“Bite me.”
Darci leaned over and bit her on the shoulder.
“Not funny.”
“I phink imf himariouf.” Darci released her toothy grip on Harper’s shirt and righted herself.
Harper swallowed a sudden explosion of wanting to cry. She’d missed her goofy-ass stoner friend so much. Finding her in that Army camp had been a one in a million long shot. She forced herself to smile through the grief of what almost happened. Embrace the positive. Stop dwelling on the bullshit.
“You okay? Now what?”
Harper cleared her throat. “Think I swallowed a fly.”
“Lies.”
Harper laughed.
“Aww, I wub joo, too.” Darci winked.
They chatted about random funny things that happened at school, like the time Darci got detention for smoking weed senior year, then got busted smoking weed in the detention room. That got her sent to counseling.
“The counselor and I smoked together outside the psych place,” said Darci.
“No way.”
“Serious as a heart attack. I swear. He thought the principal was a stuffed shirt.”
“That’s… Wow.” Harper whistled.
“Right?” Darci grinned. “We are the weed nation. Our numbers are legion.”
A spot of bright beige caught Harper’s eye on the left.
She slowed, staring into the trees along the side of the road. A little boy no older than five or so wandered naked on a side street, covered in some manner of orange sauce, probably from canned ravioli. He bounced a tennis ball off the pavement, occasionally darting after it if he missed the catch.
“Lorelei’s got a kindred spirit. They’re both forest nymphs.” Darci chuckled. “At least it’s warm out.”
“Umm. Should I check that out?”
“He doesn’t look alarmed.”
Harper walked her bike a little closer. “He looks pissed.”
“That’s focus. He’s trying not to miss the ball.”
“He’s naked.”
“He’s like five.” Darci shrugged. “That randomly happens at that age.”
“Why is he smeared with sauce?”
“Kids cover themselves in stuff all the time. Remember Renee and the peanut butter?”
Harper bit her lip to stop from laughing. The girl’s mother had photos of two-year-old Renee after she’d gotten into a giant Costco jar of Jif. “Okay, true. But… that also means someone left him unsupervised. Cops in the normal world would definitely check on a little kid running around with no clothes on.”
“The world isn’t exactly normal.”
“Yeah, but…” Harper hopped off her bike, leaned it against a tree, and walked toward the kid in earnest. “Neither is this. Something’s bothering me.”
16
A Good Place
The tennis ball bounced on the pavement, again and again, the soft pop it made echoing into the nearby trees. Harper approached the child at a nonthreatening pace, waiting for him to look up and make eye contact. He didn’t. Long, wild light brown hair framed a cute, narrow face with large hazel eyes. If he’d been wearing anything, she wouldn’t have known him a boy. He didn’t appear too skinny, but everyone now more or less had the same sort of build due to rationed diet of mostly vegetables plus fresh chicken or venison and no overly sugared junk. Also, rationing kept people from overeating.
Maybe in a generation or two, people would have to worry about getting fat again. Maybe.
She watched the boy bounce the ball a few more times, trying to put a name to him. Untamed hair concealed most of his face, but an obliging breeze gave her a decent look at him. Still, she didn’t recognize him. Then again, this far south, he probably didn’t go to school. Anne-Marie Kirby, the town manager, tried to get everyone with school-age kids to go north. Granted, this boy looked a bit young to start school yet, so maybe his parents hadn’t bothered relocating.
“Hi. I’m with the Evergreen Militia. My name’s Harper. What’s your name?”
“I’m Elijah.”
She smiled. “Is everything okay?”
He caught the ball and looked up. “I dunno.”
“You don’t know?” She crouched to eye level and poked one finger into the hair over half his face, pushing it aside. “Why don’t you know if you’re okay?”
Elijah looked past her at Darci, then back to her. “I made a mess. I’m gonna get in troubles when Daddy wakes up.”
“Is that why you don’t have any clothes?”
He bounced the ball once, wobbling his head in an exaggerated nod. “I took shirt off afore open the can so’s it don’t get all sauced. But I messed up wif a can open machine, an’ puhsketti-Os went splat onna floor.”
