by Nate Kenyon
The dining room was empty, the ants gone. Jay’s bones remained, a stark reminder that what we’d seen was no nightmare. I thought about sweeping them up into some kind of container and hiding them away to spare Sue more agony, and then realized how silly that thought was; we could be attacked at any moment, and I was thinking about cleaning up the mess.
The ash flakes had continued to drift in, and the steps were now nearly covered with them. It was cold in here, the temperature dropping maybe twenty degrees since we’d opened the hatch. I steeled myself, motioned for Tessa to stay back, and brought the gun up as I walked quickly across the open space and climbed the steps to the ladder.
I looked up and squinted into drifting flakes, suppressing the bizarre urge to stick out my tongue like I used to do in winter at the first snow. The sky was even darker than before, and I thought it might be dusk or night now, but I wasn’t sure.
The opening was unbroken by shadows or shapes, and I scaled the ladder quickly before I lost my nerve, the gun clanking against the rungs as I ascended.
At the top and just before the opening I hesitated, holding my breath and wondering whether I should put my hood and mask back on. I wasn’t thinking clearly. But I wanted to be able to see, and the hood obscured my view too much. I kept them off.
As the wind died down above for a moment and a longer calm settled around me, I climbed the last two rungs and stuck my head through the hatch opening.
The landscape around me was too dark to see very well, but what light existed held an eerie purplish quality, sort of like how the world looked through an expensive pair of sunglasses. I sensed a vast plateau of singed dirt and ash, and from somewhere in the distance I heard the angry crash and hiss of waves breaking against the craggy cliffs of Sparrow Island. Directly in front of me rose the gigantic, sleeping form of Sparrow Rock, and I had the strangest feeling that it leaned toward me, ready to topple at any moment and crush me back into the shelter like one of those whack-a-mole games at the carnival.
The wind came up and whipped my hair, sending dirt flying and dust swarming into my eyes and nose and mouth. I squinted into the assault, my heart pounding in my throat, holding the gun out and sweeping the area. I sensed emptiness within the darkness. I saw nothing at all—no people, no trees, no grass or shrubs, no insects, nothing.
The world appeared, for all intents and purposes, to be dead and gone.
“Pete?” Tessa called from below. “You okay?”
I nodded, wiping tears from my eyes. I blamed them on the wind.
Then I reached up, grabbed the hatch and slammed it shut, twisting the wheel and cutting off everything else.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Back in the bedroom, Dan had pulled the rest of the mattresses off the bunks and pushed the frames against the walls. He was shiny with sweat, and he looked too pale, dark circles ringing his eyes. He held his left arm close to his body. His hazmat suit had been badly torn, the hood gone and one arm of it almost completely separated from the shoulder. It would be useless now, and I tried to remember how many we had left. I would have to check.
Sue was sitting on one of the mattresses with the blanket, staring into space and rocking, clutching herself.
“Is it done?” Dan asked.
I nodded. “I don’t think anything else got in.”
“I checked everything in this room and the bathroom. It’s clear.” Dan sat down heavily on the nearest mattress, wincing and holding his injured arm. “Can’t be sure about the rest of the place.”
“We can push the bed frames against the door,” I said. “That might help us sleep.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But we don’t know where those ants went, the ones that came from…” He trailed off into silence, glancing at Sue, who didn’t appear to have heard him. “They’re in here somewhere.”
“I know.”
“We can’t stay here much longer. They know we’re here. I can feel it. They’ll be coming for us.”
I hesitated. They’ll be coming for us. “Do you…feel okay?”
“My arm, I think the shoulder’s separated—”
“Not your arm. I don’t mean your arm.” I couldn’t say it out loud, couldn’t give voice to the memory of that swarming black cloud that had enveloped his face. I did not want to think about what that meant, and yet I had to try to understand it.
They get into the blood…they get inside and they start chewing, and they don’t stop until they’re in control.
