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“She’s not thinking about things like this, Trevor. Your mother has her hands full with Lila. She’s much better with the whole pregnancy thing, seeing as I’ve never been pregnant.”
 

Seeming embarrassed, Trevor glanced down at Piper’s body then back at his own chest.

“Your mom’s good at being a mother, and I’m good at … ” She trailed off.
Nagging
came to mind, but Piper didn’t like that at all. She searched for a replacement to describe her pestering duties. Nothing came.
 

“Look,” Piper said. “Think of it this way: do you think it’s stupid to keep checking those cameras?”
 

“Maybe.”
 

“What if tomorrow is the day you check them and see your father?” Piper pointed toward the spiral staircase in the room’s corner. “Right up there, at the door by the bathroom, appearing on the kitchen camera. What if he comes back, but we never see it?”
 

“Can’t he just knock?”
 

The simple question — and the almost hopeless way Trevor had asked — broke Piper’s heart. “I don’t think he could do anything we’d hear, sweetie. The door is strong, and closed is closed.”
 

Trevor shifted moodily on the couch. “If you wanted him to come back, you shouldn’t have closed us in.”
 

“That’s not fair, Trevor. We discussed this. All of us, together.”
 

Trevor shook his head. Again, Piper tried to slip inside his mind to see things as he must be seeing them. He wasn’t trying to be difficult. He was dealing with their situation in the only way his defenses allowed. They
all
had their defenses. Heather made jokes; Lila got bitchy and blamed it on pregnancy hormones; Raj acted like an obnoxious prima donna, complaining and whining and futilely trying to contact his family on his idiotic little communicator watch. And Piper? She checked manuals and made chore lists.

As Trevor had said: the bunker ran itself so long as power from the windmill stayed on. And yes, that power had been buggy, but it was nothing she needed to worry about. There were redundancies: a rechargeable battery array inside the bunker, plus solar panels on the roof and in a nearby clearing. If redundancies failed, a generator sitting in the utility room with the battery array exhausted to the outside. And if
that
failed (or if its gasoline went bad; she’d read that it only lasted about six months), they had daylight reflected down from concealed skylights to light their way, propane to heat the place, and a lifetime’s supply of food. There were plenty of lanterns and LED flashlights, plus a few security lights mounted on the walls. They’d be fine. Her constant policing was just whistling in the dark, and it wasn’t fair to blame Trevor because his coping strategies appeared less productive than hers. Fretting was fretting, no matter its form.
 

“I didn’t
want
to close the door, Trevor. But we all agreed that we had to. We left it open as long as we could. It isn’t as if we can just leave the thing closed and unlocked. Your dad changed something when we came in the first time, somehow arming the place. Now the only way to get in is for the person on the inside to
let
them in. We would have had to literally prop it open. And how would
that
work once the crowds started showing up?”

Trevor looked toward the ceiling. It was made of reinforced concrete and could probably (knowing Meyer) withstand a bomb blast. But for a moment Trevor seemed to be trying to see or hear through it — to cast accusing eyes on the hundreds of people occupying the house, the grounds, the hills beyond the trees in their tents. The people who’d forced the family to shut the door that might keep his father out.
 

Power flickered. Piper flinched, looked up, and saw a tear brimming in the corner of Trevor’s eye. He noticed it before it could fall and wiped it furiously away.
 

He looked toward the TV, obviously longing. For the first month and a half, that thin black screen had been their window to the world. They’d obsessively watched. Then, one morning, Lila had turned it on and found nothing. There was still power to the set and satellite receiver, but not a single channel on air. The Internet died the same day. Cell service, spotty from the start, had ceased. They’d used the screen to watch old TV shows stored on the living room juke ever since. They’d been living in a little black box. Their world was the bunker and what the cameras showed them. Beyond that, there might not be any Earth left, for all the Dempseys knew.

“Do you really think he was … you know …
taken?
”

“I don’t know,” Piper said. But yes, she did think that — same as the many other abductions they’d heard of before the broadcasts stopped. Meyer wouldn’t have run off. Not after all he’d done to get them here. And if he’d gone out in the middle of the night and been killed, they would have discovered his body. Despite searching far and wide, they’d found nothing.
 

“Do you think any more of the people who were taken have been sent home?”

Piper patted his arm. She had no idea. It had been five or six weeks since they’d seen their last news report, but as of that time, abductees had been returning at a rate of about five or ten per week. They simply arrived back at their doorsteps — always dazed and confused, usually strange to loved ones and friends, sometimes paranoid and violent. Even if Meyer returned, he might be different. But still, even after all this time, there was a chance he might come home as he’d been, against all odds. But here and now, Trevor was seeking reassurance rather than fact.

“I’m sure they have been, honey.”

“And do you think — ”
 

Trevor didn’t finish.
 

At that moment, the bunker lights began to go out for good.

CHAPTER TWO

“Goddammit,” Morgan Matthews said, looking at the lock.
 

Terrence was behind him, holding his tools. He’d placed the high-powered flashlights, still on and pointed at the nook by the home’s bathroom, on the unfinished kitchen countertop. Morgan didn’t need to look back at Terrence to imagine his face: smug — very
I told you so.

Morgan didn’t want to turn and confirm. He might kill Terrence if he saw that look on his face. And he needed them all, at least for now.
 

“I told you,” Terrence said.
 

Morgan clenched his fists, fingernails digging into his palms. He forced himself to take a quiet, sighing breath before turning. He found Terrence’s dark features devoid of his smug look, but the fucker had gone ahead and said the words aloud.
 

“Hack it,” Morgan said.
 

