Heavily, the trapdoor clamped closed and exploded the bunker into blackness. Lawrence pulled out a notepad and scribbled “OIL TRAPDOOR.”
The room consisted of two recycled shipping containers that were spliced and crudely smelted together, then laid to rest in the middle of the Great Basin. They were a hot and fiery furnace that burned the sand to thick molten glass. Although this deep in the ground, the earth cooled the bunker into hibernation and left it just as dark as it was empty. Terracotta turned to slick onyx; there was no friction there. (His mother had suggested those rubber bathroom ducks for some traction, but he had quipped back that they wouldn’t fly in post-apocalyptic America. She packed them anyways.)
As he stepped away from the ladder, his shoes burst into light. Bright orchid and chartreuse erupted from his feet, and lashed at the walls, a neon prominence. Each LED twinkled and darkened like a star and he swore he could see constellations on the ceiling. He tiptoed across the prismatic hallway, and the lights danced across with him exactly as he read in Ptolemy’s Almagest.
He wondered to himself why the room was so dark. He counted every umbra, penumbra and antumbra and recited the number back to himself. Those refracting lights only cast a shadow, their glow absorbed by the six feet of earth and sand separating Lawrence from the sky. He regretted the measurement. It was too dark here.
“Lamp,” Lawrence read back to himself. “Electric?” he wrote half-heartedly. How was he going to power this lamp? The bunker was only made up of a two shipping crates and Lawrence didn’t calculate enough room for a generator. Lawrence felt the mantle of his family pressing into his shoulders. They yelped like ghouls as they plummeted into unlit shadows. Without power, Lawrence and the Lafayettes would crumble into wet sand.
He heard the sound of footsteps from above him and his father plummeted into the bunker like a meteor. Clark had an odd appearance to him that didn’t juxtapose well with his personality. He had the body of an accountant and the soul of Sasquatch. His skin hung loosely around his skeleton, but the way he arced out his chest screamed of the man he thought he was. Lawrence thought this was the reason for Clark’s obsessive prepping. It started about five years ago when Lawrence was seven. Clark had been grading stories at the university when he came across a paper entitled “As Foretold by Nostradamu,s” a short story about the world according to the 16th century apothecary and seer, Michel de Nostradame. While a complete work of fiction, after reading it Clark drove straight to the Fresh and Easy to get 20 cans of sliced peaches, then right home to tell his family. Lawrence had always admired his father’s adhesive tenacity to protect his family.
After Nostradamus’s prediction of the “King of Terror” didn’t come true in July, Lawrence’s father was devastated. Lawrence always thought it was terrible that he was sad the world didn’t end but after thinking about it, it started to make sense. His father, a creative writing professor at the University of Nevada, was up for tenure and a big raise. This big raise could’ve meant big things for Lawrence and his family, including the end of couponing for his mother. But when he quit, all the talk of a raise went straight down the drain, and Lawrence’s didn’t think anybody forgave his father for that. It’s been 5 months and Lawrence could tangle himself up in the thick web of silence that covers the room when his father walked in.

“Ever see Waterworld?”  Clark said as he handed back the notebook, which now had “Electric?” frantically encapsulated by many circles.
Lawrence didn’t like movies. They made him sick and Dramamine was never on sale so his mom could never buy it.
“Well it’s kinda like what it sounds. Something about ice caps melting and water goes everywhere, I mean everywhere. Kevin Costner has to get in a submarine just to find Denver. Denver! That city is like a mile high.”
Lawrence asked his father what relevance this had to anything. Anything at all.
“My point is that if you wanna survive the end-all we’re always talking about, you can’t use electricity. Because once those floods come rolling in that lamp’s gonna fry us.”
Lawrence tried to tell him the total-technological breakdown wouldn’t melt the ice-caps, but he didn’t care. He was doing this for his father anyways.
He crossed out “Electric?” and etched “Gas?” into his notepad, and traced the letters until they were inky-black fissures and handed the notebook back to his father.
“Ever see Waterworld?” his dad said as he handed the notepad back to Lawrence.
“No Dad, I haven’t.”
“Well, there’s this scene right. This little girl is being held captive and Kevin Costner is getting real mad, and he tells the pirates ‘Gimme back the girl or I’ll blow you right out the water!’ and of course the bad guys are like ‘Nice try’ but then Kevin shoots a flare right into their gas tank and BOOM.”
“And?
“Well I mean sure you can have gas. If you want Kevin Costner to come on over and fry us to a crisp.”
Lawrence tried to tell his father that Kevin Costner could care less about some doomsday preppers living in an underground bunker in the middle of Nevada. He crossed out “Gas?” anyways. Lawrence wrote “Plutonium?” and closed his notebook.