“If we can find help, maybe they’ll have a treatment,” I said. “I mean, if you’re…infected.”
“I’ll be fine,” Dan said. But his voice was dead, and when I looked at him, I saw a beaten-down, broken teenager. I’d always seen Dan as a little larger than life, in many ways a hero or at least someone to look up to, a man among boys. Jay’s attack had exposed the weaknesses that he’d tried to hide for so long. He would fold under pressure, or in the face of any real challenge to his authority. We might not say it out loud, but we both knew the truth: I was in charge now.
I glanced around the room, wondering where they would come from when they attacked. And that was when I saw them. I’d never really noticed before; the builders had done a nice job making them blend in with the walls, painting it all the same color and making them so that they were almost invisible.
“The ventilation system,” I said. I pointed at a fine mesh square about six inches across, set up high near the ceiling. The swarm had been made up of such small specks, and whatever they were, surely they would be able to find a way through whatever filters had been set up through the system. “That’s how they’ll get in here.”
Dan didn’t even look up, just nodded. I realized he’d already seen them, had already come to that conclusion. Maybe that was why he seemed so defeated, but I doubted it. There was another possibility, one that I hardly dared contemplate, but one that we’d all have to face, sooner or later: that they’d already been in here, in the night, and we were all infected.
I walked toward the nearest one, climbed up onto the frame for one of the bunk beds and put my hand to the grate. I could feel a slight wash of cool air. I thought about a black cloud of tiny insects swirling through the ducts and pouring out through the mesh, covering our bodies, taking control. What were they after? The death of everyone left on the planet, as Jay had said? And if so, what were they waiting for? Why weren’t we dead already?
I turned to study the group. Dan, still seeming oddly broken, grimacing and holding his arm tightly to his side; Sue, still in her bra and underwear under the blanket, rocking and staring at nothing; and Tessa, the only one looking back at me, watching my face, a half smile touching her lips. She nodded as if in encouragement.
I realized I’d already made up my mind. The only thing left was to say it out loud.
“We’ll leave tomorrow,” I said. “We’re going to the Doomsday Vault.”
PART FOUR:
HIVE MIND
“N-nothing important. That is, I heard a good deal about a ring, and a dark lord, and something about the end of the world, but please, Mr. Gandalf, sir, don’t hurt me. Don’t turn me into anything…unnatural.”
—J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
CHAPTER THIRTY
“I don’t get it.”
Tessa and I were sitting up on a mattress, our backs against the wall, keeping watch. We’d all agreed to try to get some rest, and then gather up as much as we could carry before we left the shelter. I’d volunteered for the first shift, and Tessa said she couldn’t sleep either, so she stayed up with me. Dan and Sue were snoring softly, both of them worn out from the events of the day before.
The plan was to leave through the tunnel to Sue’s grandfather’s house, the hope being that he would have more supplies there as well, including weapons and his black Jeep Cherokee with a tankful of gas still sitting in the garage. Sue mumbled something about the house being built like a fortress and the garage being screened from t
he EMP set off by the bombs, so the Jeep would probably run. We would have to siphon gas from other cars along the way, but this could be done. It was the access to food, clean water and shelter that concerned me the most. We’d bring as much as we could with us, but eventually we would have to rely on finding clean basements or other intact structures that had a fresh supply.
In the back of my mind I knew that this was, for all intents and purposes, a suicide mission. Even if we somehow found enough food and shelter to survive, even if the fallout wasn’t radioactive enough to kill us, there would be dangers we could not even comprehend right now. But we couldn’t just sit here waiting for the end either.
Of course, I had other plans that I hadn’t shared with the others yet. A detour along the way. But now that other little thing that had been nudging at my mind since the earlier attack just wouldn’t go away. Something didn’t make sense, but I’d be damned if I could figure it out.
