The New Wild

by Holly Brasher

  “Jackie…” he murmurs, sidling up to me. His legs feel slippery underwater. He leans in about as close as he can get. His face so close to mine makes my lips tingle. I don’t know what to do. I’m paralyzed. He has that droopy-eyed look guys get when they’re about to kiss you. “Jackie, can I…”

  “God, it is so hot in here I think I’m gonna faint!” I blurt out, catapulting myself up onto a rock. Steam rises off my body and dissipates in the air.

  I don’t want him kissing me. He’s hot, but he’s still a dick, and it’ll make things weird. Plus, we haven’t brushed our teeth in, I don’t know, a week or two? The second I get out of the water, he turns away, his face curled tightly in despair.

  “Jesus, Jackie,” he says, his voice all gravelly.

  “What?”

  “You wouldn’t want me if I was the last guy on earth, would you?”

  I sigh. I don’t know what to say.

  “I mean, I practically am the last man on earth,” he continues, waving his arms around. The light hits his muscles, giving them weighted sheen.

  “Well, that’s a risk I’m willing to take, I guess,” I say finally and try to smile. “Hey, maybe that kid from New York is my soul mate.”

  “Shit,” he says, under his breath before lifting himself out of the spring and walking a few paces from where we were sitting.

  I yell after him. “Please come back. I didn’t mean to sound so harsh.” He doesn’t even turn around. I can see his body move like a black shadow along the creek. He lies down at the water’s edge a bit farther upstream. I make my way over toward the fire, lay my head down, and look at the stars. We could get together some day. I can picture it. He wouldn’t even have to be the last boy on Earth…but now’s not the time. We have so far to go. Plus, we’re so stuck in survival mode, so focused on where our next meal is going to come from—much less our next bath—it’s just not going to happen right now.

  In the yellow glow of the firelight, I examine my compass, turning it around in my fingers. I don’t know what I’d do without this, without Bernard. The diamond in it catches the light like it’s waving to me, and I kiss it. I snuggle down into my blanket to sleep.

  Chapter 9

  In the morning, Xander won’t talk to me. I don’t know if he’s pissed, embarrassed, or both, but either way, I’m getting nothing but cold stares. Luckily, we’ve been surviving together for long enough that we can do it without speaking. We start walking through thick forest. Silver maples, quaking aspen, and birches of every sort are all huddled together, their branches intertwined above us. A group of honey-colored deer strut by us, flicking their white tails in greeting. There’s a weird smell in the air. It gets stronger as we emerge from the woods and into rolling meadowlands that stretch across the horizon. At first it smells like asphalt, but since there’s very little of that left in the world, I know that can’t be right. Then I feel it. A raindrop.

  “Oh, lord.” I look up at the sky, and there’s no blue in sight—just gunmetal clouds packed in tightly for miles. “Xander?” I call, terror coloring my voice.

  He’s striding about fifteen feet in front of me, trying to shake off the rejection, I guess. He ignores me, of course.

  “Xander!” I shout.

  He turns. “What?”

  “Did you feel that?”

  “Feel what, Jackie?” he sighs.

  “The raindrops.”

  “No,” he replies. “Maybe a bird shat on you.”

  “I’m serious. It’s really starting to rain, I can feel it.”

  “I’m surprised you can feel anything,” he says coldly.

  My jaw drops.

  Then another drop hits my forearm. And another. They’re sprinkling all over my skin. All of a sudden, a lightning bolt jackknifes across the sky, illuminating the whole valley with a flash.

  A second later, the thunder sounds, rippling across the empty field. It’s the loudest kaboom I’ve ever heard. I cover my ears, but it returns again. First a jolt of light, then a jolt of ear-splitting thunder. My heart pounds. Rain trickles down in pinging droplets, but it’s not long before it pummels so hard and fast it feels like liquid daggers. It keeps wailing down on us in watery cannons.

