by Sara Grant
‘Or we run out of food,’ Tate added.
‘I’m staying here with Icie,’ Chaske said and shifted to my side. The warmth of his body and the strength of his allegiance made me feel as if we were somehow a team. Me and Chaske against the world. It was strange that I could feel such a connection with this relative stranger. ‘If we’re wrong, then we’ve had an underground vacation, and if we’re right, then . . .’
‘It’s our best chance of survival. I’m staying too,’ Marissa said. We turned towards Tate.
‘Yeah, whatever. What choice do I have?’ Tate shoved his hands deep in his pockets.
‘It’s better than dying by the side of the road,’ Marissa muttered.
‘So . . .’ Chaske let the word dangle. ‘Maybe we should try to get some sleep.’ He lowered his backpack to the ground. ‘We can check out this place tomorrow.’
I wanted to explore now, shine a bright light into every corner, but I was exhausted. I hadn’t really slept in twenty-four hours, and we had hiked miles. Escaping into sleep and leaving reality until morning made much more sense.
We agreed that we would sleep together near the door. We’d all take turns keeping watch – just in case. Marissa and Tate exuded a coldness. I had changed from friendly saviour to calculating captor. I didn’t mean to. They had to understand. They would have done the same thing – if they were the ones with the key.
Chaske spread out his sleeping bag. He and Tate slept half on, half off the edges, and Marissa and I were sandwiched in the middle. Midnight curled up between Chaske and me. My head buzzed with rattlesnakes, nuclear bombs and plague-like sickness. My heart ached with thoughts of everyone I loved being trapped on the other side of that door. Strange that I thought of them as trapped and me as somehow free. Eventually I fell into a dreamless sleep.
‘Rise and shine, you sleepyheads,’ Marissa said with a little too much perkiness. She was no longer lying next to me. Her voice emanated, god-like, from a location unknown.
‘Oh, man, what time is it?’ Tate moaned. ‘It’s not even light out.’ He rolled over and right into me.
‘Um, we are underground,’ Marissa replied. ‘There is no light.’
Her words struck a nerve. My eyes opened to no effect. It was pitch black. I sat bolt upright. I felt Midnight jump to her feet. There was so much I hadn’t considered. I’d worried about how we would eat and keep clean. I’d wondered about being lonely. But now I could add no sunlight and no sense of time to my ever-growing list of reasons to panic. What about fresh air and water?
‘It’s nearly noon,’ Marissa said. The glowing face of her massive watch floated disembodied above us. ‘We need to explore and map out this place and take an inventory of our stuff. Until we know what we’re dealing with, we need to conserve.’ Marissa’s glowing watch bounced as if it were speaking.
‘How long are we really going to have to stay here?’ Tate asked.
‘I read once that during the Cold War people built bomb shelters prepared for fifteen years underground.’ Chaske’s voice was low, calm and reassuring, even when he was basically talking about being stuck down here for about as long as I’d been alive.
‘If it’s some sort of bio-threat, like my mum thought, we could probably go outside in a few months,’ I said. That is, if we don’t go all Lord of the Flies.
‘Months?’ Tate repeated.
‘Yeah, well, we’d have to wait for everyone to die off and the air to clear so whatever the hell it is ain’t contagious any more.’ Marissa said it so matter-of-factly. If she was feeling as freaked out as I was, she sure wasn’t showing it.
‘Does that mean we will have to have sex so we can repopulate the Earth?’ Tate’s voice sounded hopeful. ‘’Cause if so, I call Marissa. No offence, Icie.’
‘None taken,’ I said with a nervous laugh, but it wasn’t really funny. What chance did the human race have if the four of us were the progenitors?
‘Even if you were the last man on Earth, I would not procreate with you. Your gene pool should stop here,’ Marissa said in her staccato tone. Gotta love the Cheer Captain. She said what she thought – and sometimes what I was thinking.
‘Harsh,’ Tate muttered. ‘I was just saying . . .’
As if by magic, Chaske’s face appeared in a beam of light. ‘I think maybe you shouldn’t “just say” right now.’
