“It’s cool. Night.”
“Night.” Grace waved and ran off to Anne-Marie’s house.
Harper walked on down Hilltop Drive, gazing up at the stars.
He’s right. They really are brighter now.
23
Rational Thoughts
Saturday morning came late for Harper.
She would have slept even longer, if not for the excruciating fullness of her bladder. Voices from the distant living room announced everyone else had already convened for breakfast. Groaning at the discomfort of moving, Harper dragged herself out of bed and stiff-legged it to the bathroom. Never in her life could she remember having to go that badly. Once she finished, she just sat there for a few minutes enjoying the lack of pain.
By the time she got dressed and went to the kitchen, the kids had already vanished out the door to play outside. Cliff’s AR15 sat in pieces on the end of the table closer to the living room. He scrubbed at the bolt carrier with a toothbrush. Her portion of cereal waited for her in a bowl next to the box of almond milk.
“Sorry.”
“For?” asked Cliff, not looking up.
“Being so late last night.”
“How’d the date go?”
“Wasn’t a date.” She fell into her chair and dumped milk over her Oat Bland flakes.
“Okay.”
“Really.” Harper ate a spoonful. “We just talked. Grace showed up. Then the Army rolled in.”
Cliff shifted his gaze to her. “When I was seventeen, I had a girl over. The next door neighbors came over to complain about the noises coming out of my bedroom, but I never made a girl howl so loud the damn Army showed up.”
Her cheeks burned. “Dad!”
He tilted his head.
She nearly dropped the spoon, then stared down at her cereal. “I mean… uhh… Cliff.”
“I’m sure your old man won’t mind the occasional slip. So, I guess nothing happened. Well, except for the Army showing up.”
“We just talked.” She told him what happened, flinching a little when mentioning Grace bringing beer, but he didn’t react.
“Hmm. Not sure how long they’ll keep trying to hold it together if the chain of command collapsed, but nice of them to check for radiation around here.”
After rinsing out her bowl, she unloaded the Mossberg and cleaned it. Cliff glanced over every so often, giving her tips or pointing at a spot she missed. They chatted about the bombardment, and he admitted thinking weapons had landed much closer than Colorado Springs.
“Yeah, I had a feeling something came down nearby, but you didn’t look like you could handle any more bad news at the time. You were pretty checked out.”
“Not that checked out. I still remember everything. Guess I was just running on autopilot or something.”
Cliff reached over and squeezed her hand. “You’re a lot more alive now. Good to see.”
“Thanks. Still not sure what I’m doing, but I’m trying.”
“No one knows what they’re doing. We’re all faking it in varying degrees. Anyone who tells you with perfect confidence they know what they’re doing is full of shit. Probably trying to scam you.”
She laughed. “Yeah.”
Eventually, she reassembled the Mossberg, reloaded it, and set it back on the table.
That done, she went out back and practiced with the compound bow for a little while until Cliff joined her in the yard for more jiu-jitsu. They threw each other around working on takedown techniques for about two hours before the kids returned in search of lunch.
After a meal of peanut butter smeared on graham crackers, the kids again raced off to go exploring houses and generally run around. Harper didn’t exactly adore the thought of them being out of sight, but Cliff assured her the Shadow Man had not melted into a cloud of darkness and seeped between the bars of his holding cell, nor had he cloned himself.
The town council—Ned, Anne-Marie, and Walter—still hadn’t decided what to do with him, and the man continued refusing to say anything.
Much to Harper’s delight, Cliff set out after lunch on a hunting expedition with Roy and Dennis. Though she thought deer cute and would have been horrified at the idea of shooting them six months ago, watching everyone gradually become thinner reorganized her priorities. Needing deer meat to survive felt entirely different from shooting animals for the thrill of it—or even hunting when they could go to the supermarket and get food easily.
She daydreamed about being able to eat until she felt full again.
We’ll get there. The farm’s growing.
