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chapter seven

M
om helps me move Dad and the others outside, and we drag them one by one to the apple tree. I tell Mom this was the best, the only, spot. She doesn’t disagree. She just nods her head and helps me bring the tarps the short distance.

Once everyone is in their final resting place I shake a branch above my head and watch as the delicate blossoms fall on the masked faces of the dead. Burying them is not an option … that would require work we don’t have the calories to waste. Unlike the compound, we have no battery-powered system to replenish our weakened bodies.

              “Should we say something? About Dad at least?” I ask. The suit muffles my voice, but I know she hears me.

              Mom stands with her hands on her hips, sweat trailing from her forehead. “Everything I wanted to say to him I said before the blackout. There’s nothing left for me to say now.”

              I want to ask what was worth saying then that can’t be repeated now … but that is territory I don’t have the right to tread. I’ll never have the privilege to know that piece of the world. I wasn’t born there; therefore I have no claim to what it felt like to be known and loved in a time when the world had certainty.

Something should be said for Dad, but I can’t find the word-piece that would fit into my puzzle of emotions. So I just keep shaking the branch, wanting to be covered in blossoms too, they land on my shoulders and around my feet, and that is enough.

“We should eat, Lucy,” Mom says, snapping me from my reverie. We were brought to this place today for this exact issue. No food. But I don’t want to move forward yet. Anything I do, from here on out, will be as a fatherless girl. I’m not ready to say goodbye to the only life I know.

“Apples,” Mom says, picking one off a low hanging branch near her head. I watch in silence, confused as she lifts her shirt and fills it with the red fruit. “But let’s go to the other side of the house. I can’t look at this anymore.” She starts walking and I follow her, reluctant, but also curious about what she’s going to say or do next.

Mom plops the apples out of her shirt and sits down in the green grass next to them. Picking one she begins polishing its skin with the tail of her cotton T-shirt.

“The first one is for you,” she says handing it up to me.  The piece of fruit is disturbing on so many levels. It’s a forbidden item like in the fairy tale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Mom is the wicked witch, offering me a poisonous red apple.

That doesn’t fit with what I know of Mom … she’s always looked out for me, stood up for me when everyone else sheltered me from living. I want to trust her, but I trusted Dad and he chose to leave me without saying good-bye.

“Lucy, it’s okay. Take off your hood, sit down next to me, and I’ll tell you what comes next.”

I’m too exhausted by the past twenty-four hours to disagree any longer. Tired of this bulky suit, and not just that, tired of carrying around the overwhelming weight of fear living inside every choice, every step, and every thought I’ve had for sixteen years.

I want to simply sit in the lush, green grass, and eat an apple with my Mom.

Slow and with trembling hands, I pull off the hood. With care I remove my gas mask; the one Mom says is a useless confinement. I hold my breath as I place the mask on the ground. This moment, when I unharness a false identity, should be more ceremonial then just breathing in, breathing out.

I struggle, knowing I can only last a minute holding my breath. My eyes sting as tears appear, fearing the inevitable, knowing it’s going to happen. I want it to happen.

Wanting
and
doing
are two different things, but I can’t change my mind on this one. The mask is off, and I need to breathe. I pull in a breath. A smile forms on Mom’s lips. I don’t smile back; just because we can breathe the air now, doesn’t guarantee we’ll survive later.

“It’s okay.” She reaches for my hand, trying to downplay my fears, but this doesn’t feel
okay
, everything I’ve ever believed was false, and that’s a loss, not a gain.

I breathe in and out, filling my lungs with the fresh air, and as I do it’s impossible to not feel some of the euphoria Mom’s experiencing. I wonder how the others could think drinking the tea would be better than at least
attempting
to see if the air was breathable, livable. If death is coming either way, I’d rather die like this, with my face turned towards the sun.

Mom tosses me the apple. I catch it with my still-gloved hands. Bringing it to my lips, I take a bite of the first fresh fruit I’ve ever eaten. A laugh manages to escape my lips, as I taste a juiciness I’ve only read about. The skin is crisp from the mid-morning air and calling it perfection would be an understatement. I understand why the cowboy’s horse ate them with one fell swoop. I would shove the whole thing in my mouth too if I could.

