by David Kazzie
“You go,” she said. “I’ll be right behind you.”
He nodded, his eyes wide open, his gaze fixed on the open window, the reality of their situation settling in on them. Seconds ticked by, but he made no move toward the ladder. He was gnawing on his lower lip, a sure sign of indecision in the boy.
“Sweetie, we have to get out of here.”
He nodded again but he remained rooted to the spot. The smell of smoke grew stronger.
“Just hold tight, and take one step at a time.”
“I can’t. It’s too high.”
Her chin dropped, and a sigh of sadness escaped from her throat. Once again, decisions she had made long ago were coming back to haunt her.
“It’s OK.”
“Are you sure?”
“They’re hungry. We’ll give them some food and they’ll go away.”
They went back out to the bedroom and made their way to the door. She didn’t want to bring Will down with her, but the setting of the fire had left her little choice. Besides, did it even matter if people knew he’d been born after the plague?
“I’m coming out!” she announced.
“Nice and easy,” the voice said. “Hands on your head. No one has to get hurt.”
After draping the M4’s shoulder strap around her neck, she placed her hands on her head and motioned Will to the same. They stepped gingerly into the hallway and then carefully made their way down the darkened stairwell, one step at a time. In the gloom, she could make out the outlines of several figures waiting at the bottom of the stairs. Her heart was in her throat, as there was nothing stopping these people from murdering them where they stood. That was the world now; these people could simply kill them and leave their bodies to rot here in the foyer of this half-million-dollar house.
As they reached the landing, the group retreated slightly, making room for Rachel and Will. The foyer was dark, but not completely black, illuminated by lanterns the group was carrying. She counted six of them, four men and two women, all of them frightfully thin.
They were armed with handguns, aimed directly at them. It was an unsettling situation to be in, but the presence of the women reassured her a bit. Will pressed close against her, his body trembling. One was holding a thick piece of wood that was smoking heavily. Dammit. The house wasn’t on fire. It had been a ruse designed to flush them out.
“What do we have here?” the man on the far left asked. “A little family?”
He was the one who’d done all the talking earlier. He was short, only about an inch taller than Rachel, and very thin. He wore a thick beard, which covered up a face that had once been full but was now droopy with sallow skin. Several teeth were missing from his grill. The whole group bore scars of malnourishment and starvation, sharp collarbones pushing against skin and clothes that hung too loosely on underfed frames.
“How old are you, boy?” the man asked.
“Fourteen,” Will said, a fiction they had agreed on.
“Kind of small for fourteen, ain’t ya?”
Will shrugged his shoulders as only a real teenager could.
“Whatever. Get the bag,” the man said, nudging the woman standing next to him.
The woman approached Rachel and carefully worked the backpack off, one shoulder strap at a time.
“Can you leave us something?” she asked.
The woman leaned in close.
“Sorry,” she whispered. She gently squeezed Rachel’s upper arm.
“Here’s the deal,” the man said as the woman handed him the backpack. “If there’s food in here, everyone walks away happy. If there isn’t, well, let’s hope we don’t have to cross that bridge.”
He crouched and sifted through the bag, squealing a bit as he did so.
“Anything?” asked one of the others.
“Ravioli, three cans, tuna, eight cans. Energy gels.”
Will’s stomach growled loudly, silencing the group.
The man looked up from the bag.
“We’re not bad people,” the man said to Rachel. “You get that, right?”
She didn’t reply.
“We ain’t eaten in a week,” he said. He licked his dry lips. “A week. I hate to do this to you folks, but, you know, it is what it is.”
Indeed.
“Search the house,” he said, directing the others.
“There’s nothing else.”
The man and one of the women kept watch over Rachel and Will as the others confirmed what Rachel had told them. Everything they had was in that blue LL Bean backpack. Once upon a time, she and Will had been one of the Haves in a world of Have-Nots. Not because they were good or special or heroic or brave, but only because they’d had the dumb luck to find the warehouse at precisely the right time with the right combination of people and weapons to take it and keep it. And now that was over.
“Don’t try and come after us,” the man warned.
The man looked at his group and nodded toward the door. One by one, they left, the house emptying out until Rachel and Will were alone in the foyer.
18
They rode.
On bikes they rode west, out of Omaha, skirting the ruins of their warehouse to the south. The decision to ride bicycles had not been made easily; she worried it could leave them exposed, run them up into a dangerous situation they hadn’t had time to prepare for. But walking meant taking far more time to cover the same territory, and that was a luxury she and Will did not have. They needed to find food.
It was only about fifty miles from Omaha to Lincoln, but in their weakened condition, they had could only manage a few miles a couple times a day. The rest of the time they spent resting or foraging the plains for edible vegetation. They had taken to eating grasses and hard berries, Rachel hopefully remembering what they could safely eat. One evening, she had guessed incorrectly and they were both up half the night with diarrhea, which had probably put them farther behind on their nutritional requirements than if they had just gone without.
