After the Flood

by Kassandra Montag

“I’m not going to let that happen to us. We’re staying together. Always,” I said. I stroked her hair back from her face and a shadow of a smile crossed her lips.

  I stood up and checked the cistern. Almost empty. Water all around but none to drink. My head ached from dehydration and the edges of my vision were beginning to blur. Most days, it was humid; it rained almost every other day, but we were in a dry spell. We’d need to find mountain streams and boil water. I filled Pearl’s water skin with the last of the fresh water and handed it to her.

  She stopped playing with her headless snake and weighed the water in her hand. “You gave me all the water,” she said.

  “I already drank some,” I lied.

  Pearl stared at me, seeing right through me. There was never any hiding from her, not like I could hide from myself.

  I fastened my knife in my belt and Pearl and I swam to shore with our buckets for clam digging. I was worried it would be too wet for clams, and we both stumbled along the marsh until we found a drier spot to the south, where the sun fell warm and steady. Little holes peppered the mud plain. We began digging with driftwood, but after a few minutes Pearl tossed her driftwood to the side.

  “We won’t find anything,” she complained.

  “Fine,” I snapped. My limbs were heavy with fatigue. “Then go up the mountainside and see if you can find a stream. Look for willows.”

  “I know what to look for.” She spun on her heel and awkwardly tried to run up the mountainside. The poor thing was still trying to account for the motion of the sea, and she set her feet down too firmly, swaying from side to side.

  I kept digging, pulling the mud in piles around me. I hit a shell and tossed the clam in my bucket. Above the wind and waves, I thought I heard voices coming from around the bend in the mountain. I sat back on my heels, alert, listening. A tension settled along my spine and I strained to hear, but there was nothing. I always thought I sensed things on land that weren’t there—hearing a song where there was no music, seeing Grandfather when he was already dead. As though being on land returned me to the past and all the things the past had carried.

  I leaned forward and dug my hands into the mud. Tossed another shell into my bucket with a clink. I’d just found another clam when a small, sharp scream pierced the air. I froze, looking up, scanning the landscape for Pearl.

  Chapter 2

  Several yards up the mountainside, in front of shrubs and a steep rock face, a wiry man held Pearl, her back against his front, a knife at her throat. Pearl was still, her eyes quiet and dark, her arms at her sides, not able to reach the knife at her ankle.

  The man had a desperate, off-kilter look on his face. I stood up slowly, my heart pounding in my ears.

  “Come with me,” he called out. He had a strange accent I couldn’t place, clipped and heavy on the consonants.

  “Okay,” I said, my hands up to show I wasn’t going to try anything, walking toward them.

  When I reached them he said, “You move and she goes.”

  I nodded.

  “I’ve got a ship,” he said. “You’ll work it. Drop your knife on the ground.”

  Panic rose up in me as I unfastened my knife and tossed it toward him. He sheathed it at his waist and grinned at me. Holes showed where teeth should be. His skin was tanned to a red brown and his hair grew in sandy patches. A tattoo of a tiger spread across his shoulder. Raiders tattooed their members, often with an animal, though I couldn’t remember which crew used the tiger.

  “Don’tcha worry. I’ll care for ya. It’s up thataway.”

  I followed the man and Pearl along the side of the mountain, winding our way toward the cove. Rough grass scratched my ankles and I stumbled over a few rocks. The man lowered the knife from Pearl’s neck but kept his hand on her shoulder. I wanted to reach forward and snatch her out of his grasp, but his knife would be at her throat again before I pulled her away. Quick flashes of how things could go ran through my mind—him deciding he only wanted one of us or there being too many people to fight once we reached his ship.

  The man started chatting about his people’s colony up north. I wanted him to shut up so I could think straight. A canteen hung from the man’s shoulder and swung back and forth at his hip. I could hear liquid sloshing inside and my thirst rose above even my fear as my parched mouth ached for water, my fingers itching to reach it and unscrew the cap.