“Good, right?” Mom takes a bite from hers. “I can’t believe this tree, with this goodness, has been outside all along. I can’t believe Jordan wasn’t at least willing to try before….”

I can’t either. Never having tasted the forbidden sweetness of the apple, I had nothing to compare tasteless soy shakes with, but everyone lying under the apple tree knew. That amount of willpower terrifies me. I don’t know if I could believe anything with such passion.

“So what happens next?” I ask, biting to the apple’s core.

“Next we pack and leave. There’s nothing left for us here but ghosts and bad memories.”

“Where will we go?” I’ve never walked farther than a hundred feet in any direction from our compound. The idea of leaving it has never entered my mind. Off the compound has always meant death. Now there’s a possibility of life beyond the apple tree.

“We’re going to find The Light.”

“The group the cowboy mentioned last night?”

Mom nods.

“But why would you trust him? He was cruel in how he treated Dad!”

“Cruel, perhaps, but also right, wasn’t he?” She tilts her head towards the apple tree on the other side of the house. My stomach crawls thinking how the entire time our men stood outside with the cowboy they already had their plan for later that evening. What they planned on doing to me, without my consent.

“Do you know who they are, The Light?” I ask.

“I heard of them before the blackout, they were a religious group. No one your father or I would have associated with took them seriously, but they had these places on different islands, called their Refuges, where they met for worship.”

“Were they powerful?”

“They were a joke, but they were Preppers, like us. They believed something about waiting for the darkness to come to bring the light. They were on the news sometimes because their Refuges were pretty remarkable. When we started prepping, your grandparents would throw fringe groups like them in my face whenever I talked about our hatch and the compound. My parents compared us to The Light, saying we were crazy for what we built.”

“And were you? Crazy for doing this?”

“Not crazy for building. You’ve heard the cowboys, the blackout happened. It wasn’t some Mayan-calendar end of the world scenario like we imagined, but still, the world, as I knew it is gone. If we hadn’t built this compound we would be gone too.”

Ironically the compound ended up killing most of us.

“But there’s more to it, Lucy. When that boy started talking last night, about the prophet, it clicked. You need to go there, you need to show them your hand.”

I scoff, pulling up long pieces of grass with my still-gloved fingers. “I don’t want to show anyone anything.”

“Of course we’ll be cautious, we’ll get a feel for the place before we do anything compromising, but think about it, Lucy, you have a light, they
are
The Light. It might be the reason.”

“The reason for what?” I narrow my eyes, missing her meaning.

“The reason for all of this.” She spreads her hands out, clearly clinging to this idea.

“I don’t need a reason.”

“I do.”

Her words quiet me. I take another bite, knowing I’ll do this next part for her.

We finish three apples apiece and then go inside to pack. Once the door is shut I peel off my gloves and toss my suit to the ground. I’m ready to be rid of it, realizing how useless the whole charade has always been. Mom says to pack only the essentials. A change of clothes, soap, water purification tablets. There’s no food, but we fill our big stainless steel water bottles, putting them in our never-been-used hiking packs. Mom grabs matches and a first aid kit.

I ask Mom if we should take a few guns from the hatch with us. The men never went outside without them, but she shakes her head.

“No guns, Lucy. You’ve never shot one, and I never wanted them in the first place. If we take them they will only be used against us.”

I don’t argue, but it scares me to be alone in the wild without protection of any kind.

“Is there anything else we should take? All the stuff in the study was important to Dad.”

“Lucy, if I never look at that room again in my entire life I’ll be okay. I’d just as soon torch the place.” She has on her boots and a rain-resistant coat. I look down at myself, in my matching gear, although a few sizes too big. That’s what you get for wearing someone else’s wardrobe your entire life.

Pulling her pack onto her shoulders, she heads towards the door. I start to follow, then turn into the study first. I take my embroidery hoop from the bag next to my favorite chair and look at the bright sun stitched in the center, thinking how now I’ll be outside, able to look at the sun just like the cowboys do. I put the hoop in its bag and stuff it into my backpack.

