After the Flood

by Kassandra Montag

  “The Lost Abbots,” I said softly.

  “Oh, so you already know. Why are you going then?” She turned and straightened a couple of boots.

  I didn’t respond, my mind racing ahead. I had been so busy figuring out how to get to the Valley that I hadn’t considered how it became a colony in the first place. I knew biological warfare was becoming more common, but I hadn’t wanted to dwell on it. Why hadn’t I stopped to think of what could actually be happening in the Valley?

  Did Row even survive the epidemic? Didn’t think she’d make it. Wasn’t that what he said? He made it sound like she was being held until she was old enough for the breeding ship. So she must have survived the epidemic. Unless the epidemic wasn’t over—would it still be there when we arrived?

  I racked my brain, trying to remember what I’d heard about biological warfare and epidemics. Didn’t rodents still carry the plague, even after it seemed to have disappeared? Wouldn’t we, who hadn’t yet been exposed, be more susceptible to it when we landed in the Valley?

  I’d worried about starvation, storms, raiders, but I hadn’t spent any time thinking about illnesses. How quickly they could wipe out a whole community. I hadn’t thought about illnesses because I could do less about them than I could about anything else.

  You could hold your child’s hand as an illness broke them down, but that was all, I thought.

  You can’t protect them from everything.

  You couldn’t protect Row from her own father.

  Maybe he was protecting her by taking her away from me.

  “You okay?” the shopkeeper asked.

  “Hm?” I asked.

  “You look pale,” the shopkeeper said.

  “Is it still there?” I asked.

  “Well, I’m sure they’ve boarded up the well by this point and burned the bodies. But you never know. Fleas could be carrying it. Some places eradicate it pretty well. It’s easier on isolated islands, especially if there isn’t too much travel. But we had to quarantine someone coming from Errons, up north, where there’d been an outbreak. Just to be on the safe side, keep him monitored awhile.”

  I fingered a pair of sheepskin boots on the shelf. They were Pearl’s size. I would be exposing her to the plague by going. I would be resigning Row to a life on a breeding ship if I didn’t.

  I’d never imagined having to choose between them. Before them, I’d had few difficult choices to make. It was more like my life was an open expanse and I was waiting for something to appear on the horizon, waiting for my life to begin. With the world changing so quickly, it was hard to be ambitious or to make plans. When the floods kept getting worse, life both moved quickly and went stagnant. Schools closed, so I dropped out and never returned. People weren’t pursuing careers like they used to, they weren’t making life plans. They were trapping squirrels in their backyard and breaking into convenience stores. So I worked odd jobs—at factories, farms, ranches. I cleaned hotel rooms and picked corn. Anything that would let me work with my hands. I didn’t move out of my parents’ home and look for my own place because no one did. Several generations lived under the same roof, helping each other survive, as towns swelled with crowds and died down to ghost towns in a matter of months.

  But then Row came and my life broke open. When I first held her, I felt a sudden shift in perspective. I could at once see my life from a great distance and settle more deeply into it, as if what came before had been merely preparation.

  The main thing she taught me was that there was no going back to before. There was no later, no “let’s wait and figure something out.” There was only now, all the neediness of the present, hands against your skin, wails filling the room, a body to be rocked. There was always only moving forward.

  The north would be cold, I thought. I bought the boots for Pearl.

  Chapter 27

  The first thing I needed to do was convince Abran to stop where his old crew had hidden the medicine. If the plague was still contagious in the Valley, we would need something to protect us. I wasn’t going to sail into the Valley and watch Pearl succumb to a disease that rotted her from the inside out.

  I found Abran in a saloon, but he was so drunk, he kept slurring his words and swaying on his feet. I left the saloon without telling him the news. I’d have to convince him later, when he was sober.

  As I stood in the street outside the saloon I felt the overwhelming desire to confess and share the burden. Daniel, I thought. I could tell Daniel my plan to get the medicine and ask for his help.

