Half Lives

by Sara Grant

  Marissa was obsessed with staying in shape. She had a daily workout routine. She covered her body odour with a dose of Clinique Happy. You could smell her before you saw her, like walking into a citrus grove and discovering the orange trees were planted in cow dung.

  ‘Hey, Ice!’ Marissa called as she passed on her early-morning run. Marissa had turned the lights on in the tunnel. Her D&G bag was slung over her shoulder with everything she owned – as if Lobo were going to drive away again with the rest of her stuff. The bag banged into her back as she ran.

  In my half-dozing state, I rubbed my eyes and propped myself up on my elbows. I checked my watch – it was six thirty-seven in the morning. Seriously, Marissa? I’d started sleeping about ten hours a day. It helped pass the time and I was weary from our new apocalyptic diet.

  I reached for my comforter, wanting to cocoon myself away. Funny that I still did things like that. I’d forget where I was for a minute and think that I was somehow tucked in my king-size bed at home. I had this fluffy comforter that was like being snuggled in a bed of marshmallows – minus the stickiness. Mum had let me and Lola tie-dye the comforter cover black and red. It hadn’t turned out exactly as we’d planned. The red and black sunbursts looked more like gunshot wounds. I reached for it again but grasped thin air.

  I tucked myself in a ball to find a degree or two more warmth in this cool, dark space. I usually wore a pair of jeans and my cargo pants, a T-shirt and a sweatshirt to bed. But I still felt a chill. I buried my head under the pile of clothes I used as a pillow.

  I easily dipped back into sleep. I was dreaming that Lola and I were at the mall but the shops were closed. One minute people were everywhere, crashing into me, and the next minute everyone was gone and I was alone in the middle of the mall, calling for my mum and dad.

  ‘Ice.’ Someone was poking me. I batted them away.

  ‘Ice.’ It was Marissa and I couldn’t figure out what she was doing at the mall. ‘Ice, you were calling out in your sleep.’

  ‘Yeah, so?’ I turned over and tried to make like I accidentally pushed her away.

  She regained her balance and moved back to the entrance of my room. ‘You sounded upset. You were calling out for your mom and dad.’ She started twisting the studs up and down her ear, one by one.

  ‘My mum,’ I corrected. ‘My mum is British and that’s what I call her, Mum.’ Why I needed to make sure she understood this distinction, I didn’t know exactly. ‘Why are you waking everyone up?’ Annoyance was scratching my insides. I wanted my dream back. She’d woken me before my parents had had a chance to make even a dream appearance. ‘Let us sleep. Do you have to be so perky all the time? What in the hell do we have to be happy about?’

  She looked as if my words had punctured the blow-up Marissa doll. Her shoulders sagged. I thought she might cry.

  ‘I was just trying to help,’ she muttered.

  ‘Yeah, I know. Sorry.’ It was bad enough without me tapping into my inner bitch. None of this was her fault, but her obsessive need to exercise partnered with this exaggerated positive attitude was bugging the shit out of me.

  She started running on the spot. The flash of sadness from a moment ago was gone.

  ‘Are you going to join us for poker later?’ she asked, backing out of my room. ‘Your moping isn’t helping anyone.’

  Maybe I could handle her perky and her bossy but her condescension was a step too far. She was winding me up again. I bit my lip to keep from lashing out.

  She continued with her lecture on how I should behave, oblivious to how agitated she was making me. She was oblivious to everything really. I tried to tune her out but it wasn’t easy. ‘Your attitude determines your—’

  Argh! She was always doing that. She was like some famous quote app on acid. She had some sort of saying for everything, but she never got it quite right. At first it had been funny, maybe even a little charming, but now it was just infuriating.

  ‘Altitude. Yeah, I know,’ I said, showing great restraint. Getting upset with her again wasn’t going to help either of us. Something wasn’t quite right about the way she was acting. I was starting to worry about her.

  ‘So, poker later?’ she asked again, still running in place.

  ‘I’ll have to check my schedule.’

  ‘We’re playing right after lunch.’

  I let out an exasperated groan. ‘We’ve done the same thing for the past ten days.’

  ‘I know. Whatever.’ She raced away.

