Half Lives

by Sara Grant

  ‘We can’t tell anyone about this,’ Beckett says, mesmerized by the lights. He knows this will change everything. Their fear of Terrorists has mutated to include anything and anyone Out There. These lights will only feed their growing paranoia. And what if Finch is right? What if the Terrorists have returned? ‘We don’t want people to start panicking.’

  Finch cracks the knuckles on one hand and then the other. ‘We can’t wait until Terrorists attack.’

  ‘We don’t know for sure that it’s Terrorists,’ Beckett says.

  ‘Maybe it’s just light,’ Harper mutters.

  ‘We will guard our Mountain and ask the Great I AM for guidance.’ Beckett feels it all around him – an electricity he can’t explain. Endings are beginnings, so says the Great I AM. But he’s not sure whether this is the beginning or the end.

  Chapter Three

  None of us said a word all the way to the airport. The moment the taxi parked, Mum pushed us out and gathered us into a huddle. Dad had sniffed in time to the Beatles song on the oldies station playing in the taxi. His eyes were bloodshot, but his face looked almost normal again.

  ‘Here are your boarding passes,’ Dad said, pulling out three tri-folded sheets of paper from his blazer pocket and handing one to me and one to Mum. My eyes zoomed in on the destination.

  Vegas? What in the hell sent you running to the land of Elvis impersonators, slot machines, neon nightlife and Cirque du something? Was Dad’s nuclear physicist gig a cover for Mob connections? Did Mum have a gambling problem? Were we in some sort of witness protection programme? You could get lost in Vegas. From what I’d seen on the original CSI, weird was a way of life.

  ‘We aren’t sitting next to each other on the plane.’ Dad turned to me. ‘If anyone asks, you are travelling alone to meet your grandparents.’

  ‘Are Grandma and Grandpa Murray meeting us there?’ I asked, hopeful that maybe this wasn’t so horrible after all.

  Dad swallowed hard. ‘No, but that’s your story. Your mum is heading there for a conference and I’m meeting some college buddies for the weekend.’

  Panic and confusion knotted in my gut.

  ‘Let’s just go, Jack,’ Mum blurted, and adjusted her purse strap on her shoulder.

  ‘We should split up,’ Dad said. ‘At the gate and on the plane, don’t acknowledge each other, OK?’

  Wait. No. This was happening too fast. Brain malfunction.

  ‘If anything happens . . .’ Dad continued.

  ‘Like. What?’ I spoke slowly and enunciated each word. I needed everything to slow down.

  ‘Just act like you don’t know anything.’ Dad was breathing faster, talking faster.

  ‘I don’t know anything,’ I whisper-shouted.

  Mum checked her watch. ‘It’s time, Jack.’

  WTF! Seriously, WTF!

  They both dropped their bags and Dad pulled Mum into a fierce embrace. Mum’s fingers clawed his back, creating webs of wrinkles in his shirt. Mum’s sudden flare of emotion scared me more than Dad’s tears. Mum didn’t believe in public displays of affection – or private ones, really.

  ‘Go, Jack,’ Mum said, and pushed him away.

  Dad hugged me until I thought my ribs might crack. ‘I love you, Icie. Always remember that.’

  Shit. Shit. SHIT! That sounded like goodbye.

  ‘Dad . . .’ I didn’t even know what to say. I caught the sleeve of his shirt.

  ‘It’s going to be OK, Isis,’ Dad said, and did this weird laugh as if something was really funny. Then his face got all serious. ‘We are going to divide and conquer,’ he whispered.

  Divide and conquer what?

  Fear ping-ponged through my body. I couldn’t rationalize it away because I couldn’t quite comprehend what was happening. I mean, this was serious, beyond what I thought could be real.

  ‘I’ll see you at the gate, and if not there, then the bunker.’ He picked up his backpack, zigzagged through the traffic, and disappeared in the chaos of travellers.

  ‘Bunker?’ I looked from the spot where my everyday average dad used to stand to my wannabe superhero mum. ‘What’s he talking about?’

  Mum shushed me, grabbed my elbow and ushered me through the airport. It looked like it always did, as if people had been poured in and stirred. My parents were freaking out but it didn’t appear as if anyone else was. We were heading straight for the security checkpoint.

