FIVE
WEDNESDAY EVENING, BLINDFOLDED IN THE BACKSEAT OF HIS father’s truck, Griff considered Charity’s comment.
You boys might already be too far gone.
Griff was blindfolded because he was not yet in the inner circle. If you had a bunker, you didn’t tell anyone. Passcodes and encrypted maps. Acronyms like SHTF and TEOTWAWKI, because when Shit Hit The Fan and it was The End Of The World As We Know It, there would only be so much to go around.
Griff jolted in the truck, teeth clicking.
Something about blindfolds made him feel like he had a rag stuffed in his mouth. Like it was hard to breathe. The truck bent left, floating around a hairpin turn. He focused on the rise and fall of his chest. Facts.
This was okay. Not terribly strange.
Thousands of backyard bunkers in the US. There were Raven Rock and Mount Weather for government employees. Rising S, named after the Rising Son Jesus Christ, which offered basic backyard models and UnderEarth Luxury Condos. Underground dog parks, movie theaters, saunas, in-ground pools. Bunkers were the United States of America’s new gated communities.
The truck stopped, engine ticking.
Griff removed his blindfold and squinted, sweat chilling the creases of his eyes. They were parked on Highway 2. At the cusp of the redwood forests, the air hung heavy, chilled with mist. They walked into a grove of ash trees, each an identical height and wingspan. It tickled the primal brain with a flutter of panic—trees don’t grow up naturally together and all at once unless something bad happened.
They walked into the woods. Sky darkened.
Leo and their father walked up ahead, talking too low to hear. They used to walk all together. Mosquitos here, notoriously small and quick, drawn to the damp corners of your eyes. A whine in Griff’s left ear. He slapped at it. Jammed a finger in. Nothing. You couldn’t catch them.
They walked for half an hour.
In a nondescript clearing, they stopped at a concrete plug in the earth. Their father got on his knees and showed his face to the camera. The bunker plug made a deep-throated click. Griff was last inside the vertical tunnel. Welded rungs bubbled up where they met concrete. The powdery dry-goods scent made his throat constrict. In a town where the greatest threat was a tsunami, it seemed unwise to descend into an airless cement egg in the ground.
Someone belched in the main room. You could smell every bodily thing.
Griff followed Leo and his father past a sign printed on typing paper in bold font, duct-taped at the corners:
COMMUNITY ROOM
The space was roughly the size of a small classroom. Bricked in by neatly packed Rubbermaids, stackable blue bricks of purified water, and sealed #10 cans that held the provisions for a survival force of twelve:
4800 pounds of hard white grains
360 pounds of powdered milk and canned cheese
720 pounds of sugar
72 pounds of powdered eggs and baking powder
72 pounds of salt
360 pounds of fat
720 pounds of beans and lentils
Survival had a powdery taste.
Griff looked into the room at the other Preppers bleached white by LED lights. He felt the gravity of Scruggs’s approaching beard before he saw him. Even post-pandemic, the Senior Prepper was a hugger.
“Hey, buddy!” Scruggs said.
Griff’s vision was eclipsed by the man’s wreath of facial hair, squeezed by strong arms and a broad chest. Griff couldn’t fathom why someone so genuinely joyful could live by himself, have so little to do. Aside from the radio station, a beard was the closest thing Scruggs had to a hobby.
“Missed seeing you at the Hanging,” Scruggs said. He chewed his lip, like something was wrong. “You and Thomas still planning to do a late-night show?”
“Oh yeah,” Griff said. “If you’ve still got space.”
“All we got is space and time,” Scruggs said. “Let’s get you trained up. Thomas, you still in?”
“Rock and roll!” Thomas called from across the room.
It felt good. Something he could do that Leo couldn’t touch.
Dunbar used a bike bell to bring them to order.
Each member took a seat in a stackable green chair: Jonesy, Slim, Dunbar, Thomas, their father. Jonesy took a Bug Detector from the shelf and scanned the room. Griff tapped his own pocket. He’d remembered this time.
“Oops, dangit,” Scruggs said. He took his phone from his pocket and removed the battery. Standard security protocol.
The first item of business was the Board—a ten-foot magnetic spreadsheet with DISASTER TYPE (Y-axis) vs. THREAT LEVEL (X-axis). Current potential disasters included:
Mudslide
Forest Fire
Terrorism
EMPs
Solar Flares
Global Pandemic
The Great Big One
Nuclear Strike
Dirty Bomb
Threat levels: MILD, MODERATE, SEVERE, IMPENDING, INEVITABLE. Being September, forest fires dialed back from Severe to Moderate. Pandemic moved from Moderate to Severe. The Great Big One never budged from Impending, and the most robust conversation happened around Nuclear Strike. Dunbar perseverated on the likelihood of being nuked, maybe because that was the only scenario in which the bunker made sense.
