by K. M. Fawkes
The bullets did their job, however. To his relief, the bear stumbled forward two or three paces and then fell head-first into the muddy snow. Twenty yards ahead lay the remains of his father’s body, at last claimed by the very nature he had spent his life working to master.
Chapter 18
Brad found Anna crouched behind a cluster of snow-bearing dogwood bushes at about twenty yards distant. Her face looked ashen, and when he saw the relief that came over it as he walked over and lifted her to her feet he realized that she had been concerned not for her own safety, but for his.
Hugging his neck, she allowed hot tears to rain down onto his coat and chest. “When I saw the bear,” she said, “I thought it was going to kill both of you.”
“It almost did.” Brad hugged her tightly, unnerved by the thought of how close he had come to losing her, again and again, these past few days. “Lee’s gun saved my life.”
“It doesn’t seem to have done him any favors, though.” She broke away and they gazed silently on the remains of the fallen figure, on which snow was already beginning to gather.
“What are we going to do with him?” asked Brad. “Do we leave him there? Do we bury him in the woods?” He didn’t relish the thought of leaving his own father’s body to be eaten by wild animals.
“You don’t owe him anything,” said Anna. Placing her hands under his chin, she turned his face to face hers. “He tried to kill us. He made a wreck of your life. He didn’t ruin you, but that’s only because you’re probably the strongest and most resilient man I’ve ever met. You don’t owe him this or anything else.”
They returned up the trail through the falling snow. In a branch overhead a whippoorwill was singing. Brad couldn’t get the image of his father’s flying jaw out of his mind, the look of dismay and surprise in his eyes in the seconds before his skull was broken open like a ripe watermelon.
Lee knew more about survival than anyone Brad had ever met. In the back of his mind, he had always suspected his father might be un-killable. Even now his shoulders were still tense, as if waiting for what remained of Lee’s body to rise and follow them back to the campsite, firing bullets into the trees. It was bizarre to him, how easily his father’s life had been extinguished. All it had taken was two swipes of a bear’s paws to prove him mortal.
They found Sammy and Martha waiting for them back at the campsite; Anna had told them to go and wait there while she went into the woods to assist Brad. During their absence Sammy had kept Martha preoccupied by proposing a competition to gather stones, which they had been placing in a circle around the perimeter of the clearing. Brad could tell that Sammy had been deeply worried for their safety when they had ventured off into the woods, but hadn’t wanted Martha to know. To his surprise, both kids raised a cry of distress when informed that Lee wouldn’t be coming back.
“Maybe someday I’ll tell you the full story,” Brad said. “For now I think we need to be heading back to the truck before it gets dark. God only knows what else is lurking in these woods.”
“He was your dad, wasn’t he?” said Sammy, and Brad froze in mid-stride. “He told us the other day when we were searching for a house. He said he loved you, but had never been very good at showing it.”
“What happened to him?” asked Martha in a panicked tone. “Why isn’t he coming back with us?”
Brad hesitated, debating how much it would be appropriate to tell them. “He’s gone now, and he won’t be coming back.” His eyes searched Anna’s, pleading for her help. “He can’t hurt us now.”
“He did a lot of bad things,” Anna said grimly, “but it’s done now.”
Martha looked slightly lost, but Sam’s eyes glimmered knowingly.
“How did it happen?” he asked.
Brad guessed what the boy was really asking. “We didn’t kill him, if that’s what you mean. We didn’t have to.”
“I don’t think we need to say any more than that,” said Anna warningly.
They had been standing at the edge of the clearing for several minutes now, and snow was beginning to settle on the shoulder of Martha’s coat.
“He wasn’t a bad man,” the little girl said sadly. “Not really. He never hurt us. He never hit us. He was confused, always talking to people we couldn’t see. He said he’d been given a task, and no one else could do it but him.”
“Did you bury him?” asked Sammy with childlike bluntness. “Is that why it took so long?”
Anna shook her head, tight-lipped and fighting back tears. “No, sweetie, we didn’t bury him. The woods will take care of him.”
Sammy frowned, as if pondering a dilemma that neither adult had considered. “It doesn’t seem right,” he said, “leaving him there.”
“He killed people,” said Anna, though even her hesitation seemed to be wavering in the face of her son’s question.
“But, imagine if you died and someone left your body out there, all cold and alone.” Sammy shivered. “I wouldn’t wish that on someone I hated.”
It was hard to imagine having this sort of conversation with a child in the pre-collapse world, but Martha and Sammy had already witnessed more than one death. They were quickly adjusting to a world in which death could occur with sudden violence.
Brad stared unhappily back at the woods they had just come out of. The image of his father’s body, alone and covered in snow, depressed him.
“They have a point,” said Brad, his eyes meeting hers over the children’s heads. “He wasn’t in his right mind at the end. He was a sick, twisted old man, and he needed help.”
Anna had gone strangely quiet, studying her son with a look of fierce pride. “Yes, we’ll bury him,” she said, tears starting into her eyes. “We can afford to show some humanity, even if Lee was far past being able to do that.”