  ‘Mum, please tell me what’s going on.’ I tried to stop, but she just kept dragging me forwards. Now I was getting angry. She couldn’t scoot me along the game board like I was the silver Scottie dog in Monopoly. I planted my feet. ‘I’m not going anywhere until you tell me—’

  ‘OK. OK. Don’t make a scene.’ She was looking around wildly. ‘This way.’ She pointed to a sign with the universal symbol for toilets. I followed Mum into the unisex/handicapped/baby-changing toilet. It smelled of bleach and lemon with a whiff of stinky baby diapers. She locked the door.

  ‘Icie, please calm down, and I’ll tell you what I know.’ Mum took a deep breath. ‘An attack is being planned for multiple cities.’ She looked as if it were causing her physical pain to say the next words. ‘We think DC is one. It’s a credible threat.’

  ‘Do you mean bombs?’

  She looked around as if they might have cameras in the toilet. ‘No, the most recent intel is about a bio-terrorist attack.’

  ‘A bio-what?’

  ‘A fast-spreading and deadly virus. The initial projections are staggering. We need to get out of DC.’

  Then it hit me. I mean really hit me. I was falling, drowning and being electrocuted all at once. My mind flashed to every apocalyptic movie I’d ever seen – world wars, alien attacks, explosions, floods, tsunamis, bombs, plagues. My knees gave out and I plopped down on the toilet.

  ‘Do you remember where your dad and I met?’ Mum asked.

  I nodded, confused by her sudden stroll down memory lane. They were on some committee that had to do with strategic planning – Mum’s expertise – and nuclear waste – my dad’s. It had some bizarre name like Preventing Inadvertent Intrusion into blah, blah, bleugh. I’d always thought it sounded like the slogan for a new contraceptive device. ‘You met on that mountain outside Las Vegas.’

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘We’re going there.’

  I squinted, trying to let what she was saying sink in. ‘You mean we are going to Las Vegas.’ She certainly didn’t mean the nuclear waste repository. The one that was the subject of the committee that brought my parents together. The one that was supposed to store all the nuclear waste generated by the nuclear power plants in the country. She couldn’t mean that because that would be beyond crupid.

  ‘We’re going to the bunker deep inside the mountain.’

  Mum was telling me we were going miles underground with the same tone she used to invite me shopping at Saks. My body started doing this weird earthquake thing.

  ‘Seriously?’ Had I joined the movie already in progress? Did I miss the part where my mum’s body was probed by aliens or inhabited by a demon?

  ‘Let me finish—’

  But I didn’t. ‘We are going underground with nuclear gunk.’

  ‘No. It’s not like that. Construction was never finished on the facility,’ Mum stated matter-of-factly. ‘No one wants nuclear waste in their backyard. It’s a political minefield. Funding was cut, so the bunker inside the mountain has never been used.’

  ‘Is it safe?’ It felt as if she was giving me the rock-and-hard-place option. Bio-attack or buried alive? Some choice.

  ‘Now it’s just a big, empty tunnel into the heart of the mountain. They dug part of the main tunnel and conducted lots of geological studies to make sure that the site would be safe for the long-term storage of nuclear waste. It was never more than a research site.’

  ‘But the nuclear waste . . .’

  ‘Billions more dollars would have to be spent to make the mountain ready to store the waste. Nuclear waste isn’t like shoving
a box of old clothes in the attic. It takes a very complex system of . . .’ Mum suddenly stopped mid-sentence and then seemed to switch channels. ‘Icie, I don’t have time to tell you any more now. You have to trust me. I think it’s the only place we’ll be safe.’ Her voice quivered. ‘We need to forget about everything else and get to the mountain.’

  Get to the mountain, I repeated the phrase, zombie-like, in my brain.

  She removed the piece of paper that she’d stuffed in my backpack earlier. She placed it on my lap, smoothing out the wrinkles. ‘Las Vegas is here,’ she said, pointing off the side of the page towards my knee. ‘The bunker is in this mountain.’ She pointed her fire-engine-red fingernail to the middle of a series of three upside-down Vs. If the paper were flipped the other way it might look like a flock of pterodactyls. Two squiggly parallel lines ran across the page and were marked with a highway number. There were two dots with what might be names of cities.

