Photo by Nandor Muzsik on Unsplash.

This short story was written in 2017, never before published.

“Underground is the only safe place,” mother said, moments before she died.

The bullets came quickly for her, and the boots followed for me. She’d closed the door after I’d gone through, providing just enough time for quick feet to carry me down the long, dark hallway.  She said that if ever she closed the door behind me to never look back and keep moving forward. 

“Never look back, little Peach,” she had said.

Her last words were muffled behind the door and fading as I scurried into the blackness. Outside the mortar shells rained. The blasts rocked the palace foundations and must’ve come from nearby. Rushing headlong into the dark, my footfalls began to splash. Soon I was knee-deep in fetid water. But I had to keep moving.

Somewhere behind came the voices of frightened men, words indistinguishable from gunfire. I tried to walk slowly through the water to keep the sound down. My face crumpled at the thought of mother facing them, tears silently melting down my cheeks and dropping to the water at my feet. Somewhere ahead a ruptured sewage line flooded the lower levels of the building. 

Another mortar shell thundered outside. I tried not to gasp at the shockwave rumbling through the walls. “Underground will be safe for you, Peach,” mother had said, but how would I even get there if the overflowing sewage continued to spill downward?

My hands crept along the walls, feeling my way through the darkness. I could hear more footfalls splashing behind me, closing in. I felt a doorknob and twisted, but the water resistance kept it from budging. I pushed with all the force I could muster and it finally gave way.

Then a flashlight was in my face, blinding me. I could just barely make out the business end of the rifle the light was strapped to. A woman’s voice came from behind the light: “Who are you, girl?” 

I tried to answer, but it choked in my throat.

“It’s alright, girl,” she said, raising the light to her face. She had short, damp hair and bright green eyes that shone paranoia in the darkness.

“Soldiers,” I whimpered. “Coming quickly.”

She gripped my hand and pulled me along with her. “We have to go, now!”

My legs had no choice but to keep working as her grip hauled me forward, plunging me along. After a few brief splashes, I tripped against the tide and tumbled into the putrid water. She yanked me to my feet and compelled me down another long dark hallway, her flashlight strobing along the walls, occasionally shining on the double-cross H logo that adorned most of the palace.

“My name’s Ellen,” she whispered, still holding my hand. Her other hand stayed on the rifle handle, extending out in front of her. “You can trust me. It’ll be okay. But we need to find someplace to hide.”

We came to a fork in the hall, left or right. Ellen pulled me to the right, but I braced myself against her and said, “No. We need to go left. There are passageways.”

“How do you know?”

“Mother was a servant here.” 

Ellen’s eyes narrowed in the dim light reflecting from the walls courtesy of her flashlight rifle. “Do you know me, girl?”

I shook my head.

“How well do you know this palace?”

I looked around the dark hallway, then back the way we’d come. The sound of the splashing footsteps filled me with dread. “Well enough.”

Ellen sighed and turned down the left corridor. “Do you know where you’re going?” she asked.

Only where mother had wanted me to go. The President would not make it to the bunker and tunnels beneath the palace. Would that we had known if the mortar shells were for him or from him. He had been away anyhow, that’s how mother knew. The palace servants stayed behind. Other appointed officials would have fled by now.  The warzone had come to the palace doorsteps when it had previously been a faraway worry. 

Behind us the splashing footfalls grew louder. Words were becoming more easily discernible. 

Ellen pushed open another nearby door that led to a staircase, water gushing downward. From somewhere below, the yips of a frightened dog echoed in the wet blackness. “Go, GO!” Ellen prodded the rifle against my back, nudging me to lead the way. Behind me, she turned to aim at the door, slowly backing down the stairs. The light behind me was the only light to go by, so I had to move carefully down those steps, towards the sound of the dog.

When I found him, he was a waterlogged mess, covered in grime. I recognized him immediately. His coat should have been white. “Leave it,” Ellen said without a shred of mercy. He was pacing at the bottom of the steps, the water not quite deep enough to make him swim.

