“Please just say what you’re thinking,” Elania said. “I don’t think I’ll be able to fall back asleep for a while.” She had remembered a little of her dream, disembodied white hands pasting her movie columns onto the pages of a scrapbook. Elania had felt proud to see all of her work laid out like that, how her writing had improved from freshman year to senior. Then those hands pasted in her college essay and closed up the scrapbook, and on the cover was a Shepherd patch.
He went on. “How are we to survive a sustained disruption if one comes? Food is trucked to us, not grown in our backyards. When those trucks stop driving, we stop eating. I can’t sleep for all the things I don’t know. I close my eyes and see the day we’ve tipped over to the other side. The day you can’t run to Mr. Foods for milk, because there no longer is a Mr. Foods. Mr. Foods only exists because trucks bring it food. Food doesn’t magically appear on the shelves there. I see those three little faces looking up to me hungry, and I’ve got empty hands. I can teach them how to be men in this world. I’m as young as they are in the other.”
Taking the laptop, he clicked back to the page on fire and skimmed the directions. “So I had the chimney swept today, getting out all the old leaves and critter nests. I figured out the damper and dumped the ashes from the grill in here to make a bed. Then everyone does it differently on these sites. I don’t know which is best. I’ve got the large fuel logs on the bottom, smaller in the middle, and kindling above those. Now I put some of these bunched newspapers in and light from the top. It’s supposed to make a clean fire.” He passed back the laptop to work on it.
They had never had a dog, Elania clicking on the tab and scrolling down past Dobermans and Rottweilers, German Shepherds and Mastiffs. Dad had clicked on the button by German Shepherds. The description said that the breed was good with children. Feeling out of breath, Elania said, “I wish they didn’t have Shepherd in their name.”
“There’s a breeder up in San Francisco with a litter available in March,” Dad grunted while placing bunches of paper around the logs. “Two of the ten are still unclaimed. The Rabins bought from this couple years ago and speak well of them. We can sign up for obedience training at Pet-Pet.” He struck a match.
So these weren’t thoughts but actual plans becoming concrete! “What does Mom think?”
“Nervous about the gun, on board with the dog.” Dad’s eyes were trained on the flames licking through the kindling and paper. “What happened to your friends downtown made her really nervous. And since then . . .”
Since then. Since then the news was flush with Sombra C murders, of shoot-outs between Shepherds and Sombra Cs, between Shepherds and police. President Pitch spoke chillingly at her address that the government of the United States did not deal with terrorists, and those responsible for blowing up the transformers would be caught and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Nor did she recognize the Shepherd authority called Prime and would not entertain their influence on legislation. Her aged mother was shot and killed the next day while out shopping. It was a long-range shot, and the murderer not yet apprehended. To kill an old woman like that in retaliation, for it was too great a coincidence to be unrelated, and in broad daylight . . . it was madness.
Emergency supports had flooded the affected areas, but were not enough to quell the growing tide of violence. Anyone with the means to leave was gone, and everyone else was scavenging for supplies, rioting in the streets, or hiding at home. Two ten-year-old boys had knifed each other over a chocolate bar, all that was left to eat in a looted store. But this was all so far away, even Los Angeles.
Yet Cloudy Valley had not gone untouched. Since then, Dale Summit had passed Elania and Corbin in the hallway, pointed his finger, and said, “Bang!” To the laughter of others, who jeered outside of the government classroom. Some students didn’t jeer, but dropped their eyes swiftly and rushed on down the hall. An infected freshman was being bullied so badly that she had stopped coming to school altogether, and a girl dropped a note on Janie’s handicapped table with a wish for her to die. Since then, Zaley was being harassed for attending Welcome Mat and called a zombie lover. Brennan had protestors in front of his home, praying for him to move away. He arrived at school with egg dripping from his jacket, and now Corbin picked him up to carpool.
Elania thought of the long stretch of land between Cloudy Valley and Los Angeles, and she wished it were even further. Only a day’s drive, less than a day, and claws of fear settled over her shoulders. She added gun safe to the list.
