by Eisele, Kimi
“Sorry, Ma,” Daniel said. “Thought I heard someone last night. Probably just kids, those glue sniffers.”
Glue sniffers? The kids Carson had met a few days before hadn’t seemed high on anything but the vapors of potential food. Rumors. He kept his eyes on the gun and gauged the distance between where he stood and the door. Listen with your whole body, Ayo had said.
“The barn doubles as my shop,” Daniel said, gesturing to a table saw and an assortment of hammers and other tools hanging on the wall. A high, stuttering wail came from the side yard. Carson jumped.
“Tabitha,” Daniel said. They went outside to a small pen, where a goat stood, baying. Nearby, a dozen or more chickens scuttled about. “Milk and eggs,” Daniel said. “And over there, honey.” He pointed to a stack of bee boxes.
Two large cisterns flanked the house. “For rainwater?” Carson asked.
Daniel nodded. “Plenty to live off around here.”
The rest of the morning, Carson worked with Naomi, picking blackberries from the bushes around the perimeter of the property. In the afternoon, he worked with Daniel to tend the bee boxes. He donned a mesh mask and gloves, and Daniel handed him a small bellows for smoking the hive.
“When they smell smoke, they think there’s a fire, so they get busy gorging on honey and ignore me,” Daniel said. “You have to stay calm, too. One false move, and they’ll swarm.”
Carson felt his heart pick up its pace. He watched as Daniel opened the hives, scraped wax from the frames, inspected for parasites, searched for the queen. He noticed how carefully and methodically Daniel worked.
“Want to see the lovely lady?” Daniel said, holding up a frame. “The queen has a long body—slender, without stripes.”
Carson leaned toward the honeycomb where Daniel’s gloved finger pointed.
“See where all those drones are, circling her?”
Carson saw the drones, but wasn’t sure he’d seen the queen. By then, other bees were flying toward his veil, so he bellowed smoke and mumbled a yes.
“She can lay fifteen hundred eggs a day,” Daniel said. “And her scent keeps the whole hive together. That’s some pheromone action right there.”
The bees came at Carson’s veil, and he ducked, feeling sweat now at his upper lip and temples. Maybe he was allergic to bees. Was he?
“Easy there, partner,” Daniel said. “Calm down, or they’ll swarm. Blow some smoke, would you?”
By the time Daniel finally closed up the boxes, Carson was drenched with sweat.
“Gotta trust me, man,” Daniel said. “It’s a delicate process.”
Relieved it was over, Carson retreated to the front of the house. In his notebook, he started in on a list: How to be self-sufficient after the apocalypse. He’d already known vaguely about these strategies; he could have implemented them years ago when he and June lived in the country. Why hadn’t he?
“What are you writing about us?” Daniel asked, appearing suddenly at Carson’s side.
Carson dropped his pen, startled. “Nothing incriminating,” he said. “Just about what you’re doing here. How you’re surviving.”
“A ‘going green without machines’ kinda thing?” Daniel retrieved the pen and plopped into a squeaky lawn chair. “Write down that honeybees are a good blueprint. No drone, worker, or queen bee can survive without the support of the colony. Everyone’s got a necessary task. Plus, they dance.”
Carson knew that. “Their way of making maps, right?”
“Worker bees telling each other where the pollen is, or water, or new sites for nests. Ma loves that. Just don’t ask her about it, or she’ll do the waggle dance for you ad nauseam.” Daniel picked up a small stone from the ground and threw it across the yard, hitting a wheelbarrow.
“And what are you gonna do with all the info?” he asked. “Put it in the history books?”
“Something like that,” Carson said.
Daniel picked up another stone. “What’s out west?”
Carson gathered a few stones himself. He jiggled them around in his palm, feeling little confidence in his throw. “Someone I’m hoping to see there.” He imagined Beatrix’s face and lit up at the image.
Daniel hit the wheelbarrow again, making it reverberate.
“Dang,” Carson said. He threw a stone, and it bounced against the chain-link fence at the edge of the property. “Maybe I’m a fool,” he said.
“Women are great, so long as they don’t suck out all your blood and distract you from your higher purpose,” Daniel said.
