Strange Exit

by Parker Peevyhouse

  The older girl took a deep breath. “Lately, yeah.” She couldn’t seem to pull her gaze from the busted wall.

  “I don’t hulk out or anything.” Nervous laugh again. Did the girl maybe just take a step back from me? “It’s just that I get confused and think there’s something on the other side of the wall. And by something I don’t mean, like, homicidal dirt monsters or anything. I just mean … trees and stuff.”

  The girl’s gaze zoomed to Hailey. “Trees?”

  Hailey laughed again, hoping they were sharing the joke now. “Trees with blue and purple leaves that the sun shines right through. Maybe I saw it in a movie and it got stuck in my head.”

  The girl toyed with a thread tied around her wrist. “Yeah. Maybe.” Her brow furrowed. “I think I’ve seen the same movie.”

  The younger girl crept closer to the wall, marveling at the damage. “Should the walls of a bunker crack like that?”

  “Willow, stay away from there.” The older girl lurched to grab the younger girl’s arm and pull her back.

  “There’s something bad about that black stuff,” Hailey agreed. “She can look around the rest of the place if she wants. This is the only gooey corner.”

  The younger girl darted to the ladder that led to the sleeping nook.

  “Don’t break anything,” the older girl called, and Hailey almost laughed, because the wall. The older girl looked around the bunker again—but this time she seemed less interested in the furniture and more like she was searching for something. Her gaze stopped on a row of flowerpots under UV lights. “What happened to your plants?”

  Hailey grimaced at the withered stalks. “They died. Guess I’m not going to be a farmer in the new world.”

  The girl moved to the pot at the end of the row. “Not all of them died. See?”

  A single golden poppy showed bright against the potting soil.

  “I think it’s against the law to let state poppies die,” Hailey said with a smile.

  “It belongs outside. Don’t you think? It’s a wildflower.”

  Outside. Wind and rain and rustling leaves. “Is anything growing out there?”

  “Come find out.” The girl lifted the pot and held it out to Hailey like a gift.

  Hailey’s heart lifted with it. “I’ve been thinking of leaving. I packed a bag, actually.” She pointed to her backpack near the door. “I didn’t know if it was safe but the others said I should go with them. They said everyone’s going to a place called the Battery.”

  The girl’s arm dipped. The poppy trembled in its pot. “The Battery? Where’s that?”

  “They tried to explain how to get there. I think I can find it.”

  The flowerpot tipped as the girl turned to look at the backpack. “Maybe…” She seemed to remember she was holding what was possibly the last poppy in existence—was it?—and righted the flowerpot. Slowly, as if she were giving up a puppy, she lowered the pot back to its place under the UV lamp. “Can we come with you?”

  The younger girl peeked out from the sleeping nook. “I found an Oreo.”

  Hailey winced. I was saving that.

  “Come down, Willow,” the older girl called. “We’re going somewhere.”

  “Where?”

  Wait, did I say they could come along?

  But why not? It might even be nice not to go alone. The three of them could keep one another company, fight off apocalypse zombies together. Please don’t let there be apocalypse zombies.

  She forced a smile as the younger girl climbed down the ladder. Why does something feel off?

  Then she thought of something the others had told her, something about a girl with a younger sister …

  “Is she your sister?” Hailey asked, gesturing toward the ladder.

  The older girl frowned.

  Hailey remembered now the warning the others had given her. She shows up and people disappear, they’d said. She and her sister—watch out for them.

  Hailey’s mouth went dry. She forced another smile. “Your little sister probably hasn’t gotten to do anything normal in a while, has she?” Her heart thumped. Will this work?

  The younger girl had picked up a game controller and now turned to give her sister a pleading look. “One race? You owe me a rematch from when you broke our truce with a blue shell.”

  The older girl looked back at the door. “Don’t you want to get going?”

  Hailey shrugged. “Yeah, but who knows if this Battery place has Mario Kart. Could be our last chance to test my theory about medium-weight carts having an edge.”