“I think I hear them coming, L,” Clark spoke through a sigh. “Just be nice okay?”
Lawrence let loose a hollow “Fine” and started to kick up dust with his shoes. They twinkled again, but the shine was swallowed by the thick clouds of light and dust that billowed in through the open hatch.
Without warning, his brother bolted down the ladder and magnetized himself to his father’s leg. He was at eye level with Lawrence, and blinded him with the light reflecting off of his ivory teeth. His smile crept across his face, wide and sharp as a scimitar. Behind him, three others shuffled in. Everybody had curly red hair that was hot and thick like sand, but the faces of Vikings.
“This is… new,” the shortest girl said with a helium voice. She was about four feet tall and had eyes the color of brass.
“Better than the last one, L,” The boy added. He was cradling a silent baby in his arms.
“I love it honey!” The taller woman ran at Lawrence, arachnid arms outstretched and scooped him up. He didn’t know this woman. They were in fact, his family. The tallest girl was her mother, a 45 year old waitress named Missy with a knack for couponing. His sister, Jennifer, was very striking. Her hair was static and her presence was thin and brief like lightning; she was always leaving.
A few years back she been taking out the trash when she was approached by the new neighbor, a 16 year old hippy named Todd. Todd like the Grateful Dead and smoking and other things Missy wouldn’t approve of. Knowing this, Jennifer immediately fell for him. By some grace of the stars, Todd has somehow managed to tolerate Jenny and 3 years later Lawrence was rushing to the hospital to meet his niece.
“I take it back, I’m in love,” Jenny said as she darted around the room “After the world doesn’t end, it’ll make a nice sauna,” she spat and Lawrence thought for a second that her tongue had forked and hissed at him.
“Jenny stop, your brother put a lot of work into this,” Todd said as he bounced on his heels.
“Into what? Anybody can steal their parent’s credit card and order some shipping containers. It’s not like he joined Mensa or anything.”
“Jennifer!” Clark lashed “Your brother is doing this for you, you should be thankful goddamnit.”
Lawrence’s brother, Johnny, dipped down his head.
“Language, Clark,” Missy chimed in with an unnatural smile.
“I don’t have time for this, my book-club starts at 4 and I’m not missing it, and I won’t miss it next month when we are still here, six feet above this hell-hole.”
Lawrence couldn’t help but notice the loud crash, then the blackness after his sister left. He had never connected with his sister. She was 8 years older and a lifetime more experienced. Jennifer had always blamed Lawrence for the long downward spiral that was their father. She pictured him as a malefic omen, a two-horned demon who only existed to destroy her. In fact, Lawrence had said few words to her outside their fights and didn’t have much to do with her existence.
”We’re locked in,” Todd screamed. “She freakin’ locked us in!”
Lawrence wondered how much time passed, and imagined a clock somewhere deep within the bunker.
“Shut it Todd, she’s bluffing.”
“What does bluffing mean, Daddy?” Johnny asked.
“It means Johnny, your sister is a no good lying piece of—“
“Clark! Language!”
“You shut it too Missy, it’s not like Johnny’s gonna care about his manners when we’re waiting for the Rapture.”
“We won’t have to wait for the Rapture, Clark. Because we are getting out of here once Missy gets her act together, realizes we are stuck, and comes back. And once we get out we don’t want our son to become a serial killer right? I read in Cosmo that kids who are exposed to cussing at a young age are more likely to act out, which makes them more likely to be violent, which leads to murdering stray cats and then cannibalism! Is that what you want Clark?” Missy vacuumed all the air in the bunker after her monologue.
“It’s not a Rapture, Mom. How is a bunker going to save us from the Rapture?” Lawrence spoke for the first time and Missy shot him a glance that seemed to sew his mouth shut. Clark stood up, evicting Johnny from his perch, and walked over towards the hatch. He shoved Todd back into the wall, but artfully so the baby wasn’t woken, and started to pound on the trapdoor. He became more frantic and disorganized with each hit, and Lawrence watched his father unravel like his mother’s knitting.
“Daddy?” Johnny asked as he knocked on his father’s knee, creating a hollow sound. Todd cradled his baby and sank to the ground.
“Everybody is breaking their elbows, you know,” Missy said. “I read it in Cosmo, everybody is going out and breaking their elbows.”
Todd was unfazed and kept cradling the baby, while Johnny ignored his mother completely.
“People are just walking outside, tripping over and breaking their elbows,” Missy made eye contact with Lawrence, who was slamming his shoes against the metal. They didn’t light up.
“It’s a very vicious cycle actually. Their families hear screaming and they run outside and break their own elbows. They say it’s the winter, but I think it’s their own fault,” Missy protested to nobody as she paced around the room.
