by Nate Kenyon
If I knew then what I know now, maybe I wouldn’t have found Dan so easy to tease. Hell, maybe I would have done a lot of things differently. But I didn’t, and I can’t exactly take it back. As my mother would say, what’s done is done; work on what’s to come.
“Are those new Vans?” I asked Tessa, while Jimmie, Big Sue and Jay were in line buying items off the dollar menu. She had these cute little doll feet, and I knew her nails were painted red underneath because she wore sandals a lot. I guess you could say I loved Tessa, in some purely wholesome way (I swear), but then again, half the world might say the same, if they saw her the way I did. She was barely over five feet tall, with these huge dark eyes and expressive mouth, and she probably weighed all of a hundred pounds. In those days I often wondered why she bothered to hang with me. She’d moved in next door right around the time of my father’s death, and we had become close friends pretty quickly. She didn’t seem to mind my weirdness and humor at the most inappropriate moments, and she didn’t mind my friends. The obvious answer was that she had a crush on Dan, but she’d never shown much interest in him. Maybe it was the pot.
Anyway, these new shoes of hers were red and black with pink laces, all the rage these days. The sides had a skull-and-crossbones pattern. “Designed them myself online,” she said with a small half smile. “You like?”
“They’re cool. I was thinking of getting some Skechers if I can save up.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Skechers are so out, Pete.”
“As in ‘so out they’re coming back again’?”
“Nice try, but no.”
“What are you talking about?” Jimmie said. He was back from line with a trayful of Mickey D goodness, looking confused.
“Skechers, dipshit,” I said. “I was thinking of getting some.”
“Mischa Barton was wearing them on E! last night, eh,” Jimmie said. He had this annoying habit of saying “eh” at the end of a sentence as if he were Canadian or something. “They even made a point of talking about it.”
“Probably paid her a million bucks,” I said. “And what the hell were you doing watching E!?”
“I think Mischa’s hot.”
“Sure, if you like twelve-year-old anorexic boys.”
“Where are we going to get high?” Jay said, plopping back down in his seat. He was all business when it came to pot. He was voted the most likely to end up in rehab. I think he needed it to take the edge off. His parents put more pressure on him than anyone, because he was egg-head smart and was headed to Yale. His dad was a grad, and his older sister too, and Yale banners and books were displayed all over the house like a roadmap they’d put up for Jay’s life. Talk about pressure, all right. All that was missing was the huge, blinking neon arrow: THIS WAY TO THE PSYCH WARD.
Jay was a conspiracy theorist. If you asked him about the government, he’d get this glint in his eye and go off on top-secret organizations and futuristic weaponry and spy satellites and plots to control the world. I look at all that pretty differently now; but back then, I just laughed it off or made fun of him, the way I did most everything.
The joker, the class clown. The shrink I went to for a week called that a defense mechanism. I called him a few names bad enough to keep me from going back there ever again. A good shrink might have smiled and nodded and pointed out that my defenses were raised yet again, but this guy was lousy and I think we both knew it. I was probably better off in the end.
We went through the usual locations as we ate, all of them getting vetoed for various reasons. Then Sue spoke up. “My grandfather finished the shelter last week,” she said.
The table fell silent. “That crazy bastard,” I said. “Someone ought to tell him the USSR is long gone. What’s he afraid of, anyway?”
“North Korea, I think. They’ve got nuclear weapons that can hit us from over there. He read about it on the Net.”
“There are worse things than North Korea,” Jay said, tucking some of his long, unruly black hair behind his ears and glancing at Sue. Smart as he was, he’d usually say the grass was purple if Sue said it first. But this was right in his wheelhouse. He pushed his large round glasses up on the bridge of his nose, looking remarkably like that actor who played Harry Potter in all those billion-dollar movies (I even used to call him Potter for a while, as a joke, until he told me he hated it. I might be a smart-ass, but I’d like to think I’m not a complete jerk).
