Fallen Land

by Patrick Flanery

  In the hours after shutting himself inside, fancying he can still feel the flesh-freezing breath of the boy on his hands, he sketches a rough design: there will be only one way to get through and all other openings will lead to side alleys that stop after a short distance; a trap door will drop a man eight feet to the floor; a section of crawlspace will be studded with shards of glass cemented against the wood. All of it must be dark, unlit. With the plans finished, he gathers his materials, takes measurements, draws chalk lines in the hallway, leaving enough room for the containment door to swing wide open.

  After hearing the thump of two cars the next morning, listening for the rumble of each one reversing down the driveway, and sensing no more sound or movement in the world above and around his burrow, Paul begins with the sawing and drilling, the masonry bit chewing through sheetrock and then, deeper, into the cinder-block walls, the struts sliding into their places. By the end of the first day he has the frame skeleton in place. Another night, the thump of two cars arriving, farther apart in time than during the morning departure, the garage door opening and closing twice, and then the long night of sitting alone in his kitchen, eating his ration of rice and beans, listening to music on the portable stereo that is his only entertainment. He wishes he had thought of running an antenna for a radio out through the ventilation shaft, but this now seems like nothing more than a distraction from the important business at hand. The only music he has are albums from his childhood on old tapes whose sound is warped and disks that skip and jump, catching themselves in jarring repetition: I-I-I-I-I-I-I dream-eam-eam-eam-eam-eam. Such songs return him to high school dances, throwing him down the long hole of his recollection to years when he could walk anywhere feeling as though the world watched him with awe instead of suspicion.

  On the second day, working with a headlamp, he cuts and lays sheets of plywood to form the walls and passageways in his obstacle course. He is a beast in a burrow. Not a rabbit in a warren, but something fiercer, with victims of his own: a badger in his sett, with long claws and a hard snout, an old male never seen outside in daylight, lurking and stealthy and clever. By the end of the second day the obstacle is finished and he collapses on the couch across from the kitchen before forcing himself to eat. Eating means standing, preparation and attention. It demands thinking about the body, the needs of stomach and bowel. An ideal body would have no needs, would simply be born, grow, flourish, and function, fueled by nothing but sunlight. His waist is getting narrower, the excess pad of fat around his body disappearing, returning him to an image of his younger self. As he stands stirring his ration of beans and rice, he suddenly thinks he hears a scratching noise. Turning off the burner he drops the wooden spoon into the pot and listens but hears nothing other than his own breath, the strike of his heart, and the sound of his fingernails scratching across the counter.

  It is illogical to fear a child: this maze is just a matter of common sense, guarding against the possibility of further discovery. The trips to the boy’s bedroom were folly, a risk of his liberty and life. It was a momentary failure in his vigilance, although part of him suspects that vigilance is an illusion, his guard always slipping, imperfect, failing to see the weakness in his designs, the way he has left certain approaches unprotected. Blind spots proliferate: there are ever more numerous ways for people to surprise him. A hobo or hunter could stumble upon the cellar doors in the woods with their flimsy lock, break it open, descend the stone stairs, and discover the rear containment door. None of it is as well camouflaged as it might be. What he needs is a second obstacle at the back, but then that would eliminate the possibility of an easy escape if the entrance from the house were breached and the bunker invaded. As he eats, the smell of the woods comes into the kitchen, sucked down the ventilation shaft, the warm dry damp of cool dead leaves. He inhales the scent, seeing himself with his father in the woods, rifles on their shoulders in unmoving pursuit, finding those sleek brown bodies even when the creatures thought they were safe and alone, hidden in a tangle of trees.

  “Carson? Son? Is that you?” he speaks down the phone. Through the white noise of static he hears a cry and then words.

  “Dad?”

  “Is that you, son?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “How you doing, buddy?”

  “Okay. Do you wanna talk to mom?”

  “No, king, I want to talk to you. How’s Florida?”

  “Hmm.”

  “How’s the new house?”