“What don’t you get?” Tessa asked. She was sitting up straight, alert and well rested, looking for all the world like she were relaxing with a group of friends at the local watering hole, rather than stuck in a bomb shelter at the end of the world. She never changed, my Tessa, no matter what happened. She was the only constant thing in my life, and right now I was so thankful I had her with me.
“Why those things haven’t come for us by now. Why they used Jay that way, instead of just slipping in through the vents or finding cracks in the floors or something.”
“Maybe they need to move between hosts.”
“But why?” I shook my head. “We’ve seen the damn things survive outside a body, we’ve seen those mosquitoes attack us. What’s holding them back now?”
Tessa didn’t answer, but I wasn’t expecting her to anyway. The reason was there, in the back of my head, floating debris from some old high school science textbook or website article that I’d filed away long ago. I just couldn’t bring it to the surface.
The cold.
It snapped into focus, all at once, like I’d flipped a light switch. I remembered wasps gathering on our windowsills in late fall, unable to fly, barely able to move. Insects were cold-blooded. What was the proper word? Ectothermic. I retained very little about them from my high school biology lectures, other than that. When Jay left and the mosquitoes had gotten inside, it had been daytime, and probably warmer outside; but even then, the particles in the atmosphere had almost certainly dropped the surface temperature enough to make them sluggish, which was probably why they had nested and hadn’t come after us immediately. And when I’d gone out to close the hatch, it had been night, and even colder, and there had been no sign of them at all.
I thought of the fire extinguisher I’d used on the rats and the mosquitoes, how they slowed down, avoided the spray. That kind of model worked through carbon dioxide, which was like spraying dry ice. It was cold, cold enough to cause frostbite if you weren’t careful.
“You’ve got something, don’t you?” Tessa said.
I nodded. “Maybe.”
I explained my theory, and the more I spoke, the more her eyes lit up. “That’s it,” she said. “That’s our way out. We’re going north, and it’ll get colder the farther we go. Oh, Pete, you’re brilliant!” And she hugged me close, the warmth of her body warming my own until I almost believed her. I didn’t have the heart to mention that it would be colder up there for us too. Maybe cold enough to kill us.
And then I remembered something else; that clicking sound like a latch popping open, and a slit of darkness. In the craziness of what had ensued, it had completely slipped my mind. “Hold on a minute,” I said. I stood up and went to the closet, using the nearby bunk to boost myself up.
It was still there, at the back of the highest shelf, a crack in the panel. I pulled the shelf off its brackets for better access, got my fingers around the panel and pulled. It swung forward on silent hinges, revealing a secret compartment.
I remembered Jay’s voice, just before he broke out: it’s in here, somewhere, the answers to everything.
My scalp tingled as I reached in and pulled out several thick black binders. I carried them back down to the mattress next to Tessa, glancing at Sue, who was still sleeping with her back to us. Something told me this was going to involve her, and that it wouldn’t be easy to read. I wanted to make sure I handled it correctly, if I could.
“What is it?” Tessa said. I plopped down next to her and showed her the binders. They were made of some kind of pebbled material, the metal three-ring kind with the extra-large hoops that snapped together. And they were old, the covers flaking at the edges.
I flipped open the first one. Inside were hundreds of laminated newspaper clippings, some of them in foreign languages. The first dated back to the 1940s. The ones I could read were accounts of the Nuremberg trials, attempts to track war criminals across South America and the Middle East, and the fall of Adolf Hitler. There were stories about networks called ODESSA that had helped Nazis through secret escape routes called ratlines, and more about a U.S. effort called Operation Paperclip that provided Nazi scientists refuge in exchange for their expertise in rocket engines, medicine and engineering. Others were investigations into rumors of vast stolen treasures being smuggled out of Germany near the end of the war and hidden in the Austrian mountains, buried in abandoned salt mines and tossed into deep glacial lakes.
