Maybe revived by the fresh air, Dennis shoved her forward. Her bare foot hit the first step. She was expecting splintery, dirty wood, but the surface was smooth, like linoleum. Another couple steps up, Dennis right behind her, and the door creaked shut behind them. A whoosh and a rumble pressed her eardrums — she hadn’t noticed how loud the sound of the fire had been until they were in this sealed silence.
Dennis sagged for a moment against the wall, breathing hard, but grinning faintly. She could see his face, some faint luminescence painting it in shadows, the whites of his teeth glowing. In that minute, just that minute, Kelsey decided she could love him.
“Sealed room. Separate air filtration system.” He moved a few feet toward a bank of boxes set under the eaves and lifted a lid. “Emergency supplies.”
Kelsey moved closer to see. Water, foil blankets, food in packets. She looked up at him. “Your mom…”
“She was crazy.” Dennis’s grin faded, and he passed a hand over his eyes for a second or two before looking at her again. “Guess she was right though, huh?”
Kelsey nodded and grabbed a bottle of water. She couldn’t decide if it would be better to drink it or wash her face with it, scrub at her stinging eyes. She gulped some, then splashed her skin. The water wasn’t cold, but she let out a little gasp. Dripping, she gestured toward the door.
“The house is still on fire.”
Dennis drained his own bottle, his throat working. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and tossed the empty bottle to the floor. “Yeah. That.”
The boards beneath Kelsey’s feet felt warmer than a few minutes ago, or maybe that was her imagination. She shifted, pointing her toes, one foot and the other. “What do we do?”
“She built this room in case of invasion,” Dennis said. “Chemical agents. She was convinced that if someone got in the house they’d be using gas bombs or smoke.”
“She got part of it right. She never considered fire?”
“She thought about fire.” Dennis went to a corner of the attic, ducking to avoid hitting his head on the slanted ceiling. Set into the floor was a metal ring held in place with a thick lock. He nudged it with his toe. “Escape plan. But it’s going to be tough.”
“Better than burning alive.” Kelsey moved closer. “Can you open it?”
“Of course. Unless she changed the combination,” Dennis told her. He bent, using his uninjured hand to tug at the lock. “If there was one dumb thing my mom did, it was make all the combinations the same, or close to it. But she said keys could get lost. I tried to tell her that if someone figured out one password they’d know them all, but Mom always said if someone got past everything else, they deserved to figure out her codes.”
“She sounds like a smart lady.”
“Crazy,” Dennis repeated.
Kelsey touched his shoulder, squeezing gently. “If she wasn’t so crazy, where would we be now?”
“Not about to be barbecued like a couple of hot dogs.” Dennis grinned.
Kelsey laughed. “Yes. Maybe. Or else we’d be dead already, some freak’s lunch. Get that hatch open, Dennis. I’m starting to sweat.”
She wasn’t really. The air filtration was still working, bringing them slightly stale but not smoky air. Anxiety pricked at her though, thinking of how the flames had rushed at the stairs. Hungry. Fire destroyed everything.
“It’s going to hurt,” Dennis said, gesturing at her foot.
“Worse than being burned?” She paused, thinking. “Have you ever been burned?”
“Yes.”
She thought of the scars she’d paid to have removed, the small circles of flesh that had been so casually ruined by her grandmother’s cigarettes. Of fingertips pressed to electric burners. Even of sipping at hot chocolate before it cooled. This would be worse than any of that.
“Not as bad as being burned,” Dennis added. “I just wanted to warn you.”
Impulsively, Kelsey kissed him. Quickly, hitting the corner of his mouth and not full-on, but he didn’t pull away. “What are we doing?”
With his bad hand, Dennis couldn’t quite get a good enough grip to undo the lock, so Kelsey did it. Together they pulled the metal ring to lift the heavy wooden hatch. Below it, darkness and a glint of metal.
“A fire-pole?” She asked.
“Yes. Metal shaft, smooth on the inside, just big enough for a normal sized person. You’ll have plenty of room.” He eyed her.
Kelsey’s brows rose. “And at the bottom?”
