Half Lives (20 page)

‘Ice?’ Marissa’s voice echoed in the space with a note of alarm. ‘What did you do?’

I had to handle this right. I’d locked them in and I had the only key. ‘Uh, we have to lock whatever’s out there out there. Right?’ I swallowed. ‘I mean, we
can’t keep the door open. If it’s locked, we’re safe.’

Tate’s voice rang out in the darkness. ‘Dread, do you have the only key?’

Chaske’s flashlight illuminated my face. My eye twitched. I was conscious of all the muscles in my face and I didn’t know what to do with any of them. I nodded.

‘What if something happens to her? We should put the key on a hook or something. We should all have access to the key and know how to unlock the door.’ Tate’s voice again, but
the carefree, boyish tone had vanished. Maybe I’d misjudged him. Maybe there was a brain in that over-gelled head of his. ‘I mean if she like chokes on some gum or something, I
don’t want to die here because she can’t chew and swallow.’

‘It pains me to say this, but Tate’s right,’ Marissa said.

Even in the dim light, I could feel their eyes drilling into me. I was the gatekeeper to the real world. It wasn’t a feeling of power as much as security. I’d seen movies where
confined people go mental and kill each other. If they didn’t know where the key was or how to unlock the door, then they needed me. At least that’s what I wanted to believe.

‘Where’s the key?’ Tate wasn’t going to give up. Note to self:
don’t underestimate Tate Chamberlain.

My parents and my expensive private education had prepared me for college, for thinking and yakking about abstract issues and political ideas. For taking tests. For following rules. Nothing had
prepared me for this. ‘I don’t know what’s going on out there. None of us does. But I intend to stay here until my parents show up. My mum and dad said they would come get me when
it’s safe outside. We’ll be safe in here until then.’

‘Maybe we should check outside once a day or something,’ Tate said.

I thought that might be a good idea but Chaske said, ‘I think it’s better if we completely isolate ourselves for a while. That way nothing and no one can get to us.’

I didn’t want to force anyone to do anything, but I’d made up my mind. ‘If you want to go, I’ll open the door right now, but if you stay, I won’t open the door
until my parents come and tell me it’s OK.’

‘Or we run out of food,’ Tate added.

‘I’m staying here with Icie,’ Chaske said and shifted to my side. The warmth of his body and the strength of his allegiance made me feel as if we were somehow a team. Me and
Chaske against the world. It was strange that I could feel such a connection with this relative stranger. ‘If we’re wrong, then we’ve had an underground vacation, and if
we’re right, then . . .’

‘It’s our best chance of survival. I’m staying too,’ Marissa said. We turned towards Tate.

‘Yeah, whatever. What choice do I have?’ Tate shoved his hands deep in his pockets.

‘It’s better than dying by the side of the road,’ Marissa muttered.

‘So . . .’ Chaske let the word dangle. ‘Maybe we should try to get some sleep.’ He lowered his backpack to the ground. ‘We can check out this place
tomorrow.’

I wanted to explore now, shine a bright light into every corner, but I was exhausted. I hadn’t really slept in twenty-four hours, and we had hiked miles. Escaping into sleep and leaving
reality until morning made much more sense.

We agreed that we would sleep together near the door. We’d all take turns keeping watch – just in case. Marissa and Tate exuded a coldness. I had changed from friendly saviour to
calculating captor. I didn’t mean to. They had to understand. They would have done the same thing – if they were the ones with the key.

Chaske spread out his sleeping bag. He and Tate slept half on, half off the edges, and Marissa and I were sandwiched in the middle. Midnight curled up between Chaske and me. My head buzzed with
rattlesnakes, nuclear bombs and plague-like sickness. My heart ached with thoughts of everyone I loved being trapped on the other side of that door. Strange that I thought of them as trapped and me
as somehow free. Eventually I fell into a dreamless sleep.

‘Rise and shine, you sleepyheads,’ Marissa said with a little too much perkiness. She was no longer lying next to me. Her voice emanated, god-like, from a location
unknown.

‘Oh, man, what time is it?’ Tate moaned. ‘It’s not even light out.’ He rolled over and right into me.

