The children had become workers in their families’ struggle for survival, so school, which started at one in the afternoon and went until four, had been something to celebrate. Three hours doing math and history were way better than scaling fish or skinning the animals her dad and brothers killed. They had enough of that to do in the mornings; in the afternoons, it felt good to settle into the routine of learning. When the Pulses eventually ended and the real schools were open again, most of the Crockett kids would be way behind. But not the ones in Oak Hollow.
But today, Beth didn’t want to be here. She couldn’t concentrate.
Tears came to her eyes again. Maybe she should take Mrs. Carroll up on her offer to go home. She could find out if they’d caught the shooter, and whether her family had any word on Zach’s condition. After all — if he could just wake up, he could tell them who had shot him.
By now, Deni may have found out something as she snooped around for the Crockett Times.
Beth grabbed her backpack from under her folding chair and started to load her books in. “I changed my mind.”
Her teacher looked up from her stool at the kitchen bar. Beth hated to disturb her. As teachers went, she was a little scattered, and she wasn’t used to dealing with kids this age. She’d taught second grade before the outage, but they already had enough elementary school teachers in the neighborhood, so she’d taken this group. She had a nervous tic that continuously jerked her lip up at the corner, and a mild personality that invited the worst kids in the class to walk all over her. She hoped Mrs. Carroll didn’t think Beth was taking advantage.
“Changed your mind about what, honey?”
“I think I will go home.”
“What a drama queen!” Jordan wiped his paper where he’d erased a hole in it, and set his jaw on his fist. “She didn’t hardly even know that guy.”
“I did too. He was my brother’s best friend.”
“Was not. Your parents wouldn’t even let Jeff hang out with him!”
She wished she had a sock to shove into his mouth. “That was before. Jeff’s allowed to hang out with him now.”
“Stop it, Jordan,” Mrs. Carroll said. “Don’t be so cruel. Beth, it’s fine if you go home. Just bundle up. It’s cold.”
Beth blinked back tears of indignation and pulled her coat on. It was just a lightweight denim jacket. After all, it never stayed cold in Birmingham for long. But today it was in the twenties, and people who knew clouds were saying it was going to snow. She’d worn several layers of clothes under her jacket, but even with the corduroy lining zipped in, it still wasn’t quite enough. She hoped someone at home had kept some logs on the fire.
Jordan made a face at her as she packed up her book bag. The idiot acted like he was in fourth grade instead of seventh. He gave all of them a bad name. He didn’t know anything about her brother or his friends. It was true that her parents hadn’t approved of Zach, but over the last several months, Jeff had become so responsible — helping protect the family and making good decisions — that they’d given him a little more slack with the Emorys. He still wasn’t allowed to go to their house at night. Ever since he’d been caught sneaking out to party with Zach and his brother a few months ago, right after the Pulses began, he’d been forbidden to go there after dark. But he was allowed to hang out with him during the day and early evening.
She pictured Zach going out in the twenty-eight degree cold that morning, watching his breath fog in the icy air. She imagined him walking through the woods to his deer stand with his rifle, climbing into the tree, waiting there in the chill for a deer to come along.
One thing had become clear to her over the last eight months. Since the Pulses, there didn’t have to be a good reason for killing.
As she turned off Mrs. Carroll’s street, she saw Mark Green in his driveway, holding a dead bobcat by its back legs. He opened the door to his mother’s stranded Caravan and leaned inside.
“Hey, Mark,” she called.
He turned and grinned at her. “Hey, Sparky. Where’d you come from?”
“School.”
Mark was the only one who ever called her Sparky. He’d made up the name because he said she’d sparkled on the stage when she’d played Mary in the neighborhood Christmas play, which she had also written and directed.
She came up his driveway and looked into the van. Several slabs of meat hung upside-down from hooks in the roof.
Mark hung the bobcat up. “Did Mrs. Carroll let you guys out early because it’s gonna snow?”
“No, she let me go because I wasn’t feeling well.” She shivered. “Mark, what are you doing?”
He grinned in that way he had. “Check out my new meat locker.”
“A van? No offense, but that’s crazy.”
“Why? It’s below freezing out. When I trap animals, I need somewhere to put them. And in the van I can close them in and keep other animals out.”
She made a disgusted face. “What are you gonna do when it gets warm again? It’ll be all gross.”
He shrugged. “Stop using it.”
“Your mom’ll never want to drive this again.”
“Let’s be honest,” he said, closing the door. “This van’s engine is fried. It’s not like it’s going anywhere unless it’s chained to a tow truck.”
“But Dad says the body will still be good. And the engine and electronics can be replaced.”
“By the time you do that, it’d be just as easy to replace the whole van. But don’t criticize. I’m feeding your family tonight. I killed a deer this morning too.”
She was glad he was a friend of her family. They never went hungry when Mark was hunting. In fact, most of the people who knew Mark were better for it. Mark had figured out how to make solar ovens out of ruined refrigerators, and the Brannings were just one of many families who were now able to cook so much easier. Beth’s mother had been a bread-baking maniac lately, and was helping the family by selling the loaves.
“So have you got any new inventions?” she asked.
