by Jordan Rivet
No one slept well amidst the chaos. They were all on edge, nervous about what was to come. One night, Joanna tossed and turned so much in her top bunk that Beth yelled at her to cut it out. Giving up on sleep, Joanna crept from the room to find Garrett. She wanted to lay her head on his chest, the only thing that might quiet her worries. Or maybe she wanted more, something to obliterate thought, to make her feel alive.
After that first kiss, she and Garrett couldn’t get enough of each other. They snatched every opportunity to slip into dark corners and made excuses to ride down the mineshaft alone, even if it meant “not noticing” when someone called for them to hold the door. You could enjoy several long, head-spinning kisses in the time it took the lift to travel fifteen hundred feet into the earth. They didn’t hide that they were a couple, caught up in their own private bubble as the world crumpled around them.
No one on Blue Team Seven was surprised. They’d all stuck closer together than ever after arriving at the mine. Theresa had singled them out as an exceptionally strong example of team unity, and the other groups sometimes came to Garrett to settle their differences. He was known for his encouraging manner and his impartial voice—so when Joanna sought him out in the middle of one of their last nights, she was unnerved to hear him arguing with Blake through the thin door of their shared room.
“—being paranoid,” Garrett was saying. He sounded frustrated and tired.
“I’ve seen things you haven’t,” Blake growled.
“Don’t pull that again.”
“You haven’t been in the service.”
“It doesn’t matter now that—”
“It does matter,” Blake said. “There’s more going on than they told us in our little classes. The other bunkers have probably figured it out too. We need to prepare for—”
Footsteps sounded nearby, and Joanna flattened herself against the wall. She wasn’t supposed to be out after dark. Colonel Waters no longer tolerated rule breaking, and he was quick to expel recalcitrant BRP participants and replace them with the few soldiers still guarding the gates. The chance at a last-minute cryo berth was the only thing keeping them at their posts. But whoever was up and about didn’t come her way. She put her ear to the door again.
“—can’t risk it.” Garrett’s voice again. “Keep your head down until after we’re out.”
“And if I’m right?” Blake said.
“Dr. Huntington will stop Colonel Waters from doing anything stupid.”
“Huntington is gone.”
“What?”
“He split yesterday,” Blake said. “Stole an old bus and drove right out the front gate. I reckon he realized what was happening.”
Garrett fell silent. Joanna didn’t understand. They were days away from going into cryosleep. What was happening? Why would Dr. Huntington leave now?
“How do you know about that,” Garrett said at last, “and about all of this?”
“I have my ways.”
“We don’t keep secrets from the team,” Garrett said. “You know that.”
Blake coughed. “That’s rich coming from you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Joanna pressed closer to the door, but she couldn’t hear the answer. Then Blake spoke again, sounding much nearer than before.
“I’m just saying we have to be ready to deal with threats. I don’t know if they’ll come from other bunkers or our own, but they’re coming. Just watch.”
Joanna retreated, managing to dive back into her own room before Blake emerged in the hall. He stomped past the door, the thud of his footsteps making Beth grumble curses into her pillow. Joanna considered going back to ask Garrett what was happening, but something held her back. Maybe it was the threats looming in the upper echelons of BRP or the suggestion that other bunker groups could turn hostile. Maybe it was the undercurrent of fear she’d heard in both Garrett’s and Blake’s voices. Those two were supposed to be the bravest of them all, but they sounded lost, uncertain whether the peaceful future Dr. Huntington had extolled would ever come to pass. But now even Dr. Huntington had abandoned them. What did it all mean?
AFTER
I don’t know if they’ll come from other bunkers or our own, Blake had said, but they’re coming.
Joanna peeled herself away from the tree trunk and lurched to her feet as the words came back to her. She wished she’d asked Garrett about the argument after all. It was yet another thing she thought they could discuss after their long sleep. But whatever had threatened BRP before the comet might not have died in the impact. She hefted her backpack and pickaxe, studying the shadows sifting through the greenery around her. She couldn’t stay here. Someone was out there, and she had to face the threats on her own.
She hurried back the way she’d come, following the faint impression of her own footsteps. She raced the sun, losing visibility with every yard. Once, she thought she heard someone behind her, but it could have been the echo of her own feet on the earth.
Joanna’s world narrowed to a single concern: self-preservation. As it grew darker, fallen logs became men in camouflage. Waving branches became enemies dropping from the trees. The patterns of dying light became the ghosts of her friends.
Joanna ran faster. Even though the mineshaft had been filled with gas and whoever stalked her in the night had stolen her weapons, she still couldn’t kill the persistent hope that it might be Garrett, that she’d been wrong about the cave-in, that her friends had found her.
“It’s not them,” she hissed, as if she could tear the obstinate hope from her brain. “He’s dead, Joanna. Keep your head, or you will be too.”
She crested the ridge above the mining complex at a dead run. Her heart pounded wildly as she half ran, half fell down the incline. She shouldn’t have left her camp. Her mysterious visitors could have cleared away every last survival item she had carried to the surface. Or they could be lurking in the belly of the bunker, ready to leap out and use those rifles on her the next time she descended into its depths.
