by Carol Snow
The instant the pack was secure, Mrs. Dunkle peeled the screaming, heaving he-devil from her body and shoved him into the carrier. I almost toppled backward, he was so heavy. The way he kicked my ribs and screamed in my ear, I thought things couldn’t get worse. And then he grabbed a handful of my hair and yanked. Hard.
Karessa wandered over, sweet Sassy strapped to her back. Sassy smiled and waved at me. I smiled and waved back. (See? I’m not that bad with kids.) And then Tuck yanked my hair again.
“Ow!”
He whacked my head.
Karessa said, “Kentucky gets cranky when he’s tired, but he’ll fall asleep when we start hiking.”
“Where are we going?”
“Into the wilderness.” That didn’t exactly narrow things down.
“But why?”
“This is an evacuation drill. We do them every couple months. Keeps us ready for the next time we have to G-O-O-D.”
“Get out of Dodge?” I said, checking.
“Right!” She gave me a smile that said Congratulations! Now you’re one of us!
What I really wanted was to GBTD—get back to Dodge. Though I’d settle for GBTS—get back to sleep.
The sky was changing colors, shades of gray seeping into the blackness. The Dunkle family was snaking around the empty pool and the vegetable garden to the very back of the yard and through the gate. I turned around to check the house. It was dark.
Tuck yanked my hair. “Guh!” he said.
And so I went.
Thirty-Three
TUCK FELL ASLEEP just before the sun came up. I don’t know how long we had been hiking. It felt like an hour, but it was probably less than that. Or maybe it was more—I’d lost all sense of time in the mountains. With no cell phone, no computer, no alarm, or classroom bells, one moment stretched into the next in an endless stretch of despair divided only by meals and darkness.
With Kyle in the lead, we came to a hillside covered with brush. It wasn’t that steep, but Tuck’s weight made me feel like I was drowning. The heat hadn’t even set in, but already sweat streamed down my face. At a boulder, I paused to catch my breath.
A couple of Dunklings scampered around. When Karessa reached the boulder, she paused to readjust her straps. Sassy held up her arms to give me a two-handed wave.
I lacked the strength to wave back. I tried to smile, but even that was too much of an effort. My breathing came in labored gasps. If we didn’t reach our destination soon, they’d have to leave me behind. At this point, I didn’t even mind being left for dead as long as someone removed Tuck before he started kicking me in the head. That was not a final memory I would cherish.
Karessa didn’t even look winded. When she saw what a sweaty mess I was, she bit her lip with concern. “I need to ask. Are you pregnant?”
I struggled for breath. “Am I … what?”
“With child. You look a little … ill. My dad says that all the teenagers in American high schools engage in premarital sex.”
I blinked in astonishment (and also to keep a big drop of sweat out of my eyes). “I’m not … I don’t engage in … no.”
Her mouth made an O. Then: “It must be hard to resist all that peer pressure.”
“You have no idea.”
We caught up with the others, climbed over some rocks, and went down a small slope to find Kyle sitting on his pack in front of a cave, shirt off, sunning himself.
Beyond the mouth of the cave, there was nothing but blackness. And probably bats. And tarantulas. And maybe mummies. The only sort-of cave I’d ever encountered was in the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland, and even that freaked me out.
Kirsten lifted Sassy out of Karessa’s pack and placed her on a blanket with some plastic spoons. She immediately began singing.
My back and shoulders ached. I had to get Tuck on the ground as quickly as possible, but I didn’t know how to manage it without waking him. Fortunately, Kirsten and Karessa, who had been practicing the maneuver since they’d graduated from riding in the packs themselves, managed to unstrap me and lower the carrier without disturbing their youngest brother. A metal stand at the bottom of the carrier popped open, allowing them to balance the whole child-and-contraption unit on the ground like a decorative plant.
I collapsed near Tuck. Immediately, an ant crawled on my leg, but I was too tired to flick it off.
Mr. Dunkle chucked his enormous army pack on the ground and went over to stand above Kyle. He crossed his arms over his chest. “Lead ’em off, son.”
