by Eric Walters
Over the past two weeks there’d been more activity around our island. We’d been hearing more voices, some from people passing in canoes or kayaks or little rowboats, some in motorboats. It was the same with the boats as with the cars: if it was old enough, it seemed to work. A couple of times there had been multiple boats, like a little convoy. One of them had four boats and twenty people. Hiding in the bushes, I’d seen that they also had weapons, including a couple of rifles. Knowing how many other people were possibly lurking around made me feel very exposed out here on the open water.
“Do you hear that?” Ethan asked.
I heard something but I wasn’t sure what it was.
“Is it an animal?” Ethan asked.
“It’s a baby,” our mother said. “It’s a baby crying.”
The sound was getting louder and seemed to be coming from the little island to the left. Our mother steered us toward a small beach, and we picked the canoe up and walked it up and along a little path that led into the middle of the island before putting it down. I reached inside for my bow and arrow. The jackknife was in my pocket. Ethan had the knife that the men had dropped, which he had immediately claimed as his own weapon. And, of course, my mother had her pistol out.
The baby kept crying, and we followed the sound.
“Voices,” my mother whispered.
I tilted my head to the side. I could hear them as well. Male and female—more than just two or three.
“Maybe we should go back,” I whispered.
“We need to know who our neighbors are,” she replied. “We’ll stay quiet.”
She continued forward along the path and we followed. The crying was now so loud that we had to be close. We were almost there, and suddenly a woman rounded the corner, holding the crying baby. She screamed in shock.
“Please don’t shoot! Please don’t hurt us!” she yelled.
My mother lowered the pistol, and at that same instant three men appeared, skidding around the corner of the path, surrounding the woman. One of them was holding a rifle. He pulled it up so it was aiming right at us.
“Drop your weapons,” he yelled out, “or I’ll shoot!”
I felt a rush of complete fear fill my entire body as I stared at the rifle—wait, something looked wrong.
“I think you’d better put that down,” my mother said, “before I decide to fire my gun.”
He didn’t move. Nobody moved.
“Please,” she said. “I have a real gun that fires real bullets, and you have a pellet rifle that fires BBs.”
That was what was wrong. It was a pellet gun, basically a toy—the barrel and muzzle were just too small to fire real bullets.
“Look, I don’t want to hurt anybody. We heard a baby crying. I’m a nurse and I thought—”
“You’re a nurse!” the woman exclaimed. “She’s not well. Please, could you help her, please?” The woman rushed forward so quickly that my mother hardly had time to holster her gun.
“Let’s find a place where I can examine the baby.”
—
We all sat around at three picnic tables surrounding a little fire. There were seven of them—Ian and Jess and their three-month-old baby Olivia, another younger couple, Jim and Paula, and two older men, Julian and Ken, who looked like they were also a couple. It had been the baby’s father, Ian, who had threatened us with the pellet gun. He’d apologized half a dozen times and thanked my mother another half a dozen times for looking at Olivia.
My mother had used a towel and a pot of hot water to help get steam into the baby’s sinuses. The baby had stopped crying. Everybody was grateful, but nobody more than the parents.
“It’s not much more than a bad cold,” my mother said as she handed her back to her mother. “Just give her steam a few times a day to help clear the congestion.”
“Thank you. With all this rain, it’s just been hard to keep her dry, to keep anything dry,” Ian said.
“Where are you staying?” my mother asked.
“Here, right here,” Ken explained.
“Here, where?” I asked. I didn’t see tents or any kind of shelter.
“Under the tables. The plastic tablecloths have been our only protection from the rain. We have one table for each couple, and the baby with her parents,” Ken explained.
“And it’s not much protection at that, but it’s better than being back there in the city,” his partner Julian added.
“You came out from the city?” my mother asked.
“We had to. It’s a nightmare,” Jim said. “We had a man with a boat take us out to Main Island.”
“We all paid somebody,” Ian added. “We figured it would have to be better here. We tried to get the people over on Ward’s to take us in.”
“But they barricaded the bridge and took shots at us,” Jim added.
I turned to Ethan to silence him in case he started to tell them who had been leading that charge.
“Really, they were firing into the air,” Jess said. “But still, they didn’t want any part of us.”
“Did any of you know each other before this started?” my mother asked.
“No, we just sort of connected for protection once we were out here,” Ian said. “Some of the other people out here are forming groups too.”
“He means gangs,” Ken said. “Or packs, like wolves. Everybody is getting desperate. People have been turning on each other. We thought it would be safer to be away from everybody else, and this little island looked like our best choice.”
“And how did you get out here to this island?” I asked.
“Paddleboats. We borrowed—I guess stole, really—some paddleboats from the amusement park. And these tables were in the picnic area on the big island. We floated them out.”
“Do you have any weapons other than the pellet gun?” my mother asked.
“We have a couple of knives, and a hammer, and a few other things that could be used as weapons. I brought along my toolbox,” Julian said. “Ken and I run a home renovation business.”