And then Brad was fighting back tears—the first tears he could remember shedding since he was a boy and his pet robin had died—and he realized he was crying for the man his father could have been, the father he could have gotten but had never had.
Leaving Anna go watch the kids, Brad returned to the woods one last time to retrieve Lee’s remains. Heedless of the cold, he removed his coat and placed it over his father’s body, then hauled him back down the trail to the house by the lake.
Later, as the sun was setting, Brad mounted Lee’s body, and Vanessa’s body, and the bodies of the men who had died protecting the house, onto a pyre built of logs they had found in the back of the truck. There they burned the bodies, as Sammy and Martha looked on and Anna prayed a quiet prayer.
Chapter 19
Back at The Renaissance, the little community of survivors welcomed its four newest members with cakes and cheeses and tubs of specially made ice cream.
Freshly clothed and washed, Sammy and Martha whooped in delight as Marley led them on a tour of the grounds—into the lab where she had been conducting the experiments that had restored power to the reservoir; the cozy upstairs common room with its winged chairs and broad windows looking out over the frozen river. “No matter what happens,” she told them, “you’ll always have a home here, for as long as you want it. I’m not going to let anyone take that from you.”
“Mom said there was a library,” said Sammy. “Can we see it?”
“Of course.” Marley radiated joy at the question. “We’ve been acquiring so many books from abandoned houses and libraries that we’re having a hard time processing all of them. Soon we might need to employ a second librarian.”
“I’ll volunteer,” said Anna. “I’d like to do something to earn my keep around here.”
“I’ll ask Emma about it.” Marley began descending the ladder, but before her face completely disappeared from view, she added, “But within the next week or so I might have another job for you.”
“What sort of job?” asked Anna, but she was already gone.
The kids followed, leaving Brad and Anna alone in the spacious and lavishly furnished room. Brad moved to the window, watching the sun set over the pale pearl s
heen of the river.
“When the lights went out,” he said, “I thought I would never know another day’s happiness. There’s been so much death. But still, every day or so, I experience a moment of beauty that leaves me breathless.”
“I guess life goes on, even after the world ends,” said Anna. She sidled up beside him and leaned her head against his shoulder. Brad liked the feeling. The world was constantly in flux and all things were in the process of changing, but here he had found one thing he hoped never changed: the two of them, together, like this. “I think the beauty would continue, even if there was no one alive to witness it.”
“I’m glad that we made it,” he said. “I used to think I didn’t want to live anymore. But there are benefits to being alive in the world. I’m talking about you, mostly.”
He had seldom spoken so frankly about his appreciation for Anna; then again, he had rarely felt it as keenly as he did in this moment. Anna glanced up in surprise, looking suddenly bashful. “You mean that?”
“I do.” He stooped and kissed the spot on her forehead just over her brow. “We’re like two logs plucked out of a fire. If I have to live through the end of the world with anyone, I’d want it to be you.”
Brad’s boldness seemed to have awoken Anna’s own, for she gripped him the more tightly and said, “I’m not going to run from you again; I can promise you that.”
“You’ll never have reason to,” Brad replied, in a tone of quiet assurance. He had never wanted to kiss her more fiercely than he did now, but he held back for a moment, adding, “There have been times, especially lately, when I thought I could go live out the rest of my days in the woods. I’m getting older, though. I need people in my life. I need you.”
“You’ll have me for as long as you want me,” said Anna.
“Be careful,” said Brad, taking her chin in his hands. “I could be wanting you for a very long time.”
They stood quietly, both lost in thoughts of the future that stretched before them. Outside the window the sun was sinking below the tops of the pines in tones of bright yellow, as if someone had cracked an egg over the roof of the world, and the whippoorwills were calling to one another.
Epilogue
June 2031
Five years had passed since the world went dark, and it was now summer in northern Maine. The dogwood shrubs had blossomed again, bears had emerged from their caves in the hills and the smooth-flowing rivers teemed with trout and salmon.
Brad, Anna, Sammy and Martha were still living with The Renaissance, which still boasted Marley as its leader and had been inhabiting the reservoir for nearly six years without fuss or interruption. “At this point I don’t think anyone is going bother us,” Marley had said a few months earlier. “Maybe you haven’t noticed, but the woods are a lot quieter these days. Most survivors have fled south for warmer climes, if they were lucky enough to get that far.”
A celebration had been planned for the community’s sixth anniversary, during which one of the fatted pigs would be slaughtered and the residents would partake of homemade wine, summer sausage, salami, and a variety of pies. Recently they had had occasion to celebrate another milestone: two of the residents had welcomed a baby, the first born in the reservoir since the disaster.
Sammy was thirteen now, Martha had just turned fifteen, and both were receiving an education within the confines of The Renaissance. Although Brad had once joked that they lacked formal schooling, realistically they were likely better educated than most other children in the world of the same age.
