The Shelter Cycle Read online

  In that darkness he could almost hear the decrees echoing up and down the passageways; he could almost see his mother, so pregnant, decreeing with the other women, all cutting the air with their two-foot swords—rending the bad energy, slicing it loose from the air around them. His father had been coming and going, wire cutters in one hand, a voltmeter in the other. Colville had just sat on the top bunk that night, watching and listening, buckling and unbuckling the seat belt that was there in case of earthquakes or a close missile strike.

  He lay still. The way he felt, it was as if right now were twenty years ago. Decrees ran through his mind, memories of being in the top bunk, his parents beneath him, waiting in the darkness, right here in this room.

  And then, now, he heard a different sound. Not only the shelter’s quiet roar; a howling, higher-pitched. His forehead butted the plywood as he tensed, tried to hear, to figure it. Finally he slid the cover away. He carried his boots and his headlamp as he crept past the books on their shelves, down the hallway, toward the hatch.

  The sound rose higher as he approached. Not voices, not footsteps. It gusted, it almost whistled. He’d left the hatch open; the wind had picked up and now howled across the opening, like a person blowing across the mouth of a bottle.

  In his stocking feet, he climbed the metal rungs, up the narrow cylinder. The air turned colder as he ascended. He stuck his head out, above the surface, and his skin stung, the hairs in his nostrils brittle. Squinting across the glowing white expanse, he could see no movement, no one approaching, no person or animal.

  He stood half in the hatch, his head and torso exposed to the bitter cold. The energy hummed around him, the landscape all alive. He laughed aloud, took a deep breath. Heavy snowflakes drifted down out of the dark sky. No stars, no moon. The snow already filled his footprints from earlier today, and Kilo’s paw prints. Colville looked behind him, to each side. Descending, he took hold of the rope just above the counterweight and lifted. The hatch slapped shut gently above his head. The wind’s howling was gone at once, and silence thickened around him.

  12

  THERE WERE EIGHT carts, all together, and Colville pushed seven of them to one end of the tunnel, out of the way. He found an oil can in the tool room and lubricated the metal wheels of the eighth cart until it ran smoothly, with a low metallic hiss. Lying on his back, holding Kilo pressed against him, he kicked along the ceiling of the tunnel and the cart shot through the darkness. He covered the hundred yards in less than thirty seconds. To slow down, he let the toes of his boots drag along the corrugated metal above.

  He wandered, he searched. His headlamp’s beam shone like a bright rope that pulled him deeper into the darkness, toward new discoveries. Turning corners, he still expected to meet the boys he’d known, or their parents, to hear decrees or see the men with the radiation gauges, measuring everyone who came in from outside. He wore a pair of his father’s tennis shoes, their laces replaced with wire. The down vest, too—he could remember his father wearing it; when he pulled it out of the cubby, the black electrical tape that had been used to patch it fell off, slippery now on both sides. As he walked, he nervously held one hand over the rip, as if the little white feathers might alert someone to his presence.

  One family’s stash of Jane Austen novels, cans of chewing tobacco hidden inside a wall, swords used for some of the blasting and rending decrees. He found axes and knives, hidden behind beams in ceilings, and dolls with dusty hair, chewed hands and feet. Folded-up body bags, stored next to white radiation suits. A record player, albums of Christmas music. All of the six dormitory pods were more or less the same, only laid out slightly differently. There were the rooms where people slept, then the toilets and showers—all the water turned off, now—a decontamination chamber, a kitchen, and a common area where decree sessions and school could be held.

  He stood in one such common area and shone his headlamp along the alphabet running letter by letter along the top of the wall, where it met the ceiling. He sat in the tiny desk where he might have studied, for months or years, if things had gone a different way.

