by C.L. Bevill
Chapter 15
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 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 a 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, food, 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 the volunteer expedition.
So I got to read my how-to-sword fight 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 female 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 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 sociologist’s 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 sixty-something man deferred to Gideon. It wasn’t fawning; it was respectful observance of Gideon’s decisions. When had that ever been the norm in American society? Never, for sure. Elders are always considered to be more apt 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 notes 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 had 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 any more 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 wanti
ng 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 omelets 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 NIHM. 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 swinging double doors.
When I looked back at Gibby, she was smiling at me, too.
Me? I scowled to myself.
