“Don’t do it,” a voice whispered.
I whirled around, flicking open the switchblade that I kept on my person at all times, and found myself face-to-face with Eirian, who raised his hands above his head when my knife neared his throat.
“Whoa, easy there!”
“Shit, I’m sorry.” I quickly folded the blade again and stored it in the pocket of my coat. “I get anxious. New place, people I don’t know. You know how it is.”
“Not really, but I can take a guess,” Eirian said. “Does Ludo know you have that?”
I stayed quiet.
“Thought so,” he said, chuckling. “We don’t allow residents to keep weapons in the camp. If someone wants to duke it out, they have to do it with their fists. Less casualties that way.”
“Does that happen often?”
“Not at all,” Eirian answered. “We know what we have to lose here. We need everyone in the best shape so that no one slacks on their job. Fighting is stupid. It only causes problems. I’m surprised they didn’t find that knife on you when you checked in. Where did you hide it?”
Again, I didn’t answer, although I did let a smug smile tug at my lips.
“Never mind,” he said, catching the grin. “I don’t want to know. I do, however, have to ask why you slipped away from a perfectly in-tune rendition of Britney’s Toxic to come stare at Sylvester’s cabin.”
“How do you even know Britney?” I asked him. “If you’ve been living on homesteads for your whole life?”
“Top Forty haunts us all,” he replied. “Although I’ve only heard covers, never the original. I answered your question. You answer mine. What gives?”
I sighed, looking up at the cabin again. “I used to live there.”
“In the cabin?”
“My father built it,” I said, wondering how many times I would have to explain this. “I helped him. I came out here to look for him and found Camp Haven instead.”
“Huh.”
“What?”
“It makes sense this way,” Eirian said, brushing his wavy dark hair out of his eyes. “I never bought that whole ‘Sylvester found an angel’ story. It’s more likely that he got lucky, found the cabin, and then started Camp Haven.”
“That doesn’t explain what happened to my dad,” I told him.
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Nine years ago.”
“Wow,” Eirian said. “That’s a long time. How do you figure he didn’t just move on from here and go somewhere else?”
“He was agoraphobic,” I explained. “He would’ve never left this place willingly. It was perfectly set up for what he wanted. Complete seclusion.”
“Maybe he’s still here then.”
I shook my head. “No, there are too many people here. My dad was a loner. But I would like to check to make sure. Ludo mentioned earlier that Camp Haven keeps archives of every resident in DotCom. Do you know where they are?”
“Sure.”
“Do you think you could show me?” I asked him, batting my eyelashes.
He covered my eyes with one gloved hand for a brief moment. “You don’t have to do that. I don’t need convincing. Do you want to go now?”
Fighting off a flush of heat, I nodded. Thank goodness it was dark and cold outside. Otherwise I would have died of embarrassment. I wasn’t used to guys who didn’t require persuasion. Then again, I wasn’t used to guys who had never been exposed to the toxic masculinity of regular society. Eirian, raised as he had been, was a rarity.
“Follow me,” he said.
He seemed to automatically understand that I needed to be alone, so we skirted the main square where the event was still in high swing. Someone belted Aretha Franklin from the podium, accompanied by an acoustic guitar that did not fit the genre at all. Eirian hummed along as he led me behind the main the buildings until we reached the rear door of DotCom.
“I heard Ludo got you an office,” he said, lighting a lamp in the hallway with a metal Zippo. There was something carved into the side of the lighter, but he tucked it into his pocket before I could get a better look. “Which one is yours?”
I pointed to the door. “That one. It’s not much right now.”
He looked through the window. “I’m sure you’ll fix it up. Come on. The archives are this way.”
We turned the corner and reached another door, which Eirian unlocked with his own set of keys.
“Does everyone get keys?” I asked him as we went inside.
“Nope,” he replied. “High-ranking individuals only.”
“I thought this camp was built on a trust system.”
“It is,” he confirmed. “But you can only trust people so much before they want more for themselves. It’s human nature.”
