The real storm would come.
CHAPTER TEN
BIKES
SARAI HEALED QUICKLY and on one sunny day, while Bear slept in the sun, and Mirri drew unicorns in the dirt, Jem took out Sarai’s stitches. Clare watched as he pulled gently and the stitches came undone like a zipper.
“Wow,” said Clare.
“My mother the doctor.”
“Still wow.”
“She could put them in and take them out with one hand.”
Now Sarai only needed a little Tylenol to help her sleep, which Clare gave her from her own supply.
“For headaches?” Jem asked her.
“Cramps.”
Jem blushed.
Clare looked past Sarai and saw that the Cured-in-a-blue-dress was huddled next to the barn, gazing into the distance. From time to time Mirri, who was now drawing sad unicorns with sagging pockmarked faces, would turn and glance at her.
The birds were calling to each other. Pest had come, but nature went on. Fallon and the other towns and cities would slowly fail; rain and rot would bring down the buildings; creepers would cover the ruins. Nature would reassert itself until even the great highways were no more than paths through the wild. The era of the human race was over.
The Cured-in-a-blue-dress stood. Sarai and Mirri stopped playing and watched as she lurched around the side of the barn.
“What does she eat?” Sarai asked. “She comes and goes, but I never see her eat.”
“I don’t know,” said Jem. “And I’m not sure I want to.”
Food was a constant topic of conversation. Jem, Sarai and Mirri—and now Clare—worked constantly to maintain their supply. But three people, now four, went through a lot of food—and resources in Fallon were limited.
It seemed it was always time to scavenge.
They left the farmhouse early the day the stitches came out. Sarai and Mirri made sure that Clare had her own pair of rubber gloves, a kerchief for her mouth and Vick’s VapoRub to smear under her nose.
“Our scavenging costumes,” said Sarai.
In her few excursions alone, Clare had found foraging to be scary nasty work, often not worth the trip. In return for witnessing appalling horrors, Clare would get as little in return as a box of wormy cornflakes. Or everything would be covered in mold, or, in the refrigerator, she would find a mass of vegetables turned to a black soupy jello.
“Don’t worry,” said Mirri as they set out. “Jem keeps us out of the worst houses. He doesn’t want us desensitized.”
“I put that word on my vocab list,” said Sarai.
“Jem does all the really nasty stuff,” said Mirri. “He always goes into the houses first to see how much decomp there is. That’s what he calls it. Decomp.”
Clare thought, as she had before, that Jem was pretty tough for a chess player.
As they trundled onto the road with the wagons, Clare thought she saw movement out of the corner of her eye, but when she turned there was nothing. Sarai noticed the direction of her gaze.
“It’s the Cured-in-a-blue-dress,” said Sarai. “Sometimes she follows us.”
The first house they approached had its curtains drawn. A lot of people, it seemed, had wanted to shut out the outside world as they died. Their houses were like tombs.
“I’ll go with you, Jem,” said Clare when they stopped.
“I’ve sort of gotten used to it,” said Jem, “if you want to wait outside.”
“How bad is it?”
“Well, put on your gloves, and we’ll see.”
“You think I should use the Vicks?”
“Yeah.”
It was bad. The body of a young man lay half in and half out of the kitchen. He stank.
Then Clare saw movement.
“Jem. He’s alive.”
“No,” Jem said. “It’s the maggots. They can make a body look like it’s moving.”
“I feel a little sick.”
“We’ll keep the others out of here. It’s always harder when the bodies aren’t in bed. There’s way too much to see.”
But in many respects, the house was a winner. Someone had gone in for winter sports, and, besides ski equipment, they found down jackets, down vests, snow pants, neck warmers and woolen hats—some for children and some for adults.
“We’ll take some of it now and come back for more later,” Jem said.
“What if some of the children survived?”
“They didn’t.”
“You can’t be sure.”
“I checked when we first came in. They’re in the back bedroom.”
