“Drop it.”
He was staring at me wide-eyed, looking from me to the gun and back.
He shook his head, no.
I remembered his name. “Drop it, Miles! That’s not yours!”
“What do you care? You don’t live here,” he said, as if that meant anything.
“I do now. Drop it and get out of here or I’ll have to shoot! Maybe you haven’t heard but people who steal food get shot on sight, now. You just killed our last grown rooster.”
“Don’t break my heart,” he jeered, staring at me, sizing up my threat. He looked around warily.
I realized he might be looking for a partner, someone who would come to his assistance. Frightened, I aimed at the ground by his feet and took a shot. I hoped to scare him into dropping the bird. He got scared all right—he jumped and started running—but he hadn’t dropped the bird! My first instinct was to run after him but instead I let my firearm follow him, aiming just ahead of where he was, knowing I could probably slow him down—or worse.
But I didn’t. I watched him go with a strange sense of helplessness. I should have stopped him, but I couldn’t shoot a fellow high schooler. If he’d been a stranger, if he’d tried to shoot at me, perhaps it would have been different. But I hadn’t seen a weapon on him, and knowing him from my school—from my old life—had thrown me out of whack.
I turned and hurried back towards the house, terrified every second of getting shot. From the upstairs windows, I heard them calling my name, telling me to hurry. A shot sounded somewhere nearby.
As I neared the door, it opened from the inside. Mrs. Buchanan, looking grim, waited to close it behind me. I pulled the action figure from my pocket, anticipating the happy smile of my little brother when he saw it.
“Look, Aiden!”
Only—he wasn’t there. My brother was gone. Again.
While Mrs. Buchanan double-locked the door behind me, I asked if my brother had gone downstairs.
“All the children are down there,” she said.
“But I left Aiden up here. He wanted his toy.”
“You were downright foolish to go out there for that.”
“I know, but I had to.”
“You did not have to.”
“I did.” I despaired of explaining, so I asked, “Can you help me look for him?”
“Of course.” We fanned out. I took a quick look in the nearest rooms but they were empty. Somebody must have taken him to the safe room, someone who wouldn’t be swayed by his crying or histrionics, no matter how much he fussed. Perhaps Mrs. Martin had lost patience and come and fetched him herself. She would be angry with me for taking so long. She would be furious when she found out why I had done so. I took a breath and headed to the hallway leading to the basement.
On the way, I thought about Miles taking our rooster. It was frustrating, because we needed that bird for breeding. We’d continue getting eggs until a male pullet grew to adult size, but this would slow down meat production. But could I really blame him for taking the bird? Everyone needed food. He was probably desperate.
Then I got worried—would some people in the compound be furious if they knew I’d had a shot and not taken it? I determined right then not to say anything about the whole episode. It wouldn’t be the first time an animal had disappeared with no explanation.
Chapter 22
SARAH
“If we live through this,” I told Richard as we ducked inside an old barn looking for shelter, “I’m going to write a book someday.” We hadn’t seen or heard more military trucks, and we’d crossed miles of land, straddling the edge of fields and tree lines, trying to put distance between us and them. This area of the state was more rural than Warren County, that was certain.
Richard wanted us to go back to our old method of traveling by darkness, so although it was still daylight, we were gonna lay low until sunset. We blinked, trying to adjust to the dusky inner light of the old structure. The door was old and wouldn’t shut all the way, but that was fine. If it was in good shape, it could be a target for scavengers. The more broken down and neglected a place appeared, the more likely it would be passed by as having no value.
Richard hadn’t replied to my mention of writing a book. Either he didn’t think I was capable of doing it—I’d never been the brainy one in the family—or he didn’t think we’d live through this. Maybe both.
A sudden scurrying sound caught our attention and a big, fat rat, dragging hay on its feet, scurried in and then back out of sight into a dark corner.
“I don’t want to stay here.”
“Are you kidding?” Richard said. “That’s dinner.”
I shook my head. “We have stuff in the backpack. I can’t eat that.” After all the good, normal food we’d had at the Steadmans I was sure I could not bring myself to swallow rat meat. Not until I was starving again.
He surveyed me. “O.K. But we need to stay here until dark.”
That night after crossing more fields, we entered woods. They were thick and full of ravines. Vines and downed logs tripped us up, and bugs landed on our faces, in our eyes, ears, anything open. The terrain was hilly and exhausting, forcing us to find a road. Luckily we were between towns, so it was as empty as we could wish.
We’d been on it for maybe half a mile when we came to an intersection with a huge sign. In the moonlight, the words were clear: REFUGEE CAMP. An arrow beneath the words pointed right, and writing, this by hand: FOOD! PROTECTION! MEDICAL!
“Refugee Camp—do you think that’s the soup kitchen?”
Richard didn’t answer. He was thinking.
“We should go there,” I said. When he didn’t answer, I added, “We both know that Aunt Susan—” I couldn’t complete the sentence. I couldn’t say she was probably not alive. But how could she be?
“You know we have nowhere else to go.”
Still Richard said nothing.
“C’mon.” I tugged on his arm, turning him to the right so we could find the camp. “It’s a sign for refugees. That’s what we are.” We began walking but Richard was dragging.
