by Anna Dove
Elizabeth had crouched beside her on one side and Junetta on the other.
“I can’t do it,” whispered Haley. The darkness seemed to be concentrated around her, pressing her down.
“Are you afraid of what’s inside?” asked Elizabeth.
“No, no” said Haley, barely audibly. “I know they’re alive. I don’t know if they’re in there, but I know they’re alive. I just--it’s so horrible--I’ve just never seen it like this before. I’ve never seen it without a light on.”
Junetta placed an arm on her granddaughter’s shoulders.
“I know,” she said, and gave a little sigh. “But you have to listen to me. This is not over. None of it is over. We need to push through until we find them. You need to take a deep breath.”
Haley inhaled and exhaled, and shivered. They sat for a minute in silence, and the breeze whispered in the treetops, brushing the leaves against each other in a soft rushing sound. Then, Haley wiped the tears from her face with her sleeve and slowly stood, Junetta and Elizabeth following. They faced the house and then began to walk towards it, up the brick walkway that led to the front door. Haley’s heartbeat pounded loudly in her ears, and all other sounds faded as they reached the front door.
She turned the doorknob; it was unlocked. The door caught on the wooden floor inside as it always did, and Haley pushed it a little. It swung open, and she stepped into the foyer, which adjoined the dining room. She turned into the kitchen to her right, and opened the drawer of candles under the countertop, striking a match and lighting one. As the others closed the door behind them, she entered with the lit candle and a handful of others, and they each lit a candle from her flame and held it up to see the rooms.
The house was very empty, which Haley had suspected, and there were no sounds except for the creak of floorboards and their own breaths, and the occasional sputtering of a candle. They entered each room in a preliminary search, and found no one. The house was surprisingly neat; it did not appear to have been abandoned in a great hurry. The furniture was neatly arranged as usual, the kitchen sink was clean, the bedrooms were in order. The family’s departure must have been premeditated, planned carefully.
“It will be morning soon,” said Carlos, as they all stood in the living room after having walked the entirety of the house. “I think we should sleep, and then determine what to do. I will take the first watch--you all sleep for a few hours.”
“I’ll take the second watch,” said Haley.
The women went upstairs to the bedrooms, and Carlos took his station down in the foyer. Haley went to her old room, where her little sister Lily had been sleeping since Haley went away to college seven years ago. The little girl had painted the walls a sky blue, and had pictures of horses all over the walls, and ribbons from horse shows hanging from lamps and curtain rods. Haley took a nearby ribbon, and holding it in her hand, slipped under the covers on the bed. The pillows and mattress felt cloud-like after having slept on sticks and leaves and horseback and in the bottom of a boat, and within two minutes Haley was fast asleep, the ribbon clutched close to her.
It was light when she was awakened by Carlos, who lightly shook her shoulder.
“Haley--it’s your turn. It’s almost nine in the morning.”
“Thank you,” said Haley, rubbing her eyes. She found the ribbon still in her hand. “How long was I asleep for?”
“About five hours.”
“Thank you, I needed it,” said Haley, pulling off the covers. Carlos handed her the gun he had been carrying and she took it carefully, and then made her way downstairs.
The light streamed through the glass windows in the dining room; the windows ran from the roof to just above the floor, and allowed a view of the wide backyard and garden, meeting a slope that led down to a chicken coop, blueberry bushes and a garden shed. Haley sat, munching on granola bars from the pantry, sipping water, and letting her gaze run over the familiar land. Her eyes rested on the garden beds, and suddenly she sat up very straight in her seat.
The beds were turned. Fresh dirt lay in mounds, only slightly dried. Usually, by this time of the year, there would have been leafy greens, bean vines, young potato shoots, tiny onions, baby flowers. Now, nothing--no green, no buds, no promise of food--nothing. Haley examined the mounds from the window, and as she looked closer, she saw pits in between the mounds.
The plants had been dug up, and apparently very recently. Her family had not been gone long. Hope sprung up in her heart and she stood up. She had to figure out where they had all gone.