  “We’re not in Florida.”

  “What do you mean you’re not in Florida? Where are you?”

  “I think we’re dead, dad. We’re all dead.”

  The phone is dead. There is no reception underground, no dial tone, no sound whatsoever. He dials numbers but nothing happens, and yet the voice keeps coming back to him. It is not the first time he has heard his son speak when technology has failed.

  He wakes in the kitchen chair, the pot crusted dry before him, grains of cooked rice turned to hard shrunken bullets. His watch tells him he has slept through at least one night. When he goes to examine his maze he realizes the obstacle is inadequate, its puzzle too simple. Straightaway he begins disassembling the boards and joists, spends the rest of the day taking apart the skeleton, and then without pausing to worry whether he might be heard by the people in the house above he starts rebuilding a more complex structure based on the pattern of a double helix, with only one of the two strands penetrating the heart of the bunker, the other doubling back on itself and returning to the point of origin. In the process of building this new structure, so much more complex than the first, he gets lost for an hour and a half, bumping his head against boards and beams until he becomes aware of blood smeared on his hands and clothes. But this must be a good sign. If blood has come, if he can lose and injure himself in a plan of his own creation, then this must prove he has crafted a puzzle that only the most determined and most intelligent, perhaps even the luckiest—luck would have to play a part in any successful breach—invader might ever solve. Still, something is lacking: from the entrance to the pantry anyone can see his maze is a man-made structure. He crawls back through it, emerging into the open space of the bunker, and exits through the rear containment door, propelling himself through the old stone storm cellar and up the steps into the cool night. Moonlight is everywhere above him. He drops to his knees, puts his palms on the soft wet earth, and on all fours he collects branches, twigs, moss, dried leaves, everything he thinks he needs, carrying it all back into the cellar in great armfuls. Lying on the floor of the bunker, his materials look inadequate, and so throughout the night he ferries in buckets of soil, leaves, and rocks, pushing the loads on all fours up and down through his obstacle and depositing everything at the far end where he stamps it into place, thumping with his fists until his hands are raw, and then embellishing the dirt with rocks and branches, twigs, moss, and leaves, to suggest an underground cavity of natural design—if not a creation of the earth itself, then something made by one of its less human inhabitants. He stops only when, coming out into the woods once again, he finds the eastern sky turning red. Anyone who might investigate the pantry hatch, who managed to overcome the containment door, would see that beyond it there lies nothing but dark territories of earth.

  Leaving his muddy clothes in the hallway he stands for an hour under the shower, his body slender and hardened by walking the city, by the poverty and monotony of his diet. When he is clean and dry the pain surfaces. In the mirror he sees the damage to his forehead and scalp, the places where the flesh has opened. The bleeding has stopped but when he leaves the bathroom he finds the chaos of his frenzy: blood and soil and leaves, gravel and stones and tree roots littering the hallway, the living space, the doorways and throughways. He is too exhausted to clean and instead stumbles into his bedroom, to the double mattress that almost fills the space, where he once imagined holding Amanda through the apocalypse he believes is still imminent, perh
aps already in the first hours of its unfolding. If we are not in the final chapters of our history then we are at the end of a particular volume, unable to predict how further installments may unfold. What is certain, he thinks, is that the future will not be one of societies and unions, but of individuals, small family units, fighting to protect their own interests, in the last hours before the ultimate end.

  On his bed he sleeps rolled up in down comforters. Waking only to piss, he is careless of his excretions. Sticky and cold he rolls to a place of dryness and warmth. Hours and minutes dissolve and recombine into new units whose quantities mean little to him. With no radio reception underground, days pass uncounted, if, indeed, days are passing at all. Days are secondhours, hours are minuteyears. A moment is millennia. I am the beast of time, circling my track, caught in my own dead ends.

