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J udith trudges through the snow, clutching the bolt cutters at her side. The air is heavy with the impending storm, and the clouds droop overhead, already releasing a few wayward flurries. The sharp, biting wind flings them around, and Judith ducks her head and moves a little more quickly, her breath fogging the air.

The entrance to the fallout shelter looks as it did this past summer, with the same heavy padlock. The snow in front of the door is thinner than it is elsewhere, as if someone swept it away before the snow fell this morning.

Judith swallows, her throat scratchy. Of course she knew Kenneth was lying about the shelter. But that he lied so brazenly—that he had likely been stomping around out here yesterday as she cooked that stupid beef stew for him—sends little tremors of anger into her chest.

She hoists up the bolt cutters and positions them around the padlock’s ring. The wind howls, sounding like a weeping woman. The air sparks. The storm will be here sooner than the newspaper said.

Judith squeezes the bolt cutters, slicing cleanly through the padlock. It falls to the snowy ground with a dull thud, and she drags the door open, releasing a damp, musty warmth and revealing a flight of metal stairs.

Still holding the bolt cutter, she picks her way down the stairs, fingers trailing along the wall for support—the stairs are steep and feel like they’re plunging her down into the center of the earth. With each step, they rattle and clank, but there’s also the quiet hum of electricity in the background, the soft blowing of heated air.

Don’t worry about that old hole in the ground.

That liar.

The stairs deposit Judith in a small, cramped space, and she feels around on the wall until she finds a light switch. The light that comes on is a single bare bulb, its glow sickly and yellowish. But it shows everything:

Not shelves of canned food from the fifties. Not musty old bunkbeds or ancient gas masks or whatever it was people thought they would need in a nuclear apocalypse.

No. Judith finds weapons. Dozens of weapons.

Saws and hunting knives and machetes and axes, all different sizes and styles, hang from hooks in the wall, gleaming a little in the light. A metal shelf in the corner is lined with what looks like surgical equipment, and Judith wonders, briefly, how her architect husband even got ahold of such things. There are loops of chains lying in piles on the floor and another chain, single and menacing, hanging from the ceiling, a large meat hook at its end like the curved claw of a raptor. A roll of clear plastic. Buckets covered in what Judith recognizes immediately as old blood, thanks to her childhood in Texas.

The bolt cutters slip out of Judith’s fingers and clatter against the cement floor. She walks into the middle of the room, next to the dangling hook, and turns in a slow stupor, taking it all in?—

That’s when she sees the door.

It’s metal, like the stairs, and it has a padlock identical to the padlock that locked this place away from her.

Judith bends to pick up the bolt cutters and walks up to the locked door. Her heart hammers furiously, and she hesitates for a moment, considering all the things she might find inside. For a moment, she presses her ear to the door, holding her breath?—

A chain scrapes inside.

Judith jerks back. Her palms are slick with sweat.

That fucking liar.

And her, a fool who should have seen the signs. She knows them well enough, doesn’t she?

“I left that behind,” she whispers, and her anger surges again, although this time it’s at herself.

Judith clenches her jaw and slices open the padlock. This one doesn’t fall to the ground, and she wrenches it off and hurls it at the wall of blades, making them clatter.

Inside the room, someone whimpers.

Judith heaves the door open. This time, she isn’t surprised by what the sickly yellow light illuminates:

A filthy cot. A rusty chain.

And a woman streaked with blood and bruises.