“Go to your son,” I told him.
The child was shaking, with a dark spot growing below his waist. A pool of liquid ran out the bottom of his pants. His eyes bore into me as he pushed his cheek deep into his father’s chest. I knew I’d never have been able to kill them. I thought of when my mom had first married my stepfather, of his two sons, both older than me, and of how they had looked like miniature versions of him.
“This is not a discussion,” my stepfather had said to my mom. His voice giving me chills for the first time. “I have a place out in the woods. When the end falls, we’ll be safe.” He had paused to stare at me. His eyes boring into me and his words like punches to my soul. “I’ll make us strong.”
My mom never wrapped her arms around me again. I never buried my face deep into her chest again. No one ever made me feel safe again. I broke from that memory as Oliver put his hand on my shoulder. He glanced again at my machetes, still drawn, and motioned with his head that I should sheathe them.
“What do you want?” the father asked us just as the mother burst through the front door. She pointed a pistol at us, shaking so badly that she was just as likely to hit her husband or son as us.
“We just saved you.” Oliver held up his hands to surrender.
I didn’t follow his example.
“But you came to scavenge, didn’t you?”
“This house belongs to a friend of ours,” Oliver said slowly, as though carefully choosing his words. I studied the mom, waiting for an opportunity to get that gun away from her.
“Nobody owns anything anymore,” the dad said, “’cept by force.”
“Put your weapons down,” the mom warned us, her voice shaking more than the gun, “and get on your knees!”
“We saved your son!” Oliver shouted back, as his crossbow hit the dirt. He dropped to his knees, but I stayed standing.
“You, too!” the mom screamed.
“No.” I pointed the tips of my machetes toward the dad and kid. “Think you can shoot me, hit me, before I run them through?”
I don’t know whose face grew redder or whose expression looked more horrified, the mom’s or Oliver’s.
“I’ll—I’ll shoot you from here!”
“Miss, and you kill your husband and son.”
Spit flew from the mom’s mouth in place of words. Oliver slowly rose to his feet and loaded a bolt in his crossbow. Oliver had no compassion in his voice, just like when he’d first seen all the dead soldiers around my house. “All we want is to take a look around for some of our friend’s stuff.”
“Martha! No!” the dad shouted as the mom lowered her gun.
“There ain’t nothing left in here. What little food we found, we ate.”
“We’re looking for papers.” I didn’t need to look at Oliver to know that was not what he had expected to me to say.
“What papers we found, we burned.” The dad said this too quickly. “For cooking. For heat.”
Stalemate. The mom held the gun at her side. The dad gripped his son. Oliver had a loaded crossbow. And me, armed with my machetes. Even after we’d saved their lives, they had zero interest in helping us. What it came down to was simple—either we kill this family, or we walk away with nothing.
“Fine. We’re leaving.” Oliver made the decision quickly. As though worried it wouldn’t be the one I’d make. We kept our weapons ready, and Connor kept growling. The mom raised her gun and kept it pointed at us until we were in the bushes.
“Where is Kady’s shelter?” Oliver asked.
“Once it’s dark, it may be near impossible to see. It’ll also be impossible to get Connor in and out of it. Was that your plan? To wait until dark and sneak to the shelter?”
He mouthed yes, his cheeks showing a little embarrassment. After a pause, he said, “I don’t want to kill them.” Oliver knew these people wanted to kill us. And they were squatting in Kady’s home. He knew the old rules didn’t matter, and that the new rule, the only rule, was that might won. “What do we do, General?”
“Your plan is good. We sleep in Kady’s shelter. Connor stays outside. The deaders aren’t interested in him, and he needs to learn to guard and wait. We don’t need to kill this family.”
Oliver patted my back, and I wondered if that was meant as a sort of hug.
WE WAITED FOR THE DARKNESS to come before we made our way to the shelter. Candle lights flickered in the house, and I assumed the family was staying awake on watch in case we returned. No beams of light shone from the windows, so maybe they didn’t have flashlights. If we had chosen to kill them, it wouldn’t have been hard to do right then.
