From Under the Eve (Short Story)

From Under the Eve

A Dystopia Rising: The Pike Short Story

By Jenn Tharp

Audio Version Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQwv0SKIPeE

“Hey, that’s new.”

Cinna’s mask was caught on the handle of one of the knives on his belt, so he ignored Sid’s pronouncement, working to get it free. He knew they were coming up on the weakest part of the tunnel, and the mask would probably do nothing to stop the dose of radiation that would still reach them through the few feet of dirt and rock between them and the Candlewood’s radiation storm. But sometimes it was the little rituals that kept you alive, and putting his mask on at this point in the tunnel had become an old habit. He finally managed to get it free and moved to pull it on, but immediately felt a slap to the back of his head.

He turned to glare at Sid, but she wasn’t looking at him. She was pointing up at the roof of the tunnel. “Look,” she said.

He looked.

There was light. There wasn’t supposed to be light. He knew the roof of the tunnel was thin this far through, and it wasn’t kept up as well as the others, so it made sense for fissures to form — but this was actual sunlight. It came in through a few little cracks in the roof and shone off of the minerals in the tunnel wall. Real sunlight, not the weird colorful radioactive light the Candlewood usually gave off.

“Huh,” he said.

Sid grinned, her big pale eyes lighting up, sharp teeth bared, and Cinna immediately knew that coming down here had been a mistake. He opened his mouth to say that they should turn back, but she was already skittering toward the beams, pulling her hood up and her goggles down.

He sighed, pulled his own hood up to cover his skin, and followed.

It looked like a very minor collapse, something that they could easily fix themselves before moving on with the salvaging mission they were ostensibly on for the Last Eve. But he already knew that they weren’t going to finish that mission. Sid was studying the cracks with her own special brand of excited intensity, prodding at the edges, checking the integrity of the area.

“We can definitely climb up through these,” she said. She rested the goggles back on her forehead. “The rest of the roof’s intact enough that we could widen the gaps and see what’s going on.”

Cinna gaped at her. “It’s broad daylight,” he said.

“Yeah! And that’s weird as hell, right?” She pulled the goggles back down and started to scratch carefully at one of the cracks, using a tool from her pack to gently dislodge the dirt and let it tumble down to the tunnel floor. “What are we gonna do, just ignore the fact that the storm’s gone and go and get some scrap?”

“The storm might not be gone,” Cinna argued. “This spot could be in an eye of it, or it could have parted for a minute and it’ll come rushing right back in the second we get topside to burn us from the inside out.” He folded his arms, watching her continue to pick away at the slowly widening gap. “Sid, come on. Please stop doing that.”

“No,” she said easily. She kept going, eyebrows lowered in concentration.

Cinna pinched the bridge of his nose. “If we die out here, we’re going to come out of a random morgue and then burn to death again and again until we come out as zed and then burn again.”

“Sure, that might happen.” Sid managed to connect one of the cracks to another, and a large piece of earth fell to the floor of the tunnel. More sunlight filtered in — a wider, unbroken beam that made Cinna wince and step back. Sid shrugged. “And we could get killed by some kind of radioactive critter at the salvage spot. You only live a couple of times, Cinna. Stop being a baby.”

And with that, she reached up through the hole she’d made, gripped the topside edges, and pulled herself through.

Cinna stared after her, his brain whirring unhelpfully. He should go back to the Eve. He should tell Umbra what was going on. He should pull Sid back down into the tunnel. He should—

“Oh, holy fuck!” Sid shouted above him.

He was dragging himself up through the hole before he had time to register that he’d made a decision.

For the first few seconds, he was blinded. He could feel the sunlight starting to tingle uncomfortably even through his clothes, and he pulled his cloak more firmly around him, blinking, trying to adjust. When he could finally see, he swore under his breath, eyebrows raising to his hairline.

The world was a scream of color. The trees were rich with autumn leaves, all shades of red and yellow and orange and brown. The ground was carpeted with them, and the bright green grass beneath poked through, only just starting to crisp to yellow in the slowly growing chill of autumn. There were buildings nearby, a little old and worn, but still standing. Cinna stared, whipping his head around to try and take everything in.

“This,” he said, “is not the irradiated wasteland I was expecting.”

“Right?!” Sid was crouching next to a bush, brushing her fingers over its leaves, marveling. “Look at this. It’s perfect. I mean, it’s irradiated as hell,” she added, drawing her hand back and shaking it out, as if that would dislodge the radioactivity that was definitely seeping in through her gloves, “but it’s alive and it seems healthy. Really healthy.” She spun to look at him. “Let’s take a look around.”

Cinna stared at her. “No. Now’s when we go and talk to Umbra.”

But she was already moving, walking towards the nearest building.

Cinna hesitated. Out here, in the light, he could see the way that the shadows of the nearby trees fell in stark outlines on the ground. He hated the way that shadows looked in sunlight, so solid and separated from one another. He preferred the soft way that shadows fell against each other in the dark underground, or in the night. In sunlight, there was something eerily insistent about them. He shivered, and started to go after Sid — but he stopped and spun around.

Something had moved. One of the shadows had moved, had changed slightly. He stared hard at it on the ground, trying to see what was different. After a long moment, he took another step backward toward the building that Sid had walked off towards. Nothing in the shadows moved when he did.

“Are you coming or what?”

Cinna jumped at the distant sound of Sid’s voice. He took one last look at the shadow, then shook his head and jogged off in the direction that Sid had gone. He forced himself not to look back.

