Beneath

1

I f***ing hate humans.

Sirens pierced the air all around me.

Maybe that’s a bit harsh. Fine, I just hate humans.

The wailing sirens filled the tunnels, a deafening alert of yet another nuclear storm raging on the surface. We all huddled hidden beneath the ground like ants. What was left of us, anyway.

The last storm trapped us down here for months—or moons, as some people had taken to calling our survivalist passing of time. I just called it hell. But even that meant less and less as religions disappeared. I didn’t blame anyone for forsaking any of the gods they had once worshipped when not a single one had come to our aid.

Rations had diminished to crumbs in order to preserve provisions. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to losing the essential weight I had just put back on. I picked at my still-loose pants; at least I had a belt this time. I grimaced, remembering how I had come by the belt. The deceased patient I had taken it from. Survival. I twisted the black identification band around my left wrist.

You have to survive now, little flower. I doubted my father would still call me that if he had seen what I had become. The things I had done to survive.

Across from me, a little girl let out a small whimper, staring at me with wide, dark brown eyes, almost the same shade as mine. A green identification band glinted as she covered her ears. A man and a woman—her parents, I assumed—wrapped their bodies around the little girl—shielding her.

She couldn’t be older than three. Maybe four. The woman ran a comforting hand through her daughter’s hair. A family. An anomaly these days. A relic of life before the war; a life that little girl wouldn’t have been alive to see.

We had been dwelling almost entirely underground for six years now. The message auto-repeated on the radio along with the coordinates as the end approached.

All are welcome in Haven, humanity’s last hope!

I had delayed coming, the distrust and fear overwhelming. That had been a mistake. The idea of never seeing the sky, of being shut up with others who might have been an enemy . . . I hadn’t been able to stomach it. I fought against it, until I had no choice. Until I found myself sprinting here, desperate. Then, the reason for my desperation died.

I stayed simply because I had nowhere to go. No one and nothing.

I had been right to be wary; it was always dark. There was no tracking time besides the noises: bells, buzzes, and alarms. We were left to believe the sounds represented the passing of time. It was disorienting.

Now, it felt normal. That frightened me. But what other option did I have? The land above was uninhabitable, decimated by the war.

I was fifteen when the war started. Tensions worldwide had been on edge for some time, felt by all regardless of nationality. Then it happened; it had been a Monday. I was dressed for school, complaining about a math exam I didn’t want to take. I had pinned back my long, dark auburn hair with a pink bow to garner a reaction from my mother.

She told me the bow looked lovely while tending to my two younger siblings. I still remember her distracted smile.

Then my parents’ cellphones had started dinging. My father had read the screen before grabbing the remote. The news filled our home, and everything shifted. A permanent fracture in my life.

I hardly understood the gravity of it, but sometimes, those first harrowing images still drove me from my sleep all these years later. No one had been prepared for how quickly the war escalated. Technology broadcasted every moment across the entire world, into everyone’s homes and phone screens, the coverage inescapable. It felt like no time at all until those broadcasts reached our backyard. Until it was our towns and cities being shown, and the next, and the next. One endless live stream of humanity obliterating itself.

In two years, humans destroyed the planet, countries, hope, and one another. Fueled by anger and fear, the media our endless food source. The enemy had seemed faceless initially, some faraway assault threatening our safety; that had been easier. Once food and resources became scarce, neighbors became the enemy. Then illness turned loved ones into the enemy. I had kept mine alive while terrified I too would fall ill. I never caught it, but they didn’t get better.

Now, I was alone. I wiggled my cold toes in my oversize boots.

There had been billions of people before the war. Here at Haven, the population was a tiny fraction of that. It had felt like a lot in the beginning, each day bringing droves of people. The tunnels had felt cramped. Sleeping arrangements were scarce. But the nuclear storms picked up, and the doors closed. Those left above died. The supplies dwindled, and people began to starve. Cramped places bred disease. Suddenly, sleeping arrangements became available again, this time assigned by the leaders who implemented a rudimentary social system to help us survive.

The family across from me should ignite some hope for humanity—that they had found a way to carry on and bring more life into a world hell-bent on dying. That alone should reignite my desire to keep fighting.

Fight who, though? The enemy had been everywhere. It had worn many faces and appeared in so many forms until it destroyed everything.

I didn’t know what I was still fighting for or what we were fighting against. I couldn’t change the broken earth, the raging storms that made life almost impossible, the radiation that blanketed the planet. I couldn’t change that the remaining survivors were direct competition for the resources, including the little girl in front of me. Where did it end?

The sirens stopped, my ears ringing in the sudden silence. Lights flickered on along the walls. The tunnels were better provisioned than I had imagined before arriving, outfitted with electricity and plumbing.

The anxious sounds of my fellow tunnel dwellers filled the air, then a loud buzz signaled that the tunnels were officially sealed. Lockdown had begun.

I rose to my feet, dusting off my pants. I had been on my way to the mess hall for the evening meal, but that would be strictly rationed now. I glanced at the little girl one last time as her father scooped her up and continued toward the cafeteria. She smiled sheepishly at me before disappearing into the throng of people. She would eat, and I would not. As it should be, even as my stomach protested.

I pushed against the current of people still making their way toward the cafeteria. They would be turned away; only the young or elderly would eat tonight. The Kitchens would run inventory before providing rations tomorrow. Pieces of conversation met me as I was jostled side to side.

“Another f***ing storm. The last one ended not even two moons ago—”

“I don’t care what they say. I’m getting food. They can’t starve us again—”

“I hope the Force all got in—”

My stomach swooped at the last comment—but I ignored it.

Our underground society contained five sectors: the Kitchens, the Force, the Hospital Ward, Sanitation, and Expansion. Every person in Haven belonged to a sector. The assigned sector deter mined the color of an identification band we were all given when we arrived at Haven: dark blue for the Force, white for the Hospital Ward, green for the Kitchens, black for Sanitation, and gray for Expansion. An identification number was assigned and written on the inside of the band—a primitive system for our survivalist way of life.

The Force was an allied group of mostly men and some women who maintained the peace below and scouted above, looking for resources and carrying out patrol. Early on, they had searched for survivors, which wasn’t necessary anymore. It was the group Tristian kept pestering me to join, telling me my talents were wasted on Expansion. He had a point, but swinging a pickax at a dirt wall was soothing and predictable after five years in the Hospital Ward.

Now, I was twenty-three and felt more comfortable with death than life. In the Ward, I had learned how to recognize certain illnesses, the signs of infection, the look of death. Every illness and injury someone contracted or obtained was documented in the health score system, which measured one’s ability to perform in specific sectors. Health scores were our only currency. Mine was extraordinary. No matter the illnesses people brought in as others caught them, I didn’t. It was why I had been handed a white apron in the first place.

Shortly after I joined, they brought in a two-year-old boy who had fallen sick. When he didn’t improve, the doctors decided to cease treatment. But I couldn’t walk away. I sat at his bedside until death took my seat. Next, they brought in an elderly man, covered in the dreaded skin disease that had swept through the tunnels. No one would touch him, but I stayed by his side. His last wish had been for me to look for the arrival of his wife and tell her that he loved her and had tried to find her. Again, I took death’s seat until it arrived. An hour later, I sat next to a woman who had been stabbed over a bowl of broth. And so on, and so on. Their faces burned into my mind. One never-ending procession of death.