by A N Sandra
“You’re so domestic.” Duane grinned. “You almost don’t belong with us science geeks.”
“Cooking is chemistry,” Helena replied. She wasn’t sure if domestic was good or not. “I’m not a science geek, though. I’m the Garden Warrior.”
“The rabbits haven’t gotten much.” Duane bowed. “You have dealt with them well, Garden Warrior.”
“I’m shocked at how bold they are, though,” Helena said. “I see other animals at the edge of the forest looking, but they’re scared by our noise. The rabbits can’t resist.”
“I saw a black bear this morning,” Duane said.
“Seriously? I hope you told Lourdes, she’d go chase it down—”
“I wasn’t dumb enough to tell Lourdes,” Duane said. “I just wanted a little time alone and I went too far. I learned my lesson. I did find some wild blueberries, though. The bear was eating them. I might go back tomorrow and pick some if Peter comes with me and I take a gun.”
“Blueberry cobbler,” Helena said. Her mouth watered. “That’s easy, I can make that no problem in the Dutch oven. I would like to make blueberry muffins, but I’d need an oven. How soon can your dad get the generator to work?”
“Really soon, it’s almost done.”
“A generator that doesn’t need gasoline that will provide electricity for three houses sounds like science fiction.”
“It works on black magic,” Duane joked. “There are some solar panels to put together for next year, but that’s a winter project for dad.”
“Knowing your dad, it’ll get done in ten days.”
“Probably.” Duane smiled. “Then he’ll have all winter to help your mom figure out how to fix this mess.”
“You think they can?”
“No. I think it’s going to be worse than they think. They always see the best-case scenario. That’s why they got so far with the original project, but I think it’s going to hurt them now.” Duane shook his head. “The Hollisters are evil, and they have the whole Global Bank and Global Forces working for them.”
“I am really dreading this winter,” Helena said. “I’ll be shut up with my mom in a tiny house, watching my dad do things for Ray and Lourdes.”
“I bet it won’t be that bad. We’ll go sledding. I made sure they brought two tractor tire inner tubes to go down that hill with. We’ll go snowshoeing, that’s fun. I did it lots of times in Boy Scouts. And we’ll study. I’m going to study so much that I can get back into MIT with a different name even if I have to start at a community college somewhere.”
“I admire your drive,” Helena said. “I guess I should worry about the future too, now that my trust fund is gone.”
“We all have to think about how to support ourselves now,” Duane said. He tried to shrug as if he didn’t care, but he clearly did. “We don’t know what the world is going to be like when we leave. It might be the same, or it might be mostly empty.”
“If it’s mostly empty it’ll be empty of the wrong people.” Helena shook her head.
“Preach it, Sister,” Duane answered.
“I’ll put my stuff there, but I’ll sleep in the garden in my sleeping bag until it gets too cold.” Helena told Peter.
“You can do what you want, I’m going to sleep inside.”
“Great, you can have the bedroom.”
“Mom was going to sleep in the loft so that we could each have our own bedroom,” Peter said.
“That’s nutty. It’s a little late to make sacrifices now. I’ll tell her to take the bedroom.” Helena shook her head.
Peter was helping frame the house the Wilsons would live in. It was the last structure the group was going to build.
Helena walked back to the garden and looked over it proudly. There were tomatoes the size of baseballs and fully-grown cabbage. The corn was looking like it might not make it, but other than that the garden was growing well and every day Helena harvested something fresh for dinner.
“The lettuce is going to seed,” Miss Jan said behind her. “I’ll get you some paper and show you how to make packets and save the seeds for next year.”
“Do we need to do that? We have more seeds in storage.”
“It’s not a bad idea,” Miss Jan said. “Besides, you should know how to do it. If you get to go to college, it’ll be good for you to really be a totally right-wing survivalist.”
“I prefer Garden Warrior.” Helena smiled.
“I do too, but you are going to have to at least pretend to be someone else.”
