The Compound (9 page)

Dad’s office door was shut. Through the thick wood, I could just barely hear him talking to himself. His tone sounded perturbed.

Suddenly my plan didn’t seem so great after all. I didn’t want to disturb him in the middle of work, especially if he was frustrated. The moment had to be right, and I sat down on the floor to the side of the door to wait. I tied back my hair, then pulled out the laptop from Eddy’s room.

The laptop came on. Out of habit, I clicked on the Internet icon. Because it was there. I waited for the message to come up and tell me I was not connected to the world.

But it didn’t.

Instead, another message came.

Wireless Network Now Connected
.

My jaw dropped. “What the hell?” Words formed in my mouth. I fought the urge to call out to Dad. But I remembered the promise I made to Mom, the promise to keep the laptop a secret.

The leather of his chair squeaked. “Is someone out there?”

I shut the laptop and cleared my throat. “Yeah, Dad, me. I wondered if you could help me with some experiments.” I stood up, scrambling to cover the laptop with my notebook. “Later’s fine, though, if you’re too busy.”

The door swung open. “Now’s fine.” Dad stood there in his usual jeans and T-shirt, a sheaf of papers under his arm.

I held my breath, trying to resist the urge to look down at Eddy’s laptop, hoping that, half covered by the papers, it resembled my other laptop enough to not draw his attention.

Dad moved toward me as the door shut, but I still got a glimpse of his office.

Although it was infinitesimal, I noticed something. My father had always been meticulous. He believed in a place for everything, everything in its place. No variations; things were always in their spot as if glued there. So when my glance revealed something out of place, it didn’t take long to notice what item was not where it was supposed to be: the Seattle Seahawks football phone.

We headed toward the lab, Dad poring over a sheet of paper as he walked. He went into the hallway restroom, and I took the opportunity to open the laptop back up, see if the message was still there. There
was
a message. Just not the one I wanted to see.

Wireless Server Not Available
.

I shut the laptop. Had it been my imagination? Did I want to see something so badly that I hallucinated? In the lab, I slipped the laptop in a drawer before Dad could notice it.

“Oh, Eli. Here.” Dad handed me a CD.

Still freaked by the laptop, I just thanked him for the CD. I didn’t look at it until I was back in my room. The band was Cake. Never heard of them. The song started and my pencil started tapping.

I liked it. Which wasn’t always the case with the songs Dad gave me.

The song ended and I ejected to find out the name of it.

The door stuck, trapping the CD halfway out. I noticed the label on top of the CD had an edge sticking up. Took me a little while to get a good enough grip before I could yank it out.

The label was simply a printout, made with high-quality photo paper, somehow heat sealed or laminated. Tearing it all the way off revealed a recordable CD. In black Sharpie, the name of the band was written in Dad’s handwriting.

A date followed: a very recent date. My hand slapped over my mouth.

How was that possible? How in the hell did I come to be holding a copy of a CD made only weeks ago?

It was like the dated note I’d found in the chapel. But I wasn’t going to dismiss this one so easily.

I’d been holding my breath. It came out in a rush.

Unless we always had the music and Dad simply made a copy of it, adding the date as he always did.

I dug through the stack of CDs on my desk, all given to me by my father. For the next hour, I used the sharp side of some scissors to scrape away at several labels. All fake. All PC-recorded CDs with handwritten names and dates.

All the dates well after we were in the Compound.

In the media room, I found the catalog that listed every CD we had with us. I took it back to my room.

My finger tracked down the list as I perused it for any of the groups on my desk. I went through the entire stack, dozens. There wasn’t a listing for any of them. This was no small omission on my dad’s part. This was colossal.

I
WAS AWAKE ALL NIGHT, THINKING
. I
WAS PISSED, PISSED AT
the possibility that my father was keeping things from me, maybe even lying. And if that was true, I would be even more upset at myself for being such a dupe, just taking things lying down, believing everything he said.

But I was also afraid of what would happen when I did ask him for the truth. What if he didn’t give it to me? Worse, what if he did and it wasn’t what I wanted to hear?

But I knew what Eddy would do. I also knew he wasn’t here to do it for me.

Right away the next morning, before I could chicken out, I pounded on Dad’s office door.

He opened it. “I’m busy, Eli. Can it wait?” There were deep circles under his eyes and his jaw was covered with stubble. Must have been one of his sleepless nights. He was wrapped in a plaid fleece blanket in his chair, leaning out the door just enough to see me.

I handed him the Cake CD and waited.

“What’s wrong? Doesn’t it play?” He noticed the missing label, the date written in his own handwriting. His face paled.

“Dad, I think …” I suddenly wasn’t sure what I thought. My carefully considered argument abandoned me. So, heart pounding, I stammered out what I could. “I’ve felt for a while like something isn’t right.” A bit of a lie, since it had taken Terese to open my eyes.

Dad opened the door wider and scooted his chair back to his desk. He set the CD down, then leaned back in his chair. I couldn’t believe he was being so open, ushering me into his inner sanctum. I froze, and wondered if I looked as dumbstruck as I felt. He motioned for me to sit down on the couch, where a pillow and blanket lay, and I realized he’d been sleeping there. I moved them aside to make room.

I sat, then untucked my hair from behind my ears and let it fall forward over my eyes. My eyes strayed to the padlocked door, but I dismissed it for the moment. One thing at a time.

Dad removed his reading glasses. He took his time folding them before he placed them on his desk. He yawned and pulled the blanket up around him.

Inside, I screamed at him to get on with it.

“Eli, there’s something you don’t know.”