With a barely perceptible eye roll, Kyle pushed himself to his feet and dusted his hands on his camo pants. He seemed in no hurry to lead us off in whatever he was supposed to be leading us off in.
He said, “Okay, yeah, so. We’ve evacuated. What’s the first thing we need to—”
“Find water!” Keanu screeched before Kyle even finished speaking, like he was on a game show and there was a prize for being the first to answer.
“No,” Kyle said. “Kelli-Lynn?”
Kelli-Lynn paused from trying to catch a butterfly. “Get shelter.” She went back to bug hunting.
“We already have shelter,” Keanu protested in that awful voice. “The cave. So next comes water.”
“You wanna sleep in that cave the way it is now?” Kyle asked.
Keanu tilted his chin up. “Sure.”
“Why don’t you go in there, then. Tell me how it looks.”
Keanu stomped off into the darkness.
“Wait,” I said. “We’re not really going to stay out here overnight?”
Where was Henry?
Kirsten raised her eyebrows. Everyone else ignored me.
Keanu emerged from the cave.
“Well?” Kyle asked.
Keanu crossed his arms over his skinny chest. “Looks fine to me.”
“You sleep on the wet ground, then,” Kyle said. “Rest of us is gonna need some ground cover.”
“It ain’t wet!” Keanu said.
“Yeah?” Kyle said. “You just wait till it’s the middle of the night. You see if it’s dry enough. And warm enough.”
“No, seriously,” I said to Kirsten. “We are going back to the compound before dark, right?” After all, I had a perfectly nice bus waiting for me. And a smelly, scratchy blanket. And a mattress that felt like it had been stuffed with lint balls from the dryer. I missed them!
“Could be out here for days,” she said.
“Days?”
“Last evacuation drill lasted almost a week. And it was raining. This is what we do instead of taking vacations or going to the mall or doing whatever it is normal families do.”
I was too upset about the prospect of being stuck out here to fully appreciate that Kirsten had been the first to acknowledge that her family was not normal.
Once Kyle and Keanu finished sparring and Keanu stomped off to the cave, we determined the group’s plan of action:
1. Establish shelter.
2. Find water.
3. Build a fire.
4. Find food.
We established shelter by hauling our crap into the cave and laying tarps down. It took maybe forty-five seconds. Keanu was right to sulk. Next on the agenda was finding water, but since I was the day-cave director (har, har), I got to stay back with Kirsten to watch Sassy and Tuck, who thankfully remained unconscious.
When the others were gone, Kirsten and I settled ourselves against the rock wall, the sun on our faces. Birdsong and eucalyptus filled the air.
“So what’s school like?” Kirsten asked.
“You mean, is everyone pregnant and on drugs? Because Karessa asked me that, and—no.”
She smiled. “Karessa would ask that. I just meant … what’s it like? Going to parties and football games and all that stuff.”
I shrugged. “I don’t get invited to a lot of parties. Which is okay. That’s not really my thing unless they’re, like, board game parties, but the only person besides me who is dorky enough to play board games is Henry, and the
two of us don’t make a party. Except, in some ways I guess we do. It feels like a party when I’m with him. Used to, anyway.”
“Are you in love with Henry?”
“No!” I wasn’t, was I?
“I think he’s in love with you.”
I shook my head. Henry couldn’t be in love with me. That would ruin everything. Not that there was much left to ruin.
Fortunately, Kirsten was more interested in life in the outside world than she was in Henry. “Do you go to football games? Are you a cheerleader?”
“Ha! No. I’m not a cheerleader. I went to a couple of games my freshman year.” I was about to say that I found them kind of boring so I left early, but there was something so eager and hopeful about her face. I didn’t want to disappoint.
“Was it fun?” she asked.
“Oh, sure,” I said. “People wear the school colors, and the band plays fight songs, and everyone cheers along. And if your team wins, you jump up and down and feel proud like you had something to do with it because it’s your team, but if they lose it’s not the end of the world, you know?”