Griff had initially found these conversations fascinating. Terrifying, even.
They’d watched videos of nuclear tests. Like God breathing fire. Nevada palms turned to feather dusters, then dust. The nuclear flash burned shadows into permanent ink stains and turned sand to melted glass. Kilotons, megatons. The bunker felt like the most thrilling backyard fort a boy could dream up and a man could build.
Now Griff mainly dwelled on the shrinking chance of losing his virginity before the apocalypse.
“We’ve got intel on twenty-three new missing warheads—” Dunbar said.
Sitting up in his green plastic chair, Griff contemplated never having laid his hands on an actual set of breasts. The mechanics of clasps and the one-handed bra removal trick Leo had bragged about. Despite his ability to tie knots. One simple clasp. Griff’s fingers fidgeted, imagining. Clasp, release.
“—a single activated warhead can deploy a cluster of thirty-six devastating explosions, and I don’t need to remind you that this will make Hiroshima look like a game of patty-cake—”
Griff sized up his fellow Preppers. Fairly certain all of them, even Jonesy, had probably been with a girl or at least made out for a satisfactory amount of time. He felt a sudden surge of jealousy. It seemed impossible anyone would let these boys’ tongues, willingly, into their mouths. And here he was, thoughtful. Cared about music. Played piano. Yet something was apparently wrong with him—
“—the fires would be worse than the bombs, we’d get swallowed—”
Griff paid attention to his mouth. Ran his tongue along his teeth. Licked his lips. Could he do it properly? What if the Thunderbolt 1000T went off—could he kiss and be kissed? He retreated to the fantasy scenario in which the school reacted to news of impending doom by flying into unbridled, erotic abandon. Couples shoving up against lockers, on the floor, shutting themselves into supply closets, whipping off clothes as sirens wailed and the impending apocalypse counted down to zero—
The conversation moved to the lighthouse.
Griff perked up. This was important.
Dunbar had continued to repeat his idea, steady as war drums.
“We need to deal with the lighthouse.”
Meaning: convert it from a lighthouse to a military-style outpost. A long-simmering idea among the Preppers. Remove the only Fresnel light on this stretch of the coast. A two-ton, steel-and-glass miracle of engineering. Hundreds of concentric rings in a bull’s-eye pattern, visible for over 20 miles. They wanted to replace it with equipment to monitor incoming warheads, sea levels, the unsubstantiated threat of patrolling Russian submarines.
“Not like a lighthouse is useful,” Jonesy said.
“Not for the last few decades,” Dunbar said, agreeing with his son.
“It’s good for tourism dollars,” Griff’s father said. Smart. He knew the word dollars would find purchase somewhere in the slick interior of Dunbar’s mind.
“Then who is on SubWatch this week?” Dunbar asked.
Griff let his eyes go blank. Imagined little glass plates in front of them. SubWatch, as a duty, was the Prepper equivalent of scrubbing toilets. Outside in waders. Holding a giant copper receiver. Listening to the wordless thrum of low-frequency broadcasts until you prayed for someone to please just bomb the coast already.
“See?” Dunbar said. “Everyone wants to save the lighthouse, but no one wants to work!” Jonesy finally volunteered, and they moved on to assigning the three available alert tones for the Thunderbolt 1000T siren. Tone one would signify a warning for the Cascadia Subduction Earthquake. Tone two: Nuclear Attack. After a debate on wildfires vs. mudslides vs. terrorist incursion, they agreed the most practical use for tone three would be to announce monthly city council meetings, as tardiness had become an issue.
Dunbar played the three tones on his bunker stereo. Tone one. Tone two. Tone three. He played them again. Everyone leaned forward, squinting. Griff could not tell the difference between the tones. Leo and he exchanged a look like, what the hell?
“They all sound the same,” Griff said.
“They do not,” Dunbar said. “What do you think, Leo?”
“More or less,” Leo said. “Like any three AC/DC songs.”
“Oooo,” Jonesy said. The whole room looked at Thomas.
“That comment has been logged for future retribution,” Thomas said.
“That’s kind of a problem,” Griff said.
“Yes,” Griff’s dad said. “We don’t want people to mishear. They could show up for a meeting on proper land use development and get vaporized by a Russian nuke.”
