This World We Live In

by Susan Beth Pfeffer

  This World We Live In (Last Survivors #3)

  Susan Beth Pfeffer

  Chapter 1 April 25

  I'm shivering, and I can't tell if it's because something strange is going on or because of the dream I had or just because I'm in the kitchen, away from the warmth of the woodstove. It's 1:15 am , the electricity is on, and I'm writing in my diary for the first time in weeks.I dreamed about Baby Rachel. I dream about her a lot, the half sister I've never met. Not that I know if Lisa had a girl or a boy. We haven't heard from Dad and Lisa since they stopped here on their way west, except for a couple of letters. Which is more than I got from anyone else who's left.

  Rachel was about five in my dream, but she changes age a lot when I'm sleeping, so that wasn't disturbing. She was snuggled in bed and I was reading her a bedtime story. I remember thinking how lucky she was to have a real bedroom and not have to sleep in the sunroom with Mom and Matt and Jon the way I have for months now.

  Then in the dream the lights went out. Rachel wanted to know why.

  "It's because of the moon," I said.

  She giggled. A real little-girl giggle. "Why would the moon make the lights go out?" she asked.

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  So I told her. I told her everything. I explained how in May an asteroid hit the moon and knocked it a little closer to Earth, and how the moon's gravitational pull got stronger, and everything changed as a result. There were tidal waves that washed away whole cities, and earthquakes that destroyed the highways, and volcanic eruptions that threw ash into the sky, blocking out sunlight, causing famine and epidemics. All because the moon's gravitational pull was a little bit stronger than before."What's sunlight?" she asked.

  That was when the dream turned into a nightmare. I wanted to describe sunlight, only I couldn't remember what the sky looked like before the ash blocked everything. I couldn't remember blue sky or green grass or yellow dandelions. I remembered the words--green, yellow, blue--but you could have put a color chart in front of me, and I would have said red for blue and purple for yellow. The only color I know now is gray, the gray of ash and dirt and sadness.

  It's been less than a year since everything changed, less than a year since hunger and darkness and death have become so commonplace, but I couldn't remember what life--life the way I used to know it--had been like. I couldn't remember blue.

  But there was Baby Rachel, or Little Girl Rachel, in her little girl's room, asking me about how things were, and I looked at her, and she wasn't Baby Rachel anymore. She was me. Not me at five. Me the way I was a year ago, and I thought, That can't be. I'm here, on the bed, telling my half sister a bedtime story. And I got up (I think this was all the same dream, but maybe it wasn't; maybe it was two dreams and I've combined them), and I walked past a mirror. I looked to make sure I was really me, but I looked like Mrs.

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  Nesbitt had when I found her lying dead in her bed last fall. I was an old woman. A dead old woman.It probably was two dreams, since I don't remember Baby Rachel after the part where I got up. Not that it matters. Nothing matters, really. What difference does it make if I can't picture blue sky anymore? I'll never see it again, anyway, or yellow dandelions or green grass. No one will, nowhere on Earth. None of us, those of us who are still lucky enough to be alive, will ever feel the warmth of the sun again. The moon's seen to that.

  But horrible as the dreams were, they weren't what woke me. It was a sound.

  At first I couldn't quite place it. I knew it was a sound I used to hear, but it sounded alien. Not scary, just different.

  And then I figured out what the sound was. It was rain. Rain hitting against the roof of the sunroom.

  The temperature's been warming lately, I guess because it's spring. But I couldn't believe it was rain, real rain, and not sleet. I tiptoed out of the sunroom and walked to the front door. All our windows are covered with plywood except for one in the sunroom, but it's nighttime and too dark to see anything anyway, unless you open the door.

  It really is rain.

  I don't know what it means that it's raining. There was a drought last summer and fall. We had a huge snowstorm in December and then another one later on, but it's been too cold and dry for rain.

  I probably should have woken everyone up. It may never rain again. But I have so few chances to be alone. The sunroom is the only place in the house with heat, thanks to the firewood Matt and Jon spent all summer and fall chopping. We're in there together day and night.

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  I know I should be grateful that we have a warm place to live. I have a lot to be grateful for. We've been getting weekly food deliveries for a month now, and Mom's been letting us eat two meals a day. I'm still hungry, but nothing like I used to be. Matt's regained the strength he lost from the flu, and I think Jon's grown a little bit. Mom's gotten back to being Mom. She insists we clean the house as best we can every day and pretend to do some schoolwork. She listens to the radio every evening so we have some sense of what's happening in other places. Places I'll never get to see.I haven't written in my diary in a month. I used to write all the time. I stopped because I felt like things were as good as they were ever going to get, that nothing was going to change again.

  Only now it's raining.

  Something's changed.

  And I'm writing again.

  April 26

  I didn't tell anyone it rained last night. When you share a room with three people and a cat, anything you can keep secret feels good.This morning I thought maybe I'd dreamed the rain, the way I dreamed Baby Rachel turning into me and me turning into Mrs. Nesbitt (dead Mrs. Nesbitt, at that), but I'm pretty sure it did rain. When I made my bedpan-emptying run, it seemed like more snow had melted.

