Herdenmord - ONC2021

Underground

The days underground merged into one long day that dragged out forever.

At first it wasn't so bad. Survivors straggled in and we had contact with the big bunkers in Melbourne, but soon people stopped arriving and, within a fortnight, the rats found and destroyed both the underground wiring and signal towers. There were rumours Command could communicate via satellite, but if that was true, they weren't telling the likes of us.

Before communications failed, I found out my uncle's family were in one of the city bunkers and Sam was alive in Byron. Nobody heard anything afterwards. Losing that fast track to information was worse than I'd thought it would be.

We were all isolated in our crowded hidey holes, living on rations and twice weekly showers. It was grim. There was no privacy and everyone was mourning someone. Some people lost entire families. No matter where you went, you could hear someone sobbing.

Quan came to me a few days after we arrived and stroked a finger down my palm. He smiled, his visible eye soft and warm, his injured eye healing behind a black patch. He took my hand and led me into one of the quieter tunnels. I thought he wanted to show me some secret but what he actually wanted was to take me in his arms and kiss me.

"You don't know how much I've wanted to do that," he said, his eye patch giving him a rakish look.

I leaned forward and kissed him again, my tongue gliding over his lips, silk on silk. We stayed in that tunnel for a long time.

Even trapped in a sweaty, claustrophobic bunker, I felt lucky. I had Quan, but I also had his family. Lam had taken his Jeep the long way and then cut through connecting park lands, mowing down anything in his path. We had Dimi too, whose growing belly reminded us life went on. She'd lost her father and a younger brother, but she had the rest of her family and all of Aaden's to lean on. We'd all pulled our palettes together, comforted by each other's closeness.

And, of course, there was Jamie.

Jamie suffered more than most of us. She'd heard nothing of her parents and the hormones she depended on weren't available underground. She, and others, asked whether they could be obtained, but it wasn't deemed essential enough to risk lives for. She'd argued, of course, but it made no difference.

There were still birth control pills. Quan and I took full advantage of them, but Jamie could not. They weren't right for her body. There was no guarantee she'd ever be able to access hormone therapy again. Her body started to change, and her eyes got deep and stormy. She clung to Dimi as though Dimi, with her growing bump, was the only thing keeping her head above water.

And Dimi clung back just as hard.

She'd told us the story. She'd liked Aaden as soon as she met him and they'd started seeing each other a couple of months before. They kept it quiet and casual, meeting up at uni or his house, and sometimes he snuck in nights when I was dead to the world. It wasn't serious, she said...until she took the pregnancy test. They'd been trying to decide what to do when herdenmord took the decision out of their hands.

She was happy they'd never decided. Having a part of Aaden growing inside her helped. It helped us all. We had something to think about other than all the people we were missing. And the rumours.

There were so many rumours. Rumours that people had gone underground, just like us, in the Northern Hemisphere, and something had come. Something worse than herdenmord. Something so bad they couldn't even warn us.

Dimi's mother woke up screaming some nights. She'd pant in the dark, whispering that the old gods weren't dead. That they'd won. Dimi's brothers crossed themselves every time she said it.