Moss
The day eight hundred and seventy-three after the bombs had taken out half of the world was still a shitty place to be. No one who had lived back then, before the bombs, knew what the world was like, but everyone knew what had happened and why everything had to be monitored and permitted.
The narrow corridor made his breath hollow. The dampness and the moss-covered walls made him think about the outside world.
He had read books about rats, and he felt like he was living inside the walls, pressed close to the generation ZG. He was the sixty-eighth child to be born to the community. Because of his small size and agility, he was a runner, delivering mail between different communities. He wasn’t permitted to go up as the forty-fifth did. She boasted about getting to go to the surface, but whenever he asked about it, she said nothing—a show-off.
He pressed his fingers against the moss, letting them slide down the wet, soft, patterned shoots. Were there plains covered with this stuff? Now it appeared in small patches, following the lines where the water had come in. He looked up at the ceiling. The little cracks had become bigger since the last time. He followed the lines to the small cameras in the corners. It had been evident for a long time that they didn’t work. He wondered if the ones in his own room and the communal kitchen worked either.
He was going to do nothing about it. He pressed onward, reaching for the door that led to his sister’s chosen community. She was already expecting. He wasn’t sure when he was chosen to have a wife. He wasn’t quality stock, but he served a function that few wanted to fill.
The door was open. It should be locked. Only he and the postmaster had the keys. He pushed the door open and stepped in. The connecting corridor to the hub was quiet. Usually, Fred met him there and relieved him of the mail, but now there was only eerie silence.
He had never been past the corridor. He glanced back at the door he had come through, but thought otherwise. The community behind the door Fred guarded was silent. He moved along the identical bunker to his, passing empty room after empty room. He reached the communal kitchen and found dead bodies collapsed against the desk. Some had dropped on the floor. Their skin was blue, and their lips were hard and cracked; blood had dripped down their cheeks.
His sister was among the dead. Her belly had already swollen big. He stood there, stunned. There should be an emotion, something. But he was numb. Numb about his sister, the dead baby he would never see. He glanced at the door he had come through, then at the wristwatch he had wound this morning to the correct time. If he weren’t back in fifteen minutes, the postmaster would send an alarm.
He returned his gaze to his sister’s face. He would soon be like her. It wasn’t as if this was the first time.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I never really loved you. It’s not like we got the chance, but I still mourn you and your child, I promise.”
He left the communal kitchen and headed to the door forty-five used to get outside. He shouldn’t know that, but he had followed her. He knew how to open it. The latch came off easily. Maybe someone else had already used it to get out. He took the stairs up. The moss that had been in the corridor between the communities was more prominent here. It had taken over the entire wall.
He reached the top and pushed the door up, flooding the space with light. He almost lost his grip, but he held on. When his eyes had adjusted to the light, he emerged from the bunker into a wilderness. Luscious wilderness.
—
I tested out what would come out of the start I wrote. I’m pretty happy with where it went. Nothing original in the story, but I liked testing what it would be like to write a bunker dystopia story, and I had fun figuring out the tone and the words. What I got today was a lyrical dystopia tragedy story written in the omniscient third person.
Thank you for reading! Have a day of wilderness, and see you tomorrow ❤
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