  I never thought I'd yearn for mud and slush. Then again, I never thought I'd be responsible for bedpan emptying.

  I wonder if it rained where Dad, Lisa, and the baby are.

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  I'd rather wonder about stuff like that than wonder if they're still alive.Sometimes I ask myself what I'd give up to see Dad again or even to know how he is. Would I give up a meal a day for the rest of my life? Would I give up electricity? Would I give up my home?

  It doesn't matter. At some point the two meals a day will become one, the electricity will vanish, and we'll have to leave here just to survive.

  When that happens, I know I'll never see Dad again, or Lisa, or Baby Rachel, who may not even exist. Because once we leave here, Dad will never be able to find us, just like we can't find him, or any of my friends who left here hoping things would be better someplace else.

  We stayed behind. I tell myself we've made it through the worst and we can face whatever will happen next. I tell myself what Mom always says, that as long as we're alive, hope is alive.

  I just wish I knew if Dad was alive also.

  April 27

  It rained again.This time it rained hard for most of the afternoon.

  You would have thought it was raining food and sunlight and dandelions, everyone was so excited. Even Horton tried to get out when we went to the front door to check on things. Jon shoved him back in.

  "We should get pails," Mom said. "Buckets. Pans. Anything that'll hold the rainwater."

  We raced around the house finding containers. We got soaking wet putting them outside, and none of them filled

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  up all that much. When we poured the water into a couple of pots, though, it looked more impressive."Do you think it'll rain again?" Jon asked after we'd dried ourselves off and hung the towels on the sunroom wash line.

  "It rained a couple of nights ago," I said.

  Everyone stared at me. I couldn't tell if that was a good thing or not.

  "The sound woke me," I said.


  "You should have told us," Mom said. "We could have put pots out."

  "I didn't think of it," I said. "I had a bad dream and I woke up and heard the rain falling. Or maybe I heard the rain falling and then I woke up. I don't know."

  Mom sighed. It was her "Miranda is never going to grow up and be responsible and understand that when it's raining she needs to let me know so I can put pots and pans outside and catch the water and make all our lives easier" sigh.

  "What?" I said. "It was raining. I didn't wake you up. It stopped raining. Now it's raining again, and for all we know it's going to rain every day for the rest of our lives and we'll float away to sea."

  "What if the rain washes away the snow and then it stops raining?" Jon asked. "What would we do for water?"

  "If the snow melts, the well will fill up," Mom said. "As long as the pipes don't freeze, we'll be fine."

  "Running water," I said. "Now that we have electricity sometimes, it'll be a lot easier to do laundries."

  "It's funny," Mom said. "The things we used to take for granted. Water. Power. Sunlight."

  "We still don't have sunlight," Matt pointed out. "And we can't count on power. Or water, for that matter."

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  Mom looked at the pot with all the accumulated rainwater. "It's a good sign, though," she said. "A sign better things are coming."

  April 28

  It started raining again yesterday afternoon, and it hasn't stopped since. A heavy, steady rain.Mom decided to celebrate by giving Jon and me pop quizzes.

  Jon flunked his. Mom got all scowly.

  "What difference does it make?" Jon asked. "So what if I don't learn algebra?"

  "Someday schools will be open again," Mom said. "Things will be more normal. You need to do your work now for when that happens."

  "That's never going to happen," Jon said. "And even if schools do open up somewhere, they're not going to open up here. There aren't enough people left."

  "We don't know that," Mom said. "We don't know how many people are like us, holed up, making do until times get better."

  "I bet whoever they are, they aren't studying algebra," Jon said.

  April 29

  I went upstairs to Mom's room to find something to read. I've read every book in my room so many times, I can open them to any page and recite it from memory. At least it feels that way.Mom likes biographies, which don't usually interest me, and given everything that's happened in the past year, interest me even less. Sure, Mary Queen of Scots spent most

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  of her life in prison and then got her head chopped off, but compared to me she had it easy.How much volcanic ash did she have to breathe every day?

  One good thing about those biographies, though, is I haven't read them. Not all of them, not all the way through. And since I can't go to a bookstore or the library to get anything new to read, I went up to Mom's room to find something.

  Mom expects us to keep our bedrooms as clean as possible, even though we're rarely in them. I noticed right away that there was no dust on the furniture or even on the books. I pulled one off the shelf, looked to see if I'd find it even remotely interesting, decided I wouldn't, and took another one instead.

  I noticed something sticking out of the third book I looked at, a piece of paper about halfway in, and pulled it out. It was a shopping list. Mom had probably used it as a bookmark.

  MilkRomaine

  OJ

  WWB

  Butter

  Eggs

  Raspberry preserves

  That was it. That was the whole list, just seven items. It took me a moment to figure out that WWB is whole-wheat bread. It's been so long since I've had any bread, let alone whole-wheat.

  It's been so long since I've eaten any of those foods. So

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  long since I'd even thought about raspberry preserves or butter.I can't say staring at that list (and I couldn't take my eyes off it) made me hungry, because I'm always hungry. The food we get every week is enough to keep us going, not enough to keep us full. And it sure didn't make me nostalgic. Oh, for the good old days when you could actually breathe the air and put a little raspberry preserves on your whole-wheat French toast! Mary Queen of Scots probably missed French toast, assuming it was invented by then, but not me. I'm past all that.

