Race the Night

by Kirsten Hubbard

  And every once in a while, Eider found it.

  “Hey, Eider,” Finch said, startling her from her thoughts.

  “Hey, Finch. What’s up?”

  He ran a hand through his hair. It was so pale, it looked like the color had been frightened out of it. “I was wonder—” he began.

  Before Finch could finish, Jay crashed into both of them. “Looks like we’ve got another obstacle course,” he bellowed. “Get prepared to lick my dirt, losers.”

  “Watch it,” Finch said.

  “Or else what? You gonna bore me to death with your circular rhythmics?”

  “They’re called circadian—” Finch sighed. “Never mind.”

  Jay hooted loudly.

  Eider rolled her eyes. She’d decided maybe if she ignored Jay enough, he’d go away. It hadn’t happened yet, but she was optimistic.

  There were two types of Physical lessons: Structured and Free Play. Free Play was everyone’s favorite. The kids could take part in any activity they wanted, as long as they kept moving: kickball, tag, pretend games.

  During Structured, Teacher chose their activities and observed them. The cooler the day, the more intense the workout. Like navigating the obstacle course. Or jogging around the inside of the fence until Eider’s sides felt pinched by invisible hands. When summer peaked, they’d hide in the classroom with the swamp coolers blowing and do stretches, or roll a ball around.

  But today wasn’t too hot, and Jay had been right about the obstacle course. All five kids stood at the start of it, arms crossed.

  “Finch, you’re up first,” Teacher said. She held a clipboard and a stopwatch, as usual. “Ready. Set. Go.”

  Finch might have been the smartest kid at the desert ranch. But his strength was all in his head, not in his gawky, too-tall body. Even his first step was clumsy: he almost missed the tire.

  Eider looked away. The rise they were standing on wasn’t that high, but she could still see the entire ranch from up here. Their entire lives.

  She saw the old concrete buildings where they ate and learned, and the trailers where they slept. The twin windmills, which provided most of the ranch’s electricity. The solar panels on the rooftops, which gave them the rest.

  The grove of date palms, which offered much-needed shade and chewy, bland fruits. The well where they got their water. Teacher’s office. Beside it stood the metal spike, yet another artifact left over from Before. The spike was the tallest thing at the desert ranch. It had its own fence around it, and a rusty old sign:

  NO TRESPASSING

  KEEP OUT

  And then there was the main fence, stretching all the way around the desert ranch. Some of it was barbed wire. Some of it was chain-link. In other places, it was scraps of wood nailed together.

  Teacher used to say the fence was symbolic—that it only existed to separate the desert ranch from the nothing Beyond. But over the last three years, the Handyman had made the fence much stronger and taller.

  If you wanted to find a place to cross to the other side, you really had to look.

  Avis slung an arm around Eider’s shoulder. “I’m awfully tired of these obstacle courses,” she said. “Is it just me, or are they getting easier?”

  Eider shrugged, glancing at Teacher to make sure she hadn’t heard Avis’s comment. Then again, it might impress her, like most things Avis did.

  “Avis!” Teacher called. “Ready? Go.”

  Out of all the kids at the desert ranch, Avis was the most agile. Eider watched her pound through the tires, hop hop hop. Grab the rope and hoist herself up. Swing from bar to bar to bar. Avis always made Teacher proud.

  “Very good, Avis!” Teacher marked her clipboard. “Jay! Ready? Go.”

  Jay took off. With his big, meaty hands and brawny shoulders, he was the strongest by far. He never let anybody forget it.

  “What’s the holdup, slowpoke?” he’d shout at Linnet. “C’mon, monkey arms!” he’d bark at Finch. “Wasted all your breath on talking, huh?” he’d holler at Avis. “Wake up, cloudface!” he’d yell at Eider.

  “Jay,” Teacher often warned.

  But as far as Eider knew, Teacher had never disciplined him. Maybe because she didn’t realize he could be outright cruel—something Eider knew from the collection of animal skeletons he kept under his bed. Any meanness Teacher saw could also be interpreted as confidence.