Still studying his wavering fire, Dad said, “How far do we go? What’s the line between sensible precautions and lunacy? Should I get seeds for a vegetable garden? Chickens and a coop? Invest in gold? I have no idea. I honestly have no idea. I wish I had some guidance.”
“What does your gut say?”
He patted his belly fondly. “My gut says I should drive to that all-night Bulls-Eye in San Criata and load up. But it’s crazy to do that. I should have the boys clean out the playhouse in their toy room and use it for storage. But that’s crazy, too, letting my children think the world might be headed for anarchy. It’s just the night that’s speaking maybe. The dark.”
“Or sense,” Elania said, almost in a whisper. “Dad, can I go with you?”
They were in the car ten minutes later, the fire put out, the list forwarded to their phones, and a note left for Mom in case she woke up and found them gone. On the drive it seemed crazy again, rushing south on the bare freeway. Elania said, “I guess the worst is we get a gun that stays in a safe and never gets shot.”
“And a dog that is only ever played with. Food and water in the playhouse we don’t ever have to rely on, but it’s there.” The buzz startled them. Dad pulled out his cell phone and glanced at it. “Tawnie and I have been texting about this. She’s planning to buy some pullets.”
“Some what?”
“Pullets. Young hens. The health code in Sable Heights allows four chickens per residence.” Dad put away the phone and said, “That’s what I mean, Lani! We don’t know these things. We’ve never done without. We’ve grown flowers, not food; kept pets, not livestock. If civilization ended tomorrow, what good are all the things I’ve learned in forty-five years? No one’s going to care about my computer skills if there aren’t computers.”
Outside the windows were gas stations and Tic-Tac-Tacos, diners and furniture stores. Elania couldn’t picture a day where they were relics of a world fallen away. “This is denial, is that it, Dad? Wanting to go home and insist it’s all okay, since we can’t imagine otherwise?”
“We can’t let ourselves imagine it. It’s too frightening. But civilizations fall apart all the time. We know that from history, from being Jews. You want to trust that the world will always be as you know it. But I think that it’s time to start preparing for the worst, and praying that it never happens.” He nodded a little to himself. “We’re doing the right thing. If we never need it, the worst that will happen is this will become a family legend of the night Dad and Lani went nuts.”
It was freezing when they stepped out into the parking lot, Elania putting on gloves and immediately sucking her hands back up into the long sleeves of her sweater. Her neck was covered. The scarf was meaningless in the chilly store, where half of the sleepy employees and most of the customers were soundly wrapped up. Dad got a jumbo cart and rolled to water first. There were six-packs of gallon jugs, which he loaded one after another into the cart and along the bottom. Calculating how long it would last, Elania thought it didn’t look like enough.
From there they went to food, choosing cases of beef stew and chicken soup, beans, tuna, pears and peaches, potted meat and sausages. There were no bags of rice on the shelves, only a sign reading that the major exporters of Vietnam, Thailand, and India were restricting shipment. Elania hadn’t heard that on the news, but so much slipped by now when the dominating story was always Sombra C. They could not buy rice. Their family rarely ate rice, so it wasn’t much of a loss, but tha
t the option was gone alarmed her. She searched her phone for news while Dad canvassed another aisle. Since the droughts of the last few years pushed up the price of grains, followed by the smack of Sombra C disrupting farming by varying degree the world over, foreign governments were holding on to what rice they had.
Disturbed as Dad rolled around the corner, Elania slipped into the cart a canister of chocolate rolled wafers, saying hastily, “For the boys! If the world is going to end, they should have a treat.”
“If the world is going to end,” Dad repeated. “I’ll hit first aid, you go around the corner and pick out some coloring books and markers for them.”
The selection in the art aisle was plentiful. She selected a book of vehicles for Percy with a police car on the cover, sea life for Cormac, and outer space for Conor. The books had connect-the-dots and mazes, spot-the-difference pictures and silly jokes as well. By the time Dad came back, her arms were full of markers and crayons, colorful modeling clay and chalk, and a four-pack of Magic Marley books that a previous customer had forgotten in the art aisle. “I guess I went overboard.”
