Contain (8 page)

I can't think of a compelling reason,
whether good or bad, why anyone would deliberately risk all of our
lives, our security, or at the very least, our complacency, to mess
with things that way. And when pressed on the matter, neither can
Bren or Bix. The closest we can come is that the constant minor
equipment failures might make Dad appear an incompetent leader. But
it doesn't take much to shoot that perception down. Nobody expects
him to be perfect. Everyone knows the conditions he's working
under.

A part of me wants Bix to be right
about Jonah being involved. He's petulant and vindictive. But as
much as I'd love to knock him down a few notches, my intuition
keeps telling me no. It's not his style.

The clock on the wall says it's just
past one in the morning. After hours of tossing and turning and
enduring the incessant drone of my father's snores just a few feet
away from my head, sleep is as unattainable as ever.

I rise without disturbing him and
quietly head out of our quarters. I need to walk. I need to clear
my mind.

The sleeping quarters are all arranged
in a single hallway on Level Three, modified from whatever purpose
the builders had in mind for them when the facility was erected
twenty years ago. There are more than enough rooms to accommodate
the thirty-one of us. And blessedly, it's also one of the quietest
levels.

The hall curves, following the arc of
the dam, which means that only a few doors are visible at any given
time. They're usually closed — given the circumstances, it's
understandable that people would value what little privacy the
place affords — and tonight's no exception. No one else is out
and about.

Aside from the turbine's thrum coming
through the thick concrete from the power plant, the only other
sound is the soft slap of my bare feet on the floor.

In the level above us, there are a few
unused rooms which could have been converted to quarters had the
other bus made it with its load of survivors from the evac center.
Other than that, there's the watch room with the security monitors,
and the facility's main control room. Only a couple people have
access to the latter.

The common areas are on Level One, as
are the kitchen and working larder.

Just below us, on Level Four, is where
we store most of our non-perishables, not that there is very much.
It's mostly old, useless equipment; chairs and desks; oil cloths,
which we've used to make everything from shirts to pillows; and
metal parts and such. One room contains, rather curiously, bags of
sand and cement, the latter of which has long since hardened in
their sacks. At the end of the hallway is the loading bay door,
and, on the other side, the ramp we ran down to get inside the day
we arrived.

We never got the chance to ask the man
who saved us, who drove us here from the evac center and led us
into quarantine, why he hadn't let in the security guards who
fought back the attacking Wraiths. Of course, at the beginning,
everything was so chaotic and we were so fearful of the disease
somehow making its way in with us, that no one dared to ask about
the guards once the door was locked. But in the days that followed,
I'm sure every single one of us has wondered about it at one time
or another.

The man's name was David Gronbach. He
was our assigned coordinator at the evac center. Years before, he'd
been an engineer on the dam project, so he was quite familiar with
the facility and its operation. I never got the chance to ask him
why the place was prepped for an end-of-the-world event because six
days after we were locked in, he grew suddenly ill and died less
than a week later.

There was a lot of paranoia back then,
as well as misinformation. Some people thought he'd been infected.
We knew so little about the Flense, other than what we'd been told
at the EC about how it manifests itself in people, and how it
spreads. Not that we know very much more about it now, three years
later. So it was understandable that the sudden change in Mister
Gronbach's health sent paroxysms of fear rippling through the
group. Nobody wanted to go near him.

My father was the
exception. He seemed sure that the symptoms weren't the same as the
Flense, and he was right. With help from Doctor Cavanaugh and
Bren's dad, he tended to Mister Gronbach as he continued to ail.
Then, right before he died, he transferred all the security codes
to Dad, leaving him the
de facto
leader of the group.

Jonah's parents have never been happy
about that. They've always insisted that Dad wasn't adequately
trained to be in charge, nor did he have the right type of
personality. As if they were and did. There was even a rumor
started accusing Dad of poisoning Mister Gronbach to take his
place, but it was quickly squashed, in part because it made no
sense. Other than the Resnicks, who seemed to lust after power
simply for no other reason than to have it, why would anyone want
to be in charge of a group with no common bonds and no clear
mission other than to survive?

Over time, Dad has shared many of the
various door access codes as he has deemed appropriate, but he has
never given out the ones for the exterior doors. And in the three
years we've been in here, he has used those exactly once, to open
the door to the catwalk on Level Six so that Mister Gronbach's
body, wrapped inside one of the oil cloths, could be released into
the spillway and the river below.

That day, less than two weeks after
we'd been locked away inside, was the last time any of us felt the
sunlight or the breeze on our faces. And we couldn't even enjoy it,
as the moment was cut short by the appearance of a dozen Wraiths
that somehow managed to defeat several eight-foot tall chain linked
fences topped with razor wire.

I pass the Abramson's door and wonder
if Bren is asleep or if she's having trouble like me. She shares
the room with her parents, Seth and Kaleagh. They're both nice
people. Seth was a computer programmer before the outbreak, first
with the military, then in a startup company. His wife taught fifth
grade. According to Bren, his work was his entire life before, but
in here, the only computers are those that monitor the power plant
and control the various sluice gates, and my father has given
strict instructions that no one is to touch any of them.