  The desk was the same as the ones they’d had in Glastonbury, back in the classroom with Francine. Francine’s mother was their teacher. She had been patient with him; she had taught them so many decrees. She decreed along with them, and even in the classroom the Light would suddenly come into her, sometimes, and knock her down, knock her out as if she’d suddenly fallen asleep. It would take her a while to return to this plane. She had been meditating and decreeing when she died, too. She was overcome; her heart just came apart, filled with Light. Some said she’d ascended right there and then.

  Kilo would not sit still, would not stop circling between the desks with his head up, his back arched. Suddenly he barked at the wall. Once, twice, the sound echoing.

  “Here.” Colville’s voice was a hiss. He bent down, his hand around the dog’s snout. The air settled; there was no sound.

  Only the air didn’t quite settle, despite its silence. It felt different. Heavier, the energy pulsing in jagged waves around the dark room. He shone his light along the wall, stepped closer, pulled furniture away. Shadows, spider webs, the word TRANSMUTATION in black marker. He paused at an altar, hesitant to touch, to disturb it. The light of his headlamp reflected off the glass in the frames that held the Masters, gazing out at him. Saint Germain, El Morya, Jesus Christ. Carefully he lifted the purple fabric that was draped over the table, then dropped onto his stomach.

  Here was a door in the wall, behind and underneath the altar. A square door, perhaps two feet across. A silver lock hung from a metal hasp, the hasp’s metal plate folding back over the screws, so they could not be pried loose or easily undone. Colville just stared, Kilo whining behind him. Heat came from the wall, too much energy seeping out. Had the lock trembled, vibrated, or was that the trembling of his head, the beam of his lamp? He didn’t know whether the energy was good or bad, only that it was too much. Dragging himself backward, he felt the hem of the fabric lap over the top of his head like a huge hand, slipping away.

  •

  Two big Isuzu generators stood bolted to the floor in one corner of the DCS; one was in case the line from Montana Power went out during or after the attack, the other in case the first generator failed. Their fuel rested in tanks buried near the shelter, filled with enough oil to last a long time, depending on everyone’s usage of electricity.

  If the second generator failed or the fuel ran out, there were these bicycles—also bolted to the floor, and attached to a large wheel that could turn out enough horsepower for the shelter’s emergency needs. Colville’s father had set this up, and now Colville rode the bikes. For exercise, not electricity—and mostly he rode in darkness, decreeing while keeping his ears alert, watching for Kilo’s reactions.

  As he rode, he glanced at the shadowy towers of stacked pallets in the DCS. Twenty feet away was the hiding place he’d made—a flap of plastic that looked solid, labeled as dried beans, but that was hollow inside. If he was surprised here, or cut off from the tunnel, he and the dog could be hidden in five seconds. He practiced leaping down from the bike, scooping up Kilo. It was as if they had never been here.

  He ate a dried rice cake, a handful of tiny, silver dried fish, then the round chips of bananas that tasted like dust. Switching on his headlamp, he read about survival techniques, about the Messenger’s visits to Atlantis in her earlier embodiments, about the Soviet cosmonauts who reported, in 1985, that they had seen seven large angels, floating in the atmosphere.

  He pumped harder, his circling feet slipping a little on the pedals, his knees kicking up and down. A kind of charge built up in him, energy beyond simple heat. Closing his eyes, he imagined himself riding down a street, outside somewhere. The gravel roads of Glastonbury, under the sun, or the smooth city streets he’d known later. He could feel the sun, the wind, the sweetness of the air almost, and then he opened his eyes and there were the dark shapes of the generators again, hulking in the dim light.
He couldn’t look at them, or even at the silent, staring faces of the outlets on every wall, without thinking of his father threading the wires, tightening the connections. His father had always explained the energy of the Ascended Masters in electrical terms—how theirs was a kind of higher ether electricity that worked its way through suns and solar systems and then planets and bodies, the vibrations more and more condensed. A regular person couldn’t withstand that energy, yet the Messenger had been able to take and listen to it, to step it down as a transformer would, to pass it through herself in the form of dictations, to pass it on to everyone.

