by A. M. Geever
Kendall stood with his hands in the dirt, his task forgotten.
“We’re working on ramping up production and getting the vaccine out to people. And letting people know we’ve got it. They’re already starting to come. Then San Jose, and the people there who control that vaccine, will become irrelevant.”
Kendall stared at her. He seemed to realize his mouth was hanging open and shut it. “You were out here looking for people to tell?”
“No,” Miranda said, shaking her head. “We were— It doesn’t matter. I make it easier to move around. If you stick right next to me, they’ll stay away.”
“That’s…incredible,” Kendall said softly. “I’ve seen things by flying drones, but—”
“You have drones?”
Kendall shrugged. “Some small ones. I saw it happen…how fast it spread. Almost every place people tried to keep safe was overrun, eventually. So many were terrible to each other, the people, I mean. I stayed here.”
What would it have been like to watch it happen from a safe place? she wondered. Not in a place you thought was safe, or was safe for the time being, but truly safe. It must have been terrifying, though not as much as being in it.
“Not all people are bad.” She remembered something he’d said through the speakers before they entered the bunker. “You knew where we’re from. You’re the one who brought up the park. You’ve seen it from your drones, haven’t you?”
Kendall suddenly looked trapped, like he’d been caught out in a lie.
“It’s fine,” she said quickly. She didn’t want him clamming up. “It’s not like you’ve tried to mess with us. It’s great here, compared to home. Everybody gets along, and they work together. They aren’t trying to screw each other for a buck.”
Kendall didn’t respond, and Miranda wasn’t sure what else to say. Had she said too much? Had she freaked him out? It was a lot to dump on a person all at once. She went back to thinning the plants. When she and Kendall were in the same spot again, he started to talk.
“My family said I was crazy for building this place.”
“So it is yours.”
Kendall nodded.
“Must have cost a fortune,” she said.
Kendall almost smiled; it looked like a grimace. “It was expensive.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “I just wish the others had made it.” He paused, then added, “It surprises me, though.”
He didn’t say more. Having to ask a follow-up question for almost every one of his statements was starting to make her tired. “What does?”
“That more people weren’t prepared.”
Miranda barked a laugh. “For the zombie apocalypse? I don’t think anyone saw that coming.”
Kendall shook his head. “No. I mean for an emergency. It’s not that hard to pull together supplies and a plan, and have a place to go. Property wasn’t that expensive in more remote areas. You wouldn’t need a place like this…just something.”
She narrowed her eyes and had to work at not frowning, for his statement rankled. He sounded smug, like he’d been so much smarter than everyone else, instead of realizing that he had the ability, the resources, to do something most people on the planet could only dream about. He was right about property being cheaper in the middle of nowhere, but most people hadn’t had that kind of money. Some people never owned a home, and it wasn’t for lack of wanting to or working hard.
An intense dislike for Kendall bloomed in her chest. Maybe seven years alone wasn’t enough for someone so arrogant to learn much of anything.
Aloud, she said, “Not everybody’s Kendall Grant, with more money than they could ever spend.”
His eyes widened. He was Kendall Grant, just as Alec had said.
“That’s not what I meant,” he said, defensive. He also looked alarmed, as if it had only just occurred to him that they knew where he was and what he had, and what that might mean.
Miranda sized him up for a moment, pretty damn sure that was exactly what he’d meant.
“Don’t worry. None of that matters anymore, and we don’t care who you used to be. My family was rich. San Francisco Gold Rush money, and it didn’t do diddly squat to save my mom and dad and brothers. I’m only here because San Jose managed to scrape through somehow, and I was in the right place at the right time. This kind of stuff—” She waved her hand around to indicate the bunker. “Was nice to have, obviously. Still is. But I like where we live, out there, and the work we’re doing.”
Kendall blinked at her, which made him resemble an owl, and pushed up his glasses. He swallowed so hard his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. She dusted off her hands.
“I’m going to bed. See if I can get back to sleep.” She gestured to the infant plants between them. “Thanks for letting me help. And don’t worry that we’ll tell anybody about your layout here. We have no reason to.” She chuckled as she said, “And nobody’s getting in that door of yours.”
Kendall nodded. After a moment he said, “I…enjoyed talking. With you.”
A corner of her mouth curved up. “You must be a glutton for punishment, Kendall. My friends are always telling me what a pain in the ass I am.”
He grinned, just a little, as if he was unused to doing so. He started to blink like an owl again. She supposed he was rusty, after so many years alone. She could feel his eyes on her until she was through the door. She detoured to the kitchen for another bottle of wine before heading to her room, feeling justified in liberating a tiny bit more of Kendall’s excess wealth.
She looked at the label: Harlan Estate. She recognized it; her mother had liked this winery, and their wine had cost several hundred dollars a bottle. More than some people had made in a day. More than some made in a month, or more. Not because they were stupid or lazy, but because of what country they were born in, or what school district their parents could afford to live in. Not buy a house in, but live in, period.
