by Alison Stine
I started walking again.
I remembered when Lobo had bought his new gun, the one to replace the old, battered handgun I carried in my pocket, which apparently I was always touching: it was back when Mama was sick. One of those nights when the light in the farmhouse bedroom stayed on all night, curtains fluttering and ragged as her breath, or maybe on one of those days that she didn’t know were days, he went to the gun show. He came back with a black plastic case. I watched him take it from the truck, carry it into the house.
There would be no burying it this time.
She was trying to quit, I remembered that much: the vomiting, shaking, the smell. Stains on the floor. She couldn’t quit. Lobo carried more than a gun into the house. He had bought drugs for her. What kind, I didn’t even know.
Something crouched in front of me on the hill. A creature, white and furred. It almost blended with the snow, except the white of the thing was dirtier than the snow.
My impulse was to run, not to reach in my pocket for the gun, but to take flight. Selfishly, weakly. My heart knocked in my chest. Dance put his arm in front of me.
Then the white thing lifted its head. I saw that it had been bent down. It was a person. Misshapen by layers—just a person, trying to stay warm. He wore a white coat with a hood he had zipped all the way up, like a ski mask over his face. Bunches of newspaper, balled into fists, insulated the coat and made him appear lumpy and swollen. Cut into the hood, on either side of the zipper, were white mesh screens. Eyeholes. It looked like a monster but it was only a young man.
There was a moment where we saw him, and he saw us. Then he turned and fled.
“Wait,” I said.
“Who the fuck was that?” Dance said.
We abandoned the tracks, running up the hill instead after the hooded person. The snow and our boots weighed us down. The person in the hood moved lighter, quicker. Except for his coat, he was not dressed warmly enough. Snow caked his pant legs. He wore ordinary tennis shoes, which must have been wet, but allowed him to run.
He reached the top of the hill and paused for a moment to look down at us. That uncanny hood, eyeholes like a moth, or giant white fly...then he was gone.
I reached the crest before Dance, and looked down. “Oh, no.”
A valley stretched before us, broken by a stream. More white swarmed the valley: people wearing white coats and furs. Another camp. Another group. In the center of the valley near the stream was a picnic shelter, and in front of it: a pile of junk, stacked together like a funeral pyre. I recognized something in the jumble.
My duffel bags.
“Wait, Wil. What’s the plan?” Dance tried to hold me back, but I shrugged him off.
“We get our stuff. That’s the plan.”
I was out of breath from running up the hill after the boy, but I launched myself down the other side of it, kicking up a spray of snow. At the bottom of the hill, people looked up at the sound. There was no way we were going to surprise them now. I stumbled down into the valley, and right into a blanket being held out for me.
I was wrapped in the blanket before I realized what was happening, like a runner finishing a race.
Two women held the blanket. One tucked the end around my neck. It was soft and worn, white fleece. But it smelled of mold. The woman looked willowy and faded, ethereal but beaten down. She had long, greasy hair beneath the hood of her white coat. She moved with hazy, dreamlike motions, not looking me in the eye.
“We wear white here,” she said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
Dance made it down the hill behind me. The women were ready for him, too. They threw an old, white sleeping bag around him. He looked at me, too surprised to resist.
This could have been a kind gesture, strangers helping us out in the cold, keeping us warm. But I didn’t think so. A man was coming toward us through the snow.
Wrapped tightly in the blanket, I couldn’t get to my pocket.
The man wore a sheepskin draped across his shoulders. His chest was bare to the waist, pocked with cold, a red rash slashed across it like poison ivy. I thought again of the gun. I did not try to touch it, to draw attention to it, to struggle too much in the blanket. I thought of Jake’s flip-flops: of men who were too arrogant to cover up, to dress sensibly, who thought they were beyond the reach of weather. I looked at the man’s pink skin.
“Hello, friends,” the man said. “You’re just in time.”
“I think you have our things.” I shrugged off a side of the blanket to try to point at the pile, and both the women rushed forward to tuck the blanket back in.
“We wear white,” the man said. “It’s kind of a rule we made.”
The coats and blankets the women wore around their shoulders, the people milling about the campsite by the stream—everyone was in white. They blended with the landscape, though their whites were dirtier than the snow. Maybe it was camouflage. Maybe they wore white to sneak up on people, to steal from them without being seen.
I had been to Skate State. I had seen the Occupied Forest. I had grown up with The Church—and with growers and sellers, who were their own kind of community, a den of watchfulness, resourcefulness, and trickery: a den of thieves. I had even assembled my own group of sorts on the road: the waiter, the scavenger, the grower, the mama and child. Maybe this was how we made it, sticking together in the families we made.
But something was off about this group in the valley. There was none of the busyness of camp. Nobody was cracking ice in the stream or melting buckets of snow for water. I didn’t smell wood smoke or food. I didn’t see tents. Nobody was even rummaging through the pile of our stolen things, looking for salvage they could use, their favorite canned foods, coats that fit.
“You have our stuff,” I said to the man in the sheepskin.
He seemed dismissive. “We picked up some junk.”
“It’s not junk. We’re using it. We need it, and it’s ours.”
