Corley Miller

Eileen didn’t expect to enjoy the bunker, even when she heard she’d been selected as staff. She imagined crates of canned food piled at foot-thick doors, stalactites over itching bunks, corridors reeking of mildew. And Nico hadn’t even applied, so—what did love weigh? This was on the second day, when the fever was still confined to Indonesia.

When she arrived: a bright octagon hollowed from a New Zealand hillside. Solar-powered touchscreens and, even on the staff floor, a jacuzzi. Bedrooms the size of the apartment to which she’d clung through four years as a surgical resident in Williamsburg. Carpets and paintings in the corridors, and a minor van Gogh outside her room.

A park, even. Seven square and pathless miles of stern Matai pines and slim Kahikatea under a translucent dome. Ventilated, somehow. When it was built, in the eight hours of attention Twitter paid to the lifestyle-mag feature—Charles Peal’s Post-Everything Paradise—Eileen had tweeted ice-hearted private equity ghouls eating the heart of our society so they can survive the collapse they’re creating.

Now each dawn she walks to a meadow in the park’s northeast corner, where clover and cranesbill strive up to be drenched in sun. On the east verge there’s a nest of hawks. She found it on the second day, after dinner. A tall, red-breasted bird returning to a bleached treetop. The mate proud on a basket of sticks: black-winged aristocrats. Hooked beaks scorning the Zealand spring. In her purple notebook she drew one. It came out a lump.

Plenty of time to learn. From the stiff bird book in the maroon library, she named them: swamp harriers.

Today she can’t find the nest. Crossing the meadow leaves an apron of dew on her pants. At the tree’s base she finds a strange debris: the nest, fallen from somewhere, filled by a squirming fledgling. It’s featherless. Not quite a bird yet. It wobbles. Works an unsharp jaw. A hot poker of love is quenched in Eileen’s heart.

Birds are viral vectors, was the last thing the scientists managed to learn. Reservoirs.

Not every bird. And Peal closed the dome pretty early—probably not this bird.

Still, she stays six feet away. Finds a long branch and uses it to nudge the nest back together a little and push it toward the base of the tree. Tosses a bit of jerky at the chick, hoping that’ll help. Searches the sky for absent parents.

Eileen walks back to the complex slowly, with one hand on her lower stomach. She’s alive and there isn’t yet a bulge.

When she’s halfway back she hears the alarm. It bores a low E in her temple and then she’s running, pushing through the wet brush onto the lawn, touching her pulse in the airlock.

It’s the same people, the only people, in the Operations Room: Norman and Kennedy, staring at the wall of screens.

They’re watching a scuffed gang of survivors. Eight of them. The genetic elite in scrounged rags. A homemade paint-on-bedsheet banner reads NO INFECTIONS / NEED DYSENTERY MEDS. There’s a little girl, maybe eight, holding a distended stomach and walking towards the huge main gate.

Eileen looks at Norman, who’s technically in charge. Sitting in the big chair flipping the cover on the incinerator button open and shut. Other hand exploring his pec under the green sweatshirt. Boston Celtics. Eileen hates him serenely. A salesman, before.

“You are eight meters away from our cordon,” he says into the microphone. “Stop now.”

Eileen’s job in the Operations Room is to maneuver the cameras. Because apparently in Charles Peal’s billionaire mind the life-and-death decisions could not be given to a doctor but required a goon. Only a goon could be trusted. She’s going for a close-up when a woman comes up right behind the kid, puts a hand on her shoulder. Not an actual mother, Eileen thinks—a mother of choice. She would have liked to choose. Imagine: a goonless apocalypse.

The survivors say something that the outside mics don’t quite pick up.

“Probably amebic dysentery,” Eileen says. “We’ve got, like, a century’s supply of tinidazole down there.”

“Ninety-nine point seven percent lethality,” says Norman, like that was the only important thing.

“They’re not really asking to come in,” says Kennedy, who’s twenty-two. Basically a child. “We could, like, make a big slingshot. And open the door thiiiis much.”

“Ninety-nine point seven,” says Norman. “Drowning in your own organs.”

“That’s not the actual method—” Eileen starts.

“We could send it out in one of the drones,’ Kennedy says.

The woman takes a step forward. The girl follows her.

