by Amy Briant
“Five minutes,” I said to East.
I stepped off the road and found a place to sit in the shade under the trees. East hesitated, then followed me. I didn’t know if anyone was looking for us, but it seemed prudent not to hang out in the middle of the road waiting for them. Would anyone even know we were missing from the bus? Probably not—a census of all the miscellaneous body parts at the blast site would take quite some time and still come up inconclusive. On the other hand, a tracker could easily find our trail. I mean “tracker” as in footprints and broken twigs, not GPS and satellites. They said the satellites all went down, literally or functionally, during the Bad Times. No one knew if that was just a rumor or really true. Still, only a fool would lounge in plain sight on the highway.
Hunter finally realized we weren’t walking back to him and noisily tromped to our location. He threw his pack to the ground, narrowly missing my feet, then took a seat next to East.
“What happened back there?” he asked.
It was the first thing he had said in a while. He drank from the water bottle she offered him, then drew a shaking, filthy hand across his mouth. He was staring at his sneakers, which was good because I was looking at him like he was crazy. East glanced at me expectantly, which I found strange. I figured the two of them were having a conversation, not me.
“The bus blew up. Everyone’s dead,” I finally said, stating what I thought was the obvious.
“I know that, asshole,” Hunter said testily. “I mean, was it an accident?” He finally raised his head and looked me in the eye.
“I heard that observatory guy yell something right before the explosion,” East said. “Something about the Shiprights. At least, I thought it was him.”
According to history class, the Ship of State was a far right-wing militia group, one of many spawned during the heatedly divisive times Before. Their philosophy of “righting” the ship of state was rife with senseless violence and fearmongering. The group’s many followers—zealots, bigots and flat-out lunatics—became known as Shiprights. That’s what they taught us in school, at least. Gran had her own version.
“Most people need someone to hate, Kell. It’s in their DNA,” she told me not too long before she died. “It’s what we’re put on Earth to rise above, I believe, but hardly ever do. And the easiest one to hate is the one who’s different—different skin color, different language, different way of looking at things. Different is dead, Kell. And you’re different. You’re smart and you’re a hard worker and you got a good heart, kiddo, but all most people will see is how different you are. Don’t get me wrong—I’m proud of all your differences and mine too. They make us special, but they make us stand out. You’re just like me in that regard. You look different, you act different, you talk different.”
“What’s wrong with the way I talk?” I said, incensed that yet another aspect of my personality that I thought was just fine had been identified as a defect.
“Not a thing, except for swallowing that dictionary. Now, come on, don’t make that face!”
I must have frowned. Besides, if I talked funny, it was her fault. Who else encouraged me to read all those books? Who else did I have to talk to except a batty old woman? No wonder I sounded weird—I sounded just like her! But she wasn’t done.
“Just understand, kid, most people don’t like to be challenged. They think boys wear pants and play sports, and girls wear dresses and play with dolls. If you don’t fit in one of their little boxes, they can make your life mighty uncomfortable. Different is dead, Kell—don’t ever forget that.”
In school, there were a few books about grandmothers who baked cookies and told bedtime stories. Apparently Gran never read those.
“So what am I supposed to do?” I asked. “Pretend to be someone I’m not?”
“Oh, hell no,” she said. “You’ll never pull that off. Nope, Duponts just have to be Duponts, I guess. But you’ll never win any popularity contests, I guarantee you that. Lord knows I never did!” She cackled her way into one of her coughing fits. In the end, the cackles were few and far between, the coughing relentless.
“Maybe something was wrong with the bus,” Hunter was arguing. “Maybe the gas tank caught fire and that’s why it blew up.”
“I think it was a missile,” East retorted. “Or a bomb. Did you hear that noise right before it blew?” Neither of us answered her. She turned to me. “What do you think, Kell?”
I was startled again that she included me. Like she’d said, we had never really spoken before. Oh, maybe a word or two, here or there, in class when the situation demanded it, but an actual conversation? No way. In school, nobody ever talked to me. To be fair, I never talked to them either. Silence was one of my best weapons.
