by Amy Briant
Chapter Eight
The Aptitudes
The quake was over before we could even regain our feet. As I jumped to mine, my no doubt inappropriate reaction was heartfelt gratitude that we wouldn’t be doing any digging that evening. My next thought was that the gorge no longer seemed like such a swell place to camp. The hills which rose on either side of the creek seemed menacing now, like they were closing in on us. But I was torn—I still wanted to stick with the water.
East had gone down awkwardly and was stuck like a turtle on her back, Mr. Giovanni’s heavy pack weighing her down. I helped her up. Back on her feet, she clung to me tightly. She was crying and gasping for breath. I thought she was winded from her fall, but then I saw the panic on her face. Her teeth were chattering, her body rigid.
“Hey,” I said to her. Then, “Hey!” more sharply. She looked at me then, but her eyes were unfocused and wild.
I managed to pry myself loose from her grip and took a step back. I stooped to pick up my fallen canteen, then realized this was the perfect moment to throw my water in her face. I always wanted to do that to somebody.
She was sputtering then, pissed off and still crying, but at least I had her attention.
“We’re going to make it,” I said with as much conviction as I could muster. “You and I are going to Segundo and we’re going to be fine.” Frankly, I needed the pep talk almost as much as she did.
“B-b-but what if they’re all d-dead too?” she said, tears glistening on her cheeks. That was my worst fear as well, but I didn’t see any point in talking about it. She started to shake.
Oh, crap, I thought, but stepped in for the hug. Which was made clumsy not only by the heavy packs on our backs, but the apples in her pockets. Not to mention my keen awareness of her breasts. Classy, Kell. Her boyfriend’s a corpse and you’re thinking about boobs. When the worst of her distress seemed to have passed, I let her go.
“Come on,” I told her. “Time to find a place to camp.”
“Not here,” she said with a shudder and a glance toward the mound of dirt that marked Hunter’s final resting spot.
“Not here,” I agreed.
We headed upstream in the dwindling light. Two good things happened along the way. One, there were no aftershocks. Two, as the creek meandered northeast, the hill on our right petered out. We found ourselves on the verge of a great grassy flatland, just as Gabriel had described it. With the last few dying rays of sunshine, we made camp by the creek.
There was plenty of driftwood along the banks, deposited there by the rushing waters when they were much higher in the spring. By the light of a crackling fire, we ate our apple dinner, supplemented by the last of the trail mix. Having water again was major—I felt immensely relieved, both physically and mentally.
East was quiet. She was obviously distressed and I couldn’t blame her. I was just glad she wasn’t going off in total hysterics like some girls would. Or asking me questions I couldn’t answer—like what had happened to the Settlement. Or how exactly I planned to find Segundo in a vast unknown wilderness.
“How come you never talk?” she finally said after we’d finished eating. We sat side by side on the largest of the driftwood logs, the creek murmuring to itself in the background.
“I talk,” I said. It sounded defensive, even to my ears. “When I have something to say.”
“You never talked in school. We’ve never even had a conversation before.”
“And that’s my fault?”
That gave her pause.
“Okay,” she said slowly. “I guess not. I guess that’s on both of us.”
There was another long stretch of silence broken only by the gurgling of the creek and the hiss of the fire. The stars in the limitless black sky above us were amazing as always. Gran had told me you couldn’t see the stars at night in San Tomas Before. She must have been pulling my leg on that one. There was no way to make a million blazing stars disappear.
“So how come you never talked in school?” East persisted, poking at the fire with a stick.
I considered my answer for a moment.
“I don’t like to lie,” I finally told her. “I’d rather be silent if I can’t speak the truth.”
“But—” she started in again.
I stood up abruptly, wanting to change the subject. She seemed to take the hint. I grabbed Mr. Giovanni’s pack and started going through its contents. A whistle, a flashlight powered by squeezing and a bar of soap were all keepers. I put all the good stuff in the pockets of my cargo pants. My plan was to remove all unnecessary weight from the pack, but to hang on to anything useful.
I pulled out the clothes for East to sort through. I had some of my own clothes in my pack, but she had only what was on her back. None of Mr. G’s garments was her size or taste, but she set aside a few items. She held up a pair of way too big wool socks for my inspection.
“Keep ’em,” I advised her. “At least they can keep your feet warm at night. Or you can use them for mittens when it gets colder.”
“When it gets colder?” she echoed with some dismay. “Just how long do you think we’re going to be out here, Kell? Shouldn’t we be in Segundo by the time it starts getting really cold?”
“I hope so.”
She frowned, then balled up the socks and threw them at me. I stuck them in my pockets—far be it from me to waste a good pair of wool socks. I dug deeper into the backpack. There wasn’t much left in there. We’d already eaten almost all his food.
“Here, see if I missed anything.”
I traded East the pack for her fire stick. As I leaned forward to tend the flames, she upended the empty backpack and gave it a shake.
Something small tumbled out.
“What’s that?” I asked. The teacher’s secret stash?
East felt for it in the dark, then picked it up. A little red leather notebook. I remembered seeing Mr. Giovanni jotting notes in it at school. Diary? No, too small for that.
