The Great Big One Read online

  Griff paid attention to his mouth. Ran his tongue along his teeth. Licked his lips. Could he do it properly? What if the Thunderbolt 1000T went off—could he kiss and be kissed? He retreated to the fantasy scenario in which the school reacted to news of impending doom by flying into unbridled, erotic abandon. Couples shoving up against lockers, on the floor, shutting themselves into supply closets, whipping off clothes as sirens wailed and the impending apocalypse counted down to zero—

  The conversation moved to the lighthouse.

  Griff perked up. This was important.

  Dunbar had continued to repeat his idea, steady as war drums.

  “We need to deal with the lighthouse.”

  Meaning: convert it from a lighthouse to a military-style outpost. A long-simmering idea among the Preppers. Remove the only Fresnel light on this stretch of the coast. A two-ton, steel-and-glass miracle of engineering. Hundreds of concentric rings in a bull’s-eye pattern, visible for over 20 miles. They wanted to replace it with equipment to monitor incoming warheads, sea levels, the unsubstantiated threat of patrolling Russian submarines.

  “Not like a lighthouse is useful,” Jonesy said.

  “Not for the last few decades,” Dunbar said, agreeing with his son.

  “It’s good for tourism dollars,” Griff’s father said. Smart. He knew the word dollars would find purchase somewhere in the slick interior of Dunbar’s mind.

  “Then who is on SubWatch this week?” Dunbar asked.

  Griff let his eyes go blank. Imagined little glass plates in front of them. SubWatch, as a duty, was the Prepper equivalent of scrubbing toilets. Outside in waders. Holding a giant copper receiver. Listening to the wordless thrum of low-frequency broadcasts until you prayed for someone to please just bomb the coast already.

  “See?” Dunbar said. “Everyone wants to save the lighthouse, but no one wants to work!” Jonesy finally volunteered, and they moved on to assigning the three available alert tones for the Thunderbolt 1000T siren. Tone one would signify a warning for the Cascadia Subduction Earthquake. Tone two: Nuclear Attack. After a debate on wildfires vs. mudslides vs. terrorist incursion, they agreed the most practical use for tone three would be to announce monthly city council meetings, as tardiness had become an issue.

  Dunbar played the three tones on his bunker stereo. Tone one. Tone two. Tone three. He played them again. Everyone leaned forward, squinting. Griff could not tell the difference between the tones. Leo and he exchanged a look like, what the hell?

  “They all sound the same,” Griff said.

  “They do not,” Dunbar said. “What do you think, Leo?”

  “More or less,” Leo said. “Like any three AC/DC songs.”

  “Oooo,” Jonesy said. The whole room looked at Thomas.

  “That comment has been logged for future retribution,” Thomas said.

  “That’s kind of a problem,” Griff said.

  “Yes,” Griff’s dad said. “We don’t want people to mishear. They could show up for a meeting on proper land use development and get vaporized by a Russian nuke.”

  “Or pancaked by a Pacific Goddammit,” Thomas said, smiling. Thomas had a number of them—Pacific Goddammit, the Cascadia ComeGetcha, the Juan DeFucYou.

  “Oops!” Dunbar said.

  Conversation drifted to a better siren, problems with mounting, and Dunbar’s mind rolled back downhill on one of the few paths available and landed back at the lighthouse.

  “That darn lighthouse is the pretty little albatross around our neck,” Dunbar said.

  Griff’s mind could not ride these rails anymore. He reached for his chocolate bar, which had become an empty wrapper. He slapped his crinkling pocket.

  Never mind one had to kill an albatross before having it tied around one’s neck—that being the point of the albatross-around-the-neck—he would not win this fight with a demand for accurate metaphors. How had the search for truth led him to this bunker?

  Nights, once spent digging through their grandfather’s Mysteries of the Unknown books, up late on the computer, piecing together the riddles of the world—Catatumbo lightning, the secret language of trees, riddles of the afterlife—the feeling that you could lie on your back in the lawn and fall up into the stars and never stop—how enormous it felt. Secrets so important they needed to be guarded like treasure.

