The Shelter Cycle

by Peter Rock

  Through the ribs I could see the men, so busy, racing along. My dad was in charge, building all day every day, deciding what people should be doing. Then I saw him, waving up at me, shouting. His arms and face were all black with dirt except around his eyes, where he’d been wearing welding goggles. That’s when I knew it was only another drill, that it was not the day, even though the Messenger had visited us. My father was smiling, down there, laughing like it was all the same to him whether the world ended or didn’t end. He knew that everything was temporary.

  10

  WELLS AWAKENED ON the couch, white pages strewn around him. A few still rested on his chest; he held one out now, squinting: Francine, trying to sleep so far underground, surrounded by her family and yet separated from her friend by miles of dirt and stone.

  When he sat up, pages slid to the floor. Kilo, sleeping there, lifted his head with a startled sound.

  The dog followed Wells out of the living room, down the hallway. The door to the baby’s room was open, the room empty, as was their bedroom. The bed still made, the blankets pulled tight. Wells picked up Francine’s phone from her dresser, turned, and headed toward the kitchen.

  It was almost ten o’clock; she should be home by now. He dialed the hospital, waited to be connected to her department. The woman who answered was not someone he knew.

  “Francine’s not working now. She’s not here.”

  “When did she finish?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “She worked last night,” he said.

  “I don’t think so. I believe she’s gone on maternity leave. I can check the paperwork if you like.”

  “That’s all right,” he said, hanging up the phone. He knew that the woman was mistaken; if Francine wasn’t at the hospital, she had to be here soon, on her way home.

  Kilo was scratching to be let out. Wells took hold of his collar and opened the door; barefoot, he led the dog down the steps to the driveway, unlatched the wooden gate to the back yard, and let him loose.

  The morning was cold. The air smelled like snow. Wells glanced up along the slope and for a moment thought he saw two figures—one taller, one shorter—standing on the distant ridge. Then they were gone and he couldn’t find them again. Turning, he went back up the steps into the kitchen.

  He started the coffeepot, got dressed. Five minutes passed, ten. Francine should have been home by now, and he didn’t like waiting, and anything could have happened to her, somewhere between the hospital and home without her phone to call him with. He snatched his keys from their hook, headed outside, and climbed into his truck.

  Down the street, around the corner, he accelerated to make it through a yellow light. This was the way she drove home; he thought it was. He passed under a billboard, the lost girl’s huge, pale face staring and smiling down at him, and then a thought came to him, a suspicion. He turned suddenly, away from the path to the hospital. It would take only a moment to check, to be certain.

  He pulled into the parking lot of the Econo Lodge, skidded to a stop. There was no one around. Hurrying to the door of room 12, he knocked twice, hard, then waited.

  “Colville!” He slapped at the door with the flat of his hand; he pressed his ear close to the brass numbers. There was no sound inside. Nothing.

  And then, farther down, he saw movement, a door opening. A man came out of the office. Bald, wearing a Boise State parka, a cigarette in one hand.

  “He checked out this morning!” the man shouted, then coughed. “Room’s empty!”

  Wells began to step toward the man, to ask him if he knew anything more, but just then the phone in his pocket began to ring. He pulled it out—it was Francine’s phone, not his. When he flipped it open, he saw that it was Maya calling.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “I must have the wrong number—”

  “Maya,” he said. “It’s Wells.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Hi. I was supposed to call Francine, so I could meet her. You have her phone? I mean, obviously you do.”

  “Is she all right?” he said. “She’s there?”

  “I thought she called you.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “She’s fine,” Maya said. “She’s okay. Just visiting for a day.”

  “Is she alone?”

  “What? Yes.”

  “Where are you meeting her?”

  The reception crackled and snarled. Across the parking lot, the motel manager stood next to Wells’s truck—its door was still open, and he’d forgotten to shut off the ignition. Steam twisted from its tailpipe.

  “She’s coming back to Boise tomorrow,” Maya said. “I think that’s her plan.”

  “So I’m just supposed to wait?”

