by A N Sandra
The wind hit Helena in the face as she stepped outside, and for the first time since her mother had called to her to wake up, she really felt awake. Tawna was going nuts. Really nuts. Was it all a stunt to get pain medicine? Had Tawna really almost burned down her house to get some pain medicine? Or had she figured that if the house burned down she would get to go to civilization? Helena couldn’t begin to guess what Tawna really thought.
“I’m making some coffee,” Christina said as soon as they were all inside the house.
“You’re not going back to sleep?” Peter asked.
”I doubt I could sleep again any time soon, and I’ll need to go check on Tawna in a few hours,” Christina responded with resignation.
“I couldn’t sleep now either. I’ll have some too,” Helena said.
“Make it three,” Peter said. “You all want to play some Scrabble?”
“Mom always wins.” Helena frowned. “But why not?”
“I’ll handicap myself,” Christina said.
“You only get five tiles and if you draw an X or a Z or a Q you need to put it back in the bag,” Peter stipulated.
“Get the board.” Christina smiled confidently.
Joel Harris came back in the middle of the night with an overstuffed backpack and a worried look that didn’t go away.
“What’s in your pack?” Lourdes wanted to know right away as all the young people jumped around him and Tawna watched from the window of her tiny house. Tawna had been drugged for six days straight and was barely standing by the time Joel Harris came home. There were only seven tablets of oxy left.
“You don’t need to know right now,” Joel said more firmly than he normally would.
Lourdes stood back pouting, but Helena smiled, thinking of the promise of peace the backpack might hold if it were full of pot to keep Tawna mellow. Helena pictured how the conversation would go:
“It’ll make me fat,” Tawna would pout.
“You could stand to put on a few more pounds,” Joel would tease, and then… peace. Finally.
“Dad.” Helena hugged Joel tightly around the neck, and as he squeezed back, she realized that a shift in their relationship had occurred. Instead of taking comfort from him, he was taking comfort from her.
Peter and Joel exchanged “man hugs” before Joel took him aside. Helena could hear Joel say to Peter, “Tell your mother and the Wilsons to meet me in the storage building at nine tonight.”
The Wilsons. Was Duane allowed to be a grown adult also? The unfairness burned Helena in tender places. Duane was four years older than her, but she had kept the whole group fed all summer, she was burning through her school curriculum, and she wanted to be in the loop, dammit.
Helena decided she would be at their meeting, even if she had to be creative about the details.
“Coming over for spaghetti and moose meatballs?” Helena asked Joel as she laid her plans.
Helena could see that the “adults” would almost certainly meet in Miss Jan’s art studio in the back of the storage room, where there was a small space heater and plenty of seating.
“I couldn’t hear everything I needed to from behind the food storage last time…” Helena muttered to herself.
Helena paced the area looking for a place she could hide from everyone, while holding the jar of Italian seasoning that she had come for as pretense tightly in her grip as she concentrated. The storage room had a small gap between the large generator and the food storage area. In a moment of desperation, she pulled up the large sheet metal lid over the huge generator to see if she could hide inside it somehow, but while there might have been room, she could tell that she could never hear any conversation that would happen in another area over the steady hum of the generator.
“If I move the paint somewhere else, I could hide in the paint cupboard,” she finally concluded. The clock on the wall said that she had a very short amount of time to do what she was going to do. Her father would be at the house for dinner in fifteen minutes. In desperation, Helena began to move the huge bottles of gesso and paint out of the cabinet and put them under the camping equipment that was kept in the front storage area.
The bottom of the cabinet was empty, and Helena got in and pulled the door shut to see if she could fit. Perfect. Her hips just brushed the doors, but she fit. She would have to be quieter than a church mouse, but she would be, and no one would know she was spying.
“I shouldn’t have to spy,” Helena defended herself to her own conscience.
Over spaghetti and meatballs, Joel described his small adventures on the way to Fairbanks. He had bumped into some colorful characters who had insisted he stay the night in their trapper’s cabin. They had plied him with moonshine and been helpful in other ways, which he would not elaborate on, but Helena was sure they had probably supplied him with the marijuana he had been planning to bring to keep Tawna out of everyone’s hair.
“I am so sorry,” Joel apologized over and over again for the debacle Tawna had caused with the fire in the middle of the night. “I’m going to keep a better eye on her, I promise.”
“She’s the one who got the worst of it,” Peter said. “You should have seen Helena smashing her head with the fire extinguisher before Ray knocked her over.”
“I’m glad I didn’t see it.” Joel shook his head and grimaced. “I can’t bear to think of my family brawling like a bunch of hooligans.”
“We weren’t hooligans, we were brawling like Texans.” Helena grinned. She wished she had paused at the time to take satisfaction in smashing Tawna’s head with the fire extinguisher. Now it was a blurred memory, but it would sustain her for years.
Joel smiled in spite of himself.
“I really should go check on some things,” Joel said as he wiped spaghetti sauce off his face with a napkin. “I’m glad to see you all took care of everything while I was gone.”
