How We Became Wicked

by Alexander Yates

  “Honey,” her mom hissed, “get back upstairs!”

  “Can you walk?” Natalie asked.

  “I can’t,” her mother said. “Upstairs!”

  From just outside came the crunch of footsteps, and a long shape darkened the partially open window. “You guys,” the wicked man said, “I think that today is the day. I think everything is going to finally work out for me.” Then, to Natalie’s horror, he shoved the narrow mouth of the rifle through the food slot and fired off another round. The sound in the enclosed space was deafening, and sparks burst here and there as the bullet ricocheted around the room. Natalie just stood there. She could feel the bullet in the air as it traveled around her in a jagged, angular orbit. Now passing by her ear. Now bouncing beside her foot. It seemed like the first bullet hadn’t finished its flight before her grandfather fired again, and again, blindly, pinging shots between the generator and the air compressor. Her mother was screaming for Natalie to move, but somehow she couldn’t. She stood frozen in the center of the room, locked in a moving cage of sparks and metal. She was going to die—Natalie was as sure of it as she’d ever been of anything. She was going to die when she’d hardly lived a fraction of a life, and all of it on this tiny heap of rocks in the sea. She wanted to close her eyes, but she was too frightened to even do that. What a bitter last feeling this was to have. The surprise to learn that you’re a coward.

  Suddenly Natalie’s mom was on her feet, her bad ankle bent oddly beneath her. She grabbed Natalie by her shirt and pushed her down upon the concrete behind the generator. Then she threw herself on top of her. It would have winded Natalie, if she’d had any wind left in her. The shots kept coming. They whistled and pinged about the engine room like a swarm of angry singers. One of the bullets bounced to a stop right in front of Natalie’s nose, lying there on the floor hot and spent. Then, just as abruptly as he’d started shooting, her grandfather stopped again.

  “How about now,” he asked, “did I kill either of you?”

  CHAPTER 13

  Hello!

  NATALIE AND HER MOTHER STAYED huddled and silent behind the generator for the rest of the night. Her grandfather remained outside for a time, calling their names. But as dawn approached, his attention drifted, and he wandered off.

  “I’m so sorry,” Natalie said, her voice hoarse with thirst.

  “This was my stupid idea,” her mother said. She shifted her weight to one side. “I’m the one who should say sorry.”

  “I just froze.”

  “You didn’t—” Her mother caught herself. “You won’t next time.”

  She really sounded like she believed it, which made it easier for Natalie to believe it too. Off in the distance they began to hear a sharp, brassy clang. Her grandpa had returned to the bunkhouse. He was fussing with their pots and pans.

  “Your ankle is broken, isn’t it?” Natalie said.

  “It is,” her mother said.

  They were silent. Nothing much else to say about that.

  Morning light poured through the open window. Slowly but surely the stagnant air began to warm again. Despite that, Natalie had stopped sweating. Her mother had too. She was also panting, even though she hadn’t moved in hours.

  “There’s a breeze upstairs,” Natalie said. “Can you make it?”

  Her mother thought it over for a moment. “We’d probably better try,” she agreed.

  She was able to get upright easy enough, but walking was more complicated. The slightest press of weight on her broken ankle was agony. Carefully Natalie led her mother up the spiral staircase, supporting her weight as she hopped from one step to the next. The skin of her mom’s palms felt swollen and tight. If going this long without a drink was hard on Natalie, she could hardly imagine how it must feel for a pregnant woman.

  “Do you know how many he used?” her mother asked as they made their way slowly through the dark kitchen. “I lost count.”

  “How many bullets?”

  “Yeah.” Her mother bumped into the fridge with her hip as they passed by, and the plastic forks inside chattered like teeth. “I’m pretty sure . . .” She trailed off, lips smacking. “Well, you tell me first.”

  Natalie had to think it over. Her grandfather had fired a shot at the stars, a shot at the storm glass, and a shot through the bedroom window. But then . . . how many into the engine room? Six maybe? Seven? The sound had drummed and doubled against the walls, so she couldn’t be sure.

