by R A Doty
“What were all the sirens about today?” his wife said, glancing at him briefly while carving a piece of meat on her plate. “I heard them while I was in the shower this morning, and by the time I got out they were gone. Did something happen?”
“I heard them too,” Sarah said, seated next to her mother, “but I was too sick to get out of bed to see what was going on.”
“You poor thing,” Melanie said. “How are you feeling now?”
Bill Weston stared at his daughter as she told her mother how horrible she felt all day. He noticed she barely touched the meat on her dinner plate, but ate almost the entirety of her vegetables. “How are you getting along at your new post at the kennels?” he asked her, interrupting a reply she was giving her mother in mid-sentence.
Sarah turned toward him, surprised that he would ask. He rarely took an interest in anything she did. “I’m doing fine. It’s not as horrible as I expected it to be.”
“Why would you think it would be horrible?”
“I don’t know. I guess I thought taking care of the nutrimen would be disgusting, but it’s really not that bad.”
“You work just down the hall from Calla, don’t you?”
“Yeah, but we don’t see each other that often. We’re both too busy, usually.”
Bill smiled. “It isn’t quite as pleasant as your clerical job was, is it?
Sarah was pleasantly surprised at her father’s jovial disposition. It wasn’t that often he smiled while conversing with her. She longed for more and eagerly replied with a smile. “I’ll say. All I had to do in the office was punch-in information about the nutrimen, and now I have to clean out their pens, which is sometimes disgusting, but I won’t get into that at the dinner table.”
“Carla once told me how efficient you were at entering the nutrimen’s data. You probably knew your way around their files better than anyone else on the staff.”
The statement changed the tone of the conversation, and the smile left Sarah’s face. She knew, at that moment, he was no longer praising her for being good at something, but interrogating her for something he thought she did. Or, more than likely, something he somehow knew she did. But how could he have found out? She was probably just being paranoid. “I suppose I did,” she said, avoiding eye contact.
“You never answered me, Bill,” Melanie said, interrupting the conversation. “What were all the sirens about today?”
Bill looked at his watch and then his wife. “We should be finding out any moment now.”
“I don’t understand. What does that mean?”
Before Weston could reply, the intercom sounded from a speaker in the ceiling. “There is someone at the front door.”
Sarah looked at her mother, and she, in turn, turned to her husband. “What’s going on, Bill?”
“I guess it’s time to find out,” he said, standing from his seat and walking to the front door. He opened the door and escorted two policemen back to the dining room. “Take her away,” he said, pointing to his daughter.
“Father! What’s going on?” Sarah pleaded, as the officers grabbed her by the arms.
Melanie stood in front of the men, blocking their path. “Bill, I demand to know what’s going on, right now!”
Bill walked up to his daughter and stared into her eyes, which had begun to turn shiny with tears. He seemed to take pleasure in watching her lip quiver as she waited for his answer. “Did you really think I wouldn’t find out?” he said. “I suppose I could expect something like this from the Wilkinson girl, but you? I raised and provided you with a home for eighteen years. I even treated you as if you were my own flesh and blood and this is how you repay me?”
The tears filled Sarah’s eyes and rolled down her face. “But I am your flesh and blood, Father—”
“Don’t call me Father!” Bill said, his finger pointed at Sarah’s face.
After a nod from their newly appointed supervisor, the two men escorted Sarah to the door.
Melanie grabbed her husband’s arm. “Bill, please don’t do this, I beg you.”
Weston pulled away and went to his office, leaving his wife standing alone.
Melanie looked out the window at her daughter, who was being guided into the backseat of the police car, and then toward her husband, who had just closed his office door. She dropped to the floor and cried into her hands.
Chapter Thirty-Five
FOR THE FIRST TIME in many years Elana was content—not that life couldn’t be better, but content in a sense that she and her family were surviving, and things could ultimately be worse. Jessie seemed to be adapting very well to their new life by the sea, and Stevie was well on his way to becoming a man. Elana even grew accustomed to Josh and treated him as an equal to her own children. She wore a proud smile as she arranged the table for dinner. Something tapped her leg, and when she looked down, Jessie was standing next to her.
“Mommy can I go outside?”
“Why don’t you wait until after dinner, honey. We’re gonna eat pretty soon.”
“Okay, Mommy.” Jessie walked back to the living room and climbed into the big puffy chair where Walter was waiting for her. She grabbed him and squished him onto her lap.
Life was harder for Elana now that Samuel was gone, and she solitarily carried the responsibility of the family’s survival, being the only parent, but she was getting used to it. Abandoning the cave and moving to a real house did help to make things easier, however. Yes, she thought, as she looked around her new home, her daughter seemingly content playing with a toy bear—maybe we can survive. And then she opened the pantry.
Her hand instinctively covered her nose to block the odor. She slowly walked forward, eyeing the shelves filled with jars of canned fish; weeks and weeks of hard work displayed before her as a testament of her and her family’s will to survive. She grabbed one of the jars and held it up, mold covered fish immersed in cloudy, gray water. She grabbed another and saw the same thing. She studied every jar on every shelf, all depressingly similar. Tiny footsteps crept up from behind her.
