“Like we have time for that,” I mutter.
“We have no choice, Keno.”
“I know it. I’m just pissed about it.”
Uncle Eddie pats me on the back. “I hear ya, man.”
Wavery bands of green light suddenly shoot up into the sky along the northern horizon. We all stare at them for a minute, but we’re getting half-used to it, like it’s normal to have dancing lights in the sky when you’re three thousand miles farther south than Scandinavia.
My brain is scrambling, thinking about how to protect Alma and my cousins; Nana and Jack; my uncle, aunt, and grandpa, who are pissed at us; and my mom, who won’t talk to me anymore.
Even though we’re a little cut-off from the rest of the city and we have the park, railroad tracks, and empty houses around us to give us a buffer zone, we’ve always known that people are out there lurking, people we need to fear. Now we know that two particular guys are plotting against us.
And that skinny, freaked-out guy with no clue how to survive in this world, stealing a baby rabbit for his starving kids, armed with nothing but a Swiss Army knife? That’s just…
Fuck! Dinner’s waiting for us, but my appetite is gone.
CHAPTER 2
I’m pedaling my bicycle like a demon, taking Tasha home from the only clinic we’ve found to get her checked out.
“Hurry, Keno. Go faster!” Tasha’s yelling into my ear from the bike cart behind me. “Chas is gonna catch us!”
“I’m trying! Hold on!” I hunker down and pump harder, huffing for breath, my leg muscles burning.
I turn a corner, and Tasha hollers, “Woohoo! We’re getting away!” She’s laughing into my ear, squeezing my shoulder. “Best brother ever.”
I peek back to see her pink cheeks, her grin, the pure glee in her eyes. My pretty sister with her long, dark hair. I’m protecting her from the asshole who made her pregnant and won’t leave her alone. I’m proud of myself as I lock eyes with her and give her the biggest smile I’ve got.
I turn my eyes back to the road and keep pumping, racing the bike faster than I thought it could go with the bike cart attached and my sister inside.
“I’m glad they can’t give me an abortion,” Tasha says. “I love babies!”
I reach back and squeeze her hand. Then, suddenly, the corner into our neighborhood is in front of us. I brake and turn the handlebars, and I lose control. The bike is tumbling and crashing with the cart, and Tasha is flying through the air, hitting the concrete on her stomach. I scrape myself off the pavement, and Tasha is bleeding.
I scoop her into my arms and run, both of us covered in her blood.
I cry out and shoot up in bed, shaking and dripping with sweat. Alma pulls me to her, and I latch on. She’s used to me doing this. She strokes me, saying, “Shh, baby. Shh.” She doesn’t tell me it’s all right, because she knows that it’s not.
By breakfast time, Uncle Eddie has the whole neighborhood organized for more patrolling. He assigns Alma the morning shift for tomorrow, and I’ve got the afternoon today. He says we’ll have the same schedule every four days on top of our nighttime patrols, when we take turns going out in teams of two.
“I’m thinking of adding more people at night,” Eddie says.
“Then we’re gonna need more patrollers,” I say. “We’ve only got—what? Thirteen or fourteen men, a handful of women?”
“Jack’s going to train more people,” Eddie says.
“Like who?”
“Old people. Women. Teens like Milo.”
“Milo’s just a kid.”
“Keno, he’s the only person in the neighborhood who’s killed anyone before. He can handle it.”
“I know he can shoot, but don’t you worry about what kind of person he’ll grow into with so much shooting?”
“It worries me sick, but we need a safe place to live if he’s going to grow up at all.”
Eddie’s my mom’s stepbrother. He’s only been home for a few months after walking with his brother two hundred miles to Waco and back to search for Mom and Grandpa and for Milo and Mazie’s parents, Aunt Jeri and Uncle Tom. The four of them had gone to a football game up in Dallas. Grandpa had called us from the road when they were heading home and almost to Waco, just minutes before the sun went ballistic, and that was the last we’d heard from any of them.
