by Max Brooks
Pursued?
Are they being chased like that rabbit that time? I keep thinking about what chased me. If it wasn’t in my head. A bear? I’m kind of two minds about that. Being pursued by a real bear would mean I’m not totally losing it or…or I’m just totally wimpy to run from a dust speck in my eye. But the first option would also mean there’s a real bear out there. Do bears attack people? What was that movie where Leo gets mauled by one for, like, twenty minutes? Was it based on a true story? If there is a bear out there, I can’t blame the animals for being scared of it.
They’re not scared of us though, not the way they’re chomping through all the fruit trees. Well, all except ours. Good call, Mostar. But the Perkins-Forsters, the Boothes, the Durants. No one’s tried to shoo the animals away. And Palomino’s even feeding the deer! I’m not sure if the girl actually liked it. She wasn’t smiling. Effie was enjoying herself, crouching behind Palomino, holding her arm up to the deer’s snout, constantly whispering into her daughter’s ear while Carmen stood approvingly at the kitchen door.
And Bambi sure liked it. He ate three apple slices in as many seconds, slices that Pal and her moms might really miss later. Look, I get it. I love animals too. And I do feel for them. The drought, the bad berry harvest. And now they’re being driven out of their homes. Of course they’re hungry. But so are we! Spinning on this makes me wonder if these cute little critters aren’t actually more dangerous than a bear. After all, if they’re eating our food supply, aren’t they threatening us with starvation? Death by competition. I can’t believe I’d ever think this way, but after hearing about the riots in Seattle…
That’s where I am now. Not in Seattle, in the car, listening to news about Seattle. The violence has “tipped over.” That’s how they’re putting it. “Food riots.” Mobs are looting grocery stores, beating people up. Killing some. Stabbings, shootings. And not just in the city. Something about a sniper on the I-90. That’s the main east–west highway across the mountains, the one they’re depending on for supplies.
This guy, it sounded like just one guy, the “I-90 Sniper,” he hid in the trees and started shooting at these army trucks. The road’s closed now. They don’t know if there are more snipers out there.
From everything I’m hearing, the army and the cops are being “redeployed” to Seattle to “restore order.” And they’re recalling some of our troops home from Venezuela, but it sounds like that’s going to take a long time. Some reporters are speculating about how long it’s going to delay relief efforts in the actual disaster zone, and how many more people are going to die while they wait to be rescued.
I feel so bad for all these people, and guilty that my first thought wasn’t for them. We’re really gonna be stuck all winter. No doubt about that anymore. That mental needle I’ve talked about, it’s pointing 100 percent toward Mostar. We’re stranded. That’s it. Everything we do, everything we think about, has to be devoted to surviving.
At least we don’t have to worry about injury or exposure. That’s what the radio said will be the number one and number two causes of death out there. But for us it’s food.
Food.
Last night, over a dinner of rabbit stew, I showed Mostar my “calorie calendar.” Applying her ration plan to how much edible material we had, I figured we’d run out somewhere around Christmas Eve.
“Okay.” Mostar just nodded at what I thought was a devastating fact. “Good to know.”
“Good!” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “How is that good?”
Mostar chewed a mouthful of stew, winced at something, then spat a shard of bone into her napkin. “Good to know if we’re getting to that point with no relief, we can half our rations, then half them again. People have lived on a lot less for a lot longer. Trust me.”
She raised her stew mug, downing the last gulp, then ran her tongue around the inside border. “Bowls next time. Easier to lick.”
“But what about when our food does run out?” I pressed. “When there’s nothing.”
“Then we eat nothing.” Mostar poured the remaining water from her glass into her mug, covered the mug with her palm, then sloshed it around for a few seconds. “We can live for a month or so like that.”
She drank the cloudy contents, licked her palm, then added, “But it’ll probably never come to that, Katie, because by that time the garden should be ready for harvest.”