Then eight fat stalks of flame bloom under the woman’s left foot. She’s ashed in an instant: pollen of cinders bearing south-southeast in the spring breeze. Further back, the girl’s ignited by the heat. Red leaves furling on her old clothes. Blind and backwards she runs.

“I think we could maybe have found a way to innovate, there,” says Kennedy.

The girl’s skin boils as she runs. Eileen suffers an obscure collapse. Here with a goon and a child, killing. For three breaths she feels an enormous pressure to die. When she doesn’t, it’s like every single rule—everything from 10th-grade Cotillion to Charles Peal’s 400-page Bunker Guidance Manual—has boiled out of her.

“Let’s watch The One Where Nana Dies Twice tonight,” says Norman, who’s a fiend for Friends.

“That was monstrous,” Eileen says. She needs to throw up, she thinks. Or maybe kill Norman.

“Fuck, Eileen. There’s work to do!”

“We never know what day they might arrive,” says Norman. “So we have to be ready.”

Eileen does throw up: in the staff toilet on the way to the freezer room. But after lunch she goes back to the meadow, where the little bird’s still screeching and struggling. Maybe a ten percent chance it’s a carrier. Maybe twenty. She wraps it in her sweatshirt and brings it back through the dark wood to the bunker. It’ll kill her, or she’ll save its stupid little fuzzy life.

Kennedy Peaks filled out the bunker application form at an improv troupe party sophomore year, through the haze of three lime-a-ritas and two hours of yes-and flirting with a junior named Catlin, who he’d thought to impress by wittily filling out the questionnaire:

I am an extremely talented panicker…I will ensure the entire bunker is filled with nostalgic clutter.

Catlin’d rewarded him with four minutes of weirdly rigid kissing, then a year and a half of standoffishness. When he learned he’d been picked, and had ninety minutes to reach a private airport outside Madison for a drone flight to New Zealand, he thought of Catlin. On the second sleepless night in the bunker he found her Instagram account, where Bloody Mary brunches had, over the last two weeks, transitioned first to jokes about hemorrhagic Marys, and then to a couple days of optimistic thumbs-up-in-the-hospital posts, and then the pure wretched farewells and I-love-my-mother and please-can-someone-break-into-my-apartment-and-feed-my-dog posts to which Kennedy had, weirdly, begun to lose sensitivity, because by then they were a genre, the only genre.

His mother, in particular, is dead. She’d called while she was driving his father to the ER in Waukesha. Kennedy tried to reach her twenty-three times after that. She was too busy dying, he guesses. Not much comfort. The first week in the bunker he spent regretting his survival, crying and masturbating, building little shrines. Kennedy’d been at a loss before, about stuff like whether vodka or gin made for a better post-show party, or what seminars to sign up for at the Peal Freedom Leadership Institute he’d won a fellowship to between junior and senior years. Which was weird: he mostly remembers people trying to hook up with each other by trading Ronald Reagan quotes.

But he’s never been at a loss about just how? How to live? That first week, the chore list—8:30 am check solar batteries, 9:15 am inspect south comms array—was the only thing that kept him alive.

It had come, of course, from Charles Peal. And sometime in that second week he’d had this breakthrough, this moment of clarity: while Kennedy was trying out for improv Charles Peal figured out how to survive the actual end of the world. He does remember hearing Charles Peal speak at the Institute, talking about the can-do spirit and the zone of influence, and thinking: hey, this is a lot like yes-and. And now he thinks: this whole hemorrhagic fever has proved Charles Peal right about a whole lot of things. And: it was a great idea to build a bunker, and to become a billionaire. And then: what if I handle the apocalypse like Charles Peal? What if I try to yes-and this motherfucker?

He’s not quite up to that, not every day. But he thinks he can hold it together until Charles arrives, and that Charles will have some kind of a plan—some way to get things back together. To start over. For the last eight days Kennedy’s been improvising. Engaging Eileen and Norman in rounds of One-Word-at-A-Time, doing new characters for every chore, trying to help everyone get through it. Just until Charles comes.

And so Kennedy Peaks is trying to meet this morning’s incineration fight with his very best yes-and: yes, that was harrowing, and they all just need to really come together in this difficult time, with some good improv games. Usually they all gather in the Entertainment Grotto after evening chores, and Kennedy’s even written up little cards with the rules and some good prompts, Foreign Film Dubbing and Story or Die and Sit-Stand-Lie, and he just knows it’ll get things back on track.