With Cliff off hunting and the kids somewhere in town having fun, Harper decided to go for a walk. Despite it being her official ‘day off,’ the Mossberg still went along. She fussed at her jeans, which quite needed a wash, remembering she hadn’t gotten around to doing laundry. Soon as I get home. I only have two pairs. Maybe Liz will let me grab another one if they have any in my size. Will she let me grab a dress too? Be nice to have one for when it gets hot and I’m not on duty.
Harper headed down the road toward the quartermaster’s.
When she reached Route 74, a din of shouting from up the road rose in the distance. Harper sped up to a jog, encountering an angry crowd gathered at the quartermaster’s building, shouting about the rationing and demanding more food be given out. A few people brandished handguns or baseball bats. Sadie Walker, Ken Zhang, and Leigh Preston stood between the crowd and the main entrance, their rifles trained on the ground by the group’s feet. Liz Trujillo hovered in the doorway, one hand on her .44 revolver.
Harper circled left around the angry group to stand with the other militia between the upset gathering and the building. She left her shotgun on its strap over her shoulder, refusing to point her weapon anywhere near the townspeople. Facing down a huge, angry crowd kicked her square in her terror of public speaking and stole her voice. Still, she tried to stand tall and fake confidence.
“Someone is stealing from the stores,” yelled Sadie. “That didn’t cause the shortage, but it’s not helping. If the person doing that can hear me, maybe if you stopped, the rationing would improve.”
A barrage of angrier shouts came back.
Hearing the woman blame the people for their own misfortune made Harper cringe. Something bubbled up inside her and she shouted, “Everyone please hang on a sec!”
The crowd’s rumbling lessened to a tentative silence, everyone looking at her.
“Guys…” Harper looked at Sadie, Leigh, and Ken. “These are our neighbors, the people we’re supposed to be protecting. Put your guns down.” She looked at the crowd. “That goes for you guys, too. No one needs a gun out right now. Please, we’re all just trying to survive here.”
After a tense moment of staring, handguns went into pockets, baseball bats became walking sticks, and the militia slung their rifles.
Harper’s hands shook from her being the center of attention, but she stuck one in her pocket and clutched the shotgun’s strap in the other. “Yes, I know the food situation is… not great. I’m like always hungry, too. I see my kid sisters and brother getting thinner. We’re all eating lean. It’s not like there’s a handful of people in charge hoarding all the food while the rest of us are chasing rats. That farm is our best chance at survival, but it doesn’t just spit out food overnight.”
“The land wasn’t previously farmed,” said Ken. “It’s taking a little longer than expected, but we are making progress.”
“Getting angry isn’t going to help anything.” Harper looked back and forth over the crowd. “If we blow through the food we have before the farm is ready, then we’ll have nothing at all for however long it takes. Eating small portions sucks, but eating nothing for days sucks a lot more.”
“We’d hunt if they didn’t take all the damn guns,” yelled Mr. Rhodes, a late-fifties man in an Air Force jacket.
“They’re out hunting right now.” Harper gestured in a random direction. “There’s no working refrigerators, so if th
ey get something we’ll probably have another community dinner.”
Anne-Marie Kirby walked up the drive with the poise of a teacher finally showing up to quiet down an out-of-control homeroom. “All right, everyone. Let me say a few things and if anyone has questions or concerns, I’ll be happy to hear you all out. First, we are not being stingy with the food just to be stingy. There is math involved. We’ve tried to assign out calories to people based on what we have in stock to maximize the length of time we have before it’s the farm or nothing. Yes, there is food disappearing from the stores and the militia is working on figuring out who is responsible. Jim tells me that we should start seeing some useful produce in another week or two. The chickens are breeding well and it shouldn’t be long before we have a good source of protein.”
“There’s gotta be more cans somewhere,” shouted a woman near the back of the crowd.