“I’m not sure,” I said slowly. Missile or bomb? Did it matter, when the result was the same? “I did see that Lookout Dude poking around the luggage compartment when I got my gear out.”
“Why would he blow up the bus?” Hunter argued, looking at me the way he always did—as someone to take his aggression and insecurity out on. “He was from the Settlement, for chrissake. He was one of us.”
“But he was the one yelling that Ship of State stuff,” East pointed out. She looked at me like I was supposed to jump in and referee. Fat chance.
What was the point of wrangling over the details? The mushroom cloud over San Tomas made it clear the Bad Times were back. I noticed neither one of them had mentioned that yet. I gazed up at the sky—still clear, still blue. The movement of the treetops told me the wind was still blowing east to west. Good.
“So where are we going anyhow?” Hunter asked, his petulance a poor mask for his fear. East said nothing, but looked at me.
“I’m going to Segundo,” I said.
“Segundo!” Hunter crowed derisively, like I’d said I was going to the moon. Picking on me seemed to be perking him right up. “You’re crazy. We don’t know where that is. Nobody’s even heard anything from that group.”
“I know where it is,” I said staunchly. “Gabriel drew me a map before she left.”
“That’s your sister, right?” East asked me. “Gabrielle? One of the Pioneers?”
“It’s Gabriel and yeah, she’s my sister.”
“Isn’t Gabriel a boy’s name?” Hunter said with his usual ugly smirk.
What in the world did she see in him? But I merely responded, “My parents named her Gabriel, like the angel, and they named me Kell. Just like your parents named you Hunter and her parents named her Elinor. Got it?”
“Yeah, Hunter, be cool,” East urged him. “Let’s not fight, okay?”
There was a brief silence. In spite of the awfulness behind us, and the shock and the horror that we all three were feeling, it was still a beautiful fall day. Sun shining, birds singing. People destroy, but nature abides, Gran used to say.
“Look,” I tried again. “All we basically have to do is follow the highway for a hundred miles. At twenty miles a day, we’ll be there in less than a week. That was their plan, you know—to establish the next Settlement one hundred miles away, to the north and then east.”
I said it like it was a piece of cake, but in reality, I knew it wouldn’t be easy locating Segundo. We could walk for weeks and never find a trace of them. It made sense that they would follow the highway and establish the new village nearby, but there were a hundred different reasons why they might do something else. It didn’t matter to me. Ever since my grandmother had died, my plan was to first honor my promise to her to graduate, then set out on my own to find Gabriel and Segundo. Maybe I was crazy to think I could do it, but I was pretty confident in my skills. I’d done all right on my own after Gran passed. And it wasn’t like I had any better options in life. I wasn’t going to live alone in Gran’s cabin forever. I sure as heck wasn’t going to stay in the Settlement. I was an outsider to those people. I’d never felt welcome there. No one would miss me if I left.
Although, there was the question of the Aptitudes. Gabriel was
certain that I’d be a Pioneer, just like her. That would have been cool, but I had my doubts. Gabriel and I weren’t that much alike. Our physical differences were easy to see, but I knew that we felt and acted differently too. She was extroverted, easygoing, a conformist, to tell the truth. And I thought I understood the reasons for that. Why fight the status quo when it’s working so well for you? It was people like me and Gran—“subverters of expectations” was Gran’s fancy phrase—who stuck out like sore thumbs, who were stubborn about getting our own way.
I was sure the testing and evaluations that led to one’s Aptitude had uncovered that I wasn’t anything like my big sister. Maybe I was meant to be a Scavenger, part of a small team devoted to retrieving resources from what was left of San Tomas. I knew I would hate to be a Settler. In theory, it was possible to reject your Aptitude—but they said no kid had ever done that.
Screw it. All bets were off now.
“Let’s go,” I said, standing up and tightening the straps of my pack. “A few more hours, then we’ll find a place to camp for the night.”
