Foreverland Is Dead

by Tony Bertauski

  Cyn examines the rough surface of the table and the candleholders, which appear to be iron rods crudely welded together. Wax puddles on the table. The walls are barren and the wood floor scuffed. There are two doors on the back wall, one on each side of the stove.

  The girls heads are shaved, all except the blonde. Roc’s laughter breaks the silence. “You’re looking at them like cattle.”

  Bits of apple shoot from her mouth.

  “What are your names?” Cyn asks.

  No one speaks. She points at the one with black hair and dark skin. Indian, maybe.

  “Jen.”

  “That’s what it says inside your pants?”

  She nods.

  “Okay. How about you?”

  Kat’s hair is bright red, her cheeks freckled. The other one is Mad. She has black skin, tight curly hair. The blonde has found the corner again, looking for a mouse hole to climb inside.

  “What about you?” Cyn asks. “What’s your name?”

  “Miranda.” She rattles the bracelet on her right hand. She doesn’t have a tag inside her designer clothes, just a fancy bracelet, her name engraved on a gold plate.

  “You’re the one that pulled me out of the fence.”

  She nods, eyes cast down.

  “You woke up in the brick house. How come you were in there?”

  Miranda shakes her head.

  “Why doesn’t the fence bother you?”

  Again, she shakes her head.

  “Well, what’s in there?” Roc interjects.

  Shrug.

  “You don’t know?” Cyn adds, softer.

  No response.

  Cyn looks over her shoulder. Roc says, “Told me she woke up in a bedroom and came down some steps, came right outside. Don’t think she looked around, but how should I know? She hasn’t said two words since. She ate the hell out of a can of beans, though.”

  Roc tosses the apple core into the corner.

  “So no one knows anything?” Cyn asks. “I mean, where we are or how we got here?”

  They shake their heads.

  “Does anyone remember anything?” Cyn looks at Roc. She’s picking her teeth. “Because I don’t. I couldn’t remember my name when I woke up. I don’t know if we’re in the United States or Russia or on another planet.”

  All she gets is Roc sucking on her teeth.

  Cyn goes to the window. And yet I know those are horses. I know the garden has been weeded and the wind harvesters are generating electricity. Am I dreaming?

  “I remember something,” Mad says. “I remember a dream.”

  Cyn turns. “What was it?”

  Mad describes a tropical island. She was flying over the palm trees and soaring over the ocean. She says there were boys there, like it was some sort of Neverland, only they didn’t call it that.

  She stops.

  “Then what?” Cyn asks.

  “Something happened…but…I don’t remember.”

  The sky falls. That’s what.

  “What about you?” Roc points at Miranda. “You have any dreams?”

  Miranda dips her shoulder. Her face is completely hidden behind her hair.

  Roc rubs the scar along her chin. There’s a tattoo on the inside of her right arm. The fuzzy blue lines look like a long dagger from the inside of her elbow to her wrist.

  “Come over here, Miranda.” Roc pats the chair next to her. “I don’t bite, girl.”

  Cyn doesn’t care about the dream. She’d rather forget it. As dire as things feel, it’s better to be inside the cabin than inside the dream. The screams sounded like people were being pulled apart.

  “They’re hungry,” Kat says.

  Cyn didn’t realize she was staring at the horses. They’re still romping along the fence, craning their necks over the wire, but the grass is out of reach.

  “How do you know?” Cyn asks.

  Kat shrugs. “Isn’t it obvious?”

  Not to Cyn. But now that Kat said it, Cyn can tell they’re anxious. Have they been without food as long as the girls? How long have we been asleep?

  “I don’t remember.” Miranda is next to Roc, hugging herself.

  “I’m not asking what happened before you woke up,” Roc says. “What’s inside the brick house, girl? Is there a phone or a computer? You know, something that could save our lives, that sort of thing?”

  Cyn walks past Roc’s interrogation. The kitchen is to the right of the wood stove. The door is cedar plank, but there’s an electronic lock on the silver handle, one that requires a programmable keycard.

