Chapter 9

“Only poets think in poetry. Everybody else just thinks.”

Dan blinked. Everything was black, like someone had dumped a bottle of ink into his eyes.

“Andrew?” Dan reached out and groped at the air. His hand laid on Andrew’s chest, and he blushed. “Sorry.”

After a moment of stunned silence, Dan let his wrists go limp. “Right,” he said. “What now?”

“More waiting, I imagine,” Andrew said.

“What? No, don’t they have to pump air in here?”

Andrew groaned. “I mean, it is a big tunnel. Three days shouldn’t hurt.”

Dan had to think. Even there was an air pump, he didn’t know if the air was filtered in the first place. What if they’d been breathing fallout the whole time? He decided not to think about that.

“I guess if it gets too bad, we can just leave early?”

“No,” Andrew said. “Radiation is slow. I’ve seen pictures—you get all crumbly, or slimy, or both, and then you get cancer and die.”

“It’s just—do we really know how long it’ll take for everything to clear up? You said five days, but what if that’s too little? What if it doesn’t go away for months? What if it’s already gone? Will it even reach us? We don’t know anything.”

“We don’t know how the ventilators work, either.”

“Well—sorry, don’t let me be a bother,” Dan said, his shoulders falling with his breath.

The men sat in silence. Eventually, Dan looked away and wrung his hands together. “I’m tired.”

“I don’t want to sleep.”

Tracing the wall with his hand, Dan closed his eyes. “I know.”

Dan’s peeled his eyes open, breaking the crust between his eyelids. If he’d dreamt that night, he didn’t remember it.

He groaned as the skin on his back stretched against his spine. Smacking the dry flesh in his mouth, he consulted his watch. Ten o’clock. The tunnel was still black, but a pinhole under the door had let a beam of light into the tunnel—barely a hair’s width, but to his eyes, it burned like the sun. Still, his eyes adjusted, letting the scattered light paint a grainy picture of the room. All their belongings lay where they’d set them, all the pipes and lamps still hung undisturbed, and there, beside the door, laid Andrew, cradling his own arm, shaking like a blade of grass in a storm.

“Andrew,” Dan muttered.

The financier groaned. His suit swished on the ground as he rolled away. But after a while, Andrew started to bring himself up from the ground. It must’ve been twenty minutes before either of the men managed to stand, but by the time Dan did, he started to taste something in the air.

“It’s stale,” he said.

Andrew sniffed the air. “Fuck.”

Dan stared at the light-stream. “Think there’s a creek near Valton. Bottle’s full, so we’ll keep for a bit. Worst comes to worst, there’s always the river down south, right?”

“And there’s houses on the way down. See? We’ve got options.”

“Right.”

Despite the long hours they’d spent locked away, neither of them moved toward the door. Andrew traced a long crack in the wall with his finger. He paused when the crack split in two. After considering for a moment, he dragged his finger across the top path and clicked his tongue. “I suppose it’s best if we go now,” Andrew said. “Fallout aside.”

“It’s only been two days,” Dan said.

“Hard to believe,” Andrew said. The light glinted off his half-open eyes, but the rest of his face was still drenched in darkness.

“I can’t imagine hiking on an empty stomach,” Dan said.

“We’ll eat when we have to. And it’s not very far. Not far at all.”

With that, Andrew grabbed the door handle and pushed.

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