How to Pack for the End of the World

by Michelle Falkoff

  I tried to imagine the worst possible thing, which made me think bomb. And the safest place to be in the event of a bomb was a bomb shelter. There had to be one on campus, but where? Gardner was big, the size of a small college, between dorms and faculty housing and academic halls and the gym. I wasn’t going to be able to guess where a bomb shelter might be.

  I decided I’d had more than enough tea and went back to my room to get out my laptop. The new student information packet had nothing about bomb shelters on campus, though it did provide evacuation instructions in the event of fires or other catastrophes. Not super helpful. I’d have to find it myself. If there was a shelter somewhere on campus, it had to be in a basement, right? I hadn’t been at Gardner long enough to do much exploring, so first I had to figure out which building was most likely to have a basement. I was up for the challenge.

  I made a map of the buildings as best as I could remember them in my notebook and then decided to start in the place I’d identified as the best option: the gym. It was gigantic, with multiple basketball courts and a swimming pool, not to mention the fitness center and the indoor track. With all that space taken up already it seemed like you’d need to go underground for storage, I figured.

  The sound of basketballs echoing off lacquered wooden floors assaulted my ears the moment I opened the massive front door of the athletic building. I’d thought maybe it would be relatively quiet because it was the weekend and the weather outside was shockingly warm for mid-September, but the practice courts were filled with students playing weekend pickup games. Maybe I’d just underestimated people’s love of basketball.

  I walked past the practice courts and turned a corridor to pass athletic department offices, my flip-flops flipping and flopping on the concrete floor, though there was no one working on a Saturday to hear me. I tested every unmarked door I could find in the hopes there would be some secret basement entrance, but it wasn’t until I reached a stairwell that I realized I’d made things harder than necessary. Though ostensibly the stairs only went up, there was a door, painted the same gray as the cement blocks that made up the wall of the stairwell, right where one might expect a set of stairs leading down to be. Even the handle was painted gray; the door almost blended right into the wall, which was clearly the intention of whoever painted it. I was sure it would be locked, but it wasn’t.

  The stairs did lead down into a basement, as I’d expected, but the basement was really just another set of offices that were no longer in use. Long fluorescent lights flickered over a dropped ceiling, with those white tiles that looked like they had holes punched into them at random. I wandered the halls looking for some sort of room that might function as a shelter, but I saw nothing but offices and bathrooms that hadn’t been cleaned in a very long time. There was some evidence other students knew the basement existed; I saw condom wrappers and empty beer cans in one of the bathroom trash bins, and all of a sudden I felt how alone I was, hanging out in this basement by myself.

  When I got back to the staircase, though, I noticed another gray door, again where a down staircase would be. And when that door, too, was unlocked, I had a feeling I might be onto something.

  There were more stairs this time, or maybe it just felt as if there were because there wasn’t as much light. I stepped into a hallway with the same cement brick walls as the staircase, the same concrete flooring as the main floor, though it was scuffed and dirty with years of use and little cleaning, as far as I could tell. Gone were the ceiling tiles and flickering fluorescent lights, replaced with lightbulbs trapped behind what looked like little steel cages and set at intervals along the narrow walls. I’d found some sort of hallway. No—it wasn’t a hallway; it was a tunnel.

  This had to be the place. But the lights were dim and the tunnel seemed to head in both directions and I had no idea which way to go. I didn’t want to get lost, but I hadn’t exactly brought breadcrumbs with me, so I decided to go right and then keep going right any time I had to make a choice.

  After about fifteen minutes of taking right turn after right turn and seeing nothing but hallways only occasionally interrupted by a storage closet or yet another door leading to more stairs, I decided it was time to change my strategy. I started going upstairs every so often, popping my head aboveground like some sort of gopher, orienting myself to where I was on campus. It quickly became clear the tunnels tracked the buildings, serving as an underground means of getting around campus. There was no way a school with the foresight to maintain these tunnels didn’t have a bomb shelter, or several, but I wasn’t going to find it wandering around aimlessly like this.

