He nodded, a frown wrinkling his brow. His face had so many shadows, could pull into so many different masks. Gentle, tired like he was now. Dark and angry as he had been last night when he and my mother fought. Peaceful when he played the guitar. Blank, hollow like he was just before his rages.
“Are you hungry?” I asked, eager to keep him as he was.
“A little,” he said with a shrug. “Can you cook?”
“I can make oatmeal. Would you like some?”
He nodded. “That would be nice, little bird. Then we’ll go out. I want to show you something.”
After breakfast, we walked through the woods, down a winding path that was barely there, cleared by Jay and my father. I had to nearly jog to keep up with him. As we walked, my father delivered one of his sermons.
“When the global financial collapse ends society as we know it, and the sky turns red with flames, people like us will be the survivors. The world will belong to us.”
“When? When will the world end?”
I wondered about my school, my teachers, the friends we’d left behind. What would happen to them when the world ended? And how could the world end? It didn’t seem possible—the air, the earth, the sky, the birds—all of it here long before us.
“It’s already ended. Humanity just hasn’t gotten the memo.”
“What’s a memo?”
Another chuckle. “Never mind. Here we are.”
We had come to stand before a squat cinder block building with a large metal door. It was jarring to come across it in a place of nature, all hard angles among the curve of trees, the swish of the wind, and drop of leaves.
“What is this place?” I asked, putting my hand on the cold metal door.
“It’s something my father built,” he said. “It’s a bunker. A safe house.”
He took a ring of keys from his pocket and unlocked the door. We stepped inside and climbed down a narrow flight of concrete steps with the outside light guiding our way. At the bottom, he unlocked another door.
He walked inside and turned on a battery-powered lantern that hung from a hook on the wall.
I followed him, my heart thumping, throat dry. There were two cots, a table with four chairs, a tattered plaid couch, piles of books and games, and what looked like endless rows of shelves stretching into the dark. The air was moldy and dank.
“Who lives here?”
“No one,” he said. “Right now, we just use it to store the things we’ll need later.”
He went deeper into the space with the lamp, and I followed him past rows of canned goods. I recognized some of the jams I’d made with my mother, her careful handwriting on the labeled jars—blueberry, strawberry, grape. Cans of tuna, sardines, beans, and beans and more beans—black, baked, pinto, garbanzo, navy—stood in tiny organized rows. Yams, apple sauce, peanut butter—giant tubs. Sacks of rice were stuffed into plastic containers. Rows of batteries, jugs of water. It seemed like enough to last a lifetime. Where had it all come from? Some of it was covered in dust; other items seemed new.
My father unlocked another door. Inside this deeper room, he held up the lantern.
I drew in a breath. Weapons. Bows and arrows, all manner of knives from serrated hunting knives to machetes. And an enormous stockpile of guns—semiautomatics, rifles, assault weapons, pistols, and rounds and rounds of ammunition. My throat went dry.
“Why do we need so many guns? Guns are for killing.”
A heavy hand on the crown of my head. “Because in the end, only those who can defend themselves will survive, little bird.”
“Defend against who?”
I looked up at him, sure that he was going to say something like aliens or zombies, the diseased undead.
“Each other.”
Something about the way he said it, the flat quality to his gaze made my whole body tingle.
That night I would dream of zombies and the sky turning red, running from a faceless demon through the trees, a demon who turned out to be my father.
Now, as I pull off the highway, the roads get smaller and smaller, until I’m on the one that will lead me right back to the place from which I am forever running.
The newspaper article I found in the box of your things is yellow and creased, lying on the passenger seat.
On the radio, David Bowie sings about the starman in the sky.
A sign by the side of the road reads: Welcome to The Hollows.
I pull onto Main Street and drive though the pretty square.
The Hollows is a picture postcard of a town, one of those places where people from the city come for the weekend to visit pumpkin patches, and pick apples, and drink cider, watch the leaves perform their wild color show of gold and amber, flame red, and bright orange. Quaint, they might call it. Peaceful. Bucolic. The tony boutiques selling local crafts and art and wool blankets from sheep up the road, the yoga studio bright and spare with white oak floors, the upscale coffee shop with its cold brews and gluten-free scones will seduce. It’s the kind of place urban dwellers long for when they imagine that simpler life.