For seven sunless years they’d lived down here. On that day when the sirens wailed and the sky poured death he’d carried his wife down the hatch and into the bunker and she’d screamed till she tore her throat, and by the time the baby came his wife was already gone. He’d laid her outside and then began what seemed to be an impossible task of raising a child in a ruined world.

He’d done it selfishly, too. He knew that. He’d always known it, though during those moments when he was drunk at the kitchen table or drooling in his sleep, he was able to bury it. A little deeper with each sip, until he convinced himself it wasn’t even there anymore. Years of alcoholic stupor wedged into the place where good parenting should’ve been. And she’d never known, since she’d had nothing to compare him to.

But in sober moments like this one, that buried shame clawed up from its grave. Yes she was smart, and healthy, and inquisitive ... but how much more of each of those might she be if he’d done his job properly? If he’d only—

“Daddy?” the girl said. He looked up from the map and smiled at her, relieved to be saved from himself.

“Yes, hon?”

“I’m tired.”

“I’ll tuck you in.”

The father bent to scoop his daughter into his arms and then carried her to bed. He pulled the covers over her.

“Goodnight, Dad,” she said, her face already turned to the wall.

“Night.”

He extinguished the lamps and found his own bed, though it was hours before he slept.

*     *     *
The girl rose first. She had granola bars for breakfast; behind her, her dad snored. It sounded like ... like ... well, she didn’t know. But she imagined it sounded the way those big scary animals might’ve sounded in the last colouring book she had—the tigers of the jungle, or the elephants, or the gorillas. The rhinos were her favourite; she loved those horns. She’d give almost anything to be able to see any of those jungle creatures, or really, any other creature at all.

She chewed her breakfast numbly. Though the girl couldn’t put a name to it, it was longing she most felt—a longing for the outside world. She’d take almost any of the bad situations her dad said might happen outside over being stuck down here.

Her dad stirred and groaned and then sat up. “Morning.”

“Morning,” the girl replied.

He always woke up and ate cereal and put on the suit and the mask and he would promise to be back soon, and she always watched him open the door to the chamber, slam it and lock it, turn to the ladder and climb, and even from the inside of the bunker, her faced pressed against the glass of the chamber door, wide eyes staring upward, she always saw that brief flash of sky—sometimes it was blue and sometimes blue and white and sometimes completely grey—and then the cover would slam down and her father wouldn’t be back for hours.

Except this time her daddy hadn’t stood.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said absently, and he had a weird look, like he wasn’t focusing.

“Dad?”

“Hmm?”

“What’s wrong?”

“Hmm? What? Nothing, honey.”

“Okay.” The girl finished her granola bars and got out the colouring book.

*     *     *
The man stood at last. His knees seemed to be getting more sore by the day, the damn things, though he could very well have said that about the last half-decade running. Once you hit a certain age, he theorized, the body never fully healed. Something was always sore all the time, and just as soon as something fixed itself another thing wanted the spotlight.

It was time to tell her. No avoiding it any longer. But it was so hard ... somehow, though he was about to make his daughter happier than she’d ever been, it was the hardest thing he’d ever have to do. Maybe it was the risk—where she saw joy and exploration, he’d see a thousand opportunities to die between here and there. Where she felt excitement, he’d feel apprehension. But even now, with life so limited and precious, risks had to be taken, didn’t they? Didn’t they?

“Daddy?”

“Huh?”

“Why are you acting so weird?”

“Sorry, child. How’s your book?”

“Good.” She held it up for him to see. Ariel’s fin was purple, and her once-red hair was now blue.

“Looks great, hon. Listen, uh ...”

He began to pace. He put his hands behind his head, put his hands on his hips. Sat down, stood up, sat again. Christ it was hard. But he looked her in the eye when he spoke.

“I’ve got a present for you.”

“Oh! What is it? Where?”

“You see that green bag in the corner?”

She looked. “Yeah.”

“Bring it here. Don’t open it yet.”

Dutifully, she sprinted over, grabbed it, dragged it back. “Heavy,” she remarked.

“Yeah. Now, before you open it, I want you to know ... uh, we’re gonna ... it’ll take some time to prepare.”

“What?” The way her eyebrows knitted together was just the way the girl’s mother’s had so many times before her. The man fought off a stab of painful memory and gave his head a frustrated shake.

“You know what, just open it. Okay, hon? We’ll talk about it when you see it.”

With no more encouragement needed, his daughter tore open the bag and grabbed ...

“A mask?” she said with wonder. “And ...” she reached back in, found the suit, and pulled it out.

“It should fit,” he told her.

She dressed quickly. He helped her zip it over her baggy clothes and then helped fasten the mask in place. He tugged and pulled and checked every inch for security—it was a little loose, a little big. But it would be okay.

