by Sandy Nathan
“This is great, but we want to get down today,” Henry said. “Isn’t there a temporary way to set up a ladder?”
“Yes,” Sam said. He looped a chain around a boulder near the edge of the ledge and bolted the ends to the ladder. “This will be good for today. Tomorrow, I will fix the ladders right. And the solar panels.”
Sam had never had such a good time. He could barely comprehend the overwhelming plenty of tools and things around him. Working with them was a joy.
He and Jeremy were putting the tools inside the computer/medical container when Jeremy said, “Sam, what’s going on with you and my mom?” Sam froze. “Don’t tell me ‘Nothing,’ because I know there is. You were friendly when we first got here, and now you don’t even talk.”
“She does not like me,” Sam managed to say.
“Why?”
“Because I threw her bottle.”
“I don’t think that’s it.” Jeremy thought a moment. “I’ll ask her what the deal is.” He stumbled over his words. “I wanted to tell you that I’m glad you’re here. I couldn’t do what you did today. None of us could. Uh. I wanted you to know that I wanted to tell you, like … Well, you and my mom. You know, if … Like … Well …
Sam wondered what Jeremy was talking about. Was he saying that he approved of his mother and him, if they were friends? Or more than friends?
“Are you going to the river, Sam?” Jeremy seemed relieved to change the subject.
“Yes.”
“Tell the rest of them that I’ll be right down. I need to print some stuff.”
When he came out of the container, the group was climbing down the ladder for a picnic by the river. They let the fishing gear down with a rope.
“Hey, Sam, good job!” said Mel and showed him how to do the “high five” salute.
Sam smiled. “I will finish tomorrow, when the grout is dry.” Earlier that day, he didn’t know what grout was. Now he could high five and talk about grout.
Sam intended to go down to the river, but when he looked over the edge of the cliff, everything seemed to move. He stepped back fast. Such height was unimaginable. He couldn’t go down the ladder. His feelings about leaving were changing. He didn’t want to leave.
He’d had an idea about something for his rooms. He’d found chisels and rock carving tools in the container. He thought of something that would make him feel safe. Perhaps he could rough it out by that night. He picked up the tools, and looked around for the lady.
She was sleeping in her cubby. He felt the atmosphere around her. Not good. Her book and music-playing thing were lying next to her, as were the beads and scarf. He took them as silently as only a digger from the underground could. He’d have them back to her before she awakened.
He took a piece of charred wood from the fire and went to his room.
22
Jeremy stowed the printouts in his backpack and headed for the ladder. “Come on, Ellie, I’ll go down with you now.” He’d wanted her to stay up top because of her illness the night before. Also, he was concerned about her getting down the ladder with hooves instead of feet. But what he’d printed out made it imperative that he join the others by the river right away.
“Go meeting,” she said, skipping to the edge and hopping over before he could stop her. He looked down, and she was on the ground waving at him. He turned and carefully stepped onto the ladder. He could hear Sam hammering away at something in his room.
Jeremy made his way down the swaying ladder, wishing there was some other way to reach the river. An escalator, maybe. What he had in his backpack proved the need for their cliff-top defenses. It proved the need for much more than that. They needed water up there. They needed to be able to withhold a siege.
They needed a community meeting right now.
‘Hey, everybody!” Jeremy called, wading through the sand. The river curved just beyond their cliff. Years of spring floods had deposited sand and boulders along the curve. The shaded inlet formed a first-class waterside resort, and the group had taken advantage of it. James and Mel were having a water fight a bit downstream while Henry cast into deeper waters upstream.
“Hey, everyone! I have the printouts from the shelter, plus some infrared pictures I just took. They couldn’t tell what I was doing underground.” Jeremy sat in the shade and spread out the images around them, anchoring them with rocks.
They gathered around him. “Just take a look. It’s self-explanatory. I’ve taped the images together to show the floor plan of the shelter.”
Mel said. “Dante would have a good time with this. It’s hell.”
“That’s the one that I saw in my nightmares,” Lena pointed.
Sam Big. Jeremy had blown up a face shot of him.
“They’re mutants,” he said. “Giants by their size, but also with the exaggerated musculature. And those growths on their faces.”
Mel took a close look. “It looks like bone.”
“That’s not even Neanderthal,” James commented. “They’re like monsters.”
“They are monsters.” Jeremy also brought 360-degree panoramas that he had taped together. That gave a full view of each room. He’d taken down shots from the ceilings to give an overview of what was going on in each area. He drew the floor plan of the shelter as he remembered it and superimposed it on the photos. And he’d produced some new infrared photos that showed what lurked in the darkness.
Sam Big was raping a man much smaller than himself in the main hall. Bigs wrestled nearby. Three Bigs were chained to the walls. They looked like they were roaring. Several Bigs were attacking women in the pit. Women were tied or chained to the walls.
“Here are the solar fields. They look pretty good. Sam’s doing, I bet.” Jeremy gave them a tour of the site. “The Bigs have the main hall and most of the space. There are other halls; here, you see one. These are for the less favored bloodlines.” None of the people looked as normal or healthy as Sam. “And in these outer rooms, you’ll see forms that seem to be just lying there. Those must be Sam’s people. He takes care of them. Many of them can’t take care of themselves. They have no defenses against the Bigs.
