by Hunter Shea
He helped her up, again inappropriately thrilling at her touch.
“My house is just down the block,” he said. “Once we get there, you can call someone to let them know you’re okay.”
She winced when she saw his arm. “We have to get that checked out.”
“My mother used to be a nurse. I’ll be fine.”
Maybe it was shock that gave him the bravado. His arm had gone a little numb and the bleeding wasn’t as bad as he thought it would be. He thought, Is the bullet still inside me? He hoped not. He’d watched enough cop shows to realize it was always better when the bullet went clean through.
As they turned to run the final two blocks, he heard someone shout, “Rey!”
He was too choked up to reply. Pulling Dakota along, he ran to his father.
21
Each passing minute was an agonizing eternity for Elizabeth. Alexiana was talking to her, but she couldn’t hear a word. Miguel had fallen asleep on Gabby’s lap. Max sat on one of the folding chairs, staring at the door, like her, waiting.
“What?” Elizabeth said, catching the tail end of Alexiana’s rambling.
“All this time, I thought Buck was crazy. You can’t imagine the amount of money and planning and daily maintenance, what with the rotation of water and food, he’s put into this. All I can say now is thank God for that man. I want to apologize for doubting him, you know? He was right. We were stupid to be lulled back into our safe little worlds. Something like this was always around the corner.”
Elizabeth put a gentle hand on Alexiana’s. She whispered, “Please, I don’t want to get the children more upset than they already are.”
She sensed where her neighbor’s mind was going and wanted to cut her off before she started expounding on terrorists and sleeper cells and doomsday. They’d had a few conversations over the years, especially on summer nights in the yard with tiki torches around them and plenty of frozen margaritas in them, about the state of the world and how New York would always be a hard target. Over a decade without a follow-up attack was giving them a false sense of security, Buck would say.
Amazingly, he’d never let on about the bomb shelter. It was a considerable shelter, stocked to the ceiling with supplies and enough room to accommodate all of them—when everyone was finally safe inside.
His own girlfriend of fifteen years had thought he was nuts. Elizabeth guessed he didn’t want them thinking that, too.
Max spoke for the first time since they’d come into the shelter. “Do you think it’s stopped?”
Elizabeth was ardently praying it had. “I think so.”
“Then Pop and Rey should be here soon.”
He said it with an assurance that infected her, gave her hope.
“Gabby, are you all right, sweetie? Do you need anything?” Alexiana asked. Gabby shook her head, lightly stroking her brother’s cheek while he slept.
“It seems very quiet now,” Elizabeth said.
“This shelter has so many layers around it, it would be hard to hear a rock concert if it happened right above us.”
They sat in silence.
Elizabeth said, “Maybe I should go up and wait with Buck.”
Alexiana motioned for her to stay calm. “You need to be here with your children, Liz. I’d go, but other than Buck, I’m the only one who knows how to get in or out of the shelter.” She checked her watch, a pretty rose-colored Fossil with little jewels around the watch face. “Trust me, Buck will be here very soon, even if it’s just to report in. He has everything planned down to the last detail. If either of us isn’t in the shelter but nearby, we have to check in at the top and bottom of every hour. It’s almost four thirty.”
Elizabeth was having a hard time with everything. A little over an hour ago, she was waiting for her children to get off the bus and planning a punishment for Max. Now God knew how many bombs had been dropped on the city, and she was waiting in an underground shelter for her husband and oldest son to make it there alive.
“What did we do to make you so angry with us?” she murmured.
“What was that?” Alexiana asked.
Elizabeth had to keep from crying when she felt the pressure of Max’s hand on her back.
22
Buck let out a long, exhausted sigh when he spotted Daniel, Rey, and a pretty-yet-disheveled girl running to the house. He stepped outside to greet them under a low, black sky.
“At least something’s gone right today,” Buck said.
Daniel was smiling despite their dire situation.