“Are we going out?” she asked, and began to bounce up and down in her excitement. “Are we, Daddy? I get to go with you?”

“Yes, honey. We’re gonna go for a trial run, okay?”

“Whatzatmean?”

“We’re gonna go outside together, for a little bit, and see how you do.”

“Okay!” she bounded for the door.

“Wait,” he said sharply. She came back.

“What?”

He got a roll of duct tape from the supplies (noting, as he did so, and as he always did whenever he took a good look at them, how quickly they were dwindling) and tore off a long piece and wrapped it around her leg, snake-like, pinning in some of the billowing excess. He did that on the other leg, her arms, around her middle. He stood to admire the result—she was much more compact.

“Listen to me, okay? You can’t let anything damage your suit or your mask, and you must never—take—anything—off. Got it?”

“Yes.”

He dressed in his own suit, looked at her with a worry she would never be able to see behind his mask, and led the way outside.

*     *     *
At first it was the colours—she’d never seen so many colours, but they were tinted by the mask’s green shield and so she instinctively reached to take it off ... and let her hand fall back down. She couldn’t, but that was okay, because something was spreading from her toes to the tippy top of her head and she felt amazing ... as though the whole wide universe was both at her fingertips and thousands and thousands of miles away—

The girl felt a hand on her shoulder and jumped. “How you doing, hon?”

“Daddy?” She looked up; he was a mile tall with the sky above him—that bright, open, endless sky, clear blue today ... and off to the right was a ball of angry red, too bright to look at even through the tinted mask, and it hurt her, and she remembered her father always called it the son which meant it was her brother but how could that be if it wasn’t even a person and it hurt so mu—

“Do you like it?”

“I—”

“It’s a lot to take in. But you see this, here?” He walked a step forward and kicked the rim of a giant metal plate. “That’s the hatch to the bunker. If you’re feeling overwhelmed we can go back in.”

The girl had fixated on a tiny cloud and didn’t hear the last of her father’s words. She stared up at it as it moved lazily along—it was much nicer than the son, and peaceful, but she couldn’t figure out why it was moving. Was it alive? Her neck was bent back in an effort to see as much as possible; her spine strained ...

“Honey?”

A weird invisible hand started grabbing her and she shrieked; it was pulling at her suit, slapping her; she was being attacked—

“It’s just wind, honey!” her dad shouted quickly, shielding her, holding her, comforting her. “Just wind. It’s normal, okay? Christ, I always forget how much you don’t know ...”

She was crying. The tears were filling the mask; she wanted to take it off so badly, take it off and fall down and cry her heart out; she was reaching for it now, both hands pulling at it, tugging—

“No,” her dad said sharply, a voice of hurt and rare sternness that made her cry more. Suddenly she was lifted, and though she struggled at first she felt safe in her father’s arms, and went limp. Dimly, she heard the hatch open, felt a bump, and then they started going down because he was on the ladder, and she closed her eyes tight.

When they got to the bottom and through the chamber and into the bunker she fell to the floor; her right knee landed painfully on a crayon and she threw it aside in anger and frustration. It clattered against the wall and bounced under her dad’s bed.

“Honey—”

“No!”

“No what?”

“I hate it! I hate the outside! I—I—” But breathing was impossible; her lungs refused to work and she was hitching, sobbing again, unable to say how unfair it was that the outside world was so horrible.

“Shh, honey, shhh. It’s okay.” Dad was holding her again, stroking her hair, calming her. She wept on his shoulder until her breathing steadied, and then, exhausted, she fell asleep. He carried her to bed.

*     *     *
The man sat at his table, that evening, with paper in front of him and pen in hand. He sipped at his scotch and reviewed the list:

• wind
• fire
• sun and moon
• wild animals
• cars, buildings, machinery

He’d given up. It was a short list, a bad list. A list that did little to properly determine exactly what he’d be able to teach her, and what she’d have to learn for herself. A list that couldn’t begin to make up for the years in which neglected to teach her the most basic of concepts because he’d lived in his own little nihilistic world, all but given up on life. He’d been a poison to her in that neglect, and now he couldn’t possibly explain everything to someone walking Earth’s shattered landscape for the first time.

They’d have to learn as a team. As much as he could try now to prepare her, she’d find a thousand things to marvel at or be scared by between here and that society.

He heard her stirring behind him, and waited for her voice. “Dad?”

“Hi, hon. How was your sleep?”

“Okay.”

“You slept right through your exercises.”

“Okay.” She stood and started the workout. For a while, he watched her do the jumping jacks, the push-ups, the sprints between one wall of the bunker and the other. She could make it fifty miles, he thought. She could. But a cold grip of doubt suggested otherwise.

