by Jordan Rivet
Joanna had been surrounded by survivors all summer. They grappled with grief and loss but not with their own looming deaths. BRP had succeeded in shielding them from the worst. The rest of the world might well have found a way to make peace with their mortality, but it was hidden from those who’d been selected to carry on.
Joanna rubbed her eyes and plastered on a smile before she rejoined the others at the roadside. Garrett rushed to meet her, smelling faintly of fuel. He looked angry.
“You shouldn’t wander off like that.”
“There are no BRP guards nearby. No one’s going to shoot me.” Joanna neglected to mention the man who’d pointed a gun at her moments ago, in no mood to defend her actions.
“Something could have happened to you. We have to get back on the road.”
Joanna put her hands on her hips. “What were you going to do? Leave without me?”
Garrett grimaced, not catching her playful meaning. Her tone hadn’t been quite as light as she intended.
“I wouldn’t leave you,” he said hoarsely. “You’re my family now.” His hand tightened into a fist at his side. “I’ll never leave my family again.”
Joanna winced. Garrett clearly still felt guilty for leaving his brothers and parents to join BRP. She wanted to reach out to him, but what comfort or wisdom could she offer, when her own guilt was just as severe?
“You didn’t have a choice,” she said. “It would have been wrong not to take this chance to survive. I’m sure your family understood.”
“Understands.”
“What?”
“Understands,” Garrett repeated. “They’re still alive.”
“Of course. I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s—you’re right. They wanted me to do this.”
Garrett’s shoulders deflated. They shuffled their feet on the gravel roadside, not speaking. Joanna wished she hadn’t made light of his worry for her. And she wished she could offer him the kind of solace he gave others. She had left her family behind too. They all had. But Joanna had always expected to outlive her parents, and they had protected her. She had never felt responsible for anyone the way Garrett did as the oldest of so many siblings.
“All aboard the magic apocalypse bus!” Beth called, breaking them out of their awkward silence. Garrett gave Joanna a pained smile and returned to the van. Beth tossed him the keys, and soon they were winding on down the road once more.
They left the mountains behind as the sun set. The golden light faded to purple as they drove through rolling highlands. The taillights of the school bus in front guided them onward through the deepening darkness. Before long, the lights could no longer mute the riot of stars outside.
Suddenly, Chloe gasped and almost dove over the driver’s seat, pointing at the front windscreen.
“Look! That’s it!”
Beth started awake in the shotgun seat. “The bunker?”
“No, Brandon!”
“The Brandon?” Troy called.
“Yes, look at that extra-bright star on the horizon line. It’s the comet.” Chloe bounced up and down from excitement. The others shifted to get a better look.
“It has been visible to the naked eye for weeks,” Chloe explained, “but the mountains blocked our view. The earth’s position in relation to the angle of approach means Brandon is only visible at the horizon for a few minutes in this part of the world.”
The comet appeared as little more than a ball of light dancing above the rolling hills. If Chloe hadn’t pointed it out, Joanna might have thought it was a distant farmhouse or a firefly buzzing beyond the window. So that was the bastard that would kill almost everyone aboveground in hours and wipe out the rest in a period of sustained cold and starvation. Neat.
“Why the hell do they call it Brandon?” Blake asked. It was the first time he’d spoken since leaving his father’s body outside the training school. The others turned to look at him. He glared back defiantly, as if daring them to ask if he was okay.
“Wolf-Biederman was taken?” Troy said at last.
“If I never hear another Deep Impact reference for the rest of my life . . .” Ruby muttered.
“Brandon is such a lame name, isn’t it?” Joanna said. “They could have called it Wormwood or Jurassic Strike Two or something.”
“Jurassic Strike Two?” Troy said. “God, Joanna, I had no idea what was missing from my life. That would make a badass video game.”
“Wasn’t it discovered by a Brandon?” Beth asked. “That’s how it works, right?”
“Actually, they don’t name comets after the people who discovered them anymore,” Chloe said. “That was the practice until so many started being discovered by instruments or teams of people. In the nineties they switched to a number-and-letter system based on when the comet was first discovered.”
“So Brandon isn’t its official name?” Beth asked.
“That’s correct.”
“I read an article about it.” Joanna remembered the senior project she’d completed a lifetime ago. “The media insisted on assigning this one an actual name because it would sound better than a stream of numbers.”
“Bingo.” Chloe leaned forward to look at the comet again, practically climbing into Beth’s lap. “The official system doesn’t leave much room for creativity. That astronomer, Harvey Brandon, was the first person to calculate the comet’s trajectory, so they used his name.”
“Harvey Brandon should have had the decency to change his name to something epic before telling everyone,” Troy said.
“Whatever happened to him?” Vincent said. He didn’t ask anyone to describe what the comet looked like, meaning he genuinely didn’t want to know. Joanna had learned not to offer.
“I read he was building his own bunker,” Chloe said. “Lots of people have been doing that.”
“A cryosleep bunker?” Joanna asked.
