The Outside

by Laura Bickle

  He stood opposite me, staring at me. I was certain that he could physically stop me. He could impose his will on me the way the Elders tried, with the threat of violence or restraint.

  But he didn’t. I knew that he respected me.

  “I get it,” he sighed. “I don’t want to see you mauled by wild animals. But . . .” He spread his hands, and I could see the helplessness he felt in that gesture. “I can’t protect you. Maybe being food for an animal is better than dying of snake venom or vampires or starvation.”

  I stepped up to him and kissed him.

  “Bonnet, you are the most frustrating woman on earth.”

  I lifted my eyebrows. “I know.”

  He shook his head. “You ever seen Star Wars, Bonnet?”

  “No.”

  “Never mind, then.”

  Ginger knew what I meant to do. From the corner of my eye, I saw her lead Horace to the house, let him inside as if he were a giant house pet.

  I found the latch to the wolf pen. Alex watched warily. The wolves hung back, watching me with their luminous eyes. I flipped up the latch and swung the door open. I stepped back, waited with my heart in my mouth.

  One by one, they bolted out of the pen. They glanced at me in passing, and my heart soared to see them go. They trotted down the road, making guttural growls and yips.

  One remained in the cage. He was a thin gray wolf with sad eyes. He was smaller than the others, a bit more golden, as if he had some domestic dog in him.

  “Go on,” I said. I felt a lump in my throat. “I don’t have any food for you. Go with the others and hunt.”

  Alex struck the side of the fence with his boot, making a rattling noise.

  The wolf whimpered softly and skulked out of the cage.

  “Go on,” I told him.

  He lifted his nose to sniff the air. For a moment, I was afraid that he would attack me or Alex. And then he took off at a loping pace after his skeleton pack.

  I gave them some time to recede beyond sight before turning to the next enclosure. The tigers.

  They paced with open mouths, watching me. They’d seen what I’d done for the wolves. They knew.

  And they were hungry.

  The cage was held shut with two simple push latches. I flipped the bottom one up, then the one at the top. I didn’t intend to open the cage. I intended to let the tigers open it for themselves.

  And they came lunging toward the door, at me, in a flurry of stripes.

  I heard myself scream.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The weight of the tiger crashed the door of the cage against me, pinning me to the exterior cage wall. It drove the wind out of me, and I was face-to-face with the giant cat. It stood on its back feet, with its paws pressing against my shoulders through the wire. I could feel the heaviness of its body and its claws prickling against the shoulders of my coat. It lowered its head to the level of mine, drawing back its lips to reveal its teeth. Its hot breath smelled like death. Golden eyes burned at me. This wildness was something far beyond my stilted ideas of good and evil. In this beast’s world, there was only kindness and cruelty.

  Dimly, I was aware of Alex shouting. But that was a background sound, tertiary to my breathing and the tiger’s breathing, both short and shallow.

  Without warning, it pushed off from the door and released me. It dropped back to all four feet, beside its mate, tail lashing.

  It gave Alex a deadly glare, growled. He was holding his knife and standing his ground.

  “Don’t hurt him,” I said. I didn’t know if I was speaking to the tiger or to Alex.

  One before the other, the tigers turned and walked away. Their massive paws disturbed the dust of the road and their painfully thin shoulders worked beneath their dirty hides.

  I released a breath, didn’t move until they’d receded beyond sight at the edge of the field, becoming lost in that line of sunset.

  “That was stupid, Bonnet,” Alex said. “Real stupid.”

  “Just the bear and the jaguar are left,” I said. My voice sounded much more level than I felt.

  The bear didn’t react initially to the open door. I stood far away, watched as it shambled through the opening. It seemed reluctant to leave its mate, shoved at the carcass with a paw. The display of affection caused me to wipe a tear from my eye.

  But it too lumbered away, down the path that the wolves and the tigers had taken.

  And then there was only the jaguar. It sat beside the door, its luminous eyes burning into me.

  “I hope that you will be better behaved than the tiger,” I said.

  I opened the rusty door. I saw the jaguar crouching down, coiling like a snake, readying for the chance to flee. When I’d gotten the door half open, the jaguar lurched out. Unlike the others, it ran. It ran as fast as it could, ears flattened, toward the horizon.

  I stood, shaking. I knew that I would never see anything that magnificent in my life again.

  “I hope we don’t meet them on the road,” Alex said.

  I said nothing. I hoped they would live. All of them.

  We had prepared for night the best we could. We’d hauled a cabinet up against the broken window and locked the door. Horace seemed content to occupy the living room, with the couch pushed up against the wall. He chewed idly at the carpet, though I knew that he was full on grass. There was a little water left in the pipes of the house, and I gave him a dishpan full to slurp at.

  Ginger, Alex, and I headed upstairs. We did so in the dark: there was no electricity, and we wanted to create no light by which vampires could spot us across the open countryside.

  The house held three bedrooms that appeared to belong to adults, a boy, and a teen girl. As if by prior assent, we each took a room. Ginger took the adults’ room. Alex took the boy’s room, and I took the girl’s.