  They’d found the old federal mailbox outside Downtown Depot. Abandoned. Waiting for them like another sharp corner of the universe’s puzzle. They’d hauled it home four awful blocks with one broken flip-flop and a bloody toe and they’d painted it black and decorated it with TOE, their first secret acronym—the TOE Box—out of reverence for Griff’s poor toe, but the letters stood for the Theory Of Everything, because anything less than the perfect intersection of science, and magic, and love was beneath them. Just two years ago, they’d both known what Charity still knew—it was a great big world out there.

  Life had gotten small.

  Small chairs. A small room. Scruggs took out a small flask and tipped it into his beard. Jonesy and Slim spat small black seeds into their small cups. Even Jonesy used to talk about extraterrestrial life and watch the sky for UFOs. What happened here?

  “Well, okay,” Dunbar said. “Done.”

  Dunbar rang the bike bell.

  They stood for the postmeeting Hangout. Slim, Jonesy, Thomas, Dunbar, Leo, and their dad stood in a circle. Each man roughly the same distance from the next. Like mutually repellent magnets. Drinking. Spitting seeds. This was the Hangout.

  “Given any thought to the Gap?” Dunbar asked Griff.

  The Gap was the one-year program after high school based in Arizona, meant to give graduating seniors a year of practical survival experience instead of college. He had no desire to go.

  “I’ve given it some thought,” Griff said. He tried to breathe. The bunker air felt sandy.

  Mouth on autopilot. Saying whatever slippery thing could get him out of the conversation. Slim brought in the indestructible yellow DeWalt stereo. Griff’s father poured brown whisky for the adults. Griff felt like a candle being snuffed. Flickering for lack of oxygen.

  He walked quickly through the group, toward the ladder, praying the concrete plug would open, praying the whole big impossible world was still up there where he’d left it.

  At home, Griff and Leo lay in bed. The lighthouse flashed on the window. Waves drummed.

  “Bro?” Leo asked. “What happened down there?”

  “Whoomp,” Griff whispered.

  “You kind of lost it.”

  Griff stared at his brother. A smudge in dim light, propped on his elbow. They used to talk for hours this way.

  “Do you ever still have night terrors?” Griff asked.

  For years, Leo used to wake up thrashing. Screaming with his eyes open. Gasping, he clawed up through the air like a desperate swimmer. Griff would try to shake him awake. One night, his father had lifted his flailing son into the shower with ice-cold water and Leo had shrieked as if being stabbed. That’s how they learned not to wake him. During night terrors, the victim must wake themselves.

  “Not for a long time,” Leo said softly.

  “What stopped them?”

  He was quiet.

  “Maybe the range,” Leo said.

  “C’mon.”

  “Shooting is meditative,” Leo said. “It’s about breathing. You should try it. You know, you might want to get more involved. We’ve actually got a good crew down there.”

  “Jonesy?” Griff said.

  “So you want to be outcasts again?” his brother asked. “Go back to the Tripp Me Twins?”

  Griff held his breath. Leo’s words conjured the horrors of middle school hallways.

  “We finally belong, bro,” Leo whispered.

  No, Griff thought. For the guys in the bunker, music was a light switch. Something you turned on or off. And they liked pieces of Griff. His accuracy with a nail gun. Occasional jokes. Knots he tied. Small features of his personality, sorted and lifeles
s as equipment on a table. This group of friends reflected him like a warped mirror. After too long, he’d start to resemble the reflection.

  “I just feel like there’s more out there,” Griff said.

  When the lighthouse flashed, it limned their window in white light.

  “There is,” Leo said softly. “There’s Charity.”

  SIX

  THE MORTIMER ESTATE STOOD PROMINENTLY AT THE CORNER OF Fifth and Price, blue, three stories high, and shaped like a pretentious high-backed sofa. Griff, Leo, Thomas, and Charity assembled on the front patio and Thomas gave them a warning.

  “I’m not trying to scare you,” Thomas said. “But my parents should be avoided at all costs.”

  “I’m already scared,” Charity said.

  Leo giggled. He was always giddy at the start of a new plan. A band! With Charity on Thomas’s front patio, everything felt brand-new.

  “My father, Halford Mortimer, roams the house like a Dickensian ghost,” Thomas said. “His soul has been vacuumed up by endless stock trading. If he looks you directly in the eye, you will be transformed into a large pile of numbers.”

