Cut Off

by Robertson, Edward W.

"I'll go over there tomorrow," she said. "Give him a chance to cool down."

  Alden went inside the house. A minute later, he came out with a basket of rusty metal aerosol cleaning products and shaving cream. Wordlessly, he carried them off to be sprayed out, which they had decided early in their post-apocalyptic life was safer than piling them up where they might wind up punctured and/or exploding. By day's end, they had removed all the obvious clutter from the house. Next would come a whole lot of cleaning, which Tristan was not looking forward to.

  In the morning, she went for a quick run. After, she rinsed at the stream, then, on a lark, waded into the pool below the falls. The top of the water was warm, but the layer below the surface was so cold she drew a deep, involuntary breath. She paddled across to the falls, gasping as the chilly water spilled over her head.

  The early morning sun seemed to brighten, the leaves of the trees suddenly so green she wanted to be a part of them. Her breathing was a religious experience. She felt weightless, as if she had emerged from a heavier, duller world. She knew it was nothing more than the exertion of the run and the exhilaration of immersing herself in cold water, yet she pushed those thoughts from mind, staying within the moment. She swam back to shore and dried off. Before she'd dressed, the feeling had passed.

  It was a little early to be barging in on people she'd recently punched, so she went back to the house to scrub some walls. After another hour, she returned to the stream and followed the trail beside it up into the hills. As Alden had said, after half a mile, the trail forked left. Past a wall of trees, a small green house stood on stilts. Patches of crops grew around it, the jungle mingling into them. She climbed the front stairs. Ke snored on a couch on the porch. Tristan hesitated, uncertain of the social protocol of waking up a potential enemy who didn't know you were coming.

  Ke blinked, eyes widening as he became aware he wasn't alone. "What are you doing here? Come to finish the job?"

  "To clear the air. I'm sorry for hitting you."

  He sat up, rubbing gunk from the corner of one eye. "You didn't seem too sorry. You were smiling."

  "I'm sure it was just a battle-grimace."

  "There was a fist in my face at the time, so maybe I didn't have the best view. But I know a smile when I see it."

  She gestured at the couch across from him. "Can I sit?"

  He sighed, though it might have been the sigh of a person waking up. "If you have to."

  She did so. "I'm not here to waste your time. Did you come to my house to hurt Alden?"

  "I was there to get Robi. I don't give a damn about your brother."

  "Protecting your sister. From what?"

  He spread his hands. "Well, I don't know, do I?"

  "Seems rash to come to my house looking for a fight. All you had to do is tell Robi it was time to leave."

  "I wasn't thinking clearly, okay? Is that what you want to hear? Things were different in Honolulu. First time a guy came at Robi, I backed him off with words. When he came back, that's when I got this." He tapped the bullet scar on his shoulder. "A few years later, when another guy told me she was his, I didn't give him the chance to come back."

  She folded her arms. "Now I'm wondering why you weren't carrying a gun yesterday."

  "You two, I didn't get that feral vibe I got from the survivors in the city." He smiled wryly. "I was mad, yeah, but I thought bluster would do the trick. Didn't count on running into Mrs. Pacquiao."

  To her surprise, she felt a blush coming on. "Again, sorry. I'm glad I came by. This is starting to make a lot more sense."

  "I appreciate it. In this place, we're practically neighbors."

  "If that's settled, I'd like to move on to other business." Tristan bit her lip. "I'm afraid that they like each other."

  Absently, Ke rubbed his shoulder. "They just met."

  "At their age, that's all it takes. And it's not like they have a lot of options these days. Alden would probably date a dolphin if he could find its breasts."

  Ke bit his lips together. "Then tell him to get swimming. I'm not going to pimp my little sister to him."

  Tristan gazed across the yard. A floral, pollen-heavy scent oppressed the morning. "How old were you when the Panhandler hit?"

  "Seventeen."

  "In high school?"

  He gave her a look. "Why wouldn't I be?"

