by Lynda Engler
“You can’t read? Then the book I brought was pretty useless, wasn’t it?” She laughed, twirling a lock of her curly brown hair.
“No, it wasn’t. I figured some of it out. I’ll spend the rest of my short life working on it – maybe I’ll finish in five years. I’ve never had a book before.” As he smiled at her, his bright white teeth seemed to light up the night.
“I could read it to you,” Isabella said. “If you’d like.”
Malcolm thought about her offer. “That would mean you’d have to come out into the poisoned world. No Isabella, I couldn’t ask that of you.”
“But what if that’s something I want?” And in that moment, Isabella realized she wanted much more. She wanted to be with Malcolm. She wanted to stay Outside in the home his tribe was building. She wanted to explore the world with him and his people when spring came. She knew in her heart that it would be better to live and travel and experience the world and die soon than to merely exist, unhappy and caged. She needed to escape her meaningless existence in the shelter and actually do something with her life. And she wanted to do it with Malcolm. If she only had the courage! But wanting something and having the nerve to actually do it were two very different things.
The two talked for another hour, trading stories of their lives. Malcolm told her a bit about their lives in Ewr before they left and how they traveled along the broken super highway out of Ewr to find somewhere better to live.
Isabella told Malcolm about life in their shelter. She told him about how electricity was generated by solar panels and stored in batteries. She told him about running water and showers. She described the huge library that held thousands of books and how her grandmother had become school teacher to her and her sibs. She told him of her mother, who she loved but didn’t get along with. She told stories of her disgusting male sibs and the stupid, childish jokes and antics they constantly perpetrated.
Later that night she snuck back into the shelter, enduring the torturous DeCon pressure wash in the airlock, the shower chemicals once again stinging every bit of exposed skin on her body and the bright blue lights attempting to blind her.
This went on for two weeks, Isabella stealing away to see Malcolm every night before she finally got up the nerve to tell him what she had come to realize. “Malcolm, I want to stay Outside with you. Please let me stay.”
“You can’t. You know your grandfather won’t allow it. It will be the start of trouble for all of us. He will drag you back inside. Or worse – he’ll come out here in that chem-rad suit of his and chase us off.”
Isabella swore. “You’re right! But you don’t know how bad it could get. He thinks all mutants are worthless and sub-human and that they should all die. And he isn’t alone in that belief. You’ve got to leave. You aren’t safe here. You need to stop building your settlement and leave as soon as you can. You have to.” Tears flowed from her eyes, realizing that she just asked the one person she wanted to be with more than anyone else in the world to leave her forever.
“But it’s too close to winter to start over. Oh Belle, do you know how cold it gets in winter? Our plans were to stay here. If we must leave now, that leaves us hardly any time to find another safe locale for the winter. I wish I could have gotten some maps from Ewr. But the Jet Believers guard the libraries and won’t allow access to the maps. They think it all belongs to their sacred government and one day they will come back and put everything back the way it was before the wars. They say that if we take things from them we’re stealing or hurting the government, or something. They’re all crazy, so we just stay away from them,” Malcolm explained.
Malcolm paced around their camp, still talking to Isabella. “I have to think of a solution. The log cabin is almost done. All it needs is a roof and a door. Leaving now is such a drastic change in my plans. I didn’t expect this at all.”
He paused to think again and Isabella didn’t really know what to say to him. She knew that finding a new direction for his tribe – for all their lives! – was more than he could easily deal with.
“And at this point in the year, we don’t have time to build another shelter once we find a safe location. That means we’ll have to find a place that’s safe AND has a suitable building we can live in, at least until the spring thaw,” said Malcolm.
Isabella thought about the problem and finally said, “I can get maps. I can find out which direction you should head where you can find a safe place to winter. I can probably get you other things as well. I always felt we lived a Spartan existence in our shelter, but compared to you, we have so much. I’ll deal with my grandfather. Just tell me what you want.”
