“The Bunker” by Dilys Lovell

 

They had moved there when she was little more than a toddler, to the wild island with its rolling heathland and black rocks. Its jutting coastline made it look like a giant had torn a rough hunk off the mainland and tossed the hard, unwanted end away into the sea. There were few points where you could navigate the cliffs down to the beach; Star’s parents had, at least, built their clapboard cottage behind one swell of land that eased down to a broad stretch of grey pebbles, washed smooth by the pounding sea.

Star was bored as hell. Her parents between them had homeschooled her for the last ten years. They’d worked in the city in their life before, so they had a pot of money to draw upon and their needs on the island were minimal anyway. They kept chickens and goats. Blackberry bushes ringed the vegetable garden. The greenhouse crawled with tomatoes. Outside of her lessons – with Mum in the morning and Dad in the afternoon – she was free to roam.

Once a month, on a clear day, all three of them made the hourlong crossing in their motorboat to the mainland. They bought provisions from the supermarket and the DIY store near the dock. Further up the cobbled high street, Star liked visiting the second-hand bookshop, where she was allowed to choose as many books as she could fit into her backpack. She got dizzy watching all the shoppers, dogs, cars, bikes criss-crossing in the town; she had to hold someone’s hand to avoid bumping into people. Stargazing, like her name, her mother said. And then they came straight back to the island.

“I don’t have any friends,” Star complained. Her parents told her she was lucky not to be the victim of playground bullying, or worse, and that she would always have a friend in books.

“What about Pluto, and Ursa, and Zinny?” her mother Abi said, naming the goats.

It was early autumn, when the wind off the water grew sharper and the skies fell dark by supper time. Returning from the beach, Star found her parents a little way behind the cottage, digging into the earth.

“What are you doing?” she asked, pulling off her gloves. Her father, Sean, planted the silver point of his shovel into the dirt and leaned on the handle.

“The fighting on the mainland is growing,” he said. “We need to take steps to protect ourselves in case the consequences spill over.”

Star frowned. “What consequences?”

“It’s not for you to worry about, Cherry,” said Abi quickly, using the pet name for Star that had grown out of her early French studies, when she’d mispronounced cherie. “We just want to make sure we can protect ourselves in case governments keep making crazy decisions, and people suffer as a result.”

“Suffer more,” Sean muttered, driving the shovel into the ground.

In two weeks, the hole was the size of Star’s bedroom, and so deep they had to climb a ladder to get out of it. Sean laid walls and a roof, cutting a hatch and a small circle to fit a smokestack. They stocked the space with supplies – blankets, fuel, storm lamps, water, their own jars of preserved fruit and vegetables, as well as tins from the mainland – until it resembled the cellar beneath their house.

“Why wouldn’t we just go in the cellar if we needed to?” Star grumbled, hauling logs. 

“Do you see this?” Sean said, showing her the dark–grey sheeting behind the thin panels of the walls. “It’s extra insulation that the cellar doesn’t have. Extra protection. Just in case.”

“In case what?”

“This is a little more disguised,” Abi said quickly. “Or it will be, once we’re finished.”

Sure enough, when Sean laid the final square of turf, the bunker looked like just another scrubby curve in the land, swelling up like an air bubble in one of Abi’s freshly baked flatbreads.

“Now here’s the marker,” he told the others, showing where a patch of purple heather disguised the entryway. He grasped a metal ring within the heather and lifted. “Open sesame.”

Inside looked dark, as if the earth had opened its mouth, about to eat them. Black as the inside of a whale belly.

“It’s just for emergencies,” Sean said, noticing the look on Star’s face. “We’ll be glad to have it if we need it.”

Star couldn’t get the bunker out of her mind. She felt uneasy, and the feeling took root deep in her gut like a tenacious weed. In the cottage kitchen that evening, with the fire crackling and bowls of corn chowder before them, Star could only stir her soup moodily. The weed had grown tentacles and seized her stomach.

“What’s wrong?” Abi asked when Star refused a hunk of freshly baked bread. “Are you feeling poorly?”

Star dropped her spoon in her bowl and sat back.

“Living here’s already like being in prison,” she said. “Now you want us to go into that bunker, if we have to. For how long? It’s like a grave. Like we’d be burying ourselves alive.”

“It’s the opposite,” Sean said. “It’s for survival. In an emergency.”

“I know, you said that,” Star muttered, sullen. “But I don’t know what we’d be surviving for, anyway.”

“Star!” said Abi. “We have one life. We value our one precious life.”

“When it’s over, it’s over,” Sean said.

“My life is over anyway,” Star said. “What can we do here? It’s like a living death. There’s nobody else. We can’t live here alone, forever. I want us to live on the mainland.”

Abi looked pale, on the verge of tears. Sean spoke sternly. “There’s about to be a war on the mainland.”

“Well, maybe we should take part in that war. You know, fight for good.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Abi said. “War means destruction. It means killing people. War is a terrible thing, man’s inhumanity to man. A consequence of patriarchal hubris, the urge to dominate and destroy, for power. It’s never good to take part in.”

