Post by Violet Schultz on Jun 26, 2010 10:47:39 GMT -5
This is the first chapter of a novel I am trying to write. It's a post-apocalyptic sci-fi. Let me know what you all think.
Poking my head out from under the lead hatch, I examined the barren landscape, my green eyes focusing especially on the sky. There was nothing around the bunker aside from a vast desert of beige dirt and a few sparse trees, blackened from their deaths nearly a century before. Still, with the exception of a few other hatches rising out of the ground, everything seemed still. I opened the hatch the rest of the way and let the door land with a muted thud before climbing out of my shelter, and others simply returned to their homes under the earth, leaving the hatches open to let the fresh air in. Even the thin clouds seemed relieved of the sudden tension which was routine in those days, flat wisps of moisture sliding through the auburn sky on the dry wind that always followed the blue scourge.
“Audrey?” I heard my brother’s voice call from inside the bunker.
“It’s fine, Josh,” I replied, turning back and crouching beside the entrance. “There’s no blue in the sky, and there’s nothing moving out there.”
He came to the ladder and climbed up after me, his long, sturdy limbs stretching as he shook off the musk of what we “affectionately” called “The Hole”. He was twenty, two years my senior, but he was the closest thing I had to a parent any more. We both took after our father, with sandy blonde hair and eyes as green as the leaves that we could only read about in books. Of course, he was a lot taller than I was, and he was muscled up from the constant work that it took to get us by.
“We’re almost out of supplies,” he said, “We’ll have to head to the Fort soon.”
The Fort was an outpost that a rebel group set up to help the survivors in this region. With the constant bio-bombing of the surface, it was impossible for us to grow any food or even survive without a place supplying the families out where we lived. My father used to tell us that this place had once been a great city, named Cincinnati, but that was before the Sirens came.
Sirens. The last of the sentient species in the known galaxy to contact Earth. In the beginning, they had come with promises of friendship and rich trading, and like fools, the leaders of our planet trusted them. Once we let down our defenses to let their “goods frigates” past, they launched the first of the bio-bombs. It was the first time that anyone had seen the blue flash. In an instant, the ten billion people on Earth were decimated into a scarce five million. The lucky survivors were mainly from the ocean colonies; too far underwater for the bio-bombs to reach. Others, like my grand-parents, found accidental shelter in lead-lined bank vaults.
Once the people were supposed dead, the Sirens leveled our cities and civilizations, leaving nothing but wasteland as far as the eye can see. Nothing grows here, since the bombs continue to fall and “cleanse” the surface, as they call it. The only food that we can get was either grown by the ocean colonies before their fall or synthesized by the last of our scientists, and then circulated by the rebels who call themselves Phoenix. Unfortunately, the Sirens quickly learned of the survivors. The bio-bombings resumed.
Humans survive by hiding whenever the blue scourge lights the sky, and anything caught in the open is killed like an ant under a magnifying glass. The only thing that the flash doesn’t penetrate is lead, and all of our subterranean homes are lined by it. Were it not for the medicines circulated by Phoenix, most of us would probably have died of lead poisoning by now. Instead, a normal life was marked by a home underground; scavenging, making weekly trips to the rebel outpost which supplies meticulously gathered and protected foods with the rest of us.
It was to that far-off refuge that we needed to go, now that the last of the clean water was gone. Getting water from the river three miles across the Cincinnati desert was foolish at best, suicidal otherwise, unless one went well-provisioned and owned one of the rare filters that could get the Siren poison from the water.
I gripped the edge of the ladder with my booted feet and slid back down, into the bunker that was our home. It consisted of three rooms, which was up-scale compared to most of our neighbors. Building a bunker was a dangerous business to begin with, and most families stopped after the first room, due to the fear that they would be spotted or lose track of time. It wasn't uncommon for a builder to get cleansed because they were looking down at the dirt, rather than at the sky like most of us did. We were like the animals our father had described in stories, rabbits, under the eyes of a hawk, one eye to the sky at all times.
As I headed into the bedroom for my travelling bag, I heard a distant rumble, followed by a low curse from my brother as he followed my lead and slid back into the Hole, closing the hatch above his head as the rumbling peaked. The warzone racket above our heads grew in volume, with the airy punctuated spit of the Phoenix weapons coming closer, pursued by the mechanical whir of a Siren warbird. We were both silent as we listened, hearing a series of masculine yells and then screams as I turned to look at Josh, my eyes wide and terrified. It had been many years since the war with the Sirens had found its way toward our home, and we could only guess that the melodrama unfolding above us would lead to more trouble for us in the end.
His face was obscured by dark, as neither of us had bothered to turn the light back on, but I thought I could see the hard, cold mask that he had occasionally worn since that September that our father had left us. It was lined with anger, and a fierce pride that made me nervous. I hated that look. It made me feel so distant from him, so insignificant, and I knew that the hatred that burned in his chest was directed at the monsters we could hear, decimating the people who were trying to fight them off.
The temperature had nothing to do with the shiver that crept up my spine.
