering with our cycles. It was how we survived, Leader Becker said. After all, here we were decades after the end of the world, still living. That didn’t mean those of us with wombs who kept our bunker from dying couldn’t have a choice in when we reproduced. So, I made sure I did my part in giving us that choice, even if I was risking my place in the bunker by doing so.
I took a small packet of suppressant powder from the box and looked up at Danika, who answered before I could even ask the question. “She’s nineteen.”
She was getting up there. She’d likely be forced into a match soon. The only reason that at twenty-eight I wasn’t on my third or fourth breeding cycle was the concession made for me because of my parents, but I knew I didn’t have much longer. Leader Becker had not been exactly subtle the last few times he’d seen me. But my own troubles were for me to worry about at a later time.
“The council is meeting for another hour, so you’ve got time.” Danika paid a lot of attention to the daily schedules posted by the Bunker Life Offices. It seemed these days the council spent more time locked up in meetings than dealing with the people they were supposed to look after. But in any case, council meetings were the best times for these handovers because most people were taking breaks and not paying too much attention to who was out in the corridor.
Survival in a bunker meant that life was regimented almost to the second. Everyone had a job to do and a time to do it in. Even breaks were mandatory and there wasalwayssomeone watching. As a bunker baby, I was better than most at escaping the prying eyes we constantly had on us, but recently it was getting harder to do. There had been so many confrontations between the lower levels and the uppers. The air in the bunker was becoming more contentious with each passing day. More and more of the systems were failing. Things were breaking, dwellers were getting older and there were not enough people who were working age to take on the load of what was required to keep the bunker going. I missed my brother, who was so much better at bridging the gap between levels than the rest of the council. I missed my mother who was complicated, but, in the end, tried to do the right thing. My father…I didn’t think about my father.
“Can you cover for me?” I asked Danika when I was finally ready. I only prepared the blocker dose when it was needed. I figured if they ever found my stash, it would be harder to prove what I was doing if it was just a bunch of powders and herbs.
Danika nodded and rushed to my “mourning” robes which were hanging on a peg next to the door. I sighed as I donned them, feeling the scratchy fabric rubbing against my arms. Being forced to wear robes that distinguished females who no longer had males in their family was one of my least favorite bunker rules. The council said it was as a protective measure. So people knew we were alone. I wondered sometimes if the robes only made us targets for bad-acting males. Which was another recent trend.
“I can use these as an excuse to get down there.” I pointed at the cart full of magazines and comics, then back at Danika who as usual seemed a bit skittish about my covert activities. “These are for the kitchen anyways.” I said it in a quiet voice, even though it was only ever the two of us here. Becker and the council put so many restrictions on what books could be borrowed that people gave up on coming up here altogether.
Like everything in the bunker, there was a strict hierarchy of who had access to what. The reason being that bunker dwellers were growing restless and reading about life above ground would only lead to revolts and unrest. I wondered if my brother’s attempt to reach the outside was in part because it was becoming clear that eventually whatever was happening up there would be better than what was going on down here. I certainly didn’t think limiting people’s distractions would help matters. So, I had devised a way to sneak some lighter materials for the staff down in kitchens and gardens.
Danika looked dubiously at the contraband periodicals, but didn’t say anything. She still had her mother, but she was ill, and her father had been apprehended for insubordination last fall. I didn’t know if this fact made Danika’s attitude toward our increasingly controlling council one of defiance or compliance. Only time would tell, and for now, I had the forbidden superhero comics to distribute.
