“A month? Six weeks?” Zach didn’t quite understand.
Kara gave me a little squeeze again. “Oh, figure it out, Einstein.” Then to me she said, “We can find some place for you to lie down, Sophie. Somewhere away from the noise.”
Gideon came up to us and waved his hands for quiet. “I’m going to make this short and sweet, because obviously we have an injured person here. Her name is Sophie and she’s from Springfield, Oregon. Then this is Zach from Medford.” He pointed toward Zach. Then he motioned at Kara. “And not leastly, Kara from Klamath Falls.”
Gideon looked at us. “We’ll get around to introductions of the folks here later. Right now, you have to know our rules. One. We don’t out into the forest alone. I think you can guess why. It’s doubly important now considering what happened to Sophie. Two. I’m in charge. When I’m not in charge, Ethan’s in charge. Three. Everyone does chores. Sophie will be excluded until the doctor says she’s able to work. I’m sorry to put this on you here, but you need to know the rules.”
Zach shrugged. “I was expecting something like that. Are we talking about a democracy here?”
“They elected me,” Gideon said simply. “Next year we’ll have another election. And everyone is freely able to make complaints to a tribunal. We’re working on the rest. It’s pretty new to us, too.”
Kara nodded. “Do I smell food?”
Gideon laughed. “Smells like stew. Robert over there is getting pretty good with a crossbow. Elk stew, right?”
“Yep,” Robert said agreeably. He was a lanky, thirtysomething year old with brown eyes and a friendly face. “But I keep hoping to bag a wild hog. I’ve got a terrible hankering for bacon.”
I scanned the crowd carefully. The faces were smiling, curious, and interested. There was a range from ten years old to a man who looked to be in his sixties. Everyone was patently cheerful about our presence. There wasn’t dissent. There wasn’t unhappiness. There wasn’t anger and I felt very strange.
My chest was tight and I knew it wasn’t because of the healing lung. I didn’t like being here. Suddenly, I became aware that imposed rules seemed contrary. And Zach wasn’t speaking to me anymore. Instead, he asked Kara about me or shot me glowering stares from his frowning face. Then he would look away if my eyes settled on him.
Sinclair and Kara came to help me from the trailer and I shoved away everything I was feeling so that it went deep inside me. They put me in a cabin that was set up to be a medical clinic for the doctor and let me alone to go outside. There was a bed there that I suspected was the doctor’s. I clumped up the pillow, laid down, and stared at the ceiling.
The noise from people talking to each other so eagerly floated inside to me and bothered me. I wanted to escape. OMG.
Chapter Fifteen – Ain’t it Peculiar?
Two weeks later and I was pretty sure that things weren’t improving. Physically, I was better. I could breathe. My stitches were gone. The red scar below my breasts was healed up and only itched occasionally. I was up and helping out in the ways that I could. I wasn’t permitted to leave the campground until Sinclair said I was 100 percent well. Evidently he didn’t think I was, although I didn’t agree and I suspected that Zach had been whispering tales in his doctorly ears in order to sway that opinion. So I sat on a stool in the large camp’s kitchen and chopped vegetables or mixed food or sliced homemade bread.
Gibby was the cook, head chef, and captain supreme of dish washing. She was about the only one in the camp who didn’t switch chores. She looked like she was about thirty five years old and she had blonde hair that was cut short. Her eyes were brown and she had a nice wry sense of humor, when she talked. Mostly she liked to cook. She liked to find neat things to cook. She praised the scavengers when they brought things back that were interesting to her. “Beets? Cool beans.” “Portobello mushrooms? Whiz bang.” “Pickled snake heads? Neato mosquito.”
Since I was basically in her way she didn’t say much to me. “Good job slicing potatoes, Sophie. Make them more square next time.” “Slice the French bread, Sophie, not your fingers. I’m not making lady fingers today. Ha. Ha. Ha.” “Go take a nap, Sophie. You look like a dust mop kicked your butt.”
