by Platt, Sean
Then he’d kissed her cheek, and she’d walked back toward the porch, sitting in the kitchen while he’d done something that took about ten minutes. Probably dragging the three dead men into the trees, maybe freeing the horses from their tethers.
He came into the kitchen with Trevor and Lila at his sides, each holding one of his hands like toddlers. Heather brought up the rear, but said nothing sarcastic. She simply came to where Piper sat in her chair, stooped to wrap her arms around her, and said, “Thank you.”
Meyer went to the kitchen sink, overlooking the lake out front, and took a moment to stare out across the moonlit scene. Then he washed his hands of red and brown grime, and said, “Let’s get inside.”
Piper didn’t reply. She just wanted to sleep.
Hours passed.
Day must have dawned outside, but the bunker didn’t have windows, and they could only guess. Meyer locked the bunker door, flipped a few switches that made machines hum and putter behind the concrete walls, and suggested everyone rest. He himself hadn’t slept. Heather and Trevor seemed to have nodded off for a few hours, but despite Meyer’s trying to conceal the tunnel he’d dug through the pantry’s drywall, it hadn’t taken much detective work to find it once they’d woken and found him gone. Piper hadn’t slept either. She’d been far too nervous, to worried about what might come next, and that someone might die. Lila must have been the same; she’d wanted to take her turns faithfully on the binoculars rather than attempting to bed down. Piper couldn’t blame her. It was tiring to surveil the house, but so much worse to simply sit in the quiet darkness with the dots of alien ships overhead, and wait.
So they bedded down. Meyer had done his usual paranoid best, and outfitted their space in the best manner that a rich man’s money could buy. Five bedrooms for six people. If Lila and Trevor had shared a room (blessedly, Lila and Raj didn’t ask to do the same), there would even have been room for Garth.
Piper didn’t think she’d be able to sleep.
But she did.
Piper woke to the sound of a television. How long had it been since she’d watched a TV? Not an Internet stream (though she hadn’t seen one of those for a lifetime either, it seemed), but an actual TV on an actual wall?
It had been a very long time. The last time Piper had watched TV, the world had been a different place. Piper had been a different person. She’d been so much younger. Trevor and Lila had been innocent. She’d lived in a totally different life, caring only about foolish things like yoga and her own entertainment.
How long ago had that been? Ten years?
But no. It had only been a week.
The bunker had been built to mirror the floor plan of an ordinary home, and despite the gray concrete walls (they were due to be painted at some point, but the apocalypse had called first), it almost looked like one. There were attractive track lights mounted to the slab overhead; there was plush carpeting and hardwood in the kitchen; Meyer had furnished the place in an inappropriately lavish (but very Meyer) style.
She entered the living room, trying to think of it as a real living room. She found Heather on the couch, flanked by Trevor and Lila.
Heather gave her a very un-Heather smile. They’d met many times, and even taken a few vacations en masse “for the kids’ sake.” On those family vacations, Heather was supposed to be the hanger-on, but Piper always felt like the odd woman out. They’d got along fine. Heather was hard not to like, once you were used to her always-on personality — and this despite Piper’s suspicion that she was still sleeping with Meyer.
Heather and Meyer shared history that the two of them never could. Piper liked to think she was mature enough to respect different kinds of love for what they were, but suspected she might be pitying herself.
Maybe she wasn’t enough for Meyer. He certainly had much more in common with Heather — and that extended to memories and preferences, not just hobbies. Maybe he needed Heather. Maybe she was just too bedraggled, being raised by a mother who served her husband, to stand up and put an end to it.
Heather held her small, uncharacteristic smile. The room was quiet despite the TV, and they all seemed reluctant to break some sort of a spell that had descended on the room.
They were safe. The fight was over, and they’d reached their destination.
They could bask in that feeling for a while before facing the next thing.
“How are you feeling?” Heather asked.
“Tired.”
“Sleep well?”
Piper hadn’t slept well, but she’d slept some. She nodded.
“Did you sleep at all?”
Heather shrugged, seeming to indicate the children at her sides. They looked sleepy but not asleep. She must have stayed up with them. Like she’d once chased away their nightmares. Piper had never done that. Lila and Trevor had both been grown when she’d entered the picture. There was a moment of jealousy, and then it was gone.
“Not really.”
Piper sighed, then sat. She wanted to say something conclusive to cap their adventure (even “Well, we made it” would do), but her lips betrayed her. She found herself watching the screen, hypnotized by its glow, its soporific, low volume.
Heather was watching the news. The kids, at her sides, looked like zombies — their eyes open and mesmerized.
“How do we get TV down here?” said Piper.
“I don’t know. There was a TV. I turned it on. It worked.”
“Satellite,” Piper guessed. There was a humming behind one of the walls. It might be a heater, but it also might be a generator or three. There might be line power to the house, but there were also solar panels on the roof and huge wind turbines visible farther up the hill. If there was line power and it went out, theirs, down here, never would.