Note to self: Stop using phrases like “the end of the world.”
She sighed. “I wish I could have gone to a high school.”
“It’s not that great,” I said. And then I thought about Kirsten’s little world and thought: Yes, it is. “Have you ever gone to a regular school?”
“For a little while. In elementary school. We were living in Arizona, and me and Karessa were still too young to take care of the babies. I don’t remember much, just that I had my own locker for my jacket and that we made paper turkeys for Thanksgiving. But then we moved to Nevada, and the kids were really rough because most of them came from single-parent families. Ever since then we’ve been homeschooled.”
I waited for Kirsten to realize that, oh yeah, I was the child of a single parent … but she didn’t. So instead I asked, “Have you moved a lot?”
“Like every year or two.”
“Seriously?”
“We either follow the work or run from the trouble. That’s what my dad says. I like your hair.”
“What? Oh.” I examined the cherry-red ends. They were a lot lighter than before. “Too bad there’s no Kool-Aid out here. We could do yours. Of course, your parents would throw a fit.”
She snorted. “Doubt they’d even notice.”
“It seems like they’re pretty strict.”
She shrugged. “We have to do what they tell us to do. Clean and cook and take care of the little ones and whatever. But besides that, we can do pretty much anything. Course, there isn’t much trouble to get into out here.”
“Argh!” Something stung my ankle. I flicked away a tiny red ant. I was just about to settle back against the warm rock when Tuck stirred; my outburst had woken him up.
His eyes flickered open. He looked around, and then he saw me. So of course he screamed.
“Party’s over,” Kirsten said, pushing herself off the ground.
Thirty-Four
WE SLEPT IN the cave. Well, other people slept. I just lay there shivering, wondering what Henry was doing right now and trying to decide whether I hated Mr. Dunkle even more than I hated his wife.
“Where’s your BOB at?” Mr. Dunkle had asked when everyone was settling down for the night and I requested a blanket.
“I don’t have one.”
“Guess you won’t be making that mistake again.” He shimmied into his puffy sleeping bag.
“I couldn’t have carried a Bob up here anyway because I had your child on my back,” I called after him.
He ignored me, so I added, “And you shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition!” It probably didn’t help my cause, but it made me feel better.
The Hawking and Waxweiler families weren’t coming tonight, Mr. Dunkle had told me at dinner. (And by dinner I mean tearing open the meals ready to eat, if you had them in your bugout bag. Which, of course, I didn’t.)
Between bites of stroganoff, Mr. Dunkle let me know what he thought of his employers: “Too soft for real survival training like this. Know what I call them kind? REI preppers. Because they think the best way to prepare is by shopping. And by paying people who know what they’re doing. Me and my kids, we’re the real deal. When TSHTF for real, who’s gonna be left standing? Not them suburbanites.”
“Why am I here, then?” I asked. “You could have left me back at the compound.”
He sneered. “Think I wanted you to come? Mr. and Mrs. Hawking, they pretty much begged me to take you away.”
Mrs. Hawking had always been clear about her disdain for me. Still, that hurt.
“Are they going to meet us here tomorrow?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Dunno. Maybe.”
Now, in the cave, which was dark except for one small lantern, Kirsten shared her ground tarp, and Karessa lent me a couple of pieces of clothing to drape over myself for warmth. But it wasn’t enough. I was exhausted, but I was too cold and uncomfortable to sleep. I wanted to cry but that would only stuff up my nose, and I didn’t have a tissue.
I want to go home, the voice in my head pleaded. I closed my eyes and tried to picture my bedroom. Instead, a long-buried memory bubbled to the surface.
When I was in the third grade, this girl in my class, Kimberly Kelton, had a big sleepover. I didn’t want to go, but my mother said it would be good for me make some friends besides Jennifer Park, who was in a different class that year. (I had lots of friends. It just happened that most of them were imaginary.) So we went to Target, where we bought a bubble machine for Kimberly and a pink sleeping bag for me.