“Hard day,” says Norman, “We’d better watch something funny, to take our minds off it.” Everyone knows this means Friends, because Norman has this thing about Friends, and because he’s literally already gotten out the commemorative DVD case, which, the walk-in DVD room initially felt antique to Kennedy but now that the internet’s winking off seems like another smart move by Charles Peal.

“How about a zombie movie,” says Eileen. “Where they all die.”

“That might be too on-the-nose,” says Kennedy. “Listen—”

“We have to take our minds off it,” says Norman.

“Norman, I actually had a different idea for tonight,” says Kennedy.

“Are we even sure that they have porn?” asks Kennedy.

“How could you plan to survive the apocalypse without porn?”

Kennedy tries to point out that it might be embarrassing to know what kind of porn the Peals had picked out, while serving as live-in staff, and to argue they should be doing something together and not just watching something together.

“Who cares what they think,” Eileen says. “We’re here. We survived.”

‘We should still be considerate,” Norman says, “just in case.”

Kennedy tries to explain the rules for Story or Die.

“That’s morbid as shit,” Eileen says, without missing a beat. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter if we impress them,” she continues. “You’re both just living in the past. Like it fucking matters. We’re all just animals going around incinerating each other until we die, anyway.”

“Eileen, we’re watching Friends. That is an order. I’m ordering you to watch Friends with us.”

“Do you want to pick an episode?” Norman asks.

Eileen looks at him. “Yes, Norman, that is what I want today. I want to pick an episode of Friends.”

Norman looks really pleased as he hands her the DVD case. And then Eileen shoves the entire thing in the slot in the wall marked INCINERATOR, and flips Norman off with both hands, and stomps off toward the staff quarters. Norman curses after her, and then runs into the DVD room to look for another copy, and Kennedy Peaks—who is, after all, twenty-one years old, and who was a pretty good ultimate frisbee player and moderated a couple of subreddits and was really looking forward to graduating from college in just two months—thinks to himself: how would Charles Peal handle this?

Norman makes a point of carrying the new incinerator cartridges down himself: leadership. Heaviest shit in the bunker, a searing half-mile rep. There’s a handcart, and there’s already two years’ supply in the incinerator bay anyway, but he loves the thought of the muscles, splitting and knitting and holding. And the pain’s better, by about infinity, than the million nevers that the bunker hits him with, whenever he’s idle for a moment: never the meetings in Parsippany, never the rounds of shots in test tubes, never the desk guard printing a picture of his smile on a curling paper badge. Never the Celts, the Pats, never the drop of the bass or Sweet Caroline, or—never, never, never.

If Norman got to choose, he’d want to be quarantined with Phoebe and Rachel, easy. Easy. But if he couldn’t just choose the chicks? Still Phoebe, also Joey. Even though Rachel’s hotter, to him. Because those are the two who just love it the most. Love it: the way Norman does, or did. Being alive. He’s memorized every episode. Except for season nine, out of protest. At quiet bars it’s how he used to hit on girls: says that he thinks Friends is like the actual Bible. Everything you need to know to live.

On the day he left, Boston hadn’t gotten its first case yet. He looked down at Fenway and Gillette from the drone and thought: what am I doing? Everything’s fine. And then he’d thought: this will be like Friends. We’ll live in two apartments, and we’ll have jokes and play weird games and somebody will have a guitar. And eventually Norman was going to marry somebody, one of the other bunker people. Because Norman’s like Chandler. But also like Ross. And also like Joey, because he’s hot. So he was going to get married.

Instead there’s Eileen. Who’s cute, but is like the sentimental parts of Phoebe without the fun parts. The kind of person who thinks more about who’s getting incinerated than about who’s reducing their exposure. The kind of person who probably had a lot of complaints, who probably listened to NPR, even back then when things were great.

Last night Norman had thought he wanted to watch The One Where Nana Dies Twice, even though it’s not his favorite, because it had the death, that wasn’t death, but was, and this whole we-can-continue message, which he thought Eileen needed to hear, but it was like she didn’t even give a fuck what he was trying to do for her.

Which Norman was initially calm about, both because he was in control and because he was sure that there’d be a backup copy of anything as important as Friends, but then there wasn’t. And he’d been sitting there in the DVD room, which has this really nice carpet and an actual chandelier, and he’d realized he was never going to see Friends again.