“Will it?” was all I could manage. “And how much can we expect to get from two sweet potatoes and half a handful of peas?”
“No idea.” Mostar shrugged, completely unfazed that the whole endeavor might have been a giant waste of calories. “But I’m sure some of our neighbors will have come around by then and even if they don’t have too much extra food to share, some of that food might have seeds for the garden. And”—she raised her well-washed mug to the window—“there’re always more opportunities out there.”
I saw the target of her toast was a skinny squirrel poking through our now-empty apple tree.
“I might be able to make more of those traps,” she mused, “but we’ve got to be careful that none of our neighbors step in one. We can’t afford to alienate anyone. Cooperation’s more important than a quick meal.”
I’m not so sure. There are a lot more rabbit stews out there. And how long could we live off just one deer? I know Mostar’s at least considered it. The way she looked at the doe sniffing around our yard.
That’s exactly how I looked at the buck Palomino was feeding.
As I watched the girl giving away more precious apple slices to that walking feast, my eye caught a couple squirrels just chowing down on the Boothes’ herb garden. Bobbi was at her kitchen window, doing dishes, I guess. She was watching the rodents with this pained expression. Was she afraid to chase them away while her neighbor was being so “kind and generous” to these poor defenseless creatures? Or was she genuinely conflicted, caught between ingrained ideology and the cold hard truth?
I don’t know, and right now I really don’t care. I know what I was thinking, and what I saw, and smelled! I thought maybe I’d go over there to save the herbs. I wasn’t going to be aggressive, just walk loudly enough to scare the squirrels, then claim ignorance and maybe later accept a belated thank-you. I was trying to do something nice. That’s all. But as I got closer to her house…
I know she saw me. Her head didn’t move but I saw her eyes flick in my direction. I know that’s why she closed her window, and the curtains. And as she did, the faintest breath of warm air from her kitchen wafted past my nose. Fried food. Hash browns.
Potatoes!
Bitch! Yes, I said it! Fucking liar! That’s why she’d been so uncomfortable when I’d asked her. She knew she had some. She knew and she lied!
And as I write this, I don’t know who I’m more angry at. Her or me. I could have confronted her about it. Knocked on her window, totally gone apeshit in her face. Or maybe just called her out in that cold, judgy, sarcastic way Mom used to use. “Oh hi, Bobbi, I just wanted to let you know I was trying to save your herb garden just now ’cause, you know, we gotta look out for each other, right? Sharing, pulling together. Community, right? RIGHT?”
Why didn’t I do that, do anything? Why do I never—
What the hell is Dan doing? Coming around the side of the house now. This giant, bamboo pole.
Wha
At this point the a ends with a long, deep squiggle that extends to the bottom of the page.
From my interview with Senior Ranger Josephine Schell.
Mrs. Holland’s probably too young to have seen Fantasia, but that’s what went through my mind when I saw the animals migrate…and freeze. Remember that scene, the plant-eaters smelling the T. rex? That’s what I saw, all those skinny, starved deer suddenly raising their heads to smell the air, just like Mrs. Holland described in her journal.
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Again, like with the bone fragments, I didn’t have the time or mental clarity to dwell on it. I do remember feeling sorry for them. I don’t think I’d ever seen so many animals look so hungry before. First the berry harvest, then having to flee. You could understand why so many of them were getting aggressive. I witnessed a couple squirrel fights that seemed to go on forever. Buddy of mine in another team saw two black bears just rippin’ the shit out of each other over an elk carcass. I kept praying I wouldn’t find a similar situation but with the corpse of a human refugee.
And that almost happened, not with a person, but a deer. I stumbled across this pack of coyotes gnawing on a skeleton that’d already been gnawed by something else. Coyotes are pretty wimpy by nature. They’ll almost never confront a large adult human. But this pack did. They stood their ground, growling and snapping at me. I don’t think they were looking to hunt me, but they woulda definitely fought for the last strips of meat on those bones. Even when I yelled back, made myself big, threw a couple rocks, and finally fired a shot in the air, it took the rest of my team showing up for those little buggers to finally bugger off. I’ve never, in my whole career, seen animals be that bold.