“Concrete.”
“Ouch.”
“That’s why you’ll have to hold on. Grip the pole hard.” He looked at her legs, the bare skin, then at her face. “With your thighs. Can you…can you do that?”
“Of course. I can crack a walnut with these babies.” He might be blushing, she couldn’t be sure, but now wasn’t the time to be coy. She peered over the edge into the darkness. “A door?”
“There’s a sliding door at the bottom that opens into a walled-off section of the basement. There’s a tunnel from there, leads out to behind the garden shed.”
She smiled, though by now the floor was definitely getting hotter, and she was convinced she could smell the first bite of smoke. “Clever.”
“The door at the bottom is locked. Triple coded. Electronic keypad.” He paused. “No room to maneuver. And if the electricity’s gone out without the automatic generator backup, the door won’t work. We’ll be trapped.”
Kelsey swallowed hard. “Better hope the generator’s still working, huh?”
“Yes.”
She rubbed her hands together briskly, testing the ache in her sprained wrist. It would have to be okay. “So, what are we waiting for?”
Dennis looked uncomfortable. “I think you’ll need to go first…my hand. I’m not sure I can lower myself down. I might just fall. And I won’t be able to do the locks at the bottom, she set it so both have to be done at the same time. Two hands.”
“I can handle it,” Kelsey assured him.
“I know you can.”
Still, he hesitated. There wasn’t time for this. Kelsey moved closer, both her hands on his shoulders, to look into his eyes. “What?”
Dennis licked his lips, gaze steady on hers. “It’s the only combination I’m not positive I know.”
“Okay.”
He shook his head slightly. “If you get it wrong…”
Kelsey frowned, her stomach sinking. “Let me guess. Something shoots out of the walls and kills me.”
“She was crazy,” Dennis told her almost apologetically. “But very, very thorough.”
54
Maddy crept along the corridor on silent feet, not because she was worried about being caught but because it felt good to be sneaky. Everyone else was sleeping, but Maddy wasn’t tired. She was never tired anymore. Toe-to-heel, sliding her sock feet on the smooth floor, she pretended she was a spy. Back to the wall, around the corner. Quick, quick. Look to the left, look to the right. She pointed her gun first one way, then the other, giving the “go” signal to an invisible army behind her.
Dad always said guns were a necessary evil, that too many stupid people didn’t see them as weapons but as toys. A gun’s only purpose was to kill, Dad said. Sometimes, that was what you had to do, but you should always know that’s what you were doing and why.
Maddy had pulled this gun from a box under Dad’s bed. All the guns were supposed to be locked up and used only by the people who were on guard duty upstairs, outside, or in the big sections of the mine that the community hadn’t taken over. People on guard duty rode in special golf carts all around the underground caverns. Maddy thought that would be super fun, especially if you got to race them, but Dad said she was too young to drive a golf cart, much less go out there on guard duty where there could be any kind of crazy or sick people.
Maddy wondered what Dad would say about her carrying a gun.
She hadn’t known how to load it, but the whispering voices told her. Didn’t tell her
, not with words. Showed her. She closed her eyes and her hands moved, plucking bullets from the box, fitting them into the holes in the spinny thing. Spinning. Spinning. Pushing it closed. The voices made other pictures in her head, too. Of putting the gun to her mouth and pulling the trigger.
“No way,” Maddy said aloud in the empty corridor. She giggled. “Can’t get me that way.”
Inside her brains, the slippery wiggle went still. She squeezed anyway, just to remind whatever was in there that she was the boss. Maddy was the boss.
“Maddy is the boss,” she muttered. “Maddy is the boss. Maddy. Is. Boss. Boss. Maddy is.”
A silver strand of drool hit the floor before she noticed it was coming from her mouth. Maddy swiped it with her toe, smearing it. With the back of her hand, she wiped her lips. Her fingertips shook a little until she stared at them, hard.
“Maddy is the boss,” she said in the same voice Mom used to use back in the times before she started drinking all the time.
Nothing happened inside her brains.
