Impetus (11 page)

CHAPTER
12
 

Mick struggled with the idea of telling the group right away about the encounter he’d had with Solomon and the self-proclaimed Rubble King. He went back and forth but ultimately decided against it, at least for the moment. The group deserved to know. Secrets did little but hurt in the post-Impact world. But Mick needed to figure out his own thoughts first, understand what exactly had happened back there. There was no use in getting even one of the herd excited about something that probably didn’t even matter.

Mick
waved to Greg as he neared the shelter.

“
Anything new?” Greg said from up top.

Mick
shook his head and smiled briefly to hide the story he was itching to tell.

S
arah was tending to her garden outside the shelter in a neat bed of dirt and dust. She called it a garden, so Mick did, too. However, it was nothing close to a garden by yesterday’s standards. She pushed the dust away and cleared down to the cracked soil beneath it. Mick figured she did this each day as a way to bring a sense of normality into her life, like a runner going for a daily jog. He was not sure if she actually expected anything to grow or if she simply went through the motions. After all, the two most important things essential to plant growth were the two things most sorely missed: sunlight and water. But that did not stop her from trying. If anything were to grow there, it would have sprung from hope alone.

“
Hey,” Mick said with another smile.

Sarah looked up and wip
ed the slightest bit of sweat from her brow with her sleeve. “Hey yourself. How was your walk?”

He
thought for second, probably less, before saying, “Dusty.” That would suffice for now. And it was the truth no matter how obvious.

“
No getting away from the stuff, unfortunately.”

A quick breeze
kicked up as if listening to their conversation and blew some of the newly cleared dust back into Sarah’s garden.

She looked down.
“See what I mean.” She pushed the dust back off to the side with her hands, a chore she undoubtedly had done hundreds of times before. Smears of dirt marked her forehead and right cheek. Her hair, as usual, had been tightly pulled back and knotted in a bun.

“
You’re really determined to get something to grow?” Mick said.

She smiled.
“Determined, yes. Naive enough to believe it will work, no. But I’ll keep trying. Remember what they used to say about the lottery?”

Mick thought for a moment before shaking his head. He was never much of a gambler.

“You can’t win if you don’t play,” Sarah said. “It went something like that. The person with the winning ticket never thought in a million years that they would be the one to win. But someone eventually does. Or did, anyway. So I’m going to keep digging in this stupid dirt and clearing this annoying dust on the off chance that I’m holding the winning ticket.”

“
That’s a good way of looking at things.”

She stood from the ground, brushed the dirt from her knees, and gently touched
his arm. “Unfortunately, Mick, It’s the only way of looking at things that doesn’t make me want to curl up in a ball and rock back and forth like a crazy person in a padded room.”

“
Would that be so bad?” Mick said with a wink. “At least you’d sleep comfortably.”

She laughed.
“True. Okay, I take it back. I’d prefer the padded room, please. Think you can make that happen?”

He
said, “Sure,” and pretended to pick up the phone. “Hello, Doctor? Yes, I’ll need your nicest padded room please for my friend Sarah.”

Sarah closed her eyes.
“Imagine that, Mick. I bet they’d have a hot shower there. How good would that feel?”

Mick
hadn’t thought about a hot shower in a very long time. It was one of those things that he put out of his mind as it was certainly never going to happen—not today or in the future. He likened it to the sun. It did nothing but remind him of how many other comforts they all now missed. But watching Sarah soak in the hot shower in her mind forced him to do the same. And when he did, he soon longed for it more than anything in the world. To feel the thousands of warm drops wash over his body would be as close to orgasmic as things got for Mick nowadays.

“
Can you feel it, Mick? The warm water rushing over your body. The smell of lathered body wash and coconut shampoo.” She sighed happily. “I’d stand there for hours under the water. I’d get all wrinkled and prune-like, and I’d love it. Every single second of it. Hmmm.” Sarah melted into the moment in her mind.

“
Well,” Mick said, cruelly shaking her back to reality, “maybe that can be your next project after your beanstalk grows.”

“
Beanstalk?” she said. “I wish. We could climb out of this crap if that was the case. No, I’ll settle for a carrot.” Sarah walked a few steps to the side of the building and picked up an old tin can. She had poked holes in the bottom of it and used a plastic cover to hold back the dirty undrinkable water until she was ready to use the improvised watering can. “Here’s to hope.” She removed the plastic lid and let the water trickle out and onto the patch of soil.

“
You never know, Sarah.”

“
That’s what I keep telling myself. Lottery, Mick. Lottery.” The rest of the water emptied from the can. They both watched the drops vanish quickly into the dry earth. “You know, they say there is a secret bunker down by the harbor. I bet they have carrots growing down there.”

He
laughed. “And all the Twinkies we can eat.”

Sarah held up her hand and suddenly appeared sick.
“No, thanks. I’m not sure your cake was all that fresh. It didn’t sit right with me.”

“
Same here. But it’s the thought that counts. Plus, it was cool to see a Twinkie again. It brought back some good memories.”

He
had heard something a few years back about the bunker Sarah mentioned. He never put any stock into the story, though. That wasn’t the only secret place he had heard about. Greg had told him about another one rumored to be located in Cape Cod, down by Woods Hole, where a group of scientists were feverishly trying to figure out a way to get the dust cleared from the atmosphere. There were even crazier stories about cities in the sky and some at the bottom of the ocean. As far as he was concerned, they were nothing more than fairy tales.

“
Do you really think places like that exist?” Mick said.

“
What? A secret base?”

Mick
nodded.

