Survial Kit Series (Book 1): Survival Kit's Apocalypse

by Williams, Beverly

  “What?” he asked.

  “If it goes, I’ll attach a shoelace to the cable and pull it through the window. We can yank on it instead of using the gas pedal, and drive her home that way.” This backup plan was super-janky, but would be effective and quick to implement. I pretended I was pulling a string through the window. “Vroom.”

  “Where’d you learn to do that?” he asked, sounding impressed.

  I told him about “mechanics learning” with the farmer, about the engines we’d worked on, the vehicles we’d torn apart and rebuilt, the way he’d pushed me to come up with creative solutions… and then I realized I wasn’t mashed against the door any longer. I was sitting normally in the seat again. Huh. I hadn’t expected to be getting over our earlier conversation so quickly.

  As we drove down the road, I hung my hand out the window, with my opened tea bottle in my fingers. I held it at an angle, and the wind sang a long, sweet note across the bottle’s opening. I squinted in the sunlight. Eric stopped asking questions.

  “Here where the gray incessant spiders spin/Shrouding from view the sunny world outside/A golden bumblebee has blundered in/And lost the way to liberty, and died.” Elizabeth Akers Allen, “In a Garret”

  All my life, I’ve been followed by depression. Eric picked up on it early. I didn’t want to become his problem. I didn’t want to drag him down with me. Facing it with him at some point seemed unavoidable, though. I just didn’t think it would be so soon.

  I’d left my tent (thanks, sporting goods store!) and stolen away into the woods to be alone. I was unprepared when Eric found me. It wasn’t a chance encounter. He’d tracked me down.

  I’d been cutting short, even strokes across my upper thigh. Easily covered even by short shorts. It didn’t hurt. It felt like those little, measured slices were giving me more control over my life, though I knew that was just a rationalization. There wasn’t any true harmful intent in it, and I hoped he knew that.

  Eric sat and mutely covered my hand to stop me from cutting further. He didn’t admonish me and he didn’t question me.

  I wasn’t sure what to say. This was another thing I hadn’t wanted to share with anyone. It was too personal. Too private. How could I even begin to explain? How could I justify it?

  Still not speaking, Eric lifted his sleeve and showed me a series of parallel marks on the inside of his upper arm, old scars.

  Eric dropped his sleeve and I tugged at my not-so-short shorts, and we walked back to camp together.

  We never actually spoke about it. We never had to.

  Since my head was knocked against those cinder blocks back in the stairwell, I’ve had episodes of seeing tiny points of light floating in the air around me. It’s not painful, it’s not even unpleasant. Just a bit disorienting. The first time I experienced it, I was too interested in those tiny stars to even be alarmed by them. They zoomed by in thin streaks, appearing and disappearing at random.

  I don’t know for certain all the things that set them off. An abrupt change in blood pressure does. And not breathing enough. I enjoy watching them when they join me. All those tiny stars wisping around before my eyes. As I was pondering them one evening, Rob approached me.

  “I wanted to give you an opportunity to apologize,” he declared.

  My reply was a sharp bark of laughter.

  He didn’t appreciate this. Rob’s face turned an amazing shade of red. “Look at thish! You did thish to me!” He pointed at the dark spittle-rimmed gaps in his mouth. “Thish ish your fault!” he finished hotly.

  I calmly stood my ground. “It’s your own fault.”

  He roared, punched a tree, shook his hand in the air, and lumbered away.

  I heard a noise and turned around.

  “And here I was, ready to defend you!” Matthew smiled broadly.

  I fell asleep that night thinking of Officer Bissett. He’d developed a list of general life rules to follow. He’d brought a copy of his list for me on one of his visits. I don’t know more accurately when; all that time melted together in a goopy mess. It had become a Tar Pit. I considered what the tar might conceal, then let the thought go. I listed and considered the rules, and fell asleep stuck at number seven, hearing Officer Bissett’s assured voice speaking it in my head. Healing hurts.

  ove takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

  The next afternoon, we were preparing vegetables for part of supper, getting a head start before the food area got crowded. We were alone, and I realized Eric was watching me. Not in a creepy, stalkerish way. Just observing. Then he gave voice to his thoughts.