“There is but a single thing that I am wanting of, but I couldn’t ask it of you,” Malcolm said shyly in his odd dialect.
Isabella held herself still, sitting on the ground waiting for him to ask. But he didn’t. Instead, he leaned over and kissed her mouth. His lips were warm and soft and she fell willingly into his arms.
The hours passed like minutes. When Isabella finally managed to pull herself away she said, still catching her breath, “Pack up in the morning. I’ll be here at sunrise with the map.” Her eyes held him, expressing deeper feelings than she had ever known before. She could still feel his warm body against her bare skin, even though they were no longer entwined in each other. She dressed quickly and smiled as she walked to the entrance to her shelter.
* * *
Isabella clamped her eyes shut and held her breath as the chemical shower washed the poisons down the drain. It was a relief when the final rinse water fell over her, cleansing her body of the chemical wash that was never meant to touch human skin. Knowing it would be the last time she would ever go through the DeCon chamber made it easier. She stripped off her wet clothes, toweled off and got dressed in the PJs she had stashed in the DeCon chamber. She planned to hide her wet clothes in the dirty laundry like she had every other time she had snuck out.
It was 4 a.m. and her grandmother was waiting for her inside the door. “Isabella! How could you?” Her grandmother ground out the words between clenched teeth. She wore a stony expression and her arms were crossed across her chest.
Isabella’s eyes widened in surprise. She had been sneaking in and out of the shelter for so long now that she was past worrying about ever getting caught. She must have gotten sloppy somehow and her grandmother had found out. Ignoring the question, Isabella simply answered, “I’m getting supplies for the tribe. I’ve told their leader that they need to leave. They didn’t realize they had settled above our shelter; they’ve built a house and wanted to stay here forever. Once I told them how Granpapa would feel about that and how much trouble it would cause, Malcolm agreed to leave. But they will need supplies. I need to help Malcolm and his family. Soon they’ll be gone and out of your lives forever.”
“Our lives, Isabella,” she corrected. She threw her hands up in disgusted resignation. “But the sooner they are gone, the better. Get them what they need quickly child. I’ll help you.” Together they went quietly to the kitchen and packed up some food. Isabella gathered fruit from hydroponics and stuffed it into a sack, then got the map she had told Malcolm about, a few more iodine water purification tablets and a portable water filter. When the supplies were gathered, her grandmother said, “Take these Outside the airlock and just leave them by the door. Don’t risk delivering them to the mutants. They’ll find them. I don’t want you exposed a moment longer than necessary. I’ll make sure no one comes looking for you.”
“Not yet, Granmama. I need a few more things.” She left the sack with her grandmother and walked swiftly to her room, returning moments later with yet another stuffed bag. “Okay, I’m ready now.”
Her grandmother stared at the other bag. “Blankets?”
Isabella considered lying. What would her grandmother’s reaction be if she told the truth? She twirled her hair with her free hand and hesitated. “No, Granmama… My clothes.”
“Isabella! You’re not!”
“Yes, I am. I love you very much, but I cannot live in a cage. I’m leaving with Malcolm’s tribe.”
“Those awful creatures! You can’t live like that. If they don’t kill you, the poisons will.”
Isabella looked at the airlock that separated her from Malcolm. She wondered if she walked out that door, was there a possibility that she could come back. What if she changed her mind? Could she come back inside the shelter later? Only, of course, if her family let her back in.
But would they? she wondered.
Isabella kissed her grandmother, took the sack from her hand and stepped inside the airlock for the last time. “Granmama, the mutants aren’t what you’ve been led to believe. I don’t know everything about them, but they are not the violent and stupid creatures that you think. I’m sure that we could all get along together, humans and mutants, if Granpapa would just allow it.”
Isabella desperately wanted her grandmother to agree, to tell her that she really didn’t need to leave in order to be with Malcolm. She wanted her grandmother to convince her grandfather and everyone else in the world who hated mutants that they were all wrong. That they could live together peacefully.
