Sparrow Rock

by Nate Kenyon

  Tell them, Sue…they deserve to know the truth.

  I felt dizzy with what this meant, almost drunk with it. “Jay was right,” I said. “About all of it. The conspiracies, who was behind the attacks and why, the engineered insects. He tried to tell us, but we wouldn’t listen.”

  She nodded, still sniffling. “You know how he was with that stuff, always digging into everything, always wanting to believe the worst. But his logical side kept him honest, you know? He was just too smart, too driven. Once we started dating, once we slept together, things changed, he looked up my family history online, you see, for fun. It didn’t take him long before…” Her voice trailed off, and she glanced at me, then quickly away. I realized with a shock that she was embarrassed. Of course she would be; what person in her right mind would ever want to admit she was a direct descendant of a Nazi war criminal? But this went far deeper than that. By association, if nothing else, she was part of some gigantic twisted web that had done nothing less than destroy the world.

  “He linked our name to Joseph Grase, and then he found him in a report on the trials,” she said. “He started reading more articles, piecing things together. He started believing it all. I didn’t know any of it at first, nothing. But my grandpa did. He hated his father, and I never knew why until Jay started asking questions. Where did our money really come from? Why was my grandfather so secretive? Why didn’t any of us know about this link to Die Spinne?” She shook her head, crying again, fighting against it. “He wouldn’t stop, and at first I thought he was crazy. It all seemed so ridiculous. I made him swear not to talk about it. I made him swear it. He loved me. He would have done anything for me.”

  “So he kept your secret, and he died for it.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them. It was a terrible, hurtful thing to say. After all, was it really Sue’s fault? The authorities certainly wouldn’t have listened to a couple of crazy teenagers, even if they’d tried to tell. Did it really matter now, knowing who was responsible for what happened, and why? The bombs had dropped, there was a plague upon the earth, and we were all in danger. Those were the relevant points here, not whether Sue’s family had a connection to the people who caused it all to happen.

  Dan’s voice came back to me: Sue’s grandpa could have helped drop the bombs. I don’t see how, but why not? Hell, he could have been the devil himself. What difference does that make for us?

  Sue stopped sniffling. When she spoke again, her voice was cold, and she stared at the wall, refusing to look at me. “My grandfather spent his life gathering evidence of what was happening. He wanted to stop it, but he was in terrible danger if he ever spoke up. We all were. Die Spinne has connections to everything, every government, every huge corporation, even the military.”

  “Sue,” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  “I know,” she said. “It’s okay.”

  But it wasn’t, and I knew it. She should have told us, but I understood why she didn’t. I understood the power of secrets. I glanced at Tessa, and she just shook her head and looked away. The sick feeling in my stomach deepened into a bitter ache.

  We all sat without speaking for several minutes. Dan’s snores had quieted, and he lay still, his back to us. I didn’t know if he was awake and had heard any of this. But that didn’t really matter either.

  “We can’t stay here forever,” I said. “We need to leave the shelter and try to find help. The Doomsday Vault is still our best shot. Do you know anything that will make a difference for us now? Why we’re being attacked this way, what their end game is, whether the vault even exists?”

  Sue shrugged. She still wouldn’t look my way. “Jay figured they wanted to start the world over again. Create a new Aryan race, or something, the way Hitler never could. They’ve built a special bunker in the Austrian mountains to ride out the storm. The nuclear attack was meant to disrupt any government response, to keep them from being able to function while the second wave took care of what was left. Jay figured they’d engineered the plague carriers to have a short life span and be unable to reproduce after a certain point. Then they’d begin to rebuild.”

  “This bunker in the mountains, it’s like the Doomsday Vault?”

  She nodded. “Even bigger. Miles and miles of it, carved out of a natural cavern system and old mines and turned into an underground city. It was meant to hold the only survivors. But there were others like Jay who saw this coming, some with a lot more money, and they built shelters like this one and like the vault in Alaska to keep themselves safe if the worst happened.”

