by Nate Kenyon
It had to be a dream. Yet there was more, and this time I heard him say something like “doomsday waltz,” but that didn’t make any sense.
I sat back for a minute and exhaled, trying to will myself to relax and think. There was someone still alive out there. Someone was alive and broadcasting.
I smiled, then chuckled, and then I gave a great whoop, all my emotions spilling out at once in a cry that would wake the dead. The others came running, first Dan, wide-awake in an instant and ready for action, carrying the battery-powered lantern like a weapon; then Sue and Tessa, both of them groggy from sleep but equal parts terrified and bewildered; and finally Jimmie, limping slightly but otherwise looking remarkably like his old self, apart from the odd bald patches on his head.
When I explained to them what had happened, they looked blankly at me at first, as if unwilling to believe it. But my enthusiasm must have convinced them, because one after another, smiles broke out across their faces, then laughs and claps and hugs. Even Sue, her dirt-smeared and tearstained face still slightly swollen from Jay’s slap, seemed to light up from the inside.
They all gathered around me at the table and listened as we scanned through the frequencies again. This time the static was unbroken, and I went back through again, then again, one click at a time. Nothing. Slowly the light in them began to dim, the energy draining from the room.
I went through it yet again. Nothing.
“Doomsday,” I said. “I’m telling you. Something like ‘doomsday waltz.’ Pretty poetic, huh?” I pictured a thousand couples slow dancing to music through mushroom clouds, as the world slowly crashed and burned around them. Some image.
Rainbows are visions, but only illusions, and rainbows have nothing to hide…
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Dan said. “Are you sure you weren’t hearing things? Pops in the static that sounded like a voice? I mean, it’s understandable, we’re all tired, we want something badly enough—”
“I swear to God,” I said. “You think I’d make this up? No, no way. I heard it loud and clear.”
“What were you listening to the radio for, anyway? You know I listen to it every morning and every night—”
“Hey,” I said. “Sorry. I didn’t realize you were lord of the airwaves. Is there a sign-up sheet or something?”
My voice had gone up a notch. Dan sighed heavily and sat down in the chair next to me, rubbing his face with his hands. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s just that I’d been listening earlier and didn’t hear a thing.”
I knew what he really meant. If what you’re saying is true, I wanted to be the one to hear it first. As our fearless leader, I suppose we owed him that much. But it wasn’t the way it went down, and there was nothing I could do about it now.
I could sense control getting away from me, the excitement in the others fading fast. I knew I’d heard the voice. I hadn’t imagined it. But I didn’t know how to convince them, and I heard the urgency in my own voice when I spoke. It sounded weak, almost whiny, and I hated it.
“It’s a military frequency,” I said. “NORAD, actually. 10.19 through 10.45. Look it up in the book. That makes sense at least, right? If we’re going to hear something, it would be down in that range.”
“Sure it does,” Tessa said. I looked at her gratefully, and she gave me a wide smile and a nod. I could have kissed her right then.
“NORAD, eh?” Jimmie said. “What the hell’s that?”
“North American Aerospace Defense Command,” I said. “It’s a part of the U.S. and Canadian military that monitors missile attacks and protects the airspace over both countries. I think the main base is in Colorado, but there are others in Canada and Alaska.”
“Doomsday waltz,” Dan said. “Doesn’t sound military to me. Just because it used to be a NORAD channel, doesn’t mean it still is. Maybe they’re a couple of crazy ham radio operators holed up in some abandoned shell of a building, talking to themselves.”
“The Doomsday Vault,” Sue said.
We all turned to stare at her. She’d sat down on the bottom step of the staircase to the hatch. She’d started crying silently again, and the tears ran down her face and dropped from her chin to the floor. Right then she looked about a hundred years old, a husk of her former self. I realized I’d mostly stopped referring to her as “Big Sue” in my own head a while ago, a nickname we never actually used in her presence, but one I suspected she probably knew about, and hated. She’d dropped at least ten pounds since we’d been trapped down here, and her normally pink, soft skin was a grayish color, her eyes red from crying.
Sue had been a pretty girl, larger than life in every way, tall and big boned and usually bubbling with energy. But not anymore.
She shook her head, letting loose one great hitch and shaky sigh, and wiped her eyes. “Jay told me about it,” she said. “The Doomsday Vault. One of his conspiracy theories…” She took a deep breath, seemed to balance herself, and went on. “I read an article from Time about it a few months ago that he sent me, so I know the place exists. The official story is that it’s an underground seed vault created by the United Nations and some of the wealthiest foundations in the world, along with the U.S. government and a few foreign countries. It’s designed to hold millions of seeds, hundreds each of every single important crop and plant and tree in the world, and at temperatures cold enough to keep them viable for centuries. Sort of nature’s safety net in case we screw up the world. Go figure, right?”
“If this is a real place,” Dan said, “what’s the conspiracy?”