Connor followed close on our heels. I paid him extra attention in case he smelled deaders. We managed to locate the hatch. I opened it with Kady’s combo. Oliver climbed in first, and as I started down the ladder, Connor circled to find a way inside.
“Stay here,” I told him, and he whimpered as he licked my face. With his head down he wagged his tail slowly. “Guard the hatch. Stay.”
I closed the lid and, until the seal locked, heard Connor whimpering and clawing at the hatch. Inside, I felt my way along the wall until I found the switches. The lights and fans came alive. Oliver bumped my shoulder to pass me.
“This is where Kady was living? No wonder she hates our colony so much. I’d be a total bitch if I had to leave here.”
“There’s a shower and beds we can sleep in. I’ll make us dinner if you want to wash up.”
“We are going to talk about why you asked about papers,” Oliver said just before he headed for the washroom. I nodded and started searching the cupboards. There was enough canned food to last for months, and no reason we couldn’t store it here for safekeeping. We’d have to sneak past the family living in Kady’s home, but I had a feeling the army brats would take care of them for us, eventually.
The shower turned on just as I opened a tin of stew. I found three bowls—one for Connor—and two spoons. Other than luxuries and food, it didn’t seem as if Kady’s father had planned for anything. No weapons, no exercise equipment, not even surveillance.
While Oliver was in the shower, I got the idea that he might like fresh, clean clothes. I didn’t want to make him wear Kady’s brother’s loser clothes, but thought he might like me to wash his. Doing something that might make him happy made me smile.
I wandered over to the bathroom and listened at the door. The water was going, and he was taking extra long with it. Didn’t blame him, as it might be his last shower. I gently turned the knob and slowly opened the door so he wouldn’t hear me. The clothes were on the floor. I reached in and grabbed them. His trousers, gitch, shirt, socks, and what looked like a black rubber back brace. I managed to get them out and into the washer without him knowing. I didn’t throw the back brace in, since I wasn’t sure it could be washed. I wondered what was wrong with his back.
“Uh, hey General, where’s my clothes?” Oliver yelled from the bathroom, after he’d finished.
I rushed back to the kitchen and searched for the can opener. “I threw them in the wash. Just throw a towel around your waist.”
There was a pause. Not a wrapping-a-towel-around-the-waist-before-emerging-type pause, but a really long uncertain-what-to-do pause before he said in a cracked voice, “Can’t.”
“What? Why? Just get out here.” I found the can opener and started opening the can.
“Can you please just bring me back my clothes?”
I stopped what I was doing. Ridiculous. “What’s your problem?”
Again, a silence that lasted too long. I started walking toward the shower and stopped just short of the door. I could have just gotten him clothes from Kady’s brother’s closet, but that just seemed so strange that I didn’t want to.
Instead, I reached for the door handle, but it turned before I had a chance to grab it. The door opened slowly. Oliver stood behind it with a towel wrapped around him up past his chest. Before I could ask what he was doing, I saw the towel covered bumps on his ches
t that had been squished down by the brace. We still didn’t speak, and the silence was getting more uncomfortable. His lower lip was trembling, and his eyes were as red as his cheeks. Or rather, her cheeks.
“My name is Olive, not Oliver—”
“You don’t have a sister, do you?”
Tears slowly fell from her eyes. Some caught on her cheeks, and some landed on the floor. Now I understood the story Oliver had told me. There was no sister. After the men had beaten him up, he died as a girl and woke as a boy. I had nothing in my experiences to draw on to know how to fix this. I reached out and hugged her. At first Oliver was rigid and shaking. She didn’t hold me back, and it was awkward. I considered letting go, but instead I held her tighter. Slowly, she wrapped her arms around me and buried her face in my shoulder.
“This is awkward,” she said. “Can you take a shower while I finish making dinner?”
“I want to help you feel better.”