She leafed through it, which seemed wrong. Whatever was in there, he had never meant for us to read it. But he was gone…Everyone was gone.
“What does it say?” I asked her, returning to my seat on the log. I was not so much curious as hopeful for a distraction from the dead.
She held the tiny book up to the flickering firelight, which, in case you don’t know, is hell of hard to read by. I inched down the log to see. My leg brushed hers. She didn’t seem to notice. I inched back.
“It’s some kind of list…” she said, peering intently at the cramped handwriting. “I think it’s a list of us.”
“His attendance list from yesterday?” Yesterday. A few centuries ago.
“No. It’s the names of everyone in our class on one side of the page and on the other…”
Her nose was all but touching the paper.
“So what, did I flunk the last history test?”
“It’s not grades, Kell,” East turned and pinned me with those big eyes. “It’s the Aptitudes.”
The sky chose that inopportune moment to start raining on us. And I mean a cold, hard, drenching rain. Sometimes the rain would be a gentle mist and sometimes it came down in buckets like somebody up there was mad at us. This was one of the latter. It began with a few fat drops, then the deluge commenced in earnest. The fire went out in seconds. Fortunately, my first task when making camp was always to set up the tent. East clutched the little notebook to her chest and ran for it. I was right behind her with the pack and the armful of Mr. Giovanni’s clothes she’d set aside for herself. The rest of our gear was already inside the tent, so at least not much got wet.
I’d been planning to sleep outside by the fire under all those stars, giving her the privacy of the tent, but the rain cancelled those plans.
After a few breathless moments of figuring out how two people, two packs, three sleeping bags and a few miscellaneous other objects could fit into a very small, very dark, confined space, we each found a place to sit. The whirring noise of the squeeze-op
erated flashlight was overwhelmed by the intense drumming of the rain on the tent.
East sat cross-legged on her sleeping bag, drying her long, dripping hair with one of Mr. Giovanni’s shirts. My hair was so short, I just ran my hands through it a few times to shed the excess water. She had draped her wet denim jacket over the larger pack, while I did the same with my sodden dark green UCST hoodie. Not surprisingly, Mr. Giovanni had also had a dark green UCST hoodie in his backpack. The Scavengers had found several hundred of them in the wreckage of the university bookstore’s storage room, each one clean and soft and new, individually sealed in airtight plastic, sizes XS to XXL. All dark green. So we’d had a generous supply of those for the foreseeable future.
As if the future could be foreseen.
It was funny, not to mention random, the things we’d had so much of back at the Settlement, compared to the things we desperately craved. Gran always grumpily said we had everything we needed and more. But then she had already mastered off-the-grid living long before the Bad Times hit.
East, shivering a bit, pulled on the way-too-big hoodie. I had to smile as her head popped through the opening. She just looked so damn cute. I was less so, but probably warmer, in Gran’s old brown wool sweater. It was going to be a cold night, particularly with no fire. Thank goodness we had the sleeping bags. I was keenly aware just how thin the line was between our survival and us not making it. I would need everything I’d been taught to keep us alive long enough to find Segundo.
“Kell, can you hold the light for me?”
East had the tiny red notebook open again, flipping through the pages. I held up the flashlight so she could read, although part of me felt like I could care less what the Aptitudes had been. That was all past now.
But I guess I was a little curious after all. Curious enough to want to see what they thought my Aptitude was. After all the testing and analysis the school had put us through…Maybe Gabriel was right and they’d made me a Pioneer just like her.
Suddenly, it all felt wrong.
“East, wait,” I said, moving the light away.
She looked at me quizzically.
“Maybe we shouldn’t look. I mean, do you really want to know the Aptitudes for all those kids?”
All those dead kids was what I didn’t say, but she knew what I meant. I thought the knowledge might upset her. Heck, I thought it might upset me. She stared at me intently for a moment, then looked down at Mr. Giovanni’s notebook in her hands. She closed it abruptly, then handed it to me.
“I don’t know,” she said, biting her lip.
“Does it even matter?” I asked. “It’s not like we’re going to do our Aptitudes when we turn eighteen.” If we turn eighteen, I didn’t add.
“But it’s our Aptitudes,” she said, looking surprised. Like it was a done deal that of course we would do exactly what our elders had decreed.
“East, think about it. Like, if I’m a Pioneer and you’re a Settler or whatever, what exactly are you going to settle?”
“Oh, you just assume I’m a Settler?” she flared up at me unexpectedly. I thought girls like her all wanted to be Settlers.
“And you’re so sure you get to be a Pioneer like your sister?” she went on in the same fiery manner. “It’s not automatic that we get the same Aptitude as our brother or sister, you know.”
East had an older brother—Baird. Two years older than us. Baird Eastman was quite the Golden Boy. Tall, handsome, good at sports, good student, popular with his peers, respectful with the adults. I guess no one was surprised when he received one of the rarer and more prestigious Aptitudes: Messenger.