  Instead, I made my way back to the dining hall to get a sandwich, then went to my room to check the campus map. If the tunnels went everywhere on campus, then a shelter would probably be closest to where people lived. And not just any people—important people. Most likely it was under one of the administration buildings, or the Gardner president’s house.

  I felt so sure I’d solved the problem I was tempted to take my chances and show up right at midnight, but it wasn’t in my nature. Instead, I headed back underground. It was almost anticlimactic to find, just under the president’s house, the black-and-yellow sign indicating the presence of a fallout shelter. It was the only distinguishing feature drawing my eye to yet another gray door blended into yet another cement-block wall, but it was enough.

  I didn’t try the door to see whether it was unlocked; it was one thing to show up a few minutes early, and quite another to miss the mark by hours. I went back to my dorm, grabbed some dinner at the dining hall, and spent the rest of the night trying to imagine what this group might be about. I was feeling pretty confident that either Hunter or Chloe had started it, but who else would they have invited? The soccer team? Chloe’s roommate? I’d noticed some girls had figured out who Chloe was and were starting to shadow her around campus, wearing outfits similar to hers; would this end up being a club of her followers?

  I showed up just before midnight and got part of the answer to my question: both Hunter and Chloe were there, along with the wiry girl from Game Night who I’d so wanted to get to know. Jo, Chloe had said. “Amina!” Hunter yelled, clearly both surprised and happy to see me, and gave me a hug.

  I had not expected this—so far we were class-and-lunch friends, not hugging friends—so it took me a minute to hug him back. “Hey, Hunter,” I said, bringing my conversational A game, as always. “Hi, Chloe.”

  “So you’re not in charge of this,” she said, frowning. “I’d been so sure.”

  I laughed. “Funny, I thought it was you.” I wondered why neither of us had been willing to ask the other, but I supposed we didn’t know each other that well yet.

  “We’ve already established that it wasn’t Hunter or Jo,” she said. “Have you two met yet?”

  “I’m Amina,” I said. “Did anyone knock?”

  Before she could answer, the door swung open. Standing in front of us was the shaggy-haired boy from Game Night, a huge grin on his face. “Come in, come in,” he said, practically bouncing up and down. “I wasn’t sure how many chairs to set up, but it looks like there’ll be plenty. Any trouble finding the place?”

  The place in question was indeed a fallout shelter, a square space I estimated to be the size of two dorm rooms, with a little door in the back corner that most likely led to a bathroom. The floor was the same concrete gray as the tunnels, the walls covered in the same cement blocks, but in front of two of them were floor-to-ceiling metal shelves filled with canned goods, bottled water, and first-aid supplies, along with what appeared to be tool kits. The shaggy-haired boy had set up seven or eight spindly folding chairs in a circle in the center of the room, but there were only five of us, including him, which meant he’d sent out more invitations. Had the others gotten lost? Or were they just not into it? It didn’t matter to me; I was happy to be among the few and the proud who’d made their way here, and I didn’t love big groups anyway. The shaggy-haired boy plunked himself down on one o
f the chairs, and we all followed suit.

  Hunter spoke first. “It wasn’t that hard, getting here. I started on Google and tried to figure out what kind of place would be safest, and bomb shelter seemed like the obvious choice. From there it was just a matter of finding it, and here we are.” He opened his arms to indicate the room. How had he found it so fast? Had he already been underground?

  “I went straight for the blueprints,” Chloe said. “The originals were on the town hall website.”

  “Such high-tech activity for a low-tech task,” Jo said. “The blueprints are in the library, dorks.”

  “I bet it took Chloe half the time to find it,” Hunter said. I was not loving how he jumped to her defense, especially when I was pretty sure she didn’t need that kind of help.

  Chloe smirked, and I waited for her to lay into Hunter. But her half grin was for Jo. “Your nicknames were much more creative on Game Night.”