“Underground terrorist groups have been secretly testing long-range missiles,” he said, “and we already know they’ve got nukes. And worse than that too.”
“So? We’ve got a missile shield, right?” Jimmie said. “Shoot the fuckers out of the sky.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Why not?” Jimmie made a noise like a firing rocket, and pantomimed his two hands coming together. “Bam,” he said. “Just like that. Gone.”
Dan had appeared from out of the back at some point during the conversation. His shift was over, and now he stood over us, letter jacket in hand, like a guy who’s ready to bolt at a moment’s notice. I knew he hated this job, and only did it because he needed the money. Football was his true passion. But high school was almost over, and he wasn’t going to college. No athletic scholarships for players from little Podunk schools like ours, and his grades were lousy. He was like the guy who worked all day in the paper mill and lived for the weekends, drinking himself silly down at the bar with his buddies. I wondered if he might just become that paper mill guy, in a few more years.
He punched me in the shoulder a little too hard, and I pretended not to feel it. It was our little game, I guess. Hurt like a son of a bitch. Some game.
“Who cares about North Korea or a bunch of third-world terrorists? The shelter’s probably stacked with food and it’s empty. Is that your point, Sue?”
“I know how to get in,” she said. “He’s asleep by now. Nobody will see us.”
We looked at each other across the table. Jay nodded. Tessa just smiled. That was the end of the discussion.
We all jumped into Jimmie’s car and headed out to the island.
CHAPTER TWO
Sparrow Island. I still think back on that drive, and what might have happened if we’d switched on the radio. Would we have turned back and run home to our families? Would I have died huddled under the dining room table with my mother beside me? Or would we have realized it was too late and just kept going, aware that there was nothing else we could do to stay alive except get to Sparrow Rock?
But we didn’t turn on the radio, and we didn’t know what was coming, and so we ended up crossing the bridge and turning onto the long driveway that led to the Myers estate about fifteen minutes later.
I want you to understand something here. We’d all known each other for a long time. Hell, I’d known Jimmie since the first day of kindergarten. We sat next to each other in those little plastic chairs, the kind that stick to your legs after coming in all hot and sweaty from recess. That very first day, I’d felt sorry for him when the teacher pointed to a letter on the board and he didn’t know it, and so I leaned over and whispered the answer in his ear. Of course the teacher saw it and gave me a lecture. But Jimmie appreciated my effort all the same.
You know about Dan and me already, and the rest of the gang I’d met freshman year of high school in some class or another, and we’d been friends ever since. So we knew each other pretty well, all right. But we were kids. When you’re a kid, saying you’re friends means you know what kind of soda they like, and the TV shows they watch and whether they want to drive a Mustang or a Volkswagen. You might know something embarrassing they did once, or whom they have a crush on, or whether they pick their nose. But you don’t know who they really are. The private thoughts they don’t share with anyone. The dreams they don’t want to let into the world. Things that make them bleed inside.
So I guess I should say we thought we knew each other, but we were wrong. That was the way it was among all of us, before Sparrow Rock.
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br /> Sue’s grandpa, Scott Myers, had bought the eighty-acre island just off the coast years ago and built a bridge and an entire complex at the foot of the Rock, spending a chunk of the huge pile of cash he’d made in the lumber business back in the fifties. He was slowly losing his grip, but that didn’t keep the contractors from taking his money. The latest extravagance was the bomb shelter, which had probably cost him ten times what my father had made in a year, and which would sit, gathering dust, until one hundred years from now someone else saw fit to fill in the hole.
At least, that was the way we saw it then.
We’d all been eagerly waiting for the day they finished the shelter. We’d witnessed various stages of its construction, although none of us had been out here in weeks. But facing it now, as a bone-shivering mist drifted in off the water, I felt vaguely disappointed. There was nothing but a round submarine-style hatch set into a ring of concrete at the base of Sparrow Rock to mark its presence.