Harper’s worry increased. “You opened the can? While your Daddy was asleep?”
“Yeah. He won’t wake up.”
Darci sucked in a breath.
Harper grasped Elijah’s shoulders, staring into his eyes. “How long has he been asleep and not waking up?”
Elijah jammed a finger up his nose. “I dunno.”
“Couple hours?”
“Longer.”
“A day?”
Elijah pulled his finger out of his nostril and looked at the snot. “Yeah. I sleeped two times.”
“Crap,” whispered Darci.
Harper guided the boy over to her. “Keep an eye on him?”
“Sure.”
“You gonna wake Daddy up?” He peered up at her.
“That’s what I’m hoping,” replied Harper in a brittle voice. “Where’s Mommy?”
Elijah pointed up. “Inna sky. Mommy went away when the sky lit on fire. Daddy says she inna good place now.”
I hate this stupid world. Why does it have to be like this? A lump formed in Harper’s throat. “Be right back.”
She stood.
Elijah resumed bouncing his tennis ball. “Okay.”
Harper walked from the road to the tree-shrouded driveway marked by child-sized footprints in cheap tomato sauce. A length of sidewalk connected to the front porch of a house nearly three times the size of her new one with a double garage on the left. The front door had been left wide open. Not too surprising given the heat. Also, few people in Evergreen locked their doors. People knew each other; no one really owned anything worth stealing, and almost everyone had at least a handgun if outsiders barged in.
Even though she didn’t expect dangerous trouble, she still kept a hand on her .45 as she stepped inside. The instant she crossed the threshold, the stink of death hit her. Fortunately, it hadn’t become overwhelming. She coughed, pulled her T-shirt up to cover her mouth and nose, then headed for the stairs to the second floor, assuming the bedrooms would be on the upper level in a two-story.
The stink worsened in the hallway at the top of the stairs, but fell short of making her spontaneously vomit. Various toys, mostly action figures or spaceships, littered the hallway. Crayon markings covered a patch of wall near a bathroom. She kept going to the end and peeked into the master bedroom.
Sure enough, the bed contained the body of a man, covered to the waist by a thin sheet. She couldn’t tell his age due to swelling of his face and the complete loss of hair, including eyebrows. The rest of him also had a high degree of swelling as well as purplish red patches and bleeding sores. Spaghetti-O sauce smeared the sheets near the head, and a child-sized handprint in orange marked the pillow. As soon as she processed that all his hair had fallen out, she flashed back to the instant she’d put the irradiated man out of his misery.
Oh, shit!
Harper backed away and ran down the hall, down the steps, and out the front door, coughing on the clean air outside. She hurried over to Elijah and Darci, scooped the boy up into her arms, and hurried to her bike.
“Hey, where are you going?” called Darci. “Shouldn’t we get him a shirt or something?”
“Don’t go in there. Don’t take anything out of that place.” She climbed onto the bike and set Elijah
in her lap facing her. “Hold on tight, okay? I need to get more help.”
“Okay. Did Daddy wake up?”
Harper bowed her head and squeezed the tiny person clinging to her. “I’m sorry, Elijah. He didn’t.”
She remembered passing the old Sheriff’s office barely a minute before spotting the boy, a building next door to the giant library. Harper steered to the right, heading south again. Darci trailed after her, keeping quiet though she had to have a hundred questions brewing. It didn’t take long at all to reach the entrance to the library area, a short but wide five-lane access road leading straight ahead to the library and left to the sheriff’s department.
Three useless police cars and one pickup truck with sheriff’s markings parked in front of the beige one-story building that served as the official headquarters of the Evergreen Militia. Harper had no idea why Walter ran the show from the secondary HQ at the north end of town. Probably because the majority of the residents collected up there and he wanted to be closer, leaving Janice to look over the building that had an armory and jail cells, even if they had little intention to ever put anyone in the holding cells.
She rode up onto the sidewalk, leapt off the bike, and carried Elijah inside like he was on fire.