  “I know you hurt,” he said, taking my hand in his.

  I drew it away gently. He’d been looking at the dorsal side of a line of dots that encircled my wrist.

  “I see it on you, like… like a heavy coat worn on a sweltering summer day.” He dragged his thumb across the lump in my collarbone where, as the result of a car accident, the bone had broken and knit back together slightly unevenly.

  I stood still this time.

  “You hide it well,” he continued, “but you’re shrouded in it. Sometimes you let slip a small sign.” He took my bad wrist in his hands and applied gentle pressure which soothed its ache. “Sometimes I catch a glimpse, before you conceal it again. I can tell it’s always there.”

  “Poetical,” I commented flatly.

  “Truth.”

  I tried to meet his eyes, but couldn’t.

  “You should talk about it,” he urged.

  I shook my head. “Changes nothing.”

  “Maybe try it on for size. Sometime.”

  “Maybe, sometime.” But I didn’t think so.

  “Seriously.”

  “Seriously,” I parroted.

  “You’re thinking again,” Eric observed the next day, settling beside me on the grass.

  “I’m always thinking; it is never finished.”

  “No. I mean thinking about Before,” he clarified. “You sit very still with your hands wrapped together like this.” He demonstrated the gesture, not realizing why I held my hands that way. (This habit was a holdover from before I took to wearing fingerless gloves all day long—it’s how I concealed the scars on my palms.) “Then you rub the palms of your hands with your thumbs.” He continued to hold the gesture a moment, with his palms curled around his thumbs and his fingers curled around the backs of his hands.

  “Just a vision from the Tar Pit.”

  “The what?”

  “Tar Pit.” I bit my lip, and continued. “It’s like a well of memories. An overall impression of things that happened. Every once in a while a specific memory will emerge from the ooze. I’m trying to process it is all.”

  He nodded as though this made perfect sense. “I have that. I never thought of it in those terms, but it’s spot-on.” He picked at a scab on his arm. “I used to get in trouble on purpose. Took the focus off my brothers. I’d await punishment feeling more proud than scared. We were going to be beaten regardless. Might as well deserve it.”

  He examined the scar on the top of my shoulder, the one that climbed the side of my neck. One only turtlenecks or scarves would’ve hidden. He gave it a long, close look, trying to distract me by continuing, “If I acted up, there was a good chance he’d leave them alone.”

  His words felt… new. These were words he’d never spoken before. Somehow I’d already known. Fewer scars on Matthew and Thom spoke to this truth.

  “One day,” he went on, “I was thinking about that time, and a memory floated up. Like it had been drowned and then it bobbed up from some dark place. Thom had broken a picture frame, and Dad was lashing him with a leather belt. I took the keys to the truck, went outside, and ran it into a tree. Dad forgot all about Thom.” Eric rubbed his shoulder sheepishly. “It was the only thing I could think of to do.”

  “It worked, right?”

  “Yeah.” He didn’t tell about the punishment for ruining h
is father’s truck. I was going to ask about it, but Eric saw this and turned the conversation around. He wanted to focus on getting me to talk more. He inclined his head at my shoulder’s topmost scar. “Tell Of?”

  It was owed to him. An exchange of information. I tried, faltered, failed. “I can’t.”

  “Another time, then.” He let the words hang between us.

  And then Thom was calling him.

  “See ya,” Eric told me as he headed in Thom’s direction.

  “Bye,” I murmured, but he was already gone.

  I pulled off my gloves and considered my hands. They were a testament to my younger self’s stubbornness of will, all the layers of scars on my palms. Admittedly, the first time I was punished, I didn’t understand what I was being punished for. The subsequent times, I’d apparently felt the reward was worth the cost. For a while, at least. The memory of the rewards for this “misbehavior” had long since faded from my body.