  “Everything’s fine,” Maya said. “Really, it’s okay. I’ll have her call you.”

  Wells closed the phone and put it back in his pocket. He drove home more slowly, retracing his path. When he reached the house, he parked in the driveway and sat there for a moment before climbing out.

  “Kilo?” he said. “Here, boy.”

  But when he opened the gate, the dog did not come leaping out, as he usually did. Wells stepped into the back yard, scanned its perimeter. Empty. He looked up along the slope that led to the ridges, but there was no sign of the dog. Sometimes this happened; when neither Wells nor Francine was home, Kilo would find a way out of the yard, go searching for them. He always came back.

  Inside, there was only the smell of burned coffee, last night’s dishes in the sink. Wells walked into the living room. The pages were scattered white across the couch, spilled onto the floor. What would Francine say, if she came home to this? He’d like to hear it, for her to see these pages everywhere and to know that he’d read them all.

  The fires came in 1988. They burned all through Yellowstone Park and came over the ridge, threatened the Heart. That’s where we gathered, raising our voices: Reverse the tides, Roll them back, Set all free. The sky was all smoke, the mountains invisible, trees coming and going. I stood next to my mother, watching her face, the heat on my skin. The peanut butter and egg salad sandwiches we’d brought all tasted like smoke.

  I chased after Colville when he called my name, broke away from where we all stood. We ran out along the edge of the deep pit being dug for the shelter, past the yellow bulldozers, through the tall, dry grass. We left beaten-down paths behind us.

  Between the fire and all the people, animals gathered, herded down the slope by the flames. Elk and moose, raccoons and snakes and mice, all too worried to chase or fight, too afraid to eat each other.

  Fires are energy made visible. When the flames came closer, descending the canyons, we wore wet bandannas over our faces. We prayed so hard. The heat bent the air, the heat in my throat. Voices rose up: Reverse the tides, Roll them back, Set all free. The voices rose up and the flames skirted the Heart. They didn’t burn one tree.

  11

  COLVILLE AND KILO broke camp and started hiking before daybreak. In the new snow they were able to follow the elks’ path, which came upon and followed the Shooting Star trail south before tapering off. Up and over two ridges, in and out of stands of pine and aspen, along frozen creeks; they passed through charred deadfalls and sections where the ground was still black, new trees growing up through the remains of the fires.

  And now they stood here, on the last ridge, overlooking the Heart. Below, the long rectangular indentations of the shelter showed clearly in the snow, the berms like drifts around them. The wide meadow was white, untracked. Had he expected the tents? The people? The energy spun up along the ridges; he felt it thick in his chest, a vibration that almost lifted him off the ground.

  The soft snow eased his descent. He tried to slide a little in the snowshoes, to obscure his tracks, make them look less like what they were. Carefully he emerged from the last stand of trees, then circled the shelter, keeping a distance. Here in the icy snow, uncovered by wind, were vehicle tracks, chains on the tires. The watchman or maintenance man, mos
t likely, checking in, sometime in the recent past.

  Someone would come, would unlock the door, and Colville would have to wait, prepare himself, figure out how to get inside when that happened. Meanwhile, he’d trust that he had enough food to last until he could get to the provisions inside.

  “Stay close, Kilo.”

  Colville didn’t approach the large metal door; he could see the locks all over it from where he stood, fifty feet away. Instead he walked the perimeter of the shelter, up along the berm. Two low turrets rose above the surface, ten-foot antennas like whips above them. Thin rectangular windows, the only way to see out when one was inside, glinted beneath the snow above them.

  Walking slowly, carefully, he uncovered one round escape hatch, then the next. Two feet across, round and made of concrete, each hatch was an inset circle with a hairline gap around it, impossible to pry open. He kept on, around the perimeter, the cold wind blowing snow in every direction.

  As he approached the third hatch, at the shelter’s corner, he could see that the snow had already been brushed away from it. Closer, he realized that the lid was not closed, that something—a slim metal rasp—was wedged in the gap. He took his hand from its mitten, fit his fingertips inside, and lifted the cover on its hinge, open.

