SHELTERED

a short story

by

Quent Cordair

© 2011, Quent Cordair. All rights reserved.

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Published by

Cordair Inc.

1301 First St., Napa, CA 94559

(707) 255-2242

www.cordair.com

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Author’s website

www.quentcordair.com

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HE STOOD AT THE BOTTOM of the corrugated metal shaft, looking up at the sealed hatch cover above. A bare bulb threw hard shadows down on the twelve rungs of steel rebar leading to the surface. Droplets of condensed humidity clung to blooms of rust on the ladder’s welds. The welds, like him, weren’t perfect, but they were strong, they would hold. He had made them himself.

He adjusted the gas mask over his face, tightening the bands and checking for leaks as he blinked and closed his eyes against the perspiration trickling from his forehead. Beneath the hazmat suit, his clothing was damp. The knee-deep water in which he stood had sloshed into his rubber boots. His breathing had shallowed, quickening as the pulse pounded in his ears. It had been a year and six days since he had sealed the hatch cover above. A year and six days, but today was the day and this was the hour—now was the time. He would be courageous. He wouldn’t hesitate.

From somewhere within him a paroxysm of fear welled up and shook his core, trembling through his abdomen and pushing at the back of his knees—but he remained standing.

A year and six days underground without sunlight or breeze or contact with the world above—whatever might be left of the world above. A year and six days without touch, without unrecorded voice, without contact, without friends or family. If only they had listened, if only they had been ready. But he—he had prepared. He was Reginald B. Wakefield, and he hadn’t died. A wave of vindication washed over him, lifting and sweeping away all doubt and fear. He had been right. He raised his eyes again to the hatch cover above.

He had been right.

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When he had started building the shelter in his backyard, his neighbors hadn’t laughed. Many undoubtedly would have laughed or would have shaken their heads reprovingly had they known of what he was doing. But they hadn’t known. It was one of the first rules he had learned from the websites and the books—to be exceptionally careful about whom, if anyone, you let know of your disaster preparations, for neighbors can become very unneighborly when they and their own children are starving. If they know of your provisions and preparations, some will resort to taking whatever they need, using whatever means necessary to do so, and all of your preparations will have served only to have made you and your family a target.

He and his eldest son, Mark, had carried out the excavation by hand, with shovels, buckets, a block-and-tackle rig and a wheelbarrow. They hauled off the dirt at night in the back of his pick-up truck, covering the growing hole in the back lawn with a large tarp. For privacy he had added two extra feet to the top of his back fence: his next-door neighbor, Ron, whose backyard barbeques were a regular feature in the neighborhood on summer weekends, was friendly enough, but as inquisitive as he was talkative—he had been particularly difficult to throw off of the scent. Given the difficulty of deflecting Ron’s questions, speculations, and unremitting interest in lending his advice on whatever his neighbor might be working on, Reginald had found it necessary to suspend his habit of borrowing from Ron’s considerable collection of tools.

Anyone who might catch a glimpse of the tarp or the workings through the house’s rear windows were told that an in-ground swimming pool was being built. The neighborhood children, who had been banned from playing in the backyard during construction, were disappointed the next summer to find that the large hole had been filled in and covered with new turf, but they were thrilled soon thereafter, as were his own children, when Reginald installed an above-ground pool over the spot. The pool was something of a luxury, but he justified the expense: the attached pump-house provided perfect camouflage for the shelter’s ventilation ducting, and the pool itself could provide a source of emergency water. He installed a separate drain from the pool, accessible from within the shelter below; a mesh screen in the pool’s vinyl cover allowed for the collection of rainwater if and as needed.

When he had first told Mark of his intent to build the shelter, Mark had been more than eager to assist, to his father’s pleasant surprise. The boy had never before shown any enthusiasm for work of any sort, but through the long months of the excavation, he proved to be an unflagging and inexhaustible partner. Reginald couldn’t have been more proud of his son: it was from good stock such as this that the land would be repopulated someday—and it could have been, if only Mark had survived. If only he had listened. If only he had stayed the course.

Reginald still held out some small hope that his son had somehow found adequate shelter somewhere above. As it was, Reginald would have to find another wife. She would be young and pretty and willing, and she would trust him wholeheartedly, the way younger women do. Being a survivor herself, she would understand and appreciate his wisdom and foresight, and she would never question him—not the way Margaret had. With Margaret it had become worse than questioning really, especially towards the end.

At the outset of his preparedness efforts his wife had been accepting, even proud of him—he remembered her saying so—but it seemed almost immediately she had begun questioning the scale of what he considered adequate preparation. She had been supportive of his stocking a few shelves in the garage with a couple of weeks’ worth of extra food and water for their family of five, along with first-aid supplies and such, and of having a written plan to follow in the event of an emergency, but she had balked at the cost of the large generator he wanted to buy, holding out for the purchase of a smaller, less expensive model. In the end, she had surrendered to his persistence, though the acquisition had meant shortening the family’s vacation to the lake that summer.

He gradually committed nearly a quarter of their two-car garage to the growing cache of emergency stores, but even this space wasn’t large enough to contain the vision to which his ambitions were rising—not less than a full year’s supply of food rations, water, medical supplies, batteries, propane, iodine tablets and other survival necessities such as gas masks, a water filtration system, gardening implements, woodworking tools, weapons and ammunition. Margaret’s discovery of his purchase of twenty bushels of seed grain and vegetable seed had apparently proved a tipping point for her. They had argued and fought over it all night. It was true that their house stood on less than a quarter of an acre, in a suburban neighborhood, and that between the two of them they could barely keep the flowers alive in the planters on the front porch, but Reginald had been convinced by his new friends on the internet boards that seed would be worth its weight in gold in the event of societal breakdown and more tradable than most commodities. By dawn he had worn her down again, and from that day forward she had largely held silent on the subject—tolerating his “hobby” as she called it—as long as he promised not to spend too much more money on it and would continue to make time to attend the children’s school functions and extracurricular activities.

But the preparations continued to cost more money and more time.

It was beyond him to comprehend how his wife could not be as concerned as he was for the safety of their family, particularly given that they lived only fifteen miles, and downwind, from the nuclear power plant. For any reasonable person, it seemed only sensible to fear that a natural disaster, accident or terrorist attack might cause a leak or explosion at the plant, and that rolling clouds of lethal radiation could engulf the town. To Reginald, there was almost nothing more fearsome than radiation, all the more so because the threat was unseen. And a nuclear disaster was hardly the only or even the worst danger to be worried about—there was every sort of potential natural disaster that might occur and the consequences of the impending economic collapse. He tried to convince Margaret to read some of his books and to watch the videos he had purchased. She had been happy enough to go to the shooting range with him to learn how to handle a handgun, and she had become proficient at doing so, but she obviously didn’t grasp the full reality and peril of the coming times—or she couldn’t or she didn’t want to. He was unsuccessful in convincing her to watch more than the first two parts of the Wintering the Fall video series, and she had finished less than a hundred pages of Surviving Hell’s Fan before returning to her novels and cookbooks.