Winters in Nevada were harmless. It was the nighttime when the white-hot sands glaciate into crystals, not the winter.
“I mean how stupid can people get? Just throw some salt out there and you’re fine. But no, people are too preoccupied with their own lives to think about the future. Nobody can live two steps ahead of themselves, I know, but you can at least tell where you’re going,” Missy landed an arm on Lawrence’s shoulder.
“And why was this a cover story? I expect Cosmo to write better crap than this.”
Lawrence felt the sunset above him. He saw tendrils of frost weave themselves into blankets in the corners of the room. He watched as they crawled from floor to ceiling, skittering and crackling like goblins.
“I did this all for nothing.” Lawrence said to himself.
“You know I hate that self-deprecating bullshit Lawrence, leave that to the adults. You’re too young for that,” Clark shot a finger at his jugular. 
That wasn’t what Lawrence had meant. He remembered the night his father came home, drenched in rain and sweat and paper-cuts; it was the first time he had seen his father afraid. His father filled up the apartment with the smell of wet cotton and peaches, a smell that Lawrence would learn to hate. Clark had an odd air about him that night, an abscissor to the rest of his family. As soon as he entered, he spilled the peaches on the floor and marched across the room in crooked and irrational lines, muttering to himself. He sketched angles into the carpet as he paced. Obtuse. Acute. Right. This was not right. Lawrence knew something was up.
Lawrence’s mother and Jennifer were out, Johnny was in his crib. Clark eventually stopped his erratic ricochet and stared Lawrence in the face. He shoved the thick stack of papers in his hand onto Lawrence. The moisture wicked itself onto Lawrence, and stamped “Nostradamus” onto his forehead, backwards.
“Listen son.” Clark’s eyes created parallel lines all across the air. “We are the last of us, you know. Or will be, eventually. I need you to know this.”
Clark always had a dramatic aspect, but this was far worse than normal.
“This right here, it’s what’s gonna save us.” He peeled the paper off Lawrence’s head and started to read it aloud to him.

“Shouldn’t we be dead, or like comatose or something?” Todd asked everybody as he set his daughter on the ground, preparing for unnecessary CPR. Clark looked up from the ground for the first time since his tantrum “I mean, we’ve been here a pretty good amount of time right? Shouldn’t we be choking? Like altitude sickness?”
“We’re in a bunker, Todd, not climbing Mt. Everest.” Clark said as his gaze fell back towards the ground.
“No, no that’s not what I mean.”
“Well it’s what you said. Please don’t waste my time with your dumb ideas Todd, Jennifer might think it’s cute but nobody else does. You’re wasting breath.”
“That’s what I mean! Shouldn’t we be out of breath? There isn’t that much air in this place.”
“He’s right Clark, there must be an air vent or something.” Missy was suddenly excited. “Was there, Lawrence?”
Lawrence didn’t know the answer to the question. Everybody in this room thought this was his creation. Minus Clark of course, because after all it was his. He remembered when they first drew up the blueprints, on a napkin in a Perkins. It was a constellation of ashy pencil marks and ruler lines. They crudely met at perfect angles and formed a platonic rectangular shape. It was entitled, “Fort Lafayette,” the end all for the Lafayette family. On that napkin, there was no air vent. But Lawrence hadn’t kept up. He always went to meetings and construction sights but just as the cowering shadow to his father’s figure. Clark had somehow convinced his family that this was all Lawrence, while alienating Lawrence in the process.
“There’s one somewhere,” Lawrence said with plastic confidence. “I heard the contractor say something about an, um, air vent, I’m pretty sure.”
There were three rooms in the bunker, all divided by ancient pad-lock doors straight from a WWII submarine. Everything was monochrome and shallow, dizzying to the eye. Missy had started combing through the walls, her hands were tiny pale spiders sifting through sheet after sheet of nail and metal. Todd was picking apart the storage room while Clark scoured the bedroom. Lawrence was an idle promontory in a chrome sea.
“Mommy! I found something,” Johnny threw a wobbled plate of metal on the ground, causing a loud clash. The air duct was about 8 by 8 inches, and nobody knew how deep.
“I can’t fit. I knew I should’ve stayed with Weight-Watchers,” Todd said to himself. Clark pulled his body up against the opening in the wall. His angstrom-wide skeleton was a mass of muggy electrons rotating around his hollow nucleus. His body was thin and empty. Still, his shoulders stuck out against sleek walls, they twisted and jarred like antlers as he tried to slide his way in.
