by J B Cantwell
“Yup,” Grandma said, falling into step beside him. “I’ve seen it again and again on the farm. Stopped hoping a long time ago, though.”
“Well, out west there’s no sign of hope at all anymore,” he said. “Not from what I’ve heard. Every ten years or so there’ll be someone who wants to go west, scout it out, see if they can find better resources than what we’ve got up high. But every time, they either return with nothing, or don’t return at all.”
He glanced at me for a moment, and my heart fell into my stomach.
That could be me. Not returning. So far lost out in the middle of the wasteland that it would be suicide for anyone to even come looking.
“How do you grow crops so high up?” Grandma asked. “I still manage to farm enough for myself down below, covered with tents to protect from the rain. But I never knew you could grow in the mountains.”
“Oh, sure,” Carl said, adjusting the huge pack on his back. “We got good rain, just like everyone used to. Only problem is our growing season is so short. We start a lot inside, then move the seedlings out when the frost passes. Still, there’ve been years we’ve lost crops. The rain may be clean, but the weather’s not as predictable as it used to be.”
As we ascended the long tunnel, I could feel the air getting thicker, warmer. I pulled my face cloth over my nose and mouth, and paused to help Cait do the same. Carl didn’t have a face cloth, and I doubt he would have accepted one if we had offered it.
Finally, we emerged into the light of day. He managed to shove his supplies between the barrels of gasoline and water, tightening them down with a thin rope that was dangling from the side of the trailer. Then, we all piled into the car, Cait sitting in the front seat in Carl’s lap, and set off away from the mine.
To say the ride was uncomfortable would be an understatement. Carl’s size, while impressive in the cavern, was unmanageable in the tiny sedan. Cait was cozy up front, but comfortable. The rest of us fought to share the little space that wasn’t taken up by too many humans. The car groaned as Mom coerced it, weighted to the limit, up the dirt road.
I watched Cait as she eyeballed Carl’s braid jealously, thicker and shinier than hers, as Mom turned back onto the highway. But then she quickly abandoned her stare to look out the window along the winding road. She wouldn’t soon forget the feeling of carsickness that our journey had started with.
I was squished. I tried to keep my left arm and leg away from Sean, who sat in the middle, wanting to give him the space he needed to be comfortable. Not to mention that I hadn’t counted on needing to snuggle up to anyone, especially some kid who seemed to loathe me. But my attempts were useless, and soon I resigned myself to the fact that we would be making this ride in very close quarters.
The car, now encumbered with the extra weight of Carl and his belongings, as well as the suddenly steep incline of the road, puttered along at a pace much slower than all of us would have liked. At one point, I felt certain that I could have outstripped it, myself, if I had had a bicycle to race against it. Still, it pushed on, slowly taking us up the steep mountainside.
Carl rested his head back, his face still unprotected, and closed his eyes.
“You all just keep on going,” he said.
Carl dozed on. He looked like he hadn’t slept for ages, and I guessed he was as relieved as we were to be on his way out of the haze.
In a way, we were lucky that the car was so slow. The road was slick, and if we had been able to travel faster, we probably would have met our death at the bottom of one of the steep cliffs we drove across. Someone had been through to plow, I could see, though not recently. Piles of snow lined the sides of the lanes, though several untouched inches of the stuff crunched beneath our tires.
We all fell silent as we took in the beauty. It was a relief to me. I had spent so long in the Fold, where the natural world was still healthy, that I hadn’t realized how difficult these last days had been. Somehow, feeling my feet walk across ground that was vibrant and teeming with life helped ease the tension of the seriousness of my plight against the Corentin. But on Earth, where the ground was not only dead, but continually battered by rain after rain, my drive to continue on had been harder to maintain.
Now, I could see that there was something left worth fighting for here as well as in the Triaden.