“
I doubt it,” Sarah said. “At least not one so close to us. You’d think we would have seen someone or something during the past ten years, right? I mean, the harbor isn’t that far away. There
was
a government submarine base being built there. That much I know for a fact. One that nobody talked about. It was going to be my first big story for Channel Seven. One night, I ended up hanging at a bar on Newbury Street with a naval contractor that was working at the base. He was all drunk and hitting on me. And you know what they say about loose lips.”

“
How do you know about his lips, young lady?” Mick teased.

Sarah shoved him
. “Shut up, Mick. It wasn’t like that.”

“
That’s what they all say.”

“
Whatever,” she said, smiling and blushing at the same time. “Anyway, this guy worked there. He told me all about this base in Boston Harbor that nobody knew about. He said they were working on a new kind of nuclear power.” She stopped and thought. “No, actually, it wasn’t nuclear. It was a fusion reactor or something. Whatever comes after nuclear. That’s what they were working on. This guy said it was like the Area 51 of the East Coast.”

“
Well,” he said, “I’ll have to keep an eye out for it should I ever happen by the harbor.” Which he knew he probably would not. To get to the harbor, he would have to pass through the crucifixion zone. And after his run-in with the Rubble King, that scenario was even less likely.

Sarah said,
“Tell them I said hi. Ooh, and bring me back a carrot. I’ll put it in my garden and tell Sandeep it grew there. That would sure freak him out.”

He
touched her arm and said, “Well, I’m going to head down. You coming?”

“
In a minute.” She looked down at her garden. “I’m going to brush the dust off one more time. Don’t ask me why. It’s just going to get covered again. I’m a glutton for punishment, I guess.”

“
Okay,” Mick said. “I’ll see you down there.”

**

Mick rested on his cot, awake, and listened to the group as they slept. Inhales mixed with exhales and the occasional snore, a symphony of essential human functions, off-key but still soothing in a way. He wished he could join them in their rendition of sleep rather than observe, but his encounter earlier that day kept him awake as he’d known it would.

As
his mind played back what happened, Mick found himself clenching his fists and tightening his arms, as if he were about to fight. Second-guessing himself was a bad habit he could not seem to break over the years—another habit that came from youth, a time when he made a lot of bad decisions and learned from too few of them. A person could only screw up so many times before the doubt set in. And when it set in with Mick, it became a permanent member of his psyche, presiding over his every decision, casting every light in a bit of a shadow.

He
rose from his cot and shuffled silently to the main room. He could navigate their entire dwelling in the dark. Though he would not need to that night.

Chester
, the eternal night owl, sat against the far wall. Being a night owl was rather unfortunate in the post-Impact world, considering there was not much to keep him occupied but the darkness and his own thoughts. Mick figured that Chester somehow managed to fill his head with better thoughts than he was able to, an envious position for sure. Chester tended to see the glass as half-full, while Mick failed to see the glass at all. The kerosene lamp burned dimly as he read from a book on his lap.

“
You mind some company?” Mick asked.

Chester looked up in surprise.
“Of course not, Mick. Please, sit.”

Mick
walked over and slid down the wall on the opposite side of the lamp. He crossed his legs and leaned his head back, letting out a small sigh as he did.

“
Is everything all right?” Chester asked.

“
As good as it can be, I guess.”

Chester closed the book on his lap, which
Mick could see in the faint glow of the lamp was the Bible. While Chester tried in vain to get Mick to join his scripture readings, he was good about not pushing his views. He realized that Mick did not believe what he believed, and he usually left it at that. It was probably one of the many reasons they got along so well.

“
You don’t sound so sure about that, Mick. You sure you’re okay?”

“
Ah, Chester,” he said, exhaling regret. “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure.”

“
Care to tell me about it?”

At first
Mick did not want to say anything more. It would open a can of worms that he was not sure he wanted open at all. But it was eating away at him from the inside. He needed an outlet. If for no other reason than to be reassured that he’d made the right decision. But if that wasn’t the case? What if he made the wrong one? Did he truly want to know? If left alone, this nugget of his day, just one of thousands gathered over the years, would ultimately ruin him, cast all his decisions further into doubt. He suddenly realized that he was not protecting the group; he was protecting himself from knowing whether he’d made a bad decision or not.

He
rolled the back of his head against the wall so he was facing Chester.

“
For now, please keep what I’m going to tell you between us?” Before Chester could reply, Mick added, “It’s not like it’s a secret. I just don’t know how I feel about the whole thing. And I want to make sure I’m not jumping the gun.”

“
Mick,” Chester whispered. “What’s said between us, stays between us. But for the record, I trust your decisions. You have never led us astray.”

“
I’m glad one of us trusts my decisions.” He turned to stare at the far wall, the one separating them from the rest of the herd in the sleeping quarters.

The small bit of
light the lamp cast across the main room flickered in an ever-changing dance of silhouettes. Shadows would ebb and flow, come into existence only to be quickly consumed. Mick found it soothing in a way, the quietness and serenity of this sterile room. He could not make any of the wall decorations out—many had been hung over the years—but he knew where everything was. A good majority of it was from his kids, their drawings. Works of art in his mind. What father would not be so blinded as to not think his child was the next Picasso? The one piece of artwork that he could make out despite the low light was also his favorite. Nate had drawn it at age six or seven; Mick forgot exactly, like so many other things. The drawing was a simple circle, colored yellow, with orange and yellow lines protruding from it. It took up the entirety of the page and glowed in the lamp’s aura. Nate had told Mick at the time that since they did not have a real sun anymore, he’d made one for them, because Nate knew how sad Mick was. Just the thought made Mick fight back a tear. The simple innocence of youth could be so beautiful before the world came in and strangled it dead.