“Oh.” He waited for me to pass by him, into the hallway. Better than anyone else, Dad understood the need for me to not be touched. Not that he’d ever really been the touchy-feely type, anyway. He shut the office door behind him, tight this time. “Let’s take a look.”
Back in the computer lab I explained how I’d tried to solve the problem, unsuccessfully.
Dad rubbed his chin and squinted at my writing. “Did you convert it to math?”
I held out my notes. “That’s what I’m trying to do. The quantities aren’t fixed.”
“Did you name them by a variable?”
I shook my head. “Didn’t get that far.”
“Let’s try a similar one.” He jotted down a complicated equation. His mind seemed to work so fast that his fingers couldn’t keep up.
I tried to solve for x, but couldn’t figure it out. Dad being so close made me nervous, not able to think straight.
“Come on, Eli. Think.” He solved it as I watched. “You can do this.”
The answer dawned on me and I smacked my forehead with one hand. “Stupid. That was one of my first ideas but it didn’t seem right.”
Dad shrugged. “You should have gone with your first instinct. It’s usually right.” He stood. “I need to get back to work.”
AFTER DAD LEFT, I HAD TROUBLE CONCENTRATING ON THE rest of my studies. Why was Dad so freaked about me being in his office? Before we came here, if he was working on new software or a new computer design, he was doubly cautious about security. But why would he be paranoid down here? Who was I going to tell? And what was behind that locked door? Other than the room behind the yellow door, I’d toured the entire Compound so many times I knew every room. Or so I thought.
At first I’d assumed our close proximity over the past six years would have made me closer to Dad. He no longer had the huge demands of his company. In the old world, our time with him had been scheduled, as if it were an appointment written down in some shiny black book. We had dinner as a family at six every night, spent an hour or so in the library or den, maybe played a game or something, then at nine he bid us adieu and headed off to his study.
Nothing had really changed that much. He still did exactly what he wanted and none of us questioned him. Maybe the hardest fact to swallow was that, despite his being my father, I didn’t know any more about the man than the general public might find out by reading his biography.
Rex Yanakakis, adopted as a baby, then orphaned when he was nineteen, used his genius mind and inheritance to get a degree in computer science at MIT, and then start his own company. Not wanting to forget his roots, he supported the orphanage he’d been sent to as a baby. They ended up naming it for him. Quite a slick move, I’d say. It basically guaranteed his continued generous support.
At age twenty-seven, when his company was already on its way to the top, he saw my mom play in the Seattle Symphony and didn’t stop sending her white roses by the dozen until she agreed to see him. I can imagine the situation was attractive to her. To be raised with hardly any money, then grow up to be courted by one of the richest, most powerful men in the world? I’m sure the thought of a life with that kind of security had to hold a huge appeal.
They got married, built a thirty-room estate overlooking Puget Sound, immediately adopted one-year-old Lexie from the Yanakakis Home for Children, and then had three kids the regular way. They lived the sweet life. Happily ever after and all that crap.
That’s the Rex Yanakakis the world knew.
What Rex Yanakakis did I know?
My dad was never one of those dads you could ask for a quarter if you saw a gumball machine. Instead he had one of those black American Express cards not available to the general public. Gumball machines didn’t have slots for those.
My dad was never one of those dads who raked piles of leaves to jump in with their kids. He worked long hours most of the year, so his idea of quality time was a two-week trip twice a year, usually to somewhere exotic like Tahiti or Morocco. And there was usually another reason for going, like the time he “acquired” the software company in Rabat, or bought an uninhabited, uncharted island in the South Pacific. Our “vacations” always included some kind of business transaction.
Except for that last trip, a camping trip, the one that ended with us coming here, to the Compound. We just happened to be on Dad’s three thousand acres in eastern Washington when our nation was attacked.
Even though Dad always told us the Compound could be reached by helicopter from our estate in under that ubiquitous forty minutes, I thought that was cutting it a bit close. I remember thinking how lucky we were to be at the cabin with our RV, so close to the Compound we had heard so much about right as the nightmare began.