Playing spy wasn’t so much fun by herself. She wished more families with kids had taken shelter here. Dad said it was because lots of people with kids couldn’t afford the prices, and also every family had needed to be approved, and most people without kids didn’t want kids shoved in with them underground in the event of an apocalypse. He’d tried to explain about growing the community, he said, which basically meant having enough people who could make babies happen, and that was totally disgusting to her. But even the people who’d signed up for this place hadn’t seemed to believe it could be forever, that’s what Dad said. So here they were, and it looked like they’d be down here for longer than they thought. Maybe not forever. But a long time.
Maddy thought Dad was being stupid. All the grownups were stupid. Why was everyone so afraid of going outside, anyway? Afraid of getting sick? She coughed against a sudden sting in her throat and waited for the wiggle and squiggle in her brains, but there was still nothing. If only they knew, she thought, how good it felt.
Gooooood.
With one hand flat on the wall, head hanging, Maddy’s body tensed and jerked, twitching. The hand holding the gun went limp, though she clung to the metal by the tips of her fingers. It clanged against the wall. It might go off, she thought as though from very far away. She might shoot something by accident. But she couldn’t care because the waves of electric, tingling goodness sizzling all through her made it impossible to do anything but give in.
More drool slipped from her lips in long strands. One hit her shoe. She didn’t move her foot. Her eyes went heavy-lidded, something shifting behind her lids. Back and forth. Up and down. Her eyelids fluttered. Her eyes rolled back in her head. Her tongue fell out of her mouth like one of those cartoon dogs.
“Maddy?”
Slow, slowly, slow, Maddy let her forehead roll along the wall so she could look toward the familiar voice. “Mama.”
“What’s…wrong? Are you sick?”
“Not sick.”
Mom moved closer on unsteady feet. Drunk, Maddy thought with sudden clarity and sudden anger. What kind of mom drank all the time? A bad one. That’s what.
She straightened, shoulders squaring. She swiped at the drool, careless. Her eyes, no longer tickling with swimming squiggles, narrowed. She took a step toward her mother, the gun still dangling from her fingers.
“What’s the matter, Maddy?”
“Nothing.”
“It’s late.” Mom lifted her chin, trying to look stern. That was stupid. “You should be in bed. Not wandering around out here. It’s…dangerous.”
Maddy lifted the gun. “I’m playing spies.”
“That’s not a toy.”
“I know that.” Maddy scowled. “You think I don’t know that? I’m not stupid, Mom! I’m not stupid!”
She expected her mom to take a few steps back. Maybe even turn and run, escaping the way Dad did in the schoolroom. Maddy wanted her mom to run, to be afraid. The thought of it made her feel almost as good as the worms digging in her headmeat. Almost.
Mom stood her ground. She was shaking, but not with fear, Maddy thought as she sniffed for the constant stink of booze that usually surrounded her mom and smelled only the stale, recirculated air. Mom was shaking because she wasn’t drunk.
Huh.
“This has gone on long enough, Madison.” Mom held out her hand. “Guns are not toys, and the things you do are not games. Enough. Give me the gun.”
Oh, her whole name. That meant Mom was pissed off. For a second, Maddy almost gave her the gun out of habit, but instead her fingers curled around it harder. She drew it closer to her body, cradling it like she used to hold her baby dolls. She tilted her head to look her mother up and down.
“No.”
“Give it to me, Madison. I’m not kidding.” Mom’s hands shook, but her voice didn’t.
The voices started up again. Poking Maddy’s brains with picturewords, like those old puzzles she and Dad had liked to leave for each other as jokes. Rebuses. Making messages. Trying to get her to do what they wanted, making her not the boss.
“No,” Maddy said and shook her head so hard her pigtails slapped her cheeks. “No. I’m the boss. Maddy is the boss.”
“I’m your mother. And I said, give me the gun.”
Inside Maddy’s head, the whispering, the pictures, went dim as she squeezed them, but the sting in her throat made her cough again. Her lungs burned. She tried to breathe and couldn’t. She tasted rotten meat but her stomach growled, suddenly ravenous. Her head tipped back as her eyes closed. Her mouth opened as she gasped and coughed and choked.
