by Isla Morley
“That’s okay. I respect that. I know some people who flap their gums all day. You want my opinion, it’s fools who talk the most.”
An awful lot of words for one breath of air, is what I think, but Adam grins. If he had a tail, it would be wagging. Three days ago, confronting Dobbs with a knife, and here he is, as eager to please as a young boy. All that time worrying about how I would deal with his fears about the world, the disappointment that was sure to come from having been raised on fantasies, and I haven’t made any preparations for how to deal with his blind faith. How do I keep him from falling for every smile, every slick word? How a man holds himself, what he does with his hands, can tell a straighter story. If living with Dobbs should have taught Adam anything, it should be at least this much.
“I’ve got a buddy like your mama here.” The sitter takes a seat next to Adam. “He ain’t much of a talker, either. He has his reasons, as I’m sure she does. Tunnels of Cu Chi—you ever heard about those?”
Adam draws a blank.
“ ’Nam, brother. 1974. Dyno was a tunnel rat. It was his job to crawl down those holes to find Charlie.”
Adam swings around to look at me.
“Different Charlie,” I say.
“Dyno never knew if he was about to step into a booby trap, if some trapdoor of nails was going to slam down on top of him.” The sitter smashes his fist in the palm of his other hand. Adam flinches. “The guy’s one tough sonofabitch, I’ll tell you that. Nothing fazes him. Not much of a talker, but one very wily cat. Got out of ’Nam with all ten fingers and ten toes, unlike most. Started his own dealership back in the day. How d’you like that? A car salesman who don’t talk! Damned if he didn’t make himself a ton of money, too. One year he even got some fancy award for having the best dealership in the state of Ohio. People went to his place, see, they didn’t need no sales pitch. Dyno was an honest-to-god war hero, and folks found a way to show their appreciation. Some said it was a shame he ended up on the street so soon after, but the way I figure, he got those tunnels inside him.”
“My mother killed the man who kept us locked up. Are they going to put her in jail? Is that why they won’t let us leave?”
“Adam!”
The sitter holds up his hands, and goes, “Whoa, whoa, whoa.”
“She was going to tell the police as soon as she got me to the hospital. We couldn’t drive there because of the trees.”
The sitter leans past Adam to look at me. “You have a car that runs?”
“It ran out of gas,” Adam replies, shrugging off my glare.
The man’s face drops. “Scavengers have got to it by now.”
Adam snaps his fingers. “We saw them! They live in a train. I think my mom ran over one of them.”
“Okay, that’s enough, Adam!” I stride toward him and situate myself between him and the sitter.
“She didn’t mean it, though.” He knows I’d like to throttle him.
And in this way we put on a nice little show for the man with one good eye until he offers to turn out the lights so we might sleep.
* * *
Darkness feels like a respite. As long as the lights aren’t on, I don’t have to pretend. Between me and the sitter are only a few feet, but in the dark it might as well be miles. Lit up, this place gives the wrong impression, that with people around we are found. Truth is, the more there are of them, the more isolated I feel. Cut off is what the darkness shows. On our own. Silo-alone.
“We lived underground where they used to put rockets,” Adam whispers.
“You mean, like a missile silo?”
“Yup.”
“Son, you bullshitting me? Because I’ve heard some stories in my day.”
“No. It’s true.”
The sitter mumbles about children having being squirreled away in all sorts of places, but never a missile silo.
“He wasn’t protecting us.” Adam explains a truth that for him has only barely set. “He kept us locked up. That’s why my mom doesn’t like it here—she doesn’t want to be a prisoner. We’re not prisoners, right?”
The sitter is silent for a moment, as though he’s forgotten it is a person next to him and not a story. “How long you been living in that missile silo, Adam?”
“My whole life.”
“Your whole life.” He says it real slow. “And your mama’s been down there that whole time, too?”
“She’s been there longer. Since before I was born.”
“Since before you were born.”
