name?”
“Shane,” he answered.
“Shane,” she repeated, her voice stepping back, turning inward. The name conjured up images of old television westerns and leather-skinned gunfighters. The hot, flat glare of the sun and a dusty place where death was never far away. Marie decided that he had gunfighter’s eyes: a dark shade of gray now, but in the sunlight they would turn to an overcast and guarded blue. She felt herself drawn to him and decided to trust that feeling. She lowered the muzzle of the shotgun to the hard and oily ground.
“The house isn’t empty,” she told him, “but it’s too big for just one person.” She tried on a hesitant smile. “I’ve felt like a ghost rattling around inside.” The smile faded until only her hesitancy remained. “If what you say is true… if you really don’t mean any harm, then you might as well come inside for the night.”
Shane nodded, grateful, and followed her in.
He missed the door on the first pass, not knowing where the shelter was; hearing about it secondhand from his parents and Rudy Cheng, and then only briefly, as if it were a grave or sepulcher they’d rather not think about. Shane himself had been imagining something in the basement, like a submarine hatch: something leading deeper into the earth. After several minutes of fruitless searching, he came back to the bend in the stairs and the door seemed to pop out at him. At first he thought it was a storage nook — a cramped, cobwebby space filled with old clothes and Christmas decorations — but on second glance, the door looked much too wide for that. Much too solid.
He glanced questioningly at Marie. “Is this it?”
She shrugged, telling him she’d never seen a bomb shelter before.
Tentatively, Shane touched the handle. The door felt suddenly very thick, as if it might open on a bank vault. When he tried to open it, the heavy steel handle didn’t budge. It felt welded into place.
“I think this is it,” he murmured, taking his hand away and looking at his palm in the faint fall of daylight that trickled down the stairs. The burnished steel had felt cold, and now he wondered if the space behind it had become a tomb. He’d overheard Larry ask Mr. Cheng to take care of his family, but walking through the quiet ruins of the cul-de-sac, that didn’t mean much anymore. Nor would he get beyond this bend in the stairs if there was no one left alive to unlock the door and let him in.
“Try knocking,” Marie suggested, suppressing a shiver. There was a coldness creeping up the stairs from the basement.
Shane raised a fist and knocked. The sound hardly seemed to scratch the surface; it was like rapping his knuckles against a large shelf of bedrock, painful and utterly senseless.
“This isn’t going to work,” he muttered, frowning. “We need something solid, like a hammer or a good-sized wrench.”
“There’s a hammer upstairs,” Marie informed him. “It’s lying on the table with a bunch of loose nails.”
“That’ll work,” Shane nodded. “Would you go get it?”
With a flip of her hair, she disappeared up the stairs.
“What about your mother?” Shane asked.
“She’s dead,” Marie replied, sitting on her bed with her knees pulled up to her chin while Shane sat cross-legged on the floor, his back against the wall. “She died of cancer when I was eight. Dad and I have been living here alone ever since.” She turned wistfully toward the window, which was hung with a sheet of black tarpaulin so the candlelight stayed within the room. “Now I suppose he’s gone, too.”
Shane didn’t offer an opinion on that one way or the other; it was hard to say what happened to people once they started wandering away from home. He wolfed a spoonful of Nalley’s chili straight out of the can, savoring it like ambrosia; it seemed perfectly suited to fill the nagging hole inside him. In days past, he’d imagined that cold chili must taste something like dog food; they looked and smelled almost the same. That part of him seemed very distant now.
“You know… just lately, before you showed up, I’d gotten to the point where I’d almost begun to envy dead people.”
Shane paused in his eating and looked up at her, surprised.
“Oh not the ones who are still walking around,” she clarified, “but those who have already lived full lives and died before this ever happened. They’re the lucky ones, even my mom. I mean, she was only thirty, but she never had to worry about anything called Wormwood.”
Shane considered her strange thread of logic as he took another bite from the open can, working it down slowly, thoughtfully. “I’m sure she had her own worries, just like everyone else.”
“Maybe,” Marie allowed, “but they’re over now.”
Shane couldn’t help laughing. “That’s a very backward way of looking at life.”
“I suppose so, but it almost seems like…” — Marie sighed — “I don’t know, money in the bank to me. There’s something very comforting about it.”
“Like an iron-clad guarantee?” Shane suggested, still smiling.
Marie’s whole face lit up. “Yes! That exactly right! A guarantee!”
“That would be nice,” Shane nodded.
They fell into a comfortable silence as he finished his chili, Marie watching him eat with a satisfied air, as if she had cooked and canned the meal herself. She played with the white flannel hem of her nightgown in an absentminded way, wondering when he would notice her legs. In the short time she had known him Marie decided that she wanted to be with Shane, if he would have her. Feeding him was one thing, but she had something else in mind that was more persuasive, more certain.
Still, she didn’t want him thinking that she was a whore, available to any man who happened by. It had to seem like his idea, or something that happened between them.
“Shane?”
He looked up at her, his thoughts interrupted, scattered like dead leaves. He looked relieved, and then his eyes dipped down to a bare length of thigh. Smooth, firm and white. She tucked her nightgown under her leg as if brushing back a fallen lock of hair, then shook her head.
“Nothing.” She seemed embarrassed and her eyes dropped to the folds of the bed. “Never mind.”
“What?” he prodded, looking at her in the candlelight. Her hair was loose, casting soft shadows over her face. The glimpse of her bare leg was still with him.
She shook her head again, rearranging the golden threads in her hair. “Nothing,” she insisted, hesitating. “You’ll think it’s silly.”
“No, I won’t,” he assured her, the vision in his head catching fire now. He reached out for her hand.
She looked at him.
“Will you hold me? Just for a little while?”
He got to his knees and crawled to the bed, folding her inside his arms.
