Лайонел Шрайвер - The Mandibles - A Family, 2029-2047

“This guy’s been dead a long time,” Willing said. “That probably makes us lucky.” Were he pressed to theorize: what made corpses horrifying was moisture. The completely alive and the completely dead, fine. The in-between was the problem.

“You up for one more level?” Nollie gestured to the staircase, which wound farther down. “I’m intrigued.”

“Take my hand.” She seized it. He wasn’t sure who was comforting whom.

The floor below contained an elaborate kitchen: convection oven, microwave, slow cooker, a KitchenAid mixer with a clatter of attachments. Finely tooled ash with stylish brass fixtures, the cabinet doors were flung open. Whatever ruffians had rifled the larder were not culinarily inclined. They’d left behind the bread maker, pasta machine, and food processor, while julienne slicers and olive pitters littered the linoleum. Though the floor was sticky from broken bottles of evaporated goo, several shelves were lined with cocktail onions, caviar, artichoke hearts, anchovies, hazelnut oil, and preserved lemons. What struck Willing about this buried Dean & Deluca Christmas basket was that there wasn’t merely one jar of Seville marmalade with Glenlivet. Like all the other chichi comestibles, there were dozens of marmalade jars—foreshortening two feet deep.

He picked up a jar of candied kumquats, and brushed it off. Mumbling, “My mother didn’t believe in sell-by dates,” he slipped it into his belt pack.

Nollie was panning her fleXpot over the contents of an open chest freezer, six of which lined a whole quadrant of this level. Poking at the contents with a long-handled barbecue spatula, she read from the labels. “Sea bass, filet mignon, duck breast, quail, foie gras, smoked salmon—”

“ Eat your salmon,” Willing remembered.

“I don’t think so.” The airless plastic packets were uniformly an evil black.

Opposite the kitchen, a curved dining table of an exotic wood traced the circular wall of the silo. Three of its residents were propped in chairs. They looked hungry.

“The circulation system must have kept working for quite a while,” Willing supposed. “Or the smell in here might be unbearable. What do you say—one more?”

They curled a third flight down—which entailed nudging one of their worse-for-wear hosts out of the way, about whom they became blasé with unnerving rapidity. Willing would have predicted this: a floor-to-ceiling wine cellar in the round. Or that’s what he inferred, though it was here that previous tourists had concentrated their pillage. Most of the bottles were missing, and those that remained were empty: drained fifty-year-old Bordeauxs lay amid discarded cardboard canisters of Talisker and elaborate wooden corks of top-shelf cognac.

“I know something about French wine,” Nollie said, raising a broken bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. “This was a good year.”

“If we’re going to rule out a virus, that was their mistake.” Willing pointed to a break in the grid of cubbyholes: a tall, empty cabinet whose open glass door nonetheless sported a sophisticated lock. Inside, the sections were long and vertical.

The next floor down was an entertainment center, where three corpses were riveted by a cinema screen of a size that a maXfleX could now duplicate in any teenager’s bedroom. Below that, a lounge area, where several socializers seemed a bit too relaxed. The two floors thereafter were all residential units, each with a private sitting room and bath. These, too, had been ransacked, the dresser drawers yanked out, the mattresses flung. If the scavengers had been searching for valuables—jewelry, gold—Willing bet they scored handsomely. But they hadn’t bothered to take the cash, scattered willy-nilly around the bedrooms like discarded candy wrappers. He picked up a $100 bill, an original-issue greenback—too small to blow your nose in, not absorbent enough to clean your glasses. When the dollar was replaced by the dólar nuevo, like most people he’d been glad to see the back of the old currency, and hadn’t thought to save a sample as a memento. The distinctive flannel texture, the painfully pompous engraving, triggered an unexpected nostalgia. He pocketed the bill.

Including an enormous backup water tank, the bottom level was for storage. Looters had disregarded most of the contents: gluten-free pasta, running shoes, joint supports, and sea-salt truffles, one of whose assortments Willing opened; the glaucous chocolates were brittle and encrusted, like barnacles. Here also was the trash compactor. The dense, variegated cubes stacked beside it numbered under a dozen. This underground summer camp hadn’t lasted long.

On the way back up, Nollie spotted a glint amidst the discarded bottles in the wine cellar, and rescued a magnum of champagne, its foil intact. “Whole reason we came here,” she said. “I’m thirsty.”

When they emerged, Goog was grumpy, and, after their detailed lowdown, jealous. Before sliding into the driver’s seat, Nollie popped the cork. “Can’t remember the last time I needed a drink more,” she said, and took a slug.

“If you’re going to hit the bottle, you have to put the Myourea in automatic.”

“Willing, you’re such a pussy drag.” But she conceded, and once she bumped back to the mesmerizing straightaway on I-80 put her feet up. Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska played for atmosphere while they round-robined the warm champagne.

“So was that some nuclear bunker, then?” Goog asked.

“I checked the dates on the food,” Willing said. “It was all bought in ’33. So they were hiding from worse than nuclear holocaust: other people. Unfortunately for them, they let some of the other people inside.”

“Were they attacked, then?” Goog wondered. “Robbed?”

“Nah,” Willing said. “This is America. There was a gun cupboard. Better than even odds they killed each other.”

“Lived high beforehand, though,” Nollie said.

“They were rich,” Willing said. “And they were old.”

“Rich, obviously,” Nollie said. “But how can you tell if a corpse is old?”

“By their products thou shalt know them,” Willing intoned. “The exercise equipment is a generational giveaway. The bathrooms were stocked to the ceiling with anti-aging creams, tooth-whitening gel, and caffeine shampoo. Medication for hypertension, cholesterol, erectile dysfunction—and not only a vial or two. Hundreds. Wish I could have told Great Grand Man—we finally found out who cornered the national market on laxatives.”

“And your poor mother,” Nollie said to Goog, “hoarded Post-it notes.”

Rumors had long circulated about the “über-rich.” In folklore, these pampered fiscal vampires had retreated to fortified islands of sumptuous abandon, paddling in pools, propping piña coladas, while their countrymen starved. To discover that they hadn’t all escaped unscathed—that, if nothing else, they may not have escaped one another—was satisfying.

Attempting to cross into the Free State on I-80 seemed a little obvious. Opting for the road less traveled by was the whole reason they’d chosen a northerly entry point into Nevada in the first place: most subversive emigrants would take I-70 to Las Vegas. If the degree of fortification along the border varied, Immigration and Customs Enforcement would surely concentrate its discouragements near the renegade state’s largest and most famous city in its far south.

So Nollie exited the interstate for the secondary parallel roadway, US Route 58, which led into the town of Wendover, whose original municipal boundaries straddled the Utah-Nevada border. At first glance, Wendover seemed buzzier than similar communities en route. Hitherto, motels had been ramshackle, with bedraggled bedspreads and cracked, recycled plastic glasses. Here, more upscale hostelries looked new, with names like Pilgrim’s Rest, Pilgrim’s End, and Pilgrim’s Pillow. They didn’t seem to be referring to religious refugees in wide-brimmed hats. As their party drew farther into town, gaudy restaurants, casinos, and shops proliferated: The Turncoat Inn, The Deserter Sands, and Traitor Joe’s. Multiple establishments made droll allusions to what visitors like Willing most feared: Fission Chips, or Chip Off Ye Olde Block. The Last Chance Bar advertised concoctions christened Brain Freeze and Stroke in a Glass .