I want to find some excuse to leave, ask to go to the bathroom, fake sickness, anything so I won’t have to keep sitting here. Will puts his hand on my leg. He’s holding it a little too tightly—agreeing with Pioneer, forcing me to stay. He nods emphatically as Pioneer talks. His devotion to protecting the Community is borderline manic sometimes.
I fight the urge to wrestle my leg out from under Will’s hand. If I run, I will only prove what they’re starting to suspect—that I’m a coward and that it’s their duty to try harder to rehabilitate me. That kind of attention frightens me more than anything else.
After class, I rush out without a word. I want to paint by the lake or head out to the corral and saddle Indy, but I know Will will just follow me there and I don’t want to see him right now. His need for perfection in all things, even rule following, is frustrating to be around sometimes, and the way he acted in class has me more than a little angry. I don’t need him to remind me of what I need to work on, so I head home instead.
My mom’s in the kitchen preparing dinner. It’s Sunday, the one day a week when we eat in our own homes. Every other meal is eaten in the dining room at the clubhouse with the rest of the Community. For once I’m glad it’s Sunday. Not having to face Will and Pioneer tonight is the one bright spot in this whole wreck of a day.
I linger in the doorway and watch my mom chop vegetables. She lifts her foot and scratches the back of her leg with one toe. Her hair is pulled back into a haphazard ponytail. The light from outside enhances the red-gold in it, effectively camouflaging the gray that’s started to come in. She’s tinier than I am, and although we’re both pale, she’s much thinner, more fragile looking. Standing behind her, I feel taller, curvier—sturdier—like a coffee mug placed next to a china teacup.
She turns to drop her pile of cucumbers and tomatoes into a bowl of cold pasta noodles and sees me. “Hey there. Dinner’s almost done. Would you mind tracking down your father?”
“Sure.” I come up beside her and reach into the bowl to grab a cucumber and she swats at my hand. Part of me wants to talk to her about what happened out on the field … but can she understand? When she practices shooting, I know she’s like me and also imagines the targets as actual people, but for her it’s different. She sees the person who took Karen and she’s never missed a shot. Not once.
I decide to just walk away and leave her to finish making our meal. She’s humming to herself as I leave the kitchen. I’ll have to try to imagine whoever took Karen when I shoot next, but I know I won’t be able to draw from the same emotions that she does. Karen is all faded for me, not a flesh-and-blood girl anymore, just one more thing to feel guilty about. Is it because I’m missing some crucial part of my heart that I can’t keep feeling the pain the way Mom does? Am I really just like McClellan, cowardly and selfish? The worst of it is that I want to be good, to do what’s expected. So why do I still hesitate?
“So how’d target practice go today?” Dad asks between mouthfuls of pasta salad once we’ve sat down to dinner. I sigh heavily and set my fork down on the place mat. When I look up, the first thing I see is the picture of Pioneer that we keep on the kitchen wall. I always feel like the real Pioneer’s watching me through it somehow. There goes my appetite.
“Something tells me you already know how it went,” I mumble.
“I have an idea.” Dad leans back in his chair and looks at me. Mom looks from me to him and back again. Now I get the rare privilege of telling her what happened after not telling her as soon as I came home and then getting a double dose of lecturing from both of them. Wonderful. I push down on the tines of my fork with my fingers, making the handle bang against the table.
“Kneecaps,” Dad says in explanation, and my mom makes an “Ooohhh” face. My shooting habits aren’t exactly a surprise to either of them, I guess.
“Look, I shot the heart today, okay? Pioneer already talked to me about this. I get what I have to do.” I lean back in my chair and look up at the ceiling.
Dad wipes his mouth on his napkin. “We’ve never doubted that. But can you do it when there’s a face staring at you instead of black plywood?”
“If I have to, yes,” I say, but I’m not the greatest liar. I don’t even convince myself.
“That’d be easier to believe if you actually shot accurately without being prodded by Pioneer first,” Dad says.
I glance up at my mom. I was sort of hoping that she’d take pity on me and change the subject, but she’s holding Dad’s hand now, making them a united front.
Dad goes into lecture mode. “Look, none of us want to hurt people. You get that, right? But we may have to make some hard choices pretty soon in order to survive. The Community’s stayed safe for a lot of years, but we’re still a point of curiosity for the towns around here. Don’t you think they wonder why we’re out here all alone? Do you think that once the earth’s rotation reverses, they won’t figure it out? We only have enough supplies stockpiled for our own people, and even then we might not have enough. If people start showing up here looking for shelter, they aren’t just gonna take ‘Sorry, we’re full up’ as an answer and walk away. They’ll fight,” Dad says, the volume of his voice gradually increasing with his enthusiasm for this subject. “Would you really risk one of us dying to ease your own misguided conscience?”