“Or pancaked by a Pacific Goddammit,” Thomas said, smiling. Thomas had a number of them—Pacific Goddammit, the Cascadia ComeGetcha, the Juan DeFucYou.
“Oops!” Dunbar said.
Conversation drifted to a better siren, problems with mounting, and Dunbar’s mind rolled back downhill on one of the few paths available and landed back at the lighthouse.
“That darn lighthouse is the pretty little albatross around our neck,” Dunbar said.
Griff’s mind could not ride these rails anymore. He reached for his chocolate bar, which had become an empty wrapper. He slapped his crinkling pocket.
Never mind one had to kill an albatross before having it tied around one’s neck—that being the point of the albatross-around-the-neck—he would not win this fight with a demand for accurate metaphors. How had the search for truth led him to this bunker?
Nights, once spent digging through their grandfather’s Mysteries of the Unknown books, up late on the computer, piecing together the riddles of the world—Catatumbo lightning, the secret language of trees, riddles of the afterlife—the feeling that you could lie on your back in the lawn and fall up into the stars and never stop—how enormous it felt. Secrets so important they needed to be guarded like treasure.
They’d found the old federal mailbox outside Downtown Depot. Abandoned. Waiting for them like another sharp corner of the universe’s puzzle. They’d hauled it home four awful blocks with one broken flip-flop and a bloody toe and they’d painted it black and decorated it with TOE, their first secret acronym—the TOE Box—out of reverence for Griff’s poor toe, but the letters stood for the Theory Of Everything, because anything less than the perfect intersection of science, and magic, and love was beneath them. Just two years ago, they’d both known what Charity still knew—it was a great big world out there.
Life had gotten small.
Small chairs. A small room. Scruggs took out a small flask and tipped it into his beard. Jonesy and Slim spat small black seeds into their small cups. Even Jonesy used to talk about extraterrestrial life and watch the sky for UFOs. What happened here?
“Well, okay,” Dunbar said. “Done.”
Dunbar rang the bike bell.
They stood for the postmeeting Hangout. Slim, Jonesy, Thomas, Dunbar, Leo, and their dad stood in a circle. Each man roughly the same distance from the next. Like mutually repellent magnets. Drinking. Spitting seeds. This was the Hangout.
“Given any thought to the Gap?” Dunbar asked Griff.
The Gap was the one-year program after high school based in Arizona, meant to give graduating seniors a year of practical survival experience instead of college. He had no desire to go.
“I’ve given it some thought,” Griff said. He tried to breathe. The bunker air felt sandy.
Mouth on autopilot. Saying whatever slippery thing could get him out of the conversation. Slim brought in the indestructible yellow DeWalt stereo. Griff’s father poured brown whisky for the adults. Griff felt like a candle being snuffed. Flickering for lack of oxygen.
He walked quickly through the group, toward the ladder, praying the concrete plug would open, praying the whole big impossible world was still up there where he’d left it.
At home, Griff and Leo lay in bed. The lighthouse flashed on the window. Waves drummed.
“Bro?” Leo asked. “What happened down there?”
“Whoomp,” Griff whispered.
“You kind of lost it.”
Griff stared at his brother. A smudge in dim light, propped on his elbow. They used to talk for hours this way.
“Do you ever still have night terrors?” Griff asked.
For years, Leo used to wake up thrashing. Screaming with his eyes open. Gasping, he clawed up through the air like a desperate swimmer. Griff would try to shake him awake. One night, his father had lifted his flailing son into the shower with ice-cold water and Leo had shrieked as if being stabbed. That’s how they learned not to wake him. During night terrors, the victim must wake themselves.
“Not for a long time,” Leo said softly.
“What stopped them?”
He was quiet.
“Maybe the range,” Leo said.
“C’mon.”
“Shooting is meditative,” Leo said. “It’s about breathing. You should try it. You know, you might want to get more involved. We’ve actually got a good crew down there.”
“Jonesy?” Griff said.
“So you want to be outcasts again?” his brother asked. “Go back to the Tripp Me Twins?”
Griff held his breath. Leo’s words conjured the horrors of middle school hallways.
“We finally belong, bro,” Leo whispered.
No, Griff thought. For the guys in the bunker, music was a light switch. Something you turned on or off. And they liked pieces of Griff. His accuracy with a nail gun. Occasional jokes. Knots he tied. Small features of his personality, sorted and lifeless as equipment on a table. This group of friends reflected him like a warped mirror. After too long, he’d start to resemble the reflection.
“I just feel like there’s more out there,” Griff said.
When the lighthouse flashed, it limned their window in white light.
“There is,” Leo said softly. “There’s Charity.”