Protecting Our Home

by Colton Lively

  Cody saw the challenges, which must have been the same for his father, back when Sharpshooter ran the place and turned it into a mix of retreat, training facility, plant laboratory, and sanctuary. “This kind of thing can’t really be scaled up,” said Cody. “It’s a shame it has to be kept small, but it really does.”

  “Twenty-five, I reckon, would be near our limit,” Cabot had already calculated. “You get past thirty, so they tell me, and you get weird factions and infighting. That,” he said pointedly, banging his fists together, “we do not need.”

  “So, everyone gets along here, pretty well?”

  “Well enough. We don’t allow fights to break out. I mean, if someone gets a broken nose, it’ll be six or eight hours before we can even get them to an emergency room.”

  “But arguments are inevitable, surely?” said Mary.

  Their gear was brought in, and they stood now among the dozen bags and duffels which comprised their possessions. “Over scheduling or food, or maybe there’s a collapsing relationship…”

  “Sure,” said Cabot. “We’ve had folks show up here who truly didn’t belong. One guy decided that because he’d left behind running his business to ‘go native’ in the woods, that meant he was the boss up here, too. Another guy figured he’d sit in a hammock for twelve hours a day and let everyone else do the work. They didn’t last long.”

  He showed Cody and Mary the light switches, making sure they would recognize which one turned on the garbage disposal. Then, they finalized arrangements for Cody and Mary to speak with the community later that day, and Cabot left them to it.

  “Kids? You asleep?” asked Mary, who could barely wait to get under some blankets.

  “Nearly,” said Emma from her room. She’d already chosen the larger bedroom of the two, with its picture-postcard view of the woods and a small lake beyond.

  “GeekLord?”

  “Yep, I’m asleep,” said Jacob wearily. “I’ll work on the radio tomorrow, I promise.”

  “It already is tomorrow, genius,” said Emma, but she lacked the energy for proper banter.

  The two parents had a futon-style fold-out mattress which was less private, but a lot more spacious than the single beds upstairs. Neither of them had anything left in the tank, and by nine-thirty, full of breakfast and lulled by the tranquil quiet, all four were asleep.

  21

  The Russell Homestead, Maine

  D-Day + 2 (2:45 pm, Day Two)

  To her surprise, Emma managed to navigate the creaking wooden staircase without waking the others. She could have slept for longer, but something in the pervasive silence made her curious to see the rest of the camp and to meet some of the people. They were either napping, foraging in the woods, or working in their own homes in near-silence, and Emma wanted to see which was true.

  The Russell Homestead brought together the feel of several other places that Emma knew. There were shades of her Girl Scouts weekends—little wooden huts, bucolic silence, the sense of accessing a remote bolt-hole that hardly anyone else knew about—and also the quiet industry of a work camp, maybe, or a base camp for mountain climbers.

  Everyone was doing something all the time. The kitchens were never still, and most of the sounds which resonated across the camp were metal spoons clashing on pans, or more discrete indications of culinary plans such as the beating of eggs. She was heading in that direction when a tiny, elf-like girl came from nowhere and zipped across Emma’s path carrying a woven basket.

  “Hey. Wanna help?” the girl offered, looking back.

  “Sure. Where are you…?”

  “Come on,” the girl said and skipped into the forest with the sure-footedness of someone who had lived there for months or years. “Mom sent me to find some hemlock,” she said, speaking just as rapidly as she moved. “You know what it looks like?”

  “Erm…”

  “I’m Hope, by the way. You’re Emma Russell,” she said.

  “Glad to get that confirmed,” said Emma, still trying to keep up.

  “Your grandfather built the main house.”

  “That’s true, yeah, Grandad Russell built that. But I never met him.”

  “He’s still here, you know,” the girl said, leading Emma along a thin path that snaked away from the camp and into the woods. “Still protecting the place. I think,” she said, stopping now to confide in Emma, “it was him that brought you here today.”

  “I thought it was a bunch of good luck and an old Dodge army truck that refused to die,” said Emma, “but call it what you want.”