  Colville thought of his father and his mother—reminded by sleeping in the space they had prepared, where he could have spent seven years so close to them—yet his thoughts turned even more frequently to Moses. He knew that all this energy wound up and vibrating inside him, this Light, had once been inside his brother.

  Still pedaling, Colville unzipped the pocket of his vest. First he pulled out the wrong piece of paper—the article from the Spokane Spokesman-Review, the lost girl’s picture, her face, a fold cutting across the part in her hair—before he found what he was looking for, the last letter that Moses had written to him.

  Colville,

  What up? I miss you. Everyone could use a big brother out here. It’s something else, the waiting and waiting until your hoping for something to happen and then someones shooting at you or you see a dog blown up by an IED right in front of you and you start hoping for these days like now. Boring. Sand fleas. Bad music played too loud. I’m taking care, and I’m good at this, don’t worry, and I’ll write more later I just wanted to say I’m thinking of you brother.

  Moses

  Moses was supposed to be born here in the shelter. What had been the plan for where he was going to sleep? And how would it have been—how strange to be born here, to be underground for so long and to know the world outside only through pictures in books? And then finally to go outside, where it would look nothing like the books, where everything would be burned up, blackened, covered in ash, and if there were animals they wouldn’t be like those in the books? Or maybe there would be radioactive animals, all kinds of mutations, so many unknown living things.

  13

  THE DAY WAS BRIGHT and cold, the snow frozen into a hard crust that he could walk across without leaving any sign. Col-­ ville wore a white radiation suit, to be invisible against the snow. He lugged the white bucket, his toilet, up toward the trees to dump it.

  Kilo ran ahead, delighted to be outside, zigzagging up the slope, disappearing into the trees. Colville looked back once, checking the hatch, always nervous that the door would somehow close. Turning, looking across the Heart, he squinted his eyes and imagined the snow gone, melted; he could almost see the white tents, could feel how it felt, chasing Francine through the tall grass with the smell of food cooking and the sound of the decrees humming everywhere, everything giving way to the Messenger’s amplified voice, dictating the words of the Masters so forcefully that they echoed everywhere, seemed to emanate from the mountains.

  Colville was almost to the trees when the air began to tremble. The vibrations came in waves; after a moment the sound itself rose, louder, all around him.

  He dropped to the snow, crawled. Once he reached the trees, he squinted down across the white expanse. At first what he saw seemed like blowing snow, caught by a gust, and then perhaps a small animal, a dark round spot amid the whiteness. It came up from the road that led to the canyon, growing larger as it approached.

  And then another black shape—Kilo, darting across the space between, circling toward the hatch, up across the slope, searching for him.

  The sound grew, rattling the trees, as the shape approached. Sliding across the surface of the white snow, it was a creature half man and half machine, black and whining. An Entity. So fast, with so little friction. The light bent and shivered; all edges blurred. Colville looked away—at Kilo, still out in the open—then back to where the black shape rushed closer, throwing snow in all directions.

  It slid to a stop, suddenly went silent. And a man, in a black jacket, with a balaclava over his face, leapt free and began to run. Toward the steel door, around the berm, suddenly out of sight.

  Just as Colville began to understand, he heard another sound, something else approaching. A pickup truck came lurching through the powder, then stopped next to the snowmobile. Another man climbed out—heavier, in a green coat with a fur-lined collar—and followed the first one, beyond where Colville could see, toward the metal door. These men had to be the caretakers from the Activity, the names on the clipboard. James and Stephen. They were inside now, writing their names on the clipboard, switching on lights, walking through the passageways. Was today Tuesday? Had he left anything out that would draw their suspicion?

  Now Kilo saw Colville, barked once, and raced into the trees.

  “Quiet, boy. Here.”

  Wind rushed all through the Heart, ice crystals in the air, a whistling in the needles of the pines. The trees’ shadows grew longer, disappeared as the sun went behind a cloud. Holding the dog tight, Colville wondered if they could make it to the hatch, if they should try.