  “About ten altogether?” she guessed.

  Her mother frowned. “I’d hoped it was more than that. We can’t go outside until he’s used them all up.” Only ten bullets fired meant that there were still at least ten more to go. Natalie found something about this thought grimly funny. For the first time in the history of their lives on Puffin Island, they were looking forward to running out of something. The way things had panned out, Natalie would have done better to let her useless dad take the rifle after all.

  At least it was getting cooler as they climbed. A fresh breeze greeted them in her grandfather’s bedroom, blowing in through the shattered window. “That’s the stuff,” her mother said, sighing deeply as she lowered herself down onto the mattress.

  They could still hear him chattering on the rocks below. His voice burbled up, carried on the wind. “I know you’re in there, my little darlings,” he said. “I know that you’re hiding from me.” Strange—he sounded too far away to be talking to them. A moment later Natalie heard a creaking, metallic crash, followed by a terrified squawking. Her grandpa must have been talking to the hens. He’d found their hen coop, and the precious, scrawny little chickens inside. She rushed for the window to get a look.

  “You stay away from there,” her mother snapped.

  “We should at least try to stop him,” Natalie said. It was horrible. She could hear the tin roof of the hen coop groaning and the wire walls scraping loudly across the rocks. The chickens wailed from inside. Her grandfather giggled. “If he sees me, he might get distracted,” she said. “Maybe some of them will get away.”

  “We’re not reminding him that we’re in here,” her mother said firmly.

  Natalie didn’t have time to argue before she heard a metallic snapping. Then there was a scramble of wing beats and squawking. A few more shots rang out from the rifle, and the birds fell silent.

  “I’ll huff and I’ll puff!” her grandpa sang out from below. “And I’ll pull out your little lungs.” From the sounds that followed, it seemed like he was doing just that.

  Natalie slumped down to the floor, her back pressed against the wall. Those hens meant more than just eggs to her. Next to the puffins, they were the only company her family had on this horrible little island.

  “There are more out there,” her mother said from atop the bed. “It’s a big world. Plenty of chickens left in it.”

  Natalie found her optimism nauseating. “Well, that’s good,” she said, regretting her sarcasm immediately. Still, she couldn’t help it. “If that’s the case, then everything will work out super for us.”

  “Glad you see it my way,” her mother said, ignoring her tone. She blinked, her eyelids pale for lack of water.

  Not a minute later, she was asleep.

  • • •

  They didn’t have time to sit around and wait for Natalie’s grandpa to run out of bullets. Her mom, and the baby inside her, needed water now. Who knew how much longer they could go until permanent damage set in?

  Natalie moved quietly. She scooted along the tower wall and peered out the window. Her grandfather had wandered down to the little cemetery, where he tried unsuccessfully to yank out the gravestones. Then he went to the greenhouse and busied himself digging holes in the vegetable beds. Finally, when he tired of this, he wandered off to the western shore. The glass village of Goldsport was faintly visible on the horizon, and her grandfather began waving his hands in the air in some kind of hopeless attempt to get their attention. He began hollering a name—Henry. Natalie had heard her grandpa use it
before, but she had no idea who Henry was supposed to be. For all Natalie knew, he could be alive or dead, real or imaginary, a person or a puffin or a moose.

  “I’m right here, Henry!” he was calling. “If you can hear me, clap twice!”

  Natalie wasn’t likely to get a better chance than this. She snatched the lighthouse keys from her mother’s pocket and headed softly downstairs. There she cracked open the iron door and slipped out of the tower and into the sharp midday sun. Locking the tower behind her, she approached the bunkhouse. The scene that greeted her there looked like the aftermath of a flood. The bed lay out in the open, its coiled blankets rigid with dirt and dew. Clothes were scattered everywhere, carried from the bunkhouse and dropped once her grandfather had grown bored of them. The hen coop lay mangled on its side. Bright splashes of dust-crusted blood were only clues as to where the hens themselves had met their ends. A single, giant word—HELLO!—was painted in jam across the greenhouse wall.

