The Fly House (The UtopYA Collection) (6 page)

He was prepared to never go back into the chamber room again, except that it didn't take very long for his hope to build that someone would wake up as he had.  He finally gathered his courage and ventured in, but only to the very first row.

And it was there that he'd found her.  Third from the end, she had a familiar face, although he couldn't place it.  After viewing others in the row, he found himself returning to her again and again. 

Just to look. 

Then to stare. 

It wasn't like she minded. 

She was a lovely girl who somehow radiated tranquility and assurance in her slumber.  He brought in a chair from Supply and from that moment on, Steven assumed all kinds of things about her.  He became protective of her, especially since the light, no matter how hard he cranked, barely reached her.

The attraction wasn't sexual.  At least, not at first. 

Once he found candles, he balanced one in an empty chicken can and used the light to reveal the name tag on the girl's chamber.  Etched on the plate at the crown of the box was her name.  Maeve.  Maeve Aypotu. 

Steven knew the surname.  Her family was prominent, her father owning all the leading medicinal brands.  He controlled as many health outcomes as God did; Aypotu Drugs ran through the veins of people on all seven continents.

Aypotu was a household name, but even if Steven Burtman had never popped an aspirin or filled a prescription in his entire life, he would've figured out that the Aypotu were the people who sat on a bigger pile of Benjamins than anyone else in the Archive.  Their Profanyl Chambers were top of the line titanium tanks that sat right up front.  Those chambers came with all kinds of benefits, including the promise to be opened first, so their inhabitants would be sure to attend the party in the new world ahead of everyone else. 

But money was not Steven's incentive to watch over Maeve.  It was her. 

The classic beauty, with her creamy skin and small chin and wide eyes—he couldn't leave her side.  She was his Mona Lisa, his slumbering princess, his Pearl of Venus, and if he could just find a way to open her chamber, he could be her Prince that kissed her awake.  He could feel it in his gut. 

But with no way to open the chamber, Steven Burtman settled for keeping watch at the helm of Maeve Aypotu's chamber, faithfully monitoring for any invasion of bugs.  And occasionally tried to peep down the open
V-neck of her jammies.  Since he couldn't kiss her, he said her name out loud a hundred times a day instead.  It was an opiate on his tongue, the effect radiating a soothing warmth in the deepest parts of his chest.  It was the only heat left in the whole, dark underground warehouse.

Steven sighed.  His chair creaked.  It was getting so damn lonely
.

CHAPTER FIVE

Five Weeks Post First Waking

Someone had parked a couch on Maeve's eyes, she was sure of it.  She woke and stared into her dry, dark lids, unable to flutter them open.  It didn't freak her out as much as maybe it should have.  Probably because her whole body felt horribly cold and beautifully drugged all at once, a gauze-winged moth on the first day of winter.

She lifted a weary hand to her face and the bed she laid on rumbled beneath her.  There was a slow creak overhead.  Then she heard a man's voice.  It wasn't particularly deep, but it was a man's voice.  Something dragged across her cheek.

"C'mon...wake up, beautiful," he said.  It was a little creepy that he sounded so intimate when the voice wasn't at all familiar.  It certainly didn't motivate her to haul open her eyes.  She decided it would be better to gather a little info before she let whoever it was know that she was absolutely awake.

It was a great plan until the druggy feeling faded and the shakes started.  Cold and hot at once, it came on like a blazing snow storm, a few numb flakes circulating in her veins and then wham!  Her skin was reduced to a burning bag with thick, icicle bones thrust inside it.  The raging ice burned in her veins, all of her muscles and nerves jerked back to life.  The shakes started off small, but gained speed until she was flopping around, whacking the sides of the solid surfaces around her, as if she could open up and toss out her bones.

Something heavy draped over her and a pair of hands wrestled to hold her down. 

"Okay now, the blanket should help...it's alright...settle down..." The voice struggled to stay calm and even, as much as Maeve struggled to get free of her bones and those hands that sought to keep her still.

Her eyes popped open.  The room was dim, but she could make out the man's face.  He was a stranger.  Maeve's brain registered at once the overkill of his classically handsome features that didn't knit together in a way that produced a handsome man's face.  Instead, his eyes were an odd shade of hazel, his strong cheekbones were set too high, the thrust of his forehead too drastic and his nose turned up just enough that she might be able to see the inner workings of his brain.  To photograph him in pieces, he would be stunning, but to view him as a whole, he looked a little weird.

The man smiled, his piano-key teeth ducking in too close to her face.  Maeve swung a fist free, ready to bang a tune out of his mouth.  His faster reflexes saved his dental work.

"It's okay, sweetheart...it's okay..." he said, but his voice was high and tight, the calm clinging to it as desperately as a tightrope walker who had slipped.  Maeve leveraged herself up and whipped her head around, trying to gather a sense of where the hell she was.

