by Andrew Smith
Breakfast picked his nose and scratched his balls. “A what?”
Breakfast didn’t know what chimpanzees were.
And Olive, who actually was a chimpanzee and never argued anyway, didn’t argue about it.
“A chimpanzee,” Edsel said.
“She’s just a girl with a bunch of hair on her,” Breakfast said. “You’re not making fun of her, are you?”
Breakfast was ready to fight the guy, even if he was a hundred years old and apparently frail. But Edsel, having developed such a pronounced degree of patience after spending so many endless days and weeks holed up inside Doc Sawbones’ Field Amputation House of Horrors!, especially during the first few years, when the infestation of the creatures was particularly bad, continued attempting to explain to the twelve-year-old naked wild boy the fundamental differences between human beings and chimpanzees.
Breakfast wasn’t buying any of it.
He took Olive’s hand. “Come on, Olive. We’re leaving. Let’s go get our stuff from the shit truck and find another vehicle, so we can get the fuck out of here. I don’t like that old man with the pictures on his skin.”
Breakfast and Olive turned back in the direction they’d been heading when Edsel came running for them.
“Wait! Please! You can’t leave,” Edsel said.
“Sure we can. Who needs you?”
“No. I mean you can’t leave.” Edsel’s voice was flat and cold.
When Breakfast turned around, the old man was pointing a pistol directly at the boy’s belly.
And Edsel said, “I’d just as soon shoot you both here and now, and then gut you out and have Mimi stew you up with some dumplings, as let you walk out of here.”
Breakfast didn’t know what to do. He’d never in his life been in or even witnessed a situation where a human was threatening to kill another human.
It didn’t make sense to Breakfast, who was wild.
Part Two
All Stories Are True
Number 42 Breaks Every Rule
“I was beginning to think you were going to sleep all day. I even checked to see if you were still breathing.”
It was like being dead, and then coming back to life.
I could tell by the color of the sunlight in the windows that it was afternoon. And then I thought, How did Mel check my breathing? Did she lay her hand on my bare chest? Did she put her face close to mine?
“Oh. Uh.” I sat up in Mel’s little bed.
I was starving. She had been cooking food while I slept. The smell of it must have been what called me back down to earth.
“Is something wrong with you?” Mel asked.
It would take me at least an hour to answer that one honestly, I thought.
“No. I’m okay.”
“I watched that movie about birds this morning while you slept. I don’t think things like that ever really happened, or else people used to be incredibly dumb, right?”
“Uh. That’s what I think too.”
And Mel said, “Sorry I fell asleep last night and missed watching it with you.”
“It’s okay.”
“Well, why did you go to sleep over there?”
Because if I fell asleep next to you, I would have ended up embarrassing myself, I wanted to say.
But what I did say was, “Um. I don’t know.”
“Well, I apologize for taking over your bed. I made some food, though, if you’re hungry.”
Mel didn’t know anything about how I left last night, how I was nearly killed. It all seemed like a strange dream, like a bad movie from before the hole about how stupid people used to be.
And I was exceptionally stupid.
“I’m starving,” I said. “And I need to pee. I’m going outside.”
“You can’t go alone.”
“It will be okay. Trust me. I’ll stay right by the van.”
But when I stood up, I was reminded about the broken glass I’d stepped through and the wooden bench I’d slammed my knees into. I groaned and grabbed on to the counter beside the sink to keep myself from falling down.
“Oh my gosh, Arek! What happened to you?”
Mel bent down to look at the purple marks on my knotty knees and the dried blood on my borrowed socks.
She gently touched her fingertips to my legs. It felt so cool and healing.
And then I remembered I had absolutely nothing on except for some very loose, very thin basketball shorts, and that Mel was bent down in front of me, touching my naked legs with her perfect hands. I clutched myself and said, “I really need to pee. I’ll tell you the story when I get back.”
I limped for the door.
And Mel said, “But you have to leave the door open, and I’m standing right here with the guns.”
I tried not to groan when I stepped down to the pavement below the van but was not successful in the attempt.
Mel stood in the doorway, and I went to the front of the van. It was a beautiful day—clear and warm. I felt bad that Mel had had to stay inside all day while I slept. It must have made her feel trapped and bored.
“Are you watching me?” I said.
Behind me, Mel said, “Yes. Stop being weird, Arek.”
“I can’t stop being weird, Mel.”
I hobbled back to the door with an apologetic look on my face. We went inside, and Mel sat me down on the little bed. She said, “Now, let me see. And tell me how this happened.”
“I must be a sleepwalker,” I said.
“Bullshit.”
“All stories are true the moment they are told,” I said.
“That moment ended immediately,” Mel pointed out.
So I told her everything: about how I drank whiskey and had to shut myself inside the boys’ locker room cage in order to avoid being eaten by a monster.
Mel kept asking why.
Why did I drink whiskey—I didn’t know.
Why did I go outside, unarmed, alone at night—I didn’t know.
Why did I think it was okay for me to risk leaving her entirely alone—I did not know.
