by Tosca Lee
I curve back into the right lane, even though we have yet to see another vehicle. Search the sky with quick, furtive glances. Looking for life.
Or barring that, buzzards.
Static. “We’ve got Micah back,” Irwin says. He sounds tired. So does Micah, when he comes on, both their voices so subdued as to sound like the public radio Ken used to like listening to in the morning.
“Either of you get any sleep yet?” Chase says.
“I admit I dozed off while you were picking up your friend,” Micah says.
“You were saying something about the security footage,” I say, hoping talking will take my attention off my wobbling handlebars.
“Yeah, so the drive is designed to hold up to three months of footage—depending, obviously on the number of cameras, etcetera. It doesn’t record continuously. It’s triggered by motion. People coming and going, maybe birds or other animals. When the drive gets full, it starts recording over the oldest stuff.”
“Okay,” I say.
“But someone disabled all the cameras except the one on the front porch,” Micah says, “and reconfigured the drive to quit recording as soon as it was full so the recording at the beginning wouldn’t be erased. Which happens to be the only one with any people in it, including Noah.”
“What were they doing?” Chase asks, sitting down on the bike’s seat and glancing back to check that we’re behind him.
“Leaving. There’s three people carrying bags and boxes out of the house, Noah last of all. It’s weird, he looks right up at the camera as he passes beneath it, and then reaches up with his free hand and adjusts it so it points out toward the driveway where a truck is waiting—Mel’s, I think. The other three load up the truck and get in while Noah unlocks the gate. The truck drives out, Noah closes the gate and locks it behind them. And then he walks out to the truck, gets in, and drives away.” I practically hear Micah rub the scruff on his cheek.
“So he wanted whoever found the drive to know he left,” Chase says.
“Not just him, everyone. The entire front yard was empty. It’s a message, except it doesn’t tell us why they left, or where they went.”
“What day was that recording?” I ask, my mind pedaling as doggedly as my legs. “Can you tell?”
“It’s time-stamped March twenty-first.”
The date on the tear-off calendar.
“There’s nothing else after that but footage triggered by animals, the occasional moth, a few storms. Until May first, when a billow of smoke rolls across the yard from the direction of the barn.”
“The plane crash,” I say. I wonder if the pilot was dropping flyers over towns like Gurley.
“It burns for a couple days, uses up the rest of the drive space. And that’s it.”
I think of the X on the front of the house. Try to imagine what anyone else would think on seeing Noah so purposefully film his departure.
I wish I could see the footage myself.
“Did he look sad? Angry?” I ask. Not that Noah was one to show much emotion.
“Hard to tell.” Micah pauses, and then adds: “He was wearing a mask.”
But Noah didn’t wear masks. Whether out of faith or bravado I never knew. The night he welcomed Chase and me before sending us off with two of his vehicles to breach the Colorado border, he’d only had on gloves.
“Everyone admitted to the ranch was tested for the flu just like us,” Chase says.
I falter, foot missing the pedal so that I nearly wipe out again as I say, “You saw the X on the door.”
“But we never found any graves,” Chase says.
“I suppose it’s possible they could have burned or removed the bodies to protect themselves or even the water supply,” Micah says.
“Then why move?” Chase says.
“I don’t know.”
It doesn’t make sense. Why would Noah just take everyone and leave? Especially knowing we were there!
“Which direction did they go?”
“East, toward the road. They could have gone anywhere from there. Oh, he had your dog, Buddy, under his arm in the video.”
I’m relieved, at least, that I don’t need to wonder if Chase shot Buddy early this morning. If he limped off, alone, to die. It’s the first sliver of decent news we’ve had since the door opened.
But it’s more than that. Carrying Buddy wasn’t a coincidence. Noah did it so we’d know that Buddy is with him. That he’s safe.
Something scratches at the back of my mind, bothering me, but by now I’m so tired I can barely move, each rotation of my pedals done with leaden limbs, my brain sluggish in the climbing heat.
Static in my ear. “Guys, I’m about to turn in for a couple hours,” Irwin says. “Delaney’s offered to relieve me.”
“Sleep well, Irwin,” I say. “And thanks.”
“Yup. Signing off for a bit.”
My forearms by now are pink, my skin fairer than I ever remember it being, after six months belowground. Otto, who’s even paler, is going to look like a lobster tomorrow.
We stop by the side of the road a short time later, walk the bikes off to the shadow of a copse of trees. Otto retrieves the partial gallon of water from my front basket, where his sketchbook and pencil are stashed, as Chase and I sit heavily on the ground and drag the water bottles from our packs. I take off my cap, hold it out to Otto.
He touches his chest, head cocked.
“You need it more than me,” I say.
He takes and examines it, points to the B on the front.
I shrug.
“Boston Red Sox,” Chase says. “Baseball.”
Otto hands it back.
“Dude, your face is getting sunburnt,” Chase says.
Otto wrinkles his nose, brushes it with a finger.