“I don’t trust it.”
“I can’t keep living this way,” I said. “I’d rather die than keep living this way.”
He gave me a reproving look but said nothing. I wanted to get a look at the refugee camp—we could decide after seeing it if it was a place we’d want to go. I think Richard was also weary of the way we’d been living, traveling by night, sleeping in old barns, homeless and lonely. Those four glorious days with the Steadmans—days that felt almost like life could be normal again—had ruined us for this life. Somehow, a taste of a home, a real home, made our hardened spirits shrivel up. We needed that hardness now, back out on the road, but it wasn’t there anymore. Richard and I both—we longed to be cared for.
We lapsed into silence as we often did, when walking.
“I wonder if Dad is at a refugee camp,” I said. “Hey! Maybe there’ve been camps like this all along, we just didn’t know about them! We could have left the library sooner!” I continued to think about that. What if there had been places to go all along? All our suffering, hunger, danger—maybe we could have avoided it!
“Mom and Jesse might still be alive if we left the library sooner and went to a camp!” I was getting upset. Richard had been listening to me silently, his face grim as usual, but at these words he stopped and turned and gave me nothing short of a glare.
“Don’t—” he said, and paused. “Nothing would have saved Mom or Jesse except if the pulse had never happened. Don’t talk nonsense. I could barely make it to Wal-Mart and back in those freezing temperatures and Mom would never have been able to travel in that weather. Neither would Jesse.”
We continued walking but I couldn’t get the thought from my mind that my mother and little cousin might have died for nothing! They might have been saved if that sign was right and there really was food available at these camps. (I assumed instantly if there was one camp, there had to be more. They were
probably all over the place. We’d missed them because we’d stuck to woods and fields!)
I felt madder and madder about it the longer we walked. We slowed as we approached a town, the outline of buildings against the moonlit sky giving us warning. Like most towns we’d seen since the pulse, this one looked like a band of drunken madmen had blundered through, destroying everything in their path. Even in the dim moonlight you could tell it was a mess. The acrid smell of burnt wood hit us. We scanned the buildings for lights, for signs of life. If there were people around, we’d have to hide. We heard nothing, saw no sign of occupancy. The houses, as we slowly walked down the sidewalk, were broken up, windows smashed, doors actually swinging on loose hinges. We came to a block where an entire row of small homes, all close together, were merely burnt remains.
We weren’t surprised. Many towns we’d passed since leaving our own had looked like this. And we were used to seeing plumes of smoke in the distance, no matter where we were. Fires seemed commonplace.
“It’s a ghost town,” I whispered. But Richard shook his head at me, motioning me to be silent.
I wanted to talk. I wanted to say, “Why does this happen? Why do people have to be so savage?” But I already knew the answer. There were gangs of survivors who really were madmen; they didn’t care about anything or anyone. We’d heard rumors they even ate people.
It was depressing. I stopped looking at the damaged homes with their weedy, overgrown lawns. As we neared the end of the street, I said, “I think we went the wrong way. I don’t see any refugee camp.”
Richard pointed. A sign, hung haphazardly across the wooden gate of an abandoned house, said, “Refugee Camp Ahead, ½ mile. Again the handwritten words were beneath the official words, Food! Protection! Medical! An arrow showed we were heading in the right direction. We continued on.
“What if the camp isn’t being run by the government?” Richard said.
“Who else would run it?” He didn’t answer right away and so I thought about it a minute. “A charity? You think it’s being run by a charity?”
Richard stopped. “I don’t think we should go to the camp.”
I gaped at him. “Why not? They have FOOD!”
“We don’t know that,” he returned, looking up and down the street.
“The sign said so!” I was astounded by my brother. Didn’t he want to eat a good square meal? Wasn’t he as hungry and miserable as I was?
“Sarah, a sign saying so doesn’t make it so.”
I gasped in disbelief. “What possible reason would there be for anyone to lie?”
“To get people to come willingly!”
“But if they want us to come, they must have food and supplies! Why else would they—remember what that farmer told us? They took his family’s food to bring to camps like this!”
“That’s not what he said. He said they were setting up soup kitchens. A refugee camp is a thousand miles from a soup kitchen.”
I started walking in the direction of the camp. “I don’t care what they call it; soup kitchen, refugee camp, whatever—I just want a place to go!”
Richard caught up to me but he said, “Wait. Let’s wait until morning to find the place. Then we’ll watch it.”
“Watch it?”
“I have binoculars, remember? I want to see what’s going on. Once we get inside one of those places, we may not be able to leave.”
“Why wouldn’t we? And maybe we won’t WANT to leave! If they have food and a bed, I’ll be happy to stay!”
“Just humor me,” Richard said. “If everything looks kosher, we’ll go in. We still have provisions from Tom and Martha. You can wait another day.”
I felt tears pop into my eyes. I hadn’t realized how much hope that sign had given me until now, until Richard was taking it away. The idea of the government having food for us—even an unfair government that would take food from its rightful owners—still made me feel that the world hadn’t ended. There was still a semblance of order, of help. Plus, I was tired of being scared and dirty and homeless. I wanted to go—even if I couldn’t get out again.