But the more he read on the internet, the more he was convinced that a single card pulled from beneath the country’s increasingly fragile structure could bring everything crashing down, leaving a virtual hell on earth. The catalyst to collapse might be another banking and financial crisis, or a massive solar flare taking out all the electronics, or widespread food shortages due to drought and high fuel costs. There were far too many vulnerable fault lines—the fragility of the economic and monetary system, an aging transportation infrastructure, the vulnerable power grids and information systems, the unchecked influx of immigrants, a federal government that seemed bent on tyranny, cultural strife wherever one turned, and always the anarchists in the wings, waiting and willing for a chance to unleash destruction. The downfall was coming—it wasn’t a matter of if, but of when, and the when was surely much sooner than the naïve and gullible public were being led to believe.

For Reginald, the imminent collapse and the imperative to prepare for it were becoming two certainties in a world of uncertainty, twin pillars of truth through which there opened a path to salvation that was sure and free from doubt. With each step he took in the light of his new purpose, he grew bolder in his convictions, thriving on his budding sense of efficaciousness in the face of a miasmic future.

But then there was Margaret. Smiling, happy, contented Margaret. His wife’s buoyant optimism and unflappable practicality disappointed and disturbed him deeply, and he had continued, in subtle ways, to try to inform her, to open her eyes to the truth. He left certain websites open on his computer so that she might see and be influenced by them. On the kitchen counter, he strategically left magazines and newspapers open to articles that alluded forebodingly to cataclysmic times ahead. Surely only a Pollyanna could believe that the country wasn’t on the brink of implosion, but his wife’s response, or lack thereof, frustrated him deeply. Margaret was certainly intelligent. Why couldn’t she take the dangers as seriously as he? Why wouldn’t she? She would quote statistics on the safety of nuclear power relative to coal, to gas and even to driving across town, and on the economy she would hold forth on the difference between concern and worry, maintaining that the former was proper and often justified but that the latter was wasteful and counterproductive. It was all niggling semantics to Reginald’s ear. Margaret claimed to be “appropriately concerned, adequately resourceful and ultimately unafraid.” Ultimately unafraid? What could that even mean?

And so it had surprised him when she was supportive of his desire to build a rudimentary storm shelter. “That would be prudent,” she had replied cheerfully, as she took another sip of wine and continued her study of a recipe for lamb stew.

His internet research revealed a broad offering of pre-manufactured shelters available for purchase, but his budget was limited, and besides, the thought of building the shelter himself strummed the chords of his inner longing for greater independence and self reliance. As he explored the various designs for a homemade shelter, it became increasingly clear, as he read the reviews and opinions of those far more knowledgeable than he, that while a simple, relatively inexpensive shelter might save the family from an initial nuclear blast or a tornado, such would hardly serve for protection for more than a few days, or a week or two at most. How long might the family need to be able to shelter in place if radiation contaminated everything above? What about surviving a long-term famine or an epidemic or riots or marauding gangs after societal breakdown? To be truly prepared, it would be necessary, at the very least, to move all the emergency supplies underground and to fashion a shelter that was livable for an extended period—for a year at minimum, he decided. His acquaintances and advisors on the internet approved.

With Mark at his side, he had started work on the project in the early spring. Every available evening and weekend, weather permitting, they excavated, and when the weather was too poor for digging, Reginald was researching and soliciting construction and design advice from his resources. The footprint for the shelter, cleared after four months of exhausting labor, was a third of the area of the house itself, with the hole as deep as the house was tall. By autumn, he had poured the slab and had commenced the laying of the reinforced block walls.

Unlike Margaret, Mark unquestioningly trusted his father’s judgment, believing everything his father told him about the magnitude of the dangers they faced. He stopped going to band practice, to his mother’s dismay, and gave up his position on the school’s baseball team, to his father’s approval, in order to devote as much time as possible to the shelter’s construction. As one of the “men of the family,” as Reginald had begun referring to the two of them, Mark traveled with his father to a preparedness convention in the next state, where in a hall packed with booths and displays, he met other boys and girls whose families were equally enthusiastic about surviving an apocalypse. Among the people they met there he discovered an alluring sense of community that he had never experienced at school, where he had never been more than a shy and awkward outsider. At the convention, everyone was an outsider and all outsiders were insiders. Afterwards, he stayed in communication with several of his new friends, at least for a while.

More than anything, he loved going with his father to the shooting range, and he learned to break down, clean and reassemble their rifle and two handguns quickly and proficiently. He even became the better marksman of the two, though he was only just on par with his mother, who accompanied them to the range only two or three times a year and teased that if the men of the family went shooting a little less often, perhaps their arms might be less tired and they might shoot as well as she.

Reginald had patched together his own shelter design from the many dozens of plans he had studied, and through the building of it, it was his intention to teach his son basic carpentry, plumbing, electric and ventilation—though it was necessary to learn a fair amount of the skills and knowledge himself, on the fly. He had never really built anything of substance before, and there were more than a few hard lessons learned along the way. Some of the mistakes had been costly. By the time he laid the third row of block, the walls were out of level, for which he tried to compensate but ended up having to break them all down and start over. Later, it was necessary to redo much of the plumbing due to having used mismatched piping materials. He had come close to electrocuting himself when he forgot to turn off the main power before trying to rewire a reversed switch, only to realize later that he had merely installed the switch upside down. Through it all, he refused to consider allowing a contractor to come onto the property—one loose set of lips in the community could compromise everything.

The construction costs continued to mount, but he couldn’t afford to bolster his income by putting in extra hours at his job at the printing press, which would have left even less time to work on the shelter, and there weren’t enough hours in the day for that as it was. Indeed, to stay on schedule, he had declined several requests by his manager to work overtime when the press was under deadline. It had even been necessary to take several unscheduled days off from work when pouring the shelter’s slab, which turned out to be more time-consuming than he had anticipated.

He applied for a new credit account so as to not upset Margaret or her household budget, deflecting her questions regarding the expenses, allowing her to believe that he was using money he had tucked away over the years. It wasn’t difficult to rationalize that worrying much about how long it might take to pay off the account or about the potential risk to the family’s credit simply wasn’t worth it: what good would having good credit be when the banks and the financial system crashed?

He missed many of Peter’s soccer practices and games while finishing the shelter’s walls and trying to maneuver the ceiling trusses into place before the second load of cement was scheduled for delivery. He missed Amanda’s school play while relocating the generator to its underground compartment. Margaret had found herself alone at a parent-teacher meeting regarding Mark’s slumping grades while her husband was at an estate sale in the next town, bidding on a shortwave radio set. Reginald remembered their seventeenth wedding anniversary—a week late.

