“There were people here, some kids I went to school with, but they left.”
“Left for where?”
She shrugged. “There’s no food left. I hid some but it’s almost gone.” She let my hand drop and looked down at her feet shyly, as if she was unsure she should be telling me what she was about to say. “There’s a city where they have lots of food.”
“What city?”
She shrugged again. “Someone told us once that if you walk down the road all the way to the river, find the highway and follow it as far as it goes, you’ll find the city. You have to go north.”
“I don’t understand why they just left you here,” I said.
She studied her feet again, shy and embarrassed despite the suffering she’d been through. “I was too young, they said. They were older. I couldn’t keep up. I tried but I was afraid of getting left behind somewhere so I came back.”
That was how I found my first child, a child to me although I’m not much older. And that was how I found a direction in which to go. My father had said he was being taken to the large city to the north and I would follow.
Five
The name of the girl I found that day, or who found me, was Emily. After a day of berry picking, after having been unable to shoot the rabbit, I have an older, cleaner, healthier Emily perched at my feet, her back propped against a leg of the recliner I’m sitting in.
I take a sip from a bottle of orange juice. We’re in a house that has a clear view on all sides of the surrounding neighborhood. Except for cobwebs, flyspecks and dust, a clean house, abandoned long ago. A house where we did not come across the body of someone who had died of the disease, the corpse of a frightened person unable to reach their car to drive somewhere to seek help. So often, Larkin and I have found remains in a bedroom at the back of a house we’d entered, that mildewed, sickly-sweet smell, the shrunken, contorted, mummified bodies beneath the sheets.
If we find a house with a body inside, the kids refuse to stay there. I don’t blame them but it’s caused Larkin and I to spend a lot of time looking for just the right place. Even here, in this house, at night, while the others sleep, Larkin and I take turns walking through the house, keeping watch and listening, trying to tell if there are any strange human sounds mixed with those of the animals outside.
Emmy’s become a chatterbox over the past two years. She never seems to worry much about the future or talk about the past. I draw a comb through the tangles of her thick, uneven hair. I cut everyone’s hair, even my own, with a pair of barber’s scissors I found long ago. “Gilly,” she says. “Can we can go swimming in the creek tomorrow?”
“Maybe,” I say dreamily, staring out the house’s intact front windows. It’s so tranquil outside, deep in the hot afternoon, with the branches of shade trees hovering over the sidewalks, a few abandoned cars blocking the street the only thing out of place. The other three kids are in the yard, Stace, CJ and Terry, kicking a soccer ball around, their yelling and teasing so happy and natural, it’s hard to believe anything’s wrong.
This town, Oxbow Ferry, seems untouched, despite how near it is to the interstate. Finding a place like this was one of the best things to ever happen to us. The only supermarket in town has shelves still heavy with cans and jars. There are boxes of crackers and cereal, some of it not completely stale, sealed in plastic pouches. There’s powdered milk and cans of cheese whip. It feels like years since we’ve eaten this well, tins of meat and fruit, rice and pasta we boil over a fire pit in the backyard.
Emily jabs my shin. “You’re not listening to me.” She’s been talking but I haven’t been paying attention. She jumps to her feet and stretches. She’s as tall as I am. She’s only about a year younger. I thought she was much younger when I first saw her, ragged and starving. She runs a hand through her straw-colored hair, skin tanned and glowing. “I think I’ll go outside for a while.”
“Okay,” I say, getting up and tossing the comb on the chair. “Have you seen Larkin recently?” I ask her.
She shakes her head. “I think he went upstairs. Let me know when you’re ready to make dinner. I’ll help you.”
“You’re the best.” I wander into the kitchen to set the bottle of juice on the counter. The kitchen table is littered with cans and boxes, some empty, some waiting to be used. I wander slowly through the house. It’s a mess, the corners piled with clothes we’ve found, games and toys, shoes and sandals strewn across the floor. I go to the staircase and clump heavily upstairs to let Larkin know I’m coming. He likes to be by himself sometimes, reading a book he’s taken from the local library.
The door to the room he’s claimed as his own is shut which is odd. He usually leaves the door half-open in case something happens or someone needs to talk to him. I knock. There’s no answer. I open the door a crack. “Larkin?”
He has the windows shut and the room has a heavy, musty smell. It’s very hot. He’s lying curled up in a corner. The curtains are drawn and it takes a moment for my eyes to adjust. He’s turned toward me with his eyes open but he isn’t really looking at me.
“What’s wrong?” I go to the side of the mattress he lays on. I want to reach down and touch him, run my fingers through his hair. He’s wearing the same shirt he wore earlier, stained with berry juice.
“I’m all right,” he says slowly. It’s as if he’s looking through me. I wave my hand in front of his eyes.
“Are you there, Larkin?” I smile as I say this but I’m starting to get worried. He’s never been ill before, really ill. Some of the younger ones had to be nursed into shape after a fever or a sore throat but never Larkin. Or me. We won’t allow ourselves to get sick.
He makes an effort to look alert, heaves himself up on his elbows. I slip a pillow behind his back. He looks annoyed. “I’m okay, Gil. I felt sleepy when we got back today. Too much sun, I guess.”
