Twenty Four Shades Darker: The Hunt

(16) Close Enough to Touch

Lights snapped on ahead of him, illuminating cold steel walls with bunker-doors set at regular intervals. Every so often an air unit whistled away, adding a melody to the background of clunking pipes, the whirring of the elevators, the distant explosions from the practice ranges.

The man ran a hand over his hair. It had been a long time since he'd been up to the surface but everything about him still said 'farmer', from the sun-cracked hands to the weathered face. His thumb caught in a mass of grey curls and tweaked painfully when he wrenched it free; he'd broken it in an accident in the practice ranges a few years ago but had never had it set properly. The Thirteen doctors were good but he didn't quite trust them and he hated the chemical smell that was even stronger in the medical rooms. So his thumb had set itself, badly, and now stuck out at an angle and kept getting in his way. He flinched as he cracked it back into place and whistled a quick tune to cover it.

One of the bunker doors slid open and a gaggle of girls spilled out, each of them dressed in the standard dark green shirt and beige combats that were regulation here. He stood aside politely to let them pass. None of them were smiling but somehow they seemed to be enjoying themselves anyway. After ten long years here he'd learned to tell which were refugees from the districts like himself and which were what was referred to by the high-ups as Original Stock; born and bred in Thirteen. The refugees were more subdued. Maybe that was it. He'd spoken to Maige about it a few times - his second wife was OS - and she'd said she'd never noticed.

He checked his arm as if the ink would have changed by now. It hadn't. It still read 11:20AM - Meet. Pres. The holoclock in the corner was reading 11:23. With a sigh, he turned a corner and waited for the mechanism to scan his eyeballs.

ACCESS GRANTED

The door hissed aside, allowing him into the waiting chamber. He hadn't been in here for over a year and wasn't sure exactly what he'd been expecting, but whatever it was, he wasn't disappointed. It was about the same size as the bunker he shared with Maige, with the usual steely walls and a few district seals stamped into them. A flickering screen showed images of a square outside a Justice Building, dotted with people going about their everyday lives, the whole world drained of color. A few flakes of snow drifted in the air. Nothing interesting appeared to be happening. Here two boys were slumped on the floor outside the door to the President's room: a tall and lanky figure with greasy blonde hair and a slightly smaller, bulky lad with a bad buzzcut and an expression that said that this was a place he was too used to being. The man lifted a hand in salute to them. The buzzcut boy copied it and grinned.

"You'll be the man who's getting grilled before us, correct?"

"I reckon I am."

The two boys looked at each other and winced. They were both dazed, pale and spotty and positively unhealthy. They were in need of sleep and food - both were strictly regulated here, so they obviously had some important function in the inner running of the district that allowed them to dodge the busyness of everyday life.

"You'd better get in there, then," the buzzcut boy continued, his voice precise and Capitol in every way, and his friend collapsed in giggles as if it was the funniest thing he'd heard in weeks.

The man nodded and pressed his hand to the door. A red light scanned over it, momentarily tracing the outline of his palm on the material, before his bunker number flashed up and a voice inside called him through.

The President was behind her desk, hands clasped in front of her and wearing an expression of extreme patience. He strode into the center of the room, then wondered if he'd perhaps seemed too confident and bobbed a quick bow, stopping himself just before he started to turn red. She kept her eyes fixed on him.