She stopped her sprints and looked at him, sweaty and panting. “Dad?”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry for being scared of the outside.”

“Oh, honey, that’s okay.” He knelt beside her and took one of her tiny hands. “It’s scary out there, and I should have done more to help prepare you. There are a lot of things about the outside that I take for granted because I lived out there for many years before being in this bunker with you, so it’s my fault for not remembering everything you don’t know. Here, I made a list,” he added, sweeping the paper off the table with his free hand.

She took it. “Wind?” she read. “Fire?”

“They’re things I need to explain to you. Things you probably know to an extent, but which are different outside than they are in here.”

“Okay ...”

And for the next hour they talked. The man did his best to tell her everything he thought she might need to know, from watching her footing while climbing over roots and rocks, to a description about rain that she found exceedingly fascinating and which derailed his train of thought so he could go into detail about the water cycle. It did little to make up for all the damage he’d done, but it was a start.

For dinner they had pasta, and while they ate she asked him more and more until he thought her head might explode from the influx of knowledge. These were the questions she might once have felt afraid to ask, or which he would’ve dodged, and rather than question why he was telling her everything at last, she let open the floodgates of childhood imagination and curiosity. The promise of leaving the bunker—though it terrified her, he was sure—enraptured her even more.

“When do you think you’ll want to go back out again?” he asked her when there was finally a lull in her questions.

She stalled; her forehead creased with concentration; she stared at a point many miles beyond the walls of the bunker. “I don’t know.”

“How about tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow?” she said sharply, looking at him.

“Just to practice again. For a few minutes. Now that you know more of what to expect.”

He could see the worry on her face; no amount of preparation would be enough, in her eyes.

“I don’t ...”

“Tomorrow,” he said, this time firmly.

“Do we have to?”

“Yes. I know you can do it,” he added gently. “You’re strong and brave.”

“No I’m not.” She looked glumly downwards. “Not brave.”

“Yes, you are,” he insisted, and knelt beside her again. “Hey, chin up, look at me.”

She looked.

“You’re brave, and I would never ask you to do something I didn’t think you’d be able to do.”

“Okay,” she said doubtfully.

“Bedtime?” he asked. “Or do you wanna read for a bit?”

“I’ll read for a bit.”

“Great. And hon?”

“Yeah.”

“I love you.”

“Love you too, Dad.”

*     *     *
That night, while they slept, there was an earthquake. Though it did not disturb their slumber, it was enough to crack open the stretching expanse of the land around them. Earth shifted, and with it shifted the foundation of the bunker. Cement fell and split; water rushed in. The bunker began to fill, and the father woke four hours later to find that almost all of their remaining supplies had been destroyed. Food, clothing, drinking water. He began to scream.

*     *     *
“GOD FUCKING DAMMIT!” the girl heard, and it broke her dream like a toy. She rolled over slowly, not yet ready to be awake.

When her dad screamed another bad word a red spike of fear shot up through her heart, and her lungs worked rapidly, the air ragged and dry and thin.

“Daddy?” She leaned out of bed and saw him covering his face with his hands.

“Oh God—”

He began to pace, sloshing from his bunk to the kitchen and back. And it was the sloshing noise that first alerted the girl to the water; she saw it glimmering blackly on the ground, swept her eyes along its murky depths—it was everywhere. Under her bed, under the door, in the kitchen, everywhere.

“Daddy, why is—”

“Grab your suit and that mask,” he yelled, turning at the sound of her voice. “Now!”

Her eyes welled up with tears. “Daddy, you’re—you’re being scary!”

Dad’s face softened a touch. “I’m sorry, honey, but this is urgent. We need to move.”

The tears came for her anyways, like they often did. She brushed them off but more came in their place and when she tried to stand she felt a hot grip of panic seize her and hold her. She just wanted to stay in bed until this was all—

“MOVE!” he screamed, and her legs took her before she could even realize it. Terror plunged her mind into an icy numbness; she wasn’t even aware of her feet dragging through the water, her hands grabbing the bag—only the full dark of cold fear fogging her.

“Listen,” a voice said, and she felt a hand grab her arm roughly. She shrieked.

“Listen,” the voice said again, and her dad was picking her up now, standing her on top of the kitchen table. She was clutching the bag.

“You need to put that on here, where it won’t get wet, okay?”

“Huh?” some version of her echoed.

“Put the suit on, now. Just like yesterday.”

Her father began wiping at her legs and feet with a towel, and her hands retraced their previous day’s actions in spite of her shattered thoughts; she heard words of encouragement as she pulled the suit on, and through the sloshing noises she somehow thought of Ariel: Ariel was a mermaid, and that meant she could swim. Ariel could do anything ... Ariel would help her be okay.