  Charity laughed.

  “My mother, at this ripe old hour of seven, has likely transformed from a kindly homemaker into the Shambling Gin-Breathed Zombie.” He pointed. “Avoid the CigBiz.”

  “CigBiz?” Charity asked.

  “S, G, B, Z,” Griff said. “CigBiz.”

  “I see,” Charity said.

  “Okay, team. Shoes off.”

  Charity removed her shoes. Fashionable canvas shoes with cool frayed laces. Bare feet slipped out. Toes!

  They entered the house. An ocean of white carpet lay between them and the basement steps. To the right, a room arranged like a furniture showroom, mirrors glinting in curio cabinets. Thomas stepped as if probing a frozen pond for cracks. Leo used the fox-walk stalking technique—heel first, rolling his foot. Soundless.

  A creak. They jolted.

  A figure suddenly rounded the corner by the stairway. A tall, pale man—chinless as a pencil. They froze, staring at him like a deer they’d chanced upon in a misty clearing.

  “Hal?” a voice called from deep in the house.

  Mr. Mortimer gave them an understanding nod, then vanished up the steps. The group crossed the room, bursting into giggles as they ricocheted down into the basement, past wood-paneled walls to the workshop door:

  A wooden sign above the entrance marked with Sharpie:

  THE RAT’S NEST

  The name originated with Mrs. Mortimer, who, when agitated, would rail about Thomas ratholing himself in the basement for hours, ratholing their family’s community property, ratholing visitors and guests.

  “Ratholing,” Thomas concluded, “is a great word.”

  And here was Charity. At the Rat’s Nest. Such a strange feeling, to be near her, living and breathing—

  Thomas opened the door.

  A vast space, largely unfinished, with an odor like a wood-chip playground and old books. Exposed pipes. Small ribboned flags crisscrossed the ceiling, pegboards outlined in marker. Distantly, floor-length tapestries carved the space into mysterious enclosures. And in the center—the workbench. It exerted its own gravity, drew them close.

  “My god,” Charity said. “What a lair.”

  On the bench, three opaque spheres roughly the size of tennis balls. Around them, a confetti of circuitry.

  “EARS,” Thomas said.

  “Thomas invented ears,” Charity said matter-of-factly.

  “See,” he said, “there are fifty-two of these submerged up and down the Pacific Coast. Temperature sensors. Electromagnetic detectors. Pinhole cameras.”

  “Can I touch one?” Charity asked.

  She reached out for an orb, the size of a Christmas ornament. Translucent, squishy like a rubber ball. Inside, a soldered nest of circuits and wires. Twinkling solar panels. Thomas unrolled a bag of tortilla chips.

  “Amazing,” she said.

  “If it works,” Thomas said, “it buys us seven to ten minutes advance notice.”

  “That’s it?” she asked.

  “Every second counts,” he said.

  Thomas ate chips by placing them in his flat palm, then forcing his palm against his mouth like a sucker fish that had never discovered fingers. Charity stepped back from falling chips. Looked at the ground. Froze.

  “What’s that?” she asked. “Cat?”

  Thomas shook his head.

  Charity stared at her bare feet.

  “Rat?” Charity asked.

  “Shit, Thomas,” Griff said. Leo and Griff exchanged a look. They were going to lose her.

  “It’s just Neapolitan.”

  Thomas crouched and made a chirping sound in the back of his throat. The rat was in Thomas’s hands now. White fur with chocolate-colored splotches. Pink eyes and claws. All the colors of Neapolitan ice cream.

  “Cute,” Charity said. “Why a rat?”

  “It’s my first disaster alert system,” Thomas said. He extended his hand. The rat moved from his palm to Charity’s. She gasped.

  “Oh my gosh,” she said.

  Neapolitan turned, exposing her long, earthworm tail.

  “Uuff,” Charity said. “That tail, though.”

  “I know,” Thomas said. “If people could cope with rat tails we’d save thousands of lives.”

  “Hey, all,” Leo said with his best smile. “Should we start practicing? You should see this gear, Charity.”

  “What do you mean, Thomas?” Charity asked.