I thought of Jove. “You’re telling me.”
The archives room was no grander than any other part of the camp. It was full of repurposed cardboard or metal boxes stacked on simple handmade shelves. Each one held stacks and stacks of paper. The room was organized alphabetically by subject.
“Where do you get the paper?” I asked.
“We used to buy or steal it from the city,” Eirian answered. “Now we make it ourselves. We recycle everything here to make sure there’s as little waste as possible.”
I looked through a nearby box, kneading the strangely textured paper between my finger and thumb. “That’s amazing. You guys have really thought of everything, haven’t you?”
“I like to think so.” He pointed to a shelf near the rear of the room. “I believe the archives start over there. The names aren’t alphabetical. The signatures will be organized according to the earliest date. When do you think your dad might have been here?”
I maneuvered through the shelves and peered up at the faded labels on the boxes. “Right at the beginning, I’d guess. Those are from 2008 and 2009. That’d be it, right?”
Eirian stood on his toes and stretched up to get the box. His many layers rode up, and his undershirt untucked itself from his waistband, revealing the line of one muscled hip. I quickly cleared my throat and looked away.
“Here we go,” he said, bringing the box down to the floor and popping the lid off. “What name are we looking for?”
“Amos Fitz.”
He handed me a stack of papers to look through. The pages were crisp and fragile, torn out of old school notebooks or journals. Each one boasted at least twenty signatures of those who had come to Camp Haven in the last decade.
“I didn’t expect the archives to be this extensive,” I muttered, scanning the signatures for a glimpse of my father’s name. “There aren’t that many people here.”
“We made a lot of mistakes in the beginning,” Eirian said. “We recruited too many people. Advertised to campers and hikers. They didn’t understand what we really wanted to do here. A lot of them showed up, stayed for a week or so, realized that this wasn’t what they wanted, and went back to the city. It wreaked havoc on our system. We were wasting supplies, and our visitors were treating the compound like some kind of vacation retreat. They wouldn’t pull their weight, and they complained about everything.”
“So you stopped advertising,” I said.
“Pretty much,” Eirian replied. “We had enough people to keep the place running. We became our own community. We had plans to expand before the EMP hit. We were thinking about letting a few more couples have children—”
“Doesn’t that sound absurd to you?” I asked him. “Controlling childbirth?”
“We don’t have a choice,” he replied. “Think about it. It’s the middle of the woods. No pharmacy, no birth control. We have to manage our population wisely.”
“There’s no way everyone here is abstaining.”
Eirian grinned. “Of course not. We’re human after all. We take a lot of precautions, but we do get the occasional accidental pregnancy.”
“How many demerits is an accidental pregnancy worth?”
He shot me a confused look. �
�We don’t shame women for the natural state of things. If someone gets pregnant, it’s not the end of the world. They have their baby, and everyone moves on. No big deal.”
I continued scanning the papers for my father’s name.
“Are you worried about your fiancé’s sister?” Eirian asked. “I noticed how young she was.”
“Pippa can take care of herself,” I assured him. “I guess I’m just not used to how things are done around here.”
“Feel free to ask me anything,” he said. “I’m a wealth of knowledge when it comes to Camp Haven. I was actually in the first group of people to move here. Does this look like Fitz to you?”
I squinted at the cramped handwriting. “No, that says Fisk. My dad wrote in all caps no matter what.”
“Gotcha.”
“So you’ve never lived off a homestead?” I asked him, intrigued. “How is that even possible in this day and age?”
Eirian lowered himself out of his squat to sit on the floor with a groan of relief and continued to look through his batch of signatures. “It’s a long story. My real parents abandoned me when I was born. I have no idea who they were. They dumped me somewhere in the hills of Southern California. I guess they figured I’d die out there, and they wouldn’t have anything to worry about anymore.”
“And I thought my childhood was messed up.”