  “It’s important we have new nations now. Important for . . .” The man cast his hand out in front of him, as if he could pluck a word from the air. “Organizing.” The man nodded, clearly pleased. “That’s how it was always done, back in the beginning, when we were still in caves. People aren’t organized, we’d all be snuffed out.”

  There were other tribes who were trying to make new nations by sailing from land to land, setting up military bases on islands and ports, attacking others and making colonies. Most of them began as a ship that took over other ships, and eventually they began trying to take over communities on land.

  The man looked over his shoulder at me and I nodded dumbly, wide eyed, deferential. We were half a mile from our boat. As we approached the bend along the mountainside, the ground dropped away at our side and we walked along a steep rock face. I thought about grabbing Pearl and leaping from the cliff to the water and swimming to our boat, but it was too far in this choppy water. And I couldn’t know if we’d have a clean fall into the water or if there were rocks below.

  The man had shifted to talking about his people’s breeding ships. Women were expected to produce a child every year or so, to grow the raider crews. They waited until a girl bled before they moved her to a breeding ship. Until then, she was held captive in a colony.

  I’d passed breeding ships when I was fishing, recognized them by their flag of a red circle on white. A flag that warned boats not to approach. Since illness spread so quickly on land, the raiders reasoned the babies would be safer on ships, which they often were. Except when a contagion broke out on a ship and almost everyone died, leaving a ghost ship, unmoored until it crashed against a mountain and drifted to the bottom of the sea.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” the man continued. “But the Lost Abbots—we, we do things the right way. Can’t build a nation without people, without taxes, without having people to enforce those taxes. That’s what gives us the chance to organize.

  “This yer girl?” the man asked me.

  I startled and shook my head. “Found her on a coast a few years back.” He wouldn’t be so keen on separating us if he didn’t think we were family.

  The man nodded. “Sure. Sure. They come in handy.”

  The wind changed as we began to make our way around the mountain, and voices from the cove now reached us, a clamoring of people working on a ship.

  “You look like a girl I know, back at one of our colonies,” the man said to me.

  I was barely listening. If I lunged forward, I could reach his right arm, pull it behind his back, and reach for my knife in his sheath.

  He reached out and touched Pearl’s hair. My stomach clenched. A gold chain with a pendant hung from his wrist. The pendant was dark snakewood, with the engraving of a crane on it. Row’s necklace. The necklace Grandfather had carved for her the summer we’d gone to see the cranes. It was colorless except the drop of red paint he’d placed between the crane’s eyes and beak.

  I stopped walking. “Where’d you get that?” I asked. Blood surged in my ears and my body thrummed like a hummingbird’s wings.

  He looked down at his wrist. “That girl. One I was telling you about. Such a sweet girl. I’m surprised she’s made it this long. Doesn’t seem to have it in her . . .” He gestured with his knife toward the cove. “Don’t have all day.”

  I lunged at him and swiped his right leg with my foot. He tripped and I smashed my elbow down on his chest, knocking the air from him. I stomped on the hand holding the knife, grabbed it, and held it to his chest.

  “Where is she?” I asked, my voice all breath, barely a
bove a whisper.

  “Mom—” Pearl said.

  “Turn away,” I said. “Where is she?” I pushed the knife farther between his ribs, the tip digging into skin and membrane. He gritted his teeth, sweat gathering at his temples.

  “Valley,” he panted. “The Valley.” His eyes darted toward the cove.

  “And her father?”

  Confusion furrowed the man’s brow. “She had no father with her. Must be dead.”

  “When was this? When did you see her?”

  The man squeezed his eyes shut. “I dunno. A month ago? We came here straight after.”

  “Is she still there?”

  “Still there when I left. Not old enough yet—” He winced and tried to catch his breath.

  He almost said not old enough for the breeding ship yet.

  “Did you hurt her?”

  Even now, a pleased look crossed his face, a sheen over his eyes. “She didn’t complain much,” he said.

  I drove the knife straight in, the hilt to his skin, and pulled it up to gut him like a fish.

