by Alison Stine
* * *
The light dipped behind a brown mountain and Grayson rolled the truck to a stop. “Any farther and we’re out of gas,” he said.
There was no other car on the road. There had not been one for miles. Woods alongside of us, woods behind. Mountains before us, craggy and spiked with more trees.
“How far are we to the Tennessee border?” I said.
“I don’t know anymore. We’ve taken so many detours. Maybe we’re close.”
“We’ve been driving forever,” Jamey said.
“What—” I tapped my finger on the windshield “—is that?”
Orange flared in the trees along the left side of the road, a wink in the drab landscape. It flickered, bright, then dim, then bright again. A lantern? A chemical plant?
“Some other idiot got his house blowed up,” she said.
“No, it’s too small.” I was already pulling on my gloves. “Stay here. I’ll check it out.”
“Wil?” Grayson said.
“Maybe they have fuel. I have the gun,” I said.
I had my knife, too. I tucked the ends of my hair into my scarf and went out, sucking in the shock of air. Cold settled into the folds of my arms and legs.
It felt like it was getting worse. The snowfall the night we had been robbed hadn’t ever melted. Nothing had melted, and more snow was coming all the time.
Grayson, Jamey, and Starla all crowded into the front seat of the truck and watched me, their breath steaming the glass. Grayson had left the headlights on to light my way down the road, but the orange light came to me.
Out of the trees, it came, growing and bobbing over the gravel and salt on the side of the road, to where I stood. Grayson flashed the lights. I turned and he blinded me, flicking on and off the brights, some signal I wasn’t getting. I turned back around.
A boy stood in front of me.
Eight or nine? I was no good at children’s ages. He carried something, and I took a step back, feeling for my pocket.
A gun. I thought he carried a gun. Like me.
But it was a toy. Oversized, with buttons and fluorescent levers that did not belong on a real gun, details that might have been meant to protect him in the world before the lost spring, but maybe would not have. It was plastic. The barrel held a burning wad of cloth. He was using the toy gun as a torch.
“It’s this way,” he said behind his scarf.
I looked back at the truck. Grayson had dimmed the brights and was mouthing something to me. Jamey was shaking her head.
“Lock the doors,” I said, as if they could hear me. “Be back soon.”
I followed the boy.
This was my job. I thought it had always been mine, but I had only just grown into it: to follow with hands in my pockets—knife in one, gun in the other.
The boy blended into the undergrowth off the side of the road. The only hint of him was the torch, which flickered in and out. Saplings gave way to thicker trees as we veered farther away. I turned back to look at the truck, and the boy reassured me, “It’s right this way.”
What was? Was I wrong to trust a child?
“We need fuel,” I said. “We can trade or pay for it.”
“Come on, then.”
Where were we going? I glanced back one time more to see the lights of the truck still blazing. They were going to run down the battery—but they needed that heat. The boy ducked under a branch, and I followed. He held brambles back for me. Walking along a dirt track, we passed a tangle of metal and rebar. An old road sign. It had been used for target practice, the letters mangled with buckshot. I tried not to feel afraid at this. It didn’t mean bad men, it didn’t mean Skate State.
TOWN, I read. Nothing more.
Beyond the sign, small white houses lay out in a double row, facing each other across the dirt track. They seemed like blow-up dollhouses, barely bigger than my own tiny house, each with a tin roof, small windows, and a porch. They were occupied, each window lit by a candle or lamp. At the end of the row—I could barely make it out in the darkness—was a building much larger than the others.
I had seen this before. A coal company town. A company store. And all the little houses, planted down almost on top of each other, were homes for the coal miners’ families.
I couldn’t believe this company town was still standing. But of course it had been taken over. Shelters like this, with walls and roofs, wouldn’t stay empty for long.
The boy with the torch, who had been so solemn in his mission to lead me here, raced off, confident he had done his job, whatever that was. He joined a group of other children playing. Then he became a kid again, in a blur of bright coats and plastic things.
The kids were tumbling in and out of a parked van. It had ice molded to the sides of it, flat tires, and a blue glow that was familiar, and also strange to see again: a TV, hooked up to a generator. It blared cartoons. Whatever they were watching, it had to be a DVD. I was pretty sure TV stations weren’t on the air anymore. I saw something written on the side of the van...
Then I was surrounded by women.
“Do you need food? Do you need shelter?”
“Gas,” I said. “We need gas. We can pay.”
“Are you hungry? Are you in any danger?”
“Are you running from anyone?”
The women had lanterns and flashlights. It felt like being swarmed by fireflies. But one of the women spoke with a musical voice, high and light. I recognized that voice. It both blended and rose above the ones. I parted the women, trying to get a glimpse of the face in the light.
It was her. It was her. It had to be.
Why was she here? How had the boy led me to her? It felt like a year had passed, maybe longer—but it had not been even a season; there were no seasons. I thought of us lying side by side in our sleeping bags, when camping was fun, not survival, just something we did in her room or the backyard. I thought of us running deep into the woods behind her house, branches slapping us, my face stung with tears, when I told her about Lobo: losing my mama to him, his anger, the basement room. There was nothing to do after that but go home. I thought of boys vying for her attention, pulling her hair, flicking notes at her on the youth group trips while I looked down at my hands, rough from work, scratched from stems and the trimming shears. There was nothing to do.