But we were not lucky that we were away from the cabin, a ways away, when we discovered Terese had smuggled a stray kitten into the RV.
We were not lucky when Eddy’s allergies flared up.
Not lucky that his medicine was back at the cabin.
Not lucky that Gram had to drive back to the cabin in the Range Rover to get the medicine while the rest of us went to bed.
Not lucky Eddy climbed in the back of the SUV without anyone knowing.
And definitely not lucky that some country decided that moment was the right one to launch a nuclear attack, sending us careening across the flat landscape in the RV.
The rest of it comes to me in a series of black-and-white flashes:
Dad slamming on the brakes. Grabbing Terese.
Dad shouting at the rest of us. Get out! Run! Run! Run!
Following behind him in the dark. Stumbling over rocks in the middle of nowhere. Mom running, too, helping us up.
The night. So dark. Chilly. My family simply manic shadows alongside me.
Stopping at a hole in the ground. Not a hole. A hatch.
Dad pushing us, making us climb down. Dad staying up on top.
Me screaming for Cocoa. Dad promising to find her. Me going with the others. Down into a room. Stairs. So many stairs.
Descending. Descending. Descending.
To the silver door. A gaping mouth wanting to swallow us.
Waiting. Waiting. Precious minutes ticking.
Too much time.
Mom leading us through the silver door.
Dad returning.
Me screaming.
Silver door closing. Loud. Reverberating in my head.
Gram gone.
Eddy gone.
World? Gone.
That wasn’t all of it. My mind censored out the worst part. The part where I was selfish. The part where I would do anything to get what I wanted. Even if it meant leaving my brother out of our only hope for survival. Our sanctuary.
My dad was the type of dad who spent a billion dollars on that sanctuary so his family could survive a nuclear attack. That should have been enough for most people.
Problem was I had never been most kind of people.
I would have rather had a dad with change jingling in his pocket; one who would have spent the last forty minutes of the world raking leaves for his kids to jump in, so that they perished in one loud, bright instant, giggles still bubbling up from their bellies, never suspecting a thing.
Yeah, well. Tough luck, rich boy.
MY DREAMS THAT NIGHT, LIKE SO MANY OTHER NIGHTS, WERE of food. Cheeseburgers, loaded with bacon and mayo and ketchup. Seasoned curly fries, greasy and dripping in mustard. Milk shakes, thick slices of strawberry cheesecake, hot fudge sundaes.
When I woke up, my pillow was wet with drool and my stomach growled. I hated waking up like that, immediately reminded of our pathetic food situation.
It hadn’t always been bad. In the beginning we had plenty to eat. An enormous open room near the hydroponics housed the poultry and livestock. Without Eddy to do the job, caring for them fell to me. We had five Holsteins, all with suckling calves. With their soft fur, slippery noses, and sandpaper tongues, the calves were so loveable that it helped me not miss Cocoa so much.
>
Their pen was a smaller version of a corral you’d see on a ranch. Smelled like one as well. Every day, wishing I could worm my way out of it, I grudgingly held my breath as I scooped up their manure and hauled it to one of the incinerators. I gave the animals water, and then carried grain by bucketfuls to their trough. The trough sat near a water tank that I filled with a hose from a nearby spigot.
The chickens were not as fun as the cows. I sprinkled their corn, brought clean water, and rushed out of the henhouse. I hated the putrid stench of chicken crap. Most days I gathered eggs. Those were a treat, especially when Mom made them into cheese omelets.
One entire room of the warehouse was devoted to feed for the animals. Should it dwindle, Dad explained, we would butcher the cows and make do without milk and the cheese and butter that Mom made. Even though it would mean less shoveling for me, I chose not to think about that day, counting on the feed to last.
Between the dairy and poultry products, produce from the garden, and freezers full of meat, we ate well.
For the first seven months.