Shows you what hunger can do.
JOURNAL ENTRY #7 [CONT.]
I can’t stop shaking. Half a day later and my heart still won’t slow down. I’m glad I decided to keep writing in this journal. I know you won’t see it for a while, and I know it’s probably silly to pretend like I’m still writing it to you, but just the act of writing, putting everything down on paper where I can see it, is so helpful in organizing my thoughts.
And I have so much to organize from six hours ago when I got interrupted by Dan trying to clean the solar panels. This all goes back to last night, when Mostar and I were discussing the ration plan. As she was talking about the problems of making more rabbit traps, Dan said, “We got a bigger problem.”
He hadn’t really been listening, focused pensively on his tablet. “We’re running out of power.” He flipped the iPad around to face us. I recognized it as some kind of energy monitoring page, an icon of our house with the wall battery in yellow and the roof solar panels in orange. “I think the ash’s covered them.” He tapped the panels, which showed 25 percent. “Yours too.” He tilted the screen at Mostar and swiped over to her house. He explained that, normally, these “smart panels” would automatically signal the Cygnus maintenance team for immediate cleaning. But now…
“Do we really need electricity?” Mostar didn’t look too worried. “Losing the freezer means we’ll have to find other ways of preserving what we have, and eat first what we can’t. But trust me, when the power’s gone you realize what a luxury lightbulbs are.”
Dan countered with, “Not for the garden. When the shoots come up, they’re going to need a ton of artificial light, and warmth.” He explained that our heating system was electric, not gas, that all that homemade methane beneath our floor was only used for cooking and fireplaces. I asked, innocently, if the rain wouldn’t just wash the ash off our roof. Dan nodded, digesting what I’d said, which makes me realize now that it’s been so long since he’s actually done that with anything I’ve said.
He acknowledged I had a point, “but eventually, the rain’s gonna give way to snow.” He took a breath, then asked Mostar if she had a broom, and on her nod, perked up. “Great, I can just get up on the roof tomorrow and brush them off.”
“You can’t!” I surprised myself with how quickly that came out. “We…” I tried to find a “safe” answer. “We don’t have a ladder.”
“We can make one.” Dan was still positive, even enthusiastic. His eyes suddenly sparked with an idea. “The bamboo! I can cut some stalks, tie or tape them together and—”
“You’d get in trouble!” Okay, so maybe that wasn’t a lie. I did, do, always worry about getting in trouble, but it was still a “safe” answer and not the one I was really hiding. “The bamboo belongs to the whole community, and if we cut them down, won’t that…” I looked to Mostar for backup, and got nothing. Thanks, Mostar.
But off her silence, I said, “Maybe we can eat the bamboo!” It was a brilliant redirect, I thought, and honestly, a pretty good plan. “The shoots, we eat them all the time in ramen!” I actually don’t. I love ramen but I’ve always ordered it without the bamboo shoots. I’m sorry but they smell how I think horse manure would taste. Still, I tried to enlist Mostar again. “The neighbors might not mind us harvesting the shoots! And if we get enough, we might not even need the garden!”
I don’t think she meant to shoot me down. “Is this type of bamboo edible?”
Damn you, Mostar.
“I’ll just make a ladder.” Dan. The rise in his voice, the light in his eyes. “I can saw a few…do we have a saw?”
“But you’ll burn so many calories…,” I tried.
Dan didn’t hear me. “Maybe using the bread knife as a saw…”
“What if you fall!” There it was. The real reason I pushed back so hard. “There’s no doctor! And we can’t get you to a hospital! If you hit your head, break a leg…”
“What, you’re saying I’m not up to it?” Dan’s face, surprise verging on hurt. Dan’s not, how do I say this, the “athletic” type. And it’d never mattered, to either one of us, until now.
