The End of Refuge Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  Part Two

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  Part Three

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.

  Copyright © 2016 Beth Martin

  Cover photo from Shutterstock.com.

  To keep up to date on Beth Martin’s writing, please visit her website:

  BethMartinBooks.com

  To everyone who encouraged me to keep writing.

  1

  Juliet Morse ran down the hall. She didn’t need to check her watch to know she would be late again. She knew these halls like the back of her hand, the unchanging landscape of her entire life. The green painted cinderblock walls blurred in her periphery as the tired fluorescent lights lining the ceiling flickered, threatening to go out for once and for all.

  This is where Juliet and everyone she’d ever known lived. The residents called it Refuge.

  She was in her first year of work after general education and still learning how to do her new job. Just last year, Juliet would have gotten off with just a warning or maybe a detention if she had been late for class. But being late for work? She would for sure get a credit cut and a notice. She had already been late to work twice and with two strikes on her record, the third would definitely lead to stiffer consequences. Three strikes and you’re out. Baseball metaphor, not that she’d ever played baseball.

  She didn’t even remember getting out of bed and turning off the shrill ringing of the alarm on her micro tab. She must have, because the alarm was off when she finally did get out of bed, forty-two minutes later. In her rush to get out the door, she didn’t even take time to shower or brush her teeth.

  Suddenly, the ringing that should have woken her earlier this morning sounded all around her. RING RING RING RING. Red strobe lights flashed down the hall, promising to keep it illuminated even if the fluorescent lights died. Avery Graves was taking notes on his micro tab while walking down the hall toward Juliet when the alarm broke his attention. His pale blue eyes glanced at the flashing red lights. He remained calm like the alarm was gently tapping him on the shoulder and not actually screaming at the top of its lungs. Juliet stood frozen in fear, her brown eyes fixed on the flashing lights.

  Next came the pre-recorded voice. “Warning. Warning. Everyone, please proceed to the closest safety destination. Warning. Warning.”

  Bomb shelters like Refuge were built to be immensely strong and withstand a variety of potential disasters, but there was always the possibility of a fire. She had lost her father in the last fire, and even though that was nine years ago, the memory suddenly felt fresh and raw.

  Avery had also stopped walking and moved his curious glance from the flashing lights to Juliet. She remained frozen in place, pale and panicked. Her straight brown hair trembled along with the rest of her body. “Juliet,” he called to her. “Juliet.” She looked over at Avery, not actually seeing him, she was so overwhelmed by the alarm.

  “Come with me. There is a safe destination near here,” he said. Juliet grabbed his arm with both of her hands and clutched tightly. He walked slowly, carefully leading her down the hall before turning right. “Come on, Juliet, just up here,” he said, reassuring her.

  This hall wasn’t marked as a safe destination. It leads nowhere, and simply stretched to the extreme edge of their existence. Everyone called the long narrow hallway on the outskirts “the pipe”, and this was the place where teenagers and young adults would hang out away from the prying eyes of the older residents. Halfway down the hall, there were no more lights, and the handrails along the sides of the passage were required to navigate to the end. Avery followed the handrail with his hand while Juliet clung closely to his side. As they continued forward, the hall got darker and darker. The red flashing and noisy alarm also seemed to fade away. Another hundred feet and the alarm was just above a whisper and there was little if any light.

  “Let’s sit down here and wait for the all clear. Can you do that with me, Juliet?” Avery asked. She gave a little nod and even though she knew he couldn’t see her face in the low light. He slowly lowered himself to the floor, sitting with his back against the wall. Juliet followed, still holding tightly to his arm. She laid her head against his chest and let the stream of tears building up behind her eyes run down her face. All he could do was stroke her brown hair with his hand, and make a soft shushing sound like the ones made for a baby.

  In the darkness, Juliet’s imagination could fill her vision, playing her memory of the last fatal fire. Young Juliet thought the alarm was so fun because she got to leave her classroom in the middle of the day. But after they got the all clear, and the children had filed back into their classroom to resume their studies, they were interrupted. An officer from command had knocked on her classroom door. He wore a somber expression over his pressed white shirt which was neatly tucked into his pressed khaki slacks. Only the people working in command wore ties, and his tie was held down neatly with a tack. The serious tone of his close matched the stony expression on his face. He informed her class that this had not been a practice drill. There had been a real fire in the cafeteria kitchen. Juliet’s stomach clenched. Her head started to feel dizzy. Her father worked in the kitchen.

  “I need to speak to Juliet Morse,” the officer said.

  “No, no, no, no,” Juliet thought. The officer led her outside of the classroom into the green painted hall to talk to her one on one. He crouched down to Juliet’s eye level. She could read his badge, Perry, and smell the coffee on his breath. He told her that John Morse, her father had tried to put out the fire. It was started accidentally by one of the newer cooks, and John got too close to the flame. He sustained burns over most of his body and was being treated in the medical wing. He wouldn’t make it. Officer Perry had come to take Juliet to the medical wing, so she could say goodbye to her father.