With a last gurgling scream and the fading droning whir of the war bird, the surface went silent. It wasn't until Josh gently grabbed my wrist that I realized that I was shaking violently, my almost sickly-thin frame shuddering like a dying engine. I took a slow breath and he released his steadying grip on me before he turned and headed into the lounging room, his face unreadable in the dimness of the Hole. I turned to stare back up at the motionless hatch on the ceiling, knowing that it would be foolishly reckless and far too dangerous to go back up to the surface when we knew that there was a Siren somewhere nearby. Their sensors couldn't detect us through the lead which lined the shelter, but if we opened the hatch, there would be nothing to stop them from finding us.
With a sigh, I turned the light on and headed back into the bedroom. Like all of the rooms in our little house, it was roughly rectangular, with earthen walls slathered over by the silvery leaden paint before covered in plaster. The cramped space seemed even smaller with the room that our two small cots took up, each against an opposite wall. Decorative items were sparce, but a bookshelf sat in the corner, its wooden boards worn with age. Three cheap plastic picture frames sat forlornedly on the shelf, coated by a frosting of dust. The ceiling was domed upward but flat near the center of the room, supported by a series of simple beams which I had to duck to avoid as I crossed the room.
I had almost reached my bed before the unmistakable sound of a knock came on our hatch, muffled by the thickness of the metal and the dirt camouflage which lined its top side. For a moment, I stood there, staring stupidly back at the hatch before moving. Who would be so careless as to be above ground so soon after a battle, and why would they be willing to give us away to the enemy like that?
"Don't answer it," came Josh's taciturn voice from the other room.
"Please!" a muffled voice intoned from above our heads. "Those SOB's killed one of my partners, and the other's in a bad way!"
I waited for my brother to respond, but he didn't say a word, or otherwise move from the other room. Conflict tore at my chest as I went back into the narrow hallway between rooms to look at the hatch. It seemed strange that the wooden ceiling itself didn't cave in to admit the desperate soldier, and I couldn't figure out how my brother could be so cold and callused. Actually, I could, I just didn't want to think about the pain he carried, or how it had changed him.
The man's pleading continued, getting more desperate as the minutes crawled by.
"Josh, we have to help them," I said. "They'll never survive out in the open until they reach a Fort."
"You open that hatch, and the Sirens'll come here and find us," Josh warned. "No one who is willing to do that to us to help themselves can be trusted."
I was silent for a few short moments before replying, the words low and reluctant.
"What if it had been Dad?"
"Don't go there, Audrey," he replied, the angry warning clear in his voice.
"What if he had been out there dying, and no one opened their hatch for him?" I continued, my voice getting harder as I insisted.
"Audrey, I said stop," he said with finality, at last coming into the room. "Dad told me to keep both of us alive, not to save every person who happened to stumble by."
"It's not every person," I retorted. "It's just these two, and they need our help."
Josh groaned, and turned around, pacing in a short circuit between the hatch and the lounging room while ruffling the hair on the back of his head for a few moments as he debated with himself. With pleading eyes, I watched him, but he skillfully avoided eye contact, knowing that he wouldn't be able to refuse me if he didn't. Finally, he released a resigned sigh and turned to look at me.
"Fine, open the hatch," he said. "But I'm going to be armed. I don't want to get killed for our trouble by some bandits clever enough to take advantage."
I nodded and waited while he went into the bedroom and rummaged through his drawer for his weapon. It was the only one in the house, and I couldn't help but stare as he brought it out. The sleek silver of the handgun's barrel seemed out of place in our otherwise earth-toned home, and it especially didn't look right in the hand of my brother, whose hands had cleaned my scrapes when I tripped and fell, or fixed my food when I got sick. I hated the sight of it, but I knew that he was right about it being necessary, so I didn't complain.
I climbed up the short ladder and unfastened the lock before pushing the opening mechanism and opening the hatch. The sight that met my eyes was gruesome.
The knocking man’s dark eyes were filled with relief, but his face was spattered with gore, red human blood and yellow Siren blood mixing to form a morbid orange which looked even brighter in the pale light of the orange sky. His leg was wounded and bleeding heavily, and his gray t-shirt was shredded below the collar. His coffee-colored skin was coated in sweat, lined in scars. But the man wasn’t what disturbed me. It was his partner, a hundred paces back, minced almost beyond recognition by circular laser burns and ugly scythe wounds. His blood was scattered and smeared across the tan desert floor, an irregular red stain against a sea of uniform brown.
“Thanks, girl,” he said, his voice strained and wavering. “Sam’s over there, and I can’t lift her right now.”
I turned to look where he had indicated with a jerk of his bald head. A small red-haired woman was lying sprawled on the dirt a few yards away, red spilling out from her torso as well from slashes on her arms and shoulder. I looked back at the man in alarm as I heard a small thud, but I was relieved realize from the rise and fall of his broad shoulders that he had only passed out. It was all to common for Siren attacks to leave a trail of death in their wake.
“Uh… Josh?” I called down to my waiting brother.
“What?” he asked, coming to look up the ladder.
“I’m going to need your help.”
