by Suzanne Weyn
“Thanks,” Tom said, taking the paper from him. “When do you think school will open again?”
“Soon, I hope,” Mr. Curtin replied, moving forward in line. “I’m desperately in need of a paycheck.”
“I’m desperately in need of food,” Tom said. “Do you know where I can buy some?”
“Do you know where the little A&P just about a mile up the road is? I heard that’s open, although there’s probably not much left.”
“Great. Thanks,” Tom said, backing toward the door. “I’ll go there now.”
“Okay. Good to see ya. Remember, you’re welcome at my house anytime.”
“Thanks.” Tom motioned for Larry to follow him, and the two of them left the post office, going in the direction of the old A&P, built before the day of the superstores.
As they took the road back down into the valley, the water once again began to rise around them, and Tom wondered if he should have gone back for the canoe. He was a quarter mile down the road, looking at the houses, taking in the various kinds of damage they’d sustained. He came to one where a very large tree had come down right on top of a red hybrid parked in the driveway, crushing the roof on the driver’s side. Tom recognized the vehicle.
Brock Brokowski came around the tree and waved to Tom. “How’s it going?” he asked.
Tom shrugged. “Sorry about your car.”
Brock shook his head miserably as he surveyed the damage. “I saved for this since freshman year,” he lamented.
“Got insurance?” Tom asked.
“Yeah, but we’ve got no cell signals and even the landlines are down.”
“I know. Sucks,” Tom sympathized.
“Listen,” Brock said, and an uneasy expression came over his face. “Have you seen Niki since the storm?”
Tom immediately saw himself kissing Niki there on the island and hoped Brock couldn’t tell what he was thinking. He had no reason to feel guilty. Brock and Niki had broken up, and Tom had heard rumors that it was Brock who had broken it off. And apparently, Brock knew he was involved with Niki, or he wouldn’t have asked if Tom had seen her. Just the same, Tom felt incredibly awkward. “Yeah, I saw her a few days ago. She’s okay, I guess,” he answered. “She’s still living at Lake Morrisey.”
“Do they have electric over there yet?”
Tom shook his head. “No, and that gas station that was getting fuel is shut down now, too.”
“Man,” Brock said with a sigh, “if those rich people over there can’t get any help, what chance do we have? But you said Niki’s okay, right?”
“Yeah, she seems to be,” Tom told him. It sounded to Tom like Brock was still stuck on Niki. But if he was, why had he broken it off with her? Tom didn’t know Brock well enough to ask. “I have to get going,” Tom said instead. “Good luck with the car.”
“Thanks,” Brock said with a wave, returning his attention to assessing the damage.
By the time Tom and Larry neared the grocery store, the water was just below Tom’s knees. The large, white building was in sight at the far end of a midsized parking lot, which was spotted with large puddles but was otherwise pretty dry. Tom noticed a vacuum machine about the size of a small car in the far corner of the lot, its orange hoses dangling, and assumed it had been used to suck up much of the water from the lot. This struck Tom as a hopeful gesture, considering that although there seemed to be about twenty people in front of the store, there were only three cars in the parking lot. He knew that right now most people couldn’t get their water-logged engines running, and those who could start their cars couldn’t find gas to fuel them.
He started to cross the lot but stopped walking when he realized that people were milling outside the store. Something about the scene wasn’t right, but he couldn’t quite figure out what. Then, suddenly, a man was knocked to the ground and Tom knew what was really happening. They were fighting. A curse was hurtled through the air as if to seal his new understanding of the situation.
A young woman ran toward him, pulling her little daughter along by the hand. In her other arm, she clutched a paper bag that looked half full.
“What’s going on?” Tom asked the woman as she passed him.
“They’re fighting over the food. The store is nearly out and closing down. Those who haven’t been able to get any are attacking people as they come out with their bags,” she reported.
“But you escaped? You’re okay?” he checked with the woman.
“Yeah, I was able to grab this bag even though some spilled,” she said without stopping.