Along with several other young people who had found their way to the reservoir—and a few older ones—Sammy and Martha were studying art and literature and history in a class jointly taught by Emma and Anna. Brad had been placed in charge of his own class, Wilderness Survival Skills, which met twice a week on Wednesdays and Saturdays. However, neither class interested the children as much as their Tuesday and Thursday lessons in Marley’s lab, where they were assisting her in her continued research.
Brad had questioned both Sammy and Martha about their memories of the year following the EMP and was relieved to find that neither of them remembered much. Over time their stay in the compound, the events leading up to the abduction and Lee’s death had blurred like an unhappy dream that was best forgotten.
Their memories of the pre-disaster world were even more nebulous: Marley had once spent twenty minutes trying to explain the properties that had made possible heavier-than-air flying machines, because Sammy found it hard to believe that great metallic winged instruments had once dotted the skies, traveling hundreds of miles an hour to destinations all over the earth.
In the lab, Marley and her team were continuing to build upon the advances of their earliest experiments. A couple years back they had succeeded in rigging up a rudimentary communications system, searching for whatever traces of civilization might still be out there. One of Marley’s assistants had compared it to SETI, the old government program that scanned radio signals coming from outer space in the hopes of making contact with alien life—only in this case, the life they were seeking was on this planet. Thus far, however, their broadcast had gone unanswered.
That year’s annual midsummer celebration was the largest they had had since the community’s beginning. Fresh fruits and vegetables from the communal garden and a nearby orchard that they had adopted and maintained were piled together on gleaming silver trays alongside thick slices of ham and rinds of aged cheese. Brad found it odd how his perception of plenty had changed in the past six years: he had attended larger feasts in the pre-disaster world, but somehow hadn’t appreciated them quite as much.
“In a way, I’m glad this place is hidden away from the rest of the world,” he said to Anna. They were hanging back in a corner drinking lemonade out of tin mugs while, on the other side of the room, Sammy and a few other children played charades with the ever-exuberant William. Marley had promised to come down in a few minutes and inaugurate the party with a brief speech, though at present she hadn’t yet emerged from the lab where she had been working without interruption for the past ten hours.
“Why’s that?” asked Anna. As always now, she instinctively pressed close to him.
“Because if word started getting around about how we live here, we’d have mobs beating down our door. I mean, look at all this food—I can guarantee you most people are living on seeds and berries if they’re lucky.”
“We’re truly blessed to have found this place,” said Anna. She pointed in the direction of Sammy and Martha, who were both now clapping along as William did an Irish jig. “I’m glad those two have gotten a real education. How many other kids today can say that?”
“Not many.” Brad took a long sip of his lemonade. “In a few years they’ll be leading whatever world has come into being by the time they’ve come of age.”
It occurred to him that the post-collapse world had benefited Sammy and Martha in a way it hadn’t benefited most people. If they had grown up before the pandemic they would have been two among hundreds of thousands of above-average kids; but here they were at the forefront of scientific advancement, receiving the equivalent of a world-class education. They were, improbably, among the world’s elite—or what qualified as elite in this new world.
Emma stood now in the center of the room, wearing a constellation-print cotton dress, her hair pinned up in a tight bun, looking as beautiful a woman of sixty as Brad had ever seen.
Striking a fork against the side of her tin mug, she said, “If I could have your attention for a moment… when Marley first asked me to take the position of head librarian six years ago I gave her a flat no. I didn’t see any place for teaching or literacy in a world that, at the time, seemed to be rapidly dying. I’ll never forget what she told me—”
But what Marley had told her they didn’t find out until long after, for just then the double doors leading into the dining hall came upon and Marley entered the room in a state of profound agitation. She was out of breath,
her face flushed, glasses askew.
“Sorry to interrupt the party,” she said, “but you’re going to want to hear this.”
Emma set down her glass and everyone in the room turned toward her. “Something has come up in the lab,” Marley said. “There’s been a signal. Someone answered the broadcast!”
A ripple of muttering broke out at this news that soon turned into excited discussion.
“Who?” Gregory asked above the din.
“What did they say?” William added.
Marley raised a hand to call for silence. “We don’t know what they want, or where they’re stationed. Tabitha’s still in the lab trying to get more information. But I want you to think about what this means: there are other people out there. Potentially a lot of other people. There might be pockets of civilization that we don’t even know about yet.”
No one seemed to know how to react at first. Then Emma said, with a broad smile, “Marley, why are you even here? Go talk to them!”
Everyone laughed at this. The stunned silence that had greeted the news was beginning to fade now; couples were hugging each other, standing in corners whispering quietly, debating the implications. Brad looked over at Anna, who was clutching a handkerchief to her face, tears welling up in her eyes.
“I guess everything’s going to change now,” she said. “How many of them do you think are out there?”
“We won’t know until she tells us,” Brad said with an air of caution. “There could be millions. We have no idea what’s going on in Mexico, let alone the other side of the world.” Sending explorers out to scope the new world had been such a risky endeavor; it was like sending an expedition to the far side of space. There was almost no chance that they would ever come back.
But now, as unlikely as it seemed, they knew there was life out there. Maybe they were peaceful. Maybe they would be able to help them.