She reached the bottom of the hill and turned into the camp, feet skidding in the soft moss. There was no moon tonight, and she had to rely on the light of the stars. She slowed when she reached her house, watching for an ambush. It seemed quiet, undisturbed. It would be hard to hear anything over her gasps for breath anyway, which sounded too much like sobs.
When no one leapt out of the darkness at her, Joanna fumbled her flashlight out of her bag. It flickered on, then off.
Not now.
She smacked the flashlight against her palm, and the beam ignited. She shined it around the mining complex, jumping every time the light glinted on dull metal or damp leaves. Everything looked the same as it had when she left. Plants rustled, and insects sang, but there was no sign of any people. The world was peaceful. Empty.
She shined the light through her window. Her room hadn’t been touched. She considered checking on the shaft house to make sure her supplies were still stacked inside, but she didn’t want to get anywhere near the mineshaft in the dark. She’d been through enough for one night.
At last, she summoned the courage to enter her house. It was a good thing she decided against crossing the facility. As soon as she closed her door, the flashlight died, plunging her once more into darkness.
Chapter Twenty-One
Joanna didn’t sleep well. Every gust of wind and shifting shadow threatened to coalesce into a stranger with a gun. When the sun finally rose, she stumbled from her room and searched the mining facility for evidence of trespassers. The branches in front of the shaft house doors hadn’t been touched, and she could find no indication that any strangers had been there the night before.
She didn’t ride the ore skip down into the bunker at all that day. She carried her pickaxe everywhere and spun around, raising it threateningly, whenever movement flitted at the corner of her eye.
Raw exhaustion sent her to sleep the following night, and she dreamed fitfully about monsters in the forest. Tension
was her constant companion. She almost wished a mutant bear would attack already.
But as the days passed, she saw no further signs that anyone but her had ever entered the camp. If not for the disappearance of the rifles, she might have concluded she’d imagined the whole thing. Perhaps the person who had taken the rifles was just passing through. They could be the denizens of some other bunker who had seized the opportunity for a quick burglary while she was down below and then moved on.
“They won’t be back,” she told herself. “Focus on the things you can control. And quit panicking every time you see a tree branch move.”
As the steady throb of fear subsided, Joanna threw herself back into her work. She went down to the bunker less frequently, turning her attention to organizing her stores and making her little hobbit house into a home. She had saved a few precious photos of her parents in her locker, which she stuck to the bare walls, except for one she used as a bookmark. She dusted off extra cushions from the exit chamber and turned her simple couch bed into a luxurious—if mismatched—nest. She spent rainy evenings reading survival manuals in her little cocoon and went to sleep feeling almost safe.
She finally worked up the nerve to open her friends’ lockers too. They would want her to use their things. She decided to do it slowly, breaking one lock every few days and savoring the memories as she said goodbye to Blue Team Seven. She made a point of choosing something from each locker to keep in her room on the surface.
Ruby’s locker was stuffed full of books—mostly paperback romance novels, of all things. Ruby had saved clothes in various shades of black, family photos showing a pair of cherubic twin nieces, and a cheap hair dye kit. She had also stored a brand-new pair of high-tech running shoes that fit Joanna perfectly. She wore these shoes whenever her Converse got too wet from tramping around the muddy camp, and they made her feel strong.
Inside Chloe’s locker, she found posters to decorate her walls. One was the expected Star Wars poster. There was also a portrait of Maya Angelou with an inspirational quote, a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge, and a picture of a pug with a purple ribbon around its neck. It was amazing how a few pictures could encompass her friend’s personality so completely.
Joanna didn’t fit into any of Chloe’s clothes, but she ran her fingers over the vibrant fabrics, remembering the good times they had spent together during their training. Chloe’s huge stack of notebooks contained even more memories, but Joanna left those in the locker to respect her friend’s privacy. She wished Chloe were here now. She would have been a welcome companion, someone to share the weight of anxiety Joanna had shouldered since the rifles disappeared.
She could also use Chloe’s help in assembling a working radio. She was vulnerable the longer she stayed here alone. Even if the only surviving bunker groups were on the opposite side of the country, she wanted to hear real human voices again. If she remained alone much longer, having a mini heart attack every time a shadow moved would be the least of her problems.
Unfortunately, the radio was little more than a jumbled mess of parts salvaged from the decimated control room. Joanna extracted the bits of plastic and wire from the rubble—along with a generous supply of batteries—but she couldn’t figure out how it all went together. She brought the parts over to her room and fiddled with them whenever it was too rainy to work outside.
As her fear over the mysterious stranger faded, Joanna knew she’d have to venture beyond the mine complex again. She was going to run out of water eventually. There’d be no point in continuing to fix up her house if she had to leave it due to the absence of a reliable water source.
Two weeks after her expedition to the second mineshaft, Joanna assembled supplies for a longer trek into the wilderness. She filled her trusty knapsack with water bottles, flashlight batteries, a water testing kit, food from the storage tunnels, and a double handful of wild blackberries she had discovered growing behind the old BRP headquarters. That last would be her reward for finding water.