“OK, we all got the scene down there. The Bigs are monsters and the others are very handicapped. You can see all the tunnels here; they just look like black spots with lighter areas inside of them? Those are infrared shots. People are in those holes. I think Sam and people like him—diggers—made them trying to get away from the Bigs, or to get more room.
“This burrow is very close to this munitions storage.” Jeremy pointed to a square he’d drawn on the printout. “There’s a solid cement wall here, with extra rebar and support, but it doesn’t have the security setup that the main entrances to the munitions bays have. Those are impregnable.
“If they get through here somehow, they can get into both weapons caches.” He pointed to the area.
“What’s in them, Jeremy?” Henry asked.
“The most heavy-duty shit they made before the war—lightweight versions. Formidable. I don’t know what we’ve got in the other storage container. I assume that we’ve got the equivalent. But ours is here, and theirs is there.”
“That’s good,” Mel said.
“Not necessarily. They can shoot a rocket at us and we’ll be toast. If they know how to use what they’ve got.”
“They probably don’t, do they?”
“No. Not now. But it’s all on the computers. If they can get my lab up and running, they can figure it out. They’re smart—I can feel it, can’t you?”
“I almost feel like they know what we’re doing now,” Lena said. “Of course, part of it is how I feel looking at those pictures.”
“And part of it is the nightmares.” He pointed at Sam Big. “He’s after us because of Sam. He wants him back.”
“And he’s crawling all over us trying to find him.”
“Sam isn’t the point any more. He knows about us. He wants us. He’s entered our minds and we’re already scared shitless. We
have to get up to speed to fight them right away.”
James broke in. “You’re talking as though we have no choice but to go to war. We just got out of one terrible place. Why can’t we just set up here and let them live over there?”
“Why do you even ask that, James?” Mel scowled. “You saw the pictures. Jeremy says they’ve got super weapons a few feet away. And look at what they’re doing. Don’t you think they’ll do that to us?”
“Why do we have to deal with this? I’m sick of all this.”
“We all are, James,” Lena said. “But I don’t think we can do anything but face the problem.”
“But how? March off to war? None of us knows a thing about that. You’re going to go running after those monsters with what? We have weapons, Jeremy says, but no one knows how to use them.” James shook his head. “I don’t want to do this.”
“None of us wants it,” said Jeremy. “We do have one person with military training. My mom knows how to use everything in the container. And she’s a commando—the general made her do their training. She could lead us, but there’s something wrong with her.
“Yeah. What’s going on with her, Jeremy?”
“I don’t know, Mel. She’s not sleeping. Did you see her standing by the ledge laughing yesterday? Then she was pissed off, and then she fell apart. I’ve never seen her like this, even when my dad died. The other thing is, I’m afraid Sam’s going to leave. I was working next to him all day, and I felt like he’d be out of here the minute he could slip away.”
“I felt that, too,” Henry said. “It’s almost like he knows what all of us are thinking, and them in the bomb shelter, too.”
“Sam said that’s how it is down there. They know everything without talking.”
“That is like Ellie’s world.”
“But not quite. Ellie’s people weren’t like that,” Henry pointed to the printouts.
“Well, I don’t want Sam to go. I don’t want Sam Big to get him,” Jeremy continued.
“He wouldn’t go back there, would he?”
“Maybe. To spare us. Give himself up so they’ll leave us alone.”
“But they will never leave us alone if they know we exist.” They looked at the images again.
“I think they already know where we are,” Lena said. The others were silent.
“We need to stop Sam from running away,” Jeremy said. “Tie him up if we have to.” They nodded.
“And I think one of us should talk to him about how much we want him to be with us. He needs to know we’re with him,” Henry said. “I think that person should be me. I’m older.”
“You don’t look that much older than him, Henry. But I agree. You’re good at fatherly talks.” Jeremy said.
“So we’re agreed. Henry talks to Sam. We find out what’s wrong with my mom. And then we get ready to go to war.”
Ellie pointed at the diagram. “Where babies?”
“Sam would know, El. They’re outside the underground’s walls, so they don’t show on the pictures.”
“We fight for babies,” she said in her tiny cricket’s voice. Jeremy looked at his wife. Her posture was almost militant. He’d never seen her like that.
23
Veronica’s eyes opened. The terror she’d been feeling came back full force. Jumping out of bed, she looked around for something to help her. She remembered her book and the disk of the monks singing.
She searched around her cubby, but the book and disk player weren’t there. Neither were her prayer beads and shawl. Who would take her precious things? Someone in the group was a thief.
She stood by the stone supporting the ladder when she heard a sound in a nearby cave. The sound of metal striking metal. She walked into the cave.
“Hello? Is anyone here? Hello?” The cave had several rooms opening off it. Seeing a movement in one, she investigated. Sam was inside, wearing the headphones and hammering away at the wall with a chisel. Her book was propped open, with a picture of Rinpoche lying on the page. He had the shawl draped around his shoulders.