“You should lock up your house tight, Dan. No telling how long we’ll have to wait things out. And pack a bag with one change of clothes for each of you. I’ll take Rey and the little lady to my house and wait for you there.”
Rey was reluctant to leave his father. He shot him a look of total confusion.
“Buck has a bomb shelter under his house,” Daniel explained. “Your mother and brothers and sister are there already. Go!”
Buck led them to his house while Daniel started locking the front windows. Buck was glad he’d made calculations for the Padillas and at least two unexpected guests.
“My name’s Buck Clarke,” he said to the girl, offering his hand. She really was a looker. He wondered how she and Rey came to be attached to one another. She held Rey’s hand like it was a lifeline. Then he noticed the blood on the boy’s shirt.
“I’m Dakota. Dakota Charles.” She shook his hand weakly.
“You all right, Rey?”
“I think so. One of the res cops started shooting at us.”
Buck shook his head. Cutting through the reservoir during a meltdown had been a bad idea. The res was filled with armed guards dreading a day like today. Their nerves were on high alert, which made for itchy trigger fingers.
“You good enough to help load some extra things and bring them downstairs?” Buck asked.
“Yeah.”
Once they entered the kitchen, Buck told them to hold still while he ran to the linen closet. He grabbed a handful of fresh pillowcases. He tossed one to Rey and one to Dakota.
“Rey, I need you to go in my pantry and fill yours with anything edible you find in a can. Dakota, fill yours with the water bottles from the fridge.”
They got to work without any questions. Buck opened one of the drawers and scooped his hand inside. It was filled with unopened bags of cookies and boxes of crackers. Once they were in the bag, he dropped in a jar of peanut butter.
“Almost forgot,” he said, ambling into the living room. “I think we’re gonna need this.”
He made sure not to crush the cookies and crackers under the bottles of tequila, Wild Turkey, Johnnie Walker, and vodka. For all he knew, these might be the last drinkable bottles of alcohol he’d ever see. No sense wasting them.
By the time he was done, Daniel was back, holding a couple of bulging bags. Buck locked the back door and double-checked the front.
“You might want to help Rey out,” he said. The boy was having a little trouble holding the can-laden pillowcase.
He swept his free hand toward the door leading to the cellar. “After you.”
23
Buck gave a series of knocks, and there was a lot of clicking and whirring before the door opened. Elizabeth nearly knocked Rey over when she saw him.
“Thank you, God, oh, thank you,” she cried, pulling her son to her by his neck.
Buck ushered them all inside. They had to go down a few steps before they were on level ground. Alexiana threw her arms around Buck. Gabby and a sleepy-eyed Miguel rushed to hug Daniel’s legs.
“We were so worried, Dad,” Gabby said.
Daniel kissed them all, wiping tears from Gabby’s cheeks.
“It’s going to be all right,” he said. “Now that we’re all together.”
“Oh my God!” Elizabeth exclaimed. She forced Rey into a chair. “Alexiana, do you have a first aid kit?”
“We have more than one.”
“What happened to you?”<
br />
“Some asshole shot him,” Dakota said.
Despite everything that had happened, Miguel and Gabby stood openmouthed.
Alexiana handed Elizabeth a blue plastic box. She cracked it open, taking out the scissors and cutting Rey’s blood-soaked sleeve away. Everyone looked at the angry red gash that ran vertically across his bicep.
“I always said you were lucky,” Elizabeth said. “The bullet only grazed you.”
She applied antiseptic to the wound. It fizzed and bubbled with white foam. Rey hissed in pain. “Jeez, Ma, that stings.”
“It’s supposed to. Sit still and let it work.”
She asked Daniel to hold two sterile pads to the wound while she wrapped gauze around his arm. She said to Buck, “I know this sounds crazy, but is there any chance you have antibiotics?”
Buck went to an olive cabinet on the wall. “I have everything we need in here.” He gave her a bottle of amoxicillin and a bottle of water from the bag Dakota had brought.