She squinted into the receding dark, making out a vague sea of coffins.  No.  They were not coffins, they were chambers. 

It all came rushing back.  She remembered what had once been a lighted showroom, remembered Casper
Bergen's wire glasses, the way her parents had already been hooked up and locked down in their chambers by the time she got to her own.  She remembered how frightened she had been to go through with it, how the sweat rolled down her fingertips in soft drops.  How she cried when she laid back in the chamber, feeling like she was going to die, and then how Bergen was standing over her, with a syringe plugged into her arm.  A sedative, Casper Bergen had said in his dull, emotionless voice.  It was the last thing she'd heard. 

Until now.  As if her eyes had only just fluttered shut on a clean, bright room and fluttered open to this dusty, dark crypt.  She blinked, as if that might be the secret of waking up to what she wanted.  It wasn't. 

Her parent's chambers were still sealed.  Most were.  The place smelled moist and stagnant with a whiff of rot.  Maeve choked, putting a hand to her mouth.

"Thank God, you're okay," the creeper said.  His voice was weirdly joyful, which plunged a hard dose of Maeve's flight instincts directly into her tingling, useless legs.  She was stuck.  Might as well keep him talking.

"Where are my parents?" she asked.  The man's joy vanished.

"Still in their chambers."

"Could you wake them up?" She said it pleasantly, as if Mr. Creeper might really enjoy having Mr. Aypotu, and his extra-large aura of authority, present for this and all future conversations.

"I can't.  If we open the chambers, they die.  Or the bugs come out.  You're the only one who's woken up on your own so far, besides me."

"What bugs?"  All of her words were hollow, echoing in her head like she was trapped in a log.

"I don't know.  There are bugs I've never seen before and they get into the chambers somehow.  Once they get inside, the people die."

Bugs.  Maeve had never been a shrieker when it came to spiders, but she knew she could cultivate a healthy fear of them if they were people-killing bugs.  She squirmed and hauled herself up.  The man helped her out of the chamber.  She let him. 

She scrambled over the side and collapsed off her wobbly legs, onto the chair beside the box.

Maeve clasped her head and closed her eyes.  She vaguely remembered the assistant, Donny, who brought her down to the Archive, showing her the odd clock on the wall.  It was big as a flat screen TV.

"You're making history right now, Ms. Aypotu.  See that clock?  It tells you the date and time.  When you wake up, it'll read 2030, a few years after the government says this mess will be all straightened out.  We've gotten all kinds of news that the atmosphere patches are already showing promise," he'd blabbed on and on.  "We've even suspended a bunch of endangered species.  We are planning on doing our part, here at the Archive, suspending as many species
as we can handle.  We even have mosquitos and dung beetles!  Just think, you're going to wake up seventeen years from now and you won't have aged a bit."

"I guess I'll know how vampires feel."

"Oh no, things aren't going to change that much,"  Donny said.  Like he knew.  His smile said he was an idiot.

Maeve twisted around on the chair beside her chamber until she located the dark rectangle of the lifeless clock.  "What year is it?"

"I don't know," the man said. 

"What is your name?"

"Steven Burtman."

"I'm..."

"Maeve Aypotu," he said it like a breeze off his tongue.  "It's a beautiful name.  I read it a million times on your chamber tag."

Ok, that was a little creepy too.  Maeve noticed the chair she was sitting on and the proximity of it to the chamber she'd just climbed out of.  He noticed her noticing.

"I was hoping you'd wake up," he stammered.  "I watched over you until you did."

"What did you do to make it happen?"

"Unfortunately, nothing."  He relaxed a little, dragging a hand over his face.  "I wish I knew.  I just watched over you."

She glanced at the enormous room, a quarter full of chambers.  "Why me?"

"Because," he said, nibbling his lip, "you're beautiful."

Oh great. 

Slowly, Maeve was coming back to herself, her wits climbing back into her skin, her invisible wall scaling back up.  Something was stuck to her chest.  She reached into her neckline and peeled the plastic key Casper Bergen had given her from her skin, but she left it dangling around her neck by the string.

She rested her back against the chair, looking at all the other chambers, at the walls, at the dimly lit door that led into Supply.  Oh yes, there was a place to eat.  She remembered the dining room.  Her belly grumbled, remembering too.

"Is there food?" she asked.

"Yes, yes, there is." He pointed as he stumbled toward the door to Supply.  He paused at the door, holding it open.  "Can you stand?"

"Yes," Maeve lied.  She didn't expect to have to do it so quickly, and the last thing she wanted was him stumbling back over and wrapping his arms around her to help.  Everything about waking up in this dark room with Mister I-saw-you-sleeping-and-know-your-name gave her the willies.  In a burst of determination, she pushed herself to her feet and rocked, flattening her soles to the floor.  Steven hustled back to support her, slithering a hand beneath her breast.  He pushed it up a little in his palm as he pressed the edge of his thumb against the firm globe.  Maeve knew perv when it touched her.