“Just put it in,” Dad said.
She wedged everything into the cart and spotted bear spray. “Dad?”
“That’s for you. Keep it on your keychain. Good for twenty-five shots and shoots to a distance of ten feet.”
“But school-”
“You have to,” Dad said. “I don’t want that to be you, backed into the loading bay at Mr. Foods by some thugs. Just keep your keys in your pocket or backpack and don’t tell anyone what that is.”
There were a variety of radios in the camping aisle. They decided on the one that could be powered by multiple means: the hand crank, solar power, a car charger, from a wall or a laptop. Putting two in the cart, Elania checked the list while Dad popped solar-powered flashlights with emergency battery backups from the shelf. Iodine tablets to purify water, lightweight fleece blankets, they picked up a second cart for more room. Both were so loaded by the time they turned back to the registers that they were sweating to push them. It was a little embarrassing to unload it. The cashier watched everything travel to her on the conveyor belt like she’d seen this all before.
In the parking lot, Elania fixed the bear spray to her keychain. She was nervous to think of carrying this around at school with the zero-tolerance policy for weapons. But to have nothing, like she did now every day . . . how long until Dale’s bang turned into someone’s real one?
She adjusted the bags in the back while Dad returned the cart. As they drove away, he said, “Okay, we’re now officially nuts.”
“Nuts until we need this, and then we’re prophets,” Elania said sagely.
He chuckled. “If you were younger, I’d be tempted to take you to a walled-up place like Mirror Lake. Maybe that’s lunacy, the step too far. No one knows until it’s too late.”
Once home, they did not stop. Elania slipped through their quiet home after Dad to the triplets’ playroom. It was a disaster like always, board games upended and the pieces scattered, broken crayons and jacks and little cars everywhere. She got the broom from the closet and swept a path to the playhouse. The boys used it as a fort. Dad dumped pillows and stuffed animals out of its windows. Then he went out to start carrying in the water while Elania swept out the playhouse of its last toys. Building blocks in the corners, rubber aliens on the sills, she closed the windows and peeled pink and gray wads of gum in disgust from above the door. From hooks in the ceiling hung a crusted purple boa from their dress-up chest. She unwound it and hoped the crust wasn’t boogars. Her brothers were so gross.
When it was clean, she lifted the first case of water and tucked it in the far corner. How was she to organize this? The heavy things should be on the bottom, and maybe the water along one wall and the food on the other. If a time came to take things out, whoever did it wouldn’t have to dismantle all the food to get to the water, or pull out some water and risk collapsing everything on top of it.
Pushing the first case away from the back to the side, she brought in the rest one by one. The wall of water grew higher, cresting the bottom sill, the lower pane of the window, and then it reached the higher pane and lifted over the top sill. Although there were still three more cases, she lined them up along the back since the slope of the ceiling kept them from stacking neatly.
“They caught him,” Dad said while setting down the case of chili. “Just heard it on the radio. They caught the man who shot the president’s mother. Former cop.”
“Have they taken down Prime?”
“No. They received intelligence to a location, but no one was there by the time troops arrived. Some soldiers are being held as traitors for tipping off the Shepherds, giving them a chance to hide.”
Elania put her phone to the news and let it play while she stacked food. No rice. That made her want to eat rice, simply since she couldn’t. A report was coming to an end and a new one picking up about a new hunt to apprehend Shepherd Prime for blowing up the transformers. A blizzard was on its way to Boston, people leaving in droves if they could and hunkering down if not. Vans of relief supplies were being mobbed, houses robbed of generators, stores smashed in and alleviated of everything from food to liquor to televisions. Despite the more amenable weather, parts of Los Angeles were in such mayhem that travel through it was not advised. The knockout of electricity had resulted in four hundred people escaping a confinement point. One hundred and fifty of them were dangerous, and the city had enacted a curfew so that the Armed Forces could sweep the streets and sewers. Their local Shepherds were screaming about the curfew, which included them. Some went out defiantly and were arrested. Elania glared through an interview with a Shepherd sympathizer shouting that this was exactly why Sombra Cs should be put down. Now look! They’d gotten out! He failed to grasp that the only reason they had gotten out was due to Shepherds.