Elizabeth gave the items to Rey. He washed the horse pill down. “I’ll give you two a day for the next couple of days just to be safe.”
With the immediate need addressed and everyone finally together, a long, uncomfortable silence filled the underground shelter. There was so much to say, so many questions to ask, too many fears to discuss. It all formed a bottleneck in each of their throats. After the chaos of the past hour—could it have only been that long?—maybe silence was exactly what they needed to regroup.
Max was the one to mercifully break it.
“Were there any more explosions?”
Rey answered, “None that I could hear, no.”
“Did you see anything blow up? Was anything on fire?” Max continued. Daniel knew his son. Max always needed to know. He craved facts. He was their deep thinker, and lately their fearless brawler.
Rey looked to his father, then Dakota and Buck.
“Actually . . . no. Someone at the track was screaming about a fire, but I didn’t see any actual flames. Did you, Dad?”
Daniel thought about it, replaying his sprint from the office and the awful incident with the old lady. He had seen something explode in the sky, but that was it. The whole panic came about from a series of chest-shaking concussions and a lot of smoke.
“Come to think of it, no, I didn’t. There’s smoke everywhere,” he said.
“Then what happened?” Max asked.
The adults looked to one another, then focused on Buck. Their neighbor, who had obviously spent a considerable amount of time and money preparing for a day like this, should have a better idea than most.
He lifted the cowboy hat from his head and smoothed his sweat-soaked hair back.
“I have a couple of theories,” he said. “But before I start thinking out loud, why don’t we get the kids settled into the other room.”
24
After a back-and-forth in hushed tones, Rey was permitted to remain with the adults. The humiliation of being tucked in what Buck called the bunkhouse with Max, Gabby, and Miguel would have been unbearable. He didn’t want to appear any younger in front of Dakota than he already was. After what they’d been through, he also felt he deserved to be part of the conversation. Thankfully, his father relented.
When they asked him what had happened at the track, he and Dakota spent a lot of time stepping over each other’s sentences. When they got to the part about the horses going wild and attacking people, going so far as to eat some of them, the adults took a collective breath.
“Even a horse scared near to death won’t go feral like that,” Buck said, tipping his hat back so he could rub his forehead. “That’s not natural.”
When Rey went into greater details about the carnage, his mother stopped him by changing the subject. It was obvious she was overloaded.
“I can’t believe the size of this shelter,” Elizabeth said. “I counted ten cots back there.” There were five sets of bunk beds in the bunkhouse. Crates of supplies had been crammed under each bed. No space was left unused.
“It’s the reason I bought the house back in ’95. The main structure under the house was already here. It’d been installed in the sixties, back when the Cold War was in full swing. My ex-wife and I lived over in Fort Lee when the car bombing in the World Trade Center garage happened. We both worked in the city at the time. She was in Midtown and I was down in Chelsea. That day opened my eyes. That was followed by the bombing of the Cole, then U.S. embassies around the world. You could see where things were heading if you had your eyes and ears open. Too many people were making too much money at the time to give a rat’s ass.”
Buck reached into the pillowcase he’d brought down and pulled out a bottle of vodka. Alexiana got a few glasses out of a nearby crate. “We might as well have a drink. No one’s going anywhere for a while.”
“Are we safe down here?” Rey asked. Everyone had a glass but him.
“Other than some heavy-duty military bunkers, you’re in the safest place you can be, kiddo,” Buck said. “I expanded on the shelter, extending it into the yard. It’s shielded to protect us from nuclear fallout and any other nasty crap the enemy can throw at us.”
Daniel said, “So you and your wife moved to Yonkers after the garage bombing?”
“Nah. We got divorced two years later. I caught her cheating on me with some younger guy in her law firm. He was one of those whatchyacallit metrosexuals, though at the time, I just assumed he was gay. All those business trips they went on with me sitting at home without a care in the world. Goes to show you never know.”
“If it wasn’t for him, you’d have never met me,” Alexiana said, draining her glass and pouring another. Her hands shook, the bottle’s neck clinking off the rim of the glass.