  I looked off in the distance. Another ghost had emerged from the tar.

  “You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

  Eric gently set about dredging up my past and teaching me to accept his touch. Like a skittish filly, I was ready to bolt at the slightest intrusion into my personal space. Eric began to attempt minor expeditions there regularly.

  “I named you Kit back in the van,” he said out of nowhere. We were sitting near the lake, having lunch.

  “Oh?” I tried not to sound as surprised as I felt.

  “You were so organized. You seemed ready for anything, you and that backpack.”

  I touched the leather L.L. Bean logo on the front of the heavy, durable canvas. The bag was deep blue, the color of a darkening sky reflected in snow on a quiet winter evening. “It’s served me well. We’ve been through a lot together. Officer Bissett gave it to me.”

  I saw him file away a thought for later, and then he continued, “You seemed like you didn’t need anyone or anything else. It occurred to me you were like a survival kit for the apocalypse.”

  Eric reached out and touched the bag, too. His fingers brushed over mine. I didn’t pull away.

  “Is it Another Time?” Eric asked later, touching my shoulder/neck scar lightly.

  I’d worked on the words. I recited them to him. “Most people see that and think it’s from a seat belt, from a car accident. They ask about what it was like, being in a car accident. I can honestly admit that I was in one. But that’s not what caused the scar.” Frustration overtook me, and I gave up on my recitation. “You know what it’s from,” I told him. “Why are you even asking?”

  “Because you need to tell me.”

  “What I need is to forget about it all.”

  I was strolling on a trail, and I heard a small voice behind me.

  “Aren’t you afraid?”

  I looked back and saw James tagging along.

  “Afraid of what?” I asked.

  “You know. Of him. Eric.”

  “Why would I be afraid of him? He’s my friend.”

  “Yeah, but he’s so strong! My parents said he was a… loose canyon.”

  This made me giggle. “A loose cannon?”

  “Yeah! They said he was strong, headstrong. They said they didn’t know how to control him.”

  “I think they’d do best not to try,” I told the little golden-haired boy. “Eric can control himself. Besides, has he ever done anything to scare you?”

  “Well, I was scared when he was fighting. No one could’ve stopped him. But he hasn’t done anything to me.”

  “He won’t. You know that, right?”

  “Yeah. He’s not like Buck.”

  Buck was the camp ass-ache. “Ha! He most certainly is not like Buck.”

  Sandy-Sandra called to James, off in the distance.

  “Bye!” James shouted as he ran to his mother.

  I noticed Eric staring at the scar on my neck again. I sighed. He’d been patient. Thom was sitting on the cliff with us, but I finally answered Eric’s question. Thom would’ve heard about it later, anyway.

  “My stepfather was very fond of his braided kangaroo-skin bullwhip, Methuselah,” I said softly. “The day he broke it in, he didn’t quite have the aim down. He usually kept things confined to where they were easily covered by clothing. It got away from him, that’s all.”

  Eric took a breath to speak and I put my hand over his mouth to stop him, hoping we could end the conversation there.

  I knew people at camp talked about my scars, and about Eric’s, and about everything about everyone. They hadn’t talked to me directly about it, but my ears were sensitive, and everywhere, people were gossiping. I tried to not hear them, but couldn’t block it out. I loathed that they were paying any attention to me at all.

  Eric peeled my fingers from his mouth, staring into my eyes and holding my index and middle fingers together in his hand. He paused, then brought my fingers back to his lips, and kissed them.

  “Okay,” he said, letting it go.

  Sometimes it felt like all those siblings who had gone before were fictions, figments of my imagination. Maybe they were characters from a book I’d read, or a bad movie I’d watched. I mentally listed off the ways each died. I could remember a lot of those details. For the majority of the kids, though, I couldn’t remember anything about them. There was no remembrance of their personalities, just how they dealt with fear and pain. And death. All other details were gone. In my memory, those siblings were as flat as the page I’m recording this on. I felt bad about this, but tried not to be too hard on myself. Our environment played a big role in causing things to turn out that way.