17
Role Model
Harper rushed up to the front desk, behind which sat a late-twenties woman in an actual sheriff’s department uniform. The woman looked up, her gaze bouncing back and forth from the Mossberg over Harper’s shoulder to the quite naked Elijah in her arms.
“Oh… you must be Harper,” said the woman, relaxing. “Not used to seeing random people running in here carrying semi-auto shotguns. What’s up with the kid?”
“Umm. Found him wandering like this. I, umm…” She handed the boy to Darci. “Mind looking after him for a bit?”
“Yeah, sure.” Darci collected him. “Oof, you’re a bit big to carry around.”
“My Daddy won’t wake up,” said Elijah.
“Aww, shit,” muttered Celeste.
“Yeah. It’s that.” Harper approached the reinforced door to the left of the counter and whispered, “Don’t wanna talk in front of him.”
Celeste let her in. “C’mon back. Might as well keep Janice in the loop.”
“Great. Yeah. My thoughts, too.”
The woman led her down the hall and around a corner to the office once used by the actual elected sheriff, now occupied by Janice Holt, the second in charge of the Evergreen Militia and the person responsible for managing the south portion of town. She had a former-cop air about her, hair back in a bun and a no-nonsense stare, but also gave off a sense of friendliness. The sort of friendliness that could turn on a dime to fire if someone stepped too far out of line.
A tall Hispanic man sporting the neatest hair Harper had ever seen on anyone since the bombs fell sat in one of the chairs facing the desk, evidently in conversation with the boss—before they barged in.
“Janice,” said Celeste. “We have a situation. Something happened to Aaron North. Harper here just brought Elijah in bare as the day he’s born. Kid said his father won’t wake up.”
“Aww, damn,” muttered the guy.
“What happened?” Janice looked at Harper.
“Walt sent me down to deliver pills to this guy Henry Rogers. Did that. On the way back, I spotted the boy wandering around alone. Something about him bugged me. He just didn’t seem to be acting right, so I decided to check on him. His father’s dead in bed upstairs. From what the boy told me, it’s been two days. He’s been feeding himself, but… yeah.”
“Crap.” Janice sighed. “Poor kid. Any idea what killed him?”
“Yeah. Radiation poisoning.”
Everyone stared at her.
“Say what?” asked the guy.
Harper glanced at him. “All his hair had fallen out and his face was puffy. I mean eyebrows, arm hair, chest hair, all of it. He had purple blotches on his skin. I saw a guy a while ago who’d been irradiated. Basically turned him into a zombie. Guy could only moan and flail around. The man in the bed kinda looked like that, but not quite as bad.”
“Where the hell did North go to get exposed to radiation?” asked the guy.
“Harper, this is Calvin Velasquez.” Janice gestured at him.
“Oh, hi.” He shook hands with Harper. “Must be weird not being a celebrity anymore.”
“Umm. I never was a celebrity.” She fidgeted, then glanced at Janice. “I got the boy out of there as fast as I could. No idea if he’s been exposed. He didn’t look burned.”
“That why he’s naked?” asked Celeste. “Worried about contamination?”
“YouTube videos?” Calvin smiled. “Shotgun prodigy.”
“Not famous.” Harper faced Celeste. “No, found him like that. He didn’t want to get sauce on his shirt. But, yeah… contamination is why I didn’t bother grabbing anything to put on him. I have no idea how hot that house is. Do we have any way to find out what in there is radioactive? This could be dangerous for the whole town.”
Janice stood. “Aaron North went on frequent scavenging trips. It’s possible he ran into something radioactive out there. I hate to say this, but if the radiation was around here, the boy would be in the same shape as his father.”
Harper and Celeste cringed.
“Pretty sure Roy Ellis has a Geiger counter. He used to be a doomsday prepper survivalist type before the morons in DC proved him right.” Janice frowned. “Assuming we started it. Hell, even if we didn’t, only morons would fire back.”
“That’s not terribly patriotic, boss,” said Calvin.