“He’ll drown. Or worse,” I said, picking him up. He shivered in my arms but nipped at my face, licking at my nose. 

“Will he keep quiet?”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.

“Then we should leave him.”

“I can’t.”

“Girl,” she said, fury in her eyes barely visible from the reflected light. The two of us looking up at her, pathetic and gritty, must’ve worked some kind of magic because she gave in so easily. “Fine,” she muttered. 

He was such a small thing, but heavy from the wet fur. That she had swung from no mercy to begrudging acceptance so quickly meant that I would not let him slow us down. I hurried further down the corridor. Ellen held her rifle and flashlight behind us to ensure a pleasant gift to any soldiers who might be following. We had not heard the door at the staircase open or close. No footfalls nearby. With any hope, we had lost them. 

“There’s a bunker—my mother knew of it. There will be no one down there,” I said. 

“Where is your mother?” 

“Back there,” I murmured.

She didn’t speak another word for a long while. 

The three of us trudged through the flooded hallways of the lower palace levels to the sound of exploding mortar shells. The ceiling and walls trembled, pieces of debris shaking down on us. Ellen would pivot forward and back, both hands grasping the rifle. I held the shivering pup close to my chest.

“Not going to let it happen ever again,” I heard Ellen whisper, her crazed eyes darting back and forth in the low light. 

It was difficult remembering the way mother told me to go. “We have to go through the wine cellar,” I said. 

“Seriously? Do we pull a certain vintage out from a wine case and the wall turns inside out?”

“Something like that,” I responded. 

The President had been a paranoid man, seeing enemies everywhere. Beyond the normal precautions of any leader, he needed escape. The palace servants knew that he would never be taken alive. The bunker my mother spoke of was most certainly meant to be a tomb, unless there was another way out. We wouldn’t know until we found it.

“How did your servant mother know about the bunker?”

I didn’t know how to reply, so I remained silent.

“Are you going to answer me, girl?” she asked.

“He talked about it,” I guessed. “He bragged about how they would never catch him.” It sounded like it might’ve been true.

“I was a guard,” she said. “I was one of the palace elite. He was a loudmouth braggart, that’s for sure.”

We no longer heard anyone following us, but Ellen stayed alert. I led us to another staircase with waterfalls cascading down the steps. 

“Do you think anyone else has this idea? Heading to the bunker?”

Again, I didn’t know how to answer. She was smart enough to think of all the things that mother hadn’t. She had armed herself and kept her wits about her. She had such a look of anger, though to someone else, to someone older, she might have seemed small and unassuming. Maybe that was her strength.

“And what about the water? Will it be flooded like everything else?”

She asked numerous questions I just couldn’t respond to. Would there be provisions? Lighting? Plumbing?

“We can’t go outside,” she said. “The rebels are just as likely to mistake us for loyalists and shoot us. Or capture us. I will not be captured.”

In the dim light, her arms glistened from the moisture. Her muscles were lean, but fierce. She wore a white tank top, stained and discolored from wading around in the filth. Her jeans were soaked from the flooding. The little white dog continued to shiver in my arms, hiding its face against my chest.

The air smelled burnt, even over the rotten odor of the flood.

We moved with the water, ever downward.

“What if we find this cellar and it’s just a cesspool? What if we can’t even get to the door your mother told you of?”

“We’ll get there,” I said. Never look back, little Peach. Keep moving forward.

The sound of footfalls resumed. Voices barely audible haunting the blackness.

“Stay back and stay down,” she whispered. “Hold on to my belt.”

I did as she asked, reaching a hand to the waist of her jeans. She clicked the flashlight on the rifle off, and the utter blackness rushed to greet us. It was hard to tell if the voices were behind us or in front of us. Her footsteps through the water were slow and steady—she paced backward as I clung to her waist, the dog quiet in my other arm.

At the end of the hallway behind us, a flashlight aimed at the far wall became visible, flashing across a double cross logo. We moved silently backward. I became conscious of the breath thundering through my nostrils, the chattering of the freezing dog, and just how loud each of my footsteps sounded in the fetid water. Another mortar shell shook the building, debris again raining and splashing. But Ellen remained perfectly quiet as the outlines of several soldiers carrying flashlights on their rifles came into view. They didn’t see us, but we saw them.

