He groaned and threw both arms over his face. I glanced around the room, taking in the white walls decorated only with a large American flag, the plain childish furniture, the windows shaded by artlessly stitched homemade curtains. I peeked out between them and saw the three little boys running around in the yard. “So those are Candy’s hellions, huh?”
“Yep. Wait till you meet their dad. Hoo boy.”
“They look pretty wound up. Bet she’ll be glad to get them off to school on Monday.”
“They don’t go to school. They’re homeschooled. By Candy, no less. The girl who spells religion with a d in it.”
“At least it’s not part of the curriculum.”
“If you’re Candy, it is the curriculum. Wait and see.”
I let the curtain drop. “Where’s your parents’ room?”
He tapped the wall beside the bed.
“Wonderful.”
“You’re telling me. Elias sleeps on the other side, but he isn’t going to care, so we can move the bed to the opposite wall. Of course, that would probably scandalize my mother. But it’s not like she can pretend otherwise, with you pregnant and all.”
“True. Hey, what’s happened to Elias?”
“What do you mean, what’s happened to him?”
“He’s gained a lot of weight. And the tattoos.”
Cade shrugged. “Yeah, he’s gotten pretty chunky. But to tell the truth, that’s what he looked like before he joined the army, more or less. The shape he was in when you saw him before—that’s not normal for him. Hey, speaking of food—follow me. You’ve got to see this.”
I followed him back down to the first floor where he pulled open a hallway door that led to the basement stairs. Candy peered over from the kitchen and called, “Hey, Cade, you going down cellar? You want to bring me up a can of black beans? I need ’em for tomorrow.”
“Sure thing.” He sounded almost gleeful. As we descended the dark steps I could tell by the smell of it that this cellar must be finished and not earthen; that much was good, because low dirt cellars gave me the creeps. Then he pulled the chain for the light, and what I saw made me pull in my breath.
The entire wall that faced me, running the length of the house, was filled from floor to ceiling with shelves stacked with giant-sized cans of food. Each bore a dusty yellow label printed with a cornucopia spilling out with produce. Only the black lettering differentiated their contents. PEAS. BLUEBERRIES. CHEESE POWDER. POTATO PEARLS. ROAST BEEF FREEZE-DRIED. Six fifty-five-gallon drums, in a cheerful shade of blue, sat along the adjacent wall beside a chemical toilet and a stack of military-green sleeping cots. An old television sat on a wooden crate, and next to it, a camp stove and a large gasoline-powered generator.
“What is this, a bomb shelter?” I asked.
“Kinda-sorta. You see the gun safe over there?” asked Cade. He waved a hand toward a wall holding the brackets for at least a dozen hunting rifles, and to the side, a tall brown metal safe that must have held the rest of their collection. “If the army ever runs short, they know who to call. Actually, they don’t. Which I think is half the point.”
I turned and looked around the room in wonder. The walls and floor were finished with clean concrete. An entire section of wall was devoted to evaporated milk. Several shelves contained varieties of vegetables and fruits, while another seemed to contain only baking mixes: BUTTERMILK BISCUIT MIX, CORN BREAD MIX, FUDGE BROWNIE MIX. There were even cans labeled GARDEN SEEDS.
“Jesus.” I exhaled. “You guys are ready for the apocalypse.”
“Sixty thousand dollars,” said Cade.
I looked at him. “That’s how much all this cost?”
“That’s my best guess. Freshman year of college, when I was short on money, I got pissed off and sat down to work out what I figured they’d spent on all this shit. That’s the number I came up with. How screwed up is that, huh? I’m working my ass into the ground to pay for school, getting nothing from these people, and here’s where it all went instead.” He pulled a giant can from a shelf and held it up like an infomercial salesman. “So when Jesus comes back, we can all eat precooked bacon.”
“I can see why that would piss you off.”
“You better believe it.” He chucked the can haphazardly back onto the shelf, then walked the length of the unit until he found one labeled BLACK BEANS. “Three goddamn months and we’re