He laughed, a sound that I decided I liked quite a bit. “It’s not as dramatic as it sounds. I don’t remember it at all. Anyway, a group of women found me up there. They called themselves the Sisters of the Wind. The Sisters grew out of the idea that we owed something to nature in return for taking care of us. That’s why they lived as simply as they did. They took me in and raised me.”
“What happened to them?”
“A few died,” he admitted. “There were only ten of them to begin with, and some of them were already quite old. A few others assimilated into other homesteads in order to survive. That’s how I ended up here. I went from the Sisters to a campground in Idaho to here in the Rockies. Wynonna, the Sister who I always regarded as a mother, actually made it here with me. She’s a maternity specialist now. Fitz!”
I dropped to my knees at his exclamation, accidentally tipping over the box and scattering papers everywhere. “That’s him! Amos Fitz. He was here!” I ran the pad of my finger over the capital letters, a declaration of my father’s existence. “What now? That means he’s here in the camp, right? I can’t believe it.” A muscle in Eirian’s jaw twitched, and I understood that my enthusiasm was premature. “What is it?”
“I know everyone in this camp,” he said. “If there was an Amos Fitz here, I’d know him.”
“Then where did he go?”
“I’m not sure,” Eirian replied. “There’s no sign-out here, which means that if he left the compound, there’s no record of it. There is one other list we can check, but…”
“But what?”
He stacked the papers neatly, put the lid back on, and returned the box to the proper shelf. “We keep a book of everyone who’s passed away at Camp Haven. I’m not saying that he’s on it, but if he is, it might give you the closure that you’re looking for.”
Somehow, it had never occurred to me that my father might actually be dead. After all, he did live in the middle of nowhere. If an emergency situation arose, he had no way of calling someone for help. For all I knew, he was dead.
“Do you want to check?” Eirian asked. “We don’t have to.”
“No, we should,” I said. “I want to know.”
He approached a different shelf and took down a different box. “Death certificates are in alphabetical order, no matter the year. Here’s the F’s.”
We sat on the floor again, leaned in at the same time, and bumped shoulders. Eirian didn’t pull away, ensconced in the search for my father’s name in the death box. I stayed put too, savoring the warmth that we shared in that small space.
“Finigan, Fisher, Fitch,” Eirian muttered, licking his finger to separate the certificates. “And then Flagler. No Amos Fitz. He’s not in here.”
“This doesn’t make any sense,” I said, slamming the lid onto the box. It was made of recycled aluminum and clanged loudly. “I know this says that he was here during Camp Haven’s inauguration, but he never would have let so many people onto his land.”
“Maybe he was having trouble surviving on his own,” Eirian suggested. “He thought he might benefit from Camp Haven’s existence.”
“You don’t know my father,” I said. “He would rather suffer and die than trust someone else. I don’t get it.”
I rubbed my temples. A headache grew in the space between them, from dehydration or stress or lack of sleep. Eirian reached into his pocket and produced a small tube.
“Here,” he said, tipping the tube on its side. A few drops of liquid, smelling strongly of candy canes, plopped onto his finger, which he dabbed against my temples. “It’s peppermint oil. Natural headache relief.”
The oil chilled my skin, but the crisp scent cleared my mind. “Thanks.”
“Of course,” he said, capping the tube. “Is there anything else I can do that might set your mind at ease about your father?”
“I suppose not,” I said, shoulders slumping in disappointment. “Unless you have another suggestion.”
“None that I can think of at the moment. Come here.” He stood up and offered his hands. I took them, and he gently pulled me to my feet. “What do you say we go back outside and enjoy the rest of open mic night? It’s actually quite fun, and it’ll give you a chance to meet some of the others. Plus, I’m sure your fiancé is missing you.”
“He’s not—”
Once again, I thanked the low lighting, which covered my slip-up. I yearned to talk about my broken engagement with anyone other than Jacob. I needed that release, to work out what had gone wrong with someone other than my own self. Eirian, however, didn’t seem like the best choice. For one thing, I hardly knew him, and for another, Jacob’s behavior at the Bistro during breakfast implied that he already harbored a disliking for the Camp Haven native.