They wore helmets with down visors so you could not see their faces. They may have been the President’s command forces or the rebels, just as Ellen had suggested.

Five of them, and only five.

The world ripped open to the flashing of gunfire.

As I hid behind Ellen, I could only think of the same sound on the other side of the door mother forever closed behind me. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t breathe.

When the gunfire ended, the barking of the frightened dog in my arms startled me. It took a moment to realize he’d been barking the whole time, from the moment the firing began. Ellen flipped on her flashlight to see the five bodies floating at the edge of the hall. The dog finally stopped.

“Let’s go,” were the only words she spoke. She didn’t care who they were or what they wanted, she only knew that she would not be taken. They probably didn’t even know what had happened—only that death coiled for them in the darkness, then reached out to take them.

When we finally reached the wine cellar, the water pooled about a foot deep. 

“Go, girl. Find your vintage.”

Mother told me there was a blank spot in a wine rack built into the wall. “Three down, three across. Easy to remember, yes?” she had said to me. Ellen shone the flashlight on the rack for me to find the spot I was looking for. I reached my arm into the empty bottle holder, just as she’d told me to do. There was a wooden slot at the back of the rack that I pushed back. Behind the slot, a lever. There was just enough space for me to pull the lever.

On the far side of the room opposite the rack, a door sized piece of wall lifted upward. As Ellen aimed her flashlight at the wall, water rushed down a dark hallway. Inside this hidden hatchway was a green button below another double cross H. 

“C’mon, girl,” she motioned with her rifle.

We three quickly moved inside and she pressed the muzzle of her gun against the green button. The wall closed tightly behind us. It didn’t appear any more water was leaking through. In the other direction, the passage stretched maybe twenty feet and turned right. As we moved along, the water only trickled forward, so maybe this would be an escape from the putrid sewage. Maybe this would be safe.

“My mother told me that underground was the only safe place,” I said as we crept together through the dark, brick passage. 

“You never told me your name, girl,” she said.

Peach was what my mother called me, but that’s not my name. For a moment, I considered how merciless she’d been toward the pup. If she were truly a palace guard, she’d recognize the dog too. It was the pet of the president’s son. And she just slaughtered five people in front of me without a moment’s hesitation. Could I trust her with my real name?

I sighed and answered, “Diana Cordova.”

“That wasn’t so difficult, was it, girl? It’s nice to meet you Diana. My name’s Ellen Grey.”

The passage curved again, this time to the left. At the end of the corridor was the final door. A numerical keypad etched into the wall on the right prevented our entry. 

“I don’t suppose your mother knew the PIN number, did she?”

I tried the year of the President’s birth, then the year of his current wife’s birth. A combination of birthdays—his, his childrens’, his various spouses. Nothing worked. I worried we’d be locked out for trying too many times, or that the lack of electricity would prevent the correct number from working. Then I tried the year his father was born. Luckily this is all common knowledge to the palace staff. 

The door clicked open.

“Impressive, kid,” she said.

“He wasn’t a complicated man. There were only so many things it could be. And I’m sure this thing was trip-wired to help survive a power outage. After all, if you can’t get in while the power’s out, what’s the use?”

“Smart.”

Only a little water spread across the floor as we entered and quickly closed ourselves in. No electric lights, but there were lanterns. Racks filled with bottled water and canned foods, each marked with the H logo. Sterno for cooking. Cots and blankets to keep warm. It looked like it might have been an old bomb shelter nobody tried to upgrade. Analog would be best for survival anyway. He could’ve withstood an assault or a siege for months, maybe years. Knowing him, it would’ve been a last resort anyway. A little more life to avoid capture for just a little longer. 

But think about it. He’d have never escaped.

“Well I suppose we should strap in,” she said. “We’re going to be here for awhile, I think.” 