Chapter Five
The First Night
The long-gone manufacturer of my tent optimistically described it as a four-person model per the still-existing label over the door. For one small person such as myself, it was spacious. I loved sleeping out under the stars, but I could see fog creeping over the tops of the coastal mountains to the west. There would be no stars to see that night. The temperature would likely drop into the forties, if not lower. I was extremely thankful I had left the bus with all my gear on me.
We stopped in the late afternoon to make camp. Gabriel had taught me that one of the first rules of camping is to make sure you’ve got plenty of daylight to set up. There had been no sign of anyone following us. Which didn’t mean they weren’t back there, but I was trying to focus on the positive. East and I gathered wood to build a fire. Hunter found a flint in Mr. Giovanni’s pack, along with clothes, food and cooking equipment. All of which I had in my own pack, but it was good to have spares. Particularly the food.
I knew the fire would give away our location to anyone searching for us, but we needed it, for the psychological comfort as much as the light and heat. I didn’t really think we were being followed. After obsessing about it all day, I concluded that the Lookout Dude was nuts and had blown up the bus. Maybe he was in cahoots with whoever bombed the Settlement. Maybe, since he couldn’t be part of that, he had unilaterally decided his contribution would be to take out the senior class. The bottom line was he and everyone else in the vicinity was dead—the three of us were on our own. By the time anyone realized we had survived—if anyone even cared—we would be days ahead of them on the trail. I hoped.
“It’s kind of small, but we can all sleep in my tent if we stash our packs in the trees,” I offered. Quite graciously, I thought. East was about to speak when Hunter interrupted her.
“I’m not sleeping anywhere near you, girly boy,” he said with a curled lip. “And neither is she.”
“Hunter!” East said loudly, her tone a warning.
“Maybe you should give that shit a rest,” I said to him. “Things are a little different now. Hun-ter.” I gave his name some extra emphasis.
“You little—” he started to say, arising from where he’d been crouched by the fire. But East stood in his way.
“Knock it off, Hunter,” she said. “Kell is right. Things are different now. We need to pull together, not fight with each other.”
He looked from her to me, his eyes narrowed to slits, then abruptly turned on his heel and stomped off into the bushes, grumbling under his breath.
“Sorry,” East said to me. “He’s just upset, you know? He’s not always like this.”
“I know exactly what he’s like,” I told her. She looked taken aback. Every time I opened my mouth, in fact, she looked surprised that I had the power of speech. Not to mention an opinion.
“I guess I better go find him,” she said after a moment.
I shrugged. “You’re still welcome to sleep in here if you like. It’s going to get pretty cold tonight.”
“Thanks,” East said. “I appreciate it. I’ll see if I can change his mind.”
I meant she was still welcome, not him, but whatever. It looked like there was finally going to be a silver lining to his hatred—I’d be cozy in my tent, he’d be freezing his big bullying ass outside. Sounded good to me.
The three of us didn’t talk much at dinner that first night. I think we were all still stunned by what we’d seen. What we’d so narrowly missed being a part of. At least we had plenty to eat for a day or two thanks to the food in Mr. Giovanni’s pack. I had decided not to share with them—at least not yet—the list of what I had in my backpack. Living alone in the woods, I never left the cabin without some basic survival tools and supplies, like my flint, compass and hunting knife. Things that could mean the difference between life and death in the wilderness. And I certainly didn’t tell them about the gun.
But I silently thanked the universe for the extra food. The only problem was Hunter ate more than East and I did, combined. I tried to tell him we needed to ration the food. He threw an empty can at my head. And missed. I gathered up the trash and buried it. No point in leaving more of a trail than we had to. Even if the Mad Bomber wasn’t after us, there might be others out there without our best interests in mind. Most survivors in the area had made their way to the Settlement in the past several years, but there were stories about people still living on their own out in the woods or the ghost towns. If the stories were true, I hoped to avoid those people.
Later, snug in my sleeping bag in my tent and glad of at least some semi-privacy, I closed my eyes. My body wanted to sleep, but my mind kept cycling through the moments just before and after the explosion, over and over again. I couldn’t stop it, no matter how hard I tried. Then I heard East’s voice. Eavesdropping was a welcome distraction.