There wasn’t much else of use in the house: a bottle of ketchup; some pickles; a jar of peanut butter.
The bodies in the second house they checked were also tucked away in a bedroom, and so Mirri and Sarai came in too, but there didn’t seem to be much food.
“Look what I found,” said Mirri when she came out of the pantry.
They looked at her armload of cans.
“It’s cherry pie filling. Can you believe it?”
“Mirri—” Jem started to speak and then appeared to think better of it.
“Cherry pie filling is good. My mother used to let me eat it right out of the can. My mother—” Her eyes started to fill, and she looked down.
There was an awkward silence. It was Jem who broke it.
“I love cherry pie filling,” he said.
Sarai just thumped Mirri on the back.
After they got back to the farm and stowed the food, Clare went down to the meadow, Bear at her heel. The soft afternoon light cast long shadows, and the smell of the grass was sweet. A movement caught Clare’s eye, and she turned around in time to see the unmistakable figure of Mirri coming down the steps of the porch. Clare almost called to her before she noticed that Mirri had something in her hands. Mirri kept looking nervously over her shoulder at the house as she ran to the nearby copse of trees.
Clare slowly sat down next to Bear and buried her hand in his thick coat.
Mirri stood with her back against a tree, and Clare could now see that she was carrying a small basket.
There was a flicker of blue in the trees, moving rapidly among them. Mirri held out the basket stiffly, and the Cured-in-the-blue-dress took it from her. As she did, she hurriedly backed off, as if to run. But Mirri raised her hand, slowly and gently, and the Cured-in-the-blue-dress submitted, and came forward and let Mirri’s hand rest on her shoulder.
The strange moment of intimacy over, the scared woman turned and ran, and the vivid blue of her dress flickered away between the trees.
Clare stayed still until Mirri had returned to the house.
When Clare herself returned, Mirri and Sarai were gathered around Jem, who had just returned from the local library with some kind of survivalist manual. On its cover a man dressed in camouflage held a gun in one hand and a dead turkey in the other.
“We’ll have to read fast,” Jem said. “It’s due tomorrow.”
“That’s a joke, right?” said Sarai.
“Right,” said Jem. “No librarian.” He flipped through the pages. “There’s an awful lot of stuff we don’t need here. Where to get automatic weapons, for example. We’d probably shoot ourselves. What provisions to stock up on in anticipation of an emergency. It’s a little late for that.”
“Anything useful?” Mirri asked.
“Maybe. There’s a section on gutting and preparing deer and wild fowl, as well as a section on finding edible mushrooms.”
“Finding mushrooms sounds fun,” said Mirri.
“The man on the cover does not look like a mushroom specialist,” said Clare.
“You have no trust,” said Jem.
Later Clare took the book from Jem, and she flipped through it. On the last page was a list of medications to stock up on, and someone had scrawled, right across the list, ‘As many SYLVERs as you can get.’
AFTER LUNCH, MIRRI announced that she was going out. “I left a Pretty Pony where I was playing this morn
ing.”
“Take Bear,” said Clare. But Bear would not leave her, and the image of Mirri using a little leash to try and drag along a determined dog more than double her size made Clare smile.
“I’ll be okay,” said Mirri.
Mirri came back half an hour later. Clare noticed that she did not have a Pretty Pony with her.
CLARE KEPT AN eye on Mirri the following day, but Mirri didn’t attempt to slip away. Sarai and Clare went to work in the garden.
“Jem’s in charge,” said Sarai as they harvested tomatoes.
“Of course he’s in charge.”
“Even though he’s younger than you are.”
“Age has nothing to do with it.” Clare really meant it. While she had wallowed in grief and self-pity at the cabin, Jem had saved and kept civilized two scared little girls.
As she picked tomatoes, she thought about how it had been before. The midnight runs to Pizza One with the cheerleading squad, where they would discuss the new cheer formation, or whether they should dress alike for a whole week, or if Hannah Preston had cheated on her boyfriend.
None of that mattered anymore.
