by Platt, Sean
“Nothing,” Raj reported.
Meyer still seemed to be seething.
Piper said, “They don’t answer?”
Raj shook his head. “No signal.”
“The network is down?”
Trevor: “Probably just flooded.”
“We should get a hotel,” Piper suggested. “Let traffic clear out. Maybe the networks will open up.”
She looked at Trevor, the last to use a phone. He looked away as if angry. Maybe he resented her for something. Piper didn’t know, and had been trying for weeks not to be bothered, but he sure had been acting like it.
Lila said, “People aren’t going to make fewer calls as the aliens get closer.”
Raj wrapped his arm around her, and pulled Lila closer. “You don’t know they’re aliens.”
“Just empty ships from outer space, then,” Trevor said. “That are flying themselves.”
Piper thought, Flying.
“That doesn’t mean that … ”
Piper turned to Meyer, but she spoke loud enough to stop Raj in the back seat. “Wait. How far are we from Morristown?”
“Like, nine or ten hours.”
“How far.”
“Thirty, forty miles?”
“Well,” said Lila, verbally pouting. “I guess we’d better settle in for a long trip.”
She pushed her body even harder against Raj, then glared at the side of her father’s head. Lila and Trevor got along with Meyer, but they were still teenagers. Piper, recently a teen herself, tried to understand, but often there was no use. Somewhere around your twenty-second birthday, teenagers started sounding like melodramatic idiots no matter what you did.
“That’s another reason to get a hotel room,” Piper said. “They might let planes fly again. We can take the Gulfstream.”
“They’re not going to unground flights. Not any time soon.” He shook his head. “I knew they’d do it, too. Only makes sense. Something coming from the air, military craft heading up in droves, people down here freaking out and storming the airports because everyone has to go somewhere when panic strikes, even if it doesn’t make sense … ”
Lila said, “Good thing we’re smarter than that.”
Meyer seemed to consider shouting, but only mumbled. “This is different.”
Lila laughed. But when Piper shot her a glance, she settled, having made her point.
“We’ve all talked about this,” said Meyer. “Whenever I’m … well, when I think about it … it’s been clear to me for a while that something was coming.”
“Come on, Dad,” Lila said.
He’d talked all their ears off about this. The maddening thing was that coming from Meyer Dempsey, talk about the end of the world never really sounded crazy. He put it in terms of change and inevitable consequences and how it was stupid not to be prepared when you had the financial means to do so. Piper didn’t understand where Meyer’s mind went when he went on his Ayahuasca trips and had never wanted to partake herself, but there were two things Piper knew for sure: Meyer believed what his inner eye showed him, and she trusted him no matter what.
Trevor said, “Kind of hard to say Dad’s full of shit right now, Lila.”
“Trevor!” Piper snapped. “Watch your mouth.”
“We have to get to Colorado,” said Meyer, returning his eyes to the road. Cars were starting to move — slowly, but steadily. Piper could see the singularity of purpose and knew the futility of arguing. “The ranch is mostly done, and the part that matters most, in the vault, has been finished for over a month. I had it stocked last time I was there. We have an isolated power source, air filtration, plenty of supplies in food and water, concrete walls and lead doors … ”
“Everything the modern paranoid survivalist needs,” Lila said.
It was hard to call anyone paranoid when his fears came true, and hard to argue with the need to survive.
The cars stopped again. The van, still on auto, stopped without ceremony. Piper watched Meyer’s eyes, seeing how they were scanning the roadsides and median. She didn’t know if the JetVan could do off-road, but knowing Meyer, he may have had it specially equipped.
A diffuse red light appeared on the horizon behind them — the first rays of a pre-dawn morning. In the dim light with her night-adjusted eyes, Piper could see the cars ahead casting scant shadows.
Car doors in front of them opened, and both the passenger and the driver got out. The same thing was happening across the stopped traffic, one car at a time.
“What’s going on?” said Meyer.
But Piper saw. She pointed.
“That,” she said.
CHAPTER NINE
Day Two, Morning
Las Vegas Outskirts, Nevada
Heather was alternating between cigarettes and joints in the small cabin of her PriusX, wondering if combining a stimulant and a depressant was somehow a bad idea, like driving an old-fashioned car with the brake applied. She’d done that once, back when she’d been learning, when most people who rode in a car alone still had to be driving it.
Driving with the brake on for most of an afternoon had done incomprehensible levels of damage. Her father’s mechanic had told her that he’d never seen four brakes stripped so completely. Her father had made Heather pay for it out of her part-time income, and had suggested that she spend a bunch of time praying for salvation. Not from God, but from him.
She’d smoke a cigarette to its butt, toss it out the window rather than into the wet-compactor below the stereo, then start in on one of her pre-rolled joints. The smokes kept her alert, and the pot made her not care so much about whatever the cigarettes had caused her to notice. It was a perfect combo.
She picked up her phone. Dialed. Was told that the party she was trying to reach was unavailable at this time.