  "God, you're sensitive," she said. "So you were in school. Had friends. Were you always back by curfew? Did you ever sneak out? Drink beer? Smoke pot? Trespass? When you lost your parents, were you still a virgin?"

  His annoyed expression became thoughtful. "Make your point."

  "We did our job: we've kept them alive. Maybe it's time to let them live."

  Ke rubbed his mouth. "Is he eighteen?"

  "Almost twenty. Is she?"

  "Nineteen last month. Where is this going?"

  She pressed her palms together. "If they wind up wanting to be together, do you think we could stop them? If we tell them no, that would only justify their Romeo and Juliet complex."

  "But if we keep their respect, they might listen to some of what we say." He leaned back into the couch. "Aren't we getting ahead of ourselves? Last week, she didn't know he existed."

  "You know how fast things can move when you're young." She stood. "Sorry again for hitting you."

  She tromped down the steps and returned to the jungle. It did feel hasty to be talking about this already, but she had a sense of inevitability. Something would happen between the two teens. Maybe it would last and maybe it would be no more than a fling. Either way, she had to position herself to be able to influence Alden. Otherwise, they would insulate themselves with the strongest bond two people could make: a young couple's belief they were being persecuted by meddling older relatives.

  Meanwhile, there were real issues to navigate. Including ones that wouldn't have been issues back in the days of established order. Like age. How would she have felt if it had turned out Robi were only seventeen? Should they still care about age of consent? Obviously a line existed somewhere, but she wasn't sure she'd care if a nineteen-year-old and a sixteen-year-old wanted to fool around or shack up or get married.

  She hadn't given anything like this much thought until now. Laws were only necessary in a society of multiple people, a situation she and Alden hadn't been in for years. She did know one thing: the old laws had been designed to sustain a world that no longer existed. Most were no longer relevant. Some former rules might be in opposition to the survivors' new goals (whatever those might be). If it was their intention to stay in Hana—and she still wasn't sure that was the best idea—it would mean an ongoing series of decisions about how to shape this new place.

  Back at the house, Alden was scrubbing walls. "How'd it go?"

  "Hope you're feeling strong. I need you to help me bury a body."

  His eyebrows jumped, then drew into a skeptical line. "No you didn't."

  She didn't know whether to feel amused or disheartened that he'd believed her, if only for a second. "We're cool. If you guys want to hang out, I doubt it's going to lead to any more brawls."

  "Cool."

  He brought Robi back to the house the next day, along with a shopping cart of cleaning supplies. The two of them always seemed to be in a different room from Tristan and she often found herself straining her ears to make sure they were making noise. Silence was a bad sign and she had no idea what she would do if it lasted longer than a few seconds.

  She did not enjoy this spying. It didn't help that Robi remained unfailingly polite: all smiles, asking regularly what she could do next to help. The whole affair made Tristan feel twice as old as she was and unbearably motherly. Two days in, realizing she was driving herself insane, she assigned herself a new project: setting up a water filter.

  Until now, they'd been using the little portable one. It wouldn't last much longer, and anyway, it took forever to get a decent amount of water through it. To kill two birds with one stone, she dug a fire pit, set up two wire chairs above
it, and topped them with a massive tamale steamer she'd looted from one of the neighbors. She got the fire going and filled the steamer with taro root. Once it was cooked, she set it aside to cool and poked the coals and embers down to charcoal and ashes. While she waited for that to cool, she removed a coffee table from the pile, dumped the taro roots on it, and began the tedious process of smashing it into paste.

  After a few minutes, she looked up to discover Ke watching her from the shade of a tree. She jerked her hand in surprise, narrowly avoiding crushing her other hand with the fat stone she was using to grind taro.

  He moved toward her. "Where'd you learn to do that?"

  She set down the rock and stood. "Crush stuff with other stuff?"

  "That's poi. Our version of...hot dogs, or pizza. How'd you hear about it?"

  "By existing on Earth? Watching Wayne's World? I didn't know what it looked like before I got here, but I went to the library for a book on local plants." She glanced at the thick purple-gray paste on the table. "It said it lasts forever and it sounded easy to make. My kind of food."