  “My original plan for an alert system was the Clade City Promise! Everyone gets 10 acres and a free rat.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “He’s not,” Griff said.

  “Look,” Thomas said. “Rats know before people do. Helice, Greece, 300 BC, rats poured onto the roads and climbed the hill to Corinth five days before the earthquake hit. Five days! Same thing in Haicheng, China, rats and toads and snakes came out of hibernation and in Thailand, in 2004, it was flamingos and rats and elephants—”

  When Thomas got really excited about a concept, sometimes spit formed at the corners of his mouth, and Griff was getting nervous about how long he would talk when Leo called—

  “C’mon, guys!”

  “Maybe we should go play,” Griff said.

  “Okay,” Charity said. “Fascinating, Thomas.”

  Neapolitan squirreled around in her palm. Leapt onto the floor.

  The practice space was framed by hanging curtains C-clamped and clothespinned to exposed floor joists and cables—very cool. A keyboard. Guitar in a cradle. Drum kit and serious audio decks. Six different pedals plugged into a sound-mixing nerve center. Four microphones.

  “Wow,” Charity said. “What a playground. You gonna drop some sick beats, Thomas?”

  And then something happened. Surrounded by instruments and colorful tapestries, sealed off in the basement, Griff stopped thinking she’d run. It felt like they belonged just where they were.

  Thomas dropped some beats. A low bass pulse in his throat, hissing through his teeth like a hi-hat cymbal. Funny, but good. Griff played a few major chord progressions on the keyboard and a song whipped up out of nothing.

  “Keep it going,” Charity said. She came over to Thomas’s microphone.

  “My name is Thomas Mortimer,” he sang, spitting words like a drumbeat.

  “—and he’s got ratsssss,” Charity sang.

  “You need evacuation routes, and I got maps—”

  “You need a couple bug-out bags, I’ll show you where they at—”

  Griff played a solo—bright, funky thing—then Leo jumped in. They kept it rolling. Not like a practice room, or a concert. They were just playing together.

  “Okay,” Leo said when the energy finally calmed. “Should we practice for real?”

  “That felt like practice,” Charity said. “It was fun.”

  “I thought we’d pull together an actual song,” Leo said.

&nbs
p; “What’s that look like to you?” she asked.

  “I’ve been working on a few things,” he said.

  Leo pulled out a binder.

  Suddenly it became Leo’s practice. The room seemed to shrink around him. Leo’s first song, “Old Country Bridge,” relied heavily on imagery of dry riverbeds and the brightest stars he’d ever seen. He sang the first chorus alone. The second time through, wordless sounds joined with the music, perfect pitch. Griff mistook it for one of Thomas’s sound board miracles—it was Charity.

  Her eyes closed, lips near the microphone. Humming. A crooning sound, from some deep, hidden place. Her voice cast a spell. Like striking a match in darkness and seeing, briefly, the flash of a cathedral.

  Leo stopped.

  “Could you put words to that?” he asked.

  “Hmm?” Charity asked, seeming to come out of a trance.

  “Maybe echo my lyrics back?” Leo asked. “Could we try that?”

  Charity did what he asked. Leo had plenty of corrections. As minutes passed, her voice crawled from her chest to her throat and then lived mostly in her mouth. After an hour, Leo announced:

  “I think we have a song!”

  “I think we’ve got a band!” Thomas said. Practice was over.

  Griff was still puzzling through it—the feel of Charity’s voice, the unexpected magic of their first song—and then Leo, ahead of the game with a binder, a stack of songs, and now, again, Griff moving too slowly through the mud of thinking to recognize Leo had already leapt ahead into the most important race of the night:

  The Walk to the Big Blue Chair. Big enough for two.

  Griff had learned that the making of a couple often happened with the same split-second thunder of a hawk snatching up a vole. On the California beach, with the sweet Australian girl, Rhiannon, she and Griff had laughed more and talked longer. Built a sand castle together, with a far superior moat. But when they all stood to see the sunset, Leo grabbed her hand first. Just like that.

  Rhiannon and Leo walked. Talked. Kissed. Griff watched their silhouettes dance off down the sand and wondered what he’d done wrong. He went alone into the ocean. Held his breath until his lungs screamed and wondered if that was how it would feel to drown.