by Jordan Rivet
Garrett scrubbed a hand through his hair. Joanna knew he wanted to live in a simple world where he could do the right thing and everything would turn out well in the end. He wanted to dash off at the last moment to save his family, bringing his girl with him. But Joanna lived in a complicated, desperate reality.
“I’m not going to Montana.” She folded her arms. “And I don’t want you to, either.”
“Joanna . . .”
“In fact,” she continued, “you’re staying right here. I need you, and so does the team. You said yourself we’re your family now.”
He looked at her for a long time. Joanna was prepared to stare at him for the rest of eternity if it meant he wouldn’t run off and get himself killed.
“I want to do the right thing,” he said softly.
“Then don’t go.”
He moved closer to her, their bodies almost touching. Joanna’s heart thundered as he brushed the back of her hand with his fingertips. She could hardly bear to be so close when he might be about to leave. But she couldn’t reach out to him, not until she had an answer.
Garrett gave a deep sigh.
“Okay, Joanna Murphy. I won’t go.” His lips quirked in a half smile. “Did you really mean that? You want me even though I’m a dumbass?”
Joanna grabbed his face with both hands and kissed him. She’d only intended to make it a quick kiss, a seal and a promise, but he wrapped his arms around her waist and kissed her back.
It was even better than she’d hoped it would be all the times she had imagined kissing him over the past few months. Her fingers tightened in his hair, a sort of gleeful panic filling her to the brim. Before she knew it, her back was against the wall, and Garrett was kissing her more deeply and thoroughly than she’d ever been kissed before. He started to release her, muttering something about how long he’d been waiting for this, etc., etc., but Joanna barely listened, pulling him closer. She wouldn’t have noticed if the comet hit then and there.
Garrett never mentioned the bunker in Montana again.
Chapter Eighteen
It took Joanna all day and another night to recover from climbing the ladder. Miserable didn’t begin to cover the experience. The sun was out for most of the first morning, then heavy clouds rolled in and a wild rainstorm drenched her to the bone. She collected enough rain to replenish her water supply, but she would almost trade that to be dry again. The smell of the damp, pungent earth replaced the stench of sweat, and the chill aggravated the pain in her muscles.
She berated herself for not making better use of her survival strategies.
“Shelter, water, food, remember? Two out of three isn’t good enough.”
She’d sought safety high above ground, but her pile of rubble offered no protection from the elements. Their instructors had warned them how easy it could be for common sense to fall by the wayside when in an unfamiliar or stressful situation.
“That was the whole point of training so hard,” she croaked as she tried to wring rainwater out of her clothes and into her water bottle. “You get a D-minus in wilderness survival for today.”
Resolving not to make any more impulsive decisions, she spent her waking hours studying the complex and scouring the landscape for signs of other humans. The world remained stubbornly deserted. As night fell for the second time, her hopes that someone else had survived faded.
Halfway through the third day, she managed to scramble down from the rubble at last. She staggered around the overgrown complex, looking for a safe water source. The scummy puddles and muddy trickles didn’t inspire much confidence. She’d have to rely on the water stores in the bunker until she could venture out in search of the river that was supposed to be a few miles away. She added that to her list of things to do when her muscles stopped scolding her for overusing them too soon.
Fortunately, getting back down into the bunker wasn’t as difficult as she had feared. In a gloomy corner of the shaft house, she found several sturdy ore skips, metal tubs that could be secured to a cable and hoisted up and down the mineshaft with a big steel crank. She took apart the rusty devices and rearranged the pieces until she had enough working parts to make a single skip and crank system, which she could operate by herself.
She took frequent breaks, and before she knew it the sun was sinking low over the hills once more. She tested her system as the light faded from the sky, thinking wistfully of the couches down in the exit chamber, but she decided to wait until the following morning to lower herself back into the bunker. She would get another night’s rest before she attempted the descent.
“You might survive this mess after all.”
She slept in the shaft house with the door open, the wind in the vines singing her to sleep. In the morning, she sipped dew from the widest leaves and drank the last of the water she had captured during the rainstorm. Her muscles still hurt, but she felt less like a two-hundred-year-old lady. She was ready to return to the bunker.
She engaged the safety, climbed into the skip, and swung out over the mineshaft. The hoist creaked ominously as she descended into the darkness. She hummed to drown out the creaking of the rope and the squeaking of the pulley. The tune echoed into the abyss, making her feel as if she weren’t alone. She hoped humming to herself wasn’t a sign she was going mad already. She hadn’t even been awake a week!
Soon she was thudding onto the large rock wedged into the bottom of the mineshaft and slipping past it into the capsized lift cage. A jolt of elation went through her as she crawled back into the control room, but the true test would come when she tried to return to the surface.
Not a single light in the exit chamber worked now, making it difficult to tell whether more of the ceiling had come down in her absence. Moving as carefully as a mouse in a lion’s den, she drank long and deep from the water tanks and limped around collecting supplies, resolutely ignoring the door to the cryo chamber. Then she showered, washing away the sweat from her climb and soothing her aching muscles. She knew she ought to conserve her water, but the exit chamber had been stocked for everyone to have one shower, and no one else needed theirs.