  The shelves are stocked with canned goods and jars of fruits and vegetables. The food has been shoved around; empty cans lay on the floor. A half-empty bottle of water. Bruised bananas hang from a hook but still yellow.

  There are two stoves: one wood burning and the other electric. The industrial sized refrigerator is polished silver with a pantry next to it. A nail is bent on the shelf above the sink holding two cards on strings, each about the size of a credit card.

  Cyn retrieves them. She slides one in the kitchen lock. A green light goes on and gears turn. The light turns off and the gears go back.

  “I DON’T REMEMBER!”

  “Don’t give me that!” Roc towers over Miranda. “You walked through that house, you’re not blind, you had to see something, now what’s in there?”

  “She’s right.” Cyn steps between them, kneeling down. Miranda is shaking. “If there’s a phone, we could call someone.”

  “That’s genius,” Roc says.

  “Let’s go over there.” Cyn rests her hand on Miranda’s. “We’ll go with you. You could be the one that saves us.”

  Miranda stops quivering but doesn’t lift her head. Cyn pats her knee. Roc reaches over her head and yanks the chair back. Miranda has to stand to keep from falling. Cyn stands between them. She holds out one of the keycards.

  “Here.”

  “What’s this?”

  “It unlocks the kitchen. If there’s not a phone in the brick house, we need to start rationing food.”

  Roc puts the keycard around her neck. “Why?”

  She doesn’t look at Roc. She stares at Miranda. “Because we’re going to run out.”

  Miranda looks up. Her eyes are blue, her face clean and free of scratches. Cheeks puffy. She lacks the gaunt tug of hunger.

  Miranda waits on the front porch while Cyn and Roc lock the kitchen.

  Kat, Mad, and Jen venture off the porch towards the garden. They don’t want to be around Roc and she can’t blame them. But they didn’t ask Miranda to come. They couldn’t care less about her.

  She doesn’t care, either.

  She wouldn’t hang out with them anyway. She doesn’t like to mix. She’s not sure what that means, but it seems to have to do with race. Blacks, Irish, and Indians—that sort of thing.

  Miranda’s the one quaking on the porch while they walk through the garden, but they’re the dumb ones. If Cyn hadn’t said something about the food, those pea-brains would’ve plowed through those shelves like rats, led by the Dagger Queen. They wouldn’t listen to Miranda. No one would. She’s too small and…different.

  Thank God for Cyn.

  Miranda can’t remember any more than the rest of them, only she didn’t wake up in the bunkhouse. She saw where they woke up, looked like a redneck cellblock that smelled like an armpit. The stink was in them and they didn’t smell it. Miranda breathed through her mouth when they were in the same room.

  “You ready?”

  Cyn comes out of the dinner house. The shoestring is around her neck, the plastic keycard dangling between her breasts. She needs a bra. The rest of them don’t.

  Miranda least of all.

  “Let’s go see what’s in the brick house.” Roc puts her hand on Miranda’s neck, guides her off the porch.

  Miranda breathes through her mouth.

  The house is a two-story home with Old Georgetown brick, functioning shutters, and a green metal roof. The cabins look like they
were built two centuries ago. The brick house, last year.

  They slow at the end of the garden. Roc still has her hand on Miranda’s neck, gently squeezing.

  “Circle around,” she says. “If we stand where the tall grass starts, we’ll be able to see into the front door.”

  Cyn doesn’t know much about the fence. The others tested it from every angle, knowing where their necks would start buzzing and how close they could get. They walk along an invisible line but only they can feel it. Feels like nothing to Miranda.

  They stop twenty feet from the house. Double doors are between large windows. There’s a lamp in each one, the one on the right still on.

  It’s no accident the house faces south, not that any of the others would know. The southern exposure allows the light inside for warmth. The other end faces north. They’re protected from the winter wind by trees. Miranda doesn’t know where they are, but it doesn’t take a genius to know winter is cold.

  She’s not really sure how she knows.

  “Open both doors,” Roc says. “Open them real wide so we can see.”