  And confidence meant the kids were trying. They were realizing their potential. They cared—unlike Eider.

  Eider wanted to do well. She wanted Teacher to be proud of her, so badly. But ever since she’d woken from her rattlesnake fever and found out Robin had been imaginary, everything felt like too much trouble.

  Lessons. Checkups. Even Circle Time.

  Robin had never been real. But still, losing her felt like an amputation. Like missing a leg or an arm.

  No, it felt like half of Eider’s heart was missing. And her entire being suffered for it. Her emotions. Her strength. Her energy. She didn’t have enough blood pumping through her body, that was why. She’d never catch up, with fifty percent of a heart.

  “Very good, Jay,” Teacher said. “Eider!”

  Eider took a deep breath.

  “Ready? Go.”

  She ran.

  LIFE WAS GOOD AT THE DESERT RANCH. Teacher reminded them, time and again.

  “You’re the luckiest kids in the world,” she said. “You’re brilliant and special and purehearted. Most of all, you’re important. Without you, there’d be no hope for the world. Because you are the whole world now.”

  Sometimes that did make Eider feel important. Like the entire scroll of world history had unfurled all for them.

  Other times she felt differently. Because if they were the only people left, why did it matter if they were important? What was the point?

  Eider wanted there to be a point.

  Really, really badly.

  But a point didn’t have to be a big thing, like the sea. Or a sister. It could be something as small as a book.

  Specifically, a fairytale book kept under a floorboard in the storage room.

  During Quiet Time the next evening, Eider wiggled the loose floorboard until it opened like a creaky door. Her penlight’s glow revealed Cinderella in her pumpkin coach, glass slippers sparkling.

  “Hey there,” Eider greeted her.

  She flipped through the stories of goblin rats and mermaids and pumpkin coaches, straight past the final page of the final story. Then came a bunch of blank pages—pages now filled with Eider’s wind-gifted papers.

  Her secret papers weren’t make-believe, like the fairytale stories, but real. Real like the facts in the World Book. Realer than the World Book, actually, because they weren’t just explanations of the world before. They were from Before.

  She didn’t find them often. Every month or so, although one thrilling week she’d found three. Most were very small. Just scraps, really, smaller than the papers they used in the outhouses. Some listed odd-looking words in faded ink with numbers beside them:

  CABBAGE BNCH…$0.99

  SWS HOT CHOCLTE…$3.49

  TIL CHEDDAR 2LB…$6.89

  Eider’s favorite paper was a stiff rectangle. A postcard, she recalled from the Mail section in World Book M. The front was a glossy image of a beach. The sea was bright blue—just like in Eider’s mermaid story!—and the sand nearly white. Right in the center sat a bright pink drink in a stemmed glass that resembled a desert flower.

  The back had handwriting on it:

  Dear Roland,

  Bet you could use one of these right now! Wish you were here.

  Love,

  Mandy

  Roland and Mandy. Eider had thought about them lots of times. Mandy and Roland. Dear Roland, Love Mandy. She wondered if Roland had been waiting for the glossy rectangle, and if Mandy had assumed he’d received it. If, somewhere between the sending and receiving, the world had ended.

  She wondered how many letters the end of the world had interrupte
d.

  Once, after a windstorm that had lasted two whole days, Eider had found a long, skinny paper with a round hole in the top. It wanted her to eat a bunch of odd-looking bundles called “sushi,” a word Eider had no idea how to pronounce.

  Suh-shee? Soosh-ee? Suss-high?

  Unlike the unfamiliar terms in the World Book, Eider couldn’t ask Teacher about sushi. She didn’t want Teacher to know about the papers she collected. Or that she still had the fairytale book. Teacher would take the book away, like she had all the others, and Eider would never see her papers ever again.

  In the dark, she traced their words with her penlight. Whispering them out loud, like magic spells sent from Before.

  Rap. Rap. Rap.

  Eider almost dropped her book. Nobody had ever knocked on the storage room door. Even in the daytime, it wasn’t the sort of place where a person knocked before entering—they usually strode right in, seeking a jar of pickles or a shovel.

