“I’m just frying those onion rings,” I called. “Do you need mustard?”
“Send down a whole jar. I’ll go nuts.”
“Steak’s nearly ready.”
“Nice and juicy, is it, Greg?”
“It’s beautiful. You’re going to love what’s on this tray. Steak, fries, the trimmings. A whole pie. A jug of cold sweet cream. Keep that image in your mind, Phoenix.”
The voice came back calm and genuinely grateful. “I knew I could rely on you to help me, Greg. Thanks, buddy. You’re a good man.”
“Here it comes.” I nodded to Zak, who placed the tray containing the dynamite into the midget elevator. Loosely, I coiled the fuse inside.
“I think you ought to speed things up. My roommate’s waking up. I think she’s gnnn…”
Tony shouted from the other room. “Hey, come and look at this-quickly, guys.”
“The food’s coming down, Phoenix,” I shouted and lit the fuse. As the sparks flew I slammed the door shut and hit the DOWN button. With a click it began to hum its way down to the sealed room below.
“Greg!” Tony’s voice rose. “Hurry!”
I ran into the adjoining room. On screen Phoenix rose from his chair. One look told me that thing had him in its grip. His eyes glazed. He moved like a sleep-walker. Behind him, the girl still sat as she had before, not moving so much as a finger, as if asleep.
Tony grunted. “Looks like sleeping beauty woke.”
I focused on the screen. Her eyes had opened. There was something cool and distant about them. They looked up at the camera that filmed her… It seemed as if she gazed through the TV screen directly at us.
Over the speaker I heard the buzz as the dumbwaiter descended into the Communications Center. In a dreamlike way Phoenix went to it, opened the elevator door. For a second he stood there without reacting, even though he must have seen the two sticks of dynamite and the burning fuse.
In one fluid movement he scooped the dynamite from the dumbwaiter, then as if he was shielding a newborn baby from the rain, he hugged it to his chest before moving away from the girl. He walked to the farthest corner of the room; there he pressed himself to where the two walls joined.
In an unearthly way things seemed to stay like that for whole moments, Phoenix pushing himself face first to the wall, the fuse burning toward the explosive he clutched to his stomach.
The girl gazed at the camera. Her eyes were languid, even sleepy. I knew she understood what was happening. Only she didn’t seem afraid. She tilted her head to one side, as if studying the expression on my face. Her dark hair spilled down over one naked breast. Her lips parted like she was just about to speak.
Then the flame reached the detonator. With a cracking thump a blossom of flame erupted in the corner of the room where Phoenix stood. A second later something wet and red struck the lens, smearing it so thickly we could no longer see the interior of the room.
For a moment no one spoke. The thick concrete floor that separated the lounge from the room beneath our feet shielded us. Even so, it knocked enough dust out of the carpet to mist the air. Electric lights flickered, then steadied again. The computer faithfully compensated for any damage; the backup systems kicked in, the air conditioner hummed steadily as before. Even with its human controller dead, the bunker’s electronic brain would automatically maintain everything as before. Probably for months, if not years.
Zak looked ’round the room. “I guess all this is ours now.”
Tony grimaced. “We still have to evict the bad guys, remember?”
I knocked the dust off my arms. “They can’t spoil anything now. Besides, Phoenix will have made sure all the storerooms were locked up tight. First we need to get hold of those antibiotics for Michaela. And we need to fix Tony’s leg.” I smiled. “Then we can all come back here, clean the house and maybe enjoy a vacation.”
“First, how do we find a way out of here?”
“We’ll find a way.”
Zak put his hand on my forearm. “There was something else, too, Greg.”
“Oh?”
“What Phoenix said about you being from a hive. That you were the same as the girl.”
I shook my head. “You saw the state that guy was in. It was all a delusion.”
“Was it?”
“Keep believing it was.” I gave a grim smile. “Because that’s what I intend to do. OK, Tony, old buddy? If you can manage it, it’s time to take a little walk.”
Christmas
On the day I carried Tony out of the bunker on my back, trying not to knock his busted leg against the walls, it all changed. Only you never seem to know that you’ve reached one of those pivotal times in your life until much later, do you? Ben drove Tony back in the Jeep. The bottom of the vehicle almost dragged through the dirt, we’d piled so many supplies into the thing. All I knew then as I followed the Jeep was that I was grateful to be alive, that my buddies were alive and that the afternoon sunlight never seemed more beautiful to me than right then.
I rode alongside Zak on the Harley. For a while he’d talked about Phoenix and the girl in the bunker and asked me if she had some kind of telepathic powers. Would she have been able to reach inside our heads and control us, too? At last I smiled at him and called out over the noise of the motors, “Forget them, Zak. They’re dead. We’re not. That’s all that matters.”
So we rode on, seeing birds flying overhead. A deer ran alongside us for a while, as if wanting to join the pack, before peeling off to disappear into the heart of the forest. It still seemed then as if we’d carry on fighting for survival every single day of our lives. But that was the day we turned it all around.
Zak gave Michaela her antibiotic shots. It seemed in no time she was back to her old self, with those darkly erotic eyes and a smile so full of good humor you could almost light up a room with her. Tony’s leg healed. Before long he was hobbling ’round with a stick. Now it doesn’t bother him at all unless it rains; then he grumbles that it aches and he winds up growling like a bear with a sore rear end.
We know we would have starved if it weren’t for the bunker. First we had to clear out what was left of the hornets… dead ones, too, so they wouldn’t stink up the place. After that every few weeks we’d return with the Jeep (that now pulled a huge trailer); then we’d go crazy piling it high with fuel, food and ammunition before returning to the cabins on the hillside. What about Phoenix? Well, we never tried to break down the locked door that sealed Phoenix and the girl into what had become their tomb. “Let sleeping dogs lie,” was Michaela’s advice. Good advice, too. That episode was over. It was time to forget and start to live the rest of our lives.
And get this: The second half of the summer was a long and peaceful one. No hornets came our way. The biggest warm-blooded creature I saw was an elk that snuffled ’round the cabins one morning in the fall just as the leaves were turning red and the dawn mist bore an unmistakable chill. It was times like that I half believed I could climb on the Harley and roar all the way back home, where I’d push open the door to see Mom busy in the kitchen, and she’d smile up at me and say, “Hi, Greg. I made pizza for supper. Would you be a honey and go help Chelle with her homework?”
That was when ghosts came as stealthily as the dawnmist. But when all’s said and done ghosts are only memories. And memories are nothing more than movie clips from the past, right? They can’t-or shouldn’t-take control of your life. Even so every now and again old phantom memory would rise up. Once I dreamed of Phoenix. He was sitting on the end of the bed as Michaela slept beside me.
“I never thanked you for what you did, Valdiva,” he said. “Thanks, buddy; you set me free… You know she had me like a puppet… pull the string, pull the string…” Smiling, he pulled an invisible string.