  No, it was the romaine that got me. Seeing "romaine" in Mom's handwriting, written who knows when, made me think about who we were, who we used to be. We were a family that ate romaine. Other families ate iceberg, or Bibb, or Boston lettuce. We ate romaine. The Evans family of Howell, PA, favored romaine.

  What about other people who ate romaine and raspberry preserves? Are we the only people left on Earth who did?

  Somewhere there must be a place where people are eating eggs and drinking milk. I don't know where, or how they get the food, but I bet somewhere in what's left of America, there are places with food and electricity and lots of books to read.

  The president had kids. The vice president had grand-kids. Millionaires and senators and movie stars had families. Those kinds of people don't subsist on two cans of vegetables a day.

  I wonder if they make shopping lists. I wonder if they prefer romaine.

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  April 30

  I hate Sundays. And this one feels even worse because it's the last Sunday in April.Mr. Danworth brings us our bags of food on Mondays, along with a little bit of news and the sense that there are people still living in Howell. But every Sunday, even though none of us says anything, we worry that he won't show up, that the food delivery will have stopped, that things will go back to where they were in the winter, with us all alone and slowly starving.

  Only it would be worse now, because for a little while we've had food, so we've had reason to hope.

  If I hadn't started writing in my diary again, I wouldn't realize it's the last Sunday in April. There's no reason to think things are going to change just because the calendar does, but it's one more thing to worry about. Maybe the food deliveries were going to last only through April.

  I hate Sundays.

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  May

  2021

  ***

  Chapter 2 May 1

  There was no food delivery.We spent the whole day waiting for it. Every sound we heard made one of us jump. After a while Mom gave up pretending that Jon and I were studying.

  It's never light, but with it being spring, it's getting less dark later. Finally, though, we knew it was nighttime and Mr. Danworth wasn't coming.

  "We're okay for a few days," Mom said. "We still have food in the pantry. A week's worth if we're careful."

  I know what "careful" means. It means we eat one meal a day and Mom stops eating altogether.

  "Just because we didn't get a delivery doesn't mean there isn't any food," Matt said. "Maybe Mr. Danworth can't use the snowmobile anymore. Maybe they ran out of gas. I'll go to town tomorrow and see."

  "You're not going alone," Mom said. "Miranda can go with you."

  "Why can't I go?" Jon whined.

  "Because you flunked your algebra quiz," Mom said.-It's funny. I've felt holed up here for so long, you'd

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  think I'd be excited at the thought of going someplace, anyplace, even if it's just to town. But it scares me. What if there's no one there?

  May 2

  Mom made Matt and me eat breakfast this morning. She said she and Jon would eat later, but we all knew that meant Jon would eat and Mom would forget to.We decided to take our bikes, riding them when we could and pulling them along when we had to. We used to bike into town last summer, but I stopped once I started getting scared about what I might see. Then, after the blizzard, we couldn't bike anyway.

  There was pavement for most of the trip. Some places, though, the rain and the snowmelt had left a layer of ice, and we walked and skidded there. Both of us fell more than once, but neither of us broke any bones.

  That's what constitutes a good trip. No broken bones.

  "City H
all may not be open," I said to Matt. "I think it's only open on Fridays."

  "Then we'll go back on Friday," Matt said. "If it's closed then, we'll figure out what to do."

  "We'll have to leave," I said. "Maybe we should anyway. Find a school where Jon can learn algebra."

  "Mom wants us to stay for as long as possible," Matt said.

  "If there's no food, we can't stay," I said. "You're not telling me anything I don't already know," Matt said.

  "I'm sorry," I said, even though I wasn't. Sometimes I think Mom and Matt make all the decisions and don't care what I think.

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  With the four of us cooped up in the same room together day and night, I don't know when Mom and Matt have the time to whisper conspiratorially about my future, but I guess they still do. They probably talk about Jon's future in algebra while they're at it."I don't know if I agree with Mom," Matt said, which I knew was his way of apologizing. "But if we do decide to move, we're better off waiting until summer."

  Summer used to be a time of blue and yellow and green. Now I guess it'll be less gray. It's like no broken bones. You keep your expectations low, and "horrible" is down to "merely rotten."

  "Where would we go?" I asked. "Have you and Mom talked about that?"

  "Pittsburgh," Matt said. "At least for a start. That seems to be the closest place we know is still functioning."

  "Do you think there are places where things are actually okay?" I asked. "I know it's gray everywhere and cold, but maybe there are places with food for everyone. Running water and electricity. Furnaces. Schools and hospitals."

  "And twenty-four-hour pizza delivery," Matt said. "Think big."

  "I bet there are places like that," I said. "Towns set up for politicians and rich people and celebrities."

  "If there are, we don't qualify," Matt said. "But we know there are people living in Pittsburgh. If we have to, we'll resettle there."

  Mom gets the Pittsburgh radio station almost every night, so we hear more about it than anyplace else. Mostly they read the lists of the dead, but they also talk about food handouts and curfews and martial law.