by K. M. Fawkes
“The world is a hellish place,” said Brad, “but something in us wants to keep living in it.”
They were interrupted by a low moan from the coat where Anna still lay, looking tipsy now.
“Listen, I don’t mean to break up the reunion but I have to stitch my friend’s leg up,” Brad said. “If you wouldn’t mind helping me—”
“I don’t mind,” said Emma, wincing as she stooped to retrieve the book from the floor. “I hope your friend doesn’t mind a bit of whimsy with her surgery.”
“She’ll probably be oblivious at this point.”
Turning to William, Brad added in a lower voice, “I need you to go and fetch me some supplies—a couple of fresh bandages, whatever painkillers you have on hand, and the surgical equipment that Marley mentioned. Can you do that?”
“I’ll be back in a jiffy,” said William, looking eager to please, and took off.
Over the course of the next half hour, Brad removed Anna’s old, makeshift bandage and examined her wound, relieved to find that it wasn’t infected. What was more, there were no bullet fragments lodged in her flesh and the nerves didn’t appear to be damaged.
As William took one hand and Marley took the other, Emma read the first few chapters of The Wizard of Oz, ending with Dorothy’s first encounter with the strange inhabitants of Munchkinland. Anna half-listened, though as Brad had predicted she seemed mostly insensible, occasionally letting out a sharp cry and gripping all the more tightly to the hands of the two people on either side of her.
“How much longer?” she asked desperately as he applied the new, more absorbent sterile bandage.
“Almost done.” Brad made another stitch, bracing himself for the inevitable flinching. It was considerably easier to get the job done with two other people assisting. “Do you guys have any antibiotics?”
“We do,” said Marley. She spoke with the hushed air of a mother trying to calm a sleeping baby. “As long as you’re here, you’re welcome to them.”
Brad hoped his appreciation was self-evident. “Obviously we can’t pay you in cash, but I’m willing to help out for as long as you need. Place like this, I’m sure there’s always work to be done.”
“I’m sure we can find a use for you.” Marley motioned to William. “Last couple nights his partner has been sick and he’s been having to go on patrols alone. I’m worried that one night he’s going to take a wrong turn or lose his footing on an icy precipice and we’ll never see him again.”
“I’m a grown man, I can take care of myself,” said William, though the expression on his face suggested that he appreciated her concern. “Wouldn’t mind having a companion, though. It does get lonely out there.” He looked to Brad. “You ever hunted?”
“Often.”
Brad remembered an illustrated retelling of The Odyssey he had read as a child in which the wily sailor and his crew washed up on an island that was covered in lotus. When they ate the flower, they lost all desire to return to their homes and wives.
It would have been easy to forget his quest and to settle here where he and Anna would be warm and safe and well-fed. Soon, though, he would have to find Lee and the children. He didn’t want to say so just yet because he didn’t want to seem ungrateful, but as soon as Anna had recovered enough to move on, they would be leaving again. He would never fully be able to enjoy the peace and serenity of this community while Sammy and Martha were still under his father’s dubious care.
Soon—though it likely felt longer to Anna—the wound was stitched up and a fresh bandage applied. Brad handed the extra bandage back to William, who took it back to the supply closet along with the medicine. Emma sat solemnly with the book in her lap, as if sensing that she and Brad had a long conversation ahead of them.
“Fascinating story,” said Marley. “Does she ever make it back to Kansas?”
“Have you never read or seen The Wizard of Oz?” Emma asked in surprise.
Marley shook her head. “I was more of a Doctor Who girl.”
“So was I, but…it’s The Wizard of Oz.”
Having seen how supportive the rest of the group had been during the surgery, Brad was now feeling embarrassed for his initial display of aggression. While Emma returned the book to the library and Anna was led away to a room with a couple empty beds on the floor below, he took Marley aside and said, “I don’t usually have reason to say this, but you and your crew have been exceptionally good to us tonight.”
“Did you really think we were just going to let her die?” replied Marley, looking amused. She had large, eccentric blue eyes and her hair fell in curls around her face. “My grandmother taught me that when you see someone in need, you’re supposed to help them without asking where they’re from. Besides, it’s not like we see a lot of other survivors these days. We try to help when we can.”
“Well, you’re maybe the first person I’ve met in the past five months who seems to operate by any sort of moral code. Maybe the worst thing about the collapse was what it did to the living.”
Marley nodded knowingly. Brad had the weird feeling that she was storing away everything he said in some vast reservoir inside herself. She possessed the rare quality of being able to pay attention, and remember.
“When you were operating on Anna,” she said, “she mentioned wanting to know what had happened to Sammy and Martha. Who are Sammy and Martha?”
Brad had been earnestly hoping that he was the only one paying attention to Anna’s ravings. His voice sounded oddly weak and thin over the roar of the furnace behind them.
“They were children. They were taken from us.”
“Her children? Your children?” Sensing Brad’s hesitation, she laid a reassuring hand on his arm. “I don’t mean to press the issue, and I understand if you don’t want to talk about it. I do like to have context, though. It gives me a better picture.”