Movement in the water beside her—her father was pulling his suit on, too. He paused to help her with her mask once the suit was snug and then she stood there, fragments of vision and reality and understanding coming back one at a time, tinted green. The girl was thinking harder and harder about Ariel until all this this bad stuff would go away.

“Here,” he said, and she was lifted and carried above the water to the door.

Slosh-slosh-slosh—

The door cracked open and she heard her dad grunting to pull it against the water. She clung to his shoulders.

“Why can’t I get wet?” Her voice sounded thick and distant because of the mask, and the words fell like drops shaken from a damp cloth.

“Because you won’t be taking the suit off for a long time.”

“But you got wet.”

“It was inevitable.”

He got the door wide enough for the two of them to squeeze past and then they were climbing, lurching up one rung at a time, leaving behind an entire life and all she’d ever known.

*     *     *
He threw open the hatch and it sounded like a gunshot in the clear air. The father set the girl down but she didn’t move; she grabbed his hand and held it. For a minute he let her stand there but then encouraged her forward gingerly, a gloved hand on her back. “We need to move, hon.”

“No. Not yet.”

He thought he detected a certain resiliency in her voice, as though rather than fight her fate she was working towards accepting it. “Okay,” he said.

And so they stood, for a time, and he fought with a twisted knot of worry in his gut. All their supplies gone like that ... fifty miles ahead of them ...

He was about to try again, but she stepped first. They began to walk, hand in hand.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

The map flashed through his mind—destroyed by the flood with everything else. But he’d long since memorized their route. “Just stay close.”

She held up remarkably well. The going was slow—her strides were so much shorter than his so he let her dictate the pace—and for a long time they didn’t talk much. He thought she might have a million questions about everything she saw or felt or maybe got a whiff of through the mask, but if she did, she kept them to herself. Though she did look around with a bright and vivid curiosity, and at times he’d point to something and explain its origin or significance ... the better to fill, one small piece at a time, the half-decade void of where being a good father should’ve been.

When they got to the first town, where he’d seen that first sign a year ago, she wanted to explore some of the old shops. He allowed the detour—keeping her appeased would make for a smoother journey for both of them—but right now time was the enemy, and he didn’t want to linger.

“What’s this?” she asked.

He smiled. She was holding a tablet, and he told her so.

“What’s it do?”

“Nothing, anymore. But it used to do lots of stuff.” The tablet was caked with dust, the Apple logo obscured. She put it back on a shelf and wiped her gloves on her suit and then picked up something else.

He explained three or four more now-archaic electronics to her. Then said, “Now let’s get going, honey. Long way to go.”

“’Kay.”

They left the store; as they walked she wanted to touch other things that caught her eye and he let her at first, but then grew more insistent that they leave. At the end of the main street they passed the sign. She ran to it, stood in front of it, read it aloud.

“Is that where we’re going, Daddy?” she turned to look at him. He could sense the hope in her voice, and behind her, the painted words gleamed with promise: SANCTUARY! UNDERGROUND SOCIETY! NEW MEMBERS WELCOME! A WHOLE CITY FOR ABOVE-GROUND SURVIVORS!

Under them, the coordinates of the destination and the reason for the stains of scotches come-and-gone on the map, the hours he’d spent studying it ... and the familiar nagging worry of the society’s actual existence. If it was a myth, they were dead.

“Yes, child. But it’s a long way away.”

“How long?”

He pointed. “See that forest way over there?”

“Yeah.”

“We have to go through that.” And then what? Miles and miles to go, pal, and you can’t take your mask off, and you’ll get thirsty and hungry ...

He shook the thoughts off. They’d make it. They had to.

“Oh,” she said. “But there’s people there? Real live people?”

“You bet.”

At the edge of town there was a pile of bikes. She stopped to ask what they were, and he stopped to pick one up. He found one that would suit him, and mounted it.

“Sit behind me,” he told her, “on this part of the seat. Put your feet on these axles—”

“What?”

“These things,” he tapped with his boot. “And put your arms around me and hold tight.”

She hesitated.

“It’ll be fun, and get us there faster.”

She climbed on. He kicked off, and into that dusty afternoon they rode together, her first time on a bike, and she began to laugh with delight. The father smiled.

They could make it.

*     *     *
The girl could feel that wind tugging at her again, pulling at the suit and grabbing her ... but this time it wasn’t so bad. This time, she kind of enjoyed it.

