“But they need help and if—”
“She sounds desperate, honey, and desperate people are potentially very dangerous—in any circumstance. Though you’re right, we haven’t heard anything like this before, so it’s worth keeping an ear on them.”
“There seem to be a lot more survivors out there than you guys have told us about.”
“And fewer every day,” he said, turning the page. “I wonder if they’re out in the San Gorgonio Pass.”
“That place is huge!” she said. “My dad drove us through there once. There’s like four thousand windmills out there.”
“And the land is barren for hundreds of miles,” he added thoughtfully. “Which would make an extended siege difficult at best. You’d have to hit them fast and hard.”
“Shouldn’t we tell the others about this? It’s a pretty big deal.”
“This is a case of what they don’t know won’t hurt them. So don’t go blabbing.”
“But—”
“I’m serious, Melissa. False hopes are bad news, and it’s way too soon to get excited about these people. We have to be careful with morale.”
Just then the floors and walls began to vibrate as if a train were rumbling beneath them. There was no real movement because of the shock dampeners that protected the installation, but the rumbling in the earth was unmistakable.
“Whoa,” Melissa said, instinctively placing her hand on the console, though there was no need to steady herself. “That isn’t just a tremor, is it?”
“Doesn’t feel like one.”
There had been a number of tremors since the asteroid impact, but none of them had caused so much vibration within the facility.
“Are we still safe?”
“We’re fine,” he said. “We’re nowhere near any of the known fault lines, and it would take a major shift to crack us open.”
A couple of minutes later Ulrich wandered sleepily into Launch Control in his bare feet. “That one woke damn near everybody up,” he said. “What have you two been doing?”
“It sounds like somebody’s forded up on a wind farm,” Forrest said, tapping the index. “I’m guessing San Gorgonio. My assistant here picked up some new traffic. We’ll need to make sure we’re listening tomorrow.”
Ulrich cocked an eyebrow at Melissa. “And who said you could use my radio?”
“I didn’t touch your crappy radio,” she said, crossing her arms. “Everybody knows analog’s better than digital.”
He looked at Forrest. “I guess I don’t have to ask where she got that.”
“Don’t look at me,” Forrest said. “I’m not the only one who thinks digital sucks.”
“Yeah, well I wasn’t talking about the bullshit opinion,” Ulrich said, turning for the door. “I was talking about the smartmouth.”
When he was gone, Melissa looked at Forrest. “I think I made him mad.”
He shrugged and went back to the index. “You may have.”
“But… but what if he doesn’t want to copy down the code for me anymore?”
He looked at her and smiled. “You should have thought of that before you got salty with him.”
“But I was…”
“But you were what?” he said with a chuckle.
“Well he was the one who… He’s always such a grouch. Can you fix it for me?”
He laughed and closed the index, picking up his book again. “Your mouth wrote the check, kiddo, not mine.”
“But he… he was the one who…”
He chuckled again as he refound his place in the novel. “You say that like it matters.”
Forty
Early the next day Maria Vasquez and a number of the other mothers were busying themselves with the work of turning silo one into a spook house. They were on the far side of the silo hanging a number of sheets and black trash bags to serve as curtains, cordoning off little hiding places for the witches and ghosts who would soon lie in wait for the unsuspecting children. Ulrich emerged from the tunnel and stood on the main deck watching them with his hands on his hips. He had already been recruited to dress up as a mummy, and though he felt a little stupid about it, he knew the party would be a great distraction for the children.
Melissa was in the silo as well, but she wasn’t helping with the Halloween project. She was busy up above with her deciphering project, which had so far yielded nothing in the way of cracking the code. She listened to Ulrich talking with the other women and eventually decided she had better walk down to the main deck and find out if she was on his shit list. The trip downstairs made her feel like when she was a little girl and got in trouble with her parents. Only it wasn’t her loving father waiting three decks below but a perpetually dour soldier who didn’t seem to have much in the way of a paternal instinct.
Ulrich glanced briefly in her direction as she came down the stairs, then went back to talking with Karen and Maria about where they might displace some of the food bundles until after the haunted silo project was finished. She walked over and stood listening, realizing now that Ulrich was definitely annoyed with her because, while his glance wasn’t disdainful, it hadn’t been exactly pleasant either.
“Very well, then,” he said. “Just so nothing falls over on anyone.”
“Amen,” Karen chuckled.
He turned to walk away without a word to Melissa, and she stood watching him go, debating whether it would even be worth the effort of trying to get back into his good graces. She asked herself whether it would matter if she didn’t need him to write out the Morse code transmissions for her. Deciding it would, she trotted after him. “Wayne?”
He stopped and turned to look at her. “Yes?”
“I’m sorry.”
“About what?”
“For smarting off to you last night.”
Only the slightest of perceptible grins came to his lips. “Realized you need me for the code?”
“Even if I didn’t, I still wouldn’t want you mad at me. I didn’t think before I spoke.”
He smiled, understanding she had only been trying to buddy up with Forrest, wishing that he had a better excuse to be pissed with her, disliking his own vulnerability. “I thought you might get Jack to smooth it over for you.”
“He said my mouth wrote the check.”
Ulrich laughed. “He did, huh?”
“He said I shouldn’t have gotten salty with you.”
He laughed some more. “Well, you know you’re wasting your time with that goddamn code, don’t you?”
She shrugged. “I don’t have anything else to do, though. I never knew I could get so bored. I don’t know what it is… nobody else seems to be.”
Ulrich reflected that the more intelligent the creature, the more negative the effects of confinement. He recalled briefly his first and only visit to the zoo as a child, the gorillas in their cages with the saddest, most tragic expressions he had ever seen.
“Well, I appreciate the apology,” he said quietly. “But the truth is that you’ve got more than enough of the code now. You’re not going to find anything new by continuing to copy it down. Especially if they’re altering it.”
“Altering it?”
“They may change it from night to night. Just enough to throw off a code breaker.”
“Do you think they are?”
“There’s no way to tell if the changes are minor. Either way, you’re better off sticking with what you’ve got. Honestly.”
“You’re not just saying that?”
He shook his head. “If I was mad at you, I’d tell you. Ask Jack.”
“Were you before?”
“I was trying to be.”
She bit her lip, hesitating a moment, then, “How come you don’t let people get close to you?”