The sitter repeats everything Adam says—about getting the door open; about never having seen the moon or stars till a few days ago; about never having been outside. It’s as if he can believe the words only if they come from his own mouth.
Adam is out of bed, rummaging in his trousers. He asks the sitter to hold out his hand. “That’s some of the gravel I’ve collected. There are so many different kinds of earth. But rain’s my favorite thing so far; it turns this stuff to mush.”
Just when I’ve decided to hate this man, he pipes up, “There’s lots of different kinds of rain, too.” For a minute, we listen to it thunk down on the corrugated siding. “You afraid of getting wet?”
The sitter and Adam stand in the doorway where the rain makes a beaded curtain against the porch light. Adam sticks his hand in it, pulls it back, and then rubs his head. Watching Adam is like watching an astronaut on a new planet. You see him experiencing the world, it’s like you’re experiencing it for the first time, too.
The sitter steps into the porch-lit rain and holds out his hand. Adam takes it. I lean forward on my elbows and watch two boys dance under a cloudburst and kick up puddles.
* * *
We are back Below, having to listen to what’s wrong with the world.
“No!” I shout, sitting up. Not in my cot in the silo, but in the Quonset hut. The storyteller is a hunched shape beside my son’s bed—not Dobbs, but that sitter, Marcus.
“Can you turn on the lights, please?”
We all squint at each other when he does.
“What’s going on here?”
Adam hesitates, like he doesn’t want to be the one to break the news. “It was Diablo, Mom. Just like Mister said. The solar flares, the electromagnetic storms shutting down the grid, the nuclear reactors melting down—it all happened.”
Dobbs sometimes referred to what was happening on the surface as AD, meaning After Diablo. Diablo Canyon was supposedly a nuclear reactor in California that was the first to melt down.
“Ninety reactors around the world, all told,” Marcus chimes in.
“There’s no more Korea,” Adam adds. He looks as though he might weep. “Or Russia. Almost everyone in Europe died.”
No, no, no. It’s supposed to be a fossil-fuel crisis. It’s supposed to have affected only parts of Kansas, not the entire country. Not the world. Hollowed out is how I feel.
“We took the biggest hit, even bigger than the Asians,” Marcus continues.
“Not everyone died, surely,” I manage. Twelve people here, the four visitors, the people living in the abandoned train, the charred soul in the old farmhouse. Mightn’t there be a chance that my kin survived? That in some tucked-away place Mama is still waiting for me?
“No, not everyone.” But the way he says it—apologetic, cautionary—means I shouldn’t go asking for specifics. I ask anyway.
He explains that in the first month, the population of the country saw a 20 percent drop. Six months later, fewer than 20 percent were still alive. By the time a year rolled by, there was nobody around to keep track of the numbers. Estimates still swing widely, he says. Being an optimist, he puts the number somewhere between seventy-five and two hundred thousand. “That’s just North America. Nobody can hazard a guess as for the other continents.”
He runs his hand across his brow. “Hard to believe that this coming May will make it fifteen years since Diablo. Seems a lot longer. Many a day I wake up and wonder how come I’m not six feet under yet.”
I think back. Adam would have been three months old. Dobbs moved down with us around that time. I remember because Adam had started teething and I was worried because it was too early for a baby to start teething, and his crying made Dobbs even more testy than usual. I told Dobbs to sleep in his own house if it bothered him so, but he jumped down my throat: when would I get it into my thick skull that he didn’t have a home anymore, is how he put it. I thought this meant he’d lost his job and the bank had taken his house. For eight months straight he stayed down there, not once going up for supplies. Then there’s the time he rushed Below and went for his shotgun, before dragging me up to the exit door and telling me the Scalpers were after us. I thought perhaps the police had come for me. I kept waiting for the door to bust open. When Dobbs did eventually make a foray back outside, I was bitterly disappointed. It meant that he wasn’t on anyone’s radar. No one was coming for us. All that talk of the Last Days during those months—I mistook it for craziness. He’d come back with few supplies but plenty of biblical references. The Parable of the Sower was a popular one. He spoke of refugees on their way to Mexico, likened them to seeds falling by the wayside. Where they fell, they were literally eaten by crows. The seed left to wither on stony ground were the survivors who supposedly stayed put and tried to tough it out, only to starve later. The criminal element that rose up was the weedy patch. Dobbs would talk Bible stories, and then look over at Adam as though one boy wasn’t going to do the trick. I thought all of it was to get me to stop begging him.