The flashlight was positioned under his chin, illuminating a slice of his face. He had deep sleep lines etched along his cheek and a scar that cut diagonally through his left eyebrow. Tate was stretched out on his back with his arms crisscrossed over his face. Marissa was sitting at the end of the sleeping bag and Chaske and I were sitting with our backs against the cool metal door.
‘I’m hungry,’ came Tate’s muffled voice. Was he crying?
‘I could eat,’ I said, and gave Tate a playful shove. She shouldn’t be so hard on him. ‘Marissa had some juice and cereal bars in that bag you carried all day yesterday, Tate.’ I nudged Marissa. ‘How about you serve us up some breakfast?’
Marissa tossed me three cereal bars. ‘Here, Tate,’ Marissa said, and handed him a small box of apple juice. I laid a cereal bar on his chest. He sniffed and wiped his face. He took the juice and cereal bar and sat with his back to us.
I gave Chaske his breakfast. He switched off the light and we ate in silence. I nibbled the cereal bar, savouring every bite. My stomach felt like a bottomless pit and each little bite hit with the tiniest ping – a grain of sand in the Grand Canyon. I jumped a little when Midnight rubbed against me and purred. I broke off a piece of my bar and crumbled it in my palm. She licked my hand with her rough tongue. As much as I hated to admit it, Tate was probably right. Midnight might have had a better chance of survival on the outside, but I couldn’t say goodbye to anything else.
‘Why don’t Tate and I explore the rest of this place and you guys sort out our supplies and stuff?’ Chaske said when the chewing and drinking sounds subsided.
‘Oh, right, the men should go hunting while the women-folk gather berries,’ Marissa said with what sounded like a forced laugh.
‘Um, no,’ Chaske corrected. ‘I thought you might want a little cooling-off period from your new lover boy.’
‘Whatever,’ Marissa said with a laugh. ‘You boys go off and kill us a bear, or better yet, find water, food and four king-sized beds.’
Chaske switched on his flashlight again and slowly swept it around. The place was massive. You could fit three lorries parked side by side, and three more stacked on top in the entryway and still have room to spare. In the pitch black, the space had felt much smaller, claustrophobic. I took a deep breath. It was as if I could breathe again in this big open space.
The walls were solid rock. Chaske’s light paused on the far wall. I could see there were parallel, horizontal lines maybe six feet apart, as if someone had chiselled out the rock in large rectangular blocks. The entrance narrowed to one tunnel. The floor sloped at a sharp, steady decline.
‘Let’s go, Tate.’ Chaske stood and directed his flashlight at Tate.
Marissa checked her big pink watch again. ‘If you’re gone any longer than two hours . . .’
‘You’ll come looking for us,’ Chaske finished her sentence.
‘No.’ Marissa paused. ‘I was going say that’s more food for us.’
I swallowed hard, recognizing the nugget of truth in what she said. Would we turn on one another like the stars of every post-apocalyptic movie I’d ever seen?
‘Here’s all I got.’ Chaske handed me his backpack. He removed the gun from under the corner of the sleeping bag where he had slept and tucked it into the back of his jeans.
‘Where’d you get the gun?’ Tate asked, picking up his line of inquisition from yesterday.
Chaske shrugged, untucking his shirt to cover the weapon.
‘I bet it was your dad’s. He’s a cop or maybe an FBI agent, isn’t he?’ Tate stood.
‘As far as you know, yeah,’ Chaske said. He put a brotherly a
rm around Tate. ‘Come on, Tate. Onwards and, well,’ he pointed to the sloping tunnel, ‘downwards, I guess.’
Midnight raced after Chaske but paused at the tunnel’s entrance, glancing back at me before scampering off.
‘First we need light,’ I said, reaching for my backpack.
‘Wait. Wait. I think I got something.’ Marissa rummaged around in her ginormous handbag. ‘Most of my good stuff drove away with that damn thieving taxi driver, but . . .’ More rummaging. ‘I do have a few things to contribute.’
There was a pop and then we were bathed in a faint yellowish-green light. She held up a glow stick with the words Barry Manilow written on the side.
‘Never pictured you as a Fanilow,’ I said.
‘I took my gran to the concert. Everyone got one of these.’ She shook the glow stick. ‘I couldn’t bear to wave it around while the entire audience sang “Daybreak”, but I thought it might come in handy, you know, at a drunken party in some state park, but whatever.’ She emptied the contents of her D&G and started humming what I thought was ‘Copacabana’.
