by Dan Wells
It was nearing twilight, and the rocking of the wagon was putting Marcus to sleep. Kira watched as his head drooped, nodding, then jerked up as he came awake, then slowly dropped again. Over and over. The horse’s hoofbeats echoed dully off the empty houses, but as they drew closer to the populated area, Kira saw the familiar signs of human activity: painted houses, mowed lawns, roofs that were still standing. East Meadow. Kira watched closely for the gleam of reflected light, and smiled when she saw it: glass windows. Everywhere else on the island the windows had been shattered by cats and birds and weather and the uneven shifting as wooden walls rotted around them. Not here. Here the windows were protected and cared for, and most were still as clean and clear as a piece of solid sky. Out in the wilderness there were thieves and the Voice and the dying carcass of an entire world.
Here, there were glass windows.
“Wake up, sleepyhead,” said Kira, bumping Marcus’s ear with her shoulder. “We’re almost home.”
“I didn’t order sushi.”
“What?”
Marcus opened his eyes warily. “What did I say?”
“Nothing I have to smack you for. You’re lucky you were dreaming about food instead of girls.”
“I’m male,” said Marcus, rubbing his eyes. “It was a fifty-fifty shot.”
“Our overnight vacation turned into two days, a Voice attack, and a military debrief,” said Kira. “You think we’ll get in trouble for missing work today at the hospital?”
“The Defense Grid must have told them what was going on,” said Marcus, stretching the kinks from his neck. “I figure if we even try to go in for the rest of the day, they’ll send us home with ration packs of chicken soup.”
Kira laughed. “That sounds like an excellent reason not to go in.”
Marcus grinned and looked at the sun. “Not much daylight left, anyway. And if they’d send us home from the day shift, there’s no way they’d let us work the night.”
“Then it’s settled,” said Kira, shifting her weight on the hard floor of the wagon. “I’m going to head home, get cleaned up, and fall asleep. I might wake up for the party this weekend, but I’m not making any promises.”
“I wouldn’t miss that party for the world,” said Marcus. “Xochi’s gonna make a chicken—a real, live chicken. Though I suppose it won’t be live for long. I’ll even pluck the scabby thing myself.”
“You think her mother will be there?”
“Senator Kessler?” asked Marcus, his jaw falling open in disbelief. “Xochi owns a gun now—Kessler won’t get anywhere near the place.”
Kira laughed and nodded. She hoped Xochi wouldn’t actually shoot her adopted mother—but she couldn’t be sure.
“Just bring something to share this time,” said Kira, turning back to Marcus and tapping him pointedly in the chest. “I’m not covering for you like last time.”
“That was a one-time thing,” said Marcus, laughing, “and it wasn’t last time, it was four times ago, and I’ve covered your share way more than that.”
“I’m just saying,” said Kira, poking him again in the chest, “I don’t want my good-for-nothing, freeloader boyfriend to make me look bad in front of everybody. Again.” She poked him one last time, glared at him playfully, then poked him again for good measure.
“Do you poke all the boys, or am I special?”
She leaned closer. “It’s just you.” She kissed him on the cheek. “Until somebody better comes along.”
Marcus put his hand on the back of her head and pulled her in for another kiss, on the mouth this time, slow and soft and perfect. Kira pressed herself closer, feeling his body against hers, thinking about what he’d said at the clinic. Was it time? Was she ready?
“Guys,” said Brown, “I’m like two feet away.”
Kira pulled back, embarrassed. “Sorry.”
“I’m not,” said Marcus. “Totally worth it.”
“You said the blue house, right?” Brown pointed ahead to the row of houses, and Kira recognized her street.
“Yeah, the blue one’s mine.”
Brown nodded. “Is Romeo getting off with you?”
“I would,” said Marcus, “but Nandita wouldn’t let me in anyway. I’m just two streets over, if you can do it.”
“Not a problem.” The young soldier slowed the wagon and pulled the horse to a stop. Kira gave Marcus a final peck on the cheek and hopped off.