But with his new focus and commitment, he had begun to feel like a man again in a world in which, over the years, he had come to feel increasingly ineffectual. There was a newborn pride in his soul, swaddled in the conviction that he was one of the exceptional few who could see a future that others could not. One day, if he persevered, he would be counted as one of the men who had seen, one of the men who had taken action. His family would be among those who would endure to rebuild the world and to stand strong in whatever the aftermath might bring. Few of the unprepared might survive, and those who did would find themselves dependent on men like himself—the men who had prepared.

The main living area of the shelter included a kitchenette and a small dining and sitting area with library shelves, a television, a computer station and the shortwave radio. The second room stored the dried and canned foods, the first-aid, cleaning and survival supplies, farming implements, bags of seed, a grain mill, tools, extra clothing, gas masks, hazmat suits, spare parts, light bulbs, toiletries and other sundry provisions. Firearms and ammunition were kept in a padlocked cabinet. A compost toilet and a wash basin were installed in a closet off of the main room. In the third and smallest room, five bunks were built against the walls, with the top bunks hinged so that they could be raised during waking hours, leaving the lower bunks available for extra seating.

Ten months after groundbreaking, their fourth child, Isabelle, was born. It was too late to expand the shelter—Reginald decided that the baby could sleep at first with Margaret and later either with Martha or on a pallet on the floor made up with spare clothing.

Recessed in the wall of the sleeping quarters, hidden behind a mirror, was a compartment for money, records and critical papers. It was Reginald’s fervent wish to add some gold and silver bullion to the cache, but given the priority of other expenses it was not yet within his means to do so. He purchased a ventilation system with blast valves and special filters that promised to protect against nuclear, biological and chemical contamination—the system was the company’s top-line package and not inexpensive, but as the video on the company’s website reminded, all of his other expenditures and supplies would be worthless to his family if he didn’t provide safe air for them to breathe. The underground water tank, bought used, was of sufficient capacity that with careful rationing and the addition of water from the pool the six of them could survive for over a year. The remaining credit on the new account was spent on a large propane tank which would supply fuel for both the cooking stove and the generator. The generator in turn powered the ventilation fans, the television and DVD player, the modem, the computer and a single light bulb in each of the rooms. The shelter’s hatchway, with its extra-thick, double-insulated steel blast cover, was hidden beneath the hinged steps to the swimming pool.

He devised a homemade periscope from PVC pipe and mirrors, disguising its top within a corner of the doghouse at the back of the yard. Antenna wires for the AM/FM and shortwave radios and the satellite cable for the television and internet were run up through the same opening, through the doghouse and into the branches of the old sycamore tree above. It had been Mark’s idea to route the periscope and the wires through the doghouse and to camouflage the antennae and the satellite dish in the tree, painting the wires and the dish to match the tree’s bark.

Reginald thought back on the boy’s ingenuity, smiling with pride. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a single photo of any of the family in the shelter. Who would have thought that any photos would be needed?

He had been working on the project for close to two years when he was laid off from his job. Often fatigued and distracted from being up late at night on the computer, he had made several costly mistakes on large press runs, and when the company needed to tighten its belt, the less dependable became the more expendable. Being fired was enormously unfortunate—at least Reginald felt so at first, particularly given his concern over how Margaret was going to react—but after driving around town awhile, wondering what he would do next, he realized that he was relieved: he could now devote his full attention and time to the preparations.

Margaret, unsurprisingly, was exceedingly upset over the turn of events, and her frustration only escalated as her husband pursued new employment only halfheartedly and intermittently. But he had given up trying to convert her to his perspective on what the family’s priorities should be, and she was barely talking to him any longer anyway.

At Ron’s barbeques next door, Reginald could hardly help but steer any and every conversation to politics, world events and the economy. In any circle he joined, his dark and dire predictions would thoroughly dampen any of the festiveness, though certainly not the drinking. Even Ron, who was never at loss for words and seldom shied from an argument, would find himself laboring to change the subject to lighter fare whenever subjected to Reginald’s dour expositions on what the future would bring. And so it was that, in the company of dozens of his neighbors, Reginald would often find himself standing or sitting quite alone—and he would slip quietly away to return to his shelter.

On the children’s birthdays, he would make an appearance for just long enough to see the candles blown out on the cake before excusing himself to continue experimenting with the shortwave radio or studying his preparedness books. He thrived on reading about how to farm, how to skin and tan animal hides, how to conduct an emergency appendectomy, how to trap fish and how to distill water in the desert using only a square of plastic sheeting and some chopped-up cactus. He and Margaret were no longer sleeping together, which was just as well because he found that he slept more comfortably and securely in the shelter anyway.

Mark had become quieter around his father, and the longer his father went without employment, the quieter Mark became. Of his own initiative, he found a job bagging groceries at the supermarket, and despite his mother’s protests he turned over the entirety of his meager paychecks to her to put towards the household bills. The store manager allowed him to bring home bags of dented canned goods, imperfect fruit and day-old bread.

After returning home from the store one evening, Mark came down the shelter ladder. Upon his father’s asking, he claimed to have nothing particular on his mind.  Reginald returned to working on his wish list for additional emergency supplies while Mark sat on a bunk and thumbed distractedly through one of the illustrated medical books, paying little attention to its contents.

What Reginald hadn’t known was that when he had first told his son of his intention to build the shelter, Mark had envisioned a high-tech cave, a secret hideaway, an underground lair, and with such an asset at his disposal—a powerful counter to the money, athleticism and good looks of the other boys at school—he might have a chance of earning the notice of one of the prettier girls, maybe even Lisa Ashburn. In the two classes he shared with Lisa, who was not only pretty but smart, he could think of little else. While hefting the endless shovelfuls of dirt in the backyard, he fantasized of the possibilities constantly, wanting the hole to be as deep as he could dig it, imagining Lisa’s eyes growing wider with each descending step and her reaching out for his reassuring hand. She would be so impressed with the facility that, there in the dark, wearing one of her soft, mounded sweaters, she would let him kiss her—and maybe even do other things.

Of course he had revealed none of this to his father, but now that the shelter was more or less finished, he finally worked up the nerve to ask—as his eyes continued scanning casually over the medical illustrations—if it might be okay if he showed the shelter to just one other person, as long as that person swore never to tell anyone, not even her own parents.

Reginald’s explosive rebuke put his son immediately on the defensive, but when Mark tried to leave, Reginald physically blocked his path, stating that there was more to be said and more that would be heard. When Mark attempted to detour around him, Reginald grabbed him by the front of his shirt and pushed him all the way back into the sleeping quarters, shoving him towards the bunk on which he had been sitting. Mark stumbled. His head hit the concrete wall. He sat there on the bunk, drawing his knees up to his chin and clutching the back of his head as he stared at his father in pained disbelief.