  Chapter 3

  Pearl and I stole the man’s canteen and shoved his body over the side of the cliff. As we ran back to the boat I kept thinking of his crew in the cove, wondering how soon they would start searching for him. There was enough wind, I thought, to push us south quickly. Once Bird got behind another mountain it’d be hard to track us.

  When we got back to the boat I raised the anchor, Pearl adjusted the sails, and we surged forward, the coast behind us growing smaller, but I still couldn’t breathe steadily. I hid from Pearl under the deck shelter, my whole body shaking, not unlike how the man’s body shook when he died. I’d been in fights before, tense moments with weapons out, but I hadn’t killed. Killing that man was like stepping through a door to another world. It felt like a place I’d already been to but had forgotten, hadn’t wanted to remember. It didn’t make me feel powerful; it made me feel more alone.

  We sailed south for three days until we reached Apple Falls, a small trading port nestled on a mountain that had been in British Columbia. The water in the canteen lasted us only a day, but late on the second day it rained a small bit, just enough that we weren’t ill with thirst by the time we reached Apple Falls. I dropped the anchor over the side and glanced at Pearl. She stood at the bow, staring at Apple Falls.

  “I didn’t want you to see that,” I said to Pearl, watching her closely. Pearl hadn’t spoken to me much since.

  Pearl shrugged.

  “He was going to hurt us. You don’t think I should have done it? You think he was a good person?” I asked.

  “I just didn’t like it. I didn’t like any of it,” she said, her voice small. She paused, as if thinking, then said, “Desperate people.” She looked at me a little too intently. I always said to her, when she asked me why people were cruel, that desperate people did desperate things.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Will we try to find her now?”

  “Yes,” I said, the word out of my mouth before I knew I’d already decided it. A response beyond reason. Just the image in my mind of Row in danger and me moving toward her, with no choice, only one direction to move, the way rain falls from the sky and does not return to the heavens.

  Though I was surprised to realize this, Pearl showed no shock. She merely looked at me and said, “Will Row like me?”

  I walked to her, squatted, and wrapped my arms around her. Her hair smelled like brine and ginger and I buried my face in it, her body as tender and vulnerable as the night I birthed her.

  “I’m sure of it,” I said.

  “Are we going to be okay?” Pearl asked.

  “We’re going to be fine.”

  “You said everyone is alone. I don’t want to be alone,” Pearl said.

  My chest tightened and I pulled her close to me again. “You won’t ever be alone,” I promised. I kissed the top of her head. “We better count these,” I said, gesturing to the buckets of fish laid out on the deck.

  Row is alone out there, I kept thinking, weighing each dead fish in my palm, one part of me asking how much it was worth, the other part imagining her alone on some coast. Did Jacob die? Did he abandon her? My hands shook with cold rage at this thought. He abandons people; that’s what he does.

  But he wouldn’t do that to her, I argued with myself, feeling myself being pulled back into the hatred that had kept me awake at night for years after he left. I’d been blinded by love and now, I knew, I was blinded by hate. I had to focus. To remember Row and forget him.

  The last three days we’d sailed, a part of me thought of Row incessantly. I had the sense that my entire body was plotting how to reach her, while my consciousness focused on tightening the rope at the block or reeling in fishing line, the small daily tasks that grounded me. There was both a low thrum of panic and shock at discovering she was alive, and a strange animal tranquility as I moved about the boat as if it were simply another day. It was what I’d dreamed of and hoped for and also what I’d feared. Because her being alive meant I had to go after her, had to risk everything. What kind of mother abandons her child in her hour of need? And yet, wouldn’t taking Pearl on this journey be a kind of abandonment of her? An abandonment of the peaceful life we’d fought to build together?

  Pearl and I loaded the salmon and halibut into four baskets. We had gutted and smoked the salmon already on our boat, but the halibut was fresh from this morning, which could give us bargaining power.

  Apple Falls was aptly named—apple trees had been planted in a clearing between the peaks of two mountains. Thieves were shot by the guards of the orchard, who had watchtowers on each mountain. I was hoping we’d be able to trade for at least half a basket of apples, plus some grain and seed. At our last trading post we had only three baskets of fish and could barely trade for the rope, oil, and flour we needed. We needed to trade for some vegetable seeds so I could grow a few more vegetables on board. Right now we only had a half-dead tomato plant. Beatrice, my old friend at Apple Falls, would give me a better deal for my fish than at any other port.