I should probably explain a little more about the Aptitudes. Not every role was assigned every year. It wasn’t about filling a quota. The testing and assessments every student at the Settlement school underwent were what determined one’s Aptitude. And they weren’t just academic tests—I’m talking full-blown physical, psychological, intelligence and everything else evaluations. From strength and agility tests to an analysis of your ability to understand spatial relations to an appraisal of your communication skills. Gran was often impatient with all the former academics in the Settlement (“Got no more sense than a billy goat” was one of her favorite observations), but they formed the majority of the population so they made the rules.
Anyhow, if one senior class produced only Settlers, so be it. Settler was the most common Aptitude and the one that needed the most warm bodies, so that worked out. The next class might be a mixed bag of Scavengers, Pioneers, Engineers, Educators—you name it. Some Aptitudes apparently called for such a rare mix of skills and attributes that years would pass before someone got that assignment. That’s how it was with Baird Eastman. I had never even heard of the Messenger job before him. Even Gran couldn’t remember the last time it had happened. The Messenger’s mission was simple on paper: to carry a message from the Settlement to Washington, DC. The message was simple too, something along the lines of, “Yo, we’re still here!” Of course, the tricky part was who knew if Washington even existed anymore? Not to mention the three thousand mile-plus trek to get there. Baird the Golden Boy had squared his broad shoulders and set off the previous fall after completing his months of specialized training. No one had expected to hear anything from him yet. Frankly, most people never expected to hear from him again, period. That was the brutal truth behind his particular Aptitude. And yet those same people clung to one small sliver of hope that he might be successful—that he might actually make it back there and find whatever remained of the federal government. And that something good would come of it all.
It must have been hard on East, even if she missed her brother only half as much as I missed Gabriel. I’d heard the other kids say she and Baird were close. Their mother had died during the Bad Times, a few years after her first husband disappeared. A lot of people went missing in those days. Unfortunately, before their mom died, she had remarried and rather poorly too, to a drunken lout who was lazy when he was sober and belligerent when he was not.
This was the stepfather the two kids were left with when their mother died in the Monterey flu epidemic. The three of them had shown up at the Settlement, starving and bedraggled, toward the end of my ninth-grade year. East had been cooking and cleaning and dodging fists, if not worse, since she was a little kid was how I heard it. I hoped she was enjoying her vacation from domestic strife.
But she was still glaring at me, having taken offense at my “settler” remark.
“Sorry,” I said, hoping to placate her. I hadn’t meant to insult her in the first place. This was yet another reason I hadn’t talked much in school—all the teenage drama was a pain in the ass.
“I’m just not sure if it’s going to be a good thing for us to know,” I said.
“Isn’t it better to know than not to know?” she asked. “Isn’t that what they taught us?”
I was confident she and I had been taught entirely different things in school. She learned that a pretty girl often gets her way. I learned not to get caught alone in the corridor between classes.
We both looked at the book in my hand.
“Dude, your hands are really small,” East said by way of a non sequitur. I don’t know why that rattled me, but it did.
“Fine,” I said, shoving the notebook back at her. “Read the stupid thing.”
“I’m going to save ours for last,” she said with a gleam in her eye. Apparently, this was something like fun for her. Which it really wasn’t. I carefully shone the light on the page as she slowly began to read, struggling to make out Mr. G’s chicken scratch.
“Anderson, Kristy—Settler. Bautista, Enrique—Engineer. Cohen, Hunter—”
Her voice cracked on that one. I thought she was wiping a tear from her eye, but then realized she was lightly tracing the fading bruise on her cheekbone.
“Cohen, Hunter—Settler.”
She made a big deal of skipping over Dupont and Eastman while averting her eyes and turning the page. By the time
she got to the Witkowski twins, Adam and Astrid, I could feel the tension in the pit of my stomach. Which was ridiculous. Even if we’d still been in school, I probably wouldn’t have done their dumb Aptitude. It was my life.
“Eastman, Elinor,” she read her own name. Her eyes were shining. Her lips curved as she read her Aptitude. “Pioneer.”
She looked over at me. “Ha!” she said victoriously. I rolled my eyes at her, but couldn’t help but smile back.
“Dupont, Kell.” Her eyes widened as she read the word that followed. She paused, for effect, I could only assume, then took a deep breath. No smile this time. “Are you ready?” she asked me solemnly. I nodded.
“Kell Dupont—Messenger,” she said.
“Yeah, right.” I grabbed the little book from her, certain she was joking.
Wow. No joke. It really said “Messenger” right next to my name. For a second—a paranoid second, I admit—I wondered if it was just their way of getting rid of me once and for all. Shipping off the misfit, the outsider, the unwanted freak…But Baird Eastman was a Messenger—no flies on him, the Golden Boy.
Was it a mistake?
Did they really think I could do it?
I glanced over at East. Two tears had trickled down her cheeks. She met my gaze defiantly. I could not figure that girl out.
“My brother Baird is a Messenger,” she said.
“I know.”
“He’s not dead,” she added almost angrily.
“Okay,” I said neutrally. And paused a moment, unsure what to say to her in her fragile mood. I handed the book back to her. “Are you all right?”
“Aren’t you scared?” she suddenly yelled at me. With the wind whistling outside and the rain now lashing the side of the tent. She threw Mr. Giovanni’s notebook at me, but it sailed harmlessly past my ear. “Why the fuck aren’t you scared?”