“There’s Nandita,” said Marcus, straightening up and pointing. Kira turned and saw her working busily in her garden. Marcus lowered his voice. “See if she’s got some herbs for the chicken.”
“Rosemary, I assume,” said Kira, and Marcus nodded with a grin. “Anything else?”
“Whatever she can spare,” said Marcus. “Everything in your garden is awesome.”
“You got it,” said Kira. “Thanks, Brown.”
The soldier smiled. “Call me Shaylon.”
“Easy, tiger,” said Marcus. “She’s spoken for.”
The wagon pulled away, and Kira shouldered her pack and walked toward her house. Kira shared her home with several other girls and their “nanny,” Nandita, though after eleven years she seemed more like a grandmother than anything else. Between the Partial War and RM, no family had survived intact: Every surviving wife became a widow; every child an orphan. Those few humans who’d been immune to the virus had banded together for protection, gathering here on Long Island because it was a developed, defensible position with good access to fish and arable land. The children had been divided among the adults, and Nandita had happily laid claim to four of them: Kira, Madison, Ariel, and Isolde. Ariel had moved nearly three years ago, on her sixteenth birthday, and Madison had moved in with Haru when they got married. Ariel had hardly spoken to any of them again, but Kira loved them all like sisters.
Nandita was working in the garden, and Kira could smell the exotic mix of aromatic herbs: rosemary, nutmeg, anise, cilantro, basil, marjoram.... Kira helped in the garden every summer, and she still couldn’t keep track.
“Does Marcus want rosemary on the chicken this Friday?” asked Nandita. The old woman straightened up from the garden, brushing soil from her hands. She spoke quickly, almost impassively, but Kira could tell from her eyes that she had been worried sick the entire time Kira had been gone.
Kira smiled.
“Did you hear him?”
“I didn’t need to hear him,” said Nandita. “That boy has a one-track mind.” She grunted and stood up, picking up a basket of fresh leaves and sprigs and berries. Even while gardening, she was wearing a sari. “The market was good today. Help me inside.”
Kira shouldered her pack and her medkit, following the old woman up the porch steps and in through the doors; Xochi’s music was blaring upstairs, and Kira smiled. She’d have to go talk to her when she was done helping Nandita.
Nandita loved all her girls, but she’d always had a soft spot for Kira. Maybe because she was the youngest, or maybe because she was so precocious; Kira remembered helping Nandita in the market as a child, calling out fearlessly to passing adults and ordering them sternly to buy a sprig of mint. Nandita called her the Little Explosion.
Sometimes Kira felt guilty that she had so many memories of Nandita, and none of her real mother. Her father she knew, but her mother… It was okay. She had Nandita.
“Did anything exciting happen while I was gone?”
“My Little Explosion almost died in a big one,” said Nandita, pushing the door open. The previous owners—the Martels, according to the papers and photos and scrapbooks they had found inside—had died with the doors locked, and the early survivors had been forced to break them open to get inside and clean up the bodies. Nandita had replaced the door four times over the years, as one or the other of the girls had forgotten their keys after a long night out. Replacing the door, she said, was preferable to leaving it unlocked. It wasn’t like the island was short on unused doors. Kira dropped her pack inside and followed Nandita into the kitchen.
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“You have grown up well,” said Nandita, turning in the kitchen doorway and regarding Kira with a smile. “You will make a good wife.”
“Um, yay?”
The woman walked to the counter and set down the basket, opening the cupboards to look for bowls. “You do not want to be a wife? You are not going to marry Marcus?”
Kira opened a cupboard and handed Nandita a ceramic bowl. “I … haven’t really thought about it.”
Nandita stopped moving, turned, and stared at Kira. Kira squirmed uncomfortably, waiting for her to look away, then finally sighed and threw up her hands. “Okay, so I’ve thought about it, but I haven’t decided anything. I don’t know what I want.”
“You want to be happy,” said Nandita, reaching past Kira to the open cupboard and pulling out the entire stack of dishes. “That’s what everybody wants. You just don’t know what will make you happy.”
Kira grimaced. “Is that weird?”