And it occurred to her that maybe that was true for all of them. Each of them had a past that was moving, inexorably, to the vanishing point.
Later that morning, Clare, Bear padding behind her, found Mirri in the bedroom stuffing a blanket into a bag.
“What are you doing?” she asked mildly.
“Nothing.”
“You’re stuffing a blanket into a bag.”
“So what?”
“I don’t mean to sound like your mother; I was just curious.”
“I know you’re not my mother,” said Mirri, and she dropped both bag and blanket and walked away.
Clare was sure the blanket wouldn’t be there when she next went into the bedroom.
Back in the kitchen, Clare found Jem staring into a big cardboard box.
“Cheese Whiz,” he said.
Clare peered in and counted. “Fifteen cans of Cheese Whiz.”
“I don’t remember finding this,” said Jem.
“I did,” said Clare. “Two houses ago.”
“Cheese Whiz is disgusting.”
“You’re wrong. Cheese Whiz is good. We used to squirt it right into our mouths before a football game.”
“That’s just gross.”
“Instant energy. Anyway, I bet you had a routine before a chess match.”
“True. But it didn’t involve ingesting cheese products.”
Bear nudged at Clare for attention. “Sorry, Bear,” she said, and scratched his ear.
“Is that dog of yours ever going to like me?” asked Jem.
“He’s not a wag-tail kind of dog. But he hasn’t taken your throat out yet. I think that’s a good sign.”
Sarai and Mirri burst into the kitchen.
“We were in the barn,” said Sarai, “and we found bikes.”
“There’re a bunch of them,” said Mirri.
“We’re busy,” said Jem.
“Don’t be so grown up,” Mirri said.
“There was a hand pump,” said Sarai. “For the tires. We got one of the bikes ready. Mirri rode all around the barn. Until she fell off.”
“I hit a bump. I didn’t just fall off.”
Jem sighed. “How are you on a bike, Clare? Can Cheese Whiz wait?”
Clare smiled. “I could live on a bike. And there’s a dairy farm we could check out that’s a short ride over.”
“Then let’s go,” Jem said.
The bikes were behind an ancient horse cart. Sarai picked a green one; Mirri’s was red. Jem oiled the chain of the blue bike he found and gave it to Clare with a smile before taking the last one, which was a battered silver.
Jem led the way down the path from the farm; Clare took up the rear; Bear loped along beside her. She looked behind and saw that the Cured-in-the-blue-dress had come out to the very edge of the meadow and was watching them. Her dress billowed like a sail.
It took them no time at all to leave Fallon behind. The rolling hills gave way to flatter terrain. Soon hay meadows alternated with overripe wheat fields. The heavy heads of wheat had spilled open, and Clare could see swaths in the fields where deer must have fed and slept.
They passed a field of withered, rag-brown corn, and they careened past a church and a series of small wooden crosses placed every quarter mile along the road. The first read ‘GET,’ the second, ‘RIGHT,’ the third, ‘WITH,’ and the fourth, ‘GOD.’
As they sped downhill, the wind licked at the sweat on Clare’s face. Bear’s tongue lolled and his jaws were flecked with foam, but he still had no trouble keeping up with them. Up ahead, Jem had raised his arms and was peddling with his hands in the air. He shouted something before coming to a sudden halt. Sarai almost rammed into him; Mirri swerved off the road; Clare skidded to a stop.
They were beside a miniature golf course. It was overgrown, but all the main features were there: the windmill, the moat, the sand trap, the alligator pit.
It took them only a few minutes to break out the clubs and balls from behind a boarded-up counter. They weeded the course and then played a few rounds. And it didn’t matter that the sails of the windmill didn’t go around or that there wasn’t any water in the moat or that the motorized alligators didn’t snap at them. They laughed and made up rules, and when it was Mirri’s turn and her ball almost made it to the hole, but instead hovered at the lip, Jem bent down and gently flicked it in.
Bear looked at Clare with his head cocked to one side.