Nana had been keeping Mazie, Milo, Tasha, and me for a long weekend but hadn’t planned on being in charge of us for months and months with no help, no power, no outside communication. Nana never complained, though. She just kept right on taking care of us when the world fell apart.
No one got found in Waco. Eddie and his brother, my Uncle Pete, got held hostage by the National Guard up there until they escaped. When they finally made it home in late summer, Nana had just had a stroke and couldn’t talk, and Tasha had been dead for months.
Uncle Pete had to leave town again, but I feel a lot safer now that Eddie is back. After Nana’s stroke, I was the oldest able-bodied, able-minded person in the family. That was petrifying. I don’t know what I would’ve done if Eddie hadn’t been here six weeks ago when Mom and the rest of them finally came home after being missing for more than a year. We’d thought for sure they were dead.
We were so glad to see them, crying and hugging. But then they started spouting insane bullshit, screaming at us that we’d done everything wrong when they didn’t know shit about it. And when Mom found out that Tasha was dead, she collapsed, but not before she blamed me.
This morning, as soon as Jack gets Nana settled on the patio and kisses her goodbye, I go to hang out with her. I need to get to work in the gardens, but first, I need comfort from my grandmother.
Now that Nana’s a little better from her stroke, Jack brings her over every morning to stay with whoever’s here while the rest of us go out to work. Alma loves, loves, loves to cook, so she’s usually the one to stay home.
They were lovers before her stroke, Nana and Jack. With Grandpa gone so long, I think it hit Nana how much she hated the way he treated her. He was a dick to her all the time, acting like she was stupid, the one thing that Nana is not.
I was pissed at her for sleeping with Jack at first, until I thought about how hard it would be to stay married to a dick like Grandpa. Jack treats my Nana right. I love that about him.
As Jack walks away, he says, “Keno, we need to start thinking about getting more gasoline for the rototillers soon. I’d like to talk to you about it.”
“Sure. Maybe some evening this week, we can talk.”
Jack nods with a little wave and walks away.
We’ve had enough gas up until now, because Nana stockpiled so much and then the men siphoned it from the seventy or eighty cars we have in the neighborhood. All the people who left had to leave their cars behind. We still have about ten jugs, which will go a long way with rototillers, but we’ll need more before long.
“Keno,” Nana says with a sigh when I hold her hand and kiss her cheek. Since she got better, she remembers our names again.
“Hey, Nana.” I sit down beside her, keeping hold of her hand. “How you doin’ today?”
“Okay,” she says. She won’t say she’s good, because we all know she’s wasting away to nothing. Nana will always tell the truth, no matter how many words she’s lost.
“Your mother?” she says like a question, and I wince.
“She’s still not talking to me. I don’t know what to do.”
“Wait,” she says.
“I have to wait, don’t I?”
Nana nods, but I feel her pouring love into me. “Your dreams?”
“Still there. Still bad.”
Sitting here with Nana, I might be reading my own wishes into things, but I feel like she understands me and the grief I’m dealing with, the crushing worry. Her eyes are full of sympathy. They give me courage, like she believes
in me.
“We had to chase away a guy last night who was stealing water and a rabbit. He said his kids were starving.”
Nana’s eyes get big. “Oh no,” she says.
“I wanted to take him and his kids in, but I didn’t feel like we could. Our food stock is running low.”
“I wish…” She takes a deep breath. “Wish I bought more.”
“Nana, you bought enough food to feed all fifty people in the neighborhood for more than a year. We still have some left. You don’t need to feel bad.”
“Not enough,” she says, and she looks away.
“I just…” I pause until she faces me again. “I wonder if it’s bad karma that we didn’t help that guy and his kids. If the help he could give us would pay back whatever food and water they would use.”
“Don’t know,” she says, her face sinking into a sad sort of smirk.
“We gave him the rabbit—”
“Good.”
“But we didn’t give him water. We’re so short on water right now.”
