by Jordan Rivet
“Listen . . . to . . . me.” Garrett strained to keep Blake from twisting loose, cramming him against the door. “BRP will shoot anyone who gets out of the vans. They warned me this morning.”
“I don’t care,” Blake hissed. “He deserves better than to lie out there like road kill.”
“Everyone deserves better than this,” Garrett said. “But if you go out there, you will die.”
Blake and Garrett stared each other down, Garrett keeping a firm grip on Blake’s arms. Chloe’s soft gasps and the hum of the engine were the only sounds. Joanna dug her fingernails into her palms, afraid to move lest she break the tenuous equilibrium between the two men.
Suddenly, the van hit a pothole, and everyone lurched off balance. Garrett lost his hold on Blake. Chloe screamed as Blake launched himself forward, swinging his fist at Garrett’s face. This time the punch connected with a nasty smack.
Blake grabbed the handle again. The door popped open, swinging wide over the asphalt, and Blake tried to leap from the moving vehicle.
Garrett grabbed the doorframe and threw himself halfway out of the van, catching hold of Blake’s belt before his feet hit the ground. Joanna’s heart clenched like a fist as they hung suspended out the doorway.
Then Garrett hauled Blake back—just as a shot rang out.
The two men toppled backward into the vehicle. Garrett landed hard on Joanna’s lap, making her grunt. Troy lunged forward to pull Blake into the back seat. Ruby slammed the van door with a bang that echoed like a second gunshot.
For a moment, no one moved.
Fearing the worst, Joanna looked down at Garrett, whose shoulders rested on her legs.
“Are . . . are you hurt?” she said.
“No. Just a warning shot.” Garrett’s eye was already swelling from Blake’s punch, but there was no sign of blood. She touched his cheek, and he gripped her hand tightly before pulling himself back into a sitting position.
Joanna and Chloe squeezed sideways to make room for Garrett on their bench. The van lurched onward, Beth still cursing under her breath in the driver’s seat. Garrett turned around to address the others.
“I’m truly sorry about your father,” Garrett said to Blake. “The BRP officials warned me not to let anyone out of the van no matter what.”
“They’d really kill us after going to the trouble of training us?” Joanna said.
Garrett grimaced. “I think they’ll do whatever it takes to make sure we don’t cause trouble for the program.”
Joanna caught Ruby’s eye. Maybe Garrett really was skeptical of BRP’s good intentions. She remembered Theresa’s insistence the other night that she make no attempt to leave. They all understood the risks now.
“We’re really in the last days,” Vincent said. “It’s starting to actually feel like it.” He paused. “And smell like it.”
“Why do you think Blake’s father came out here?” Chloe said quietly. “Did . . . did he really believe they’d let him in?”
No one answered. Speculating was pointless. Blake’s father must have known he was going to die. Perhaps he wanted to spend his last days in his son’s company. Joanna shied away from the thought of her own parents. She believed them to be steady, rational people who would never run off to break into a secure government facility. But could anyone know how they’d act in these circumstances? She had tried to view her parents’ impending deaths as an abstraction or a historical event—a strategy BRP encouraged. But it was getting harder to maintain the fantasy. Poor Blake had come face-to-face with cold, corporeal reality.
Joanna twisted in her seat to look back. Blake was staring out the van window, muscular arms folded over his chest, tears streaming steadily down his face. Troy thumped him on the shoulder once then left him alone.
Everyone stayed quiet as they left the school behind. Garrett didn’t move back to the front seat, staying squished against Joanna on the bench as they continued onward through an apocalyptic wasteland every bit as bad as the movies.
Burned-out cars and trucks littered the roads. People walked aimlessly, some sticking out their thumbs, others trudging along at a steady pace, still others holding up signs about judgment and horsemen and the end being nigh. The service stations and isolated houses they came upon were burned or barricaded as often as not. Joanna was glad they stuck to the less-populated areas. She didn’t want to know what the cities were like right now.
“It wasn’t as bad when I drove here,” she whispered to Garrett.
A muscle worked in his jaw. “Same.”
