He stepped over the threshold of the iron pressure door, rusted open so fully that it didn’t budge an inch even when he leaned his full weight on it, and into a little antechamber, more packaging rustling underfoot. In the next room a dim yellow panel of overhead lights flickered on as the dog loped by, a plastic packet in her jaws. It must be a motion sensor, Malcolm thought. He ducked through the inner airlock and stepped down to the sunken space beyond.
Another panel of lights buzzed to life, half of them flickering, most of the rest long since dead, throwing the recessed bookshelves stuffed with disintegrating paperbacks and the moth-eaten couches set along the walls into sharp relief. A big wood-frame television hunched on the far side of the room, right where a fireplace would have been in a real house. He could hear something rustling around under the couches. Rodents, maybe. Pale little moths no bigger than quarters fluttered through the flickering light. He hugged himself against the cold.
I should get back, he thought again, but the lure of the rooms opening off the main area was too strong. The first was a pantry, row after row of those packaged meals spilling off of wire racks, some torn at, some gnawed through by little teeth. The dog was shaking her head to tear one open even as he stepped inside. Malcolm scanned the shelves. Franks in red sauce. Bacon and greens. More ham and scalloped potatoes. Who had lived here? Someone sick? Insane? It felt like a sad place.
The bathroom was small and cell-like, tile over concrete, the shower recessed in the wall behind a glazed plastic sliding door. The door fought him when he tried to get it open. It was jammed, maybe the metal rim had rusted shut, or it was stuck on something. This is how people die in horror movies, he thought, and at that moment the door flew open and slammed into its slot in the wall, and Malcolm screamed in terror as the flickering lights reflected off something smooth and white and—
Bones. It was just bones. A skeleton lying curled on its back at the bottom of the shower. Some of it had been disarticulated and strewn over the dirty tiles, showing marks where something had chewed on them. A splintered rib. A length of shinbone cracked and gnawed at one end. Coyotes, he told himself, but his imagination bubbled over with stick-thin cave dwellers, hair matted and filthy, eyes sunken in deep sockets, lipping leathery flesh from their father’s remains. They’d be blind after so long in here. Afraid of the sun. Afraid to leave this place.
He knelt for a closer look and wondered with a sudden surge of nauseating fascination if the body in the shower had slipped and broken something, perhaps aggravated some miniscule spinal deformity, and then starved to death folded up in that tiled cell, the water beating down on them until there was no water left, only the rattling and groaning of empty pipes. Was it really that different from a coffin, though? Either way you were dead and gone. Cold cuts, his dad always called corpses. Just meat. He forced the rusted shower door shut anyway, if only because he didn’t like the way the skull’s dark sockets seemed to follow him.
The last room held only a small dresser set into the wall, a twin bed covered in rumpled, rotted linens in which it looked like something had made a nest for itself, and a tall, narrow wall safe, slightly ajar. The dog appeared at his side as he stood in the doorway. She licked his palm and for a moment he thought about going right then, about ditching this sad little hole in the ground where some poor weirdo’s whole fucked-up worldview had slipped and fallen in the shower and then lain there staring at its own limp junk and jumbled limbs, waiting to die. He felt like someone was watching him.
Somehow instead he found himself gripping the wall safe’s corroded handle. He pulled. Nothing. Harder, and a growl of rusted hinges. He set a foot against the wall and heaved. The locker swung open, first an inch, then all at once so that he fell and bruised his ass and the dog jumped back with a frightened yelp. It took him a moment to stop shaking, to step close again so he could make sure what he’d seen was right.
It was. The cabinet was full of dynamite.
“A bunker in the hills,” said Felix, crushing down the dull ache in his chest. The stiff, chewy corn tacos the mess was serving today made him think of his mother’s tortillas, thick and fluffy. He kept thinking about things like that. He could feel himself softening. Opening up. He didn’t like it. “What were you even doing out there?”
“We were digging holes for a fence,” said John. “Malcolm picked a fight with Vick, because he’s an idiot. Vick chased him off, and there was a whole, like, fallout shelter in the woods. There were guns, food, a skeleton, so—”
“Who’s telling this story?” Malcolm asked, exasperated.
“Keep your voices down,” said Nadine. Felix followed her stare to where Cheryl prowled the edge of the mess, circling the tables like a shark. “A bunker’s good news. If the MREs are still in plastic, they should be edible. My uncle Jason’s in the army and he says those things last fifty years if you store them right. That means we can stop worrying about granola bars. After we make our call, we’ll stop off there to stock up.”
“It was … kind of sad there,” said Malcolm. He shrugged at their looks of incredulity. “Just a feeling. But yeah, it’s better than stealing two granola bars at a time and getting whipped for it.”
“I’ve been thinking, we should do something to make sure they don’t follow us after we make the call,” said Felix. “Some kind of distraction, maybe.” The idea of hurting the Glovers excited him in a way he didn’t fully understand, except that it felt like his fantasies of strangling his father did sometimes. “The knobs are always coming off the stove; the metal’s all stripped. You could leave the gas on—”
“No,” said Nadine, shaking her head. “This shit is too fucked up, we don’t know who we might hurt. What if they’re keeping Smith in the house? The rest of the kids who’ve disappeared?”
“Should we, um,” John interjected, visibly flustered. “Should we maybe try to get other people out of here with us? Should we try to find Smith?”
There was a moment of silence. Felix knew they couldn’t do it, that to add another step to a plan already hanging by a thread would all but doom it. Still, he hoped someone would say they should. It felt like the kind of thing good people were supposed to do. The silence stretched on. Finally, Nadine spoke.