I had completely devolved into a hung-up, before-the-hole teenage boy. I couldn’t understand it.
I felt terrible. And to make things worse, while we talked, Mel gently took off my ruined socks and cleaned the cuts on my feet with warm soapy water. It stung.
In the end, I could do little more than apologize to her and promise I would never be so stupid again. It was probably a lie, I thought; I was bound to be just as stupid as ever.
Mel served us the last of our eggs and jarred potatoes from the night before.
She said, “We are going to run out of food today.”
I nodded. I’d been thinking about that too.
So I asked her, “Do you want to go back?”
Mel shook her head. “I miss my mom and dad, but I don’t want to go back, Arek. I had no idea that all this was out here. Now I want to see more of it. And we need to look for Austin and Robby, besides.”
“There are others out here too. Dad’s found signs and stuff from someone who calls himself Breakfast.”
Mel said, “Breakfast? Like the model you built?”
“Yeah. It’s why I named him that,” I said.
“Does it scare you at all, the thought of finding people?” she asked.
I thought about it. “It kind of does, Mel.”
“Me too.”
“It’s going to get warm,” I said. “The Unstoppable Soldiers are going to be out now. Like last night.”
“I know.”
“Well. I guess that one wasn’t so unstoppable, right? He pretty much got his ass handed to him by a boys’ locker room basketball cage.”
“And a drunk barefoot kid.”
“Number forty-two breaks every rule,” I said.
Looking for my fathers was only an excuse that got us out of the hole to begin with. The moment we found what was out here, the instant Mel stood, laughing, in that first snowfall, I believe we both recognized that the excuse, d
espite all the risks, had become a pretense we both laid claim to, perhaps as a means of disguising what it was Mel and I were truly looking for.
And maybe I was fooling myself with that, too.
What if I’m wrong?
This was, without end, the barrier I’d built between myself and Mel: Neither of us had the freedom to choose the other. There was no one else. We were, as Dad liked to call us, Adam and Eve. What if Mel felt nothing special toward me? What if, given a choice, given the opportunities that before-the-hole human beings had, I would become repulsive to her?
And what if I was wrong about that?
I shut up and ate.
Two Notes and One Picture
We came to the airfield the next day outside a place called Independence.
It was Mel who’d first spotted the lone airplane, tilted half on its side with a broken wing, nearly obscured by the brush that grew up alongside the runway. I was too busy concentrating on avoiding debris in the roadway. It was everywhere—windblown branches, entire sections of roofs, the charred remnants of tire fires, abandoned cars and motorbikes. And when I pulled the van around through a chain-link gate that had been battered down, we both saw the car that Robby and Dad had been driving the last time they left the hole.
It made me excited, anxious, and sick, all at the same time.
Mel knew it too.
I’d been driving around without any real idea of direction or distance. It was almost as though an unseen hand had guided us to Independence.
Our plan for the day had been to go inside abandoned houses. Dad and Robby had always told me there were plenty of houses in Iowa that had belonged to people who called themselves survivalists, which I thought was funny since they clearly did not succeed in becoming what they claimed to be. Dad told me to look for their holes, because survivalists religiously kept stores of food and water that could last a lifetime.
That part—the part about lasting a lifetime—was very accurate, I thought. Possibly an overestimation, in fact.
The car was a white BMW four-wheel-drive vehicle. We both knew it was Dad and Robby’s without looking inside. But we looked inside it anyway. It made me more than a little bit sad, and worried, too, because this was the first time I’d considered the possibility that my two fathers may have had some kind of accident, that something terrible had happened to them.
Inside, we found cigarettes and bundles of extra clothes in the backseat. There were a few jars of food, too.
“I don’t think Dad or Robby would mind if we borrowed some of this stuff,” I said.
“I’m sure it’s okay.”
So I took all the food and some new T-shirts and socks and boxer shorts because I didn’t really have any spare underclothes.
But the most important thing in the vehicle was a note, written by Robby. He’d left it facing up on the dashboard.
My name is Robert Brees Jr. I am flying a Piper Malibu. Departed on February 23 from IIB, Independence, Iowa, with my husband, Austin Szczerba. We are looking for more people. We spotted two groups of survivors last winter near what we believe was the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, but were unable to put the plane down due to ice and snow. We are going south today, heading for Nashville, TN, or perhaps Atlanta, GA, depending on conditions and fuel. Looking for a person named Breakfast and his companion, who has indicated he observed us flying overhead, and is also heading south. There is a group of us—eight in number, the youngest, my sister, is almost sixteen years in age—living in an underground shelter outside the town of Ealing. Directions to our shelter, called Eden, are below. We will come back again, depending on conditions and fuel. We can make a return flight from Nashville without refueling. If we go as far as Atlanta, that will have to be determined.
I’m sorry if this sounds like some kind of police blotter report. We don’t really talk like this. Good luck, stay alive, and we hope to see you soon.
Austin says you can have a cigarette if you’d like.
—Robby Brees and Austin Szczerba
I read the note aloud to Mel.
