Lorelei put her right foot up on his desk. “I have pink socks!”
“You sure do.” Walter smiled at her. “They look nice and warm.”
The child nodded, grinning. “Daddy got me them for Christmas.”
Harper tugged her back from the desk. “Shoulder still bothering you?”
Lorelei stretched her leg, trying to pull her abandoned shoe close enough with her toes to step back into it.
“A bit. Doc Khan says it should eventually stop, but I think he means I’ll just get used to the pain.” He chuckled. “Something more than my shoulder is bothering you.”
“Yes.” She hesitated a few seconds, afraid he’d think her an easily-frightened child, but decided to let it out. Despite her urgency, she spoke in a calm and detailed manner, explaining what she knew about the ‘stalker’.
Walter listened, occasionally nodding. Growing concern in his expression added to her confidence and calmed her enough to keep speaking in a controlled manner, though she couldn’t keep her worry out of her voice entirely. Once she finished, he asked the kids to tell him again what they saw.
“We were going home from school. I just kinda looked into the trees and saw this guy watching us,” said Madison. “I pointed at him and he started coming after us, so we ran.”
Her description of him as being ‘all black like a ghost’ did make Walter smirk a little, since he’d also heard of Mila’s story. However, as Harper had already mentioned thinking it’s a normal person in all-black clothing, he didn’t laugh them out of his office.
“All right. It does sound like this is a matter of concern. We’ll put it out there to the town that no kid should go anywhere alone for the time being. Not until we find an answer to this.”
“Thanks.” He doesn’t think I’m crazy at least. “Oh, Liz asked if anyone found anything about the food thefts?”
“Not yet, I’m afraid. It’s being looked into. She’s got every reason to be persistent, but asking us five times a day isn’t helping.”
“Yeah.” Harper nodded. “Just passing on a message. Thanks, Mr. Holman. Gonna take the kids home and try to keep them safe.”
“Okay. Drat. I wish phones still worked. Gotta send someone down to Janice.” He tapped a finger on the dead desk phone.
“I miss phones, too,” said Madison. “Maybe too much.”
Jonathan stuck his hands in his pockets. “It’s strange not having video games with me everywhere I go. Is that what it was like when you were a kid, Mr. Holman?”
He laughed. “I’m not that old. Video games just started up back then. We had an Atari 2600 in the living room.”
“What’s that?” asked Jonathan.
“A dinosaur.” Walter smiled. “Kind of like me.”
The kids laughed.
“Thanks for taking it seriously, Mr. Holman.” Harper gathered her siblings close. “I know it sounds a bit out there and there’s no real evidence, but…”
“Well, you made a good argument that something might be going on. And a little while of extra vigilance is hardly worth the risk that something might happen.”
Harper stood tall, relieved that he’d taken her seriously. “Gonna take these guys home now, unless you want me to run that note down to Janice.”
“I still have to write it. No sense making you sit around here. There aren’t that many kids down the south half anyway. If this guy is targeting children, he won’t have much reason to be down that way.”
“Okay.”
She stood there awkwardly for a moment, not sure if she should wait for him to tell her she could leave.
“Is there something else?” asked Walter.
“No. Just the break-in I told you about yesterday, and Katherine’s missing handgun.” Warmth rushed to her cheeks. “Sorry. Just thinking.” After giving Walter a feeble smile, she ushered the kids out of the room and headed outside.
Except for Lorelei saying hello to random passing birds or squirrels, no one spoke as they walked down Route 74. Harper’s thoughts swam around in a torrent of emotion. One moment, she hated the universe for everything that happened, wanting to go home to the world she remembered so badly it brought tears to her eyes. The next, she slipped into wondering why she bothered trying to survive at all. Whoever hit ‘the button’ made the decision that humans didn’t deserve to exist anymore. Maybe they’d been right.
“Hi, Mr. Squirrel,” chirped Lorelei.
“I think that’s a possum.” Jonathan made a clicking noise, which startled said unknown critter into a streak of grey fur.