Marissa’s worldly possessions included an issue of Cheerleader Quarterly, a purse-sized anti-bacterial hand gel, a Hello Kitty wallet, an avalanche of make-up, a nearly full bottle of Clinique Happy, a confetti of loose change, foil gum wrappers, abandoned breath mints and a scrap of paper with the name Cruz and a phone number.
We dumped the contents of my and Chaske’s backpacks, my messenger bag and Marissa’s goodie bag onto Chaske’s sleeping bag. I handed her a pink gel pen and took a green glitter one from my messenger bag. I ripped out a few pages from the blank notebook that was supposed to be my journal for English class. We started organizing and cataloguing. Soon she had me humming along. My dad liked a bit of Manilow too. That song – and thoughts of my dad – lodged themselves in my brain like splinters that hurt like hell but were impossible to remove.
I made a separate list of the feminine hygiene products. The boys didn’t need to worry their pretty little heads about our girl issues. I wanted to get this list finished and the products hidden before the boys came back. Marissa had six ultra tampons, two partially unwrapped regular tampons she found in the inner lining of her purse, half a packet of contraceptive pills and three condoms. I was less prepared. I only kept one tampon in the zipper compartment of my bag. Mum had packed three washable sanitary pads and two menstrual cups, which looked sort of like the diaphragms the health teacher showed us in our lecture on contraception. Um, disgust-o-rama. They were in brown, recycled envelopes from a place called Organic Feminine Care. There were diagrams and instructions. To be honest, I grieved more for the loss of disposable feminine hygiene products than I had for every senior – except Lola – at Capital Academy. I showed my find to Marissa.
‘Now that’s what I call roughing it,’ she said, and shook her head.
We quickly had everything organized in piles and documented on our inventory sheets. We didn’t have a lot of clothes. With everything combined, we each had two complete outfits with a few T-shirts and sweatshirts to spare. I’d have to share with Marissa. I was bigger than she was in every area but the one that mattered most to boys. Chaske was easily twice Tate’s size. They’d looked like David and Goliath walking down the tunnel earlier. Guess it wouldn’t matter if our clothes fit down here. It wasn’t as if we were going to host a subterranean fashion show.
My parents had done an amazing job of packing everything I would need. There was a first-aid kit. Mum must have emptied the medicine cabinet. I had a variety of painkillers and penicillin, as well as a nearly full prescription of Dad’s Valium. A thousand multi-vitamins, each big enough to choke a line-backer. A few lighters as well as four Maglites with extra batteries. They had also packed disposable facemasks and rubber gloves.
These supplies hadn’t been gathered in a rush. The packaging had been removed and everything was crammed in clear plastic bags. Some of these items had been ordered and acquired from survival stores. My parents had created a survival kit after 9/11. Mum tried to sit me down once and tell me what to do in case of some national disaster, but Dad told her not to worry me. I think they told me where the kit was, but I hadn’t paid any attention. I’d thought she was being, well, Mum. I figured it was just a flashlight, radio and candy bar, but she’d really thought it through.
Chaske had a hammer, a small collapsible shovel and one of those multi-purpose pocket gadgets that had every kind of tool, including a toothpick. He also had a coverless copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, two water canteens, a pack of cards, four boxes of matches, a box of ammunition for his gun, two signal-flares and a one-man pop-up tent.
‘Whoa, get a load of this,’ Marissa said, unwrapping a screepy hunting knife from one of Chaske’s shirts. ‘Are you sure we can trust this guy? I mean, look at the size of this.’ She pinched the handle between her fingers and let the four-inch blade dangle and reflect green in our Manilow light.
‘Maybe he was out here hunting or camping or, I don’t know, just hiking. People do that all the time.’ My stomach rolled, not because of hunger this time. Everything about the knife, from the curve of its handle to the jagged notches on the blade, was designed to kill. I didn’t like having that thing in here with me.
‘Yeah, maybe, but it’s weird him being out here on his own – and he’s not exactly Mr Chatty,’ Marissa said, glancing down the tunnel to make sure they weren’t listening. ‘What’s the deal with him?’