As I flipped through more of them, I saw accounts of Nazis still at large. Others were feature articles on various fascist movements in the U.S. and foreign countries in the 1960s and ’70s, new generations trying to bring Nazi ideals back to prominence; the FPO and NDP, extreme right-wing demonstrations on college campuses. There were dozens of them. Belgium, Croatia, France, Germany and Russia all had active movements, many continuing to the present day.
The final article was a recent, very long feature in the Times by an investigative journalist who had attempted to track the dizzying web of rumor and innuendo to form a cohesive whole, and had written a book about it; the writer claimed, with some authority and citing extensive research, that as Nazi Germany collapsed near the end of World War II, Hitler and his advisors had devised a plan to scatter Nazi leadership and go underground, hiding a fortune in gold and other treasures, and creating pockets of Nazi survivors across the globe. This effort was led by a group called Die Spinne. Their goal, the writer argued, was to build a vast web, creating wealth and influence and eventually mass panic and destruction through the financing of various terrorist organizations, which would result in the rise of a new golden age of Aryan power. They called it the Fourth Reich. The writer even claimed to have discovered evidence that this movement had financed the World Trade Center attacks, and was planning a much larger one that would kill millions.
The strings behind al-Qaeda. The tingling in my scalp deepened. I put the binder aside and picked up the next one. There were a series of maps inside, with lines drawn in complex patterns, and red dots marking locations in South America, Austria, Russia and the Middle East, followed by a large number of documents and reports in German. I saw what appeared to be scientific articles and diagrams, charts and timelines. I saw bank statements with staggering sums of money listed. There were expense reports and withdrawals and payments to hundreds of what I assumed were legitimate businesses, some of which I recognized.
I turned to the third binder. This one was far more personal. It contained handwritten letters and other correspondence, a number of grainy photos, a few more newspaper articles, and diary entries, as well as genealogy reports.
I scanned the lines of the last part several times, trying to get my head around what it meant. According to this, Sue’s great-grandfather, a man named Joseph Grase, had been a high officer of Hitler’s elite guard. He had never been caught.
“What are you doing?”
I looked up to find Sue staring at me. I slammed the binder closed, my face reddening. I felt like someone who’d been caught looking at a pornographic magazine, and even as I felt this, I was b
ewildered. Why should I feel ashamed? I’d done nothing wrong. And yet the way she kept staring at me, and the look on her face, made me want to brush it off and pretend it was nothing.
“I…found these,” I said. “Hidden in the closet. I think they belonged to your grandfather.”
Her reaction was nothing like what I’d expected. She didn’t scream at me, berate me for snooping around her business or even ask questions. She simply rolled away from me, onto her back, and stared at the ceiling.
We all stayed like that for what seemed like a very long time, Dan’s slow, even snores somehow rhythmic and soothing in the silence. I had a million questions myself, but I kept my mouth shut. Tessa too, thank God. Whatever Sue needed to say, she would have to find her own voice for it.
“He was supposed to meet us here,” Sue whispered finally. “He and my mom. Something must have happened to them before they could get to the tunnel. Maybe it came more quickly than he’d expected.”
“You knew,” I said. Sudden anger flushed through me, surprising me with its heat and intensity. “All this time, you knew what we were facing? What was going to happen?”
“No, not everything. It’s not what you think.” Abruptly Sue sat up, the blanket falling away from her shoulders. She seemed oblivious to her near nakedness, wiping a hand across her nose and sniffling. “I didn’t know. He, he told me I had to get to the shelter that night. He saved us. But he’s not part of this.” She shook her head vigorously, and I wondered how much of it was trying to convince herself. “My grandfather was never a part of it. His father, yes. But not Grandpa.”
My God. I sat there stunned, trying to comprehend what she was saying. His father. Not my great-grandfather. Distancing herself.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “You think you do, but you don’t.”
I thought of the looks I’d seen passing between her and Jay, the increasing levels of paranoia he’d shown, his obsession near the end with searching through the shelter for something he wouldn’t talk about with us.