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“My mom used to have a saying,” says Kyle on one of the nights they can bear to talk, “that “To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart”. Moyniham, I think, but whoever it was, the Irish were kind of bang on the money, weren’t they?”
*
Whoever built this tight-fit, bleak-ass hole in the ground decided that the best way to spend the next fifty years waiting for the nuclear fallout to thin out a little was in an upmarket motel. All the walls are painted tasteful, “warm” shades. There’s a lot of furniture Hal thinks is meant to look kind of Mad Men-ish, and there’s a lot of abstract art that Kyle says was churned out in factories.
“I’m serious. They actually have these, like, workshops full of artists who are given like a theme – Rothko, Mondrian or something – and then churn out things that look vaguely modern and sophisticated and entirely unthreatening. I had a friend who worked there once. It was the best paying job anyone at art school had.”
Whoever built it also helpfully decided to make the doors out of some super-strong glass shit, so if you felt like it you could mosey on up to the lobby and watch the world burn.
For the first three days, when the fire was still right up inside the door, you could see the reflection of the light on the wall opposite the hallway. The wall just happened to be in the central room.
For the first week they didn’t talk, because what the hell were you meant to talk about? It’s not like you could go outside. There was no need to forage for supplies. There was no need for discussion of action because there was no more action to take – the bunker was built for four, four people were in it, voila, welcome to eternity. And what then? “Hey, they have all the boxsets for Game of Thrones. Pity we’ll never find out who won in the end, amirite? No? Not your speed? Hannibal? Orphan Black? The Walking Dead?”
(He would kill – maybe not kill but seriously maim and possibly kidnap – for a good old zombie apocalypse right now instead of this second-rate lobby for destruction that they’re sitting in.)
It was Tuesday on the second week when Guy brought in a plate of biscuits that looked ridiculous in his huge hands, set them down on the table with a crack that made Hal winced and introduced himself.
“Guy Gardner. Teacher.”
And Kyle had looked up and gone. “In a metaphorical sense, or…?”
And that had made him laugh, and that’s how he found out that John was the a military man turned architect and Kyle was an awkward teenager turned awful hipster artist and Guy had gone through more career changes than you could count on one hand but that his primary talent remained finding the booze. And that Kyle couldn’t drink whisky without coughing, and that John could beat him at chess without trying and Guy could barely remember the rules but had as much enthusiasm as anybody.
“Don’t you want to play?” he’d said to Kyle, stretched out long and languid and lovely on the chaise longue that looked more like a torture instrument, and he’d given him a slow, heavy look from under that fringe and smiled, shaking his head.
At some point (after they’d gotten far too drunk to play chess and Hal was on the chase longue and Kyle was laughing into the floor) Guy had tipped back his head, belched heartily and said;
“A pilot-turned-mechanic-turned-pilot, a soldier-turned-architect, a bartender-slash-teacher and an artist. I reckon we didn’t do too badly.”
“One of those things is not like the others,” said Kyle, barely lifting his head from the carpet. Hal reached down and scratched him behind the ears and he’d tilted his head up just like a little cat.
“It’s like back when people used to play this like a game,” he’d said. “And everyone would always include someone creative. A poet or an artist or something. Someone who could do more than just survive.”
“Just survive.”
John had frowned. “People used to play this like a game?”
“Yeah. You remember. Like, you’re stuck at the end of the world. Who do you save?”
“I don’t think I ever played that.” He’d finished off the last of the whiskey. “No, I never played that at all.”
*
When Hal was first learning to be a fighter pilot, Carol explained to him the concept of manufactured normalcy. It was the reason no one else got flight.
“When you’re in a commercial plane,” she said, “you’re sitting in one of the most amazing pieces of technology in the world, doing something our ancestors would have thought impossible, travelling distances that for most people a hundred years ago would have seemed like a dream. And everyone involved in the business is working as hard as they can to make you forget you’re not just sitting in a poorly designed waiting room.”
The reason why, she explained, was because the future was a big, scary place and people didn’t particularly like to be reminded that they were living in it.