  From the couch, the younger girl called, “Do you have any more food? She never eats anything, and it makes her miserable to be around.”

  “Willow,” the older girl said tightly.

  Hailey responded with her most pitying smile. “She’s had it hard, hasn’t she?” she said to the older girl. “You both have. You want to sit a minute? Bet there’s no filtered air aboveground. Just hang out while I get the rest of my stuff, and then we can all leave together.”

  The older girl hesitated. She squinted at the door like she couldn’t remember why she should be in a hurry to leave.

  “You’re lucky you two have each other,” Hailey said, and this time she wasn’t trying to bluff. Life in her bunker would be so different if she had someone to eat cereal with and compare kart stats and complain about pea soup. “I bet you haven’t been apart since the day this all started.”

  The girl turned and looked at her sister lounging on the couch like she’d never heard a Public Warning siren in her whole life. “No. Not a single day apart.”

  Then she moved toward her sister with leaden steps, as if she were sinking deep underground.

  Hailey fetched a mop from the tiny kitchen. She crept toward the cracked wall and its oozing black tar.

  8

  TAREN

  Taren leaned against the outside of the house, feeling the cold seep through the back of his shirt and using it as a timer. When his back went numb, he’d go down into the bunker and get Lake out. Willow too, he guessed. However that worked.

  The two of them shouldn’t have gone down there. Never go anywhere that you won’t want to leave. And now Lake was in a bunker, probably feeling safe and sound, hanging out with the sister she couldn’t be with outside the sim.

  The wall against his back was like ice.

  I’ll have to go down there and get her out somehow, and then the sleepers inside the house will be stuck. And all of us will be stuck on the ship.

  Waiting.

  He hated waiting.

  He used his foot to push away from the side of the house. There had to be a faster way to do this.

  Gravel crunched under his feet as he strode to the front door, trying to come up with an idea.

  There was still the tar. What were the odds of surviving contact with it? Lake hadn’t told him, didn’t seem to know. Too dangerous, then.

  He stopped in the middle of the driveway and shivered at the thought of the tar inside the house. Creeping over the floorboards, a spreading poison, evidence that the world had gone wrong.

  He couldn’t use it—but there had to be something else he could do.

  He turned and looked out at the eucalyptus trees surrounding the property. Shrouded in fog, they looked almost flat. Like a backdrop.

  He strode toward them, to the end of the gravel drive, just past the dark-throated shed whose door still hung open.

  A curtain of fog, shadow-flat trees. Taren felt like he’d come to the edge of the world. He reached out, his skin prickling in the cold. His fingers brushed what felt like a heavy curtain.

  The edge of the world. Or, at least, of this pocket of the sim.

  Could he create a new pocket here? Like he had done when he’d stepped through a door into the convenience store?

  Lake had said that if someone who created a pocket in the sim woke up, the pocket would close and everyone inside would wake up too. What if Taren created a new pocket and convinced everyone from
the house to go inside? Then he could exit the sim—he could wake up, and wake all the other sleepers with him. A strange exit, but one that just might work.

  He pushed harder against the curtain of fog and trees and felt it stretch like a membrane. “Make a street here,” he told the sim. “With that taco truck that shows up outside school on Wednesdays.” The one with the girl cashier who always smiles at me.

  The membrane stretched into a bubble that expanded, forming asphalt, the taco truck, the window where a dark-haired girl smiled at him.

  Taren stared for a moment, his chest expanding as rapidly as the bubble had. I did it.

  He looked down at his hand. World-creator.

  It had been easy, just like dreaming up the convenience store had been.

  Now all he had to do was convince the sleepers to walk into the pocket. And who wouldn’t want tacos when the alternative was drinking air from an empty glass?

  He jogged back to the house, breathing eucalyptus-scent and fog and triumph. “Who’s hungry?” he called in the doorway. “There’s a taco truck out front.”

  “Get like twenty and bring them in here!” Sharon called back. “There is not a single thing to eat in this house.”