  He nodded slowly, approving, then glanced at the house. "How they doing?"

  "Good. She's a hard worker. As far as I know, we're not grandparents yet."

  Ke snorted with laughter. "Well, I was going to invite you guys to the secret beach, but now I think I'm going to go be sick instead."

  "Secret beach? You can't drop something about a secret beach and then walk away. That's a good way to get punched. Again."

  "It's too far to get to today. You free tomorrow?"

  "I'll bring the poi."

  He grinned and said something in Hawaiian she didn't understand. After he left, she stirred the remnants of the fire to make sure there were no live embers, held the back of her hand above it to ensure it was cool enough to handle, then gathered up the charcoal and got to work grinding the chunks. Finished, she set it aside, then went to get gravel from the stream and sand from the beach. Once she was back at the house, she layered all of the above into a big plastic jug and brought it up to the lanai.

  The house was far too quiet. She opened the screen door and stood there, dread mounting in her stomach. Feeling like the babysitter in a slasher movie, she braced herself and stepped inside. She found them lying on the living room floor, belly-down, comic books spread before them. Robi looked up, saw her, and waved.

  In the early morning, Ke and Robi came to the house together, backpacks over their shoulders, each of them walking a pair of bikes. Alden was still waking up, but Tristan had already prepared, including donning a swimsuit beneath her clothes, and they set off within minutes, riding north up the highway. Ke set a brisk pace; he wasn't sure they'd be able to make it there and back in one day. He explained this apologetically, as if he thought Tristan might throw down her pack and go home—which wasn't an unreasonable fear—but she'd been working hard for days and was up for a break.

  Besides, even she wasn't so hard-nosed to be immune to the lure of a secret beach.

  Alden and Robi spent most of the ride talking about old movies and TV shows they'd seen, a conversation that consisted mostly of "Remember when?", followed by a recap of events that didn't always match Tristan's memory of the show in question. The plots sounded both melodramatic and trivial in comparison to the last six-plus years of their lives. In general, Tristan tried not to reminisce—it was pointless yet painful—but she found their talk strangely enjoyable.

  Early that afternoon, after at least twenty miles of highway, Ke led them from the highway to a shaded parking lot overlooking a decline to the sea.

  Tristan eyed the bathrooms and tourist station on the former park grounds. "Some secret."

  "Secret to you," Ke said. "Or did you take the scenic route before settling down?"

  "We missed it," she admitted.

  He crunched through the gravel to a dirt trail. It was a warm day and the air was heavy with the sick-sweet smell of the decaying seed pods the trees dropped in profusion. Below, a shoal of black rock thrust from the waves, a natural arch cut through its side. They followed the trail onto a pure black beach.

  "Whoa," Alden said.

  They all stopped, even Ke. The upper beach was a jumble of fist-sized stones fallen from the lava formations behind it, but the composition grew finer the nearer it ran to the waves, first as smooth round pebbles, then as coarse sand. Heat radiated from it as if it had a fever. By the time Tristan stepped on the pebbles, her whole body was sweating.

  "I retract all my complaints about the length of the trip," she said.

  Ke crunched onto the rocks beside her. "It's nice, right?"

  "Only in the sense the sun is bright."

  To the left, a short bluff carpeted in ivy and undergrowth sheltered the beach, dampening the waves. Tristan yanked off her shoes and peeled down to her swimsuit. Ke gave her a glance, but nothing lingering. She wasn't vain enough to think that every man who saw her would swoon to the ground, yet he hadn't favored her with so much as the male's habitual, semi-conscious assessment of any young woman in a bikini. The scars around her eyes and mouth had mostly faded. She was missing two knuckles of one finger, but was otherwise young, intact, and healthy.

  She watched him dive into the water and crawl stroke through the low waves. He had good angles to his face. Stern-looking. Turned out he was thoughtful, though, while at the same time—assuming his stories were true—being unafraid to take action. She hadn't given it any conscious thought until then, but it added up to something attractive.