The seams of society were coming apart at last. Despair painted every face they saw. These people knew their days were numbered. These charred wrecks were the last things they’d see before the firestorm encircled the earth and killed everything but the cockroaches. It would be worse if they made it through the initial impact. Then they’d face the choking atmosphere, the loss of daylight, the slow death of the impact winter. They must know the truth, and still they trudged across the land in search of solace.
Joanna felt stripped bare as they drove slowly through the end of the world. She couldn’t prove herself worthy of her spot in the bunker. She couldn’t change what was to come. She shivered as the weight of inevitability came crashing down.
Garrett slipped his arm around her shoulders, and she leaned into him, smelling clean laundry and safety. Chloe hiccupped in the seat next to her. Ruby and Vincent murmured quietly behind them. In the back, Troy sat in vigil with Blake, and in the front, Beth drove them onward with a steady hand. Joanna took comfort in their quiet voices, in their warmth seeping into her skin. These seven people, randomly assigned and squished together in this grumbling old van, were all she had left to hold her together.
Chapter Thirteen
Joanna felt as though all she had ever done was climb. The car ride she’d spent tucked under Garrett’s arm happened so long ago it might as well be a dream. She was a ladder person now, condemned to climb endlessly through the dark until she went mad. Her song was the thud of her shoes on the rungs, the tug of the rope around her waist, the rhythm of her breath. She imagined the ladder was a treadmill, churning slowly beneath her hands and feet, going nowhere.
She was trying to remember which circle of Dante’s hell was a ladder in a mineshaft when her knuckles rapped against metal. That was new. She felt a smooth plane above her. Yes, definitely new. Could it be the door at last?
She prodded the dark expanse above her head. She couldn’t tell exactly what it was, but the ladder appeared to end here. She tied another knot in case she slipped and retrieved her flashlight, praying she wouldn’t have to climb any higher. The flashlight beam nearly blinded her. She turned it on and off a few times as her eyes adjusted, slowly getting a sense of her surroundings. The mineshaft continued another ten feet, then the concrete walls changed to steel bars. A metal cage enclosed the top of the mineshaft, beyond which she could just make out the vaulted ceiling of the mine headframe. She had made it to the top at last.
“Well, that was easy,” Joanna announced, needing a little bravado. No one was around to contradict her, anyway.
She studied the metal enclosure rising above the concrete, where the lift cage would nestle whenever it rose to the surface. The flat object she’d felt above the ladder turned out to be a large metal box set into the wall, perhaps for electrical circuits. She’d hoped it was a door, but ground level was still ten feet up.
And there was another problem. Joanna shined her flashlight around the top of the mineshaft. The doors glittered wickedly when the beam drifted over them. They were more like gates than elevator doors, porous, with a double line down the middle indicating where they opened. But they were on the opposite side of the mineshaft. It was far too wide for her to jump across to reach the doors, even if they had been open.
“I can’t catch a break, can I?”
The beam of light shivered like a strobe as Joanna surveyed the mineshaft, looking for a way across the abyss. Sweat soaked her clothes,
and her limbs trembled worse than ever. She was too tired to feel scared.
The ladder had to be on this side for a reason, she told herself. She’d find a way across.
She didn’t have a lot to work with. A few pipes and wires ran around the shaft from the circuit box to the doors, none of which looked particularly sturdy. The cage enclosing the top of the mineshaft was too far overhead to reach. Shouldn’t there be a catwalk or something? Perhaps the miners used to extend a gangway across the gap to this ladder in the past, or maybe the final ladder segment had fallen long ago.
She noticed a heavy cord hanging overhead, a bit of the lift cable still suspended from the hoist. She had a brief vision of grabbing the cable and swinging across the gap like some sort of post-apocalyptic Tarzan. Probably not the smartest idea she’d ever had.
She examined the mineshaft’s circumference for a more practical solution. A sturdy-looking pipe ran along the wall a few feet above the electrical box. That might support her feet. If she could reach the bottom of the cage—ground level—she could hold onto the bars while she shuffled around the mineshaft on that pipe. She didn’t think she had enough strength left to pull herself up to the cage itself.