Nandita shook her head kindly. “Happiness is the most natural thing in the world when you have it, and the slowest, strangest, most impossible thing when you don’t.” She set out the dishes and started sorting through the herbs, separating them into groups and tearing off leaves and branches for the bowls. The scent of crushed mint filled the kitchen. “It’s like learning a foreign language: You can think about the words all you want, but you’ll never be able to speak it until you suck up your courage and say them out loud.”
“What if you say them and they’re wrong?”
“Then you’ve probably just asked the waiter for a bowl of library elephants,” said Nandita, “or whatever the metaphorical equivalent of that would be. I can’t carry these analogies very far, I get mixed up.”
“Too bad,” said Kira, picking up a handful of rosemary and breaking off pale green twigs for the bowl. “I was hoping you’d just keep going: happiness, love, the whole … purpose of life, I guess.”
“Whose life?”
“What do you mean?”
“Each life has a different purpose, and some people can find their purpose more easily than others. The key,” she said, turning to Kira and gesturing firmly with a sprig of cilantro, “the most important thing you can ever know, is that whatever your purpose is, that’s not your only choice.”
“Huh?”
“No matter why you’re here, no matter why any of us are here, you’re never tied down to fate. You’re never locked in. You make your own choices, Kira, and you can’t let anyone ever take that away from you.”
“Okay,” said Kira. “That’s not really where I was expecting this conversation to go.”
“That’s because I make my own choices, too,” said Nandita, picking up her basket. She still had nearly half the herbs unsorted. “I’m taking these to the neighbors; Armand is sick. You go and get cleaned up—I want my house to smell like basil, not teenage armpits.”
“Done,” said Kira, and ran upstairs. The music was louder up here, the usual assortment of screeching, booming, yelling music that Xochi always chose when she was alone. Kira smiled, then smelled herself, grimaced, and went straight to the shower.
On the very small list of benefits to the end of the world, at or very near the top, was clothes. Long Island had once held nearly eight million people, with the shopping malls and department stores and fashion meccas necessary to clothe them all. The Break had reduced that population to a tiny fraction, and obliterated the economic system in the process, leaving all those clothes pretty much free for the taking. It was horrible, Kira knew, and the survivors lived their lives in a brutal mix of hard work and desperation and fear. But they were very well dressed.
Many of the clothes on the island were too shabby to wear—too moldy, or too moth-eaten, or too faded from exposure—but a lot of them were still good, even today. “Shopping” was as simple as combing through an empty store or neighborhood, finding something that fit, and giving it a good wash to get rid of the bugs and the smell. Storage rooms and warehouses were the best. There the clothes were sealed in boxes instead of loose to the world, and Kira had spent many of her weekends with her friends, picking through ruined strip malls in search of a Twenty-Two or a Threadless or some little boutique that no one else had found yet. Nandita’s girls had an entire room filled with every kind of outfit they could imagine, from baggy sweats to slinky dresses and everything in between. Kira chose something that showed off her legs—might as well have some fun after two days of near-death experience—and went to say hi to Xochi.
Xochi Kessler had moved into their house soon after Madison left it; Xochi had just turned sixteen and couldn’t wait to escape from her “mother.” She’d brought with her four banks of solar panels—her adopted mother was rich, if nothing else—enough to run lights, an electric stove, even a toaster if she wanted it, but instead every ounce of juice those panels brought in went straight to Xochi’s music system. Music was practically Xochi’s life. Kira had met her years ago while shopping, Kira for clothes and Xochi for digital music players. They were palm-size tablets of metal and plastic and glass, on which their former owners had stored hour after hour of every kind of music imaginable. Xochi had collected nearly a hundred of them.
Xochi waved as Kira stepped into the doorway. “Give it up for Kira, mighty hero of the infamous Asharoken salvage run! You are rocking those shorts, girl.”
Kira grinned and waved back. “When one has legs like mine,” she said airily, twirling on one foot, “one has a responsibility to display them. For the little people.”