“Hi, Mr. Bird!” called Lorelei, waving at the sky.
The girl’s bright, cheerful tone pulled Harper back from the precipice of apathy. As Hilltop Drive came into view, she found herself on Panic Island, dreading ambush from every shadow. That lasted only a few seconds before anger took over. Evergreen should’ve been a haven, not a dangerous environment. She scowled at trees and the corners of houses, daring whoever had the nerve to poison her new home to show themselves.
Upon reaching the house, the kids headed to the backyard to play, going around the outside. Harper went in, startled to find Grace sitting on the couch.
“Hey. Sorry for just walking in.”
“It’s cool.” Harper exhaled, trying to still her nerves. “On edge.”
“About?” Grace followed her into the kitchen.
After resting the shotgun on the counter, Harper leaned on it while explaining about the supposed Shadow Man.
“He’s not just watching kids. I’m pretty sure someone or something followed me last night.” Grace smoothed her dress over her legs in a repetitive, nervous motion. “I thought it might have been a mountain lion. Think it’s the same thing?”
“I’m sure it’s a person.” Harper proceeded to organize the food she’d put away so hastily earlier.
“Maybe there’s more than one thing out there?” Grace got up and helped sort cans.
“Could be. Oh, how’d it go with the job?”
Grace offered a nervous smile. “They’ve agreed to let me apprentice with them to see how it goes. Guess I’m smart enough.” She laughed. “It was kinda funny. Dr. Khan took one look at me and I could tell he was like, ‘yeah right this ditz wants to be a doctor?’ You should’ve seen the shock on his face once I started answering questions. He figured blondes are stupid.”
Harper laughed. “That’s cool.”
“Mommy said I’m stupid, too.” Lorelei grinned and tugged at her platinum blonde hair.
“Gah!” Harper nearly jumped out of her jeans. “Where’d you come from?”
“Outside. Can I have water?”
Harper hugged her. “You’re not stupid, Lore. Don’t let anyone say that again.”
The girl blinked, bewildered. After a few seconds, it seemed to register with her that ‘stupid’ meant something bad. She briefly appeared heartbroken, but brushed it aside in seconds and hugged Harper.
Grace crouched behind her, fussing at the girl’s hair and tickling her. “You aren’t stupid, sweetie. You’re like the happiest, cutest person I know. Us blondes gotta stick together.”
Lorelei hugged her.
The girl chugged her glass of water, chirped a thank you, and ran back outside to play. Harper sighed at the door, wanting to find that girl’s mother and smack her. Unable to do that, she sighed and resumed sorting food while chatting with her new friend. Their conversation started off on the unexpectedness of a girl with Grace’s looks also being smart enough to apply to schools like MIT. She thought Harper intelligent as well, though probably said that mostly to be nice. She didn’t consider herself abnormally smart, despite Madison often calling her ‘brainy.’ Sure, she got good grades and enjoyed learning, but the real ‘genius kids’ took AP classes and went to college at fourteen, came up with world-changing inventions by fifteen, that sort of thing. Perhaps she might have had the potential, but she lacked the drive. Grace, on the other hand, could have been halfway through college already if her parents
hadn’t been so married to their plan for her.
Grace drifted off on a tangent about how frustrating it had been to feel like a spectator watching her own life, and that steered them into reminiscing about their existence before the war. Surprisingly, talking about her old friends, summer jobs, school, movies, and so on didn’t make Harper want to break down and sob again… but it did leave a weight pressing on her insides. Talk of past boyfriends eventually led to her mentioning the confrontation between Logan and Zach.
“I dunno,” said Grace. “I don’t think he tries to be a jerk, but it’s like he can’t help it. His father was such an…”
“What?”
Grace’s cheeks reddened. She looked worried for an instant, then defiant. “Asshole!”
Harper laughed. “Umm, okay.”
“I said it, and I’m not ashamed of myself.” She took a deep breath, grinned, and spent a moment saying random swear words.