Bren's mom, at my father's urging, has
pieced together a sort of rudimentary school program for the half
dozen or so kids in here. The parents are grateful, even if there
isn't much she can do without textbooks or computers.

Across the hall from the Abramsons is
where Bix and his dad sleep. Harrison Blakely was a guitarist in a
cover band called Geemoe K9. Bix's mom was the drummer, but she
split about a week before the outbreak hit, and neither Bix nor his
dad knows where she went.

Harrison took it hard. He packed Bix
and his guitar up and hit the road in a van he paid a hundred bucks
for from some nightclub owner. The way Bix described it, the inside
was covered floor to ceiling in green and purple shag carpet and
stunk of strawberries and cheap massage oil. We picked them up
about a mile up the mountain from the dam. They were nearly
overcome by Wraiths.

The memory of that scene still sends
shivers through me and infects my dreams.

I blink the images away and find
myself standing at the end of the hall in front of the lift. But I
turn away without pressing the call button. The motor rattles
obnoxiously and wakes people. I don't need anyone poking their head
out to see who's up. I turn and push through the fire door into the
stairwell instead.

The chug of the turbines fills my
ears, though it's not so loud that you can't have a normal
conversation.

Four stories down, on Level Seven,
there's a narrow, enclosed walkway that leads to the power plant,
and it’s in there that the noise gets really amplified. That by
itself would be enough of a deterrent to anyone who might consider
it a cool place to hang out, but for obvious reasons, Dad keeps the
door accessing the walkway locked. Only he and a few people are
authorized to check on the generators, and it's always supposed to
be in teams of two or more.

I reach the level with the food stores
and step out, pausing as I often do to listen for voices coming
from below. There's a large open area on Seven which we’ve used for
recreational purposes. It can get quite loud down there; the shouts
easily fill up the entire three-story space. But as it's still
nighttime, no one is there right now. And anyway, the homemade
masking tape ball we’d been using for soccer finally came
unraveled. Now, the only people I know who use the space are the
Rollins boys with their homemade skateboards.

Cool air caresses my face. It smells
of oil and moldy concrete, plus the faint tang of burnt metal. This
last is new, the lingering traces of the pipe repair Jack Resnick
and Stephen Largent did down in the boiler room. The smell must be
coming in through the vents.

My bare feet make no sound on the
metal grating as I make my way to the locked storeroom. I key in
the code and push open the door and the light flickers on, buzzing
for a moment as the filaments warm up. They sound unusually loud,
angry, as if they resent being woken up at such an hour. I find my
clipboard where I had flung it and begin my work.

As the minutes and hours pass, my mind
settles into the comfortable routine, and I steadily make my way
from the front to the far back corner of the room. When I get to
the end, I notice the small mountain of rice which has cascaded
from the hole I'd accidentally made last week, and I curse myself
for forgetting about it. It'll need to be fixed and the spilled
grain recovered.

But when I bend down to inspect it, I
realize something's wrong.

It's not rice. It’s not even
edible.

“Sand?” Bix frowns at me and shakes his head. “In the rice? What
are you talking about? Have you been licking the mold in the shower
again?”

I grab his arm and pull him out of his
quarters and quietly shut the door. He stumbles groggily after me
and makes a point of rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands.
“Come on, man. Can't this wait until the sun's out?”

I have no patience for his jokes this
morning. “Listen to what I'm saying,” I whisper urgently. I hate
the way my voice cracks and the way the blood sounds pounding
through my head, but right now I'm a little out of control with
panic. It's not a feeling I like. “Downstairs, in the storage
room.”

“
Take a breath, bro,” he
tells me. “Start from the beginning.” He yawns widely, and a
mouthful of stinkbreath washes over my face.

I try to calm myself, but I'm shaking
all over. “Someone put sand in the rice bags.”

“
Sand in the rice?” he asks
again. “I'm not following.”

“
In the bags. I was doing
the inventory and I noticed that they took the rice out and
replaced it with sand. I checked the sandbags upstairs. They've
definitely been messed with.”

“
Why are you inventorying
the sand?”

“
Not the sand! The
rice!”

“
Wait a sec,” he says,
frowning. “You said bags? As in more than one?”

I nod.

“
How many?”

“
More than half of what's
left.”

It takes a moment for this to sink in.
His eyes widen as the impact of what I'm saying finally sinks
in.

“
The food's gone?” he
cries.

I hold a finger up to my lips and
start to drag him toward the stairs, but he resists.

“
Dude," he says, "at least
let me put on some pants. I’m in my boxers, for crying out
loud!”

“
I need to show
you.”

“
But I—”

I push my hand against his mouth when
a door at the far end of the hall opens. Someone speaks, but the
sound is distorted.

I thrust the stairwell door open and
plunge into the landing with Bix in tow, a warning look in my eyes
signaling him to keep quiet. As soon as we're through, I release
him to grab the door and gently, silently guide it shut.

“
What the hell,
man?”

“
I don't know what else to
do, Bix. I think I'm in deep trouble.”