by Jeff Hirsch
I remembered sitting inside that first day, desperate to flee, feeling alien and alone amid all those kids who seemed nothing like me. I looked around at the group of us now. Everyone was streaked with ash and peppered with burns and trails of blood, our clothes torn into ruins. Carrie was leaning into John Carter’s shoulder while Derrick and Martin sat on a snowbank on either side of Wendy, helping her wash the ash out of her eyes. Jenny’s hand fell into mine.
Standing there as the school burned, that group of us drew together into a tight little band that felt solid as iron. The houses could burn and the school could fall, but maybe together we’d survive.
“Look,” someone said.
We turned toward the field just as a group of people emerged from the trees opposite us, maybe forty in all. “Are they ours?” Derrick asked.
“All of our people went back to fight the fires,” Jenny said.
The group moved slowly, weaving their way past the bodies and the wreckage of the jeep. They definitely weren’t slavers, but as they got closer I made out the thin silhouettes of rifles in their hands.
Whoever they were, we still weren’t done for the day.
THIRTY-THREE
Jenny, Jackson, and I moved the younger kids back into the woods with Derrick and the others.
“Should we go get Mom and Dad?” Jackson asked.
Jenny shook her head. “There’s too much to do down there. Looks like it’s just us.”
The three of us made our way through the carnage, our boots sliding on the muddy and blood-soaked snow. As soon as the others saw us coming, they unslung their rifles and lifted them. The three of us slowed.
“Just stay calm,” I whispered. “Don’t make any sudden moves and keep your hands where they can see them.”
It was a ragged group, a mix of old and young. They weren’t clothed or fed as well as those in Settler’s Landing, but we couldn’t mistake that for weakness. Some looked just as scared as I imagined Jenny and Jackson and I did, but some also looked hard and ready for whatever might happen. They would use their weapons, no doubt about it.
This looked especially true of the one I took for their leader. He was a tall, rail-thin man with a scraggly black-and-white beard and a patch over one eye. He had a chrome revolver attached to his hip but was so calm he hadn’t even drawn it yet, just moved across the field with his hand resting on the pistol’s grip.
We kept our approach slow and easy until there was only about ten feet separating us. Everything around us stank of blood and fire. Jenny and Jackson and I stopped where we were; the man with the patch lifted one hand, and his people stopped too. Gun barrels dipped slightly but did not drop.
No one said anything for a moment as we took a measure of one another. I looked back over my shoulder. No one in sight. Everyone was still in town fighting the fires. A shot of nerves quaked through me. I’d have given anything for Marcus and the others to appear, but we were on our own.
I took a step forward. My mouth felt full of cotton. My hands shook.
“You’re from Fort Leonard,” I said.
The man nodded slowly. “Looks like you all had a bit of trouble here.”
“Yes sir.”
The man appraised the field around us and spit on the ground. “Slavers. We passed a bunch of them retreating on the way over. No coincidence they were here, I guess.”
“No sir.”
“You all hired them to take care of us.”
I looked over at Jenny and Jackson. I could tell both of them were scared, but they were putting on stony faces. I felt their strength bleed into me, straightening my spine, making me even more sure of what I had to do.
“Yes sir,” I said. “We did.”
“Guess it didn’t go as planned.”
“Some of us thought the folks who hired them shouldn’t be running things anymore,” Jenny said from beside me. “When we told them and the slavers to take off, they went after us.”
“You think I’m going to thank you for deciding not to turn all of me and mine into slaves?”
“No sir,” Jenny said.
It went quiet again and I had to fight to keep still. This wasn’t going right. What were we thinking, coming up here?
“Stephen, Jenny, Jackson — step away from there!”
The three of us whipped around to see Marcus and Sam and about ten others appear on the field behind us. Each of them had a gun trained on the people from Fort Leonard, who in turn raised theirs with a metallic clatter. The man with the patch had his gun out now and was pointing it right in Marcus’s face. The chrome hammer was drawn all the way back.
“Stephen,” Marcus said slowly, “take Jenny and Jackson and move out of the way.”
I swallowed hard. “They’re not here to fight,” I said.
“Stephen.”
I turned to the man with the patch. “Are you?”
The man tightened his grip on the revolver.
“They killed two friends of ours. We will fight if we need to, son.”
“Tell them it was an accident,” Jenny pleaded.
“Just get out of the way!”
I turned away from Marcus and back to Fort Leonard’s leader.
“It was my fault,” I said. “Okay? It was a dumb prank. I made everyone here think your people were attacking us and that’s why they sent the group that shot your friends. So if you want to shoot someone, then shoot me, but we’re telling you the truth. The ones who sent the people who killed your friends, the ones who hired the slavers, are not in charge anymore. I swear they’re not.”
The man with the patch considered this as we all held our breath.
“Look,” I said, as steady as I could, “the people who came before us nearly destroyed the whole world, but that was yesterday. This is today, and today we’ve got a choice, right?”