If she was leaving, and wanted to leave behind a subtle message about where she had gone, what would she do?
Locking all the doors so that she would hear any intruders, she began to quietly examine the rooms of the house. They must have left some clue, intentional or unintentional, of where they were going. What had they taken with them? What was missing? Haley stood in the living room and looked around her slowly.
The piano, with family photographs on top. A window, with yellow curtains. A bookshelf, full of books--theology books, history books, classic novels, gardening tutorials. She stepped closer to the bookshelf, as she saw that some of the books leaned sideways, indicating that some books had been pulled out. Several were missing in the gardening section. So she had been right--they had taken the plants, and manuals on how to take care of them.
She continued around the room--the stone fireplace with ashes from previous winter fires, several plush chairs with plump cushions, the ornate oriental rug with deep reds and blues and a soft sage green.
Into the hall, which connected the kitchen to the living room, with a bathroom in between. Nothing in the bathroom, nothing in the hall. In the kitchen she pulled out the drawers, and noticed a variety of knives and a few kitchen utensils missing, as well as a pots and pans. Next into the foyer and the dining room, and she moved with anxious anticipation into the different corners and opened the cabinet drawers, but found everything in its place. She stepped then into the family room, the more relaxed room that had previously been the children’s playroom before they had all grown up. A couch, desks for drawing, art supplies, a television, a collection of movies.
She scanned the supply cubbies, under the couch, behind the television, but found nothing out of place or noticeably absent. Frustrated, she frowned, and sat on the couch, picking up a toy from a nearby bin. It was a pen that shone a blue light out of the ink end if one pressed a special button. Wondering what she had missed, Haley pressed the button absently and the blue light shone on her leg. She remembered using the pen when she and her brothers were playing pretend, making believe that they were spies that had to crack special codes. They would write secret messages and hide from their parents--
Suddenly Haley jumped up and dropped the pen, and raced into the hall. Just before the hall met the staircase to the bedrooms was a tiny door in the wall, not more than two feet high and fifteen inches wide. It was the entrance to a tiny hideaway, a space under the stairs that they had used as children to be their secret spy fort. There was a coded lock on the door, and Haley twisted the numbers to 3683, their confidential passcode. The lock popped open and she opened the door.
Taped to the door was a piece of paper, and on the paper was written her name, and then a small cryptic note that read “46 Aldino”.
Haley covered her mouth with her hand and tears welled as relief flooded over her. She sat down on the floor staring at the paper. She knew where her family was.
On Aldino Road, barely a mile from Haley’s house, sat a large farm that belonged to friends of Haley’s younger sister Lily. The grand farmhouse sat on a property of two hundred acres; forest stretched to the south, pasture to the east and north, and a lake to the west that was filled by a spring. The property owners, the Fergusons, raised two dozen dairy cows as well as keeping a few sheep and horses and a roost of chickens. The Fergusons were a vibrant and adventurous family, with three young equestrian daughters and a toddling infant boy whose plump face and chu
bby fingers were constantly covered in dirt.
Haley took a map of Maryland from the bookshelf in the living room and noted their course, memorizing the areas that she did not already know. She felt certain that they could easily arrive at the farm within two or three hours of walking, especially if they kept to the woods and fields between her house and the farm property. Excitement coursed through her veins as she realized how close they were.
As the others woke up, Haley informed them of her discovery, and they prepared for their last leg of the trip, taking turns eating and sleeping, refilling their food and water supply.
When evening came, they began on foot. There was new energy that awakened them; the prospect of safety and protection quickened their steps. Through the night they walked, not speaking much, each person lost in their own thoughts, ready for the journey to be done. Step after step the miles past behind them, the light of the moon and stars sifting down through the tree leaves. The spring peepers sang around them and the wind rustled in the treetops.
Crossing Aldino road, they entered the wooded area that Haley knew was to the south of the farmhouse.
“Not much longer,” she said quietly to the others, whose faces brightened.