Tom stared at her, aghast. She looked like a nice, normal person, a mother with her small child. She had robbed someone of their groceries?
“Don’t look at me like that!” the woman shouted over her shoulder at Tom. “The kid is hungry. What am I supposed to do?”
Larry barked at her as if giving a reprimand, though Tom knew it was probably only a reaction to her agitated tone. He was caught between his impulse to avoid the fighting at the grocery store and intense curiosity. His curious nature won out, and he walked toward the front of the store.
Angry, shouting voices snapped in the air as he came close to the front entrance. One man punched another and sent him tottering backward so close to Tom that Tom had to leap out of the way. “You’re not getting my food, you—”
Before the man could finish, the other man was off the ground and running back, his head bent as if he were a ram intending to butt horns with a rival, and shouting ferociously. The first man grabbed his groceries and began to run. He didn’t get far before he was tackled to the ground by the guy he had punched, sending his food rolling out of the bag.
While the two men wrestled on the ground, three women and two men pounced on the spilled food, fighting to get as much of it as possible. Two of the women struggled over a jar of tomato sauce until it went flying out of their hands and smashed onto the parking lot’s blacktop, spraying Tom and Larry. Larry licked his face clean with his long, pink tongue.
Tom saw that two boys about his age were shoving each other. He realized that one of them was the tall, Mohawked kid he’d seen Gwen with that day he’d been talking to Carlos by his truck. Hector. Maybe he knew where Gwen had disappeared to.
It didn’t look like the best moment to speak to him. Hector was clutching his bag of groceries to his body while the other boy was trying to tear it away from him. “Hey!” Tom shouted at Hector’s attacker. “Get your own food.”
“Get lost,” the other boy snarled.
“Why don’t you get lost?” Tom countered, shoving the boy away from Hector.
As he staggered back, the kid glowered at Hector. “You’re lucky your bodyguard showed up. Next time I’m gonna mess you up.”
Hector just stood there panting as he hugged his brown bag of groceries. After the kid stormed off, Hector looked to Tom. “Thanks a lot,” he said. “I’m not sure there’s going to be a next time.” He shook his head. “You know what I have in here? Anchovy paste. And canned corn. And pasta in the shape of unicorns. Basically, the only things left are the things that nobody ever really wanted.”
A grocery clerk came to the door and quickly turned the inside dead bolt, locking the door. In the distance, a police siren sounded.
A heavy woman came flying between them, having just been pushed away from an abandoned grocery cart by another woman.
“Let’s get out of here,” Tom suggested to Hector after a quick check of the woman, who seemed to be unharmed as she ran back into the fray of people fighting over the cart’s contents.
“Good idea,” Hector agreed.
They walked to the back of the parking lot, skirting the wide puddles, without talking until they were far enough away to feel safe from the fighting. Two police cars came into the lot, their sirens screaming. Tom ducked his head away and noticed that Hector did the same. The last thing they needed was to be picked up for fighting in public; Tom supposed they would call it disorderly conduct. He had to wonder how the jai
ls were functioning without power.
With a nod of his head, Tom signaled Hector to follow him even farther out of the lot until they were on a quiet side road. “Hi, I’m Tom,” he said once it seemed safe to stop and talk. “This is Larry.”
“Hey, Larry,” Hector said with a small wave. “He’s a great-looking dog,” he told Tom.
“Thanks, I found him in the flood. Listen, we’ve never met and you don’t know me, but—”
“I know who you are,” Hector interrupted him. “You live behind Gwen. At least you used to before her house went up in smoke.”
“How do you know where I live?” Tom asked.
Hector gazed at him as though filtering his reply, deciding what he wanted to say, and then he shrugged. “I think Gwen and I walked past your house one day and I figured it out.”
“Of course, sure, I remember,” Tom said. “That’s why I wanted to ask if you know where Gwen is. I haven’t seen her since the fire.”
“I saw her after that,” Hector revealed. “She was going off to find some old mine shaft to live in to keep safe from OscPearl.”