  “Find the kitchen,” Cyn adds. “We need all the food out of there, first thing. We don’t want anything going to spoil if no one’s in there.”

  “Yeah, that’s great,” Roc adds, “but if there’s a phone you forget the food and start dialing 9-1-1.”

  Miranda wants to get away from them—she doesn’t like all the attention—but the other direction doesn’t feel any better. The brick house is so quiet. The lamps look like eyes, the steps like teeth. As much as she hates the attention and body odor, she remembers what the inside of the brick house smells like.

  It’s not body odor.

  Roc pushes her.

  Miranda’s legs are stiff. Roc shoves her again. Miranda steps safely inside the fence. Roc can’t reach her, but now she’s stuck between them and the brick house. She wants to chew on her finger, bite the skin from the sides, but stops herself from that bad habit. Perhaps she’ll just sit down, right there, inside the fence.

  The first step is the hardest. The second one isn’t much better.

  The grass is worn away near the bottom step. Miranda looks down at her shoes. They aren’t boots, aren’t made for roughing it. These are casual flats. And she feels the pebbles through the thin soles.

  She puts her foot on the first step. It feels like the house is pushing back. She wonders if that’s what it feels like to the others. She doesn’t want to go in there, she doesn’t know why.

  “Come on!” Roc says. “We’re going to starve before you get there.”

  Miranda grabs the railing. She pulls herself up–A high-pitched scream.

  It’s somewhere toward the dinner house. Cyn and Roc turn toward it. Miranda backs off. The girls aren’t in the garden. Cyn starts walking, careful to stay outside the fence. It’s hard to tell where it’s coming from.

  They hear it again. This time, two girls are screaming.

  Cyn starts running. Roc follows, but she goes straight through the garden, plowing a path through the rows and snapping plants off at the base. Miranda is all alone, one foot on the bottom step. The lamps stare at her—one on, one off—like the house is winking.

  Or got punched out.

  She leaves the safety of the fence, runs around the garden. Right now, the pack is safer than the unknown. The screams are coming from the trees.

  3

  Jen stumbles out of the woods before she falls. She scrambles to her feet.

  Roc is there first, rushing to the trees. More screaming. Kat and Mad come out a little farther down. Cyn puts her arms around Jen. She clings to her. Her chest heaves with sobs.

  “What is it? What happened?” Cyn says.

  Kat and Mad fall behind Cyn. Their arms and faces are scratched and bleeding. Mad hides her face.

  “Settle down, settle down.” Cyn peels Jen off of her, brushing away tear-streaked grime. Long welts line her face. “What happened?”

  “We were…” Jen swallows a sob, takes a deep breath. “We were just looking around. Mad saw it first and then…then I saw it, too.”

  Mad’s still hiding her face.

  “What is it?” Cyn asks. Neither of them answer. She looks at Kat.

  “I didn’t see anything. I hauled ass when Jen started screaming. There’s a little path in there but we cut through the trees, limbs tore us up.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Go down a bit, you see the opening. Mad’s the one that found it—”

  “I’m not going back there.” Mad’s shaking her head.

  “Me, neither,” Jen adds.

  The girls sit closely, huddling behind Cyn. Miranda stands several feet away. They’re watching the trees. Limbs begin cracking. Cyn creeps closer, her heart thumping.

  Something rushes through the thicket.

  Cyn backs up, arms out, like a mother fencing off her cubs.

  Roc jumps out, wiping spider webs off her head and arms, spitting.

  “What’s in there?” Cyn asks.

  “There ain’t a trail, I can tell you that. But something’s back there. Something dead.”

  “Down there.” Jen points at the bunkhouse. “You’ll see down there.”

  There are black plastic cisterns on the back of the bunkhouse and the dinner house. They’re as tall as the roof and are connected to gutters to collect rainwater. Each must contain thousands of gallons. There are no windows on the back of either cabin, but there’s a door on the bunkhouse, right between the cisterns.

  Cyn wanders over, warily looking at the trees and back to the girls. There’s a narrow path starting at the bunkhouse door that cuts to an opening.