The world flew past them—or were they the ones flying past the world? She was gripping her dad as hard as she could; at first it had been terror but that quickly got replaced by ... she just learned the word last week: exhilaration. They were soaring. Great, empty fields zipped past them to the right and left; she bent her neck back and saw the clouds, like massive, wonky pancakes, racing them; over the rush of the wind she could hear the bike clicking as it sped along the road. There was a bitter smell on the air, too, or the hint of one that got through the mask’s filters. She thought she could kind of taste it, and at one point she yelled to her father, wondering what it was, but he either chose not to answer or pretended he hadn’t heard.

“Don’t look at the cars,” was all he said.

There were cars everywhere, though; some of them on the road and most in the ditches to either side. Her dad steered around the ones in the road but she couldn’t help looking at them as they passed, and then she thought she saw—

A body. She turned to look, but it was gone.

They pulled to a stop. The girl straightened and looked past her dad’s elbow at the wall of trees ahead. The road they were on didn’t go through; it curved to the left.

“Okay, get down, hon.”

The girl hopped down on one side and swung her leg over. She was slow and deliberate—Daddy told her never to damage the suit. But this forest ahead ... she was certain to damage it in there. Even he was probably going to damage his. Nervousness threatened to flare in her again and she tugged at his arm and looked up at his mask but he wasn’t looking at her; he was walking towards something, mumbling to himself, and she followed—

It was another sign. This one said, FALLOUT’S OVER! SAFE TO BREATHE!

“Daddy, is that true? Can I ...” She reached for the mask.

“No!”

She flinched backwards at the shout, and immediately wanted to cry again.

“I’m sorry, honey,” he said, and she felt him hug her. He was saying more, and she listened, hoping he’d tell her everything was going to be okay, that she could take it off soon, that he was sorry for yelling, but he was talking about that stupid sign instead.

“... probably isn’t true, so I want to play it safe. At least until we get there, and then when we meet other people ...”

The girl was staring at a clump of dirt. She didn’t care about other people right now; other people were stupid, just like that sign.

“Hey,” he said gently, shaking her.

“What?”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. When can we eat?”

He didn’t say anything for a few seconds, and then, “Soon.”

“How soon?”

But he was walking around the sign, checking the back of it. “Shit,” she heard him say. Another swear. She hated it.

“What?” she asked, joining him. Then she saw: there were more words on the back.

SANCTUARY AHEAD—ALL SURVIVORS UNITE. UNDERGROUND BUNKER CIVILIZATION. ALL ARE WELCOME!!

“But that’s on the wrong side,” she said. “Daddy, which way do we go?”

“It’s fine,” he said. “We’ll keep going the way we were. Someone turned it around and wrote the other message where people would see it.”

“Why?”

“Either as a sick joke or because they truly believe it. Regardless, keep your mask on, and don’t let anything damage your suit.”

“I know,” she said.

“We’ll have to be careful.” Her dad sighed and then turned and started walking.

The girl hurried to catch up. She grabbed her dad’s hand and felt relief—she was safe.

*     *     *
The going was even slower now. His daughter took small steps at the best of times, and now with both of them hypersensitive to damaging the suits, each rock was a mountain and each tree its own forest.

“I’m tired,” the girl said eventually. “And hungry. And thirsty. When are we getting there?”

The man thought of the leagues ahead, the rough terrain of the woodland and the uncertainty on the other side, and gave the same answer as earlier. “Soon.”

“When?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you carry me?”

“Sure.” He bent to scoop her up and positioned her so no limbs were sticking out and at risk of catching a branch. Soon she was dozing again, and grew heavy in his arms. The father started sweating; it rolled down his back and clung to his shirt and stuck through to the suit’s fabric. Some dribbled down his forehead and fogged up his mask.

The girl was tired, hungry, thirsty ... and so was he. Oh Lord so was he.

*     *     *
The path emerged sometime the next morning. They’d spent the night under a huge spruce and the father cleared a place on the floor before darkness fell in earnest. He searched the woods for leafy boughs and fallen branches of soft pine—he made them each a bed as comfortable as nature would allow, and—most importantly—free from sharp protrusions. Each of them fell asleep immediately, exhausted enough to override discomfort and hunger.

The man shook his daughter awake when dawn came and passed and then bled into morning proper. She grumbled but got up, and together they began the journey once more. Her steps were even slower today; she dragged her feet and stumbled more than once. Irritated, he carried her again, wondering how long his own strength would hold out and how much farther till the woods grew sparser and he might be able to see the world through the trees.

And as if providence, it was only an hour later when he stepped over a root, around an explosion of moss, and ... onto a path. In his shock, he stopped walking. The girl twisted in his arms.

“Dad? Why’d you stop?”

“Look.”