When we returned to the square, some of the event’s energy had died off. The kids had gone to bed, and the older residents of Camp Haven had retired too. The music turned to soft folk and blues rather than pop and rock songs. Jacob had, in fact, taken the podium to sing an old Lou Reed song.
“I’ll let you listen,” Eirian said, squeezing my shoulder in farewell. “Have a good night, Georgie. I’ll see you tomorrow for my first shift.”
He saluted me with two fingers before disappearing into the crowd to join a few of his friends for a drink. Nita, who’d been sitting on one of the benches around the fire to listen to Jacob, waved me over.
“What was that all about?” she asked, her eyes lingering on Eirian’s statuesque figure.
“He was helping me figure out what happened to my father,” I told her. Jacob plucked dutifully at a borrowed guitar, his voice velvety and soft in the cold night. “We looked through the archives.”
“Did you find anything?”
I leaned my head on Nita’s shoulder. “No.”
She perched her chin on top of my head. “Is everything okay?”
Jacob finished his song. The last chord lingered in the air. Then the crowd clapped politely as Jacob handed the guitar off to the next open mic participant.
“I don’t know,” I said.
4
Before I knew it, two weeks had passed at Camp Haven. I fell into step with the rest of the compound quickly. The schedule and work was familiar once I remembered how to do it. This was the way I had grown up, with candles and well water rather than a monthly electricity bill and working toilets. To me, it felt natural, so I assimilated within a few days, eliciting a number of questions from the other members of Camp Haven. After the third or fourth unprompted interview, I stopped mentioning that Sylvester’s cabin used to be mine. No one was inclined to believe me, though they nodded politely to placate me. I d
id, however, ask every single person that I talked to about my father in the hopes that someone might recognize his name. No such luck. They all claimed ignorance about Amos Fitz, leaving me to continue to wonder about my father’s fate.
The radio tower went up in about a week and half. It would have been sooner, but the camp didn’t have all of the construction materials that I needed to make it work, which meant that Eirian and a few other men had to venture closer to the city to scalp industrial yards for parts. They left in makeshift combat armor, carrying rifles across their backs. To someone naive, their vehemence may have come across as paranoia, but I understood the precautions. As the days passed us by, Camp Haven went on unhindered. The people lived as they had always lived, off of the land and off of the grid. I knew that the regular population of Denver, and the rest of the United States for that matter, would not fare the same. By now, if I was right about the level of destruction, thousands of people had died from lack of care, no access to medications, violence in the streets, and general idiocy. When Eirian and his friends returned, they confirmed my assumptions. Denver was in ruins, taken over by gangs and other crime circles. Though the camp’s scavengers had not ventured far enough into the city to get into trouble, Eirian had seen enough to hollow out his eyes. As he hauled parts for the tower to the location I’d requested for it, the usual gleam of his green irises was absent.
“Are you okay?” I had asked, pulling on a pair of thick workman’s gloves, the fingers of which were too long, and lifting the other end of the steel support that he’d been dragging through the compound.
“I don’t want to think about it,” he replied. “Let’s just work.”
So we did. It was the first time I’d ever been in charge of such a process. I drew up rough blueprints of what I needed from the crew, picked a place for the radio tower that was central for the entire camp in order to get the best range possible, and asked Ludo for a small team of workers that could get the tower up and running as quickly as possible. From there on out, I spent the days in a hardhat and steel-toed boots, helping as well as instructing. Eirian’s desire to work suddenly made sense. The more I threw myself into the tower’s construction, the less I thought about the destruction on the other side of Camp Haven’s walls. It was a relief to sweat and ache from a physical standpoint rather than a mental one. Each night, exhausted as I was from the day’s work, I fell asleep moments after my head hit the pillow.
Blackout: A Tale Of Survival In A Powerless World- Book 1 Page 5