“Don’t cry, Hunter,” she said softly, “we’re going to be okay.”
I heard a strangled sob. I couldn’t catch everything he was saying.
“My mom and dad…everybody…and Ronnie…He was my best friend since we were little kids…Ronnie’s dead, East…”
Ronnie was the guy sitting next to him on the bus, the one who had laughed while Hunter tried to twist my arm out of its socket and steal my backpack. Ronnie, over six feet tall, had once spat into my hair as I passed him in the hallway at school. Usually, though, his role was merely to snicker and applaud as Hunter verbally or physically assaulted anyone who was weaker or smaller or different. I just didn’t have it in me to grieve for Ronnie.
But Mr. Giovanni was a good guy. And there were people at the Settlement who had worked with my parents at the university for years. Gran had a few friends who had been pretty decent to me. So many people gone in a moment…I kept feeling the unfairness of it like an electric shock in my stomach. Not to mention the pictures in my head of the blood and the bodies…
I doubt any of us got much sleep that night.
Chapter Six
Animals
In the morning, my first thought was to get us moving, but my second thought was to keep an eye and an ear out for water. I had my canteen and East had the water bottle she’d found. Mr. Giovanni’s pack had a full water bottle in a side pocket, but all three of us were running low. None of the containers held more than a quart.
We broke camp early, but not too early. I didn’t say anything to the other two, but I didn’t want to be out at dawn with a couple of greenhorns bumbling through the forest and making a racket. Dawn and dusk were when mountain lions hunted. Bears, formerly rarely sighted in the urban sprawl of the Bay Area, had made a comeback after the Bad Times. Wild animals, in general, had flourished. It was humankind, the depredator, who had been systematically wiped out, mostly by each other during those Times. With the top of the food chain suddenly vacant, Mother Nature was back in charge. Still, as a rule it was rare that any wild animal would attack
an adult human unless provoked. Everyone knew to give mother bears with cubs a wide berth. Cougar attacks were unusual, but not unheard of. Wild boar were known for their nasty and unpredictable tempers. And, of course, snakes didn’t give a damn about any rules—we needed to be careful about snakes.
There had been stories—tall tales—of exotic beasts escaping from the zoo in San Francisco, but surely that wasn’t true. The zoo was a flat, black, scorched place now, like the rest of that doomed city. It was also said—and much more likely true—that some farm animals, like horses, cattle, sheep and goats, continued to thrive, grazing on the grass now covering many areas that had once been urban.
We’d had experience at the Settlement of another formerly domesticated animal. Many dogs were abandoned by their owners during the Bad Times. Coyotes picked off the little ones and disease thinned out the purebreds. But in the way of dogs, the remaining previously cuddly pooches had gotten together and formed packs. Several years and doggie generations later, they had reverted to wild dogs. Whatever breeds they had started out as, they were all pretty much just basic Dogs now. Short-haired, more or less brown, thirty to forty pounds, with tails that curled up over their hindquarters. If you came across one of them in the woods, you could usually scare it off with a few well-thrown rocks and a show of belligerence. The problem was, there was never just one of them. Fido and Fluffy were now soldiers in a highly efficient killing machine—the pack.
The good news, however, about all this burgeoning wildlife was that some of it was available for us to eat, instead of it eating us. There was fruit and nuts and plenty of other growing things to eat. I knew we were fortunate to be in this bountiful region, with lots of fresh water, plants and animals. We probably wouldn’t starve to death. Probably. My concern was the time it took to find and prepare food. Time I would rather be spending on getting to Segundo as quickly as possible. The one-week timeline I’d given East and Hunter was a joke. There was no way those two could do twenty miles a day, even if we knew exactly where we were going. And we wouldn’t be going far without food. I resolved to keep my eyes open for anything edible as we hiked along. As far as meat, all we had to do was catch it somehow. I couldn’t waste ammo on it, though. I’d checked Lookout Dude’s gun in the privacy of my tent—six bullets and that was it. I was thinking along the lines of something small that I could trap, like rabbit or squirrel. Maybe quail. Fish would be good.