  A half-hour passed, perhaps an hour. The men returned. They didn’t look around themselves, or up the slope to where Colville and Kilo were hidden. They didn’t even glance toward the hatch that was propped open with the metal rasp; its lid was lifted only slightly in any case, and looked about the same as the others.

  One of the men climbed onto the snowmobile, the other into the pickup. The snowmobile fishtailed, spraying white snow, and the truck carefully turned around, followed at a distance. They both disappeared down the canyon.

  •

  When he wasn’t exploring, decreeing, or exercising, Colville was reading. Survival manuals, dictations and decrees he’d never heard, new Teachings, piles of newspaper clippings. As he took food only from pallets up high, from their dark sides, he took only a few papers at a time and then returned them.

  The Messenger warned about the Soviets and the Asians and Osama bin Laden; she wrote: The West will be confronted by Asia in economic matters and by Islam in matters of religion. She warned about technology: Scientists have genetically engineered pigs and cows to bear human genes. They have grown a human ear on the back of a mouse. There was a time in Atlantis, too, when many people abandoned their first love and their allegiance to the divine Light within. Their scientists even went so far as to create grotesque forms of interbreeding man and animals through genetic engineering. These half-man, half-goat forms we read about in mythology are a soul memory of these events.

  Colville’s eyes adjusted to the dimness—he’d brought so many batteries for the headlamp, but they would not last forever. Of the pale lights in the hallways, every third or fourth one still glowed. He gathered chairs from the many rooms and stacked them on each other as steadily as possible. Sitting that way—up close to the ceiling, wrapped in his sleeping bag, wearing a wool cap—he held his head to one side so light could shine on the words. He read the words, sometimes aloud; let the vibrations all pass through him, settle in the darkness around him. He paused only when he began to feel sleepy or cold, and then he climbed down to do calisthenics or practice yoga. Kilo, atop a padded camping mat, raised his head to watch.

  The yellowed newspapers were all from the time of the shelter cycle. Articles about the Activity—anger in the surrounding community, geothermal disputes, herds of elk, buffalo escaping from Yellowstone Park—were surrounded by stories about President Bush’s deficit plan, Gorbachev’s glasnost. The mayor of Washington, D.C., admitted his drug use; the wall came down in Germany; an earthquake struck San Francisco.

  He read some of the books that had fascinated him when he was a boy, which still entertained him yet now felt almost beside the point. Theories telling how civilization had evolved on earth twice, how the visitation of ancient astronauts was the return of descendants of ancient humans who had been separated from earthbound
humans; how there were Egyptian artifacts that looked like tiny Space Shuttles, cave paintings in Italy where people seemed to wear space helmets, the famous Lid of Palenque whose carving showed the Mayan king inside a rocket ship.

  The books he liked best were from his father’s shelves: all the survivalist literature, the books about the classification of plants and animals. Sometimes there was scribbling in the margins; more often there were underlined passages, signaling what was important to his father, what he had gleaned: Just as cold is actually the lack of heat, and as what we know as darkness is no more than the absence of light, so is getting lost an entirely negative state of affairs. We become lost not because of anything we do, but because of what we leave undone. Colville unzipped his sleeping bag, climbed down, slid one book back and pulled out another. We learned not only to camouflage our bodies, but also to camouflage our minds and spirits, moving into the place of invisibility. We became so adept at camouflage that neither animal nor man could detect us even if they looked directly at us.

  Often, reading, he would hear something—a creak in a wall or the ceiling overhead, a mousetrap somewhere, even a mouse trying to get free of a trap, slapping it across a distant floor. A footstep, the sound of breathing? The sound of a cart on the tracks, as if someone was pushing it down the tunnel or a wind was somehow blowing underground? He would stand, wait, listen. He would walk to the door of the tunnel, open it, stick his head through. Silence.

  •

  Colville picked up Kilo in one arm and climbed up the narrow ladder to the lookout. Finally they reached the top, and he pushed the dog in, climbed over, struggled to the long, low window.