The World That Remains (Evergreen Book 2)

by Matthew S. Cox

  “Where are you going?” asked Madison.

  Harper trotted after the little blonde girl. “Going to walk Becca home. She’s almost half a mile away on Thunderbird Lane.”

  “Wow, your mom yells loud.” Jonathan laughed.

  “It’s not far,” said Lorelei. “We pass her house coming home from school.”

  “I know. Just wanna make sure she gets there.”

  Becca stopped and looked back, likely having heard the conversation.

  “Sorry,” said Harper. “You just got me worrying with what Emmy said.”

  “It’s okay.” Becca smiled. “It’s nicer to walk with someone than be alone. It’s almost dark. Don’t tell Maddie, but I’m kinda scared of the dark now.”

  Harper nodded. “I won’t. Umm, did something happen?”

  “Not really. Just the lights went out and we sat in the dark listening to scary stuff. Whenever it’s dark, I think about people screaming. A lot of people screamed outside, but we stayed in the basement.” Becca looked up at her. “I’m really sorry about your parents. They were cool.”

  “Thanks.”

  The girl lived up at the north end in the fringes of the golf-course-turned-farm, where most of the families with school age kids had been assigned. Harper walked with her past Carrie’s house and took a left onto a dirt trail somewhere between huge driveway and road. It led between that house and the next, allowing car access to two more houses well removed from the street. She headed across the grass at the end to a strip of gravel that connected to a street she knew as Sun Creek. It curved back and forth in a repeating S bend until ending at a crossing street.

  They continued straight north over dirt and grass to Lewis Road, went past it, and marched up a grassy hill covered in thick trees to save time. A direct path felt more like she hiked a forested wilderness than walked across a town, but that route would make the trip much quicker.

  “Have you seen anyone scary following or watching you?” asked Harper.

  “Nope. Except when I visit you guys, I don’t walk alone. Mila’s always alone ’cause no one really likes her.”

  Harper sighed.

  “I mean, she says scary stuff that’s weird, always about dead people. Some of the kids talk about her behind her back. Do you think she does it on purpose to make people stay away from her?”

  “Not sure. Has anyone tried talking to her?” Harper scaled a steep spot and paused to look around for anyone watching them.

  “Yeah.” Becca grabbed a tree for balance while following up the hill. “Phew. Why are we climbing? The roads are easier.”

  “Got food on. Don’t want it to burn so I’m taking a shortcut.” She smiled.

  “Yeah, I tried talking to her, but she kept saying weird stuff like the Shadow Man’s gonna get me. Do you think there’s really a Shadow Man? Or someone watching Emmy? Is that why you wanted to walk me home?”

  Harper decided to follow Medinah Drive once they reached it. After they passed the house with the pale driveway, she’d cut to the right across the hills and go straight to Thunderbird, where Becca lived. “I don’t know. Wanted to be extra cautious.”

  “Cool.”

  “Hey, if you hear any of the other kids talking about being watched, please let me know? Or tell someone else on the militia?”

  Becca nodded. “Okay.”

  Mr. Perry emerged from the house when they approached. Becca thanked Harper for escorting her home and darted inside. Her father also thanked Harper for keeping his daughter safe, and made pleasant conversation for a little while. She almost mentioned that a girl said she’d been followed, but didn’t want to ignite a panic so she kept that to herself and hurried toward home once the man went back inside.

  She didn’t mention it because she’d only heard second hand information, and from kids overhearing another kid at that, not even an adult. Also, anything she said would be taken as the word of the militia, which still made her feel awkward as hell. If she elevated something one kid said and another kid took the wrong way to a town-wide state of alarm, it would not go over well with Walter Holman.

  She’d have to find more concrete evidence first.

  The frankensoup she’d thrown together came out good.

  However, in all fairness, her standard for ‘good’ food had fallen quite a bit in recent months. Any food that met three conditions: not bugs, sorta-hot, and didn’t make her gag, amounted to a good meal. On the rare occasion they ate something approaching pre-war normal, it amounted to a feast. She’d never admit it to Madison, but she loved it whenever Cliff brought home chicken or venison. Some militia teams had been out hunting lately, but didn’t have much luck.

