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id you take your vitamin D pill?” Mother asked through the hole in the wall. Bobby and I always took our vitamins yet Mother always asked if we did, not quite believing us but unable to do anything about it if we weren’t. She handed me a small, tightly folded stack of clean clothes and watched as I placed them in our chest of drawers. I emptied the laundry bag of our dirty linens and clothes and sorted them, handing them over to Mother in small piles that fit through the hole.
Once she had squared away the dirty clothes, she said, “Be sure to finish your history homework before you watch any television.” Then she closed the 9x12 inch metal sliding door that covered the hole through which she took care of Bobby and me.
Once the metal door was secured, Bobby flopped on his bed and turned on the television. I said, “Didn’t you hear? No television until we finish our homework.”
“What’s she going to do about it, Molly? Tear down the walls? Ground me?” He scrolled through the channels, muttering each time he passed a news channel that Mother had recently blocked. Lips curled in disgust, he said, “Ever wonder why she doesn’t want us watching the news?” Increasingly he refused to call her Mother.
I thought back to Mother’s last lecture on the evils of the media. “Because it’s pessimistic and a tool of the government to keep us in fear?”
Bobby rolled his eyes at me. “God, Molly? Ever think for yourself? She worries that if we watch it too much, we’ll wonder why we’ve been in here ten years and yet the world still seems to exist,” he said. “Before she blocked the news, it was funny how we never heard about any of the crazy theories that made her lock us in here in the first place.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say back. I’d never looked at it that way before.
When I was four and Bobby was six, Mother built a narrow, hidden room that ran the length of the kitchen and living room. She built it around the bathroom on the ground floor, but unless you had the floor plan of the house, there was no way to know the room existed. Our father had just died of cancer and she was certain that the food he ate killed him. Mother was sure the government was controlling people with bad food that affected our brains.
She built the cement block room for Bobby and me to live in so that when the government plot backfired and people went completely crazy from bad nutrition, we would be safe until it was over. I don’t remember the day she bricked us in but Bobby once said he remembered us sitting in the middle of the room, watching as Mother hummed to herself, arranging bricks atop slathers of mortar, watching as the last brick was squeezed into place.
We had twin beds parallel to one another, a desk and a bureau we shared, as well as a bookcase with a rotating collection of books Mother passed to us. We had little storage in the room so we were careful about the books we kept. Our bathroom was on the same wall as the hole, complete with a shower. Sometimes it got stuffy in the room but Mother made sure she ran the air conditioning enough to prevent it from getting too bad.
Through the hole in the wall, she passed us salads and soups she made from the garden she grew. She gave us jump ropes, a small television and batteries for the television remote. Through the hole, she nagged us about hygiene and studying. We celebrated our birthdays with gluten-free, stevia-sweetened cakes. She educated us through that hole, passing us a laptop computer loaded with educational software.
We were both good students but we hated her lectures on nutrition. Mother’s eyes became wild when she informed us about the horrors of the modern diet. “High fructose corn syrup is why the world is so crazy!” she insisted. “The government puts it in everything so that people get fat, stupid and easy to control but the joke will be on them when their brains malfunction and people riot in the streets!”
“So, any time frame on when that will happen?” Bobby asked her recently, as sarcastic as he dared to speak.
Her face tightened. “You think I like keeping you two in here, my two angels? You think I like locking you two up for your own safety?” Since she was addressing Bobby directly, I said nothing. But Bobby refused to answer her, too. This caused the lines around her blue eyes to deepen as her face contorted with disbelief. “You think I like this, don’t you? You don’t think it’s happening? Why just last week Mr. West, the man up the street, ran his car into the house next door! Why would he do such a thing if he weren’t violently crazy?”
“Maybe he mistook the gas for the brake,” Bobby said. This common sense reply set Mother off and she instructed us for hours on the evils of the world outside. Obesity, mental illness, violent children who shot up schools, monitoring devices implanted in infant skulls, cabals of food manufacturers and Masons trying to control the world . . .
When she grew hoarse and finally wandered off to bed, Bobby said, “Mother’s a paranoid schizoid, you know that don’t you?” He’d been watching the community college psychology classes on cable access, a channel Mother hadn’t blocked because she felt it was of educational value. I didn’t know what he meant, but I had noticed Mother had been absent minded over the last few days, failing to get dishes after meals and wandering off in mid-sentence. She seemed distracted.
Bobby wore me down like Mother did to convince us of her delusions in the first place; he talked endlessly about his beliefs until I finally gave in and admitted he was likely right. If the world was going to end, it would have happened by now. “So what do we do, Bobby?” Even though I knew Mother was out shopping, as she always did on Wednesdays, I was still nervous. It seemed a betrayal even to think about rebelling against her.