They had not walked a quarter mile further when they heard the click of a gun being cocked, and a man’s voice cried out:
“Stop there!”
All four froze immediately in their tracks and looked up and around, searching for the owner of the voice. Haley frowned, and then an expression of joy lit up her face.
“Dayton!” She called. “It’s your sister!”
“Haley?” the voice responded, and a young man stepped into view ahead on the path. He was dark haired and tan and wore a tan jacket and blue jeans. When he saw his older sister, his face broke into a smile, and he eagerly stepped down the path towards them, putting his firearm on safety and slipping it into his belt holster. Reaching the group, he immediately hugged his sister and grandmother, and introduced himself to the others.
“Where is everyone? Are they in the farmhouse?” asked Haley.
“Yes, not only us, but six or seven families. We have decided to pool our resources here to wait out the summer and see what happens. We’ve set up food systems and we’re getting along pretty well,” he said. “Come on. I’m so glad you all are here. We were worried about you, Lily asks if we’ve seen you almost every day.”
“I saw the note on the door.”
“That was Jason’s idea,” said Dayton, referring to the brother older than him and just younger than Haley. “We didn’t want to write out where we had gone for anyone to see, but we figured that you might come up here, and we remembered all the times we spent in that little cubby under the stairs.”
“And you all came here when?” asked Elizabeth.
“We’ve been here about ten days now I think.”
“Is it safe here?”
“As safe as it can be, I guess,” said Dayton. “All any of us can do right now is just take a day at a time. We’ve set up systems as best we can, in order to survive here, and as far as what’s happening on a national level, I have no idea. I have no idea if our military is taking action, I mean, even if they exist right now, we just know nothing, and since I think everyone is under that same mentality, we just have to do what we can to keep ourselves alive and then see what happens. But as far as safety goes, we are out pretty removed from any major cities, and we have a system of watch guards set up around the border of the farm. No one fires a gun unless necessary, and if a gun is fired, we all know that it means danger.”
“So no hunting?” said Haley.
“We do hunt, we use compound bows and arrows, you know, the professional archery kind...arrow speeds at three hundred feet per second. Super effective and quiet. You know the Bozemans? They’re here too, and they brought several industrial strength bows. None of us are really any good at shooting except him, but we help with transport and skinning and cleaning and preserving. We fish too. In terms of food, we really do have a great system set up. You’ll see.”
“How did you all know to come here?”
“When it happened, Dad sent us boys on our bikes to all of the different houses with this plan. Gave everyone a week or so to gather stuff and come. We didn’t know exactly what had happened at the time, but since our phones stopped working we figured it was more than a simple power outage and we decided to move quickly.”
The farmhouse, having been constructed in the earlier decades of the previous century, was better equipped than most homes to operate without electricity. Methods and tools for light, heat, and water, the three necessities, had been restored post-attack. A plentiful supply of candles lit the rooms, their cheerful dancing flames adding softness and shadows to the space. During the daytime, sunlight streamed through the many windows and cast square patterns on the hardwood floors. For warmth, on chilly spring nights, the woodstove would be filled with freshly chopped logs, piled with twigs and balled up newspaper, and lit with a match, until the tiny flame catching the edges of a newspaper would spread, gobbling up the print, engulfing the snapping and popping twigs, and licking up the sides of the cut logs. Water proved slightly trickier to conquer. The first methodology was the rain barrel; placing the wide wooden barrel at the end of a slanted gutter, rainwater could be collected as it ran off the roof. The second methodology was sterilization; buckets of lake water were brought up and boiled in pots over the gas stove and then poured through a cloth to strain out bits of leaves and algae, dirt and pebbles.
At the edge of the forest was a chicken pen, filled with bustling hens and no roosters. There was also a garden, bustling and blooming and bountiful, containing vegetables, some originally grown there and some transplanted from their original plots.
The community had been arranged very carefully, taking comparative advantage into account when assigning tasks and responsibilities. A schedule had been arranged to rotate the property border sentries every four hours around the clock. Every person in the community over eighteen had the responsibility of acting as sentry for their four-hour shift.