“It’s fine.” Brad didn’t know how to explain to her that he hadn’t planned to discuss this tonight. “The boy’s Anna’s son. Martha was just a girl we came across—I say ‘just,’ but she became like a daughter to us.”
Marley’s bright eyes probed him curiously and sympathetically. “You keep talking about them in the past tense. If you don’t mind my asking—”
“They’re not dead,” said Brad. “As far as we know.”
“But they’re lost?”
“In a sense.”
Brad didn’t want to explain about the kidnapping, even less that his father was the person responsible for it.
“The person who took them,” he said, “we don’t think he could have killed them. Our hope is that they’re still out there somewhere.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Just a couple days ago.”
“Then you might still find them,” said Marley, not very reassuringly. “Sorry, I’m not the sort of person to offer false hope. But if it’s only been a few days and you’re confident they haven’t been—”
Brad shrugged away the notion. He appreciated that Marley hadn’t condescended with false comfort, though someone else might have been offended by her abrasiveness and honesty.
“I know the man who took them,” he said. “He’s deluded, thinks he’s doing what’s best for them even if it means taking them from the people who love them. That being said, he knows how to survive in the wilderness. I know they’re not dead. We’ll find them.”
By now much of the group was retiring to bed for the night, though a few of the men, armed with the same type of rifle that William had been carrying earlier, stood watch at the tunnel’s entrance. Motioning for him to follow, Marley left the bunker and walked at a brisk pace toward the end of the hall, where stood a wall-mounted ladder made of iron pipe.
With a surreal feeling, Brad followed her up the ladder into a room furnished with a Turkish carpet, a large bookshelf and a couple of leather armchairs that was lit by an old-fashioned goose-neck lamp. Places for tea were already set for them; Marley motioned for him to sit and offered him a pip
e and tobacco, which he felt it would be ungracious to refuse.
After five months of perpetual darkness, even the sight of a plain room illuminated with electrical power struck Brad as bizarre; but the opulence of this room compared to the rest of the rooms in the reservoir heightened the dream-like feeling. He felt like an Arabian peasant who had been invited into a sultan’s palace, or a common sailor visiting Captain Nemo’s private quarters. He half-expected to see enormous deep-sea fish floating past the broad windows.
“Do you want some brandy?” asked Marley, reaching for a decanter on the nightstand. “Found it in a lighthouse off Boothbay Harbor.”
“Please.”
Greedily, Brad took a sip of the liquor, unnerved by the persistence of Marley’s generosity. Had she sensed that he was planning on leaving whenever Anna recovered, and was she making a bid to impress him into staying?
“Does the rest of your crew know you live in such luxury?” he asked.
Far from being offended, Marley laughed at the question. “They don’t find it nearly as impressive as you do, truly. I’m guessing it’s been a while since you’ve been inside a home.”
She was right about that, though Brad didn’t like to admit it. He had been inside houses, but none of them were lit like this; none of them exuded such an aura of warmth and comfort. The stench of death wasn’t pervasive here like it was in other places.
“I don’t guess I can judge you for taking your pleasures where you can get them,” he said.
“Most hours this room is open to the rest of the crew,” said Marley, sinking back into the chair and tranquilly lighting her pipe. “They come up here to borrow books or make tea—though we’ve had to place limits on how much tea a single person can drink during the week because supplies are running low. Tea’s going to be an increasingly scarce commodity in the world to come. After curfew the room is closed to visitors so I can get some rest.” She took another puff from her pipe, looking thoughtful. “Emma seemed to recognize you. Did you know her, before?”
Brad could sense that she had been waiting to spring this question when he was most comfortable.
“We knew each other,” he said tersely. “She was a friend of an old friend.” Eager to change the subject, he added, “How did you come to be out here? William wouldn’t tell me; he said it was a story I had better hear from you.”
“He probably wasn’t sure how much he should divulge to someone he had just met. I don’t mind telling you, though.”
Marley poured herself another half of a glass from the decanter. “I had actually worked here in the lab for about eight years before the disaster. When we realized the outbreak was on course to become a pandemic, most of my colleagues decided to go be with their families—I never saw them again. Marshall, my husband, was out of the country at the time. He phoned me and told me he didn’t want me to leave the lab. So I stayed.”
“William mentioned that you’re trying to restore the electrical grid.”
“We’re working on it.” Marley gripped her glass tightly, as if sensing the weight of the responsibility that had descended on her. “As you can see, we’ve made some initial advances. Our goal is to eventually replace the electronic circuits that were fried by the EMP with new ones. The reservoir has proven an ideal location for the task because it flows year-round, regardless of the conditions outside.”
Despite all that he had seen, a part of Brad wanted to argue that she was being delusional and overly ambitious. But he couldn’t deny that her work had born fruit.
“What are you hoping to achieve now?” he asked.
“Currently,” said Marley, “now that electricity and heating have been locally restored, we’re working on converting our vehicles to run without benefit of gasoline or electricity. You might have noticed that Will’s old Mercury is gasoline-powered. We have a limited supply of gasoline here, but it’s guaranteed to run out or expire eventually, so I’ve been experimenting with alternative fuels.”