The force of Reginald’s verbal assault was commensurate with how deeply he felt betrayed. He expressed his profound disappointment that his own son could dare to even think of jeopardizing all they had worked so hard to build together by wanting to show it off to some slut at school. That was the word he had used. He knew it was harsh, and truth be told, he had no idea who the girl might be, much less the quality of her character—but in the end, it didn’t matter: he simply had to convey to his son, through the sheer force of his own anger if necessary, that revealing the shelter’s existence to anyone could be a matter of life or death for any and every member of the family, right down to the baby, and that no inconsequential, primped-up object of a teenage boy’s hormonal urgings could be allowed to put at risk the family’s survival and salvation. No one else could possibly matter—no one. He had to impress upon his son, as firmly as was necessary, the proper value hierarchy. He might not have been able to accomplish it with the boy’s mother, but with his own son, he would not fail.

As Mark sat in silence, eyes averted, his father went on to lecture for a full hour—revisiting and reviewing every imminent threat that they faced and every extended consequence of taking a wrong step between now and the day that their lives would depend on their preparations. When he had finally exhausted his anger and arguments, he asked if he had made himself clear. Mark mumbled in the affirmative and asked weakly if he could leave. Reginald acquiesced only after securing another oath from Mark that he would never reveal the shelter’s existence to anyone.

As the boy walked unsteadily to the ladder, one of his hands still pressed to the back of his head, Reginald noticed the blood between Mark’s fingers. Feeling a momentary flood of shame and regret, he wanted to apologize, but said nothing, reminding himself that it was a hard lesson but a lesson that had to be learned. What he had done may not have been ideal, but it had gotten the boy’s attention, and the boy would thank him for it someday.

Later, as he wiped the blood off of the rungs of the ladder, he steeled himself for Margaret’s reaction. But her reaction never came. Apparently, Mark never told her about the incident. The boy did, however, slip into an impenetrable melancholy during which he spoke as little as possible to anyone in the family and his grades plummeted further. Even going to the shooting range was no longer of interest to him, especially relative to his new obsession: the bloody obliteration of the parade of human and alien targets in his video games. His father’s next visit to the shooting range was alone.

Reginald continued preparing, assembling a thick binder of emergency plans with a red cover and separate tabs of line-item instructions and lists for each conceivable disaster, including flow charts dictating the chain of actions to be taken by each family member in each scenario—tornado, nuclear explosion, power outage, chemical spill, rioting, etc. At the beginning of a long holiday weekend, he lured the entire family, including the dog, down into the shelter, and he sealed the hatch above them in order to conduct a four-day test under emergency conditions.

This didn’t go over well with Margaret. She not only had just discovered one of the bills for Reginald’s credit card, but was scheduled to attend a friend’s wedding shower that Sunday. Mark, smoldering, locked himself in the toilet closet and refused to come out until he was allowed to go back up to retrieve his game console. Reginald himself had to break his own rules the very first night, returning to the house to retrieve Martha’s pumpkin pillow, without which she refused to sleep, and for formula and diapers for the baby. The cases of formula in the storage room were discovered to be past their expiration date, and the boxes of diapers he had purchased only six months prior were already a size too small.

The dog, Beezer, refused to do his business on the square of fake grass that Reginald had provided for the purpose, and it became unavoidably evident that the ventilation in the toilet closet would need to be improved. With six living and breathing mammals in such close quarters—seven, including the dog—it became clear that a dehumidifier would be necessary. Margaret insisted, in one of the few moments in which she was speaking to him, that at the very least a supply of spices and flavorings would be necessary for cooking and that his inventory of foodstuffs was entirely too carbohydrate-heavy for as little exercise as any of them could expect to get in a confined space over an extended period. After bathing and drying the children, dealing with their dirty clothes and wet towels turned out to be an unanticipated challenge.

In the morning, Margaret declared that the shelter was simply too cold and damp for the baby, with whom she returned to the surface. Mark pleaded to be allowed to go up with her, and when his request was refused, he retreated again into his games and comic books until Martha began pestering him incessantly to play cards or dolls with her. After he shut himself in the toilet closet again, Martha and little Peter began fighting over which videos they would watch and who had pulled whose hair first. The children barely touched the rehydrated stroganoff Reginald prepared for lunch, with Martha declaring dramatically that it made her want to throw up. After another nine hours underground, a propane leak in the stove’s connection provided Reginald with sufficient cause to call an end to the first trial only thirty hours into what was supposed to have been a ninety-six hour stay.

Yet he emerged undaunted. He bought new board games that the family could play together and a preparedness-education kit complete with curricula, flash cards, projects and worksheets that would make more valuable use of the children’s time. He purchased a second small heater, a dehumidifier and exercise videos which the family could all follow together to help the children burn off excess energy. In the toilet closet he installed a stronger motor for the ventilation fan. The gas leak on the line to the stove was soon patched, and to manage wet clothes and linens, he built a drying rack with a fan in the storage room. Once he had supplemented the pantry shelves with more canned vegetables, fruits and a spice rack, he was confident that Margaret should have no further complaints. Privately, he decided that in an emergency of any duration Beezer would have to fend for himself above: over the long term, the extra space for dog food and the additional water requirements simply couldn’t be justified, and besides, carrying the squirming dog up and down the ladder was always a struggle.

A year and six days later, he cleared the fog from the lenses of his gasmask and looked back into the rooms behind him. The light from his headlamp swept through the sleeping room and over the empty bunks, all but one of which were still perfectly made, the pillows fluffed as if Margaret had arranged them only yesterday. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to strip the sheets and the neatly turned-down blankets, having never given up hope that, somehow, someway, at least one if not all of his family would eventually make their way back to the shelter. But none of them had. It was small comfort to him that, in all likelihood, they had died almost instantly. Or at least so he hoped.

It was Margaret’s fault, he thought again, and bitterly, for the thousandth time.

On that fateful Sunday morning three weeks after the first test, they had gotten into a fight again over priorities. The children’s summer break was almost over, and he had announced at breakfast that, with only twenty minutes notice, the family was to retreat again into the shelter and spend a full week there.

At their silent, blank stares in reply, he enthusiastically shared news of the games he had purchased, the learning programs he had found, and the improvements he had made so that they would all be more comfortable, and how much fun it would be spending the week together learning how to weave rope out of dead plant fiber, make soap from ashes and leftover cooking fats, and fashion shoes out of a deer hide he had found at a yard sale.

Mark muttered something under his breath which to Reginald sounded like an expletive followed by the word “loser.” He demanded that Mark repeat it and more loudly, which Mark did not. He demanded that Mark not leave the table, which Mark had already done. When he started angrily after the boy, Margaret pushed her chair back and stood, positioned conveniently in her husband’s path. Something in her eyes gave him pause. She was studying him as if she had never seen him before.

