Chapter 1
New Sector Four: Scouting Division
Nightmares were commonplace among everyone. It was like they lived in a collective waking nightmare. Everyday they lived in the horror of the present, one where they had to wake to the disappointment of reality. Maybe, in some way, the nightmares were like a dream. A dream away from this place.
The generator gave off constant hums as the team worked silently at their computers. The old parts were strewn together, but all in all worked in perfect harmony- most of the time. The team kept their makeshift headphones on their ears listening to the soaring winds outside. Together they listened for stragglers, lone survivors, and families as they made their way to the new base outside the wastelands: Sector Four. Sector Four was nestled in the desert. It was like a gateway to the promise of a new civilization, but it was a poorly made one.
Everyday Scouts patrolled the perimeter where they investigated stories heard from forlorn travelers, ones that were of ghosts or loved ones long past. Some of the small details changed, but there was always the same parallel structure in all of them. It was starting to turn into legend. Captain Conroy did not listen to legends but she could not stop everyone else. In the bunker the rest of the crew would tell legends into the night. Stories of the old days and sometimes, dreams of the future, which felt far and away to Jenna. She didn’t believe in legends or hope. Those were memories of the old world.
Jenna took the reports and neatly filed them. These reports consisted of every straggler that made their way through Sector Four. Sometimes she would sift through the stories and find similarities. She would sometimes see the same legends, the same ghost stories. At first, she thought that maybe she was imagining things. She had written it off as hysteria or the wild imagination of stragglers. The stories would play in her subconscious as she archived each flimsy paper away in a filing cabinet. Each story haunted her movements and kept itself like a dark friend at night.
At night the ghost stories moved from her subconscious to her mind like a continuous siphon of neverending nightmares.
Night in the bunker was pitch black. The lights in the hall glowed red, but in the individual rooms themselves they were all lights out. Her bunkmate, Simone, was fast asleep-she took the Pills every night. She would say it was the only way to deal with this crazy world. Jenna didn’t want to rely on drugs to get her to sleep, but this night when she drifted off, her subconscious took her somewhere she didn’t expect.
For a moment she wasn’t in a bunker. She was home. Before the dust and desolation, before the end of the world. She stood before her childhood house, her whole body shaking. It was one out of a thousand in a cookie cutter neighborhood. She stood in the shadow of a house where tears were shed, doors were slammed, and raised voices screamed at each other over small slights. Among her own memories were dark shadows, ones she didn’t want to dwell on. The few happy memories she had were lost to the dust of the present. A shadow cast over her as she stepped timidly towards the door. The door opened into the entryway. There was no warmth or sunshine, only cold darkness that filled every corner of her life. The house simultaneously felt like home, yet not like home. The air felt familiar, but the walls were warped in time. The house consisted of two levels and had a big open kitchen. Her mom liked to cook Thanksgiving dinner and family meals there. The smell of turkey would enter her nostrils and she would inhale in delight of the lucid dream.
She was a little girl again and ran upstairs. She heard a whisper.
“Find me,” said a broken voice, as if something otherworldly was trying to crawl through her dream.
She took a few steps and found herself in front of a mirror, her heart pulsed in her chest. She trembled. There was a black mass towering over her in the mirror. A shadow, faceless yet demented. She tried to scream but her voice was lost.
She shot up, awake, her heart pounding in her chest, and sweat dripping off her brow.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Simone, Jenna’s bunkmate, said.
Jenna could hear the scowl in her voice, even though she could not see her in the complete darkness of the bunker. Lights out meant lights out.
“Jenna,” she groaned, “I’m trying to sleep. If you need a Pill. Go see the Vet.” Simone put her head back down and went back to sleep. .
There weren’t many doctors these days, most of them were at the more important bases. Serving the people deemed more important in society. Vets were employed at the lesser bases, since they could perform surgeries in a more creative way. Supplies were usually low and injuries were frequent.
Vets had a low supply of medicine, but reserved the painkillers for those about to die so they could drift off as painlessly as possible. But that wasn’t the only medicine that was found in the bunker. The Pills that Simone had on hand were new, designed for fresh troops to sleep quietly through the night. The Pills were rumored to be in widespread use and an economy grew around them. Jenna didn’t try to make sense of it, but she didn’t judge those who did. The news that they were cheap to make spread like wildfire, and soon, so did the Pill.
Captain Conroy headed efforts to contain the spread of the Pills, but failed. Jenna knew that Simone was one of the dealers and was amazed every time she passed inspection.
Jenna took to the showers, her only one allowed for the week, and let the cool water run down her face and body. It was the only way she knew that she could shake off the nightmare.
She looked at herself in the dirty mirrors, illuminated by a single red light. She was thin from malnutrition. The good thing about the military was they gave you mostly hot meals, but they never promised the quality. Simone had told Jenna that in the new urban centers, where the top brass worked, that they had chicken soup and fresh tomatoes picked from the vine. Jenna didn’t want to believe her, but the idea of sunlight bouncing off the red skin of a tomato almost brought a tear to her eye. She wanted to see the sun again, which is why she wanted to be a Scout.
She applied to become a Scout multiple times, but everytime she was denied because of her age. Eighteen was the minimum age and Jenna was seventeen. But her commanding officer started training her on becoming a Listener, the first step to become a Scout. Listeners serve as lookouts for the Scouts in the field to protect them from harsh weather and monitor threats of gang activity. That was the first step, and she just had to keep focusing on that.
She went back to her bunk and got in the bed silently, so as to not wake Simone, but she didn’t sleep. She stared at the dark nothingness in front of her until her eyes grew tired.
