by Alison Stine
I looked up. Above me, Jamey stood on the rim, Starla on her hip. She was glowing, lit by headlights. Her free hand, the one that had thrown the skateboard, clenched into a fist at her side. “Shouldn’t ride without a helmet. Jake always was a damn fool.”
* * *
Dance drove, Grayson rode shotgun, and Jamey and I crowded into the back seat.
Starla curled on Jamey’s lap, the girl’s yellow head tucked beneath her mother’s chin. Instantly, whether from exhaustion or stress, Starla fell asleep, though we tore over the hill at a speed that almost made me sick. I knew, from the way the engine strained and the back fishtailed, the house was behind us, somehow, but I didn’t dare to look to see if it was damaged, if it had been ransacked or burned.
Grayson, shouting, tried to navigate: up the hill; around the garage with the girl, the meat, and the grow room. Dance clipped the porch as we passed, and one of the support beams buckled. The whole porch roof slid, like a cake falling off a table. It crashed in the snow and we kept on going.
Out the window, I saw running men and torches of fire, waving flashlights. The men had working batteries, or the foresight to stock up on solar-powered lights. Dogs were barking. Men lunged for our truck, and then when they realized Dance wasn’t going to stop, leaped out the way.
“Why aren’t they driving after us?” I said.
Dance got a little smile on his face. “Not many of their trucks are running now.”
Nobody said anything about Jamey. She had helped me into the truck and climbed on in after me, backpack on her shoulders, Starla clinging to her like the sash on a beauty queen. I saw a pacifier in the mesh side pocket of the backpack. Jamey had packed for herself and Starla. She had been ready for a long time.
But other women had helped me, too.
“What about Kaylee?” I asked. “And the girl in the meat house?”
“The meat house?” Grayson said.
“We can’t just leave them there.”
Dance met my eyes in the mirror. “We can’t save everyone.”
Jamey didn’t say anything, didn’t look at me. I think she thought if she spoke up, we would notice her and what a burden she was; we would make her and the baby get out.
I fell silent. I finally glanced back at my house. It seemed fine, a little dented. A few shingles were missing from the roof, but the windows weren’t broken, and I didn’t see any other damage.
A few of the men were giving chase on foot down the road behind us. One threw a flashlight. It struck a tree and shattered. I turned back around.
* * *
The two spray-painted junk cars that had blocked the rural highway, blocked our passage, and forced us to turn into Skate State in the first place had been towed to the sides of the road. But they were on fire. We drove between them, flaming sphinxes.
“The world’s gone crazy,” Grayson said.
“No,” Jamey said, looking out the window. “It was always this way.”
10
We kept going, as quickly as we could. On the narrow, icy road, the tires gritted, desperate for traction. We skidded, swerved around ruts. We were driving too fast. Dance gripped the steering wheel tightly and we held our breath, tensing at every spin, every rasp of the brakes. I kept expecting men to leap out of the trees. I kept looking behind us for headlights.
They came, as I knew they would: yellow eyes, burning through the snow. Coming up fast. The headlights were small. “I think it’s bikes,” I said.
Jamey didn’t look. “Jake has motorbikes. They used to race them.”
Dance met my eyes in the mirror. He hadn’t known about that, hadn’t broken those engines.
“We can’t slow down,” Grayson said. “If they catch us...”
He didn’t finish his sentence, didn’t have to. I glanced over at Jamey, but she had turned to the window, her forehead resting against the glass. She closed her eyes, willing it all away. But it wouldn’t go away.
We could hear the motorbikes now, the whine of their engines above the wind. The trees by the sides of the road looked like men. Then the trees gave way to fields, which should have been corn or wheat, but the crops had never grown, had never even been planted. In the darkness, the flat bumpy fields seemed like the surface of the moon—that inhospitable, that rough and alien. Nothing could live here.
Dance cut the wheel hard—and then we were traveling over the fields, jerking through them with a recklessness and speed that made my teeth clatter in my head. Starla woke up and began to cry, her face screwing in a red crease. “Don’t like,” she wailed. “Don’t like.”
It was the most I had ever heard her say.
“What are you doing?” Grayson said to Dance.
But Dance kept driving fast, his shoulders hunched. The house banged and fishtailed behind us, weighing us down, rocking the truck.
“We’re going to roll!”
A tire sank into a groundhog hole. The truck dipped forward and we all slid, Jamey and Starla pushing up against me. Then Dance steered us out of it. Starla slid up on Jamey’s lap and popped her thumb into her mouth, silently weeping. Jamey held her tightly.
“We just have to find another road,” Dance said.
But there was no another road. We rocketed over the fields. Plain and jagged and endless. I was afraid to look back, to see if the house was safe, if the motorbikes were there. I couldn’t hear their engines anymore. Then Dance slammed to a stop.
The truck was blocked by a line of trees, packed so tightly together I had almost missed them. They looked like extensions of the darkness. Starla wailed. I stared at the trees, exposed by our headlights.