  We run. All I want to do is find cover before I drown, but this field is endless, not even a tree in sight. I put my hand over my forehead to shield my eyes but all I can see is farmland, bare and desolate. The ground is so muddy it’s starting to look like a flash flood came through and wiped everything out. This is so much worse than Portland rain. Portland rain is ubiquitous, yes, but it’s also clean, tidy. It never feels like the sky is pushing waterfalls down onto your head. The thunder booms louder than ever, and I literally swipe my fingers across my ears to see if they’re bleeding. My clothes and bag are soaked through. At least they’re clean now. Then, not even a minute later, I trip on a rock and fall face-first into the mud, mud that’s gushing so thick and deep that the whole front half of my body is submerged.

  If this happened months ago when I was in Portland, I’d be choking back tears. But today, I can handle it. And other things are so much more important. My mom. Bernard. Getting home. I lift myself up to my elbows and hear Xander sloshing toward me.

  “Christ, are you okay, Jackie?” He picks me up out of the mud with one hand.

  “Yeah,” I murmur.

  The rain slows to a soft and steady drizzle, so we no longer need urgent shelter. I stand and let the water wash over me, clearing the mud from my face and clothes. I open my mouth and let it fill, then uncap the bell jar and do the same. For a while, we just stand there, in the rain, letting the sky have its way. When we finally get moving again, I don’t know which way is west. Xander doesn’t either, though he’s happy to point and pretend like a dick. I reach for my compass, swiping my fingers around my neck, chest, even under my shorts. It’s not there. It’s nowhere. I inhale sharply. Now I am going to cry.

  Xander frowns. “What is it?” he asks.

  “This is bad,” I say, completely monotone.

  “I know, I think I’m ready to drown.”

  “No, Xander. I lost my compass.”

  “What?” His eyes are the size of saucers.

  “I. Lost. My. Compass!” I enunciate, tears brimming in my eyes.

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Yeah, shit,” I snap.

  “In the mud?”

  I drop to my knees, kneeling down in the sludge, and comb through it with my fingers. Xander does the same. I pull up pebbles, and a couple of beetles, but no compass. My heart sinks. How could I be so stupid? How could I lose my most treasured possession? And more importantly, without it, how the eff am I gonna get home at all? I know my directions about as well as the average toddler, and Xander’s no better. We are, in a word, screwed.

  For a few seconds, I want to lie there and die, let the rain wash my body away, never to be seen again. A heartbroken ache washes over my chest.

  Just when I think I can’t take any more, the rain turns to hail. Lethal, icy, ping-pong ball hail. I feel like the sky has become one giant, gray jawbreaker dispensary, because they’re coming down on us like it’s their freaking job.

  Again, I run. Xander scampers after me. The mud is so thick it’s like jogging in quicksand. It grabs at our feet. We’re not sure where we’re going, no idea which direction, no trees in sight. It’s like we stumbled upon a giant, human-sucking wasteland. And then, out of nowhere, it ceases and the whole earth is white.

  It’s unsettlingly quiet now that the hail has ended and a hush has settled over the land. I fall to my knees, breathless, as Xander looks every which way, trying to figure out where we should head.

  “Jackie,” he says, panting.

  “What?” I manage.

  “Look.”

  At first, all I see is yards of white hail unfolding over the plains. But then, out in the distance, set like a beacon over the sea, I notice a tiny farmhouse, lights blazing.

  “Oh, thank God, oh my God,” I say, tears p
ooling in my eyes.

  Xander grabs my hand, yanking me to my feet, and drags me toward the house. It looks like new construction—built within the last year or two—but like it was modeled after the houses of the 1700s. There are low, carefully crafted gables over the windows, and rippled glass like it was manufactured before factories perfected the process. The lights that cast a surreal yellow glow over the hail fields aren’t the world’s LED standards, but antique gas lanterns flickering in the breeze. I’m scared to knock—my ingrained fear of psychotic strangers still intact—but Xander struts right onto their unadorned porch and pounds heavily on the door. I hang back a few feet from the stoop and notice a couple of little kids peering down at me through an upstairs window—one Asian, one Latino. They smile and hide when they see I’ve spotted them.

  Just as Xander’s fist is set to thud again on the wood, the door swings wide open. An older man with a long, gray beard and dancing blue eyes smiles at us.

  “Well, hello,” he says, his voice deep and inflected with an odd, lilting accent. “We’ve been expecting you.”

