by Julia Kent
Deke halts mid-step. “I really overestimated you. None of this is about fear. It’s about preventing fear. It’s about radically planning ten steps–hell, twenty steps–ahead of everyone else in the event of an unexpected catastrophe.”
“How do you plan for the unexpected in your business, Deke?”
“You plan for what you can and the rest you just...” His voice trails off.
“Geothermal heat systems?” I say. “Smart. Solar with battery backup? Sure. Stockpiling food, weapons, and ammo? Medicines? Fine. But what’s the point of five pounds of saffron, like I saw in the kitchen? Cute. Really. But this is all show. You’re selling people on the idea that their fear of the unexpected can be mitigated.”
“Mr. Philosophical here is lecturing me on prepping,” Deke huffs.
“No. Not lecturing. I don’t lecture people. I let them come to their own conclusions and figure it out for themselves. If they never do, that’s their issue. Not mine. And you are offering value, Deke,” I say, giving the guy a little credit. “Self-sustaining, off-the-grid systems make sense for smaller interruptions, and I do plan to implement some of this.”
Deke eyes Gerald. “Already got a security force?”
Gerald answers for me with a grunt.
“Then what the hell, Andrew?” Deke looks around. “Places like these are going in everywhere. Workers sign NDAs. Retinal- and fingerprint-scan access. You need something.”
“I need flexibility. I read up on preppers for people at our level. People are all over the map. Some are investing big in fixed locations. Some are buying land in places like New Zealand. Others are investing in society in an effort to stave off the problems you’re worried about.”
Omar and Deke just snort at that one.
An image of Amanda hits me, holding our future baby, her face tight with fear, a breeze blowing the woods around the house in an ominous way, dark clouds forming in the background.
Here’s the thing about fear: it does motivate.
Like it or not.
“These larger systems are smart,” I tell them as Deke walks forward slowly, hands clasped behind his back. “They make sense on every level.”
“You still have aboveground electric lines at your Weston house,” Deke says with a tone of disapproval.
“How do you know?”
“Research,” is his curt reply. His eyes narrow. “And it’s not about fear.”
“Sure.”
Shaking his head slowly, he doesn’t lower his gaze, which isn’t just a challenge. It’s something more, unfolding second by second.
“If you think this is about fear, you’re miles ahead of most people, Andrew, but you still don’t get it.”
More images of Amanda come to mind, of fires and tsunamis, of power outages and martial law. The big sign on the wall behind Deke, with the words Martial Law, doesn’t help.
“If it’s not fear, then what? Denial? Zombie apocalypse? You know something the rest of us don’t?”
He snorts. “It’s about advantage.”
“You’re worried about competitive advantage in an apocalyptic scenario? Supply chain disruption, financial resources won’t be there, consumer demand will dry up, not to mention–”
“Not competitive in the corporate sense. In the Darwinian sense.”
“Funny. I read most of Darwin’s works. He never mentioned stockpiling saffron as part of survival of the fittest.”
“In survival mode, tiny advantages make the difference between life and death.”
“Luxury bunkers like this are not ‘tiny advantages.’ If anything, they’re burdens.”
“Not when we band together. We’ll have a security force. Mercenaries.”
Omar’s face splits into a huge grin. “And all the sexbots.”
“This isn’t about advantage,” I say, completely done with this conversation. “It’s about winning.”
“Now I see your resemblance to James,” Deke declares, as if I’m supposed to be pleased with myself for realigning, his way.
“You care about winning above all. Anyone who doesn’t prep your way is a sucker.”
His face falls. “You have a wife.”
I go cold, again. These guys chill me to the bone. “Yes. What about her?”
“Kids?”
“Not yet.”
“Power outage for a few days. Imagine life without electricity on that estate in Weston.”
“We have backup generators.”
“For weeks? A big ice storm comes and you lose power for five days. You completely operational?”
“No,” I admit.
“What about a mutated flu? One we can’t get any vaccines in place for? Or a coordinated cyber attack on our energy infrastructure? It could happen. You need to be more resilient.”
He’s right. I’m man enough to admit it.
“I agree.”
He blinks, twice. I’ve surprised him.
“But not one hundred percent right,” I amend.
“Now you really sound like James.”
We laugh together. Gerald smothers a grin.
“I’m not buying into this, though,” I tell Omar, who frowns.
“At least buy an island, Andrew. For my sake, have some dignity.”
“Your sake?”
“Don’t make me buy you an island.”
“Why would you buy me an island?”
“The same reason I give to charity.”
“Because it’s an act of compassion?”
“No! Because it makes me look good.”
“I don’t need your money, Omar.”
“But you do need my common sense.”
“I’ll handle my prepping my own way, thanks.”
Deke leads us back to the stairs. He turns to Omar.
“Told you.”
Omar acts horribly offended. “I thought he was smarter!”
“I’m right here,” I grouse.
“Not for much longer,” Gerald mutters in my ear.