“But we notice things changing.”
“Yes, but only when we look back and take the long view. How many improvements in, say, computers have you really felt?”
“So no one else gets flight?”
“So no one else gets flight.”
He’d liked that thought, back when he was tumbling in the air at the edge of the atmosphere – a freewheeling point of the future above the curvature of the earth. Now, he chooses which coffee to use and remembers that Carol is probably a charred skeleton somewhere. Manufactured normality.
“You’re brooding,” says Kyle.
“What’s not to brood about?”
“You can’t just brood all day. I mean, you’re pretty damn good at it, and it suits you, but you need to get a new hobby.”
“I don’t need a hobby. I have whisky.”
“At this rate, you’re only going to be drinking it for the next ten years.”
Hal winces at that. He tries not to break up the time. Fifty years when said as one unit is ok, it sounds manageable, it’s barely more than half the average adult human lifespan. He doesn’t want to think of two times twenty years, of five times ten years, of his-life-lived-so-far-plus-66%. That’s not possibly a imaginable length of time.
He drinks the coffee down in one go and enjoys the way it burns his mouth.
*
When Hal gets too sick of the walls, of the noise and the lack of it, of the taste of the slightly over-oxygenated air, he picks a fight with Guy. Because it’s easy, because it’s fun, because the quick physicality of block-block-punch stops him from thinking.
“You two must really hate each other,” says John, warily poking at Guy’s bruises. They don’t. They rely on each other. And in a fifty-by-fifty foot bunker, how could they hate each other?
(The mirrors are shatterproof, the crockery and cutlery plastic. Minimal glass. Minimal metal.)
After each fight, he goes and collapses on his bed – or someone’s bed, they’re getting loose with whose room is whose now. Once, he opens his eyes and finds Kyle curled up at the end of the bed, almost on his legs, sucking on a twist of his hair and sketching him.
“Whayoudoing?”
“I like drawing you when you’re all bruised.”
He shuts his eyes and lets the soft scratching of Kyle’s pencil lull him back to sleep again.
*
In the end, the box sets do come in handy. They marathon TV shows in long, drunken stretches during which they regularly nap, and end up talking like the characters. And there are a lot of boxsets.
Kyle sets up a schedule which covers the next thirty years and gets them though the collection.
“What then?” says John.
“It will have been thirty years,” says Kyle. “I think we can start re-watching.”
“Ok,” says Guy, “but not Hannibal. Unless making me watch it is some bizarre way of saving food by making sure I can’t eat.”
Kyle jumps onto the sofa and stretches out across the three of them, his head in Hal’s lap. “Oh no, we don’t need to save food rations. This is just my way of starving you to death.”
“Very funny, kid. Hey Hal, which one of us is most likely to snap and murder the other one first?”
He laughs, because there really is a possibility he’ll kill Guy one day but that’s fifty years away and by that point they’ll both probably be pretty cool with it. “You’ll snap first and I’ll kill you in self defence.”
“Yeah fucking right.”
“You’re all wrong,” says John. “I’m going to snap and then I’m going to poison you by degrees with the awful fucking shampoo in this place.”
“I love you guys,” says Kyle dreamily. “When we restart civilization, the first thing I’m going to do is dig through all the rubble until I find a surviving therapist.”
Guy starts laughing suddenly, and they all turn to look at him.
“Oh my god. Oh my god. Technically I’m a guidance counsellor. I could… I could give you guidance.”
“Guide me,” whispers John, and then they’re all laughing again, the kind of hysterical laughter that makes your chest hurt, and he’s pretty sure that they’re all going mad.
*
They all get pretty comfortable with nudity real quick (it’s mostly Guy’s fault), and with physical intimacy, because the bunker is small and Hal may be an alpha male but it’s the end of the world and he’s allowed to want a hug, dammit.
Of course it’s Guy that pushes it, when they’re all in the kitchen, taking up too much space and irritating John as he’s trying to cook.
“Soooo, who’s gay in here?”
John coughs. Kyle raises an eyebrow.
