The Outside

I. The Walls That Raised Us

The first thing I remember is the filtered air. Always cold. Always dry. We were taught that moisture in the lungs meant sickness—that everything outside these walls was soaked in death.

They called the virus Veridian. A synthetic strain born of desperation during the collapse. It moved through skin contact, air, and blood—unstoppable, invisible. Civilization crumbled in a matter of months. Governments fell. Cities became graveyards.

The last survivors retreated underground.

They built sanctuaries. Steel-boned wombs buried beneath the old world. Our home was called Haven 57. Five hundred people. Four floors. Sealed tight.

I was born here, deep below the surface. I’ve never felt rain. Never seen a bird. Never tasted an apple that wasn’t grown under fluorescent light.

They told us the surface was still teeming with Veridian. That going outside would mean death within hours—bloody, screaming death as your lungs burned and your veins turned to black rope. The outside was a myth. A mistake. A graveyard of fools.

And we believed them.

II. Patient Zero

His name was Callen. Seventeen. Quiet. Careful. He was one of us, born behind walls and raised on fear.

He went missing during a water line inspection near the surface vents. The Wardens told us he slipped, fell, and died instantly.

But three days later, he came back.

Alive.

He didn’t cough. Didn’t blister. Didn’t bleed from his eyes like the training videos showed. He stood, breathing in the stale, recycled air like the rest of us—but something in his eyes was different. Brighter.

Wild.

They locked him in isolation. Full hazmat protocol. No contact.

Mira, my closest friend, was on sanitation duty outside his cell. She told me he whispered through the vent.

“The air’s clean. The virus is gone. They’re lying to us.”

That was the spark.

III. Infection of Doubt

Rumors spread like mold.

Callen survived exposure. Callen went outside. Callen says the world is healing.

Of course, the Wardens denied everything. They called it Residual Hallucination Syndrome, claimed the virus had neurological effects that caused delusions. They said the surface was still uninhabitable. That only they understood the danger.

But the stories wouldn’t die.

“I heard Callen didn’t even wear a mask. ”Someone said he saw green trees—real ones. ”He said birds are coming back. ”Why would they lie?”

Because fear is control. And in Haven 57, control was everything.

IV. The Forbidden Zone

I couldn’t sleep. I started wandering, looking for evidence. Old terminals. Power grids. Schematics.

That’s how I found the blueprints for Surface Access Tunnel 12-D.

It was real.

And it had been accessed—multiple times in the past year. Logs wiped. Cameras disabled.

The virus wasn’t keeping people inside.

The Wardens were.

V. Containment Breach

The door was hidden behind a false wall near the ventilation sector. Rusted. Fused shut from disuse. I waited until a power relay test cut cameras for two minutes and forced it open.

It screamed on its hinges.

A corridor of peeling paint, mildew, and silence stretched ahead. I walked it with my heart hammering in my ears.

And then—light.

Real, golden light slanting through a broken bulkhead at the end of the tunnel. My breath hitched. I reached up and touched the leak with my bare hand.

Warm air.

I stepped outside.

VI. The World They Buried

The sky was not red. Not black. Not raining blood.

It was blue.

Bright, searing blue streaked with drifting clouds. Grass, thick and wild, pressed against my legs. I sank to my knees and grabbed it with trembling hands.

Birdsong.

I cried, gasping. Not from sickness—but relief. My lungs drank in the air like it was water. No coughing.

No burning.

Veridian was gone.

The Earth had healed. Without us.

VII. The Wardens’ Lie

I returned.

They arrested me.

They scanned my blood, my lungs, my skin. All clean. No trace of infection.

They said I was a statistical anomaly.

But I wasn’t the first. And I wouldn’t be the last.

They locked me in a white room. Lights buzzing. Air dry. Food through a slot.

But Mira found me.

She tapped the glass once and whispered, “Is it true?”

I nodded.

She vanished the next night.

So did half of Hydroponics the day after that.

The Wardens lost control.

VIII. Exodus

The rebellion was quiet.

No fire. No violence.

Just people slipping away, one by one, through the old tunnel. A migration into light.

When I left for the last time, I turned to see the bunker’s entrance swallowed in vines.

I didn’t mourn it.

IX. Reclamation

We built homes near an old wind turbine overgrown with moss. The air is different up here—alive, full of sound. The virus left no trace. Nature filled the void.

We learned to hunt again. To plant. To laugh in the rain.

We named our new home Halcyon.

Some days, we hear distant echoes—sirens, old broadcast signals from bunkers not yet free. We mark their locations. We wait.

We’ll find them.

X. The Outside

Now I sit by the stream, telling stories to the children.

Not of the virus—but of the walls. Of how fear was stitched into every breath we took underground. Of how truth is fragile, and freedom must be chosen, not granted.

I show them a leaf, and they marvel like it's treasure.

They will never know what it means to be sealed away.

Because they were born in the light.

Because we broke the lie.

Because the Outside is not death.

It is the cure.