The Voice followed us in here, too. “In the lockers you’ll find everything you need. Choose a pair of sandals from the shelf. Once you have everything, pass through the red door into the residential area. Have something to eat; make yourselves comfortable.”
Michaela still stood there, her hair dripping, her bare skin red from the pummeling of the high-pressure shower. She looked up. “Listen, thanks for letting us in here.”
“Don’t mention it. Some of us haven’t abandoned all traits of civilized society.”
“Will you be in the residential area?”
“No. You’ll be alone for now.”
“We’d like to be able to thank you in person. This intercom stuff ’s a bit impersonal, you know?”
“We’ll be able to talk later. But it can’t be face-to-face yet, unfortunately. You are being housed in the quarantine annex. For obvious reasons, as the name implies. You understand?”
“Yes. Of course.” She rubbed her hands. I noticed her fingertips were blue with cold. “Thank you. It’s really good of you.”
“I must go.” The Voice quickened, as if in a hurry. “Good-bye.”
“Greg.” She shot me a warning look. “I told you, I’m not a goddam peep show.”
“OK, you first.” I turned my face to the wall. Soon I heard locker doors opening as she hunted through them. Meanwhile I noticed that the door to the decontamination unit had closed. There was no door handle. I didn’t try it, but I’d guess it would be locked tight.
“OK, you can turn ’round now.”
I turned to see her standing facing the open lockers. She’d wrapped a large white bath towel ’round herself that reached from above her breasts to her knees. She’d found a smaller towel that she now fastened turban-style ’round her head.
“By the way, Valdiva, on your butt you’ve got a bruise the size of Idaho. You might have to eat standing up.”
For the next ten minutes we finished drying ourselves with soft cotton towels. In the lockers were hard, mysterious objects encased in plastic. I looked at them for a moment before exclaiming, “Hey, shrink-wrapped clothes.” Using my thumb, I tore a hole in the plastic. With a hiss the packaging softened, expanded, like a shiny lung inhaling. Inside were a sweatshirt and pants in a cool shade of green. Neatly folded there were also a white T-shirt and two pairs of underpants. “Hey, they think of everything.”
“Check the label first,” Michaela said. “You’ve opened a child’s size. See? Small, regular, large, extra large.”
Soon we were dressed in matching green outfits. For our feet there were something like rubber beach sandals in hospital white. Another locker had been stacked high with individual toiletry sets marked either Male or Female. When I opened a Male I found disposable razors, shaving foam, a toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, talcum powder and a comb. I grinned, feeling, absurd to say, like a kid at Christmas. “Look. Just what every nuclear calamity survivor needs.”
Michaela didn’t share my absurd sense of fun. She sighed. “I’m hungry.” Then she picked up a Female toilet pack before heading for the red door that The Voice had indicated.
Thirty-four
Maybe I should have been asking questions about our immediate future in that place, but to step through the red door was to step into a different world.
Whereas the first two rooms we’d passed through had been utilitarian and colder than a zombie’s good-night kiss, this suite of rooms was warm, comfortable, even luxurious. Like a pair of vacationers in a new hotel room we explored. On the first level was a kitchen painted in warm oranges with a modern stove, refrigerator, sink and countertops in stainless steel. Bolted to one wall were a whole bank of microwave ovens.
“Looking at these”-Michaela opened a microwave door-“you can guess what will be on the menu.”
She guessed right. A walk-in pantry had been stacked floor-to-ceiling with every microwave-ready meal you could think of. While the refrigerator had been packed with what I first thought were racks of toothpaste. Only a closer look revealed that these were labeled NASA PATENT PENDING. I saw they were marked either cheese, mayonnaise, cream or butter. “Butter from a tube?”
“Good God.” Michaela’s eyes widened in sheer wonder. “They have butter? I’ve forgotten what butter tastes like.”
I picked up more tubes. “But which one of these contains the bread?”
“Idiot.” She smiled. And it was such a breathtakingly beautiful smile that I found myself grinning back at her. She broke away to open a cupboard full of knobby vacuum packs. “There’s the bread.” Taking out the tennis ball- sized lump, she read the label. “ ‘Remove all packaging. Place on oven tray and bake for twenty minutes’… partly baked bread. We’re certainly not going to starve here. I wonder if they’ve got any coffee.”
“It’s in the drum by the kettle.”
She turned on the faucets. “Hot and cold. It looks pure.”
“It’ll be pumped from a sealed well, I guess.” I looked up at the lights. “They must have a good set of generators, too, and a heck of a lot of fuel. They’re not worried about rationing.”
Stroking a clean countertop, she gave a sigh of pleasure. “We might as well enjoy it while it lasts. It’s un- likely the government’ll keep us here as guests for long.”
“I guess not.”
A living room came next, with comfortable sofas, deep armchairs, fluffy rugs, a wall-mounted TV screen that was bigger than your bedroom door. Again the place was pleasantly warm and decorated in luscious orange with a pale yellow ceiling. “Some nuke shelter,” I said, running my hand over a lush velvet drape beside a false window that showed a painted view of a stag drinking from a stream.
“I read somewhere that these bunkers were all decorated in bright colors and furnished like this after psychologists said that people who spent long periods of time in them would go crazy or start killing themselves.”
“You’re hardly likely to suffer cabin fever here,” I said. “Look at those potted plants. They’re real. They’ve even got their own automatic watering system.”
“If you’re going to keep people in a concrete box for months you’ve got to look after their creature com-forts.” She picked up a remote from a coffee table. When she pressed a button soft music padded into the room from concealed speakers. “Ambient music.”
“No doubt chosen by psychologists, too. There are probably subliminal messages of hope and optimism buried down in the mix.”
“Don’t knock it, Greg. I think we’ve just stumbled into heaven on earth.”
“Let’s hope so.”
She smiled. “Cynic. Come on, let’s explore.”
Carpeted stairs led down below ground level to a hallway, again painted bright yellow, with a frieze of dolphins and palms. One door led to a corridor lined with yet more doors. These were the bedrooms (although they resembled ship’s cabins). These were a little plainer but had comfortable beds, closet space, tables, mirrors, washbasins: the usual stuff. There were also a couple of bathrooms, too, for shared use.
Back at the other side of the stairs, a wide door opened up into a plain white painted corridor. There weren’t as many doors-and these were all hard steel-and locked. Beside each door was a keypad where the bunker people would tap in their open sesame code. The doors bore stenciled notices that said things like Back-up Ops or Sick Bay or Service Center or Q.A. Board room. In the middle of one wall were a set of large twin doors (but no keypad, I noted). Those doors were labeled Comm-Route, whatever that was.
“That looks to be the extent of it,” she said. “Come on, let’s make the most of paradise.”
The Voice didn’t visit until that evening around ten hours later. I say evening because I only had my watch to go on. Of course, there were no windows in what was, when all’s said and done, a grande deluxe bomb shelter. Part novelty and part hunger, we both ate half a dozen microwave meals apiece. Mexican, Chinese, Italian, French cuisine. They tasted wonderful considering they came out of vacuum packs. And when we’d baked the fresh bread