  “I think he wants you to be here. To be protected. Because the world is ending.” With that, she skipped away again, stopping only to kneel by a cluster of plants at the base of a large tree. “Here,” she said. “We only want the needles. My mom makes tea from them, and then we can pickle things in the tea. Papa Cabot says we could make wine of it, but I don’t think mom knows how.”

  Watching the girl’s deft fingers, Emma couldn’t help a nagging concern. “Isn’t hemlock dangerous?”

  Hope waved this away. “We’re fine unless we boil the needles. Mom says that’s dangerous. Just got to simmer then for a few hours.”

  “And you come into the forest every day to gather things?”

  The tiny girl stood, a handful of the thin, dark-green needles in her hand. “I know you just arrived but…” she said, trying not to be rude, “where else am I gonna go? It’s not like there’s a grocery store around the corner.”

  “Would you go there if there was one?” Emma asked as Hope continued stripping needles from the tree.

  “Maybe, maybe not. I don’t really miss anything.” She thought about it, then shrugged and said, “Mango, I do miss that. No way we could grow mango here. But the forest is full of edible stuff. She paused for half a beat. “And bears, of course.”

  “Woah.”

  “Just black bears, not grizzlies.”

  “Still, though.”

  “I see one every few days, nosing around the edge of the camp. They’re cute, especially the babies.”

  Hope finished her gathering and spread out the needles in the bottom of her basket. “Maybe we’ll find something else. Sasha needs another vegetable for tonight. Because we have extra people,” she grinned, “but I guess you knew that.”

  “I don’t know how you manage,” said Emma. “I’d be totally freaked out if this was my life.”

  Perhaps twelve, but imbued with the confidence of a young adult, Hope handed Emma the basket and said meaningfully, “I heard a little bit about what happened yesterday. I think this is your life now.”

  She chose a new path, and they were off again, through a more tangled part of the woods, and into a sequence of clearings. “The ranch was here,” said Hope, always five paces ahead of Emma, who’d thought she’d be in better shape after a semester of crushing it on the volleyball court. “They had cows, and some little pigs, but they couldn’t make any money.”

  Each of the clearings had become a larder in its own right, and Hope visited a dozen spots, the best not to exhaust an individual stand of plants. “’Lamb quarters, Papa Cabot calls it,” said Hope, holding up a thin stem with leaves shaped like flint arrowheads. “But mom calls it goosefoot, probably ‘cause she’s a vegetarian,” the girl laughed.

  “And she taught you to recognize all these plants?” Emma asked, kneeling to pick a handful of the leaves.

  “Mom taught me some, and Papa Cabot showed me the rest. He says the Native Americans used to plant goosefoot here, right back at the beginning of farming, thousands of years ago.” Hope’s basket began to fill up. “One more thing,” she said. “If they’re in season yet.” Quick as a sprinter, she was off again, racing down another partly overgrown track with Emma lagging, feeling like a bumbling novice as she tripped over a root and had to catch herself.

  “Is there really enough food, so close by, to give everyone a good diet?” she asked.

  “Mostly,” said Hope, glad of each question. “Papa Cabot
says if we get eighty percent of our calories from the forest, that’s good going.”

  “Wow, eighty percent?”

  “Sure! There are thirty edible plants, berries, and grasses within a mile of camp. We have our gardens, too. And there’s… Wait, do you eat meat?”

  “Not for three years.”

  “Oh, you’re gonna miss out when we get our next venison,” Hope said, all but licking her lips.

  “I can’t imagine feeling left out, but I’ll be happy for the others,” Emma replied diplomatically.

  “It’s a real feast. And after, my mom makes jerky that lasts forever and tastes amazing.”

  “Sounds like your mom is quite something,” Emma said.

  She shrugged. “Isn’t yours?”

  “Yeah, for sure, but she couldn’t tell hemlock from a Christmas tree. And I don’t think she ever tried making jerky. Spaghetti Bolognese is about as far as she’s normally prepared to go.”