“Where did you three come from?” Paula asked.
“We left the city the day it all happened,” my mother said. “We’ve been living out on one of the neighboring islands.”
“So you don’t know anything about the city at all,” she said.
“We’ve been back. We’ve watched the fires, and we’ve heard from other people how widespread it all is,” our mother answered.
“We’ve heard that it could be our entire country,” Ian said.
“I have no question it’s the entire country,” my mother said.
“How can you know that?” Jim asked.
“If it was only part of our country then the federal government would have intervened and helped. Nobody is coming to offer us assistance. We’re on our own to survive.”
“I don’t even like to think about that,” Jess said.
“But maybe we don’t have to be so alone,” my mother said. “We don’t have much, but we have more than you have here. Why don’t you join us?”
“You’re going to help us?” Jess said.
“Yes. And you’re going to help us. I think we’re stronger together.”
14
The smell was better than anything I had ever smelled in my entire life. A big goose was suspended on a spit and roasting over the fire. Ian had not only killed it—that pellet gun was apparently good for something—he had plucked and cleaned it, and now he was cooking it. Having something other than fish was going to be a real treat. Not that there was anything wrong with fish.
My brother remained the king of fishing, but Paula had become his sidekick. Over the last week and a half they’d caught so many fish that we were able to dry and store what we didn’t need for food right away. They had also taken two volleyball nets from a court on Main Island and put them together, which made the holes small enough to trap fish. Ken had built a drying rack for the extra fish out of pieces of driftwood.
We had taken three dozen tables fr
om the picnic area and floated them out to our island. That was maybe the strangest sight, because we were using two of the paddleboats from the amusement park—the ones that looked like gigantic swans. They weren’t fast or powerful but they did the job.
Once on our island, the picnic tables were disassembled and we used the planks to build four small buildings—sleeping quarters—plus an open-air shelter that was now the cooking area. With a combination of mud, tarps, and plastic tablecloths the shelters had been made waterproof. They weren’t much bigger than our tent, but they were more solid, and while you couldn’t stand up all the way inside, they provided the best shelter. We’d given our new friends our three extra blankets, too, since we still had our sleeping bags.
The smoke from the fire and the aroma of roasting goose floated up and out through the open sides of the cooking shelter. The roof wasn’t much but it kept the area dry enough to cook, even when the rains were strong.
Ian walked over and gave the goose a little spin on the spit to cook another chunk.
“It smells amazing,” I said. “This is going to be the most delicious dinner. And we have you to thank!”
“Well, I don’t know what we would have done without the three of you joining up with us,” he said. “Believe me, we’re very grateful for your help.”
“We’re all helping each other. We couldn’t have made this shelter without you guys.”
“Who would have thought that any of us would be so grateful for a wooden shelter and a blanket?”
“And a goose,” I added.
“And a goose. Still, four weeks ago this would have been the dream of nobody but a homeless man.”
“Four weeks seems like forever ago. And I guess that’s what we are now, a bunch of homeless people.”
“I don’t like to think about it that way. You know, for years I used to look across the harbor and think about how amazing it would be to have a little place out here on the island.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “I guess you should be careful what you wish for.”
Jess, holding Olivia, came out of their shelter. “Are you talking about marrying me?”
“That wasn’t just a wish. That was a dream,” Ian answered.
The two of them kissed, and then he took the baby from his wife and held her close. It made me smile. They really loved each other. They were a couple…a family. And that was what we used to be, that was what we used to have. Would it all end for them someday, just like it ended for us?
“So, where is everybody?” Jess asked.
“Paula and Ethan—”
“Are obviously fishing,” Jess said.
“Of course. Ellen and Ken and Julian are on Main Island scavenging, and Jim is on watch on the far point,” Ian said.
“Speaking of which,” I said, “I think it’s time for me to relieve him.”
I grabbed my bow and arrows to take with me. I continued to practice every day. I was getting better, and that made me feel better.
“You’re not planning on eating that without me, are you?” I asked.
“You have my word, although I’m going to continue to smell more than my fair share,” Ian said.
I wasn’t worried. I trusted him. I trusted all of them.
We’d decided not to leave our little island after all, and I, for one, was happy to stay. We’d become a tight little group, and together we’d made things better for everybody. My mother had been right about that. While we didn’t really have a leader, she was sort of the leader. She was the only one with military training, so she gave all the directions about security, about keeping us safe. Other people had different skills and abilities to contribute, but even those ideas all seemed to run through her. Safety was the most important thing on everybody’s mind. And I knew that I was feeling safer these days.
During the day there was always somebody watching the perimeter of the island, patrolling along a clearly marked path that was not visible from the water. At night the perimeter path was unmanned, but somebody was on watch at the camp. It made it easier to sleep, knowing that somebody was always watching over us.