The morning it all changed started out like any other. Life had become routine, almost like we’d always lived in the Compound.
With an orange wheelbarrow, I hauled a new bag of feed out of the storeroom and poured it into the cows’ trough. They dug in with gusto as usual, the calves nursing as their mothers chewed, their crunching loud. The chickens were ecstatic when I fed them, their ruffling feathers and cackling driving me nuts.
The next day I went to feed them. I was puzzled. Neither the chickens nor cows touched the food I gave them. The cows dripped saliva while the calves suckled. I went to get Dad.
He wasn’t that up on hanging out with the livestock. His nose wrinkled the minute he walked in the room, and his eyes were glued to the ground as he took ginger steps around any dirt I might have missed when I cleaned up, even though he wore knee-high muck boots.
Dad wasn’t sure what to make of the cows’ behavior. “They probably have to adjust to this place, too. They’ll be back to normal in a day or so.”
Later, I went back to check. The cows stood there, panting and drooling. The calves lay on their sides, still.
I rested my hand on one.
The fur was still soft. But the body was stiff and cold. The calves were dead. All of them.
And it was quiet in there. Too quiet.
I realized what was missing. Cackling. Inside the henhouse, I found all the chickens, unmoving and lifeless.
I ran to get Dad, and then struggled to keep up as we raced back. By then a cow was on her side. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he hissed.
My mouth opened to defend myself, to tell him I’d done everything the way I was supposed to. I was afraid to speak.
Dad held a hand to the cow’s heaving flank. I realized his words were directed at her, not me.
He grabbed a couple of stainless steel buckets from the stack. He put some water in one and a few handfuls of grain in the other and took them to his lab. I followed to watch him.
He readied the microscope and his other equipment, then set to work. Inspected first, the water ended up being fine; it was the same we all drank.
I went to check on the cows and decided to stay with them. One by one they dropped to their forelegs, then fell onto their sides. I was with them through the afternoon. One by one, they died.
Back in the lab, I found Dad deep in concentration. He didn’t seem to notice me as he studied the information that compiled on his computer screen. At last his analysis was complete. “No, no, no. No, No, NO.” Dad leaned on the counter, holding his head in his hands. “Traces of rat poison.” His exact next words escape me. I do know he shouted something about the cows and swore. A lot.
I took all the dead chickens to the incinerator with the orange wheelbarrow, which I christened The Hearse. Dad sliced up the large animals with equipment from the meat processing room. The grinding whine stayed in my head for days.
I COULDN’T GO BACK TO SLEEP. MY ALARM HADN’T GONE OFF yet, so I stayed in bed and daydreamed, as I often did, about things I used to take for granted. The smell of Cocoa after her bath, and the way she tore around the house, rolling on every carpet in sight, grunting. I felt her then, her body on top of my feet, her warmth seeping through the covers. She was my phantom limb.
For six years I’d tried not to dwell on thoughts of her or anyone else too long. It was better to separate the old world from the new. It was better to stay cold and detached.
Actually, I was getting good at cold and detached. Too good.
I shivered, and pulled the covers up tight.
I often wondered about the cows and how it all could have happened. Could one of the workers have sabotaged the food supply? And the grow bulbs in hydroponics. Could someone have put fluorescent ones in their place on purpose? A disgruntled worker who knew the job was coming to an end? An envious working stiff who hated the thought of his own family dying while the Yanakakis clan lived out nuclear winter in luxury?
I hid my face in my hands, rubbing away at the sleepiness.
Dad had planned well, of course. But even he had made mistakes. I crunched my last tortilla chip when I was eleven. Swallowed my last Mountain Dew when I was thirteen. Peanut butter ran out when I was fourteen, the jelly soon after. We each learned to hoard. Underneath my bed, a dozen Snickers called to me. True, the one I ate on my birthday was white around the edges and tasted rather off. Still, I saved the rest. I liked knowing they were there.
