by Nate Kenyon
We found that lifeline and we clung to it. It gave us a reason to go on, to prepare for some kind of rescue.
Still, as the first few hours passed down in the hole the idea that we didn’t really know what was happening topside kept eating at me. I didn’t doubt that some sort of nuclear attack had occurred; after all, I’d seen the evidence with my own eyes. My brain kept trying frantically to scrub it away (maybe I’m imagining how bad it was, maybe I’m going crazy), but the images remained, burned into my memory.
I wondered whether humankind had survived at all, and if so, whether cleanup had already begun. With the confusion they would surely face in such an effort, would they really come for us? Isolated as we were down here, how would we know the truth?
It was the ultimate irony: we couldn’t know for sure unless we ventured outside. But we could not risk opening that hatch.
Sue and Jay huddled together for a while that night, holding each other and whispering things I couldn’t make out. Dan fiddled with the radio for a long time, looking for a signal, and then he paced the room, as if deep in thought. I sat in a chair and tried my best not to think at all. But that was impossible, and I found myself going over the last few hours before the strike, my last words to my mother, our time at the restaurant, the drive to Sparrow Island. I kept searching for something we’d done wrong, something we might have changed, a clue we should have caught. But, of course, there was nothing. And what good would it have done, even if there had been a warning?
And there was something else, something I was trying to avoid facing at all costs. That I could have been exposed. That I could be, even now, dying one cell at a time.
Sometime later Tessa came over to me. I stood up. She didn’t say anything at first, just touched my cheek where a purple bruise had spread. Her fingertips were hot and dry as she traced the pattern of my flesh. “I’m sorry I hit you,” she whispered. A tear trickled down her face, and she pressed her lips together. Then she hugged me. We stood there for what seemed like forever, just holding on to each other.
When I was six years old, a blizzard hit White Falls and covered our house with nearly three feet of snow. The power had gone out about an hour into the storm and with our nearest neighbor a half mile away, and nobody moving from where they’d dug in, we had no idea how long we would be stranded. My mother estimated that the plows wouldn’t come through until the middle of the following morning.
I didn’t like being locked up in the house. From the haunted, blood-starved look on her face, I could tell my mother didn’t like it either.
But my father was a different story. It was as if the storm had breathed life into his otherwise pale existence. Jeff Taylor’s eyes grew brighter and his face flushed a healthy pink. He went around sipping his usual rum and Coke and humming a Beatles tune, his steps speeded up and more purposeful than before. The cruelty that was normally present in him was gone.
That day might have been the most excited I’d ever seen him. He went from window to window, staring out into the swirling blizzard and grunting his approval. He pointed out several times how the ice clung to the branches of the trees, and the snow drifted and swelled against tree trunks and brush. I think he liked the idea that there was nothing else alive and moving around out there.
Apparently we weren’t enthusiastic enough for him. After a while he took a lantern and went down into the basement and picked up one of his endless woodworking projects, leaving my mother and me upstairs to face the storm alone. We could hear him hammering away down there in the near dark. The moment, that hint of some sort of a connection, had fled.
What is it about isolation that brings certain people to life? What does it say about them? I remember wondering if my father might have been better off if my mother and I had never existed. Maybe it was the pressure of having to provide for his family that pushed his self-destruct button, or maybe it was the thought of someone cracking his shell and finding out who he really was underneath it.
Or maybe, just maybe, he knew he was mortally wounded, and like an animal with a broken leg he was just looking for a place to crawl off by himself and die.
CHAPTER SIX
It was Dan who finally pulled us together and gave us focus. I’d always thought of him as a born leader, mainly because he seemed to lack the imagination the rest of us had, but I realized later it wasn’t quite that. Dan was all about action. To make decisions quickly, you couldn’t think too much about the consequences, you just had to move fast and keep from second-guessing yourself. It was the same instinct that had served him well on the athletic fields, I suppose.
Of course, nobody is exactly the way others see them from the outside, and I didn’t really have a handle on him at all. But at that point, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that he was willing to act.
Early the following morning (we knew it was morning only by the clock mounted to the wall), he called us all together. We all sat but he remained standing at the head of the table, assuming a natural position of authority.
While we were all watching, he took a screwdriver from the little toolbox on the shelf and scraped a small, vertical line into the wall near the entrance to the other room. “Day one,” he said. “If we’re down here for a while, we’ll need to keep track.”
Day one. We all sat there and thought about that, the implications of lines on the wall, building up day by day until there were groups of six vertical lines with slashes through them, groups of seven at a time marching across the wall and marking the passing of days, weeks, maybe months. It was a pretty primitive way of marking a calendar, but maybe that was Dan’s point. If all else failed, power, water, if the batteries all died and we were sitting in the darkness, if we used the last of the paper and pencils, we could still scratch lines to keep track of time passing. Even without all those conveniences, we were still human beings. We were civilized, conscious and capable of order and structure. We were strong.
“Listen up,” he said. “We need to approach this situation rationally. Take stock of our supplies and estimate how long we can survive down here. Try to figure out the extent of the damage outside, and who might or might not be coming to help us.”
