Her Face, and Her Faces

Death comes for us all, in a multitude of manners. It’s like a snowflake: no one death is quite like another. Terrance Michaels had lost his wife Penny instantly—in a car accident, one second here and the next with your Maker. Thereafter, Terrance always hoped to be prepared for the end. At least for a few minutes.

Terrance was a man of some stature. Approaching middle age, he had recently taken an officer position at one of the leading defense contractors in the United States. A rare achievement, but without much time for revelry—on the day his promotion became public, the military directed him to a secure nuclear bunker where he was told to go with all due haste at any sign of imminent danger to America. In prior years, this visit might have felt like a field trip to the museum: a fascinating place where you feel safe in spite of the horrifying alternate world you’re visiting. But not now. And certainly not for Terrance.

A couple years before Penny collided with an oncoming tractor-trailer, she and Terrance had a daughter. Justine Michaels was the only girl left in Terrance’s life. She barely remembered her mother, but Terrance always kept a picture of Penny on his person, to remind Justine where she came from, and he’d often show her the jewelry that he’d given Penny during her life. “You’ve got her face, and her faces,” he’d tell her. Seven years of hearing that and Justine still couldn’t figure out what he meant by it.

Terrance had known for some time that the Cubans possessed nuclear weapons that could reach the capital. Once he’d earned his place in the Capital Bunker, he built a separate bunker to hold Justine until he could reach her. A two-bedroom underground shelter on an empty property near their home, 14 miles outside of town. He packed it with nutrient-rich imperishables and a year’s supply of peanut M&Ms. He sound-proofed the premises so potential intruders wouldn’t be able to coax his naïve little girl into letting them in. He installed an industrial-grade door and checked with eight different builders to make sure it was impregnable. And then he installed a keypad with a 10-digit code on the door—a code that only he and Justine knew.

One night, with the bunker complete, Terrance took Justine out to dinner at her favorite place. Between bites of greasy cheddar bacon fries, he gave her a laminated card with three short instructions in the event of a nuclear attack.

1. The second you hear that a nuclear weapon is inbound, get to the shelter and bring this card. Bring only the clothes on your back.
2. The code to the steel door is 1-5-9-3-8-3-2-8-7-7.
3. Once you get inside, don’t open the door for any reason. Don’t let yourself out, and don’t let anyone else in.

Justine didn’t seem to grasp the seriousness of the conversation, but she was an obedient daughter, and she trusted her dad. Hopefully this would be enough.

Terrance always kept his “bunker card” in his wallet. He formed that habit about a month before the fateful day came. While in his office, a pale blue light flashed on his telephone dashboard—a signal to move inconspicuously to the Capital Bunker. As he left his office, he grabbed his briefcase and his cell phone, on which he tried to text his daughter. She was at school, with an iPad that only received texts when her internet was active. His instructions went undelivered. She was probably chatting with friends—unbeknownst to her, for the last time.

Then, the bomb. Terrance heard a faint crackle above the surface. He was safe in the Capital Bunker, but still hadn’t heard from Justine, and he began to wonder. He tried to hide his terror as he asked one of his superiors if the warnings had alerted the public in time. The boss pursed his lips, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “I imagine so.”

48 hours passed, one by tantalizing one. Terrance took out his anxiety on some poor schmuck former ambassador who had never played Spades before. The radiation levels at the surface had subsided enough for the bunker inhabitants to exit with full body suits and specialized masks. Terrance was, obviously, the first one out the door.

As he ambled onto dry land, Terrance oriented himself with the sun and started walking west, in his military-grade survival equipment, and didn’t once consider the suffering survivors along the road, asphyxiating in street clothes. There must have been 50 of them in the first half-mile he walked—trying to break into abandoned cars, losing their breath, and collapsing on the hot, radioactive asphalt. Four of them had another idea: attack the hazmat suit.

They ganged up on Terrance and tried to grab his mask, but he easily frisked away their withering arms and kept moving. One of them ripped the back of his specialized suit, but he was wearing pants underneath—he imagined he’d be fine.

This incident reminded Terrance that his best bet was to avoid the near-zombified survivors. He found a metro station and checked for running trains—of course, nothing was active, so he could safely wander along the tracks. And so he did, for 13 miles. Each one was harder than the last; his feet blistered, and his lungs struggled to keep pace as they recycled the same oxygen over and over again. He reached his last stop on the brink.

After sauntering another mile to the field above the bunker, pulled up a tuft of grassy turf to reveal a trap door, leading underground. He’d found the Michaels’ shelter.

Suddenly, Terrance couldn’t take a step further. He’d known his daughter might be gone for more than two days—much longer than he’d had to wonder about Penny—and now he was about to find out. He sat on the grass for twenty minutes, processing.