  I paused in the twilight, my eyes slowly adjusting to the new surroundings. I could make out a quilt on the bed, smoothed it with my fingers. Unlike all the quilts at home, this one was manufactured—I could tell by the artificially even stitching. The walls were covered with posters of young men and women holding guitars and microphones.

  I paused by a short dresser with a mirror. Plain people didn’t keep mirrors for any purpose but for shaving. We were told that it encouraged vanity. And it seemed that it did—my eye roved over neatly stacked cosmetics on the surface of the dresser.

  In the dimness, I looked at myself. I wanted to know if there was any visible proof that the journey had changed me. I wondered if I carried any outward sign of failing faith, some taint or mark.

  I removed my bonnet. I looked pale. Gaunt. I could see shadows around me, under my eyes, around my mouth. But I didn’t know how much of that was the venom and the journey and how much was just the dark.

  I walked over to the girl’s wardrobe and opened the closet doors. My clothes felt stiff and dirty, and I craved something clean to sleep in. I found a soft gray sweatshirt, sweatpants, and socks. The Ordnung forbade women to wear pants, but I was cold and tired and needed something warm. There were no metal fasteners on these clothes—no buttons or zippers that I was not allowed to use. They were the simplest garments I could find, and I didn’t think that God would mind. I changed clothes, tucking the Himmelsbrief into the sleeve of my sweatshirt, next to my wrist.

  It had been weeks since I’d slept in a bed. I climbed under the covers. This girl’s bedclothes smelled like perfume, unlike the clean scent of lye soap that I was used to. But it was better than hard ground, or a snake-covered church pew.

  I expected to fall asleep immediately.

  But I couldn’t.

  My thoughts circled around the idea of the girl who had occupied this room. Was she a victim of the vampires? Or was she still alive? Was she alone, trying to make her way in this world with no help?

  I tossed and turned. My han
d throbbed, and I was too accustomed to being alert at night to fall asleep easily, even in these soft surroundings.

  I slipped out of bed and crossed the hall to the boy’s room. I noticed that the door was ajar. I knocked lightly before entering.

  Stenciled dinosaurs decorated the walls, and there were glow-in-the-dark stars shining softly on the ceiling. Plastic toys covered a shelf and were strewn on the floor. I wondered if the boy had had time to choose a favorite to take with him.

  “Hey,” Alex said. He was sitting up in bed. He was dressed as I was, in sweat clothes. They were too large for him. I assumed that he’d found them in the parents’ laundry. “Couldn’t sleep?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “C’mon.” He lifted the edge of the blanket and scooted over to the edge of the bed.

  I padded across the floor, avoiding the toy dinosaurs, and slipped into bed beside him. His arm cradled my head, and I already felt better. I had never had my own room. I had shared with my sister. Even out here, Outside, I hadn’t slept alone.

  A low growl-snort emanated from across the hall. Ginger snoring.

  “Not everyone is having trouble sleeping,” I said.

  “She will bring the undead to our doorstep one of these days.” Alex said it lightly, as if he was joking. But there was some truth to that. And nothing to be done for it.

  “She won’t hear them coming.” I laughed softly.

  We lay in silence for some time. I felt safe with my head next to Alex’s chest, even though I rationally knew that he had no better chance of keeping me safe than Ginger did. I shyly rested the flat of my hand over his heart, where I knew the scarred ankh lay under the sweatshirt fleece.

  He broke the silence. “You did a good thing today, Bonnet. A brave thing.”

  I squirmed under praise. “It was the right thing to do.”

  “That jaguar,” he said. “It reminded me of something. An old myth.”

  “Oh?” I snuggled in closer. I liked it when he told stories. It reminded me of what he would have been in an intact world—a teacher. And it gave me something to think about other than food and Darkness.

  “The Jaguar is sacred to the Mayans. He’s associated with a sort of dark star myth. On one hand, his coat is supposed to contain all the stars in the heavens.”

  I looked up at the plastic stars on the ceiling, faintly glowing, and smiled.

  “Jaguar Sun rises each day and paces across the heavens. He starts out as a young jaguar, a cub. He paces from east to west, chasing prey. He ages as he goes, and by the time he reaches the western horizon, he’s an old cat with gray in his muzzle.”

  “He dies?” I asked.

  “No. Jaguar Sun doesn’t have it that easy. He falls into the darkness of the underworld and fights the lords of the underworld all night long. He emerges victorious in the east each morning, a young cub, ready to begin the fight again.”

  My eyes felt heavy. “He’s strong.”

  He kissed my forehead. “Indeed. And he hunts and fights day and night, keeping us safe from the spirits of the underworld.”

  In the distance, I could hear a thin, eerie howling.

  I smiled. I imagined that it was the wolves, chasing deer. And that Jaguar Sun was fighting the Darkness while we slept.

  ***

  “We can’t stay.”

  Alex was right. We all knew it.

  For three nights, we had been at the Animal Farm. I called it that first, and Alex and Ginger began to laugh.