“I’m all for retaliation, but nukes are just stupid. Kill mostly civilians, ruin the entire world for everyone. Makes no damned sense to me at all for anyone to use a weapon like that.” Janice walked around the desk and patted Harper on the arm. “Would you mind running north and seeing if Roy’d be willing to head down here with that counter, or at least let you use it?”
“Sure. On it.” Harper hurried back to the lobby.
Darci, seated in the small waiting area beside Elijah, looked up. “What’s going on?”
“Wait here a bit? I gotta run and get Roy real quick. Watch him. I’ll be back in a few minutes.” She ran out to her bike, not waiting for an answer.
Harper pedaled hard, leaning forward like some kind of motorcycle racer. Normally, Roy worked with Cliff patrolling around the western part of town, south of the militia HQ all the way down to the Safeway. The residential areas there held mostly childless single adults. Today, they wouldn’t be on their late rotation, so they ought to be in that area. However, since Roy worked the investigation into Weldon’s murder, he could be almost anywhere.
Dammit. We need personal radios!
The most frustrating part about not having radios was that the town did have a whole bunch of walkie talkies… but they’d all been killed by EMP. No amount of wishing would resurrect the dead technology. Even if they could find some working radios, the way the new power grid kept going up and down would make them unreliable. Rechargeable batteries didn’t work so well without somewhere to plug them in to actually recharge.
As fast as she could make the bike move, she rode to the north part of Evergreen. Eventually, she headed left on Stagecoach Road past the Big R store, steering for the residential area where Roy and Cliff would most likely be. Having no other way to communicate, she swallowed her introversion and shouted, “Roy!” every five to ten seconds as she cruised along. Making noise, drawing attention to herself in public, had been the thing that scared her the most during high school. But a little social embarrassment seemed insignificant in light of a possibly irradiated child.
Fortunately, a world without electricity, working cars, or aircraft tended to be quiet.
The sixth time she yelled, a quick air horn pip sounded from her left and a little behind. She slammed on the brakes, yanked the bike around in a 180, and headed right on Quarter Horse Road.
“Roy?” shouted Harper.<
br />
“Yeah,” called Roy, a fair ways in.
She stopped at a Y-shaped fork in the road a hundred or so feet in from the turn. “Where are you?”
“What’s wrong?” shouted Cliff to the left.
Harper rode that way, nearly crashing into the two men while taking a hard left turn. She ended up hitting a street sign marked ‘Silverleaf Oak,’ but not hard enough to damage the sign—or the bike.
Cliff jogged over and pulled her back onto the road. “What’s got your butt lit on fire?”
Winded from the fast ride and lightheaded from the shouting, she took a moment to simply breathe. “There’s… need… Roy.”
“Here I am.” Roy smiled, arms out to either side.
She looked up at him, never happier to see a cop. Even if she technically was one herself, he still looked like one. “Do you have a Geiger counter?”
“Yeah. And crap. That’s never a good question to ask. What happened?”
“Who got into what mess?” Cliff’s grip on her arm tightened a little from nervousness.
Harper shook her head. “This guy past the lake, Aaron North. Walter sent me down there to deliver some medicine. On the way back, I saw this little boy wandering around in his birthday suit looking lost. Checked on him… found his father dead in bed. Looked like radiation poisoning. All his hair fell out. Swollen. Been there a couple days. Janice sent me up here to ask for the Geiger counter.”
“You know how to use it?”
“Not a clue.”
Roy nodded. “All right. Guess I’ll take the ride then. You handle it okay up here?”
“You know it.” Cliff rubbed Roy’s bald head. “Careful with the radiation. We’d never notice if you got poisoned.”
“You’re a funny man, Burton.” Roy made a ‘come here’ gesture at Harper. “Let me use the bike to go grab the counter and a second bike.”
Harper dismounted. “All right. Guess I’ll head back out onto 74 and wait for you there?”
“That works.” Roy swung the bike around, got on, and rode away.
“Exciting day.” Cliff folded his arms. “You see anything hot?”
Evergreen (Book 4): Nuclear Summer Page 16