“What are you doing?” she shouted.
He jumped and turned around, removing the headset. She could hear the monks’ voices coming from it.
“Those are mine.” She grabbed the photo and put it in its pocket, slammed the book shut, and seized the disk player. “Give me that shawl. That’s mine. You took my things! You’re a thief. Thief!” Her fist struck his chest. “I thought you were so nice, but you’re not.” She pushed him out of his cave, shrieking, “Get out. Thief!”
Going down the ladder was the most terrifying thing he had ever done. He grabbed the chains and stepped on the rungs, sure that he would drop to his death. But if that happened, it would be better. This terrible time of trying to live outside would be over.
He reached the bottom and stood on the soft earth. Smells of grass and wild flowers and the river came to him. He could hear the water moving and feel the wind on his skin. He saw and heard it rustling the trees. He had never seen such beauty. He couldn’t see any of it. All he could hear was her screaming, “Thief!”
Should he go back to the underground? Should he travel along the river until he found other people or died? Should he jump into the river? That would end it.
He decided to throw himself in the river. He was heading toward it when he met the others heading back to the cliff.
“What happened?” Henry asked. “We heard Veronica screaming.”
His shoulders curled over as though he’d been beaten. “What is a thief?”
“You don’t know what a thief is?” Mel asked.
“No.”
“It means someone who takes things from someone without asking and doesn’t give them back.”
“I took the book and music thing. I did not mean to keep them. Underground, only the Bigs have things. I wouldn’t take something from a Big.”
‘You don’t have private property?”
“I don’t know what that is.”
Jeremy came forward, “Hey, Sam, I’ll go talk to my mom. It will be OK. Come on, everyone, let’s go up and let Henry talk to him.”
They sat on logs by the river. Sam looked everywhere but at Henry. He wiped his eyes. His shoulders shook.
“She hates me.”
“I don’t think so, Sam. I think she loves you.”
“Why? She called me thief. She talks to me like I am a boy.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen her do that. And she loves you. Just like you love her.”
Sam looked down. “I love her. She hates me.”
“No, she’s in a bad way, Sam. She’s got her whole life sitting on her now and she can’t make it better by running off to a party or going home with some asshole she doesn’t give a shit about. That’s eating her, in addition to what she feels about you.”
“She talks to me like I was Jeremy.”
“Ah. Now you’re getting somewhere. What’s the problem with that?”
“He’s her son.”
“That’s right. She looks at you, a young man.”
“I’m twenty-nine.”
“Yes, a young man.”
“I am the oldest man in the underground. Sam Big is younger than me, they all are.”
Henry’s mouth fell open. “You’re old for your world?”
“Yes. People die before,” he flashed his ten digits twice. “Most of them.”
“Veronica doesn’t know that. To her, you look like one of Jeremy’s friends visiting from school.”
“Like her son?”
“Yes. You get the problem, Sam?”
Sam got the problem. If boingy boingy between cousins was not allowed, between mother and son was really not allowed. “What do I do?”
“Nothing. She’s going to have to see that you’re lifetimes older than Jeremy for herself. And you need to learn some things about women. First off, do you think she was mad at you?”
“Yes.”
“Women have feelings, son, lots of them. Veronica is more woman in ma
ny ways, and she has more feelings. With your being younger than her, she’ll automatically feel old. And ugly, even though in Veronica’s case that’s nuts. Look, she’s run around more than they said in the village, Sam. She and my brother were in love with each other, but they were never happy. They had a few good holidays together and made Jeremy. That isn’t happiness.
“So, now she sees you, a handsome young man, and what does she think? That loving you is wrong. That you’ll leave her, even though there’s no one to leave her for. She’s probably ashamed of things she did, and she’s determined not to make the same mistakes. It’s churning around inside her, making her act nuts. Just like you were thinking crazy, about to head back to that place where they’d kill you.”
“You knew?”
“We all knew. We’ll tie you up if we have to, Sam. We will not allow you to go back to that thing.”
Henry sat up and waved both of his arms over his head.
“What are you doing?”
“It’s a signal we worked out. Lena’s going to talk to Veronica about you wanting to leave. I don’t think she’s aware of anything but her own pain right now.”
“No.”
“Yes. She needs to know what’s she’s doing to you. And she needs to know what a fix we’re in. We will not allow that monster to have you or any of us. We know what that nightmare was about. It was him, searching for you.”
Sam flushed. They knew about Sam Big and him. He jumped toward the river. Henry grabbed him.
“You’re bigger than me, Sam, and can probably outfight me. So you can go drown yourself if you want to. I don’t want you to, and neither does anyone else. And I won’t make it easy.”
Sam looked at him, wanting to hit him, wanting to leap into the water. Wanting to hug him. Wanting to cry again.
“Oh, no! Sam, I’m sorry!” Veronica’s cries came down from the cliff. “Sam, don’t go. Please. I’m sorry.” And then she was screaming. Not just screaming, erupting with the uncontrolled shrieks of a terrified child.