She excused the other children from the table, and when all but the baby were out of earshot, she suggested to her husband that if he knew what was good for him and for the family then he would be spending the next week searching full-time for a full-time job, and not just searching but finding. Furthermore, when he wasn’t job hunting, she needed his help cleaning the house and the garage, and then she wanted him to start converting the half of the garage where the supplies had been into a playroom, and then perhaps to lay out the raised vegetable garden that he had been promising her since before Peter was born. And furthermore, she wasn’t going to spend another single day in “that wretched hole” until and unless he could produce nothing less than a category-F2 tornado on the near horizon or he installed a skylight and a soaking tub in it for her.

He stormed out of the front door. Mark was already disappearing around the far street corner on his bicycle. Finding a morning paper on Ron’s sidewalk, Reginald brought it in, slammed it down on the table in front of Margaret and jabbed his finger at the headlines about the drug wars spilling over the southern border, the riots in Detroit over benefit cuts to public workers, the earthquake in Missouri and the corn and wheat shortages predicted by the end of the summer. What should worry her most—he was shouting now—was the report about the three Arab men seen photographing the nuclear plant in California. If she cared about her family, she would care enough to be prepared—or maybe she didn’t really love the children as much as she claimed to. . . .

He had made a mistake with that last—he knew it before the words were out of his mouth—but there was no taking it back once said, and besides, maybe that was exactly what Margaret needed: to be shocked a little into being sufficiently worried about the seriousness of things.

After a long, chilled silence, she stated calmly that she was taking the children to the park, and that they would talk again that evening.

Reginald finished the remainder of his breakfast at the table alone, reading the paper, whistling to himself as he rinsed his plate. He took the truck to the discount store where he bought a half-dozen bags of bulk rice and took advantage of sale prices on batteries and sterile gauze. When he returned home, Margaret was still gone. He switched off the outside power to the shelter, clipped Beezer to the chain on the doghouse and went below, turning on his headlamp as he descended, to tinker with the wiring to the radio, which had been shorting out of late.

When he surfaced for lunch, Margaret’s car was in the drive, but neither she nor the children were in the house. He guessed that they were likely over at Ron’s. The music, lighthearted chatter and laughter wafting over the fence annoyed him. Beezer’s whining and straining at the doghouse chain annoyed him. With a sandwich and soda in hand, he climbed back into the hatch and lowered the cover to block out the noise.

While attempting to create some slack in the radio’s antennae wire, he fouled the satellite cable in the swivel of the periscope mount. After untangling the mess, he was glancing through the scope’s eyepiece to ensure that it was turning freely again when a mushrooming ball of smoke and fire filled the horizon in the viewfinder.

The mirror in the periscope above shattered as a booming vibration shuddered through the shelter’s walls and hot air rushed in through the pipe. A splinter of glass punctured his cheek—he had turned his eye away just in time. He stumbled back, tripping over the chair, and his soda can crashed to the floor as the antenna wires and cable ripped out of their connections and whipped violently up into the pipe, disappearing into the hole.

Regaining his footing, he tore off his shirt, broke out what was left of the eyepiece with a screwdriver and stuffed the shirt into the opening before racing up the rungs of the hatchway. At the top, he hesitated, suffering a moment of indecision before wrenching the handle tightly to seal the cover. He waited there, listening, hoping to hear something, anything, but no sound penetrated the thick layers of steel. There was only the silence of the shelter and the pounding of his heart.

His hands were shaking as he descended. As he started up the generator, he cursed himself for not thinking to locate the breaker from the outside power within the shelter itself—though it was probable that there was no longer any outside power available anyway. Switching on the ventilation system, he was thankful for having invested in the protective filters. To thoroughly seal the periscope opening, he stuffed a can of tomato paste into the pipe behind the shirt and fixed the plug into place with a layer of adhesive, capping it with a solid layer of duct tape.

His emotions careened from elation to agony, from fear to absolution. All of the risks he had taken, all of the calculations and the thousands of hours of planning and toil had paid off. Adrenaline surged through him as though he had just struck a mother lode of gold after mining in solitude for years—yet he was in a mortified panic for Margaret and the children. A terrible sense of helplessness and guilt enveloped him as he tore at himself over what to do.

He turned on the television, but there was no signal. Scanning the radio frequencies yielded nothing but faint, distant whispers and unintelligible garbles. Beneath the six feet of earth, cement and steel, the equipment was worthless without the antennae and the satellite. He checked his cell phone, though the signal had never penetrated the shelter when the hatch cover was closed, and it was unthinkable to risk opening the cover now: the toxic smoke and radioactive fallout might already have reached lethal levels. He had prepared for the cell-phone system being knocked out, insisting that each family member carry a two-way radio when traveling more than a hundred feet from the house, but it was unlikely that Margaret had hers with her in her purse—more than once he had discovered it in her nightstand. She complained that it was too heavy and took up too much room. There was a chance that Mark may have been carrying his radio in his ever-present backpack, but with the hatch cover closed there was no signal on Reginald’s. After attempting to call several times on the pre-arranged channel, with no success, he left the radio on, propping it on the table, calling out on the other channels intermittently, waiting and hoping to hear any news at all, from anyone—but there was only flat static.

Yet he had prepared even for this contingency, given that an electromagnetic-pulse attack or a disruption in the atmosphere from a massive solar flare might knock out all radio circuitry and transmissions. As a final option, if anyone could make it back to the shelter, he had attached a small metal rod by a chain to the outside of the hatch cover. The family, even little Peter, all knew and had practiced the special signal: three quick taps, followed by three slow, then three more quick—Morse code for “S-O-S.” A family member needed only to tap the code to be distinguished from an unwelcome intruder.

By the third day that no one had come knocking on the hatch, he was able to begin ruling out the less catastrophic scenarios. While it was possible that Margaret and the younger children could have been killed or injured in a more localized explosion, the friend with whom Mark had been spending time lived all the way across town, and if Mark couldn’t come or send authorities to help by now, then it could only be concluded that the entire town had likely been destroyed or contaminated. Anyone daring to venture out into the open in such conditions could receive a lethal dosage of radiation within minutes, maybe even seconds. He owned a handheld radiation detector, but it was worthless for testing the levels outside the shelter unless he dared to open the hatch cover, which only a fool would do.

A week went by, and then a second week, with no sound from above. With each day that passed, Reginald’s confidence grew that the worst scenario had indeed occurred. If the blast had been due to terrorists or an enemy nation attacking not only the local plant but the hundred-plus others across the country, along with perpetrating god-only-knew what other forms of attack—then chaos, horror and despair would reign above. It would be anarchy or martial law, and it was hard to say which would be worse.

If only Margaret had taken him seriously. If only she had listened.

He still missed his wife and the children, but there was only so much worrying that a man could do. He found himself humming and whistling as he went about his days.

He had been right.

During the third week, someone or something knocked firmly on the hatch cover with something larger than the little metal bar. It sounded more like a hammer. After a silence, the knocking came again and louder—but certainly not using the special code. By the time the third set of knocks came, slower, louder yet and more insistent, Reginald was pointing his loaded rifle up at the hatch, with the safety off, wondering how long it might take for someone to break in. But the knocking ended, followed only by silence. It could have been anyone—a representative of the new police state, a Chinese soldier, an armed thug. He tossed in his sleep that night, dreaming that a starving, subhuman scavenger, its face and body half melted away by radiation, had pried through the cover and was clawing at his face. Pieces of its rotting body fell off as he tried to swat it away.