“You know Meyer,” said Heather. “He’s probably got his own satellite up there. And armed guards outside protecting the dish. Did you know that when he started Fable, he was so paranoid about other movie studios stealing his techniques that he had decoy studios built, so it would be harder for spies to know where the real action was taking place?”
Piper shook her head. She hadn’t known that. She thought of how Heather had started the story by saying, You know Meyer. But Piper, hating herself a little, thought instead, YOU do.
She looked over at Heather, sitting between the children Piper had spent the last few years raising. Heather looked tired and rumpled — not at all the polished, primped woman with the outrageous dresses she usually wore in her comedy specials. But Heather dressed down exceedingly well. She looked good casual. Comfortable. Even normal. It was hard to fathom her situation’s reality, but oddly enough Piper found her conversation with Heather oddest of all. Heather wasn’t being Heather. They were talking like old friends. Which, under different circumstances, they probably would be.
“Have you been watching all night?” Piper said, nodding toward the TV.
“Mostly.”
“Mom made us watch Friends for a while,” said Lila. “Just like you do.”
“It makes us think of our youth,” said Heather, smoothing Lila’s hair. But Piper had been far too young to remember the show. She liked it in the way Heather liked older shows before her time — with a sense of days passed, times she’d missed out on.
“What’s going on?”
“The ships are starting to settle over big cities.”
“‘Settle’?”
Heather nodded. “Just hanging there. Floating. Like in V. Did you ever see V?”
Piper shook her head.
“Lucky. Meyer made me watch it a few times.” She pointed at the screen. “There. Like that.”
Piper put her hand over her mouth, feeling her wide eyes bloom wider. The picture on the screen was surreal. She saw the familiar New York skyline, now circled with what seemed to be an unusual number of helicopters. But smack in the middle, eclipsing the screen’s top half, was the curved bottom of a huge silver sphere. Then the screen changed, an announcer babbling on in w
ords Piper could barely hear. The new shot was from several miles farther back, taken from a helicopter, judging by the high viewpoint and slight jostle. It showed the sphere in its entirety, just hovering above Manhattan like a giant brushed steel bowling ball.
Piper looked at Lila and Trevor, feeling a strange urge to shield their eyes. They shouldn’t have to see this. Then again, it was their new reality. And they’d seen so much worse already.
Heather reached for the tablet on the back of the couch, tapped the screen, and killed the picture.
“I know that look,” Heather said. “It’s how I think I looked a bit ago, when they first started showing footage of the things arriving.”
“They’re not doing anything?”
“Not as far as I’ve heard. Just waiting.”
“For what?”
But Heather could only shake her head.
DAY SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Day Seven
Axis Mundi
The first twenty-four hours were the hardest.
Piper was used to being out and around. She was a New York girl now, and living in Manhattan meant constantly walking. Meyer had had the foresight to equip a small gym, but walking on a treadmill wasn’t the same. She craved fresh air and felt slightly claustrophobic — a fear that seemed to magnify if she considered tomorrow and the next day, knowing that depending on what the ships did, they might be here for a long time. Knowing Meyer, “a long time” could provide sustenance for a decade. The idea of staying inside this bunker for a decade was suffocating, and when she thought about it the first time, Piper retired to her room while Meyer was playing a game with the kids, closed the door, and cried.
There was a floor area in the gym, and Meyer, bless his considerate, forward-thinking heart, had floored it in bamboo so that Piper could do yoga. Doing a few sun salutations calmed her mind, so she pulled up some of the stored routines on the small juke in the gym and played through a few longer sessions as led by her favorite video instructor, Heidi Bleue. That helped more. But even after the invigoration of a long and tiring session, she found Savasana, the moveless pose that always closed her routines, hard to stomach.
Piper was supposed to be clearing her head, breathing into universal intelligence with her body and mind. But now her universal intelligence was polluted with Meyer’s visions — with the premonitions he’d seemed to have about all of this, as spied when he’d taken his drug. The aliens seemed to be out there somehow, visible when one cleared his or her mind. And now they were all Piper could imagine: gray skinned with black almond eyes like in the movies, or green and dripping with slime.
She looked longingly at the spiral staircase, wanting with everything she had to go up. The ships might be above Denver, but they wouldn’t be above Vail. This was the back country. It’s why Meyer had chosen the land, why he’d bought so much to assure isolation. So why couldn’t she go outside? The bunker’s air felt stale, almost suffocating.
She’d known Meyer wouldn’t want anyone to leave, so feeling reckless one day, Piper quietly climbed the stairs with her walking shoes on, vowing to only taste the air for a few minutes.
But the door was locked, the access code changed.
He’d sealed them in.
In the afternoon (Piper didn’t know when and didn’t care; time didn’t matter in a world where sunshine was rumor), Piper found herself preparing an argument for Meyer.
They couldn’t hide for the rest of their lives, especially when there wasn’t even anything menacing going on. Maybe the ships were there to stay, but maybe they’d only hang there forever without disembarking. Maybe they were stranded. Piper hadn’t seen V as described by Heather, but she’d seen another of Meyer’s favorites: a rather violent film called District 9. Those aliens had basically run out of intergalactic gas and parked their ship above Johannesburg. Maybe this was like that.