Finally, Mom seemed unable to resist any longer. She stopped the car in the middle of a clear stretch of road and got out. Grandma laughed and quickly followed. I stared at them, surprised and a little worried at their sudden exit. But then I saw Mom, kneeling over with her hands outstretched towards the snow. The tips of her fingers brushed up against it, then made swirling motions through the thin drift she had found. She smiled, gripping a handful in her palm and standing up, staring at it as if it were the most precious, alien thing she had ever seen.
Cait popped open her door and jumped out, and while I was tempted to follow, I didn’t.
Carl awoke at the gust of cold air from the open door, and leaned over to close it. Seeing the three of them, now frolicking in the snow like little girls, Sean nudged me with his elbow.
“Aren’t you gonna go?” he asked.
My hand rested on the door handle, and for a moment I almost pulled it. But something stopped me.
“No,” I said, releasing the handle and pressing my forehead against the glass.
I wanted to. A big part of me wanted to get out there, to forget everything that I was facing so that I could have a few moments of joy with my family. But the weight of my task was heavy in my chest, and it kept me inside the vehicle. I gritted my teeth, staring ahead.
“We need to get there,” I said.
Carl turned back from the front seat, giving me an appraising look, and there must have been something about the look on my face that spoke to him. With a loud groan, he hauled himself out of the car, walked around and opened the driver’s side door and slid into the seat. He punched his fist lightly against the horn in the steering wheel, and Mom, Grandma and Cait all looked up, surprised.
“Time to go, ladies,” he called out the window as he rolled it down.
Their faces fell with the pronouncement. Then Mom took the opportunity to get one last fistful of snow and hauled it at the windshield, at Carl, where it splattered, melting a little in the morning sun.
They climbed into the car, their faces pink with the cold.
“Mind if I drive?” Carl asked Mom, who had taken the passenger seat, Cait tucking neatly into her lap.
“Not at all,” she said, smiling back towards Grandma.
Cait was breathing in great gasps, a wide smile on her face, and Grandma rolled down her window. The air blew, gentle and biting at the same time, against her gray hair as Carl put the car into drive and hit the gas.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It didn’t take long to make it back to the village from there. As we rolled slowly into the tiny town, curious people stepped out from their houses to welcome Carl back home, wrapping scarves around their necks and pulling on their thick coats against the winter cold as they waved. Carl rolled down his window and nodded back at the familiar faces.
I was amazed as we moved deeper into the town. The little store from yesterday had been on the very outskirts, but as we penetrated beyond the outer houses, it was like driving through a history book written about a time I had never known. Dotted along the hillsides, little cabins spread out from the main road. Rooftops were covered in thick blankets of snow, smoke curling from nearly every chimney. Quaint. That was the word. The place seemed like the sort of destination a family might go to for a vacation back before the droughts began. Though now, vacations were mostly a thing of the past for the inhabitants of Earth. Looking around, I understood why Carl chose to remain here instead of down in the cities below. Here, the natural world was still free, still alive. To move to the city from a place like this would be like surrendering your freedom in exchange for a jail cell. Seeing this and remembering the city, my home reminded me of n
othing more than a fortress designed to keep you alive. Functional, but without inspiration or joy.
Here, the joy shined from nearly every face. Their son had returned.
Carl turned the car up a side road, and the wheels spun against the icy pavement. But years of practice put his foot down hard on the gas, and we accelerated up the hill. He turned into a driveway, and before us a small cabin came into view.
A boy, maybe eight-years-old, opened the side door to the place and poked his head out. His face was suspicious, protective. Then from behind him, a younger girl, somewhere around Cait’s age, burst through the door and ran towards the car.
“Daddy!” she shouted.
Her little feet scrambled atop the icy snow. Carl parked the car as the children slapped their hands against the driver’s side window. He chuckled, opening the door.
They practically knocked him down into the snow with their hugs.
The rest of us stepped out of the car, and immediately the cold of the place took my breath away. It shouldn’t have surprised me, with all the snow, but I immediately broke out into a wave of chills, shivering. The mine had been so warm, and even the stop Mom had made to inspect the snow had barely felt more than crisp as the air had come through the car window. But here the cold was biting. I grabbed the thin canvas jacket I’d brought and wrapped it around myself, though it did little good. My feet crunched along the ground as I came around the side of the car to meet Carl’s family.