But her grandmother didn’t offer any such suggestion. Instead she asked, “Isabella, are you really going to walk out that door to be with that man?”
Isabella swallowed past a lump in her throat. Until that moment she hadn’t known the answer, but now she nodded. “I love him, Granmama.”
Her grandmother said, “I realize that there is no talking you out of this now. Oh Isabella, you are such a stubborn young woman. But you are a woman. I hope this choice is the right one for you. But this doesn’t have to be forever. You can come back if you find out this was the wrong decision.”
Isabella nodded and said almost inaudibly, “I love you.” She sealed the door behind her.
* * *
By the time Isabella returned, the tents had been packed, the sun was coming up and the tribe was ready to go. Isabella emerged from the trees and stood before the group of a dozen mutants. She marveled at the rag-tag bunch. This was the first time she had seen them fully clothed. They wore ragged and torn clothing, except for the footwear. Even the youngest child wore sturdy hiking boots, making her lightweight sneakers seem woefully inadequate.
“Hello. I brought you a map.” She spread it out on the ground and showed them how to orient the map then pointed to a spot on it.
“We are here. You said you walked ten days from the east, from a big city by the Hudson River. That must be here –” she pointed to the blue line that marked the river and then to a dot on the map labeled Newark. Then she drew her finger along a dark line that marked the perimeter of the beige section of the map. “This is a state and it’s called New Jersey.”
Isabella pointed out blue splotches and lines that indicated lakes and rivers, dots that showed towns, different colored and weighted lines that marked roads of varying sizes and hash-marked gray lines that showed railroad tracks. She continued, “We must walk northeast until we get to Dover or Rockaway. There will be shelter there. The map shows rivers running through each city, so we should be able to get water as well.”
“We? You’re coming with us?” asked one of the tribal elders, a tall, brown haired boy just a few years older than her.
Malcolm answered for her. “Isabella and I talked about it last night. She wants to get out of her shelter and come with us. Our tribe could use another person anyway. Our gene pool is too small – if we don’t keep expanding, we won’t prosper. Isabella will be my mate – but not my mate for having children. I will pair her with someone else for offspring, but not as… I don’t know the word…”
“Wife. I will be Malcolm’s wife. He will be my husband,” Isabella said.
“Right. It’s probably not even possible for me to attempt to father children at my age, so it makes most sense for Clay to do that when he comes of age. Maybe I’ll pair Kalla up with Maxi instead of Clay, next year when Maxi is old enough,” the leader explained to his tribe.
Kalla’s eyes widened in alarm and she stood stunned and shocked. “But I’m to pair with Clay! And she’s too old to have children anyway!” Her pale face flushed blood red.
“No, her shelter-folk genes are undamaged so far, but Isabella must bear children soon before that changes. The chemicals will affect her body much faster than ours, because she hasn’t built up a tolerance. She’ll age quicker, but still outlive us. For now her offspring will probably not be as mutated, so she is a good biological match for Clay. But if we wait another year for Maxi to come of age, it could be too late for Isabella. We really don’t know how long before Isabella’s genes become just as bad as ours.”
Kalla scowled and moved off to the back of the group. Clay followed her and put his arm around her shoulder. Isabella could hear the young girl’s sobs. Clay spoke softly to Kalla so Isabella couldn’t hear what he was telling her, but she guessed he was trying to comfort her.
A few months earlier, her grandmother had spent a week on a lesson about genetics and the chemical poisons that were inflicted on the Earth during the Final War. She had thought a lot about that information and come up with some theories of her own that she wanted to share with Malcolm and his tribe. “Kalla, Clay, please come back. I didn’t come here to make trouble or to make anyone unhappy. And I’m not the least bit thrilled at mating with your boyfriend! Nothing personal Clay, but I love Malcolm. If Malcolm says it’s the best for the tribe, we might need to consider it, however, I don’t want children. All I want is Malcolm.”