“But it might mean something. What are we supposed to do, just live here doing nothing until we die? Feeding the goats and growing vegetables? For our whole lives?” Star’s voice rose in a quivering wail. 

Her parents looked at each other, anguished. Abi reached forward to take Star’s hand, but she yanked it away.

“We will figure it out, some day,” Abi said, “after the war. Of course at some point you can go to the mainland – to study, to work. But this is a wonderful time in your life. You’ve got books, freedom, the whole of the island, all to yourself.”

Later that night, unable to sleep, Star stared out of her bedroom window at the churning sea. Her parents saw freedom there; she saw a gigantic, foaming trap. What could her life be without other people? The point surely wasn’t simply to stay alive, to preserve yourself. It was to get out there and experience different places and do as much as you could while there was time.

Star knew how to use the motorboat; her father had shown her many years ago, and she was allowed to take it out when the sea was calm. An hour before dawn, she crept down to the kitchen and packed bread, cheese and apples into her backpack, filling her bottle with water. She shucked on her heavy down coat and quietly let herself out of the house.

The boat was rocking gently at its dock. Star shoved her backpack underneath the bench and untied the boat’s tether, slinging the rope into the hull and stepping in after it. Light was just starting to glow at the horizon; her parents would be stirring, but once she was gone, there was nothing they could do.

She pulled the starter cord and the boat roared in the silence. Quickly, Star nosed toward open water and eased forward the throttle. She thought she heard a door bang back at the house but couldn’t be sure over the thrum and slap of the boat in the waves, and she was too set on her course to look back, afraid of what might melt inside her if she did.

Gradually, the sky lightened as she moved farther away. Soon she could look around her and see only water on all sides. She shivered, unsure of what lay ahead, yet also feeling a thrill of excitement at finding out. She had a little money as well as her supplies; it wasn’t like she was going forever. She just wanted to discover what lay beyond her narrow horizons. An adventure, discovering the world for herself.

After almost an hour of travelling east, the scratch of the mainland against the sky came into view. Heavy-hanging cloud made it difficult to see at first, but as she drew closer Star could see grey columns rising into the sky. Was it smoke or fog? But then, above the noise of the boat and the water, she began to hear crackling sounds, snaps and bangs, like wood in a bonfire but without visible flames.

Star cut the engine and floated for a moment. Something was wrong; the buildings of town had a smeared, indistinct outline. At this time of the day the approach was usually peaceful and quiet. As she listened, she started to hear what sounded like shouts. Screams.

Instead of strolling about the streets as they usually did, the people of the little seaside town were running haphazardly – fleeing buildings, carrying children and belongings, firing up cars and blaring their horns. Star heard a whistling sound and, to her horror, a missile streaked out of the sky and blasted into a large building near the centre of the town, blowing a great plume of smoke skyward and bursting into flames.

Adrenaline surging, Star powered the boat on again. Boats, most larger than hers, were streaming out from the coastline; one, another motorboat, was zooming out in her direction. As fast as she could Star turned to go back but, before she could get up to full speed, the other boat had drawn close enough that she could see a man, or a boy, waving and yelling something she couldn’t make out.

Star pushed the boat to its limit, hanging on to the steering wheel as the boat bounced and jolted through the choppy water. Glancing back, the boy – who looked only slightly older than her – was gaining. She could hear him now, calling Wait! and Stop!, but with a sob of panic she leaned forward, as if she could urge the boat faster like a racehorse.

In a moment, though, the boy drew level.

“Stop! Where are you going?” he called out. Seeing the terror in her face, he yelled, “It’s ok! Slow down, I’m on my own too!”

Glancing at him again, Star could see he was young and skinny and as scared as she was, his eyes bloodshot and his hair wild. She looked at the water behind and, seeing nothing else, she waved at him to slow. They slowed their boats and came to bob close enough to speak.

“What’s happened?” Star asked. “Why are you following me?”

The boy shook his head, tears springing into his eyes. 

“I don’t know,” he said. “The booming woke me up and then our house got blasted. I ran to my parents’ room and that whole side of the house was gone, just blown away. When I ran outside there were people running everywhere. I could hear the explosions. And when I thought to get the boat out, I could see you coming in, heading towards us. So I thought you’d come from somewhere else and might know what’s going on.”

Star listened quietly and sat in silence for a moment when he finished talking. Her parents had never invited anyone back to the island. She wasn’t sure how they’d react if she returned with the boy, but his plight seemed genuine. His face was open and honest in its distress, and he was surely too young to pose any kind of threat. 

“Follow me,” she said to him. “I live on an island, about an hour west. I’ll take you there. You’ll be safe.”

“I’m Star,” she added.

“Star?” he repeated. “I’m Jonah.”

“Ok,” Star said. “Follow me.”

Neither looked back as they started their boats and raced away. Soon the noise and the smoke behind them receded as they powered on through the grey sea, into the howl of the headwind.

As they approached the island, however, Star was shot through with a sense of deja-vu, wondering if they’d got turned around somehow. They’d left the burning skyline behind them and yet, here was another.