“Are you kidding me?” Tom cried, alarmed. “And you let her go?”
“I couldn’t really stop her,” Hector defended himself. “She has her own mind. If she’d stayed with me, the cops or social services would have picked her up. Besides, right now, I’m living at the shelter in the basement of the elementary school. OscPearl demolished our trailer. I went up to the hills looking for her yesterday and the day before. I found a couple of mine shafts, but they were boarded up from the outside. There was no way she could have gotten into those.”
“So where do you think she is?” Tom asked.
“No idea. Maybe she found Luke and they went off somewhere.”
“She wouldn’t have said good-bye to you? You’re her boyfriend, right?”
“Did she tell you I was?”
“No, but I…you know…I assumed.” Tom had meant to be casual when he’d asked if Hector was seeing Gwen. After all, it was none of his business, really. He’d just been kissing Niki yesterday. But he’d definitely detected a certain strain in his voice when he asked, and he wondered if Hector had caught it also. “Do you think we should go look for her again?” he suggested.
“Yeah,” Hector said, “I think we should. I don’t know where else to look except in the forest some more.”
“I have a canoe. We can take it part of the way,” Tom said. He whistled for Larry, who had gone off to explore some tall grass. “Let’s go.”
Tom tied the canoe to a tree, stowed his oars, and steadied the boat as Hector and Larry climbed out. They were all standing knee-deep in water but the canoe could no longer move forward. Without a word, they trudged up the muddy dirt road leading to the forest.
Tom’s thoughts focused on Gwen. If she had been up here during OscPearl, how would she have survived? A mine shaft was probably good shelter, but did she have enough drinkable water and food? And OscPearl had ended four days ago—why hadn’t she come down and let Hector know she was all right? “Why wouldn’t she contact you? You are her boyfriend, aren’t you?” Tom checked.
Again, Hector’s shifting eyes made him seem to be calculating how he wanted to answer before actually speaking. Then a look of resignation came over his face. “If it were up to me, I would be,” he finally replied.
Tom cast him a confused glance. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t think Gwen is all that into me—I mean, in that way.”
“But you like her?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh,” Tom said, absorbing this new information.
“Why?” Hector asked as they neared the trail leading into the hilly forest. “Are you interested?”
“In Gwen?”
“Who else are we talking about?”
Tom realized he was avoiding the question. Was he interested in Gwen? Niki was the one he was supposed to be involved with, wasn’t she? And he did like Niki; he’d thought of no other girl but her for such a long, long time. But he’d found himself thinking a lot about Gwen ever since the night of the fire when she’d run off. Maybe he was just worried about her. But it felt like something more than that. “I don’t know,” Tom admitted to Hector. “I’m not sure.”
Hector grunted noncommittally. “I’m not sure you’re Gwen’s type.”
“Probably not,” Tom conceded. But still…
CHAPTER 17
Gwen put down the fork she was using to eat the salad she’d picked from the greenhouse on the top floor of the Whippersnapper 3 Green Model Home and stared intently out the expansive wall of a window to the forest outside. Solid forms were moving among the trees. One? No. Two. Squinting for a better focus, Gwen could tell they weren’t the white-tailed deer that often browsed by in their constant quest for leaves and brush to eat. There were two people out there.
They wouldn’t be able to look in at her. Yesterday she went outside through the camouflaged sliding door and knew that the window panel was made of mildly reflective one-way glass. At first, all they’d see was more trees, and as long as they didn’t catch sight of themselves in the greenish reflection, they might not realize there was anything there at all.
Getting up off the floor, she went close to the window for a better view. The forms were coming toward her. Were they hikers? Forest rangers?
No—
Hector!
Tom!
Running to the side door, she pounded the button that caused it to slide open and raced into the forest, calling to them. “I’m here! Over here!”
Larry barked and ran to her first, knocking her back a few steps as he leapt on her, infused with the excitement of her outburst. Gwen rubbed his head. “Hi, pleased to meet you,” she said, laughing.