He walked her back to his garage. “I’m no inventor. These aren’t my ideas.”
“But you’re the only one who knows how to pull them off.” She looked at the things he was working on in his garage. There were two sliding glass doors from a shower leaning against the wall. Each had a crack. “What’s this gonna be?”
“I’m working on a solar water heater. I got these doors from Sam Tobias, who has that bathroom renovating company. He let me have them free because they’re cracked. I had to promise that if I made it work, I’d give the first one to him.”
His flat-screen television sat on the floor. “What are you doing with that? Are you going to use the sun to make the TV work?”
He laughed. “Nope, can’t do that. But I’m going to use the TV screen for some of my solar projects. You ever heard of a Fresnel lens?”
She giggled. “What do you think?”
“The screen is a sheet of clear plastic, and its surface has tiny little grooves in it. If I use it in the sun, that’ll have the effect of magnification, so you’ll be able to concentrate the heat where you want to create energy.”
“But you have to tear up your nice TV to do it? No way my mom would agree to that.”
“Why not? They’re fried too. They’re absolutely worthless, even when the power comes back on. If we can use them for something else, especially something that’ll heat or cool our houses, then why not do it?”
She let out a heavy sigh. “I guess so. It’s just all so sad.”
“What? That all our stuff is ruined?”
“Yeah. Sometimes I get really depressed.”
He sat down on a table and smiled. “It’s just stuff, Sparky.”
“Yeah, I know.” She shoved her fists deeper into her pockets. “We’re lucky just to be alive. Especially after what happened to Zach today.”
“Yeah, I heard he was shot. But he’s okay, right?”
“I don’t think so. It sounds really bad. They sa
id he might have been dead by the time the ambulance came.”
“But he was still alive when they drove him off, right? Zach’s tough. He’ll pull through. A lot of people are praying for him.” He looked down into her face and messed up her hair. “Don’t let this get you down in the dumps, now. Everybody depends on your smile.”
A grin pulled at her lips.
He slid off the table. “Come on, I’ll walk you home.”
“Deni’s not home, you know. She’s out snooping.”
He chuckled. “I think they call that reporting. And I’m not doing it for Deni. What do you think? That I’m some kid with a crush, trying to find excuses to see her?”
She grinned. “Yep.”
He laughed and messed up her hair. “Okay. But I’m walking you home, anyway.”
She didn’t really know why Deni and Mark weren’t together. It was a romance waiting to happen — it just hadn’t quite happened yet. Late last September, Deni had broken off her engagement with Craig, her pompous boyfriend from Washington. Since then, Mark had been around a lot. The chemistry between them almost crackled on the air. Whether it was just plain busy-ness, or something deeper, something had kept them apart so far. For the life of her, Beth didn’t understand it.
If she were older, she would have snapped Mark up and made sure everyone knew he was hers. And if Deni didn’t do something soon, Beth might do it, anyway. She was almost a teenager, after all. And Mark was only twenty-two.
But she’d rather have him as a brother-in-law.
They walked quietly for a moment, and as they reached her street, she glanced up at her tall friend. “Mark, do you think Zach got up this morning with some kind of premonition about dying?”
He looked down at her. “I don’t know.”
“I mean, like, was there a dream last night to warn him? Or did he look in the mirror and just . . . know?” She knew Mark couldn’t answer that. “I mean, sometimes you hear about teenagers dying, and you find out later they blogged about it, or wrote a poem or a song. Or they talked to their friends about death just the day before.”
“Beth, he’s not gonna die.”
“But what if he does? Do you think he knew?”
Mark sighed. “Maybe you should ask Jeff. He’s the one Zach would have talked to.”
She looked at her feet. “I doubt he’ll talk about it.”
Mark set his hand on her shoulder. “Why does it matter, Beth? What difference would it make?”
She thought about that. “I guess . . . it would make me feel better. Like maybe I won’t wind up dead all of a sudden . . . that God would give me warning before somebody came along and shot me.”
He stopped walking and touched her chin, pulling her face up. “You’re not afraid of death, are you?”
“I don’t think so . . . I mean, not the heaven part of death. But I don’t much want to be gunned down like Zach was.”
“Don’t worry. You won’t be.”
“It’s not a stupid fear,” she said. “We’ve had people break into our house before, and Dad’s been shot once.”
“I didn’t say it was stupid. But you have a lot of protectors, Sparky. And God has watched over you all this time. Remember the verses your dad had the church learn a few months ago? ‘The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?’ ”
Beth finished the verse. “ ‘The Lord is the defense of my life; whom shall I dread?’ Psalm 27:1.”
“It’s true, Beth.”
“Then why wasn’t he watching over Zach?”
She had him there. “We don’t know that he wasn’t. But living in fear is no kind of life. We have to trust God. That doesn’t mean bad things won’t happen. But we know he’s in charge.”
She wished she could believe him. She almost did. Mark always told the truth, and he seemed, to her, almost as wise as her father. Slowly, he started walking again, and she followed, quietly letting his assurances sink in.
“Tell me something, Sparky. When have you felt closest to God?”
She thought for a moment. “When Deni was missing. When little Sarah was in trouble. I prayed more then.”