It also felt safer to have wooden walls instead of the nylon of the tent. We slept on a little platform that got us off the ground, so it was warmer, and the dampness of the ground didn’t penetrate our sleeping bags. I’d started to wonder, though, what would have to be added—what could be added—to make the shelters adequate for sleeping during the winter. What worked in June wasn’t going to work in January. Really, though, the old pioneers didn’t have much more than this. There wasn’t much difference between a log cabin and a plank cabin, was there?
I knew Jim would be walking clockwise so I walked counter-clockwise, and it wasn’t long before we met. He had the binoculars around his neck and a baseball bat on his shoulder, like a guard with a rifle. I wished it were a rifle.
“I can smell that goose on every circuit,” he said.
“It’s even better up close. Have you seen anything?”
“A surprising number of boats out on the lake, but nothing came near. People are putting older boats back into service. It would be nice to have a motorboat.”
“It would be nice to have a paddleboat that didn’t look like a swan,” I suggested, and he laughed.
One of the swan boats was hidden close to the camp and the second, along with the canoe, was with my mother and Ken and Julian on their scavenging trip to Main Island. There was something so funny about getting around on a swan-shaped paddleboat; it always made me smile. Here we were, camping out on a little island, thrown back in time, living off the land, and fearful of everything around us. And yet we got around in a couple of swan paddleboats.
Jim turned over the binoculars to me and headed back to camp while I took up watch. The island was now my world, and I knew it better than I had known any chunk of land in my entire life. This wasn’t home and it wasn’t much, but it was what we had.
I stopped walking as the towers of the downtown came into view. The city struck me as almost as strange as the swan paddleboat. There it was, across the harbor, so near and so far. We could see it but we were separate and safe. No, not safe, but safer.
During the day everything looked pretty much the same as it would have before. From this distance you wouldn’t have been able to see the cars or the people. It was only after the sun went down that everything was different. The city, instead of standing out in a blaze of lights, disappeared into darkness. The towers were still visible—darker shades against the darkness—but the only lights were from the occasional vehicle on the mainland, or the running lights of an old boat moving across the harbor.
Our new friends had been in the city more recently than us, but even their reports on what was going on there—and in the larger world—were already dated. I thought the people at Ward’s Island might know more, but my mother was still reluctant to go over there. She said we couldn’t go there as “beggars”; we needed to wait until we could go with an offer of strength, because lots of people were going to be showing up at their borders asking for things. We knew that for certain because our new friends had been there to ask for something, and we’d been part of turning them away. That little secret remained with the three of us.
As I walked and looked out over the water, my eye caught some movement well out in the harbor. I pulled the binoculars up. It was a boat, but it wasn’t that small. It was hard to tell from this distance, but I figured it to be twenty or even thirty feet in length. There was a deck, and a flying bridge. I saw a couple of outlines on the bridge and brought that into focus. There were three figures…and two of them had rifles.
Quickly I started scanning the entire boat. I counted another dozen people, and many of them seemed to be carrying weapons. Of course from this distance I couldn’t tell a rifle from a pellet gun from a baseball bat. I tried to count the people aboard. There were at least a dozen. I couldn’t tell how many might be below deck. All I knew for sure was that they were coming in our direction.
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I turned and ran toward the camp. I was alarmed to see a thin trail of smoke from our fire rising up into the air and marking exactly where the camp was located. If I could see it, wouldn’t they be able to see it from out there on the water? I ran faster, skidding to a stop by the fire.
“There are people coming!” I yelled.
They all jumped to their feet.
“Where, how many?” Ian asked.
“Lots, on the water, and they’ve got guns.” Then I remembered. “We have to put out the fire! It’s visible.”
Jim grabbed a tub of water and was about to pour it when Jess stopped him.
“No, that will create smoke and steam—that will make it even more visible.” She started picking up dirt and throwing it on the edge of the fire to smother it.
“Be careful of the goose!” Ian exclaimed.
“Dirt on the goose is the least of our problems,” Jess said.
“I’ve got to get Ethan and Paula,” I said. “They’ve got to get away from the shore.”
“I’ll get them,” Jim said. “I’ll bring them back—no, I’ll bring them to the meeting spot.”
We had a prearranged place to go on the far side of the island where we had a much bigger version of one of our hidey-holes. It was a hole about four feet deep, topped by wooden beams that were covered with dirt and grass to blend in and hide what was beneath. The wooden door was also hidden in the bushes. It wasn’t big, but we could all crowd inside to hide. My mother had insisted that we needed it, and Ken and Julian had designed and created it. At the time it had seemed like a lot of work to me, and the end result reminded me of an underground parking garage. Or worse—a mass grave. I couldn’t stop myself from thinking that while we were excavating it. Were we digging our own grave?
The fire was out and the smoke trail had vanished. They would have nothing to follow now, and even if they’d already seen it, for all they could tell it might have been coming from anywhere on the big island.
“Jess, take Olivia and go to the hiding place,” Ian said.
“Aren’t you coming with us?” she asked.