  “Hold on!”

  She slid the book back under the floorboard. When she opened the door, she found Finch outside, shuffling his feet. The sunset gave his hair a pinkish glow.

  “Hey, Eider,” he said. “I thought I saw you head over here. What are you up to?”

  “That’s none of your business,” she said.

  Finch frowned. “Oh….Sorry. I can go.”

  Eider felt bad. She’d never felt particularly close to Finch, but he wasn’t the sort to tell on her for sneaking. “No, it’s okay. I just come here to think sometimes.”

  “About the sea?”

  She blinked in surprise. “Well, a little bit. Yeah.”

  “You really saw it?”

  “Yeah…I really did.” She joined him outside, closing the door behind her.

  “What was it like?”

  It was the question Eider had been dying for somebody to ask. And Finch, of all people, was asking it. Straitlaced, unimaginative Finch, who wouldn’t know a mermaid from a rotten fish. Who spent Free Play tinkering with metal scraps. Or studying his notebooks—and enjoying it.

  She remembered all the answers she’d prepared about the sea:

  I’ve never seen anything so big!

  There were fish everywhere!

  Yeah, I’ll never forget that seashore smell!

  But she found herself telling Finch the truth instead. “It was…Really, it was nothing. I mean, it was huge! Don’t get me wrong. But it had all gone bad.”

  “The water?”

  “Yeah. It was brown and mucky. And stinky, too. And the fish—”

  “There were fish?”

  “Dead fish. They were all dead, as far as I could tell.”

  “So Teacher was right.”

  Eider nodded.

  She and Finch glanced at each other, then away. There seemed to be a lot of things they weren’t saying. Like how they’d both wondered if Teacher had been mistaken about something. Even though she hadn’t been.

  But Eider also felt a little encouraged. Turned out she wasn’t the only kid at the desert ranch who wondered about Beyond.

  She opened her mouth to speak. “I—”

  Eeeeeee. Eeeeeee. Eeeeeee.

  The alarm.

  It was a high-pitched whine, like a mosquito scream amplified. A sound the kids knew well—and hated. It meant danger. Or, more frequently, the potential of danger.

  “Let’s go,” Finch said.

  Eider glanced at the storage room, hoping she’d replaced the floorboard securely. Then she ran for the shelter.

  Teacher called the shelter their safe place. “No matter what kind of danger arrives,” she’d told the kids, “you’ll be safe inside the shelter.”

  From the outside, it didn’t look like much. Just a rooftop the color of desert sameness, and a slanted doorway with steps leading down. But as soon as the kids shut the door, the darkness made it distinct. Even in the daytime. The only openings to the outside world were narrow windows obscured by thick, black screens.

  Usually, the alarm was just a drill. A couple times, there’d been an actual danger—but it had passed. Drill or danger, the kids never knew until afterward, when Nurse released them. And he never told them what the danger was.

  “All that matters is that we’re safe!” he’d say.

  Drills were very serious, Teacher told them time and again.

  But they were also boring. Sometimes, they went on so long the kids fell asleep. This time, Jay didn’t even wait. He sprawled facedown on a cushion and, moments later, started snoring.

  “Such an oaf.” Avis scowled at him, then sat on a cushion beside Eider. “What do the rest of you want to do?”

  “I wish we had our notebooks,” Finch said. “Then we could get Q over with.”

  “What have you got against Q?” Avis asked, poking him in the side with her penlight.

  Finch swatted at her hand. “Nothing. There are just a lot of words that begin with R. I think it’ll be more interesting.”

  Eider could only think of one word that began with R, and it was the only word she wasn’t supposed to say. The scar on her ankle twinged. She reached down and scratched it, searching her brain for other R words.

  “I think all the letters are interesting,” Linnet said quietly.

  “You would,” Avis said.

  The younger girl flushed.

  “We’ve got even better letters coming up soon, though,” Avis continued. “Weird ones, like W. And X and Z.”

  “Z is the final letter,” Finch said.

  “Raven!” Eider said triumphantly.

