The Survival Code Page 8

  “And go where?”

  The fact that there’s no answer to this question is what forces me to go farther inside. I drop the yellow duffel bag next to MacKenna’s suitcase and walk into the kitchen. Something crunches underneath my shoe. I lower the flashlight to find a floppy disk under my heel.

  “Do you think Dad did this?” Charles asks.

  “No.” I don’t think even Dr. Doomsday would be nuts enough to destroy his own house.

  I try flipping the kitchen light switch, but whoever trashed the place smashed the lightbulbs in the fixture that hangs over the table. The room stays dark.

  “Jinx. We shouldn’t be here,” MacKenna says with more force.

  There’s a mess everywhere I shine the light. A lot of Dad’s old tech has been dumped all over, and there are piles of batteries, fan assembles, wires and different kinds of disks. Paper is everywhere too. Mostly it looks like stuff from my father’s teaching days—old term papers and quizzes. Dad hasn’t taught a class in two years. I don’t even know why he kept the stuff. A set of blueprints, maybe for the bunker, have been tossed under the kitchen table.

  A sense of unease builds inside me.

  Whoever was in here was searching for something.

  Did they find it? Are they coming back?

  MacKenna is right. It isn’t safe to stay in the house.

  I pull my hoodie around me and fight off a shiver.

  “Okay. We’ll go to the bunker,” I say as I do one last sweep with the flashlight.

  “Are you for real? The bunker? That sounds even creepier. And how do we know that whoever was in here isn’t waiting in there.”

  Charles can’t help but yawn. “No one can get in the bunker.”

  Exhaustion sinks in, and I desperately want to crawl in a bed and never come out. “It’ll be light in a few hours. We can get some rest and then decide what to do.”

  “Maybe my dad will be home by then,” MacKenna says.

  The yellow bag taunts me from the doorway. “Maybe.” I leave the kitchen and shut Dad’s front door. There doesn’t seem to be much point in locking it.

  The bunker is about a quarter mile from the main house with an entrance concealed inside a large silver shed. I point the flashlight in that direction.

  MacKenna stops. “If no one’s here, whose cars are these?”

  “Dad keeps a bunch of old cars around.” There’s a Chevette he inherited from his grandfather, a couple of clunky station wagons and an old truck with a camper. “If anyone comes by, he wants it to be unclear how many people live here.”

  I don’t mention it, but the cars are also loaded with supplies. They’re backup plans.

  MacKenna snorts. “Well, it is. Unclear.”

  I start walking toward the shed.

  Dad changes the lock to the shed all the time and keeps the key in a heavy, fireproof safe concealed by a pile of garden hoses. It takes me a couple of tries to get the combination right, but I’m able to get the key.

  This whole thing is starting to seem like a drill.

  Charles must be thinking this as well, because he says, “You have to put the key back,” as I’m about to go into the shed. “And hurry. I have to go! Bad.”

  I return the key back to the safe and then open the shed door. “I have to start the generator.”

  “Perfect,” MacKenna says, crisply pronouncing the p.

  The shed is stuffy and dusty and smells like sweaty shoes.

  It’s also cramped. The generator is definitely bigger. The portable, pull-cord model is gone. It’s been replaced by a huge beige Generac unit the size of an air conditioner. There’s an LED screen on the front that reads Active. I shine the flashlight on a metal pipe connected to the unit. It’s labeled “Natural Gas” in Dad’s cramped script. This gas model must be ready to go anytime. The old generator could power the bunker for forty-eight hours. I get the sense that this does more and lasts longer.

  The actual entrance to the bunker is a stainless-steel hatch in the corner of the shed, which Dad has concealed behind racks full of boxes of Christmas decorations and old books. We squeeze behind the racks and I give Charles the flashlight to hold while I kneel down. The hatch has an electronic keypad lock.

  The combination is the date he met Mom.

  I keep thinking he’ll change it. And he doesn’t.

  The heavy hatch opens with a creak and, until the automatic fluorescent lights turn on, we stare at a bleak, dark hole in the ground.

  I go first down the thick, reinforced steel ladder and have MacKenna hand down the bags. I feel a little bit better that the yellow bag is down here. It should be safe in the bunker. I’m in the landing alone while Charles tries to cajole MacKenna into going down.

  “This is the drill,” he tells her. “I promise.”

  “Is there...uh...anybody down there?” MacKenna asks.

  “No,” I say.

  But she’s skeptical of my response. “How do you know if you don’t check?”

  The landing, a tiny space between the hatch and the interior door of the bunker, is so small that I’d practically be on top of anyone else who happened to be down here. And there’s no way in hell that anybody could get past Dad’s security.

  “There’s no one down here, MacKenna,” I say, wishing that, for once, she could trust me. “The bunker door is secured by a fingerprint scanner, a retinal scanner and a password protected lock. There are a series of motion detectors in the bunker that do a sweep every thirty seconds. There are two indicator lights on the outside of the door. One that indicates if any motion is detected and another indicates if the system has been tampered with in any way. My dad installed the thing himself.”