I push open the front door and step through. Mom locks the door behind us with a key, and then leans to a stone near the door. She lifts the rock to place the key underneath.

“You plan on returning?” I ask.

“You never know in this life.” She looks over to the tree where her husband lies, but she isn’t soft around the edges, or weak like last night. She is strong, like the Mom I’ve always known. She shrugs and says, “To new beginnings!”

I cringe, not understanding her word choice. It’s not clear if she’s being callous on purpose or not, either way my heart aches for what we’ve lost.

Before we head into the great unknown I pause at the edge of the yard to put several apples in my pack. I look at the sun, squinting in a futile attempt to wipe the past twenty-four hours from my memory.

chapter eight

A
s the walk begins I’m in-step with Mom. She keeps looking over, as though she wants to make sure I’m still here. Pine trees tower above; bright green needles cover their branches where red faced Western Tanagers perch watching us. We hike through the woods, etching ourselves farther and farther from the compound, into the unknown canvas of our future.

I brush tears away as the loss of everything I’ve ever known begins to set in. The pine scent invigorates me as we pass through the thick trees; but it isn’t the same as the desk where I spent years studying botany. It is not the same as the greenhouse where I would stand next to Mom, watching as she attempted to coax cabbage into living. I can’t voice to Mom that only two miles from our past-life I already miss the things I knew, especially when the things I miss are such poor imitations of what I can now see and smell and hear.

We make our way to a paved street with a faded yellow line in the center. There are overgrown roadside plants, I point out the green-leaved salal shrubs dripping with dark berries and flowering lupine, remembering them from the books on Northwest plants back at the compound, where glossy photos were my closest encounter with the native growth.  In one spot we have to duck down low to pass through the tangled mess of tree branches. Mom tells me construction crews used to come through the roads and cut down trees and overhanging limbs to keep roadways clear. No one’s done that for sixteen years.

“We’re going to follow this street for the rest of the day. We’ll sleep in the tent. Tomorrow we’ll make our way to the city; our compound was built thirty miles outside of the nearest one. It’ll take us about two days.” Her eyes are fixed on something I can’t see, something unsaid.

“Okay, and then what?”

“Then we find someone who can help us get where we need to go.”

The rest of the day is long and exhausting. At one point I tug on Mom’s sleeve in wonder as two small deer stop and stare at us. I’d seen these animals before, as they walked around our property, but for the first time in my life, there is no protective gear barring me from them. Beyond that nothing transpires besides my growing head and side aches from walking; Mom says it’s from all the apples. We pitch our tent under the canopy of a cedar tree and once we’ve unrolled the sleeping bags, all I want to do is curl up in a ball.

“Are you hungry? You should eat something, you look terrible.” Mom digs around her pack and miraculously produces two granola bars. “Which kind do you want? Oatmeal Raisin or White Chocolate Macadamia?” She smiles as she dangles them in front of me.

“Where did you get these?” I ask, shocked at the contraband.

“My secret stash. I thought we might need them someday. I was right.”

“These would have kept us alive another meal,” I point out, annoyed at her hoarding.

“Offering six granola bars to the group wasn’t going to change anything. They had made up their minds. I took the bars knowing I wasn’t going to let their choices determine what would happen to you.”

I snatch the oatmeal bar from her hand, not wanting her logic or her reason. Thinking about everyone laying back under the apple tree ties my stomach in knots. I burrow myself into the sleeping bag, turning from her, and eat the bar she has given.

“I’m sorry, Lucy.”

As I chew the gummy bar, I can logically understand Mom’s choice; she stashed these bars for my survival. My frustration isn’t about her; it’s about everything else. Once finished with my meal, I try to fall asleep, but I’m startled awake with each new sound, the noise of rustling leaves and gusts of winds outside the tent. Mom tosses in her nylon sleeping bag too, leaving me to wonder if I’ll ever feel safe.