Missy poised herself next. Laying there on the floor, Lawrence noticed how insectile her anatomy was. They were long and thin, each bone attaching to another at weird, double-jointed angles. Her chest was compact and short, a thorax . It was her legs that took up most of her space. Just as her arms, her legs were that of an arachnid’s, unending and slim. They were each two vertices in space-time, cross-stitched into feeble and brittle bones. Knees equidistant from foot to hip, she was weirdly symmetric; she looked like a dissection. She launched herself forward into the 8-inch abyss, only to repeat her husband’s mistake. They sulked in the corner after their defeat, like frauds failing to pull a sword out of a stone.
Lawrence started to realize that his life rested in the hands of his sister. He imagined his sister on the highway, driving toward some lustrous desert he hadn’t heard the name of before. White, the dunes were white and glossy and Jennifer’s body sliced its glamour with her slim Lafayette body. He wondered if she could feel him under her feet.
“Can I try?” Johnny vibrated in his skin. His mother gave him a nod and told him it would be okay if he was scared, that he was very little and they didn’t expect any great hero out of him just yet. Like any other nine year old boy, he interpreted these words like a challenge and launched himself into the vent.
First Lawrence heard nothing.
“It’s dark in here Mom, like really dark.”
“You’ll be fine Johnny, I promise,” she said this with a caring tone, but shot an annoyed glanced at Clark.
Lawrence could tell he was moving slowly through the vent because only occasionally would her hear the pop and sputter of his brother’s body clawing at the metal. He was maybe two feet in but Johnny yelled at his mother like they were separated by two vast oceans. Lawrence imagined their yells distorting his vision, emanating across the desert. When the sound would reach the nacre sands of Jenny, they would shamble and crumble to nothing. Jenny would flee into her car and drive away frantically, but the iridescent waves would eat at her until her foot let off the pedal and she sped down into the gnashing waters behind her. Johnny’s screams fell into fugue state; a loss of noise.
“Honey, is everything alright?”
“Just come out Johnny, it’s no use,” Clark pleaded with his son, wanting to starve a proud father.
“If Lynn Redgrave can do it, so can I. She’s not that great, right?” Todd asked to lighten the mood.
“I don’t have time to validate you, Todd! And Lynn Redgrave is amazing, don’t act like you’re better than her. Have you seen Gods and Monsters?”
“Well,” Todd sunk to the floor and the baby cried for the first time since they’ve been down there. He started singing some hippie-song that amplified his baby’s cacophony.
“Johnny, what’s wrong?” Missy placed her head inside the duct. She saw only a motionless body, chilled in a thick fog of subterranean cold.
“Spider,” he replied.
“What?”
“Spider.”
“There’s a spider?”
“Shush!”
“Johnny, I don’t think spiders have ears.” Missy didn’t have the energy to mask her voice with softness.
“They can feel your voice in their hairs, Mom, their hairs,” Johnny said with a mouth full of wonder.
“Just get out, I’ll do it,” Lawrence said, but didn’t want to. Nobody suggested it because they knew that he would shoot them down.
“They can see motion, I can’t move.”
Lawrence reached a long arm into the vent and grabbed his brother’s ankle. He ripped his brother from the wall while Johnny released loud parping screams into the bunker. Johnny rolled around on the floor like his flesh was on fire.
“SPIDERSPIDERSPIDERSPIDER!” His words exploded into buckshot.
“There’s no spider. I swear.” Missy reached down to comfort him.
“That’s what it wants you to think!” Johnny was still screaming. Clark looked away from his unraveling child and gave a nod to Lawrence.
Lawrence c***ed his body at the mouth of the beast in front of him. He saw no spiders in the shaft, only blackness like the bunker. He squirmed himself in, slashing a diagonal line through the vent. Inch by inch he writhed further into the shadows, the screams of his family growing distant. Above him Lawrence imagined Jenny, not alone in an alien desert, but sleeping six feet above him. She was waiting for 2000, when she would open the bunker and prove them all wrong. Lawrence knew that this was true. Yet he still crawled forward. Behind him, Lawrence imagined the night his father crawled home. The smell of wet cotton and peaches, his dad like a bundle of electrons in motion; haywire. He imagined his lifetime on a line, bending to the curve of Clark’s back. Lawrence was the imprint of his father, and he didn’t want to be. Below him Lawrence imagined Nostradamus. He wondered how Nostradamus imagined the end of the world. One big battlefield of acid greens and blacks, the sky darkened with lead and smoke. He wondered if Nostradamus had seen him. If he wrote about a young boy, escaping his family through a vent that lead nowhere in particular.
Lawrence knew that Nostradamus was wrong, that the sky wouldn’t fall and the only green would be that of grass, not battery acid. Still Lawrence waited for his prediction to be true. For a bomb to set itself on the bunker. For it to blast a big rusted wound into the ceiling. He imagined this hole throbbing with caustic green, the color of the end. Alone, in darkness, Lawrence wondered how big a crater is.