“There were a lot of online rumors that it wasn’t just a seed vault. That it was a cover for a complete underground ecosystem, a place where people high up in society could hole up with plenty of food and water and live for months, maybe years. It was built above a huge oil reservoir and they tapped into that for power. A little underground city, complete with electricity and filtered air and even growing rooms for fresh fruits and vegetables.”
“The Doomsday Vault,” I said. “Of course. That’s what I heard. Not waltz, vault.” The excitement was back in me again. I could feel the buzzing snap of it through my veins, that feeling that I’d been right, that there were people still alive in the world besides us, and they were broadcasting, looking for survivors. There was hope again, after all this time, and goddamn, it felt good.
“Where, Sue?” Dan asked. He seemed to feel it too. “Where is it?”
“Alaska,” she said. “Up north beyond the Gates of the Arctic Park. They tunneled down about three hundred feet into the base of a mountain, through the permafrost.”
“That’s gotta be five thousand miles from here,” Jimmie said, his voice cracking. “Even if it’s true, and there are people alive up there, there’s no way for us to reach them.”
We all sat quietly after that for a minute, thinking it over. Jimmie was right, of course. Knowing something about what had happened aboveground, and with all the other threats we’d already encountered in our time in the shelter probably multiplied tenfold if we tried to leave, whoever was broadcasting might as well have been broadcasting from the moon.
I didn’t want to lose hope yet again. But despite my best efforts, I felt my mood sinking slowly, as if the chair I was sitting in were pulling me right down through the floor.
“Why did he have to run?” Sue said. “If he’d only held on a little while longer, we could have helped him, we could have found a way out of here, I know we could have done something…”
The sobs that she had been holding in so tightly burst through all at once, and she lay down on her side on the floor at the foot of the steps, digging her nails into the carpet and moaning, looking for all the world like she were dying. This was worse than she’d been right after Jay had left, much worse. This was raw and screaming and completely unhinged. I’d never seen such naked pain in my life, and the sound of her despair nearly sent me over the edge. I didn’t know if she was crying just for Jay, or for herself and all of humanity too, but her
grief seemed to symbolize everything we’d been through, and it made me wonder if all this was worth the fight. Maybe Jay was right after all; maybe one more glimpse of the open sky, even if it was filled with ash and gray as death, was the best way to go.
I wondered how it would happen, how it was happening with Jay right now. Would it hurt to breathe in the first few minutes, would the acid in the air start eating away at you from the inside? Or would it take much longer, days of thinking you were going to make it after all before the sores began to erupt across your limbs and your lungs filled with fluid and you drowned in your own vomit?
Or maybe the bugs would get you before anything else could…
I went over and crouched beside Sue. When I touched her back she jumped, but I rubbed in gentle circles.
“It’s going to be okay,” I said. “I promise.” I flashed back to that night when I woke up to find Sue sitting on my bed, and how angry she’d gotten at my useless reassurances then. Fuck that, Pete…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? She’d been right then, but maybe not now. Maybe that voice on the radio offered us real hope. A chance. Wasn’t that all we could ask for?
But even if we did make it out of here somehow, there were so many tragedies we had not yet faced, and so many things we’d never get the chance to do. The loss of family, the loss of a chance to ever say you’re sorry to those you have hurt, or tell them how much they meant to you. The loss of innocence, of first love. Those feelings you only get one shot to experience; being able to park in some deserted back road and kiss, with nothing to fear except getting caught with your pants down. No mushroom clouds, no fallout, no dead and dying friends and no end of the world to take all that away.
“Everyone you have ever loved in your life becomes a part of your soul,” I said. “They never leave. They’re always inside you, and you can bring them out whenever you want.”
I don’t know where it came from, or why I said it. But I felt Sue’s cries begin to slow, the jerking in her limbs began to quiet down, and she took deep gulping breaths of air. Eventually I helped her sit up again, and she hugged me very close, and held on for a long time. I felt her wet face against my chest, her tears and snot bleeding through my shirt, and I didn’t care at all. It felt good to be needed.
Finally she pulled away from me. “Thank you,” she whispered. “You’re a good guy, you know that?” Her chest hitched and she sighed like children do after a hard cry. She looked so lost right then, I wanted to gather her up and hold her forever.
She touched the wet spot on my chest and smiled. “Sorry. That’s kind of gross.”
“It’s okay.” I frowned. Something on her neck…I tried to pull her shirt down, but she yanked away from me.
“What?”
I touched my own neck, just above the collarbone. “You’ve got something here. Let me see.” I reached out toward her and she looked at me suspiciously with a crease in her brow, but she let me move the collar down until I’d exposed what looked like a small but deep wound in her skin.
“Does that hurt?”
“I don’t understand. Does what hurt?” Sue looked bewildered. She tried to bend her head but couldn’t see it without a mirror, and she glanced around the room at everyone else as if she wanted some kind of confirmation. “I don’t feel anything.” She touched the wound and looked at the faint blood on her fingers with surprise.
“We must have scraped her,” Dan said. “When we were trying…to keep her calm.”