It was her. Lisbeth.
Her face looked both older and younger at the same time. Lines marked her face, fine as telephone wire. She had dark circles; we all did. Hair straggled out of a braid under her hat. When I hugged her, I felt the sharpness of her bones.
“What are you doing here?” Lisbeth said.
“We’re on the way to California. Following my mama.”
“Your mama? Who’s we?”
“What are you doing here?”
There were so many questions, only questions.
Lisbeth stepped back, and I saw the town clearer. Fires burned in barrels along the path, their sides corroded like lace. People had been told there was a visitor, a stranger to the camp, and they were coming out of the little houses. Many of the windows were broken, I noticed, patched with cardboard and plywood. Rags were stuffed in the holes in the house siding. Gutters had fallen down, packed with frozen moss. A few houses had trees growing through the rotten shingles. The saplings’ growth was stunted now.
I saw white shapes in the shadows that might have been the other church vans. The van where the children played had not been moved in a long time.
“This is as far as we made it,” Lisbeth said. “The vans started to break down. All of them. One after the other. It seemed like a sign.”
“You don’t believe in signs.”
“Then we found this place. We’re fixing it up, making it a real town again. My parents are happy.” She was doing that thing when she chattered on, filling the space, when what I want
ed, all I really wanted, was for her to stand there. Just to be. “A few other people have joined us. Like you.”
I couldn’t think of what to say. I couldn’t make my mouth say it. She looked wind-burned, raw, and underfed.
“My parents!” She grabbed my arm. “You have to see my folks! They’ll be so happy you made it.” She wasn’t looking me in the eye.
I squeezed Lisbeth’s hand and dropped it. “I have to go back to the truck and get the others.”
14
I don’t know what I expected. That we would drive across the country together, ride through the cold dark, and arrive side by side, alive and safe, in sunny California. Grayson, healed. Starla, healthy. Jamey, happy. And me. Maybe Lisbeth.
But then came the news that The Church hadn’t made it anywhere warm, hadn’t made it out of Appalachia even, had just given up where they’d broken down.
Dance had said, long before he left, that one thing collapsing meant everything would. Ice froze power cables, crashed tree limbs into lines. Ice stalled water in the pipes, brought trains on the rails and trucks on the highways to a halt. Fuel couldn’t get to the gas stations, food to the stores. People stopped showing up for work. I imagined paychecks stopped arriving. Banks were drained. No farmers could grow more food, except for those with greenhouses and grow lights. Generators for the power. Diesel, solar, wind.
And seeds.
I didn’t show Lisbeth the pouch of seeds around my neck, or the heaviness in my pocket. I didn’t tell her about the Pumpkin King. Or Dance, who was gone. She might have asked me if I had liked him, if he was handsome, what he had meant to me, which were the wrong questions.
Lisbeth and I sat out on the hood of one of the church vans. This one had been repurposed as a laundry room, and the hood thrummed with the machines inside. Who knows where The Church had found them. The coin slots had been jammed with rags, and the machines were plugged into a generator. Long extension cords snaked across the frozen paths through town. At least this meant women didn’t have to wash clothes by hand here. I hoped. A pipe expelled the dirty water from the washing machine, repurposing it for something else. Everything had to be recycled, every broken thing remade. Another van had been turned into a chapel, the front seats removed for a mini pulpit. A cross hung from the rearview mirror. There wasn’t enough room for the whole of The Church in there, of course, but the preacher spoke with the van door open, congregants stamping out in the cold as they stood and listened, and there was talk of maybe soldering a few of the vans together to make a larger space.
The company store was in ruins, Lisbeth said. The ceiling had fallen down, sodden with rot. Rats and other animals had made a home in there, but then they had died. The Church was fixing it up, but that would take a long time.
“I guess you’re here for a long time,” I said. The laundry van, the chapel van—those things weren’t going to be on the road again anytime soon.
Lisbeth looked in the distance, across the old railroad tracks that bordered the town. Once coal had shuttled through here. Now the tracks were bones under the snow. I wouldn’t have known they were even there if she hadn’t told me; others from The Church had found them when they had first explored.
“How is this better than home?” I asked.
“It isn’t. But it’s where we ended up. It’s what happened. We didn’t know things would get so bad on the road so quickly.”
“Yeah, we didn’t, either.”
“I like it here. I like that we’re picking up where someone else left off. We’re making it work. I guess we’ll stay here as long as it works.”
“Is it working, though?”
I thought of the railroad tracks, rusting. What else might be buried under the snow? I tried to remember the last time I had seen a train. Were there train cars stalled, abandoned down the line? Had sleet melded the wheels to the track? Was it all just waiting there, stocked with food or supplies?