“Cathy, Dana, Aster, Cait,” Carl said, pointing to each of us in turn. Then, “This is Caleb and Lily.” He pointed to each of his children, ruffling each of their tousled heads of hair as he spoke their names. All of us nodded our heads in greeting. I crossed my arms over my chest, trying to keep the heat from leaching out of my body.
I felt awake. Maybe it was just that I was recovering from the effects of the haze, but the combination of the cold air, the snow and the vibrant faces were a new experience. I was suddenly excited to explore this strange place, where life went on almost as if nothing horrible had ever happened to Earth.
And it wasn’t just me. All of us were smiling as we looked around, shivering in the frigid afternoon.
“Hey, old man.” The voice was gruff and scratchy, and we turned to find a man dressed head to foot in animal skins stalking towards us through the snow.
It was the man from the store.
Carl’s face, if it were possible, smiled even wider than before.
“Amos!” he shouted.
He broke apart from his children and went to greet the man, the two hugging each other like brothers.
As we stood, waiting to see what would happen next, I noticed Cait and Lily looking at each other, tentative smiles playing on their faces. I wondered when the last time was the Cait had seen another child her age, and I suspected a quick friendship was about to be made.
Caleb was staring at me, starting to hop up and down as the cold bit through his t-shirt and jeans. His look reminded me of a puppy getting ready to break out into a game of spontaneous chase with an older dog. Eager. Excited. I didn’t know how to react to him, and I glanced nervously between him and his stoic older brother. My life had always been that of a reject. The other kids at school in the city had mostly ignored me. And in the Triaden there wasn’t time for connections to be made with other children unless our lives depended on it. I found myself at once shy of Caleb and wary of Sean, suddenly unsure of how to behave around these people.
I looked up at the trees, the sunlight shining through the boughs that broke it into a thousand rays of light. Here, there was no need to form alliances based on the Corentin’s actions, no worry about unlocking magical powers to ensure my survival. No monsters possessed the people. And the scenery was that of a beautiful, natural world, not that of the wasteland that was my home. I felt both comforted by the normalcy and concerned by it.
Finally, Carl and the man named Amos approached us. Lily raced to her father’s side, and he picked her up and hugged her to him. She tucked her arms between her chest and his, trying to suck the warmth from his body.
“Glad to see you all found each other,” Amos said. “We were starting to wonder when Carl would be making it back to us.”
“Well, we have you to thank,” Mom said.
“You didn’t find the hermit then?” he asked. “This Jack you were looking for?”
Mom shook her head. “We have some ideas, though,” she said.
“I heard,” Amos said. “California, eh?” He shook his head. “If you’re looking to kill yourself, I could just show you the highest cliff to jump off of around here.” His eyes smiled despite the pronouncement.
Mom laughed.
“Let’s go in,” Carl said, and turned. His boots quickly collected the snow in the treads, making enormous footprints in the snow for us to follow. A giggle escaped Lily, and I realized Carl was tickling her sides as he approached the home he hadn’t seen in many weeks. The sound of the little girl’s laugh was easy, familiar. Noticing Cait watching Lily with a look like jealousy, I took her hand and smiled, suddenly feeling that everything was going to be okay. We all followed, and I for one was relieved at the prospect of warmth after just a few minutes standing out in the cold.
The inside of the cabin was smaller than it seemed from the outside, but it was cozy and warm, and I felt relief flood through me as the blood flow returned to my arms and legs. The walls were made of solid wood, animal skins draped across them. Looking around, I wondered where they all slept. Then, as I stepped further into the space, I realized a sleeping loft was built into the ceiling over the kitchen. The smell of cooking food was in the air, and on the small counter space a few empty packets of rations sat beside a small pot on the single-burner stove.
