2. Maria
Chapter two
Maria
The vegetable silo alarm sounds, and despite my exhaustion, I jog along the underground cableway to the control center.
I never open the roof door at night. When the alarm sounded, I was fixing a plumbing problem with our waste-disposal system and figured a motor malfunction triggered the alert. Maintenance on this place never ends.
Biting my lip, I punch the monitor button to display the closest roof camera—a security system my parents jury-rigged before they died—and watch the door slide open.
Then a man peers through the silo’s opening.
A thief. Here to steal whatever little food we’re able to grow underground. Hell’s bells. I don’t have the energy to deal with this asshat. Not when I’m the only one left to perform all the work a whole community used to do.
Well, I have one quick way to fix this. I flip the switch to close the roof, and the door starts to slide shut.
Then the huge panel suddenly reverses course.
A man slips over the edge. Lanky, with short hair as dark as the night sky, he’s dressed all in black.
Smart, if he’s figured out how to open the silo and override my controls.
I glimpse his face as he passes close to a security camera.
He couldn’t be more different from my dead husbands.
No denying he’s good-looking. But this man is a thief. What he looks like doesn’t matter.
He holds out an arm, and long, curving claws explode from his fingertips.
Crap. A nightcrawler.
He grips the silo walls to descend to where my system of ladders and platforms begins about ten feet from the opening.
Darn. Darn. Darn.
Since Gabriel and Lehm died six months ago, I’ve been alone, except for Zinnia.
Our daughter plays with a bunny where I left her in our underground sleeping habitat. She only has weak memories of losing her papas, thankfully, though I wish she hadn’t lost them at all.
Now, our survival depends solely on me.
My gut clenches as I watch the nightcrawler creep down the vegetable silo, using the built-in ladders and staggered balconies.
He stops and inspects the mesh trellises where climbing beans, cucumbers, and pea vines grow.
Then he examines a salad tower, a cylinder built from wire mesh, supporting lettuce, spinach, and other greens.
After he looks in the baskets and boxes where I planted tomatoes and herbs, he jumps to the balcony below him, landing lightly.
Why is a nightcrawler interested in my garden? According to the manual my parents left behind, he survives on human blood. So what is this? Curiosity? Or is he evaluating our nutrition level to determine how good a meal we’ll make?
He suddenly stops and pivots toward the rabbit pit below the garden.
Do nightcrawlers drink the blood of animals, too? I don’t know. One of his kind has never gotten this far before, but I’m not taking the risk with my daughter’s food supply.
I have to stop him.
I run through the cableway tunnel connecting to the underground sleeping habitat where Zinnia plays. “Stay here. Read your picture book.” I take one off the shelf. “No matter what, keep the door locked.”
A curious but obedient child, she nods at me.
The intruder is descending fast. I don’t have much time before he reaches the rabbits. With any luck, I’ll make it to the silo before he lands on the bottom floor.
I strap on a quiver of arrows and grab my bow off the wall hook. From the stories my parents told me, I can kill a nightcrawler with an arrow through the heart. That’s my only hope of surviving the night and saving my daughter.
Not that we have much to live for now. Eventually, Zinnia will grow up, I’ll die, and she’ll be all alone.
We’re the last of the Titan Community that created this sanctuary using the remnants of humanity’s worst, most self-destructive impulse.
In moments like this, I desperately wish more of my generation had survived.
The Titans started as a mix of unrelated families with children.
Now, ninety years later, Zinnia and I are the last descendants of those survivors.
Disease, old age, and nightcrawlers took the rest.
I straighten my spine and throw back my shoulders.
It’s not much of a life, no, but while we live, there’s still hope. That’s what my dad always said. It’s what I believe, too.
I close the sleeping area’s door and hear Zinnia lock it behind me, then I run up the stairs as quietly as I can, through the first cableway to the control room, up three flights of stairs from there, and across the final cableway.
The door to the silo is already open. He’s standing with his back to me, bending over the balcony railing, staring at the base of the silo where the rabbits live.
I sneak up behind the nightcrawler, nock an arrow, and aim.