  Instead of criticizing Emma’s mother or further extolling her own, Hope simply said, “You’ll see.” A few moments later, she found the third item on her list. “Cattail,” she said, running her fingertips up the plant’s long, thin stem. “If we cut them when they’re young, mom says we can stir-fry the stems. Tastes a bit like celery. But these are older.”

  “So, we can’t eat them?”

  “We’ll leave the stems, but the ones that have their pollen, we can… Okay, here it is,” she said, showing Emma a tall, brown stalk frosted with bright yellow. “Wait a sec.” She disappeared into the woods, and for a minute, all that Emma knew of Hope was disconnected sounds, but then she returned, holding a rudimentary basket made of bound leaves. “You hold this,” she said to Emma, “and I’ll shake that. We grind the pollen into flour. There isn’t much, but mom says you can thicken a stew with it.”

  They took five of the tall stems in total, tapping and shaking the yellow pollen into the leaf basket. After the third one, Emma couldn’t resist and began humming and then singing aloud: “Players gonna play, play, play… Haters gonna hate, hate, hate…” She looked up, intending for Hope to join in with the song. “I’m just gonna shake, shake, shake…” Nothing was happening. “Not a Taylor Swift fan?”

  “Who?”

  She stopped dead. “Wow.”

  “Yeah, sorry. I’m a woods girl, and woods is what I know.”

  “You don’t get to play music here?”

  “Oh, sure. But Papa Cabot said it’s not healthy for girls to be taught that they’ll become successful only when they learn to shake their ass the right way.”

  Emma started laughing, and most of the way back to camp, couldn’t stop.

  22

  The Russell Homestead

  D-Day + 2 (17:00 pm, Day Two)

  Cabot knocked on the cabin door a little earlier than was necessary. “The wash house gets busy around five. Wanted you to have first dibs,” he said, directing a yawning Jacob to three wooden stalls at the far corner of the camp. “I don’t know what you brought with you, but there’s all-natural soap in each stall. We try to keep industrial crap out of our water table.”

  Having already found the showers after her high-speed foraging trip with Hope, Emma was helping to stack twigs and kindling to build a fire in the central pit. They didn’t light one every night, as each cabin had its own form of heating, but the arrival of the Russells was deemed a special occasion. Once the fuel was aflame, Emma retreated to the kitchen to help Maddy.

  “I don’t know if I slept way too much,” said Mary, rubbing her eyes, “or way too little. But I’ll definitely sleep again tonight.”

  Someone had brought them coffee, and Cody made sure to drink down two mugs before saying much of anything, certain that his exhausted brain would produce only gibberish. An hour after waking, with the fire going strong and lots of busy, preparatory sounds emanating from the kitchen, Cabot came over and offered him a cold can of beer. “I’m buying,” said the old homesteader. “Besides, I’m guessin’ you got some pretty bad news to deliver to these folks. Thought a little Dutch courage might help.”

  “No lie,” said Cody, and politely hoisted the can in Cabot’s direction. “To your health. And thank you, for all of this,” he said, nodding back toward the cabin they would seemingly call ‘home’.

  “Thank you, son,” said Cabot, then headed over to his cabin, most of which doubled as the camp’s indoor public space. People were mingling, judiciously drawing down the camp’s beer stocks, and wondering to each other about the new arrivals. There were some youngsters among them, mostly around Jacob and Emma’s age. Hope’s younger sister, Fern, and another girl of about twelve were returning from foraging carrying purplish flowers and some kind of moss. Once their baskets were dropped off, Hope’s mom sent them straight to the showers. “Hurry, though. We’re going to listen to the new family who arrived today.”

  There was laughter from the kitchens, and Emma emerged, holding her nose. “Wow, no way,” she said. “I’ll help with anything else you want, but that’s just nasty.” The others had a good time poking good-natured fun at the newcomer; helping prepare the evening’s salad, the vegetarian Emma was always going to be caught out by the intensity of hot-smoked brook trout.

  “More for us, then!” someone called after her. “Don’t worry. Next time we get back from Spencer Lake, and it’s all hands on deck, we’ll get you filleting like a professional.”

