GRENUN: When The Air Killed Us

Chapter 4: Underwater

I am underwater, and my mask is leaking.

The cold hits my face like a slap of broken glass. Cold black Baltic water, heavy with mud, diesel, and pulverized concrete, forces its way under the lower rubber skirt near my jaw. The sharp, bitter burn of contaminated salt water surges straight up my left nostril.

My diaphragm violently spasms. Don't inhale! Silas, don't you dare inhale!

I fight the terrifying urge to gasp, clamping my teeth together so hard my jaw muscles ache. The taste of the water is vile—like licking the lead terminal of a rusted car battery. It scorches my tongue, leaving a dry, metallic film that makes my throat swallow on pure instinct.

Everything is dark. Down here, thirty feet under the surface of the flood, there is no sun, no emergency lighting, no direction. I kick my feet wildly, my heavy leather boots dragging like iron weights, but I can't tell up from down. The pressure in my ears builds to a dull, throbbing scream as the churning current tumbles me over and over through the drowned ruins of Sub-Level 2.

My sister.

The thought hits my brain through the rising cloud of oxygen deprivation. Hannah.

I promised her I’d call at six o'clock. I promised her I’d be home for dinner in Greifswald town center tonight. She’s eighteen, sitting in her small apartment near the station, probably looking out the window at the gray sky right now, wondering why her big brother hasn't picked up his phone. She doesn't know about Project Regen. She doesn't know the air is dead.

I can't die down here. I can't leave her alone.

My left hand is still clamped around the hard plastic handle of the yellow emergency box. Even underwater, its sealed hull pulls against my arm, surprisingly buoyant, tugging upward against the drag of the current.

Up. The box wants to go up.

I kick with everything I have left in my thighs. My right arm claw-slashes through the murky blackness, my hand hitting something hard and jagged—a submerged structural beam. The sharp rusted steel tears through the sleeve of my lab coat, slicing into my forearm. Pain flares bright and hot, but I leverage the beam, pushing off with both boots in a desperate, surging kick toward the surface.

My head breaks through the black foam.

I gasp violently into my mask, blowing a mixture of trapped seawater and air through the purge valve. PHUT-PHUT-CLACK. The rubber flutters, spraying dirty water across the inside of my clear visor.

I cough uncontrollably, hitting my hands against the concrete ledge I’ve managed to snag. I’m on a flat section of a submerged rooftop, three blocks south of the facility. The ocean wave has swept past, leaving behind a wide, stagnant, drowned landscape.

Above me, there is no sun. The sky is a heavy, bruised gray—an impenetrable blanket of radioactive ash and low-hanging cloud that turns the morning into a perpetual, dim twilight.

I collapse onto my belly on the wet gravel roof, my chest heaving, coughing up green-tinged salt water into the bottom cup of my respirator. My lungs burn as if someone poured acid down my trachea, but the filters on my face are still buzzing with every breath.

SKRRR-HHHH. SKRRR-HHHH.

I drag myself up onto my knees, my whole body shivering violently in the freezing coastal wind. I wipe the slick grime off my visor with my torn sleeve and look down at my hands.

My right hand is bleeding into the gravel. My left hand is still locked around the yellow emergency box.

And three feet away from me, sitting on an overturned air conditioning vent, an old woman in a wet floral apron is staring at me.