“She’s right.” Finally. Mostar nodded at me with glum recognition. “Injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you. That’s why most weapons of war are designed to injure instead of kill. Wounded are more of a drain than the dead.”
Um, okay, I could have done without the obscure military trivia, but her argument produced the exact reaction I hoped for, and feared. Dan’s face fell, his shoulders sagged. I swallowed as he sighed and looked down at the table. I remember thinking this would undo everything, his whole new positive, productive attitude. Popped like a bubble. Back to depression. Back to the damn couch.
But then, suddenly he reinflated, tapping furiously at the iPad. “Maybe I can work on the efficiency settings for the houses. And maybe”—his eyes widened—“no, no maybe…we all donate a percentage of our electricity to the Common House to help charge the delivery vehicles. Why can’t we share power with each other? Your house to ours?”
The last sentence was directed at Mostar, who shrugged. Dan smiled at himself. I could have cried with relief. “That’ll buy us some time to think of something.” Still smiling at the screen, he reached out to grab my hand. “We’ll think of something!”
And then he was on his feet, clearing all our dishes and rushing them over to the sink. “Black hole sun…,” singing above the rush of water, “won’t you come, and wash away the rain…” He was scrubbing away, head bouncing to his own rhythm.
Mostar smiling at his back, then at my unconsciously shocked expression, leaned in and whispered, “How?” I knew exactly what she was talking about.
“I don’t…,” I stammered. “I mean…when his business…”
“This isn’t business,” Mostar whispered, “this is life or death. This is when the real you comes out.” She took my hand. “This is when, as the saying goes, adversity introduces us to ourselves.”*1 Then she sat back, nodding proudly at my husband. “Nice to meet you, Danny Holland.”
“Wha’?” he asked over his shoulder, to which Mostar replied, “Nothing.”
“Cool.” Dan grinned back at us, dramatically drying a cup. “Don’t worry, I’ll think of something.”
And by this morning, when I was writing that last entry, I saw what “something” was.
Using our bread knife, Dan cut down the longest stalk of bamboo he could find, trimmed away the branches, then attached it to Mostar’s broom with some of our packing tape. And it works. The first storm of ash that settled on the car told me that he’d reached the highest panels on our roof. If only he’d remembered
to cover his nose and mouth! Dan went down coughing. So did I, when I got out of the car to help him. We coughed, sneezed, then laughed. It was a wonderful moment. Nice to meet you, Dan.
Then we heard someone scream.
Back behind the houses. Dan and I looked at each other, then ran into the alley between our home and the Perkins-Forsters’.
Palomino was still in the yard, alone at her apple tree. Effie and Carmen, grabbing each other’s hands, watched her from the back stoop. Nobody moved, nobody spoke.
A mountain lion! Long, skinny, with muddy paws and ash-covered fur. It stood right at the edge of the yard, eyes locked on Palomino.
What are you supposed to do! Make yourself bigger? Yell? Throw something? Run? What do you do when any mistake could be fatal?
Dan whispered, “Don’t move,” so close I could feel his warm breath on my ear. Palomino must have heard him because she turned in our direction. I could see Effie mouth something and hunch her shoulders toward her daughter. Carmen blocked her with one arm while lifting the other hand toward Palomino in a pained “stay still” gesture. But the girl wasn’t looking at her moms. Her eyes were on me. That expression. Fear. Pleading. I took a step toward her, then froze as the cat gave this low growl.
Palomino backed up half a step.
Effie shouted, “Stay still!” and the puma’s crouch deepened. The flesh of its mouth curled back, revealing these long, yellow fangs. The growl rose to a sharp hiss.
Palomino turned and ran.
A high-pitched “Stay!” from Carmen.
Everything happened so fast! I saw Palomino stoop under raised arms, Effie and Carmen running toward her, the cougar rising up, and then this pole, this long, thin, green stick streaking past my face to smack right into the animal’s ribs.