Ellen Grey and I became fast friends. At first she spent most of her time watching the door, while both of us remained conscientious of the trembling earth outside. It seemed like the bombs rained down for an endless number of days. I thought there must’ve been nothing left but rubble outside. At first, I tried to pass the time with Cooper, the shaky white pup that used to belong to the president’s son. He could do tricks like shaking hands, rolling over, playing dead.

Ellen and I took turns on watch duty so the other could sleep, and then our days would overlap by eight hours. It was Ellen’s idea to rotate between the two of us. To pass the time, we played quite a few games under the dim lantern light. My favorite was the one where you had to take over the world to win, but she wasn’t crazy about that one. She preferred the murder mystery one. And then there was the one where you had to buy properties and build hotels, but it just went on forever with the two of us trading fortunes. 

There was a small bathroom down there, but the pipe that had burst outside had made running water impossible. The only way we could keep clean was to try to use a little bit of bottled water to wash ourselves and to flush waste down the toilet. Poor Cooper had to stay matted and grimy. He had the run of the place as far as going to the bathroom indoors... there was just no way to prevent it. We could only clean it up with paper towels and try to keep the odor away with air fresheners. 

We worried that if we tried to leave, that wine cellar would be completely flooded.

The shaking from the mortar shells outside was so constant that I learned to sleep through the night to the vibration. Cooper, who had initially been terrified by the constant quaking, began to ease and sleep at my feet. I tried not to think about mother on the other side of the door. Never look back, little Peach. In order to block out thoughts of gunfire and voices muffled by doors, I sang myself to sleep. Any song I could think of, any melody that would block out the sound in my head.

“My girl, my girl, tell me where did you sleep last night...” I heard it in my mother’s voice, which was some cold comfort. 

I twitched at night when I couldn’t sleep, as though my nerves were trying to jump out of my body with each rattle of a mortar shell. 

“In the pines, in the pines, where the sun don’t ever shine, I will shiver the whole night through...”

“That’s a great song,” Ellen said to me one night as she sat hunkered by the door, her rifle strapped to her arm. The only time she let go of it was to let me stand guard while she slept.

“Mother used to sing it to me. She said it was an old, old song.”

Ellen replied, “I can sing it to you if you like, if it’ll help you sleep.” 

She sang in a low, soulful voice. “My girl, my girl, where will you go...” She sat with me and petted my hair, which stopped me from twitching. My tension began to slip away and my muscles began to relax. It was almost like mother was there again.

We sang the whole song together, until the final verse, when only she continued. Something like comfort finally crept back into my heart. She was beginning to hum the song over again when suddenly she stopped.

“Diana,” she whispered.

I snapped back to attention.

“Listen.”

The rumbling outside had ceased.

She stood up slowly, her eyes glaring above as if she expected the ceiling to give way. “Should we go out there?” I asked.

“No, not now,” she said. “We’ll be safer in here. I’m sure there are soldiers clearing the zone. ”

“You won’t leave me here?”

“Oh Diana, no. You and I will stick together. Even the stinky little mutt, too. They couldn’t drag me away.”

The next day, I found her note, along with a loaded handgun.

She said she was going out for reconnaissance. She waited until I was asleep so that I wouldn’t argue letting her slip back out into the warzone. She said for me to stay put and that she would return in only a few hours. She repeated herself, saying there was a chance that soldiers would be out there clearing the way—she just wasn’t sure what kind of soldiers. Also, most importantly, she’d found a cache of handguns in a crate. 

“This one I loaded for you,” she wrote. “If I don’t return, don’t let them take you without a fight.”

And that was how Ellen Grey disappeared from my life.

In the nights that followed, I dreamt of her emerald green eyes. I dreamt that she charged through the door with a cavalry of soldiers to rescue me from this bunker. And Cooper would nip at her face. Behind her, mother walked out from the blazing sunlight to hug me. This would be my family now.

I twitched myself awake. 

I sat alone for days, waiting for Ellen to return. But she never did.

“Underground is the only safe place,” mother said. But underground is maddening. It’s twitching in my sleep and the stale smell of waste and the feeling of cold, bottled water to keep myself clean and the deafening sound of silence...