That’s how it had been all afternoon, all night, and all morning so far. She’d learned to trust Meyer even if she thought he tripped out a bit too much on plant juice — more because he had excellent instincts than that Mother Ayahuasca was laying some knowledge on him whenever they drank and purged. Heather never felt the “deep understanding” that Meyer claimed, but if he thought he saw other planes while high, then good on him. That was the goal of any drug, after all: to alter your states enough to free you from the boredom of everyday life.
But Meyer had sent her on this errand, and he’d done it a bit like a kid pushing a toy boat out into a wide lake. Heather was the boat, and now that she was away from her home base in LA, the kid who’d given her that shove was no longer around. Despite trying every fifteen minutes or so, she wasn’t getting any midtrip updates. He’d ordered her to the compound outside Vail, so that’s where she’d go. But if Meyer fell into a hole in the road, she’d never know. She’d simply arrive to find his stupid “Axis Mundi” empty, then spend the apocalypse alone. What a stone-cold bummer.
Heather felt a slight sideways sensation. She looked up to see her Prius pass a red car that had seemingly broken down. There was a man standing beside its steaming hulk, waving his arms overhead as if trying to flag her down. For the briefest of moments, Heather considered stopping. But how exactly would that work if she did? He was one guy, alone.
He might steal her car.
He might rape her.
Heather took another toke, holding the smoke a moment before exhaling into the already-fogged cabin. Yes, that seemed likely. Aliens were coming, but men never really stopped being rapey. If the aliens had already landed those big balls somewhere and were marching forward with their ray guns up and that same guy tried to knock Heather out of the way of the blast, she’d still probably worry about his dick. Once in the ditch, who’s to say any savior wouldn’t take what he wanted? Anything to forget all the tentacles and probing of an alien invasion. She’d been in the spotlight — a confident and not-at-all-unattractive woman with risqué material and strong opinions — for long enough to know how threatened men were by girls like her.
Well, except for Meyer Dempsey, w
ho the press seemed to think must wield a pretty thick prick stick. And that wasn’t his dick itself (which was impressive), but just his general manly boorishness. That’s what the New Yorker had implied; it’s what the Times and Newsweek had both implied; it’s what Saturday Night Live portrayed in its parody. Everyone seemed to think that Meyer was an arrogant asshole just because he was successful, had revolutionized film, had taken the Internet for a ride back in the gold rush. But success and confidence alone didn’t make a person a bully or a bitch. Heather knew from experience.
She watched the stranded motorist disappear in the rearview, assuaging a prickling of guilt by telling herself that she would have stopped for a family or a woman. It wasn’t true — this felt like an every girl for herself sort of situation, and right now she had a vehicle and some supplies. But telling herself helped. A little.
She picked up the phone, tried again, and was told that service was unavailable at this time.
Deciphering the various ways in which her phone could fail had become a road game, similar to the way she used to catalogue state license plates or play I Spy on long rides with her family. She set the phone aside, thinking.
“The party you are trying to reach at this time” meant that something was jammed on Meyer’s end but that hers was working.
“Service is unavailable at this time” meant that she wasn’t getting a signal on her end. This one only counted toward her road game if she could see bars on the display and knew, contrary to the phone’s opinion, that she did, indeed, have service. “Service is unavailable” probably meant too many people trying to call at once.
Sometimes she got “Your call cannot be connected. Please try again.” Of all the ways Heather’s phone could fail, this was her favorite. For one, it was an optimistic failure, urging her to never give up. Second, it was blunt and honest, like Heather’s comedy act. That message wasn’t bullshitting her about “at this time,” like it was just an error of unfortunate timing. No. It just said that your call couldn’t be connected, no bullshit beyond that.
You know what, bitch? No, you can’t make this call, so move on. But hey, there’s always tomorrow, so don’t lose hope.
Twice now the phone had simply failed to light up. Those times, she’d let the battery run out while using the GPS. That one didn’t happen anymore because she’d plugged the phone into the universal port.
It was a stupid game, but Heather had to pass the time somehow. Leaving LA had been tricky, but Meyer had been right; she was to the east of the city and, by moving quickly as he’d insisted, she’d been able to avoid the worst of the panic traffic. She’d moved slowly for a bit, dragging for a few hours beyond that as traffic thinned and inched, still filled with assholes manning their own wheels instead of letting the cars do their jobs.
After dark, as she’d moved into less populated areas, staying off highways for the most part, Heather’s pace had picked up substantially. She had her phone’s GPS on for curiosity (the one built into the Prius didn’t have a wide view and had a bitchy English accent), but she’d never have wanted to try the tangle of roads she’d taken on her own. But what did she care? The car could make those decisions. All she had to do was sit back and smoke.
But it got boring. She lived in movies and wanted none of them. She had all sorts of old TV shows loaded into the Prius’s juke, but she’d already watched four episodes of Three’s Company and five of her hands-down favorite, Friends. She’d had enough watching for now. And really, they’d probably do nothing but watch Friends when she got to the bunker. It was one of the things she and Piper shared, even though Piper was young enough that she almost had no right even knowing the classics. It was infuriating. Part of Heather wished Piper was a brainless bimbo — a midlife crisis seized upon by a forty something man to follow his failed marriage. But Piper was hard to hate. Impossible, really. It would suck spending forever underground alongside her, knowing that guilt about sleeping with Meyer would prevent her from doing it in such close quarters.