Justine had done her part. She heard the warning on the day of the attack, pulled out her laminated card (which she’d kept in a little purse her dad had bought her last Christmas), and used the code to get down into the bunker safely. She was dancing to music in her headphones when the bomb struck the city.

However, as the days passed, Justine began to consider that her father might not make it to the shelter. She heard occasional knocks on the door and, per her instructions, did not oblige. The first day, she’d counted 16 separate sets of knocks. The second day, another eight. Her mental math told her that meant 24 imperiled suitors had begged for entry into her fortress. She’d turned them all away—two dozen damsels in distress.

Justine had a TV in the second bedroom, and a whole closet full of DVDs to watch, but those screen stimuli couldn’t distract her from the possibility that she was an orphan already. How long would she need to live in this bunker? What if Terrance never came? How many days should she wait before she assumed him dead and stepped out into a world where she knew no one, and had no sense of where to go? The dawn of a third day felt like a third century; and Justine, seven years old, was aging rapidly.

Terrance made his way down the rusty metal steps to the doorway. There were too many footsteps to count: a sign that plenty of people had found the door, but couldn’t enter. The footsteps encouraged Terrance—his castle had withstood quite a few would-be intruders—but they didn’t necessarily suggest anything about Justine. Maybe she forgot her card and couldn’t punch in the code. Maybe she never got the warning in the first place. Or maybe she was inside, watching a DVD, just seconds away from seeing her father again. Terrance dwelled on this last outcome while he checked the premises to make sure he wasn’t being followed.

Nope. All clear.

He reached into his back pocket to grab his wallet, which held the card, which contained the code.

But his pocket was empty. No wallet, no card, and no code to be found.

Frantic, Terrance patted his whole body down twice. No wallet. He sloughed off his hazmat suit. Nothing inside there, either. Every pocket, every crease, every nook and cranny of his clothing where a wallet or a card could be concealed—it was nowhere. Then he remembered those first few moments out in the sun, when that band of raiders had tussled with him for survival. They must have picked his pocket. They must have jimmied an abandoned car open and made north. They must be in Maryland or Pennsylvania or Delaware, spending with his credit card, using his security clearance to bribe their way into an emergency room to get checked on. Someone in that posse was Terrance Michaels, and Terrance was just a father, frozen some twenty feet from his beloved little girl, without a wallet, or a card, or a code.

He tried knocking on the door, shouting his daughter’s name. “Justine! Justine!” No response—which, again, didn’t necessarily suggest that she was inside the soundproofed shelter. Before long, he was punching every 10-digit numerical combination he could conjure, but the numbers were completely random, and the number of digits meant that he had a few million permutations to go through. The door’s code feature went black after 15 failed login attempts.

Terrance was sweating, trembling, and extraordinarily daunted. He’d built a bunker so secure that he couldn’t sneak into it. His nerves began to overtake him, and he was moved to tears as he caromed off a wall and crumpled to the floor. “Justine!” he wept. “Justine!”

Terrance had no tricks for dealing with panic attacks, because he’d never had one before. This was a moment he’d just have to ride out. He tried running his hands over his trembling body to calm down. He took off his suit jacket and let it fall to the floor. As it fell, something clanged inside—“Ting!”

What metallic object was in his suit jacket? Once Terrance regained control, he reached into the pocket and found it. A heart-shaped locket; one of the many mementos he carried to remind Justine of her mother. Inside the locket was a picture of Justine as a toddler, bearing Penny’s face and making one of Penny’s faces. Terrance looked at the picture, and looked at the door, and looked down at the bottom. He froze.

The path leading up to the bunker was built on rock, but a small film of dirt had formed above it, and the steel door’s builder had not scraped off this dirt when building the door. So, while this door was impenetrable to human beings, there was a miniscule space—a millimeter or two—at the bottom. The foot traffic in the days before had loosened up the dirt and exposed this tiny opening.

Terrance saw his chance. The space was too small for him to push the locket under with his fingers, but if he could clear out some space by removing more dirt from around the door, he could try to slide it inside. So, after a couple practice slings, a desperate dad slyly slid the locket under the door. He couldn’t tell what was going on below, but the cleared-out dirt had given him a chance to hear, very faintly, the happenings inside. He put his ear to the ground and listened for one hour, after another, after another. There was nothing to be heard. Terrance languished, but kept waiting. He had no other choice.

Then, he heard footsteps on the other side of the door. One, after another, approaching the door, until they suddenly stopped. And then a pregnant pause, a slight movement of the steel door, and its bristling against the ground as it slid open.

And then Justine’s face, and her faces.