Renee Brown

The Refuge

The girl wiped away beads of sweat from her soot-smeared forehead. She sighed with relief at the sound of the whistle filling the chamber. “Shift over, back to your bunkers,” a voice spat over the loud speaker. She was relieved to finish her shift shovelling loads of grimy stinking coal, a job she deeply loathed. The girl had never been outside the Refuge; a mining facility turned make-shift bomb shelter, kept functional via an archaic coal-powered system. It was the only place she had ever known, but instead of a home it felt like a prison to confine her until death made its claim. The only person close to her that had seen the world outside was her grandmother. Her family were evacuated from their village in the summer of 1952 when the war turned hot, and bombs were sent everywhere. She arrived at the Refuge when she was only ten-years-old, living most of her 60 years underground with the ‘Last of Humanity’. Or so they were told when the MAD signal came through. The Guardians of the Refuge, the cruel authority in charge, were the outcome of wealthy evacuees gradually corrupting and usurping poorly organised military forces. They turned what was intended to be a safe haven into a draconian nightmare for the underclass majority. Their rules were clear; no education of any kind – education leads to ideas and ideas are dangerous; work is the only priority – if we don’t keep the furnaces burning, we die; and no questioning the authority! "We survive by the will of the Guardians," was ingrained into every facet of their lives, playing repeatedly over the loud speaker together with the sounds of air-raid sirens. All to remind them about the apocalyptic wasteland outside, and to ensure the workers remained afraid enough to respect the order of things. The girl saw how living in the Refuge was especially hard for her grandmother after knowing life on the outside. But her grandmother found purpose in secretly teaching the girl to read by drawing letters in the film of dirt beneath their beds, and telling stories about her childhood studying the flowers in the woods beyond her home. Her grandmother’s dream was to build the world’s largest botanical garden holding a million plant species, a dream that was never meant to be. The girl longed to feel the warmth of the sun her grandmother spoke about and to breathe air that didn’t carry the stale remnants of the furnaces. The Refuge was cold, industrial and devoid of colour other than patches of rust coating the walls and ceilings, making it difficult at times to envision the world full of beauty her grandmother had described. The girl was always careful not to reveal she could read in front of the Guardians as they enforced the rules with extreme malevolence, often beating workers for their own amusement. They would also refer to them as 'shelter rats' to reinforce the status quo. She had witnessed many of them brutalised beyond recognition for even the slightest remark. No one spoke-out though, because they likely feared the consequences of doing so. Even though they outnumbered the guardians, they didn’t have the strength to fight back. Her grandmother died 10-years ago, one of the last evacuees from the 20 thousand that arrived 50 years earlier. Five years before her grandmother’s death, her mother and father both died of exhaustion and malnourishment, a common death among the workers. The girl didn't expect she would live much longer as she looked much older than fifteen, with sickly pale skin pulled tightly over her withered frame, grey rotting teeth, hair falling out in clumps and a constant feeling of fatigue from enduring years of heavy labour. She wanted nothing more than to just die in her sleep, at least then she could rest in peace with her family. But every morning she awoke to a familiar sense of dread. “Oi you, shelter rat, did you not hear the announcement? Shift is over back to your bunker,” one of the guardians snarled at her. She nodded obediently before being forcefully shoved to follow behind the others.