“You forgot praying,” I said. “Now’s a good time to find God.” I was only half kidding. I wasn’t particularly religious, but that sounded pretty smart to me at the moment.
“Dan’s right,” Jay said. “We’ve got to keep our heads. Disaster-response experts would say the same thing. We should make a list of our options, with all the pros and cons for each. What are the risks for each action? How can we make an informed decision?”
“My grandfather would have thought of everything,” Sue said. “He’s careful that way. He’ll have what we need to keep alive down here.”
“But not forever,” Dan said. “We have to know how long he planned for, and exactly what we’ve got. Maybe there’s some kind of supplies list. If not, we’ll have to make one. Sue, will you do an inventory when we’re done here?” She nodded. “Okay. So, assuming we have enough supplies to keep us safe for at least a month, our options are pretty simple. One, we remain where we are for as long as possible, and wait for the radio to work or for someone to come get us. Two, we open that hatch ourselves, stick our necks out and take a look.”
“No fucking way,” I said. “We both saw what happened out there, Dan.”
“I didn’t,” Jimmie muttered. He’d been so quiet I think we’d all half forgotten he was there. That wasn’t like Jimmie at all, and it made me very nervous.
Now he looked up and met my eyes. I saw a mixture of unreasoning hope, anger and pure fear. “How do I know?” he whispered. “You think you’re so funny, eh? Maybe you’re lying. Maybe this is some kind of big practical joke.”
“Believe me, it isn’t,” Dan said. “What kind of sick fuck would do that?”
Jimmie looked away from me. “Pete, maybe,” he said. Then he looked at Dan. “And anyway, who died and put you in charge?”
Ninety-
nine percent of the human race, I thought, but didn’t say it.
Jay spoke up. “Martial law,” he said. “In times of crisis, there must be a clear chain of command or everything will break down. Dan wants the job, I’m not going to stand in his way.”
“Me either,” I said. “You want it, Jimmie? You think you can do better? And for the record, I may be a joker, but even I know when to stop. This is no joke.”
“Fuck you,” Jimmie said, and stood up. Veins popped in his skinny neck, and his eyes bulged. He looked around the table. “Fuck all of you.”
“Yeah, that makes sense,” I said, and I stood up too. “We’re the enemy here. We’re the ones who blew up your house.”
I knew I should have kept quiet but he was pissing me off. As soon as I said it Jimmie sprang at me, hands out and going for my face. It happened so fast I hardly had time to get my arm up to ward off the blow, and the momentum from his body knocked me backward over my chair. I hit the floor hard and my head thudded against the carpet.
Jimmie was like a spitting cat, clawing at me as I tried to push him away.
Then he was gone. I looked up in time to see Dan picking him up by the back of his shirt and slamming him into a chair. “Knock it off!” he shouted. “We’re not gonna fight each other, you hear? You hear me?”
Jimmie struggled for a moment, but Dan had him pinned, one big hand on the back of the chair, the other against Jimmie’s chest. He gave one final heave and then went limp and started crying, sucking air in great, whooping gasps. Snot hung from his nose. “Sorry,” he said, “sorry, I’m sorry…”
Dan let him go and turned away to help me up. “I’m all right,” I muttered. “I’m okay.”
Jimmie wiped a forearm across his face. “Sorry,” he said again. His chest hitched like a little kid’s after a tantrum. “It’s just…I just freaked out.”
“You’re a quick little son of a bitch, you know that?” I said. I made a big show out of squinting at him and rubbing the lump on the back of my head. “And now there’s two of you. Great.”
Jimmie stared at me for a moment and then he burst out laughing. So did Sue and Tessa. The tension broken, Dan shook his head and sat down.
“Let’s take a vote,” Sue said, after we’d all calmed down. “Wouldn’t that be fair? Who thinks Dan should be in charge?”
We all raised our hands. Even Jimmie.
“Okay,” Dan said. “Enough of this horseshit, then. Let’s get down to business. We all heard what Jay said last night. The fallout alone will kill anyone stupid enough to go outside. We can’t risk everyone’s lives just to take a peek. So that leaves option one.”
“What if there was, I don’t know, some kind of protection around here?” I felt stupid as soon as I said it, but the words were out. “A suit, something.”
“Hazmat suits don’t protect against radiation,” Jay said. “Biological warfare, yes, but not this kind of attack.”
“We stay inside as long as possible, then,” Dan said. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t stay busy. We need to explore every inch of this place, and keep working the radio. We need to conserve food, starting right now, by keeping track of everything we eat. We should make a note of anything we might be able to use, anything at all. Are you with me?”
We all nodded. “Good. Now let’s start that list.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
We did, indeed, find hazmat suits in a garment bag in the little bedroom closet, and we found a bunch of other stuff too: some spare T-shirts and shorts, a fire extinguisher, rodent and insect killer, more spare batteries, three tooth-brushes and six tubes of toothpaste under the bathroom vanity, a pretty extensive medical kit with potassium iodide tablets, Geiger counter, notebooks and pencils, some DVDs and a stack of books. But the most important thing we found hidden behind some blankets on the top shelf in the closet: a .38 snub-nosed Smith & Wesson revolver with two boxes of bullets.