  Water rippled against the mountainside and the bank rose in a steep incline up the mountain, with a small peat ledge for a dock. A wooden boardwalk, half submerged, had been cobbled together over the years.

  We docked our boat and paid the harbor fees with a crate of metal scraps I had found while hunting the shallows. Bird was one of the smallest boats in the harbor, but it was sturdily built. Grandfather had designed the boat to be simple and easy to maneuver. One square mast, a rudder, a punting pole, and oars on each side. A deck cover made from old rugs and plastic tarp where we slept at night. He’d made it from the trees in our yard back in Nebraska at the beginning of the Six Year Flood, when we knew that fleeing was our only chance to survive.

  Water had already covered the coasts around the world by the time I was born. Many countries had been cut to half their size. Migrants fled inland, and suddenly Nebraska became a bustling, crowded place. But no one knew the worst was yet to come—the great flood that lasted six years, water rising higher than anyone could imagine, whole countries becoming seafloors, each city a new Atlantis.

  Before the Six Year Flood, earthquakes erupted and tsunamis struck constantly. The ground itself seemed heavy with energy. I’d hold out my hand and feel the heat in the air like the pulse of an invisible animal. On the radio we heard rumors that the seafloor had split, water from within the earth seeping into the ocean. But we never knew for certain what happened, only that the water rose around us as if to swallow us up in a watery grave.

  People called the years the coasts disappeared the Hundred Year Flood. The Hundred Year Flood didn’t last exactly a hundred years, because no one knew for sure exactly when it began. Unlike a war it had no call to arms, no date by which we could remember its beginning. But it lasted close to a hundred years, a little longer than a person’s lifetime, because my grandfather always said that when his mother was born New Orleans existed and when she died it di
d not.

  What followed the Hundred Year Flood was a series of migrations and riots over resources. My mother would tell me stories of how the great cities fell, when electricity and the Internet faltered on and off. People would show up on doorsteps at homes in Indiana, Iowa, Colorado, clinging to their belongings, wide eyed and weary, asking to be let in.

  Near the end of the Hundred Year Flood, the government moved inland, but its reach was limited. I was seventeen when I heard over the radio that the president had been assassinated. But then a month later, a migrant passing through said he’d fled to the Rockies. And then later, we heard a military coup had taken over a session of Congress and members of the government had fled after that. Communication was breaking down by that point, the whole world reduced to a rumor, and I stopped listening.

  I was nineteen when the Six Year Flood began and had just met Jacob. I remember standing next to him watching footage of the White House flood, only the flag on the roof visible above the water, each wave soaking the flag until it lay sagging against the pole. I imagined the interior of the White House, so many faces staring out of its paintings, water trickling down hallways into all its chambers, sometimes loud and sometimes quiet.

  The last time my mother and I watched television together it was the second year of the Six Year Flood and I was pregnant with Row. We saw footage of a man lying on an inflatable raft, balancing a whiskey bottle on his tummy, grinning up at the sky, as he floated past a skyscraper, trash swirling around him. There were as many ways to react as people, she always said.

  This included my father, who was the one to teach me what the floods meant. The blinking on and off of communication was familiar to me, the crowds of people at soup kitchens normal. But when I was six I came home early from school with a headache. The garden shed door was open and through the opening I saw only his torso and legs. I stepped closer, looked up, and saw his face. He’d hung himself from a rafter with a rope.

  I remember screaming and backing away. Every cell in me was a small shard of glass; even breathing hurt. I ran inside and looked for my mother, but she wasn’t home from work. Cell towers were down that month, so I sat on the front stoop and waited for my mother to come home. I tried to think of how to tell her but words kept wincing away from me, my mind recoiling from reality. Many days, I still feel like that child on the stoop, waiting and waiting, my mind empty as a bowl scooped clean.