Sid was already around the other side of the smallish building when Cinna caught up with her. She had her face pressed against the window in the door, her hands cupped around her eyes so that she could see inside. When he reached her, she pulled him over to look, too.

“It’s weird,” she said. Cinna didn’t like the way that her voice sounded. Quiet. Worried. He cupped his hands around his own eyes and looked in through the glass to see what was so strange.

On one of the tables in the center of the long room, there was a card game set up. A jug of hooch sat with its cork off and on the table, and three glasses sat in front of three empty seats. All around the room were bunks, set up like a barracks, each just a few inches from each other. Every one of them was covered in mismatched linens, sleeping bags, blankets, pillows. Some beds were made and some were unmade. Cinna saw a record player open on one of the tables further into the room.

Everything was piled with a thick layer of dust.

Cinna frowned. “How long has this stuff been sitting here?”

He felt Sid shrug. “I don’t think anyone could have lived here while the storm was happening,” she said. “So at least that long.”

He stepped back, away from the door. “It doesn’t look like anyone was in a hurry.”

Sid didn’t say anything. She stepped away, and then out to the path that led further into the little town. There were buildings on either side of the road, spaced out oddly, as if each had been added as an afterthought. Most of them were pocked and pitted by the constant wash of radiation. A few roofs were collapsed; vines grew around and through them. Only one of them looked like it had been placed with real purpose. It was the biggest one, and it sat almost directly against a wide lake. Beyond that lake, mountains climbed up into the sky in a way that made Cinna uncomfortable. Too big. Too open.

He hurried to catch up to Sid, but he didn’t have to hurry long. There was something tempered about her insistent curiosity, now. She walked more slowly and waited for him to fall into step beside her, and they both made their way toward the larger building.

“I don’t like this,” she said quietly.

“Then why are we still here?”

She shrugged, like that was answer enough. And it was, sort of. Cinna knew his sister almost better than he knew himself. She couldn’t leave a thread unpulled. And he couldn’t leave her on her own.

So they walked, almost shoulder to shoulder, down the center of the path, toward the building on the lake.

The door creaked loudly when Cinna opened it. The hinges were rusted and warped. Inside, the building was one large room, flanked on both sides by stone fireplaces. At one, there was the ghost of a cozy set-up, with couches and chairs huddled near one another as if in conversation. The rest of the space was cluttered with tables. One was set for a large meal, with bowls and cutlery at each place, and a large tureen at the center. Whatever food had been prepared had long since rotted away in the pot and the bowls, leaving nothing but a dark stain at the bottom of each. On the other tables, crafting projects sat unfinished, as if just waiting for their artisans to return and make them into something useful.

Cinna watched as Sid crossed to the back wall of the lodge to stand at one of the large windows. Beyond her, the lake stretched out until it met the other side of the Candlewood. Light glinted off of the water as it gently lapped at the beach. He shuddered again, and instead turned to the couches by the fireplace. On one, a book sat open with its spine in the air. The cover had warped and faded over time, and it struck Cinna, in that moment, that someone had left it like that.

Sid pointed at a row of coats and protective gear hanging from pegs next to the door. “They didn’t take anything with them,” she said. “Even rad gear.” She folded her arms over her chest. “It’s like they all stood up at the same time and walked outside and disappeared.”

Cinna frowned at her. “Why would they—”

There was a sound from behind a door on the other side of the room. Cinna stopped talking, stopped moving. Every bit of his attention focused itself in the direction that the noise had come from. It was a brief rattle, a tapping of metal against metal, and then a whisper. He was sure it had been a whisper. He raised his eyes to meet Sid’s, and he saw his exact feelings reflected back at him on her face.

Oh, fuck.

There was quiet for a moment, and then another whisper — but this one was cut off suddenly.

In the slow silence that began to spiral out into the stillness, Sid began to move. She placed one foot in front of the other, an eye always on the door that hid whoever was there with them. She had a hand stretched out towards Cinna as she went, and he didn’t know what she meant to do with it, until the silence was broken by the clear racking of a gun from behind the door.

Her hand closed hard around his arm, and then they were both running, crashing out of the front door and up the path toward the main road.

Cinna heard footsteps behind them, but he didn’t turn around. He put every ounce of his energy into keeping up with Sid, who had always been the faster of the two of them. When he tripped, she dragged him until he found his feet again. Her hood fell back, and he could see her wincing at the sensation of the sun against her face, but she just put her head down and kept going.

When they made it back to the hole that Sid had made, they dropped into it and didn’t stop running. The tunnels that they knew so well unfurled around them, and they took each turn at random, putting as much distance as possible between them and whoever had been chasing them. Eventually, they stopped. They leaned against either side of the tunnel, bent over their knees, pulling air into their lungs in pained gasps. Cinna pressed his hand against the stitch in his side and tried to cobble his thoughts together into something coherent.

“Fuck,” was all he managed to say.

Sid just nodded as if in complete agreement. “Did you see them?” she managed to ask. She was slowly straightening back up, breath settling into something almost normal.

Cinna shook his head. “No. You?”

“No.” She looked back down the long, winding path that they had taken away from the hole. Cinna couldn’t hear anything but the normal sounds of the underground, and his heart beating at the base of his throat. They hadn’t been followed. Small blessings.

“Umbra now?” he asked, after a long moment.

Sid sighed. “Umbra now,” she agreed.

They walked, shoulders touching, back toward the Eve. They would tell their boss the news — the storm had cleared. And someone else already knew.