  Finch glanced at her. “Huh?”

  “Never mind. What do you guys think we’ll do after we finish studying Z?”

  “I guess we’ll know everything then,” Avis said. “Or maybe we’ll start at A again. It’s been a couple years—all I remember is, like…airplanes.”

  Airplanes flew over the desert ranch from time to time, but there was nobody inside them. They flew automatically. Another A word.

  “Agriculture,” Eider said.

  “What do you remember about agriculture?” Avis asked.

  Eider shrugged.

  “Everything,” Finch said.

  Avis poked him again. “Nobody asked you, Finchy. We already know your brain’s made of prickers and glue.”

  “Art,” Linnet said.

  Eider smiled at her. “I’ll bet you remember lots about that.”

  When the kids were younger, Teacher used to give them paper and markers for drawing. They’d all enjoyed it, but Linnet had loved it the most, filling page after page with cactus blooms and coyote faces and funny doodles of the other kids.

  Now, all they had were their notebooks, and those were just for Practical. “We should be more conservative about paper,” Teacher had announced. “And only use it for important things.” Art didn’t seem to count.

  The kids continued to chatter animatedly, then more slowly. Linnet was the second to fall asleep, curled into a ball like a storybook kitten. Avis was third. Eider didn’t feel sleepy yet. She leaned her head against the wall, wondering what was going on outside.

  “What was it you were going to say?” Finch whispered.

  Eider glanced at him. “When?”

  “Before the alarm sounded.”

  She thought back. “Oh. Just that…” It seemed strange to say it now, locked inside this cramped space. “I still think there could be something out there. You know? Something left. I’m always waiting for—I’m always keeping my eyes open.”

  They both glanced at the shelter door.

  “You’re just waiting for something to come to you?” Finch asked.

  “No, not exactly…”

  The sound of a key in the lock shut Eider up. She nudged Avis and Linnet, while Finch woke Jay. “Go away,” Jay muttered. Then his eyes widened.

  Teacher stood in the doorway, holding a lantern.

  Eider’s eyes widened, too. Nurse always came to get them, not Teacher. Had the danger been real?

  “Just
a drill,” Teacher said. “Sorry it ran on so long.”

  All the kids let out their breath. But Teacher didn’t hold open the door, the way Nurse did. Instead, she stepped inside the shelter and switched off her lantern.

  “It’s time for our night lesson,” she said.

  “DOES EVERYBODY HAVE THEIR LIGHTS?” Teacher asked.

  The kids all nodded. Their penlights lit their faces from below, making them look slightly ghoulish.

  “Good.” Teacher closed the shelter door behind her. “Now turn them off.”

  Five clicks and then darkness. Total darkness. Eider couldn’t see Avis beside her, or Teacher before her, or even her own hand in front of her face. She could have been anywhere at all. That was a strange thought.

  “Darkness is an interesting thing,” Teacher said. “Technically, it’s just the absence of light. Right, Finch?”

  “Right,” Finch replied, his disembodied voice somewhere to Eider’s right.

  “It feels like more than that, though, doesn’t it? Almost like it has a presence. A power of its own.”

  Eider nodded, even though nobody could see her.

  “Even during new moons, or on overcast nights, the darkness isn’t complete. Not like it is in here.”

  Eider opened her eyes, then shut them, then opened them again. No difference.

  The darkness was complete.

  “But it only affects our eyes,” Teacher went on. “And fortunately for us, the human body is a complex thing. It compensates. When one sense shuts off, the other senses kick in even stronger—if you let them, that is.”

  “Let them?” Avis repeated, then paused. “I raised my hand.”

  “You must go deep within yourself. Give power to your senses. Everybody listen for a minute. Hold your breath if you must.”

  Eider held her breath and listened.

  At first, all she heard was silence. That same heavy, desert silence she knew so well.

  But with nothing but darkness to distract her, Eider began to notice other sounds, too. The clatter of wind-tickled pebbles. The screech of crickets. The sound of a door closing, far off—it must have been Nurse, leaving his office.