Red the First (24 page)

“
The key! Who has the key?”
my mother said frantically.

“
You do, Elizabeth,” Blanche
said, pointing to the key hanging from a chain around Elizabeth’s
neck.

“
Good grief,” she said,
entire body trembling. “I’m so stupid!” She glanced at me, then to
the television screens, then back to me, biting her lip. “Somebody
take him out of here.”

The next thing I knew, Blanche was
dragging me out of the room, despite my protests. She took me away,
through a dimly lit passage, back toward the biosphere.

“
A little bird told me that
this place has round-the-clock electricity. And there’s a movie
theater, a school, skateboarding rink, and every video game ever
made.” That’s when I noticed Blanche’s bottom lip quiver. The
lights along the wall began to blink red. An alarm sounded all
around us, making me feel panicky.

“
Oh, Michael!” She suddenly
broke down, hugging me tight, crying into my shoulder, stroking my
hair. “It’s happening.”

“
What’s happening?” I wanted
to know. “I don’t understand.”

“
Blanche!” a voice made us
both turn with a start.

There was Nate. I tried to peer behind
him, looking for my Dad. Blanche dropped me like a hot potato, and
flung herself into Nate’s arms, kissing him all over his
face.

“
My Dad?” I asked. Even
though I already knew the answer, I had to hear it out
loud.

Blanche pulled away from Nate to look
at me with deep concern.

“
I’m sorry, kid.” Nate said
quietly. “He didn’t make it.”

“
His sacrifice will be
remembered,” I said. Even then I knew that was a weird thing for a
kid to say, but the dream had showed me as much, and how to say it.
“Uh, does anyone know if Father Bob is here?”

Nate and Blanche shook their heads. I
had given the priest something of mine on the way out of Hewego,
something that wasn’t important now, but which dreams had shown me
would be of value in the far future.

..............................

My dreams show me bits of pieces of
things to come, but most of the details are left out. That’s why I
was stunned to learn that my mother had nuked the entire world.
Normally, that’s not something a kid would brag about, but all the
grownups made her out to be a hero. I was proud of her, in a way,
but she was always quick to point out that she hadn’t acted
alone.

If it wasn’t for the loss of Red, I’d
have remembered those first days in the bunker as the beginning of
a pretty nice life. But I had loved him as my own father. Zena’s
absence only worsened my despair. She was a good dog.

Deep inside our bunker, artificial
sunlight illuminated projected skies, ever-changing billowing
clouds dotting the false sky as if they were in truth blown by the
world’s winds, now forever forbidden to the living. Lakes filled
with frogs, catfish, eels, salmon and trout left little to be
desired, especially when the huge fans were blowing during the fake
thunderstorms. Zena would have loved to romp in the woods. Trees
from different climates grew inside the different biospheres—the
deciduous forest of Biodome Three was my personal
favorite—especially the apple orchard. The biospheres were even
programmed to mimic the position of the sun’s angle throughout the
day, giving way to a starry-night sky, and different phases of the
moon. The facsimiles weren’t as good as the originals, but were
better than anyone had hoped for.

The people of Hewego and Last Haven
lived, worked, loved and developed their special gifts, wondering
if similar abilities would be passed down to the next generation.
Seven months into our internment. my mother gave birth to a baby
boy with a star-shaped birthmark near his left eye. We welcomed him
with open arms. Everyone called the child Junior, but he had been
baptized in the name of his father, Redmond Wakeland.

My mother eventually remarried. Jacob
Fade was an okay guy, I guess, though I found myself spending more
and more time with Red, Jr. As little Red grew up, he got more fun
to play with, and we became true pals. After Elizabeth and Jacob
had two sons together, Barrett and Bryce, little Red and I were
pushed further away by our step father. He wasn’t a mean man, just
cold.

Over the years, the children of
Galatians Bunker studied hard and did their part to keep the bunker
going—most of them anyway. We amused ourselves with basketball,
video games, watching the movies, pranking one another, the Fight
Club, and a few activities I cannot mention for fear of
incriminating the guilty.

As we matured, we pursued careers,
found love, and started families of our own.

My brother, Red the Second, had been
blessed with many special charismas early on. One in particular had
been building a long time, causing him a lot of distress, but it
hadn’t ripened yet, and he was at a loss as to how to use
it.

One night, he came to the door of my
unit, knocking lightly. He had grown into a tall man, lean and
strong, like his father. He even got himself elected as mayor of
the bunker without having run for office.

“
Hey,” I said quietly,
answering the door in my underwear, not wanting to wake my wife and
my brood of children. Red stood there in the corridor, where the
lights were dim to mimic the night. His family’s unit was two
stories up, so I knew he hadn’t just happened by. “What’s
up?”

“
Dad’s ghost paid me a call
tonight.”

“
What did he say this
time?”

Besides his wife, I was the only one
who knew about the ghost of Red the First. If the story had come
from any man other than my brother, I’d have written him off as a
liar, but my younger brother was beyond reproach. I trusted him
without question.

“
Let’s go for a walk,” he
said.

First, I slipped into a pair of jeans
and a T-shirt, and then we navigated the vast network of hallways
to Red’s favorite biosphere, the one that pretended to be a rocky
beach on the Pacific. There were big boulders for climbing.
Machine-generated waves slapped the shore. At the push of a few
buttons, the fake digital image of the sun began to set in the
distance.

Red had never known any world except
the bunker, but I had. Therefore, I appreciated the thought that
had gone into the place, but sometimes it still felt like a cage.
Bunker Psychosis had been a common condition in the earlier years.
The community had endured a dozen suicides on account of
it.