Harper clenched her jaw. I’m high on the list. If they send out a scavenging run, I’m going to be on it. That scared her more than having people looking at her, and she found herself no longer shaking. A sick feeling swirled in her stomach at the idea of leaving Evergreen.
Hopefully, Anne-Marie and Liz will find a way to make the provisions work.
The crowd thinned, though a handful of people remained with questions. Having overdosed on people for the day, she decided not to bother requisitioning more clothes, and headed home.
Harper stood in her bedroom, staring at her sad little wardrobe.
All the clothes she had in the world consisted of three T-shirts, two pairs of jeans, one pair of yoga pants, half a drawer of undies, a dress, some socks, and two nighties. Worse, every single article of clothing had been worn for at least a week or more, including her underwear. Some of the socks had started to feel rigid in spots. The mere thought of putting any of her undies back on again without washing them made her skin crawl. Her old home back in Lakewood may or may not still have her much more impressive wardrobe… clothes she’d bought when it still mattered what they looked like or what other people would think of them. Now, she only cared about two things: not being naked and keeping warm.
Well, three things… she couldn’t bring herself to wear a garment so dirty it came close to qualifying as a separate life form.
Overwhelmed with disgust, Harper stripped completely, then wrapped herself armpit to knees in a towel, which she secured in place with a few safety pins, making an improvised dress. She blushed, but at least the towel was clean, having come from the basketball place a few days ago. She’d much rather put up with it than even touch any of her filthy clothes. Besides, washing everything in one shot both saved detergent and would let her wardrobe last longer before she had to do another batch of laundry again.
What are we going to do when there’s no more detergent left? I don’t think they had Tide in the 1800s.
She gathered all her clothes, holding her breath while carrying them to the bathroom and dropping everything in the tub. After turning the water on, she added a capful of laundry detergent, then ran back to the bedroom to grab Madison and Lorelei’s clothing, which she dropped in the tub as well.
When the water rose to the midway point, she cut the faucet, knelt beside the tub, and scrubbed things as best she could with her bare hands. Whoever had run around town taking everything useful from the various abandoned houses had fortunately left her a laundry basket. After she finished washing each garment, she rinsed it in the sink, wrung it out, and dropped it in the basket to take outside later.
Thinking about how she used to complain whenever her mother asked her to do laundry lodged a lump in her throat. Emptying hampers, sorting everything into color groups, and stuffing them in a machine took only a few minutes and little manual labor. How trivial it had been, yet she’d often complained like Mom had asked her to walk to Canada and back.
I’m sorry, Mom.
Her fingers went numb from the chilly water; her sinuses flooded with the smell of detergent that also left a weird slimy feeling on her hands. One by one, she washed and rinsed each item of clothing, getting the hang of a technique to scrub them by rubbing two fistfuls of fabric back and forth.
The kids still hadn’t come back, but it didn’t really matter. She wouldn’t have asked them to wear towels so she could wash the clothes off their backs. I could just let the water sit here until something dries for them to change into.
Once the basket filled with wet stuff, she lugged it to the backyard. Walking outside in the towel dress made her blush, but she’d already soaked every article of clothing in the house and had little choice. The towel did offer more modesty than the two nightgowns the quartermaster gave her, both embarrassingly close to transparent. It also covered more than any swimsuit she’d ever owned.
Ten years from now, we’ll all be wearing towels and trash bags, blanket togas.
The rest of the afternoon went by in a blur of laundry—and trying to figure out what the ever-loving hell happened to some of Jonathan’s briefs.
What is it with boys! Good grief, I’d burn these if I could buy new ones.
The whole time she worked, she couldn’t stop thinking about her dread of leaving Evergreen. Anxiety hung over her about the next scavenging trip as though she’d done something illegal and the cops knew about it. At any minute, one would knock on the door and arrest her.
She’d make herself go on that scavenging run, but that didn’t mean she wanted to.
Eventually, the kids returned.
“Harp?” called Madison. “Are you here?”