At the party, I discovered that the bubble machine required batteries and that everyone in third grade knows that pink is no longer cool. At least I hadn’t brought along the stuffed kitty that I normally slept with.
But it wasn’t so bad. After bowling, we came back to the house to gorge on a sheet cake decorated with Kimberly’s edible photograph. There was a piñata and a game that hooked up to the television and taught you how to dance. I didn’t talk much to the other girls, but I had fun anyway.
At midnight, Kimberly’s mom, Mrs. Kelton, told us to brush our teeth, put on our pajamas, and spread out our sleeping bags. And still, it wasn’t too bad. Everyone was nice, and I liked the gossip and ghost stories. But after a while, the whispers quieted down. One by one, the other girls fell asleep.
Except me. The floor was so hard. I couldn’t get comfortable. The girl next to me snored. I wanted to go home. No, I needed to go home.
At last, I got up and crept through the house. Mrs. Kelton had left a lot of lights on in case anyone had to go to the bathroom. The clock on the kitchen wall said 2:20 a.m. There was a phone on the counter.
My mother answered on the third ring.
“Mom?” My voice quavered.
“Daisy? Are you okay?”
“No.”
“You want me to come get you?”
“Yes.”
Ten minutes later, her headlights shone outside the house. She was still in her pajamas, and her hair, normally held back in a braid, fell over her shoulders. My favorite stuffed kitty sat in the passenger seat, waiting for me.
“I’m sorry I woke you up,” I said, blinking back a tear.
“I’ll always come if you need me. You know that.” She hugged me and kissed the top of my head. Then she took me home and put me to bed, where I stayed warm and cozy till early the next afternoon.
If only I could call my mother now. She would come get me, if only she knew where I was.
“I need you, Mom,” I whispered, in the darkness of the cave.
Thirty-Five
SOMEHOW, I MANAGED to sleep, if fitfully. The sun, streaming through the mouth of the cave, woke me. My entire body hurt, and I was so thirsty.
Next to me on the tarp, Kirsten was still out cold. I got up as quietly as I could to avoid waking her and crept out into the early-morning sunlight. In the clearing just outside the cave, Kyle was stack
ing wood for a fire.
“Need help?” I asked.
“Could use some more water to boil. Stream’s that way.” He pointed.
Plastic jugs in hand, I traipsed into the brush. Immediately, I heard a gurgling sound. All around me, the forest pulsed with life: Bugs hummed, animals scampered, birds chirped in a chaotic chorus. It smelled so good out here, so clean.
At the brook’s deepest spot—which wasn’t that deep—I held the jugs under the surface. The icy water stung my hands. When the jugs were full, I capped them off and made my way back to camp.
Kyle poked at a tiny fire ringed with stones. For a guy who had slept on a rock floor, he looked pretty well rested. He’d changed his clothes, too. Instead of head-to-toe camouflage, he wore a black T-shirt and green cargo pants.
“I didn’t think fires were allowed at this time of year.”
He laughed. “We don’t exactly follow the rules, case you hadn’t noticed. Anyways, we’re on rock here, and there’s no wind. We’ll put it out after breakfast, light a new one later.”
I held my palms up toward the flame. “The heat feels good.”
“Cave was pretty cold last night.” He poked some more. The flame licked a dry log and spread. “My dad can be a dirtbag sometimes.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I remained quiet.
“Says it’s for our own good,” Kyle continued. “Learning life lessons. One time we was out in the wilderness, just me and him, and I left my purification tablets at home. Forgot my fire starter, too, so I couldn’t even boil water. He had the tablets—matches, too—but he wouldn’t let me use them.”
“Did you just not drink anything?” I asked.
“Can’t go without water. You’ll die. There was a lake nearby. Ice cold. Looked good, tasted like heaven.”
“And?”
He threw his stick into the fire and sat down on the stone ground. “Got the runs so bad I wound up in the emergency room.” He shrugged. “But I never forgot my tablets again, plus now I know how to start a fire with just sticks and stones, if I have to. Anyways. I’ll make you a blanket with leaves and bark. You’ll be warm tonight.”