Kendall Grant had started out in life so far ahead of so many people, just like Miranda had. His family hadn’t been wealthy like hers, but he’d mentioned attending Stanford or Harvard, a place like that. He probably thought he was a self-made man, but there was no such thing. That was one thing her parents had drummed into her head at least, when it came to money or success. He’d been able to take advantage of opportunities that most people could only dream of, and got a lot of help to do it. Mentors and connections from college, business loans when he started his company, and later, favorable legislation he’d had the money to make a reality, yet he thought surviving the zombie apocalypse had been about having the foresight to plan for the unimaginable? An emergency, sure, but a full-on global disaster that had been impossible to get ahead of anywhere? Most people hadn’t lived their lives that way, and the people who had tended to be completely fucking paranoid.
There’d probably been a hundred people on the planet with the money to build a place like this. Her family had been loaded, but she wasn’t sure they could have built this. A smaller, less snazzy one maybe, but who the hell did so in the old world except for people like Kendall? And after all this time he was smug because he’d had billions, and spent half of one percent of it building a bunker? It made him smarter that he flew drones around to see what was happening while people were getting eaten by zombies, but did nothing to help anyone?
She shook her head, disgusted. Kendall was a hoarder, nothing more. He’d hoarded wealth in the old world, keeping far more than he’d ever need at the expense of everyone else. Just like her family, for that matter, even if they soothed their conscience with charity work and foundations that were well-intentioned, but a drop in the bucket compared to what was in their bank account. They’d had so much when so many had so little, and she’d never questioned why that was until she got to college. Until her horizons were broadened, and she met people with backgrounds different from her own. It didn’t seem that Kendall had ever made that connection. He was still hoarder of wealth; only the currency had changed.
Apart from the sleazeba
lls on San Jose’s City Council, people didn’t think that way so much anymore. Survival was too immediate, and the margins too thin. Yet here, in this tomb to the old world’s excess, the ‘Me, me, me, I did it on my own and fuck everyone else’ mentality seemed to be alive and well.
“What an asshole,” she muttered.
As far as she was concerned, they couldn’t get back to LO fast enough.
8
Miranda looked up when Delilah, who lay on the floor beside the couch she lay on, began to thump her tail. Alec had entered their domed apartment. She set her glass of wine on the coffee table and resumed reading the Irish police procedural she’d taken from the library. The writing was excellent and story really creepy. It made her wish there was still such a thing as international travel as it once had been: easy and fast.
Alec rubbed Delilah’s tummy, then sat down sideways near Miranda’s feet so he was facing her. He folded his right leg under him, his other foot touching the floor, and lay his arm along the couch’s back.
“What’s with the sourpuss?”
“I didn’t know I had one,” she said.
That slow, sly smile started at the right corner of his mouth and worked its way left. It hadn’t escaped Miranda’s attention that Alec was handsome, with those hazel eyes and strong jaw and black hair. And there was the accent. But it was when he smiled, as if he knew how good he looked and liked what he saw of you, that he transformed into the bad boy your mother warned you about. The one you just couldn’t stay away from, even though you knew it would end in heartbreak. He had charmed his way into many a girl’s bed with that smile, of that she was a thousand percent sure.
“When you haven’t ignored our host the last two days, you’ve been a wee bit snippy. Hurt his feelings at breakfast, I think.”
Miranda rolled her eyes.
Undeterred, Alec said, “Then you got a book and a bottle of wine, and you’ve been hiding here ever since.” He glanced at the three-quarters empty bottle, then added, “You’re ripping through that at a fair rate, lass, and it’s not even lunchtime.”
She returned to her book. “I like to read. And drink. This is good wine.”
Alec caught her toes and wiggled her foot.
“What?” she said, not looking up from her book.
“So why’ve you gone off our lad Kendall? Rich told me you had a midnight chat with him. What did he say?”
“Trying to read here, Alec.”
She wasn’t reading, of course, since he was distracting her. He started to tickle her foot. She snatched it away.
“Stop!” She glared at him. She should probably slow down on the wine. “Go be charmingly annoying somewhere else.”
“I’m charming, am I?” he said, laughing. “Seriously, though. What’s with the attitude? He’s a lot looser when you’re around.”
Miranda dropped the book to the floor and scooted up so that the small of her back was propped against the arm of the couch, and her feet were out of Alec’s reach.
“It’s stupid… He was saying how it surprised him that more people hadn’t prepared some place to go to if there was a disaster like zombies, because, you know, everyone saw it coming.”
“Ah,” Alec said.
“He talked as if everyone had the money to do it,” she continued. “He was saying how land was cheap east of Portland, and they didn’t have to build this kind of place but could have done something. He’s right that land was cheaper, but most people didn’t have the money to buy land that was hours away, much less build on it. He was so…smug about it, like he was so much smarter than everyone else. Meanwhile he’s hiding here, all by himself, for years on end. It annoyed me.”
“I can tell.”
Miranda scowled. “He’s telling me how he flew drones around, and saw it happening, but he didn’t try to help anyone. He just watched and hid.”
Alec shrugged. “If I’d had a place to stay that was safe and stocked like this, I don’t know that I’d have gone out.”
Miranda snorted dismissively. “You’re not a chickenshit, Alec.”
