Tim, a garbage handler in a post-apocalyptic bunker, loses the little he has. But then he finds Amy, the redhead with an attitude. Together, they will try to change the world they live in.
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Tim is one of those who shovel the shit and clean away th...
The birds of doom haunt the barren surface high above the caverns.
Fear their despair.
The Manuals of the Bunker, Vol. 3, Verse 4
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For a moment, Amy and I just sat there, silently.
The last time I had entered this place, there had been a draft rising through the shaft from below. Now, the air stood still like death. Yet I shivered, and not only because of my wet clothes.
A rustling sound made me look up into the dark shaft. I had heard it before, right before I had fallen.
I knew the sound, and I grabbed the grid of the platform with both hands. "The birds!"
The flapping noises closed in on us.
"Let's get out of here!" I said. "The birds, they'll attack us."
"Birds?" She laughed—short and bitter.
"Don't you believe me?"
"They're bats, stupid." Still bent over her candle, she raised an eyebrow. "Are ye 'fraid of bats?"
"Bats?" I did feel stupid now, but that wasn't hers to say.
"Yes, bats... critters like mice with wings. Don't ye know them?"
No, I had never heard of bats, but I didn't reply. The flapping was almost upon us. My muscles tensed, but I didn't want to ask her if they were dangerous. She'd probably laugh at me—she'd be running by now if they were.
Would she? Or had she stopped caring? Her mom and her other folks were down below—at the bottom of that ladder where the water had rushed in.
Something brushed my head, and a black shape zipped past me.
I flinched.
"Aren't they dangerous?" Unable to hold back the question, I crouched low and shielded my head with my arms.
"No, stupid." She looked up from her lap and eyed me. "They're a real pest if ye go higher, but there's only a few down here. They leave ye alone most of the time. And they taste like flying shite."
One of them whizzed across the gap between us. I shied away.
She cocked her head. "Coward." The light in her lap lit her features from below. The thin line of her mouth and the tip of her nose glowed a bright orange, yet her eyes hid in the dark.
Everyone she knew must have drowned. She was all alone now.
And Ed—he had died while tinkering. And I had talked him into this.
"I'm sorry about your folks," I said, concentrating on the lass next to me. Ed was too hard to think about.
She turned her gaze towards the dark shaft. "They..." She swallowed. "When we had a cave-in, about a year back... as the ceiling came down in one of the tunnels, where we grew most of our food, many people died. Me mom told me we had to go on, in moments like these. We have to endure, and we have to adapt." The last words were but a whisper.
