CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I took a shift three hours later, sitting up in the dining room and drinking instant coffee while the rest of them slept. Sue and Tessa were still huddled together in Sue’s bunk, and I let them be. The longer Sue could escape from the reality of what had happened, the better.

The coffee was bitter and it burned my throat going down. I took my time, blowing across the top of the cup, and stared at the marks on the wall that served as our rudimentary calendar. Nearly four neat sets of seven marks now, six vertical lines with a slash through them; we’d been down here almost a month. It seemed impossible to believe, the time both passing too quickly and not quickly enough. I wondered if Dan had missed a day or two, and figured he had not. If there was one thing we could count on, it was Dan’s orderly mind. Got it from his father, who had served twenty years in the army and demanded the same disciplined approach from his family that he’d received in the service. But Dan’s father did it with love and affection, from everything I’d seen, which was vastly different than my own father’s tactics. There was discipline, there was order, and then there was cruelty. Sometimes the lines blurred together, and sometimes they didn’t.

For a moment I felt a mix of panic and disorientation as I looked at the clock on the wall: 6:30. I couldn’t remember if it was morning or night. Did it matter, really? If I opened that hatch and looked out, would I even be able to tell?

Sitting there in the silence, I had plenty of time to think. I listened to the occasional grunt and creak as someone turned over in bed, and thought about Jay, all the years I’d known him, the times we’d spent together. It was mostly as part of the group because, although I liked him a lot, Jay always seemed to have this layer of reserve, this protective aura about him that kept most people at arm’s length. Jay was the kind of guy you could know for years without really knowing him; he didn’t share many secrets, he didn’t break down, he didn’t let you see behind the mask very often. I guess he must have with Sue, but even with that relationship he was secretive. After all, we hadn’t found out they were dating at all until we were locked together down in the shelter, but from the looks of things they’d been a couple for quite a while.

That got me thinking about the others. How well did I really know any of them? Back before the bombs hit I would have described them all as my best friends, and I would have meant it. But now I wondered.

The private thoughts they don’t share with anyone. The dreams they don’t want to let into the world. Things that make them bleed inside.

The prevailing wisdom is that tragedy brings people together. But it can do the opposite too. It can drive a wedge between you, I think. Make you look at a person you thought you knew, and wonder if you really ever knew them at all. Tessa was the only one of the group that I really felt like I knew as well as I knew myself. But she was different. She was closer to me than anyone else in the world.

Jay wasn’t coming back. It seemed so strange to think about our gang without him. But right now I was feeling alone down here in the dark, even with four sleeping bodies in the other room, and the weight of the world seemed to be pressing down on me.

I don’t know why I got up to get the radio. Dan had already listened to it for nearly an hour that day, scanning every channel several times and finding nothing. Maybe I needed some noise to fill the empty space, even if it was nothing but static. In my mind I kept hearing Jay’s voice, the way he strained to get the words out: You take care of her, you p-p-promise me. I…can’t hold them off anymore…hurts…so bad.

I was beginning to get decidedly creeped out. I took the radio scanner off the shelf, then sat back down. It was one of those fairly high-end emergency kits that had a flashlight built in and ran off batteries, and if the batteries died it had a hand crank on the side that could generate enough power with a few turns to run the thing for five minutes or so.

We’d been lazy, up until now, running it from the large supply of batteries we’d found on the shelves. We’d only had to replace them once so far, and there were plenty left. Still, if we were going to remain down here for weeks longer, we should have been more careful.

I turned the crank for a while, the soft whirring sound rhythmic and soothing. Finally my arm started to ache, and I switched it on, turning the sound down low enough to keep from disturbing the others. There were something like a thousand channels on there, including aircraft, police, fire, ambulance, military and ham radio—from 25 MHz all the way up to 1.5 GHz. If someone were broadcasting, we would hear it.

Static up and down the traditional FM band, which wasn’t surprising. I knew that FM wavelength didn’t cover very long distances. Traditional AM radio offered nothing but crackles, pops and hisses. But when I switched and went down into the lower frequencies, I thought I heard something.

I turned up the volume, my heart pounding, and worked my way back through, very slowly. Was that a voice, or had it just been my imagination? Already I was doubting myself, and I couldn’t find it again. Quickly I got up and grabbed the book we’d found that explained the frequencies and who broadcasted on them.

The area I was scanning, down at the lowest end of the readable spectrum, was normally used by the military.

I tried again, and this time, when I worked the dial back down, I heard, very clearly, the word doomsday.

Something else followed, but static filled the speaker again, the sound washing in and out. I turned up the volume. The voice was a man’s, that much was certain. My scalp prickled as I bent closer, every nerve in my body alive and screaming, my muscles taut and quivering. I felt this strange sense of unreality, as if I were outside myself watching a play happen onstage, or asleep and dreaming; a voice on the radio, the same radio we had been listening to for weeks now with nothing but static, a voice from the outside world that seemed so far away, so divorced from the world we now knew, these concrete walls and floors and narrow rooms that had become our prison.

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.