“No, just one with canned food and stuff.” Chloe sat back in her seat, her voice taking on that professorial tone that reminded Joanna so much of her mother. “Some people think the earth will be inhabitable a lot sooner than scientists say. It’s strange that Harvey Brandon is doing it, being a scientist himself, but people do weird things when they’re scared.”
Ruby spoke up from the middle seat. “So they could pop up in, say, five years and get a head start on the whole earth repopulation thing?”
“That’s what they think, but it won’t work,” Chloe said. “If they come up anytime in the next fifty years, they won’t make it. And can you imagine being underground and conscious for fifty years? No, cryosleep is the only sane option.”
“Sane might be giving Burp too much credit,” Blake muttered.
They fell silent as the comet made its slow progress along the horizon and set behind the mountains, leaving nothing but stars in its wake.
Three hours after Brandon set, they reached the mine complex turned bunker facility. Floodlights illuminated a pair of massive gates topped with barbed wire and armed men standing guard. A wicked-looking fence curved away from them, encompassing several low hills. More soldiers patrolled the entrance than they’d seen during all of orientation, making it look more like a prison camp than a mine.
They joined a line of BRP vans and buses waiting their turn to pass through the gates. Armed guards walked up and down the line of vehicles, some with vicious dogs growling at their sides. It was so much like a scene out of a World War II movie that Joanna wondered if she’d fallen asleep on the drive and started dreaming. When the Blue Seven van reached the front, two soldiers shined their lights inside, scouring every inch for unauthorized passengers. A third scrutinized everyone’s identification, ticking off their names on a list one by one.
They all held their breaths when he got to Vincent. The soldier, who looked no older than Joanna, studied the crisp blue passport for a long time. Then he shined the light in Vincent’s face. Ruby moved beside him, giving a subtle signal, and Vincent squinted as though the light bothered him. The soldier narrowed
his eyes.
“Is there a problem, sir?” Garrett said.
The young soldier started, seeming to realize he’d been staring. Then he glanced around the van with what Joanna was quite certain was jealousy.
“You’re all cleared. Move along.”
He held out the passport, and Garrett took it before Vincent had a chance to reveal himself by not reacting. The soldier waved the van through the gates.
The old silver mine was located at the bottom of a small valley. Sparse yellow grass covered the hills around it, and there wasn’t a tree or river in sight. Harsh spotlights illuminated tire tracks and piles of extra dirt and rock as they drove closer to the facility.
“This is where we’re spending the next two hundred years?” Ruby said. “Maybe I should have stayed home.”
The wasted environment was such a marked contrast to the tranquil forest where they’d trained that Joanna wondered whether they could even settle here when they reemerged. But BRP had a limited number of deep-earth facilities large enough to house the cryo chambers and their power sources. They’d make do.
They bumped down a dusty road toward the mine complex, whose dominant structure was the headframe. A large concrete box topped with steel beams and a massive pulley, the headframe looked like one half of a drawbridge, or maybe a rocket launch platform, minus the rocket. Sprawling offices, storage buildings, and a processing plant made up the rest of the complex. A handful of prefabricated buildings had been put in for the workers, but for the most part BRP hadn’t bothered to build anything new on the surface. The important construction was happening deep underground.
A somewhat ordered sense of bedlam prevailed as they climbed out of their van and crossed an asphalt lot. Commands were shouted through bullhorns, and spotlights swept across the crowd of bewildered youths. The convoy had been expected much earlier, and the officials hadn’t anticipated having to unload everyone in the sleepy confusion of the middle of the night.
They marched on stiff legs toward a cluster of prefabricated buildings under the watchful eyes of more armed guards. Nervous faces surrounded them, the BRP denizens appearing younger than usual. The too-bright lights and smell of petroleum jarred and confused. Someone shouted something about reporting for cryo training after breakfast. Coupled with the appearance of the comet in the night sky, it finally felt as if this apocalypse nonsense was really happening. It was the end of the world, and they were going to be canned and stored in less than a month.
Theresa met them in front of the prefabricated dormitories. She handed out room keys, new name badges, and a detailed instruction packet, including a schedule for their cryosleep trial runs. Her familiar busy energy was welcome after the traumatic drive and the tense arrival.
After accepting her key and name badge, Joanna lingered by Theresa’s side.
“Can I help with anything?”
“Aren’t you tired from the drive?”
“I just sat there,” Joanna said. “You look ready to drop. I can help.”
Theresa gave her a weary smile. “I need to stay here, but if you find me a cup of coffee, I’ll give you my firstborn child.”
“I’ll pass, thanks. Where do I find the coffee?”
Theresa gave her directions to the building being used as BRP headquarters.
“Don’t let anyone stop you.” Theresa tapped the stack of name badges. “Wear it where any guard can see.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Joanna pushed her way through Magenta Teams Three and Four, who had just arrived in an old school bus. She waved at a few people she knew from their casual basketball games before heading in the general direction of the headframe. The controlled chaos continued as more vehicles rumbled down the dusty road and disgorged their passengers. The spotlights whirring over everything made Joanna feel as though she were attempting a prison break.
