Page 4 of Trade (After the End #7)

Chapter Two

In a few minutes, I transform from a woman to a puppet.

Susan shoves papers at me, sticks a pen in my hand, and stares at me until I sign. Bennett’s gaze is riveted on his legal pad while the guard takes my elbow and pulls me to my feet. No one looks at me while the guard pushes me out the door.

Slowly, my sobs fade as he escorts me to my new quarters in an unmarried women’s dorm. As I stumble along, trying to keep up with the pace he’s setting with my numb legs and feet, the bunker shrinks.

The farther we descend, the lower the ceilings get. By the time we reach Level K, I could touch the tiles if I lifted my arms straight over my head. If I had the energy.

The halls are narrower down here, too, and darker. The lower levels are only allotted one fluorescent light per block, so as you walk, you move from pitch black to bright, blinding, garish white and then back again.

The farther I get away from the elevators, the tighter the grip the animal in my chest has on my lungs.

In the blink of an eye, I’m not myself anymore.

An hour ago, I was the Assistant Head of Agricultural Preservation, the woman who knows where things are and how things are done. People came to me for answers.

And now I’m tripping over my boots to keep up with the guard, who’s basically a kid—he can’t be more than twenty or twenty-one—because I’m suddenly terrified of being left behind in the dark.

Every ounce of my confidence has been stripped away as easily as an orange peel. I’m scared in a way I haven’t been since I was a child. Nightmare scared. Monster-under-the-bed scared.

When I was little, I’d go to Dad when I felt this way, and then I had Bennett, and now it’s just me, and I’m not even myself.

We finally reach the dorm, and the guard pushes open the heavy metal door.

“Your stuff is on your bunk,” he says. It’s the first and only thing he says to me. He’s gone before the metal door creaks shut.

My first impression is that the ceiling seems even lower in here. I thought dorms were big, but the room is no bigger than our quarters.

No, not our quarters anymore. Bennett’s quarters. Bennett and Meghan’s quarters.

My stomach lurches, and I try to breathe through it, but the air is close and thick. I swallow desperately a few times, and by some miracle, the urge to vomit fades.

When I look up, two dozen young women stare at me from the bunk beds lining the two walls.

I don’t see a living area or kitchenette, only a narrow aisle dividing the room in half.

On second thought, the ceiling isn’t actually lower, it only seems that way because the top bunks are so close to the tiles.

I can’t live down here. There are too many floors above us. What if there’s an earthquake? There has never been one in the history of the bunker, but books and movies from the Before are full of them. I can’t run up eleven flights of stairs.

I’m breathing too fast. I’ve got to get out of here. And go where? Outside? Where the men are lining up to rape me?

“Boss!” a familiar voice calls out, distracting me from my panic.

Amy, the Heirloom Produce tech, drops from a top bunk and makes her way to me, slipping across the green vinyl tile in her stocking feet.

She has her coverall unzipped and hanging from her hips, exposing a standard-issue white tank top.

She grins and grabs my hand. “We drew straws to free up a bottom bunk for you. And it’s in the back! ”

She pulls me down the aisle, and as I stumble along, women greet me.

“Hi, Gloria.”

“Hey, bunkie.”

“Welcome to the suck.”

“Sorry to see you here, but happy to have you.”

I try to smile or nod or something but it’s like someone cut the strings between my mind and muscles.

When we get to the second-to-last bunk, I see another familiar face. Cecily is leaning against the metal frame with the same sad smile she was wearing in the bathroom earlier.

“You knew,” I say, the horror taking on a whole new dimension.

“Everyone knew.” Her brown eyes hold mine, and even in the dim light from the single bare bulb in the middle of the room, I can read the words she leaves unsaid. Didn’t you, too? In your gut?

Didn’t I? Working late? Really, Gloria?

“Come see,” Amy says and slips past us into the narrow aisle between bunks, waving for me to follow. With my wide hips, I have to turn sideways.

The duffel bag I take to the gym is sitting on the thin plastic mattress. Whoever brought my bag stacked my dad’s books on the bed, but they fell over, so they’re lying in a pile. Silent Spring. The Secret Life of Plants. The Emerald Planet.

I sit beside them, my butt sinking a little between two metal slats. The mattress is hardly an inch thick.

“What do you mean, you drew straws?” I ask Amy, her earlier words finally registering.

Her upbeat facade finally thins. “Some of us with bottom bunks who know you—and people who you’ve, uh, helped—we drew straws. Well, strips of paper, actually. Short straw got your assigned bunk. Newbies always get a top bunk.”

“I can’t take someone’s bed.” I can’t do any of this.

How am I going to do this?

Panic clutches at my chest and fresh tears fill my eyes. I’m not a crier. I don’t want to cry in front of these women. I watched them walk to the lottery time after time, and I didn’t cry then.

The shame burns.

“Too bad,” Amy chirps. “It’s yours now.” Her grin fades. “You helped my sister after she won the lottery, you know. Gina Armstrong. She works in Facilities now.”

“That’s great,” I manage. I vaguely remember a brunette with two black eyes and a broken jaw, her torn nails digging into my forearm. The tea will work, won’t it? It has to work.

I’d lied. I’d sworn to her it would—one hundred percent—and if it didn’t, I had something else.

Dad never lied to the women when they came to him for the old recipe made from plants considered weeds in the Before.

I understand why he wouldn’t, the principle of the thing, but it always felt like another act of violence to me, to withhold comfort from a person in pain.

I pick the first volume of Flora of North America out of the pile and hug it to my chest, tracing the worn corner of the cover with my thumb.

I wish Dad were here. So he could live every minute with the lottery hanging over his head?