Terrence shook his head. His black skin made him hard to read in the twilit room, and his sunglasses in the dark made Morgan want to punch him. His hair managed to look stylish instead of disheveled. His vest mocked the air’s chill in the same way his sunglasses scorned the mostly set sun. His bare, lean arms were painted in tattoos. Morgan never understood why black guys got tattoos. It seemed like a waste of ink since you could barely see them. Morgan’s own Irish skin — which had no tattoos — would have made a much better canvas.
 

Terrence’s defiantly cool manner, as he looked back at him now, infuriated Morgan and made him want to shove a gun in his belly. But he’d never enter the concealed basement without Terrence. He forced himself to let the irritation go. Besides, that displeasure was misplaced. He loathed
the closed
door
. He merely disliked Terrence and the other four men in his crew in the way Morgan Matthews disliked everyone.
 

“I can’t hack that lock, boss.”
 

“Why not?”
 

“For one, how am I supposed to get in? The computer controlling the lock is inside the door or behind it. But secondly, I don’t know anything about it.”
 

Morgan pulled on the door. It wasn’t just closed and locked; its very substance felt solid, as if its core were concrete or solid steel. “But you cut the power.”
 

“This system is solid. Cutting the power isn’t enough.”
 

“You cut the
redundant
power, too.”

Terrence shrugged again.
 

Morgan turned toward the approaching footsteps, coming from the kitchen behind him. It was the kid, Cameron. Morgan liked Cameron better than Terrence, despite him being a thug with no special skills. He and Dan, the big mother Cameron had shown up with, seemed like scrappers. Maybe they had a gay thing going on; Morgan didn’t know or care.
 

Cameron had a screw loose, and that was all that mattered. Morgan liked a little crazy in the people he worked with.
 

Some dumbass from the tents-and-hippies set camping around the house had questioned Morgan’s authority to cordon off the estate’s west side at the nook where they found the exhaust pipe. The same dumbass had complained when Dan and Vincent dug around the pipe, searching for treasure. Morgan didn’t like being questioned. But before he could so much as threaten the dumbass into submission, Cameron had leaped on the guy and beaten him until there were maybe three breaths left in his body. So yeah, Cameron was the coolest of the bunch, in Morgan’s mind. A real team player.
 

“That pipe over on the side of the house is still cold, Morgan,” Cameron said, his breath a bit short. That was another thing Morgan liked about Cameron. The kid hustled, even if only from the home’s side to the kitchen door.

Terrence turned to face Cameron. Then finally — blessedly — he removed his oversized sunglasses and tucked them into his vest pocket.
 

“Of course it’s cold,” he said. “What, did you think the generator was going to kick on?”
 

Dan and Christopher entered the kitchen behind Cameron. Outside, in the fading light, Morgan could see a few of the gathered hippies watching them enter the kitchen. They’d looked askance at Morgan and his men since their arrival, but those hippies out there wouldn’t say dick. Even at the end of the world, tough ideas failed at the finish line. Morgan’s gun didn’t stop them. Many people in the crowd had guns. But with their pussy attitudes, those guns might as well be sticks. Morgan was willing to
use
his weapons — even for the hell of it. Most people weren’t as cool with violence. Morgan was, and those asswipes knew it from watching his walk.
 

Dan and Christopher traded a glance. They seemed as if they might report the same thing as Cameron: that the exhaust pipe sticking out of the foundation was still cold, and they were surprised that Terrence had been right — that the machine on the other end of that pipe was off and would remain that way.

“I told you, I clipped off the switch,” said Terrence. “The generator won’t kick on as long as it doesn’t realize power from the windmill and solar has been interrupted.” He looked at them, annoyed. You didn’t question Terrence’s technical know-how. Even Morgan, who was otherwise in charge, knew that.

Christopher said, “I’m not even convinced that’s a generator on the other end of that pipe.”

“
It
’
s a generator,
” said Terrence. “There’s a pipe sticking out of the wall.”
 

“Maybe it’s a furnace,” Christopher said.

“It’s not a furnace,” Terrence retorted.
 

“How do you know?”
 

Terrence rubbed his forehead as if Christopher’s stupidity hurt him. “It’s not a big enough pipe to be a furnace. It’s also not insulated. There’s not nearly enough clearance, and it turns a ninety-degree angle within six inches of the foundation. No zoning inspector in the world would okay that, and this is new construction.” Terrence gestured toward the unfinished kitchen.

Christopher chewed his lip. “We’re wasting our time here.”
 

“How so?” Terrence asked.

“Digging down the side of the house to where the pipe enters the foundation all goddamned day. Jimmying with those wires and junctions.” Christopher wiped his nose. “We should be fleecing these fucking hippies. Hell, they
want
to be taken; you hear them serenading the aliens with Kumbaya. Why wait not make it easy on them? We could
take
shit from them right now.”

Terrence put a hand on Christopher’s arm. Christopher flinched then settled. Terrence glanced at Morgan then gave Christopher his “shut your mouth because I’m trying to save you from getting shot by the boss” look.
 

“We’ve searched the house,” he said, still watching Christopher’s eyes. “There’s no basement access inside, and yet there’s
clearly
an exhaust pipe coming out of the ground over there. So what did we do, Christopher?”

“We dug.”
 

Terrence nodded. “We dug. And we found out that the pipe goes right into the foundation. Think about that for a minute. What does a pipe going through a house’s foundation say to you?”
 

“Who cares?”
 

“There are no crawlspace vents around this place. No cellar access on the outside. No basement staircase. And yet still, there’s clearly something under the house. Some machine worthy of what’s
clearly
an exhaust pipe.”