The Divide

by Jolina Petersheim

  “Bet you haven’t seen one of these in a while, have you?” The man says this in a mocking tone as he brings up a two-way radio with a long antenna protruding from the top. “Hey, base,” he calls. “This is Lone Wolf. You copy me?”

  A beat of silence passes before the radio crackles to life. “Yeah, we copy. What’s up?”

  Satisfaction spreads across the man’s features as he responds. “You know that Mennonite community we’ve been looking for . . . to work in the camps?” He stares at me until I feel sick. “I’ll be bringing in a couple here soon who can help us find it.”

  My mind’s a race of viewpoints tripping on each other, making it impossible to think. I morally cannot do what I have to do, but have and need are divided by a thin line, and I suddenly find myself standing on the other side of it.

  Nausea causes saliva to pool in my mouth. I watch the man struggle to get the radio back into his right-hand pocket. My body trembles, but my gaze doesn’t waver as I smoothly pull the pistol from my own pocket and raise it. The gun is already being lined up with his body before he even notices it.

  This time, his eyes are the ones that widen with shock and fear. The wintered world narrows to a heartbeat. The press of my damp fingers on the revolver. A blur of black and white as the man attempts to raise his rifle to meet the threat that is in the hands of the Mennonite girl standing before him.

  But his motion is not faster than the bullet that leaves my hand.

  The snow-filled air floods with the scent of gunpowder. The shot hits the man center in the chest and nearly throws him off his feet. His rifle drops forward, barrel first, into the snow as his body crumples to the ground. Shaking, I turn to my brother and can only say, “Run, Seth. We have to get away from here.” I try to heed my own instructions, but the snow—like a waking nightmare—bogs me down. In the foreground, I can hear the brisk wind streaking through the trees, whose root systems are tethered to the mountain. In the background, just as we are leaving, we hear the radio again crackle to life. “Hey, Lone Wolf, you copy? Where are you?”

  Seth and I stand stock-still before turning to look behind us, in the direction of the two-way radio; in the direction of the man who’s grown silent—the snow beneath his body stained red, the same as the coyote I killed. But now, I killed a man. Keeling over, I feel the contents of my stomach come up, but there is not much there. I straighten and spit into the snow, my eyes and nose watering as if I’m crying. But I’m not. I’m far too sick and scared to cry.

  My brother looks at me, his gaze rife with confusion and loathing. “I’m going to make my way to the militia in Kalispell,” he says. “Right now. I couldn’t care less if you like it or not. You make your way back to the community, but I’m not going back. Ever.”

  “I’m sorry, Seth,” I murmur. My teeth are chattering. “I—I shouldn’t have done that.”

  It’s like he doesn’t hear me. Without a backward glance, my brother begins to leave the way we came. Realizing that there is not one thing I can do to stop him or to change his mind, I stare at Seth until the image becomes too painful and I have to close my eyes.

  Moses

  MY EYES BLUR as they scan the middle distance, but at first all I can see is a bald eagle rising and falling with the current of wind. Then I notice the shape of someone peering through the diamonds in the airport fence, near the old cell phone waiting area. It could be one of our guys, but I doubt it. There’d be no reason for them to snoop around like that.

  Reaching for my gun, I look at the hangar and see Josh is tinkering with the old Cessna. Kalispell Airport’s shaped like one long, tapered rectangle. Harold and Dean are monitoring the entrance gates from the traffic control center, and Keith and Robert are positioned at the two farthest points of the grounds. But having guards doesn’t mean we’re above infiltration. Especially since a majority of us are out scouting for provisions and to see whether there’s any sign that order is being restored in the state, or if society’s still as lawless as it’s been since the EMP.