  “‘Four legs bad, two legs good,’” Alex said.

  “Or is it the other way around?” Ginger mused.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Animal Farm. It’s a book by George Orwell. If we find a copy of it, I’ll be interested to see what you think of it.”

  I wasn’t sure that there would be much time for reading in the future, but it was a pleasant thought.

  We brought Horace outside for supervised grazing during the day, but never once saw any of the wild animals. We knew that they had been there—I’d found the remains of a deer in the middle of the field. The tuft of gray fur stuck to a rib bone seemed to indicate that it was not the work of the vampires. After dark, we heard the howling of the wolves. Each successive night, it seemed that they moved farther away.

  The pain and swelling in my hand began to subside. I think that the sleep and aspirin from the convenience store had done it some good, as well as our relatively clean surroundings. I felt guilty about letting Horace poop in the living-room-turned-stable, but I was sure that no was one coming back. Ever.

  We had fallen into a routine that felt relatively normal. We slept for more than twelve hours a night and ate the supplies from the convenience store. We found a few canned goods and cereal in the cupboards. I’d gathered rainwater in a bucket and had used it to wash our clothes. I learned to play Monopoly at the kitchen table with Alex and Ginger. Ginger always won.

  Ginger had located a photo album of the family in the bottom of the china cabinet. I looked through it with interest. I saw wedding pictures of a man and a woman and pictures of many holidays and vacations with the two children. The girl looked a lot like Sarah when she was younger. There were also some pictures of the animals. I saw the jaguar as a cub and the wolves looking much smaller.

  “Why did they keep those animals?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ginger said. “Maybe they thought they were helping, if the animals were abandoned by other owners and they took them in. Like a rescue. Maybe they had a thing for exotic animals.” She sighed. “It’s hard to get into other people’s heads.”

  I stroked the edge of a picture of the girl who looked like Sarah holding a wolf pup. The photographs made me even more conscious that we were occupying someone else’s home. And they made me miss my parents and my sister and my dogs.

  So when Alex said it was time to leave, I was ready. We gathered up anything that would be of use to us. I realized, as I was packing kitchen knives into a backpack, that I had become inured to the idea of stealing. And that made me sad, that I had dropped that part of my moral compass in order to survive.

  I found pencils and paper and wrote the family a note, just in case they ever returned. It was hard to find the words, but I felt that I needed to do it:

  I hope that all your family is well. I am sorry to have used your house and your possessions in this way. I hope that you return and are able to put things back in order. I hope that we all can return home and put things back to rights.

  We let the animals go.

  —Katie

  I came to regret leaving later. We all did.

  But that morning seemed cool and crisp and full of hope. My belly was full, my clothes were clean. I tugged the backpack high up on my shoulder and followed Alex out into the clear morning.

  As always, we moved north. Inexorably north.

  I was certain that the sun had colored the left side of my face more than the right. But not enough to burn. It was growing too cold for that. Our feet made tracks in the grass where they wiped away the frost.

  I knew that we wanted to get to Canada before snow. We needed to find Alex’s family before hard winter came. We had a long way to go; if we continued to go north and avoid densely populated areas to cross the border, we might have to go as far as Sault Ste. Marie, Alex said. I didn’t know how we were going to survive that without reliable shelter. Nor did I have any idea how the rest of humanity would.

  I suspected my community had a good chance of surviving the hardships of winter. We Plain people were reasonably self-sufficient, growing our own food and raising our own cattle. One challenge would be getting enough heat; kerosene
stores would be bound to dwindle. But they’d figure something out, cut firewood, tolerate the elements as our forefathers had.

  But the vampires . . . I didn’t know how they would survive them. The Darkness had been let in, and the Elders were in denial. The Hexenmeister had the power to protect them, if only they would listen.

  But, always, my horizon was today—the next sunrise or sunset. And then . . . I couldn’t see beyond and then. I hoped that somehow a cure to the contagion would be found, that we could return to our homes and that life would return to some semblance of normal—if we still remembered what that felt like.

  I wrapped my coat tightly around my neck. I could feel the cold air creeping in. I had kept my Plain clothes, but Ginger and Alex had taken clothing from the Animal Farm, changed into jeans and heavy sweaters. Alex had found a replacement for his old jacket among the father’s clothes, a jacket made of green oilskin. Ginger was wearing the mother’s navy blue sweatshirt embroidered with kittens. I felt even more out of step with them than when we had started.

  But I was determined to keep up as we walked along a two-lane road. I saw farmland right and left studded with a few farmhouses with metal roofs to withstand the wind that scoured over the northern part of the state. Trees around the houses nodded east, as if the west wind had pushed them for many years.

  Off to the west, I could see a forest on the flat land, with the sunlight slanting through it. I squinted at it as Alex spread open a map. It flapped against his jacket, tearing at the corners as he swore at it.

  “There.” He pointed to the woods. “That’s where we’re going.”

  I lifted my eyebrows and shuddered instinctively. “It’s dark there.”

  “It’ll be safe,” he promised.

  I wrapped my arms around my elbows and followed him.