  I went to the door and waited until she disappeared around the first bend. I knew I probably only had ten minutes before she’d pass this way again. I marched over to Chaske’s room. We had to do something about Marissa.

  When I peeked into his room, he was standing with his back to me wearing only this tatty white pair of boxers. The elastic band was wavy and they hung off his hips. There was a hole on one butt cheek. But that wasn’t the most shocking thing. His body was a roadmap of wounds. His lovely brown skin had round, dark dots and lighter lines. When he bent over to rummage around in his backpack, I saw that the skin behind his knees was a spaghetti bowl of scars.

  I stifled a gasp and ducked to one side of his door, out of sight. Maybe he’d been in a car accident, or maybe there were more scary things for him outside than deadly viruses or chemical attacks. Maybe that’s why he didn’t care that the world could be ending. He looked as though he’d already survived a war.

  ‘Chaske, can I come in?’ I called. I heard him shuffling around in his room.

  ‘Yeah, one second.’ More shuffling. ‘All right.’

  When I entered, he was sitting on his bed, fully clothed in his uniform of plain T-shirt and jeans. ‘Hey, Ice,’ he said in his low baritone voice, any hint of sleep long gone. ‘Everything OK? You’re up early.’

  I completely forgot why I was there. My mind was filled with the image of those awful scars. He removed the rubber band from the end of his long braid and combed his fingers through his shiny, thick black hair. Ever since we’d locked ourselves in, I’d imagined him as my rock, my hero – this perfectly mysterious man who seemed so in control. Now he seemed broken somehow.

  ‘Icie?’ he said. He started to chew one of his nails but thought better of it.

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ I said, shaking off his secret. ‘It’s Marissa. She’s driving me crazy.’

  ‘She’s dealing the best she can.’ He gestured to his cot and I plopped down next to him.

  ‘Yeah, I know.’ I felt the overwhelming need to tell him everything was going to be all right, that whoever or whatever had hurt him was out there and couldn’t hurt him any more, but I couldn’t. I finally understood why he didn’t want to talk about anything from before.

  ‘Can’t you talk to her about waking up everyone so early? I need my beauty sleep,’ I said, tossing my dreads behind my shoulders and batting my eyes at him. ‘If I’m going to be Miss Apocalypse America when we get out, I’ve got to get my rest.’

  He sort of smiled.

  ‘And all that exercise can’t be good with as little as we have to eat,’ I continued. ‘I am worried about her. Something’s not right. She acts too perky and I think she’s going to blow one day.’

  ‘We should just give her time and space,’ he said.

  He was probably right. I needed to lighten up. Maybe it was me, not her. Without realizing what I was doing, I leaned into him. He slipped his arm around me. I rested my head on his shoulder as if it were the most natural thing for me to do. This closeness surprised me, but I surrendered to it. And for a moment, I was content. All my anger and frustration faded.

  ‘Icie.’ He touched my face and I flinched. What was he doing? ‘Icie,’ he said again more quietly and turned my face towards his. He was looking into my eyes, directly into my soul. Was he going to kiss me? I closed my eyes, willing it to happen. I could feel his breath on my face.

  ‘Hey, guys!’

  My eyes sprang open. It was Tate. I scrambled away from Chaske, nearly falling of
f his cot. I got to my feet.

  ‘I thought since we were up already we might start the poker tournament early.’ He was oblivious that he’d wrecked the best moment I’d had since my world fell apart. But maybe I had misread the situation. Maybe Tate had saved me from completely embarrassing myself.

  ‘So what do you say? You two losers ready to lose?’ Tate was clutching what looked like one of Chaske’s black T-shirts in his hand, except it rattled when he shook it. ‘I collected four hundred pebbles from that avalanched wall.’

  ‘I thought we agreed that you wouldn’t go back there.’ Chaske’s voice was low and loud again.

  ‘Chillax there, big man. I thought poker would be way more fun if we had more stuff to bet with.’ We had been playing with the hundred-ish fifty-dollar bills left in my money belt.

  ‘How about after breakfast?’ Chaske said. ‘I’m starving.’ Midnight appeared in the doorway and gave one short, sharp meow, as if she was hungry too.