Red and I took a seat together on a
boulder. His gray eyes stared across the pseudo-ocean’s horizon,
the way they always did when something serious was troubling
him.

“
So…” I really wanted to
know. “What did Dad tell you?”

Red picked up a stone, squeezed it,
turning it into powder. Bursts of physical strength were one of his
abilities. I looked at his curled fingers with envy.

He glanced up at the illusory,
computer-generated sky and took a deep breath. “He said, together
we will form a new nation, you and I. And one day the people will
rise up against me.”

“
What?”

“
They will call for my
blood.”

“
Not me!” I gasped. Red was
not only my favorite brother, but my best friend in the world. The
thought of betraying him made me sick. “I would never hurt you—not
on purpose!”

He didn’t reply, which made me feel
somehow guilty.

“
Are you still having those
dreams?” He turned the questions on me. This time I was the one who
didn’t reply. I swallowed hard and looked for the exit.

“
Don’t ignore my question.
Are you?”

“
Yes.”

“
And what have you seen,
Mike?”

“
I don’t understand them; I
can’t explain. We’re at war, but not down here, up there. I’ve seen
you and me, Nate, Veronica, others, all as we are now, on the
planet’s surface, but I recognize nothing. Yet somehow I know it’s
Ohio, right over our heads. You know how things seem in
dreams.”

“
Were we fighting the
Celeruns?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I keep
seeing mountains and forests, horses and swords. Pretty
strange—eh?”

“
The computer simulations
say the surface won’t be habitable again for generations. There’s
no way either of us will see the surface again.”

“
I dreamed what I
dreamed.”

“
Are earthquakes part of
your dream, brother?”

I knew why he was asking. The rumblings
had started two years ago and were getting closer and closer
together. Yesterday, a strong tremor had shaken the bunker,
knocking everything offline. Part of the theater room had come
crashing down, injuring several of the children. There had been a
scare that the life support systems wouldn’t come back up, but
thanks to Veronica, our computer guru, her team had gotten them
back online. Next time, Veronica said, she might not be so
lucky.

As we pondered another crisis, the
ground beneath our feet began to vibrate. We waited for it to stop,
but it grew stronger until large cracks began to form in the glass
sky. My first thought was my sleeping family.

I knew Red’s concern was for his family
as well, but being the mayor, he had to think bigger than that. I
chased after him through the exit.

“
This is the big one!” I
screamed, having played this out in a dream a dozen times over.
“The main control room is on fire, Red. Nothing can stop
it.”

I didn’t smell the smoke yet, or see
the flames, but I knew the earthquake had pulled the bunker apart
at the center. The plumbing was broken. Sprinkler systems would
fail.

“
What did I do in your
dream?” Red asked me, as we headed to the upper sleeping
chambers.

“
You led and we
followed!”

“
Where do I lead
you?”

“
I can’t tell you
that.”

“
You can’t or you
won’t?”

I had learned the hard way that it was
best to keep prophetic dreams to myself. A person shouldn’t know
too much about his or her future. As a youth, before I had learned
the art of discretion, I had watched people come undone over what I
had told them about my dreams. Although I had often confided in my
brother, I had chosen to keep my dreams concerning his destiny to
myself alone.

“
Your charisma, Red,” I
offered one little hint. “The one that refuses to be contained. The
one that’s kept you up at night since we were children. I think
it’s time to use it.”

The alarms began to blare. The shaking
stopped, but smoke started to fill the hallways. The emergency
lights had gone on, so I knew we’d lost the main power
grid.

“
Get my family, Mike, and
head to the hatchway.”

Red knew that he could count on me—at
least I hoped so, because that’s how I felt about him. I loved him.
I loved his family like my own.

My wife, Jessica, and the children were
waiting at the door, looking pale and afraid, but our practice
drills had prepared them for this precise moment. They were dressed
in layers and already had their backpacks strapped across their
shoulders. I heard Red’s voice come over the intercom, blasting
through the entire bunker.

“
The outer shell of the
bunker has been compromised. The life support systems have failed
and will never come on again. Fire has already consumed the three
bottom stories. I am ordering a full evacuation. Starting
now.”

“
A full evacuation?” my wife
said, gripping the front of my T-shirt. “Oh, god, Mike, we’ll die
out there!”

My youngest daughter clung to Miss
Buttercup.

“
The radiation, the cold,
the…” Jessica’s voice trailed off like a ghost into the
fog.

“
We must trust in the power
that has brought us this far,” I said.

I swooped up the bag that I had
prepared for this moment, and swooped up my youngest daughter,
while my oldest son filled a duffle bag with food, flashlights,
batteries, and other odds-and-ends. My six children followed behind
me, while my wife took the rear, making sure we didn’t lose anyone
in the madness.

The halls were filled with crying
children and panicked parents, single people of all ages, all
heading up to the hatchway. We stopped at Red’s family unit, where
his wife was waiting with her little ones, all bundled in layers of
sweaters, each holding a bag.

I should have known Red had prepared
them for going topside. I’d been talking about it since we were
children; how he would someday see the real sun, the real stars,
and feel the real wind against his skin.

Red was already at the bottom of the
truck ramp. I squeezed through a sea of people to join him
there.

“
The future begins now,” I
told my wife.

“
What’s left of it,” she
replied. “I suppose you’re going to play the part of the captain
and stay with the sinking ship?”

“
We will all be together
soon. Everything will be fine. You’ll see.”