Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith

Author:Andrew Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-02-10T16:00:00+00:00

GIDEON’S BREEDING RIGHTS

SHANN’S BEDROOM HAD a door that led into a brick wall and another that dead-ended at the foot of a stairwell. It was what I called a dungeon for horny Polish boys.

In truth, the silo called Eden went all the way into the foundation of the McKeon House, and the doorways in Shann’s room had been bricked off when the Eden Project work crews finished construction on Dr. Grady McKeon’s subterranean shelter.

Just as those McKeon Industries scientists back in the 1960s had been playing with self-sustaining universes they trapped inside globes of glass, the bigger enclosed bubble project they’d been working on lay beneath the ground under Shann’s bedroom and stretched beyond the derelict cornfields on Dr. Grady McKeon’s own property.

Here is what we found: Eden had a gymnasium, a fitness center with polished wood floors and weightlifting equipment, a sauna, and another shower room. There was a small facility for laundry that put the Ealing Coin Wash Launderette to shame in terms of its cleanliness and lack of discarded condoms and cigarette butts on the floor.

There was even a salon with those old-fashioned hair dryers that looked like brainwashing torture machines from science fiction movies, barber chairs, and haircutting tools.

Shann looked at her hair in the mirror. As always, it was beautiful, the color of mature wheat in late August. Her skin was perfect and unblemished.

I said, “Would you like us to do something with your hair?”

Shann said, “Do either of you guys know anything about hairstyles?”

And Robby continued our string of unanswered questions with, “Why are you both looking at me? Do you think it’s just natural that I’d be, like, into doing hair and shit?”

Later, we found Eden’s dormitories. Naturally, I was incapable of wandering through the bedrooms with Shann and Robby without feeling horny and guilty. I wondered if there had ever been threesomes inside Shann’s silo.

Each room had two double beds. They looked, in style, like hotel rooms, except they lacked bathrooms and toilets, which were all located at the center of a hub of hallways that connected the fitness center and the lecture hall and entry room where we had changed out of our Iowa surface-dweller clothing.

There wasn’t much room for argument in the discussion we had as we explored the bedrooms: Eden was built to house survivors for the end of the world. We could say the idea was to protect a few human specimens in the event of a nuclear war, but Robby and I knew Eden was probably built for something else entirely.

The idea that Robby and Shann and I were inside some kind of breeding compound for the genesis of an entire new species of humans was particularly thrilling and attractive.

“If we never came out of Eden, the three of us would be able to start an entire new race of underground Iowans,” I said.

“Uh.” Robby was unenthusiastic.

“Well. If we had to,” I offered. “Between you, me, and Shann, we would have enough genetic diversity to not breed two-headed boys and shit like that.

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