Everyone’s sick. The air smells tart and pungent, and there’s hardly a moment when someone isn’t sitting on the toilet bucket. I feel dizzy and hot with a cramped stomach that’s different from the cramps that come from hunger. For the first time in days, I don’t think about food or even getting out of the shelter. I just want to stop feeling sick.

By now, the men have torn their pajama tops into rags, but there’s still not enough. Dad is the first one to take off his pajama bottoms. Only there isn’t any material around for Janet to make him a loincloth the way she did for Sparky.

We nap, wake, sit on the toilet bucket, and lie around feeling too ill and weak to move or talk.

“I wish you’d never built this thing,” Mr. Shaw tells Dad.

Finally I wake up and the cramps are gone. Dad hands me a cup of water, and I gulp it down. Most of the others are awake. Somehow they don’t look as sick as before.

“It’s time,” says Mr. McGovern. His jaw is covered by a short, scruffy beard, and the skin that once stretched tightly over his round belly is loose and saggy.

“Let me check —” Dad begins to reach for the radiation kit.

“I don’t care anymore,” Mr. McGovern says, cutting him short. “I’m going up.”

He doesn’t sound crazy or desperate like Mr. Shaw did. Instead, he’s calm and determined. When he starts to get up, I half expect Dad to try and stop him, but he doesn’t. Paula watches without a word.

Mr. McGovern stands in the dim shadows, a grown, naked man with skinny legs and flat feet. “I’ll need the light,” he says.

Dad picks up the flashlight.

“Can I come?” Sparky asks.

“No.”

“Please?”

“Make sure he stays there,” Dad tells Janet, and takes out two of the gas masks.

With the masks on, they look like naked men with horse heads. The shelter gets darker when Dad follows Mr. McGovern around the shield wall and into the narrow corridor. We listen to the muffled sounds of Mr. McGovern’s grunts and heavy breaths as he starts to climb up the rungs. Then it gets quiet. Then more grunts and heavy breaths. Another quiet period follows.

Finally the bolt beneath the trapdoor slides open with a screech.

My heart speeds up.

Silence.

Then a grunt and a groan as if Mr. McGovern is struggling.

“It’s heavy,” Dad says, his voice muffled by the mask.

A louder groan follows, along with the clank of metal.

Then more heavy breathing.

We all hear what Mr. McGovern says next: “There’s something on the other side blocking it.”

A sense of alarm spreads. Mr. and Mrs. Shaw push themselves up and go see. The rest of us follow. Soon we’ve all squeezed into the narrow corridor watching while Mr. McGovern climbs down the rungs. Dad hands him the flashlight, then turns and looks at us through his mask. Is he going to tell us to go back into the shelter? No. He starts to climb.

Above him is the trapdoor. This is the first time I’ve seen it since the night we came down here, and back come all the awful memories of the struggle and the desperate cries of those above who didn’t get in. Dad was right. Of all the things that have happened, those horrible sounds and haunting pleas are still what I remember most clearly. And somehow, even though I’m only eleven, I know they’ll follow me forever.

Dad has to stop partway up the rungs to catch his breath. Come on, I think anxiously. Hurry!

He starts to climb again, then places his hand against the trapdoor and pushes up. The door rises a fraction of an inch and then falls closed with a loud clank! He tries again, straining, and the door rises a tiny bit higher before falling. Dad lowers himself a rung and stares up, catching his breath. Even though he’s been weakened by lack of food and exercise, he should have been able to push the trapdoor open.

Mrs. Shaw says what’s on all our minds: “We’re trapped.”