  I found Pearl first, in the mangroves, sitting against a cypress tree, feet tucked under her, whittling a piece of wood. Five dead snakes lay beside her, draped over a rock. Her snake pot was wedged between tall grass and a cedar tree. I walked over to Pearl, climbing around ferns and over fallen branches. She was whittling a bird out of a cypress branch. I squatted next to her and hugged her.

  “Hey, careful!” she said. “Don’t smoosh them.” She gestured to her dead snakes on the rock.

  I remembered when Pearl first caught a snake. She was five and we both were diving and I was spearing fish. When I came up, Pearl was treading water, holding on to a tiny snake, one hand pinching him behind the head, the other holding its body. It lay limp in her hands, only its eyelids moving.

  “Pearl, that isn’t a fish. We’re only catching fish,” I said nervously. “How did you know to catch him behind the head?”

  She looked at me like I was stupid. “I saw he had teeth.”

  After that she caught a few more in the water and would stroke them, calling them her babies. When on land, she’d spot their burrows and stalk them or entice them out of hiding with frog legs. She caught mostly young, small snakes and I’d let her play with them for a short while before making a meal of them. We’d feed them scraps of fish, frogs, insects, or small mice.

  When she caught them on land, I’d warn her that I didn’t know if there were laws against hunting snakes.

  “Laws, laws, laws,” Pearl would sing, petting the snake.

  Most villages had an overpopulation of them, but still wanted them around to control disease-ridden rodents. The rats seemed to know the floods were coming before we did, scurrying up the mountains, digging new homes. One woman in a saloon told me she saw a pack of rats climbing the mountainside one morning during the Six Year Flood, their brown coats glossy in the sunlight, darting over rocks and across fallen trees.

  Some people kept snakes on boats to hunt mice, favoring the thin, long ones that weren’t poisonous. Handmade guidebooks of poisonous snakes were distributed in ports, to alert people which ones to avoid.

  “They’re actually cleaner than cats,” a man at a port told me.

  “Cats?” Pearl asked.

  “You saw one once, in Harjo,” I explained.

  Pearl had shrugged. “Must have looked boring; I don’t remember.”

  I worried about Pearl getting bit all the time. But I also knew she had a skill, and it was a food source. And she needed both. So I made her pore over the guidebooks and avoid the poisonous ones, which she promised she did, but I knew how much she liked to push limits.

  I reached out and smoothed her hair from her face, and she swatted my hand away.

  “Where’s Daniel?” I asked her.

  She pointed east, where he stood ankle deep in water about twenty feet away, shrouded by cypress and cedar trees thick with lichen and mushrooms. A small bag was slung over his shoulder, bulging with mushrooms.

  “It’s for my sister,” Pearl said, setting the bird in my palm. The wings looked like a fish’s fins, short and lined.

  “Your sister liked birds,” I said.

  An expression of recognition and pleasure crossed Pearl’s face briefly and vanished. “I know.”

  I thought of Row in the Valley with the epidemic rotting those around her. I thought of her in a bed somewhere, boils on her wrists, fingers blackened, breath ragged in her throat. When she was sick as a child she liked me to pinch each of her fingers,
one by one. I’d stroke her hair from her wet brow and then press her tiny finger between my thumb and finger and release it. We’d watch the blood come back to the tip, each of us marveling at her body. She said I was “pressing her” and it made me think of pressing her like a stamp, reminding both of us she wasn’t going anywhere.

  I lifted the lid of Pearl’s snake pot. A mass of snakes slithered over one another, trying to lift their heads above the rim of the pot and into the sunlight. I slammed the lid back down.

  “Pearl, how many do you have?”

  Pearl shrugged. “Six? I have trouble counting.” She grinned slyly at me.

  “You’re only supposed to keep one or two. We need them for tonight’s supper.”

  “No, we’ll eat fish.”

  “No, most of the fish has been traded for goods. We’re at port, remember?”