The girl was silent for a time; they each marveled at it. Where’d it come from? The map he’d spent hours scouring over had never so much as hinted at a pathway through these woods, though it had just about everything down to the last pebble on it. He turned to see how far back it stretched, and within the first dozen feet it grew less clear and then stopped altogether, running into a wall of trees. A path that ended in the middle of the forest. He could follow the sun to the other side but where this path led was anyone’s guess ...

“Why are you waiting, Daddy?”

“Not sure where it leads, hon.”

“Let’s try it.”

Let’s try it. He hesitated; a heartbeat passed, then another. He stepped forward.

“Yay!” his daughter cried.

And how he wished he could share that enthusiasm.

*     *     *
The gentle swaying put the girl to sleep soon after her dad started on the path. Everything before that was way too bumpy; she’d started to hate the forest, but now the path made things smooth and easy and in her sleep her head was filled with sharp images, an imagination run rampant.

She was in a field. At her feet lay the suit and the mask, and she had her arms spread wide, head thrown back, eyes closed, spinning in a slow circle of freedom and crisp air and all the smells the mask had filtered out. Her dad was gone but somehow that was okay; right now her world was filled with ... well, this word she didn’t know. She didn’t think there was a word for how she felt, and in her happiness she was staring now at the son, vivid and bright and it still hurt ... but it was okay. This time, it was okay. The son was nice, and it was warm on her skin, and as long as she didn’t look at it too closely it felt so good she wondered why she was ever scared of it.

She began to walk. Grass crunched softly under her feet—she was barefoot, and it felt somehow soft and rough at the same time and she wanted to run all of a sudden, and the wind whipped past her as she sprinted into the endless field and somewhere she heard laughter and a group of other people. She went to them, and her heart started hammering in her chest, and her tummy twisted uncomfortably and she knew it was nervousness she’d started feeling because she had never met anyone else before and they were right over there. Right ... over ...

... There. She stood in the middle of a ring; they were surrounding her and the laughter had stopped and her nervousness was replaced by a fear so deep it was like she’d fallen down a dark well because they weren’t moving or talking and all of them had their suits on, and masks, and they were holding knives, bloody knives, and now they were closing in on her, one step on dead ground after another, snap-crunch, snap-crunch—

Snap-crunch a branch went under her dad’s foot, and the girl jolted awake so violently her dad almost dropped her.

“Honey?” she heard him say, his voice sharp and anxious. “What’s wrong?”

The fear of the dream was still so fresh that she clung to him as hard as she could and began to sob. “Daddy—Dad—”

“Shh ... It’s okay. Deep breaths. It’s all right. I’ve got you. Was it a bad dream?”

She nodded her head and hoped he’d feel it.

“I’m sorry, hon. It wasn’t real though. You know that?”

“Uh-huh,” she mumbled. “I don’t like the real world, Daddy. Can we go back?”

“We can’t go back. The bunker flooded, remember?”

She did remember, and something tasted bad in her mouth, and her tummy hurt again but this time it was real because—

“I’m starving, Daddy!”

“I know, hon. I’m hungry too.”

“No! I’m starving! I need food!”

“Honey—”

“I need it—”

“No!” he yelled, and his voice tore through her ears and brain and carried on through the trees on either side and her eyes welled with tears.

“No,” he said again. “I’m sorry, hon. We can’t eat, or drink, or take our masks off, or slow down, because if we do any of those we’ll die. You can eat when we get there.”

She wanted to say something to that but didn’t know what. Dad sounded ... different, and it was a full minute before she could figure out why. He was tired, and he felt just as bad as she did. Sadness filled her again but this time for him. What if he was going to die?

“Hon?”

“Please don’t die, Daddy.”

“I’m not going to die.”

*     *     *
That night they camped under another tree and the father made two more beds of leafy boughs. The girl felt homesick for the bunker. The man thought of a classic meal from his twenties, of macaroni and cheese mixed with ground beef and mayonnaise.

And though neither of them knew it, the end of the forest would’ve been another two minutes’ walking, at the end of the path they’d taken, cleared and shaped for that very purpose by residents of the underground society.

*     *     *
It was a clear night. Above, the trees parted wide enough for large chunks of sky. The girl asked, “Daddy, is that the moon?”

He smiled at the wonder in her voice and that made the hunger and the thirst abate just a little—by day’s end he’d begun to think they might not make it after all. This moment with her now seemed almost a blessing.

“Yes, hon. That’s the moon. Full tonight, by the looks of it. And the stars are really something, aren’t they?”

“Yeah ...”

They each stared for a while longer. The girl, who’d calmed somewhat after her nightmare, was not aware of the small rip in her suit, as it was on the back of her leg. And the word she would’ve thought best matched how she felt in that first (happy) part of her dream was euphoria, and right now she felt it again, staring at that unbroken sheet of dancing starlight and the shining, silver moon in the middle of it all. Behind her mask, her mouth was slack with amazement, and hard at work somewhere deep in her head, her mind did its best to achieve what billions of human beings before her could not: comprehension of what she saw. It was so endless, and daunting, and beautiful, and ...