  Cyn’s guts feel twisted, her eyes unblinking. She points at the opening and Jen nods. Cyn ducks under a low-hanging branch and enters the cool shade. Branches have been cut away. A dirt path swings around the tree trunks and, up ahead, turns to the right.

  Roc breathes loudly behind her.

  Cyn pauses, looks and listens. The wind rustles the tops of the trees but the air is dead beneath it. She reaches the turn and stops. The smell hits her. Something foul, something spoiled. It’s not a skunk. More like road kill baking on summer asphalt. She leans around the corner, pulls a branch down.

  Twenty feet away, right where the path turns, there’s something on the ground. Tan and ragged.

  Cyn takes a step and waits for it to move. Deep down, she knows it won’t. Pants. Those are tan pants.

  Two legs lay across the path, both mired in dirt and dried blood. There’s only one shoe. The other foot is bare, the sole caked with mud.

  “It’s a body.” Cyn says it louder than she intended to.

  Roc looks over her shoulder. “Told you.”

  Cyn covers her face with the bottom of her shirt. Roc does the same. The smell penetrates the fabric. Even when she holds her breath, she still feels it.

  The torso is off the path, buried in the undergrowth. The pants are shredded on the back side, exposing muscles and tissues. Looks like the work of scavengers. Hopefully, long gone.

  They’ll be back.

  Cyn stops short of the body. The odor saturates her face. A knot swells in her throat. She blinks away the tears and tries to hold her breath again. Vertigo spins in her head, but she wants to make sure.

  An adult.

  The woman is heavyset, facedown in the weeds. Her hair gray and matted. The shirt has been clawed away, the bra strap still intact. The flesh isn’t.

  “The hell happened?” Roc asks.

  “I don’t know. Wolves, maybe.”

  Maybe.

  “Think we need to bury her?” Roc asks. “Keep the wolves away?”

  Cyn is thinking the same thing, but she doesn’t want to touch that body to roll it into a hole even if they dig it right next to her.

  “Let’s leave it,” she says. “Keep the girls out of here for a while. No one comes down this path, not until we’re sure it’s safe.”

  Roc is already backtracking.


  Cyn kneels down for a closer look. She dry heaves once and pinches her nose. If there was more than an apple in her stomach she would lose it, but she’s not coming back anytime soon. She wants to be sure she’s not missing anything. Perhaps if she sees the face it will remind her of someone. Maybe jog loose a memory, provide a clue.

  But there’s nothing familiar. Not the clothing or the body or the hair. And she’s not about to roll her over to see the face. She’s certain it’s beyond recognition.

  There’s something in her hand. Cyn pokes it with a stick but the fingers are stiff. Looks like a plastic bag.

  Cyn backs away. She’ll come back much later to investigate.

  Or maybe never.

  4

  Miranda doesn’t sleep much that first night.

  There’s an open bunk in the back. The clothes in the box are her size but they’re filthy. She sleeps in the clothes she’s wearing. They’re dusty, but at least they don’t smell like wet animal.

  She’s the first one in bed. There’s no way she’s going back into the brick house, even if there’s clean clothes and a soft bed in there. She just wants to go to asleep, wants to wake up from this dream. Because it has to be a dream.

  The other girls wander into the bunkhouse once it’s dark. Miranda peeks from under the covers, just a sliver of an opening. They look drunk, sort of staggering to their beds and getting undressed, eyes half shut. They’re breathing heavily, softly snoring.

  Somewhere out there, a wolf howls. It sounds like outside the cabin. Others join. It’s getting hard to breathe beneath the blanket, but she’s not about to look. She’s trying not think about an animal getting inside.

  They’re probably coming back for the body.

  She didn’t follow Cyn and Roc into the woods. She stayed back. She wanted to run but then she would’ve been all by herself, so she waited outside the trees. She never saw anything, but she caught a whiff.

  Cyn didn’t talk about it, but Roc did. She said it was an old woman, half-eaten. Said the head had been gnawed off and the spine stuck out like a chewed corncob.