Joanna slung another loop of rope around the ladder for extra security, trying to ignore the aches in her body. If her muscles hurt now, she didn’t want to think about how they’d feel when she was hanging from the metal cage by her fingertips.
She tugged the harness around her waist to make sure it wouldn’t come loose in the final moments then climbed from the ladder onto the narrow electrical box. It protested her weight with a metallic grunt. From this higher position, she reached for the cage overhead, shaking nearly hard enough to vibrate off her perch.
Just a little bit more . . . Her fingers tapped against the concrete wall. Still too far. She reached for the bars, all too aware of the yawning blackness behind her. It was going to take more than this.
Rallying the last of her courage, Joanna bent her knees and jumped. Her hands closed around the bars at the bottom of the cage. Before she could think better of it, she swung to the left, launching herself away from the electrical box. Her feet smacked into the pipe running along the wall with a clang like a bell. Toes scrabbling against the wall, she managed to find her balance on the pipe, still holding tight to the metal cage. The pipe groaned ominously.
Joanna inched carefully to the left, gripping the bars overhead. She supported most of her weight on the pipe to relieve the pressure on her fingers as she edged hand over hand around the mineshaft. Her shirt snagged and caught on the rough wall as she tiptoed around the chasm. The stench of her sweat pressed in on her, mixed with the chalky scents of concrete and dust. Spots floated before her eyes from the effort, and her blisters burst one by one, leaving her hands slick with fluid.
By some miracle, she made it around to the doors. She tried to stick her fingers into the crack between them but couldn’t quite manage. She stretched, trying to gain another inch, maybe two. Her foot slipped.
Don’t panic, don’t panic, don’t panic.
But Joanna was out of strength. Plastered against the wall, toes on the pipe, barely holding onto the rough metal bars above her head, she couldn’t pull herself up the rest of the way. She was stuck.
Joanna swore, the word echoing back down the mineshaft, and tears filled her eyes. White-hot pain scorched every muscle. It was a matter of seconds before her hands slipped free. She couldn’t do it. She had made it this far, but she didn’t have enough strength left for the final push. It was over.
Then, just before she let go, her parents’ faces rose before her. Her father’s high forehead and gray stubble. Her mother’s blue eyes and round cheeks. Her parents had been filled with hope for Joanna’s future, even when they knew their lives were about to end. They had wanted so badly for her to survive.
You can’t give up, Joanna. She wasn’t sure if it was their voices in her head or her own. Otherwise, this was all for nothing.
Her fists clenched tighter around the bars. She gave one final push with her toes and hoisted herself upward. She moved one hand to the next crossbar, gaining a few inches. Then a few more. Bracing her feet against the wall, she climbed up the cage doors, clinging to them like a bat. Muscles straining dangerously, she squeezed her fingers into the crack between the doors and forced the metal gate open an inch. Two inches. Three.
She kept expecting her muscles to snap. Any moment she’d topple back into the shaft. The rope around her waist was the only thing that might save her from the death she’d avoided for the past two hundred eighteen years. But at last, with what felt like a superhuman effort, she forced the gates apart enough to stick her head through. Her shoulders followed, and she hoisted herself out of the mineshaft.
Joanna collapsed onto a cold concrete floor, purple spots dancing before her eyes. She had made it. She summoned the energy for a triumphant fist-pump then flopped back to the ground. Sweat dripped off her, disappearing in the thick layer of dust atop the concrete. It took a long time for her heart rate to slow, for her to accept that she had solid ground under her at last.
When her vision cleared, she sat up, whimpering at the pain in every muscle, and looked around a familiar space. The shaft house had industrial-strength walls, dirty floors, and not a single comforting feature. But it didn’t matter. Joanna was back on the surface of the earth.
Chapter Fourteen
BEFORE
It took the whole day and well into the night to drive to the bunker, located deep in Idaho silver country. The drive would only have taken four hours in better circumstances, but roadblocks and wrecked vehicles impeded their progress, forcing long detours. Garrett drove when Beth needed a rest as they crept slowly through the shattered world.
