“Jesus,” Xander says to the tabletop.
“People were counting on a rescue,” Mandy says. “That’s why everybody has been so calm, I guess. Lulled into a false sense of security by those bullshit videos. The fight continues. We will defeat them. Shelter in place. Ha! We’ll be lucky if we come out the other side of winter.”
“But will the Nahx come here?” Emily says.
Sawyer speaks at last, with some of the authority that he showed before Felix died. “This quarry is pretty low, even though we’re surrounded by mountains. And we’re underground. We might be trapped, but maybe we’re safe here.”
I sigh impatiently. “That’s what you said about the camp.”
“Right, and don’t you think now that you should have listened to me?”
“So we could starve? And that was even higher up than here!”
“We could have made a go of it! They might never have found us!”
“Or maybe they would have!”
Topher’s head shoots up. “Stop it! Stop it, you two!” He turns to me. “It’s possible that the Nahx will ignore us since we’re hidden, but I wouldn’t count on it. It’s immaterial though because Calgary is in the red zone, and we’ve made that our new objective. Right?”
“We have?” Sawyer says. Topher turns to me expectantly.
“There are survivors in Calgary. There’s also a ton of supplies, medicine, food. Condoms,” I add, and can’t resist directing my gaze at Emily. “We can get there if we take the Humvees.”
Sawyer speaks with a lower voice. “I don’t think Kim will go for it.”
Topher replies with his twin’s intensity, scanning our little group. “But it’s a good idea, right?”
I turn to look at Emily and Mandy, at Xander, whose lost expressions pretty much sum up my whole attitude too. The plan to launch a rescue mission back to Calgary now seems even more fanciful than it did an hour ago when we first conceived it. It would be like last-ditch chemotherapy on a terminal patient. Maybe give us a few more months until starvation, disease, or the Nahx get us. At least if we stay here, we will die warm. That would not have been the case at the camp. On the other hand, if we want to survive longer term, leaving is our only option. We need to start sourcing food and medicine.
It seems hopeless. But now it’s our only hope. My head hurts.
Topher turns to Sawyer. Even though things have changed since we arrived at the bunker, he’s still our leader. “Are you in?”
“Like I’d let a bunch of seventeen-year-olds go off on their own.”
“I’m sixteen,” I say. Xander grins along with me.
Sawyer reaches into his jacket and pulls out a hip flask, passing it to me.
“This is contributing to the delinquency of a minor,” I point out as I uncap it. “You should be ashamed.”
“There is no age of majority after an apocalypse. Can we agree on that?”
The sip of vodka stings on the way down, but the instant sensation it gives me makes me crave another.
“How do we convince Kim?” Topher asks, taking the bottle from me.
“Why do we have to?” Sawyer says. “Since when do we do things by the book?”
As we pass the bottle around our table, I realize the cafeteria has fallen silent except for the continued sobbing of a toddler. I look around in time to see another older child, a dark-skinned girl with a long braid, rise and touch the crying child’s head affectionately. I expect her to say There, there or something, but instead she starts singing “Baby Beluga.”
When the toddler’s mother starts to sing along, the child settles. But the little girl keeps going as others around her join in, one by one. Adults sing. Children sing. I’m pretty sure at least a couple of people are singing in French, and Xander seems to be singing in Chinese. Soon the whole room is singing. “Baby Beluga” is the funniest, most incongruous song to sing deep underground a thousand miles from the sea, but we bellow it out, laughing through tears, our voices ringing off the concrete, stone, and metal walls of our snow-covered tomb.
I sing too, because we need it. We are terrified. Betrayed and uncertain. Angry and heartbroken.
But united, for now. And human, above all. We are human. We are human.
I’m just not sure that will be enough.
EIGHTH
I suppose I should be grateful that it is a human who finds me and not one of us, a human with a gun more suited to killing squirrels than penetrating armor. But the man scares me anyway. He screams hateful and violent things at me and empties his sad little gun, from point-blank range. The bullets ping off my armor, but sting enough to knock me over.
Think now. Think. My instinct is to kill him. I could snap him in half. I could certainly get a dart into him, drag him back out into the street, and drop him into a snowdrift. That’s my mission. Those are my directives. Their relentless rhythm in my mind is much stronger now that I’m with others. Much harder to disobey.
Disobedient. Defective.
Spiderwebs. Snowflakes. The golden-haired human girl. I stand with my rifle raised.
The man shakes so much as I stand that he can’t reload his gun. “No, please . . . ,” he says. I take a step toward him. The mission is . . . the mission . . .
Run, I sign to him. He doesn’t seem to understand. Some part of me longs to pull the trigger. He’s standing right there. I could crush his skull with one hand.
Run, please.
He doesn’t move. I search my memory for some alternative to killing him. Can I just walk away? He might manage to shoot me in the back, but that won’t injure me.
I focus on the image of the girl, her hair the warm color of new pinecones. I lower my rifle.
Where are your friends?
The man takes a step back, then another.
Your friends. Are you alone?
As he turns and runs. I hear a noise from the street above. Heavy footfalls. Not human.
No! Wait. I’ll help you!
I can’t stop him. He runs back out of the storeroom, knocking over boxes and shelves as he goes. I hear the outer door bang open, the whining of the dart rifle, and the thump of the man’s body falling onto the icy sidewalk.
I tell myself there is nothing I could have done and creep back into my hiding place until the heavy footsteps fade away.
RAVEN
Nights in the base are quiet now. Kim seems to have disappeared. She and her cronies, the other officers, her son and his close friends, sometimes issue orders from the command level. They change snow clearing or kitchen shifts. Occasionally, sleeping arrangements are reorganized. It all smacks of a command team with nothing to command. If they’re still planning an attack on the Nahx, wherever they are, they haven’t shared it with the likes of me. Topher, Xander, and I train some of the other civilians in hand-to-hand combat, more as a way to pass time than for any realistic purpose.