“I feel like I’m pretending to be the Garden Warrior. That any day I’m going to wake up in my own bed in Dallas and be late for school.”
“I wish that was the case,” Miss Jan said. Clearly, she really did wish that life had not changed. “You’ll get to do school all winter here. We bought the most conservative Christian Curriculum that will still get you a decent education.”
“Seriously?! It’s not bad enough to do home school, but I’m going to have to be brainwashed too?” Helena was quite horrified.
“Seriously,” Miss Jan nodded. “You get to read the Bible over the winter. But everyone should read it once. You’ll be glad to know all the stories and the themes.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Helena said. “I love myths. I just don’t want to become like Pat Robertson or one of those rude TV preachers who make people feel bad. I don’t want to sound ignorant.”
“If you weren’t so intelligent this would be a very bad idea,” Miss Jan said. “But you’ll be fine.”
“People keep saying that,” Helena said.
“Being encouraging is the most helpful thing anyone can do right now,” Miss Jan answered.
“Christina!” Mr. Harris yelled at the top of his lungs.
Miss Jan and Helena ran toward the site where Mr. Harris had been supervising the framing of the last building. Mr. Harris was bent over someone. Christina Harris came running from the supply building.
“Ray!” Lourdes called as she knelt beside him. “Wake up!”
“Move over,” Christina Harris knelt beside Ray and began examining him.
Tawna came from her house as she heard Lourdes trying to wake Ray.
“Baby!” she cried.
Mr. Harris held Tawna tightly while Christina worked over him. Helena was too far away to see exactly what was happening, but she didn’t care to get any closer.
“Joel! Help me get him to his bed. He’s going to be fine, but we should get him out of the sun,” Mrs. Harris said.
“What happened?” Helena asked Peter as Tawna supervised Ray being carried to his house.
“We were moving a beam and he tripped somehow. He hit his head on the beam as he fell.”
“Of all the people this could have happened to,” Helena said. “The biggest cry baby is the one who got hurt.”
“Mom came, she is a doctor. If she says he’ll be fine, he’ll be fine.” Peter shrugged.
“He needs a doctor now!” Tawna was screeching. “This isn’t safe!”
“I am a doctor,” Christina Harris was speaking calmly.
“Only the best doctor in the world,” Peter said to Helena who rolled her eyes.
“He needs an X-ray or an MRI,” Tawna yelled.
“If he really needed those things we could use his fake ID and take him to Fairbanks,” Mr. Harris said. “But if Christina says he’s all right, we shouldn’t risk the attention.”
“What does she know?” Tawna demanded, her green eyes rolled back in her head as she unsuccessfully tried to keep herself from melting down. “She doesn’t care about her own kids. Why would I trust her to keep Ray from brain damage?”
“In the case of real brain damage he would need to be treated more quickly than he could be by taking him to Fairbanks,” Christina said calmly, as though Tawna had not been insulting toward her. “He is not drinking enough water and he fell due to heat exhaustion. I have the equipment here to give him IV fluids if you would like, but I’m trying to avoid that. He’
s going to be fine drinking Gatorade for the rest of the day, inside, in the shade.”
“This whole situation isn’t safe!” Tawna shrieked. Her blond hair was whipping in the wind, lifting it slightly so Helena could see that going almost seven weeks without getting her roots professionally done was not working for her. She looked like a “tweaker” from the bad side of town where the Hollister Foundation had “relocated” the country people.
“It’s much safer here than it’s going to be most places in six months,” Mr. Harris told her softly.
“You don’t know that!”
“I would like to be wrong, and if I am we will leave.”
“Without ownership of BioLine!”
“We have more money saved to start a new life and put the kids through college than most people ever see. The kind of wealth we had was more than our grandchildren could have spent. No one needs that kind of wealth to be happy.”
Tawna stomped back to the house.
“If she’d been out working she could have made sure Ray was drinking water,” Peter said. “She’s been trying to avoid pitching in since her house was built.”