  A damp smell rose from the darkness. The concrete cylinder stretched down, steel rungs along its inside. Colville leaned close, listening, the warmer air rushing past him, up from below. He lowered his pack into the opening, past the counterweight and the latch, then dropped it, listening as it rattled away, as it echoed with a solid whump when it hit bottom. Next he called Kilo, picked the dog up in one arm; he swung one leg inside the cylinder, then the other. One-handed, he descended, slipping into the darkness.

  They emerged at the bottom into a rounded hallway. Only a few emergency lights shone, pale in the ceiling. Colville knew exactly where he was.

  “Easy,” he whispered. He stepped carefully from the ladder, unable to see his feet, almost tripping over his pack as he shuffled down the hallway, past the doors of other families’ quarters. He stopped at his own, pushed it open.

  Taking the headlamp from his pocket, he clicked it on, off: the bunks, the faded purple seat belts across them, the bookcases, the shelves of clothes. Illuminated for an instant, gone, glowing on his retinas.

  The room itself was a corrugated pipe on its side, round; there was storage underneath the bottom bed. Kneeling in the darkness, he slid the flooring aside, kicked whatever was stored there to one end, took off his hat, his jacket, and dropped them inside. It had been days since he had been so warm—this far underground the atmosphere was like a cave’s, the temperature somewhere near sixty degrees. Heat came from the geothermal energy below as well, or at least people had always said so.

  He swiveled around to sit on the mattress. First he took two protein bars from his pack; then he drank from the insulated container, poured some water into the bowl-like top for Kilo. The only sound beyond the dog’s drinking was the distant rush of wind; he remembered his mother saying it would be like living inside a seashell, his father answering that they’d no longer hear it, after a week or so, especially with the noise of all the other people living so close.

  Sitting like this on the bunk, Colville could hardly believe he was inside; then again, he felt like he was home, that he could be nowhere else. He tightened the strap around his head, switched his headlamp back on. Its round beam slid along the floor, across the black shape of the dog, up onto the wall.

  A wide sheet of white paper hung from rusted tacks: his father’s diagram of the shelter. Colville started his rough copy not with the outer walls, but by drawing an X where he stood and then drawing the walls right around him, the section of shelter where he stood. This section, one of six, was for families—different numbers of bunks, single and double, every conceivable space used for storage, nothing wasted. The pod where he stood would have held one hundred and twenty people; with the other five, around seven hundred, total, and in the Deep Core Storage enough food for seven years for everyone.

  As he sketched the lines, Colville thought of all the work, the hugeness of it all. His father had spoken of the long sections of the shelter barely fitting through the narrow canyon, being brought up on trucks, piece by piece. He remembered men reading army surplus catalogs in the lunchroom; piles of packages arrived from Eddie Bauer and L.L. Bean; big wooden boxes were delivered on trucks, all the equipment that was still here, underground, around him now. His father had wired the whole shelter, and his mother had worked so hard—she’d helped gather and organize, dehydrated and packaged the food, even when the Messenger said she should rest.

  Colville carefully folded the paper when his sketch was done and put it in his pocket. He was hot, nearly sweating; he peeled off his coveralls, dropped them into the hollow space beneath the bunks. Next he slid his frame pack in and fit the piece of plywood back over it all.

  His headlamp’s beam shone out the doorway into the hall, onto his family’s storage shelves there, all his father’s books. He stepped closer. How to Stay Alive in the Woods; How to Live with Low-Level Radiation: A Nutritional Guide; Sun Tzu’s Art of War; the Boy Scouts’ Fieldbook; Life After Doomsday; Project: Readiness. He reached out, but he didn’t touch them. Where There Is No Dentist; The Tracker; Tom Brown’s Guide to Wilderness Survival; The Twelfth Planet; Out-of-Place Artifacts: What Early Visitors Left Behind.

  “Okay,” he said, scratching Kilo’s head. “Time to look around.”