The man cocked his head. He had a red beard and a tattoo on his neck, small and black, right on his artery. It jumped when he spoke. It made me feel squeamish. “Really? You weren’t there.”
“We were sleeping,” Dance said. I could hear the exasperation in his voice. “You came into our camp and took our things.”
“I didn’t see any names on anything. Did you, ladies?”
The women shook their heads. Were they high? They giggled; they had blank and bright faces.
“It was all tied down in her truck,” Dance said.
“We’re ridding ourselves of our material things.”
“Well, we’re not,” Dance said. “It obviously belonged to someone.”
“Do you own this park? Did you pay to camp here?”
“No. Look, man. We’re just trying to survive this, same as you.”
The man laughed, a little rough sound. I watched his breath disturb the air. “That, friend, is where you’re wrong. We’re not trying to survive it.”
They had no food. They had no fire. Bones had been tied to the support beams of the shelter house, what looked like a groundhog skull. And I smelled something.
Gas.
“They took the fuel cans, Dance.”
The man was staring at us, standing too close.
“What do you want us to do?” I asked him.
“Nothing.”
“You have our food, our fuel. You can keep that,” I told the man.
I felt Dance jerk beside me, hearing me give it all away. But we needed to get out of this.
“Company. We’d like your company,” the man said. “That would be nice.”
“We can’t do that,” I said. “We have somewhere to be.”
“Well, we all do, don’t we? Have somewhere to be? Heaven. We have an appointment in heaven.”
“Okay,” Dance said. “Keep the stuff, like she sai
d.”
“We need the duffel bags, though.” I was sure the man would ask me why, what was in the bags. I felt certain he would check, and take the contents. But he didn’t look away from my face. He paced before me, coming near enough for me to see clearly that it was a skeleton tattoo on his neck. Shaky lines, homemade. “All right,” the man said. He was so close I could smell his sheepskin. Wet and rotten. “But you have to get it.”
He stepped aside so we could see. A woman in a white raincoat knelt by the pile while a second person, the one in the hooded jacket, the boy we had followed into the valley, danced around it, flinging something from a can. It looked like he was throwing flowers at a wedding. But it was gas from our fuel can, splashing over the pile of our supplies. The woman in the raincoat struck a match.
I shrugged off the blanket and ran for the pile. Dance was shouting my name. My vision narrowed until all I could see was the handle on a duffel bag, sticking out of the pile.
A chance to grow again. To make plants live, plants we could eat. A way to live again.
I yanked the bag free, feeling Dance’s arm snake around my waist and pull me. We fell back onto the snowy ground. Before us, the gas-soaked pile went up. I felt heat on my face, felt the orange glow light my skin. The duffel bag had punched me in the chest when we fell. I pushed up, scrambling off Dance and clutching the bag. Smoke roared into the trees, as thick and full as I remembered leaves had once been.
Nobody in the camp seemed upset by the fire. Nobody seemed surprised. But it drew them. I was aware of more people trekking through the snow around the picnic shelter to get closer to the flames. People behind us, in the trees all around us.
“We were waiting for enough fuel,” the man in the sheepskin said. “We got it now, thanks to you. We’re ready.”
“Ready for what?” Dance said.
“To be delivered.” The man gestured to the valley. Ten, a dozen people in white came close to the bonfire.
Dance grabbed one side of the duffel bag, and I took the other. We turned our backs to the fire, to the man and the others. The bag was awkward between us, but it was not the first time I had run with it. We carried the bag up the hill without looking back at the scene in the valley.
There was no thought of going back for anything else, no discussion. Everything else was gone. I concentrated on climbing, on not breaking the light in the bag. It might be our last one. All the others were in the fire.
I waited for the icy hand of the man on my shoulder, or for a claw in my hair: his women hauling me back, forcing me down onto my knees like the women in the forest, Jamey’s friends we had not saved. Halfway up the hill I realized I didn’t hear footsteps crashing through the snow behind us, I didn’t feel anyone following. They were not coming.
“Wait,” I said. I spun around and looked back.
Everyone was right where we had left them in the valley by the stream. The man with the skeleton tattoo, the others in white. They had not even attempted to follow us; they had not cared. Together, they knelt in a line by the bonfire. Orange flames flickered against the white banks. The fire looked dark and greasy. Smoke billowed into the sky. The man and the others had taken off their tops, their coats and blankets, the sheepskin, all their white things. They were bare-chested, even the women. Their skin looked raw against the snow.
I saw the women who had greeted us, the ones who had wrapped us in blankets. They had closed their eyes, put their hands on their knees. They looked like they were mediating.
Except they were going to freeze.
“What the fuck are they doing?” Dance said.
“We gotta go now.” I picked up the duffel bag again and Dance followed.
The fire roared on behind us, and we did not speak. It seemed like years before we reached the campsite.
Grayson was gathering kindling by the tree line. He dropped the load in his arms when he saw us. “You got it! You got it back!” He looked behind us and saw there was nothing else. We were lugging only the single bag. “Just one light? Where’s everything else?”
“Gone,” Dance said.
“Get in the truck,” I said.