  Emerging from his stupor there is a new and terrible clarity. Hunger hollows his stomach, and climbing from his stained bed he discovers the filth and chaos again surrounding him. He puts clothes into the washing machine, begins sweeping up the largest pieces of refuse, carries buckets of it out to the woods. With his garbage cleared and dispersed through the trees, he vacuums and dusts, scrubs the floors of the bunker, sponges the kidney-colored walls, and begins to reorganize the kitchen. After taking a new census of his stores, he discovers there is only enough food remaining for a month if he is careful. He never would have been able to provide for his family, but it seems impossible that his calculations could have been so flawed! Again he counts the cans and boxes, mistrusts his totals, counts again and again, and only after he has counted everything more than a dozen times does he know just how short his supply remains. He reduces his ration by half, although hunger is acute and he fears it may already be affecting his thinking.

  He needs a job, he needs money, but he needs a house, his house, he needs to regain it first, but first he needs a job, he has to have the house in his possession to prove his ability to build other houses, he needs money to reacquire the house, needs the house to acquire money, needs the money and the house to fight for the return of his family. Without the house he has no address. Without an address he will never be able to have a house. The house comes first, the house above all is the greatest of his immediate needs, the house and then the money to acquire it, the money and then the house, the house, the house always, first and last, the house to win back his sons. Count the cans and boxes of food: twenty times, forty times, again, again, spend days counting and eating as little as possible, barely sleeping, mistrusting the accuracy of those sums. Each time, only a month of food remains, and only then if the appetite is kept in check. What seemed an outrageous quantity of supplies when first acquired now seems pathetically meager. He knows he must eat. To eat he must go in search of more food.

  As a boy, his van to school always drove past a store called GUNS & AMMO. It was brick, one story, had bars in the windows, and looked like an Old West version of the local jail. His father never went there, always acquiring his ammunition at an outdoor leisure warehouse with high ceilings and large windows and walls covered with hunting trophies, but when Paul thought of guns and ammunition, he could only see the old redbrick building on a corner of a once respectable neighborhood across the street from a municipal golf course. He never saw anyone go into or come out of that store, and the lights were never on, but it must have done business. It has been closed for years, the windows boarded up with plywood painted offal-red, the bars across the doorway locked and chained.

  He has no hunting permit and too little money to acquire one. Already outside the law in a fundamental way, going after an animal that exists in such large numbers it is considered a pest does not seem like a serious offense. Hunting at dawn and at dusk will reduce the risk of being detected by enemies, who are consistently expanding in their numbers until it seems that anyone encountered can only be an enemy: the possibility of friendship, even of tactical alliance, is dead. His mother might still be a friend, but he is unsure if he can trust her. He has not been in touch since he last went to see her for lunch, walking back and forth across town. The messages that appear on his phone when he emerges from the bunker into the woods are always from his mother, asking if he is okay, if he could call her back just whenever you have a minute, you know, okay chiquito, bye-bye. The chiquito gets on his nerves; it started when he was small, because he was so small, and then turned into a joke when he became anything but chiquito.

  With the phone silenced and resting in the pocket of his camouflaged hunting vest, he climbs a tree and waits for the deer to come, and if not deer then turkeys, and failing all else then the lower links of the woodland food chain, the rabbits and squirrels and beavers that might be skinned and gutted and stuffed into his chest freezer, the gophers, mice, and voles. The first evening there is nothing, no animals of any kind except robins and sparrows, crawling beetles and buzzing flies, but before dawn the next morning he spots a doe and cuts her down with a shot to the head that she never hears. As his father taught him, he guts her, hidden in a sheltered thicket of fir trees. Before the sun is up he is back underground, the young doe’s carcass on the concrete floor of the hallway where he saws off the legs, skins the body, and cuts it into pieces he can freeze.