“Is there any way to know who survived?”
To my surprise, he mentions a group in Utah. “Cockroaches, yeah, but Mormons? Who’d have thought, right?” The Saints, he says, spend their days baptizing posthumously the millions who have died using something called the Ancestral Index, a handwritten database of the deceased. Updates are made to it frequently, although he doubts a request for information on surviving relatives has been submitted to them in the last few years. Everyone pretty much knows by now who made it and who didn’t. “Tricky part is communicating with them. That much distance with the CB radio has gotta involve a lot of Skippers, and once you involve more than two or three of them—well, it’s often a case of the Telephone Game.”
“What are Skippers?” Adam asks.
“You know about skipping stones on a lake? Well, it’s kinda like that with broadcasting a message across the country. You gotta bounce it from one CB operator to another. Get some rookie mixed up in the process, and a request for information on Uncle Joe could end up getting you a report on radiation levels in Uganda.”
Radiation levels in Uganda seem to Adam to be a topic worthy of conversation, but I ask them both to be quiet for a moment.
Silence doesn’t help. I ask Marcus if I might get some air.
It is my turn to stand in the rain.
Could it be that they are all gone? Could it be that they suffered something I can’t even comprehend? Something far worse than what I have had to endure? Could it be that Dobbs, my assailant, my jailor, the man against whom my will was sharpened, then dulled, and then sharpened once more has, in fact, saved me, saved my son? And having surely saved my son from suffering and death, is he not owed a debt, a debt for which I can never repay him? Am I not now beholden to him in a way I wasn’t before? Will I now never be free of him? There has been but one constant over the last seventeen years: the moral certainty that comes from distinguishing right from wrong—Dobbs was wrong; I was right. Once such a sure platform, that moral certainty now seems no more dependable than a trapdoor on the gallows. Was he wrong to take me? Was he right to keep us down there?
Behind me, I hear Adam tell about the strange blue street signs. Marcus explains about evacuation routes. Did Mama and Daddy live long enough to be evacuated? Adam mentions the mound with all the buried things, and Marcus explains the massive cleanup of anything that might have been contaminated by fallout. Dobbs used to say the very young and the very old were most susceptible to radiation, that Adam had to be sheltered as long as possible. What chance is there that my brothers and sister have survived?
Adam mentions the mangrove swamp. Marcus explains, “We got species of trees from South America I don’t even know the names of, but that’s what happens when birds don’t know which way to migrate.”
“My mom thinks the trees are ugly.”
“Some of them are, the ones from the early years. The newer ones are doing better. People the same way. Won’t be no more Defectives in a hundred years, some say.”
I cringe at the word.
“What’s a Defective?” Adam asks.
“The ones who don’t come out right. The exact opposite of you.”
Marcus is in the chair with his elbows on his thighs and his hands clasped. “Doctors and scientists have been working for years to come up with someone pure, who ain’t going to pass on radioactive cells, and then you guys show up outta nowhere. Man, they must think they’ve hit the jackpot with you, pal.”
So that explains their fascination with Adam.
“My mom thought they were making bombs here. She doesn’t like weapons.”
“Bombs? Ain’t no point in making bombs. But they’re cooking up stuff, that’s for sure.”
“Hill!” Nobody has heard Harriet Fletcher come in. She marches over to us and plants herself between the sitter and me. “What exactly are you doing?”
Marcus winks at Adam, as if to counter her crossness.
“You are not here to fraternize with the patients.” She checks the small container next to Adam’s bed.