“Mommy, can I go outside, now?”
“Yes! Just go!” The jar slipped from her hand and fell to the floor. Warm liquid splashed onto her ankle. The stench was overwhelming.
Jessie ran from the pantry, through the living room, and out the front door, the screen door slamming behind her. She sat on the ground twenty feet from the cottage and began to cry, her hands gripping the dry, prickly grass. She cried harder and louder with each breath.
Elana stood in the pantry staring down at the strips of rotted fish and broken glass. She gagged twice from the odor, but stood firm. The fish was everything. There wasn’t enough time to replace all of it before cold weather arrived, and even if there was, what could she do differently? She was certain she did everything right. She dropped to the floor and grabbed a handful of the rotted meat, a shard of glass puncturing her kneecap, blood trickling into the murky liquid surrounding her. There was no way they could survive the winter without the fish. She began to laugh, harder as she looked up at the jars filled with rotted hours and days and weeks. It was all for nothing. She lowered her head and cried into her hands. The overpowering odor forced her to throw-up between her legs. The cow, she thought, raising her head. There’s still the cow. Thank God. She jumped to her feet. “Jessie!”
She rushed to the living room. Jessie was gone. She twisted her head in every direction, searching for her daughter. “She’s outside,” she said, and ran from the cottage. When she saw Jessie crying in the grass, she ran over, sat beside her and cradled her daughter in her arms.
“Mommy’s so sorry, honey.” She kissed Jessie’s head. “I didn’t mean to yell, okay?”
Jessie nodded, quick spurts of air leaving her lungs as her mother hugged her tight. “Where’s Daisy, Mommy?”
Elana turned in the direction her daughter was staring, and the cow was gone. A broken rope lay on the ground at the base of a tree. Her eyes filled with tears and she began to laugh.
She turned back to her daughter and placed her arm around the child’s small body, pulling her close. She kissed her head again, rocking gently from side to side. The laughing stopped. The thought of watching her daughter starve to death when winter arrived was unbearable. How could things have changed so fast? Death was imminent, but maybe that was no longer such a bad thing. A rock lay hidden in the grass just beneath her arm. She shook her head. I can’t let her starve. I won’t let her starve. “Lay on Mommy’s lap, honey.”
Jessie stretched across her mother’s lap and laid her head sideways in the grass. Fingers caressing her scalp soothed her eyes closed. The air was heavy and warm as she slowly breathed the scent of the grass and hot earth. She barely heard her mother’s broken voice as she drifted to sleep.
“Keep your eyes closed, honey.”
BETWEEN DAN AND COLTON, the two men packed enough food to last a week, although two day’s worth would probably have been plenty. Dan’s face glowed orange from the campfire as he flipped one of two steaks in a frying pan. The meat sizzled when the fat hit the steel. “So what happened to the world, Cole?” he said. “It couldn’t have always been like this.”
Colton sat comfortably on the ground across from Dan, with his arms wrapped around bent knees. The aroma of the meat searing in the pan forced his stomach to rumble. “I don’t think you can attribute it to any one thing, Dan. The world just became overpopulated due to a number of reasons: advances in modern medicine causing people to live longer, advances in agriculture which, at one point, created more food, thereby allowing people to have more children, and last but not least is the fact that the earth is limited in space. I guess you could say the earth simply wasn’t large enough to accommodate the growth of mankind. Although, I might add, it didn’t help matters any when all the great minds of the world got together and created a growth hormone to expedite the cattle production, only to discover the hormone was toxic and ironically killed most of the cattle.” Colton rubbed his hand over his beard. “Having said that, I guess I have to take back what I said earlier and agree that you probably could contribute it to one thing. That really was the start of everything. A food deficiency would have inevitably still happened, but it definitely wouldn’t have happened as quickly.” The breeze shifted toward Colton, and he turned his head to avoid the smoke of the fire. While staring out toward the ocean, he noticed the dot in the sky, growing larger by the second.
Dan saw it too. “I wonder who that is?” he said, eyeing what looked like a helicopter.
The chopper looked small from a distance, but its red color was unmistakable to Colton. He stood to see it clearer. “It’s Ancada.”
“What are they doing?”
“I don’t know.”
The aircraft followed the coastline and grew much larger as it neared Colton and Dan. They could now hear the thumping of its dual propellers. Soon the insignia of a large “A” encompassed in a triangle, appeared on the side of the entrance door. The water’s calm surface came to life with thousands of waves being pushed in all directions.
Colton grabbed his bow, expecting the enormous helicopter to land, but it flew past, continuing along the coast. With his hand shielding his face, he looked up at small faces of children peering down from rows of windows. It made no sense to him, at first, as to why they would be carrying children. Were they releasing them on the mainland? Were there adults, too, but they weren’t visible from his viewpoint? The Power Elite had said they would someday re-populate the earth with a much stronger race, so Colton wondered if that day had come. His head turned to follow the chopper as it headed down the coastline in the direction of the Thorpe’s cottage. And then it became apparent to him.
“We’ve gotta go, Dan!” he said, swinging the quiver of arrows over his shoulder.
“But what about dinner?”
