Motel Serendipity

Liberty - Part 3

Something in the air moves my hair and it makes my nose itch. I pull on deep memories of stories to name it. Breeze. It is cold against my thin jumpsuit, and my skin tenses underneath, but I have no time to focus on it. Because there is grass, real grass, before me.

I fall to my knees and pull it out of the ground in fistfuls, pressing it to my face to breathe in its smell. Around me, water crashes like the calming tapes used for bedtime and I look up to see a vast body of water before me just beyond the green patch the vault opened into.

I'm not sure how to quantify water this big. The stories talked of lakes, rivers, oceans. But their size was lost on a child too young to know anything but the metal walls of the vault.

Across the watery mass, buildings stand tall against the horizon. Mechanical noises of engines and civilization echo across. People. Other people have survived. Other people are in the above.

It looks just like the storybooks, just like the movies they played in class – back when we had enough children to have classes. Some sort of insect buzzes past my ear. A rodent scurries in the bush to my left. Life. There is still life here. And it is abundant, not nearly the scraggly regrowth my mother and her cohort expected.

I spin around to go back to the vault entrance, to tell others of what I have found, but I stop in my tracks. Above me, a giant green woman, her foot as large as five men, stands staring out at the commotion across the water from us. In one hand she holds a torch, like the electric emergency lights that line the halls below. In the other, some sort of thick tablet rests in her hand.

Something massive moves in the sky overhead. I squint at it, trying to make out the species of bird. We learned about those below. We learned about most of the animals of the above, even if we were told they were now extinct. As it comes into focus, its metal body reflects the sunlight. Not a bird. A machine. A flying machine.

"Hey, lady. You can't be down there," an unfamiliar voice yells in the distance.

There's a man in a blue uniform running down the railed concrete wall beside me.

As he closes in his face turns from anger to confusion, to flat-out awe. "You-you're." He doesn't finish his sentence as I cock my head to the side and try to understand what's happening. Instead, he runs over to where the vault door stands open, a large circular crater in the green field.

He gets down on his hands and knees to stare into the hole. "Holy mother." Pulling awkwardly at the radio-like device on his waist he presses a few buttons. "The vault is open. There were still people inside. Get someone down here now." His voice is shaky, panicked. His head shaking in disbelief as he turns to me. "You. Girl. You come from down there?"

I nodded. Where else would I have come from? Another vault?

"How many more of you are there?"

My eyes dart to the side as I try to do the math in my head. "Seventy-three. No, wait. Grace Floyd had her baby last week. Seventy-four."

He takes a deep breath as his eyes widen. "Seventy-four people locked under the Statue of Liberty. That's a headline for you. Why just you? Why ain't any of the rest come up yet?"

I look longingly at the entrance to the vault, hoping to escape this conversation soon so I can let them know what I've found. "They're scared."

"Of what?" He spreads his arms out, indicating the flat, silent area around us.

"The lingering radiation? The nuclear winter? The toxic air?" Surely this man had been given the same lessons we were before he left his vault.

A curtain of understanding falls across his features. "There was never a nuclear war, girl. Only threats, forever ago, before I was born. People went into vaults like yours, but they came out when the peace treaty was signed." He sits down on the grass, holding his head in his hands as if he was the one who just saw the surface for the first time in his life. "You all are urban legends. Some say you all died from starvation. Others say no one ever went in." He lifts his head up and looks at me before rubbing his eyes and staring even more. "Either way the vault is impenetrable from the outside, so it's just become another tourist attraction on Liberty Island, just like ol' girl up there."

Rage, white-hot and burning, fills my veins. Not at this man, whose pot belly and balding head are not as intimidating as someone with SECURITY written across their back probably should be, but at the Controllers. At the wasted years. At the betrayal of my people. The unnecessary death of my mother.

But there was nowhere to direct my anger. Nothing to hit. No one to scream at. The ones responsible are long dead. This, my mission, is to take back our lives from the lingering whispers of their ghosts.

My feet sink into the wet dirt as I stomp to the opening. I take a deep breath and close my eyes, swallowing down the fear that if I enter the vault again, I will never get back out.

No one dared to climb the stairs while I was above, but many congregate around the foot now. Their faces search mine for answers, but I remain silent until I am next to my father, standing before them all. The Commander's daughter.

"The above is safe," I say, easing them into the information I am still trying to process. "The nuclear event never happened. Life went on without us."

Even my father's carefully drawn mask of indifference slips as the whispers of the crowd grows to full volume.

"How is this possible?"

"What does that mean?"

"Are you sure?"

"But the Controllers said..."

I look at my father and he nods, giving me permission to lead. "The Controllers lied to us about everything. Why would this be different? It was just another way to maintain their dominance over us."

The crowd is still skeptical, but their eyes dart back and forth between me and the stairs. They can't deny the information before their very eyes. None of us have died from toxic fumes. I have now been to the surface and returned alive. What more proof do they want?

My mind spins as puzzle pieces attempt to form a cohesive blueprint of what happened to lead us here. I latch on to bits and pieces. The security guards words echo. Some say you voted to stay down there. The vault is impenetrable from the outside. My mother's research, which I stayed up one too many night studying, flashes. No evidence of a nuclear winter. The Controllers seek to maintain power by whatever means necessary.

"They did this. They told the above we didn't want to come out." My voice is barely a whisper in my father's direction as my shoulder's fall limp and the air rushes out of me. "They nearly killed us all."

Overhearing me, people begin to come forward to the dais. They lay their hands on me as I slide to my hands and knees. My family. My people. Doing what they can to comfort me, even in their fear.

My father bends down beside me. "But you saved us." He looks up to those nearest to us and then cranes his head above them to make eye contact with those who are keeping a safe distance. "Celia told us this day would come. Now Calliope has proven to you that it is real. Do with this information what you will. I am no longer your Commander. I am merely your friend. Your friend who chooses not to live within the bounds of fear created by corrupt men any longer."

He picks my limp, sobbing body up off of the ground and holds me close as he steps forward to the stairs. A crowd forms behind him, his renewed confidence assuaging the fears of most of them.

"Single file," my father shouts in his most commanding voice, but now he sounds more like a teacher leading a line of children than a war-hardened leader.

At the base of the stairs he pauses and sets me down on unsteady feet. "Lead your people, Calliope Rae," he says as he motions to the stairs.

I climb them slowly, more than aware of every pair of eyes upon my back. At the top we move to the side as they file out behind us. It isn't nearly all of them, some will take longer to come around, but the joy and gratefulness on the faces of those who do follow us is enough to fill someone with pride for a thousand years.

Dad turns to me and envelops me in a hug. He smooth's the back of my hair as we watch our people revel in their new world. "Your mother would be so proud."