The expression on Mom’s dead face was something entirely different. It was not my dad’s Sleeping Beauty—it was Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Mom’s eyes and mouth were open as wide as manholes, and her desperate fingers were clawing at her throat like ice axes stabbing at a frozen waterfall. I knew from my AP chemistry class that—unlike carbon monoxide poisoning, which can be achieved by sucking on a tailpipe—death by carbon dioxide can be quite painful. What I didn’t know was that, barring a miracle, Charlie and I were doomed to discover whether death by CO2 would be painful for us, too.
“No, no, no, no,” Charlie wailed, then choked on a sob as he fell to his knees. It was his crying, not the sight of Mom, that made me cry, because his grief was the only thing that felt real to me in that surreal moment. I don’t know how long we huddled in the doorway like that—him on his knees, and me steadying myself against the doorjamb—but I suddenly felt the weight of the earth bearing down on us.
“Get up, Charlie,” I said, yanking on his shirt. “We have to get out of here.”
He was still keening, so I pulled him up by his armpits and pushed him toward the stairs like a human tugboat.
“That’s it,” I soothed as I pushed. “Keep walking.”
I was behind him, so I couldn’t see the reason he was shaking his head, that it wasn’t from disbelief and sadness.
“We’re going to get out of here and call the police,” I said, pretending to be calm. And maybe on some level I did feel calm, because I knew the gargoyle that had lived on my shoulder my whole life had been permanently muzzled, and the steady stream of vitriol she spewed had finally been tamped.
“We can’t,” he stammered.
“Yes, we can.”
“No, we can’t,” Charlie cried. “The door is closed!”
I craned my neck to look. I had deliberately, without a doubt, and with great fanfare, left the door to our underground hell open. Growing up with a mother who always had a script that was more important than I was had made me come to revile closed doors. A closed door telegraphed you’re a nuisance, go away, leave me alone. So now I always left them open. Always. And so, like Charlie, I was shocked to see not rain and sky, but a cruel, dull slab blocking our way out.
I forced myself not to panic. “There’s a lever, one sec,” I said as I scooted past him and pulled on the mechanism. But it didn’t open.
I raised my hands over my head and pushed on the door. It still didn’t budge.
“Shit!”
“Let me try.”
My brother squeezed in next to me. He tugged on the lever, pushed on the door, and I pushed along with him, and it was entirely, exhaustingly, maddeningly futile.
“What the fuck?”
I suddenly flashed to Schr?dinger’s cat, the famous thought experiment we’d studied in my sophomore philosophy class. Stuck down here, in this hermetically sealed box, to the outside world, we were both alive and dead. Alive because we were, at least for the moment, still breathing and our hearts still beating. Dead, because in a matter of minutes, the toxic gas that had killed Mom was going to kill us, too.
CHAPTER 64
* * *
CHARLIE
At first I thought everything was going to be fine. Being trapped in a five-hundred-square-foot box with a dead body made me a little anxious, but my wife knew we were down there; I figured it was only a matter of time before she came to look for us. But when five minutes turned into ten turned into twenty, the frightful reality emerged: that door hadn’t closed by accident, my wife wasn’t coming to save us, and I had no one to blame for my sister’s and my imminent death but myself and my Stupid Lie.
When it became clear we couldn’t go out the same way we came in, Winnie and I split up to search the bunker for another way out. Our hermetically sealed hideaway was fifteen feet underground, which meant there were no fire exits, no back doors, no windows. There was a vent, but I could barely fit my arm in there, never mind my whole body. I couldn’t even send up a smoke signal, because, as we were about to find out the hard way, that vent had a baseball stuck in it—a complication that was neither inconsequential nor surmountable. This place was as secure as a bank vault. Which was great if there were hostile armies overhead, but catastrophic if the hostile party who had lured you in intended for you to never come out.
Mom had set the closed-circuit TV monitor—the only apparent connection to the outside world—on the kitchen counter. I wasn’t a tech guy, but I ascertained it was getting a live feed through the cable that ran into the bunker through a rigid copper pipe. There was no ethernet cable, no router, no Wi-Fi, and no cell service down there. And even if there were, it wouldn’t have mattered; my cell phone was on my bedside table two stories above my head.