“And you were always this tough, I suppose?” he asked, eyebrows raised, that charming smile daring her to contradict him.
“Hardly,” she answered. “I was twenty years old and scared shitless. My best friend even told me she wasn’t dying for me if I froze or did one more stupid thing. But you know how it was—you decided if you were going to live or not. A lot of people are stumbling around out there trying to eat the rest of us because they decided not to.”
He nodded. “It’s easy to get unlucky when you decide living is too hard.”
“Exactly. I got in touch with my anger and channeled it.”
Alec’s bark of laughter was so loud that it startled Delilah, who began to bark.
“Oh, I’m sorry, doggie,” he said, reaching to pet the startled pit bull. “I don’t want to see you angry then, lass,” he said. Then his expression sobered. “We could use your help. He’s more relaxed with you. Probably finds you less threatening.”
“He doesn’t know me very well,” she muttered. A silence filled the room. Had Rich told him how she couldn’t outlast a long silence? It was time she figured out how to do it. Just be a little uncomfortable, she told herself; it won’t kill you.
She lasted thirty seconds.
“Fine. I’ll come back out and play nice. He just reminded me so much of the jerks I went to school with… Bunch of overentitled assholes.”
Alec cocked his head to the side. “Are you telling me you were a woman of means?”
She shrugged. “You might say that.”
The grin reappeared. “How rich were you?”
“It really doesn’t matter anymore, Alec,” she said, but she was grinning, too. She took another sip of her wine.
“Oh, I see,” he said. “You were from one of those modest, old-money families. The kind that didn’t like to flaunt their fortune, in case the peasants like me decided to round up the pitchforks.”
Miranda laughed. Alec’s eyes flashed. He was enjoying himself. She was, too.
She swung her legs around as she sat up. “If you must know,” she said, then stopped, as if she were weighing whether or not to continue.
“Oh, I must,” he said.
She stood up. “Before my great-great-great-grandmother married outside the tribe, which apparently her parents never forgave her for because she let him raise the kids Catholic, my family sold blue jeans.”
Alec’s eyes narrowed, then he burst into laughter. “Levi’s? Are you telling me your…what? Four or five times great-grandfather was Levi Strauss?”
“I didn’t tell you anything of the sort,” she said primly.
She headed for her room, thinking that she was walking just fine, even though her ability to walk was something she never thought about normally. I drank more wine than I thought, she realized.
“I’ll be out in half an hour. I’m going to take a shower first.”
“I’ll make you some coffee,” Alec said, chuckling. “Your grasp on your balance doesn’t look that firm, lassie.”
She flipped him off over her shoulder, his laughter ringing in her ears. She shut the bedroom door behind her, still smiling. Alec really did have a nice laugh, even if he was a rogue.
She slowed her steps as she approached the lounge nearest to the bunker entrance, listening from around the corner.
“What are you using for your solar grid?” Kendall asked.
“I don’t know,” Rich said. “It’s not one of the things I do. Is there an advantage to the different systems?”
Christ, he’s good, Miranda thought. She could hear the butter in his voice. She plowed ahead and turned the corner just as Kendall began to speak. His face lit up like a firefly.
“Oh. Miranda.”
“Hi, Kendall,” she said.
Kendall and Rich sat in easy chairs among the furniture arranged for conversation in the lounge, their backs to the dining area behind them. Rich looked relaxed
, but Kendall fidgeted. Phineas lay sprawled on a couch across from them, taking up all the cushions. The scent of coffee, which smelled as good as the crushing disappointment of how bad it tasted, wafted from the kitchen.
Phineas grinned at her. “My sleeping beauty graces us with her presence.”
Miranda flopped onto the other end of the couch, pushing Phineas’ feet out of the way. She said, “Is there any caffeine for your sleeping beauty, or just flowery words?”
“Alec made some coffee,” Kendall said. He stood up abruptly. “I’ll get you some.”
“That would be great, but I don’t—”
Kendall was already out of the room and turning into the kitchen.
“Like coffee.”
She hadn’t told Alec that she didn’t like coffee earlier. There didn’t seem to be any point in telling eager beaver Kendall now.
“Nice to see you, Miranda.”
Miranda nodded at Rich in acknowledgment. “How’s the solar system doing?”
“Writ large, I have no idea,” he said. “But at LO, seems there might be some improvements to be made.”
“Too bad you don’t know what you’re talking about,” Phineas snorted.
“I am establishing a rapport,” Rich said, voice low. “Do you need to look that one up?”
“That’s hurtful, Rich. Seriously,” Phineas said, not sounding hurt in the least.
Kendall returned, carrying a tray with a mug, a carafe of coffee, a small pitcher of creamer, a pot of honey, and what looked like a sugar bowl full of sugar, and a few squares of dark chocolate. She hadn’t seen chocolate in years that wasn’t spoiled. Kendall set the tray down on the coffee table in front of Miranda, then blinked at her like an owl.
“I forgot to ask how you like it, so…I brought everything.”
“Thanks.” She leaned forward to add sugar and milk. God, I hate coffee, she thought, but she needed to sober up, and beggars can’t be choosers.