“Yeah,” she shouted.
The three of them all came to the bathroom—and laughed their butts off at the sight of her in a towel held on with safety pins.
“Why are you wearing that?” asked Madison.
“I’m trying to make the detergent last longer by washing as much as I can. The clothes I had on were filthy. I couldn’t stand touching them.”
Lorelei pulled her dress off and tossed it into the water too fast to intercept.
“Argh. Lori!” Harper couldn’t help but laugh. “Oh well. Put a towel on. Don’t run around naked.”
“I’m not naked,” said Lorelei, a look of genuine confusion on her face. “I have socks on!”
Madison and Jonathan laughed.
Harper grabbed a towel and wrapped it around the girl.
“I’m not gonna wear a towel,” said Madison.
Lorelei looked at her. “Why I have’ta wear a towel if Maddie isn’t gonna?”
“That’s not what I mean!” Madison half-yelled, half-laughed. “I’m not gonna throw my only dry clothes in the tub.”
“Can we bath tonight?” Lorelei held up her hands to show off dirt-ringed nails. “I’s dirty.”
The question made Harper itch everywhere. She still hadn’t gotten used to only taking a bath once a week. “Yeah… sure, why not. It’s been a while.”
The kids went to the living room to play while Harper finished up the last of Cliff’s laundry. She drained and rinsed the tub, then collected the big metal pails from the back room, filling them from the tub spigot and hauling them out to the cinder block grill. If she lit the fire now, the water would be ready for a bath by the time they finished eating.
Dinner consisted of refried bean paste from a can stuffed into stale hard taco shells. Cliff returned in the middle of the meal, smiling. They’d bagged two bucks, which currently hung out behind the school to drain. Since the school building had power from its existing solar panels, the refrigerators in the cafeteria worked… something Harper hadn’t even thought of. The meat would be stored there for a day or two while the town organized another big barbecue.
And, Cliff also mentioned they planned a scavenging trip.
Harper lost her appetite. “Yeah, I figured.”
“Why are you looking like that?” asked Madison. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s my turn to go with them again.”
Her little sister stared at her, eyes huge with worry.
&nb
sp; “I know… When I decided to join the militia, I did it to protect you.” She looked at Jonathan and Lorelei. “You guys, too. And part of protecting you is making sure you have enough food.”
Madison moved her chair to sit right next to Harper, but didn’t say anything.
The rest of dinner passed in somber silence.
After, Jonathan and Madison ran outside to collect the laundry off the lines, sparing Harper the need to go outside in a towel again. Cliff graciously brought in the first hot water pail for the bath. Soon, the girls crowded into the bathroom to share the warm water and soap.
When Madison pulled her dress off, Harper almost gasped. The girl didn’t look quite as bad as Lorelei at her starving worst, but had become frighteningly bony. Seeing the girl so scrawny cemented Harper’s resolve. Instead of being terrified to leave town, she couldn’t wait for morning. They needed to do something. She couldn’t let Madison get any thinner. Also, more than her family needed food. Every kid in that school probably looked like her sisters… and Harper. She couldn’t be afraid of the scavenging run. Madison counted on her.
“Maddie…”
The girl looked up at her, a faint blush on her face. “What?”
“You’re so thin now.”
“I know.” She stepped into the tub and sat. “It’s because there isn’t enough food.”
“I’m going tomorrow to find more.”
“You said you were gonna stay here and protect me—us. Jonathan and Lorelei, too.”
Harper looked down. “I am protecting you… from starving.”
“You promised you won’t die.”
“I remember.” Harper eased herself into the water. In seconds, a sheen of dirt appeared on the surface. At not being grossed out, she let off a resigned sigh. I really miss showering every day. “Wouldn’t it be nice not to be hungry all the time?”
“Yeah. But why do you have to leave Evergreen?”
“To look for canned food or pasta or something we can eat.”
The World That Remains (Evergreen Book 2) Page 23