“Is that an Irish joke?” asked Xochi, frowning in mock solemnity. “I certainly hope so.” Senator Erin Kessler was a proud Irish woman, and thus Xochi had been adopted and raised in an aggressively Irish home. Her actual heritage was more southwestern, Mexican or even Aztec, but that hadn’t stopped the senator from forceful cultural indoctrination. When Xochi got mad, she even slipped into an Irish brogue. Kira thought it was hilarious.
“I don’t mean leprechauns, I mean commoners,” said Kira. “It was a peasant joke, but I guess it’s not funny unless you imagine that I’m actually a princess.”
“I’m totally a princess,” said Xochi, “and I dare anyone to prove otherwise.”
“Princess of what?” asked Xochi. “Lincoln Avenue?”
“My parents were the rulers of a vast, exotic empire,” said Xochi, waving her fingers mysteriously. “Or at least, since nobody knows who they were, they might as well have been.”
“What are you planning for the party this Friday?” Nandita was a good cook, but Xochi was an excellent one, and always provided the food for special occasions.
“Roast chicken, fried potatoes, and doughnuts if I can get the flour for them. Sweet rice is good, but for the love of all that’s holy, I want some effing chocolate.”
“Chocolate doughnuts?” asked Kira, whistling appreciatively. “Who died and made you senator?”
“Unfortunately, not my mother,” said Xochi. She jumped up, heading for the door. “I found a guy in the market yesterday who swore he had some wheat flour. Want to come?”
“These legs aren’t doing the little people any good locked up in here,” said Kira, standing with a flourish. “The people need to see their princesses.”
It was Friday. Rebuilding Day.
Time for a party.
There were no births on Friday, and no fevered babies to monitor, so Kira came home exhausted but ready to enjoy herself without feeling guilty. She bathed, brushed out her hair, and chose a bright-colored outfit from her “flirty” section: a silk shirt with Chinese embroidery, a pair of high-heeled sandals, and a pair of jeans just short enough that she paused to worry about the weather. It was summer, but a cold one, and another rainstorm could really make her wish she’d gone with something heavier. She mulled over the decision, comparing the jeans with a longer pair, and finally decided to go with the shorts. They looked better with the shirt, and better on her, and she needed the boost. She could risk cold legs to feel like a normal person
again for a while. They probably wouldn’t go outside anyway.
“Hurry up,” said Xochi, rapping on Kira’s bedroom door. She was dressed in all black, including lipstick and eyeliner, with an incongruously colorful apron tied around her waist. “Madison and Haru are already here, and some dude named Marcus—tall, goofy-looking, easy to push around. You’d like him.”
“I can see why your royal parents got rid of you,” said Kira with a playful sneer. “You can be a delightfully snotty person when you put your mind to it.”
“My wit is like your legs,” said Xochi. “It would be selfish of me to keep it hidden.” Kira followed her to the kitchen and waved to Nandita, busily washing dishes in the sink. Xochi pulled a bowl of sliced potatoes from the counter, drizzled them with olive oil, and sprinkled Nandita’s rosemary liberally over the top, stirring the concoction with her hands. “Nandita, these herbs smell great.”
“Thank you, scary one,” said Nandita. It was their private joke: Nandita’s entire wardrobe was brightly colored saris, and she simply couldn’t understand Xochi’s preference for black.
“Your kitchen smells great,” said Kira, taking a deep whiff, “but I’m going to tear myself away and find Marcus.”
“Give him a kiss for me,” said Xochi.
“Tongue?”
“Not too much. I don’t want to seem easy.”
Kira walked down the hall, breathing deeply as another wave of mouthwatering smells washed over her. Say what you will about Xochi’s mom, she taught that girl how to cook.
The hall was lit with gasoline lamps, all hooded and filtered to catch the smell. Kira could hear the hum of voices from the living room, and the hiss and crackle of fire from the wood-burning stove in the kitchen. This is what the farmers eat like all the time, she thought. Almost makes me want to try the life.
Almost.
She followed the voices to the living room. Marcus and Haru were deep in discussion on the couch, while Madison reclined nearby on an easy chair. The stereo was in this room, and the sound filled the room like a storm cloud.
Madison smiled. “Hey.”