You think?
I remained silent.

“I’ve always told you the Compound is wired for communication. Of course, I never expected to use it, given
that all communication would be decimated: phones, Internet, fax. But a while ago, I got a wireless Internet signal.”

My mouth gaped.

Dad smiled, nodding. “I know, I know, it felt like a miracle. I didn’t want to say anything.”

Even though I knew he’d been keeping stuff from us, that revelation threw me. “Why not?” My words were full of disbelief. With a subtle trace of accusation.

One of Dad’s hands crept up to scratch the back of his neck. “It was sporadic. Limited. Some days it worked, some days it didn’t. I didn’t want to get your hopes up. And of course I didn’t communicate with anyone at first.”

The accusation went from a trace to full blown. “At first?”

“About a year ago, I did get in touch with another survivor. A music-label mogul from L.A., has a shelter in a remote area of Canada. He prepared in much the same way I did. His kids were older when they went in and he offered to send some of their music for you. So I downloaded it.”

I pushed back my hair as I tried to sort the new information. “That’s it? The Internet comes back up and you download music?”

Dad scrunched up his forehead. “Mmm, noooo. Things are slowly coming back out there. Of course most of the satellites would still have to be intact. I’m thinking a government somewhere, maybe ours, spread wireless Internet like a blanket, so survivors could be in contact with one
another. Remember that place we went to in Colorado, on our skiing vacation?”

I nodded. “Yeah. They had free wireless all over town.”

He laid his hands out toward me, like he was giving me a gift. “There you go, just like that.”

It seemed so simple. Too simple. “So what else have you found out?”

Dad crossed his arms. “Not much, as far as conditions and such. I’m hopeful, if it was the government who got the Internet going again, that they’ll start giving us updates.”

“What about the phone? Does it work, too?”

Dad frowned. He shrugged slightly. “I try it now and then.”

I sat up straighter, faced my father. I was nearly breathless. “Why can’t we go outside now, and see? See what it’s like out there?”

“Eli, you know what it’s like out there.”

“Dad, it’s been years.” I knew I was on the losing side of the debate due to the grim reality of radiation sickness; vile beyond belief, endless puke and diarrhea until you die. Oppenheimer’s cholera.

“Eli, think about who you’re talking to. I
do
know what it’s like out there. And we’ve got to follow the plan if we have a chance of survival. The day will come when we open the door.”

“How?”

“How what?”

Fists formed at my sides. I fought the urge to shout the words. “The door. How does it open?”

“There’s a time lock, set to open fifteen years from the date we entered.”

I already knew that much. Why was he so damned stingy with the details? I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “Can it be opened before then?”

Dad scratched the stubble on his chin. “Oh, it can. With the code.”

Even though I could assume the answer, I asked anyway. “Who knows the code?”

“I do, of course.”

“Does Mom?”

His lip curled a bit. “I couldn’t risk that. I didn’t want you to know this, but a few months before we came down here she was having some problems.”

This was news to me. “What kind of problems?”

“She was having some panic attacks, extreme anxiety. You were young, and you and your brother and sisters couldn’t have understood that I had access to information about … things.”

“What kind of things?”

“Government information. Mainly the probability of a nuclear attack.”

“But you told Mom?”

He nodded. “She had to be medicated. And she can’t be on antianxiety meds when she’s pregnant. Her first bout of anxiety down here and she’d be running for the door, condemning us all.”

I could see Dad’s having ties to the government, but the stuff about Mom was bull. I didn’t buy it at all. She was
mostly calm and functional, especially given everything she’d gone through the past six years. My head started to hurt. I took a moment to rub my eyes. “So you’re the only person who knows the code.”

Dad took a big swig from a light blue bottle of antacid. It gave him a white mustache. He wiped it off with his sleeve. “Eli, I know what you’re thinking. If nothing else, we’re safe down here.”

I met his gaze. “Can the door be opened from the outside?”

“No. Only inside. No one looking for it would ever find it, anyway.” His expression became smug.

The smugness creeped me out. Just my opinion, but people in shelters after nuclear wars have no business being smug. “Why not?”

His hand moved up to scratch his head. “Remember what the land out there looks like?”

From what I could recall, the area was pretty but nondescript, with hills, trees. “Fairly basic landscape.”

“For seven years, workers built this place. For seven years, they traveled forty miles from the closest town, past the stand of pine trees, went a mile, and took a left at a boulder. Then six more miles and several switchbacks in the road until they reached the shuttle.”

“Shuttle?” I tried to keep my voice neutral. The
scrsshh scrsshh
sound of his scratching drove me crazy.

His hand dropped, coming to a stop on his bottle of antacid. “A bus basically, which took them the rest of the way to the supply entrance. Which was nowhere near the hatch.
And of course, on the shuttle ride they were blindfolded.” He took another drink, and then resumed his noisy scratching.

Chills crawled up my spine as a lock of hair slipped off my ear and over one eye. “They knew they were working for you?”

Dad laughed. “Of course not. My accountant took care of everything. They all thought it was for a sultan from the Middle East. Old Phil cooked up one heckuva story. The day they finished, they sealed up the supply entrance. Then they drove away for the last time. The next day the pine trees and boulders and any other landmarks disappeared. There’s no chance they could ever find it again without the GPS coordinates. I made certain they didn’t have those.”

“Why did it have to be so secret?”

Dad leaned back in his chair, his hands finally coming to a rest behind his head. “Don’t be naïve, Eli. People will do anything to survive. Had people known about this place there would have been crowds begging to get in. I couldn’t have that.”