“You’re being too soft speaking of them that way, Thomas.” My mom’s eyes are rippling with tears. “Those people out there are monsters. Evil. Each and every last one of them. They need to be wiped from this earth. Not one deserves our mercy. The Brethren watched all of us for years. They know the Outsiders’ motives. We are the chosen, the ones who showed true goodness and compassion. We are meant to survive, not them. And if they come here before the end—or just after the disasters begin—we cannot feel sorry for them. Not ever. We would only be helping to keep evil alive, and all of this, all that we’ve done here, would be for nothing.” She’s started trembling now. I watch as she looks over at Pioneer’s picture. She puts a hand out and touches the frame with the same kind of anxious strokes that she uses when she rubs Karen’s shoes. If somehow Pioneer really can watch us through that picture, she probably sees it as comforting.
I stare at my plate. Tears blur my own vision, making everything look like an abstract painting. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, okay? I want to do what I’m supposed to, believe me … but I just, I don’t know. I just freeze up or something.”
Mom puts a hand on one of my shoulders and Dad puts his hand on the other, their other hands still tightly clasped together. We are all connected now in one unbroken circle.
“It isn’t wrong to defend yourself, honey. What would be wrong is not fighting to keep the people you love alive,” Mom says.
They’re right, of course. I couldn’t live with myself if something happened to them, to Will or Marie. I’ve been selfish, and worse—stupid. I have to do better.
“I’ll shoot right from now on.” I speak my words like a vow—to them and to myself. I’m not a little kid anymore. I can’t choose to ignore what’s happening. It’s time I grow up.
It’s a foolish person who keeps putting himself in danger.
We must do what we can to survive, to protect those we love.
—Pioneer
We never found Karen. We buried an empty coffin along with many, many other New Yorkers that fall and tried to tell ourselves a funeral without a body was somehow just as final. When it was over, my mom couldn’t go home, not to a place with nothing but reminders of what we’d lost. The city was starting to feel like a foreign country, not ours anymore.
We spent a few months in a rented apartment while my parents tried to figure out what we should do and where we should go next. My mom took me out of school and promised to teach me my letters herself, but she spent most days under the covers staring out the window, leaving me to wander around the apartment alone all day. I drew pictures nonstop. I guess I was still trying to make things right.
My mom was
scared all the time too—scared someone would take me, scared that there’d be more terrorist attacks. My dad didn’t say much, but he didn’t have to. His eyes were as empty as that coffin had been. We were alone a lot of the time. My parents didn’t have many friends even before Karen went away. And since Mom grew up in foster care and Dad was an only child with parents who died before I was born, there weren’t any grandparents or aunts and uncles to come help comfort us.
Pioneer was the only one who came around. He didn’t stop visiting us, helping where he could. He seemed to think that he could solve our problems. He said that we weren’t alone. Many of the people he knew were scared all the time too, fed up with living in a world that felt like it was teetering on the edge of destruction. He said that they were pooling their resources to build what he called the Community out west, charting their own course just like people did so long ago. My parents liked the idea of uninterrupted land and sky, of a place where you could see trouble coming a mile away and deal with it before it ever made it all the way to your doorstep. Pioneer said that they could use my dad to help build the place there, since he was a structural engineer. Pioneer wanted to make it safe, so safe we would never need to leave.
My dad left the city first. He moved with Pioneer and some of the others almost right away. My mom and I stayed behind to sell the house, the furniture, and anything we couldn’t carry with us on the plane. We began our new life with as little of our old one as possible, but I didn’t mind. My parents were acting a little more like themselves again. I felt for the first time in more months than I could count that life was really starting for us. And I wanted it more than I could say out loud without feeling guilty for wanting anything after Karen.
Mandrodage Meadows looked nothing like it does now. The basic skeletons of what would become our homes and the clubhouse were there, but mostly it was a large open field peppered with trailers and tents. I loved it. It was like one big adventure, like something out of a book.
While my mom got us settled into our tiny trailer, unpacking our few things and making up the beds, I got out my sketchpad and started walking in a wide circle around the trailer. I didn’t want to watch her tuck Karen’s shoes by the front door. She called to me from the window and told me to stay close to our trailer, and I did, but I was itching to explore. So I sketched instead and tried to put all my restlessness and excitement onto the paper.
“Hey, you’re the new girl,” a boy who looked about my age yelled from between two nearby tents. He was heavily freckled and his hair stuck up in a dozen different directions, but I liked it. Everything about him made me want to smile. He jogged over to where I was.
“I’m Will.” He held out his hand to shake mine, a weirdly formal thing for a kid to do. He seemed to be trying really hard not to scare me. It made me wonder how much he knew about my family already.
“I’m Lyla,” I said quietly.
Will bobbed his head, and we stared at each other for a moment before he laughed. “Wanna play?”
I was a little shy. I hadn’t had many friends up to that point. I had mainly played with Karen before. I nodded and studied the ground.
“Well, come on, then. The others are out at the lake playing ball. You ever play baseball?”
I shrugged. “No.”
“I’ll teach you. It’s not too hard.” Will reached for my hand to pull me along with him just as my mom opened the trailer door and peered outside. I thought she would panic and pull me inside with her, but instead she smiled faintly.
“Looks like you’re making friends already, sweetie.”
“Will wanted me to come play ball,” I mumbled—almost too low for her to hear. I was so sure she would say no. After all, I hadn’t been out of her sight for the better part of a year, but she surprised me by smiling a little wider.
