"Now?" Plato calls up to me.
I unfasten my face shield and pull off my jumpsuit. As the dusk light wanes, I turn and look down the hill behind me. Plato stands beside a steel doorway built into the hillside.
"Let's get to work," I tell him.
Plato shoves hard on the manual release, and the bunker door groans, then slides the rest of the way open, stopping with a steel clunk. He whistles, and the men behind him emerge like slow-moving inmates trudging out of the block into a prison yard. They take deep breaths of the outside air as they carry plastic pipes, fittings, canvas tarps, sheets of plexiglass, rope, and hand tools. They know their assigned tasks. I catch the hammer Plato tosses to me.
"Tonight's the night," he says with an eager look in his eyes. "We finally leave the past behind."
I pull down the upper portion of my jumpsuit and tie the dangling sleeves around my waist. A cool breeze whispers across my bare chest. "We should have the shelters finished by morning."
"Some will want to go back. They don't look like it now, but they will. When it gets hard out here."
The energy level of the men is high, as are their spirits, as they work together. A hundred meters beyond the bunker, our attempts at a makeshift village rise up from the dusty earth. The huts are composed of plastic and canvas and steel—anything we could strip from the underground warren where we spent the past decades. Not fancy, but these structures will do the job, serving as our base camp once we begin searching for other survivors.
"I don't think they will." We descend the hill to join our brothers. "There's nothing for them to return to. The bunker is an empty tomb now. We have everything we need right here."
"I'm just saying…" Plato shrugs. "The time will come when they'll crave the familiar." He looks back. "We should seal it shut."
I follow his gaze. The bunker's dark entrance looks like the gaping maw of a half-interred beast. "Not tonight. We have other priorities, my friend. We must be certain our shelters are strong enough to withstand whatever elements come our way."
He nods. "I'm sure it'll become a moot point eventually. Most of the life support systems have shut down. It's only a matter of time before the door mechanisms refuse to cooperate entirely." He casts me a sideways glance. "I'd hate to be the poor fool trapped inside when that happens."
He makes a good point—in a roundabout way, as always. The bunker is a danger. But the men have been told it will be off-limits after tonight. For months now, Plato and I have stressed the importance of looking forward, not back. Our future depends on our ability to work together as one. At this point, after all we have accomplished—surviving below ground, maintaining our sanity, developing a brotherhood of unity, and achieving what will be, tonight, life outside the bunker for the first time in twenty years—only a fool would desire to go back to nothing.
"Do you have anyone in mind?" I pick up one end of a steel support beam and wait for Plato to take the other.
He shakes his head. "It could be any one of us—or more, if they panic. We have no idea what life will entail out here. We could not have possibly prepared for every eventuality."
He shoulders the beam, and we carry it down the middle of our street—a wide path through the center of the village—toward one of the last structures yet to be completed.
"We're in this together, my friend," I remind him. "If we remain united, we have nothing to fear."
"Of course," Plato replies. But he doesn't sound convinced.
He's the youngest of us and, in many ways, also the wisest. The philosophical discussions he'd instigate following our evening meals earned him his name from the start. Over the years, I've learned the value of heeding his concerns; but I have to remember to balance them with a certain level of optimism. He tends to believe the proverbial glass is half-empty, and I always have to work diligently to convince him otherwise.
"You're making more work for us, Samson," Plato grunts as we hand off the beam.
Samson—so named for obvious reasons—takes our offering and shoulders it alone. "Standard-issue hut won't cut it. Man my size needs room to breathe." He devoted more time than any of us to building his physique in the bunker gym, at times spending more than three hours a day with the weights. His muscle mass is now double what it was on D-Day, and he was already a large young man back then. "Besides," he grins, baring white teeth. "When we find those women you promised us, I plan on taking two!"
Everyone laughs as he punches me lightly in the shoulder. I plant my feet to keep from showing the force of the impact.
"Yeah, Luther, when are our wives gonna show up?" one of the others calls out, struggling to tie down a roof tarp. He's the oldest of us by far, named Rip (Van Winkle never stuck). "I'm not gettin' any younger, y'know!"
Amid the laughter, the men turn their eyes to me, tools held at their sides as they await my answer. For most of us, it's been the thought of repopulating the planet that has kept us looking forward to the future, whatever it holds. The government scientists selected us for this purpose. Samson, in particular, has mentioned his anticipation daily; it's become his mantra. Over the years, he's often told us how he envisions a future full of his children, filling the earth.
Segregation by sex was easy for no one, but we developed our own coping methods. I earned the name Luther for believing that we could—for the time being—live without female companionship just as religious monks in monasteries had done for centuries. (Perhaps Augustine or Lawrence would have been a more
