Free Heaven Should Fall by Rebecca Coleman Page B

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. P EAS . B LUEBERRIES . C HEESE P OWDER . P OTATO P EARLS . R OAST B EEF F REEZE -D RIED . 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: B UTTERMILK B ISCUIT M IX , C ORN B READ M IX , F UDGE B ROWNIE M IX . There were even cans labeled G ARDEN S EEDS .
    “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 B LACK B EANS . “Three goddamn months and we’re going home. And by that I mean home to D.C. Because by then I’ll be ready to strangle somebody, and when that happens their nuclear bunker won’t do them a damn bit of good.”
    “It’s kind of funny, though.”
    He turned to me with one eyebrow up. “What, this ?”
    “Yeah, all of it. Storing up food, homeschooling the kids. We had people like that at Southridge—the ones who were convinced the government was going to come after them personally. We called them the PSNs. It stands for ‘paranoid survivalist nut jobs.’” He laughed, but I cringed inwardly at my bluntness. “Not that I’m calling your family that. Sorry.”
    “No—fair enough. In my mom’s defense, I’m pretty sure she thinks this is as stupid as I do. But she’s not one to make waves.”
    “So whose idea is it?”
    “Mostly my brother-in-law’s. We always had a lot of food stored up, but it didn’t turn into a bunker until Candy married him. My dad thought it was perfectly reasonable.”
    “Uh- huh .”
    “The longer you’re here, the more sense it’ll make. Which is why we’re only staying for the summer. Hang around much longer and it starts to eat your brain.”
    “Well, we could set up our bedroom down here, in the meantime,” I said. “Wouldn’t have to worry about noise coming through the