Or even if this wasn’t like that, why couldn’t they wait until there was something to fear before hiding? They’d have time to react if a war began. She didn’t want to drive to Dallas; she wanted to take a walk around the house. She wouldn’t even enter the woods if he didn’t want her to, and he could come with her if he insisted on babysitting. They wanted to have protection available, sure. But there was no reason to voluntarily turn themselves into prisoners.
Piper found Meyer in the living room, which after just a day had already become the underground home’s clear nexus. They’d eaten dinner and breakfast from TV trays rather than at the table, and thus far the kids’ only slumber had been on the living room couches, passing out from exhaustion rather than truly going to sleep.
“Meyer,” she said, her spine tall and her hands uncomfortably near to perching on her hips, “I think we should talk about … ”
He shushed her. Piper didn’t like that at all and was about to call him on his rudeness, but then she saw his eyes. He, like Trevor, Lila, Raj, and Heather, was staring at the TV, transfixed.
“What?”
“Shh, Piper,” Lila said.
Piper looked at the screen and saw what had already become a shockingly familiar sight: a massive silver orb hovering above a city. Judging by the Slavic architecture (all swirls and onions), she thought it might be somewhere in Russia. At the bottom of the screen a red banner said, SATELLITES SHOW MOSCOW HEAT BLOOMS.
“What’s a heat bloom?”
“Shh!” This time, it was Trevor.
The announcer was going on, but Piper was coming to this party late and didn’t have the background the rest of them, who’d apparently just camped in front of the TV like drones, had already absorbed. For some reason, being shushed a third time made her furious.
“Don’t you ‘shh’ at me, Trevor! Someone tell me what the hell is going on!”
Heather looked up. For a second Piper thought she might bark at her for yelling at Trevor. Instead, her usual sarcasm still mostly absent, she said, “It’s what happens when they launch missiles.”
“Who’s launching … what kind of missiles?” She heard her voice falter.
The screen seemed to come alight all at once. Whatever had struck the sphere was massive. Piper didn’t know much about weapons of war, but the explosion looked like something from Cold War footage — a kind of awkward mushroom that shook the enormous sphere like a piece swinging in a Newton’s cradle.
“Was that one of the big ones?” she asked, now desperate. “They can’t do that, can they? Wouldn’t it destroy the city? Wouldn’t it give them all radiation poisoning?” There was more, too: where was the camera showing this footage? It looked like a helicopter. Had anyone told the pilot that nuclear action might be afoot?
Nobody answered.
Maybe the city had been evacuated.
Maybe a rogue faction had managed to launch something, not strictly authorized by the government.
Or maybe the world had already gone to shit, inside a single day.
“What’s going on in the rest of the world?” she asked, panicked, feeling her legs start to wobble. She grasped the back of a chair for support as a torrent of rapid-fire questions spilled from her lips.
“What about New York? Is there one over Denver? Did they say if they’ve done anything to us? Is our government talking about launching missiles too? Oh Jesus. Oh shit. What about the president? Has the president made any … ”
The entire bottom half of the sphere turned bright, like a down-facing lamp. Even with the set’s downturned volume, she could hear a loud, low fwump like a fire suddenly coming alight.
A few seconds later, some kind of shockwave must have struck the camera. The feed went blank.
In those seconds — between the massive light beam and the loss of signal — Piper could clearly see that Moscow’s city center was gone.
The TV was off. They sat around the coffee table in the quiet the way they’d sit around a campfire, with the lights low. Nobody had wanted to watch the news after satellites started showing overhead shots of the damage. The grou
nd seemed flat and burned, no structures standing within a radius of a dozen miles or more. And most ominously, front and center on the satellite image was the ship itself — an impossibly large silver circle above the debris, again unmoving and silent.
After that, the huge Moscow ship had moved on. Without a city to watch, it seemed to feel it had other business to attend to.
They’d watched sporadically after that, checking for new and horrible updates in the way Piper remembered her grandparents describing 9/11. Nobody, they’d said, wanted to see more of what had happened that day. And yet few had been able to look away.
Piper could relate. She told the kids to keep the screen off but found them with it on a few times, Heather disobedient in their midst. But she herself had been peeking too, ducking into rooms to watch on a tablet, staying too long behind Trevor, Lila, and Raj before laying down the law. It was impossible to turn from. Her desire to go outside had evaporated, and she was quite sure, now, that they were all going to die. But she still wanted to know when she was going to die. How she was going to die. And to be as frightened as possible in the meantime.
None of the other ships struck. Other nations, apparently having learned Russia’s lesson, stood down. Even the amount of helicopters circling the things decreased their numbers and increased their distance. There were addresses from the president, promising that the government was doing all it could to communicate and keep the people safe. Pundits pointed out that Russia had struck first, though there was no information on why, or if the action had been official.