“What, you don’t like baseball?” Chase says. “Who doesn’t like baseball?”
Otto raises a brow.
“Fine. The B stands for Boss. It means you’re the boss. Better?”
Otto puts the cap on as I dig the Excedrin from my pack. I offer a couple to Chase.
“What’s this?”
“Caffeine.”
He takes them, washes them down. Studies me as I do the same.
“How’re you feeling?” he says.
It takes me a minute to realize what he’s asking. That the question is code for where my anxiety levels are after months without the medication I was on before. Without sleep, and under stress.
As I watch the only family I have fall apart.
My first impulse is to say I’m not that fragile.
But the last time I said that to Chase, I ended up in his arms.
I return the water bottle to my pack. “Fine. I started new medication three months ago.”
Chase blinks and looks away, guilt etched around his eyes. “Because of m—”
“Because of me. Let’s get going.”
I get up and shoulder my backpack. As I do, a dove flies down from the tree in front of me, runs a short ways, and flutters on the ground.
I back a step, startled, as Chase scans the horizon. Looking, I know, for the nearest farmhouse or anywhere else we might find a car.
And then I note the bird’s wing, out at an angle as it skitters farther away. The same way I’d seen others like it do anytime we came near their hatchlings in the Enclave’s fruit trees.
“This bird isn’t sick,” I say, turning to look up into the tree behind us. Otto does, too, leaning in toward the trunk and then gesturing me over. He points through the branches.
“Yup,” I say. “It’s faking. Drawing attention away from its nest.”
I walk to my bike, knock the kickstand up with a toe.
Stop. Kick it back down.
“Micah?” I say, glancing at the bird on the ground.
Silence.
For a minute I panic, thinking my battery has run out.
“Micah!” I say, louder.
A snort issues through the headset, a snore cut short.
<
br /> “Here,” Micah says, voice rough.
I release a breath. “The light on the control panel in Noah’s office. Was that the ark door?”
“The light on the—yeah. Why?”
“The label had been peeled off.”
“What?”
Otto steps his way, barefoot, to the pebbly highway shoulder. I make a mental note to find him some shoes.
“There was a sticky mark, like when you peel off a label but it doesn’t come all the way off,” I say.
Rosella, New Earth’s kitchen manager, had been manic about labeling jars and bins of produce, dried herbs and fruit—leaving others like me to scrub off the sometimes years-old sticky remnants with our fingernails anytime a container got emptied.
Chase pauses beside his bike, where he’s just fitted a spare T-shirt over the baby seat and gas can, both. Which only does so much to disguise the spout.
“You’re saying someone peeled it off on purpose so no one would know what it is,” Micah says as Otto waves a hand in my field of vision. I turn away.
“I think Noah did.”
“Okay . . . why?”
Otto slaps the seat of his bike. A guttural sound issues from his throat.
“Because some of them were sick.”
“Then why move everyone?” Chase asks.
I hesitate. Because it sounds absurd at least, egotistical at most, to suggest that he was trying to protect those of us in the silo.
But that’s what Noah did. What he would do. Why he’d built the silo in the first place. In his mind, his own salvation depended on it.
Otto comes around, grabs the sketchbook from the basket of my bike. Flips through pages until he finds the one he wants.
He turns the pad toward me.
Noah’s face stares back.
1 P.M.
* * *
I slowly take the sketchbook from Otto.
I’d know the gray hair curling against that dark scalp, the amused whimsy of that smile, that kind and haunted gaze anywhere.
“Micah, hold on,” I say, and then instinctively cover the microphone with my hand, though I’m not sure why. “Otto, you know Noah?”
He nods.
“How?”
He gestures with both hands, a finger sweeping in front of his chest.
“You . . . used to live there?”
Otto shakes his head. Holds his hands up facing each other, and then steeples them.
“You went to the same church,” Chase says.
Otto closes his eyes, shakes his head.
I think of the bars across his windows, and his father’s inventory list, though his stockpile was obviously far too limited. “Was your dad a prepper, too?” I ask, dubious.
Otto looks away as though searching for patience to deal with village idiots. A minute later, he digs the pencil from my basket, flips to a blank page in the sketchbook, and bracing it against his middle, writes:
Small town. Every 1 know Noah.
Chase leans in to read. So close I can smell his skin. Sense the lean strength of him, lethal in the right conditions. So gentle in others.
“Then you know about . . .” I hesitate, and after a moment, he adds:
U from silo?
He looks from me to Chase.
“Yes,” I say. “The others are still there.”
Otto’s brows draw together as though he’s trying to put something together. He writes again:
Rumor sick person sneak in, close silo, kill 50+ with her. Noah and others leave before silo open n corpses infest.
“What?” I say. “But that’s not true. We’re proof of that.” And then: “Do you know where Noah went?”
Otto shakes his head.
“You said ‘her,’ ” Chase says slowly. “Did you ever hear who this sick person was?”