  On top of that, she had been rendered celibate for so long she probably qualified as a born-again virgin. There were mornings she woke from such intense dreams she had no choice but to take care of her business before getting up.

  Beside her, Alden and Robi ran delicately over the hot sand and splashed into the water. When Alden hesitated, Robi went back to him, face etched with concern, then leapt on him, wrapping her legs around his and toppling him into the ocean. He surfaced, wiping water from his eyes, then grinned and lunged at Robi.

  Tristan waded into the water. After the oven-like sand, it felt toe-curlingly cold, but that felt pretty good. She swam out until she could no longer feel the bottom, then treaded water, staring at the blue of the horizon, suddenly curious what the rest of the world was doing.

  They swam a while, then returned to the beach to dry off and take in the sun. Soon, she was voraciously hungry, as she always was after swimming. They climbed the trail to the park to sit at a picnic table and eat poi and fruit and spicy roast chicken Ke said he'd cooked the day before. Tristan was suspicious of its provenance, but it smelled un-rotten, and she found herself powerless not to eat her share.

  "Want to stay the night?" Ke said as they ate. "If not, we better get going soon."

  Tristan nodded at her feet. "My blisters vote we stay."

  "I thought I was the only one," Robi laughed.

  They scouted out a place to sleep, settling on the back deck of the park building. Overwhelmed by sudden weariness, Tristan snapped out her towel and napped. The others did, too. As she drifted out of it, Tristan realized it was the first time she had slept in the company of others besides Alden in years. Against all odds, she found herself feeling accepted. In Hana, at last, she'd found home.

  When she got up later that afternoon, she joined the others for another swim, then wandered around to watch the waves bashing the outcrops. There were a number of caves worn into the rocks around the shore, including on the black beach. She poked inside one of them, but it terminated in a scree of rock a few feet inside.

  The sun faded behind the volcano. They were on the eastern side of the island and she missed being able to watch it sink into the ocean. When they went to bed on the deck, Tristan lay with her eyes open, listening for Alden and Robi to get up and sneak off. When they began snoring instead, she found herself—to her considerable surprise—disappointed in them. After a while, unable to sleep, she quietly got up and walked down to the beach. It wasn't as striking by nig
ht, but the starlight gleamed on the black pebbles.

  After a minute, feet scuffed on the path. Ke raised a hand and met her on the beach. "Everything cool?"

  "Couldn't sleep."

  "Hard to believe after the day we've had. Think they had fun?"

  "Definitely," she said. "Thanks for bringing us here."

  "Well, I thought they'd like it." He scooped up pebbles and began plinking them into the sea. "It's funny. At first, I didn't want anything to do with you guys. But after seeing how happy Robi's been..."

  "I know the feeling."

  "It's made me rethink a few things. You seen how young they act together? They act like they were home-schooled. I think I've been too good at keeping her away from people."

  "Could be."

  "What else could it be? Robi ain't dumb. You throw her on an island by herself, a month later, she'll have built two houses, three farms, and a swimming pool. But you put her in a room with a boy? I don't know if she'd know what goes where."

  She eyed him. "Ours aren't any more complicated than yours. Press the button and it turns right on."

  He laughed and gazed off to sea. "I don't recall it being that easy. Although I wouldn't mind reconfirming that some day."

  With her heart going as if she were staring down the scope of a rifle, she moved beside him, rocks clacking under her feet. "It's been so long, it might take even less."

  She pressed herself against him, found his mouth.

  He put his hand to her hip and pushed her back. "Whoa. What's going on here?"

  "What does it look like?"

  "Kissing. Each other."

  Heat surged into her face. "You were just saying..."

  He was leaning back from her, blinking quickly. "You're hot, okay? That's not the problem."

  "It's Alden and Robi, isn't it?"

  Ke nodded at the waves. "Feels weird. Almost...incesty."

  "It does, doesn't it?"

  "We could close our eyes and pretend we're other people."

  She glanced over to gauge if he were joking. "Remind me again why you haven't been laid in years?"

  "I'm brainstorming here," he said. "At least give me credit for trying."