After her shower, Joanna made two trips up the mineshaft, bringing as many supplies as her skip could safely hold. The pulley system worked well, and she planned to rig a second one eventually. She forced herself to space out her work, all too aware how dangerous it would be to wind up incapacitated again. She had acted impulsively, falling badly at the first hurdle, but she didn’t intend to make the same mistake twice.
After her ill-fated time on top of the stone slab, she searched for a spot for her permanent camp carefully. The recent rain allowed her to check potential hideouts for dampness and see whether they’d shelter her during future rainstorms. She tramped through the thick bushes where the prefabricated dormitories had been with no success and eventually hobbled toward the old processing plant.
Ivy covered the walls now, the soft green texture turning the industrial structure into a living tree stump. Trepidation buzzed through her as she approached the heavy metal door. Even full of the constant bustle of BRP officials, scientists, and soldiers, it had given Joanna the creeps ever since her encounter with Colonel Waters.
“BRP is gone,” she told herself. “Colonel Waters isn’t in there, and neither is anyone else. Keep it together.”
The door shrieked like a banshee when she pushed it open. She moved gingerly, preparing to run if the roof caved in. It would be just her luck for the whole thing to finally collapse the day she entered. She tiptoed down the dank hallway, opening doors and peering into gaping holes where the doors had long since crumbled away. No furniture remained in the building, as if someone had taken a hose and washed all its contents out the front door.
That’s odd. Could looters have come upon the complex in the final days before the comet hit—or even in the early days afterward?
She crept deeper into the building, wary of disturbing the silence with her labored footsteps. She had expected leftover construction mat
erials, electronics, and maybe even the skeletons of people who had waited for the end here. Instead, she found nothing but dust and a sprinkling of insect droppings. At least the cockroaches were alive and well.
There wasn’t even any paper left in the offices, no discarded files she could use for kindling on cold nights. Perhaps someone had destroyed the program files before the catastrophe or stored them away in a hidden location. The officials could have been involved in a scandalous cover-up!
“Slow down, Murphy,” Joanna said, her voice echoing through the vacant building. “Now you’re just being paranoid.”
She had seen the bodies of the BRP officials with her own eyes. Theresa. Colonel Waters. The cave-in had taken officials and civilians alike long ago. Yet it still felt like just last week that Joanna and the others were entertaining conspiracy theories about all the things BRP wouldn’t tell them. Getting her head around the passage of time was proving more difficult than she expected.
Still, time alone couldn’t explain why the processing plant was empty.
Joanna reached a stairwell at the end of the partitioned hallway. Shadows cloaked the upper level. The lab up there had been filled with cryo tanks, which Dr. Huntington used to give all the BRP participants a trial run. She supposed he’d also used the participants to test the tanks—many of which had been fresh from the manufacturer. Stress had replaced some of Dr. Huntington’s fervency after they arrived at the mine. He seemed irritated that the program wasn’t being executed as well as he felt it deserved. They were forced to rush through every step as the doomsday clock counted down.
Rumor had it the participants weren’t just practicing when they reported to this building for their cryo trials. In fact, they were being tested to find out whether they’d panic. If they couldn’t handle the immersion process, they were removed from BRP—condemned to perish after all. Joanna had witnessed a member of Yellow Team Two being shown the gates after he flipped out during his trial. Apparently, he’d thrashed and choked and put long scratches down a technician’s arm before finally succumbing to cryosleep. Dr. Huntington woke him a few minutes later and sent him packing.
In the dim light of the ruin, Joanna couldn’t tell whether the second-floor lab was as vacant as the ground-floor offices. She wondered if it too had been mysteriously cleared out. She mounted the bottom stair, and it groaned ominously.
“It’s like being home alone,” she told herself. “They’re just house noises.”
She tried the second step. The groan became a loud creak.
She felt a nudge of intuition, like a hand on her arm, and jumped off the step an instant before the entire staircase collapsed with a thunderous crash. Dust ballooned around her, stinging her eyes and obscuring her view. When it cleared, the stairs had been reduced to a pile of rubble.
Joanna backed away from the wreckage, eying the gaping hole in the ceiling. Just as she was wondering if any other staircases would get her to the second floor, a loud bang echoed down the hallway.
She stumbled in surprise, her feet catching on unseen debris.
“That’s it. I’m out of here.”
She limped back the way she came and discovered the heavy metal door at the front of the building had fallen shut.
“Just the wind,” she murmured. “No need to freak out. It was just the wind.”
She pushed open the door, whispering a prayer of thanks that she wasn’t locked in, and hobbled back out into the sunshine. She paused to take deep, calming breaths.
The processing plant watched her sullenly.
“Okay, I’ll leave you alone. Message received.”
The vines draping the walls swayed in response.
Regardless of the shelter the structure might provide, she was not going back in there, not if she wanted to be sane by the time she finally got in touch with another bunker. If she got in touch with another bunker. The longer she spent in this Garden of Eden, the more she felt like the only person on the planet. She couldn’t let it get to her, or talking to inanimate objects would be the least of her problems.
