Young Writers Society

Fox Who Stole Her Name 1.1

“John-bear, wait,” Fox hissed and climbed in after him.

At the bottom of the pit, she stopped to look up. The surface seemed further away down there. It was idyllic, a painting awash in blue summer sky and grass edged in gold. She turned and surveyed the door that John-bear had gone through. It was reinforced with something Fox didn’t recognize and had been fitted, crudely, into the short side of an old shipping container.

She pushed the door the rest of the way open. It groaned on its hinges. The sunlight that streamed in from the surface was enough to light the space while Fox’s eyes adjusted to the straight, narrow lines of the shipping container. A set of bunkbeds had been bolted to the wall on one side. A propane camp stove rested on a flimsy table against the other. There was a molding shower curtain strung up at the back end of the room with a rubber tube dangling over it, snaked in from someplace above ground.

John-bear dropped onto the bottom bunkbed, the flame in the candle flickering madly. “I thought it would be cooler than this,” he said and toed a wide, flat aluminum lid that had been left askew over a storage compartment hidden in the floor.

Fox tapped the propane canister left on the camp stove. It was full, which didn’t sit well with her. Whoever left this place had either gone with a hurry, or intending to come back. She worked the canister off the stove, rust flaking in her palm, and stuck it in her backpack. “Not totally useless.” She sat on the bunk next to her brother and nudged his shoulder with her own. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get going.”

He sighed flopped back on the bunk. It was cool down there in the bunker, and missed the creeping rot of most abandoned places. It would have been the ideal place to rest and wait out the heat of the day, but Fox couldn’t shake the unease that crept along the back of her neck.

She took a notebook from her bag and worked off the rubber bands that held it together. It wilted in her lap like an overwatered flower. A road map marked her place in the middle with her careful log of their meals. “We can still make Indianapolis if we’re comfortable walking in the dark,” she said. “It might be safer anyway.”

“What are we even doing?” he asked, arm draped over his eyes.

We’re going home,” Fox said. “We’re--”

“Going to find dad, I know.” He sat up and settled a stare on her. The dim bunker shadows made his gaze sinister, not at all like the teenager she knew. “When are you going to admit that he’s gone.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do know that,” he said. “All these places you say he’s going to be, and he’s never there.”

“We’re so close,” Fox insisted. She stood, the map and notebook in her lap falling to the floor. Pages scattered, but she didn’t care. “I can feel it, John-bear.”

“Aren’t you tired?” he demanded. “We can’t keep living like this, Fox.”

At her feet, Fox’s notebook laid open on the first page. The cover had fallen off years ago replaced three times now with stray pieces of cardboard. She’d filled that first page with a list. Handwritten, erased, marked out, edited, and gone over in pen. Every time it fell out, she repeated it on the next page. At this point, she knew it by heart.

Mason. Boulder. Berkeley. Ann Arbor. Pittsburgh. A dozen places her father had recited to her, again and again as many times as she asked, of the places he would be. Before the end of the world, he’d been on a lecture circuit of universities teaching and reading from his latest research. He was supposed to meet them in Boston, but he’d never showed. That was eight years ago.

They’d been to almost every place on her list, some more than once, each time uncovering just enough hope to keep going. She knew her brother had been getting tired, but she couldn’t let go of it. Not when it was the only thing that had kept them going.

“I don’t want to do this anymore,” John-bear said.

Fox could only look at him. Then, a pair of voices spoke overhead.

“Hey, over here.”

“No way they went down there, man. That’s suicide.”

Holding her breath, Fox edged toward the bed. She eased herself back into the corner of the bunk, feet drawn up in front of her. John-bear lifted her shotgun soundlessly from the bunker floor and slid it into her lap. He pointed to himself, then to Fox. It was their signal. Me and you. Fox exhaled, relieved despite the situation. Fox repeated it back, pointed to her brother, then back at herself. You and me.

She settled the nose of her shotgun on her knee, and waited.

The metal ladder sighed. Fox sorted through her mental list of supplies. There were six empty shells in her pocket that she’d planned on trading for new slugs the next chance she got. She had a box of ammunition in her backpack with three good shells. Counting the one she had in the chamber, it would be risky, but if she shot straight it would be enough.

John-bear crept forward, knife drawn, positioning himself on the edge of the bed, ready to pounce. The shipping container floor creaked. Fox took a deep breath, pumped the shotgun, and raised her voice.

“Move on,” she warned, the strength in her tone hard-won. “We’re only passing through.”

The bunker door opened and a boy, no older than Fox, stood in the shaft of sunlight that streamed in from above. He ran a hand through his hair, a dull brown that swept back over his forehead and hung to his shoulders. A pair of aviator sunglasses with a crack in the corner of one lens sat on his crooked nose. He slipped them off and squinted into the dark. “Hey, easy,” he said and put his hands up as his eyes adjusted to the dark. “We don’t want to fight you.”

“What do you want?” She settled her aim on him, unwavering.

The boy rested his forearm on the doorframe, his face falling into shadow. Fox noted the gleam of metal beneath his cargo shorts where his left leg should have been. The prosthetic looked like a bunch of coat hangers wrapped together, bent into a curve at the foot like an Olympic runner. It might have been easy to miss with the slight cock of his head, the bigness of his grin that drew all attention to his face, but Fox didn’t make a habit of missing things.

Like the pistol in the holster on his hip.

“Can you put the gun down, please?” he asked. “We just want to talk.”

Fox stood, shotgun trained on the boy. “Then talk.”

“My name’s Ezra. We saw you back at the rest stop,” he said. His voice was dusty, warm and unspeakably cool. A hot blush crept up Fox’s neck. “You guys got out when shit went down, and we could use more of that. We’re not that different from you, just a bunch of kids trying to get by.”

John-bear eased back on his heels. His chin perked at the idea and Fox started to feel doomed. They’d travelled in groups before. They’d been refugees. Briefly, they’d come into the possession of a woman collecting children. John-bear had been young; six years old when the world ended, and he didn’t remember the things they’d been through.

But he longed for change. He longed for people. Ezra held the key to all the things he’d ever thought he wanted, and now he dangled it on a string in front of him. It was everything Fox had fought to keep them away from.

John-bear looked back at Fox, wide-eyed and desperate with hope. It wedged itself into a crack at the corner of her heart. “Come on,” he whispered. “Can’t we just think about it?”

They were manipulating her, both of them, but she knew how much food she had in her bag and how long it would last them. She lowered the barrel of her gun. “Okay,” she said. “You have one night.”