After the Lights Go Out Read online

  I flick the light switch and LEDs blink on overhead. When Dad first told us he was building an underground bunker, I imagined something small, like the size of a shipping container. But the Paddock is big. It has three bedrooms, a living area with a couch and dining table, a galley kitchen, a bathroom complete with water-recycling shower and toilet, a compact gym because Dad is obsessed with fitness, a massive storeroom complete with two deep-freeze units, and a utility room housing the air filtration system, underground aquifer, solar inverter and battery, water purification system, and a communications desk with a laptop, an AM/FM receiver and a short wave radio. There’s also an iron trunk containing weapons – knives, a crossbow and several guns. I don’t like to think too much about that trunk.

  The twins follow me in and Blythe pulls the heavy steel door closed behind them, pressing a button to lock it. The bolt slides in with a clang, and I suppress a shudder of panic. I want to make Dad proud of me, but I hate it down here, buried deep in the earth.

  I sink onto one of the couches and take a big swig from my water canteen. Panda jumps up beside me and lays her head on my lap. I unclip her harness and drop it on the floor, where it lands with a damp thump. It’s pretty heavy as it contains Panda’s very own bug-out bag: a canine first-aid kit, three days’ worth of freeze-dried dog food, two collapsible bowls, and a water-skin containing two litres of enzyme-enhanced water.

  Grace and Blythe sit at the dining table. Grace’s pale skin is mottled pink from exertion, and the back of Blythe’s neck is red from the sun. She never remembers to put on sunscreen, no matter how often Grace lectures her about skin cancer.

  We wait. Blythe drums her fingers on the table. I check Panda for ticks and pull about a million prickles from her soft curly fur. Grace rubs at a cut on the back of her hand. It’s not too deep, but I tell her to go and put some antiseptic on it anyway.

  There’s actually plenty to do down here. Dad is always talking about how mental health is important in an SHTF (Shit Hitting The Fan) situation. There are board games and books and musical instruments and a monitor hooked up to a hard drive containing over ten thousand hours of movies and TV. There’s also wool and knitting needles and sewing supplies in case we want to get crafty. Dad says these old-fashioned skills will be useful in the new world.

  ‘How long will we have to wait?’ asks Blythe.

  ‘The usual,’ I tell her.

  ‘We wait until we get the all-clear,’ says Grace, her face serious.

  Blythe rolls her eyes.

  I wonder how Ana’s movie is going. When we first arrived here I tried so hard to get Dad to send us to boarding school with the other Jubilee kids. But there was no way he was ever going to back down. Part of what he loved about living out here was that he got to control where we went and who we saw. Family is the most important thing, says Dad. We have to stick together.

  And he’s right, I guess. Dad stuck with us when Mum bailed. Dad would never give us up.

  I wonder if Ana sent me any more texts. There’s no reception down here, so even if I had brought my phone it’d be useless. The whole bunker is about ten metres below ground, and it’s encased entirely in lead to withstand any potential radiation.

  Blythe is rummaging through her bug-out bag. She pulls out a protein bar and starts to unwrap it.

  ‘Blythe!’ Grace’s frown etches deep lines in her forehead. ‘Those are only for consumption when out in the field.’

  ‘But I’m so hungry.’

  ‘Just wait.’

  Blythe scowls at her. ‘We’re in a bunker with over a year’s worth of stored food. And you’re saying I can’t have this one snack?’

  ‘You can wait.’

  Blythe tears open the protein bar and takes a big defiant bite.

  ‘Blythe!’

  There’s a scraping on the other side of the door, and the twins immediately stop bickering. Blythe swallows hastily, shoving the rest of her protein bar back into her bag. There’s a clunk as the tumblers in the heavy steel door fall into place, and it swings open, revealing a tall man wearing army fatigues and a black balaclava.

  He stands in the doorway for a moment, before pulling the mask off.

  Panda’s tail thumps against the couch.

  ‘All clear,’ says Dad. ‘Well done, girls.’

  Grace lets out a little sob of relief.

  ‘Now let’s talk about how you can improve for next time,’ says Dad, sitting down on the couch next to me.

  I have done this dozens of times. I am nothing if not prepared.