“There’s more,” Nana says, and my mouth falls open.
“More water?”
She nods at me. My heart starts racing.
“I didn’t know we had more. Where is it?”
Nana’s face crumples into a mass of wrinkles, and her breath speeds up. She’s shaking her head at me.
I don’t want to upset her. I give her a minute. Even though some kind of gymnastic event is going on inside my chest, I make my voice extra gentle. “Nana, do you know where more water is?”
She lets out a moan that startles me, and tears shoot into her eyes. She’s shaking her head back and forth, back and forth. “I… I… I can’t!” She swats her head with her fingers. “I can’t…”
I stand up and grab hold of her hand before she can hit herself again. “You can’t remember? That’s okay.” I pet her head and shoulders, stroke her arms. “It’s really okay. Now that we know about it, maybe we can find it.”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you hide it?” I ask, and she nods. Oh, God, she’s hidden it even from herself. I hug Nana, and I kiss her on each cheek while she shudders all over. “Don’t worry. You did great. We’ll find it.”
She seems to be trying to smile at me, but it’s coming out more like a strained frown.
“Good morning, Miss Bea,” Alma says as she steps outside from the house. She looks at me, with my arms around my grandmother and a frown on my face that Nana can’t see. She looks at Nana with her teary eyes. And then Alma starts singing that Bob Marley song, “Don’t Worry About a Thing.” Nana’s face lights up.
Alma can take a simple song and give it so much passion. I get all enthralled by her singing. She takes Nana’s hand and swings it, doing a little dance. We all grin.
When the song is done, Nana has settled down. If my mom would ever talk to me again, she would say that Alma is emotionally intelligent. I’d say she’s brilliant.
“I haven’t heard that song in forever,” I say.
“My mom used to sing it to me when I was a kid. Both my parents sang all the time.”
“No wonder you’re so good at it.” I settle back into sitting with Nana while I marvel at Alma as she works with her pots of herbs.
Before Tasha died and after the second solar pulse—when we were all scared the sun would kill us—Nana told me it was my job to take care of the other kids if she ever couldn’t do it herself. I should’ve seen it as a clue that she wasn’t feeling so great, but that part sailed right past me. I was busy freaking out and trying to act all cool at the same time.
I’ve stepped up like she asked me to, but I don’t always feel up to the task.
Now, I’m suddenly realizing that Nana probably didn’t always feel up to it either, but she did it because of her love for us. I want to be like Nana that way: driven by great love.
“Nana, you’re my hero,” I say, and she squeezes the crap out of my hand.
Her eyes gleam at me when she says, “And you are mine.”
As soon as I leave Nana, I go straight to the Mint’s attic to see if there’s water stored up there, but there’s not. There’s stovepipe, plumbing pipe, and some lumber, though. That’s good to know.
Then I go to our attic at home, but there’s no water there, either. Mostly old keepsakes and papers. I find a couple of boxes of new cotton underwear, socks, and long johns for different sizes. I drop those down from the attic before I close it up.
Shit, where could Nana have hidden water?
I find Jack in his pinto-bean garden.
“Hey, Jack. Do you have any idea where Nana could have hidden some water? She says she hid some, but she can’t remember where.”
Jack gapes at me from across the garden, then walks up close. “Are you sure you understood her right? That she understood you?”
“Pretty sure. She was pretty lucid this morning. She didn’t hide anything here at your place, did she?”
“Not that I know of. I don’t see how she could’ve without me knowing.”
“I tried the attics at our house and the Mint. Guess I could look in the cellar over there.”
“Good idea.”
“Doesn’t seem like there’s room in that cellar. She wouldn’t have stored it behind walls, would she?”
“I don’t think so, but there’s no telling.” Jack shakes his head.
Geez, Nana, what did you do? She’s always been the smartest person around. Now, it seems like she’s outsmarted herself.