  I studied my new friends. All my siblings clutching each other in fear were replaced by three men with a mosaic of feelings, a lifetime of experiences, and skills for almost every situation. I set out to learn more about them, hoping it would make them seem more real to me. I asked them about themselves and eventually heard three versions of their former lives. The versions fit together like interlocking puzzle pieces; each was part of the same picture, just with different details.

  “Budding at my fingertips/Touching you, I start to bloom.” Jets to Brazil, “Sweet Avenue”

  We were enjoying a lazy afternoon.

  “Why do you touch me so much?” I asked Eric.

  He reached out and touched my arm, suggestible. “Well, for one thing, you’re very soft. Touchable.”

  I let his fingers wander across the back of my wrist, then over my fleecy half-glove, refusing to move until I got a real answer. He gave me one.

  “The biggest reason I want to touch you so much is to make up for all the times you’ve been touched in ways that hurt.”

  I allowed myself to touch him back. I reached out an unsteady finger and stroked the ropy scar on his neck, the ghost of a caress. I felt his body rise and fall through this small contact at the base of his throat.

  I’d started to get used to the way Eric touched me as part of punctuating his sentences.

  Now, I rested my hand lightly on top of Eric’s forearm. I felt his muscles moving under his skin and I liked the way they felt. If he noticed, he didn’t betray this. I tried to calm my damaged little heart.

  Eric pulled a joint from his pocket, lit it, inhaled deeply, and passed it to me. He held his breath for a moment, then exhaled a cloud of smoke. “Do you ever wonder whether the human race will survive?”

  “Nah. We were all always doomed.” I took a hit.

  “Mankind didn’t stand a chance, huh?” He accepted the joint back and flicked his lighter.

  “Nope, never,” I replied.

  “You’re a realist. I like it.” He took another hit.

  I lay down in the too-tall grass and boldly put my head on his leg, slightly up past his knee. He played with my hair and hummed to himself.

  The sun was warm as I climbed the steep hill to the lookout cliff. No one was paying attention; I stood alone on the rock. The Post Watch pe
rson wasn’t around, so I quickly scanned the camp for dangers.

  Diving was something I’d enjoyed immensely, Before, at the farmer’s pond. I’d never gone off something as high up as this, but had seen it done in the farmer’s favorite movie, Gizmo (which was mostly about inventors). I wanted to feel what it was like to fall during the brief seconds from the clifftop to the water’s surface.

  I backed away from the edge, then ran toward it. I dove. My dive wasn’t as graceful as I’d wanted, but it was pretty good. I entered the water at a good angle. Underneath, the world felt like perfect liquid music. I watched the fish. Silvery-blue light was shining on their scales.

  That evening, the camp gathered for a meeting. Jeff yammered on about some perceived camp need. I wasn’t interested. I tried to listen at first, but my mind wandered. Eric and I sat at the edge of the group, far enough out to talk quietly to each other without disrupting Jeff’s rambling.

  Eric was considering something. I realized what he’d been thinking about and tugged my right pant leg down to cover it, knowing he’d be asking questions soon. Not yet. I put a curled finger to my lips to quiet the question forming upon his. He sat back. It would wait. It’s not like he hadn’t noticed this before.

  Sure enough, when I eventually left for the outhouses, Eric followed. He was waiting when I stepped out of the stuffy little structure.

  I trudged back toward the tedious meeting, and he walked backward in front of me.

  I stopped short.

  “Show me?” he asked, stopping as well.

  “Not interested,” I told him. “Thanks anyway, E.” I started walking again.

  He hesitated, then jogged up to my side. “I have this mark, right?” he stated, offering it as a trade. “I don’t even know what it’s from. Looks like a… oh, here.” He pulled up his shirt and showed me what he was talking about. The design of it was beautiful, and it was horrifying. It decorated most of the left half of his back. His skin looked like ripples on water after a rock had been skipped across the surface.