Brad hesitated, not wanting to upset her with this next question. “You mentioned your husband—what was his name again?”
“Marshall,” said Marley, sensing the thrust of the question. “He was arguably the most brilliant man I’ve ever met, and his death was a tremendous loss, not just personally, for me, but professionally. It was a loss for everyone working here. He was headed to Japan for a conference in the early days of the pandemic. He contracted the virus on the flight out.”
“Had he gotten the implant?”
“No, we had both decided against it,” Marley said. “We were skeptical of the tech from the start, believing it to have been insufficiently tested before being foisted on the public. When we submitted a paper urging caution, we were threatened by lawyers representing the major pharmaceutical companies. Of course, that just affirmed our suspicions that they had no idea of the nanotech’s long-term effects—if they had been confident in their product, they wouldn’t have tried to silence us.”
Marley swirled her glass in a melancholy fashion, as if reflecting on the irony that her husband had been killed by the virus he had been trying to warn the public about.
Brad took a final swig and set his glass down, overcome by the enormity of her achievements and ambitions. He had reacted skeptically when William lauded Marley’s brilliance, doubtful that she possessed the powers he claimed or that she would use them to good ends. But here, at least, they had heat and electricity, and she had treated her guests with unlooked-for generosity. It was a lot to process.
“Have you gotten any stragglers besides us?” he asked.
“We’ve had a few,” said Marley. “We try to accommodate them as comfortably as we can. Sometimes they choose to leave after a few days or weeks—amazingly, not everyone is on board with our project of rebuilding civilization. Not everyone thinks it deserves to be rebuilt. I’ve been called a fool and a dreamer, but I suppose that’s the curse of risking anything. There will always be detractors.”
“I can’t believe anyone would disagree with you,” Brad said, suppressing a yawn. His eyes were getting heavy; he had been awake for nearly eighteen hours. “I might stay with Anna tonight, if that’s all right by you?”
“Of course,” Marley said. “We had assumed you would want to.” Placing her glass on the stand, she rose and led him to the door. “There’s a second bed in the guest room already laid out for you. The two of you will be the only ones in the room tonight. I know it’ll probably take you a few days to adjust, so you’re welcome to seek me out in the morning if you want to continue the discussion.”
“I just might.”
Brad hadn’t come close to exhausting all his questions in their brief conversation. At the same time, he hadn’t yet gotten to talk to Emma and he knew she would be seeking him out at some point. He wondered whether she still retained any of her old feelings toward him. He certainly didn’t. Nearly ten years had passed; life had happened to both of them.
Only belatedly, as he descended the ladder back down into the corridor, did it occur to him that he ought not to have left Anna alone in a strange room in a strange place. Although the community as a whole seemed well-intentioned, he hadn’t yet ascertained whether they were individually trustworthy. With a surge of panic he ran the rest of the way down the hall to her room—only to find her safe in bed, asleep. She looked as though she hadn’t moved at all in the past hour.
He turned on the lamp by her bedside table and closed the door behind him. As he did so, Anna stirred and rose slightly.
“You okay?” she asked groggily. “You look worried.”
“Everything’s good, Anna. Everything’s good.” Brad broke into a wide smile as he looked down at her. Two days ago, their friendship had been pushed to breaking point, but the relief he felt at seeing her here, alive and looking better than she had in days, was overwhelming.
Just to be safe, though, he didn’t sleep in the bed Marley had designated for him. Instead he climbed into Anna’s bed and fell asleep at her feet, sit
ting upright, clutching tightly to his axe.
Chapter 13
Brad rose with a start. For a delirious minute he had imagined himself back in the woods, carefully tending Anna as she awaited death. But then, as warm amber light filtered into the room and the song of a warbler cut through the silence, the events of the previous day slowly unspooled in his memory.
Rising from the bed, he ventured downstairs into the dining-hall and found Anna eating breakfast with the others. Her wound had been freshly bandaged and the color was beginning to return to her face.
Over a plain meal of fresh fruit, eggs and oatmeal, the two of them discussed the search for Lee. Despite Brad’s assurances that Lee had no intention of harming the two kids, they both worried for his mental state. “I’d rather find him sooner than later,” said Anna, brows creased in worry.
“Where could he have gone, though?” Brad shoveled another spoonful of egg onto his plate. “I feel if we think about it long enough, we’ll be able to figure it out.”
“There would be no point in returning to the cabin,” said Anna. “Unless he was searching for something he had lost and thought he might find it in the ruins—but that’s unlikely, right? What about Bangor?”
“Why would he go back there?” Brad asked. He drained the last of his watered-down tea and shoved the mug aside. “Bangor is overrun with violence and pestilence, or at least it was the last time I passed through. You might die in the country but you would definitely die in the city.”
“He may not have intended to stay,” said Anna. “He might have been headed there for the same reason we were—because he was hoping to find something he couldn’t find anywhere else.”
Brad had to concede that this was possible. “But he wouldn’t have stayed there; he would have gotten what he wanted and left. His ultimate destination would have been elsewhere, and whatever that was, he’s likely to have arrived by now.” He had been thinking hard about this for much of the past couple days and it was the only solution that made sense to him.