  As a reward, Dad lets us go home the quick way, over the exposed ridge that looks out over a wide expanse of scrub. The heavy clouds have lifted, and there’s even the faintest whisper of a cool breeze in the air. We let Panda off the lead and she careens around like a lunatic, chasing rabbits and barking her head off. The endless sky is stained purple and gold as the sun starts to sink below the horizon.

  Released from the Paddock and the relentless humidity, the twins are in high spirits, and skip ahead, chatting and laughing and chasing after Panda. It’s good to see Grace smile again – she takes Dad’s emergency drills so seriously. I know he just wants to protect us, but sometimes I find myself wondering – who’s going to protect us from him?

  I can’t really pinpoint where it began. Looking back, perhaps it was always there, in some form or another. Our dad wasn’t like other dads. He didn’t play with us much when we were little. He didn’t have fun. He read a lot of books with titles like One Second After and The World without Us. He and Mum used to fight a lot. Dad didn’t want the twins to be vaccinated. He wanted to homeschool us. He wanted to leave the city. The fights got worse as we got older – screaming matches that left Mum sobbing, and Dad stone-faced and silent. When they’d fight like that, the twins and I would all climb into bed together and I’d tell them stories about how we would pluck a cloud from the sky one day and sail away on it, up into the stars.

  When we get home, Dad disappears into the shed, where he has a gym set up. Grace heads into the kitchen to make dinner, while Blythe sorrowfully removes her sneakers. The sole has peeled away from one of them, and the unicorn embroidery is ruined, just a fuzzy tangle of filthy thread.

  ‘Your life was tragically cut short, but you will live long in my heart,’ she declares.

  I flop onto the couch, stinking of sweat and bush, and switch on the TV. Panda heads over to her sheepskin and falls instantly asleep, twitching and snuffling with doggy dreams.

  Blythe twists her arm behind her and unhooks her bra, breathing a sigh of relief.

  ‘I feel sorry for boys sometimes,’ she says as she pulls the bra out from her sleeve. ‘They don’t get to experience that amazing feeling when you take your bra off at the end of a long day.’

  There’s something on the news about solar flares possibly disrupting satellites. Old news – Dad has been talking about this for weeks. We’ve been doing extra training sessions in case there’s an EMP, but mostly he’s delighted that the government won’t be able to spy on us from space for a few days.

  ‘Of course,’ Blythe says, frowning, ‘boys don’t have to wear a bra in the first place.’

  Dad is in the living room when I get up the next morning, zipping up his travel bag. I can hear the twins in the kitchen, bickering amiably about the setting on the toaster.

  ‘I thought you didn’t go back to the mine until next week?’

  ‘They’ve called us all in,’ Dad says. ‘Some health and safety seminar.’

  I feel a surge of guilty relief. I love Dad, but him being at the mine is the closest we ever get to actual freedom.

  ‘How long will you be gone?’ I ask.

  ‘The seminar is two days,’ says Dad. ‘But with the drive I won’t be back until Saturday.’

  Technically, Hansbach is a fly-in-fly-out mine. There’s a little private airstrip just outside of town that shuttles the workers there and back each week. The flight is only half an hour, but Dad insists on driving. He
says he’ll never get in another plane as long as he lives – he calls them tin cans of death. The drive adds about ten hours to his round-trip commute and must cost him a fortune in petrol. The other workers at Hansbach think he’s terrified of flying, and he encourages this, submitting to their teasing. This is the price of paranoia.

  The twins emerge with toast and juice and sink onto the couch to eat it. Panda sits eagerly at their feet, hoping for a crust. Grace is still in pyjamas, but Blythe is dressed and suspiciously well-groomed.

  ‘Crumbs,’ warns Dad, and they obediently move to the dining table.

  There’s a light tap at the security door and Dad stiffens, signalling us to leave the room. Panda doesn’t even notice. Her attention is still entirely focused on the toast.

  ‘Dad, relax. It’s only Keller,’ says Blythe, straightening her shirt as she walks to the front door.

  Keller Reid grew up in Jubilee too – his dad works at Hansbach. But instead of leaving to go to uni like most of the Jubilee teens do, Keller came back after he finished school and took over the post office from Jenny Robinson when she retired last year.

