“I’m sorry, the location is classified,” Liam says. “But it’s an old nuclear bunker from the Cold War. I can tell you that. Finally put to good use, I guess.”
As the helicopter blades wind down, he gathers us together. “May I?” he says to Sawyer, not even attempting sincerity. I’ve barely known Liam two hours, and already he annoys the shit out of me.
He continues. “We’re not a real command unit here. We don’t exactly use ranks, and mostly we go by first names. My name is Liam, like I said. My mother’s in charge. Her name is Kim. You’ll meet her later. I didn’t get all your names.”
We do some brief introductions before he goes on. “The entrance to the base is about a half mile from here. There’s a climb down a pretty steep canyon. The whole thing is underground, so I hope no one is claustrophobic.”
I think we’re meant to laugh or something, but no one does. Liam gathers what’s left of his dignity and continues. “I could radio for a jeep if you don’t feel up for the walk, but we’re supposed to be rationing fuel, and the jeep has to go the long way around.”
“We can walk,” Emily says. Liam gives her an approving look that makes me vaguely nauseous. We hoist our packs and head off into the snow.
“This snowstorm has been great,” Liam says as we walk. “Even though it’s cold, it’s made us much less visible from the air.”
“Will you go back for the bodies?” Sawyer asks, following his own personal agenda. I can’t really blame him.
Liam turns and walks backward as he talks to us, like he’s conducting a museum tour. “Not likely. It’s too dangerous. You know they don’t decay, right?”
No one says anything, but I can tell the others must have seen some evidence of this, as I have. Liam keeps talking, because he doesn’t know the horror of what he’s saying to me and Sawyer and Topher in particular. “It’s the toxin in the darts. It’s some kind of embalming thing, or a preservative.” A shadow crosses his face like a cloud, but it soon passes. “Weird, huh? Wonder what they plan to do with all these bodies.”
Tucker at least is in our hidden valley, under a blanket of earth and birch leaves. It’s a strange thought that I might be able to go back there in years and find him just as he was the day he died. One glance at Topher tells me he’s having the same thoughts. It’s a whole Dorian Gray thing for him, too. He’ll age, while Tuck will be an image of him as he is now, forever young.
God, I hate this planet.
I look around at all my friends, and their stony faces. We should all be giddy with relief, but instead maybe this rescue has confirmed what we were all hoping wasn’t true. We’re refugees. And we’ve all seen enough news stories to know how that goes.
As we arrive at the edge of a canyon, Liam leads us all onto a narrow path downward, so narrow that we have to walk single file. I walk behind Mandy, and Topher walks behind me. After five minutes I’m surprised at how deep the canyon is. After ten minutes I’m amazed. It seems to be going down and down forever.
“Is this natural?” I say to no one in particular, but Liam, who is clearly eager to show off some more, gamely answers.
“It was a quarry with a mine at the bottom of it. In the fifties, the government bought the mine and built a military bunker here. It’s pretty big, accommodation for about five hundred, but we have about two fifty now.”
“And who are we exactly?”
“About half, like me, are military families who bugged out of a base south of here during the first attack. The other half we’ve picked up along the way. Survivors from the towns, a couple of Native communities, and people like you we’ve found with the drones.”
“What communities?” I say it without thinking. We’re dipping into a topic I’ve learned to avoid, especially with people I don’t know.
“Mostly around Calgary,” Liam says. “The villages themselves have been pretty well iced, but some families escaped out onto the prairie, where we found them.”
Topher puts his hand on my shoulder, steadying me as I stumble on a patch of gravel.
“What about up north, by Slave Lake?” I ask.
Liam shakes his head. “We never got that far north. Not sure what’s happening. Why? You got people up there?” He turns, assessing me, eyes narrowed. I imagine him trying to calculate the color mix of blood in my veins. It’s a look I’m used to.
“Sort of,” I say dismissively. I have no desire to try to explain my stepfather’s family and the Métis settlement full of aunts and uncles who aren’t really aunts and uncles but claim me as a niece regardless. It’s too complicated, and anyway . . .
“Some of the information we get suggests the attack zones were fairly limited,” Liam says with a shrug. “There’s a chance that up that way things are okay. Word is a lot of survivors were evacuated, we’re not sure to where.”
That changes things, a shift in outlook so radical I’m rendered speechless. It’s Topher who puts it into words. “How many survivors are there?”
“In the world?” Liam says. “Hard to say. But there’s no way out of here, east or west. That much we know. And communications are totally toast, so we’re sort of poking around in the dark for information.”
“Even after all this time?” Sawyer says. “If this is a military base, don’t you have secure landlines?”
Liam looks uncomfortable for a moment. “Maybe you should talk to the commander about that.”
By the time we reach the quarry floor, the snow is blowing so thick that Liam recommends we hold on to each other the rest of the way. So we stomp through the dense snow, like a kindergarten class, me with Topher’s fingers crushing one hand and Mandy clinging to the other wrist.
“This feels like a bad dream,” Mandy says. Then we walk in silence for about five minutes before she adds. “I guess my parents are dead.”
The word “parents” makes me twitch. The constant rhythm of missing them and regretting the things I said and didn’t say has become background noise to the life-and-death game I’ve been playing over the last few days. Nearly drowning, being knocked out by an alien. And death, of course. Tucker. Lochie. And Felix, who died right in front of me. It all makes setting fire to a park bandstand seem small by comparison. I have to believe that if we’re ever reunited, my parents will just take me in their arms, and we’ll never speak of it again.
I try to exhale everything, but all that comes out is a cloud of frozen air.