  Taren went to stand near the couch, careful to skirt the tar still oozing over the floor. “Come get your own, it’s depressing in here anyway.” He couldn’t even bring himself to look at whatever fresh horrors showed on the TV screen.

  A boy sitting on the floor sorting through vinyl records said, “Get something for me, Sharon.”

  Taren wiped sweat from the back of his neck. “Everyone’s going. Seriously, you should see the girl who takes the orders.”

  “What’s a taco truck doing here while the world is literally on fire?” someone else asked.

  “Maybe they don’t watch the news,” Sharon said, hauling herself off the couch. “Come on, last taco on Earth.”

  Is this really going to work? Taren watched them peel themselves from the couch and the armchairs and the massive rug that looked like it might have been loaned out by a Spanish missions museum. Sharon seemed to have forgotten all about the tar on the floor, and he had to push her away from it as she passed him, and then had to do the same for another girl who hadn’t noticed it either. Then a boy in Reefs almost stepped in it and Taren froze instead of pushing him away. For a split second he thought, It would be so much faster, and then guilt flooded him. What if the boy didn’t survive contact with the tar? Taren knocked his shoulder against him and earned a “Hey, watch it,” but managed to keep the Reefs out of the tar.

  Anyway, this way is just as good. Taren led them out of the house, down the gravel drive. The smell of tacos pulled them onward.

  It’s working.

  A flash of motion at the other end of the yard caught Taren’s eye. Someone was emerging from the bunker.

  Not Lake.

  The girl from the photo? She straightened a pack on her shoulders as she gaped at the trees. Then the house caught her attention and she beelined for it. He watched her open the front door—and vanish. Gone to another pocket of the sim. Had she meant to do that, or had she just been trying to go inside?

  She’d looked like she was trying to get away from something.

  Where’s Lake?

  He ran for the open metal door to the bunker, his nerves firing.

  A metal ladder took him down into the bunker’s depths, to another door.

  “Lake?” He pushed the door open.

  It wasn’t what he imagined a bunker would be like. It looked more like an underground apartment, sleeker than any apartment he’d ever seen in person. But the opposite wall was cracked and smeared with black paint that trailed down to the floor, all the way to where two forms were slumped on the couch.

  “Lake?”

  He lurched toward the couch, then suddenly realized—the stuff on the floor wasn’t black paint. It was tar, spread thin over the floor but still as dark and nauseating as the thicker stuff he’d encountered in the house. It formed a barrier between him and the couch, too wide to jump over safely.

  He spied a long rug running from the living room to the kitchen and hurried to drag it over the swath of tar. Used it as a bridge.

  “Lake, hey.” She stared straight ahead, her eyes unfocused. He knelt next to the couch and shook her shoulder. “What happened?”

  Next to her lay Willow, eyes closed but chest rising and falling in an even rhythm.

  Taren shook Lake’s shoulder again and she stirred.

  “It’s fine,” she said, frowning at him in annoyance. “We’re fine here.”

  “You’re not fine. We have to go. You can’t stay here.”

  “Willow’s here.” Lake found Willow’s hand and clasped it in her own. “I’m staying with her.”

  I’m in over my head. Taren remembered what Lake had said earlier, that she knew she was in a simulation whenever she saw Willow alive and well. He gripped the arm of the couch. Was he really going to do this? “Remember, Lake? Willow didn’t make it. She’s not…” He swallowed, hating himself. “Willow died. Remember? This isn’t real.”

  Confusion crossed Lake’s face, and then something much worse did. She seemed for a moment like something that had already shattered and would fall to pieces at the first touch.

  “I’m sorry,” Taren said.

  “It’s okay.” A hard edge to her voice. The shattered pieces held together. She glanced at the figment of Willow sleeping next to her on the couch, touched the side of Willow’s smooth face. She turned back to Taren, her eyes glassy. “I remember now.”

  Taren’s chest ached.