Harper looked at her with a raised eyebrow.
“My parents used to freak the heck out if I used bad words. They acted like if I said ‘shit’ once, I’d wind up homeless and hooked on heroin with nineteen babies, and all their friends would shun them. It just hit me that I’m free. Is that sick to think that my parents are both dead and it’s almost… a relief.”
“Umm. Maybe a little, but it sounds like they were a bit over the top.”
“Oh, I miss them; they were my parents after all. And I cried a lot when I realized they were almost certainly killed, but mostly I think I was upset at the idea of not having them there to make all the decisions and take care of everything. Being on my own, having to think for myself scared me to death. I’m like a bird thrown out of her nest too early. Doctor Hale said I was too freaked out to be asked to work. But, I think I’m pulling it together. Anyway, Zach’s a lot like his father. Thinks the world is his and he can do whatever he wants. Only, he’s basically a giant little boy who’s never been told ‘no.’”
“Got that feeling already from him.”
Harper decided on bread with jam for dinner since the bread wouldn’t last like the canned food and they had to stretch their limited supplies. Hanging out with a girl her age and talking like she used to do with her friends got her thinking of home before the war. It melted time away in a blur of false normality that allowed her to pretend to be an ordinary high school senior with life ahead of her.
In what felt like mere minutes, Cliff walked in filthy and exhausted.
“Gah. What happened?” asked Harper.
“Went way off to the west. Rounded up a couple stray cows, and they had some objections.” He chuckled. “Gonna clean up a bit.”
“Okay.”
He headed down the hall. Harper shivered at the idea of a cold shower. The reminder of her freezing bath on the way to the mall made her look out the window to check on Madison. Her kid sister hid behind a tree, pretending with the others to have a shootout with invisible bad guys.
Grace stood. “I really should get back to the house for dinner since we have food allotted for us. Don’t want to steal yours.”
“It’s okay.”
“I know you don’t mind, but it’s cool. I’ll come back after. Still getting used to not having my whole day pre-scheduled.”
“’Kay.”
Eventually, Cliff emerged from the back in fresh clothes, hair wet, and wide awake from the frigid shower. Harper called the kids in for dinner. Once they filed in and took their seats at the table, she spread raspberry jam on two pieces of bread for Lorelei.
“We’re having bread for dinner?” asked Madison with a note of disbelief.
“Nobody had to kill it at least.” Cliff smiled.
Madison stuck her tongue out at him, then laughed.
“Yeah. Gotta make stuff last.” Harper waited for the jam to make its way around the table back to her. “Bread will go stale if we don’t eat it.”
“Wow, it’s not even moldy.” Jonathan grinned.
Madison gagged.
“The green parts taste funny. Don’t eat them.” Lorelei scrunched up her face. “You’ll get sick and then you’ll get in trouble for wasting food.”
Oh, no… Harper cringed at the thought that the girl’s mother had given her bad food, then punished her for throwing up. She and Madison had never wanted for food, never even imagined the possibility of not having enough. Sure, she knew plenty of people around the world and even in the United States used to struggle to feed their kids. Some children got a slice of bologna on one piece of bread for dinner. More and more, her old life felt far away like a dream.
While Cliff terrified the kids with stories of eating bugs if things got too bad, her thoughts wandered. The plate with a slice of jellied bread in front of her morphed into a plate with a PB&J on her bedroom desk. She’d spent most of the last year or two eating ‘dinner’ while doing homework. Except for weekends, Madison ate almost exclusively microwave meals since their parents had been too busy to cook between their jobs or driving her around to all her activities.
Dad worked for Qwest, having made junior VP only eight months before the war. He’d spent six years as a director, busting his butt for the promotion—so had little time to be home. Mom, a former nurse, had an administrative job with HealthONE. Though she didn’t put in the ridiculous hours her father used to, she’d encouraged Madison into ludicrous amounts of after-school activities, which entailed lots of running around.
