Relentless

chicken.
    After accepting a kiss and bestowing one, Grimbald asked Milo, “Have you had another experiment blow up?”
    “No, Grimpa. Not a one.”
    “That’s too bad. Don’t lose hope. Most things in life want to blow up, so it’s just a matter of time.”
    Penny stood on her toes to kiss her father, and he bent down like Kong to Fay Wray. Then he rose a bit and, as I pulled back my raincoat hood, he kissed me on the forehead.
    As Lassie jumped, jumped, jumped for Grimbald’s attention, he caught her in midair by the scruff of the neck, kissed her cold nose, and gave her to Milo, holding both of them with ease.
    We followed him through the door with the porthole, into the first of a series of subterranean chambers, a thirty-by-twenty-foot workshop, where he repaired the stronghold’s mechanical systems.
    He owned hundreds of hand tools, all of the highest quality. None were power tools because when civilization collapsed, he didn’t want Clotilda to have to exhaust herself on the bicycle generator just to operate his drill and reciprocating saw.
    Passing through the workshop, Penny and I took off our raincoats and hung them on wall hooks, but Milo remained ablaze in yellow.
    The stronghold enjoyed electric lights, though after the end of the world, the Booms would rely on candles. They possessed thousands.
    Beyond the workshop lay a large chamber stocked with enormous quantities of freeze-dried and canned food, also drums of seeds in case, after Armageddon, the earth eventually became farmable again.
    Their bedroom was traditionally furnished, and the walls were brightened by poster-size photos of huge buildings in mid-collapse, structures that Grim and Clo had been paid to implode. The space was cozy, if claustrophobic due to the lack of windows.
    They did not live in the stronghold 24/7. Above ground, they had a comfortable hacienda-style residence where they spent most of their time, except for those occasions when they flew off to far cities with their demolition team to create massive piles of rubble for substantialfees, which they referred to as having a blast, as in “We’re having a blast in Dallas next Thursday.”
    They owned this above-ground house under a false name. They lived in it under another false name. A serious survivalist could disappear from the all-seeing eye of the state and move about like smoke, if he had to, before finally going underground.
    Their official address was the small combination office and apartment in Anaheim, where a secretary who resembled the actress Judi Dench screened job offers to be sure the people who wanted a building blown up had both the authority and a legitimate reason to contract for the demolition.
    Here in the canyon, they never spoke to their neighbors, which was no loss, considering that the nearest were at a distance and were an uncommunicative couple who, believing they had been twice taken against their will into spacecraft from a distant star, were hiding out from evil extraterrestrials.
    Although they lived largely above ground, Grimbald and Clotilda went subterranean two or three days every month—what they called “in lockdown”—to stay in practice for the End of Days.
    Because they seemed always to be finding excuses to go into emergency lockdowns in addition to the regularly scheduled ones—a scary declaration by the insane leader of Iran, a scary declaration by the benighted leader of the United States, and in this instance the destruction of our house—I suspected they preferred the bunker to the sunlit world but would feel
too
eccentric if they admitted it.
    The main chamber, a combination living room and kitchen, offered armchairs, a sofa, wonderful stained-glass lamps, fantasy art that Penny—a homeschooled girl herself—had drawn as a teenager, and a sturdy knotty-pine dining table.
    Their stronghold enjoyed an effective exhaust system that could separate a single source of smoke into seven wispy streams, dispersingthem to different corners of the woods above, to avoid detection by roving bands of post-catastrophe barbarians or genetic-plague zombies, or whatever hellish beings might one day stalk the ruins of the world.
    Consequently, Clotilda had the convenience of a wood-burning stove, on which she was cooking when we arrived. The fragrant air smelled of home fries, onions, and pot roast.
    “Cupcake!” Grim called to her. “I didn’t have to kill anyone, it was really the kids ringing the bell.”
    Clotilda