Морган Райс - Arrival

“Do you think people are all right?” Luna asked. “Do you think my parents are?”

Kevin swallowed, thinking of the people lining up to go into the ships. His mother would have been somewhere among them too.

“I hope so,” he said.

“It feels wrong,” Luna said. “We’re safe here in a bunker, while everyone else is stuck out there… how many people do you think were converted?”

Kevin thought about the vast seas of people there had been on the screens before they went blank, and the dwindling numbers of people there to report on it all.

“I don’t know, a lot,” he guessed.

“Maybe everybody,” Luna said. “Maybe we’re the last ones.”

“We should look around,” he said. “Maybe we can find a way to turn it all back on. Then we can see.”

He said it as much to try to distract Luna as because he thought they had a hope of doing it. What did they know about fixing computer systems? If one of the scientists from the NASA institute had been there… maybe Dr. Levin… but they were gone, just like everyone else. They’d been transformed by the vapor, turning into things that had chased after them and hunted them.

“Come on,” he said to Luna, gently pulling her away from the screen. “We need to look around.”

Luna nodded, though she didn’t seem to be taking much of it in right then. “I guess so.”

They set off through the bunker underneath Mount Diablo, and Kevin looked around, surprised by the sheer space of it. If they’d been looking around a place like this at a different time, it might have seemed like an adventure. As it was, every echoing step reminded Kevin just how alone they were. This was a whole military base, and they were the only ones in it.

“This is cool,” Luna said, her smile too bright to be real. “Like sneaking through warehouses.”

Kevin could tell that her heart wasn’t in it, though. She might have been trying her best to be the old Luna, but what came out was too flat for that.

“It’s okay,” Kevin said, “you don’t have to pretend with me. I’m…”

What could he say? That he was sad too? It didn’t seem like enough to encompass the end of the world, or the loss of everyone they’d known, or any of it, really.

“I know,” Luna said. “I’m just trying to be… hopeful, I guess. Come on, let’s see what’s here.”

Kevin had the feeling of her wanting the distraction, so they headed deeper into the bunker. It was a huge space, which looked as though it could have housed hundreds of people if it needed to. There were pipes and cables leading away into its depths, and signs stenciled on the walls in yellow paint.

“Look,” Luna said, pointing, “there’s a kitchen that way.”

Kevin could feel his stomach rumbling at the thought, and although it didn’t cut through the rest of it, the two of them turned off in the direction the sign indicated. They walked down one corridor, then another, coming out into a kitchen that was built on an industrial scale. There were freezers set toward the back, behind doors that could have protected a vault, and other doors that seemed to lead off into storerooms.

“We should see if there’s any food in them,” Luna suggested, opening one.

The space behind was even larger than Kevin might have expected, stacked with box after box. He opened one and found silvery, sealed packets that looked as though they would keep forever.

“There’s enough food to feed us for a lifetime here,” Kevin said, and then realized exactly what he’d just said. “Not that… I mean, we might not have to stay here forever.”

“What if we do, though?” Luna asked.

Kevin wasn’t sure he had a good answer for that. He couldn’t imagine living forever in here. He could barely imagine a lifetime, let alone one night, spent in a bunker. “Then I guess we’re better in here than out there. At least here we’re safe.”

“I guess so,” Luna said, with a look around at the walls that seemed to assess how thick they were. “Safe, yes.”

“We should see what else is here,” Kevin said. “If we’re going to be staying here, we’ll need other things. Water, places to sleep, fresh air. A way to talk to the outside.”

He counted them off on his fingers as he thought of them.

“We should see if there are other ways in or out, too,” Luna said. “We want to make sure that no one else can get in.”

Kevin nodded, because that seemed like an important one. They started to search the bunker, using the kitchen as a kind of base, going back and forth between it and the main control room, which seemed curiously silent without anything on its screens.

There was another room nearby that was filled with communications equipment. Kevin saw radios and computers. There was even something that looked like an old-fashioned telegraph machine in the corner, as if the people there didn’t trust that the more modern equipment would be there for them when it was needed.

“They have so much stuff,” Luna said, pressing a button and getting a burst of white noise in response.

“ We have so much stuff now,” Kevin pointed out. “Maybe if there are other people out there, we’ll be able to communicate with them.”

Luna looked around. “Do you think there are other people left? What if it’s just us?”

Kevin didn’t know what to say to that. If he was going to be trapped as one of the last people in the world, there was no one he’d rather be stuck with than his best friend. Even so, he had to believe that there were others out there somewhere. He had to.

“There must be other people somewhere,” he said. “There are other bunkers and things, and some people will have worked out what was happening. There were people broadcasting pictures, so they must have known what was going on.”

“But the screens went blank,” Luna pointed out. “We don’t know that they’re still out there.”

Kevin swallowed at that thought. He’d assumed that the signal had just cut off, but what if it wasn’t the signal? What if the people sending it were also gone?

He shook his head. “We can’t think like that,” he said. “We have to hope that there are more people out there.”

“People who can kill the aliens,” Luna said, with a harsh glint in her eye. Kevin got the feeling that if she’d had the means to fight them, Luna would have been out there right now trying to take them on.

Kevin could understand that. It was a part of who Luna was; a part of what he liked about her so much. He even felt a part of the same anger, feeling it bubbling up inside him at the thought of being tricked by the aliens, and at everything that had been taken from him.

He needed the distraction of looking around the bunker as much as Luna did, because the alternative was thinking about his mom, and his friends, and everyone else who might have been standing under the alien ships when they came.

They continued looking around the bunker, and it didn’t take long to find what looked like a back way out. The words “Unsealed Environment. For Emergency Escape Only!” were stenciled above a hatch that looked like the torpedo tube from a submarine, complete with big circular handle to seal it. It seemed barely big enough for most people to crawl through. Of course, for Kevin and Luna it would mean plenty of space.

“Unsealed environment?” Luna said. “What do you think that means?”

“I guess it means that there’s no airlock on this exit?” Kevin said, not sure. The words stenciled around it made it sound like something hugely dangerous to open. Maybe it was.

“No airlock?”

“People wouldn’t want one if they had to get out fast.”

He saw Luna’s hand go to the gas mask that she’d had to wear for the whole drive over, and that now hung from the belt of her jeans. Kevin could guess what she was thinking.