CHAPTER 3
I’ve never patrolled in the daytime before, and it’s hard. Everywhere I look, I see work that needs to be done. Even though I’m sticking to the outer edges of the neighborhood, people who are working in gardens and building outhouses and rain-barrel systems keep trying to get me involved. I pull down my ballcap and hold my rifle more menacingly while I tramp around in the sun. From now on, I’m keeping a loaded pistol on me even when I’m not patrolling, after what the rabbit thief told us. There’s no end to the dangers around here.
When I’m done with patrolling and on my way home, I see Mom working in the Mint’s backyard, right behind our yard. It’s the house on Mint Lane where Nana stored the food, tools, and seeds. Now that we’ve eaten so much of the food, there’s room for Mom and them to live there. We call it the Mint since it stores the neighborhood treasure—we still keep what’s left of the bulk food there, plus tools for people to share.
Mom’s helping Grandpa in the Mint’s potato garden.
I stand in the shadows across the street and watch my mother. She’s very close to the place where Chas Matheson shoved a gun into my neck. Chas—the so-called father of Tasha’s baby. What a joke, Chas being a father, except it’s not funny.
So many people have died, but Tasha was only fifteen.
I don’t want to think about Tasha’s death. I don’t want to think about the baby who would have been my niece or nephew but died with her. I don’t want to think about Chas shoving a rifle into my neck and Milo blasting Chas’s brains out to save me.
Milo was only thirteen, and now he’s got Chas’s exploding brains stuck in his mind for the rest of his life. Those brains are stuck in my head, too. I’m scared to death I’ll need to kill someone, and after seeing what that looks like, I don’t know if I can do it.
Before I know what I’m doing, I’m heading toward Mom. I go into our yard at home and stop at the hedge between our house and the Mint.
I gaze at my dark-haired mother where she’s digging up potatoes and looking crushed. She’s too skinny after being locked up like a criminal for a year by the asshole National Guard in Waco. She keeps sighing deep sighs while she works. She’s only thirty-eight, but she seems older now.
I want my pretty mother back. I want to hold her and cry. I need her so bad.
Grandpa goes inside the
Mint, leaving Mom alone.
“Mom?”
She doesn’t look at me, but she stiffens up. Shit.
“Mom, are you ever gonna talk to me again?”
She stabs her spade into the dirt and stands up with her back to me. “Please. I asked you to leave me alone.”
“I get that you’re mad and have to blame someone about Tasha, but I need you to forgive me. Please!”
Mom swivels her head toward me but doesn’t meet my eyes. “You let your sister get pregnant and die. I don’t know how to forgive you for that.”
“God, Mom. I didn’t ‘let’ her! I would’ve died myself to save her.”
Grandpa rushes out the Mint’s back door, waving a spade in the air. “Leave your mother alone, boy!”
“Did you even let anyone tell you how it happened, Mom?” I’m just yelling and crying now, out of my mind. “I took Tasha to a clinic in the bike cart I built. But that asshole Chas Matheson was chasing us and Tasha didn’t want to talk to him, so I raced us away.”
Mom’s face is frozen like a mask of horror.
“But I turned too sharp, and Tasha fell out of the cart. She landed on her stomach—”
“Shut up!” Mom cries, and she throws her hands over her ears.
“—and she bled to death. So, yeah, maybe it is my fault.”
“Stop it!” Mom runs toward the far side of the Mint, and I yell louder.
“I beat the crap out of Chas after the funeral. I thought it would make me feel better, Mom. But I felt worse. Do you want to know why? Because there was nothing left for me to do for Tasha after that. Not a damned fucking thing.”
Mom is out of my sight. Grandpa’s snarling at me and leaning forward, like he’s ready to launch himself at me.
I throw my hands in the air and scream as loud as I can. “You’re not the only one who misses Tasha and who’s mad at the world that she’s gone!”
I whip around, run past Alma on the patio, and blast out the front gate.
If the Light Escapes: A Braving the Light Novel Page 2