10. Paul’s Garden
Paul’s Garden
Solace
Sleep had been difficult since the Scourge.
It was almost impossible to find, and even harder to hold onto.
Lately, though, I've been sleeping like the dead. I’d tried explaining my dreams to Patricia once, but she didn’t care to listen.
They were strange things—sterile halls and small circle windows staring out into nothing.
An endless black. Sometimes he was there. And every time I woke, my chest hurt.
I laid there wound tight, fingers itching for something.
But what, I couldn’t say. At first I thought maybe it was anxiety.
A reflex of my muscles crying out for music.
To dance across ivory keys. I’d mostly curbed the urge by replaying the recordings from my high schoolers’ last performance over the loudspeaker.
The echo of a piano filling the bunker was often better than silence, since Patricia was mute.
I shifted in my cot, rolling onto my side as the narrow frame creaked beneath me. The canvas had sagged months ago, but I’d piled a few sweatshirts across it before stretching a twin sheet over the whole mess. It helped. Mostly.
With a sigh, I pushed myself upright. The control room was dark and the main dashboard sat silent in front of me, its screens black where they’d once glowed with neat rows of information.
When the power outages started, I unplugged anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary.
Like a few lights, air circulation, water, and the microwave.
Funny thing about the end of the world—I grew up without a microwave because of my mother’s fear of radiation, only to live through nuclear fallout.
My eyes drifted across the panel where something blinked. A small red light pulsed steadily near the corner of the dashboard. I frowned.
“That wasn’t doing that before.” I leaned forward and tapped the console.
Nothing happened. “Huh. Patricia, have you seen this?” Maybe I’d kicked something in my sleep.
I stared at it a moment longer, then shrugged.
If the bunker exploded, at least it would save me the trouble of rationing breakfast.
I swung my legs off the cot and padded down the corridor toward the kitchen. The pantry shelves looked worse every time I opened them. Rows of empty space where cans had once been stacked high. I’d been stretching the supplies for months now, cutting portions smaller and smaller.
Bridget and Paul would bring more when they got back.
I reached automatically for the coffee bin, then stopped. Inside sat the last handful of instant packets. Running my fingers through, I counted them again. Three weeks, maybe. If I behaved. I sighed and pushed the lid closed. “No coffee today,” I muttered.
Breakfast ended up being half a ration bar and a few crackers. I chewed slowly, mentally cursing Paul for not being rich enough to install a proper garden down here. A billionaire bunker without hydroponics. What a waste.
Afterward, I carried my wrapper to the trash and headed toward the open space in the center of the bunker.
It had once been the common room, and now it was the gym.
I stretched first, rolling my shoulders and loosening the stiffness from sleeping on the cot.
Then I moved through the same slow routine I’d been doing for months—squats, pushups, lunges, some jumping jacks.
Enough body weight movements to keep the muscles alive, but not too much or they’d start eating through what little food I had left.
When I finished, I sat on the floor for a moment, catching my breath before heading back to the control room.
The radio console flickered when I powered it on and static filled the speakers.
I waited. Sometimes the other bunker came on around this time.
I had no idea where they were—somewhere far enough away that the signal cracked and stretched thin across the airwaves.
At this point I was fairly certain they were somewhere in Asia.
And for all their talking, I understood exactly none of it, but the sound of another human voice was enough.
Today the radio stayed quiet. “Guess they’re asleep.
” Patricia watched from the doorway while I moved around the room, checking gauges, adjusting switches, straightening things that didn’t really need straightening.
“Did you switch this on? I don’t remember it blinking this way before.
” She said nothing. I rolled into the chair and flipped a few switches I knew didn’t work, hoping one of them might turn the light off.
It didn’t. “Welp,” I said, pushing away from the panel.
“Don’t know. Hope it’s not important. I’ll ask Paul when he gets back. ”
I leaned back in the chair and rubbed my eyes.
“What should we do today? I’m almost finished with the second movement, but I’m running out of paper and I’d rather not waste it.
We could play Uno?” I glanced at Patricia.
“Or not.” With a sigh, I stood and grabbed the book from my cot. “I guess I’ll read.”
The common room was as one might expect—plain, boring gray.
A dome of concrete with electrical tubing running the length of the walls and industrial lights flickering overhead.
I tried to keep the lights off since it always seemed to push the system over the edge, but today they held steady.
I settled into the couch and pulled the green itchy blanket over my legs.
It was freezing down here more often than not, and lately it had only gotten worse.
Which had me thinking we were probably on the cusp of winter.
It was a shame that the only books that managed to make it into the bunker were those on gardening, mechanics, electrical and medicine.