“But it’s weird to see you like this. You’ve got to tell me if something’s wrong.”
He laughs a little but it’s the fake laugh of someone trying to cover up a lie. “It’s nothing. Don’t freak out, worrywart, about me taking a nap. It’s not like anything’s going to happen.”
I finally do reach down and run my fingers through his hair. His forehead feels cool. His skin looks paler. There are a few tiny white spots like reverse freckles. He grabs me by the wrist and holds my hand in front of his face, studying my open palm like it’s a map.
“I know we’ve never talked much about the future,” he says. “It’s not something you really want to think much about. We tell the kids we’re making our way north to this magic city but you and me…”
I sit down on the edge of the mattress. I want him to stop talking and hold me. I want him to tell me it’s going to be all right and make me believe it. There’s been an understanding between us for a long time, something felt but never spoken. To me, it’s that someday, when we find the perfect place, the safe place we won’t ever leave, when the children are old enough to take care of themselves, we could be together, starting out like Eve and Adam.
“You don’t have to say anything, Larkin.”
“I know I don’t,” he says. He takes my hand and kisses it softly.
Six
The day Larkin found us, it changed everything. There was still just Emily and me the first time we saw him. It wasn’t long after that cold winter morning when I woke up in the furniture store, where Emily had taken me by surprise.
What she said to me that morning stuck in my brain. Follow the highway. Find the city. For her, the city meant food enough to last forever and a safe place to hide. For me, it meant a way of searching for my mother. The only place that made sense to keep looking for her was the next closest town to where we lived, which was to the north.
There was no other option. Returning to my house and waiting to see if my mother ever came back meant starvation. It was better to keep moving, especially with Emily to care for. And even though it became increasingly hopeless, in every town we came to af
ter that first one I could search for some sign of her—for her car, for anything else my mother might have left behind.
The first day we spent together, Emily told me she had seen a car driving through the town just days before I arrived. It was white, a four door like my mother’s. The car wove its way slowly through the streets that were still passable, then drove off toward the highway.
“Was the driver the only person you’d seen since your friends left?”
She nodded.
“What did the driver look like?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t look too close. I hid.”
I must have looked angry or frustrated because she started talking faster. She seemed frightened by the thought that she might make me upset, might give me a reason to leave her behind like the kids she had gone to school with had.
“I was scared,” she said. She took a deep breath. “Someone else was here before. At night. It was loud, a man riding a motorcycle. He didn’t look right, like he would kill me if he found me. His hair, his face was white.” She stopped talking.
“When was this?”
“It wasn’t long after the others left. He just scared me. He wasn’t right.” She studied my face. “Why did you ask about the car?”
“It was my mother,” I said. The words sounded hurtful and huge. Was my mother. “She came here to look for food.” My chest felt tight, my hands clenched. “How did you know you could trust me?”
“You’re not like that,” she said. “Not…changed. You’re like me.”
It’s hard to describe how totally alone I felt. Even with Emily, the world was vast and empty, a wilderness where everything looked the same. Barren. Abandoned. No place to go, no home to return to.
We began to follow the road out of town leading to the interstate. It took forever to travel a few miles. Emily was weak, kept wanting to stop but we found houses and farms with dry places to sleep and at least a little food to scavenge. I couldn’t have hurried her along if I’d wanted to and I was not going to leave her behind.
Those first nights on the road with Emily were the worst I’ve had. When I first set out, walking to Mountain Park alone, I’d been full of the hope of finding my mother. Now it seemed impossible that nothing had happened to her. If she had returned to our house and found it empty, she would have set out again to keep looking for me.
The days were long trudges through drizzling cold but they were more comfortable than the nights. I made sure we had a place to stay picked out long before daylight faded. Although we were dry at night, it was never warm. While we lay huddling together on a mattress, the dark exploded all around us with the howls of dogs and coyotes. We heard the snuffling, the yipping, the growls of predators prowling just below the windows of the room we’d found.
One night, something entered the house where we lay. I had locked all the doors I could lock but there were broken windows and a back door had been ripped from its hinges. The closer we got to the highway, the worse shape the houses were in. That night I heard something rustling through the cupboards in the kitchen, stalking through the main part of the house. At daybreak, I made my way through the house prepared to kill whatever it was but found only sofa cushions tossed on the floor where it had slept.
When we reached the highway after so many hungry days on the road, we walked straight to the middle of the overpass. We stared until our eyes blurred in both directions, north and south, not saying a word. It was so strange—a huge, useless road to nowhere. The four lanes were studded by trucks and cars which had been wrecked or abandoned long ago.
Near the overpass was a gas station and a convenience store, a fast food restaurant across from that but nothing else. I could see a farm house in the distance but, otherwise, the road spooled out into an infinity which looked so bleak, so lonely, I started to cry.
It was Emily who took my hand and led me to the north side of the overpass. “Look at that,” she said, pointing to a green highway sign half a mile up the road. “There’s a place we can go.”