Which. Was more difficult, somehow, than it’d been leaving Boston. Because now it’s like: where is he going to get that melt from? That feeling of everything’s okay, and all the problems are little, and everything will go on forever, and it’ll just be whatever we can solve in thirty minutes, with our friends. In the ten minutes he spent looking for another copy of the DVDs he felt like his face was going to melt, because never-never-never.

Norman sat down in the DVD room. He was in control, so he didn’t let himself cry. He set a timer and he let himself make really big sad faces, and he let himself tremble, for exactly 150 seconds. Then he counted to ten, and did twenty pushups, and used his commander code to go into the medical storeroom and take two xanax, and then he went to sleep.

It isn’t till he stacks the new cartridges on top of the old, in the big square pile, that he thinks of it. What he needs is a project. A really big chore. And what Eileen needs is Friends. To get that it isn’t that serious. And that they’re all Friends. And also he, Norman, needs Friends. And he has it memorized anyways.

So he uses his commander code to go up to the Peal residence floors, where technically he’s not supposed to go. And he feels a little weird about this, but not too weird. Because if Charles Peal wanted it to be more like Friends, he’d have gotten better people. Norman has some things to tell Charles Peal, about some of Charles Peal’s decisions. But right now Norman is going to make it more like Friends. Charles turns out to have a lot of great Ross and Chandler clothes, and Naomi Peal has everything you need for the girls, but he has to scrounge a little for the Joey outfits. With the colors.

But by dinnertime? By the time he’s usually sitting down to watch Friends? Instead he’s in the Peal’s living room, with two cameras pointed at him, doing all the Chandler lines from The One with the Embryos. He’ll do Joey next, and then Ross, and then he’ll see if he can pull off the girls. That’s what’s going to fix this.

The best thing Eileen could find for the bird was the second-smallest dollhouse. A Tudor. The facade hinged out so the Peals’ future child could look into all the rooms. Eileen smashed the little settees and four-poster beds and used the debris to make a nest in the dining room. Laid the little bird in there—wearing gloves, and bandages underneath—under a tiny oil replica of Starry Night. Has been trying to arrange some kind of warming system: a hot plate glued to the Grand Foyer, just beneath.

Imprinting, she keeps thinking. She has to be screwing it up. Even if it survives it’ll wander the world not knowing it’s a hawk, thinking it’s an Eileen. What a fate, she thinks. But each evening she slides the house closed, and each morning finds it lying on its downy face, like a victim in a film, and every time it isn’t dead she feels like, okay, I can go on.

Still, she’s taking her temperature every hour. An ominous 98.9, this morning—still within the range.

She’d found the hawks on her first walk, the day she’d skyped Nico the single time, when he’d tried to cough “Someone Like You” as a joke and then shown her the blood on the Kleenex, and they’d bickered about how dark the sputum, whether he was in stage two or three of the virus, whether the color balance on her screen was off, and she’d also asked how he was doing.

“Bad. You know,” he’d said, and then they’d separately realized that she didn’t know: the only way to know was by dying.

When she called the next day it rang for hours.

And the job had turned out to be: keeping the lie, the imprint of that life alive. A dollhouse: polishing mahogany and defrosting vacuum-sealed pork cutlets, so that exactly two people plus whatever progeny could live exactly as they had. At the impossible gilded apex of human history. Wherever they were, anyway—“concluding business, taking extraordinary precautions.” Squeezing a last billion from the broken world, she’s sure.

But these birds. Building a home from spring’s rubble, the jetsam of last winter’s dying. Life in a knuckled whorl of dead things.

Partly she can’t name the bird because she’d talked about names with Nico, on that last call. Eileen had liked “Nico,” but Nico couldn’t bear it. Said it sounded like an epitaph.

Norman with his Celtics sweaters. With his Friends. She went into the DVD room at 3am last night. Mausoleum. Incinerated every Jennifer Aniston title she could find. Consoled by their unanimous badness, as films. Just to prove there was nothing. No friends, no Celtics, no neighborhood—no rules. Only the life you could make. What she’d really wanted to do was run out into the infected world, shaking her hands and pressing wet, live things onto her face. But the doors were literally locked, so: this bird.

Which may kill her. Or kill Norman. Even trade, maybe. All of them, and then the Peals when they arrive in their drone?

Corley Miller

Corley Miller

Fiction

Fall 2021

Survival