“What do you think about soup for lunch? I know we said we wouldn’t break into the good stuff except for the weekends, but who cares. The bar isn’t settling right in my stomach.”
Patricia sat on the chair across the room, and stared blankly. Large beady eyes blinking rapidly.
“It would be nice if you contributed something—anything,at this point.” She remained still, blank-faced, and I frowned. “Alright then, soup it is.”
We had exactly twelve cans left. Which was basically nothing. I had been rationing and cutting portions for over a year now, but it still didn’t matter. Paul and Bridget had gone to get medical supplies, I only hoped they were smart enough to grab food too. We weren’t going to make it otherwise.
Solace wasn’t going to make it,I thought dimly.
The Scourge, as they’d called it in the days leading up, was nothing like you’d expect for the end of the world. It was slower than I’d imagined. There was more than enough time, which was morosely ironic.
Bridget and I were sharing an apartment in our hometown after her failed marriage. After college I went out on a limb and I moved to New York to work with the ballet. It was something Jude said when we were teenagers—about not letting my parents pick my dreams. All it took was student teaching at the end of college to wake me up. What was I doing with my life? Living it for other people, I realized. So I applied for jobs on the east coast, sold anything that wouldn’t fit into one suitcase and told my parents I was leaving.
I’d gotten to live my dream for nine months. I was finally composing music—actually getting piecesperformed in a real opera house—even if it was for some low-budget production company.
Until everything went to hell.
My super started kicking out tenants and selling the building so he could buy his way into some underground bunker. That was the moment I realized the news wasn’t only news anymore. It was real and it was happening. Nothing we wished, prayed, or hoped for was going to change it.
So I moved home. Bridget was barely using her apartment after she started dating Paul, so I moved in and took a job teaching high school music in the next town over. I managed to make it through one year of teaching before the Scourge.
When things started getting scary—people hoarding groceries, gas stations running dry, soldiers suddenly showing up in cities—that’s when Paul insisted that we stayed with him.
He lived in a condo in Bellevue, but he also had a second place out in the Olympics. Paul was a prepper, as they liked to say. Which, given his age, kind of made sense. And honestly, I had to give it to him—he’d mostly thought of everything. Besides hydroponic farming.Again, nobody was pointing fingers. I’m sure if he’d had more time he would’ve added that eventually. It’s not like I was complaining, Solace wouldn’t be alive without Paul. Or Bridget and her exquisite taste in elderly rich men.
My family never made it to the bunker. Milo was away at college when everything happened, or I would have dragged him underground with the rest of us. My parents got caught in the storms that followed. Paul invited them, though. Like he had Bridget’s stubborn parents, hisyounger sister, and a few of his staff members. Anyone he could reach in time.
But it was just Solace and Patricia and Paul and Bridget now.
The rest of my waking hours passed by in a blur. It was getting harder and harder to stay awake for long stretches. My body was tired, and unfortunately so was my brain. I swept the common room, read half a chapter of a psychology book before a rogue tear slipped down my cheek and forced me to close it, and then checked the vents again.
The water supply was fine, but I still refrained from taking a shower. Tomorrow, maybe. Instead, I filled the sink with warm water and sponge bathed enough that I couldn’t feel the layer of stale must clinging to my skin.
Even withthatroom sealed off, the bunker still smelled like a tomb. A giant concrete grave. I shook off the thought, dried myself with a towel, and pulled on clean pants and a sweatshirt I’d stolen from Paul’s things a while ago. It was well worn now and no longer smelled of whiskey and cigars.
When I couldn’t help it any longer, I sat on my cot and traced patterns of notes I’d already written across the page, tapping my lap lightly in the formation they’d take across a piano keyboard. It was good to keep one’s mind busy. Mine was decaying. I could feel it; the edge of loneliness that creeped into memory and reason.
Solace wasn’t sure how long she had.
Setting the stack of music aside, I flicked my recording of Satellites on and settled back onto the cot, curling up as sleep pulled at me again. It was all I could really do these days.
11
Falling Out of Bed
Jude
The lab lights were dimmed to station cycle night, but Elias had every screen in the room glowing. SOL’s diagnostics crawled across the central monitor in neat rows of white text. Everything from radiation metrics, atmospheric composition models, thermal scans—everything the system had collected since the atmospheric probes deployed three loops ago.
I leaned over the console, scrolling through the data again. “Run the atmospheric stability model one more time,” I said.
Elias sighed softly from the opposite terminal. “That will be the fourth time.”
“Humor me.”
He tapped the command anyway. The program churned through the data, projections blooming across the screen in a storm of numbers and probability. After a moment, the result appeared. Stable. Exactly the same as the first three times.
Elias leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. “There’s nothing wrong with the programming, Ransom.”