She kept a photograph of her family near her favorite six burner stove. In it was a black haired man with a goofy smile, Gibby with a sweet smile, and three kids who all favored their father and his inane smile. Since she often looked pensively at the photograph, I didn’t complain about the lack of conversation.
When I did have conversations it was with Kara, Sinclair, or the pixies who visited every few days. It got to where there were many people who enjoyed singing for the pesky little critters. One man named Thad even played the guitar for them and they lapped it up like cat with a saucer of cream. They also had to poke their noses into every corner of the camp from the goings on in the kitchen to the giant fire pit where Robert had designed a roasting device for some of the larger animals he was hunting. However, the pixies never completely abandoned me. They always came to see how I was doing; several stayed with me every time they visited. Sometimes when I woke up in the middle of the night I would see a faint green light flutter past as one went from one place to the next. I guess I really was a member of their clan.
Zach had volunteered to scavenge with the group of people who traveled around to various cities in the vicinity. They had headed out to Eureka on a trip a few days before. They had taken bicycles with trailers like the one that had carted me around. They planned to return in a week or so, depending on what they could find. Sinclair explained they were to bring back vitamins, foods, and various other essentials decided by a triumvirate of the group designated to make those judgments.
Gee. Re-civilization was very civilized. Madame Sarcasm, take a bow. I knew I shouldn’t be like that; it wasn’t like I had better ideas. I was simply trying to keep my head on straight. No one was bugging me. Mostly no one was staring at me, except one guy and he had thankfully gone on his volunteer expedition.
So I got to read my how-to-swordfight book. Reading a book wasn’t going to properly prepare me, but it was going to lay the groundwork. I wanted to understand what I was getting into.
The other thing I did was to move into the single females barracks. Once a dorm for junior camp counselors, there were five of us in there. I was the youngest. The others varied from twenty-five to fifty-six. Five other men stayed in the male barracks that had been the junior male counterpart. The others bunked together or in various cabins all over the campground. Gideon had his own place that was once the head counselor’s hideout. Ethan and Calida were a pair and stayed together in a single cabin. Overall there were ten females and thirteen males. There were twenty-three people who had survived the most significant event ever to take place in our lifetimes.
The place had its own rash of problems. Mostly logistical stuff. Food storage. Food containment. Obtaining fresh food. The latrines were a huge issue. Obtaining water was a little easier. The campground had its own natural spring. The only thing that didn’t seem to be a problem was that the people unnaturally got along. I mean they didn’t even seem to get mildly irritated with each other. No snarling, griping, complaining or yelling. Unless you wanted to count Zach’s continued irritation with me, there didn’t seem to be any infighting. And I don’t think anyone but Kara was aware of Zach’s anger with me and since Zach was absent, it wasn’t a concern.
I had a lot of time to observe. Talk about social dynamics in play. This would have been a sociologists’ dream come true. My father, in particular, would have been twitching with eagerness to interview and develop protocols for testing his various hypotheses. And the psychologists would have been panting right behind the sociologists.
Gideon was the leader and that in itself was odd. The others kowtowed to him, even in minor decisions. He was fifteen years old; although I thought he had an old soul way of acting. Even the sixtysomething man deferred to Gideon. It wasn’t fawning; it was respectful observance of Gideo
n’s decisions. When had that ever been the norm in American society? Never, for sure. Elders are always considered to be more leaders. Age is considered a basis for experience, knowledge, and ability. Being neither older, nor experienced, Gideon was a strange choice for an elected leader, and the reasoning behind that wasn’t explained to me. But I do need to mention that I didn’t ask, either.
I couldn’t very well put it in my notepad because the situation wasn’t really a new animal, but it was strange. And don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t that I distrusted Gideon, it was that he was two years younger than I was, for Pete’s sake. If they’d elected me to be their leader, I probably would have marched them off to Los Angeles in search of a way to resurrect Starbucks for a beloved latte, which is part and parcel of why I wasn’t in the position. Did I mention that I no earthly desire to be the head honcho?