In the morning we eat another bar and an apple as we start our hike across the highway, lined with bright green sword ferns and white petal trillium. Cars used to cruise along these streets at sixty miles per hour, but our pace is slow as we take in everything around us with curiosity, the blue-winged Stellar Jays watching our every step. The world already feels so big, and I’ve only seen a dozen miles of it.

We pass a few abandoned cars, but there are no signs of life besides mosquitos that nip at us in the September heat. I stuff my coat in my pack and wrap my sweatshirt around my waist as the sun beats down on me. Wrapping my thick hair in a messy bun atop my head I bask in the light, ignoring my sore feet.

Four hours into our trek we reach a giant expanse of water. “The Puget Sound’s still here. We lived a day’s hike away,” Mom says, leaning down to pick up a small stone from the rocky shore, tossing it into the water. We stand still, listening to the plunking sound as it hits the still surface. “Unbelievable.”             

I logically knew there was an ocean here from the atlas I’ve read, but seeing it fills me with anger for the sixteen years lived in a sealed house. The salty seaweed air hits my nose, and even though it’s strong, I breathe in deeply. A seagull dips low to the water and I watch its wings spread wide, flying away. Mom’s face shines, taking in the blue-green water and the driftwood collecting at the foamy shore. My face is not bright like hers. It’s clouded from the reality of what’s been hidden from me for so long. For the life I missed out on. I take a large rock with tiny barnacles clinging to the bottom and chuck it into the lapping water.

"I'm sorry, Lucy.”

I look over at her, not expecting her words. Apologies are not a part of our history. The shining face I thought I’d seen is actually one streaked with tears. She lost something over these sixteen years too. “Here, throw another one,” she says, tossing a smaller rock to me.

We wear out our arms flinging our feelings as far from us as possible, and I realize sometimes actions are better than words. Doing something with all of my might, without the constraint of caution and fear, feels good. Eventually we sit down on a log and take long drinks of water from our bottles.

“We should keep walking, I can see those rain clouds over there,” she points to the sky. “I’d like to get as far as possible before we get rained on.”

I’ve never been in the rain, but that isn’t what scares me. “What are we going to do if we run into someone?”

“Are you scared of meeting somebody out here?”

“They could try to kill us.”

“If that happens, it happens. There will be nothing we can do to stop it.”

“Sounds like you’re giving up.”

“I’m not giving up, I’m just done with living in fear. There’s a difference.”

We walk in silence, but Mom becomes animated when we see a two-story house. The windows are shattered and weeds grow in the eaves, but it is proof of civilization.

“Let’s look.”

“Why?” Stepping foot on the fenced property, empty or not, feels dangerous. I know how angry Diane would become if I stepped foot into her bedroom, even if it was because I was helping her clean. She would point her finger at me and tell me to remember where I belong. I don’t want to go where I’m not allowed.

“Lucy … I need clues. I need to understand what happened sixteen years ago. I need more than what a half a dozen cowboys have told us.” She’s back to being the strong-willed woman I’ve always known. She’s back to being like the members of the compound, dismissing my feelings and my fears, making sure I know I’m not the one in charge of anything.

I follow her, not wanting to stand on the road by myself. The porch creaks at our weight. “Hello?” Mom calls. “Anyone here?” No one is.

Mom twists the knob of the door open and then using her foot, she kicks it in … opening it wide. A skeleton lies on the entryway floor and I let out a sharp scream. Mom pushes past me and walks inside.

I stand paralyzed by the sight of the decomposed body. My eyes have taken in so much the last two days. Nausea hits and I cover my mouth with my hand, trying to push down the bile threatening to escape. Mom walks back to the front of the house, not registering how being here overwhelms me, I’ve never set foot in a house besides my own.

“They must have been shot. There’s another body in the kitchen, a bullet straight through the skull.”

“Mom, we need to go, we shouldn’t be here.” I turn to leave, whether Mom follows or not. I need to get out of here before I get sick.

“Okay, just give me a second. It’s important to understand what happened. We have no idea what we’re up against.”