She hurried across the complex to the headquarters building, which used to be a processing plant. Made of grim concrete, it only had a handful of windows and looked decades old. Joanna slipped through a huge metal door and turned down the first hallway, as Theresa had directed. The ore processing equipment had been replaced with hastily constructed walls painted maggot-white and thick doors that made her think of an asylum. She was busy counting doorways to find the correct one when a scarred hand closed around her upper arm.
“What are you doing in here?”
Colonel Waters stood over her, wearing army fatigues and a scowl.
“Theresa sent me to—”
“Are you in the program?”
“Yes. Oh, here’s my name badge.” She held it up in the fluorescent light.
Colonel Waters still didn’t release her. She had spoken to him more than once, but he didn’t seem to recognize her face or name. “You can’t be in this building.”
“Theresa sent me to find coffee.” Joanna’s heart raced as the colonel’s face darkened, his grip tightening painfully.
“You shouldn’t wander around where—”
“Colonel!” A uniformed soldier jogged up the hallway and skidded to a halt, snapping off a salute. “We need you to inspect the hid—”
“Silence!” Colonel Waters snapped.
The soldier paled. Colonel Waters glared down at Joanna, perhaps assessing how much she had heard.
“Theresa can fetch her own coffee,” he growled at last. “You and your teammates are to stay in your designated areas for the duration of your time here. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Now get out.”
Joanna ran all the way back to her quarters, feeling shaken. Theresa was busy with a new group of arrivals, so Joanna didn’t stop to explain why she’d failed to bring the coffee. She hurried straight to the room she’d share with Beth, Chloe, and Ruby, resolving to visit Theresa in the morning and see if she could learn what Colonel Waters was hiding. Right now, she wanted to burrow into her sleeping bag and pretend she was back at the school or, better yet, at home.
Two things were certain: Colonel Waters was up to something, and the idyllic days of BRP were over.
Chapter Fifteen
Joanna lay flat on her back, muscles throbbing, slowly gathering the strength to stand. The shaft house looked relatively unchanged after two hundred years. The windowless walls and concrete floor were just as ugly as they had been when she last walked through those doors and descended into the earth. Above her the headframe rose into blackness. She couldn’t tell if the whole thing was still standing, but the ground-level walls appeared sturdy enough. They had been reinforced to protect the mine opening against seismic activity before Brandon slammed into the earth.
All their previous speculation about what the world would be like afterward rolled through Joanna’s mind. What if they’d been wrong about humanity dying out? What if the comet had missed them at the last moment, and no one woke them to say it was safe to come out? Perhaps the rest of the world had cackled over the idea of the BRP select sleeping beneath the earth, believing they were the chosen ones. Life could have gone on without them. Joanna might find the image amusing if she hadn’t seen the bones beneath the earth and the stones covering her friends’ cryo tanks.
“Keep moving forward.” Her hoarse voice echoed in the windowless room. She hauled herself to her feet, shrugging off her safety harness and knapsack, and crossed to the outer door. It was locked. She jiggled the handle, wondering if someone would have locked it from the inside or the outside. BRP had recruited volunteers from among the soldiers to protect the bunker entrance, but Joanna didn’t know whether they’d stayed at their posts until the bitter end. Put to sleep forty-eight hours before the comet was to strike, she hadn’t witnessed the impact. She had to keep reminding herself it had actually happened.
She pulled the pickaxe from her belt loop and went to work on the lock, which wasn’t one of the fancy science fiction keypads she had always imagined on a secret government facility. Just a big dead bolt on an old industrial building. She succeeded
in breaking the lock and jammed the pickaxe between the doors.
“Time to see what kind of world I’m dealing with. What’ll it be? Alien invaders? Barren wasteland?”
She pried the doors apart with blistered fingers, fighting for every inch. It was still light out, and a pale beam of daylight fell across her hands, splitting her chest in two. When the gap was big enough, she tossed the pickaxe aside and yanked on the right-hand door. It burst open with a violent screech, sending her tumbling onto her backside.
Then Joanna looked up into the future.
A hundred shades of green filled the doorway. Wild plant life curled and spread across every visible inch. Pale-white buds decorated the vines curtaining the doorway. The vines swayed as a gust of wind swept into the shaft house, swirling the dust around her. Pure sunshine filtered through the greenery to touch her face.
Joanna pushed herself to her feet and tottered to the doorway. She parted the vine curtain and, stepping up because ground level was higher than before, walked out into the brave new world.
In place of the desolate mining complex full of trucks, concrete, and engine exhaust was a secret garden, verdant and wild. Apart from the shaft house and headframe, the processing plant was the only structure still standing, a mere shell covered in creeping vines and coarse grass. The rest of the buildings had disappeared, knocked flat and overtaken by riotous life.
Joanna took a deep breath. The air was crisp and pure, smelling of fresh leaves and dirt untouched by ash or poison. Gut-deep relief swept through her, so powerful she almost collapsed on the fresh grass. The air on the surface wasn’t going to kill her after all.
