Page 7 of Trade (After the End #7)

Chapter Four

“Go!” a guard barks at me as he swarms past me with three others, jogging in formation toward the truck.

In a matter of seconds, a guard swings into the driver’s seat and the others step onto the side running boards. They drive the truck past me, the fumes from its exhaust fouling the perfect, pristine air.

Metal grinds behind me. They’re shutting the bunker doors.

Panic wraps its fingers around my heart and squeezes.

The man hasn’t moved.

Neither have I.

A muffled boom sounds. The doors are closed. I’m trapped out here, but trapped feels like the wrong word. It is so big out here. I’m lost. Left.

Except for the man.

I can’t think about him.

The silence settles in my ears, and even that sound is strange. There’s no rush of forced air, no distant, muffled hum of electricity and machinery and voices and footsteps muted by concrete.

The air isn’t still. It rustles leaves and whispers in my ear, brushing my cheek and tousling my hair.

A squawk sounds from high in the trees. A bird. A real bird. I crane my neck to see, but there are a million green puzzle pieces fluttering and swaying on branches, and my eyes are too weak to focus on a single leaf let alone find something hidden among them.

I never thought I’d see a bird.

I guess I haven’t yet, but I’ve heard him.

He caws again. What kind is he? When I was little, I went through a phase where I listened to all the bird call tapes in the audio library and quizzed myself, but that was so long ago.

All I remember now are the names. Goldfinch.

Waxwing. Thrasher. Bunting. Kinglet. Like fairytale creatures.

The man is still standing there. He didn’t look for the bird. He never took his eyes off me.

Part of me is worrying that I’m disobeying the guard’s order to go. They can see me through their camera, so they know I’m not following orders. They didn’t say anything about following their orders, though. Only that I have to follow his.

He’s big. Taller than anyone in the bunker.

Maybe over six feet. He’s broader, too. Muscular.

He isn’t wearing coveralls. He’s wearing dark green pants with side pockets and a long-sleeved gunmetal-gray shirt.

A jacket is tied around his waist. His clothes are worn and patched, but from here, they don’t look dirty.

Except for his boots. Those are caked with mud.

I peek at his face from the corner of my eye, trying not to let on that I’m looking.

My breath catches.

He’s handsome.

And young.

He can’t be much older than twenty-one or twenty-two.

His skin is a deep tan, and he wears his shaggy brown hair long enough that it shows under his baseball hat.

His eyes are dark brown, too. He’s clean-shaven.

In my head, all Outsiders have long beards, none of them are young, and none of them look like a movie star from the Before.

He’s probably about the same age as Alan, the intern who I saw break a rake, but who got so teary-eyed when Reginald accused him of losing it that I pretended I knew nothing. I couldn’t bear to see a kid, so new to the work world, cry in front of the other men.

The man in front of me doesn’t look like a crier, though.

His face is more beautiful than any I’ve seen in real life or the archives—sculpted jaw, regal nose, sharp cheekbones, proud chin—but it’s harder, too.

Not blank, not cold, but like the granite millstone in the Before exhibit, that kind of hard strength.

If he’s deformed or diseased, it’s hidden, or maybe eating away at his insides. In school, we don’t learn much about the particulars of life Outside. There’s too much to cover about the Before, too much we need to commit to memory so it’s never lost.

The air is probably poisoning me right now, but I can’t stop sucking it down, partly out of panic, but also because it hits like a glass of wine. The more I breathe it in, the sharper my brain gets, and the floatier I feel.

By the time the man begins to walk toward me, everything is hyperreal, not only the colors, but the starkness of the light and the crunch of his boots on the asphalt. His stride is unhurried. Assured. Nothing like an intern’s awkward, self-conscious schlump.

With each step he takes toward me, my breath quickens.

He knocks a chunk of broken asphalt with the toe of his boot, and I gasp at the sound.

I’ve never been more awake. I could run.

My muscles are primed. If you fight, if you flee, if you communicate with the Outsiders in any way—verbal, written, or hand signal—you will not be permitted reentry.

All I can do is stand stock-still while the man approaches, his dark gaze boring into me. Too soon, he’s right there, towering over me. I stare at his boots. The mud is black. Black mud means it’s rich in organic material. Maybe a bog or marsh.

“What’s your name?” he asks. His voice is deep, but young. So young.