I had seen television shows with rebellious and sarcastic teenagers, but I could not see being mouthy when I couldn’t leave the house in a huff, or even use a telephone and complain to a friend. I once tried to speak like the girls on a popular show, calling Mother “Mom” and raising the inflection at the end of my sentences as if all statements were questions. That upset Mother to no end, and Bobby laughed at me. “Like, you know?” he mocked. He wasn’t mocking me now. I could have used every bit of slang I knew and as long as I agreed that Mother was crazy and we had to get out of there, he would have smiled and nodded.
“We start planning to get out of here,” he said. That was the simple part, coming to that conclusion. We had no idea how we would accomplish it. It seemed impossible to get out of a windowless, cinder block room. The hole in the wall was so small not even I could squeeze through. We had no pick, no axe, not even a steak knife, for Mother insisted on a vegetarian diet. We couldn’t even contact anyone online because Mother had never allowed us access to the Internet. It seemed hopeless.
We didn’t speak quietly enough, or so it seemed. That afternoon, the television went out completely. We figured it was a problem with the cable connection, but hours passed and the television service did not return. Then Mother didn’t show up with dinner, which was alarming since we never got our lunch either. On shopping days, our lunch was sometimes late, but otherwise, mealtimes were precise in our home. Not even a severe case of the flu caused Mother to be late with meals.
“She heard us. I bet she’s got some sort of listening device in here! She’s punishing us with no food and no television!” Bobby said, so angry he unconsciously clenched and unclenched his fists.
“Who’s being paranoid now?” I asked. But I knew he was right. Mother must have heard us and was upset that we wanted out. When my stomach began to rumble, I checked the dishes left over from breakfast, but there was nothing left to eat, not even a crumb of whole grain toast.
I managed to sleep off and on that evening but Bobby paced most of the night. I would occasionally stir to hear him talking to himself, counting his steps as he walked from one end of the room to the next. We both knew how many steps he could take – 32 – but it comforted him to count them over and over again.
The next day Mother didn’t appear at all. “Are you going to starve us to death, you evil bitch?” Bobby shouted. I begged him to be quiet. Mother couldn’t abide curse words and we both knew how Mother reacted when we challenged her beliefs. If she could hear him, he was just making it worse.
It was just after 9:00 p.m. when we heard faint screams outside the house. It was hard to tell where they were coming from. In fact, it was hard to tell if they were screams at all, as the cinder blocks tended to muffle all noise from the outside. If it weren’t for the ventilation system, we’d never hear a noise from outside the house.
“Was that a scream?” I asked, speaking in a near whisper.
It took Bobby a moment to answer. Then he said, “It sure sounded like one.” Despite the thickness of the walls that encased us, I became very afraid.
“Bobby, I don’t think mother would starve us to punish us, and even if she did, she wouldn’t do it for this long.”
Bobby mulled this over and said, “You’re right. She’s crazy but she wouldn’t deprive us of food for two days just to make a point.” But neither of us had any idea what was going on.
We didn’t have to wait long to find out what was happening. The television came back on later that afternoon. Well, two channels came back, an emergency broadcast urging people to stay inside until the crisis passed and a cable access channel. I recognized the red, bloated face of the star of a local conspiracy theory show. Bobby had always said he was a kook like Mother, but he often watched the show because it was the only way he could get news of the world, though he claimed the man presented the news in a very biased manner. He sat on his bed and began to watch the show intently.
The red-faced man shouted, “People! People I warned you years ago against these genetically modified crops and everyone said, ‘Oh Alan, you’re so paranoid!’ Well am I paranoid now? Genetically modified corn turning people into vampires isn’t just a bad movie on the SciFi channel, is it? You cannot monkey with nature, people!”
Someone off camera shouted, “They’re not vampires, you idiot!”
Alan’s face grew redder. “Oh yes, my camera man wants to split hairs. They aren’t technically vampires. Would zombies be a better description?” There was some more shouting off camera, followed by a rustling sound. Alan looked very annoyed and started speaking in a flat, sarcastic tone. “Fine! They’re just people with a disease! A disease they got from eating genetically modified corn! A disease that makes them crave the blood of those who don’t have the disease! Most Americans are going to get it. If you’ve so much as slurped a soda, you’re gonna die. Why? Because soda has high fructose corn syrup in it, made from genetically modified corn! You’re gonna attack the healthy and drink their blood until the disease kills you and the government doesn’t want you to know what’s happening. If you don’t have it, those who do are gonna sniff you out unless you get to safety fast or unless you live in an armory! What’s the time frame on it?” he asked someone off camera.
“A few days to a couple of weeks,” a different voice shouted. “This new form of porphyria can take up to two weeks to kill those who develop it, and so far it is always fatal.”
Bobby muted the television. “Porphyria?” he asked. He walked over to the computer and typed the word into a search field in a medical encyclopedia Mother had installed on the computer. He scanned the screen and read some of it to me. “This is just a generic entry about it, but it says porphyria’s a blood condition that inhibits the production of hemoglobin and makes people extremely anemic.” He paused, and then inhaled audibly. “This part’s interesting, Molly. Some people think the disease inspired the belief in vampires because sufferers can’t bear sunlight, crave iron in blood and they act insane,” he read.