“Well, sure,” Helena said. Tawna’s mooching ways would always be a source of irritation. “She was smart enough not to admit that she only married Dad for his obscene wealth. It’s so unfair that if the rest of the world is going to die she gets to live because we do.”
“I think she wishes she had stayed and just died with everybody else.”
The end of the world would almost have been worth it if her family could have worked together like this three years earlier, before her parents got divorced, Helena reflected. With everyone else pitching in, the beams went just where Mr. Harris needed them, and with it being the third house, he knew how everything was supposed to fit together by only glancing at the blueprint.
The afternoon flew, and by the time Helena realized she should have started dinner, most of the frame was done.
“Chicken salad,” she told Peter when he asked. “I’ve got the lettuce from the garden, the chicken is canned, and I got the green onions from the garden.”
“Maria made great chicken salad,” Peter reminisced.
“Well, it won’t be as good as Maria’s, but you’ll be able to eat it,” Helena told him. She remembered his complaint to Maria the last day she had made a meal for him, and Helena decided not to remind Peter of his past rudeness. “We’ll have a nice dinner no matter what.”
I don’t even know how it’ll feel after nine weeks without electricity,” Helena told Lourdes. “To watch everything light up is going to be pretty amazing.”
“I don’t even know how we’ve gone nine weeks without electricity.” Lourdes shook her head.
“It’s funny how I don’t miss it right now at all.”
“Not having electricity makes every single thing you do all day an adventure!”
Helena reflected that Lourdes had grown wiser in the weeks she had spent goat and chicken herding. The two of them stood in the August twilight at the edge of the garden looking toward the three newly completed houses. The adults other than Mr. Todd stood with champagne glasses in their hands waiting to toast. Helena and Lourdes held sparkling cider and considered themselves lucky to have it.
“He’s turning it on!” Peter called from the storage building where Mr. Todd was finishing connecting all the houses to the generator he had built.
Every single light in all three houses turned on and the windows glowed in the wilderness. Everyone cheered wildly. Impulsively, Helena turned to Lourdes and hugged her, pleasantly surprised when Lourdes hugged her back warmly.
“We win!” Peter yelled. “Man against nature, and we win!”
“Yes, we do,” Duane spoke softly.
Helena quickly leaned toward him for a brief side hug. She was surprised to feel absolutely wonderful when they broke apart. She had been quite excited to begin with, but somehow connecting with Duane had warmed her to the bones. Don’t have more of a crush on Duane than you already do, she warned herself. It didn’t help. He was strong, good-looking, smart, and she truly respected his character. There was no one she would rather spend time with. She sighed. Rejection was supposed to be her lot in life. It seemed to be the price she paid for being born wealthy, and she didn’t like to hope for romantic attention from someone like Duane.
“Now we’re almost ready for winter,” Duane said. “Long cozy days of darkness in tiny houses with the people closest to us to drive us crazy.”
“I’m pretty sure that months without sunshine will drive me crazy,” Helena said. “I won’t even need people to help.”
“Before winter we have two big projects that are going to make you so tired you’ll be ready to rest in the winter,” Mr. Harris said, coming up behind them.
“Yeah?” Helena looked at him suspiciously.
“We need to get firewood, and we need to go hunting.”
“That sounds like work for men,” Lourdes smiled.
“In this world order women and men get to share work equally.” Mr. Harris smiled.
“I was afraid of that,” Helena said. “But I haven’t seen any men besides Duane cook anything.”
“You’re a Texas girl and you can shoot a gun,” Mr. Harris said, ignoring Helena’s perfectly good point. “Once we get in some target practice I think you’ll be good at hunting. You’re good at being quiet and paying attention to detail. You’re good with the pellet gun keeping the rabbits away from the garden. You’ll probably be a great hunter.”
“Garden Warrior, Hunter Princess,” Helena tried out a new title. It sounded dorky. Living with so few people might be impeding her wit. “I need a better title.”