Otto writes:
Winter.
A chill claws its way down my spine as Otto lowers the pencil to the page.
And then slowly points at me.
A dozen scenarios flash before my mind at once. Of Otto, fists flying. Cowering, that raw yowl scraping from his throat. Running in the other direction or fleeing on his bike, back the way we came. Of Chase, having no choice but to run him down, unable to risk anyone else knowing that the silo is open, safe, and filled with vulnerable others.
Until I realize he’s known all along. He was scared when we found him—I thought because of Chase, a man who never needed to announce his history as a Marine for others to know, instinctively, he wasn’t someone to mess with.
But it was because of me.
An urge to protect this gentle soul rises up inside me all at once, the swell of it practically unbearable.
“Why didn’t you run when I told you my name?” I whisper.
He lifts his shoulders in a small shrug. Writes:
If sick, U be dead.
If murderer, U not ask medicine 4 friend or give food.
“Can’t argue with that,” Chase says, walking off to study the road as he relays the conversation to Micah.
I’m about to thank Otto, strangely touched by his direct and simple logic, when he tilts his head, his expression sad and far too old for his years as he writes:
I know kind eyes. Worried eyes. I see hurt heart.
My vision blurs as he writes something else, but I can’t take any more. Not right now. I turn away, feeling more vulnerable in his silent and guileless presence than I did even when I was on trial in the silo, humbled and broken by it at once. So that I feel like something inside me might have cracked like the first fissure in a dam.
“If Wynter’s right, then Noah started the rumor himself,” Micah says.
“And as far as anyone knows, Wynter Roth the homicidal maniac has been dead for months,” Chase says, coming back. “At least until the others leave the silo.”
“I’ll talk to them,” Micah says.
I swipe at my eyes, in serious danger of losing it. Especially now that I realize what Noah did—not just for me, but for Truly. I’ve lost track of the conversations Julie and I had those early weeks in December about how dangerous it might be for anyone to know whose daughter she is.
“Desperate people do crazy things,” Julie had said. “Governments have no conscience when it comes to protecting their own people or getting a leg up on someone else, and they’d have absolutely no compunction about kidnapping her for leverage on Ashley, to get a vaccination illegally, or exclusively, or just to screw over the rest of the world.”
And I knew what she said was true based on Magnus’s willingness to put Truly, whom he believed was his daughter, in jeopardy.
“I mean, just look at that Syrian guy who gassed his own people that Rima tells all the stories about,” Julie had said. She got worked up whenever she got on the topic of people she considered crazy—or worse, idiots. But she’d stopped herself, knowing my triggers, finishing only with “No one can know who Truly is.”
And now, thanks to Noah, no one will.
As I pull onto the road behind Otto and watch him lift his face to the afternoon sun, I know once again that Magnus was wrong.
There is beauty in the world still. Even now.
And it’s worth saving for that reason alone.
Static in my ear. “Hey, guys,” a female voice says. “Micah’s gone to get some sleep. So this is DJ Delaney coming at you live from the maintenance room at KSILO radio.”
“Got any music?” Chase says.
“Actually . . . just give me a second,” she says. “I take it that means you want to skip hearing about today’s lunch special.”
Seconds later, I’m pedaling down the road to a song I’ve heard Delaney play often while prepping in the kitchen.
Just a small town girl, livin’ in a lonely world
She took the midnight train goin’ anywhere
When the chorus comes, Chase sings along. He’s got a nice voice. I wish he didn’t. Otto bobs his head without benefit of a headset as he rides off to my left.
/> “You know this song?” I ask, figuring he’s had as sheltered a life as I have.
He looks as me as though to say, You don’t?
Smart ass, I mouth. But I smile as the song ends, the silence somehow more bearable, less menacing than before.
“Don’t DJs get docked or something for dead airtime?” Chase asks.
“Sorry, guys,” Delaney says. “Much as I’d love to regale you with my entire eighties playlist, gotta conserve batteries. So that’s it for—whoa.”
“What?” I ask.
“That’s weird. Air system just shut off.”
“It shouldn’t.” Chase. “We still have fuel.”
“Chase, there’s a red light on in the big electrical cabinet—”
“The disconnect panel?”
When she doesn’t answer right away, he says, “Laney?”
“The lights just went out,” she says.
“There’s a flashlight on the wall next to the panel.”
A few seconds later, she says: “Got it.”
“What does it say next to the red light?”
A moment, and then: “Battery.”
“Battery?” he says weirdly. “The generators should have switched back on if it was running low.”
“What do I do now?”
“Get Irwin.”
“What’s happening?” I ask, pulling alongside Chase.
He shakes his head. “Place is shutting down.”
2 P.M.
* * *
“Who’s with the girls?” I say after Delaney’s woken Irwin. “Delaney! Who’s—”
“I’m headed down, hold your horses. It’s not like the place is gonna explode.” A beat, and then: “Is it?”
I blink and glance at Chase.