This World We Live In (The Last Survivors, Book 3) (4 page)

If Mom noticed the extra two cans in each bag, she didn't say so. Instead she asked how the roads were.

"A lot better than last week," Matt said. "Almost no ice."

"We biked the whole way," Jon said. "I bet we won't have any problems getting to the river."

"Al right," Mom said. "You can leave tomorrow 37

morning after breakfast. But no traveling after dark, and I'l expect you home by Friday."

"Saturday," Matt said. "That way we'l have three days if the fishing is good. We'l leave first thing Saturday morning."

"Saturday, then," Mom said. "Before then if there aren't any fish. Or if either one of you doesn't feel wel . No heroics. And no traveling separately. If one of you leaves, you both leave. Is that clearly understood?"

"Clearly," Matt said, but he was grinning, and Jon could hardly keep stil , he was so excited.

I don't blame them. If I got to go away for five whole days, I'd be landing triple axels on the living room floor.

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***

Chapter 3 May 9

Mom made Matt and Jon eat an extra can of spinach for breakfast, and then we helped them load the bikes.

Matt remembered a folding grocery cart in Mrs.

Nesbitt's cel ar, so he ran over there and brought it back. He rigged it to the back of his bike to hold the fishing equipment and the sleeping bags. They both wore their backpacks, which Mom had fil ed with food and bottles of rainwater.

"We'l bring back trash bags ful of shad," Matt promised us. "Everything's going to be better once we get back with food."

"Wear your face masks," Mom said. "And boil your drinking water. Matt, you have to be real y careful."

"We wil be, I promise," he said. He and Jon kissed Mom good-bye, and then Matt bent over and gave me a good-bye kiss, too.

I didn't like that. It felt too final.

We walked out with them and watched as they began their ride down Howel Bridge Road. The air is so bad you can't see too far ahead of you, but I bet they tore off their face masks a half mile down the road.

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I was reading Romeo and Juliet (Mom figures it must be in the curriculum somewhere) and Mom was working on one of her il icit crossword puzzles when the electricity came on. We jumped into action. We put al our pots and pans in the dishwasher, threw in detergent and buckets of rainwater, and hoped for the best.

"I had a thought," Mom said, which always means More Work for Miranda. "If we could find another electric heater, we could put one in the kitchen and one in the dining room."

"The firewood's in the dining room," I said.

"Besides, why would we want to eat in there?"

"We wouldn't," Mom said. "But if we stored the firewood in the pantry and had heaters for the kitchen and dining room, then Matt and Jon could share one room and you and I the other. Both rooms have windows that face the sunroom, from when it was the back porch, so they get a little bit of heat from the woodstove. Between that and the heaters and our sleeping bags, we would be warm enough."

"We'd need someone to check on the woodstove during the night," I said. "Maybe we should keep one mattress in the sunroom, and we could take turns sleeping in here." I pictured that, sleeping alone in the kitchen. Even sleeping alone in the sunroom, waking up every few hours to put in another log, sounded like heaven.

Mom and I emptied out the pantry (which didn't take very long, even with the extra food we got yesterday) and carried in al the remaining firewood.

The dishwasher kept churning, and natural y we did some laundry at the same time.

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Mom washed the kitchen floor while I swept every piece of bark and leftover twig from the dining room.

The electricity held out long enough for us to vacuum.

"Should we move the mattresses in?" I asked once the dining room met with Mom's approval.

"Not yet," she said. "Al this is dependent on having electricity fairly regularly, especial y at night.

That may never happen."

Great. I exhausted myself lugging firewood for a fantasy.

Mom burst out laughing when she saw me scowl.

"Things wil get better," she said. "I promise."

I wanted to ask how. Did she mean we'd get electricity regularly, or the sun would start shining again and we could have a vegetable garden, or Matt and Jon would come back with enough fish to last us a lifetime, or we'd move someplace with food and running water and junior proms? Senior proms, I guess, since I'd be a senior by the time there was a prom. Assuming I ever finish reading Romeo and Juliet.