I didn’t know how long it’d been since I went in there, since the night the bombs rained down on the palace and the city, since the soldiers chased us through the dark halls, since mother sent me through the other side of the door, but it was time to leave. I found a backpack amongst the provisions and loaded it with canned food, bottled water, and Sterno. I strapped it on my back and called for Cooper to follow me.

I held the gun with two steady hands and pushed the shelter door open. 

Cooper bolted down the passageway, toward the entrance to the wine cellar.

“Cooper, you damned mutt,” I heard myself say. He yipped as he turned down the corridors to the entrance.

The green button below a double cross logo waited for me. “Stay,” I told the dingy, grimy dog. He sat down immediately. When I finally pressed it, he paced in a little circle.

We made our way out into the wine cellar, then up the steps. All the water that had accompanied us down into the bunker was gone. White light poured through holes in the walls and chunks of open ceiling. The sky that I hadn’t seen in forever was overcast and blinding. Outside, city buildings appeared crumbling, stone mountains built in roads where flattened vehicles piled up. “Stay close, Cooper,” I said in a low voice. Thankfully, he obeyed.

We didn’t even bother to go out the palace door. In the library, we climbed over a pile of open books that had fallen from the shelves and crawled through a bombed-out hole in the wall. Sunlight tried to break through the clouds, a silver disc visible behind a layer of smoke and fog. Cooper stayed to my left side, my arms straight down at my right. The muzzle of the gun faced the ground, both my forefingers resting carefully against the trigger.  

Men in camouflage stood next to armored tanks. 

My hair whipped around my face as I struggled to see through the smoke drifting along the palace thoroughfare.

“Hey!” A man screamed. “HEY!” 

I lifted the gun and stepped carefully forward.

“SHE’S GOT A WEAPON!” the shrill voice exclaimed.

About a dozen or more clicks, ticks, and snaps echoed loudly. Every rifle in sight was aimed in my direction.

I lifted my hands in the air, motioning for surrender. I still held the gun aloft, but pointed to the sky. 

“I will not be taken alive!” I shouted. 

“Lower your weapon, girl!” another man’s voice responded. “We mean you no harm. You are not our enemy!”

He appeared near the tank, his hands in the air. The hair shaved down to the roots along the side of his head could not hide the silver flecks of age. A white streak shone in his bangs. He didn’t wear camouflage, but instead a black suit with a high black collar. He looked strangely familiar. He began to walk slowly towards me, stepping on the grass of the palace thoroughfare.

“Put your gun down! We will do the same. Believe me when I tell you we mean you no harm.”

“I told you, I will not be taken alive!” I bellowed back at him.

“Gentlemen, stand down!”

The clicks, ticks, and snaps echoed again. This time I could see them all lowering their rifles. Cooper let out a small yip toward the man. I still would not put down the gun, even though I was clearly surrendering. He slowly stepped toward me on the palace lawn until he stood about ten feet away. His elongated face was handsome, but he looked more like a chaplain than a soldier.

“What’s your name, girl?” He held his hands up in front of him. 

I didn’t answer. Instead, I posed a question of my own. “Where’s Ellen Grey?”

“I’m sorry, sweetheart, I don’t know who that is.”

“She was my friend. She heard the bombs stop and she went outside to investigate. I owe her my life. She saved me.”

“I’m sure we can find her. Together.” His voice, his tone had a soothing quality, a fullness of intent. When he said it, I believed him, and I couldn’t tell you why. “My name is Soren Westfield.”

“I’m...” the words stuck in my throat. I hesitated for a moment, then looked into his brown eyes. “I’m Diana Cordova. This is Cooper. Please don’t hurt him.” Tears dropped down my cheeks and my face curled in agony. “My mother... she was in the palace when it was under siege. She closed the door behind me and the soldiers, they...”

Soren Westfield wrapped his arms around me and I sobbed into his chest uncontrollably, the gun dropping to the ground behind him. “You don’t have to be afraid anymore, darling. You survived. And everything is going to be alright from here on out, do you hear me? Everything will be alright.”