Over the following months, the occasional odd sound could be heard through the plumbing and ventilation pipes. He imagined several times that he heard a male voice and children laughing, but he knew from the books that such hallucinations were not unusual when one is sensorially and socially deprived. There were a few pictures and videos of his family on the computer, but he had no way to print them out, and after the computer terminally crashed during the second month underground, he was left with only his memories. There were several dozen movies in the shelter, and though most were the children’s animated films and cartoons, he watched them all, many times over, until the DVD player started skipping, and then froze, and then died. There was no manual in the shelter for repairing a DVD player. He took it apart and put it back together, to no avail.

He stripped the wire from the player’s electrical cord and attempted to snake a makeshift antenna up through the ventilation pipes, but he couldn’t get anything through or around the blast valves. The shortwave would occasionally whisper or crackle with what might have been voices, but it would pick up only a few faint signals now and again. One night, he strung the wire as far up into the hatchway as it would reach and managed to find a station on which he could barely distinguish what sounded like someone making an angry speech, in Portuguese perhaps. A somber voice on another station slowly intoned a long list of numbers in French. He listened to it for hours. The only other station that came through was broadcasting what sounded, weakly, like Arabic music. While evidently there was still life somewhere on the planet, the indications didn’t bode well for conditions above.

By the end of the fifth month, he detested every type of freeze-dried and powdered food in the pantry. He had never been much of an epicure, but now he craved fresh meat, fruit and vegetables, and real bread—and Margaret’s cooking. He suffered insatiable cravings for hamburger and steak. But the key to survival was patience and determination.

After re-reading all of his preparedness books, he calculated, as well as he could manage, how long it might take for the radiation to settle out given the prevailing winds on the day of the blast and the distance from the plant. It was possible, maybe even probable, that the radiation may have returned to survivable levels within a few weeks or months, but the threat from desperate survivors in the ensuing societal collapse could prove every bit as dangerous or more so. After filling half a notebook with contingencies and flow charts, he concluded that he should remain underground for one full year before he could feel safe exposing himself on the surface. To the target date he added six days: civilian predators or enemy soldiers might anticipate that survivors would emerge on the exact anniversary date. It would be better to wait until they were less alert. Further, he planned to surface at two in the morning, when those who might be monitoring the area would be least likely to notice him. He marked the days off on the wall calendar, and after his phone battery gave out, he measured the time by a wind-up alarm clock.

After six months underground it became necessary to begin rationing the propane. Despite the ground’s insulation, he had felt interminably cold through the winter months, and by early spring he had burned through more than three-quarters of his fuel supply trying to stave off the chill. To compensate, he began limiting hot meals to one every other day and warming only enough water for bathing once every two weeks.

During what was likely the first snow melt above, he started noticing the water seepage. At first there were only a few damp patches along the hairline fractures which had developed in the concrete floor and walls, but it wasn’t long before there was standing water in the storage room. It was possible that he had miscalculated the water table or the necessary drainage around the shelter, but he had guessed at it as best he could, unable to risk bringing a professional onto the property for consultation. He was able to keep up with the leaks for a while, mopping up the water with rags and pumping it out through the plumbing—until the plumbing backed up and he couldn’t unclog it, which with the rising water resulted in sanitary challenges and a pervasive noxious odor that made mealtimes even more unpalatable.

The water from the storage tank had begun to take on a strong, metallic taste, so he switched to the pool access, but the water from the pool was green and brown with algae and had small brown worm-like creatures floating in it. The standing water in the shelter seemed the least unpalatable option of the three. When he ran out of chlorine for water purification, he resigned to boiling, which only increased the humidity in the space and depleted the propane supply more quickly. Soon, there was six inches of standing water, then ten.

The fuel in the propane tank was depleted in the ninth month, leaving only a twenty-pound emergency tank and the remaining supply of batteries for power. He saved the emergency tank and rationed the batteries, using them only in a single flashlight and for only two hours a day, which provided just enough light by which to read and to eat his cold meals. For the remaining twenty-two hours, he lived in complete darkness, with no heat and no flame for cooking. He tried once to start a small fire with scraps of cardboard and a wooden crate, and nearly died from smoke inhalation before being able to assemble and don a gasmask.

Even without smoke and carbon monoxide from a fire, the air in the shelter had become woefully stale. Without power, the filtration and ventilation fans were inoperable, and he could only hope that any remaining radioactive material above had settled enough that he would survive whatever might carry down through the pipes. So far, his detector registered little radiation within the shelter itself.

In the tenth month, he stopped washing his clothes and gave up bathing altogether. From moving about in the cold water, his feet had become red, numb and blotchy, and were giving off an odor of decay. The medical books indicated that he had probably developed trench foot with significant potential for the onset of gangrene, for which there would be only one option if he wished to continue living. He read several sources on amputation, but had doubts as to whether he would be capable of amputating one or both of his own feet. Thenceforth, he did his best to keep them dry, swabbing them with alcohol. For navigating through the shelter above the water level, he distributed crates, food tins, inverted buckets and the bushel bags of seeds, which were already rotted and worthless.

By the eleventh month, he was coughing often and painfully, having developed what he suspected was a bronchial infection, and an abscess in one of his molars was swelling his jaw, making it nearly impossible to chew on the right side of his mouth. There was no means of obtaining the herbal palliatives touted in his home-remedy books. He might have put whisky on the tooth to ease the pain, but his one bottle of spirits had been consumed within the first two weeks underground and the bottle of rubbing alcohol had been depleted cleaning his feet. He was losing weight, no matter how much he tried to eat.

Through it all, he remained committed to the goal. He had come this far—he would stay below for the full year and six days. Better sick than dead, he repeated to himself in the darkness, over and over again. But the last months in the shelter were a psychological and emotional hell, with only the two hours of light a day and his mind playing tricks on him. He was sure he heard sirens wailing one night; then he wasn’t sure of it at all. Half of the time, he couldn’t tell if he was awake or dreaming and he would lose all sense of time and place. Sometimes he was certain that his family was there underground with him, and he would go to their bunks and talk to them and try to wake them. Sometimes they would be alive and would talk back to him. Other times he would find them dead and he would cry for hours. More than once, in the pitch dark, he was certain that he could see the baby, floating facedown in the water. There were hours on end when he was sure that the water was filled with writhing snakes. He would have long arguments with Margaret over what color they would paint the house when they surfaced again, and Ron would be in the kitchen barbequing hamburgers and hotdogs in the dark and insisting that Reginald couldn’t have any until he went to the store for mustard, relish and beer. The smell of the sizzling meat tortured him. He once came to his senses realizing that he had just spent what could have been an hour or a full day combing the shelter for his truck keys.