She let the thought go. Tried dialing again and was told that she couldn’t have her way … but that she should try again later. She gave a little cheer for nobody to see. Phone-related car game: won.
For the past hour or so, she’d been seeing signs for Las Vegas. At least that was some variety to look forward to.
Part of Heather was excited. She’d played Vegas a dozen times in the past few years (her last three annual specials were filmed there) and Vegas was always a good crowd. She arrived by air, never by car, never through hills and mountains. Still, the hook was strong. It was something she knew. She had fond memories there. And right now, after a night alone in a stupid little car with nothing to look at, the idea of being somewhere familiar — some speck of the life she’d so recently loved — was undeniable.
She should probably avoid Vegas proper. It was a big city, and even during the best of times it was packed with crazies. Crazies and old people. No good could come of that as the five-day countdown (now down to four days; the radio loved to remind her) neared zero.
Aliens in Vegas? Hell, they could turn that into a show on the Strip. Charge admission. Sell shitty souvenirs and nine-dollar bottles of water.
She’d asked the car to avoid 15 in a nice big halo around the city itself, if the car was thinking of getting back onto 15 at all rather than staying in the hinterlands. But Heather wanted to get close enough to see the lights, assuming they were still on.
But when Vegas appeared on the horizon, the lights were somehow different.
The city was on fire.
CHAPTER TEN
Day Two, Morning
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Lila felt sick.
She hadn’t had time to read up on pregnancy specifics while trying to pretend the microscopic bun in her oven didn’t exist, so she wasn’t sure if it was normal to be sick this early. Morning barfing was one of the first signs of TV pregnancy, but sitcoms (from contemporary to the oldies her mother and Piper both liked) also showed birth as taking approximately fifteen seconds from the onset of pushing to the baby being out and totally clean. But one day in Los Angeles, because her mother had been a bit tipsy and thought it was hilarious and wrong, Lila had seen the video of her own birth. It had gone on forever. “Like taking a dump for days,” Mom had said.
TV didn’t get everything right. The Internet tended to, on average, because enough serious eyes were on the biggest websites, kicking out the contributions of assholes and jokers, but Lila hadn’t looked. She’d been bored enough to get past her denial last night, after Raj and Piper were both snoring and Trevor was looking moodily out the window as if waiting for a lost lover. But she couldn’t get an air signal on her phone, leaving the van’s wireless as her only option. That signal was plenty strong for some reason, but Lila wondered if the van stored her search and browse history. Dad might use his tablet up front to find an Arby’s and see her prior search for morning sickness. Shit would hit the fan.
Still, it was morning, and Lila felt ill. She’d never been great during travel, so this might be plain old carsickness. But she had been sleeping, not reading or doing anything much with her eyes. She hadn’t felt sick last night, even after hours of driving and looking at her phone for a signal — even after enduring the tense silence following Meyer’s decision to turn away from the airport they’d spent the evening trying to reach.
If this was morning sickness, she might barf. She didn’t feel it yet, but that kind of thing could sneak up on you. Lila wanted to be prepared. She was looking around when Raj met her eyes.
“What are you looking for?” he said.
“A bucket or something.”
Raj looked puzzled.
Lila pointed. “There. Crawl up and grab me that rubber thing.” She didn’t know what it was, exactly, but her dad (or someone) had filled it with more of Meyer’s gross snack foods. Subtly emptied of its contents, it would do.
“You want a snack?”
“I want the contain
er.”
Raj’s head cocked. “Why?”
“I have to throw out this tissue.” She had one stuffed in her pocket. Overnight, with the lights out, the world had suddenly and unexpectedly seemed hopeless. She’d spent a few minutes quietly crying. She was knocked up and didn’t know how to tell her dad — either that she was knocked up, or that she and Raj had been having sex. He probably knew the latter because Meyer was an adult and not stupid, especially given how she’d dutifully obeyed his “no dating before sixteen rule” and hence had earned some freedom. But the fact that she’d been letting Raj drop loads inside her was, in retrospect, bafflingly stupid. It had just seemed so hot at the time. You tell a guy to go ahead and cum in you, and it makes him just that much happier and sweatier. Like a horny puppy.
It had all hit her at around 1 a.m. She had Raj, yes. But really, she was alone. She’d have to tell her dad she’d been having sex, and she’d have to admit she’d been being stupid about it.
Oh, and apparently aliens were coming to destroy the planet or something.
“Let me take it,” said Raj, reaching for the tissue.
“I want to throw it away.”
“O … kay.”
He reached for a shower caddy they’d been using as a garbage can. It was latticework, like a basket.
“Ew, no. I want that one.”
“But this is the garbage.”
“I want that garbage.”
Trevor turned. “Jesus. Will you two shut up?”
“I’m sorry. Am I breaking your concentration on … ” she looked to see where Trevor was gazing, “ … on the back of Piper’s head?”
“Shut up, Lila!”
Lila blinked. Wasn’t she supposed to be the one with mood swings?
Trevor returned his attention to the front — not past Piper. Without turning, he said, “Aren’t you even a little concerned?”
