Eight Feet of Dirt

​A Fiction Series

Chapter 7: The Shape of Waiting

By Cliff Potts

Mike woke to the sound of air moving.

It wasn’t loud. Just a steady, low whisper from the vents, like a breeze that had nowhere to go. For a moment he didn’t remember where he was. Then the ceiling came into focus, too close and too flat, and everything settled back into place.

“Monday,” he said.

Helen, already pushing herself upright on the lower bunk, looked at him. “You sure?”

Mike nodded once. “Yeah. We went down Saturday. Yesterday was Sunday.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “This is Monday.”

Time had already started slipping.

The air was moving, but it wasn’t enough by itself. Five people in a closed space, even with the exchangers working, built up a kind of presence. Not unbearable yet. Just close. Worn clothes. Damp towels. The smell of people trying not to notice each other.

Helen said it first.

“Everybody’s getting gamey.”

Margaret gave a small, dry nod. Tommy looked embarrassed even though nobody had pointed at him. Carol just pulled the blanket tighter around herself.

Mike swung his legs over the side of the bunk. “All right,” he said. “Then we do something about it.”

He pointed toward the back corner.

“Shower still works. Water’s still running. We do it in turns.”

“Hot water?” Helen asked.

“Some.”

He stood up and stretched the stiffness out of his back.

“Tank’s electric. We don’t waste it.”

He said it like a rule because rules helped.

“Kids first. Then your mother. Then you. I’ll take what’s left.”

Tommy made a face. “Cold?”

“Maybe,” Mike said. “Builds character.”

That got a weak smile out of Helen and nothing at all out of Carol.

Water came out of the shower clean and clear. No grit. No smell. No sign yet that anything outside had reached the pipes. The toilet still flushed. The sink still drained. The city, or enough of it, was still doing its job.

Carol went first, with Helen helping. Tommy went next and tried to act like it didn’t matter, though he stayed in longer than he meant to. Margaret took hers quietly, with the deliberate pace of somebody refusing to be hurried by the end of the world.

Helen came out with damp hair and a little more color in her face.

By the time Mike stepped in, the water was warm at first.

It wasn’t by the time he finished.

He didn’t say anything about it. He just toweled off, dressed, and came back out with his hair still wet and his face looking a little more awake than before.

The place felt different after that.

Not clean.

But better.

More livable.

Breakfast was coffee for the adults and cold cereal for the kids.

Helen mixed powdered milk with water, stirred until it looked close enough to right, and poured it over the cereal without comment. Tommy ate like it mattered. Carol ate because Helen told her to.

Margaret took her coffee black and sat with both hands around the cup before she drank.

Nobody had much appetite for anything more than that.

By the time breakfast was done, the second full day underground had taken on shape.

That was the part Mike didn’t like.

The shelter had stopped feeling temporary.

Helen washed dishes at the sink and used more water than Mike liked and less than he would say anything about. With the pipes still live, sanitation still worked. The shower worked. The toilet worked. The sink worked. Ordinary things, stubbornly acting ordinary.

Against the wall, the extra containers were lined up and already full: covered pails, metal cans, old coffee tins, the battered military water can with half its paint gone. Mike checked them anyway.

Tommy stood close while he did.

“You think it stops today?”

“Maybe.”

Tommy nodded, serious.

“So we don’t wait.”

“Right.”

That was a practical answer. Practical answers were easier than honest ones.

Around what Mike guessed was late morning, the lights dipped again.

Not out. Just low enough that everybody noticed.

Helen looked up at the bulb.

“How is it still on?”

Mike leaned back in the chair.

“They didn’t hit the plants.”

“All of them?”

“They’d have to.”

She looked toward the ceiling, toward the city they could not see.

“And if they didn’t?”

He shrugged once.

“Then ComEd keeps doing its job until it can’t.”

“And when it can’t?”

He didn’t answer right away.

“Then we’ll know.”

That was all the certainty the room got.

The radio stayed on.

AM first, then shortwave, then back again.

Mike worked the tuning slowly, not because he expected answers every time he touched it, but because not touching it felt worse. A clipped voice came through once and died before it became a sentence. Later there was music, thin and far away. Later still, something in Spanish, strong for a moment and then gone.

The world still existed.

It just came in pieces now.

Lunch was fried Spam on crackers with cheese spread on the side.

The smell of it off the Coleman stove filled the shelter fast, thick and salty and familiar. Tommy approved. Carol ate enough to satisfy Helen and no more. Mike ate because fuel was fuel. Margaret ate steadily, without comment.

The radio hissed on the table between them, present the way another person might have been.

After lunch, Mike reached into the little stack of reading material and pulled out a copy of Popular Mechanics.

He flipped through it slowly, more from habit than interest, until something caught him and he gave a short breath that almost passed for a laugh.

Helen looked over.

“What.”

He tapped the page.

“How to make your fallout shelter more comfortable.”

She gave him a look.

“Little late for that.”

He smiled, but only a little.

“This is where I got the plans.”

That changed the way Tommy looked at the magazine.

Mike turned another page.

“They had a whole section on fallout too,” he said. “What to do. How long to stay down.”

