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4
Yesterday
The one constantin my life has always been swimming. No matter where I am or what’s happening in my world, I’ve been able to get up early, put on my suit and goggles, and dive into cool, chlorinated water. My body knows what to do without thinking. Kick my legs. Shape strokes with my arms. Sync my breathing. And make myself move. Fast. Smooth. Powerful.
I’m in control of everything in those moments even as the rest of the world falls apart.
Five months after coming out of lockdown, everything else is different, but I still swim every morning. Eventually we’ll run out of chemicals or the power needed to maintain the pool (or both), but it hasn’t happened yet. So on a Friday morning I get up at six o’clock in the one-bedroom apartment in the bunker that’s still mine, and I head down to the pool level.
It’s empty, as it always is now. Grant has an early-morning shift, guarding the perimeter of the camp on the surface, so he’s never swimming when I do anymore.
I swim for only an hour because my work shift starts earlier than it used to. I hurry back to shower and change into jeans, a fitted V-neck T-shirt, and hiking boots that my dad had included in my bunker wardrobe but I hadn’t used at all until we came out of lockdown. I pull my wet hair back into one long braid since I don’t have time to do anything with it and then take the elevator up to the surface where most of our community are busy with their morning activities.
There are only sixty-six of us left. Out of the two hundred who went into lockdown five years ago.
As soon as we opened up, several families took off, leaving to do their own thing, no longer under the thumb of the bunker leadership. I knew and liked a lot of those who left, and I have absolutely no idea what happened to them.
If it’s anything like what’s happened to us over the past five months, most of them are no longer alive.
In the first couple of months, before we knew enough to take rigorous precautions, we had multiple scouting and hunting parties attacked, the vehicles stolen and our people killed. It might look like there are very few people around anymore, but if we end up in the wrong areas for any reason, we become targets of roving gangs whose only purpose seems to be harming the innocent. We now know better how to avoid the most dangerous areas, so it’s been more than a month since any of our people have been attacked.
But we’ve had other problems. Two months ago, an illness hit our bunker. Dr. Willoughby thinks it was probably a virus that developed while we were underground, and so we’d had no exposure or immunity to it. It killed thirty-eight of us.
I was horribly sick from it, but I was one of the lucky ones who got better.
So all in all, our numbers have been decimated since we came out of lockdown. Some people think it was a mistake, but we would have run out of supplies eventually, so it’s not like we could have stayed down there much longer—hiding forever from what our world has become.
My life is no longer safe and boring like it used to be, but I’m also not as lonely as I was. People act differently, as if they’ve accepted that we’re out of the limbo of the bunker. That this is what life is going to be from now on. I feel like I have some friends now, when I didn’t before, and I actually like having jobs to do that aren’t just passing out coffee.
We traded our entire stock of remaining coffee for some chickens from a nearby farm, the first friendly people we met on the surface. So now at least we have eggs.
But no more coffee.
My morning duties are in the dining hall, one of the new buildings we built in our camp. Every morning, I work with Dave’s wife, Mary, to organize the day’s rations and divide them into packs. In addition to the ration packs, we also try to make a big pot of soup or stew from any fresh meat available, so each person gets a ration pack and a bowl of soup for the day. Today Tara is cobbling together some sort of fish stew nearby where Mary and I are working.
Mary is a friendly, dimpled woman in her fifties. She loves to laugh and loves to gossip, and she’s now one of my favorite people. We make up the day’s packs with fresh bread baked this morning from flour we got from the farm, vegetables from our gardens (the hydroponic and the new surface one), a protein bar from our old supplies, and some pork jerky. She chats with me about everything that happened with our people yesterday (she knows all of it) and teases me about letting my hair out of the braid so I’ll look really pretty for any cute guys who might stop by to pick up their rations.
She’s convinced every unattached man we know is interested in me even though this is obviously not true. I just laugh and tease her back (only halfway sincere) about how I’ll have to venture out into the hinterlands to find a man for me.
“Oh, I think you’ve got at least one right here who’d gladly take on the job as your boyfriend.” Mary’s deftly wrapping up a pack as she talks.
I pause and glance up at her. Then I shift my eyes in the direction she nods.
For no good reason, I expect to see Grant, but I don’t. It’s a silly impulse. An irrational flicker of feeling. I see Grant around almost every day, but I hardly ever talk to him anymore.
We ended our daily workouts as soon as we came out of lockdown.
Instead of him, I see Noah, the youngest of the men originally employed as guards. He’s probably only six or seven years older than me. He isn’t particularly handsome, but he’s cute enough and appealing with warm brown eyes and a lopsided grin.
He comes by every day to pick up his rations and lingers to chat. I thought at first it was because of Mary since he would mostly talk to her. But she insists he hangs around for so long because of me, and I’m starting to think she might be right.
Today he takes the pack I offer him and shifts from foot to foot. “How are you today, Olivia?”
“I’m pretty good.” I smile back at him because I like him and also because it’s a new and strange feeling to have a man show interest in me.
At seventeen, I was starting to get used to it, but in the bunker I received nothing except some creepy looks from random men and one unexpected night of sex with Grant.
“Did you swim this morning?”