Isabella wasn’t used to a totalitarian tribal leader dictating what she was supposed to do, but then again, what Malcolm was asking of her wasn’t really any different at all than what her grandfather and their government had asked of her: Mate with someone just for a healthy paring of genes. Further the species. Be the mother of a new generation of healthy humans.
Kalla and Clay remained rooted to the Earth away from the group. Isabella tried to calm Kalla’s fears by being the nurturing friend. “Listen to me please. Kalla, you and your kind are not mutants – you are adapted to your environment, the new world created when the old one was destroyed. You bear young much earlier in order to have healthier children; you don’t live as long; and you have a high rate of birth defects because of the damage to your genes. But you are human! Not the old kind of humans that live in shelters under the ground, but the new human race.”
The group came together slowly to listen to Isabella, except Clay and Kalla. Finally Clay took a few steps toward the group, holding Kalla’s hand, encouraging her to come back to the group. The young girl dragged her feet, reluctant to join. She had tears in her eyes.
Isabella continued sharing what she had learned. “It takes many generations to adapt to a new world. You can adapt faster if you have children earlier. In another fifty years, you’ll have progressed five more generations while we underground will have had only two. Each generation of yours is more suited to living on what has become of the Earth than the one before. And in another fifty years, it’ll have been ten of your generations since the old world ended. The old humans, the government, will come out from underground and try to change things back to the way they used to be.”
But saving the species didn’t interest Kalla. Her only interest was in being with the boy that she loved. Isabella really couldn’t blame her. The eleven year old spat at Isabella. “But you don’t even know if you shelter-folk can mate with us mutants! What if we’ve changed so much that we aren’t even the same species anymore? What if we are too new? You’ll take my Clay away, and it will be for nothing. You can’t have him. I won’t let you!”
Isabella remained calm. “Kalla, I don’t want Clay. I want Malcolm. It’s as simple as that. And yes, shelter humans and mutated humans can mate together and bring babies into the world. I’m sure of it.”
“How do you know?” asked Clay from beside his intended mate.
“We just aren’t that different,” rep
lied Isabella.
Malcolm said, “Look everyone. There is a lot more here than just making babies for a new generation. We can sort that out later. Right now we have to protect ourselves. The government wants the mutants dead. Our ancestors got stuck out here and they never did anything to anyone, except survive. We’ve evolved. We can survive out here and they can’t. That scares the human government enough that they want to exterminate us.”
Isabella said, “We can’t let that happen. We must travel to all the adapted tribes – to all the new humans out here – and tell them what is happening! We must make the Jet Believers and everyone who thinks like them see they’re just sitting around waiting for their deaths – not some brave new world! Those people are just a bunch of relics, trying to bring a dead thing back to life. My grandfather is no different from the Jet Believers. I know! Malcolm has opened my eyes to what he is.”
Isabella’s eyes welled up, a deep sadness enveloped her as she fully realized that the man she had loved and who had cared for her for her entire life wasn’t who she thought he was.
Kalla looked at Isabella with some acceptance and smiled, tentatively welcoming the newcomer to their group.
Malcolm leaned over and looked into his new wife’s eyes. “I fear I’ve brought you to your death, girl.”
“No, Malcolm,” she replied. “You’ve brought me to life.”
Isabella grasped his four-fingered hand in hers and Shia’s small hand in the other and followed her heart into the unknown.
July 2101
Seven
Six days of hard travel north brought the tribe to the banks of a shallow creek. The entire length of the creek was edged with birch trees, their trunks white in the otherwise darkening forest. A few pine trees intermingled with the birch, creating a green and white canopy that nearly blocked out the entire sky. The sun had just begun to dip below the horizon turning the sky shades of pink, beige and teal when Malcolm called a halt to their journey for the day to make camp next to the slow moving stream.