On a good day you could stand at the top of the Rock and get a clean look at the mainland. If the air were calm and clear you could make out the faces of the people who would sometimes stop their cars and stare across at the construction on the other side. There was probably no more than a hundred yards of open water between them. But they never came over, these gawkers. They knew that there was nothing but Scott Myers’s place over here, and Grandpa Myers did not take kindly to uninvited guests. As far as I knew he had yet to actually shoot at someone who trespassed on his property, but the rumor was there were more than a few who had personally witnessed the barrel end of his shotgun.
There was something strange about Grandpa Myers, I had to admit. He was one of those guys who commanded instant respect, but with a healthy dose of fear mixed in too. When you met him you got the feeling he was capable of just about anything. Something in his eyes, maybe. Some of it was the money, sure. Although we never talked much to Sue about it, we were all pretty sure he was worth more than God. When you had that much money you had to be careful, and you probably developed a pretty severe case of paranoia too. Everyone was after you for something.
I always felt Sue was just a little bit afraid of him, and maybe I understood that a little better than I was willing to admit at the time. She loved him, of course, and he sure did love her. Sue’s parents were divorced and her father had been missing in action for years, so maybe her grandfather felt like she needed special care. But he was getting older, and this whole bomb-shelter thing made it seem like he was losing his marbles. What we found out later made everything make some kind of twisted sense, but Sue would have been the last person to talk about any of that then.
We stood now staring down at this metal hatch, and I couldn’t help wondering if this was a mistake. A guy like that catches you out here messing with his stuff, even if he likes you—what might he do to you? The stories about that shotgun came to mind. But Sue was with us, and I guess it made me feel safe enough. After all, she was family. You see, as friends of Big Sue, we were the chosen ones. As far as Grandpa Myers was concerned, we were welcome. Everyone else could go to hell, and the faster the better.
“He tunneled thirty feet down into granite,” Sue said. “It’s stocked. Fully operational, the lights, air, water, everything. There’s enough food in there to feed a family for months.”
Sparrow Rock loomed over us, a boulder of immense proportions, the tip of an otherwise sleeping giant buried in the topsoil. Grandpa Myers’s house sat silently a few hundred feet away, a hulking, industrial-looking tank of a place on the water’s edge, its small, square windows dark and empty.
Tessa whistled softly, her little lips pursed, arms crossed beneath her breasts in the cold. I caught a whiff of the salt air mixed with sweet perfume as Sue touched a keypad set into the rock, and a faint hissing sound rose up into the night.
Dan twisted the hatch and swung it open. Sue leaned down, hit a switch, and several bulbs set into the wall and protected by wire cages blinked on. We faced a short ladder, concrete landing and a set of descending stairs that led to somewhere beyond our sight.
“Age before beauty,” I said, and elbowed Jimmie in the middle of his scrawny back. The smell of earth and concrete wafted up now from the hole. It felt vaguely like a crypt to me. Maybe it was that smell, or the look of the narrow hole, or the huge rock looming over us all in the dark, but I suddenly wanted no part of our little plan. I think Jimmie had the same feeling, because he took a step back. But Jay just pushed his way between us, swung onto the ladder and dropped to the top of the steps.
“What a bunch of pussies,” Dan said. “No offense, Sue.” He followed Jay into the hole. Big Sue followed him, then Tessa, and after staring at each other for a minute and feeling like idiots, Jimmie shrugged and we went down too.
The steps led down to a carpeted and paneled room maybe fifteen feet across, with a farmer’s table and six chairs in the middle. A row of shelves held blankets, pillows, clothing, books, a first-aid kit, flashlights, batteries and a bunch of other stuff all stored in clear plastic containers. A thirteen-inch LCD television with DVD player had been mounted in one corner of the ceiling.
“All the comforts of home,” Dan said, ducking back through a doorway with the TV remote in his big paw. “Cable works. Tons of food in there too. Munchies, anyone?”