  With her head ducked low, Natalie crossed the yard, stepping over the remains of their shortwave radio and into the bunkhouse. The situation was even worse than she’d imagined. It seemed as though, in just one day of freedom, her grandfather had been able to ruin every single thing they owned. Fishing poles lay snapped in half, tools had been scattered willy-nilly, and candles had been stomped into crumbling smears of wax. Natalie’s lobsters had been put into a large pot set atop the stove, where they clicked their claws angrily. Grandpa had either forgotten what the next step was in preparing food, or else decided at the last minute that he wasn’t hungry. The only evidence that he’d eaten anything at all was an open sack of sugar on the dining table, surrounded by handprints in white crystals.

  But there was no time to take stock or obsess over their losses. Quick as she could, Natalie picked up a pair of large jerricans and brought them outside. Twisting open the spigots on the rain barrels, she grabbed a quick mouthful of water for herself—she had to fight the urge to put her lips right on the spigot and just lie down beneath it—and then set the cans to fill. Meanwhile, she ducked back into the bunkhouse, made a pouch of her shirt, and stuffed it with as many cans of crab and mackerel and peas and fruit as she could carry. When she went back outside again, the jerricans had filled. Natalie screwed on their caps, closed the spigots, and hauled her bounty back to the lighthouse tower, depositing everything on the concrete floor of the engine room.

  Her first instinct was to run upstairs with one of the jerricans and wake her mother for a drink. But when Natalie peeked back through the iron door, she saw that her grandpa was still down on the western shore, hollering at distant Goldsport. There was no telling how long it would be before Natalie found another chance to raid the bunkhouse. So once again she locked the iron door behind her and raced across the stony yard, into her home.

  Now that she’d salvaged the essentials, Natalie was more deliberate. She hooked up another jerrican to the rain barrels outside—they couldn’t have too much water—and while it filled she conducted a thorough search of the bunkhouse. On second inspection, the damage didn’t actually seem so bad. Her grandpa had made a mess, but he hadn’t broken all that much. Their stock of dry goods remained mostly untouched. The lobster traps had been stacked into a whimsical, teetering pillar, but they were also undamaged. And while he had wrecked their shortwave radio, he hadn’t discovered the chest of batteries, copper wire, and spare parts. Best of all, Natalie found that the knife block was right where it should be in the kitchen area. All of the knives were accounted for.

  Natalie picked one of their mesh fishing nets up off the floor and used that as a sack. Into the net she stuffed clean clothes, a crank lantern, and their full supply of disinfectant. She was just about to head back to the tower when she remembered the box under her mother’s bed. It was where her mom kept all of Natalie’s baby stuff. She hurried up to the loft and was relieved to see that her grandpa hadn’t found it. Natalie pulled out her old bottle, a tiny blanket with little felt bears on it, and a few vacuum-sealed packets of dehydrated baby formula. The stuff was ancient, but it was probably still okay. Every once in a while her father used to tear open a packet and mix it with powdered cocoa to make hot chocolate. Speaking of old stuff—that reminded Natalie to grab the prenatal vitamins from her mother’s nightstand. The pills dated back to the world before the wickedness, and they’d crumble to chalk between your fingers if you weren’t careful. Still, her mom took them every morning as an act of faith—optimism in action.

  Natalie finished loading her net and headed back down into the common room. She was just about to leave the bunkhouse when a sound in the kitchen brought her up short. It was a rather feeble scratching, coming from an open cupboard beneath the sink. Natalie bent down and peeked inside. A fluffy, round shape stood cowering in the darkened cubby. One of their hens had survived! The bird was shaking all over, but she seemed unhurt. Natalie’s joy took her by surprise. She picked the hen up and squeezed her to her chest. She pressed her face into the downy tuft of feathers on the hen’s nape.

  “Good girl,” Natalie whispered.

  “Hey, you haven’t seen my book, have you?” Natalie froze. Her grandfather. His voice was clear as a bell. He was just behind her, standing in the open doorway of the bunkhouse. Blocking it.

  Stupid.