  That last part might not inspire much confidence in MacKenna, but it reassures me. My dad is many things, and one of those things is an unrivaled master of designing and coding security systems. I turn toward the bunker door.

  Both sensor lights are green.

  Normal.

  A few seconds later, MacKenna’s Doc Martens clank against the ladder.

  Charles follows right behind her, but he isn’t strong enough to close the hatch.

  There’s this awkward thing where we’re all shuffling around in the tiny space, our shoes squeaking on the concrete floor, while I make my way to the ladder. I climb up again.

  Below me, Charles does a little dance. “Jinx. I have to go bad!”

  Using my body weight, I pull the hatch down and lock it.

  We’re in.

  “I’m going as fast as I can, Charles.”

  “Go faster.”

  MacKenna smiles and ruffles his hair.

  I wriggle my way to the front of our little trio again and enter my password using the keyboard on the wall. Then my fingerprint on the pad. Then the eye scan.

  “Okay, I see your point,” MacKenna says. “No one could get in here.”

  The heavy, hydraulic door to the bunker does not open.

  Instead, the small, square terminal mounted to the wall beeps and a question appears on the screen.

  Who gave you your nickname?

  Dad was getting more paranoid by the day. He’d added another layer of authentication to his already over-the-top security system. When had he done this? When was the last time he’d been here? I type in my response.

  Nick Beamer

  “Who’s Nick Beamer?” MacKenna asks.

  The door to the bunker opens. Charles hits the light switch as he rushes by me.

  I shrug and let MacKenna pass me. “Some little punk from the second grade.”

  Charles is halfway to the bathroom and yells, “She killed the class turtle.”

  My face heats up. I shut and lock the bunker door. “I did not. Squirt was a billion years old. And anyway, you were wearing diapers when all this happened. How would you know?” br />
  “Mom told me,” he calls back. The bathroom door slams.

  For some reason, I keep talking. “I had a bad year. A beach ball bounced off my head and ruined Becky Halverson’s birthday cake. On the field trip to the petting zoo, a goat ate a map out of my pocket and then barfed in the bin with all our sack lunches. Nick Beamer started calling me a jinx. Dad said that the way to deal with it was to own it. To call myself Jinx to show it didn’t bother me. And the nickname stuck.”

  The wheels of MacKenna’s suitcase squeak each time she takes another step. “So, are you bad luck, then? Like a broken mirror?”

  I scowl at the back of her head. “Maybe. I mean I didn’t get sent to Europe for my sixteenth birthday like some people I know. Is that luck? Or fate?”

  MacKenna ignores this comment. She’s busy looking around.

  Dad’s got the place organized like a miniature army base. Bunk beds line the walls. One half of the room is basically a mess hall with pallets of food stacked to the ceiling, a refrigerator and stove in the corner and a long, stainless-steel food service counter that divides the room. The opposite corner is the communication center with computers and radios set up on a motley collection of desks we got from garage sales.

  “Ah. The famous basement. Where you guys are storing more food than Noah had on the ark and practicing Krav Maga,” MacKenna says.

  That’s it. I whirl around and confront her. “We are not doing anything. My dad is doing that. Your dad used to take you to pick peaches. Ours took us to PrepperCon. And while you were in London getting your picture taken with the Royal Guard, we were in the desert seeing how long we could survive eating barrel cactus. I don’t know...how...why you’re blaming me for all of this. I didn’t marry your dad. I didn’t make you move here.”

  Charles runs out of the bathroom. And backs away. Away from me. I’ve been yelling.

  MacKenna bites down on her lower lip with an odd look I’ve never seen on her face.

  Sadness. Or maybe fear.

  My brother makes a face. “Can you guys stop fighting for five minutes?”

  But I already realize I’m being a jerk. MacKenna and I might not get along, but she did just watch her dad get hauled out of our house by the cops. I try to think of what might make her happy. “Um...look on the bright side. There are plenty of phones down here. You can call Toby.”

  “Really?” MacKenna asks. Her shoulders relax.

  “Yeah. Dad keeps a bin of burner phones. And some SAT phones too.”

  I go to the bunk that’s usually mine and drop the yellow bag on it.

  MacKenna plops herself down on a bed on the opposite side of the room. “What’s a SAT phone?” She fiddles around with her suitcase.

  I walk over to the corner that Dad calls the Opps Center. If we’re doing the drill, the next step is to get the monitoring systems set up. I flip on the array of six monitors, and images from the surveillance cameras he’s got all over the property and even on top of his house fill the screens. The monitors show empty hallways and the moon setting on a cold desert landscape.

  “Um. It’s a kind of phone that uses satellites instead of the cellular network. You can get service in really remote areas. It can be more secure. These days they can triangulate the position of a cell phone to within a few feet. SAT phones are much harder to track.”

  I turn on the console that displays the security system status and pick up the old rotary telephone sitting on the desk. There’s a dial tone.

  Everything is functioning normally.

  “Charles, the water. And snacks,” I remind my brother. Part of every drill is always to stay hydrated and fed. People can’t survive without food and water.

  My brother is sitting at the bunker’s kitchenette table, his little legs swinging underneath his chair, picking at a half-dead houseplant. “Dad promised he’d water my Paphiopedilum.”

