“Alcohol! I swear, this whole generation’s the same. Caps-lock IGNORANT!”
The steps down are steep and uneven. At first Connor thinks Sonia will send them down alone, but she insists on leading the way. She takes her time, and seems more surefooted on the steps than she does on level ground. Connor tries to hold her arm to give her support, but she shakes him off, and throws him a nasty gaze. “If I want your help, I’ll ask. Do I look feeble to you?”
“Actually, yes.”
“Looks are deceiving,” she says. “After all, when I saw you, I thought you looked reasonably intelligent.”
“Very funny.”
At the bottom, Sonia reaches toward the wall and throws a light switch.
Risa gasps, and Connor follows her gaze until he sees them. Three figures. A girl and two boys.
“Your little family has just grown,” Sonia tells them.
The kids don’t move. They appear to be close to Connor’s and Risa’s age.
Fellow Unwinds, for sure. They look wary and exhausted. Connor wonders if he looks as bad.
“For God’s sake, stop staring,” she says to them. “You look like a pack of rats.”
Sonia shuffles around the dusty cellar, pointing things out to Risa and Connor. “There are canned goods on these shelves, and a can opener around somewhere. Eat whatever you want, but don’t leave anything over or you really will see rats. Bathroom’s back there. Keep it clean. I’ll go out in a bit and get some formula and a baby bottle.” She glances at Connor. “Oh, and there’s a first-aid kit around here somewhere for the bite on your arm, whatever that’s all about.”
Connor suppresses a grin. Sonia doesn’t miss a thing.
“How much longer?” asks the oldest of the three cellar-rats, a muscular guy who looks at Connor with intense distrust, as if Connor might challenge his role as alpha male or something.
“What do you care?” says Sonia. “You got a pressing appointment?”
The kid doesn’t respond; he just glares at Sonia and crosses his arms, displaying a shark tattooed on his forearm. Ooh, thinks Connor with a smirk. Intimidating. Now I’m really scared.
Sonia sighs. “Four more days until I’m rid of you for good.”
“What happens in four days?” Risa asks.
“The ice cream man comes.” And with that, Sonia climbs up the stairs faster than Connor thought she’d be able to. The trapdoor bangs closed.
“Dear, sweet Dragon Lady won’t tell us what happens next,” says the second boy, a lanky blond kid with a faint smirk that seems permanently fixed on his face. He has braces on teeth that don’t appear to need them. Although his eyes tell of sleepless nights, his hair is perfect. Connor can tell that this kid, despite the rags he’s wearing, comes from money.
“We get sent to harvest camp and they cut us apart, that’s what happens next,” says the girl. She’s Asian, and looks almost as tough as the kid with the tattoo, with hair dyed a deep shade of pink and a spiked leather choker on her neck.
Shark Boy looks at her sharply. “Will you shut up with your end-of-the-world crap?” Connor notices that the kid has four parallel scratch marks on one side of his face, consistent with fingernails. The girl has a black eye.
“It’s not the end of the world,” she grumbles. “Just the end of us.”
“You’re beautiful when you’re nihilistic,” says the smirker.
“Shut up.”
“You’re only saying that because you don’t know what nihilistic means.”
Risa gives Connor a look, and he knows what she’s thinking. We have to suffer through four days with this crew? Still, she’s the first to hold out her hand to them and introduce herself. Reluctantly, Connor does the same.
Turns out, each of these kids, just like every Unwind, has a story that ranks a ten on the Kleenex scale.
The smirker is Hayden. As Connor predicted, he comes from a ridiculously wealthy family. When his parents got a divorce, there was a brutal custody battle over him. Two years and six court dates later, it still wasn’t resolved. In the end the only thing his mother and father could agree on was that each would rather see Hayden unwound than allow the other parent to have custody.
“If you could harness the energy of my parents’ spite,” Hayden tells them, “you could power a small city for several years.”
The girl is Mai. Her parents kept trying for a boy, until they finally got one—but not before having four girls first. Mai was the fourth. “It’s nothing new,” Mai tells them. “Back in China, in the days when they only allowed one kid per family, people were killing off their baby girls left and right.”
The big kid is Roland. He had dreams of being a military boeuf but apparently had too much testosterone, or steroids, or a combination of both, leaving him a little too scary even for the military. Like Connor, Roland got into fights at school—although Connor suspected Roland’s fights were much, much worse. That’s not what did him in, though. Roland had beaten up his stepfather for beating his mom. The mother took her husband’s side, and the stepfather got off with a warning. Roland, on the other hand, was sent to be unwound.
“That’s so unfair,” Risa tells him.
“Like what happened to you is any fairer?” says Connor.
Roland fixes his gaze on Connor. It’s emotional stone. “You keep talking to her in that tone of voice, maybe she’ll find herself a new boyfriend.”
Connor smiles with mocking warmth at him, and glances at the tattoo on his wrist. “I like your dolphin.”
Roland is not amused. “It’s a tiger shark, idiot.”
Connor makes a mental note never to turn his back on Roland.
Sharks, Connor once read, have a deadly form of claustrophobia. It’s not so much a fear of enclosed spaces as it is an inability to exist in them. No one knows why. Some say it’s the metal in aquariums that throws their equilibrium off. But whatever it is, big sharks don’t last long in captivity.
After a day in Sonia’s basement, Connor knows how they feel. Risa has the baby to keep her occupied. It requires a huge amount of attention, and although she gripes about the responsibility, Connor can tell she’s thankful simply to have something to help pass the hours. There’s a back room to the basement, and Roland insists that Risa have it for herself and the baby. He acts like he’s doing it to be kind, but it’s obvious that he’s doing it because he can’t stand the baby’s crying.
Mai reads. There’s a whole collection of dusty old books in the corner, and Mai always has one in her hand. Roland, having surrendered the back room to Risa, pulls out a shelving unit and sets up his own private residence behind it. He occupies the space like he’s had experience with being in a cell. When he’s not sitting in his little cell, he’s reorganizing the food in the basement into rations. “I take care of the food,” he announces. “Now that there’s five of us, I’ll redivide the rations, and decide who gets what and when.”
“I can decide what I want and when for myself,” Connor tells him.
“Not gonna work that way,” Roland says. “I had things under control before you got here. It’s gonna stay that way.” Then he hands Connor a can of Spam.
Connor looks at it in disgust. “You want better,” Roland says, “then you get with the program.”
Connor tries to weigh the wisdom of getting into a fight over this—but wisdom rarely arrives when Connor is ticked off. It’s Hayden who defuses the situation before it can escalate. Hayden grabs the can from Connor and pulls open the top.
“You snooze, you lose,” he says, and begins eating the Spam casually with his fingers. “Never had Spam till I came here—now I love it.” Then he grins. “God help me, I’m turning into trailer trash.”