“We can’t,” she said. She looked exhausted. Drained. Even beyond all her bruises, scrapes, cuts, and other injuries, she looked tired in a way Felix had only ever seen adults look tired. Like she wanted to lie down and close her eyes and not get up. “We’d fuck it up trying to add more people. We’d need more cars, more places to escape to, more food. We’d keep making it more likely that someone would grass on us to Pastor Eddie. It has to be just us, and it has to be now. We’re leaving tonight.”
“Tonight?” Brady squeaked through a mouthful of taco.
“We’ve got no way of knowing when it’ll be our turn for their little wilderness walk,” said Nadine, her voice low. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to find out what they do to kids out there. Remember all the graduates around the fire? Just … staring. Empty. I won’t wind up like that. Boys, Shel, you come to us after lights out. We’ll figure it out from there.”
Gabe was frowning down at his tray, where a lone taco, some wilted romaine lettuce, and a square of grayish cornbread sat almost untouched. “Does this taste weird to you?”
Shelby, silent through most of lunch, seemed to come back to herself at that. “Yeah. Kind of, like, dry and crunchy?”
“Yeah.”
Malcolm elbowed Gabe, breaking the taller boy’s concentration. “Will you fuckin’ eat something, Horn? Kate Moss called; she wants her rib cage back.”
Gabe sighed as the others laughed, though Felix could tell he was pleased with the comparison. He’d seen that giddy, feverish look before in the eyes of the girls at school who threw up in the bathroom between periods, and who had razor burn on their arms from shaving the dark fur that grew there.
Felix took a bite of his own dinner, stale corn tortilla splintering between his teeth. It did taste funny, under the spices. Probably mold or something, but he’d need his strength if they were going to hike out and break into the house tonight.
So much for keeping my head down.
XI FREE YOUR MIND
It was dark when Jo woke from a dream of white cloth billowing over hidden flesh. Moonlight spilled over the floorboards, which seemed almost to ripple like a lake’s surface in a high wind. Nadine’s bed was empty, she realized, and the cabin door was open. When she swung her legs over the edge of her mattress she could feel the air caressing them, stroking her bare skin with love. Felix’s bed was empty, too. I want him to make love to me, she realized. I want him to put his hand inside me.
The cabin door was unlocked. Jo stepped out into the night, taking a deep breath of the cool, dry air. She felt as though she could have inhaled the world, as though each breath coated her insides with a reflection of the night sky and the blazing beacons of the bulbs strung up between the cabins. Something in her ached to float away among those lights. Everything Oji-chan ever said to me, he meant. He meant it with all his heart. He said I’m brave, so I must be brave. He said there’s nothing wrong with me.
She closed her eyes, swaying where she stood, and the thought that she was probably high on something flitted through her mind. She’d smoked weed a few times with Carly Prince, who she’d known since kindergarten and whose breasts she regularly imagined burying her face in when she masturbated, but this didn’t feel like that. It felt like falling into herself, like missing the last step on a set of stairs and then hanging forever in that moment, your senses all blown out of your body as you tried to recalibrate, to summon some response to the collision between certainty and chaos.
They put something in our food.
She opened her eyes. For the first time she noticed that there were others in the thoroughfare between the cabins, close to a dozen of them. A few lay on their backs, staring up into the void. Two girls down at the far end by Cabins Eight and Seven looked like they were having sex. Just the idea of the sound of a wet mouth on the flushed and tender skin of her throat made Jo shudder with euphoria. The air grew tight around her. The lights burned brighter and she saw that they were caged in soapy matrixes of some translucent substance, shifting fractals that collapsed and formed and fell apart again in scintillating bursts of color. “Wow,” she whispered, and the word flashed purple, gold, and silver as it tumbled from her tongue and spilled into the world. She laughed, snorting a little.
I am very, very high.
She made it down the cabin’s steps and the shock as the soles of her feet met cold earth shivered up through her body in blue-white waves of static. She giggled again. Someone grabbed at the hem of her shirt as she passed by them and she danced aside, her body tunneling through the air so that as she looked over her shoulder at their shadow she saw a dozen of herself smeared back along her path in a rainbow of wild colors. “I get it,” she said, raising a hand to feel her own lips. They were so soft. A red sensation, tinged with deep, warm pink. “I get it.”
“What?” asked a boy sitting sprawled against the side of one of the cabins. Vick, who’d called Shelby those awful names. He was looking at his hands.
My parents would shit if they knew I was friends with a Korean transsexual.
“I said I get it,” she breathed, but he wasn’t paying attention and the gong-like ripples of her voice passed over him without his notice, leaving him pale and haggard. She left him there, drifting past the lights of the mess hall, where dark figures stood in doorways and at windows, watching her with eyes that burned like starlight, and on to the embers of the bonfire and the empty logs and camp chairs set around it. The ghost of the fire still danced in the air, sparks and cinders drifting on the cold night wind. When she’d seen Nadine and Felix beaten, part of her had wished that it was her, not them, on display like that, her ass clenching in anticipation of each crack of the belt, her snot and tears mingling and dripping from her chin as she squirmed and wailed. For a moment she was in the locker room of the Concord YMCA, a travel meet three years before, and a dozen girls were pinching and groping her, hissing “Dyke, dyke, dyke” and calling her “jap” and “gook” and her friend Helen Strand was staring at her through the press of bodies, eyes wide, not going for help, not moving, not trying to stop it.
I want to be nailed to a cross and burned, and I want everyone to think how beautiful I look and how sorry they are.