Peter and Helena picked up the dishes and Helena washed as fast as she could, leaving Peter breathless.
“Are we having a race?”
“Would that make it more fun?” she asked.
“Maybe.”
“Then, it’s a race! I’ll wash all of them before you can rinse and dry.”
They both worked madly, Helena falling behind the race, but glad to see dishes getting done so quickly.
“I’m going to bed now,” Helena said when she put the last dish in the shallow rinse sink.
“I don’t know how anyone knows what time to go to bed,” Peter complained. “It’s been dark all day.”
“The winter solstice is coming up. We’ll be coming out on the other side of things soon enough,” Christina said. It was the sort of comment that would have driven Helena nuts in the past, as if Christina must work some science education into every mundane discussion, but she no longer minded.
Helena scurried up the stairs to her loft, but once there, she put her head down and waited for Peter and Christina to go to their rooms and give her time to sneak out. The clock on her small nightstand made tiny ticking noises. Your time is short, your time is short… Helena could almost hear the clock speaking inside her head.
Finally, Christina went to her room, but Peter stayed at the computer. Helena had to take the risk. Nine o’clock was coming up. She wanted to hear what was going to be said in that meeting so badly that it caused her to feel itchy.
With all her patience she slithered down the stairs silently. Peter was watching an action movie of some kind on the computer. Since he was wearing headphones, he didn’t hear her, but that had not been her concern. When she opened the door, no matter how quickly she did it a huge wave of cold air would come in. Would Peter turn around to look at the door? If he did, would he accept any explanation she could give him for going out on a dark night when there was no sledding?
At the door Helena slid into her boots and Peter didn’t turn around. Christina stayed in her room. Helena wished she were even more slender so she wouldn’t have to open the door as much, but she forced herself
to crack the door and shut it behind her without slamming it. Looking back through the window in the cold she could see that Peter was still facing the computer screen, unaware of the cold draught that had come over him. Suddenly he did shiver, and Helena ducked before he could look out the window and see her looking at him.
“Don’t freak out before you even get started,” she told herself. “There’s no light out here, he can’t see me, I can only see him.”
She looked toward the tiny house her father shared with Tawna. All the lights were on, but then, they always were. No one in that house would ever think to conserve electricity. The Wilson’s house only had the downstairs lights on, but the Wilsons would have turned them off if the whole family was gone, so Helena knew they were home.
Imagining that she was a stealthy fox, Helena slipped to the storage building and went inside without turning on any lights. She paused for a long time, trying to orient herself in the complete dark. The storage building only had two small windows. They were in the back for the art studio, and their blinds were closed to keep the cold out. Slowly, Helena walked to the art studio with her hands outstretched to keep her from bumping into things.
“Ohh!” she cried in spite of herself when her fingers bumped the steel shelving units by the art studio. She thought she had been moving carefully, but clearly she needed to practice her ninja skills.
With only a couple of missteps, Helena managed to find the cabinet and slip inside. It seemed to take forever for anyone to come and she was uncomfortable long before she could hear footsteps and conversation and see light through the cracks of the cabinet doors. She could hear them arranging impromptu seating around the small space heater in the art room.
“It’s worse than I thought,” Joel started without waiting for anyone to ask.
“How much worse?” Mr. Todd asked.
“The Global Bank is going to back them up. Any person eligible for a chip who does not get one is going to have their account frozen and possibly terminated. They’re really sugar coating it. Most people don’t see it for the threat that it is, but I know they mean business.”
“Go on,” Christina said in a very small voice.
“Cell carriers will not honor cell service for anyone who is eligible for a chip and does not get one,” Joel went on.
Helena could hear Miss Jan cry.
“In the lower forty-eight, everyone with a government medical plan of any kind already has a chip,” Joel said. “They moved their time frame up on a scale we couldn’t comprehend.”
“Oh, God,” Duane muttered.
Helena was upset at the news her father had given, but outraged that Duane was included as a grown up when she was not. Inside the cupboard she bit her lip extra hard and breathed very slowly.
“Private health insurance is still arguing over payment methods, but the larger companies are falling into place. At this rate, the bulk of the world population will be chipped by April at the latest.”
Christina began to sob. She and Miss Jan made so much noise it was hard for Helena to hear.
“Dammit!” Mr. Todd growled. “Nothing we did made a bit of difference.”
“Oh, it made a difference,” Joel said. “They got scared and moved everything up.”
“Could it be worse?” Duane wanted to know.
“Not really,” Joel said. “I don’t know how we’re going to rejoin the land of the living now. Short of a miracle, there won’t be anything left.”
“Our savings is in gold, but will that hold value when the bulk of the population is gone?” Mr. Todd mused.
“Gold has been the currency of a failed economy since Biblical times, but I don’t think it’s going to help now.” Joel Harris sighed. “At this point, our best bet for personal safety is to stay well out of the way and attempt to slide under the radar in a few years. It’s either that or fight some more, which I’m willing to do if any of you have fresh ideas about how to draw attention to this quickly.”