  She didn’t want to see her father. Her mother sat in a chair next to the gurney crying, “Don’t leave me John. Don’t leave me.” Seeing her mom like that was hard enough. Her mother had her hands clasped in prayer, head down, and tears free falling onto the side of the pillow that supported her father’s head. She didn’t see her father on that gurney, but rather a blackened man, a shadow. It wasn’t her father on that gurney, just a shadow. There was nothing for Juliet to do here. Her father was already gone.

  “I’m sorry,” the nurse said to the grieving widow and the little girl who still hadn’t walked past the door into the room.

  “It’s not my father,” Juliet said to herself, sitting on the cold floor of the pipe. “It’s just his shadow. It’s just a shadow.” And what Juliet could see right now, here in the long passage of almost complete darkness, was that shadow.

  “All clear.” It wasn’t the pre-recorded voice Juliet had expected, but Avery talking to Juliet, “Come on, let’s get up.” She hadn’t noticed the alarm stopping or the all-clear signal that followed. She pulled herself up, wiping her face
quickly with her hands, hoping to hide the evidence that she might have broken down crying during a simple fire drill. She was suddenly thankful for the almost total darkness and that Avery couldn’t see her face.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. I’ve got it from here.” She already found the handrail with her hand and took a few tentative steps towards the main hall that would lead her to her work at the conservatory.

  “Okay. Well, back to work for me.” They walked together to the main hall, and Avery turned left to continue towards the command center. He stopped a second and looked back, glancing at Juliet. “You sure you’ll be okay? I can walk with you if you’d like.”

  “No,” she insisted, “the conservatory is just right up here. I can get there myself.”

  “All right.” He turned and continued walking, his attention already back to reading his micro tab where he left off before the alarm. Juliet watched him walk away, his neatly combed black hair disappearing from sight.

  Juliet turned to the next passage. She wasn’t going to the conservatory anymore. She’d go to the medical wing, just to the nurses’ station. They would give her a note to miss work. Going back to bed seemed like a good idea after the morning she had.

  The note got Juliet off of work for the morning. She even stayed in her dorm missing lunch, and the cloud of anxiety had lifted making her feel like herself again. She stowed her micro tab in her desk before leaving her dorm to head over to the conservatory for the second half of her shift. The dorms, which accommodated all the unmarried adults, were pretty empty during the day while most residents were at work.

  She walked down the hall out of the residential wing and passed through the double doorway leading to the main hallway, following it until she reached the conservatory door to the right. She loved the conservatory because it had light, lots of it. The special lamps lining the ceiling of the large room emitted light that was supposed to mimic the full spectrum from the sun. This was the closest to being outdoors Juliet expected to get in her life. She knew there wasn’t much sunlight outside since the surface was probably covered in black clouds and debris that the sun simply couldn’t get through. Before the war, there was sunlight, and these lamps mimicked it. The only way to get regular access to the conservatory was to work here. When she toured it while still deciding which vocation to pursue, she fell in love with the idea of sunlight, and that motivated her decision to work here.

  “I was wondering if you would actually make it to work today, missy,” Wanda said with a quick glance up at Juliet from where she was sitting at one of the worktables.

  “I wasn’t feeling well,” Juliet responded. She didn’t feel like sharing about her emotional morning and being unprepared for the alarm. Saying she was sick didn’t feel like a total stretch of the truth. Juliet swept a brown lock of straight hair behind her ear before sitting at the bench next to Wanda, a short slim woman with strawberry blond hair styled in a bob. Sitting next to Wanda made Juliet feel like a giant even though Juliet was average height with a slender build.

  She squinted with concentration as she watched Wanda make wells into the synthetic dirt with her gloved fingers then transfer seeds from a cup of water into the well. Juliet grabbed one of the trays of synthetic dirt from the middle of the table and placed it in front of her, ready to get seeds planted for the currently barren green plot.

  “Oh, no, missy,” Wanda said. “I was going to show you my planting technique this morning, but now I’ve done more than half of the job.” She took the tray away from Juliet. “You’re on pruning duty. Make sure there are no dead leaves in the yellow plot and then maybe if you still have time before your shift is over, you can help with the last few seeds.”

  “Ugh,” Juliet groaned. Some of the plant care was already automated and regulated by the computer system including watering, fertilizer, and hours of sun lamps. There were a few others who worked the conservatory and took care of harvesting, planting, plowing, managing the synthetic soil supplies and refreshing the compost. One of them was Jim. He was a year older than Juliet and was tall and muscular from the heavy work he did. His brown hair had never met a comb and existed in a perpetual mess.

  A few tasks were left out of the scope of heavy duty work, and they were assigned to Juliet. She walked over to the supply shed and pulled a pair of pruning scissors off the wall, then went to the yellow plot, kneeling in front of the first plant.