  She gathered up the cans and the box the pasta had been in, then carried them out to the yard behind the house. The box went into the burn barrel with other food scraps, the cans into a big plastic trash bin since they wouldn’t burn. Mayor Ned wanted everyone to save the cans in case the town ever needed to melt them down and make stuff out of the metal.

  “Not even nuclear war can stop us from recycling.” She shut the lid and chuckled.

  Harper started back to the house, but paused at a sniffle from behind. It sounded like someone on Butternut Lane, a short loop road that ran past the front of the house behind hers where Dennis Prosser—another militia member—lived. She grumbled to herself for again leaving the shotgun inside, having only intended to walk into the backyard for as long as it took to put out the trash. Fast as she could, she dashed inside to grab it, threw it over her shoulder on its strap, and ran around the back neighbor’s fence.

  A pretty, blonde teen in a plain yellow dress with white ballet flats meandered down the street in no great hurry to be anywhere, crying quietly to herself. Harper had seen the girl briefly around town, one of the kids who showed up on the bus the same night Tyler flaked out. They’d all come from a high school in Colorado Springs, or rather from Denver while on a trip to play hockey as the visiting team. Had they been in Colorado Springs that morning, they wouldn’t be around anymore.

  This girl looked like a sophomore and moped along with her head down in a manner that suggested she’d just broken up with her boyfriend, or suffered an attack of the sads like Harper so often did whenever she thought of her parents. While that concerned her on a human level, it relieved her from a militia standpoint. Still, since she lacked psychic powers, she couldn’t merely assume the cause of the tears. If someone had hit her or did worse, she’d need to deal with it as part of her job.

  Harper trotted up behind her. “Umm, hi.”

  The girl stopped and turned, looking up with an almost-embarrassed expression. Red ringed her bright blue eyes. Within seconds of them staring at each other, Harper felt her defenses going up, old instincts kicking in. This girl had perfect movie star looks, which made sense considering she’d been a cheerleader for the hockey team. Though some boys, especially Colt Parrish who she’d had a mild crush on freshman year, told Harper she was pretty, she never really felt like it. Not since Freddie Brown used her as an example to explain the difference between ‘cute’ and ‘hot’ to one of his friends right out in the cafeteria where everyone could hear him.

  “Umm… That’s a gun.” The girl stared at the shotgun and took a step back. “Are you allowed to have that?”

  “Yeah. I’m Harper Cody. I’m on the militia.”

  “Oh, cool. Oh wow. Really?”

  “Yeah, really. I know I’m only seventeen but—”

  “Ooh.” The girl’s face took on an almost psychotic mixture of broad smile and crying. “You’re like a minor celebrity.”

  “Uhh, no I’m not.”

  “You’re on YouTube.”

  Harper groaned mentally. Of course, Dad posted videos of her shooting competitions. Teen prodigy and so on. “Oh, that…”

  “You don’t like it?” The girl wiped at her eyes. “My father made me watch some of them, trying to get me to the range. I’m terrified of guns.”

  “Oh. Ehh, they’re oka
y. My dad just bragged a lot about me. It got kinda old. I wasn’t exactly the sort of person who liked all that attention.”

  “Why’d you come running over? I’m not in trouble, am I?”

  “No. Just… well, are you?” Harper smiled the way she did when comforting Madison. “Kinda looked like you were upset and wanted to make sure no one had like attacked you or something.” Talking to this girl only a year, maybe two, younger than her like a police officer talking to a kid gave her a strange little spike of confidence. She shrugged off the sense of being the introverted sweet girl everyone overlooked facing off against a popular princess.

  “Nah, no one did anything. I’m just freaking out about missing so much school. They’re gonna make me repeat a year and it’ll screw up my pre-admission to Berkeley. Everything’s gonna fall apart. I worked so hard for it.”