“Do we have everything we were supposed to have?” Helen asked.

He hesitated, then nodded.

“Close enough.”

He tapped another spot on the page.

“They were selling radiation counters too. Mail order. Said every family ought to have one.”

Helen looked at him.

“Do we?”

Another pause.

“Yeah.”

Tommy looked up immediately.

“Where?”

Mike closed the magazine and set it on the table.

“Packed away.”

“You used it yet?”

“No.”

He looked toward the door without meaning to.

“Didn’t need it yet.”

Cards came out after that.

Simple games. Something to keep hands busy and the room from getting too quiet. Tommy leaned into it. Carol laughed once at something Margaret said, then looked almost guilty for having laughed at all. Helen played because it gave everybody a place to look that wasn’t the door. Mike played with one ear on the radio.

Later, Tommy found Clue in the stack and looked at it like buried treasure.

“We brought this?”

Helen smiled faintly.

“You did.”

He nodded once.

“Good.”

They didn’t play it then. Just knowing it was there seemed to help.

By late afternoon, Helen set a pot of beans to soak.

Just seeing her do it changed the room.

Tomorrow.

That was what the beans meant.

Not hope, exactly.

Routine.

Which might have been better.

“You really think we’ll want beans tomorrow?” Mike asked.

“We’ll want food tomorrow,” Helen said.

That was hard to argue with.

Against the back wall, the charcoal briquettes sat untouched in one of the bins, waiting for the day they would matter. The Coleman stove still had fuel. The lights still worked. The shower still worked. The radio still whispered.

Margaret asked for music near what passed for evening.

Helen went to the little stack of records, thumbed through them, and picked one without much thought. The scratchy song that came out was older than Tommy, younger than Margaret’s worst memories, and familiar enough to settle the room a little.

Carol listened.

Tommy tolerated it.

Mike let it play.

Margaret sat with her hands folded and her eyes on nothing that was actually in the room.

For a few minutes, the shelter felt less like a bunker and more like a place where people lived.

Mike didn’t trust that feeling, but he didn’t interrupt it either.

Then the radio changed.

The static didn’t clear, exactly. It tightened.

Mike straightened before the others even looked up.

“Hold on,” he said.

A carrier tone came through, thin at first, then stronger, steadier than anything they had heard since going below.

The signal locked in.

Not fading.

Not drifting.

Just there.

Then a voice.

“…this is the CONELRAD Radio Network…”

Mike leaned closer.

“…this is a civil defense broadcast. If you can hear this, remain under cover. Do not leave shelter. Repeat, do not leave shelter…”

The voice was steady. Professional. Calm in the way trained voices got calm when calm was the only useful thing left.

“…we are transmitting from an operational site in the Chicago area…”

Paper moved softly near the microphone. Somebody breathed a little too close to it.

“…we will repeat this message at the top of the hour… as long as we are able…”

Mike shook his head once.

“That’s WGN.”

Helen looked at him. “He didn’t say that.”

“Doesn’t have to,” Mike said. “I know that voice.”

The signal crackled, dipped, then came back just long enough to repeat the warning once more before sliding back into static.

Nobody moved for a few seconds after it was gone.

Then Helen said, “They’re out there.”

“Yeah,” Mike answered. “Somebody is.”

He let that sit a moment.

“They’ve got power out there,” he added. “Or a generator. Enough to run the transmitter.”

“Will they tell us what happened?” Tommy asked.

Mike shook his head.

“Not yet.”

Margaret had been listening the whole time, hands folded, eyes steady.

“There’d be fires,” Mike said after a while, thinking out loud more than talking to anybody in particular. “All over the city.”

He rubbed his jaw.

“Flash would’ve lit everything inside. Curtains, paper, furniture. Anything that burns.”

Helen frowned. “Then why didn’t it all go?”

Mike hesitated.

Margaret answered for him.

“Because cities do not burn that way unless you help them,” she said quietly.

They all looked at her.

“In the war, they wanted them to burn,” she went on. “Whole streets made of wood. Roof to roof. Once it caught, it did not stop.”

She shook her head once.

“This place is different. Brick. Stone. It burns inside, yes. But not all together.”

Mike picked it up from there.

“Parks break it up. Streets too. Too many gaps.”

He glanced upward, toward a city none of them could see.

“It burns,” he said, “then it runs out of room.”

Margaret’s voice softened.

“I have seen what it looks like when it does not.”

Nobody said anything for a while after that.

The air kept moving.

The light stayed on.

Water still ran through the pipes somewhere beyond their little steel door, feeding a system that had not failed yet.

Mike checked the vents again, more out of habit than concern. The airflow was steady. Not strong, but enough.

“We’re staying put,” he said. “Two weeks. That’s what they always said.”

“And after?” Helen asked.

Mike didn’t answer immediately.

“We’ll see,” he said finally.

The radio hissed softly in the background.

Tommy started shuffling the cards again. Carol leaned against Margaret, eyes half-closed now, the edge of sleep pulling at her. Helen moved around the small space, straightening things that did not need straightening.

Mike sat and listened.

Not for danger.

Not for footsteps.

For the voice.

At the top of the hour.