He vacillated between feeling dejectedly suicidal and euphorically messianic. At one moment he would have the loaded handgun at his temple with a trembling finger on the trigger, and at the next he would be relishing the prospect of having a community of doting followers at his beck and call when, like Jesus, he would emerge from his tomb, alive, purified and sanctified from his ordeal. He was finally able to pry out the abscessed tooth, but the open socket remained infected—the source, he believed, of his fevers. His feet and lower legs itched horribly and unrelievedly, and his cough only worsened, leaving his throat painfully raw as he spat up droplets of blood into his hand.

But finally, the appointed day came.

He used the emergency tank of propane to start the generator one last time for light, hot water and a hot meal. He shaved so that the there would be no leaks around the gasmask from his beard, and he bathed from head to foot before putting on his last pair of clean clothes, which had been saved so as to present a trustworthy appearance to other survivors. A good first impression could mean the difference between being embraced or being shunned or worse, depending on the new standards and conditions above.  

As he had never bothered putting a crate or upturned bucket in the bottom of the shaft itself, being that he never spent anytime there, getting to the ladder meant sloshing through the water, which filled his boots—but on this day, it couldn’t have mattered less to him.

As he stood at the base of the shaft, he turned and took one last look at the squalid, flooded rooms behind him. Then looking up, he readjusted the gasmask, zipped up the hazmat suit and checked to make sure that his pistol was secure in its holster on his waist. After taking a deep breath—which brought on another fit of coughing, fogging the lenses again—he began to climb.

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He was in such poor physical condition that the climb of merely fourteen feet exhausted him, particularly with the water-filled boots. At the top, the hatch cover was stuck so thoroughly that he feared he wouldn’t be able to open it at all. Panicking, he envisioned his slow death alone in the shelter, but with repeated, urgent pounding with his shoulders and back, he finally broke open the seal.

Quivering with the anticipation of seeing the moon and stars again, hoping that the night sky wouldn’t be overcast, he raised the cover a mere slit—and was blinded by the daylight streaming in. He had miscalculated the time of day. Either his clock was inaccurate or he had failed to wind it during one of his deliriums—but now that the hatch was open, he no longer cared. Exposing himself as little as possible, he pushed the radiation detector through the slit and squinted through the gasmask’s fogged lenses to read the meter. The reading was normal, possibly even lower than the level in the shelter below. He tapped at the detector’s case, wondering if the batteries were still good, contemplating for a moment going below to search for any fresh batteries he may have overlooked—but his curiosity and desperate longing for the surface drove him recklessly upwards and out.

The hinges of the hatch cover screamed loudly as he struggled to raise it. Once vertical, it was too heavy and he was too weak to keep it from falling open and clanging loudly against the pool decking. Drawing his pistol, he crawled out and onto the ground, the water spilling from his boots. He crouched, waiting and ready.

Clumps of waist-high grass and patches of brown weeds had grown tall in the yard. The house and the pool still stood, though both were in deplorable condition. The pool’s cover was torn, faded and lying half on the ground, and the back screen door of the house hung only by its lower hinges. There were boards over the windows. The sycamore tree behind the pool appeared to be undamaged, along with the satellite dish still camouflaged in its branches, but the doghouse was lying on its side against the back of the house, trailing a tail of antenna wire and broken PVC pipe. Pieces of his periscope jutted from the ragged hole where the doghouse had once stood.

Half of the wooden fence closest to Ron’s house lay on the ground, snapped off near the bottom, revealing Ron’s hedge. The hedge, in contrast to the vegetation in Reginald’s own yard, was fully green and neatly trimmed. As he was contemplating how oddly out of place it appeared, a spray of water from over the top of it hit his gasmask squarely, flooding the filters. He fumbled the pistol and it fell, clanging, down the shaft. Coughing and sputtering, he ripped off the mask and sucked in the fresh air.

“Hey, sorry about that! Didn’t realize anyone was over there. Who. . . Oh my god—Reginald? Is that you? You look like hell, man! Where have you—? Oh. My. God. . . . Hey, Wendy—come over here! It’s Reggie!”

Ron’s wife appeared at his side and stared at her neighbor, dumbstruck.

“Reggie,” Ron continued, “tell me you haven’t been down in that shelter for this past whole year.”

Reginald stammered, “But you didn’t know . . . Nobody knows . . .”

“Jesus, Reggie—the whole neighborhood knew. Kids talk, you know, and Margaret had to talk to somebody, and besides, what the hell else would you have dug that big hole for, with all your doom and disaster talk—a wine cellar?”

“Margaret? She’s alive? The kids . . . ? But why didn’t anyone . . . ? Where are . . . ?”

“Montana. They moved to Montana. The longer you stayed down there, the madder she got, and I figure it was September or so when she started seeing Steve. You know, Steve—from across the street, the engineer who worked at the nuke plant. The company is building another plant up north, and she and the kids moved up there with him just after Christmas. Don’t worry—the kids love him. He’s a great guy. Gotta say, Margaret seems pretty happy too. Oh, and hey, sorry about the house.”

“The house? What about the house?”

“Right—you wouldn’t know. The bank finally foreclosed on it last week. Which is just as well—it’s become a real eyesore. Bringing the neighborhood property values down, you know. They’ll have it cleaned up in a jiffy though.”

“But, the explosion . . . the plant . . .”

“Explosion? What explosion? The only explosion there’s been around here was last summer when I blew up the barbeque. Both tanks, sky high. What an idiot I am, huh? Always a good idea to check the connections before playing with the igniter, right? You should have seen the fireball, Reggie. Damned lucky no one was hurt. Hey, sorry about your fence—I offered to rebuild it, but Margaret said to let it lie, said she enjoyed getting a little extra light and fresh breeze through the back yard. Man, you should have seen your dog though! The bang scared Beezer so bad that he dragged the dog house all the way across the yard. We laughed about that for months, didn’t we, hon?”

Wendy finally found her voice. “You look famished, Reginald. We just grilled some steaks. I’ll bring you over a plate.” She disappeared in the direction of her kitchen.

“Must be a pretty sweet setup you got down there, Reggie, to be staying down there for a whole year. . . . But you’re white as a ghost, man.”

Reginald didn’t respond. He was staring at the back door of what used to be his home.

“Well,” Ron continued, scratching his head and squinting at the hazmat suit, “I’ll be getting back to my watering then. Wendy will be right over. Let us know if you need anything.”

When Ron had gone, Reginald sank to his knees. Then he fell back onto the earth, his arms falling open and wide. His eyes closed as the sun began burning his face.  

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For the latest Cordair fiction, visit the author’s website at www.quentcordair.com or the author’s Amazon page at http://tinyurl.com/3jkpssc.