The trees made a wall. They had been forced into a dense line. I saw swatches of knotted fabric, the kind of cheap blue cloth used for cleaning. The trees had been wrapped in the cloth, and lashed together with rope and bungees, the narrow gaps between them stuffed with branches, dead moss, rags. Several stumps, uprooted, had been wedged there, making a barrier like a beaver dam, sealed with mud and hard-packed snow.
Someone had done this, done this purposefully. Someone had seen how closely together the trees grew and had used it to their advantage. People had been here, and made some kind of fence, using junk and bits of the forest. What were they trying to keep out? Or in?
Dance looked over his shoulder, planning to try to back out over the rough fields again, but I stopped him. “Maybe we should hide here,” I said.
“Hide?”
“Get on the other side of that tree fence, get behind something.”
“Where are we gonna hide the truck? The house?”
“If we cut the lights, maybe they can’t see.”
Dance turned back around, reaching to switch off the headlights, but then he froze.
“What?” Grayson said.
A person stood in the glare of our brights.
They were dressed all in black, almost blending against the tree fence.
“I don’t think they’re from Skate State,” I said. They looked more careful, their clothes calculated for both warmth and cover of night. Black coat, black boots, black hood, and ski mask.
“We need to get out of here,” Grayson said.
“Do you know where we are?” I turned to Jamey.
But she was struggling with a crying, thrashing Starla. “No fucking idea.”
It was like watching a tree detach from the woods and begin to walk. They came toward us, the person in the headlights. Then more shadowy figures in black came out from behind the fence. They swarmed the truck.
“What is going on?” Grayson said.
“The whole world has gone to shit because one thing has,” Dance said.
I leaned over the front seat, looking closer at the strangers along the tree fence. I had seen something, something about the shapes of the figures or the way they moved. Something was different ab
out them. Then I knew.
They were women.
Bundled against the cold, all in dark clothes, their warm things masked them. But I felt movement gave them away: a fluid bending of their bodies around the tree wall, the dips at their waists. I thought of Lisbeth in her long sleeves and long, heavy skirts, wrapped up but unmistakably her beneath the denim and flannel and down. Maybe I wasn’t disguising myself in coveralls as well as I thought.
“They’re all women,” I said.
Dance was out the door, stepping into the headlights.
“Don’t!” I said to Dance, but it was too late.
He had left the door hanging open. I could hear the whine of the motorbikes again in the distance. Cold flooded through the cab, and Starla cried harder.
“Are you coming here to join us?” one of the women said, muffled behind her ski mask.
“Who are you?” Dance said.
“Are you being followed?”
“Yes!” Grayson leaned across the seat and shouted through the open door.
The woman looked to him, then back to Dance. “All right. Come in behind the fence. No cars. Park to the left. There’s an opening in there. We’ll hide your truck. And—” her head turned to the back of the truck and she jolted briefly but otherwise did not give much away “—your house.”
Dance got back into the truck and did what the woman asked. There was a break between the trees, barely wide enough to ease the truck through, and we drove in carefully. The forest closed up around us, dark and magic with snow.
Starla quieted, looking around. When the trailer had edged its back wheels into the woods beyond the fence, the woman held up her hands for us to stop.
“Here we go again,” Grayson said.
“Look, I don’t think this is as dangerous as what we just left,” Dance said.
“Why? Because they’re girls?” Jamey snapped. “Girls are just as dangerous as men.”
I watched the women’s sides. I hadn’t seen any guns. “I don’t think they’re armed,” I said. “Maybe they can hide us for a while, until Jake gives up.”
Grayson helped Jamey with Starla as they got out of the truck, and I stretched my hand into the front seat. “The gun,” I said to Dance.
He looked around. No one watched us; they were busy with the baby.
“You said they’re not armed.”
“The gun,” I repeated.
After a moment, he pulled it from the slit in the seat cushion and handed it to me. The gun, flecked with rust from its long sleep in the earth, felt cold. It felt heavy and strange. I shoved it deep in my coat pocket.
Dance was looking at me over the seat. I could read the challenges in his eyes. Could I use it? Had I shot one? Why did I have it? “You better get used to me having it,” I said.
But I felt those questions knocking around my own head. I should have practiced with the gun. I should have gotten ammo for it. If I needed to use it someday, would it even work?
We threaded through the forest after the women. Exhaustion hit me as I walked. The simple work of following, of watching where I was going to avoid roots or branches, seemed too much. I felt the bruises from my fall into the skate park, a sharp and tender ache. I couldn’t remember the last thing I had eaten, and the last time I had slept was in the truck.
I heard a rustling, and looked behind me. In the clearing where Dance had parked the truck, women were piling pine boughs and brush over the truck, covering up the vehicle and my house. If I turned back in a few more minutes, they would be hidden, safe. The group ahead of me went around a curve, and I followed. When I looked behind me again, the clearing and the women were lost to shadows.
What were these women doing in the woods?
Up in front, Dance walked in step beside the woman in the ski mask. She carried Starla in her arms; Jamey seemed fine with it, maybe grateful for the break. Starla was quiet now, wrapped so securely in blankets I could barely see her face, only a tuft of her hair, like a corn silk.