Hector and Tom ran to her. Hector threw his arms around Gwen, hugging her tight. “You’re okay!” Then he gripped her arms, pushing her out of the hug for closer scrutiny. “You are okay, aren’t you?”
Still laughing, Gwen leaned back into the hug. “Yes. Yes. I’m totally okay.”
“Thank goodness,” Tom said.
Gwen embraced him, too, her delight in seeing him making her forget any self-conscious inhibition. “Thank you for coming to find me. You, too, Hector. Thanks.”
Gwen’s eyes welled with happy tears. Someone had come out to look for her—two someones. She recalled the night in the mine shaft when the desolate feeling of being completely unloved and alone had been so awful that she’d cried herself to sleep.
Stepping back to look at them, she decided they didn’t look all that great. Tom’s bright eyes had a weary expression, and his clothes were dirty. Hector was even worse. His Mohawk had flopped to one side and there were dark circles under his eyes.
“How have you two been?” she asked, quickly brushing the wetness from her eyes.
“Not great,” Hector admitted. “My trailer…like…just blew away.”
Gwen gasped. “That’s terrible.”
“No kidding. It was terrifying.”
“Were you there at the time?” Tom asked.
“Hell, yeah! We were there. The roof just peeled right off. The whole trailer park is demolished. We were able to get into my mother’s car and just pray it didn’t turn over.”
“You were lucky it didn’t,” Tom said.
“It did turn on its side,” Hector reported, “and it got blown down the road, but at least it didn’t get far. That was the most horrible day of my life.”
“What about you?” Gwen asked Tom.
“Our house held, but the basement is flooded and so are the streets. I guess it’s because we’re at the bottom of the valley.”
“My house definitely wouldn’t have lasted,” Gwen realized. “It doesn’t even matter that it burned. It would’ve been washed out or blown away.”
“Maybe you should come to the shelter with me,” Hector suggested.
“Yeah, and have social services put me in foster care? I don’t think so. Besides,
I have it good where I’m living. Better than you guys, it seems.”
“Oh, yeah? Where have you been living?” Hector asked.
Gwen turned toward the reflective glass, but before she could explain, Tom jumped back, startled.
“Oh, man! What is that?” Hector cried as Larry barked at the reflection. “It’s me!” Hector exclaimed as he walked forward to inspect his image. “For a second, I thought I was seeing a ghost.”
Gwen stepped ahead of him and knocked on the glass.
“What’s in there?” Tom asked, coming alongside her.
“It’s the Whippersnapper Three,” Gwen told them.
“The what?” Tom asked.
“I’ll show you. Come on in. Follow me,” Gwen told them, leading the way to the side door that was set into a huge boulder.
“You would never even know this place was here,” Tom said, amazed, as he walked into the room on the main floor.
“I know,” Gwen agreed. “Almost no impact on its environment; even the front isn’t intrusive, as you saw.”
Tom turned to look out at the forest, gaping in wonder. “Were we just out there? Is this one-way glass?”
“Yep,” Gwen confirmed. “The Whippersnapper Three features passive solar design and natural cross-ventilation that eliminates the need for an air conditioner. It’s made from all recycled and recyclable materials. It has storm water retention, and it all runs on a magnetic generator that never costs any more than its initial start-up cost.”
“Awesome,” Tom murmured.
“And that one-way glass,” Gwen added, pointing toward the forest. “It’s a solar panel.”
“When did you become an expert on all this?” Hector asked as he slowly turned in a circle, taking in the Whippersnapper 3.
Gwen pointed to the pile of books she’d taken from the bookshelves and stacked on the floor. “I’ve been reading those, plus all the sales brochures on this place. There’s not much else to do.”
“So, do you have power here?” Tom asked.
Gwen nodded. “It seems like someone just left this house as it was and never came back. I don’t think anyone ever lived here. It’s just a sales model home. My best guess is that the people who built it live in California, or someplace else far enough away that it would cost way too much for them to move back right now.”