  I opened the third binder again, and stared down into grainy faces, men standing close together, smiling out at the camera in full uniform, people laughing together, looking the same as any other group getting a few photos taken on a sunny day. They had to be insane to drop the bombs. What kind of world was left to rebuild? And yet they’d done it, murdered billions of people in search of some twisted truth.

  I strained to see the monsters underneath, but I could not. I thought of my own father, how so many in our community had ignored the warning signs and welcomed him into their own lives in some small way, helped pump his gas and cleaned his furnace and delivered his mail and let him handle their money at the bank where he’d worked for twenty years, while deeper among the shadows and away from prying eyes he was hitting my mother until she bled.

  My father, as close to a monster as anyone I’d ever known. Evil so often had a human face.

  I closed the binder again. I struggled to grab and hold on to something hopeful, something real. If Jay were right, the plague would not last forever; there was some kind of biological kill switch built in, and, of course, that made sense, if you could make sense of anything at all in this. We just had to find a safe place to ride it out, and a place that could protect us when those responsible for the attacks came looking for any remaining survivors. Because if all that Sue had told us were true, this was only the beginning. I remembered the emergency beacon Sue had told us about when we were first trapped down in the shelter. It would lead them right to us.

  The Doomsday Vault was our best chance; we just had to find a way to reach it.

  We had to move now, before it was too late.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  It was still the middle of the night, and if I were right about the cold affecting the insects’ ability to function, we had to move quickly. We would gather our supplies, maps, the radio, first-aid kit, as much food and water as we could carry. We would travel at night, when the insects were dormant, and find places to hole up during the day. We would find a way to make it all the way to Alaska, come hell or high water.

  But first we had to take care of Dan’s shoulder. He wouldn’t admit it when I woke him up, but it had gotten much worse as he slept, stiffening up and demanding attention. He grimaced in pain as he rolled over and sat up, clutching at himself. Tessa found the medical kit and I made him swallow three ibuprofen. We should have had him take them earlier, but I hadn’t been thinking clearly. I couldn’t afford to make mistakes, not anymore. I had to do a better job.

  We all washed up in the bathroom, not knowing how long it would be before we found fresh water again, and then set about making packs out of the bedsheets. We bound up the corners so that we could carry our supplies to the house and tied them together in twos with more strips of sheet so we could loop them around our necks, and we piled everything we thought we might need into them from the bathroom and closet. We found the Geiger counter, a small yellow box with a handle and a black tube on a coiled cord, and set that aside to carry with us too. We could use it to test the air as we went along.

  Sue worked alongside us without speaking. She had put on an oversize white men’s T-shirt from the closet and the same pair of jeans she’d come here with, washed in the bathroom sink the week before. She’d taken off her bra, which was dirty and becoming ragged with constant wear, and her heavy breasts hung loose inside the shirt. I could see the wound from the mosquitoes on
her neck, and it looked puffy and red.

  She looked like someone who was beginning to fray around the edges. Come to think of it, we all did. All of us except Tessa, of course, who still looked just as cool and put together as she had when we first arrived.

  There were enough hazmat suits in the closet to go around, and Sue helped Dan into a new one before using a torn sheet to bind his arm as tightly as she could to his side. Finally we were all zipped up and ready. The only thing left was to open the bedroom door and see what might be waiting for us in the rest of the shelter.

  I went first with the gun, keeping the suit’s hood off and the mask hanging around my neck so I could see more clearly. The dining room was empty except for the pile of bones, and the steps to the ladder held nothing but that gray ash that had drifted in from outside.

  I tried not to focus on those bones, how picked clean they were, how perfectly white, as if they had been sitting out in the sun and rain and wind for months. I saw a row of teeth scattered like little polished pebbles across the floor, and I thought of Jay’s lopsided grin as his jaw was exposed to me, looking for all the world like a happy smile, before I turned away.