She had transitioned to a new stage of hunger, one she hadn’t experienced before. The end of the previous stage had been a constant gnawing in her belly, the shakes that accompanied the dropping blood sugar, the inability to focus for long stretches of time, but deep down a long-ago programmed sense of knowing a balm for what ailed her was coming soon. Never in her life had she gone more than a day or two without food, not even after they’d abandoned the farm in Kansas. Back then, canned goods were readily available, as the impact of the climate change had not really hit home yet.
But now it had broken free into some other dimension of need, of desire, even of lust. It was animalistic, primal, irrational, buried down deep in her DNA, some line of code crafted long ago that worked perfectly, executing, running, warning. You need to eat, Rachel, you need to eat, or you will die. They passed by barren bushes and trees and dead grasses and her body yearned for them anyway, for the flowering plants that had once been there. She had abandoned all other thought processes in service of this one great pulsing need.
Eat.
Her worry that they would stumble across an Evergreen search party hunting for them quickly fell by the wayside. The world was too big, the land overlaid with too many roads to make crossing paths with someone anything more than the longest of longshots. In this world, once gone, it seemed, you were gone.
The road cut straight through the flat endless plains, broken up only by the tiny hamlets peppering the Nebraska landscape. The plains were flat and endless, the horizon broken up by faded billboards and utility poles, the drooping power lines an endless series of smirks against the landscape. As they continued west, Rachel couldn’t help but wonder if she would ever come back this way again. Never had she felt so lost, adrift.
On their fourth day, they reached the little town of Greenwood, Nebraska, the two-lane road rolling up into the town’s quaint downtown area. Mother Nature’s hardiest soldiers had long been at work here, giving the once-picturesque main drag a greenish coat. Weeds and sc
raggly bushes grew haphazardly from cracks in the road and sidewalks, vines crawling up and around mailboxes and street signs. As was their practice, they stopped at the edge of the town and hid the bikes. It was early afternoon, the weak sun slowly sliding toward the western horizon.
This was the fourth town they’d come across. She always felt a little better when they came to a town, if only for the hint of civilization. A strange thing, given that the greatest danger lay in places like this, where people would gather and build and defend.
What struck Rachel was the desolation of it all. It was very easy, too easy, to picture herself and Will as the last two people left on Earth. They weren’t too far away from that as it was, but the emptiness of the plains, the land flash-frozen in time, made her head spin a little. Two little ships bobbing along the surface of a vast terrestrial ocean, no beginning, no middle, no end.
She didn’t expect anything in a burg this small, but hope had a funny way of messing with you. The next pantry, the next cabinet or closet would be hiding a case of canned black beans or spaghetti or a two-pound bag of beef jerky.
“Remember, Spoon,” Rachel whispered. “Eyes wide open.”
“I’m hungry,” he replied. At least he was whispering.
“I’m working on it, buddy.”
Then she tapped her index finger against her lips. This time he nodded silently.
Rachel held a pair of binoculars to her eyes and scanned the landscape ahead. There were a handful of buildings fronting the main drag. A law office. A dry cleaner. The town newspaper. A diner. A drug store. Main Street, U.S.A. A handful of long-abandoned vehicles lined each side of the street, all rusted and resting on flat tires, the radials dried and cracked. The windshields were brown from years of accumulated grime. She scanned the rooftops for signs of spotters, forgotten beer cans, lawn chairs, empty cigarette packs. Nothing.
She packed away the binoculars.
Anxiety prickled her. There it was. It was part of her now, endlessly coloring their lives. It seasoned her soul, her every waking hour, her restless sleep. Post-apocalyptic road warrior that she was, she would never get entirely used to the constant threat of danger surrounding them, made worse by her constant fear for Will’s safety. She remembered the parenting culture wars that had raged online before the plague, helicopter parents and a ridiculous debate about whether kids should be allowed to walk to the park by themselves. God, they had been so stupid, so naïve. Scared of their shadows. She wondered what kind of mother she would have been in a world where Medusa had never happened. She wouldn’t have the perspective of having been through it, of not knowing if she would be able to find enough food to stave off starvation for yet another day.
“Stay behind me,” Rachel said to Will.
They crept up Main Street, edging along the sidewalk that materialized at the border of downtown. As they moved westward, Rachel noticed a sharp contrast in the coloring of the building’s exterior walls; from the ground to her knees, the walls were quite a bit darker than they were higher up, suggesting a flood had ravaged the downtown area at some point in the past. She brushed her foot along the base of one wall and found it to be soft and crumbling, like a soggy muffin.
They stopped at the town drugstore first. From there, they would fan out to the other establishments. The front door was shattered, its glassy remains puddled at their feet and glinting in the sunlight. Dried mud, residue of receded floodwater stained the flooring, which had yellowed and cracked. The air was musty, thick with invisible spores of dust and mold and decay.
It was difficult to tell how long it had been since anyone had been in here, more a guessing game than anything else. There was an old footprint in the mud a step inside the store, the outline of a shoe tread, a child’s pointy mountain range, plainly visible, but it could have been a day old or a month old. She moved behind the counter, which abutted the storefront window. It gave a nice vantage point of downtown. She motioned Will to join her.
“Keep an eye outside. If you see anything or anyone, whistle. You think you can do that?”