We all shut the hell up until we resurface in the nasty-smelling VFW. I hold my breath for the walk to the main door. Bursting outside, I take about ten steps before I smile.
No wasps.
No worrying about wasps.
“You have a wasp allergy, don’t you? You prepped for that?” Deke asks, looking over my shoulder.
I turn. A bee floats on by. Huh.
In my chest pocket, I have an EpiPen. Gerald carries two. There are two in the car. “I’m fine,” I tell him.
“Listen. I didn’t mean for this to get contentious,” Deke says. “But people like us can’t be ostriches on this.”
“People like... us?”
He reaches to shake my hand, his face a mask, covering emotion. That’s the look of a man who knows he’s lost, but hasn’t figured out why.
“Good to see you, Andrew. I hope we’re not neighbors in New Zealand.”
“I’m loads of fun at barbeques, Deke. And I play a mean game of lawn darts.”
“Love to meet your wife someday,” Deke says as Omar looks at me with renewed interest.
“You only have one wife. Both of you.”
“I’m on my third,” Deke reminds him.
“But in serial! How can you have only one wife at a time? So silly.”
Barely able to stand being around them, I do what I can until we finally part.
And think of nothing but Amanda the whole way home.
Not one damn thing.
When we pull into the driveway, her car’s there. Walking into our house–my childhood home–is still a thrill, even after two years of owning the place. Gerald peels off to leave, taking his personal car home, while I search my house for my wife.
Not in the kitchen.
Living room’s empty.
Bedroom is wifeless.
I text her.
Bzzzz.
I turn around to see her phone plugged in on the nightstand on her side of the bed.
Where is she?
�
��Hey,” she says from the doorway, breathing hard, her hands in gardening gloves, face pink and shining with sweat. “You’re home early.”
“I am?” After all the sterile nonsense of Deke’s bunker in Fitchburg, her earthy appearance is refreshing.
I would hug her but she’s gross.
“Weren’t you finishing up some business?” she asks, sniffling.
“Why are you sniffling?”
“Allergies. Something in the pollen out there is driving me crazy.”
“Pollen?” Wasp allergies make me hate that word.
“No wasps. Don’t worry.”
“Good.”
“Ready for our honeymoon?” She crosses the space between us and wraps her arms around my waist.
“You didn’t touch poison ivy, did you?”
She cups me. I yelp.
“No. But I wouldn’t mind touching a snake.” Her hand makes it clear she’s turning my trouser snake into an anaconda.
“The snake gives full permission.”
“Snakes can’t talk.”
“If they could, this one would tell you to keep going.”
“You didn’t answer my question. The honeymoon!”
“Is this an offer to start now? With the sex part?”
“There’s a sex part?” She squeezes and laughs. “I thought it was all remodeling.”
Now, this is where I have to be careful, and not just because Amanda’s literally got me by the balls. I can’t tell her about Omar and Deke, but their ideas are sinking in. Not the buy-an-island idea, and certainly not the sexbot one, but fragility? I look up at the ceiling of the house, and glance out the window toward the above-ground wires.
A big off-the-grid backup system would be prudent.
“How about we divide and conquer?” I ask her. “I’ll handle the bigger systems, you make the remodeling and decorating decisions.”
“How 1950s of you. Shall I fetch your slippers, too?”
“Do you seriously care about geothermal system design and solar panels being connected to the pool to provide heat?”
She opens her mouth to say yes, but we both know that’s a lie. Feminist fury shines bright in those big, brown eyes. The struggle is real. It’s not that she isn’t capable of making decisions about engineering and backup systems.
She just doesn’t really care, any more than I care about the brand of coffee we use or the color of the walls in the bedroom where we make love.
I give her an easy out.
“Think of it this way: I’m doing oppositional research,” I say slowly, carefully.
She eyes me with deserved skepticism. “How so?”
“Yes, we’re on our honeymoon,” I say, heading off her protests in advance. “Two weeks of just us. And a crew of home remodelers.”
She beams.
Score!
“But it’s also an opportunity for me to learn which companies are organized, forward-thinking, and on the cusp of major trends and industry changes that Anterdec could learn from.”
“This sounds a little too close to work.”
“Can’t it be both? Gina’s holding down the fort. In fact, got a text from her that says she’s blocked me from her phone and all communication is one-way at this point. My SVPs are just waiting for the chance to spar with each other and see who summits on top of the others’ dead bodies. I don’t want to be part of that bureaucratic bloodsport.”
She shudders, smile gone. Oops.
“Your only job,” she says seriously, “on our two-week honeymoon is to make my legs stop working.”
“Excuse me?”
“If I can walk, you failed.”
“I never fail.”
“We’ll see about that.”
Chapter 6
Amanda
It’s Monday.
Our home looks like the set for Extreme Home Makeover, except there’s no bus to move and all of the workmen act like I’m invisible as I wander downstairs after waking up naked in an empty bed.
I throw on clothes and am down the stairs when I spot my husband.
“What is going on?” I ask Andrew, who is huddled over blueprints with some guy who looks like he runs a union hall in South Boston. Tight eyes, distrustful look, goatee, and an intensity that makes it clear you want him on your side.