Oliver let me go, and I released my hold on her. She cupped my chin in her hand and smiled. “Facebook status: ‘Ethan needs to take a shower and stop stinking up the place.’” Then she said in a less snarky tone, “That’ll make me feel better.”
AFTER A QUICK SHOWER, I found Oliver in the living room dressed in a baggy T-shirt and sweatpants. I was in a towel. I threw my clothes into the washer to begin the cycle.
“What’s the plan, General?” Oliver said, as if nothing had changed.
“I don’t care that you’re a girl,” I told her. “I won’t tell anyone.”
“I know. It’s just . . .”
“You’re not Olive anymore?”
“Like you’re not the boy who was hunted by your stepbrothers.”
Sorry is what my mom had whispered the night before my stepfather had first taken me into the woods. “If you can run away tomorrow, do it. Never come back,” was the last thing she had ever said to me. Maybe my mom saw herself disappearing into a shell. Or maybe she hoped for strength in me that she never possessed. I had believed, at the time, that she had made me weak. That she had the opinion of me as not worthy to sit at my stepfather’s table.
And as Oliver retreated to the bedroom, I hoped things hadn’t changed like that between us.
Chapter Sixteen
We used my mirror trick to safely get out of the shelter the next morning. The sun cast only enough light for us to see objects as silhouettes, but I could still tell that it was safe. When I climbed from the hatch, Connor ran to me, panting, his tail wagging against the grass. I had a bowl of stew for Connor, and he lapped it up quickly. For all I knew, that stew could have been dog food labeled as human food. Oliver passed me up a rucksack filled with cans. I grunted as I lifted it up and onto the ground. After she’d handed me up a second rucksack, she climbed out.
“Wait, is there another bag down there?” I called to her.
“Yeah, but don’t you think two bags will be plenty heavy?”
“Get a third.”
Oliver stood there, just staring at me. After raising her eyebrows and breathing heavily through pursed lips, she did as I asked. I knew it was a time waster, but I just felt as though it was needed. Connor watched around me, sniffing the air as if for scents stronger than the dew.
Oliver finally handed me up a third cloth grocery bag. “All I could find,” she said, as she came up the ladder.
“Wait a sec,” I told her. I grabbed the grocery bag and ran toward the house. Connor watched me before tearing through the grass after me. Oliver stayed with the two rucksacks.
I scurried around to the front door of the house, knowing these people were just as likely to shoot me as they were to greet me. Probably more likely to shoot me. I considered why I was leaving the food there; did I want to make them allies, or just keep their kid from starving? Superheroes followed a code to protect the weak, which was what made my stepfather the supervillain—that he hurt the weak. I lay the bag down at their front door, and then I started off. They didn’t need to know the food had come from me. I did this because it was right. But as I stepped onto the last stair of their stoop, the front door opened. I looked over my shoulder. The mom, gun in hand, stared from me to the food and back again.
“Why? We tried to kill you.”
“Each time we come back for more, we’ll leave you a bag. One day, we may come with a truck. You have my word that we’ll leave the house to you.”
With Connor at my heels, I turned to leave just as the woman grabbed the bag and took it inside. If she rationed the food out, maybe she’d have a month of meals. Somehow I doubted she’d run out of food before the army brats found them and ended them. This wasn’t a “see you later”; it was a “goodbye forever.” One day we’d return and I’d be able to look through the house for those papers, and I wouldn’t have to lay a hand on anyone inside.
I returned to Oliver and grabbed a rucksack. She punched my shoulder and gave me a big smile. “You always surprise me,” she said, taking the second rucksack.
I watched after her as she headed toward the woods. I didn’t look down at her knowing what I knew about her, just as she never looked down at me no matter what she learned about me.
WE WALKED IN THE MIDDLE of the road that entered the compound. We wanted to be visible so no one would think we were intruders and snipe at us. Connor was by my side. My arms were aching from carrying the heavy rucksack—no doubt Oliver, who wasn’t nearly as brawny as me, ached even worse. We didn’t speak the whole way back, just exchanged these weird glances where Oliver would smile at me.