The group from Fort Leonard gripped the stocks of their guns like they were trying to keep their heads above water. If the wind blew wrong, they’d fire. And if they did, Marcus and his people would too.
“Marcus,” I said, “have everybody put their guns down.”
“Them first,” Marcus said. “We’re not —”
“Just do it,” Jackson commanded, turning around to face his father. “You’ve come this far. Just go one step further.”
Marcus gripped the rifle to his shoulder, sweat cutting channels through the soot on his face.
Jenny took a step toward him. “Please, Dad,” she said, and reached out to lay her palm over his rifle’s sight.
Painfully slow, Marcus lowered the barrel of his rifle, keeping his eyes on the people from Fort Leonard the entire time, looking for any hint they were about to take advantage. When they didn’t, he lowered his gun all the way and then motioned for Sam and the others to do the same.
Jenny turned to the man with the patch. “Now you.”
The man looked back at his people and gave a slight nod. All around us gun barrels wilted and fell until we stood there, two divided fronts without a war to fight.
Marcus took a tentative step forward and held out his hand.
“Marcus Green,” he said.
The man holstered his revolver, then lifted his own hand to take Marcus’s.
“Stan Allison.”
The two stood silently for a moment. Marcus looked back over his shoulder at the smoke rising above the trees.
“If you all could spare it,” he said, “we could really use some help.”
Stan nodded, then waved his people forward. Marcus and Sam and the others from Settler’s Landing led the way, but soon the people from Fort Leonard had caught up. They all mixed together, one side indistinguishable from the other as they marched toward the fires.
We watched them go, then Jenny took my hand and Jackson’s, and once we gathered up the little ones, we followed them back to town, all of us hoping there would be something left.
EPILOGUE
It was a Saturday, but there I was anyway, sitting at the edge of Tuttle’s new des
k, a copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in my hand, facing a crowd of kids who were looking up at me expectantly.
“Who wants to read the next chapter?”
Everyone’s hand shot up, everyone’s except Claudia’s, of course. She was a small girl with long blond hair and freckles. She almost never spoke in class and seemed paralyzed by shyness. Tuttle said that sometimes you have to force them to do what they need to do.
“Claud? How about you read some to us?”
The little girl shook her head vehemently. I left the edge of the desk and sat down on the dirt floor beside her, slipping the book into her lap and leaning in close to her ear.
“How about you just read it to me?”
Claudia’s blue eyes shone as she sucked back the fear.
“It’s okay,” I said, nudging her shoulder with mine. “Go ahead.”
Claudia lifted the book up off her lap. Her first words came out in a halting trickle. There were snickers and I threw out some hard glares to silence them. She stumbled over the next three words, then let the book fall into her lap.
“Claud …”
The book fell to the floor and she ran out — crying, I was sure. Great.
“Eddie, can you pick it up?”
Eddie, the oldest in the bunch, nodded, and I went off to find Claudia. I left the log cabin schoolhouse we had built on the site of the old school and walked out into the grassy field. It amazed me that, even months later, I could still smell the smoke.
I had been doing the little ones’ Saturday classes for the last month or so while Tuttle healed from his broken arm and smoke inhalation. He did the weekday classes himself, gasping and wheezing, but he said the weekends were too much. I was hesitant at first, but once I got into it, I found that there was something strangely comforting about being in the new school and, despite what Jackson and the others thought, the little ones were actually kind of fun.
I found Claudia out under the big sycamore tree at the top of the hill, her chin in her hands. Across from her, a crew of twenty or so people raised the roof on one of what was going to be a few new cabins behind the school. Claudia was lying on her stomach, staring not at the construction but at what lay beside it.
Twenty-three wooden crosses.
They were set out in neat rows in the grass, most of them surrounded by bouquets of wildflowers, cards, or keepsakes of the person who lay beneath them. Twenty had died that night, along with three injured who followed soon after. Claudia’s dad was there. Her brother too. Her mother had died years before.
“Hey,” I said, landing nearby.
“Hey,” Claudia said, pulling at the grass and tossing it aside.
“You okay?”
The little girl nodded, her pigtails swinging. “I don’t know why we have to come here on Saturday too.”
“Makes you one day smarter.”
“My mom told me when she was little they had Saturdays and Sundays off.”
“It’s a brave new world.”
“What does that mean?”
I picked a strand of grass and twirled it around my finger. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Something Tuttle says.”
“Are you gonna teach us when Mr. Tuttle dies?”
“Jeez, Claud.”
“Well?”
“I’m pretty sure Mr. Tuttle will live forever. Like a vampire.”
Claudia laughed, and I figured this was my chance. I reached around to my back pocket and threw my own copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory down in front of her. She leaned back from it like it was diseased.
“I think you’ll like it,” I said.
“But … why?” Claudia asked, looking out at the graves. “I mean, it’s not even real.”
I searched for something Tuttle might have said then, but found nothing. I looked from the graveyard up to the roof as it was carefully nailed into place by a work crew that was half Settler’s Landing and half Fort Leonard, distinctions that were fading more and more by the day.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess … maybe it makes you realize that other worlds are possible.”