I remembered what my mama had said about the year she was born, a blizzard year when schools had closed for weeks. A woman disappeared walking from her house to her barn. A semi had been buried in drifts, found days later, the driver still alive. To get me to fall asleep at night, sometimes she would retell the story: how the roads were indistinguishable from fields—all were snowfields. How her own mama’s eyelashes froze. The animals began to starve. That was why the woman had disappeared, trying to get to the barn to take care of her animals. It wasn’t a story for children, but I had asked for it again and again.
“I wish that you were singing,” I said to Lisbeth.
She turned back to me. “I am singing. Every Sunday and Wednesday night.”
“I mean, for a larger audience. For people to really hear you. I wish you had gone to a city like you said.”
All that we had said, lying side by side in sleeping bags on the floor. It would be easier when we were older, we had decided. I could leave the farm, leave Lobo far behind. Grow what I chose. Lisbeth could sing on a stage wearing anything she wanted—eyeliner, a skirt that showed her knees.
“Oh, that was just talk,” Lisbeth said. She waved away the memories, her breath slowing beside me in the dark. She pointed to a van beside the company store. The tires had been stripped off this one, and the interior of the van fizzed yellow and red with sparks. I heard the drone of a machine. Someone was welding, I realized. “We’re working on that one. Trying to turn it into a radio station, to broadcast out. Your friend Grayson’s gonna help with that.”
“Grayson?” He never did get the ham radio to work.
Lisbeth seemed not to know that. “If we can get the radio station running, maybe we can reach other people. We can find out what they’re doing in other parts of the country. What we should do next.”
“You’re really good, Lisbeth,” I said. “I miss hearing you sing. I miss you.”
She took my hand. She wore fingerless gloves, hand-knitted. Did she spend her time doing that? Knitting? What a waste, if she did. Her fingers felt cold as roots in the ground. “You’re welcome to stay here, Wil,” she said.
“Have things changed around here?”
Her hand slackened around mine. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, can you wear pants now? Can you read whatever you want?”
“That doesn’t matter. In the long run, that’s not important to me. It’s just important that we stick together, help each other.”
I didn’t know which we she meant. “I have Jamey and Starla to look after now.”
“We can make a place for everyone.”
“Have you met Jamey?”
“Wil.” She tilted her head and looked at me straight-on.
I was afraid to meet her eyes, afraid that they might convince me—and they couldn’t convince me. I had to make sure Mama was all right. Had to find a place for Jamey and Starla. I imagined Mama welcoming them like her own grandkids.
“Wil,” Lisbeth repeated. “What if this is all there is?”
The washer grunted and finished its cycle. The sun had all but disappeared, pale pink rust in a sky streaked white. It would snow tonight. It would snow every night.
The Church patrolled the railroad tracks, and the road beyond the trees: that was how they had found us. They had watch duty, food, a school in the little town. They had a Laundromat. I tried to think of what it might be like to stay here: to sleep in a house without wheels, to wake without fear, to live in a place with guards.
But possibilities were like stars. I could go anywhere. I could have a little farm of my own. I could grow things again, everything we needed. “I have to know what’s out there,” I said.
“What if it’s nothing?”
* * *
Lisbeth left me to do her evening chores. All these new little worlds had structure, patterns. Otherwise, they would fall into chaos, like Skate State—and even Skate State had a hierarchy: Jake in ch
arge, the men beneath him fixing the cars and guarding the property, scaring up food and supplies. The women, cooking and cleaning, taking care of the children. Doing everything else, everything he made them do. All the work women were going to have to do again.
Lisbeth said she had to feed the dogs, pets that came along and strays that had wandered into the town, drawn by the smell of food. The Church was living off the emergency supplies they had brought with them, stockpiles that would last for months, though maybe not that long if they kept taking in strangers.
Dogs had been allowed to come along with the caravan—but not my mama. I remembered the offer Lisbeth had made before The Church left was just for me. I was still young enough to be saved, she had told me once, because I was a child when I first started breaking the law. When was I going to be too old, beyond the reach of her saving book? Was I already? I wondered if she still slept with her shoes on.
Someone was coming up the path toward me in the darkness. I heard the crunch of ice and a rhythmic thud. It was Grayson, dragging his leg. He hauled himself onto the van hood beside me.
I wished we had whiskey, something to warm us, sitting outside in the cold like stupid kids. We didn’t even have a fire. But as soon as we went inside, they would separate us, I knew. Boys in one house, girls in another. The thought made me nervous.
“What did the doctor say?” I asked Grayson.
“I’ve got to stay off it.”
“Why are you walking on it, then?”
“Because you’re all the way out here.”
Strings of bulb lights lit the company town behind us. Barrel fires bobbed in the darkness, and extension cords wove back and forth across the ground. Somebody was singing as they did their chores. Not Lisbeth.
“I’m not much on groups,” I said. “The Church still creeps me out a little.”
“Well, some things never change.”
“Anyway, I thought you would want to spend some time alone with your folks.”
When I had arrived back at the company town with the others, his parents had come out from one of the little houses, two people who looked like Grayson, but smaller, faded. We were the ones who had been on the road, but they were the ones who looked weary. His mama had worry lines cut deep into her face. His daddy sniffed back tears when he saw Grayson, saw it was really him—and that he was limping.