So he could watch me shoved out of the bunker, knowing exactly how the women look when—if—they come back?

I clutch the book harder until its edges bite into my palms, the horror taking on yet another dimension.

How did I not see it before? I knew. How did I tuck it away in my brain like the other things you don’t think about?

Death. Meghan with the long hair who your husband complained about daily until he suddenly stopped mentioning her at all.

“I’ve got the bunk above you,” Amy says brightly. My brain shorts so bad I swear I can smell it sizzle. She’s happy. How is that even possible?

“Okay, kiddo,” Cecily calls from the aisle. “Scram. You’re way too chipper for the circumstances. Let Gloria and me wallow in misery together for a little while.”

Amy pats my thigh. “Don’t stress too much. The odds are one in six hundred and fifty-seven.” Her eyes widen. “Oh, actually, I guess now it’s one in six hundred and fifty-eight.” She smiles like that’s good news. Like I’m not the one who’s improved the odds.

With that, she squeezes out, and Cecily squeezes in. I scoot the book pile over with my butt to make room for her on the mattress, wiping my face with my coverall sleeve.

For a moment, we sit in silence. The other women are hanging around in the middle of the room where the light is brightest or by the door where they take turns peering out the small square window into the hall.

Cecily and I have a degree of privacy if you don’t count the woman in the next bunk over who’s listlessly staring at the ceiling.

“Everyone knew, eh?” I finally sniffle and ask.

“Yeah. Pretty much.”

“How long?”

She shrugs. “A few months. He was discreet. Meghan—not so much.”

A thought hits me. “Oh God. Did she live here? Was I going to get her bed?”

Cecily shakes her head. “No, she was down in N-8.”

I exhale. “Thank God for small mercies, eh?”

Cecily hums in agreement and rests her shoulder against mine. The tears threaten again. And the shame. I’m truly afraid for the first time in my life of what Cecily had to face years ago—and live with every day since.

“I thought Bennett was avoiding me because there’s some problem with the water system, and he didn’t want me to worry.”

“Oh, there’s a problem with the water system, too.” Cecily flashes me a wry smile.

“I knew it.” I bark a laugh while fresh tears roll down my cheeks. “At least the odds are good. One in six hundred fifty-eight.”

Cecily lets out a long, ominous breath. I look over. Her face is grim, and her eyes are sad.

“Tell me,” I say.

“They’re going to pick you. At the next lottery.”

Everything inside me drops—my heart, my stomach—like whatever has been holding them in place for my whole life has suddenly disappeared, and my guts are in free fall, and there’s no floor, no bottom, no end.

I sit straighter and wrap my arms around my middle to hold myself together. What else can I do?

“How do you know?”

“You have to think like Command. Right now, every single married woman in this bunker is freaking out. Everyone knows you, Gloria. They like you. And there was no man more respected than your dad. If this can happen to you, it can happen to them, right? No one is safe.”

How stupid am I? Until today, I’d actually felt safe.

I knew it was all luck, of course. I had the right looks—pretty in the way men prefer—and I was born on an upper floor to a head of department.

And I was grateful for it, but I never once considered that the thing about luck is you didn’t earn it, there’s no way to hold onto it, and it can turn on a dime.

“The most dangerous threats in a bunker are fire, airborne disease, and panic,” I murmur.

Cecily nods. “And panic is the worst.”

“Wouldn’t they cut me a break, then, if they’re rigging the lottery and women are panicking?”

“Oh, the lottery is definitely rigged. Why would Command give up a lever of power? I won the lottery because I reported that the impellers on the pumps were wearing out, and pretty soon, we’d have breakdowns we wouldn’t be able to fix.”

“You won the lottery, like, three years ago.” I’ve never heard anything about the impellers.

“Oh, I remember.” Cecily gives me a pointed look, and my cheeks heat. That was insensitive of me.

“They wanted you to keep quiet,” I say.

Cecily smiles grimly and mimes locking her lips with a key. “Getting thrown out is the easy part compared to getting let back in. They are going to make damn sure, one way or another, that when you come back, you aren’t going to say anything that causes trouble.”

I thought no one talked because they wanted to put the experience behind them, or because they were ashamed, even though they had no reason to be.

Because I believed their bullshit. “The lottery isn’t a sacrifice we’re called to make for the good of the bunker.”

“Nope.” Cecily pops the p. “It’s what you get if you make trouble.

And you, Gloria Smith, are trouble. You’ve got hundreds of married ladies up on Level C worried what happens if their cheating husbands get their side pieces knocked up.

You’ve got them thinking that if this can happen to good, upstanding Gloria Smith—Don Walker’s daughter—then it could happen to them.

Maybe the system is broken. Maybe it needs to change. ”

“I still don’t get it.” I know I should, but my brain feels like someone punched it.

“Command has to show you falling in line and doing your duty like a good girl, affirming the rightness and virtue of the lottery, and they need to remind all those married ladies making noise who’s really in charge.”

I honestly didn’t see it before, but now, like I’ve got the decoder ring, everything clicks into place. Wasn’t Gina and Amy’s mother the sole holdout against the ten-year extension of the Head Administrator’s term? And who won the last lottery? Carla Duncan. She never came back.

I search my memory. Carla was my age, an inspector in Safety and Compliance. She worked in water filtration.

“Oh my God.” Ice surges through my veins.

Cecily grabs my hand, and leaning closer, she whispers, “Don’t fight. Keep your mouth shut. When they open the door, do what they say. Don’t fight them.” She holds my gaze like a magnet, her brown eyes haunted and fierce. “And whatever you do, never, ever tell anyone what you see out there.”