And it was nearing midnight when they finally fell asleep; the girl had wiggled her way over to her father’s pile of leaves and snuggled up next to him. This night was chillier than the last. He slept with a protective arm around her.

*     *     *
It was a cold morning. They each woke at dawn, shivering, and though the girl did not want to rise the father made her, telling her she’d warm up if they started walking.

“I don’t feel good,” she tried to tell him.

“Neither do I,” he said.

They each pushed on, feeling the bitter bite of cold in addition to the hunger and fatigue and thirst. Their steps dragged.

Then the forest began to clear—sparser here and sparser there and then ...

“Christ,” the father said, jubilation colouring the name, “oh Jesus Christ my god it’s over! Hon, we made it through! Come on!”

He picked her up and ran the rest of the way down the path, out of the forest, to the empty, dead, stretching road beyond.

The cleared road.

“Are we there?”

“Almost, hon,” the father panted. “Oh, baby, almost. We’re so close.”

He set his daughter down and she stumbled a bit. “Sorry,” he said, already turning back to the road, looking for anything ...

“Let’s, uh ... let’s start walking. We’ll find something.”

“More walking?”

“Yeah. We can do it, hon. Come on.”

The girl was feeling worse now than she had been that morning. The cold was gone but now she was too hot, and sweat was running down her forehead and smearing against the glass of the mask, which was fogging up. She was growing sicker by the minute. Her head felt all woozy. She stumbled again, trying to keep up, and tried to call out to her dad to slow down. The words would not come.

The man reached the road and stared down the stretch that he knew, from the map, went north-west and took them almost to the society’s doorstep. He was wondering who’d cleared the road and how long ago, since it looked clean of more than just vehicles, when his daughter came up next to him.

“Dad—” she began, but he interrupted her by gripping her arm.

“You hear that?”

“What?”

“Shh. Listen.”

They listened; his heart pounded with anticipation ... could it be? Had he heard correctly?

Oh yes, there it was: the roar of an engine.

“Oh fuck,” he yelled, and the girl, scared of his yelling over the last few days, recognized the difference in tone. This was a happy yell.

“What is it?” she begged to know, but then she saw it: a red truck cresting the road in the distance and coming towards them. Her dad was laughing, shouting some more, jumping up and down and waving his arms at it. The girl, infected by his happiness, found the strength to do the same.

The truck saw them and sped up, honking repeatedly in return excitement. The final blast took it right up to where they were standing, and then the door flew open and out stepped someone in a suit just like theirs, arms spread wide. This person was shouting too—none of them could figure out what they were saying because now the two men were trying to talk at once; the stranger hugged the father ... but now the girl’s joy was fading ... she felt weak. She wanted to lay down more than anything in the whole world.

“ ... my daughter. We’ve travelled for days now. We’ll need ...”

The girl felt someone shake her hand; in front of her, the two figures swam in and out of focus. Arms went around her, lifted her up, placed her inside the truck. She slumped sideways, powerless to control herself.

“Dead tuckered, poor thing,” she dimly heard a voice say, and someone was clipping something around her chest.

“Buckled up,” another voice said, and then she heard a door open and shut and a second one open and shut but mostly it was her own ragged breathing filling her ears, amplified and twisted by the mask. Her eyelids weighed a hundred pounds each and she fought to keep them open. What she could see was clouded with stars through the green glass, as though all the ones from the previous night had filled this truck. Somewhere, on the far side of this universe, her dad sat. He was talking to the new person, and she clung to the conversation desperately.

“Man,” she thought one of them was saying, “I remember it so vividly. They just got on us so fast. We were all fucked. I mean, ’scuse me—”

“Oh I’ve dropped enough F-bombs around her these last few days, don’t worry about it.”

“Don’t you dare say bomb around me, man—not once, not ever.”

Her dad’s laugh barely reached the girl’s ears.

“I know what you mean. I wonder if they know some of us survived.”

“Doubt they care, really. Too few of us to do anything.”

“Yeah. So how big is your society?”

“Oh, relatively speaking it’s pretty big. Think the last census topped us at just under four hundred.”

“Four hundred?”

“Yeah, man. We’ve been growing.”

“But ... the logistics. Waste disposal? Food? Water?”

“I’ll show you all, my man. Just you wait. She’s a beaut.”

“Christ ... four hundred. But why were you driving? Where were you going?”

“Well, assuming you came out of the woods?”

“Yeah?”