“Because, like, we’re in here for the next fifty years, and I don’t know about you fellers but I’m not never having sex again.”
John drops the knife. “Jesus, Guy. Do you have any fucking filter.”
Kyle is chewing the end of his pencil with furious intensity. “I well, I – uh. “ Everyone tries very hard not to look at him expectantly. He shrugs. “I don’t know! I was kind of figuring out when the apocalypse got in the way. Anyway, you brought it up, Guy. Are you gay?”
“Ummmm, no. I mean, college. But no. Hal?”
He shrugs. “Not really. I mean, I was in the military. Everyone in the military sucked a little bit of cock.”
John raises an eyebrow. “You know, I really don’t think that’s true.”
Guy rolls his eyes. “There’s always one heterosexual that ruins the party.”
“You literally – you literally just – anyway, I’m not ruining the party.”
“Aww, Johnny boy. Come over here and kiss me.”
“Fuck that. If I’m kissing anyone, it’s Kyle.”
“Uuuh,” says Kyle, “do I get a say in this?”
Guy makes a face. “Pretty sure you’re everyone’s first choice, kid, so go crazy.” Hal would like to protest but yeah, damn, he is.
“Uuuuh, well. Uuuh.” Hal didn’t even know there were that many shades of red to go. “Let’s drop this subject right about now?”
So in the end none of them have sex and they watch another box set.
“TV instead of sex,” says Guy. “This is probably what being married is like.”
“It isn’t,” says John, and Hal sees him touch his left hand, just a brush of fingers.
*
To their surprise, it’s Kyle who gets angry the most.
No, that’s not true. No one gets angry the most because they’re all angry all the time, a constant simmering tension under the surface. Guy gets too close to people, prods and pokes for boundaries and the things that will make them snap, and Hal knows he turns broody and disdainful and cold. John, god bless him, talks it out, his back ramrod straight and his voice low and full of menace, and Hal has a bruise across his right ribs from when that didn’t work.
But it’s Kyle who snaps all the time. Actually, it’s more than snapping – it’s throwing tantrums, and it’s a painful reminder of how young he is.
“Why does he get like this?” Hal asks, after Kyle’s disappeared in a rage about something minor to do with missing pencils.
“He’s young,” says Guy. “He’s still at the stage where everything’s important. I don’t know, Hal. Go talk to him.”
He finds him curled at the bottom of the shower in his clothes. His hair’s gotten too long and it’s draped in wet streaks across his eyes. Hal sheds his jacket and curls up next to him.
He tips his head back. The water runs down his throat (pale from lack of sunlight, enough to see his adam’s apple bob and flex as he talks).“I thought it seemed appropriate.”
“What did?”
“Sitting under the shower. In all your clothes. It’s what they do in movies, you know. When they get really sad.”
“Is it working?”
“I don’t know. It’s kind of warm, I guess.” He opens his eyes – too green, painfully green like some vital filter that clouds the rest of their eyes is missing from him. “I’m going to take my clothes off now. Shower for real.”
“I’ll leave.”
“You could… you could not.”
He’s fairly sure the skip in his heartbeat is audible.
“What do you mean?” he says, just to buy him some time.
“I mean you could stay,” says Kyle, and then he pulls off his shirt. In his head, it takes roughly an eternity for every inch of wet fabric to peel off his skin. In his head he can practically hear the sound it makes. The skin just above the waistline of his jeans is dark and smooth, and it’s just low enough for him to see a clutch of dark hairs. He wants to put his mouth there, lick and kiss and tease until he arches his back and pleads.
He’s still looking at him expectantly, t-shirt bundled like a wet rag in his hand, and he’s sure he’s never felt more breathless in his life and he’s also sure that he can’t.
“Actually, I – I should, uh, go.”
He tries to struggle to his feet but wet floor and bare feet don’t give him much traction, and he slips while he’s on his knees and falls painfully into Kyle’s legs. It’s messy and awkward and horrible and he catches a glimpse of the hurt on his face that he was trying so hard not to see, and then he pushes himself up and he’s gone.
