Day four
Penny asked whether a volcano could cough.
“That’s one way to picture it,” Cora said.
“Then when will it stop?”
My wife looked at me. I was counting food tins, although I’d counted them twice already.
“Soon,” I said.
I had no reason to say soon. On the outside camera, our garden lay under grey ash. More fell through the picture. We had watched the sky disappear on the first day and taken our children below ground before the air became dangerous.
The shelter was my project. I’d saved for years, hired builders, bought the proper air system, registered its location with the district. Friends called it Emmett’s hole. I had laughed with them because Cora was there.
Now Cora, Ben, Penny and I were alive in it. Every time I felt afraid, I reminded myself of that.
“Your brother is very quiet,” Penny said.
Ben sat by the radio. At sixteen he was usually quiet only when he’d done something he didn’t want me to know about. Now he kept tuning for his cousin’s district.
Our receiver worked. The transmitter had broken before the eruption. I hadn’t had it fixed because I’d put the money into more supplies. We could hear people. We couldn’t tell them we were listening.
“He’s trying to get news,” Cora said.
“I’m trying to get five minutes without anyone talking,” Ben said.
We gave him three.
Day nineteen
By then Penny knew the hour of every meal. She asked for lunch twelve minutes early and accused me of changing time.
Cora had slept badly. The fan’s hum bothered her, and I kept getting up to check its screen. She said each time I rose she woke to hear what was wrong.
“Nothing is wrong,” I told her.
“Then come back to bed.”
I couldn’t. The installers had rated our filters for about thirty days in heavy ash. That wasn’t a promise they would fail on day thirty-one. It was also not a promise that I could squeeze another month out of them by looking often enough.
We had begun with food for forty days. Twenty-one days remained. Clean stored water, too. Four people who had stopped laughing at Emmett’s hole.
At noon I looked at the camera. The screen was grey again. I told Penny there was a patch of blue.
She ran to see. I changed the view to the stairwell.
“It’s gone now,” I said.
Cora waited until Penny was back at the table.
“Show me the blue,” she said.
“I thought I saw—”
“Emmett.”
I turned the garden picture back on. Cora watched it for a long time.
“You want her to stop asking,” she said.
“I want her not to be afraid.”
“What happens when she finds out you don’t know?”
I knew one answer: she would be as afraid as I was. I didn’t say it.
Then Ben called us over. An official district broadcast named the roads an evacuation crew would visit. Ours was the third. Registered shelters would be checked. The crew would bring sealed vehicles and equipment for the short transfer out of each shelter.
“Day thirty,” Ben said. “They’ll repeat the instructions each evening.”
“If they get here,” I said.
“Yes,” Cora answered. “If.”
She wanted to leave. I could hear it already. I wanted to stay where I knew every switch, every tin, every small thing that could break.
We listened to the whole message. The relief shelter was a converted school outside the worst ash area. It had working filtered air and supplies. Nobody said the world was safe again.
That evening I sat beside Penny on her bunk.
“I didn’t see blue sky,” I told her. “I said it because I wanted to make you feel better.”
“So you lied.”
“Yes.”
She pulled her feet beneath the blanket. “You made me feel better.”
That hurt worse than if she’d cried.
“It was still wrong.”
“Is the truck real?”
“The message is real. I can’t promise the truck will reach us. We’ll listen every night.”
“I want to listen too.”
“All right.”
Day thirty
I packed twice as much as we could carry.
Cora put half of it back. “They said one small bag each.”
“That was general advice.”
“There are other people on the truck.”
I stood with a tin of peaches in my hand. I’d chosen everything down here. Even what Penny would eat on the day she turned eleven. I’d imagined we could wait long enough and come up into our own lives again.
Ben pointed at the camera. A sealed vehicle had stopped at the garden gate. Two people in protective gear approached our marked entrance. One held the district sign described in every broadcast.
The knock came next, three hard blows on the outer door.
Through the door speaker, the crew leader gave her name and explained the transfer. She checked how many of us there were, and whether anyone needed help walking. She knew the shelter’s registration number. We stayed inside while her team prepared.
“Are we going?” Cora asked me.
She wasn’t asking for permission. She was asking whether I would come with them.
I looked at the air screen. Then at four small bags.
“Yes.”
The crew led us out. I kept Penny close and followed their directions. Ash covered the house windows. The rose arch had fallen. I wanted to stop beside it, as if I could put it back before leaving.
Cora took my elbow. I went on.
At the relief school, they checked us, fed us and gave us beds. Ben joined the queue for the message desk. He still wanted his cousin’s news; being rescued hadn’t answered that.
Penny stood at a window. Beyond the school yard a narrow patch of sky was blue.
“This one is real,” she told me.
I said yes. Nothing more.
I lay down with my shoes on. Cora sat beside the bed.
“Sleep,” she said.
“You’ll wake me if—”
“I’ll wake you.”
I shut my eyes. For the first time in thirty days, I wasn’t listening for our fan.
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