  I studied the map. ‘That’s in the middle of nowhere, isn’t it?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s the way they designed it,’ she continued. ‘They didn’t want people stumbling onto it by accident. We experimented with how to mark the site with “Do Not Enter” signs that would last for hundreds of thousands of years. We’d need to make sure that everyone would know to stay away. These markers would have to say “keep out” in a way that future generations might understand. There’s a ring of thorns and a—’

  ‘This is insane.’ I needed her to stop talking or take it all back. I had to get out of here and wake up from this nightmare. I tried to push past her, but she didn’t budge.

  ‘Listen to me. I want you to know how to identify the mountain.’ She wasn’t shouting but her voice was forceful. I imagined that was the voice she used to talk to the president and all the other bigwigs. ‘Your dad and I used to call it the infinity project so we marked the mountain and the tunnel entrance with an infinity symbol. You know what that is, don’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s a thin, horizontal figure of eight.’ I drew the symbol in the air.

  She folded the map in half and in half again and slipped it in my messenger bag. ‘If something happens to your dad and me—’

  ‘What’s going to happen to you and Dad?’ I interjected.

  ‘Nothing, but, if something does, do whatever you have to do to get to that spot. OK?’ She squared off with me, a hand on each shoulder. ‘Icie, promise me you’ll do whatever you have to do to make it to the mountain.’

  There were two short, sharp knocks on the door. Mum froze.

  ‘Can you hurry it up in there?’ a female voice shouted through the door.

  ‘Just a second,’ Mum called back. Then she pulled me close and whispered, ‘Your dad and I have breached national security by running away. We weren’t supposed to tell anyone what’s going on, but we had to at least try and protect you. You can’t tell anyone what I’ve just told you.’

  I thought I was going to vomit. I’d never felt terror like this before. It ripped through me like a, well, like an explosion.

  Mum checked her watch. ‘We need to get going, Icie, or we’ll miss our plane.’

  ‘Should we really be on a plane if . . .’

  ‘We need to get out of DC, and it’s the fastest way. I think we have twenty-four hours before the initial attack. If it happens, the virus will spread exponentially within a few hours—’

  She was interrupted by a pounding on the door. ‘Hurry up!’ The voice was male this time.

  ‘H-how l-long?’ I stammered. ‘How long will we need to stay underground?’ I couldn’t believe I was saying it. It was admitting that all this might be for real.

  ‘A few months.’ Mum smoothed her hair. On my best day, I never looked as in control as my mum did right now with the world coming to an end. I wondered whether this would be the last memory I’d have of ‘normal’ – a stinky airport toilet, the air heavy with what-ifs.

  I had so many questions. ‘How do you and Dad know all this?’ I knew she worked in the White House, but after that any job details got a little fuzzy. ‘If something was, you know, it would be on the news. People should—’

  The pounding was non-stop now – both the fist on the bathroom door and the hammering of my heart.

  ‘Icie, we can discuss all this later. We are going to get through this. At least we have a chance,’ Mum said as if she could read my mind.

  I shouldered my backpack. I erased all the end-of-the-world scenarios that kept popping into my mind like annoying Internet ads. If only I could switch my brain off or download some firewall to prevent these images from causing my brain to crash. I needed to be strong. I wanted to be strong.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Mum said, and opened the bathroom door. Eight pairs of hateful eyes glared at us. ‘Sorry,’ Mum said as she muscled a path through them.

  I diverted my eyes when I noticed that the old lady waiting had a cane. There was a red-faced mother holding her crying baby and a man resting his hand on a wheelchair in which there sat a young boy who had casts on both legs. I wondered if all these people would be dead soon. What right did I have to this secret safe place? I added guilt to the whirlpool of feelings ripping through me.

  We marched right up to the security checkpoint. When we were nearly next in line, the security guard’s radio squawked. Mum’s eyes widened as we both heard a description of Dad come over her radio. Maybe it wasn’t him. His description matched that of nearly every middle-aged man in America. Mum took a compact out of her handbag. She flipped it open and used the mirror to look behind her. She dabbed the powder puff at the rays of wrinkles around her eyes. I couldn’t see the reflection but I could tell by Mum’s expression that she’d seen something alarming. When she put the compact away, her hands were shaking.