Carson waited for more, but no more came. His higher purpose? He looked at the tattoo on Daniel’s forearm: the sharp fangs of the inked serpent’s open mouth looked surprisingly realistic. “If you don’t mind my asking, what were you in for?”
“Oh, you want that story for your notebook?” Clang! Another hit to the wheelbarrow. “It’s not all that mysterious. Just drugs. Sold a little green for some green, mostly to help out Ma. But the fuckers caught me. Twelve fucking years, if you can believe that. I only served eight, though.” He picked up another stone and squinted.
“That place was so gray,” he said. “I would lie there for days just trying to imagine the color yellow.” He tossed and hit a tree, dead on. “Then one day, all this light floods in, and all the doors open up. It’s like in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy opens the door and everything turns to color. My cellmate, Harvey, is standing over me, saying, ‘Come on, you fuckin’ cracker. Let’s get the hell out of here. They’re gone.’ The guards, he meant. They were gone. We ran and ran till we hit this big green field. I just dropped to my knees. I wanted to drink up that color.”
“What happened to the guards?” Carson asked.
“Someone set off a bomb. And it set us free. I still don’t know if it was an inside job or an outside job. Gifts come in strange packages. Mine came dipped in fertilizer and nail-polish remover, or whatever it was they used to make that bomb. I only walked for half a day before a truck driver stopped for me. He brought me all the way here, without a scratch.”
“That’s luck,” Carson said. He aimed for the wheelbarrow again and threw the stone, this time nailing it.
The People’s Bicycle Brigade fix-ins were held every Saturday morning at the high school soccer field. A few dozen bicycles and their owners were already there by the time Flash, Dragon, Beatrix, and two other PBB riders arrived.
Penny, a rider in a yellow cap, set up a folding table and began unloading tools and snacks from her bike trailer. Beatrix pulled out the clipboard for gathering names, ages, and addresses, along with a stack of the homemade flyers she’d made to advertise Halcyon Radio. She’d raided the Fair Share office for paper and pencils and pens to make them.
All morning, the PBB riders moved from bicycle to bicycle showing people how to fix flats, tighten brakes, adjust derailleurs. It was like a teach-in, Beatrix thought, learning the essential skills for the resistance, or in this case “the persistence.” Each rider was a spoke in the wheel, essential to a larger purpose, which on this day was a way of staying put, of working together to get three dozen tuned-up bicycles.
Power to the people, she thought. It was clichéd, but it mattered. It was a kind of love.
“Penny, I heard you’re joining the service,” Flash said.
“True story,” Penny said.
“That makes sense,” Flash said. “You’re the fastest rider in the fleet.”
“What service?” Beatrix asked.
“Velocipede,” Flash said. “The mail service.”
“Like the Pony Express,” Flash said. “Coast to coast.”
“Really?” Beatrix said. “Mail?”
She thought of the pages she’d written to Carson but hadn’t been able to send. She could write to her mother, too—at least let her know she was okay. “Maybe bicycles will save the world,” she said. “Along with radio! Penny, what did you think of the first broadcast?”
“Um,” Penny said. “I didn’t hear it. I don’t have a r
adio.”
Beatrix’s heart sank a little. She looked at Flash. “Problem.”
Flash nodded. “Definite problem. We’ll get the team on it.” He held up a fist, and Penny knocked it with her own.
“I’ll add it to the list of a million things a bike is good for,” Penny said.
“Yes,” Beatrix said, feeling hopeful.
But the feeling was short-lived. Arriving home, she discovered that several bicycles had been stolen from the backyard fleet.
“I tried to stop them,” Maria del Carmen said, visibly shaken. She pointed to a cast-iron frying pan lying in the dirt. “I threw that into the yard, and they ran.”
“Did you get a good look at them?” Flash said.
“They had their faces covered,” Maria del Carmen said, her brow furrowed.
Dragon held his hands to his forehead and sighed.
“Everyone knows we have bikes,” Beatrix said. “Even when locked up, they’re a liability.”
“What about Rosie—did she see anyone?”