  Harper blinked. “Are you serious?”

  “No, I’m Grace. Grace Hughes.” She offered a hand.

  “Right…” Harper shook hands with her. “I mean, are you serious about that school thing or messing with me?”

  Grace flailed her arms. “My parents are on me twenty-four-seven about school and everything. If I get held back a whole year and blow my chances at Berkley, they’re gonna kick me out of the house. I get grounded and screamed at if I get Bs. A-minuses only get me screamed at.”

  “Umm.”

  “What?” Grace fixed her with a brittle stare. “It’s really upsetting. I have a right to be upset. My whole future is at risk, even if it’s a future my dad set up for me. I… umm… I don’t even know where I am right now. Kinda got lost.”

  Oh, this girl’s checked out. “Grace,” she said in as soothing a tone as she could manage. “There’s been a nuclear war. I’m not sure exactly how to say this gently, but there is no more school. Neither one of us is going to college.”

  The slightly younger girl jumped as if startled, then looked around at the trees and houses. “You ever fall asleep in the afternoon and wake up when it’s almost dark and forget what day it is?”

  “Couple times, yeah.”

  “I, umm… wow. Okay.” Grace let out a long, sad sigh. “Guess it wasn’t a dream. I guess I was maybe kinda half sleepwalking.”

  “That’s a thing?”

  Grace brushed her hands at her hair. “Apparently. I woke up thinking the bus made a weird wrong turn and we’d been lost out here for months. Hey, you’re on the militia? Can I complain? They’re not letting me go to school. They said I’m too old at sixteen. I don’t want to waste all the time I spent studying. And please tell me there’s coffee somewhere? Need some bad.”

  “There’s no point for us to go to school anymore. We’re old enough to do necessary stuff. Everything’s broken. Someone has to put it back together. It’s not 2019 anymore. Welcome to 1819.”

  “No… no… that can’t be right.” Grace whirled about in a circle, gesturing wildly. “Everything can’t be gone. I need to go home! My parents are in Colorado Springs.”

  Harper suppressed a cringe and grasped her by the shoulders, giving her a little shake. “I’m sorry. The only thing we can do is keep on surviving.”

  “It’s not fair! I got into Berkeley as a junior. Do you know how hard that is? What am I going to do now?” Grace broke into sniffles again.

  “There’s no sugar-coated way to say this. We’re no longer living in a world of diet mocha lattes or vegan smoothies where soccer moms scramble to shuttle their daughters from school to dance class to gymnastics, making sure the kid’s never late for anything and still has time to plow through a mountain of homework every night while scarfing down microwaved Hot Pockets because cooking real food takes too long.” Harper looked down, kicking her sneaker at the road. “Used to be, no one had time to even talk to their family… now, family is all we have left.”

  Grace shuddered. “But I don’t have any left. They’re all dead. My parents, my brother… even my cat.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. My parents are dead, too.” Harper reached toward her. “I meant the family we make. I’m not related to anyone in my house except my sister Madison, but Cliff’s basically my dad, Jonathan and Lorelei are siblings.”

  “Oh. I guess. I don’t even have that. They put us in the house with Anne-Marie and this girl Summer because they had extra room. Feels more like a dorm than home. I know what you mean about the racing around. My life was like that, too. I used to have so much to do I spent the past two years constantly busy. Cheer, drama club, homework… I used to joke with my father that I couldn’t wait to get out of school and start my career so I had time to act like a kid again.”

  Harper laughed. “Wait, actual drama club or do you mean your friends.”

  “Actual drama club.” Grace rolled her eyes. “But my friends wrote way more drama than the theater teacher.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  Grace brushed at her dress. “They’re probably all gone. Everyone keeps saying Colorado Springs was flattened, nothing left.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I didn’t really like any of my friends. I’m sad they’re dead, but I’m not like devastated. Does that make me shallow?”

  “If they weren’t really friends, I guess not.” Harper fidgeted. “How can you hang out with people and they’re not your friends?”