“I would love to know what he’s thinking,” she said.
When they were ready to go, they carefully replaced the clubs and balls and then got back on their bikes.
“I wish we could do that every day,” said Mirri.
“We’ll come back,” said Clare.
But they never did.
THE ROAD BECAME windy and lined with trees as they cycled up a gentle but long slope. Clare thought of the dairy farm ahead—the long, low milking sheds, the rambling farmhouse, the big barn.
For some reason, she felt uneasy.
When they reached the top of the slope, they stopped. The farm was spread out below them, but it had clearly been abandoned, probably sometime before Pest. The house was almost a complete ruin, and, even at that distance, Clare could see that the land had begun to reclaim the milking shed. The barn stood at an odd angle.
“Let’s go back,” Sarai said.
“Come on,” said Mirri and hopped on her little red bicycle. “I just want to peek into the barn. Once.” She started down the slope.
Clare looked up just as some clouds covered the sun.
“This is wrong,” she said. And before Jem and Sarai could even get on their bikes, Clare was a blue streak rapidly gaining on Mirri. Bear was right behind her. They arrived at the farm in a dead heat. Clare reached out and took hold of Mirri’s handlebars.
“Stop,” she said.
Mirri smiled at her, and then the smile faded.
“Are you mad at me?”
“No. But let’s wait for the others.”
“You were really fast,” Sarai said to Clare as she and Jem arrived.
“I forgot you’re a powerhouse,” said Jem. “I’m going to be very sore tomorrow.”
The rotting barn loomed above them.
“Let’s go in,” said Mirri. Clare noticed that the sun was getting low in the sky; they were going to have to ride hard to get home before dark.
“I’ll go first,” said Clare. Jem made a move as if to preempt her and then stopped himself.
“Sorry,” he said.
As Clare opened the door, Bear tried to block her with his body.
“Down and stay,” she said, and he obeyed.
The light in the barn was dim, and the air was still. Some twenty-odd sacks hung from the rafters. Clare assumed for a second that she must be looking at some farm crop drying. Then her vision cleared.
“Let’s ge
t out of here,” she said. “Now.”
Sarai and Mirri hadn’t had time to understand what they were seeing, but then Clare heard Jem suck in a breath.
“We’d better take a closer look,” he said. “Sarai, Mirri, you wait for us outside.” The girls did as he said without a challenge, but Clare saw Mirri look back over her shoulder. And she saw Mirri’s expression change.
CLARE AND JEM walked among the hanging bodies. Men. Women. Girls. Boys. Some marked with Pest. Some not.
“What happened here?” asked Clare. She examined a corpse with paint splashes on its hands and clothes.
“I think they helped each other die,” said Jem.
Clare raised her eyes. On the far wall someone had painted, in large scrawled letters, ‘NO CURE.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE GOLD HOUSE
MIRRI AND SARAI were unusually subdued for a few days, and they didn’t want to go out on the bikes.
“I don’t like surprises,” said Mirri.
“Why don’t we go to the yellow house?” asked Sarai. “There might be good stuff there.” She turned to Clare to explain. “We passed this big yellow house coming in to Fallon, but we didn’t stop.”
“It wasn’t yellow,” said Mirri. “It was gold.”
“Yellow,” said Sarai.
“Gold,” said Mirri. “With a front like a skull.”
“A little scary.”
“But gold.”
“How about going now?” said Jem.
They tightened the wheels on their little wagons and set off for the gold (or yellow) house. They could really do with a fruitful scavenge—it seemed as if they had eaten almost everything in Fallon and were running out of places to explore for food.
Clare noticed that Mirri was looking towards the wood. As she followed Mirri’s line of sight, she caught a flash of blue moving through the trees.
“Why is she following us?” asked Clare.
“She likes to be near us,” Mirri said. “She doesn’t mean any harm.”
“Maybe. But we need to tell Jem she’s here.” As Clare did so, Mirri looked at her sorrowfully, as if she’d committed some kind of small betrayal.
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