by John L. Monk
When they weren’t learning terrible and important secrets, they’d look in their plant books to identify the various species they found along the way, pointing out which ones were edible and which were poisonous. Every outing was like a new book filled with unknown adventures. Each trip a journey into a dangerous and magical world.
There were other trips Jack took—with his dad or mom and nobody else. He always felt a little uneasy about those because they didn’t talk about history, or math, or science, or even war. Nothing so concrete or entertaining. Instead, they talked about the people around them.
Jack and his dad were sitting outside a coffee shop at the mall, resting their feet after a little shopping. His dad had coffee—no sugar, lots of cream. Jack had tasted coffee before and decided it wasn’t for him, so he settled for hot chocolate.
“So what’s their story?” his dad said.
“Uh, whose?”
His dad nodded pointedly that way.
Jack, ten at the time, followed the look and saw three big kids shoving a smaller kid and punching him in the arm. The smaller kid laughed like it was no big whoop, though he did rub his shoulder. Jack watched them carefully, knowing he was expected to think before offering an opinion.
A minute later, a couple of girls—very pretty—walked by carrying purses and bags, and the roughhousing settled down. One of the boys said something and the others laughed. In response, the lead girl turned her head and replied back in anger, bringing more laughter. When the girls were gone, the boys pushed rudely through the crowd and disappeared.
His dad looked over at him. “Well?”
“They seem like jerks.”
“That’s obvious enough. Why are they here?”
Jack sighed. “Probably just shopping.”
“Is that how people shop?”
“Maybe they’re resting. Like us.”
“Is that how people rest?”
He smiled and shook his head. His dad never gave an inch. He’d ask questions like that all day until Jack got serious and engaged them properly.
“I guess they want to be here, even if they aren’t shopping. And yes, I’m trying to figure out why.” He’d almost added sheesh to the end of that, but stopped at the last second.
He closed his eyes to prove he was thinking about it. Now he was curious—just what the heck were those big kids doing here? Then he had it.
“They’re here because they’re bored?”
“Are you asking me or telling me?”
“Telling. I mean, why stand around hitting that kid? Why bother those girls? I think it’s because there’s nothing to do here if you don’t have money. Maybe they don’t have money.”
“So why are they here if it’s so boring?”
Jack shrugged. “I guess wherever they came from is even more boring.”
His dad didn’t say anything for a moment, content to sip his coffee and wait on his son. Jack worried he’d find some other group to ask him about.
“Were you afraid of them?” his dad said suddenly.
Jack grinned. “Not from over here. I’d sure hate to be that one kid, though.”
“What if you’d walked over near them? Would you have been afraid then?”
The obvious answer was they liked to hit smaller kids, and Jack was a smaller kid, so of course he’d be worried. They’d stared around at the bustling crowd with a troubling intensity, as if willing something dramatic to happen. And when the girls walked by, they’d treated it like a challenge, invading their peace for no other reason than the entertainment value of a few hurled insults.
“Yeah, I’d be afraid,” Jack said at last. “They’re big kids. And they’re bored. They might hit me or call me names. But it makes me mad.”
“What makes you mad?”
“If I want to walk over there, or anywhere, I shouldn’t have to worry about them. If they’re not shopping, they should go home.”
Finally, his dad got that look in his eyes that said the questions were done with.
“Well, son, here’s an encouraging thought: when you grow up, you won’t have to worry about cabbages like that hitting you in the arm. In fact, they’ll probably fear you more, no matter how big they are.”
Cabbages.
His dad liked to split the world into two groups: cabbages and weeds. Cabbages, he’d once said, needed farmers to take care of them. They grew in rows and would die quickly without water and fertilizer. Weeds, on the other hand, were prickly and tenacious, and if you wanted them dead you had to dig out the roots or they’d come right back. Weeds were survivors.
Jack said, “Why would they ever be afraid of me?”
“Because you’ll be their employer, or you’ll employ people like them. Now, on that note …” He groped around in his bookstore bag. “I bought you something. Trust me, it’s good.”
He took out a thin paperback with a boring cover titled, The Autobiography Of Benjamin Franklin. Jack’s heart sank a little, but only for a moment. His dad was many things, but none of them were boring.
“You know the rule, Dad,” he said, grinning. “If I read one of your books, you have to read one of mine.” He pulled out a book from his own bag and set it on the table.
Looking at the book, with lasers and giant robots fighting on the cover, his dad grimaced. “Megabots?”
“You’ll love it,” Jack said, smiling impishly. “Lots of symbolism. You know how much you love symbolism.”
“Is that right?”
The two of them laughed and enjoyed the moment. A bit later, his dad’s face grew serious. “I think you’ll like learning about old Ben. Not much symbolism from what I remember, but he ran away from home.”
Jack blinked in surprise. He wanted him reading about runaways?
“Are you and mom trying to cut back on bills?”
At the sight of his father’s frown, Jack realized he might have pushed too far.
“Young Ben ran away because he wanted to start a business. He was fourteen years old. Think about that.”