There was a hunting coalition of men and women who had any experience in the matter. Mr. Bozeman led this effort; he was a skilled archer and marksman. He had brought a variety of professional bows with him to the community and an abundance of arrows. Leading a group of ten or so individuals, he brought back deer and rabbits regularly to supplement the vegetable and starch production.
He taught his hunter coalition how to skin the deer and the rabbit and preserve the meat by smoking it. His philosophy of nothing wasted was implemented religiously. The inside of the skin he scraped as clean as possible, and then set the hide in buckets of water overnight to make them pliable. Then he scraped them again, leaving hair on, and set them to cure in a large pit of water and oak bark, dug into the ground and lined with a plastic tarp. If they were to remain through the winter, they would need warmth, and the hides would help. Many of the other organs were cut up into small pieces to be stored for use as fishing bait, which proved massively successful.
The fishing coalition was led by Mrs. Bozeman. She and Mr. Bozeman had met on a group hiking expedition in North Dakota. She knew every fish species east of the Mississippi, and had spent a few years of her life living on the Chesapeake Bay studying the aquatic patterns and species for an educational project. She had brought a long, wide net that spanned the pond, and twice every day she led a four-party team into the water, where they waded out with the net stretched wide, slowly closing the net into a circle. They regularly returned with plentiful catch. Letting the small fish go, they kept the trout, sunfish, bass and catfish that swam freely into the trap. In addition, the fishing coalition would also spend four to five hours every day with traditional hook and bait methods, casting and reeling, casting and reeling. The fish caught from both methods were then quickly gutted and boned, and the flesh and skin baked or dried. This fish tasted delicious, having been freshly caught and cooked. It melted in t
he mouth and flaked perfectly. The skin was always included, as skin is full of fats and nutrients, and calories (especially nutritious ones) were important in any form possible. She had educated her team, which was made up of three young women and one young man, to be skilled fishers, who contributed greatly to the community welfare.
Haley’s mother Judith led the garden coalition. Having raised a garden every year of her life, Judith was a skilled botanist, herbalist and crop farmer. She had inherited her love of plants from her mother Junetta. Bringing a load of small germinated plants, seeds, and adult plants with her when they came to the farmhouse, she had worked tirelessly over the past ten days to replant and nurture a young garden system that would soon be thick with calorically dense vegetables. Sweet potatoes occupied a full quarter of the garden; their dark green, fibrous leaves would spread happily upwards from the dirt mounds below. The second quarter of the garden contained onions, tomatoes and green beans. Little white flowers grew under the coverage of the delicate bean leaves; soon these flowers would become slender green beans. The onions would soon shoot up proudly, their pointy tubular stalks folding as the tops grew heavy. Green tomatoes not yet ripe would soon emerge under the jagged tomato leaves, the stalks of which were bound to branches stuck upright in the earth. The third quarter of the garden was devoted to root vegetables and broccoli. Carrots and radishes dug ambitiously down into the earth, while broccoli had begun to show promising heads from within the wide, flat leaves. The final quarter of the garden was enveloped in a mass of squatted vines, overrun with butternut squash, yellow squash and zucchini. These would not fully produce until later in the season but showed signs of health and had not yet fallen to beetles that like to bore the stems. Judith had also considered corn but realized that the deer would decimate it and render the effort useless. Under her careful planning and management, the community garden had flourished, providing nutrients and energy to the members of the community. Until the other vegetables matured, the community ate the broccoli as well as natural-growing plants from the woods. Judith gave a strict lecture to the entire community on plant identification, warning against milky sap, thorns or hairs, seed pods, purple and black spurs, and three leafed growth. She showed everyone pictures of safe plants, of dandelion, clovers, dock, amaranth, burdock, cattail roots and leaves (although few marshy areas were nearby), chicory, chickweed, plantain leaf (the short kind), mustard, and violets. Judith would lead daily expeditions for these items, teaching others how to identify and cook what they could find.