“We’ll work on that,” Duane said, evidently not bothered by dorkiness at all. “I’ll think of a new title while you shoot bears and cut firewood.”
“And fix dinner when I’m done,” Helena added. “I’m a modern woman.”
“Exactly.”
The whine of the chainsaw really wasn’t lessened much by the earplugs Helena wore. While her father cut firewood in the forest, she and the others carried it back to the side wall of the storage building where they stacked it carefully.
This is one thing we really didn’t think through,” Mr. Todd said as he trudged along with several pieces of firewood in the late afternoon sun. “We discussed getting a Rhino or a Polaris for this sort of work but getting it here when we already had to get all the building supplies and food seemed like too much at the time.”
“So now you’re sorry,” Peter said with a small smile. He was carrying two large pieces of firewood also. “We could have had a lot of fun with a Rhino.”
“We could have. We might still get one somehow. Moving the wood this way is very inefficient—” Mr. Todd froze. Peter and Helena did also, just because he did. Ray kept right on walking. Mr. Todd took a few quick steps forward and put his hand on Ray to stop him.
“Look!” Mr. Todd mouthed enthusiastically. He jerked his head to point toward a small group of what Helena thought might be reindeer that were almost next to them. The deer looked at the group of people and then looked at each other, having some sort of discussion, before breaking into a graceful run through the forest, jumping over fallen trees and rocks with amazing ease.
“We were really close!” Peter said enthusiastically. “Lourdes will be sorry she missed it.”
“I wish I’d had a camera,” Helena fretted.
“I have a camera you can use,” Mr. Todd said. “I’ll find it tonight and you can keep it with you.”
“Where are you going to print the pictures?” Peter wanted to know. “Gonna just hang a right at Walmart?”
“She can burn them to a disk when I get my computer up,” Mr. Todd said. He started walking again. “And print them on my portable printer.”
“You have a computer here?” Ray was shocked.
“We have three computers. Mostly they are for you kids to do school work on in the winter. That’s why th
ey’re still in storage.”
“Do they have games?” Ray held his breath after he asked.
“I think we may have some gaming and movie options for long winter months,” Mr. Todd conceded. “But I’m not even going to put the computers together until the first snow falls. We have a lot of work ahead of us yet.”
“Thank you, Jesus!” Ray looked at the sky. “Let it snow! Are you going to connect to the internet?”
“No,” Mr. Todd smiled. “We’re trying to avoid detection. We can’t generate internet traffic of any kind.”
“We’re pretty far away from anything, anyway,” Peter said. “Is there any internet source out here?”
“Not really,” Mr. Todd said. “I could build a series of boosters and bring cell phone service here, which we could use to gain a certain level of internet usage, but it would be unwise.”
“We could be careful—” Ray began.
“We can’t be careful enough,” Mr. Todd said, very seriously. They approached the storage building with the firewood and Mr. Todd began to add it carefully to the stack. “The Hollisters are famous for getting revenge on anyone who subverts them. Peter and Helena’s mother has been trying hard to keep them from doing something very evil. She will still stop them if she thinks of a way. The people we are hiding from always get what they want, and they resent her for making an attempt to stop them.”
“It’s really hard to like people who want to stop you from destroying the world,” Peter said. He picked up an axe to remove a pesky limb from a piece of firewood so that it would stack properly.
“That’s us,” Helena said. “Saving the world from the middle of nowhere.”
The snow is falling!” Lourdes came running to the garden. “I love the snow!”
“How much snow have you seen?” Helena asked. “Ever?”
“Other than Vail? None.”
“Me too. One year Dad took us to a resort in Vermont for Christmas, but I’ve never seen it snow in the same place where I lived before.” Helena was working madly while she was talking. “Grab a pail and help me get the last of the tomatoes in.”
Lourdes got a tin pail and began to help gather tomatoes. Their fingers tingled from the cold, but they didn’t care.