  “Hey, Jules,” Jim called to Juliet. “You should come over here and help me out. I’ll let you pick my tomato,” he said with a smirk. He was with the other workers at the red plot picking ripe tomatoes.

  Juliet scoffed at the obvious flirtation and said, “You wish, Jim. I’ll be busy for a while with the pruning.” She tried to give him a disgusted look but made more of a squinty face from the bright light.

  The conservatory was a pretty small operation considering the size of Refuge. Although it didn’t provide all the food for the whole population of just over three hundred, it did offer a little variety to what would otherwise be a boring diet. There was an enormous storage area where among other things all the grains and flour and plenty of canned foods were housed. Juliet heard rumors that they had enough food in Refuge for the next 150 years without the fresh fruits and vegetables that the conservatory provided. She thought it was a little odd that in preparation for wartime, a conservatory and chicken coup were deemed important enough to construct in a bomb shelter. But she was glad they were. Everyone at Refuge enjoyed the fresh food. Fresh tomatoes, fresh eggs, and fresh chicken.

  “Mmm, juicy tomatoes today,” Jim said to himself, loudly enough for Juliet to overhear. “Just makes me wanna take a big bite.” He looked over at Juliet while holding the fat red fruit up to his face and she looked back at his intense brown eyes. He maintained eye contact with her as he took a big bite out of the tomato flesh, drops of juices spraying and dribbling down his chin. He closed his eyes for a moment as he chewed and let out a satisfied moan, then opened his eyes back up still focused on Juliet. Although she didn’t quite understand the innuendo, Juliet sensed the sexual context. She didn’t have romantic feeling for him but could feel her face flush as Jim graphically enjoyed his snack.

  “Back to work, missy,” Wanda said, breaking the spell. Juliet realized she had put down her pruning scissors. She was still kneeling next to the first plant gazing at Jim. She grabbed her scissors and started pruning. When she glanced back at Jim, he was already back to picking tomatoes at lightning speed, putting them into the large bag hanging at his hip, still eating the first tomato with his free hand. The moment between them had passed, whatever it was.

  Lauren sat at her desk. She didn’t feel like working. Deciding to pursue higher education was a lot harder than she originally thought it would be. So much of her time was spent studying. It didn’t help that during the semester, she saw and interacted with only 150 people.

  She had romanticized the notion of living in a subterranean shelter, or SS for short. She had never been in one but had read all about it from the messages Juliet sent her. When Boston University opened an extension in an old cold war era bomb shelter, Lauren jumped at the opportunity to enroll there. Even though it seemed like a fabulous idea, in the beginning, eating, sleeping, studying, and attending class with the same people every day for weeks on end was making Lauren feel claustrophobic. She decided that she would write a new message to Juliet before jumping into her studies.

  Everyone in her third-grade class was assigned a pen pal as a creative writing assignment. Pretend that you live in a shelter and write a paragraph about life underground! After the assignment, Lauren loved reading her new pen pal Juliet’s responses so much that she kept writing back. She wrote a long message about her family’s apartment in Boston, going to the beach for their summer vacation, and how much she enjoyed her school. She received this reply:

  “Incoming communications to SS14 are reviewed for content. Your communication has been modified t
o remove the following offensive content: Mention of people living outside of subterranean shelters. Mention of moving out of a subterranean shelter. Descriptions of conditions outside of SS14. Mention of item(s) not found in subterranean shelters. Your communication has been modified to read:

  Dear Juliet,

  Hey girl! I had fun reading your message… Write back soon!

  Yours, Lauren.

  Young Lauren had been crushed by the fact that the message she sent was censored. It seemed little information transferred between SS14 and the outside world. She learned more about the shelter through Juliet’s messages than the day dedicated to it in her high school American history class. As they had continued writing messages to each other, Lauren suspected Juliet knew little to nothing about the outside world.

  Stretching her fingers then placing them on her laptop, Lauren opened her email client and started typing a message:

  Hey Juliet,

  I think continuing school was a mistake for me. Maybe you were the smarter one to jump straight into work. How has your first week in the conservatory been? Is your Jim as dreamy as I am imagining him? Because I had a nice dream featuring him the other night. It included him with no shirt, a nice six pack, and a super juicy tomato. Too much?

  Still, I can’t believe you didn’t stick with school just to get a cushy job in your command center. You come across as so intellectual and witty in your messages, so you would certainly have less trouble than humble little me getting through the education part. I know you were scared by that officer when your dad died, but that doesn’t make becoming an officer a bad choice for you. Plus, you’ve got that weird tie fetish thing, so you would enjoy it.

  You know the guy I mentioned from school, Grant? I told him we could totally hang out some time and he has been practically stalking me ever since. He acts like we are in a committed relationship that will lead to marriage, even though we haven’t even been on a date! I can’t believe I felt sorry for the guy. This is what I get for trying to do something nice.