But I didn't ask. Instead I put the second load of laundry into the dryer, throwing in one fabric softener sheet. Horton, who'd run upstairs at the sound of the vacuum cleaner, came back down and sat on my lap while I pretended to read Shakespeare by lamplight, al the while thinking about food and water, blue skies and proms.

May 10

I don't know if Horton doesn't like the food Matt found for him, or if he's holding out for the shad Matt and Jon say they'l be bringing back, or if he just misses Jon. But he hardly ate a thing.

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Mom says when he's hungry he'l eat.

We'd almost run out of cat food before Matt brought home that bag, and I'd been worrying about what would happen when we did. In the olden days people fed their cats table scraps or the cats found some mice to nosh on.

But Horton would have no interest in leftover canned peas, assuming we had any left over, which canned peas, assuming we had any left over, which we don't. And with the cold and the drought and the snow and the ice and the complete lack of sunlight, the mice have al died out.

I was six when Dad brought Horton home. Horton seemed to think Jonny was a kitten, too, because the two of them played together al the time. Horton became more Jonny's cat than anyone else's, but we al love him, and I hate the thought of life without him. He's eleven now, and he doesn't do much more than sleep and eat and sit on our laps, but he's stil the blue and green and yel ow in our lives.

I hope he develops a taste for his new cat food. I hope we can find some more for him or there's enough shad to go around.

May 11

I told Mom I was going to bike up and down Howel Bridge Road, stopping at the houses to look for space heaters. If I found any, I'd figure out some way of dragging them home.

"You can't go by yourself," Mom said. "It's too dangerous."

Sometimes I'm so stupid I amaze even myself. "I
went
al through Shirley Court by myself," I said.

"When did you do that?" Mom asked.

Then I won the Olympic Gold Medal in stupid. "On Saturday," I said. "That's where I found al my stuff."

"I thought you al went looking together," Mom said.

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"We started out together," I said. "But we split up right away."

"You mean you lied to me?" Mom asked.

I knew that "you" was directed right at me. Matt didn't lie. Jon didn't lie. Only Miranda lied.

"We didn't lie," I said. "Besides, it was Matt's idea."

"I don't care whose idea it was!" Mom yel ed. "It was unsafe and you knew it, and that's why you lied to me."

"I don't believe this," I said. "Matt and Jon can go anywhere they want. We don't know if we'l ever see anywhere they want. We don't know if we'l ever see them again, and you're mad at me for going to Shirley Court by myself?"

It's been months since Mom and I had had a real battle, and we were overdue. She screamed,

"Insensitive! Uncaring!" and I screamed,

"Overbearing! Playing favorites!"

Right after I shouted, "I never want to see you again!" I ran out, got my bike, and began pedaling as fast as I could. I didn't care where I ended up or even that I'd been too angry to put on my coat and it was too cold to be outside without one. I wanted to escape, the way Matt and Jon had.

I started by going down Howel Bridge Road, but I knew I didn't want to end up in town. So after a couple of miles, I turned on to Bainbridge Avenue, and then I turned again and again and again. I avoided streets I knew, because every one had a memory and I didn't dare face my memories.

I must have biked for an hour before I

acknowledged I had no idea where I was and very little sense of how to get home.

I thought, Of al the stupid things I've ever done, this is the stupidest, because I could die here and no one wil ever know what became of me.

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That was when I total y lost it. It's been hard to cry in the sunroom, because we're together al the time, and tears are better if you shed them alone. But I've never been as alone as I was that moment, sweating and shivering and hungry and lost. First one tear trickled down and then another, and then I sobbed six months' worth of sorrow and anger and fear.

I could have cried forever, except I didn't have any tissues on me, and the only thing I had to blow my nose into was my sweatshirt. Which made me sweating and shivering and hungry and lost and real y disgusting. Then I started laughing, so for a while I was laughing and crying, and then I just laughed, and then I just shook. After a few minutes of that I thought I'd be okay, but before I knew it I was sobbing again.