  Somehow, despite living in a town that is mostly orange dirt and wind, Keller is always neat and clean. Dad goes over and blocks the doorway, so Blythe can’t invite him in.

  ‘Another package for you, Mr Palmer, and a letter.’

  Keller Reid has all the hallmarks of a nice guy, yet somehow he makes my skin crawl. He’s a little too polite and considerate. A little too neat. He should be handsome, but he isn’t. His jaw is too narrow, his blue eyes too pale. His hair is neat and blond. His skin is the colour of eggshells. It’s like someone designed the perfect generic handsome guy in a laboratory but didn’t get it quite right. There’s something uncanny valley about him.

  And I don’t like the way he looks at Blythe.

  Panda, on the other hand, loves Keller. She abandons her quest for toast, squeezes past Dad and jumps up, placing her paws on Keller’s hips and aiming big licks in the direction of his face, while her tail whips furiously back and forth.

  Dad growls at her and hauls her down. ‘Outside,’ he says sharply.

  Panda ignores him, rolling over onto her back and exposing her pink belly for Keller to tickle.

  Dad makes a disgusted noise and takes the parcel and letter from Keller. The parcel is about the size of a shoebox, wrapped in black plastic. Dad tucks it under his arm, and squints at the envelope. I can’t really see, but the address on the front is handwritten, with several post office forwarding stamps on it. He frowns and stuffs it in his back pocket.

  ‘You know you don’t have to deliver to our house,’ he says to Keller with a glare. ‘I’m perfectly happy to pick up the mail from the post office.’

  Keller smiles, showing too many teeth. ‘But Mr Palmer, it’s my pleasure.’

  He glances at Blythe, who blushes. ‘I’ll walk you to the gate,’ she says.

  Dad shoots me a significant look, and I nod. On this front, Dad and I are totally united. Keller Reid is bad news. He’s nineteen, and Blythe is only fifteen. She’s too young to get involved with him, and he isn’t trustworthy.

  Grace disappears back into the kitchen and Panda follows her. The possibility of food is clearly more enticing than the possibility of seeing Keller again.

  Dad turns to me. ‘You know what to do if the phone rings?’

  ‘Don’t answer.’

  ‘And if someone comes to the door?’

  ‘Check through the spyhole. If we don’t know them, don’t open.’

  Dad glances towards the kitchen and lowers his voice. ‘And the code?’

  I hesitate.

  The code is for the gun safe in Dad’s room. The twins don’t know about it. There’s a Colt and a Glock in there – heavy and black and awful. Dad taught me to shoot the Colt when we first arrived here. He told the twins he and I were going out to work on the Paddock. I didn’t want to. I begged him not to make me.

  ‘Prudence.’ Dad’s voice is cold and firm. ‘The code?’

  I recite a string of numbers, and Dad nods approvingly.

  ‘What’s in the parcel?’ I ask.

  Dad hesitates before answering. ‘Something for the Paddock.’

  I feel a little miserable hiccup in my chest. I wish he trusted me more. I’m about to ask him about the letter, but Grace comes back into the living room, holding his travel thermos.

  ‘Coffee,’ she says and puts it down on the dining table.

  Dad nods in thanks. Grace sits back down and nibbles at her toast, looking small and a little lost without Blythe in the room. Panda curls up at her feet.

  The security door bangs and Blythe comes back in, her cheeks pink and her eyes shining.

  ‘Dad, can I go out with Keller on Thursday night?’

  Dad’s expression doesn’t change, but I see one of the veins in his neck start to pulse. ‘Go out?’ he says. ‘Where?’

  ‘Simmone’s Café. She does dinner on Thursdays.’

  ‘Simmone Bratton.’ Dad is unimpressed. Simmone’s husband, David, is ex-army, so Dad’s automatically suspicious of him. ‘How many kilometres is Simmone’s Café from the Paddock? Fifteen? Have you practised the route home? Could you do it in the dark? Could you do it without being seen?’

  Blythe’s not going to give up easily. ‘Dad,’ she says. ‘Keller will drive me home.’