  The doors to the tunnel, he’d always loved them; they looked like the doors on a submarine: rounded, with a bar that locked down from either side, a black rubber gasket around the edge that was now dry and cracked. He bent down to get through, kicked the metal rails on the tunnel’s floor.

  The carts were heavy, probably for mining, and could hold a lot, could be pushed in long lines as they had been before that night in 1990, piled high with sleeping bags and books and people’s personal belongings, everything they’d need. He’d ridden the carts as a boy, flat on his back and kicking the corrugated top of the tunnel to scoot himself along the whole length of the shelter.

  “Here, Kilo,” he said, and hoisted the dog up, kept him from leaping off. The cart’s metal wheels squeaked as they passed the door to another pod—one for unmarried people, if he remembered correctly—and kept on deeper into the darkness.

  At the next door he stopped pushing the cart and lifted Kilo out, then followed him into a small antechamber. Dim fluorescent lights hummed, flickered above. A table with a plywood top, hammers on it; an electric drill; a chain saw with the chain loose, tangled on itself. On the wall, a clipboard hung from a nail. Colville didn’t touch it; he just leaned close. Names, dates, times, check marks. Mostly it was James, sometimes it was Stephen. Someone always came on Tuesday, usually in the afternoon. Today was Thursday, or it was Friday; he would have to keep better track.

  Kilo sniffed over to the steel door, whined, returned. He could smell the world outside.

  “Come on, boy.”

  Deeper, past the tool room—its walls of picks and shovels, hammers, bolt cutters, pliers and wrenches—and around the generators and the stationary bicycles. Now Colville stood in the DCS, the first of its two chambers. No one ever called it the Deep Core Storage, really; the initials were enough. A few dim safety lights glowed in the ceiling, fifty feet above, and pallets of stores were stacked almost all the way to the very top. The beam of his headlamp reflected off the clear plastic shrink wrap, lit the tags. Dried Fruit, Rice, Seaweed, Flour. He walked down the aisle between the towers. His footsteps echoed; he’d heard there was a secret hollow space beneath this floor, filled with thousands of coins, gold and silver, machine guns and ammunition.

  Suddenly, a loud snap, off to his left, a high-pitched cry, and then Kilo came shooting down an aisle into Colville’s legs.

  “Mousetraps. I said to stay close.”

  They went deeper, through the gap where the chamber narrowed and opene
d up into the second vast space. Here the mildew was stronger; the air was thicker; the vibrations clustered, almost hummed. His headlamp shone into darkness, lit only suspended dust. Objects arose as if surfacing from deep and murky water: carts of folding chairs stacked ten feet high, the shadowy shapes of the backup generators in the electrical room, then the boxes and boxes with dates written in black marker: 11/20/82, 4/6/84, 7/4/85.

  At the far end of the chamber, the round beam of his lamp circled a light switch. He knew it was a risk—no doubt someone watched the electric bills, the kilowatt hours, and any change would draw attention—but for one instant he switched it on, to see it all at once and not in pieces. The image flashed in his mind even after he switched the light off: here was the meeting room; the large plastic pieces of the altar; boxes stacked high, surrounded by mousetraps, a few with the dried corpses of mice in them. The smell all around him was mice, mixed with old paper. The boxes were full of dictations, and the danger was that the mice would eat all the important words, the warnings and promises of the Ascended Masters that had passed through the Messenger into the air, before being set down on paper.

  The darkness closed down again, all the time collapsing, the air heavy around him. Was it nighttime? He needed to rest, to sleep. Carefully, he led Kilo back through the DCS, into the tunnel, and returned to the pod that housed his family’s quarters.

  Once there, he uncovered the storage space in the floor and sorted through his things. He left the sleeping bag behind, stuffed everything else into his pack, then lifted another section of the floor. The space here was full of shoes; he pushed them all to one end, then laid his pack down, slid the cover over.

  There was enough room in the floor for both of them—more than in the tent last night, and it was also warmer. Colville lay flat, the dog curled in the space between his legs. He slid the plywood over the top of them, leaving the narrowest gap to breathe through.