And the others? They did their things. There was a lot to do in a camp like this. Having no electricity they did chores by hand, and that always took longer. Washing clothes, dishes, preparing food, and getting ready for winter were all priorities. I watched them with idle speculation that both confused me and made me sad. They laughed with each other. They made jokes with each other. They even mourned their old lives and vanished loved ones with a genial acceptance that disturbed me. Regardless of their grief, they developed new friendships and love in the case of Ethan and Calida. Even Kara was developing a group of friends with an alacrity I found nearly alarming.
Things weren’t better because I wasn’t better. I didn’t like being around a group of people. I didn’t want to start liking anyone. I didn’t want to get close. If I got too close, then there was such a high possibility that they would be taken away from me.
I wasn’t the same seventeen year old girl who had hiked up a mountain trail with her father two months before. And the people there knew it. They spoke to me. They were polite. But they didn’t try to crack my shell anymore than I tried to open up to them.
There were two exceptions. One was the guitar playing man named Thad. He was fifty-two and came from San Francisco. He reminded me of my father and he went out of his way to be kind to me, even when I barely spoke in monosyllables to him. I knew I wasn’t acting like an adult but I wasn’t exactly certain how I should act.
The other barefaced exception was Elan. Elan was ten years old. He weighed maybe sixty pounds and was about five feet tall. His hair was the color of burnished wood, and just as curly as it could be without hot rollers. His eyes were large and brown and gave Zach a run for his money. He was the youngest of the group. He slept in a cabin with two of the older women, who mothered him incessantly.
Gibby said in a rare moment of tête-à-tête that Elan knew things, in a similar way to Gideon. Not wanting to put any more attention on my private theory, I gave Elan the briefest of attention. But it wasn’t so from his perspective.
Elan thought I was pretty tight. The words he used were, ‘Kewl,’ and ‘Fly.’ Often I caught him watching me when I wasn’t supposed to know he was watching me. Finally, he came to me in the kitchen, and asked candidly, “How did you get them to put the tattoo on your face?”
I was dicing vegetables for Gibby with a very large and sharp knife, being careful to get them in neat little squares because Gibby might break out a ruler after I was done. I knew what the kid was talking about, although I could have played dumb. “I didn’t ask the pixies to put it there,” I said pertly. “And it’s not a tattoo.”
Gibby was stirring something on the stove about a mile away in the oversized kitchen. She spared us a brief glance and went back to work. She had fresh chicken to work with and was having a great time with developing a menu. She hadn’t even groaned about de-feathering and gutting the birds that someone had brought back from a farm miles away. She’d even started someone on building a chicken coop, visions of omelet’s dancing in her head.
Elan frowned at me. Those big brown eyes were pools of emotion. Other than Gideon, who didn’t really count, I was the closest in age to him. I wondered if that was why he was picking on me. “But they put it on you, right?” he insisted.
I nodded reluctantly. Tattoos were cool to a ten year old, but it wasn’t a tattoo and I hadn’t asked for it. Not that I was complaining either. I could see the little wheels going click-click-clunk in his head. He wanted a face pixie and he wanted me to tell him how to go about getting one. Maybe he even wanted a little pixie for a pet. Wait until one of them went for his eyes in a fit over him pulling on their wings a little too hard. Yikes.
“It glows in the dark,” Elan said conspiratorially to me, casting a quick glance at Gibby, as if she was going to tell on him for doing something he shouldn’t do.
“They’re not pets,” I told him plainly. “They won’t play with you. They won’t put something on your face because you want it to be so.”
The frown on his little skinny face appeared again. He didn’t want to hear that from me. “I don’t want one as a pet,” he said, after a moment. His narrow shoulders contorted in an awkward shrug. “They’re just so…fly.”
“They’re special,” I told him, relenting a little. “We have to treat them specially. They’ll protect us if we do. They’ll warn us if something is wrong. We can never hurt them or try to force them into doing something they don’t want to do.”
Elan’s head tilted at me and I was reminded of the pixies aptitude in doing exactly that motion. “I don’t want to hurt them,” he protested mildly, the sincerity in his voice bubbling over. “They’re kewl. Really kewl. I mean, what else have we got now? No T.V. No PlayStation. No GameBoy. No kids around my age. I can’t chat online with my posse anymore.” His face crumpled a little. “I can’t IM my mom anymore.”