  I walked through the kitchen, checking the pantry, inside the cabinets, even the fridge and oven. Everything was clean and neat and orderly. It was almost, I thought, like the events of the past few hours had never happened.

  Except for Jay’s remains.

  I went back into the kitchen and found a plastic trash bag, and scooped up the bones as quickly as possible, hating the slippery dry smoothness in my gloved hands. We should have been having some kind of ceremony for him, something to mark the moment, instead of stuffing what was left of him into a plastic bag. It seemed so terribly wrong. But what choice did we have?

  I tied the top of the bag and stuck it in the back of one of the kitchen cabinets, as far away from anything else as I could. It would have to do. Then I went and got the others.

  I put Sue in charge of the shelves in the dining room. We packed the rest of our supplies as quickly as we could, throwing ready-to-eat meals, energy bars, powdered milk and water into the makeshift packs, enough to last us several days. We took the radio, maps, flashlights and as many batteries as we could carry.

  Even with our makeshift packs weighed down to the breaking point, I felt like it wasn’t enough, that we could never have enough. My thoughts were racing, wondering if we were insane to leave the relative safety of the shelter. At least here we had plenty of food and water and fuel. But from what Sue had told us, help would never come. Nobody was looking for us, at least not now, and when someone did come, it was likely to be people we didn’t want to see. We had to take our fates into our own hands.

  Time went by too quickly, and it wasn’t long before we were all standing in the dining room, packs ready. It was just past two A.M.

  Looking around, I felt a strange sense of nostalgia for the place where we had spent so many hours together. I stared at the slashes marching down the wall in sets of seven, Dan’s calendar marking off our days in hell. There were a lot of lines. It seemed hard to believe we’d been here that long. I thought I probably should come up with some kind of speech, a rousing call to battle the way leaders did in the movies. Braveheart for a new generation, inspiring everyone to stay strong and focused and purposeful.

  “Let’s go then,” I said. It was all I could do, and it would have to be enough.

  We all looped our strips of cloth over our necks and hoisted our packs. Dan grabbed the mop handle again as a weapon, Tessa and Sue took large carving knives. Sue also held the Geiger counter, which was ticking steadily. I already had the gun. I led the way back to the kitchen.

  The steel door gave a slight hiss when I turned the handle, then swung open without a sound. A puff of dry, foul-smelling air wafted in from the tunnel; rotten meat that had gone far beyond the spoiling point and was now a separate entity entirely. I put my hand up to cover my nose and breathed through my mouth, which wasn’t much better, but I didn’t want to put on my hood yet.

  It was cold and black as pitch inside.

  I hadn’t expected this, and already I was fumbling to keep up. I started digging through my packs for a flashlight as my hands trembled more violently with the seconds ticking by. The rats must have chewed through the wires for the lights, or else there was some other source of power from the house that had since gone out. Another example of my inability to anticipate, to prepare.

  We’re making mistakes. We should shut off the generator in the shelter before we go. We should make sure everything is locked down, just in case we have to return. We should leave a note in case someone comes here, letting them know where we’re headed…

  I felt woefully unprepared for this leadership role that had been thrust upon me, one that seemed far more difficult than I’d thought it would be. My mind continued to babble until I found the flashlight and switched it on. I held it up, sweeping side to side with the gun as my heart hammered inside my chest.

  The beam washed over the empty tunnel, across the ruined carcasses of the rats we’d crushed, illuminating the broken ceiling and blood-spattered walls.

  Sue’s grandfather’s body was gone.

  I didn’t want to think about what this meant. She must have noticed it at the same time I did, because I heard an abrupt intake of breath. I didn’t take my eyes from that tunnel, worried about the way the darkness swallowed up the flashlight beam and made the walls seem to fade away, so that it looked like a walkway on the edge of an abyss. Maybe that was exactly what it was; the entrance to hell.