Claudia considered that and, even if she didn’t seem totally convinced, she opened the book to the first page and began to read. It came slowly at first, like the words were nettled things too large for her mouth, but gradually they tripped out more and more easily. She read as the workers muscled up the roof and the wind blew the smells of sawdust across the grass. Other worlds.
I hoped it was true. That the leap of faith we all took was a beginning and not just a blip, soon to be wiped away like so much had been wiped away before. Like Mom and Grandpa and Dad. As much as things had changed, I still heard their voices and felt their hands guiding me, though their grip seemed looser each day.
Another family had already stepped forward to take Claudia in, just like the Greens had done for me. In time I hoped she would feel at home and the world would move on for her, leaving everything else safely behind.
By the time Claudia reached the second chapter, I could tell she had forgotten I was there. The words moved from the page and out of her mouth, like a mill wheel dipping into the water, lifting it up and casting it down again in a glittering shower. After a while, the workers took a break, moving off into the shade of the trees and swatting the sawdust off themselves. Even when the rest of the kids broke free from the school and poured into the yard in a riot of shrieked laughter, Claudia didn’t move.
Her words rose up into the air, up beyond the trees and into the sky.
I walked into town, past the scars from the fight with the slavers. The fires had spread quickly and destroyed more than half of the houses in town. The ones that couldn’t be saved were torn down and replaced by what were little more than rough log cabins, neat and warm but small. They were integrated with the houses that still stood, giving the neighborhood an odd mixed look of past and future. Though sometimes it was hard to tell which was which.
I headed out through the front gates and crossed the forest to the highway. Once I got to Dad’s grave, I knelt down beside it and carefully cleaned away the week’s accumulation of leaves and twigs and discarded acorns. The wood marker that sat at the head of the swell in the grass looked old and dry, the letters in his name already fading. I’d need to replace it soon. I used to come every day, but soon the demands of school and of a town that needed to be rebuilt kept me back.
Once I was done cleaning the grave I stayed there for a time and then leaned over the grass, pressing my hands deep into its waxy depths.
“Hey.”
I jerked my hands back and turned around to find Jenny standing over me, in a T-shirt and jean jacket. The bill of Violet’s old baseball cap was pulled down low over her eyes. Back near the tree line, her horse, Wind, was tied up and munching on grass. His sandy flanks glistened in the sun.
“You must have ridden him far.”
“Farthest yet,” Jenny said, pulling off her rawhide gloves and stuffing them in her belt before flopping on the ground next to me. “I swear I could see the Rockies.”
“You could not.”
“Well … it was something.”
“Any trouble?”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “Always.”
“You didn’t have to shoot anyone, did you?”
Jenny pulled off her cap and leaned on her elbows in the grass. The sunlight hit her face like a splash of cool water. “Not today, Steve-O. Not today.”
Jenny closed her eyes and lay down next to me, her chest rising and falling gently, a glisten of sweat like a mist of diamonds on her forehead.
As soon as things calmed down, Jenny had set about tearing apart the Starbucks down the highway and hauling it in pieces back to town. It had taken her weeks, but when it was done, she’d been able to trade it all for Wind and a rifle of her own. From that day on, she’d throw herself onto her horse and disappear, always heading west, always pushing a little farther each time, stretching the boundaries of her world like a rubber band.
Every time she came back, we would stay up late and she would tell me stories of the things she had seen, so excited you would have thought she’d uncovered a field of gold when it was no more than a new tract of houses, or an abandoned car rusting in the woods.
“You should have seen it,” Jenny murmured into the air above us. “Animals everywhere. Everywhere. I saw elk and mountain lions and beavers. I even found this whole herd of buffalo. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe. I ran Wind right through them. It felt like flying.”
Her eyes were distant, locked on the cloudless blue, glazed with joy at remembering.
“Is today the day?” I asked … and immediately regretted it. Jenny’s eyebrows drew together, making a gloomy little wrinkle. She checked on Wind over her shoulder.
“I think so,” she said. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
I turned on my side to face her. I had said it a hundred times before and I’d say it a hundred times again. “It’s still dangerous out there.”
“I know that.”
“Dealing with the slavers wasn’t magic. There are others — the army and a thousand other —”
“I know, Stephen.”
Jenny turned onto her stomach. I plucked a blade of grass and settled it between my teeth. We had had this fight before. I knew when it was over.
“So, how’s shaping the minds of the next generation going?”
“I’m just helping out.”
“Then what?” Jenny asked. I could feel her staring at me. “Have you thought about it anymore?”
Jenny laid her head on my chest. Her breath went in and out, reminding me of a swing arcing up toward the sky and then falling again, over and over.
“Okay,” she said, and after a long while she drifted off.
I lay there, the heat of Jenny’s body beside me, the far-off smell of sawdust floating through the air.
Behind us, Wind shook his mane and stamped his foot into the grass, eager to be on his way.
“You ready, tough guy?”