  “Um, I think not,” said Emma. “But, you guys enjoy.”

  By five-thirty, the whole camp had finished work and was gathering by the kitchen or around the central fire pit. “You ready to give us the good word?” asked Cabot, standing with a beer can in hand.

  “Sure. I ain’t got much, but in the circumstances, it’s better than nothing.”

  “And it’s better they hear it from one source,” Cabot had already decided. “This business is too important for us to be playing games of ‘telephone’.”

  “Agreed. I’m ready,” Cody told Cabot. After six hours of sleep, two coffees, and a beer, Cody felt like he was back in command of himself.

  “Brothers and sisters,” said Cabot, and this simple beginning was enough both to quiet the group and bring them close, into a rough horseshoe around the fire with the Russells at the open end. “I only get to do this a few times a year, and today is kinda special. Some of you have already met the Russell family—Cody, his wife Mary,” Cabot said, gesturing to each with an open palm, “and their young ones, Emma and Jacob. They’ve come from Flannigan, in New Hampshire. And if their surname is familiar and you’re wondering, then, yes, Cody is Sharpshooter Russell’s son, and this here land that we’re all living on belongs to him. But he’s told me already he won’t be evicting us. Right, Cody?”

  “Right, Mr. Cabot, absolutely. Nothing will change.”

  Cabot’s face grew dark. “Nothing will change… ‘cept, the actual end of the world has come, and Cody says they have a little bit of news about that.”

  “Is it war?” asked Maddy. Several others followed up, but Cabot quieted them. There would be time for questions later.

  “The short answer is, we don't know,” said Cody. “We only have a little bit more information than you do. Whatever exactly happened - and I’ll give you my theory in a minute - took place around two o’clock yesterday afternoon. The result was an immediate shut-down of the power grid. At the same time, pretty much anything electrical was fried by a huge surge. Cellphones, automobile electronics, TVs, most radios… Even fridges and toasters had to take a huge electrical spike, and a lot of them caught fire. That’s what caused Flannigan to burn down in just half a day.”

  “What about other places?” asked Maddy.

  “We don’t know. If Flannigan is an example, then… well, that ain’t good news for the rest of the country.”

  “It’s a national problem?” asked Cabot. “No way it could just be localized?”

  “I thought about that,” Cody told them, “but if other states weren’t affected, we’d hav
e seen police choppers, and FEMA, and all kinds of military aircraft flying into New Hampshire and Maine to scope things out. Thing is, we haven’t seen a single plane since it started.”

  “The National Guard have been called out,” said Mary, “but their vehicles were all useless, too. They tried to take ours, but we weren’t about to let that happen.”

  The briefing had to pause while the crowd applauded with approval; standing up and defending one’s rights and property from government overreach were, to them, not only the responsibility of every American, they were also indelibly enshrined in the camp’s founding credo. But Cody chose not to mention that their escape from the National Guard checkpoint had depended on a haphazard raid by heavily armed ‘irregulars’; he still had no idea whatsoever how to interpret that incident. It made more sense to mention it quietly to Cabot, later, Cody reasoned.

  “So, I told you I had a theory,” said Cody, slightly warily.

  The people he’d met so far had been sensible, rational types, a far cry from the tinfoil hat-wearing loons who populated the alt-right-adjacent corners of the internet. At the same time, people found themselves in “prepper” camps like this one for a whole range of reasons.

  “Let the buyer beware, as they say,” he smiled, “that I ain’t a scientist or a military man. I’m a welder by trade, and I run a business that sometimes restores old vehicles,” he said, casting a thumb at the sturdy Dodge. “But I believe in my heart, based on all the evidence, that there was a nuclear explosion in space yesterday afternoon. That’s what caused the electromagnetic pulse, which…”

  They were immediately ahead of him. The expression “EMP” made its way around the crowd, and people were nodding as though this were a scenario they’d already rehearsed and assessed.

  “I guess you guys can probably teach me about the effects. It doesn’t kill people, not directly. It just knocks out most anything electrical, and it does so long term. There won’t be any quick fixes.”