  Even when I shade my eyes, it’s almost impossible to see details against the glare of sun reflecting off the snow. One thing’s clear, though: it’s a man peering in at us, and as skinny as a whippet, but after so many months of people scavenging for food, it’s hard to tell if he’s not fully grown or just shrunken with starvation. And then he steps back from the gates, as if startled when he spots me watching him. There’s something familiar in his self-conscious shuffle. The clouds shift, darkening the airport, and I notice his black hat I’ve only seen worn by the Mt. Hebron men. I hurry down the plane’s icy steps and sprint across the snow-covered tarmac.

  “Seth!” I call. “Man, you gotta be crazy! What’re you doing here? How’d you find me?”

  His face cracks into a wide, relieved grin, and my stomach lurches, seeing a glimpse of Leora. “My daed said you were here,” he says.

  This surprises me. “Did he come up to your new community on the mountain?”

  “Nope.” He shakes his head. “Leora and I went back down to the valley, to see how bad everything was. We found him there, living in our old house.” Seth pauses and looks at the ground. “He told us how you helped him get there.”

  I wave to Harold and Dean in the tower to let them know all’s clear, and then I unlock the gate, hoping Seth won’t ask me what kind of state his father was in when I found him at the warehouse—drugged up to the point he was about half out of his mind. But Seth doesn’t appear interested in hearing any backstory. Relieved, I step outside the gates and scan the road behind him, but nobody’s there, just the empty highway stretching off to the horizon.

  “I came alone,” he says, seeing the direction of my eyes.

  I glance over my shoulder at the hangar’s silhouette—the rounded roofline glowing silver—not sure Josh is going to appreciate having a teenager underfoot.

  Seth doesn’t talk much as we make our way up the snowy path that once led to the airport’s busy passenger drop-off zone but now leads to the decimated Concourse A. In fact, he does not talk at all. I can understand his silence. For one, he looks about ready to collapse with exhaustion; for two, he’s probably shocked by what he sees. Everything you view daily, you become blinded to over time: a curse if it’s beauty, a blessing if it’s ugliness.

  In this case, it’s the latter. I no longer see the rudder of the crashed Bombardier, sticking up from the top of the parking garage. I no longer see one of the three-ton engines burrowed into Concourse C, the force of the impact collapsing the steel beams supporting the roofline’s peak and shattering the tempered glass below it so that yards of rubble glitter in the light. All of my senses have become deadened, it seems, because I’ve even stopped smelling the explosion itself: a toxic mix of burned oil and fuel that stung my nose the first time I got downwind of it.

  Josh’s reaction when we enter the hangar is just what I expect. He glances up from the plane’s engine, and it’s like a hand sweeps over his face, transforming his relaxed demeanor into a no-holds-barred scowl.

  “Seth’s from that Mennonite community I told you about.” I hate that I already sound like I’m trying to explain my way out of a fix.

  Josh takes off his sunglasses and puts them in a pocket of his navy vest, fitted with more compartments than a fly fisherman’s. He looks at Seth. “And why are you here?”

  Seth replies, “I came because I heard of a militia.”

  Josh raises a white eyebrow. “I thought you Mennonites were ‘conscientious objectors.’”

  I can hear the sneer in Josh’s voice. Seth does as well. “I’m not your typical Mennonite.”

  Josh’s mustache twitches. “How old are you?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “You’re little for fourteen.”

  “I’m strong.”

  I glance between Josh and Seth, trying to predict where this bantering is heading before we get there. Surely Josh isn’t seriously considering letting a fourteen-year-old boy stay long-term? Regardless of how ove
rblown our twenty-man “militia” may be in the eyes of those who’ve lived to tell about it, we do have to defend what we have fought so hard to establish, and no one can defend who is unwilling to kill. Most of us at the airport have no qualms about fighting—maybe because they’re all a lot like me, with no roots of any kind.

  Either this rootlessness was a decision we purposely made or one that was made for us directly after the EMP. Regardless, we continue pressing forward, determined to survive. But then sometimes, when I’m out at night patrolling and the stars are so clear, my muddled brain can think and I find myself asking, Why? What is the motivation fueling our survival to such extremes? And then I realize I know the answer, even if most of us would never want to admit its truth: we are fighting for the belief that one day we’ll have roots, and a normal life, again.

