Throughout, the housing stock was a disconcerting patchwork. Disheveled clapboards with blistered paint and broken porch railings sat side-by-side glassy, impeccably kept retirement communities with tennis courts and pools. But plenty of smaller outposts along this route were ghost towns. He wondered where everyone had gone.
It was on the fourth day, in Nebraska. At their motel on the outskirts of Omaha that morning, they’d forgotten to fill up the water bottles. Nollie declared she was parched. (She could have been closer to insane, or hypnotized anyway. Between Lincoln and Grand Island, I-80 was so straight you could have used the roadway for a ruler, the land so flat you could have used the prairie for an ironing board. Mr. Expert in the backseat verified that the route didn’t vary in its relentless, perfectly western direction by more than a few yards for seventy-two miles. For once Willing and Goog agreed on something: Nollie’s refusal to put the Myourea into automatic along this mind-numbingly monotonous passage was yunk.) She pulled off onto an unlabeled side road that soon gave way to dirt.
“No way you’re going to find a minimart here,” Goog said. “Turn around.”
She might have, had Goog not opened his big mouth. Nollie never took directions from their hostage. “Maybe not, but even Nebraska isn’t depopulated. Americans can’t be so far gone that they won’t give a stranger a drink of water.”
The track ended at a low-lying building they almost missed, since it was camouflaged by dust, and banked with windblown sand. A few exposed streaks revealed a surface the dun color of the landscape, as if it were designed to be missed. The hockey-puck structure was round, with a flat top and no windows. The featureless dwelling had only one door, which yawned open.
“Looks deserted,” Goog said. “Let’s go back. This place is weird.”
For Willing, unease battled curiosity, and curiosity won out. He stepped gingerly over the sand-mounded threshold. “Hello!” he called, and there wasn’t even an echo. “Give me my maXfleX,” he told Goog. “It’s dark.”
Willing struggled with the screen for a moment. The old fleX rolled neatly into a flashlight in a trice, but the new and improved conversion was awkward. Even when he got the tube rolled, the beam splayed asymmetrically to the left.
The immediate interior was also full of dirt, with the odd empty vodka bottle on top: they weren’t the first to discover this place. Willing swiveled the beam. It found more dirt, a smooth interior black wall, and a hole in the middle: a spiral staircase, with no direction to go but down. The entrance had once been protected by a hatch cover, which leaned at a dysfunctional tilt. Someone had jimmied it up. A smell rose from the opening—stale and dry, with an undertone of corruption. The impression of desolation was absolute. No one was here.
“What is this, Indiana Jones?” Goog whined. “We should get out of here.”
“I’m surprised at you,” Willing said. “There might be something down there you could tax.”
“Ha-ha. But I’m not setting foot in that pit with my hands taped.”
Actually, they’d grown pretty casual about the tape. It hadn’t been replaced since the day previous. Goog could probably have twisted free if he’d tried.
“He can stay up here, then. I locked the car,” Nollie assured Willing. “He’s not going anywhere. I want to check this out.”
As he and Nollie cautiously descended the gritty obsidian stairs, Willing glanced enviously at her older fleX. The roll was sweet, the light beam clean. Though the afternoon sun of the Nebraska plains was baking outside, the stairwell was cool. The foul taint in the air grew more intense.
One flight down, Willing swept his fleXpot to the side. It struck, of all things, a dusty treadmill. Behind it, the wall was lined with metal dumbbells of ascending size. A few feet to the right sat a cross-trainer, and next to that a rowing machine. He had no understanding of why anyone would bother to build a gym underground.
“Stop,” he shouted sharply to Nollie behind him, embarrassed by the pound of his chest and the bile that rose in his throat. “If you’re at all squeamish, or easily spooked, you should go back up.”
“You can’t imagine I’m ‘squeamish,’ much less—” She dropped the complaint cold.
Willing’s fleXpot was trained on the stationary bicycle. Rather, on its rider. Slumped over the digital readout as if having set the machine for an overambitious hill climb, the figure was draped in a dusty tracksuit. Skulls always appear to be grinning, though this one had enough leathered skin stuck around the mouth to convey more the grimace of exertion. One of the arms had fallen off.
“This guy’s been dead a long time,” Willing said. “That probably makes us lucky.” Were he pressed to theorize: what made corpses horrifying was moisture. The completely alive and the completely dead, fine. The in-between was the problem.
“You up for one more level?” Nollie gestured to the staircase, which wound farther down. “I’m intrigued.”
“Take my hand.” She seized it. He wasn’t sure who was comforting whom.
The floor below contained an elaborate kitchen: convection oven, microwave, slow cooker, a KitchenAid mixer with a clatter of attachments. Finely tooled ash with stylish brass fixtures, the cabinet doors were flung open. Whatever ruffians had rifled the larder were not culinarily inclined. They’d left behind the bread maker, pasta machine, and food processor, while julienne slicers and olive pitters littered the linoleum. Though the floor was sticky from broken bottles of evaporated goo, several shelves were lined with cocktail onions, caviar, artichoke hearts, anchovies, hazelnut oil, and preserved lemons. What struck Willing about this buried Dean & Deluca Christmas basket was that there wasn’t merely one jar of Seville marmalade with Glenlivet. Like all the other chichi comestibles, there were dozens of marmalade jars—foreshortening two feet deep.
He picked up a jar of candied kumquats, and brushed it off. Mumbling, “My mother didn’t believe in sell-by dates,” he slipped it into his belt pack.
Nollie was panning her fleXpot over the contents of an open chest freezer, six of which lined a whole quadrant of this level. Poking at the contents with a long-handled barbecue spatula, she read from the labels. “Sea bass, filet mignon, duck breast, quail, foie gras, smoked salmon—”
“Eat your salmon,” Willing remembered.
“I don’t think so.” The airless plastic packets were uniformly an evil black.
Opposite the kitchen, a curved dining table of an exotic wood traced the circular wall of the silo. Three of its residents were propped in chairs. They looked hungry.
“The circulation system must have kept working for quite a while,” Willing supposed. “Or the smell in here might be unbearable. What do you say—one more?”
They curled a third flight down—which entailed nudging one of their worse-for-wear hosts out of the way, about whom they became blasé with unnerving rapidity. Willing would have predicted this: a floor-to-ceiling wine cellar in the round. Or that’s what he inferred, though it was here that previous tourists had concentrated their pillage. Most of the bottles were missing, and those that remained were empty: drained fifty-year-old Bordeauxs lay amid discarded cardboard canisters of Talisker and elaborate wooden corks of top-shelf cognac.
“I know something about French wine,” Nollie said, raising a broken bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. “This was a good year.”