The Bunker Kid

      My parents were teenagers during ‘The Great Toilet Paper Shortage’ of 2020. Or that’s what my mom called it. My father called it, ‘The Year of Disaster’ or the YoD for short. They like to tell me how some of the population couldn’t handle a thing called ‘social distancing’ or wearing a piece of cloth in front of their face.

           I asked them if they were sad that they had to be apart for so long. And before my father could answer Mom jumped in with, “Best three years of my damn life!”

           “Nothing really changed for us,” my father said, “she was always on her phone messaging me.”

           That doesn’t sound very romantic… “Nothing at all?”

           She shoved the giant man’s arm. “Hey! I sent you some of my best memes!”

           I love hearing mom talk about the old world, what life was like before the underground bunkers. Mom and my father had very different accounts on the world outside. Mom was a shut-in, she liked to claim that she was, “An indoor girl, I’ve been declawed!” But she told me the world of the Internet and of video games and cartoons and manga. Now that I’m older I think ninety percent of the stories she told me growing up were the plots of video games or movies.

           My father’s life was… well quite the tragedy. He was the youngest of six children, the eldest child came out of ‘the closet’ and his father shunned him and drove away in a huff and died in a car crash. The eldest child disappeared soon after. His mother got an illness when he was three and he and his siblings were sent to live with an aunt for a while... and a while became permanent with her passing. After that the siblings split up, two of the siblings were twins and they stayed with his aunt, one of his brothers got adopted into a rich family down south, his sister was taken in by their grandfather. My father himself? He refused to say, but I think he ran away. Ran away with nothing but his wits and a passion for art. How that led to him meeting my mom I have no idea. I assumed it was fate.

           My whole life was spent in the bunker, hidden away from what was on the surface. Just me, Mom, and my father, in one little bunker. Most would find it claustrophobic; I actually like the bunker. It’s cozy, safe, and everyone I love is inside!

           I was born well into what craziness was going on outside. So, I wasn’t raised on fear or anger, my parents tried to make the bunker their own space and not just, well, a bunker. Father painted on the walls, grassy fields with clear blue skies. Or that’s what he told me it was supposed to look like, I wouldn’t know the correct volume or color of grass. I remember he let me help clean the brushes when he was done.

           Mom showed me her old tech, like a cellphone and a laptop. They still turn on and work, but she said without Internet or this thing called Wi-fi they couldn’t everything she did as a kid. I didn’t mind, besides looking at the screens for too long made my eyes hurt. I have no idea how she did it for almost twenty-four hours a day when she was my age.

           They had a radio, when it still worked, I used it to talk to my aunt and uncle. Somehow, after the YoD but before whatever led everyone to live in bunkers, my Father found his brother and sister again. I don’t know what they looked like, but from their voices his brother had what he called a ‘Southern Drawl’. His sister spoke with a lot of big words that I had a hard time understanding. Unfortunately, the twins died during the YoD, poor immune systems inherited by their mother and they got sick.

           Then I found out that I had cousins! People who were kinda related to me but not really. I love my parents, but it was so nice talking to someone who was roughly my age, I developed a thing called ‘social skills’. We traded stories, mostly chores, tips or shenanigans that go on when we are away from the radio.

           My aunt and uncle find my father’s antics amusing and ‘very like him’. Whenever I describe him to them, they chuckle and tell me the same thing, “He never changes.”

           Which was true in a way, he rarely shaves his beard. Personally, I don’t mind it, it’s weird when he doesn’t have a beard. But Mom? She hates it, and she hates a lot of things, but his beard is at the top of the list. Their argument was always the same. “Shave it!”

           “Do not mutilate my body!”

           “I accidently cut you one time!”

           “I still have the scar!”

           Then she would jump onto his back and cling to his shoulders. Like a monkey being carried by a bigger monkey. “You’re being dramatic! Let me shave it!”

           “Never foul demon!”

           Not always the same words, but the gist was there. One time when I was really little, she shaved his beard off while he slept. I don’t remember much but they didn’t talk for a few days and it was strange, and I hated it.

           One time static came through the radio. Normally I would just turn it off and back on again or messing with the dial. But I must have been bored because I spoke into the mic. “Hello?” I asked.

           “Hello?”

           It was a new voice. I didn’t know a whole lot of people, but I never heard a voice so low and husky before. “Who are you?”

           “I’m with the-” there was static, and he came back, “-do you require assistance?”

           “No, I’m fine,” I answered. Until that point, I never had the ‘don’t talk to strangers’ speech, because I never ‘encountered’ a stranger until that day.

           “We can come find you. We have food and water and-” more static “-how old are you kid?”

           “Eleven.”

           “Eleven? Are you alone?”

           “No, I have my Mom.”

           “No dad?”

           “My father is here too.”

           “Do you know your coordinates? We can bring you three to-”

           The voice cut out, but this time there was no static. A hand forcibly turned the radio off in front of me. It looked more like a claw than a hand... I looked up and saw the disapproving face of my father, eyes cold, face emotionless. I wasn’t allowed to use the radio alone anymore.

           Ever since that day I wondered who that man was and why he wanted to find my parents and me. We were fine where we were, we didn’t require assistance! I wondered most about ‘we’, he said ‘we’ not ‘I’. Who was he with? Was it one of those groups from mom’s totally not stolen stories?

           When food started to run low was the first time, I’ve seen my father panic. Truly panic. He was not a man of expression but of art, he spoke with his paints and his words, not smiles. It’s part of the reason why I say ‘Father’ and not ‘Dad’, we just don’t have that calm connection I do with Mom. He’s like a rock, unmoving and strong, I always thought nothing scared him. So, seeing fear seep into his eyes… it terrified me. Like suddenly everything wasn’t okay and normal.

           We managed for a while longer, but we knew this was the beginning of the end. I didn’t dare mentioning that we could go outside and scavenge for something. So, we rationed more… and more. Ate less and less, less than we already had before.

           I was fifteen, hungry, maybe dying. When there was a knock, quick, brief, faint. I thought I hallucinated it. But it came back, heavier, more urgent. I had no idea where it came from, I never saw any stairs leading to the surface and I searched, believe me I searched.

           So, I just laid there in my bunk, Mom putting a protective arm around me, as my father slowly got up and approached the knocking. I though he was going to bump into the wall, that blue and green wall I knew all my life, when he pushed it to the side and revealed stairs. And I thought, why did I never try pushing it to the side?

           We watched him go up, one foot at a time, slowly, one hand against the wall for balance. He disappeared the further up he went. We heard his heavy footsteps, a handle turning, something unlocking, a metal door opening. And a low husky voice, “Do you require assistance?”