“So could it be that good can come out of suffering? That God uses it to build things into us? Things we might need?”
“Yeah,” she said, “I guess he does.”
“So just because some evil person shot Zach, or your dad, or kidnapped people we care about . . . it doesn’t mean that God has lost control. He’s allowed it for reasons we don’t know, and he’s still watching over us, guarding us, protecting us. He loves us, Beth. We have to trust that about him.”
She knew that was true, but still her fears remained. “I wish we could control God with our prayers.”
He chuckled. “Thank goodness we can’t. I’ve prayed for some pretty stupid things. But our prayers can influence him. He listens to them.”
She thought of the time she’d prayed for Jordan Miller to flunk an English test. She’d almost flunked it herself. She sure hoped God took her more seriously when she prayed for Zach.
They got to her house, and Mark hung back on the sidewalk. “Lock the door, Beth,” he said. “And when Deni gets home, tell her to come see me. I want to know what she found out about Zach.”
“Okay. Thanks for walking me home.”
She went into the house and locked the door behind her. The fire had almost died out. The house was almost as cold inside as outside. She stirred the embers in the fireplace and put the last two logs on the fire, then went outside to get more. In the backyard, the cold air slapped her in the face again, making her wish she had stayed inside. Even so, she crossed the yard to the chicken coop. Since her family had gotten the chickens, she’d considered them her pets. Beth’s dad had ordered them as little chicks after the first FEMA disbursement. She’d taken care of them herself when they’d kept them in a box inside the house, to keep them from getting plucked up by a ravenous hawk or other predator. The Brannings had learned a lot about raising chickens since then. They’d had to remodel their original coop so the chickens had room to roam and feed on the ground. The yard was mostly dirt now that winter was here, but they maintained a patch of grass at the back of the yard, surrounded the coop with chicken wire, and covered it to keep out birds of prey. Since they’d used the fencing boards to build the coop, there was nothing to keep dogs out of their yard. The Brannings had to keep a close eye on their flock.
Beth supposed that was how it was with human killers too. If someone wanted to do evil, a fence wouldn’t keep them out. And if they wanted something of yours, not much would keep them from taking it. Life wasn’t worth all that much to some people these days.
Today, because it was cold, the chickens mostly stayed inside, warming each other in a little huddle. As she stepped inside the coop, the rooster cackled and the hens fluttered around as if glad to see her.
“Cold, huh?” she said to her little friends. She reached for the bag of feed sitting on the top shelf and scattered it around the area outside the door. Then she got a handful of fine sand and scattered it on top, to help them grind their food.
“They say it’s going to snow. If it does, maybe Dad will let me bring you into the garage. It’s dark in there and not much warmer. But at least the wind doesn’t blow through.”
She checked the nest; a few more eggs had been laid. She put them in her basket. The eggs their chickens produced made it possible for the Brannings to eat even when her father’s and brothers’ hunting didn’t pay off. And there were plenty of eggs to share with neighbors like Amber Rowe, the single woman with three kids who lived next door. They could even sell or trade a few when the need arose.
But there were two things about raising chickens that Beth hated. She threw a fit whenever they slaughtered one. And even if chicken poop was a magic ingredient her father loved for composting, it was still nasty and smelly, and Beth was sick of wiping it off her shoes.
She ducked and stepped out of the little gate again, closed it, and made
sure the enclosure was tight. As she wiped her feet on the grass, she looked around, making sure there was nothing around to hurt the chickens. She shivered at the thought of Zach’s killer being out there somewhere. Maybe he didn’t live in Oak Hollow, or even in Crockett. Maybe he’d gotten what he wanted and hopped a train out of town. Maybe he wasn’t a danger anymore.
Whatever.
She decided she’d better take the firewood in and keep the house locked tight.
She suddenly wished she’d stayed at school.
She went back in, leaving her chicken-soiled shoes by the door, and stirred the fire. Then she curled up in the chair close to the hearth and prayed that someone in her family would get home soon.
SEVEN
DOUG AND JEFF LOCKED UP THEIR BIKES AND WENT INTO University Hospital. Dim lightbulbs shone from the ceiling in the lobby. “Hey, Dad, look. They’ve got electricity.”
“Yeah. The conversion plants have hardened enough generators to get the hospitals operational. Otherwise, a lot more people would die.”
They pushed through the people crowded into the waiting room, in various stages of illness or injury. They saw a nurse in purple scrubs; Doug headed toward her. “Ma’am, we’re looking for a shooting victim who was brought in a little while ago. Where would they have taken him?”
The woman looked tired and overworked. “The surgical ICU is up on the fourth floor.” She pointed to the stairwell, then hurried away.
They stepped into the darkness of the stairwell. “Why aren’t there lights in here?” Jeff asked, his voice echoing.
“They probably only use the generators for high-priority areas.” His voice echoed as they went up the stairs. “Like the operating rooms and monitors and machines.”
“Then maybe they can save Zach.” Jeff felt for the door to the fourth floor and pushed into the lighted hallway. They saw a sign that said, “Surgical ICU Waiting Room,” and went inside.
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