We shoved the bag in. There was plenty of room in the bed now. The engine was already running, tailpipe streaming exhaust. I thought of the fire; I tried not to think of the fire and the smoke and the people stripped bare. Burning their things. Their appointment in heaven. Dance got in the passenger side, and Grayson and I took the back, beside Starla.
Starla was by herself.
Jamey turned around from the front seat. “Seat belts on, everybody?”
“I thought you said she couldn’t drive?” Dance said.
“She can’t,” Jamey said. She stamped on the gas and the truck lurched toward the woods, turning sharply as she yanked the wheel hard. The house wobbled.
I steadied myself, bracing my arm against the door. “Just get us to the park gate. Get us out of here. Then I’ll take over. I can’t drive right now.”
“What happened back there?” Grayson asked. “Who took our stuff? Why can’t we get it back?”
Out the window, there was nothing to look at, nothing to see. Just white. There was no hint of the people in the valley by the stream. Smoke from their fire hadn’t yet reached the treetops. I couldn’t tell if anyone was changing their mind, running away, couldn’t hear screams.
“It was a group,” Dance said.
“I think they were on something,” I said.
“Wil, those people were just waiting to die.”
I looked away from the window. “We can’t save everyone.”
13
We avoided the cities and towns. We stuck to the winding country roads, the house looping behind us like a girl’s long braid. Sometimes the driver—especially Jamey, when we let her drive—took a turn too fast, and I imagined I heard a crashing behind us, as something fell and hit something else inside the house. Another object was broken from my old life, another supply ruined or wasted; we had so few now.
In the kitchen of the tiny house I had started seeds, tamping paper towels into a glass jar with bean seeds. I had duct-taped the jars under the window, so that they would receive full sun, what was left of it, and wouldn’t sail to the floor and smash on one of Jamey’s daredevil turns.
I used precious water on the seeds, and the last of our paper towels. I was sure the seeds would sprout, even without grow lights. It was the simplest of setups, and we could start other seeds this way, too: carrots, radishes, an avocado if I could find a pit. But so far, the brown seeds had stayed dormant, curled in their secret shells.
I had an aloe plant, useful for snipping off bits and rubbing the ooze on burns, should they come. I felt all kinds of pain would come eventually, and we would be alone with it. I had some kitchen herbs, sage and basil, still alive. I asked everyone to help me look for supplies at the places we stopped for food and fuel: cups, plastic wrap, potting soil. Jamey would break in. We would leave cash folded on the counter, money for dust, for ghosts.
But of course, mostly we stopped at gas stations and roadside stores that didn’t stock gardening supplies. Everything had been emptied by now, anyway, abandoned. Still, we could usually get the pumps working again.
And then we stopped at the first gas station where we could not.
We had learned the stations visible from the road would be trashed, but soon, so too were the places a couple of miles off our route—and we didn’t dare venture much farther than that. What if we got stuck? There was no one to pull us out of a snowbank or up from a ditch. What if the truck broke down? Dance could repair trucks, but we didn’t have spare parts; we hadn’t thought of that.
I hadn’t thought of it.
The first gas station where the pumps had been drained had a Taco Bell attached to the side. This excited Jamey and Grayson. I tried to warn them we would probably not find usable food.
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What we found was an open door. It had been barricaded, and the barricade had been broken through. Most of the boards on the windows had been pried off. I entered first through the smashed door, my boots crunching on a floor sprinkled with glass.
“Pick up Starla,” I said behind me to Jamey. “Don’t let her walk on this. Or maybe just take her back to the truck.”
“No way,” Jamey said. “I’m not missing out on tacos.” Holding Starla, she fanned out behind me. Grayson and Dance took the other aisles.
The metal shelves had been stripped almost bare. The air still smelled of rot, which meant some of the food spoil was newer. Most places just smelled of cold.
I stepped over a smashed jar of pickles. Someone had spilled a bottle of motor oil, and the black slick looked like a dead snack, frozen in a coil.
“Mice have definitely been here,” Grayson said from his aisle.
“Mice are still alive, huh?” Dance said.
“Roaches are going to outlive us all,” Jamey said. “Those fuckers.”
We should have been quiet. I should have warned the others. We should have known better. But I called across the aisle to Jamey: “Any tacos?”
“Everything’s gone,” she said.
“What about gardening stuff?”
“I think this place is pretty wasted,” Grayson said.
We were meeting up at the end of our aisles. In front of us was the Taco Bell portion of the store, its dark and silent counter, familiar shapes looking menacing with the lights off.
“Everything’s gone except...this!” Jamey hopped out from her aisle. She wore a rubber Halloween mask: a werewolf. Her blue eyes swam through the eyeholes; her curls overflowed beneath the floppy neck of the mask. Starla clung to her hip, looking calmly at the monster her mama had become. “Happy Halloween!” Jamey said. “It’s almost Halloween, right?”
“Is it?” Grayson said. “I don’t think so.”
I had no idea. It was September, the last time I remembered, the last time we had had our phones. The thought that it might be October sent panic through my veins. We needed more food and fuel. We needed to find and start more seeds. We needed to move faster.