Page 36 of The Midnight Hour
“Are we staying?” Mattie demands the minute he’s closed the door behind him. She’s scooped Phoebe up into her armsand is holding her protectively while the little girl blinks slowly, seemingly unfazed.
We all glance around uncertainly at each other.
“Where else would we go?” Sam asks, the first time he’s spoken. I can’t tell how he feels about the idea; he seems resigned, but I’m aware—again—that he has not spoken to me or met my eye in several days. Our hurried conversation under that cedar tree did not resolve or even advance our issues at all, and the truth is, I’m not entirely sure what our issues even are, only that they’re there.
“It feels a little cultish,” Mattie remarks, holding Phoebe even closer. “Like, whoisthat guy? And why does he get to be in charge?”
“They need to maintain some kind of order,” Daniel replies in the same mild tone he used with Michael Duart. “But I know what you mean, Mats,” he continues as he glances at me. “What do you think, Alex?”
I don’t answer right away because I’m feeling a lot of things at the moment. I’m scared of change as well as surrendering choice, and yet…a very large part of me longs for nothing more than to curl up in a bed, in a place with running water and electric light. I crave stability and safety; the idea of two solid meals a day made by someone else feels like a little slice of heaven. Warm showers, barbed-wire fence…it’s a trade-off, but right now it’s also what I want.
Besides, what other choice is there? Like Sam said, where could we go?
“We can always leave if we don’t like it,” I point out. “So in that way it feels like a win-win situation, right?”
“We might not even get in, anyway,” Kyle ventures, biting his thumbnail as his gaze darts around the empty room. “I mean, what are these evaluations?”
“Kyle, you’ll be fine,” Mattie tells him, and he gives her a grateful yetuncertain look.
We all fall silent, waiting for someone to give the final verdict, to make us jump, but no one speaks. This is the right decision, I tell myself. It has to be.
“Let’s do it,” I say, and everyone’s relief at having made a decision—thisdecision—is palpable.
I just hope it’s the right one.
FIFTEEN
In the end, the evaluations Kyle was so scared of weren’t actually that bad. After we made our decision to stay, a man returned, professionally blank-faced; Michael Duart, it seemed, had moved on. He sent us on with an escort—a woman I didn’t recognize—to the Health Center down the road, where we would have our medical checks and ability evaluations.
There was something comfortingly bureaucratic about it all; as I waited for my turn with the Center’s physician, completing a health form, I felt I could have been at the DMV or the dentist. The building was sunlit and modern, nothing apocalyptic about it at all. There were even a few magazines on the coffee table, admittedly all a year old.
“These were out of date even before the nukes,” Mattie remarked scathingly, and I smiled. Had any waiting room ever been any different?
The medical evaluation was more or less perfunctory, given by a professional yet friendly doctor—he even wore a white lab coat—who took my blood pressure and my heart rate and checked my eyesight and hearing, my reflexes and my teeth.
“You’re in good health,” he told me, “all thingsconsidered. A little malnourished, but that’s to be expected. Hopefully it will change pretty soon.” He flashed me a reassuring smile as he ticked something on a chart I couldn’t see.
Afterwards, I filled out a questionnaire about my abilities—it felt like a cross between a Myers-Briggs test and a career quiz on Buzzfeed. What was my last complete level of education? What jobs had I had? Did I like working with people or by myself? Was I more of a big vision or a small details type person?
Mattie sat next to me, snorting under her breath as she shook her head and ticked off answers. There was something both mundane and ridiculous about it all, considering how wildly dangerous the whole world was, and yet, as Daniel had said, order needed to be maintained.
Filling out forms, I supposed, was part of that.
In any case, we all pass both parts of the evaluations, even Kyle, who was particularly nervous about the ability part of it. None of us needed have worried; we are informed, in a perfunctory sort of way, that our evaluations have been successful and we need to wait for our next orders.
We stay in the medical center for over an hour. Phoebe falls asleep on Mattie’s lap while the rest of us slump in our seats before we are told where to go—the six of us to a duplex on a side street, and Kyle and Sam to the men’s lodgings, in an apartment building down the road.
The 22 Wing air base is a mix of refreshingly modern buildings, like the medical center, and other ones that, in the pre-nuclear era, could have used a major refurb. There are houses and apartment complexes mixed in with warehouses, supply depots, and massive garages and hangars. All of it is interspersed with parking lots and swathes of green grass, so the effect is part small town, part summer camp. Every so often, in the distance, I catch a glimpse of chain-link fence topped withrazor wire, or, once or twice, the flash of blue that is Lake Nipissing far below us.
It is too strange to think about this being our home for however long, and so I don’t. I simply follow the woman to the house we’ve been assigned, telling Sam and Kyle to meet us before dinner, and then walk up the three sagging steps to a sliver of porch and then the dim interior, blinking in the gloom.
The woman leaves us alone, telling us our belongings will be delivered shortly, dinner is at six, and that we will be given our job assignments tomorrow. We crowd into the tiny hallway that manages to smell both of bleach and mold and stand there, no one seeming to know what to do.
Mattie ventures into the living room first, Phoebe on her hip, and then Ruby follows. I glance at Daniel, who manages a weary smile.
“Home sweet home,” he quips, and, for a reason I can’t really understand, this makes my eyes fill up with tears. “Alex…” he begins, alarmed, and I just shake my head and follow the girls into the tiny living room as I blink the tears back. I don’t even know why I’m crying; out of relief, or sorrow for all we’ve already lost? It doesn’t matter; now is not the time to cry.
Mattie has gone on to the bedroom, while Ruby stands in the middle of the living room, where two uncomfy-looking loveseats in faded beige face each other over a coffee table of fake wood laminate. A small flatscreen TV hangs on the wall, and a breakfast bar too narrow to use separates this space from a tiny, dark kitchen. Off the living room are two bedrooms, one double, one with two narrow twins, the standard-issue white sheets and scratchy-looking beige coverlets folded at the foot of each mattress. A tiny, windowless bathroom at the end of a short hallway completes our accommodation.