Will took a deep breath and nodded, his chest puffing out with pride.
“Stay low, behind this counter.”
He gave her two thumbs up.
“Mommy?”
“Yeah?”
“At least it’s not zombies, right?”
She smiled, feeling a spark of joy inside her; her little Will, growing up in front of her, a little bit at a time but seemingly all at once. How he knew what a zombie was, she didn’t know. An old comic book or novel perhaps. Didn’t matter. He was right. At least it wasn’t zombies.
She took a few steps backward, reluctant to turn away from him, reluctant to thrust him into this role, to force him to be a man sooner than was fair. Fair. A word that didn’t carry a lot of weight these days. Everything was decidedly unfair these days, which meant the world was fair. If anything, it was fairer than it had been before Medusa, when the color of your skin or the size of your parents’ bank accounts had a lot to do with where you ended up, irrespective of talent or hard work. But now everyone was on equal footing. But that meant everyone. Even innocent eleven-year-old boys.
Rachel decided to start with the last aisle and make her way back to the front, toward Will. The shelves were mostly barren, long since picked over, but she found a few items worth purloining. A few tubes of lip balm. Travel-sized shampoo bottles.
She went behind the counter next, swiping a carton of cigarettes that had been overlooked. Perhaps these she could trade for food. One last quick sweep of the little workspace revealed nothing worth taking. There was a door to a small office opposite the register. She turned the handle and gently kicked the door open, raising the muzzle of her M4 just in case. A shimmer of red in the corner caught her eye, and she smiled. It was something she hadn’t seen in years.
She picked up the twelve-pack of Coca-Cola, still in its cardboard packing tray, and carried it out to the front. She snapped off two cans from the plastic rings.
“Let’s have a drink, shall we?”
“Here,” she said, handing Will his very first can of soda.
“What’s this?” he asked, gingerly handling the can like it was a bomb.
“Open it,” she said, tugging on the pull tab, priming her ears for the reassuring pop of carbonation escaping the can. It was an old can, but a faint hiss greeted her, buried deep like a distant radio signal. Will fumbled with the tab, confused by the strange mechanism before him.
“Slide a finger under the tab there,” she said, demonstrating with her own, “and pull straight up.”
It popped open on his second try. He held the can under his nose and sniffed.
“Smells weird,” he said. “Kind of tickles.”
“That’s the carbonation,” said Rachel. “Take a sip.”
“What is it?”
“That, my son, is Coca-Cola,” she said. “It’s a soft drink. A soda. A pop.”
“What?”
“It was a very popular drink before you were born. In the old days.”
“Have I ever had it?”
“No,” she said. “There was some at the warehouse when we first moved there, but someone stole it.”
His eyes widened at that revelation.
“Who?”
Rachel cut her eyes toward the floor.
“We never figured that out,” Rachel said.
“A mystery! Cool!”
Only it was no mystery. The morning after the few cases of soda went missing, a man named Martin had confessed to the crime. Harry had marched Martin into the center of the compound and fired a bullet into his head. He did it without hesitating. The rules had been clear from the get-go. Theft from the collective would not be tolerated. How naïve they had been. No one believed anyone would ever do it; the threat of execution had been a lark more than anything. But there they’d been, watching the public execution of a confessed thief, someone they knew, someone they’d worked alongside, drank with, broken bread with.<
br />
It had been years since she’d had a Coke. This old flat soda would be a poor facsimile of a once precious treat, but it would have to do. Maybe having one with Will would help erase the memory of that terrible long-ago morning.
“So what is it?” he asked again.
She shrugged.
How did you explain a soda to someone who’d never had one before?
“It’s sweet. And bubbly. And cold, Spoon, there was nothing like it.”
He took a sip and grimaced.
“Too sweet for me. And not very bubbly.”
He set the can down on the counter, having already lost interest in this relic from her world. Rachel’s shoulders sagged. A dark cloud had slid in above them. She didn’t know why; it was just a stupid can of soda. But it simply highlighted the huge chasm between the world that had been ripped away from her and the world into which Will had been born. She took a sip; it was saccharine and oily and reminded her of warm spit. It tasted like the morning after the party. It tasted like the day Harry had executed that poor man. She set the can back down on the counter.
“Yeah, it’s not very good now, is it?”
“It’s terrible.”
She nodded.
“Let’s go ahead and finish them though,” she said. “We need the calories.”
They sat quietly and drank flat soda, working their way through two cans each. Her head buzzed from the sugar rush, and eventually, she could drink no more. When Will finished, they packed away the remaining cans for later.
They spent another hour exploring the small neighborhoods branching off the main drag but they found nothing. Like the corpse of a gazelle worked over by the vultures, the town had been picked clean. Satisfied there was nothing else to scavenge, they boarded their bicycles and began pedaling west. At the edge of town, where the downtown area began morphing back into natural plains, Will braked hard, leaving a skid mark on the moss-covered road. Something had caught his eye; she followed his gaze toward a small shop, standing alone, set back about twenty yards. An old faded sign reading Brooke’s Books’n’Things hung in the window of the skinny little colonial, its yellow coat of paint long since faded to a sickly hue.