Dan took the gun down and brought it to the table. We stood around staring at it for a while. It was hard to imagine that we suddenly lived in a world where a weapon was a necessity. But I think we all finally realized that the people who came to open our hatch (if anyone came at all) might not be friendly.
Then Dan put the gun away again and we all sat down at the table and talked. We talked about what we would do when the world went back to normal, even though we knew things would never really be normal again. Big Sue said she wanted to go right to Dairy Queen with her mother and get a Blizzard full of peanut butter cups. Tessa said she would cook a big dinner for her friends and then sit around the fire drinking hot chocolate. Jimmie (who seemed to be handling things a little better now) said he would play catch with his dad in the park across the street. Dan wanted go to an action movie with his baby brother and eat a tub of hot buttered popcorn. I wanted to drive to Six Flags and ride the roller coaster.
We all picked things we liked to do as little kids. Maybe that meant something.
Jay didn’t say much. He looked different. I saw something in his face that made me think of time passing, as if he had continued moving ahead while we fell back on memories. I don’t think he liked what he saw there.
Sometime later, when we had gone over the list of inventory again, separating it into categories and trying to get a handle on how long we could last down in that hole, we all sort of hit the wall at once. I looked around the table at glazed eyes and slack-jawed faces. We were all most likely still in shock, and our brains and bodies were shutting down. We’d been awake, more or less, for over twenty-four hours now. All we had seen, all we had been through, was overwhelming us.
I grabbed a blanket and pillow from the storage shelf and took one of the lower bunks near the closet. Jimmie climbed into the bunk above me, Dan and Jay to my right, and Tessa and Sue in the bunk near the bathroom.
As dead tired as I was, I lay there blinking up into the darkness for a while before I fell asleep. I dreamed I stood on the edge of the water and watched the sky bloom red. Naked people waded toward me. Everyone I knew was there; teachers, family members, friends and neighbors, and their faces were melting like soft clay against a blast furnace. They were screaming at me as their flesh dripped and ran but I could not move. I looked to my right and saw Jay and Dan embracing, and the flesh of their arms ran together and started smoldering. Then they burst into flames.
I woke up and watched Jay climb quietly down from the upper bunk next to me, cross the room and get into the lower bunk with Sue. It was dark, but there was enough light from the lantern in the other room to see shapes. Jimmie was snoring in the bunk above me, and Dan’s bed was empty.
Jay whispered something and slipped under the blanket. Sue reached up and traced a pattern on his face as he held himself above her. He leaned down and kissed her, and I heard her sobbing softly as he rocked her in the dark.
I must have drifted off again. When I woke up, someone was sitting on the edge of my bed. The shape was too large to be Tessa. Sue. The others were asleep in their beds again. I could hear them breathing.
“Are you scared, Pete?” she asked.
I sat up and touched the tender skin of my cheeks. It was tingling slightly, like a sunburn. “Of course I am. I’d have to be crazy not to be.”
“The whole world is crazy! Our lives have been ripped apart and there’s nobody to stitch them back together again. And we all just went to sleep.”
I glanced around at the huddled forms of my friends. Then I looked at Sue. She looked so vulnerable sitting there. They all did. I guess I was grasping for something, anything that would make her feel better.
“We have each other, Sue,” I said. “That’s got to count for something. We’re going to be fine.”
Maybe I wanted her to think I was strong, that I could handle it. But I could tell immediately that I’d made a mistake.
“Fuck that,” she said. Anger had bloomed in her plump face. “You show me how we’re fine. How are you fine? You think we’re just going to wait a few days, then walk out
of here and start rebuilding the world?”
“No, I don’t,” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make it sound like nothing happened. It’s just—”
“Everything’s changed. Everything.”
Her voice had ticked up a notch. Someone shifted in one of the other bunks. I reached out to touch her arm. “Sorry,” I said again. “We’re in trouble. Big trouble. But we’re alive. That’s all I meant. We’re alive.”
“He should have been here,” she said. “My mother would have been with him. She would have driven to my grandpa’s house, and they both would have come down here to the shelter. I don’t understand it.”
“Maybe they couldn’t get here, but they found somewhere else to hole up,” I said. “We have to try to stay hopeful, you know?”
Sue nodded. “I’m worried about Jay,” she whispered. A tear slipped from one eye and trickled down her cheek. “We’ve been…seeing each other. I know some things about him that are important. But I don’t want to…betray him.” She waved her hand as if to wipe something away from her face.
“I think we’re past stuff like that,” I said.
“His medication,” she said. “Oh, God, Pete. What’s going to happen to us, really?”
When you’re the class clown and the end of the world comes, you’re kind of out of a job. Or, maybe not, after all; maybe your job becomes even more important than ever, and more difficult. There’s a razor-thin line between hilarious and offensive when you’re talking about death. Think about it: some of the funniest jokes in the world are about dying. A priest, a rabbi and a lawyer go to heaven…that sort of thing. Or worse. Humor is a way of facing the pain without the fear, or breaking it down in ways we can handle.