Suddenly, I had a not so paranormal vision of what the last months had been like for Elan. He’d eventually woken up in his bed before nothing had happened to wake him up. When he’d gone looking for his parents, they had been gone. He probably hadn’t noticed the empty bed clothes that had been left. His sisters and brothers had been gone as well. The phone hadn’t worked either. He was alone, oh, so utterly alone, and he was only ten years old. He barely knew how to tie his shoes. Then when he’d gone to the neighbors they weren’t there either. So he’d waited. And he’d waited. He’d gotten sick eating too many cookies instead of something more nutritional. When he was throwing up in the bathroom, he realized that no one was there, and he was by himself.
God, I thought sickly. How had he survived by himself? And more sickly, I thought, What about the other children who survived? Have some of them starved to death because they were all alone out there?
“I knew Gideon was waiting for me,” Elan said suddenly. His brown eyes were wet. I knew he wasn’t reading my mind, he was reading my face. “I knew that he was waiting for me and that I could trust him. So I went to find him. I used my skateboard.” His skinny shoulders shrugged again. “I’ve always known stuff. Like I knew about you.”
I put the knife down on the cutting board before I accidentally cut off one of my fingers. Gibby glanced our way again and then went back to the chickens she was stewing. She was adding herbs with a zest that was abnormal to me. “What did you know about me?” I asked carefully.
“I saw you with the other man, the man who was hurt so badly,” Elan said. “The guy with the twisted smile and the black face.”
I jerked. Elan was talking about the burned man.
“He was hurting you,” Elan said matter-of-factly. “Gideon saw something too, but he never told me what. He, Doc, and the others took off to the north, right after I told Gideon about the feeling.” He plucked up a piece of carrot, checked to see that Gibby wasn’t watching, and popped into his mouth.
“Does that happen much?”
“Not really,” Elan said. “Sometimes the information’s so mucked up I can’t tell what it is to help anyone. Once I told my grandmother to buy a lottery ticket and she won ten thousand dollars. But another time I told a teacher not to cross the street
while it was raining and he thought I was crazy.” He nodded to himself. “Mr. Barradas got hit by a car the next time there was a rain storm. The guy in the car, what do they call it? His car slid across the wet pavement.”
“Hydroplaned,” I said.
“Yes, that’s it. The guy hydroplaned and Mr. Barradas spent the next three months in a body cast. He still uses…he, uh…well, he had to use a cane after that.” Elan’s face fell a little, with the knowledge that his former teacher was as gone as everyone else.
“That must have been hard for you to know that,” I said carefully. All I ever had were bad feelings, although the last one had been a doozy.
“Naw,” he said. “My mom always told me it wasn’t up to me to save the world. All I could do is warn someone and let them do with it what they would.”
Poor little guy.
“Tell you what,” I said suddenly. “The next time the firefly pixies come, I’ll try to get one to land on you, okay?”
“Sure,” he said, cheered. “Well, I got to go. Amanda is giving me an English lesson. I’ve got to read this one book. It’s called, ‘Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of N.I.H.M.’ Have you read it?”
I nearly laughed. Apparently, irony wasn’t lost yet. “Sure, a long time ago. Good book. I think you’ll like it.”
Elan smiled at me as he scuttled out of the kitchen, but not before he snagged a cookie from a cookie jar near one of the double swinging doors.
When I looked back at Gibby, she was smiling at me, too.
Me? I scowled to myself.
♦
The next day a new person came in. His name was Tomas. Boy, was he glad to see us. One of the people who were watching by the highway brought him in. He kept staring at everyone as if he thought they were going to vanish suddenly.
Yes, I knew that feeling.
Tomas was in his fifties and a carpenter. Gideon was gleefully rubbing his hands together at that. A few of the cabins had roof issues and Tomas was welcome as all get out. He fit right in, and I didn’t pay much attention to him until he said he’d seen Gideon’s sign near Redding.
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