  I tell Seth, a little tongue-in-cheek, “Be sure to make yourself at home.”

  He nods, glances around at the traffic control center, and then at the brothers, Nathan and Nehemiah, who have recently switched places with Harold and Dean for the second shift. The brothers’ imposing, Carhartt-wearing figures eclipse half of the afternoon light coming in through the bank of windows. One windowpane’s been removed to allow for a good shooting position from inside the center, so we can pick off potential invaders before they reach the airport. The others are flecked with bug and bird droppings, which help hide the three bullet holes, splintering weblike patterns across the fourth pane of glass. I don’t know the story behind those holes. Maybe nobody here does, though Josh—who was stranded at the airport when the EMP hit—would be the one who could tell it. But he doesn’t like to talk about that time period much.

  In unison, the brothers turn to the right and nod at me and Seth. We nod back, and I say, “How’s it going?” They offer no audible reply, not because they’re rude like I first thought, but because the corn-fed brothers are, by far, the shyest of our group. Seth isn’t privy to any of this, though, and I can’t help smiling as I watch his eyes widen with intimidation. The difference between his Mennonite community and this primitive militia must be as startling to him as Dorothy’s transportation from Kansas to Oz.

  I inform Seth, “The windows are sloped because it helps with reflections. Josh told me that’s also why the ceiling’s painted black.”

  Seth glances up. “Cool.”

  Just as I saw the airport afresh through Seth’s first view of it, it’s as if I’m seeing the inside of the traffic control center for the first time. The strewn wreckage from the Bombardier CRJ200—which crash-landed and exploded into flames after the electromagnetic pulse, proving how miraculous my own, softer, crash-landing was—also decimated Concourses C and D. Due to a record winter of snow and ice, the damaged roof over Concourses A and B recently collapsed as well. This, and the cold, forced Josh and our men to leave the concourses and all pile up in the control center, the only inhabitable portion the small airport has left. But, with all our unwashed bodies and clothes trapped in one space, it’s not going to be very inhabitable for long.

  Seth says to me, “Can I talk to you a minute?”

  “Of course.”

  I lead Seth into the break room we turned into our kitchen. But Brian—who at seventeen is one of our youngest recruits—is standing in the corner, near the defunct microwave and mini fridge. His back’s to me, but I can see he’s dumping a pumpkin seed packet into his mouth.

  “C’mon,” I say. “You know we’re supposed to be saving those seeds for the chickens.” I pause, staring at the empty packet. “What’re you going to be eating next, Brian? Mealworms?”

  He turns his shaggy head and swallows, wincing slightly as pieces of seeds seem to get hung up in his throat. “Mealworms would probably taste better than anything you can cook.”

  “Whatever,” I retort. “Then stop eating what I fix.” I angle my head toward the door, and Brian gets the hint. Grumbling, he walks toward it while giving Seth a curious look.

  I turn back to Seth. “You hungry?”

  “A little,” he admits.

  I light a fire in the small woodstove one of the guys found in an abandoned house in Kalispell and hauled back to the airport on a sled. Its crooked metal pipe sticks up through one of the glass skylights we broke on purpose so that most of the smoke could get carried off. But most is the key word. Taking eggs from the basket, I start cracking them—one by one—against the rim of a glass bowl. “So, Seth,” I say. “What’s on your mind?”

  Seth watches me whisking the eggs a minute, and then he looks up. The expression on his face makes my stomach flip. I set the whisk down in the bowl. “Everybody all right?”

  “Everybody’s alive,” he says, “if that’s what you’re asking. But this morning . . .” Seth swallows like he might throw up. “Leora and I, we were in the woods when this guy came out of nowhere. He pulled a gun on us and said he was gonna make us go along to some work camp unless we showed him where the community was.” His breathing comes hard, as if he’s replaying everything, and I know from experience, he’ll probably be replaying everything for a long time. “There was no choice,” he continues. “I didn’t have a gun, but Leora had that pistol of yours she’s been carrying in her coat. She pulled it out and shot the guy. Right in the chest.”