  “Come on, we should get out of here,” Lake said. “Out of the sim.”

  Taren turned, but the rug behind him had half dissolved, the tar underneath eating away at it.

  “The couch,” Lake said, and at first he thought she meant they should push it across the tar, but she climbed onto the back of it and jumped over the tar-moat, easy as that. “Hurry up.”

  Taren jumped. Lake grabbed a potted plant from near the door and smashed it against a granite counter so she could retrieve a shard of pottery. She scratched an X over the door.

  Before she stepped through, she looked back. But not at Willow. She’d already said her goodbye to Willow for now. She looked at the damaged far wall, peered at the spiderweb of cracks as if she could read something in its pattern.

  “What is it?” Taren asked.

  Lake stood entranced for a moment longer. Then she shook her head. “I don’t know.” She stepped through the door and vanished.

  Taren squinted at the cracked wall, at the floor dissolving under the swath of tar, at the empty couch where Willow had been only a moment ago.

  He had a feeling Lake still had a lot to teach him about the sim, but that wasn’t what was eating away like tar through his gut.

  His real fear was that there was more to the sim than even Lake knew.

  9

  LAKE

  Alone again in a stasis chamber.

  Peace and quiet, Lake joked to herself. But that only made her think of Willow, sleeping on a couch in a bunker. If only you really were safe and sound, Will.

  Lake eased out of the nest of machinery, leaned against the wall for a long moment. Her lungs made the same sound the laboring machines did. She hadn’t saved one single person this time. And she’d almost lost herself to the sim.

  Stupid, going into that bunker. She’d seen the girl’s face in the photo and had thought, If Willow were trapped, I’d want someone to save her.

  She pressed her sweaty forehead against the cool wall. Is that why you brought Willow down with you? You wanted to feel like you were saving her?

  Only the rich and lucky survived.

  Lake had never been rich. And one day, she knew, her luck would run out, just like Taren had said.

  She slid the door open.

  A hand shot out and pulled her into the warehouse. “It’s just me,” Taren said into her ear. Salt-and-metal smel
l, familiar to anyone who spent time sleeping inside machines.

  “What’re you doing?” Lake stumbled after him, surprised at his grip on her wrist.

  He stopped near the door of the warehouse and peered out, looking for trouble. “I did it. I woke the sleepers from the house. They’ll be coming out of their stasis chambers. We don’t want them to see us, right? They’ll tell.”

  “You did what?” She marveled at the lights in the warehouse. They were brighter, no longer flickering like the lights in the hallway.

  “I made a pocket in the sim, like you showed me. Right at the edge of the pocket we were in. I convinced them all to go inside the pocket I made, and now—I’m awake, the pocket’s closed. Which means they’re waking up now too. Right?”

  Lake stared at him. At the flickering light from the hallway pulsing in his anxious eyes. “You got all the partiers from the house to go inside a pocket you made?” she said, keeping her voice low.

  Taren nodded. He eased into the hallway, and Lake followed, alert for the sound of distant footsteps. “But we didn’t wake the girl in the bunker,” Taren admitted.

  “No, we didn’t. I messed that up.” Lake couldn’t look at him while she said it. “She mentioned a place called the Battery. I think that’s where most of the sleepers have headed.”

  “What battery? There are dozens in San Francisco.”

  “I don’t know.” Lake stopped short of the corner. “Most of them are just concrete-lined holes in the ground, or rusted gun mounts. Can’t be very many that are big enough for a group of people to camp in.”

  “Why would they want to? I don’t think any of the batteries around the city have been in use for at least a century. It’s not like they’re stocked with supplies.”

  “But a battery feels safe,” Lake said. “That’s all that matters to sleepers.” She pictured the flowerpot smashed on the counter, dirt scattered over the floor. “By the way, thanks for coming in after me when I got stuck in that bunker.”

  They’d pressed themselves against the wall of the hallway, and Taren’s arm shook next to hers. Nerves, adrenaline, thirst. “Your sister…”