  The butchering and cleaning takes the better part of the morning and with the hours remaining he goes back to inspect his obstacle, deciding to paint the wooden walls and passageways black. Before his retreat he left cans of paint in the basement of the house. He will wait until night, when the people have gone to bed, and retrieve the paint, which he is certain will be there in the corner where he left it. Before he can attend to the paint he returns to the woods with his rifle and subsonic ammunition, his suit of camouflage, suppressor, and knife. He climbs a tree to wait and in the passing hours he tries to phone his wife. He calls every cell phone number for her he has ever known, since they first met. All have now been reassigned: he talks to young men and old women, to black people and white people, a woman who speaks only Spanish, a man who shouts into the phone and threatens to call the police, an order of nuns, a gas station, a liquor store. He dials directory assistance as he has on countless occasions but there is no listing for his wife or her parents anywhere in the country. Knowing he will be unable to find them, they have nonetheless done everything possible to keep him even from speaking to his boys. Amanda is no longer the point. He understands there is no hope of recapturing her, but he might yet be able to save his sons. As soon as I have a thousand dollars, I will leave this place to find you, making my way on foot if I have to. I will sell myself to survive: if not my labor then my body. I will march across country to find you, boys, and I will bring you back to this house where we will live out our days.

  Just after sunset they appear: a buck and a doe. They are cautious, their noses raised, perhaps already scenting his body and the threat of the rifle. He takes the buck first, and though the doe startles, he catches her before she can flee. The moon is no longer full but it is bright enough that he can manage the gutting in the dark. He hauls the buck into the bunker and returns for the doe, but by then he is too exhausted to skin or butcher and goes to bed, still dressed in his camouflage, remembering only in the middle of the night his plans to paint the obstacle. Shaking himself awake, he crawls from bed and out into the hallway, then up into the passage that will take him through to the containment door. By now he has learned how to move through it quickly, knows the turns he must take, when to duck his head, when to lunge over the trap door that opens to a drop of eight feet. At the containment door he listens and checks his watch. Satisfied that the house is silent, he swings wide the door and edges open the hatch, finding the basement on the other side in darkness.

  Again the house feels different, colder, and as he turns on the lights he sees that, like the rest of the house, the basement has been painted white, floor to ceiling. He looks for the plaque he mounted on the wall and discovers that, although still there, it has been painted over as
well, the recesses of the engraved letters clogged with paint, words legible but only from an angle. It is dustless and sterile and no longer feels like a basement. Other than the woman’s workshop space, the room is empty, and this emptiness, as so much else about what these people have done, fills him with dread. There is no place to hide. On the far side of the basement, where his cans of paint should be, there is a large metal cage, five feet by two feet by three feet high, made of heavy-duty steel mesh and secured with a padlock. Inside are the cans of paint he left behind before retreating to the bunker, as well as the leftover paint from the work done by the new owners. He was a fool to leave anything behind in the house.

  Panting, his clothes soaked with sweat, he follows the light of his headlamp back through the obstacle but after only a foot or two the lamp goes out and he has to proceed in darkness, trying to discern any hint of light from the other end. There is a groaning and clunking in his ears, a rushing like water through pipes, throwing him off the path he made until, before he knows it, he is in the field of broken glass, his hands lacerated and bleeding, spreading a stickiness that keeps pulling him back into a suction lock with the wood beneath him. In retreat, he crawls backward, tries to remember how to escape from the field of glass, forcing himself to recall which turn to make, whether to go up or down at the fork: he goes up, pulling his body along the plywood surface, sniffing the air ahead in search of his own scent. As he climbs, a catch picks at the back of his mind, and then, as the memory rips itself open, he feels the wood give way beneath his weight: a whoosh and a judder and his head banging against boards, the wind pushed out of him, a fall of eight feet before he knew he was falling, but the fall itself is interminable, the boards and joists and timber passing him, all the detail of his construction visible, the poorly finished nails, the hurried carelessness of his work, the shoddiness of the materials, a sticker of a rocket ship on a board that was once part of the bunk beds intended for his boys. Wheezing great gasps, drowning, he rears back, hitting his head against a two-by-four beam. The headlamp flickers, bringing the tunnel into view, and he sees a familiar section, knows he must go forward, turn right, double back, take the first left, climb again, take the second left, the third right, and then prepare to descend the ladder into the bunker hallway.