  ‘You’ve also got to catch Marissa,’ I said as I picked up Midnight. I cradled her in my arms like a baby. She wriggled a bit to get comfortable, but she loved being held close. I kissed her on the top of the head.

  ‘Yeah, Baldy’s in. I already asked. She can’t stand that I’m whipping her in poker.’ Tate tossed the deck of cards to Chaske. ‘I’ll go get breakfast and meet you up top.’

  ‘OK,’ Chaske and I said at once.

  Tate darted down the tunnel, leaving Chaske and me alone again. There was a new strangeness between us.

  ‘I’ll go and get the . . .’ He paused as if he had to think of something. He was brushing past me. ‘I’ll go and set up things up there.’

  ‘I’ll, um, see you there. I’ve got to, well . . .’ I stammered, but thankfully he was gone before I had to finish that unfinishable sentence.

  I waited in my room, snuggling with Midnight. I felt even weirder than I normally did. There were these new feelings about Chaske. I thought about all the scars covering his body and about that magical moment when I think he almost kissed me. It was all too confusing.

  Marissa and Tate passed by. ‘What are you waiting for, Dread?’ Tate called when he saw me sitting on my cot.

  ‘Yeah, coming.’ Midnight jumped out of my arms and raced up the tunnel.

  The entryway near the metal door had become our social spot – like the Starbucks of the unfinished nuclear waste repository. It was the biggest space. I felt less confined here. I also thought we’d be able to hear my parents when they finally arrived. It had only been about two weeks. That wasn’t that long. I’d seen the traffic leaving Vegas. The highways were probably crammed. My mind flashed to the woman’s face in the minivan. The image of a family locked behind glass, frozen in time. And the image of that old woman slumped in her seat, the awkward tilt of her neck and how her hair was flattened to the back of her head. Then there was the guy with the gun. My mind always zoomed in on the barrel and what looked like an unblinking eye staring at us. The hole that housed a bullet. I couldn’t picture the guy’s face, but for some reason I could picture the bullet. Mum and Dad were out there among all that, but they were smart. They would survive. They had to.

  By the time I reached the entryway, the cards were dealt and four piles of one hundred pebbles had been distributed. Marissa was handing out our breakfast. Midnight was already snoozing by the door. We sat cross-legged on Chaske’s sleeping bag. The red, green and blue tartan flannel made our pebble chips hard to see. I placed my palm flat on the threadbare material. Chaske must have had this since he was a kid. I rubbed my hand back and forth across the soft flannel and imagined a seven-year-old Chaske tucked inside for his first camping trip. Then I remembered the scars on his back and that idyllic childhood vanished.

  ‘You in, Dread?’ Tate asked. His legs flapped. I’d quickly learned that was Tate’s ‘tell’. When he had a good hand, he bounced nervously; when he had a bad hand, he sat perfectly still.

  I checked my cards: a four of clubs and a seven of diamonds. ‘I fold,’ I said.

  Marissa sat next to me. She wore her sunglasses when we played. She held her cards close to her chest and peered at them again. She placed them face down on the blanket then began to twist her big pink watch on her wrist around and around. ‘I’ll see your two and raise you two,’ she said, dropping four pebbles in the centre of the blanket. Her hand shot immediately to her ear and twisted the diamond stud in her earlobe, then the next two hoops and on up the ear she went. This fidgeting behaviour had started a few days ago. She was always twisting or pulling or tugging at her jewellery, or her buttons or clothes. I glanced at Chaske and the look he gave me said he’d noticed it too.

  ‘That’s too rich for my blood,’ Chaske said, slipping his cards under the pile of pebbles.

  ‘Guess it’s me and you, Baldy,’ Tate said, legs wiggling. The bidding continued and the final cards were revealed.

  ‘I win!’ Marissa shouted, a little too loudly. She raked the pebbles in front of her. ‘I win. I win. I win.’ Her fingers stroked her pile of pebbles, making them rattle like a piggy bank full of pennies.

  ‘Yeah, all right already,’ Tate shouted. ‘It was just dumb luck.’

  Even with sunglasses, I could tell Marissa was giving Tate a hateful stare. I didn’t completely understand where her hostility and this over-competitive nature were coming from. ‘Watch out, rich boy,’ Marissa said. She poked her finger in Tate’s chest.