Jack thought about it, frowning in concentration for added effect.
His dad leaned over and fixed him with a considering eye. “In my opinion, Ben was a slacker. Your eleventh birthday is next week. That’s the day you start your own business. It’s a lot of work, but I think you’re up to it.”
Jack shook his head, not quite believing what he was hearing. His parents had moved their yearly bombshell announcement up by an entire week.
3
Jack entered the clearing where the main path diverged in the direction of Chantilly and shrugged off his heavy pack. Despite the cold, he’d removed his jacket before crossing the bridge over the creek near the park entrance. The steady wind painted his back in bands of chilled sweat.
Though he hadn’t traveled more than half a mile, he needed to rest. Shaking his head in frustration, he forced himself to accept the sorry fact that his pack was still too heavy by at least fifteen pounds. Most of it from food, but he didn’t want to shed any more of that. Now that he no longer had his mom’s survival pantry, he regretted his original decision to try living off the land. He should have brought more food and less ammo. If he hadn’t been so concerned about someone breaking in while he was out, he would have relocated the pantry out here and buried it in trash bags. Woulda-shoulda-coulda.
“Christ, it’s cold,” he said, mostly to hear his own voice.
A new and unfamiliar sense of vulnerability swept over him, and he mourned his parents’ fate from a different perspective. If they’d lived, he wouldn’t be out here in the cold faced with starvation, forced to flee an armed-to-the-teeth gang of cabbages.
He immediately regretted the unworthy thoughts, and tried not to hate himself for having them. His parents had helped him understand he couldn't always control how he felt about things. It was part of being human. All he could do was confront those feelings, sit with them, and try to disarm them.
His mom had called it tracing it back—a way of figuring
out how he felt way down deep and peeling his emotions away one layer at a time until he uncovered the truth. The first time he used it, he’d traced back why he was angry at a neighborhood friend who’d played a mean trick on him. He’d learned it wasn’t the trick, so much, but rather the shame of having trusted someone so easily that they could hurt him.
Standing in that clearing, Jack did his mom’s old exercise and traced it back, digging down to why he felt so angry at them. He’d gotten pretty good at figuring out why he felt things. Having parents like his, with their crazy-but-not-so-crazy questions, had done it to him. A blessing and a curse, he figured. This time it was a blessing, because he hated feeling like they’d abandoned him.
If only they hadn’t waited so long to have him. He could have spent more time with them. They could have been like normal parents who didn’t turn everything into a survival lesson. Now he was stuck with their unfair expectations. He had to survive—had to be strong—and if he couldn’t, then everything they’d done and said would get sucked away into the nothingness of death, and nobody would remember who any of them were.
“There you go, Mom,” he said huskily, looking back the way he’d come. “It’s traced.”
Way off over the trees, an oily column of black smoke curled into the sky. Though he couldn’t be sure without going back, Jack knew what it was. Those idiots had poured gasoline onto his house and lit it. Probably because of the nail trap he’d set, or maybe because they had gasoline and wanted to burn something and any reason would do. Anyone still alive in the last four houses would have heard the gunshots and noticed the fire, so he wasn’t too concerned about that.
Despite losing his house and all their stuff, he wasn’t angry. He hated the idea of people pawing through their photo albums and family heirlooms. This way, the smoke was carrying it to Heaven.
Jack smiled at that. In the years following his seventh birthday, he’d figured out his parents didn’t really believe in Heaven. And yet, for some reason, Jack still did. Well, a little. He never talked to them about it, and they never broached the subject. It felt good believing. And because he liked how it felt, he’d never traced it back to find out why.
When he glanced down along the path, Jack saw the Asian kid walking his way from their neighborhood. Too far to yell at, but at the boy’s pace they’d meet in a few minutes. Making it seem casual, Jack snapped the loop free on his holster and rested his hand there.
“That’s far enough,” he said when the kid was about ten yards off.
The boy stopped. Up close, he looked about twelve or thirteen.
“Where are you going?” the boy said.
“Somewhere. Why are you following me?”
The boy shrugged. “Because you’re not with those freaks back there. They’re nuts.”
Jack grew alarmed. “Did they see you coming this way?”
“No,” he said.
“Did they burn down my house?”
He shrugged. “Didn’t see. Probably.” He looked around the clearing. “Why are you out here?”
“What’s your name?”
“Pete. What’s yours?”
A moment passed where Jack struggled with what to say next. Trust had to be earned, sure, but people still needed a chance.
“Jack Ferris,” he said at last. “I’m off to see some friends of mine, see if they’re all right. After that, who knows?”
In truth, he and his parents had already planned out his destination, but he was keeping that to himself until he found his friends.
Pete bit his lip. “Can I come with you?”
The boy was scrawny from lack of food. Possibly near starvation. Scared, certainly. Other than that, he looked healthy, despite having crashed into a tree yesterday. Still, he could be unbalanced. His parents were almost certainly dead by now.
