Meanwhile Cecile was shaking her head, her eyes downcast.
“What a waste,” was all she said.
A TALE OF TWO BUNKERS
In the backyard of Owen’s house in Seeville, on a plateau before the hill that went down to the stream, there was a boxy cement bunker. It had taken on a black and greenish color on the exterior, with a robust mold clinging to the surface. Surrounding it was a gaggle of Old World clutter—car parts, gearboxes, spools of oxidized copper wire. It wasn’t an inviting building by any means, which was how Owen liked it.
Many bunkers were built just before the Detonation, but most were of shoddy quality, or had been stripped down afterwards. For this one, great care was taken. To protect against radiation the bunker had rebar-reinforced walls two feet thick. Most importantly, for Owen’s purposes, they had built in a Faraday cage to prevent the transmission of electromagnetic signals through the walls.
It was in this bunker that Owen was sitting. A number of circuit boards were in front of him, as well as wires, solenoids, capacitors, resistors, filaments and switches. He would imagine the fields and waves permeating the air around him, the magnetism contouring the solenoids. He would occasionally solder a new connection and turn the hand-crank generator, the green signal light revealing the success or failure of his intended architecture.
His electrical work often served as an exciting distraction from the banal chores he endured with his mother and sisters, or even the more practical teachings of trade school. Today he hoped it would also relieve him of reliving the events in the valley.
Instead, his solitude only allowed him a greater capacity for reflection.
He thought about Jakson. He thought about Noke. He wondered what had happened to Cecile.
He thought about the smartphone. They had lost so much in the attempt to acquire it, but perhaps the phone itself was the greatest loss. It held so much potential. And all the while he could speak with no one. Lord Henneson insisted the whole expedition be kept under wraps.
Owen would spin the lie Lord Henneson had woven. Thankfully his mother and sisters seemed satisfied with his explanation. “It was really terrible, a whole side of the cliff face fell away,” he told them. “They died instantly.”
They would say, “I’m so sorry, Owen. Do you want to talk about it?”
He did, but he couldn’t.
They were doing a unit on plumbing in trade school. Water pumps, valves, water pressure—it all seemed so trivial in the face of what they could have learned with the phone. They had to go back. They had to see if they could find Cecile, or see if there was something else they could salvage from the satellite.
He had resolved to talk to Preston about it. Preston was bold. He took risks. He would know what to do. And he was the only one Owen could confide in. But Preston had been missing from trade school since the expedition. He’d heard he was taking some sick days. No one could blame him, least of all Owen.
The soldering torch was starting to fade, and he realized it was running out of butane. He grasped the butane canister off the shelf, but just as soon he remembered he’d emptied it on the last refill. He wrote it down on the foraging list, which had quite a few items on it.
With everything around Seeville being so picked over, a good forage usually required a trip beyond the outskirts, and there was no guarantee you would find what you needed. It became more practical just to buy the materials in town, even though they might cost him a fortune. More than the cost, however, he didn’t want to give anyone any clues about what he was working on, especially after they’d been outed on the expedition.
So he could give up for the day… on the last few hours of his only day off… or he could try finding Preston.
He began going through his exit checklist, posted in big block letters on the door to the exterior.
1 Disconnect all active circuits
2 Disconnect and turn off all power sources
3 Shelve EM producing components
4 Confirm 1-3
5 Close both doors behind you
6 Apply EM protective shielding
After closing the second outside door, he latched the EM protective paneling over the door cracks and went back through the checklist in his mind.
He wasn’t paying full attention. He’d been preoccupied with getting to Preston, so when reviewing the process he realized there was a battery he wasn’t certain he’d disconnected. So he opened the doors, went in and confirmed the battery had been turned off and disconnected. Then he left, closed the two exterior doors, and refastened the EM paneling over the exterior door.
“Don’t forget to close the door, Owen.” His father’s words shivered through him, as they often did when the hinges creaked to a close.
He grabbed his hybrid from the tangle of bikes at the side of the house and pedaled vigorously southward. Leaves and other debris were thrown up behind him as he rolled over disorderly indentations in the road. The old pavement was still visible in places, but slippery sediment covered much of it, and potholes made for a dubious obstacle course.
Owen stopped at Preston’s house on the Downtown Mall. There, a young girl, presumably Preston’s sister, greeted him. She informed him that Preston was down at the Barnyard.
The Barnyard was only a few more blocks away, but Owen hesitated, knowing how the railroad folks didn’t like people poking around.
He couldn’t bear to wait another day.
When he arrived at the Barnyard gates he could see men were hauling equipment, cables were swinging, hammers were rapping, and metal was scraping against metal. It smelled of grease and tar and smoke. No rest for the Seeville & Raleigh railroad workers, even on a Sunday.
“Watcha lookin’ for kid?” a man in grease-stained overalls asked him just inside the gates. His face was so covered in soot it was like a black skull under his helmet.
“Preston Hatch. You know where to find him?”
The man pointed at the large, red warehouse and then wandered away.
It was one of the newer buildings in Seeville—a huge structure where they assembled train engines, rail cars and whatever else they needed for S&R Railroad operations. The resemblance of the building to an oversized barn had led people to refer to the whole rail yard as the Barnyard, and even sometimes refer to new engines as “a bull coming out of the Barnyard.”
The main hangar door was open, so Owen walked his bike in, trying to look like he knew where he was going. Inside the bay doors and to the right was a large cement box about the size of his house—a building nested neatly in the confines of the gigantic warehouse. Owen immediately knew what it was. And It was a good it was where Preston would be. He found the exterior door and knocked on it.
The door of the bunker was opened by a man with a long, expressionless face and pursed lips. Below the face was a slightly cocked blue bowtie, a starched white shirt, and suspenders. It was Quenton Bartz—Lord Quenton Bartz.
“Lord Bartz, I… I didn’t know…”
Bartz looked annoyed and dismissive at first, and then a glimmer caught his eye. “You are the other one, yes? Owen, isn’t it?” His long face tilted at an awkward angle. It was as if he was trying to look up Owen’s nostrils. Owen had never met Bartz, so others must have described him. Owen was certainly easy to recognize with the peculiar white spots on his face.
“Yes, sir,” Owen said.
Bartz’s eyebrows knitted in calculation. “Here to see Preston, I suspect. Good, good. I’ve wanted to meet you. Come in.” His voice was playful, churlish. A long finger gestured for Owen to enter.