Copycat crimes on transformers had been prevented in three states. Another was successful in some small place in Florida, and the perpetrator died in a shoot-out with cops. His brother said that the guy wasn’t a Shepherd at all, just an anti-government nut with severe mental issues. Listening to the bedlam, it did not seem so crazy that Elania was arranging food in her brothers’ playhouse. She didn’t want that craziness coming here. But if it did, they had some provisions. Dad had even bought cases of dog food, since they were on sale.
“I’ll make it easy on ya!” said a woman over the radio. “They call themselves Shepherd, arrest ‘em.”
“That’s almost the equivalent of saying every Muslim is a terrorist,” another woman argued. “How can you profile like that? I met a Shepherd squad operating in Billington, Nebraska, and they’re as horrified about Black Monday as we are. This isn’t what they set out to do and they do not support the actions of Prime! They’ve put up a roadblock not for Sombra Cs but to catch Shepherds from other communities looking to start trouble! The Billington Shepherds aren’t the same as the Shepherds who carried out these attacks.”
The reporter took over. “Increasing discontent with the vice president Liam Herald has led to death threats from more violent Shepherd factions, especially after his interview with Paula Lorner on Tuesday, in which he stated that he does not support Sombra C quarantine or extermination. Representative Tim Arkman of Iowa, known for his extremist views, was sharply reprimanded for an email released by his office showing a drawing of the vice president in crosshairs. Extra guards have been assigned to the protection of his two young daughters.”
It was very late now, yet they kept working. Once the water and food were in the playhouse, Elania pushed the heavy box with the generator over the carpet. Dad came back in with more goods and she said, “These have to be outside to run, but they get stolen. Should we have some kind of fencing to go around it? It would at least delay thieves.”
“The dog,” Dad yawned. “I’ll figure out some fencing, too, or we could chain it to the flagpole. Thieves want what’s easy.”
He passed in the l
ighter, smaller items to be placed on top of or around the stacks. The playhouse was packed and still it didn’t look like enough to Elania, who understood suddenly how easy it was to go overboard with this. “Where are you going to get a gun?”
A gust of air went out of him. “There’s a gun store named Marbles over in Blue Hill. Dear God, I don’t want a gun in this house. Not with the boys. I’m going to have to have some long talks with them about it, so they don’t think it’s a toy. I don’t want them looking at the gun safe like it’s a code they just have to crack. Conor won’t most likely, but . . .”
He didn’t have to finish that sentence. Percy, and especially impulsive Cormac, weren’t quite as mature. Cormac still stepped into the road without checking for cars to retrieve balls and Frisbees, Percy having mastered look both ways in kindergarten and Conor getting it back in preschool. “Do you know what kind of gun you’ll buy?”
Giving over the flashlights, Dad said helplessly, “I don’t know the first thing about guns. Mom and I have to talk about that more. We’ll deal with the dog first.”
It wouldn’t be smart for Elania to go on the errand to Marbles. A store full of guns and people probably wouldn’t mix well with a stamped girl. Dad taped the windows shut to keep the triplets from forcing them open and tipping the stacks inside. The radio played on while Elania reorganized to make the flashlights and extra radios more accessible.
She wished her father good night when he could not stop yawning, and did the last little things alone. The coloring books were getting lost amongst everything else. She removed the boys’ gifts, setting them down on the carpet outside of the playhouse and going in search of wrapping paper. If it all went to hell, the boys had something to hold onto of this time.
If it all went to hell. It couldn’t. She wanted to think that Cloudy Valley was immune. The first page of each coloring book had lines for to and from, which she filled out. Then she divided the art supplies into labeled gift bags recycled from their last birthday, green for Cormac, blue for Conor, purple for Percy. Two minutes after opening them, they’d be fighting about whose markers were better, but that was something normal. Something they understood in a world they wouldn’t understand one bit.
The Zombies: Volumes One to Six Box Set Page 45