"Hands off," she said. 

"Oh, uh," Steven loosened his grip, smoothing down her arm before he finally released her.  "I didn't mean..."

"Steven?  You said Steven, right?"

"Yeah."

"Steven, you might actually be the last man on Earth.  It doesn't mean you can be weird, so quit it."

He stood back, surprise lifting his eyebrows. "How am I being weird?"

"Reading my name tag, staring into my time capsule...the way you copped a feel just now." 

Steven's jaw pumped. "I...I apologize if..."

"Look, Steve, it's just you and me for now, so keep your hands away from my boobs, and let's just try to be normal, alright?"

***

Steven leaned forward on his elbows, beside Maeve, at the round, banquet table.  In the brochure the linens were white.  Now they were yellow. 

To eat, Maeve picked up the edge of one cloth and flapped off a cloud of dust.  Steven laid a stack of cans on the table and Maeve took a seat so the cans would be between them.  He took a can off the top and used the opener to twist the top off.   She ate like an animal, and even though he'd done the same himself, he watched her with arms crossed and the edge of his lip cocking unconsciously.  She ignored him until she wiped the back of her hand across her mouth.

"What do you have for dessert?" she asked.  Disgusted or not, he was a gentleman and hoped she would soon remember she was a lady.  He helped her search for something else to eat.

She found a plastic box stuffed with Twinkies.  Maeve wasn't as excited about the pantry stock as Steven had been. 

"Most of this stuff isn't good anymore," Maeve said as she rifled the cabinets.  She slammed and banged the doors and the sound of it spiked Steven's anxiety.  He rubbed his ring finger, thinking of his dead wife.  She would have known what to do.  Chloe wouldn't have slammed the cupboards.  She would've shoved Steven down onto a chair, given him something to eat while she conducted an inventory.  She would've made rationing charts.  Maeve was nothing like Chloe.    

"Whoever thought that cereal boxes or oatmeal containers would last was crazy." She banged another cupboard closed.  "Most of the canned food has sprung leaks and a lot of it is rusty.  It doesn't look safe to eat at all." 

She ran a fork over one of the shelves and held it up, so Steven could see the crusty black stuff on the tines.  He just nodded, depressed.  A chamber bug shot out from behind a stack of dishes and Maeve bashed it with an egg skillet before it could reach Steven's hand on the counter top.  He smiled at her.  She was watching out for him after all.  It stirred him, even though she never looked at him once.  Instead, she removed the skillet and peered down at the smear of bug left on the counter. 

"What are those things?" she said.  "I've never seen anything like that."

"We're 17 years in the future," Steven said.  "I suppose the bugs are going to be different, even if we're not."

"This different?  Bugs the size of gerbils?  If this is what's down here, I wonder what's changed up on the surface."

"It isn't inhabitable yet, I know that much.  The outer doors are still sealed."  He said it with great authority, but Maeve looked at him as if he didn't have a clue of what he was talking about.  It rankled him a bit.

"Did you try to open them?"

"I tugged on them." His spine twitched.  His eyes flitted away from hers. 

"Big difference between closed and sealed, a little tug might not do it," Maeve said.  "I'm going to try them."

She left t
he box of Twinkies on the table and crossed the Supply to the doors.  Steven followed behind her.  She gave the doors a yank.  Nothing.  She tried again.  They were sealed.  He jutted his chin at her with a dry smile.

"I told you."

"You didn't know," she sniped.   They went back to the table, settling into the seats after Steven showed her how to hand-crank the lights.  Maeve opened the Twinkie box and unwrapped a cake.  Steven's eyes followed her hands to her mouth and remained there, mesmerized by her lips.  He had traced their shape through the chamber window, but now here they were, moving.  An image of her mouth, traveling across his hip, flashed across his mind.  He blinked as she stuffed the whole cake between her lips.  It might've been erotic, but she chomped the thing with her mouth wide open.  

"We should play 50," she said. 

"What's that?"

"50 questions," she muffled through the mouthful.  She picked up the can opener, bounced the weight of it in her hand and placed it back down on the table between them.  "My grandmother used to say that if you ask a stranger 50 well-thought questions, you would know them like the back of your hand when you're finished."

Steven's head cocked as he considered it, pinching the tiny ripples in the musty tablecloth.  Sitting in this dismal hall, without a glimpse of the waking life they were promised, she wanted to play games.  He grinned, cherishing the way in which her mind was unable to comprehend the breadth of a situation, the scope of their hopelessness.  He felt a surge of pride at his ability to keep her insulated from it all.  He had never been a strong man, but in this one way, he could protect her.  "What if the players don't tell the truth?"