  Jo stared at her for a moment, and I wondered whether the group was doomed before we’d even gotten going. But then she laughed. “You’re absolutely right,” she said. “I went for the low-hanging fruit. I’ll do better next time, I promise.”

  I was relieved she’d cleared the air, but that meant it was my turn. “I wish I had all your confidence. It took me ages to find this place.” I told them about working through all the different theories before spelunking underground. “I started making my own map, but I’m sure the blueprints are better. I’ll have to print up a copy myself.”

  “I can do it!” the shaggy-haired boy said. Such enthusiasm! “I’ve got copies already, and I made a map of just the tunnels, too. I’m so glad you made it here! This is the only fallout shelter on campus, and it was built back in the eighties, when everyone thought nuclear war was right around the corner. It was designed for just the school’s president and his family, which is why it’s so small.”

  Exactly what I thought. “And everyone else could just crawl off and die?” Jo asked. “This school is cold, man.”

  “And it’s not even winter yet!” I said, though I regretted the dumb joke immediately.

  Hunter was the only one who seemed amused. “Dad jokes,” he said. “My favorite. Maybe because my dad is completely humorless.”

  I admitted my dad and I had a competition, ourselves. “But we go for groans more than laughs.”

  “Lucky for you,” Chloe said. “Put me on Team Humorless Dad.”

  “That’s my team too,” the shaggy-haired boy said.

  “Not mine,” Jo said. “My dad’s dead. Mom, too.”

  The room got very, very quiet.

  Then she laughed. “Oh, come on, it’s fine. You’ll laugh at dad jokes but dark humor is too much?”

  “So your parents aren’t dead?” Chloe asked.

  “No, they are, but I’ve had time to get used to it. Don’t worry, I’m okay. But if we’re already getting into family stories then maybe we need to get better acquainted.” She turned to our fearless leader, whose name we still didn’t know. “I got everyone’s names in the hall except yours, Shaggy.”

  The boy touched his hair, and I felt bad she’d made him feel self-conscious. “I’m Wyatt,” he said. “If you all got to know each other already, then maybe we should just get started.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said.

  “That’s great!” Wyatt nodded enthusiastically. I got the sense he did everything enthusiastically. “So here’s the thing: this is the first school I’ve ever been to. I grew up on a kind of commune, but my parents split up and they told me I could pick whatever school I wanted, as long as I could get a scholarship.”

  It was refreshing to hear someone talk so openly about being a scholarship kid. I wondered whether I’d have the courage, if it came up. It’s not that I minded, or was embarrassed by it, but the culture around here didn’t really lend itself to being so up-front.

  “Anyway,” Wyatt went on, “I’ve never really had to, like, go out and make friends. But after Game Night I thought maybe I could find the people who seemed to be having fun and we could start a club. We could play some other games, or just talk, or whatever. And I know it’s early to be thinking about college, but it can’t hurt to get involved in something, right?”

  “What would we talk about? Like, what’s this club about, exactly?” This came from Jo, who’d stretched out so far in her folding chair she seemed to take up half the room. I’d been trying not to stare at her, convinced she’d be able to see how intrigued I was by her, but it seemed okay to look at her while she was speaking. She’d been so edgy with the meth chemist at Game Night that I’d been sure she’d be all sharp and sarcastic, but she just seemed curious about what Wyatt was saying. Not at all what I’d expected.

  “Well, I asked that question during Would You Rather about surviving the end of the world, and that’s because given everything that’s happening these days I feel like maybe we don’t have that much time left. Like, as a species, you know?” He looked nervous, like he was worried we’d think he was a freak. “My family’s always been . . . um . . . concerned about end times and that kind of stuff, but it feels more . . . real now.” I wondered whether his commune had been more like a cult, but now definitely did not seem like the time to bring that up. “We could always talk about that sort of thing, if you all were interested.”

  “You’re serious,” Chloe said. “Are you one of those prepper types?”

  Wyatt shrugged. He wasn’t saying no, I noticed. I bet I was right about that cult. “I am serious, but that doesn’t mean we have to do it. We could just talk about it. As a group. If we wanted.”