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About the Author

Quent Cordair was born in 1964 in southern Illinois. He was raised “under a church pew,” as the saying went, in a fundamentalist Christian sect, and though his family moved regularly—the grass always being greener—it would nearly always be to a town with a church of their denomination close by. It was an insular community in which the devout were forbidden the enjoyment of movies, pop music, television, school sports, alcohol, jewelry, makeup, skirts shorter than knee length and most other temporal pleasures worth mentioning. It may not be a coincidence that the writer and artist now resides and works in Napa, California—the heart of the wine country—where with his wife, Linda, he enjoys some of the world’s best wine and food, and owns an art gallery brimming with lovely nudes and other sensuous delights. When not painting for the gallery, he writes romantic, adventurous fiction that celebrates a markedly different perspective of life on earth than the one under which he was raised.

While many things in his youth were proscribed, the reading of fiction was not—an oversight, no doubt, by church authorities—for it was amidst the library shelves that the eyes of a young man were opened to a marvelous and exciting world beyond the church’s walls. He immersed himself in boys’ mystery books and was captivated by the stories of Stevenson, Defoe, Wyss, and Doyle. In his mid-teens, he was discovering the dramatic tales of Fleming, Follet, Sienkiewicz and Hugo, and would soon bask in the ingenuity of O. Henry and the genius of Ayn Rand.

At seventeen, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps with the goal of becoming a career fighter pilot, but by the time he was accepted to attend the U.S. Naval Academy, he recognized that the only work that could ever truly satisfy him was the creation of the kind of visions that had inspired him through his youth. After completing his four-year enlistment, he launched his writing career.

His first short story was published in 1991 by the Atlantean Press Review. To support himself while writing, he waited tables, took employment as a security guard, stocked groceries and worked the graveyard shift at a mail-processing center. While working a desk job at an auction firm, he began seeking paying work more in line with his artistic proclivities. After teaching himself how to paint, he began taking portrait commissions while working at his easel in a local park and would soon be exhibiting at art fairs.

The Quent Cordair Fine Art gallery was opened in 1996 in Burlingame, California, where the work of other painters and sculptors of like vision were offered in addition to Quent’s own portraiture, figuratives, landscapes and still lifes, which are now collected by an international clientele. Linda assumed management of the business as it continued to grow, with the square footage doubling in 2006. Yet even this space proved to be too small, and in 2008, the Cordairs moved the gallery to a 3600 square-foot location in downtown Napa, where today they offer the finest selection of Romantic Realism in the world. Quent’s present efforts are devoted to his writing: in addition to publishing his short stories, he is completing a novel of grand scope inspired by his life’s journey and passions.

The Cordairs live in Napa with their cats, Lexie and Sadie, and their adopted malamute-mix, Ruby.

Also by Quent Cordair ~

A Prelude to Pleasure

How does a man find the woman of his dreams?

"Before the five-year search there had been fifteen long years of watching and waiting to fall passionately in love the way he had always believed he would, the way he once thought he had. But on his fortieth birthday, he stood alone on a rock above a restless ocean and cried. There was no one with whom to share his world, and there seemed to be nothing he could do about it. In business he could do anything, achieve anything, he refused to accept failure—but he couldn't create a woman, and he couldn't fall in love with one who simply wasn't there. Lifting his head, he had angrily wiped away the tears: he had been more than patient with the world, and the world hadn't delivered on its promise. And if he couldn't have what he wanted—he swore he would get the best that could be had. . . ."

A Prelude to Pleasure is the tale of how a man of accomplishment and wealth goes about finding his true love—and what he discovers along the way, with the help of a boy who reminds him of who he once was. The short story by Quent Cordair was first published to acclaim by The Atlantean Press in 1991. 30 pages.

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Readers review A Prelude to Pleasure

The protagonist is a good-looking, self-made billionaire who is a business genius with a gorgeous girlfriend. Seems hard to feel sorry for a guy like that, right? Yet Quent Cordair does a nice job depicting his inner struggles, including his life-long personal quest for what's most meaningful in his life. As a reader, one quickly identifies and sympathizes with the hero's plight and roots for him to win in the end.

The characters are nicely drawn and the dramatic tension unfolds according to a clever, inexorable logic: Will the hero ruin his life with a bad decision -- or have the courage to make the right decision.

I'm being necessarily vague on the details, because I want readers to check out the story for themselves.

I read this story during recovery from a painful hip fracture and found it so absorbing that it took my mind off the post-operative pain. So perhaps one way of praising it would be to say, "it's better than Percocet"!

—Paul S. Hsieh

An inspiring, enjoyable quick read! And for the ridiculously low price of admission, you really can't pass it up. I'm looking forward to more from Quent Cordair.

—Bryan Larsen

I originally saw this story in The Atlantean Press Review and I'm so glad to see it's back “in print”! Mr. Cordair paints beautiful pictures with words and really brings a story to life. I highly recommend reading his work and am looking forward to the novel!

—R. Miner

The Seduction of Santi Banesh

The daughter of a third-world diplomat is traveling with her family to New York. Their one-day stopover in San Francisco proves to be a radically life-altering experience.

"Santi Banesh was a sultan's dream of dark olive skin and burnt-umber eyes, deep almond pools that could drown a man. The long loose folds of her traditional wrap tried to hide her body, but her enchanting eyes, slender hands, the rise and fall of her chest and her graceful, sensual walk only made the robe work contrary to its intention, its overt defenses posing a rude challenge to imaginations which proceeded to lay waste to its veiling walls. Imaginations can be thorough beasts: Santi had already been ravaged by hundreds of men, though she was still a virgin and only fifteen.

"And now, just as her body was straining for perfection, it was starving. A third day without food and it was screaming. Everyone had said that after two days the hunger pangs abated, and for most girls they probably did, but her insides had set up a protest which had started about an hour before the first missed meal and had only escalated since. She had always been a healthy eater anyway. Her mother scolded that she would turn into an elephant once she bore children. But Santi's body burned more brightly and hotly than most—it needed the food—and it found this deprivation unforgivable. . . ."

First published in the 1994 summer issue of the Atlantean Press Review.

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Readers Review

The Seduction of Santi Banesh

I have read a few stories of Cordair's and this is my favorite. Santi Banesh is strong-willed and independent--my kind of heroine. The 15-year-old girl faces the ultimate culture clash when she comes directly from a third world country to one of the great cities of America. Cordair paints the conflict clearly and the ending is perfect. A great, short read. — Jason Crawford

From the intriguing beginning to the enchanting ending, this short story is a really delightful journey. It captures the joy of those seeing American possibilities for the first time. The ending leaves you smiling ear to ear. — Rachel Miner

I love this story. With imagination and story-telling skill, Quent Cordair weaves an exquisite tale that leaves the reader wanting more. Integrity is very seductive. — Michael Wilkinson

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Quent Cordair Fine Art

The Finest Romantic Realism

In Painting & Sculpture

www.cordair.com

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Author’s Website

www.quentcordair.com