“Did you come from Skate State?” the woman asked.
“How did you know?” Dance said.
“We have one of their pigs. And some refugees.”
“What are you doing out here in the woods? Do you live here?”
“We do now,” she said.
The path dipped down and I saw it. Fire, tents, a line of laundry strung between trees. There were bales of hay, a large stack of wood.
“We organized after the first lost spring,” the woman said. “Some of us started to move out here then, but our numbers keep growing. More and more people want to do something that matters.”
What are you doing? I wanted to say. What matters?
The dozen or so tents were clustered around each other, hugged by trees; there were fires in the middle. Nosing the hem of a blanket on the line was a large white pig. At first I thought it was injured, a gash in its side. As we came closer, I saw that the pig had been spray-painted with a red bull’s-eye.
“They use them for target practice at Skate State,” the woman explained.
“Then dinner,” Jamey said.
The woman looked closer at Jamey for a moment, then she addressed all of us. “Let me tell you the rules here. We don’t cook meat. We don’t use cars. We try to be as respectable and sustainable as possible.”
“Who are you?” Grayson asked.
Tent flaps had opened up and a few heads had poked out, a few people curious enough about the voices to wander out in the dark. People in their twenties, in clothes that fit. People who looked like they were in college, looked clean and well-fed, shiny. Their coats weren’t duct-taped. Their hair wasn’t matted. I didn’t see any children.
“I’m Mica,” the woman said. “We’re occupying this forest.”
“Mica?” Dance studied the woman. “I’m Dance. Do you remember me? From the tree-sit at Ladd Ridge? My action name was Dirt Boy.”
Grayson looked incredulously at me. Dirt Boy?
Then the woman—Mica—handed the baby back to Jamey, and pulled up her ski mask, revealing a face soft with youth, black freckles, and round cheeks. “Dirt Boy.” She and Dance hugged. “You look different than I remember. Not as thin.”
“Well,” Dance said. “When you’re not stuck in a tree, you can eat more. What happened to that tree?”
Mica shook her head.
“Sorry to interrupt,” I said. “But what is all this?”
The tents looked new, slick in the firelight. None of them had patches. Even the laundry, drying on the line, seemed fresh, unstained sheets that hadn’t even faded to gray. I didn’t see any bikes or cars, any way of getting out quickly. I didn’t see any weapons.
Mica looked at me. She was beautiful in a way of seeming not to care. Her hair had escaped the hood of her sweatshirt, as dark as her clothes and wild with curls and a little braid near her face, sleek as a garter snake. I could tell she did care, though. Her boots were leather with a thick heel, and she had lined her eyes. The makeup, so out of place in the woods, glittered in the firelight.
“We’ve occupied the forest,” she said patiently, as if I was a child, as if I couldn’t see and understand everything. “When things started to get bad, we made the decision to set up a camp here so loggers, frackers, and capitalists can’t take it. We won’t let the trees be sacrificed. We’re protectors.”
“Right on,” Grayson said.
I shot him a look and he shrugged.
“What about firewood?” I asked.
“We only burn dead wood.”
“What about your leather shoes?”
“Wil,” Dance said. He turned to Mica. “Thank you for trusting us.”
“I saw the direction you were coming from. Only one thing’s out that way, and it’s not good.”
In the clearing with the fancy tents, it was easy to forget the compou
nd just down the road. (How far down the road? How far had we gone?) A pig had escaped from there, running through the fields. Could Mica and the others hear the gunfire from Skate State? Were they close enough to see the smoke as the cars burned? Didn’t the men want their pig back? It was meat.
Two women from the tents approached our group.
“Jamey?” one of them said. “That you, girl?”
The women didn’t seem like they belonged with the camp. They didn’t look like the others. They wore baggy, ill-fitting coats—hand-me-downs—and the wrong shoes, not winter boots but sneakers. Their long hair was shiny with grease and tangles. One of the women had a bruise on her face.
But Jamey recognized the women and squealed. It was such a strange sound, coming from Jamey. She sounded like a little kid.
“Skate State refugees,” Mica said, nodding at the women.
There was more hugging, Starla passed around. “She got so big,” the women said.
“Are you hungry?” Mica asked us. “We have tempeh.”
“Great,” Grayson said.
* * *
After we had eaten, Mica found places for us to sleep. I wasn’t sure if we should sleep, but my limbs felt so heavy. As soon as a bed was offered, it was all I could think about.
Jamey and Starla stayed with the women they knew from Skate State. The rest of us bunked up together in an extra tent near the back of the camp.
Deep in the woods, the group was erecting structures that seemed like they could be permanent, strange misshapen buildings that, in the darkness, looked more art than shed—straw bale houses, homes made of mud—using whatever materials they could find. Amid the shadows of the trees, I saw wood planks and sheets of corrugated steel that could have been lifted off a construction site or ripped from a warehouse. Nothing seemed habitable yet, not in the wind and snow. Loose bits of steel grated against each other, and the packed mud sides of the houses looked wet.