  “Why haven’t you caught more?” Pearl asked, her eyes narrowed in accusation. “There’s a poison one in there.”

  “Pearl, take it out and cut its head off.”

  Pearl shrugged. “You go ahead.”

  “Pearl!” I couldn’t handle snakes like Pearl. I felt my face flush and wiped sweat from my brow with my arm.

  She lifted the lid and her hand darted inside and shot back out, gripping a snake behind its head, fangs exposed, its tiny tongue flickering out of its mouth. She placed its head against the splayed base of the cypress tree and cut its head off. She held the head up to me and giggled.

  “Yum, yum, yum,” she said, the fangs bopping up and down as she jiggled the head.

  “You should bury it so someone doesn’t step on it,” I said.

  She began peeling the skin off it and I reached forward and caught her hand. She had a deep cut in the middle of her index finger, bright red and scabbed over.

  “When did you get this?”

  She ripped her hand out of my palm.

  “It’s fine,” she said.

  “You let me know if it hurts or gets any redder,” I said, my nerves already sparking on like small lights. Even the smallest cuts could get infected, and once sepsis set in there was little you could do.

  I kissed the top of Pearl’s head and she shrugged away from me, but as soon as I turned to leave, she asked, “You’re leaving?” with a hint of sadness.

  I told her I’d be right back and climbed around a cypress tree, the bark smooth against my hands. Sunlight filtered through the trees, and it felt subdued and delicate compared to the brightness on the open sea. At my feet, a small turtle dove into the dark water.

  “Thought you’d be drinking with the others,” Daniel said when he saw me.

  Thought you’d be talking to someone shady somewhere, I thought.

  I waded into the water with him, my toes sinking into the mud. There was too much life around us; I felt like it would blot me out. Everything felt too close. Birds flitting between trees, snakes sliding into the swamp, water lilies floating with their faces to a sun that was shrouded by trees. The honeyed smell of flowers and grass mixed with all the decaying wood, giving the whole place an odor of something sweet and half rotted.

  I stood facing him, feeling reluctant. Better to say it quick, I thought.

  “There was an epidemic in the Valley,” I told him, watching him pluck a mushroom from a tree.

  I told him what I’d heard in the trading post. I tried to hold my face steady, but I felt the edges of my mouth tighten. Between his neck and shoulder there was a hollow filled with shadow. I wanted to place my face in it. To breathe him in and rest.

  He waded around a small tree and several bushes to reach me and took my shoulders and pulled me into him. I sank my head against his chest. He already smelled like flowers and plants; I couldn’t taste salt when my lips brushed his neck. It surprised me how much better I felt as soon as I was in his arms.

  He reached up and brushed my hair with his palm. He swallowed, his throat moving against my forehead. I felt he wanted to say something more, but he stayed silent a moment and then we broke apart.

  “Are you going to tell Abran?” Daniel asked. He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.

  I looked at him warily. I hadn’t decided how much I wanted to tell Abran, but I had a sinking feeling that I’d have to tell him everything—not just about the epidemic, but the Valley being a colony—in order to convince him to stop for the medicine. But the rest of the crew couldn’t know. I wanted to work it out alone with Abran.

  “Abran’s old crew has medicine hidden just north of here,” I said. “It’s on our way.”

  Daniel took a step away from me and shoved his hair out of his face. He cursed and looked up at the sky.

  “You don’t want to go anywhere near where raiders hide their stashes,” he said.

  “I know, but—”

  “If this happened a few months ago—” Daniel stopped short and looked down at the dark water.

  “Then she’s already dead. Is that what you were going to say?”

  “You’re dealing with hypotheticals. It’s dormant there by now.”

  “Maybe and maybe not. We haven’t been exposed; we haven’t built up an immunity. And how long until other raiders use biological warfare? The point is we have resources right in front of us,” I said.

  Daniel’s jaw was set and he looked across the swamp at moss hanging from the branches. It swayed in the light breeze.