  So, so stupid. How had she not heard him? Carefully, Natalie set the hen down on the floor, where she scurried back into the open cupboard. Then she turned to face her grandfather. He still had the rifle, but it was slung across his back. With any luck, he’d forgotten that it was there. With any luck, the fact that he wanted to murder her had slipped his mind.

  But when had Natalie ever had that? She cursed herself—she shouldn’t have spent so much time inside. She should have been smart enough not to need luck.

  “Your what?” she asked, smiling for all she was worth.

  “My book.” Her grandfather’s eyes went from Natalie to the mess he’d made. “I couldn’t find my book anywhere.”

  “Your book,” Natalie repeated. She took a half step backward and slipped one of her hands behind her. Her fingers found the edge of the countertop and then walked their way up the side of the knife block.

  “Of course,” Natalie said. “If you tell me what book you’re reading, maybe I can help you look for it.”

  “Not my book for reading,” he said, dismissing the idea with a scowl. “My book for writing. My diary book.”

  “I see,” Natalie said. Her fingers closed on the handle of one of the knives behind her back, and she waited. If the fancy struck him, how long would it take for him to unsling that rifle? Could Natalie get to her grandfather in that amount of time?

  And even if she could, then what?

  “I’ve had a great day!” he carried on, gazing over the tumult in the bunkhouse with satisfaction. “I want to write it all down. I always forget stuff, and I don’t want to forget any of this.”

  “Yeah, you probably should write it down, then,” Natalie said. Her fingers grew damp on the knife handle. The lobsters scuttled about on the cold stove, sloshing water out of their pot. From inside the dark cupboard, the chicken clucked.

  “Well.” Her grandpa sighed. “Be sure to tell me if you find it.” And with that he turned and dissolved back into the sunlit yard.

  Natalie nearly collapsed. She counted her grandfather’s paces as he walked back in the direction of the little graveyard. As soon as she judged him far enough away, she dumped the knife block into her net, snatched the surviving hen, grabbed the overflowing jerrican, and raced to the lighthouse as fast as her legs could take her. Her grandpa noticed and watched her go.

  “I could give you a hand with that!” he called.

  “No, thanks!” Natalie hollered back.

  Then she arrived at the lighthouse, went inside, and locked the iron door behind her. She fell right down onto the concrete floor, her back up against the cold metal of the door. She was either catching her breath or hyperventilating. The tears in her eye
s were either from relief or embarrassment or panic.

  Pull your shit together, the chicken said, looking up at her with disgust. You’ve got to do better next time.

  CHAPTER 14

  Sister

  IT TOOK A LONG TIME to wake her mother up. Longer than Natalie would have liked. She had to grab her by the arms and pull her up into a sitting position just to get her eyes open. But once her mother had swallowed a few careful sips of water, she perked up. Natalie watched her mom’s face change as she looked from her favorite tin mug in her own hand to the full jerrican sitting on the floor beside the bed, as she reasoned how any of these things possibly could have made it into the lighthouse. For a moment she seemed on the brink of scolding Natalie for her recklessness. But instead her mother only asked, “Did anyone get hurt?”

  “No,” Natalie said.

  “That’s good,” her mom said, pausing to drink again.

  The two of them sat there silently for a long time. Natalie kept refilling the mug, and they traded sips on the edge of the bed. She brought up a jar of cooked crab apples, and they shared it, bite for bite. Natalie could almost feel the sugary syrup trickling into her blood. The sweet, cooked apples somehow even made the water taste wetter.

  “Honey,” her mother said. “I think you should prepare for the fact that you might have to go out there again.”

  Natalie just blinked at her. This was not the reaction she expected. “I’ve got a lot more food and water down in the engine room,” Natalie reassured her. “I think we can just wait Grandpa out.”

  But her mother shook her head. “That’s not what I’m talking about. I mean . . . when your sister comes. And believe me, she’s coming soon. . . .” She trailed off. Natalie considered asking about that word, “sister,” but decided against it.

  “What I’m saying is, I don’t know if my leg will be better by then. I don’t even know if I’ll make it through the—”