They stopped at prearranged times to refuel. They didn’t see a single functioning gas station all day, but every vehicle in the convoy carried its own fuel. Their stopovers took place on the side of the road as often as not.
During one such pause, Joanna walked a few yards away from the van to stretch her legs. They were in a remote pass where the road wound back and forth along a mountainside, forcing the convoy to stretch out over several miles. Every vehicle had pulled over wherever they found a safe turning-out area or passing lane. The curve of the road gave the illusion that their team was alone as they refueled the van and relieved themselves in the privacy of the trees.
As her teammates discussed how the van tires were holding up, Joanna had a sudden, overwhelming desire for a moment to herself. People had surrounded her constantly since her arrival at training, and she’d barely had a chance to process anything without continuous input from her teammates. She muttered something about using the facilities and strode into the trees.
She didn’t have to go far to escape the murmur of their voices. A river meandered below the roadway here, a branch of the one on which they’d gone rafting at the beginning of the summer. She picked her way over boulders and fallen branches, following the sound of rushing water.
As she scooted down a steep slope, Joanna noted the types of vegetation she saw and practiced assessing which parts were edible or otherwise useful. Those berries were safe. The fibers of that tree’s bark were strong enough to use for ties. Those leaves often sheltered a grub that would be a good source of protein in a pinch. All of this wood was too wet for a campfire. The bunker would contain plenty of reference material, but their survival trainers had tried to cram as much practical knowledge as possible into their heads. It was still anyone’s guess how many of these plants would regenerate on their own after the firestorm swept the globe and dust blocked out the sun. The blast was expected to knock down ninety percent of the region’s trees, but BRP scientists hoped that at least some varieties would recover before the two hundred years were up.
Joanna tried to silence the litany of facts she’d been told about plant dormancy, thermal radiation, and ejecta deposits. BRP had assaulted them with a constant barrage of information, and
she just wanted a little quiet.
Abruptly, she broke through the tree line, and the rush of the river became a roar. She paused in the shadow of a stately old hemlock, still several dozen feet above the water. Multicolored pebbles covered the wide riverbank below her. The water sparkled with crystalline droplets of sunlight. On the opposite side, a steep cliff rose directly from the water, the rocks glistening with trickles of silver. Overhanging trees cast shadows on the river and cut patterns in the sky.
A group of children was playing in the shallows, splashing and screeching as their chubby legs churned through the gentle current. One little girl toppled over when a larger boy charged past her. She wailed until another girl—probably her sister—picked her up and kissed her cheek. She said something that made the little girl giggle, and soon they were tossing pebbles into the water together, squealing and giggling at every splash. The sounds were so normal that Joanna felt as if she had pushed through a wardrobe into another world, a world full of life and hope. A world with a future.
A handful of adults watched over the children, several with hunting rifles slung over their shoulders. Joanna didn’t venture any closer than the edge of the trees, but one man sensed her presence. He whirled around and leveled his gun directly at her. Joanna raised her hands at the unambiguous warning and held the stranger’s gaze as she stepped slowly back into the woods. He made no move to pursue her.
The children’s laughter seemed to overtake every other noise as Joanna climbed back toward the road. She barely heard the crunch of her footsteps or felt the branches scratching her arms. This would all be gone in a few weeks: the trees, the crisp, clear river, the children. Those families were waiting for the end, and they knew it. That man with the rifle would defend his family to the last, knowing that none of them would grow any older than they were now.
These were the last days of a dying people, and for the first time in the history of this planet, a species knew its fate down to the moment. They weren’t like the dinosaurs. They hadn’t all died when their own catastrophic comet struck, but they must have sensed something wasn’t right, must have felt the dread as temperatures changed and it became more difficult to find food. But the exact date and time of their doomsday hadn’t been broadcast across the globe. They couldn’t have been aware the way the man with the rifle was aware, knowing in their bones, in their souls, that this was the end.