  “Like how?” I was starting to get excited, despite myself. Maybe I really had found my people. My parents had sent me here so I’d stop thinking about the terrible stuff going on in the world, but there was no getting away from it. And I hadn’t wanted to get away from it in the first place.

  Wyatt jumped out of his chair and started to pace, except there wasn’t really room to pace, so he ended up taking two steps forward, spinning around, and then taking two steps back. I hoped he didn’t get dizzy. “There are just so many things! We could think about all the ways things could go wrong, and what we’d have to do to survive, and we could learn what to do to help ourselves.”

  “This is all sounding really intense,” Chloe said. “What happened to the whole we-could-all-just-hang-out-and-play-games part? Maybe we could get to know each other a little before we start officially packing for the end of the world? I don’t know about you people, but I haven’t spent a ton of time away from home, much as I’ve wanted to, and I’m a little freaked out. We all have to survive here before we can think about surviving the apocalypse, so maybe we could strategize that?”

  I wanted to learn how to survive the apocalypse, but she had a point. “I wouldn’t mind a little help surviving here.”

  “I don’t know,” Jo said. “I came here to get a diploma, not to make friends.”

  Chloe giggled. “You literally sound like you’re on one of those survivalist reality TV shows.”

  “They’re hardly reality,” Jo said, but she was trying not to laugh herself. “You must know the producers of Survivor got busted for cheating the very first season. They kicked off the girl who ate bugs because they wanted to keep the senior citizen.”

  “I remember that!” Wyatt was bouncing up and down again. “The eating bugs part. I didn’t know about the cheating. That sucks.”

  “Aw, he thought it was all real,” Jo said. “Poor thing.”

  Wyatt was sweet, but he did seem a little sheltered. I hoped we’d learn more about what his life had been like before he got here. It wouldn’t be boring, that was for sure.

  “I’m not that naive,” he said. “I just haven’t watched all that much TV.” He was starting to look a little dejected. Even his curls were drooping. I felt the impulse to cheer him up.

  “I think we should make this a survival club,” I said. “It can be about surviving school or surviving the apocalypse
, I don’t care. I just like the idea of having some people to talk to, and the college app thing can’t hurt. If you all are up for it, I’m in.” I looked around the group to see how everyone was reacting, and I was relieved to see mostly nods.

  “Here for the friends, at least,” Chloe said.

  “Me too,” Hunter said.

  That left Jo. She was the person I’d most wanted to get to know that first night, and I found myself holding my breath waiting for her to say something. Finally, she sighed. “I guess it can’t hurt to try.”

  Wyatt had gotten so excited he’d started bouncing again, making his way over to the shelf of bottled water and grabbing a handful to pass around. I was relieved to see that they appeared to be newer than some of the other bottles; Wyatt must have brought these himself. “I’m so happy everyone is into this! We’re going to have so much fun!”

  “Cool it, Twitchy,” Jo said. “You sold us, okay? Now chill with the exclamation marks. I can practically see them.”

  Wyatt calmed himself down and sat in his chair. He uncapped his water bottle and held it in the air. “To survival!” he said.

  “Man, you really need to calm down,” Jo muttered, but she held out her bottle anyway, as did the rest of us.

  “To survival!” we all repeated.

  4.

  The survival meeting had completely energized me. I couldn’t believe I’d actually found a potential group of friends, two of whom already seemed to like me and one who clearly shared my obsession with the imminent demise of society. Not to mention that Jo had joined too—I was getting everything I wanted, all in one place. True, I’d be feeding the fixation that had gotten me sent here, which was definitely not what my parents had in mind, but I didn’t care. For the first time in forever I wasn’t afraid to go to sleep. I skipped my Ambien and was fine, and I woke up feeling rested and happy.

  Chloe and Hunter weren’t quite as enthused as I was. “That Wyatt is kind of off the wall,” Chloe said. “Maybe it’s just that I’ve never met any homeschooled kids, but he is extra.”