“It’s a puncture wound,” I said. It looked perfectly round, like something long and sharp as a needle had punched through her skin. A very large needle. “Did you fall on anything in the kitchen, or out here, the shelf maybe?” Sue shook her head.
I pressed down a little harder on the outside of the wound, and more blood welled up. It was deep, all right, and the area directly around it looked inflamed.
She flinched away from me. “Ow. Now it hurts.” She rubbed at her shoulder. “Thanks a lot.”
“Put a Band-Aid on it,” Jimmie said. “Who cares? It’s just a little cut. I got ten times worse in my leg, and I’m doing okay. Keep the iodine on it, keep it bandaged, you’ll be fine.”
I nodded, trying to look reassuring to Sue, who had started to appear pretty worried. Maybe she’d sensed it from me. I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it, not in front of everyone, but I didn’t feel reassured at all. I remembered what Jay had said, that the bugs looked for cuts, breaks in the skin, so that they could get into your blood.
I didn’t know exactly why, but I had a very bad feeling about that wound.
It looked to me almost like something had been sucking on her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“If the NORAD base is in Colorado, maybe they’re broadcasting from there,” Jimmie said. “Maybe they’re telling people about the vault, gathering as many survivors as they can before they head to Alaska. That’s not as far, is it? We could make that, you know?”
Dan shook his head. “Two thousand miles, I guess. But the cars and debris on the roads—”
“But those would be main roads, highways. There would be multiple routes. We’d have a much better chance of making it alive.”
Tessa had gone off with Sue to wash and dress that puncture wound, and Dan, Jimmie and I sat up discussing the possibilities, still energized by what had happened. They all seemed to accept the fact that I had heard something on the radio, and now it was a matter of what to do about it. Dan was in favor of waiting to see if we could hear anything more, while Jimmie felt that our best shot was in heading for Colorado. Me, I didn’t know what to think. On the one hand, we couldn’t stay here for the rest of our lives. But on the other hand, at least we were alive.
“We don’t know what’s outside that hatch,” I said. “We have no idea what would happen to us if we left. Is the air poisoned? Are there other more dangerous things out there? It doesn’t matter if we need to go five miles or five thousand if we choke to death as soon as we step outside.”
“We have those suits,” Jimmie said. “That’ll give us some protection.”
“But not much. And we can’t wear them for days. We’ll have to take them off to eat, drink, take a piss.”
“So we find a building or something, some place with a basement that’s safe,” he said.
“It’s safe here—”
“No,” he said. “This place, it makes me crazy. I have these dreams…” He shrugged, the hair growing from below his lower lip and his chin looking even more ridiculous now that half the hair on his head was gone. “I dream about all these people talking at once, thousands of them. They need to tell me something important. Only I can’t understand a word they’re saying. I almost feel like I can, the words are so close, but they slip away. And then they climb all over me and smother me.”
“Calling Sigmund Freud,” I said. “Like Night of the Living Dead. You remember waking up last night and standing over my bed? That was creepy enough, without you telling me about this.”
“Hold on,” Dan said. He got up and went into the other room, emerging a few moments later with a book in his hands. “I saw this when we went through the whole shelter,” he said. “I’ve been reading through it. There’s a section on fallout, and when it’s safe to return to the surface. Maybe it’ll help us figure out whether it’s possible to survive out there now.”
The book was called Surviving Nuclear Winter. It had a silver cover with the words printed in white like snow-flakes and peppered with black spots.
“Why the hell didn’t you tell us about this before?” I asked.
“I thought it might freak everyone out,” he said. “There’s some pretty intense stuff in here, but most of it isn’t going to do anything but get people upset. I figured I would share anything relevant with the group when I came to it.”
I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Protecting us was one thing, bu
t this went a little too far. We weren’t children. And what if there was something in that book that he didn’t think was important, but we did? What if he missed something that would save all our lives?
“You should have told us,” I said.
“Look, you want me to lead this group, you gotta trust me,” he said. He looked me in the eyes until I looked away. “What if Sue had read something in here and it had made her want to leave with Jay? She’s fragile, Pete, you know that. Jimmie too—no offense, Jimmie.”
“None taken, prick-face.”
I smiled, more to keep the tension down than anything else. “So what’s it say?”
Dan flipped through it until he found the right section. “Here,” he said, marking a passage with his finger. “It says that fallout can be deadly almost instantly after the blast, but it loses its intensity pretty quickly. If you’re far enough downwind from ground zero, you could return to the surface in a matter of days for short periods of time. After a couple of weeks, it could be possible to be aboveground all day and return to the shelter to sleep.”
“What’s far enough downwind, exactly?”
“That’s the hard part. We don’t know where the bombs hit, or how large they were. From what we saw, I’d say it was at least ten miles away, which means we’d probably be safe by now to move around aboveground. But if I’m wrong—”
“What if you’re right?” I said. I tried to remember exactly how far the mushroom clouds had been when we first saw them—ten miles? Twenty? Fifty? “Or what if it was even farther away than that? Are you saying we’d have been safe leaving this shelter a week ago?”