I told myself Mom wasn't shedding any tears over me, but I knew she was. It was like that scene in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy looks in the crystal bal and sees Auntie Em crying out for her. I knew Mom was crying. She was crying because she's worried sick about Matt and Jon and now she was worried about me. Only that made me cry even harder, because I was worried about Matt and Jon, too, and I was probably a lot more worried about me than Mom was. She thought I was breaking into houses on Howel Bridge Road like a sane, disobedient daughter. I knew I was crazy and lost and cold and scared.

I knew I couldn't stay there forever, so once I'd stopped shaking from the hysteria and resumed shaking from the cold, I got back on my bike and let my legs direct me. I favored right turns, but for the longest time I was in countryside, with nothing but unoccupied farms around.

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Then, because right turns weren't doing much for me, I made a left. I biked maybe a half a mile down the road, and in the distance I could see a mound of some sort.

At least it was something to look at. I biked toward it. When I got close enough that the dust in the air didn't block my view, I could see it was a mound of bodies.

I got off my bike in time to throw up. Part of me said to get back on and ride in the opposite direction, but I couldn't help looking.

The pile was about six bodies high, and it was pyramid shaped, more bodies on the bottom than the top. It wasn't neatly formed, though, and there was more snow on some places than others, so it looked kind of lumpy. The cold had preserved things, and I could see hands and feet toward the bottom of the pile and heads sticking out higher up.

People have been dying around here since the summer, but before things got too bad, the bodies were buried. There were cremations, too, although maybe they were funeral pyres. You don't ask about things like that. Not unless you absolutely have to.

But when the sun disappeared and the weather turned cold, more and more people died.

Starvation, sickness, suicide. More bodies than people knew what to do with.

I thought, What if Mrs. Nesbitt is in the pile? I've known so many people who have died, but she was known so many people who have died, but she was the only one I thought of then. Mrs. Nesbitt could be in a mound of snow-covered bodies in a field somewhere near town, and if Mom ever found that out, it would kil her. She was more than just a neighbor. She was family.

I told myself not to look but of course I did. It was hard to make out faces, between the snow and the distance, since the top of the pile was tal er than me. And I didn't see Mrs.

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Nesbitt, who most likely was cremated, since she'd died fairly early on. But I did see Mrs.

Sanchez, my high school principal, and Michel e Webster, who I'd known since fifth grade, and the Beasley boys, two old guys without many teeth who used to sit in front of the hardware store, good weather or bad, and chatter in secret code to each other. They were descended from Jedediah Howel , the same as Mom. The same as me.

I thought I should say a prayer over these people, show them respect for the lives they led, the people they were. I don't know a lot of prayers, and the only phrase that came right to me was "deliver us from evil," which didn't seem appropriate. So I said, "I'm sorry," out loud, and then I said, "I'm sorry," again.

It could have been us. It should have been us. We have no more right to be alive on May 11th than any of them. Why should I be alive and Michel e Webster dead? She did better in school than me. She had more friends. Yet, there I was standing by her dead body.

Deliver us from evil. Deliver us to evil is more like it.

I got on my bike, pedaled as fast as I could, and discovered I was on the back road to the high school. From there I made my way back to town, back to Howel Bridge Road, back to my home, back to the sunroom.

Mom opened the door for me. I thought she'd be loving and comforting when I got in, but she wasn't.

"You came back," she said. "I wasn't sure you would."

"I had nowhere else to go," I said, walking toward the fire, desperately needing its warmth to heal me.

"The boys," she said. "Wil they be coming back?"

"How can they?" I asked. "They're dead.

Everybody's dead."

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Mom turned white, and for a moment I thought she was going to col apse. "Matt and Jon are dead?"

she screamed.

"No!" I cried. "Not Matt and Jon!" I pictured them on the mound, al of us on the mound, and I made a sound I can't even describe. It came from deep within me, the place where I hide al my rage and grief, a sound no one should ever have to hear.

"Miranda," Mom said, and she grabbed me and was shaking me. "Miranda, how did you find out?

Did someone tel you?"

"I saw them!" I cried. "Oh, Mom, it was horrible. It was the worst thing I've ever seen."

"Where?" she said. "Can you take me to them?