He rubbed her knee. “That’s right. Which is why I’m not the least bit bitter. Anyway, I came out here after the divorce to get away from the new happy couple. They’d bought a house just a block away. I had no desire to be their neighbor. When I was looking for a place, I told my Realtor I wanted one with a damn good bomb shelter. There weren’t that many on the market. This was the biggest one I found, and I had room to make it even bigger. I’d just had the cap relined when you all moved in next door.”
Elizabeth took a sip of vodka and winced. “How can we be sure there are any enemies? Maybe something happened to the power stations. Like a chain reaction.”
Shaking his head, Buck said, “No, we were definitely attacked by someone, not something. Right now the questions are who did it, what did they hit us with, and why?”
Unlike the adults, Rey didn’t have alcohol to help take the edge off things. It felt like every nerve in his body was humming. He inched forward in his seat, his elbows propped on his knees. “So, what do you think, Buck?”
Buck swallowed slowly. “In my opinion, the who of it all is a short list. I figure it’s either the Russians, the Chinese, or some Muslim terrorist cell. Or maybe all three working together. This was big. Maybe bigger than some sleeper cell could accomplish by itself. You know, the first attempt at bringing down the Towers started right here in Yonkers. Mohammed something, can’t remember his last name, owned a gas station where the auto body shop now is at the end of Yonkers Avenue. They filled up hundreds of gallons of gas to make the bomb that took out the garage. When shit is brewing right where you live, you have to be wary.”
He tipped the bottle into his glass, filling it with the remaining vodka. “From what I can tell, whoever it is hit us with a Chinese buffet of bad shit. They could have blown up parts of the infrastructure with your typical homemade stuff. You wouldn’t believe how big a bang you can get with the right store-bought materials. But . . . there was also a lot of surface-to-air missiles. What was in them? Could be a mix of nuclear dirty bombs, biochemical stuff that could do all sorts of short- and long-term damage to everything living. The big one that I had especially prepared for and I’m sure they set off was an EMP bomb.”
Dakota cleared her throat. “What’s an E
MP bomb?”
“That, darlin’, is the one that’ll set us right back into the Stone Age.”
25
Miguel had said he wanted to go back to sleep and that he was tired. Gabby knew her little brother well enough to understand that he was scared and wanted to get away from everything the only way he knew how. She had tried rocking him to sleep while the adults talked in the next room, but he insisted that Max lie down with him.
Max’s mood confused her. Everyone else, even Mom and Dad, were frightened and nervous. But Max, he seemed . . . angry. Not at anyone in particular, but he was definitely very agitated.
Maybe he was upset that there was no one he could lash out at this time. She’d watched the change in her older brother over the past year. He used to be shy, kind of quiet, happier with a book than horsing around with his friends. Over the summer break, he’d had a heck of a growth spurt. When he went back to school in the fall, he was suddenly someone other kids wanted to be around—like a planet pulling moons and space debris into its orbit.
It’d been a year of sudden and stark change. Max was still trying to figure things out.
Now both Max and Miguel were asleep in one of the bottom bunks.
There was no way Gabby could sleep. She was too busy listening for more explosions, waiting for the lights to turn off.
If that happens, I’ll freak out, she thought. It’ll be like getting sealed into a coffin in the ground.
The more she thought about it, swearing she could feel the weight of the earth above her on her shoulders, the thicker the air became.
Were they getting enough air?
And where was the air coming from? Was it safe to breathe?
Her chest tightened. It felt just like that time she went on the Manta roller coaster in Sea World. It had gone so fast, her breath had been knocked out of her lungs on each loop.
She had to calm herself down. Buck was smart. He wouldn’t have them all down here if he didn’t know what he was doing.
It was hard to believe this had been under their feet all the time. When Buck would break out the sprinkler and let them run around his yard, a whole other house had been inches below their bare soles, waiting for a day like today.