  Xander frowns. “Really?” he says.

  “Come in now and dry off. You must be freezing.”

  The man is wearing old-school, simple black boots, slacks, a blue-and-white-striped button-down shirt, and blue suspenders framing both sides of his long beard. He steps back and swings the door wide open to let us pass. “Yessir, we had a sign from above you’d be coming. Two new flowers on Ezekiel's tree,” he says, pointing out the window at a tree with six pink and white blossoms open to the sky standing on a blanket of white hail. “Every time a new person comes, that tree lets us know ahead of time. We get lots of signs from above, you know. We just have to be aware enough to see them.”

  “Uh, yeah…” Xander says. “Where are we?”

  “You’re in Fairweather, Pennsylvania. I’m Joseph Bender.”

  “And I’m his wife, Annie,” a diminutive, gray-haired woman says as she strides out of the kitchen, her cheeks as big as apples. She, too, is dressed in simple clothing like she stepped right out of a catalogue from 1886. “You must be famished. And wet. Joseph, get a fire going. Come with me, let’s get you out of those things.” She leads us to the bottom of a tiny stairway. “Heavens! I almost forgot. What are your names?”

  “Oh, I’m Jackie. Jackie Dunne,” I say, eyeing Xander expectantly. He’s still taking the house in. It’s amazing to see a place that’s intact, and this one is fascinating, mostly because nothing in it is even remotely modern. Everything, from the simple flickering candlesticks to the braided rag rug, looks like it was made centuries ago. The air inside the house smells like warm apple pie, a scent so delicious it brings tears to my eyes. I poke Xander in the stomach.

  “Oh! I’m Xander. Hi.”

  “Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you,” she says, her voice soft and sweet. “Come on upstairs with me, and we’ll get you a fresh change. Mario! Eunice! Come out here for a second. I want you to meet some special people.”

  A door swings open at the top of the stairs, and two kids run out—the same ones that peeped out at me from the window. Their smiles are huge. Mario wears a tiny version of Joseph’s outfit—simple slacks and a long, buttoned shirt with blue suspenders. Eunice has long, raven-black hair in fishtail-braided pigtails and wears a romper. I’d say she’s about five. Mario must be eight or nine. They’re totally adorable.

  “Youngsters this is Jackie and…Xander, was it?”

  He nods.

  “They just came in from that hailstorm, so you be on your best behavior.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” they say in unison. Mario is fidgety as heck. Eunice is half hiding behind a banister, all shy smiles.

  “We think their parents died in the Reckoning,” Annie says softly, just to us. “Poor things were dropped off here by total strangers who’d found them and couldn’t take care of them. Mario’s been here a few weeks. Eunice came just a couple days ago.”

  “Wow,” I say. “Crazy.”

  “We’ll take anybody in, poor things. Because we’ve rejected most technology and lived simply for hundreds of years, the families in our Order survived just fine, so it’s the least we can do. We need some fresh blood in our gene pool, anyway.”

  “I’m sorry, your order? What do you mean by that?” I ask, as she leads us into yet another simple, tidy room. This one has a tiny twin bed and a ceramic water pitcher on the oak bureau next to it.

  “Ha! You must not be from around here,” Annie says.

  “No, I’m from Oregon. He’s from Montana. We came from the east. We were at camp when, uh, everything happened.”

  “Well, we’re the Amish you’ve probably read about in books.”

  “Oh! Cool,” I say, then feel like an idiot. Do the Amish say words like “cool”?

  “Ours is a new Order—we broke off from the Old Order just a few years ago to help combat global warming,” Annie says. “Our goal is to teach the world what we know, so they can go home and lead simpler, greener lives. We even have our own Ordnung—our rule book—that teaches simple living. Some Amish say teaching is showy, but we think our reasoning would be all right with the Almighty.”

  “Well, simple living is everybody’s way now,” Xander says. I look at him with my eyebrows raised. He barely talks to me about this stuff, and here he is preaching to the choir.