Things moved inside her.
The gun felt so heavy, so heavy.
All of this would go away if she just put it to her head, she thought. Pulled the trigger. Splatter, splatter, the pink-grey hamburger of her brains all over the wall, making a mess. Dirty mess.
In her head was a flower.
Maddy was a flower.
“Maddy?”
I. Am. The. Boss.
The picturewords moved, telling her a story. Showing her everything that could happen if she just let them do what they wanted. More flies with honey, that’s what Gramma had always said, more flies with honey. Flies with honey, flies on shit, pigs in shit, happy as a.
Maddy’s eyes snapped open. Now she knew what the wormthings wanted. She could give it to them, not because she wanted to give in, not because they were the boss of her, but because giving them what they wanted was going to make Maddy not just the boss of herself and the wiggly squiggles in her brains…but of everything.
Of everyone.
She wasn’t going to give her mother the gun, oh no. Not that. Maddy had something better than that. She opened her arms. She opened her mouth.
“Oh, Mother. My sweet, sweet Mother. Come give me a kiss.”
55
“Grip it with your thighs and your hands. Brace your feet against the wall, your back against the other one,” Dennis said. Sweat beaded his forehead and upper lip; he licked it away unselfconsciously. The feathery bits of his hair had matted to his cheeks. “When you get to the bottom, you’ll have to feel for the panels. One for the right hand, one for the left. There will be two small ledges with buttons on them.”
“Nothing’s gonna bite my fingers, will it? No razor blades or anything?” She was only half joking. Kelsey’s stomach churned and lurched and twisted. Acid burned in her throat, but she forced herself to take deep breaths. She could do this. She had to do this.
“No. I don’t think so.”
“You have to do better than that!” She cried, her shout startling them both. “You have to know, Dennis! You have to be sure!”
His hands on her shoulders, fingers on the good hand squeezing. He pulled her close, and she was so surprised that she let him without a protest. He pressed his lips to her temple, his fingers stroking her hair. They stayed that way for a minute while she timed the in-and-out of his breath to her own.
>
“You can do this, Kelsey. I know you can.”
She clung to him for a moment longer before pushing away. Taking a deep breath. She looked him in the eyes. “Thanks.”
Dennis looked puzzled for a second. “For what?”
“Believing,” she told him.
Before she could over-think it, she patted her hands as dry as she could make them on her shirt. Her palms, along with her armpits, the small of her back and the space between her thighs were all soaked with sweat. She’d already pulled her hair back with a piece of string, but small annoying bits clung to her forehead and cheeks until she swiped them angrily — and then she needed to dry her hands again.
Kelsey, unlike a lot of the women she’d come to know, the other ones with fake tits and dyed hair and plumped lips, the ones who sought boyfriends as conquests and financial security, not for love, had never done any sort of pole dancing. It was the one thing she’d refused to do, no matter how much money she could’ve earned. Whoring herself to a lover for rent and clothes was different, in her opinion, than eye-fucking random men for a couple of dollar bills stuffed into a cheap thong. She respected women who danced for a living, there was no question about that. They worked damned hard for their money. But she’d never done it, and now the metal pole between her thighs felt thick and strange. She couldn’t seem to get a grip. She slid down a foot or two into the hole in the floor, letting out a strangled cry, before she caught herself.
“Brace with your feet,” Dennis said. “And your back.”
To do that, she had to let herself fall a few more feet, and her hands and thighs would not un-grip. Kelsey took a deep breath, then another, her head spinning. Sweat dripped in her eyes, but she couldn’t wipe it away. The small flashlight Dennis had pulled from one of the supply boxes pressed uncomfortably between her breasts, the only place she’d been able to stash it.
“You can do this,” Dennis said.
With a determined nod, Kelsey eased her grip so that she started to slide. A few inches, then a few more, until she could press her bare feet against the metal tube surrounding her. Without giving herself time to think, she straightened her legs just enough to press her back against the other side. No longer sliding, firmly braced, she looked up.