Carl slid Lily down and out of his arms. Sean immediately went to the cupboard and brought out a few more packets of food for the rest of us. Looking over his shoulder, I saw that the cupboard was nearly bare. His eyes caught mine as he turned back to the stove, and they narrowed as he shut the cabinet door with a snap.
Pride.
I watched him empty the contents of the packages into the already simmering pot, feeling guilty that we were here and seemingly about to take what looked like some of the last of their food. But once the food was in, he picked up the pile of discarded wrappers and stuffed the in the garbage can, then turned and blocked my view of the stove with his arms crossed.
Geez.
Carl meandered over to the ancient looking couch, and both it and he groaned as he lowered himself into it. Immediately, both Caleb and Lily were on top of him.
“What did you bring us?” they asked. Caleb was finally unable to contain himself further, and bounced on the couch next to his father.
“Daddy, where have you been?” Lily complained. “You’ve been gone so long. Look, I lost two teeth since I saw you last. Two!” She lifted her lips so he could inspect her teeth, giving her the comical appearance of a snarling beast.
“I know,” Carl said. “I saw.” He took one finger and slid it along the bottom edge of her lip, inspecting the now-vacant space in her mouth as if nothing more important in the world needed doing at that moment. Then, taking his hand away, his eyes widened. “You look like you got hit with one of Caleb’s baseballs!”
She giggled.
“Caleb,” he went on, “have you been hitting your sister in the face with baseballs again?”
“No!” he yelped, just slightly unsure whether or not his father was joking with him.
Carl smiled.
“But she hit me with a tree branch the other day,” he said. “Look.”
He smoothed back his black hair from his forehead, revealing a gash there that was well on its way to healing.
“Did you have it coming?” Carl asked.
“No!” Caleb answered.
“Yes!” Lily protested.
“Yes,” Sean settled.
“Ah,” Carl said. “Well then, perhaps you shouldn’t underestimate you
r wee sister, eh?”
Caleb grimaced, but a moment later Carl’s hands had found the boy’s underarms and were tickling him ruthlessly. Caleb cackled with laughter, and the sound was so infectious that even Sean let a few chuckles loose from his tight chest.
Amos was fishing through a different cupboard, and soon he had passed all of us tea in mismatched cups. The tea was strange, sickly sweet and piping hot. I didn’t care for the taste, but the warmth of the cup and of the liquid sliding down my throat was soothing. Soon we were all settled into the little room, our hands wrapped around our mugs.
“So, where you been, Carl?” Amos asked, settling himself on a cushion in front of the fire. “We were expecting you back weeks ago.”
A shadow passed across Carl’s face.
“I been in the same place the whole time,” he said. “Delivery truck refused to give me a ride up the mountain. Nothing I could do but stay put and hope my luck would change. And it did.” He nodded in our direction, and then pulled out the tiny plastic bag with his share of the gold floating inside it.
“Whoa!” Caleb said, making to snatch the bag away.
Carl was too quick for him, but it was clear that his father’s haul was far greater than the children were used to. He held the bag up to the light for all to see. Just two bare lightbulbs hanging from wires lit the entire space, but the gold dust sparkled brilliantly as he tilted the bag, inspecting his pay for weeks of work, weeks away from his family. The looks on every face, including Amos’, were like children gazing at a fireworks show. Amazed. Unbelieving.
Amos recovered first, cutting through the shocked silence.
“Good thing,” he said. “Those same boys told us that after this trip, they won’t be coming anymore.”
Carl’s hand dropped back to his side.
“What?”
His face instantly fell into a scowl, the same look he had had when explaining their refusal to take him up the mountain. But then, an unmistakable look of fear flashed across his face, and he rose from the couch, agitated. Even the children quieted at the change in his demeanor. He let out a long, slow breath, and I got the impression he was curbing a curse for the sake of the kids. He lumbered into the tiny kitchen space, leaning his hands against the counter, staring down at the floor as if the answers to how he was going to feed his family was a code hidden within the tiles.