  “Yes, I suppose you’re right,” Annie says softly. “But once the pesticides of modern farmers encroached on our farmland—killing off the bees for our honey, our crops, bringing cancer and blight—we knew we had to do something. Anyway, enough of that talk. Xander,” she says, lifting some clothes from a trunk. “You may wear these. They belonged to Ezekiel, our son, who’s now buried under that tree out front.”

  I look over at him, and his eyes are glistening like they’re about to shed a tear or two. It’s so weird to see, because he’s normally so tough. “Thank you,” he says. “I’m so sorry to hear about that.”

  “It was the way of the Lord, but he was our one and only. We sure miss him. Got leukemia just a few years after that benzene chemical spill at the factory in town,” she says, looking down at her hands for a few seconds too long. “You can wash up using that water in the pitcher there. Jackie dear, come with me.”

  We leave Xander to dress and walk to another room, this one a little bigger than the first. It must be her and Joseph’s. The mattress looks old and caved in the middle, but it’s covered with a pretty hand-stitched quilt. The few clothes in the closet are all black or navy, plain as plain, but her slips are all different colors: beet red, apple green, corn yellow. She gives me her one spare dress to wear and leaves me alone to change. I notice a mirror across the room, over a chest of drawers. I race to it and gasp the second I see myself. I hardly recognize the girl in the reflection, the creature looking back at me. I’m so painfully skinny, but toned. I didn’t even know I had some of the muscles that are popping out now. My skin is so tan I could have been born hundreds of miles closer to the equator than Oregon. I’m covered in flecks of dirt. My hair is caked with mud, matted down on my neck and back in dirty, Rasta-looking clumps. But what really startles me is my eyes. They’re such a piercing blue they almost look neon. Maybe all the other things I had back home—all the makeup and colorful outfits I wore everyday—made them less noticeable.

  There’s no way I’m ruining Annie’s perfectly clean dress by putting my disgusting body into it right now. I tiptoe across the hall, where she’s combing the little girl’s hair and re-plaiting it in braids. She smiles when she sees me. “Is everything all right? Does it fit?”

  “Oh, yes, well, I don’t know actually… Is there any way I can take a bath? I’m so dirty.”

  “Of course! How could I have forgotten to offer it to you? I’m sorry, at my age, it’s a miracle if everyone gets fed. Yes, I’ll go heat up some water and bring it right up. We have a little room yonder we use for baths.”

  “Uh, can I get in on that? I really need some of that action
,” Xander says, poking his head in.

  “Of course, of course. Jackie, you can go first. I’ll be right back. Mind the kids.”

  We play with them a while, and their bubbly giggles and sweet, big eyes make me melt. Surprisingly, Xander’s really good with them. He starts a game of “tickle torture”, and it almost moves me to tears seeing his enormous hands hold up their tiny arms and make them howl and shriek with laughter. Xander’s laughing at them, and I start laughing at him, and then we’re all letting it out in crazy, manic bursts. It feels good to laugh, really laugh. It feels like home.

  When Annie tells me the bath is ready, I spring to my feet. The bathing room is just big enough for the metal tub, with a tiny, triangular window that faces the endless fields outside. The water is steaming, with lavender floating across the top like I’m in some kind of Amish spa. Tiny beads of oil shine, dotting the surface. I put one foot in and sigh. I notice a bar of homemade white soap set on top of the towel and cry tears of joy, sobbing and laughing at the same time. This is going to be the best bath I’ve ever had.

  When I come downstairs, my skin is rubbed so clean it’s taut, and my hair falls in soft waves. Annie stands at the kitchen table, cutting some carrots up for what smells like a ridiculously amazing stew. She looks up and smiles. “There you are!” she marvels. “Now I can see you.”

  “Thank you so much, I really needed that,” I say, my voice thick.

  Xander is sitting on the bench, peeling potatoes. When he sees me, he drops a potato on the floor, flustered. He recovers pretty quickly, slinking up the stairs. “I’m gonna go hit up that bath,” he mutters.

  Joseph strolls into the kitchen, humming. “Well, what a pretty thing you are,” he says. “You’ll make plenty of hearts beat a little quicker this evening.”

  “Excuse me?” I say, my cheeks burning red.

  “Well, you just couldn’t have come on a better night,” Joseph says. “We’re hosting a Singing.”