  “My mom thought it would be good for me to spend time with particular kids my age. She picked them all for me. But every one of us had schedules. Outside of school, we didn’t really hang out that much. It felt like we skipped straight to our thirties and sometimes bumped into each other and did brunch.”

  Harper chuckled.

  “So it really happened?” asked Grace.

  “Yeah. I’m sorry.”

  The girl drew in a deep breath, gazing around at the greenery. “It’s so hard to believe it all went away so fast. I don’t know if I should hope my parents survived. It’s not like I’ve seen home and know it’s gone. Just hearing people tell me. They could be wrong, right?”

  “Guess it’s possible. But a lot of people who never met each other all saying the same thing makes it probably true. And I’m sorry for saying that.”

  “I know. They’re probably dead. Do you think it’s better to know for sure that someone you care about is dead or not know?”

  Harper cringed. She studied the road while her brain chewed on the idea of being separated from Mom and Dad and not knowing what happened to them. “Umm. I dunno. That’s a hard question. Knowing they’re dead makes them definitely dead. Not knowing, either way, there is still some hope that they might not be gone, but I can understand how not knowing is really hard.”

  “You know, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.” Harper looked off to the side.

  “I’m sorry.” Grace regarded her with an odd expression. “Can I hug you?”

  “Sure.”

  The instant they embraced, Grace burst into tears. Harper caught the contagious sadness and wept as well. They stood there holding each other for a while, awash in the shared grief of lost parents.

  Eventually, the girl let go and struggled to compose herself. “Thanks for talking. No one ever really talked to me for real before.”

  “No problem,” said Harper. “Umm… why wouldn’t anyone talk to you?”

  “They talked to me, but not for real. I was that girl. My dad was a federal judge, I was popular, had money. Other kids wanted to be around me because it made them feel important, not because they cared about being my friend. To my mother, I was like some younger version of her that she showed off to her friends. Dad wanted me to be a lawyer like him, eventually become a judge. My whole life was planned out for me… except for a husband. They didn’t quite go that far and arrange a marriage.”

  Harper whistled. “That’s… wow. Sorry. Sounds so lonely.”

  “It was.”

  “The popular girls at my school weren’t like you. So snobby and fake. Like the machine that makes Barbies got stuck and kept printing out th
e same stuck-up priss over and over.”

  Grace laughed.

  “This one girl, Tabitha, even threw a fit because the school wouldn’t let her bring her dog to class. She tried to say it was a service animal, but she had one of those little ones you can put inside a purse.”

  “Ugh. I really hate it when people do that. Service dogs are no joke.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what were you studying for?”

  “No idea.” Harper shrugged.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I couldn’t make up my mind what I wanted to do.”

  “Wow, that’s so out there I can’t even picture what it would be like not to know.”

  “Did you want to become a lawyer?”

  Grace made a ‘what can you do?’ face. “Not really. I would’ve preferred going into particle physics and working with the collider or maybe helping develop usable ion propulsion for spacecraft.”

  “Wow.” Harper stared.

  “Yeah, I know… I look like an airhead, but I’m not.” Grace lowered her voice to an almost whisper. “Don’t tell anyone, but I really hate being the center of attention.”

  “So, naturally, you became a cheerleader.”

  Grace frowned. “Mom. There’s no saying no to that woman. Apparently, any woman who became anyone had been the head cheerleader in high school. Inside, I’m screaming, but I can fake it outside. Hated those stupid games. So cold. So loud. So many people looking at me. All I wanted to do was go home, hide in my room and read or study.”

  “I feel that. I’m like the biggest introvert. And yeah, I know… shy ginger, go figure.”

  “So, naturally, you became a cop.”

  Harper made a noise like a goose hit by a car as the weight of losing Dad strangled her attempt at a laugh to silence. Without even thinking about it, she told Grace about why she couldn’t give up the shotgun, then rambled over the whole thing with Madison and the phone. By the time she finished, Grace had teared up again.

  They got into a conversation about the stuff they missed about the world while Harper auto-piloted home, Grace following.