Shelter

Anya’s neighbor had been gone for a month. During that time, his brother, who lived in the next house over, had been keeping up the front yard. The HOA frowned on less-than-show-quality yards.

He was there now, raking the front lawn. Anya knew, from the vantage point of her own back yard, that the back yard needed some attention as well. She decided to do something about it.

“Hey, Carl!” She waved at the elderly man plying the rake.

“Anya, right?”

“Right. Hey, uh…do you know when they’re coming back?” she asked.

“Not rightly sure,” he said. “Bob just told me he and Ruth were going away. Nothing else.

“I was kind of surprised, seeing how poor her health was. But I guess she was well enough to travel anyway.”

“Oh, I thought you might know when he was coming home.”

“Nope. He’s impulsive by nature, you know. Especially since he retired and Ruth…. I’m just taking care of the yard to keep my little brother out of trouble,” he said.

“Well, the back needs it too. Does he have a rake I can use?” Anya asked.

“In that shed back there. But you ain’t gotta do anything. I’ll get to it eventually.”

“It’s a nice afternoon out, and I don’t have any other plans,” she said. “I’ll start on the back.”

“It’s nice now,” he said, pointing at the dark clouds piling the east, “but rain’s coming soon.”

The leaf-pile grew rapidly. She recalled her childhood, building huge piles of leaves to jump in, hide in, and burst from to surprise her much older brother. He always acted shocked despite her uncontrollable giggling, because he was a good brother.

She was lost in memories of her childhood when the rake scraped on something. She cleared it off, recognized the water-company’s logo, and knew that it was the cover over the master water shutoff valve, like the one behind her house. What she didn’t recognize was the second cover a foot away. The same size and type but missing the water company logo.

Anya thought it might be a sprinkler shutoff, but she didn’t recall any sprinklers ever running in Bob’s yard. Maybe it was left over from a past installation.

Carl and Bob’s houses were here before any of the others. When they were built, the rest of the housing development was still woods where the brothers hunted, gathered firewood, and, if Bob’s stories were to be believed, distilled moonshine as kids.

The brothers had grown up in the house Carl now occupied, while their uncle lived in the house she was now tending. When both houses came back on the market twenty years ago, the brothers jumped on them, even though they had to assent to the HOA and its rules.

She continued pulling leaves into small piles, then joining those piles to the large pile in the center of the yard. At least the grass didn’t need mowing. She’d asked about it when she first moved in. The grass from his yard had mostly taken over hers.

He’d told her it was a fescue blend that only required an annual mow in the spring and no water other than rain. While it was slow spreading, she’d allowed it to continue to take over her yard. Mowing once in the spring was far better than mowing every week during the summer and wasting thousands of gallons of water to keep it green.

Knowing how proud he’d seemed of his lawn knowledge, she was surprised to find a patch of astroturf under the leaves. She was examining it and determined that there was something hard and metallic beneath it. An early fall leaf, a maple, was stuck under the edge of the astroturf.

She was examining it when Carl approached. “Found the shelter, huh? Told him it was a waste of money, but he didn’t listen.”

“Red scare?” she asked.

“Hah! No, we only moved back twenty years ago.” Carl shook his head. “Bob said he’d always wanted a bomb shelter like the ones the rich folks had back in the day, so he built one.”

“Impulsive, you said?”

“Always…unless Ruth was watching him. She kept him in line, and he seemed to like it that way.”

Anya couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong with the door she knelt beside. “How come there’s no handle for this?”

“It opens with hydraulics. From the outside it runs on the pressure from the water main. Inside there’s some sort of pump or something that can be activated.”

Carl shook his head. “The only time he ever used it was right after it was done. He stocked it up with food, water, and dry goods, and then we sat down there watching the game and getting so drunk we had trouble climbing the stairs back out.”

“It looks like this was opened recently,” she said, pointing at the maple leaf still trapped in the door.

“If you want to see it, I can open it up for you.”

“I’d like that.”

Carl went to the second cover Anya had thought was for sprinklers and pulled the large key ring he carried on his belt off. He had a water shut-off wrench on it, and he knelt to open the cover. His hand went into the hole with the wrench, and he grunted with exertion.

“That should get it,” he said.

The door was built like a massive safe door. It raised from the surrounding ground a few inches before swinging open on hinges that hid below the ground with the bulk of the door. As it opened with a hiss, the smell hit her first. She swallowed hard, trying not to gag. “Stay—stay there, Carl. I’m going to check it out.”

Holding her shirt over her mouth and nose did nothing to dispel the stench, but she did it anyway. The inside of the shelter was lit, and a multi-disc CD player was playing classic rock on repeat.

At the foot of the stairs, she turned the corner and found them. They were curled together on the bed, Bob holding Ruth even in death.

“Aw, damn.”

Anya jumped, not expecting Carl to be there. “I told you to wait.”

“Which just made me hurry on over.” Carl looked at the couple and shook his head. “You idiot, Bob. I was here for you, all you had to do was talk.”

Anya saw a stack of papers on the small table where two wine glasses and an empty bottle sat. “What’s that?”

Carl looked at the papers. Tears poured down his face, unimpeded. He didn’t speak but handed them to Anya.

Ruth’s last prognosis which gave her two weeks, if that, instructions for a kerosene heater which warned about carbon monoxide, and an updated will.

There was no note, but none was needed. Bob decided he couldn’t live without Ruth, so he closed them in the shelter, waited for her to die, ran the heater, and held her close while he fell asleep for the last time.

While Anya wondered what to do, Carl had already called the authorities and they were on the way. Despite his grief, he was the one more together and functioning.

The rain had started. He led Anya out of the bunker and around to the front yard where the smell of death was displaced by the petrichor on the breeze. Something about the lively smell of wet earth seemed cruel given the circumstances; she began to cry.

She let the rain fall down her face, mixing with the tears. She turned to Carl and saw that he was doing the same. Not knowing what else to do, she embraced him. They stood like that, crying in a silent embrace, even when the sound of approaching sirens cut through the soft patter of the rain.