“Emmy, that town’s seventeen miles away. How do we know there’s anything left there to find?”
She just shrugged her shoulders and I knew she was right. I remembered going to that town with my mother. And I remembered that beyond that town there was another, and another and a small city and more towns and then the largest city I could imagine us ever reaching on foot. We went back to the convenience store and stuffed our packs with whatever we could find and headed north down the off-ramp.
It took us more than a week to reach the next town but that was where we found Larkin. We had to keep wandering far off the highway to find looted farm houses where we could stay. Some of them were burned-out shells, left without a dry place to sleep but there were usually cars we could lock ourselves into or even barns and sheds. We found very little food. When we reached the outskirts of Potterville, we were so hungry and cold we were shaking like leaves in an ice storm.
There was a small grocery store not far off the highway. There was still a little food left and we stuffed our mouths with cupcakes and fruit pies. Soon Emily was sick in the middle of one of the aisles. I was rubbing her back when I began to heave. We found some bottled water and drank and drank to soothe our ragged throats.
It was already getting dark out when we left the store. We walked a few blocks to the first house I saw that wasn’t badly damaged. We went inside and scouted for a dry mattress and blankets. Emily was in the kitchen rattling through cupboards when I pulled open a door at the end of a hallway and was knocked back by the stench of decay. I glanced at the body just long enough to see that it was human and pulled the door shut. I kept Emily from that part of the house. It was already dark out. Dogs were howling and we couldn’t go back outside.
The next day I found a better house for us with no cadavers and even a few cans of food remaining in the kitchen. Once we had this place to stay, we didn’t venture out much. There was a wood stove in the living room. I smashed some furniture into kindling with an axe and lit a fire. It grew smoky in the house and we had to open windows but it felt amazingly good to huddle in front of the warm stove. We piled sofa cushions on the floor in front of it and slept there.
The following morning, we found a note taped with masking tape to the big front window of the house. A message was scrawled out in jumbo block letters with a felt-tip pen on a torn grocery sack. I read it out loud. “Here with you in Potterville. Saw you yesterday. Don’t want to hurt you, just talk to you. Meet me in the school parking lot. And don’t shoot!” There was no name, no indication of whether it was a man or a woman, a boy or a girl.
I’d been waiting for this. Not a note, exactly, just another living human being. The fact that this person bothered to write a note made them less threatening to me. They had noticed my rifle. They weren’t going to barge in on us but wanted to meet us on neutral ground. But they could be anyone, good or bad, crazy or sane, healthy or twisted with disease.
“Should we go?” I asked Emily.
She was quiet for a while. “It’s up to you. We should see what they look like. Maybe they could help us.”
There was a school just two blocks away. I wanted to leave Emily behind but she wasn’t going to stay in the house alone. We cautiously approached the school’s parking lot. An enormous elm tree had fallen and smashed in part of the building near the front steps. I saw the tree first and then the shape of a boy, tall and lanky, black hair, bundled in a ski jacket, sitting on the steps below it. He was watching for us and saw us at the same moment we saw him. I held up the rifle, not pointing it at him but just showing that I had it. He got to his feet and raised his hands above his head. “I’m unarmed. It’s okay,” he called.
I led Emily through the parking lot, ducking behind cars, ready to retreat if the boy ran toward us. Finally there was only a small space between us. The boy grinned. “I’m a good guy,” he said. “I’ve never hurt anyone in my life.” He had a big, goofy smile plastered across his face and it was hard to f
eel threatened. He didn’t seem to be threatened by me.
Holding the rifle in front of me so I only had to raise it to my shoulder if he moved, I said, “Are you alone?”
“All alone,” he said. “Been alone for weeks. And very happy to see you.”
It was Emily who pushed past me and walked right up to him. I tried to grab her, to hold her back, but she wiggled out of my grip. She stopped a few feet in front of him and said, “I’m Emily and this is Gillian,” pointing back at me.
The boy held out his hand. “I’m Larkin,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.”
It only took half a day before we felt comfortable around each other, or half a day for me to feel comfortable around him. Larkin and Emily got along like old friends from the start. He was so easy to get along with, so eager to please. He never crowded me, never told me what to do, was just happy he’d found us.
That first day together, he helped fetch wood for the stove and brought us some of the food he’d been hoarding. I wasn’t sure about him staying with us that night but Emily began to beg. “I’m scared, Gillian. He can help if someone comes.” She meant someone coming in the night, in the dark. Someone sick, someone older—we still thought there might be adults around, survivors.
I agreed to let Larkin stay.
Seven
I’m awakened late at night, disturbed by a low growling sound, as if a feral dog has crawled into the house. I reach for the rifle but it’s not there. I sit up on the mattress where I’ve been sleeping under a thin sheet, the warm summer air pushing in through the open, second-story windows.
It grows quiet again and I begin to think the growling was part of a dream. I hear Emily snoring on a mattress near me. I can see the shape of her in the dim moonlight, then the black ink-spot outlines of the others—Stace and Terry and CJ—become clear. We sleep in the largest bedroom upstairs.
What Blood Leaves Behind (The Poison Rose) Page 2