Looking down at his too-heavy pack, Jack realized that with help he wouldn’t have to shed any more weight. He could divvy it up.
“What are you doing?” Pete said.
“If you’re going to come with me,” he said, digging through his pack, “we have to share the load. You okay with that?”
Pete frowned as if puzzling over a bizarre concept. Then he nodded.
“Here, eat this.”
Pete caught the protein bar Jack tossed him and tore into it without saying thank you.
For the next five minutes, Jack split the contents of the pack into two uneven quantities. He kept his flashlight, his clothes, his collapsible fishing rod and tackle, all the ammunition, and half the food. He stacked the rest of the food, the tent, his sleeping bag, the rechargeable batteries, the fuel for the camping stove, and the mess kit onto a lightweight tarp and then cinched it up with a length of cut parachute cord.
“When we get into the woods,” Jack said, “we’ll find a stick you can tie it to. Kind of like a hobo.”
“A what?”
“A hobo. You know what a hobo is, right?”
Pete shook his head.
He stared at him in disbelief. How could someone not know about hobos?
Jack picked up the tarp, hefted its weight, and handed it over. “Hobos are people who carry stuff on sticks. Got it?”
Pete nodded, holding the bag out in front of him.
“It’ll be easier if you sling it over your shoulder, like Santa. You know who Santa is, right?”
“You still believe in Santa?”
Jack smiled. “No, but I like the holiday specials. You okay, man?”
Pete nodded and slung the makeshift pack over his shoulder. “Which way to your friend’s house?”
Jack showed him a nearby signpost describing the trails in the area. It had a little mark showing where they were. They’d barely made a dent into the park.
“We’ll go this way,” Jack said, following one of the paths with his finger to where it met a squiggly blue line. “There’s a road just beyond where the sign ends. We’ll cross the highway and stick to this creek here. It cuts between a bunch of neighborhoods. My friends live in one of them.” He stared at the kid thoughtfully. “You sure you’re okay?”
“Why do you keep asking me that?”
“Because you crashed a car into a tree yesterday. What was that about, anyway?”
Pete looked at him like he was crazy. “I was trying to learn to drive. I’m fine.”
Jack didn’t push him. He’d watched his parents drive countless times, so he knew the theory behind it. When the Sickness swept the world, they’d pushed to teach him, sensing he’d need to know how. He’d resisted. Stupid of him, he now realized. But at the time, learning felt like giving up on them. Then his dad died and his mom got sick. After that, leaving the house meant leaving his mom and their food unguarded, so he hadn’t bothered.
Together, they set off down the trail. The clearing fell away and they entered a stretch of woods. From time to time, houses popped into view through the trees, and twice they had to cross bridges over the creek that twisted through the park. During the summer, every opportunity to look in that creek revealed turtles, frogs, and water snakes.
They didn’t see people, and as cold as it was, there weren’t any animals other than squirrels. An hour later, they came out of the woods onto a single-lane road.
“You might feel like following the road,” Jack said. “But we can’t get caught out during the day. Not with all our stuff. I don’t feel like shooting anyone, and I honestly don’t want to get shot. We’ll cut across and stick to the plan. All right?”
“Why do you keep talking like that?”
Jack frowned in genuine puzzlement. “Like what?”
“Like an adult or something. Because you’re not.”
Jack smiled sadly. “Too bad for us, huh?”
Pete opened his mouth to reply and then closed it.
Together, they resumed their march on the other side, this time without a path to travel by.
4
The creek they followed was called Big Rocky Run. It was neither big, nor very rock
y. And if it didn’t exactly run, it made up for that by meandering around neighborhood after neighborhood, hiding them safely from sight. The way was thick at times with brambles they had to skirt, and other times they could walk easily beneath evergreens or through fields of tall, dry grass. Jack and his parents had hiked up and down this stretch of secluded parkland countless times, so he didn’t need a trail or even a map.
He couldn’t believe how slowly they were going. He kept having to stop, turn around, and go back to make sure Pete was okay. He was never okay—usually, he was resting. Once, Jack found him following a split in the trail leading to a neighborhood of single-family homes.
“Where the hell are you going?” Jack said.
Pete turned around dazedly and said, “How did you get behind me?”
After that, Jack made sure to stick closer for fear he’d wander off again.
When they finally made it to another road—Route 28—it was a half hour past dusk and too dark to see unless they used Jack’s flashlight. Beyond the road, the creek continued through more scrub and woods. From there, it would carry clear out to Fairfax. Greg and Lisa lived considerably closer than that. A good two more hours of hiking and he’d be very close to the twins’ apartment complex.
“When are we stopping?” Pete said for perhaps the tenth time, swinging the pack to his other shoulder. He’d tried the hobo thing, but reverted back after five minutes, complaining the stick hurt too much.
Also for the tenth time, Jack said, “Just a little farther.”
“It’s freezing out here.”
Jack turned and regarded the heavily breathing boy in the meager light.
“The more you move, the warmer you get. Didn’t your family ever go hiking?”