‘Um, we are underground,’ Marissa replied. ‘There is no light.’

Her words struck a nerve. My eyes opened to no effect. It was pitch black. I sat bolt upright. I felt Midnight jump to her feet. There was so much I hadn’t considered. I’d worried
about how we would eat and keep clean. I’d wondered about being lonely. But now I could add no sunlight and no sense of time to my ever-growing list of reasons to panic. What about fresh air
and water?

‘It’s nearly noon,’ Marissa said. The glowing face of her massive watch floated disembodied above us. ‘We need to explore and map out this place and take an inventory of
our stuff. Until we know what we’re dealing with, we need to conserve.’ Marissa’s glowing watch bounced as if it were speaking.

‘How long are we really going to have to stay here?’ Tate asked.

‘I read once that during the Cold War people built bomb shelters prepared for fifteen years underground.’ Chaske’s voice was low, calm and reassuring, even when he was
basically talking about being stuck down here for about as long as I’d been alive.

‘If it’s some sort of bio-threat, like my mum thought, we could probably go outside in a few months,’ I said.
That is, if we don’t go all
Lord of the Flies.

‘Months?’ Tate repeated.

‘Yeah, well, we’d have to wait for everyone to die off and the air to clear so whatever the hell it is ain’t contagious any more.’ Marissa said it so matter-of-factly. If
she was feeling as freaked out as I was, she sure wasn’t showing it.

‘Does that mean we will have to have sex so we can repopulate the Earth?’ Tate’s voice sounded hopeful. ‘’Cause if so, I call Marissa. No offence, Icie.’

‘None taken,’ I said with a nervous laugh, but it wasn’t really funny. What chance did the human race have if the four of us were the progenitors?

‘Even if you were the last man on Earth, I would not procreate with you. Your gene pool should stop here,’ Marissa said in her staccato tone. Gotta love the Cheer Captain. She said
what she thought – and sometimes what I was thinking.

‘Harsh,’ Tate muttered. ‘I was just saying . . .’

As if by magic, Chaske’s face appeared in a beam of light. ‘I think maybe you shouldn’t “just say” right now.’

The flashlight was positioned under his chin, illuminating a slice of his face. He had deep sleep lines etched along his cheek and a scar that cut diagonally through his left eyebrow. Tate was
stretched out on his back with his arms crisscrossed over his face. Marissa was sitting at the end of the sleeping bag and Chaske and I were sitting with our backs against the cool metal door.

‘I’m hungry,’ came Tate’s muffled voice. Was he crying?

‘I could eat,’ I said, and gave Tate a playful shove. She shouldn’t be so hard on him. ‘Marissa had some juice and cereal bars in that bag you carried all day yesterday,
Tate.’ I nudged Marissa. ‘How about you serve us up some breakfast?’

Marissa tossed me three cereal bars. ‘Here, Tate,’ Marissa said, and handed him a small box of apple juice. I laid a cereal bar on his chest. He sniffed and wiped his face. He took
the juice and cereal bar and sat with his back to us.

I gave Chaske his breakfast. He switched off the light and we ate in silence. I nibbled the cereal bar, savouring every bite. My stomach felt like a bottomless pit and each little bite hit with
the tiniest ping – a grain of sand in the Grand Canyon. I jumped a little when Midnight rubbed against me and purred. I broke off a piece of my bar and crumbled it in my palm. She licked my
hand with her rough tongue. As much as I hated to admit it, Tate was probably right. Midnight might have had a better chance of survival on the outside, but I couldn’t say goodbye to anything
else.

‘Why don’t Tate and I explore the rest of this place and you guys sort out our supplies and stuff?’ Chaske said when the chewing and drinking sounds subsided.

‘Oh, right, the men should go hunting while the women-folk gather berries,’ Marissa said with what sounded like a forced laugh.

‘Um, no,’ Chaske corrected. ‘I thought you might want a little cooling-off period from your new lover boy.’

‘Whatever,’ Marissa said with a laugh. ‘You boys go off and kill us a bear, or better yet, find water, food and four king-sized beds.’