Andrew breaks away, kisses my cheek, and gives me a saucy half grin. “Just like you wanted. Here we go.”
“Here we go what? We barely talked about what we wanted!”
“We did,” he says, suddenly defensive. “In bed,” he whispers.
“What I want in bed has nothing to do with tile colors and three-season sunrooms!” I say. Loudly.
“The guys aren’t working on anything like that,” he hisses as a few workmen suppress smiles. “We’re putting in new backup systems.”
“Backups for what?”
“Power outages. Acts of God. Hurricanes. Bomb cyclones that leave six feet of snow.”
I snort. “What, no alien contingency plan? Got a blueprint for a universal extraterrestrial language translator in there?”
Andrew reddens and avoids eye contact.
I frown. “Andrew?” I grab his arm and pull him aside, his muscles tense. “What are you doing? This isn’t how I envisioned remodeling and spending our honeymoon. For one, we didn’t have sex that second time this morning.”
He looks at the clock. “It’s only 7:53. Plenty of time for that.” He grabs me at the waist and pulls me close, trying to divert me with a kiss.
It works.
“We’ve got the geothermal heat unit figured out, and when we redo the gutter system and the roof, in addition to the solar panels, we’ve got an evaporation system set up for clean water collection. Storage is next,” he says to me.
“All that in the first hour of work?” I’m stunned.
“I’m efficient. Two weeks of my focused attention is like five years of a normal human being’s time.”
“Efficient and humble. I love that in a man.”
“You’d better, because you’re stuck with me forever.”
“Is that a threat or a promise?”
I get a pat on the ass in response.
Andrew’s testosterone creds fully established, I try to get him to use his big brain for a moment. “What, exactly, are we looking at?” I ask him, pointing to blueprints in his hands.
We’ve been together long enough for me to notice patterns in how we interact. I don’t just mean how we argue, or how we make love, or the way we track each other’s moods. I’m not just talking about how we stay connected when we both travel too much (hint: Facetime and nudity), or how we make major life decisions.
One pattern is this: after a while, the other person becomes an assumption. Not quite taken for granted. That’s not what I mean. It’s more that the fabric of life includes your person. Just like a couch has a certain expected tactile feel to it as you sit down on it year in and year out, life with my husband takes on its own texture. I turn to him for companionship, for love, for sex, for life-decision making. For fun. In pain. In sadness. He’s not in my DNA, but he’s the closest thing to it.
So as all these workmen turn our home into a functional anthill, with worker ants buzzing everywhere, doing whatever needs to be done in service to the queen (hmmm... I’m loving this analogy suddenly), I know that asking about the blueprints will engage him, but won’t threaten.
“Underground water storage. And the bunker,” he elaborates.
“Bunker?”
“Underground place to stay for a short time in case of a major catastrophe.”
“Andrew, living underground in a bunker is the very definition of catastrophe,” I say, laughing.
He doesn’t even smile.
“You’re serious? What? You’re building a bomb shelter like some tin-foil hat guy?”
“No. I’m being prudent as the CEO of a Fortune 500 company who needs to build anti-fragile systems that protect me, my family, and my company.”
&n
bsp; He’s gone full caveman, hasn’t he? Full billionaire caveman.
“That’s your idea of remodeling? You sound like a crazy prepper!”
“You know about preppers?”
“Of course I do! Shannon and I used to watch those nutso-prepper shows on the National Geographic channel.”
“Nutso preppers?” He crosses his arms over his chest and gives me a look that invites me to explain. My mouth goes dry. His eyes are amused but there’s a guardedness to him. Long gone is the man who was sweaty and naked with me in bed a couple of hours ago, promising a second round shortly.
In his place is this questioning CEO who looks like he’s running a construction site instead of remodeling our family home.
“Yes, nutso preppers. Are you planning to store five years of food in the basement? Put lead-lined concrete walls in a bomb shelter, with a zig-zag entrance so the radiation is less? Are you stockpiling ammo and buying fish antibiotics by the case?”
“Fish antibiotics?”
“When your doctor won’t give you a prescription, it’s how preppers build their medical war chests,” I explain.
“You and Shannon really did watch those shows.”
“I told you! And most of those preppers are crazy. Like, clinically crazy.”
He nods. “Stupid, too.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” I backpedal.
“The whole point of prepping, Amanda, is to be ready for a true emergency. In a scarcity situation, you don’t want to be a target. Stealth prepping is where it’s at.”
I look at the cattle herd of men–and a rare woman in a hardhat–coming in and out of the house and yard.
“Stealth?” One raised eyebrow makes my point about his hypocrisy.
“They’re just putting in systems. None of the bigger engineering work is a tipoff that we’re prepping.”
“So you admit it! We are prepping! Or, I mean, you are.”
“I am.”
I do not know what to say to that.
“How far are you planning to go?”
“All the way, baby.” Did he just... wink at me?
“Andrew!”