Harper had spent more time with her family in the two months after the blast than the two years before it. She wanted a chance to go back in time, even if she couldn’t stop the war, just to re-do the past four years so she could have more time with her family when things were good.
She lifted her stare off the plate, returning to the here and now. Wrinkles formed at Cliff’s eyes; he laughed at something Jonathan said. His smile transferred to Harper’s lips. She liked having him around, even if he would never replace Dad. It seemed so strange—in a nice way—to sit there at the table with her new family, having a father there with them who didn’t stagger in the door at almost ten at night all the time or disappear for half a month on business trips.
Madison’s nose scrunched in reaction to talk of foraging natural food from the woods. She’d mostly come out of her shell and appeared to be adjusting to the new normal. Though, she hadn’t gone back to the goofy, bubbly kid she’d been, she didn’t drift around like a zombie anymore. Jonathan laughed along with Cliff, disgustingly okay with the idea of eating bugs, even suggesting they try it so they knew what to expect if they had to. The boy had accepted this family of circumstance without hesitation. Harper smiled at him, then looked at Lorelei’s big grin.
Desperate to stop talking about eating bugs, Madison hurriedly rambled on about what they’d been doing on the farm.
Lorelei perplexed Harper in a way she couldn’t really define. A twelve-year age gap changed the girl into more of a daughter than a kid sister, which made her eerily detached happiness annoying. Harper caught herself feeling jealous, wanting the girl to love her and her new family more than total strangers. She pushed that aside, no more able to blame Lorelei for how she was than Mila for being creepy. Other people had done bad things to both of them.
Sitting there looking at the faces of the man she’d adopted as a stand-in dad and her siblings left her torn midway between guarded happiness for her new family and sorrow at the future that had been stolen from them. Only Cliff appeared better off. He’d gone from a lonely single veteran who felt apart from society working a dead-end job at the mall to having a purpose in life again, both in protecting ‘his’ kids and defending the town as part of the militia.
After a moment of contemplation, she decided to cling to hope and took a bite out of her second piece of bread.
I can’t fix the world back to the way it was, but I’m gonna make this work.
14
Legal
Marcie stopped by the next morning with word that they had to attend a militia meeting.
Cliff accompanied them on the walk to school after a breakfast of oatmeal. The hot meal had thrilled Madison, even if the March weather hadn’t been particularly cold. No sign of anything threatening showed itself on the trip to school, or when she walked back down Route 74 to the militia HQ with Cliff after dropping the kids off.
A conference room in the former office building served as the primary briefing room, with a whiteboard and desk in front of a fleet of wheeled office chairs. Cliff and Harper joined the other twenty or so militia personnel responsible for northern Evergreen, after helping themselves to coffee from a big thermal container with a spigot like from a gas station convenience store.
More efficient use of firewood to make a lot at once. She sniffed the black, unsweetened coffee, not even wincing. Six months ago, if anyone had told her she’d drink it without enough sugar to knock out a moose, she’d have laughed. Now, she thought about the resource cost of preparing it. How much coffee did places used to dump down the drain for going stale? Ugh. I really need to stop thinking about stuff like that.
She fell into a springy office chair with blue cushions next to Cliff.
Walter took a position at the front of the room, got everyone’s attention, then provided an update. The town had gained twelve new residents in the past month, lost two—an improvement over the five deaths that occurred in January due to cold. The January deaths had been older people who tried to save firewood by relying too heavily on blankets. One death last month resulted from a resident having run out of vital medication, another, a broken neck due to a slip-and-fall on ice.
After the population update, he moved on to the solar power issue. Evidently, most of the panels Jeanette and her team had salvaged and assembled on the tennis courts operated well, but they ran into problems with the distribution system. Transformers and relays had suffered burnout from the EMP surge that rode the wires in from areas closer to the bombardment. Fixing them required parts and components they didn’t have. Walter announced possible future trips into the city, targeting municipal storage facilities or electrical contractors’ shops.
The World That Remains (Evergreen Book 2) Page 15