  ‘Hey!’ Tate said, rubbing the spot she’d poked. ‘That hurt.’

  Chaske brushed her hand away.

  ‘This is supposed to be a friendly game,’ Chaske said to Tate and Marissa. I almost expected him to say something like: ‘If you kids can’t play nice, I’ll put the game away.’ That’s what my mum always said if Lola and I ever got too rowdy playing Super Street Fighter IV. We’d gone through a phase when we were ten when we locked ourselves away for a weekend and survived on nothing but video games, Red Bull and peanut M&Ms. Being in here felt kind of like that.

  Marissa slipped her sunglasses onto the top of her bald head. She rubbed her eyes and cracked her neck from side to side. ‘Sorry, Tate,’ she said. ‘It’s just I haven’t been able to sleep, you know, and it’s all a bit, whatever, and I, well, I can’t, you know what I mean.’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ I said. That’s how my head felt too most of the time. All jumbled. My body was always in a heightened sense of alert. It was hard to live not knowing, but always fearing.

  ‘Just deal.’ Marissa dug around in her handbag and whipped out a roll of peppermint Life Savers. ‘Mint?’ She offered one to each of us. Even though she was the queen of body odour, fresh breath was a priority. She made sure we got one breath mint a day. I sucked on the mint very slowly, savouring the cool sweetness.

  We played for the rest of the morning, upping the ante every half hour. That’s a trick Tate taught us from Vegas poker tournaments. It kept the game moving. The first time we played poker the game lasted for hours. It wasn’t as if we had anything better to do, but the game lost its lustre after about three hours.

  The last hand was down to Tate and Marissa. Tate’s legs were bouncing and he was even drumming his fingers on his thighs. He must’ve had a really good hand. I’d been the first one out of pebbles. I was only starting to get the hang of it – looking at my hand and figuring out my odds of winning. Chaske lost his pebbles next.

  I couldn’t be sure, because he never showed us his cards, but I think he’d intentionally thrown the game. I got the sense that, if he wanted to, Chaske would win every time. Tate bragged about his poker skills, but Chaske had the cool, calm demeanour of the poker players on those all-night poker channels.

  Chaske flipped the last card over. Tate’s lips twitched for only a split second into a smile and then he tried to make his expression blank.

  ‘I’m all in,’ Marissa said, and pushed her pile of chips into the middle.

  ‘Me too,’ Tate said and did the same.

  ‘It’s winner take all,�
� I said in my best TV poker-announcer voice. You’d think a safe bunker underground would trump being outside with a possible World War III scenario, but looking at Marissa’s bloodshot eyes and Tate’s pale skin, I wasn’t so sure. This place was taking its toll.

  Marissa showed her cards. She had two queens in her hand and there was a queen and two fours on the blanket. She had a full house. Tate beamed and slapped his cards down – he used the same two fours on the table, but he had the other two fours in his hand. ‘Four of a kind,’ he shouted, and jumped to his feet. ‘I win. You lose.’ He whooped and hollered. You’d think he’d won the lottery, not a pile of pebbles.

  ‘Who gives a shit about this stupid game?!’ Marissa shook her corner of the sleeping bag, causing the cards and pebbles to scatter. She stormed off. I’d been worried about Marissa before but this was mega-weird even for her.

  ‘Whoa,’ Tate said, freezing mid-victory dance. ‘I was just saying . . . I mean, it’s no big deal.’ He called after her, ‘I’m sure you’ll win next time, Baldy!’

  There would be no next time. When Tate brought the cards the next morning for poker, the queen of hearts was missing and, no matter where we looked, we couldn’t find it.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  ‘Don’t think, just do.’

  – Just Saying 15

  HARPER

  Harper squints through the snarled brambles. ‘Beckett,’ she calls. He wasn’t waiting at their spot like he promised. She followed a trail of footprints here, but she can’t believe Beckett would ever cross the Crown and break one of the Great I AM’s most sacred rules – anyone who crosses the Crown will be punished with death. Harper can’t believe that could happen. But why isn’t he answering? ‘Beckett, where are you?’