“I’ll go without you. Watch for me tomorrow and I’ll wave something at you to let you know everything’s okay.”
Richard let out a heavy, exasperated breath. “No way. We stay together. And I’m not letting you in that place until we see it and watch.”
“I’m tired, Richard.” I met his gaze and could barely hold back tears.
“I’m sorry. I know.”
He took my arm gently and turned me back toward the deserted street of broken-down homes. We headed back the way we’d come but he stopped in front of a house that had a little wooden gate. Most of the fence was smashed in, but the entry was intact.
“Wait here a sec,” he said, and gently pushed, until it swung open silently.
“Where are you going?” I hissed. He motioned with a hand for me to stay put. I guessed he was seeing if it was fit to spend the rest of the night in. We’d stayed in lots of places that weren’t exactly “fit,” so even though the house looked eerie and empty, it was probably no worse than other shelters we’d slept in.
Richard had used the walkway and went right up to the front steps and then the door. He knocked! He looked back at me, holding up a hand, motioning me to wait, and then tried the front door. It was locked. I could stand it no longer and went to join him.
“I told you to stay there!’
“It’s creepy standing out there alone! What if somebody comes and sees me alone?”
“Fine. C’mon.” I followed him off the porch and around the side of the house. From the sides, the house and the neighboring one looked more normal. Dark, but not destroyed. Windows were intact. From the yard, we could see other backyards of the surrounding homes, and these homes looked untouched as well, except equally silent and empty. “Everyone’s probably at the camp,” he murmured.
“You see?” I cried, in a whisper. “They went to the camps for help!”
“Maybe they weren’t given a choice,” he said.
I felt disgusted with Richard. It was his pessimistic nature rearing its pessimistic head. I wanted to join everyone else and go to the camp.
At the back of the house Richard went up to a window and, pressing his face against it, peered inside.
“What are you doing?” I whispered. “It’s too dark to see anything!” But he turned and looked back at me with a surprised expression.
“I can see enough! Things look normal in here!” He turned back and took another look, while I glanced around us anxiously.
“This place doesn’t look looted like most houses!” he said.
This was a surprise. Back in Xenia, houses seemed universally broken into with shattered windows, smashed-in doors, and the contents strewn about. Many of the homes in this town looked that way, too—from the front. Why would this one be different on the inside? Richard took a knife from his pack and tried to jimmy up the window. In a few minutes he was able to raise it a couple inches and then high enough so he could climb in. I felt my heart thumping. He threw one leg over the sill and met my eyes.
“Wait here.”
Chapter 23
ANDREA
At the door to the safe room, I hesitated. During a skirmish, the only way anyone was supposed to open the door from the inside was if the person on the outside coded the word ‘friend,’ using tap code.
We were supposed to memorize the table, the whole alphabet, so we could theoretically knock code any message we wanted, but Lexie and I had both memorized ‘friend’ and then forgotten the rest. I knocked two taps, followed by one; that was ‘f.’ I gave four taps, followed by two—that was ‘r;’ I’d just tapped ‘i’ when I heard the bolt moving, and the door being unlocked. It swung open and there was Mrs. Martin.
I hoped she would say, “Yeah, he’s here. I went up and got him because you took too long,” that sort of thing. But she looked at me in surprise for a moment. “Where’s your brother? Quentin’s worried about him no
t being here.”
“Oh, my gosh!” I felt like slumping to the ground. “I thought you brought him down!”
Mrs. Martin gave me a look of concern. “Where’d you leave him?”
I quickly explained to her what happened. I steeled myself for the disapproval that would follow–but hurriedly added, “I just don’t understand why he’d take off when he knew I was getting his toy!” I held it up in frustration. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“All right, don’t panic,” she said. “Probably one of the other adults saw him and grabbed him so he’d be safe. They wouldn’t want to leave a child alone during an attack.” She hadn’t meant it as a jab, but it cut deeply, because the unspoken reproof was that I had done precisely that. I’d left him alone while we had intruders on the property.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
Behind her I heard Quentin saying, “Is it Aiden? Did Andi bring Aiden?” His little face appeared beside Mrs. Martin. Perfect! Just what I didn’t need!
“Where’s Aiden?” he asked me, wide-eyed.
Mrs. Martin shooed him back into the room. She looked at me and said, “Go find out who’s got him.” But then she frowned. “No. Wait. You get in here and I’ll go look for him.”
But I felt guilty about letting Aiden go missing and I didn’t want to stay safe and sheltered away. I wanted to look for him. Mrs. Martin had gone to the gun vault and she now slung her rifle across her shoulder and said, “I’ll find your brother.”
“Yeah, find him!” cried Quentin.
She started out, but I grabbed her arm. “Please, Mrs. Martin! I messed up and I want to find him!”
“It doesn’t matter if you messed up,” she replied. “You stay down here. Jolene and Mrs. Wasserman are here also.” I felt deflated. She said, more gently, “It’s always better to have several adults with the little ones.”
The Pulse Effex Series: Box Set Page 40