“No. As soon as I saw them, I ran out and threw the pan.” Maria del Carmen made a fist with one hand and said, “Jonathan Blue is right. This is what he means. Violence, scarcity, darkness. It’s only getting worse. He’s right.”
Beatrix looked at Dragon and then at Flash, who raised his eyebrows. Blue’s scare tactics. But what could they say to appease her right now?
“It’s only part of the story, Maria del Carmen,” Dragon said. “But you did good. Thanks for running them off.”
The day was muggy, and a sweet scent hovered in the air. Rosie held up a single Matchbox car, yellow with black stripes along each side, one of several she and Beatrix had found in the back shed when they were building the chicken coop. Every time Diego reached for it, she pulled it away.
“Come on, girl,” Diego said. “Just give it up.”
She ran the car along his arm, then moved it up his neck toward his face. He pulled away. “Wait,” she said. “Come here.” A black-and-blue bruise circled his eye, and she traced its outline with her finger.
“Man walks into a bar,” was how he’d explained the black eye. “Seriously. I walked into a crossbar,” he’d said. “We were ducking down a stairwell.”
Rosie made a circle with her thumb and index finger and held it just over Diego’s bruise. It looked like bad makeup. A vision of Diego holding a metal bar over an older man with glasses flashed in front of her, then evaporated.
Beatrix came out of the house. Rosie moved her hand away from Diego’s face.
“Smell that deliciousness?” Beatrix said, breathing in. “Jasmine in bloom.”
Diego didn’t look at Beatrix, but Rosie inhaled and tried to smell what Beatrix smelled. All she caught was Diego’s pungent, manly scent. She didn’t mind it.
“Oh, great,” Beatrix said, her enthusiasm dropping. “There go more.”
Half a dozen people walked down the street—women, men, and two children. Beatrix called out to them. She knew everyone, it seemed.
One of the men stopped, hushing the rattle of his shopping cart full of luggage. A woman next to him waved. She looked familiar. Rosie had seen her riding her bike down the street.
“You’re off?” Beatrix said.
“We’re hungry,” the man said. “And we keep getting robbed. It’s fucking ridiculous.”
“We don’t have a yard,” the woman said. “So we can’t have a garden. Also, the little idiots stole our bikes. Fucking T-Rize.”
They continued down the block, the wheels of their carts and luggage like a distant storm.
Fucking T-Rize is right, Rosie thought. They had sequestered her in the house, those stupid kids and their weapons. She hated them. She squeezed Diego’s hand. He looked at her, blankly at first, then softened and squeezed back.
Beatrix sighed. “Everyone is leaving.”
“You’re leaving, too, aren’t you?” Rosie said.
“No, I’m not.”
“You look like you’re going somewhere right now,” Rosie said.
“Oh, well, yeah. Just down the block to Anita’s,” Beatrix said, heading down the stairs.
“Who’s Anita?”
“One of our neighbors. The one who delivers babies and used to work at the library. We’re launching a mobile library.”
“What’s a mobile library?” Diego said, once Beatrix was gone.
“A bike that carries books for people to borrow,” Rosie said.
“Duh,” Diego said, making Rosie laugh.
A horse trotted down the street, a girl about Rosie’s age riding it. The horse was black and shiny, and the girl was blond, with long, thin blue-jeaned legs. She looked so confident and independent. Rosie wished she could trade places with her, even for just an hour.
Another horse followed, brown with a white patch on its nose. The man riding it was bald and wore sunglasses. Probably the girl’s father.
“Take it easy on the turns, honey,” he called out.
Yeah, most definitely her father. “I so wish I had a horse,” Rosie said.
“Not as fast as a bike,” Diego said.
Rosie watched the second horse’s tail flicker out of sight. In its place came a vision of a girl walking alone, horseless, under a gray sky, the sound of her footsteps muffled, as if wrapped in a blanket. Rosie realized the girl was her, and she felt heavy, tears forming in her eyes. She blinked, and the vision vanished.
She heard then the voice of the preacher. “It’s simple, folks. The darkness is a gift. If you want to reconnect, you just get on the path and come. We are here for you. Here, there is light.” The voice came from inside the house, where her abuela was listening.