“I think that would be fun,” she said slowly. I looked up at her, studied the pattern of shadow and light in her eyes, and tried to decide if she really meant it.
“I’ll just come with and read a book while you play. Give me one second.” Mom ducked back inside and I stared after her. She was going to let me play. Sure, she was coming too, but I didn’t care. I was going to be with other kids again. I put my sketchbook in the grass by the front door and skipped between Mom and Will the whole way to the lake. There were loads of kids there my age tumbling through the grass, hitting baseballs, and shoving each other as they ran the bases. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t want to draw what I was seeing—I wanted to be a part of it.
We played until it was too dark to see. My mom stayed and watched me for hours, but eventually she started to drift back toward the trailers and some of the other adults who were gathered there. She hadn’t given me such a long leash of freedom since Karen. It felt good, like stretching my legs did after the long plane trip we took to get there.
That night we ate our first meal with the Community. I loved it because the table was never quiet, not like back in New York. We ate outside, with Pioneer grilling up burgers and my dad leaning over site plans with some of the other men.
Later, I ended up sprawled in the grass with a belly full of potato salad and watermelon. I was too tired to sit up any longer. I couldn’t remember ever being this utterly spent. Will was lying beside me and we were throwing grapes into each other’s mouths. All around us, people laughed and talked and ate. I couldn’t stop smiling. I had a new best friend and plenty of room to run around. I never wanted to leave. I was home.
I watch over these people. They’ve put their safety,
their very futures, in my hands. It’s an awesome responsibility,
to be sure. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.
—Pioneer
As soon as the sun starts filling up my room in the morning, I throw on some clothes and head for the stables. I want to forget about yesterday, to put a mile of prairie between me and any thoughts of self-defense. Of course, I’ll have to settle for riding Indy around the corral instead.
Riding always clears my head and calms me down. I’m sure that if I ride long enough now I’ll be able to get my head straight and dedicate myself to what I need to do. Plus, I love the smell of the barn. It’s a medley of sweet hay and warm saddle leather with a not-so-subtle undercurrent of manure, which sounds disgusting because of the poop but is actually really nice. I wish there was a way to convey this smell in my paintings. Somehow it’s as much of what makes this place beautiful as the scenery is.
Indy’s in the last stall on the right. He’s already snorting and kicking at his door. He knows I’m coming and that I always bring carrots.
“Hey, boy. Ready to ride?” I say. He nuzzles my fingers while I feed him.
We ride out into the center of the corral. It’s still pretty quiet, which makes me feel like I’m completely alone. Most of the rest of the Community is still getting ready for the day. There’s just Indy and about a dozen lazy flies to keep me company. I ride early on purpose. I love it when I have the place all to myself.
I nudge Indy in the flanks and he lunges forward. We go from a bouncy trot to a rocking canter, and I sit back into the saddle and let my mind go blank. The only way this morning could get better is if there was enough space for Indy to gallop, but the corral’s too small and we’re not allowed to ride out on the prairie alone. We have to go in a group, which for me defeats the purpose of riding, really. Still, I settle for the corral and pretend that it’s bigger than it is and not just a horse-sized hamster wheel. And I feel better, more relaxed, by the time some of the other Community members are beginning their morning chores. I can do what I’m supposed to. I will do what I’m supposed to. From now on I will stop resisting what Pioneer wants.
An hour later I’m on guard duty at the front gate with Brian. I’ve never understood why we have round-the-clock coverage here. It’s not like we ever get visitors, at least not with any regularity. Except this time there is a visitor. A car trailing a cloud of dust is heading down the dirt road that leads
to the development.
Brian notices it first. I’m just about to lay down my winning hand in Uno when he leans forward in his chair and squints out the front window. He grabs the binoculars, then curses under his breath and gets the walkie-talkie from the built-in table beneath the window.
“Pioneer, we got a live one headed this way.” He lets go of the speaker button and the walkie-talkie crackles for a moment.
“One car?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m on my way.”
I grab the binoculars from the table where Brian left them and try to get a better view of the approaching car. It’s a police cruiser, maybe a few miles away at most. I can see it after I focus the binoculars a little more, but the bar of lights on top isn’t flashing. Still, it sends a chill up my spine and my stomach flutters.
“Brian, take another look.” I hand over the binoculars.
“Well, crap,” he mutters, and grabs for one of the guns hidden beneath the table and tucks it into his belt, pulling his shirt out and over it. He calls Pioneer again.
“Treat it as a welcome rubbernecker right now. No need to panic yet,” Pioneer says. Anybody who wanders into our development out of curiosity we call a rubbernecker. A welcome rubbernecker is someone we don’t turn away at the gate.
I jump as our development’s siren lets out three short bursts at half volume—just loud enough to hear within our walls—our code for unexpected company. Basically, it means be alert, but carry on as usual. A few people will need to head to the orchard and drive a truck across the path that leads to the Silo’s entry door, just to be safe, and our guns will have to be quickly tucked away. In other words, we have to take out the apocalyptic and leave in the suburban.
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