Chaske switched on his flashlight again and slowly swept it around. The place was massive. You could fit three lorries parked side by side, and three more stacked on top in the entryway and
still have room to spare. In the pitch black, the space had felt much smaller, claustrophobic. I took a deep breath. It was as if I could breathe again in this big open space.

The walls were solid rock. Chaske’s light paused on the far wall. I could see there were parallel, horizontal lines maybe six feet apart, as if someone had chiselled out the rock in large
rectangular blocks. The entrance narrowed to one tunnel. The floor sloped at a sharp, steady decline.

‘Let’s go, Tate.’ Chaske stood and directed his flashlight at Tate.

Marissa checked her big pink watch again. ‘If you’re gone any longer than two hours . . .’

‘You’ll come looking for us,’ Chaske finished her sentence.

‘No.’ Marissa paused. ‘I was going say that’s more food for us.’

I swallowed hard, recognizing the nugget of truth in what she said. Would we turn on one another like the stars of every post-apocalyptic movie I’d ever seen?

‘Here’s all I got.’ Chaske handed me his backpack. He removed the gun from under the corner of the sleeping bag where he had slept and tucked it into the back of his jeans.

‘Where’d you get the gun?’ Tate asked, picking up his line of inquisition from yesterday.

Chaske shrugged, untucking his shirt to cover the weapon.

‘I bet it was your dad’s. He’s a cop or maybe an FBI agent, isn’t he?’ Tate stood.

‘As far as you know, yeah,’ Chaske said. He put a brotherly arm around Tate. ‘Come on, Tate. Onwards and, well,’ he pointed to the sloping tunnel, ‘downwards, I
guess.’

Midnight raced after Chaske but paused at the tunnel’s entrance, glancing back at me before scampering off.

‘First we need light,’ I said, reaching for my backpack.

‘Wait. Wait. I think I got something.’ Marissa rummaged around in her ginormous handbag. ‘Most of my good stuff drove away with that damn thieving taxi driver, but . . .’
More rummaging. ‘I do have a few things to contribute.’

There was a
pop
and then we were bathed in a faint yellowish-green light. She held up a glow stick with the words
Barry Manilow
written on the side.

‘Never pictured you as a Fanilow,’ I said.

‘I took my gran to the concert. Everyone got one of these.’ She shook the glow stick. ‘I couldn’t bear to wave it around while the entire audience sang
“Daybreak”, but I thought it might come in handy, you know, at a drunken party in some state park, but whatever.’ She emptied the contents of her D&G and started humming what
I thought was ‘Copacabana’.

Marissa’s worldly possessions included an issue of
Cheerleader Quarterly
, a purse-sized anti-bacterial hand gel, a Hello Kitty wallet, an avalanche of make-up, a nearly full
bottle of Clinique Happy, a confetti of loose change, foil gum wrappers, abandoned breath mints and a scrap of paper with the name
Cruz
and a phone number.

We dumped the contents of my and Chaske’s backpacks, my messenger bag and Marissa’s goodie bag onto Chaske’s sleeping bag. I handed her a pink gel pen and took a green glitter
one from my messenger bag. I ripped out a few pages from the blank notebook that was supposed to be my journal for English class. We started organizing and cataloguing. Soon she had me humming
along. My dad liked a bit of Manilow too. That song – and thoughts of my dad – lodged themselves in my brain like splinters that hurt like hell but were impossible to remove.

I made a separate list of the feminine hygiene products. The boys didn’t need to worry their pretty little heads about our girl issues. I wanted to get this list finished and the products
hidden before the boys came back. Marissa had six ultra tampons, two partially unwrapped regular tampons she found in the inner lining of her purse, half a packet of contraceptive pills and three
condoms. I was less prepared. I only kept one tampon in the zipper compartment of my bag. Mum had packed three washable sanitary pads and two menstrual cups, which looked sort of like the
diaphragms the health teacher showed us in our lecture on contraception.
Um, disgust-o-rama.
They were in brown, recycled envelopes from a place called Organic Feminine Care. There were
diagrams and instructions. To be honest, I grieved more for the loss of disposable feminine hygiene products than I had for every senior – except Lola – at Capital Academy. I showed my
find to Marissa.