Heaven Should Fall

“In the den. Same as always.”

Cade circled around the back of the recliner and led me into the room behind it. The space was larger and airier—an addition that encompassed a modern-looking kitchen-and-dining-room combination, as well as a nook that contained another TV and a couple of chairs. In one of these sat Elias, whom I recognized by his features and haircut but who was otherwise strikingly changed. Gone were the hard stomach and muscled chest that had flaunted themselves even from beneath his sandy-beige T-shirt. In their place were a significant gut and soft pectorals, and he carried the weight in his face, as well. When I had met him in the fall, his forearms were notable only because of their strength and deep golden tan. Now both were covered in tattoos. I blinked at him and tried to match the image I remembered with the one in front of me.

Cade took my hand and guided me to follow him. He stepped directly into Elias’s line of vision before he spoke. “Hey, bro,” he said. “How’s it hanging?”

Elias looked up from the television. “Hey,” he grunted. He met my eye and said, “Hi, Jill.”

I threw him a warm smile. “Hey, Elias. Great to see you again.”

“Did Mom and Dad tell you?” asked Cade.

“Yep. You knocked her up.” He half grinned and flicked a glance toward Cade. “Good job there, buddy. You ever heard of Trojans?”

“Yeah. They don’t work if you leave ’em in the box.”

“They sure don’t. Jill, hope to God it doesn’t come out looking like me or acting like Candy’s kids. If it has to be an Olmstead, at least its dad came from the deep end of the gene pool.”

“If you say so,” I said, and Cade threw me a joking scowl that made Elias snicker. “He’s got endurance, that’s for sure. I can’t believe he makes that drive all the time. It’s long.”

“Not long enough,” Cade said under his breath, and his brother chuckled again. I followed Cade up the stairs to a bedroom sandwiched between two others. He closed the door, then lay down on the full-size mattress and rubbed his eyes. “I’d like to go home now,” he said.

“You are home.”

He groaned and threw both arms over his face. I glanced around the room, taking in the white walls decorated only with a large American flag, the plain childish furniture, the windows shaded by artlessly stitched homemade curtains. I peeked out between them and saw the three little boys running around in the yard. “So those are Candy’s hellions, huh?”

“Yep. Wait till you meet their dad. Hoo boy.”

“They look pretty wound up. Bet she’ll be glad to get them off to school on Monday.”

“They don’t go to school. They’re homeschooled. By Candy, no less. The girl who spells religion with a d in it.”

“At least it’s not part of the curriculum.”

“If you’re Candy, it is the curriculum. Wait and see.”

I let the curtain drop. “Where’s your parents’ room?”

He tapped the wall beside the bed.

“Wonderful.”

“You’re telling me. Elias sleeps on the other side, but he isn’t going to care, so we can move the bed to the opposite wall. Of course, that would probably scandalize my mother. But it’s not like she can pretend otherwise, with you pregnant and all.”

“True. Hey, what’s happened to Elias?”

“What do you mean, what’s happened to him?”

“He’s gained a lot of weight. And the tattoos.”

Cade shrugged. “Yeah, he’s gotten pretty chunky. But to tell the truth, that’s what he looked like before he joined the army, more or less. The shape he was in when you saw him before—that’s not normal for him. Hey, speaking of food—follow me. You’ve got to see this.”

I followed him back down to the first floor where he pulled open a hallway door that led to the basement stairs. Candy peered over from the kitchen and called, “Hey, Cade, you going down cellar? You want to bring me up a can of black beans? I need ’em for tomorrow.”

“Sure thing.” He sounded almost gleeful. As we descended the dark steps I could tell by the smell of it that this cellar must be finished and not earthen; that much was good, because low dirt cellars gave me the creeps. Then he pulled the chain for the light, and what I saw made me pull in my breath.

The entire wall that faced me, running the length of the house, was filled from floor to ceiling with shelves stacked with giant-sized cans of food. Each bore a dusty yellow label printed with a cornucopia spilling out with produce. Only the black lettering differentiated their contents. PEAS. BLUEBERRIES. CHEESE POWDER. POTATO PEARLS. ROAST BEEF FREEZE-DRIED. Six fifty-five-gallon drums, in a cheerful shade of blue, sat along the adjacent wall beside a chemical toilet and a stack of military-green sleeping cots. An old television sat on a wooden crate, and next to it, a camp stove and a large gasoline-powered generator.

“What is this, a bomb shelter?” I asked.

“Kinda-sorta. You see the gun safe over there?” asked Cade. He waved a hand toward a wall holding the brackets for at least a dozen hunting rifles, and to the side, a tall brown metal safe that must have held the rest of their collection. “If the army ever runs short, they know who to call. Actually, they don’t. Which I think is half the point.”

I turned and looked around the room in wonder. The walls and floor were finished with clean concrete. An entire section of wall was devoted to evaporated milk. Several shelves contained varieties of vegetables and fruits, while another seemed to contain only baking mixes: BUTTERMILK BISCUIT MIX, CORN BREAD MIX, FUDGE BROWNIE MIX. There were even cans labeled GARDEN SEEDS.

“Jesus.” I exhaled. “You guys are ready for the apocalypse.”

“Sixty thousand dollars,” said Cade.

I looked at him. “That’s how much all this cost?”

“That’s my best guess. Freshman year of college, when I was short on money, I got pissed off and sat down to work out what I figured they’d spent on all this shit. That’s the number I came up with. How screwed up is that, huh? I’m working my ass into the ground to pay for school, getting nothing from these people, and here’s where it all went instead.” He pulled a giant can from a shelf and held it up like an infomercial salesman. “So when Jesus comes back, we can all eat precooked bacon.”

“I can see why that would piss you off.”

“You better believe it.” He chucked the can haphazardly back onto the shelf, then walked the length of the unit until he found one labeled BLACK BEANS. “Three goddamn months and we’re going home. And by that I mean home to D.C. Because by then I’ll be ready to strangle somebody, and when that happens their nuclear bunker won’t do them a damn bit of good.”

“It’s kind of funny, though.”

He turned to me with one eyebrow up. “What, this?”

“Yeah, all of it. Storing up food, homeschooling the kids. We had people like that at Southridge—the ones who were convinced the government was going to come after them personally. We called them the PSNs. It stands for ‘paranoid survivalist nut jobs.’” He laughed, but I cringed inwardly at my bluntness. “Not that I’m calling your family that. Sorry.”

“No—fair enough. In my mom’s defense, I’m pretty sure she thinks this is as stupid as I do. But she’s not one to make waves.”

“So whose idea is it?”

“Mostly my brother-in-law’s. We always had a lot of food stored up, but it didn’t turn into a bunker until Candy married him. My dad thought it was perfectly reasonable.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The longer you’re here, the more sense it’ll make. Which is why we’re only staying for the summer. Hang around much longer and it starts to eat your brain.”

“Well, we could set up our bedroom down here, in the meantime,” I said. “Wouldn’t have to worry about noise coming through the walls, that’s for sure.”

He laughed wickedly and slapped me on the backside, and we hurried back up the stairs, the can of beans rattling all the way like a children’s toy.