Helena was outraged. Three years before she was old enough to go into the world on her own, it was rolling up and going away. She would never study in Madrid, go on safari, or have a cozy ski weekend in Durango, and neither would anyone else. The unfairness choked her. Suddenly, she realized that she was biting her lip so hard it might be bleeding. She tried to breathe deeply, quietly.
“Assuming we decide to lay low, is this far enough out of the way?” Duane asked.
“An island might have been better,” Joel said. “I considered buying one, but I was afraid it would be easier for someone to research where we were. We’ve done our best. We’re off the road, off the grid, and I made sure to place the houses where they will be hard to see from a satellite. It could be a lot worse.”
Mr. Todd and Christina began to talk about technical things that were way beyond Helena’s comprehension. Joel and Miss Jan occasionally asked for some clarification at different points, but their questions and the answers they were given didn’t help Helena understand and her mind began to drift.
Suddenly she could hear them all leaving. When she was sure they were gone, she unfolded herself and let blood slowly return to her legs, which were quite cramped.
Helena had not comprehended putting all the art supplies back in the cupboard in the dark when she had made her plan. It was slow going, and she knew nothing would be in the order Miss Jan had left it in. Hopefully Miss Jan would just think that someone had been looking for something and been untidy.
“I’ll just have to wake up extra early and get back here and make sure it doesn’t look too bad.” Helena sighed quietly.
“I’m pretty sure you won’t be able to fix it the way it was,” Duane’s voice spoke out of the darkness.
“Oh my God!” Helena exclaimed. Her heart thumped against her ribs from the surprise. “Have you been in here the whole time?”
“I have,” Duane said calmly from the shadows on the other side of the generator.
“You… you…” Helena was at a loss for words.
“I knew you were in the cupboard the whole time,” Duane said. “I was sitting across from it, and sometimes you bumped the door and it twitched. Just a little.”
“How did you know it was me?” Helena was annoyed. “It could have been Peter or Ray or Lourdes.”
“None of them would have been crafty enough to have gotten in there without detection in the first place,” Duane said.
“Thanks for not outing me,” Helena told him with chagrin. “I had to know what’s going on. I really had to.”
“I know. It wasn’t fair that they didn’t just tell everybody everything at the same time.”
“To be fair, Tawna is going to flip when she understands there really won’t be any going back to the old world. And Ray and Lourdes ask the most annoying questions at the wrong times.”
“I know.” Duane sighed. “But it wasn’t fair to you and Peter. I think they’ve been doing top secret work so long, keeping all their technology from getting stolen, that secrets are so normal to them they don’t question it.”
“Oh, I know how they love their secrets,” Helena said bitterly. A picture of the ivory box flashed through her mind. “But there’s no point in keeping this one from us now. I can’t believe so many people already got chipped.”
“I can. And they wanted to get started a year sooner than they did. They had a lot more processes in place than we knew about.” Duane paused. “The worst part is that we were all supposed to be dead by now. Did you know that?”
“Huh?”
“The people who hijacked the chips to reduce the population were going to kill all of us last fall. Even if they’d stayed on the original schedule, they were going to kill us three months before they started chipping people. Dad hacked their email plans.”
“Seriously?” Helena was even more outraged. “Mom developed the idea for the chips, Dad put his whole company on the line for twenty years to make them, to save the world from heartache and disease, and they were going to kill u
s? Even us kids?”
“Oh, even us kids. They didn’t want anyone around who could reverse what they were doing, not that we really could have by that point. They were already producing the altered chips, and combatting that would have taken a team of scientists as smart as your mom. They didn’t want anyone to know what they’d done. They didn’t want anyone who had a vendetta left to come after them. Also, I think they didn’t want anyone as smart as your mother around to make trouble for them later.”
“Wow,” Helena said. “I think even Hitler had more loyalty than that during the Holocaust.”
“Hitler was a nothing compared to these guys. And they were all working together, with labs all over the world doing crazy work.”
“Who will be left?” Helena asked quietly.
“As far as my dad could tell, fewer than two hundred million people,” Duane said. “Most of Africa will be gone—more of its population is dead than people know already—and the large population bases of South America. Sao Paulo will go first. They’re going to cut the satellites over those countries so that they can’t broadcast internet or make cell phone calls. It’s going to be chaos, but it’s going to be fast.”
Helena thought she might throw up.
“Large swaths of India and China are going to go right after that. Then Manila, Bangkok—”
“There’s no way—” Helena thought of every end of the world movie she had ever seen. “The chaos—”
“Global Forces has been training for this for more than ten years.”
“Global Forces?” Helena knew they were a private army, but she didn’t see what they had to do with it.
“Global Forces is a military power that spans the whole world. The people planning this fiasco are smart enough to never trust local police anywhere. They’ve been training their own peacekeepers for this event for years. There’s more than four hundred thousand of them, selected, chosen, and trained for this moment, even though they don’t know this moment is coming.”