*
Hal kisses Kyle for the first time in the kitchen after a fight with Guy. He’s dabbing at his bloody lip, and Kyle’s there, pressing ice to his forehead and just looking at him, and suddenly he’s really had enough.
Kissing with a broken kiss hurts just enough to make it interesting. He pushes him onto his back on the table and Kyle wraps his arms around him and goes pliant, tilts his head so Hal’s lips slide across his jaw and down his neck. There’s a spot of his blood pressed into Kyle’s cheek and he pulls away just long enough to admire him before he leans in to lick it off.
Something seems to snap in Kyle in that and he sits up and pushes Hal backwards, breathing hard.
“What the fuck, Jordan?”
“I kissed you. You seemed to enjoy it. Very mixed signals here, Kyle.”
“You are – Are you seriously – you’re like the fucking king of mixed signals.”
“Yeah, well, the signals I’m sending at the moment are very fucking clear.” Kyle opens his mouth like he’s got more to say but Hal kisses him again and this time he gets something back, a tongue in his mouth and then spark of pain as he rolls his bottom lip between his teeth. Hal’s fumbling with his belt, and then his own belt, and this rapid switching between the two of them isn’t making any progress until finally Kyle pulls away with a laugh that almost makes him angry again and deals with the belt, pulling away from his repeated attempts to maul his neck.
“You’re kind of a hot mess, Jordan.”
“At least I’m hot – oh.”
Kyle has him in hand and he’s jerking him fast and rough – faster than he’s used to, fast enough to make him hiss and bite his shoulder. He reaches out and jerks him too, smiling into his neck when he makes him twist and exhale a string of “fucks” that sound utterly wrecked.
They’re moving in time now, and he should really stop and move this further but it’s been so long and he’s so close. Kyle’s alternating between making these breathy, wet gasps that sound like they’re being ripped from his lungs and planting kisses on his neck that are barely even kisses, just messes with teeth.
He comes, biting his teeth against his yell in case he says something dumb like his name with one hand twisted in that black hair, pulling hard enough to make him grunt in pain and then follow him over the edge. He arches back from Hal when he comes like he’s been knocked down, but he pulls him closer and hold him against him through the aftershocks, breathing into his mouth.
Kyle’s expression is blissed-out, his eyes heavily lidded and veiled. Every time he breaths, his lips tremble, and when Hal pulls his hand away and licks it clean he makes a sound that’s almost a whine. His lips move like he’s talking in his sleep before he finally manages to talk.
“I was going to do something sexier than that.”
Hal almost laughs, because that was the hottest thing he’s felt in months even if it was over faster than teenagers fucking in a closet, but instead he just smiles.
“Like, I was going to blow you. I’m pretty good at that.”
“Next time.”
“Next time?”
“Yeah.”
“You seem pretty confident there’s going to be a next time.”
I’ve got fifty years minus eight months, Kyle, I can talk you into a next time is what he doesn’t say. Instead, he says “I’ve got charm.”
“Charm.”
“Yeah.”
“One way of putting it.”
They’ve moved apart – as far apart as you can in this tiny rat’s ass of a kitchen – and now Kyle is still sitting up on the table and Hal’s leaning against the floor of the fridge for some support. He has no idea what the etiquette is now. He wants to kiss him again, push him against the table while he’s this pliant and explore him until he’s got himself together enough to work out a few things he’s been thinking about since the shower, but kissing him again is probably dangerous. Besides, they all cover every inch of this bunker every day, and the fact that Guy and John haven’t discovered them yet is nothing short of a miracle.
Kyle pushes himself up and onto the floor. “You know, it’s my turn to cook.”
“Oh good.”
“You want anything?”
A lot. “Lasagne?”
He laughs. “Ok, lasagne. And afterwards – “
“Afterwards?”
“Next time happens afterwards.”
“Great.”
“Get out of here. I can’t cook if you’re clogging up my space, asshole.”
“Cocksucker.”
Kyle laughs, pushing back his stupid shaggy hair. “Like I said. Next time. Now get out.”