I shrugged. ‘All I know is that he saved my life and he seems pretty normal, except for the man-of-mystery routine. I’m sure he’ll talk when he’s ready, and he’ll be some average guy from some average place. It will make perfect sense why he’s alone on the mountain with all this survival gear.’
‘Let’s hope you’re right,’ Marissa said as she placed the knife next to Tate’s Swiss Army knife. Tate’s knife with its shiny red exterior and white cross logo looked like a child’s toy next to Chaske’s massive hunting knife. ‘I plan to keep a close eye on him just in case he’s escaped from some nuthouse.’
I knew less than a Facebook profile about these people. I added fear of Marissa, Tate and Chaske to my ‘Reasons to Panic’ list, not only fear of who they really were and what they were capable of today, but of what they might do after a few months locked in a bunker.
We turned our attention back to the inventory. My parents had sent hundreds of Nutri-power Bars in every flavour imaginable. That was all Mum ate when she was busy. I’d tried one once. It had the taste and consistency of mud and sand mixed with jelly. Chaske had exactly eighty-one of these vacuum-packed, army-issued ‘Meals, Ready-to-Eat’. MREs. Cheesy tortellini from a packet I could live with, but I wasn’t sure about eating vacuum-packed meat products like Mediterranean chicken, or spicy penne pasta with some sort of sausage. He also had a big bag of beef and turkey jerky. Marissa had twenty-three packs of breath mints and assorted travel-size snacks.
We had nearly finished organizing our supplies into food, medical, tools and miscellaneous when the place was suddenly flooded with light. I squinted at the brightness. Marissa and I leapt to our feet. My head swam from the sudden action and lack of food. Two parallel lines of those energy-efficient lights lined the ceiling.
‘This place is massive,’ Chaske hollered to us. We rushed towards one another. Midnight raced between us, as if following the conversation. ‘I think the lighting must be solar powered. There’s also some sort of air-filtration system. We switched everything on.’
‘Oh, that’s fab!’ Marissa clapped. Her enthusiasm was a bit over the top. Maybe the latent cheerleader in her was coming to life. I wondered if she had a cheer for not suffocating in a bunker.
‘This tunnel spirals down about a mile,’ Chaske said.
‘It would be great for skateboarding,’ Tate interjected.
‘The tunnel gets narrower as you go down. There’s a part at the back that’s not finished. No lights or anything. We should stay away from that part,’ Chaske said. ‘I’m not
sure if it’s structurally sound. All right?’
Marissa and I nodded.
Chaske raised his eyebrows at Tate.
‘Yeah, yeah, whatever.’ He kicked at the dirt floor.
‘Well, I’ve got good news and bad news,’ Chaske said.
‘What’s the bad news?’ I asked.
‘You’re supposed to ask for the good news first,’ Marissa said.
‘I’m “glass half-empty” at the moment,’ I replied.
‘Well, you’re getting the good news first,’ Chaske said. ‘We found a few dusty gallon-jugs of water in this huge room near the back of the tunnel. That should last us for a little while, but there are also a few places where water is pooling from cracks in the walls. We should be able to collect that water somehow.’
‘And . . .’ I prompted.
‘There are even a few cots. The construction crew must have slept here sometimes,’ Tate jumped in.
‘So what’s the bad news?’ I said, getting more anxious by the minute. ‘Is the place infested with nasty beasties?’ I hopped on the balls of my feet at the thought of more snakes or rats or alligators or mountain lions or zombies or werewolves . . .
‘Nope, we didn’t see any creatures, did we, Tate?’
‘Nope,’ Tate said.
‘Just tell us the bad news already,’ I demanded.
‘No toilets,’ Tate announced.
‘No plumbing of any kind that we could see.’
I suddenly had the overpowering urge to pee.
‘We’ll figure out something. It’s not that big a deal really.’ Chaske was trying to sound reassuring.
It felt like a big, ginormous, urgent problem. Mum always said she was going to ‘the necessary’. She hated any of the words – British or American – for toilet. Now the title seemed one hundred per cent appropriate.
Until now the worst thing that had ever happened to me was Tristan Carmichael breaking up with me before prom. I felt light-headed from my dramatic change in priorities. If I survived this, I promised whatever god was listening that I would never complain about anything ever again.