  “Every time we take a turn, I keep thinking you’re going to back out on me,” I said. That’s why I came to him, I realized. I wanted to stop feeling like if I turned around he would be gone.

  Daniel watched a bird flying between the trees. He turned something over in his mind, his jaw twitching. I touched his arm.

  “Are you with me on this?” I asked.

  Daniel looked at me, his gray eyes tender and distant, like he was remembering something he’d forgotten. Then something shifted like a curtain being drawn back from him, and he stepped forward and took my hand. I felt like I could breathe for the first time in that thick air, inhaling a deep breath and letting it go.

  “I’m going to help you get to your girl,” he said. “I promised you that, and I’m not leaving now.”

  Chapter 28

  It was starting to get dark on my way back into the village. I needed a drink, so I headed for a saloon tucked into the mountainside, close to the harbor.

  A large ship was anchored in the harbor and several men walked along the dock, herding several girls in front of them. One of the girls looked younger than fourteen, her belly rounded with child. Her hair was cut short around her face and her temple was branded with a t, the scar bubbled and pink, glistening in the twilight. She glanced up at me and quickly looked away.

  “Move along,” one of the men said, swatting their legs with a belt.

  I hurried along the rock face, the path tilting toward the sea as I rounded the bend. Beyond the saloon, shacks and tents climbed up the mountainside, some glowing from within by lantern light. A low murmur of people ending their day drifted down to the sea.

  I slipped into the saloon, went straight to the bar, and threw back a whiskey. The room was thick with smoke, light from the lanterns and candles heavy and foggy in the small space. There were chinks in the wood slats of the walls and the dull light of twilight shone between these holes.

  Someone tapped my shoulder and I turned and saw Behir.

  “You look pale,” he said.

  I shook my head and then told him what I’d seen in the harbor. While raiders could settle debts by taking people captive in various ports, normally slave trade itself was conducted in small bays and inlets just outside trading ports.

  Behir nodded. “Wharton is a base now. Even the water just around the ports is taxed. That’s all I’ve heard from the fishermen all night.” Behir gestured to a group of dark-skinned men sitting behind us at the next table.

  “Which tribe?” I asked.

  Behir shrugged. “Lost Abbots. They have a stronghold here in the Caribbean—bases, colonies, you n
ame it. All night it’s been talk of taxes, public beatings, the slave trade.” Behir shook his head, his young face etched with worry. “It’s why I’m glad we’re not just trying to settle in some port. That’s what my mom wanted, but I kept telling her you never know if a port is already a haven for raiders. Already under their thumb. We didn’t know Wharton turned until we got here.”

  Something turned over in my stomach and I felt the urge to tell him that the Valley was already a colony.

  I ordered another whiskey instead. I downed it quickly, focusing on the heat in my throat. We were both quiet for a while and I watched the light dim between the cracks in the walls. Behir was listening intently to the men sitting behind us. I couldn’t recognize the language they spoke.

  “What are they—?”

  “Hindi,” Behir said. “My mom insisted I learn, said it would come in useful.” He rolled his eyes. “She’s always right.”

  He leaned closer to me and whispered in my ear. “You saw those big houses close to the harbor? I guess this man who lived in one—a broker back in the day or something—was a distant cousin of the family that started the Lost Abbots. So they came to an arrangement. The Lost Abbots could make this a base if they shared what they looted from other communities with Wharton. To help grow the society here. Wharton also gets free protection from the Lost Abbots from other raiding tribes.”

  Behir paused and listened more closely to the men. “Government officials here could keep their jobs; stay in leadership,” he said. “Sounds like Wharton’s a democracy of some kind, they hold votes every year. But there’s a lot of bribery.”

  I shook my head and we fell silent again, twisting our drinks on the table. Next to us two women were arguing about the floods.

  “She preserved us. We’re still here,” one said.

  “She tried to wipe us out,” the other said.

  “She destroyed everything so we could rebuild.”

  “We’re not rebuilding; we’re going extinct.”