  I took a trembling step out into the hall, avoiding the rats’ remains. I wondered why the insects hadn’t eaten these away like they had Jay’s body, and if there could possibly be any method to what they’d done to Jay. A warning, a show of strength, an attempt to weaken our resolve? This is what we can do, once we get inside?

  But that was too terrible to contemplate, the idea of intent in their actions. I felt like the gazelle in one of those nature videos, head up, sniffing the wind, while a few feet away a lion crouched, waiting to pounce.

  I waited for another long beat, listening and watching, sweeping the beam from the hallway to the hole in the ceiling. Nothing moved except the dust I’d stirred up in my passage. It was cold enough to see my breath. I waved a hand, and we all shuffled out into the tunnel, but before I’d gone more than a few feet I heard the sound of the door closing on us.

  I whirled around, pinning Sue in the beam of the flashlight. She blinked, held up the hand with the knife in it to her eyes, and I let the light play over the steel door and the keypad set into the wall on the right.

  Locked out.

  “You let the door shut,” I said.

  “I…I thought it would be good to keep things from getting inside,” she said.

  “Do you know the combination?”

  She shook her head. “I’m not sure,” she said. “If it’s the same as the hatch, yes.”

  “Try it.”

  She turned to the keypad and I let the light shine on her fingers as she punched some numbers and hit enter. The light remained red.

  I let that sink in for a moment. Let them all understand it. We couldn’t go back now, even if we tried.

  We were trapped inside a blackness so deep it was almost a physical presence.

  I could feel the others’ anxiety ratcheting up. “It’s okay,” I said, as calmly as I could, while inside I felt the panic rising in me too. “This doesn’t change a thing. We’re going forward, not backward.”

  Tessa touched my arm with her free hand and squeezed, a familiar, comforting pressure. I could feel her heat even through the glove and the suit’s slippery fabric.

  The Geiger counter ticked softly, steadily in Sue’s hands. At least the radiation levels were remaining low. We could leave our masks and hoods off, for now.

  It wasn’t much, but I would take what I could get.

  Sue pulled a lantern from one of her sacks and switched i
t on, bathing the tunnel in a cool, blue-tinged light. She and Dan brought up the rear as we began to move again, a small, glowing beacon swallowed up by the arrow-straight blackness ahead.

  The tunnel seemed to go on forever, even though it was probably only a couple hundred feet long. As we continued, the smell got stronger, an acrid, biting stench that seemed to seep into everything, invading my nose, settling in my hair and coating my skin. I breathed shallowly and through my mouth.

  Eventually the slope of the tunnel began to rise, and the beam of the light picked out the bottom of a set of concrete steps leading up. The door at the top was open about a foot.

  I’d seen the Myers house from the outside many times, of course, and it was a giant concrete-and-steel fortress. But I’d never been inside before, and I had no idea what to expect. I assumed the door would lead to some kind of garage or storage room, and beyond that would be the entrance to the rest of the house.

  “We’ll go up one at a time,” I said. “I’ll clear the other room first. Dan, you watch the tunnel and make sure nothing got behind us.”

  He nodded, and I started up the steps, gun out, flashlight aimed at the crack in the door.

  I paused at the top, glanced down at the group huddled below me, then pushed open the door, blood thumping in my ears. The flashlight beam revealed a large, windowless mudroom, wire shelving against the walls, jackets hung on hooks, shoes and boots lined up neatly under a white wooden bench. I stepped quickly inside and swept the entire room. It was empty, one door directly across from me, another to my right, both of them closed tight.

  I let out the air I’d been holding in a long, slow hiss, and set my sacks down on the floor. The smell was overpowering up here, but I began to wonder if it might be spoiled food from the kitchen. I saw none of that ash anywhere, no evidence of a struggle or other damage. It was possible the house was intact, which seemed to be more than we could have hoped for; I’d wondered if we would find anything left standing at all, even with Sue’s assurances that her grandfather had built the house to withstand the full force of a hurricane.