Smoke curled from different points on the coastline, rising from the sagebrush, and tall flames licked the sky from Star’s house. The cottage was blazing, engulfed by fire and roaring noisily. 

“Mum!” screamed Star into the wind. “Dad!”

Forgetting about Jonah behind her, Star raced towards land, driving the boat too fast onto shore and tumbling out of the side. She scrambled up the stubbled bank, tugging the rough tufts of grass as she stumbled, and ran panting and screaming towards the blaze.

Helplessly she ran around the burning pyre, blocked by the wall of heat. The house was consumed on all sides. She sank to her knees, sobbing. Her ears were so full of the roar of fire and wind that she thought she was imagining the sound of her mother calling her name.

But then her voice drew closer, and she was grabbed from behind and enclosed, Abi pulling her upwards and into her arms, stroking her hair and calling her name.

“Mum,” Star gasped, clutching her back.

“It’s ok, we got out,” Abi soothed. “We’re in the bunker.” Then she pulled back to look Star in the face, and gave her shoulders a little shake. “Where were you?”

As Star wiped the tears from her eyes she noticed, beyond her mother’s face, her father holding Jonah at bay with a shotgun.

“Dad!” she screamed, pushing away from Abi to run towards Sean. “What are you doing? Stop!”

“Who is this boy?” Sean demanded. “Did he follow you here?”

“I invited him,” Star said. “The mainland is on fire too. He was escaping. His name’s Jonah. He had nowhere else to go,” she pleaded, putting a hand on Sean’s arm.

Jonah stood frozen, looking haggard and pale.

“He lost his parents,” Star whispered.

Sean lowered the gun and turned to look at Star for the first time.

“You shouldn’t have gone,” he said roughly. “You don’t know who this boy is, and you shouldn’t have brought him here. He could be anyone.”

“He was alone, Dad,” Star said softly. “What if it was me?”

Sean pulled her into a hug as Abi approached Jonah and laid a hand on his arm.

“It’s ok,” she said to him. “We’ll give you shelter until we can figure out what to do.”

A droning sound began to grow louder in the sky, and before they could move a jet whooshed overhead.

“Quickly!” Abi yelled. “Into the bunker!”

Ushering Jonah, they ran to the hatch, which lay open. The jet had receded into the distance but appeared to be circling back. They descended into the dimly lit space and pulled closed the hatch.

“Wow,” breathed Jonah. “What is this place?”

With four of them inside, there was little room left. Jonah’s eyes wandered over the shelves of provisions, the cot bed and the bunk, the periscope, which Sean was looking through at the world above.

“The jet flew over again,” he said, “but I think it’s going now.”

Sean turned back to face them, a grim look on his face.

“We’d better settle in.”

They spent the rest of the day navigating the close quarters, feeling tense and sweaty. Star’s parents spared Star and Jonah the third degree, the situation above ground having superseded any other concerns. Sean piled blankets on the floor to sleep, giving Abi the cot bed and the teenagers the bunk. None of them actually slept; the air in the bunker was fetid, and Star could her the muffled sniffs above of Jonah crying quietly.

In the morning, it was Abi’s turn to cry, looking through the periscope.

“Our house is gone,” she said, sobbing into Sean’s shoulder. As Sean held her, he looked at Jonah, who had descended from the top bunk and was standing awkwardly in the corner between the bunk and the cot bed.

“What’s the situation on the mainland?” he asked.

Jonah shrugged, his eyes welling again.

“They dropped bombs in the night,” he said, “blowing things up. Our house was hit. Like yours.”

“What kind of bombs?” Sean asked sharply.

Jonah looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“What kind of smoke did the bombs give off?” Abi asked, more quietly. “Did they give off any big clouds?”

“You mean a mushroom cloud,” Star interjected. Abi nodded.

“I didn’t see that from where I was,” Star said, “from out on the water.”

Jonah sagged like all of the air had gone out of him, and sank down to sit at the edge of the cot bed. He stared round at them, these strangers he’d been thrown together with, in a space that allowed no privacy.

“So what does it mean?” he asked. “What do we do now?”

“We have to wait,” Abi said.

“But what about my parents?” Jonah said, more fiercely.

Abi sat down on the cot bed next to him. She laid a hand on his shoulder.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“But we can’t just stay here,” Jonah insisted. “We need to do something.”

“There’s nothing to be done,” Sean said. “We wait. When it’s time, we rebuild. We start again. And until then, we hunker down.”

A wild look crept back into Jonah’s eyes. Star felt the frustration rising off him like a shimmer of heat and wondered how they could possibly stay together, her family and this strange, grieving boy, together in their underground confines, and just hang on. 

She looked into Jonah’s face and wondered if some part of him – irrational maybe, but some part – regretted what he’d done, in fleeing to the island, and was yearning for the flames.

* 

Dilys Lovell is a teacher who lives in Glasgow. She has published short fiction and poetry in publications including Passages North, Carve Magazine, Rust & Moth, Scribble, and Potato Soup Journal. Her short story collection Moon over Water is forthcoming in 2025.