I said, “He’s right. My dads don’t really talk like that.”
“That sounds like something Wendy would have written.”
I nodded. “If I read this, I would not follow the directions to the hole.”
Mel said, “Not a very good sales pitch.”
We considered our choices. The fact that my fathers had been gone for more than a month ruled out a round-trip with no refueling. It could have meant something terrible, but neither of us wanted to say that out loud. Waiting at the airfield didn’t make much sense to us, given the time that had already gone by, and since the motorhome was stocked with every imaginable road map, we decided to head south and try, if it was at all possible, to get to those two places—Nashville, which was in Tennessee, and Atlanta, which was in Georgia, both of which were in North America, which was floating between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and on and on, without end.
And despite all the potential dangers, I had a sense Mel was as excited as I was about going farther and farther away. I thought about those two lightning bugs Robby had brought down for me when I was thirteen, which was a very sad year in my life—how happy they must have been when Robby took that jar back up to the surface and opened it, freeing them.
I had no idea.
“It is a very dangerous thing we are doing,” I said.
“I know.”
“Are you scared?”
“No.”
“Neither am I,” I lied. My chest felt like I’d been inflated with a frenzied swarm of tiny fluttering birds, like the ones in the movie, which also terrified me. But I would do anything to stay with Mel, who was much braver, and far more sensible, than I was.
Before we packed up the van to leave, I wrote a reply to my fathers and left it on the dashboard beside their official, rule-constrained-sounding note.
Dear Dads,
No thanks on the cigarette. I tried that once, and Mel does not smoke either. So your cigarettes will be waiting for you when you come back, unless someone other than me or Mel comes by first.
If you have not guessed by the salutation, it is me, your son, Arek Andrzej Szczerba, and Robby’s half sister, Amelie Sing Brees. I just thought of something: Is there anything wrong with me and Mel being together? Because we aren’t really related, right? I mean, not that we’re “together,” because we are not—trust me. Anyway, I don’t know why I am even thinking of that. Well, actually, I do know why I am thinking of that, because, as you know, I still can’t stop thinking about Mel and me. And no, Dads, I have not said anything to her. So you know what that means for me at night (ha-ha).
Also, if you have not guessed by virtue of the fact that Mel and I are here at Independence Airfield, we have left the hole. I hope this does not make you mad. Which reminds me, I have never seen either of you mad at me. So don’t be now. I had to leave. I was not only sick of living in the hole—and I think this was mostly your fault for taking me fishing that time, which, until now, was probably the greatest day of my life—but I felt useless if I did not come looking for you, and useless as far as the others in the hole (except Mel) were concerned.
I told Mel I was leaving the day before I did it. I did not know that she had hidden inside the vehicle until late the first night I was gone. But then it was too late. At least she told Connie she was coming with me. So at least everyone knows what we are doing. And no matter what anyone “thinks” I am doing—I am not.
I really wish I could just talk to you, like we used to talk about things. But not in the library. Not in the hole. I don’t think I ever want to go back. Is that bad?
What if I am wrong?
I took some clothes and food from your car. I hope you don’t mind. I am driving that big black Mercedes van. I have not crashed it yet (ha-ha). We decided to go to Nashville, and then to Atlanta, to look for you, or to look for whoever is out here.
You never told me it would be like this, Dad.
I love you both. Mel loves you too.
I know we will see each other again.
Arek
PS I drew a picture for you.
The Church of the Screaming Stag
The hole we found was located beneath the floor of a garage in a house that had been burned down, outside a town called Rome.
The entire town of Rome was about the same size as the hole I’d lived in my entire life, but at least it was aboveground and had a view of the sky.
We’d been looking through houses for two days. Mostly, the work was disappointing, and even though neither of us admitted it, we were hungry. Starving. We found some clothes and interesting objects that neither of us could identify, but the most troubling things were all the photographs—pictures of children, of family gatherings, weddings, and old people.
There had been so many people, without end, and now they were all gone.
A few of the houses had the heads of dead animals and preserved fish hanging on the walls. I did not understand the purpose of such things.
“Maybe it was a kind of religion, one that was different from the Christmas religion Wendy made rules about,” I theorized.
“What kind of religion would put dead things on the wall?” Mel asked.
On that day we were inside a two-story house somewhere south of Cedar Rapids.
I thought about it. I said, “All religions put dead things on walls.”
Hanging above the fireplace, which had probably been used to incinerate hundreds of Christmas gifts, was the head of an enormous deer—a stag, with sharp racks of antlers rising like frozen flames from its skull. The stag’s neck was turned, and his mouth was open, as though he were screaming something. Whatever it was the stag was screaming, it must have sounded horrifying.
“I wonder why his mouth is open like that.”
I could see the stag’s teeth.
“Maybe he was screaming in pain because he was being circumcised,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Well, when Wendy started making me go to church with her, she told me about it. It was one of the first stories she shared with me. According to Wendy, and her Bible, God expected people to cut off parts of boys’ penises, to show that they were good, and they believed in God.”