  Dad promised a lot of things.

  “Charles.”

  He keeps mumbling. “Look at the stem. Even if I repot it—”

  “Charles.”

  He lets out a dramatic sigh but does go to the refrigerator. He passes out bottles of water and protein bars. I stop him before he can return to his half-dead orchid.

  It’s almost morning, but still. “You have to get a couple hours of sleep.”

  He yawns as he says, “That’s not the drill.”

  Even though I’m so tired I can barely move, I say, “I’ll handle the rest.”

  I deviate again when I reach into a bin under the desk and pull out a few phones from the backups Dad keeps in stock. I toss one of the smartphones on the bed next to where MacKenna is sitting. “It’s got a label on the back with the phone number. In case you need to give it to Toby.”

  She nods but sits there without dialing.

  “You can text and everything. It should work,” I say.

  Charles crawls underneath his covers. I tuck him in and turn off most of the lights in the bunker, leaving just enough light for me to finish my work.

  “I wish Toby were here,” MacKenna mumbles.

  “Me too,” I say. And it was true. Toby always knew the right thing to do. “Hopefully, he’ll be home tomorrow.”

  She nods and dials the phone, and I get back to the drill.

  Next step. Get our gear ready in case we need to leave quickly.

  I cross the basement, open the container full of our emergency supplies and find my utility jacket. It’s the same as it was the last time I saw it. The outside is a standard black windbreaker. The inside is lined with the essentials of survival. A couple small knives. Paracord and carabiners. A personal locator beacon. Tactical flashlight. A compass. And a Taser gun. I grab my brother’s jacket as well and place them both near the door.

  Dad keeps a few extra backpacks in one of the supply cabinets. I fill one with burner phones, put a ruggedized orange SAT phone on the top and add the bag to the pile of stuff.

  MacKenna sighs in frustration. “He isn’t answering.”

  “He’s probably asleep.”

  She sets her suitcase down gently on the floor, being careful not to wake Charles. “Who could sleep through all of this? Jinx, you don’t think anything’s happened to him, do you?”

  “No.” Not even we could be that unlucky. “We should get some sleep.”

  She pulls back the covers on her bunk. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure,” I say, although this makes me uneasy.

  “Why did you bring those books?”

  Oh. The ones I stuffed in my bag so I could smuggle Jay’s laptop out of the house? Yeah. Those. “I guess... I thought we might end up having time. While we wait.”

  “You think we’re going to be waiting so long that you’ll have time to read a twelve hundred–page book?” she asks me, her voice laced with incredulity.

  I can’t help but yawn. “I don’t know anything about politics, and it seems like, with everything going on, I probably should.”

  “You know, your mom teaches history. She’s an authority on this stuff.”

  I turn off the rest of the lights, leaving us with only the glow of the monitor. “I know. But she’s always talking about game theory. And late-stage capitalism. And something about John Locke and Alexander the Great and Plutarch. It makes next to no sense to me.”

  MacKenna lies down as well. “You think you understand machines but not people.”

  Crossing to my bunk, I say, “Machines are predictable.”

  From researching that cryptic message on Jay’s laptop, to checking in with Terminus, to seeing what’s happening on the news, there are a lot of things I should be doing right now. Instead, I crawl into bed.

  She yawns. “Machines are made by people, and people are predictable too.”

  I prop myself up on my elbow. “What does it say? The Modern Guide to The Spark?”


  She sits up as well. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  She thinks for a second. “The Spark is about making things fair for everyone. Giving everyone civil rights, a chance to live the American dream. The Spark is about doing something real. Unlike The Opposition, which is about stopping other people from doing things.”

  “The government is always saying it’s gonna do things, and then things stay the same.”

  She lies down again. “Next, you’ll be saying all politicians are the same.”

  “All politicians are the same.”

  MacKenna sighs. “Jinx, Ammon Carver bought his results with money, influence, bigotry and hate. Because of him, real people will suffer and die. Even if things could stay the same for us, we shouldn’t look away from the fact that they won’t for everyone.”

  My eyes won’t stay open a second longer. “Everyone’s for Rosenthal.”

  “Right.”

  The wolf is shaved so nice and trim. Red Riding Hood is chasing him.

  I drift into a sleep with dreams filled with wolves and dark woods and red cloaks.

  A world that won’t be controlled by machine code.

  * * *

  I awaken in a panic.

  Noise fills the bunker.

  The ring, ring, ringaling of the archaic rotary phone.

  But also something else.

  The more electronic bing bong of the modern console.

  The perimeter alarm.

  I bolt up, sending my blankets flying toward the end of my bunk.

  Running to the Opps Center, I almost fall into the desk chair on wheels and have to grab the desk to keep myself from rolling away. I pick up the heavy phone receiver and press it to my face.

  “Yes?” I say. That’s kind of a stupid greeting, but I’m groggy and using part of my attention to watch the sequence of security camera images flickering on the monitors for a sign of what might be setting off the alarm.

  “Susan?” Mom’s hollow voice comes through the phone.

  Crap. She never calls me Susan.

  “Mom? Are you coming home?”