She staggered a few steps farther from the building, toward a small green hillock she hadn’t paid much attention to before. Suddenly, the ground gave way beneath her. She screamed as her foot plunged into a deep depression.
“You’re fine,” she squeaked. Regaining her balance, she examined the spot where the earth had given way. Her foot had broken through a dried-up bush, revealing a dark cavity. She cleared away the crinkling branches, yanking the bush up by the long-dead roots to reveal a doorway sunken halfway into the ground.
She had assumed the hillock was just another rubble heap, but it was in fact a small building. Ground level had risen throughout the complex—whether from settling ash or periodic floods, she couldn’t be certain—but this structure looked as though it had already been partially set in the ground before that. Standing only one level high, with long grass and shrubbery growing over the top, it looked more like a hobbit hole than a house. A few inches above ground level, the square shapes of windows were visible, their glass replaced with a thin veil of vines.
“Jackpot.”
Joanna hacked through the bushes to clear a passage to the door. It was made of thick wood, any paint long since flaked off. She forced it open and found herself inside a small office made of hefty concrete blocks. The squat building must have been ordinary, even ugly before the plants transformed it. Joanna wouldn’t have looked twice at it. Despite its ordinariness, it was still here after most of the other buildings had collapsed.
“Maybe we should be friends,” she muttered as she ventured across the dusty linoleum floor. The office looked as if its occupant had just stepped out for a moment. It was still furnished, with two desks and two rusty chairs, scattered papers and pens, a grimy electric kettle, and a heavy plastic bin containing assorted hardhats. Joanna picked out the smallest hardhat for herself and put it on.
On the wall by the door, a metal rack held half a dozen hunting rifles. Dust covered the weapons, just like everything else in the forgotten space. Joanna wondered if they belonged to some long-ago foreman who hadn’t had a chance to retrieve them from his office before BRP commandeered the mine. She left the rifles where they were. She wouldn’t be going hunting anytime soon.
Besides, she was focused on the best part of the room: an overstuffed couch along the back wall. She crossed the office in five steps and sank into it, welcoming the softness on her sore muscles despite the choking plume of dust that mushroomed from it when she sat. She marveled at how this modest space had withstood the pressures of time and weather and everything else the atmosphere had thrown at it. The building’s placement partway underground had protected it from the worst effects of the impact, almost as if the little hut had also been sleeping deep underground for the past two centuries. But the windows made all the difference in the world. The glass was long gone, of course, but daylight filtered through the vines, reminding her she wasn’t buried alive after all.
She had some cleaning to do, but Joanna was pretty sure she’d found her new home.
“All it needs is some pictures on the wall.” She glanced around, thinking of another thing she was probably never going to have again. “And indoor plumbing.”
Chapter Nineteen
Joanna began to feel better after establishing a base of operations on the surface. She set about turning the overgrown mining complex into a proper survival camp. There was plenty to do, and thanks to her ore skip, she’d never have to climb that accursed ladder again. That made her feel positively cheerful.
She stuck to easy tasks near the bunker for the next few days: sorting through her supplies, cleaning out her new home, and studying the vegetation that grew wild around her. She couldn’t assume every species would look exactly the same after so many years and so many rapid changes to the environment. Despite the abundance of flora, she intended to take her time before turning to nature as her primary food source.
She brought up essentials from
the exit chamber—water, freeze-dried astronaut food, blankets—and piled most of it in the shaft house, which made an excellent aboveground storage facility. The rest she brought over to her little hobbit house a short walk across the complex. She worked slowly, giving her body time to adjust, as she should have done when she first came out of cryosleep.
She spent most of her time thinking about the day when she would feel well enough to seek out the entrance to the other mineshaft, which came up miles away from the main complex. She couldn’t walk out to it after pulling every muscle she possessed, but in a few more days she should be able to limp over and see for herself whether the entire cavern truly had collapsed.
She knew better than to get her hopes up. No food or water had been stored by the redundant mineshaft, which was supposed to serve as an emergency exit only. Any survivors who emerged from the bunker would surely come straight here. But Joanna saw none. No human seemed to have walked within shouting distance of her position in two hundred years.
Still, as the days passed she found herself looking up when the wind stirred the trees on the surrounding hills, half expecting to see her companions cresting the ridge and strolling down to join her. She couldn’t help it.
As her strength returned, she explored the area more thoroughly, learning which piles of debris were likely to collapse and which patches of earth hid cavities she could fall into if she wasn’t careful. She began imagining what the little office would look like after she built a kitchen, an outhouse, a porch, maybe even a swimming pool. Having the entire mine complex to herself and knowing she could do whatever she wanted with it was kind of exciting. Freeing, even. She had been conditioned to rely on her BRP cohort, but now she was forced to stand alone—utterly alone—and it wasn’t so bad.
Or at least, sometimes it wasn’t so bad. When the sun was shining and she was organizing her supplies or clearing the brush from around her windows, she felt like a regular Robinson Crusoe. She chatted to the insects and imagined they answered her with a chorus of buzzes. She debated about what to name her little house—The Burrow was her first choice, closely followed by Wilson.