“He’s not giving any more urine samples,” I announce.
“I see.” She narrows her eyes at Marcus as though this is somehow his doing. Her tone softens when she speaks to my son. “Adam, you do need to give us a specimen. We really are trying to help. Despite what your mother thinks.”
Harriet Fletcher pulls Marcus to one side. Something about getting restraints from Quadrant D should the need arise. Before leaving, she takes an armload of files off the shelf and dumps it into his arms and says, “Since you’ve got so much free time on your hands.”
I approach Marcus. “These tests they want to do on my son—”
He cuts me off by flicking a chart. “This patient’s got failed kidneys.” He pulls out the folding chair, sits down, and leafs through another chart. “This one’s got no iron in her blood, and this poor kid’s got lymph nodes the size of oranges. We get a lot of sick people come through these doors. I’ve been doing this job for two years, and it never ceases to amaze me, the things they do. Cut open a man’s throat, take his thyroid out and sew it up again, good as new. Tumors the same way. Fifteen years ago, you couldn’t get treatment, good or otherwise. This place, they got the aces working here.”
“You said they hit the jackpot with Adam. What do you mean?”
Marcus points up at a little black speaker and says unnecessarily loud, “What you got here is a five-star facility. That’s right, uh-huh.” Judging from the look on Marcus’s face, this fact is not something about which we should feel thrilled. He pulls us close and whispers for Adam to bring over his notepad. He draws on the page, and hands it to me.
A squiggle. I frown and shrug.
He outlines his drawing again, and this time it looks like a tadpole, until he draws a big circle next to it.
I mouth the word. Sperm?
Marcus nods and then erases his sketch. I snatch the pad from him and fill the page with a giant question mark.
Marcus spends several minutes designing a comic strip. The first square is jam-packed with stick figures, the second square has half as many, and in the third square the remaining stick figures fall on top of one another. Next is a diagram of a big syringe with bubbles inside, and a fried egg. I draw a complete blank. Adam, on the other hand, is spurring Marcus on with vigorous nodding.
Marcus hands us the notepad when he’s done. Something about sick people, and beans on a conveyer belt, and beans being packaged in a
bag, and the bagged beans going for a ride on a cart into a forest.
I would still be wondering what beans have to do with this place if Adam hadn’t whispered, “Mom, they’re making babies here.”
So there can be no doubt, Marcus nods deliberately.
“And they intend to use Adam in their operation?”
Marcus shrug-nods.
ADAM HAS SPENT the better part of the morning watching the wall clock. He has tested each bed for springiness, fiddled with every latch and knob and wire, turned on and off the faucet at the sink a thousand times. He has exhausted every activity and is now waiting for when the deaf woman pretending not to guard the door will leave and Marcus will return. Until I have some idea from Marcus where Adam and I could go, we’re not about to leave, but each attempt to communicate this to the woman results in more food trays.
According to the booklet Harriet Fletcher gave us, when geomagnetic storms knocked out the transformers and shut down the grid fifteen years ago, emergency generators were used to pump coolant so the nuclear rods at power stations wouldn’t melt down. Some plants didn’t have more than a few days’ worth of diesel to keep the generators running. Trucks carrying diesel got waylaid in massive traffic jams and then hijacked. The government called for the pumping of more diesel, but you can’t pump it out of the ground by hand. Just as you cannot pump by hand water to houses or sewage from them. Without power, ATMs and credit card machines were useless. Good-bye, NYSE; hello, mattress money. Refugee camps sprang up hundreds of miles from cities where rioting, looting, and murder became the order of the day. Most camps dried up quickly for lack of supplies, but a few became cities themselves, with local municipalities run like co-ops. Apparently, there are no more states, no central government. There are prefectures, provinces, something called the North American Confederacy. America is now a no-name-brand country. A hand-drawn diagram on the back page shows only two borders—the Atlantic and the Pacific.
“What if his clock and this clock are different?” Adam asks.