“There’s no time! We have to go, now! Leave everything behind and we’ll get it on the way back.”
Dan jumped to his feet and kicked dirt on the fire to extinguish the flames. He then ran to catch up to Colton. “What’s the big hurry?”
ELANA TRIED WITH ALL her might to refrain from crying as she reached for the rock with one hand while caressing her daughter’s scalp with the other. Jessie would never feel it if she was asleep, she thought. She looked down at the small head to locate the exact spot where the blow would hit. Is one spot better than the other? How hard would the rock have to hit to be fatal? She began to cry, parting the hair on her daughter’s head to form what would be the target. It has to be done. She raised the rock.
A great roar thundered from the sky above. Jessie opened her eyes to the sight of a giant red monster hovering above her. She scurried to her mother and buried herself in her arms. “Mommy, I’m scared!”
Elana dropped the rock and held her daughter tight. She closed her eyes to avoid the tornado of dry dirt and grass. She, too, was frightened, as the helicopter landed in the yard next to the house. She slowly opened her eyes when the dust settled and the noise silenced.
A door opened, and three men exited the chopper. They walked over to the woman clutching the child they spotted from the sky.
“Please don’t hurt us,” Elana begged, eyeing the guns two of the men were carrying.
“I can assure you, ma’am,” one of the men said, “that is not our intention. Quite the contrary.” The man extended his hand. “Please, allow me to help you and your child to your feet.”
Elana reluctantly took the man’s hand, and he pulled her and her daughter to a standing position. “Thank you,” Elana said, releasing the man’s hand.
“You’re quite welcome. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is William Weston.”
“I’m Elana, and this is my daughter, Jessie.”
Weston bent down to the small child clinging to her mother. “That’s a very pretty name for a pretty girl.”
Jessie cowered tight to her mother.
“She’s shy,” Weston said with a smile. “Isn’t that adorable.”
“Why are you here?” Elana said.
“I’m here to offer your daughter a new life. A life where she’ll have everything she could possibly need.”
“You’re from the city in the ocean, aren’t you?”
“Indeed, I am. Ancada’s the name of our wonderful city.”
Elana remembered the name from Colton. She unconsciously backed up. “Why would I possibly let you take my daughter?”
“Because you would be doing her a great injustice by keeping her here. We have plenty of food, she would be educated in the finest schools, she would always be clothed in new apparel, and above all, she would be safe from a world that we both know she would never survive in.” He offered everything that Elana would never be able to give her daughter.
Elana considered the thought of introducing Jessie to this new world, a world where she would have a chance to survive and live a normal life. What was the alternative if she refused his offer? Smashing a rock against her daughter’s head and burying her in the sand next to her father? “Why would you do this? What’s in it for you?”
“Because we in Ancada are very fortunate, and we have plenty to share. It saddens my heart to think there are children living on the mainland with no food or shelter, or the hope of a future.” Weston pointed to the children peering out the helicopter’s small square windows. “As you can see there are others that have gladly accepted our offer. But I understand if you don’t. I’m sure it would be hard to part with your child.”
“I have two other sons, as well. Why can’t we all come to live in your city?”
“There’s nothing I would like more than to offer shelter to everyone on the mainland, but our city is limited in space. If we allowed everyone to come we would quickly become overpopulated. We have plans to eventually move back to the mainland and help those of you living here, but for now we can only make this offer to the children in need. How old are your other children?”
“Nineteen and nine.” Steven and Josh appeared fro
m behind the helicopter, running toward Elana. “Here they are now,” Elana said.
“What’s going on?” Steven asked, running up to his mother and positioning himself between her and the man. “Who are these men, and what do they want?”
“Calm down, Stevie; they mean us no harm. They’re from Ancada,” Elana pointed to the island. “They’re offering a home for Jessie.”
“What do you mean, a home? She has a home with us.”
“Does she? Can you really call this a home?”
“Of course you can, Ma. We’re a family. They’re not gonna just take her away. She has everything she needs right here with us.”
“Stevie. We don’t have enough food to get through the winter. They can give her what we can’t. She won’t survive if she stays with us.”
“What are you saying? We have all the fish we caught. And the cow.”
“I looked in the pantry this morning and all the fish is spoiled. I must have done something wrong when preserving it.” Elana nodded to where the cow was usually tied. The cow ran away.” Stevie noticed the broken rope. Elana continued. “We have nothing, Stevie. She won’t make it through the winter. We’ll be lucky to make it.”
Steven couldn’t believe it. So many hours were spent catching the fish and it was all for nothing? Josh nearly drowned, and it was all for nothing? He refused to believe it, but what reason would his mother have to lie? “All the fish went bad? Are you sure?”
Elana nodded.
“And the cow’s gone?’
“I’m afraid so, honey.”
“But maybe it just wandered nearby.” He began to walk toward the back of the cottage, but his mother grabbed his arm.
“Stevie, it’s gone. We have to accept it. It’s not coming back, and it’s not nearby. It probably escaped during the night and it could be miles away by now. Somebody else probably found it and already killed it.”
Steven leaned closer to his mother and lowered his voice. “But what about what Cole said about that place? To stay clear of it.”