The night before her departure, she opened Blake’s locker and found a wonderful collection of clothes in various shades of camouflage. She chuckled at the camouflage boxer briefs and a shaving kit in a camouflage pouch. She selected a green-and-brown camo jacket to wear instead of her old raincoat, rolling back the sleeves to make it fit. She was pretty sure Blake had been wearing this same jacket the day they went whitewater rafting.
She dug further into the locker and found a canteen, which she slung over her shoulder. A name was scrawled on the top in permanent marker: Rex Taylor. Blake’s father. The sight made her feel brave. She carried more than one legacy now, and she wasn’t going to let the future defeat her.
She glanced at Garrett’s locker as she marched back toward the skip. She was saving it for last. She knew exactly which family mementos and treasured objects it held. She had leaned against the locker next to it while Garrett put his things inside, chatting with him about their families, about their plans for the future. They had shared their favorite things about the people they’d left behind in order to survive. Joanna’s whip-smart mother and her warm, cheerful father. Garrett’s steadfast parents and rambunctious brothers. Laughter and tears had mixed as they brought forth the memories like an elegy. Together they had agreed they wouldn’t make it in the future if they were trapped in the past. They mourned the people who weren’t even gone yet and agreed to leave their memories beneath the earth when they awoke.
Joanna wasn’t ready to break into Garrett’s memory just yet. She was doing well on her own. She felt proud of her organized storeroom, her homey bedroom, and her refurbished ore skip. She was finally getting the hang of this whole survival thing. She didn’t need a reminder of how things might have been.
Joanna set out for the river—or at least where she thought the river would be—first thing in the morning. It should be several miles to the southeast, but the world’s dams and reservoirs had been left unattended for centuries. Rivers once restrained could have overflowed and sent the waters crashing and shifting across the landscape. Still, she hoped the river would be close enough that she could stay at the mine after her water stores ran out. It was starting to feel like a home.
As she hiked into the untamed landscape, Joanna imagined she had gone back in time instead of forward. She half expected to round a stand of trees and find dinosaurs grazing in the meadows. She had loved playing with plastic dinosaurs as a kid. Sadly, the comet had destroyed all large animals—humans or otherwise—so she wasn’t likely to encounter so much as a raccoon. Unless some bunker had preserved non-human beings in cryosleep, it would take millennia for large creatures to roam the earth once more.
Joanna lived in the age of the plant now. She walked among curtains of hanging vines, which tickled her face like feathers. She trailed her hands over soft moss and picked at bits of lichen with her fingernails. She pushed through stands of tough, scrubby trees, the sunlight filtering through the sparse canopy lighting her path.
As she strolled through the forest, she focused on not jumping at shadows. She’d had enough of feeling afraid and sad. She was alive, the sun was shining, and she felt healthier than she had since she first climbed out of the bunker. Within a mile, she was singing.
Joanna never had much of a singing voice, but there was no one around to listen, anyway. She breathed deeply and belted out every song she could think of, from summer anthems to show tunes to Christmas songs. She refused to let the specter of some transient stranger scare her anymore.
She sang and skipped her way through the wild brush of the post-apocalyptic woods, light on her feet in Ruby’s shoes. Brandon hadn’t defeated her after all. She was going to find water. She was going to make this place her home. She had lost her family, her friends, the boy she loved. But these woods were brand new, and this was a new beginning.
When she ran out of songs, she belted out lyrics of her own making, singing to the bugs and the trees that ruled this world. Her songs shattered the silence as she danced her way through
the wilderness.
Joanna got so into her own personal musical number that she didn’t hear the river at first. When she recognized the soft roar for what it was, she broke into a run. Not the terrified run of days ago, but a run toward possibility. She was only two miles away from camp! This river could be hers. She could stay in her little house and make a future that was all her own.
She burst onto the riverbank. The river was a wide, wild thing. It rushed along a shallow, rocky bed, dancing with life. She kicked off her shoes and rolled up her pant legs, hesitating at the water’s edge. She had the tester kit in her pack to identify any contaminants that a good boil-and-filter couldn’t eliminate. But as she reached for it, she spotted the silvery shapes of tiny minnows darting through the shallows. If they could survive, the water must not be too poisonous. That was good enough for her.
On a sudden impulse, Joanna shed the rest of her clothes and piled them on a rock beside the river. The sun warmed her bare skin, and a feather-light breeze raised bumps on her arms. She forced herself to stand still for a minute, not covering her body for the benefit of the rocks and the trees. She claimed this place. It was her river, her wild countryside. She might be alone, but she was alive, and she was going to freaking live.
She splashed into the river and dove beneath the churning surface. The water was cold but not icy. She felt as if the cryo gel was finally gone for good, even though she’d scrubbed herself clean dozens of times over the past few weeks. She thought of the children she’d seen playing in another river hundreds of miles away in the world’s final days, the children who hadn’t been given the same chance at life that she had. She let the cold water swirl around her, lifting her hair and caressing her skin. She had thought herself unworthy for so long, but this was a baptism, a fresh start.