Jonathan Blue’s voice made Rosie think of laundry detergent—at first, it seemed pleasant enough, but then it oversaturated you. Abuela said Blue’s voice sounded like hope itself. Abuela wanted to go there, to the Center, away from all the darkness, toward all that hope.
Beatrix was right when she said that sometimes your real family doesn’t understand you in the same way your chosen family does. She said her own mother never understood her; only her Aunt Vera did. She said you have to love your blood anyway, but that you also have to thank the stars for the nonblood.
“Good things await you, my friends. Come join us.” Blue’s voice droned on.
Rosie didn’t want to leave this home. She didn’t want to leave Diego.
She felt the tickle in the back of her throat. She closed her eyes, and behind her eyelids she saw someone lying on a wooden floor, looking up at her. Dragon? There was a bicycle there, too. She opened her eyes, feeling a little panicked. She’d never had so many visions this close together.
“‘I measure every Grief I meet,’” she muttered.
“What’s that, mi linda?” Diego asked.
“Nothing.” She loved that Diego called her this. Mi linda. My pretty. Diego’s grandmother spoke Spanish, and his family was from Mexico, too, from Jalisco, where they made tequila. He once told Rosie maybe they’d go there together sometime, after all this.
“After all what?” Rosie had said.
“This mess,” he had said, moving his hands in circles.
“And what will come after this mess?” Rosie had asked.
“Something better.”
“How will we have time to go to Mexico? We’ll be the ones cleaning ‘this mess’ up,” Rosie had said, mimicking Diego’s hand motions.
Diego had shaken his head in disagreement, but after watching her grandmother clean up other people’s messes her whole life, Rosie knew it was true.
But, when Rosie said the same to Beatrix, Beatrix had also disagreed. She’d said that young people would be the ones to invent new things and lead people in the right direction. “Rosie, you’ll be one of the leaders,” she’d said.
No one had ever said anything like that to Rosie before. She didn’t see herself that way.
“I see it,” Beatrix had said. “You just have to pay a lot of attention to things.”<
br />
“Pay attention to what?” Rosie had asked.
“Everything. People. Places. Keep your eyes open. Take note.”
“‘Before I got my eye put out – I liked as well to see,’” Rosie said now.
“What?” Diego said, leaning into Rosie. He reached for the Matchbox car in her hand.
Rosie pulled it away and laughed. “Nothing, just lines of poetry.”
“Say them to me,” he said.
The tickle was still there in her throat, but she ignored it, because there was Diego’s friend Charlie pulling up on a bicycle. “Hey, guys, wanna play Crazy Eights?” he said.
Carson rose early to help Naomi milk the goats. After breakfast, Daniel called him over to the back side of the barn, where he unlocked a padlocked door. With a small flashlight, he shined light on a room full of boxes. “DVD players. Coffee makers. Coffee. Sheets. Pillows. Garbage bags. Brand-new shit.” He slapped one of the boxes. “That trucker I told you about? He was driving a Walmart shipment through the heartland. All this shit.” He pulled down a small box full of unopened packages of AA batteries.
“Oh my God,” Carson said. He felt a rush of sensation to his chest, a damp clamminess in his hands. He took a step backward toward the door. All this from a hitchhike ride? He didn’t buy it.
“Most of this shit is useless now, but there are some prizes,” Daniel said, dropping four batteries into Carson’s hand.
“Incredible,” Carson said, playing along. “What happened—he just never dropped off the stuff?”
“Nope. Walmart closed its doors. He was still on the road. By the time he picked me up, he was a bit unsteady in the head, if you know what I mean. Too many NoDoz? When I hopped in, he asked, ‘Where to?’ So I directed him here.”
Carson couldn’t quite shake the feeling something wasn’t right. He glanced over his shoulder. He could slip out quickly if he had to. “Why are you showing all of this to me?”
“’Cause you’re a goner, man.”
A brick dropped in Carson’s stomach. Daniel probably had a weapon in here, too; the supposed Walmart bonanza had just been bait to lure him into this dark room. Walmart sold guns, for heaven’s sake.
“And you sure can’t carry much with you where you’re going.” Daniel grinned.