Sue gave us the full tour. The kitchen was pretty small but held everything the most demanding bomb-shelter owner might require: tiled floor, refrigerator, stove, micro-wave, toaster, sink, even a dishwasher and trash compactor. A huge pantry off the kitchen was crammed with (among other things) flour and sugar, protein drinks and energy bars, cans of soups and vegetables, tuna and Spam, dehy-drated military meals, dried meat and fruits, crackers, hard candy, powdered milk and gallons of water. Another room held three twin bunk beds, and the single bathroom contained a handicapped-accessible shower, toilet and sink.
“There’s an underground water tank to supply the bathroom and kitchen,” Big Sue said. “It recycles, I think. This place has its own septic system too.”
“No shit,” I said. Nobody seemed to get the joke, or if they did they didn’t want to give me the satisfaction of a reaction.
I didn’t know jack about bomb shelters, but this one seemed like the deluxe model to me. I had the vague idea of little tin cans buried in the ground with a hole in the floor for a toilet and jugs of warm water that tasted like plastic. The kind of place you wanted to leave as soon as possible. This was like a five-star hotel by comparison, and would suit our needs for the evening just fine.
The smell of pot had started wafting in from the other room. We wandered back in that direction. Jay was sitting at the table, joint in one hand, eyes closed, half smile on his face. Smoking pot was the only time I ever saw him relax, and he was getting his groove on good this time. Must have been a bitch of a day.
Big Sue dug around the shelves and found a pack of cards, while I went into the pantry and started rifling through the food. When I returned with a bag of chips, beef jerky, a bottle of soda and plastic cups, the gang had already started playing a hand of poker around the table. “Deal me in,” I said. “Prepare to be annihilated.”
I got a pair of threes in the first hand. Just my luck. But then things got a bit better. The joint made the rounds several times, and less than an hour later we were all feeling pretty good.
“You’re all straight guys, right?” Sue said, after winning a hand with a royal flush.
“Last time I checked,” Jimmie said.
“All right, Jimmie. If you and your girlfriend were the last people on earth, would you make a baby?”
“Obviously a hypothetical question,” I said. “What with the girlfriend and the possibility of sex and all.” Jimmie threw a piece of jerky at me.
“No, seriously, would you bring a child into a world like that?”
Sue was always coming up with this stuff. She was a philosopher and an environmentalist, which I thought was probably the most dangerous combination imaginable.
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“Come on, Sue,” Dan said. “That’s shit. You’re making my head hurt.”
“I don’t know,” Jimmie said. “What’s the world like? Where’d everybody go?”
“Let’s say it’s been wiped out by a disease and you’re immune. But you don’t know if the baby would be.”
“That’s a different question,” I said, getting into it. My brain buzzed slightly, my mouth coated with fuzz. “You’re talking about risking the child’s life.”
“It’s a question of moral responsibility,” Jay said. “You owe it to the human race to procreate.”
“Something like that isn’t a duty,” Tessa said. “And what if one person wants to and the other doesn’t? You can’t just force it. It takes two people to make a child, unless you’re talking about rape.”
“Deal the fucking hand,” Dan said irritably. “‘Moral responsibility’ my ass. I have to be home by midnight. I don’t have time for this bullshit.”
“Pot’s supposed to mellow you out,” I said. “So, let’s say you both agree to go for it. If the baby survives, it has to grow up in a world without people? And Jay, fucking genius that you are, you fail to point out that you’d have to make two babies, a boy and girl, to save the human race, and then you’d be asking a brother and sister to do the nasty.”
“That’s disgusting, eh,” said Jimmie. “You’ve got a fucked-up mind, you know that?”
“Somebody has to think of these things. I just elected myself king of the pervs.”
We all looked at Jay. A bunch of students looking to the teacher for the correct answer. “I’m telling you, you’d end up having the child,” Jay said. “It’s human nature. You can’t stop it, even if you wanted to.”
A look passed between Big Sue and Jay, just a moment of eye contact, but it was there. They’d been gravitating closer together lately, and I wondered if something might be going on. Sue was tall and a little overweight and Jay was a serious geek, but stranger things have happened.