Kady waved from the roost and Oliver waved back. Big and Skinny were hoisting a pole on the roost—probably for the wind turbine Skinny had been researching. The fence posts, all in place, just needed wire to finish them. No more dead bodies littered the ground, and a nice stockpile of firewood sat by the shed. Next I saw what they probably hoped I wouldn’t. The door to the shed was open. The lock broken. I stopped cold in my tracks.
“What?” Oliver asked, as she took a few more steps before stopping.
“They opened the shed. You were never to open the shed!” I listened to the tone of my words. Calm. No anger. Like how I imagined Uncle Ben would have sounded when Peter had started blowing off his chores and refused to take his Spider-Man power seriously. Disappointment. The trust we had built. The goodwill I had experienced. All gone. Washed away.
I dropped my sack of cans nearly on top of Connor, who scampered away, and I collapsed to the ground as if a force pulled me to my knees.
“Oh, god. What did they do?” Oliver whispered, and hurried toward the house.
Long before Oliver got there, Skinny dashed from the front door with Big Guy close behind him. They talked, and I watched, frozen, as their lips moved. Skinny, shaking his head, pointed at the shed. They know. Now they know.
Skinny, Big Guy, and Oliver all started toward me. I couldn’t help but see them walking in slow motion as pressure built in my head. I rocked, hoping that just maybe the movement would jar loose the emotions I could not name or control. Go in the shed, I heard my stepfather tell me. You will understand pain. You will become a man in that shed.
“I didn’t know,” Skinny said, as he leaned onto one knee so he was face-to-face with me.
“We wondered if there’d be tools in there,” Big Guy said from behind Skinny.
Oliver was walking to the shed. Where she’d see it. Where she’d see just how I became what I am. The chair. The chains. The leather strap. The darkness inside. Just like the darkness within me.
I couldn’t hear Oliver speak, but when she looked inside the open door and her hand covered her mouth, I knew she’d whispered, “Oh, dear god.” Whatever progress I’d made with my colony was gone. I would be alone again. They would never stay with a boy as broken as me. A villain playing the hero. Pretending.
Skinny put a hand on my shoulder. His stillness made me aware of my shaking. “No one will ever do this to you again,” he said.
Hearing words that didn’t match what I expecte
d him to say seemed weird. Freak! Weirdo! Get in that shed! That’s what I waited for—but those words weren’t coming from any of them.
“Blake and I talked it over,” Big Guy said. “We want to chop down that shed and burn it. It shouldn’t be there. It never should have been there.”
Oliver rushed to me with a blanket that she must have gotten from the house. She wrapped me in it tightly as I rocked. “Bring him Connor,” she said.
And Connor was in front of me, his nose on my nose. He made me feel calmer, and as the rush in my head began to subside, I could hear what they were saying. Hear the words for what was said, and not for what I feared.
“No one will ever do this to you again.”
“We’ll burn the shed. Get rid of it.”
“You’re with family now.”
THE AFTERNOON WAS FILLED with the noise of hammer and ax on wood. I wanted to be a part of it, to help with the destruction of what my stepfather had once called my “training shed.” But Oliver decided it would be better if I stayed away. That bringing back memories might be worse than the cathartic destruction of my nightmare.
As I stood at the riverbed, Connor at my feet and Oliver treading water, I still couldn’t completely agree with her.
“Kady is watching for intruders, and Blake will come get us when they’re finished. Why don’t you just swim?”
“I can’t,” I said flatly, concentrating on Connor’s panting and not on the breaking wood.
“You could if you wanted to. Nothing is stopping you—”
“No, I can’t.” The finality in my tone stopped Oliver from finishing her sentence. No one had ever taught me to swim. It wasn’t seen as something important, like something I would need to know. Kyle and Zeke had learned, but they were supposed to survive the coming end of days.
Oliver swam back to shore and walked out from the water. Even though this spot was completely secret from everyone, Oliver stayed in her shirt and shorts. Her shirt was wet and tight against her skin, and I could tell she was a girl.
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