  I raise my eyebrows in surprise. “Did it kill him?”

  Seth nods. “It didn’t take long.”

  “So this happened right before you came here?”

  Again he nods.

  “Where did Leora go?”

  “Back to the community, I guess. I don’t know. I left after that.”

  I look away so Seth can’t see my frustration. “Did she know where you were going?”

  “I told her as much.”

  Sighing heavily, I set a skillet on the stovetop and spoon out some lard from a tin coffee can. I let the fat warm up, and then I pour the eggs, using a spatula to wipe out the bowl.

  Seth says, “She’s used to people leaving, if you’re wondering if she’ll be okay.” For the first time, I hear the crackle of anger in his voice, and I try to understand it.

  I say mildly, “Are you talking about me?”

  “Mostly, yes.”

  I put the spatula down with some force. “Are you really standing there, judging me for not coming back, when you’re the one who just left her after she was forced to kill a man?”

  His face darkens. “I would’ve done it myself if I had the gun and not her.”

  “But she did, Seth. She was trying to protect you, and you punished her for it.”

  Five seconds pass. A pocket of air rises in the cooking eggs and pops.

  He says, “That’s not the only reason I left. I’ve been wanting to leave for a long time.”

  I wonder, over the generations, how many teenagers have attempted to cut off—either physically or emotionally—the only support systems they have left. Though I wasn’t a teenager when I did it, I attempted to run away from my life, and the memory of my brother’s death, by accepting Grandpa Richard’s invitation to come up to Idaho and work on his Bonners Ferry farm. But even then, such a cloistered lifestyle couldn’t fill that ache in my gut.

  Because of this experience, I understand what even Seth probably doesn’t. He left the community because of loneliness and, therefore, needs me to support him although it seems he’s trying to push me away. The difference between his experience and mine is that he’s going through his turbulent years during some of the most trying times in history, when it’s not only imprudent to abandon your support system, but dangerous. On the outside, Seth Ebersole and I might have next to nothing in common, but deep down, he is just a younger version of me.

  Leora

  Jabil meets me about ten yards outside the community, so I know he must’ve been watching—or at least had someone else watching—for my return. The snow falls quietly between us, and he studies me below the brim of his black felt hat. His face, in contrast, is the same ashen hue as mine.

  “Where’s Seth?�
� he asks by way of a greeting, which is what I anticipated he’d do.

  “We had a fight on the mountain. He left and joined the militia.” My explanation comes out wooden, and as rehearsed as any scripted lines, but Jabil either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care.

  “The one in Kalispell that the trappers were talking about?”

  I nod. “Daed’s staying in our old house. He told us Moses is with the militia.” I shrug. “I guess Seth left to be with him.”

  Jabil looks at me for a long time without speaking, so that I start trying to guess what’s running through his mind. “People got sick while you were gone, Leora,” he finally says.

  “Sick?” I stare back at him. “Like how?”

  “Flu, I guess. High fever, diarrhea, vomiting, chills . . .” His voice trails off.

  “Who’s been affected?”

  “Your grossmammi.” He pauses, glancing to the side. “She has it too, but—”

  “How bad?” I interrupt, peering around him toward the gates, as if I can see from here.

  Jabil moves toward me. “Steady, now.” His hands rest on my shoulders, a warm counterweight for the pressure building inside my chest. “My mamm’s been checking on her every hour around the clock, and Anna knows to come get her if something changes.”

  “And who’s watching Colton?”

  “Judith Zimmerman’s offered to take care of him.”

  I groan in frustration. “I was barely gone for twenty-four hours. What can happen in that time?” But I know exactly what can happen: a pacifist can take a life; a brother can turn his back; a community can implode. I cover my tearing eyes and tell myself to breathe.