“Looking at corpses isn’t going to help.”  I walk out to the front yard and sit in the high grass, fuming at Mom. A half hour later she join me.

“The rooms are empty, besides some water-logged mattresses. Looks like a fire consumed most everything at some point.”

I don’t answer, because there’s nothing to say. I nod and follow her off the property. We pick up our pace on the road, though it feels like our motivations are different for doing so. Mom wants answers, I want safety.

Mom has always wanted to protect me. She wanted to go inside that house to figure out the ending to the story she missed out on, to put together the pieces so she can take care of me. I get that, but there’s this great divide between us. I don’t know if this is how every mom is with their children, I’ve never met another one, child or mother. I walk ten paces behind her, yet when I look over, our strides match. We’re both tall, and long-legged, red hair and green eyes. I am her duplicate in so many exterior ways. But inside? Inside I don’t belong. I don’t belong to her.

“When I was your age,” she says, “I’d get in big fights with my mom, your Grandma. She’d insist on ironing my jeans or she’d pack me a lunch for school when everyone else bought theirs in a cafeteria. I’d roll my eyes and be so … so … mean to her.”

I keep looking straight ahead, not responding to her soliloquy. Her talking about her past makes my insides constrict. I don’t understand so much of what she says.

“After we moved into the compound, I spent a long time regretting all the foolish things I did in my past. For months I remember wishing I could just say sorry to her for being so angry over such frivolous things, but it was too late.”

“I don’t know why you’re telling me this. I do what you ask, always. I am not the girl you were.”

“Listen, this isn’t not about teen angst. This is about our life, right now. Eventually I had to accept the person I was and the person I wasn’t. I realized I needed to live in the present – not the past – if I was going to take care of you. That hasn’t changed.”

“It has, Mom. Everything’s changed.” The memories of my life seem foolish now. The smell of the linoleum floor after I mopped it four times in a row for “sanitation purposes” or the science lessons Forest made me memorize, which were really his hypotheses, are reminders of a false reality. I feel duped.

“No, Lucy.” Mom stops and grabs my shoulders. She stares into my eyes with an intensity she always reserved for Dad. “I am still living in the present. The present is survival.”

She lets go and I tremble. She’s never so stern with me.

“Okay. I get it.” I step away and the divide between us widens with each breath we take.

“I don’t think you do.”

The silence returns as we keep walking. Mom tries to start conversations, trying to bridge the gap, but things have changed between us. The unspoken truth we both know is we changed the night Dad died and we lived. Our family, as we knew it, dissolved.

There are more houses as we make our way towards the city, dilapidated and overrun. Mom points out an elementary school, describing again for me how schools used to work. I’ve heard about education systems before, and looked on a map to see where people at the compound had gone to college, but looking at a building is so different than a photograph.

“Nothing looks as bad as I expected, Lucy. There are still houses standing, buildings upright and tall. Everything is just so overgrown. If only Jordan could have seen this.”

I withhold turning my thoughts into words …
he could have
; instead I focus on the world around me. The growth is so green, lush, and full. So different than the blatant destruction I’ve always pictured in my head.

After we’ve eaten the last of the apples, and our bottles are near dry, I worry what we’ll do next. My head begins to pound, and I tell Mom about my headache. She tells me to stop stressing, but my worries are founded because soon we walk down what Mom calls an overpass. From the higher vantage point we see where the countryside and the picturesque views of the Puget Sound end, and where the destruction and looting the cowboys have told us about begins.

Mom covers her face with her hands, hiding her eyes from the view, and she stifles a sob.

“It’s okay, Mom. We can always go back to the compound.”

She pulls back her hands and blinks fast to fight her tears. “No, Lucy, we can’t. We need to find a place. A place for you.” Then she keeps walking.

Buildings and houses are on either side of us as we walk up and down streets that turn into big hills with long slopes. The houses are crowded, right next to one another, no wide-open spaces like we have seen on most of our journey. Mom explains what each shop had been. Grocery store. Sandwich shop. Gas station. Pharmacy.

              We pass house after house void of human inhabitants, and I’m overwhelmed with what the virus meant for the world.