“You found a path?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s me, man. Been working at it for two years now. Painstaking. Been using this.” The man held something up that the girl thought looked like a giant knife. Her vision blurred it, focused it, blurred it again. Her head felt so hot she thought it might burst. She tried to talk and couldn’t. Why couldn’t Dad just look at her? Just turn around and see her ...

“Why not a chainsaw?”

“Don’t trust myself not to cut my suit open or tear off my hand. This is slower but more manageable.”

“Amazing. And gas? How are you driving this thing?”

“Oh, we’ve got some geniuses living with us. For gas we’ve got these HHO generators—basically they transform water into fuel, but to be honest, I’ve never understood how, even though I’ve had it ’splained to me about a hundred times. Now you tell me about yourself, man. How’d you come to be wandering around after all these years?”

The girl heard her dad tell this new man about the flooded bunker and then finding the signs that gave them a destination.

“Fuck yeah. Third one in three years, you are. Glad they’re paying off.”

“Yeah, but one of them said the fallout’s over.”

“What? Hell no it ain’t. Our Geigers are still going off the charts.”

“So did mine, man, and I took ’em on every damn run I went on. The reading hasn’t changed. I know a regular fallout’s five years max, maybe six, but who the hell knows what they used on us ...”

“Goddamn right. Might be decades still. Glad you had the good sense to keep your suits and masks—”

There came a gargling noise from behind the two men, and then a retching noise, and then a healthy splat. Even though she hadn’t eaten in days, the girl had vomited inside her mask. She reached up and the father saw what she was doing, saw the state she was in, finally, but she was out of reach, and though he was screaming at her now she didn’t seem to hear him; her hand trembled as it rose, trembled as it loosened the clip, and then fell limply back. The mask clattered to her feet.

“Curious,” she mumbled, inaudibly. “Wanted to know what air smelled like.”

*     *     *
She was dead a long time before they got to the underground society. The father knew that, of course, but he was not ready to accept it, and so he screamed and swore at the other man to get him inside and get her to a doctor and the man hurried because he’d seen a lot of death since the bombs first started falling from the sky, and he’d seen a lot of people reacting to that death, and he knew the best thing you could do for someone grieving over a still-warm body was to let them carry on their denial and delusions as long as they saw fit.

Two sets of feet thundered down the spiral stairs; the man in front led the way and behind him the father carried the girl. They burst through one set of doors and went through some plastic sheeting and then burst through another. The father stormed for the next doors but the other man, with a resigned sigh, asked him to stop.

The father rounded on him. “My—”

“I know. But this is the decontamination room. If you go through those doors with your suit still on, you could infect everyone. You’re not doing that. Strip, toss your suit in that pile, and shower.”

The father almost argued, then acquiesced instead and began undressing—first himself, and then his daughter. The other man said nothing.

He was given a towel and clean clothes. He dressed while his companion found something for the girl and then the father dressed her, too. The whole process took under five minutes, but to him it felt like five years. She was dying as he dressed her.

He turned for the doors again.

“Wait.”

“What now?” he demanded, his girl limp in his arms.

The other man hesitated and then spoke slowly. “She, uh ... well I’m not sure what she’s sick with, but if she’s under the weather with something then I think I should get the doctor out here instead of bringing her to the doctor, you know? I’ll be super fast.”

The father’s face went stormy but thankfully he did not move, and the second man slipped past him, opened the door, locked it behind him, and jogged for the infirmary. He got a doctor and described the situation. Then he got two guards to accompany them should the father decide to get violent at the news, and together they marched for the man and his child.

*     *     *
The people were quite nice. They’d all been respectful of him and his daughter; they’d been welcoming; they’d tended to his every request. They’d told him she’d get a funeral and a service and a vigil. He wondered if they’d offer him the same.

His bedroom door creaked slightly as he opened it. He paused, listening. No one moved. He stepped out. They’d given him padded slippers and on the metal walkway he was noiseless. It was dark, but some of the rooms were lit and light escaped from under the doors or through cracks, and it was just enough to feel his way by, once his eyes had adjusted.

He paused near the doors to the decontamination room. There was some kind of stand erected in the hallway, facing the doors, presumably there because it would be the first thing a newcomer would see once they got inside. He looked at it.

It was a map. How fitting.

Every floor of the society—which was apparently named Newville—had something different to offer. And on the bottom floor, a school. She could’ve taken classes. She could’ve made friends.

He pushed on. He didn’t bother with trying not to be heard. No one would catch him in time. He went through the doors, past the sheeting, through more doors, up the staircase ... and then, when he finally started hearing commotion below him, opened the hatch and climbed.

He stood outside, arms spread wide in that barren land, and breathed deeply of the fresh air.