  I glance over at Grace, who is picking at the hem of her shorts. I can tell she’s on Dad’s side. She knows there’s no room in Keller’s van for her.

  ‘I know you think I’m being harsh,’ Dad says. ‘All I want to do is protect you girls. If I could, I’d be here all the time. The best I can do is teach you to look after yourselves. You have to be strong. You can’t let them get to you.’

  Blythe makes a frustrated sound. ‘I’m not going to let them get to me! Why can’t you trust us?’

  Dad’s expression clouds over. ‘I trusted your mother,’ he says softly.

  Blythe opens her mouth to argue, but I shoot her a warning glare. We’ve had this fight before, and I don’t want to go there again. It’d be so much easier to be like Dad, to believe that we lost Mum to some kind of secret government conspiracy, instead of the truth that she just left. Left me and the twins and Dad because she fell in love with some smooth-talking lawyer at her work. The day she left, she made a vague promise that she’d come for us once things were settled. We haven’t heard from her since.

  If she did try to contact us, she was too late. Within a month Dad had quit his job at the university, found an engineering position at the Hansbach zinc mine and moved us out to the middle of nowhere. He purchased forty acres, most of it bush, and built our house on the edge, fifteen kilometres from Jubilee. Building the house was really a smokescreen, an excuse to hire the earth-moving equipment needed to create the Paddock. People might have been suspicious if Dad had suddenly been getting massive deliveries of steel and lead, but everyone was meant to assume it was stuff for the house.

  Before we left the city, Dad threw out our old phones and got us the clunky unsmart ones we have now, and made us delete our Facebook pages and email addresses. It all happened so quickly that I wondered how long he’d been planning it. Waiting for Mum to either give in, or give up.

  I think about the letter in Dad’s back pocket. Maybe Mum is looking for us. Dad doesn’t let us use the internet – he has it on his laptop for his survival forums and to lodge our homeschooling paperwork, but he takes the modem with him whenever he leaves the house. I know how to be sneaky, though. I’ve tried emailing Mum at her work address using the ancient computer in Jan Marshall’s shop, but it bounced back so I guess she’s changed jobs. I’ve checked online and there’s been no missing persons report filed. If she is looking for us, she’s not looking very hard.

  Defeated, Blythe stomps off to her room. Grace hovers anxiously for a moment, then drifts after her, the invisible cord that connects them pulling her like elastic.

  Dad hefts the parcel from Kel
ler. ‘I’m going to the Paddock first,’ he says. ‘Drop this off. Then I’ll head out to Hansbach.’ He glances down the hall to the twins’ room. ‘Promise me you’ll keep them safe.’

  ‘I promise.’

  Dad reaches over and places his hand on the top of my head and holds it there for a moment. This is the closest Dad ever gets to physical affection. A pat on the head.

  ‘Good girl,’ he says, and despite everything, I feel a swell of pride.

  Dad picks up his thermos of coffee. He pauses in the doorway and looks back. ‘Remember,’ he says, ‘you say nothing. Nobody can know.’

  I stifle a snort. As if. There is no way I am ever telling anyone my dad is a doomsday prepper.

  2

  It’s twenty-four hours since Dad left, and I’m so bored I’d even welcome another emergency drill.

  The twins are flopped on the couch in front of the television, devouring talk-show gossip so they can pretend they’re part of the real world. The satellite reception is usually pretty good, but today it keeps dropping out. Sentences get cut off and even though I don’t really care about which housewife of wherever is doing what, I find it infuriating. It’s a perfect metaphor for our existence out here. Every now and then we get a little taste of what a normal life is like – hanging out with the other kids in the school holidays, looking at Facebook on their phones, getting snippets of new music and fashion and movies on TV – but mostly all we have is each other, and endless stretches of scrubby brown wilderness.

  Panda whines at the back door to be let out, and I open it. She goes tearing out like a floppy, bouncy Muppet, barking and scattering chooks all over the place. She gallops around in a circle, looking back at me with a happy, proud look on her face. I shake my head and laugh despite myself. Our rooster, Winston, puffs out his chest and aims a peck at Panda’s nose. Panda shrieks in alarm and comes sprinting back inside, tail between her legs. She nearly bowls me over as she flees past me into the safety of the living room.