If you communicate with the Outsiders in any way—verbal, written, or hand signal—you will not be permitted reentry.

But there is a machete strapped to his right thigh, and now that he’s close enough to touch, I see the other knives in sheaths hanging from his belt and the folded blade in his pocket.

If he knows my name, it should be harder for him to hurt me, right? To kill me.

I need to keep my priorities in order. Live through this first. Then get back inside.

“Gloria,” I whisper with my head tilted down. Please don’t let the camera see.

He makes a gruff sound, acknowledging that he heard.

“Come with me,” he says, but he doesn’t turn to go.

He waits, staring down at me, until the silence gets to me and I finally glance up and meet his eye.

Then he grabs my hand and leads me back down the sloping drive that curves and disappears into the thick woods.

His hand envelops mine. His grip is firm, but he doesn’t squeeze.

He walks with a purpose, but so quickly that I can’t easily keep up.

A few yards downhill and the drive curves enough that the bunker entry disappears behind tall trees and undergrowth.

I identify oak, maple, and beech, as well as bracken ferns and liverwort.

Was the bunker built under a mountain, or was a mountain built on top of the bunker? The forest is temperate, not montane. I see very few coniferous trees.

I’m distracting myself with plants, but what’s my other choice? Think about what’s going to happen next?

At a bend in the drive, the man pulls me off onto a dirt path leading into the trees.

My heart thuds faster, dread crawling up my spine.

We travel a few yards to a small clearing.

At the far side, there’s a steep, rocky drop-off that opens the view onto a lush valley that spreads for miles and miles.

In the middle of the clearing, there is a stained mattress laying in the dirt.

The man lets go of my hand. “Go lay down,” he says.

A gasp catches in my throat. I see the mattress. Why am I surprised? I know what’s happening.

This is happening.

I curl my shaking fingers into fists. “Not on that,” I whisper even though there’s no way they can hear me this far from the bunker.

Whatever color the mattress used to be, it’s gray now except for the reddish-brown splotches. None of them are dark or big enough that a person must’ve died, but there are so many of them, faded to so many different shades, overlapping, intersecting, creeping along the seams where something pooled.

My stomach heaves. I pant through it, trying to make as little noise as possible.

“Not on that?” the man repeats.

I shake my head hard.

He clears his throat and glances around the clearing. The mattress is surrounded by compacted dirt, but at the edges closer to the trees, there are patches of sparse, flattened grass.

“Come over here,” he says, walking to the base of an elm. He frowns at the ground for a few seconds and then unties the jacket from his waist and lays it out under the tree. “Lay down.”

I can’t just do what he says. He’s Alan the intern’s age. If I’d let Bennett do what he wanted when we first snuck off into the access ducts, I could be old enough to be the man’s mother.

This can’t be real. I’m the Assistant Head of Agricultural Preservation. I got married. I did everything I was supposed to do.

“Come on,” he says. His voice is gruff, but his tone isn’t impatient. It’s almost, somehow, coaxing.

I can’t run. I don’t know where I am. I can’t fight. I don’t know how. If I don’t comply, they won’t let me back inside.

The longer I stay Outside—I don’t know what will happen, but it’ll be bad, the worst thing that could possibly happen.

I don’t have a choice.

All I have to do is lie down on the jacket. That’s all. The future doesn’t have to go any further than that.

I can lie down on the jacket. It’s not a decision. I’m just playing for time.

I walk over and sit. The jacket is thick, but the ground is hard. The cold seeps through the fabric. The air is cooler than inside the bunker, but the sun is warm on my face where it finds its way through the green canopy overhead. It must be spring, if seasons still work the way they do in books.

“Lay all the way down,” he says, coming closer to stand over me.

His muscles have tensed. His sharp jaw is even sharper.

A vein at his temple pulses. He is so pretty, and I’m so scared, and he’s in charge, but he’s also Alan’s age, an intern’s age, and I’m extra kind to them.

I take time to explain what I’m doing. I’m firm and clear and reassuring when they inevitably fuck up.

He’s not an intern. He might be as young, but he’s six inches taller and fifty pounds heavier than any man I’ve ever met, and his confidence isn’t put on at all.

He does have that reticence, though, that fraction of a second before he speaks or moves that says he isn’t as familiar with what he’s doing as he acts.