  ‘You get to the gate, and we’ll meet you there,’ she whispered, so close that her lips touched my ear. She slipped a necklace over her head. It had been concealed under her shirt. A strange-looking key dangled on the end of a sturdy silver chain, not like the dainty kind Mum usually wore, but the kind security guards had hanging from their belts. She slipped it over my head and tucked it under my shirt. ‘This will open and lock the bunker.’

  I shook my head, dreads flapping. ‘No, no, no, no . . .’ If she was giving me the key to the thingy-whatsit then that meant she wasn’t sure if she and Dad were going to make the plane.

  ‘This is just in case,’ Mum said.

  ‘I can’t, Mum.’ I couldn’t move. My body felt as if it had hardened in concrete.

  ‘You’ve got to, Icie.’ Mum’s expression was what Dad and I called her ‘Don’t Mess With Me’ face. Set jaw. Narrowed eyes. Flared nostrils. ‘Right now you are your biggest obstacle. You’ve got to think positive. You can do this. Go to the gate and get on the plane. Your dad has another key. If worst comes to worst, we’ll meet you at the bunker.’

  ‘Mum . . .’

  She leaned in again and whispered, ‘Icie, we stole the keys to the bunker. We did all this for you. There’s no turning back now. Don’t let us down.’ She dug around in her handbag. ‘How silly of me,’ she said with too much false enthusiasm. ‘I’ve left my driver’s licence at check-in.’ She seemed to be putting on a show for anyone watching.

  ‘Next,’ the security lady said, extending her hand for my documents.

  ‘Go ahead, and I’ll meet you at the gate.’ She hugged me. ‘I love you.’

  ‘Love you too,’ I choked out. Everyone probably thought I was some stupid kid crying when I had to leave my mummy. All these queues and queues of people had no idea. They thought today was just like any other day – and maybe it was. Maybe Mum was wrong. Maybe someone would stop the attack.

  Mum walked away. She didn’t look back. Her shoulders straightened as she marched off.

  Suck it up, I told myself. Mum and Dad had sacrificed too much for me to lose it now. I handed my boarding pass and driver’s licence to the security woman perched on a stool. She looked from the documents to me, circled something o
n my boarding pass and then passed my stuff back. When my backpack and I were all scanned, I turned back, hoping to catch a glimpse of Mum. But it wasn’t the final farewell shot I’d imagined. She was surrounded by security and being led away. Any shred of hope I was feeling vanished. Not only was the world potentially ending, but now I was going to face it alone.

  Chapter Four

  ‘Some things are just not meant to be.’

  – Just Saying 23

  HARPER

  ‘Race you to the spot,’ Harper says, but doesn’t wait for Beckett’s reply. She zigzags around the Mountain. Every inch of her skin is covered to protect her from the sun’s burning rays. Scraps of material are wrapped and tied around her body.

  She leads Beckett and Lucky to the Other Side of the Mountain. She needs to get Beckett alone. She slows when she sees the rocky outcrop up ahead, the place where Beckett found her thirteen years ago.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Beckett asks when he catches up with her. Beckett’s features are like chiselled rock – strong and solid. His deep brown eyes radiate warmth. He has a shock of white hair that splits his jet-black dreadlocks. His is the first face she looks for in the morning and the last image she sees before she falls asleep each night.

  Harper shrugs.

  He tugs at the frayed knots on her arms. ‘You looked like you were being attacked by butterflies with these pieces flapping as you ran.’

  She likes the image of butterflies lifting her off the Mountain.

  ‘Why don’t we find you some clothes that fit properly?’ His finger finds a small patch of skin. She melts at his touch but elbows him away so maybe he won’t notice the red rising in her cheeks.

  ‘I don’t mind using the scraps.’ She adjusts the material to cover any exposed skin.

  They stare out at the Man-Made Mountains below. Lucky winds a figure of eight around their legs. Harper recalls the lights in the valley last night and shivers.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Beckett says, draping his arm across her shoulders.