Evolution by Teri Terry

Author:Teri Terry [Terry, Teri]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Charlesbridge
Published: 2020-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

FREJA

A GIRL PEERS OUT AT US—maybe fourteen or fifteen years old. She has dark hair and eyes, and the bright aura of a survivor.

“Azra! I told you not to open the door!” a boy says, peering around her shoulder. A few years younger than she is, and he’s a survivor too.

“No one wearing a hat like that could possibly be dangerous,” she answers, an upturned eyebrow at the flowery monstrosity on my head. I take it off.

“Hi. I’m Freja, and this is Kai.”

“What do you want?” the boy demands.

The girl gives him an impatient look. “I’m Azra, and this rude boy is Wilf.”

Hi, Azra; hi, Wilf, I say silently while Kai says hello out loud.

“You blocked me. How’d you do that?” Wilf says to Kai.

“Easy-peasy, once you know how.”

Wilf’s eyes are wide.

“Now that we’re all nicely introduced, what exactly do you want?” Azra asks.

“Well, we actually came here looking for fuel. We weren’t sure if the cameras meant someone was watching the place still—so I wore this,” I say, and waggle the hat. “To stay incognito.”

“It’s just us,” Wilf says. “I worked out how to use the cameras! I was watching you the whole time.”

Now Azra glares at him: is it because he said they were on their own? And I reassure her. It’s okay, as you said—we’re not dangerous.

“You two are here by yourselves?” Kai asks, concern in his voice.

“So what? We’re fine,” Azra says. I’d be even finer completely alone, she adds in an aside to me with another impatient look at Wilf. And I’m pleased she’s talking to me like this now. “You might as well come in,” she says out loud, then turns and goes back through the door.

“Come on! I’ll show you. It’s really cool,” Wilf says, and we follow him in, down more stairs with dim lights on the walls—they have power? Well obviously, they must, to operate the cameras. At the bottom of the stairs, we go through another heavy door.

And it is cool: it looks like a control room, like something out of a spy movie.

“What is this place?” Kai asks.

“A bunker! You know, so in the event of war or nuclear fallout or something, the command from the base could hide away in here and direct stuff from underground.”

“Did the air force just abandon it?”

“Most of them cleared out of the base when the epidemic got close,” Azra says. “Some of them came here instead, but they died in this bunker—they must have been sick before they got in and locked the doors.”

“Azra thinks they are ghosts,” Wilf says.

“I do not!” she says sharply. “Anyway, one of them must have realized they were dying and tried to leave—we found a body up above. He left it unlocked. The others died down here.”

There is a flash through her mind of the two of them moving the bodies. They couldn’t get them up all the stairs, but there’s some sort of back emergency exit. They put them out there and locked it. The doors all seal, but no wonder she thinks there are ghosts.

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