Dad had stockpiled tons, literally, of food. But even he couldn’t extend the shelf life. Most canned goods were fresh for three, four years tops; wheat and honey were the only two foods with an indefinite shelf life. Trust me on that.
The meat in the freezers became increasingly inedible in Year Three. We’d been vegetarian since I was thirteen. Not by choice. I’d have given a few body parts for a burger and fries.
Sometimes when I thought about this place called Uncle Barney’s we used to go to, I’d get a little choked up. They made these incredible Monte Cristo sandwiches with layers of smoked turkey and honey ham and cheddar and Swiss, drenched in beer batter, then deep fried. Nice, eh? Rich kid pines away for food, and doesn’t shed a tear for the brother he killed.
My stomach growled then, at just the thought of meat. I resisted the temptation to reach under the bed for a Snickers. Instead I got up to do my tai chi. I began the motions. I tried. I couldn’t stop thinking about the food.
How food used to be fun.
Not anymore.
Meals had become scientific, every bite like a mathematical equation, each integer blending together to create an adequate sum, product, solution. This bite and that equaled proper nutrition.
My gaze fell to the oak dresser and the industrial-size bottle of vitamins I took by the handful. No substitute for real food, they were close to expiring. We wouldn’t starve as long as the honey and wheat lasted. Malnutrition could become an issue, inviting related ailments such as scurvy and rickets. Nice.
My right calf muscle felt tight. I stopped to stretch. My hands kneaded the sinewy lower half of my leg.
Of course there was a safety net: MREs, meals ready to eat. Dad laid in a huge stock, thousands purchased from a military supply place. Way to go, Pops.
My concentration was shot, so I gave up on tai chi and went to take a preworkout shower. Thanks to Dad’s hightech water heaters, at least we had plenty of that. I stepped in, hoping the water would wash away my thoughts. Didn’t work.
I didn’t get it, how he could go through the entire planning process of the Compound, and then screw up the most important thing. I respected him for the effort, of course, who else could have pulled this off, but still. To screw up something as basic as the food supply?
The blasted saga of the MREs wouldn’t leave me alone.
Stored at 60 degrees, they have a shelf life of 130 months, give or take a few. They would last for at least ten years. Stored at 60 degrees. The thermos
tat in the MRE storage room malfunctioned. Rising to 90 degrees, it stayed there for over six weeks before anyone noticed. Stored at 90 degrees, MREs have a shelf life of 55 months.
We began eating up the MREs while they were still good. Good being a relative term. I suspected they were always crappy, even in their prime. Not much variation there. Macaroni hot dish. Beef stew. Chop suey. There was, however, variation in how they were prepared, as stated by the official instructions. I’d read them so many times while I ate that they were ingrained in my mind:
Place unopened pouch in warm water for 5-10 minutes. Unopened pouch may be laid on a warm surface.
Lay unopened pouch in direct sunlight. Not much chance of that down here.
Place unopened pouch inside your shirt, allow your body temperature to warm your MRE.
I was surprised they left out: Place unopened pouch on ground and pee on it.
As the water ran hot down my body, I had another thought. Could the thermostat in the MRE room have been sabotaged as well? Who would wish us such ill will? Stupid question. Billions of people. For no other reason than for all that we possessed. Especially our survival.
I switched off the water and stepped out, grabbing a towel.
If someone had tampered with our food, they never could have imagined the depths we would sink to in order to remedy the situation. Because soon after the MRE disaster, Dad made a decision necessary for his family’s survival; a decision a normal person could never have lived with.
A decision I had to live with every day.
A decision I had to think about, whether I wanted to or not, every time I walked by that yellow door.
I TOOK A SIP OF WATER BEFORE SHOVING THE BOTTLE IN THE holder on the treadmill. Then I stuck my headphones in my ears and increased the volume on my MP3 player. The White Stripes blasted in my ears as I set the treadmill’s hilly course for six miles. Running on the treadmill probably wasn’t as fun as running outside. I didn’t know any different. And it was the time I set aside for just listening to music.