“I wonder how it is that genetically modified corn is affecting red blood cell production. That would be interesting to know,” he said. Bobby had always been interested in mental and medical conditions. Mother once said he needed to be a doctor one day. Of course, neither of us mentioned that she’d eventually have to let him out in order for him to achieve such a goal.
I certainly had no answer. I wasn’t sure I understood what “genetically modified” even meant. I turned to look at the television. Even with it on mute, I could tell the host was shouting again. Then I noticed some small print on the lower right hand of the television screen. The television screen was so small I had to stand less than a foot away to see the print clearly. It was the program date. The program we were watching had aired thirteen days prior. “Bobby?”
“Yes,” he murmured, as he read more about porphyria.
“I think the end of the world started a couple of weeks ago.” Then the power went off.
Saturday was so horrible I wondered if we would survive. Weak and scared, Bobby and I stayed in bed as much as we could. I wondered if Mother had been attacked at some point during her shopping trip, though why she would have left the house during the end of the world was a mystery to us both. “When you questioned her the other day, why didn’t she tell us it was really happening?” I asked.
“She did. Remember the guy driving into a house? Mother makes no sense when she’s agitated, but she did try.” He was calling her Mother again, but I didn’t draw attention to it.
“But why would she leave the house when she knew it was so unsafe?” I was inconsolable and needed answers, though I knew Bobby had no more answers than I did. Still, he did his best to comfort me. He didn’t say anything and I stopped asking questions then. The reasons didn’t matter. We both knew she wasn’t coming back.
Without the air conditioning coming in through the ceiling vent, our little room became stifling. We sweat through our clothes and were forced to strip down to our underpants. I licked the sweat off my upper lip as it formed, feeling sticky and unwell as I did it, but unable to stop. Because we were silent, we could hear the symphony of growls that played in our empty stomachs. We drank as much tap water from the bathroom sink as we could to quell the terrible, rumbling pangs.
We only knew the time because of the digital, battery-powered clock next to Bobby’s bed. Even though we were terrified, we had lived with such a rigid schedule for so long that we went to bed on time and tried to sleep, trying to take some comfort from the normalcy. We awoke in the middle of the night to a loud crash in the living room. Bobby leapt out of bed. He ran to the opening in the wall, eased the metal door open with the flat of his hand and peeked out. I leapt out of bed too, and then Bobby shrieked and lunged backward, falling onto the floor. He scrabbled back in a crab walk and yelled, “Don’t go near the hole, Molly!”
I didn’t. As our eyes adjusted to the dark, we saw gaunt faces with deranged eyes looking in at us, backlit by the moonlight pouring in between the curtains Mother never returned to close. A woman with cracked lips put her arm inside the room, beckoning us to walk towards her. She ran her tongue over her lips and curled her fingers towards her palm, over and over. Soon, she was shoved away by someone else, equally pale and parched, who craned his head through the hole in the wall but whose shoulders were too wide to permit entry.
Bobby took my hand and we stood in the middle of the narrow room, the room our mother had built to protect us. I began to shake and Bobby put his arm around me. We stood there shivering despite the heat and watched the faces as they watched us, desiring us, wanting to reach us, but unable to get inside.
After a while, the shock of what we were seeing faded, though people continued to walk through the house, banging on the walls, shaking the small metal door frame as hard as they could. They never spoke and none of them ever went into the garden shed to get tools to help them get inside the room. We sat on Bobby’s bed for hours watching as face after face, drawn and tight, pale with unsated hunger, looked in through the hole in the wall.
On Sunday afternoon, we awoke from an uneasy nap to realize we could no longer hear people roaming about the house. I crept slowly to the open metal door and looked out. Mother’s tidy living room was littered with dead bodies.
I began to cry and threw myself on my bed with as much energy as I had left. “Mother was right! We would have died yesterday if she hadn’t built this room!”
Bobby slumped down beside me. “Mother did what she thought was right but if we don’t get out of here, we’re going to die anyway.”
Bobby was right. We were going to starve. “But what chance do we have out there? What if there are more of them who just now contracted the disease?”
“I don’t know, but we have a better chance out there than in here,” he said. I curled into a fetal position on my bed and continued crying. After a while, I sniffled and sat up, my swollen eyes adjusting to the semi-dark in the room. Unsteady on my feet, I made my way over to the sink. I rinsed my face, but still a bit wobbly, I lost my balance and careened into the toilet. Something fell off the toilet tank and crashed to the floor. I leaned down and felt around – I had upset the dishes from Wednesday’s breakfast, dishes that Mother never collected. I patted the ground until I found a butter knife and a fork.
I walked over to the still open metal door and began prying at it. Bobby saw what I was doing, found the other knife and fork on the floor, and joined me. It was slow going and we spent hours chipping at concrete before we were able to jiggle the door frame around.
The ambient light from the living room gave us just enough light to see what we were doing. I hoped nightfall would not rob us of too much momentum. I did my best not to look over at the dead bodies that showed Mother had been right in spite of herself.
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