Nothing fun or helpful in mental escape.
Solace wanted a historical romance, or a witty lit-fic.
Currently, she was making her way through a book about the electrical components of the air filtration system for the fourth time already.
If we ever got out of this, I was fairly certain I could pass the test to become an electrician on one attempt. Or a farmer. The books on gardening had undoubtedly been the most interesting. “Too bad there isn’t a garden to tend to, eh Paul?”
If I was allowed to go to the surface, I could probably identify everything in the forest. Or could—who knew what it looked like now. I wasn’t sure the trail cams were working any longer considering it had been years since I’d seen any sort of life pass by.
“What do you think about soup for lunch? I know we said we wouldn’t break into the good stuff except for the weekends, but who cares. The bar isn’t settling right in my stomach.”
Patricia sat on the chair across the room, and stared blankly. Large beady eyes blinking rapidly.
“It would be nice if you contributed something—anything, at this point.” She remained still, blank-faced, and I frowned. “Alright then, soup it is.”
We had exactly twelve cans left. Which was basically nothing. I had been rationing and cutting portions for over a year now, but it still didn’t matter. Paul and Bridget had gone to get medical supplies, I only hoped they were smart enough to grab food too. We weren’t going to make it otherwise.
Solace wasn’t going to make it, I thought dimly.
The Scourge, as they’d called it in the days leading up, was nothing like you’d expect for the end of the world. It was slower than I’d imagined. There was more than enough time, which was morosely ironic.
Bridget and I were sharing an apartment in our hometown after her failed marriage.
After college I went out on a limb and I moved to New York to work with the ballet.
It was something Jude said when we were teenagers—about not letting my parents pick my dreams. All it took was student teaching at the end of college to wake me up.
What was I doing with my life? Living it for other people, I realized.
So I applied for jobs on the east coast, sold anything that wouldn’t fit into one suitcase and told my parents I was leaving.
I’d gotten to live my dream for nine months. I was finally composing music—actually getting pieces performed in a real opera house—even if it was for some low-budget production company.
Until everything went to hell.
My super started kicking out tenants and selling the building so he could buy his way into some underground bunker. That was the moment I realized the news wasn’t only news anymore. It was real and it was happening. Nothing we wished, prayed, or hoped for was going to change it.
So I moved home. Bridget was barely using her apartment after she started dating Paul, so I moved in and took a job teaching high school music in the next town over. I managed to make it through one year of teaching before the Scourge.
When things started getting scary—people hoarding groceries, gas stations running dry, soldiers suddenly showing up in cities—that’s when Paul insisted that we stayed with him.
He lived in a condo in Bellevue, but he also had a second place out in the Olympics.
Paul was a prepper, as they liked to say.
Which, given his age, kind of made sense.
And honestly, I had to give it to him—he’d mostly thought of everything.
Besides hydroponic farming. Again, nobody was pointing fingers.
I’m sure if he’d had more time he would’ve added that eventually.
It’s not like I was complaining, Solace wouldn’t be alive without Paul.
Or Bridget and her exquisite taste in elderly rich men.
My family never made it to the bunker. Milo was away at college when everything happened, or I would have dragged him underground with the rest of us.
My parents got caught in the storms that followed.
Paul invited them, though. Like he had Bridget’s stubborn parents, his younger sister, and a few of his staff members. Anyone he could reach in time.
But it was just Solace and Patricia and Paul and Bridget now.
The rest of my waking hours passed by in a blur.
It was getting harder and harder to stay awake for long stretches.
My body was tired, and unfortunately so was my brain.
I swept the common room, read half a chapter of a psychology book before a rogue tear slipped down my cheek and forced me to close it, and then checked the vents again.
The water supply was fine, but I still refrained from taking a shower. Tomorrow, maybe. Instead, I filled the sink with warm water and sponge bathed enough that I couldn’t feel the layer of stale must clinging to my skin.
Even with that room sealed off, the bunker still smelled like a tomb. A giant concrete grave. I shook off the thought, dried myself with a towel, and pulled on clean pants and a sweatshirt I’d stolen from Paul’s things a while ago. It was well worn now and no longer smelled of whiskey and cigars.
When I couldn’t help it any longer, I sat on my cot and traced patterns of notes I’d already written across the page, tapping my lap lightly in the formation they’d take across a piano keyboard.
It was good to keep one’s mind busy. Mine was decaying.
I could feel it; the edge of loneliness that creeped into memory and reason.
Solace wasn’t sure how long she had.
Setting the stack of music aside, I flicked my recording of Satellites on and settled back onto the cot, curling up as sleep pulled at me again. It was all I could really do these days.