Night of the Purple Moon

by Scott Cramer

  Barry Marks came from a big family. He had three older brothers and two older sisters, all of whom, along with his parents, died the night of the purple moon. Until recently the nine-year old had coped well. Now he was becoming increasingly reclusive.

  He joined several of his fourth-grade classmates in the dining room, a good sign, but not long into the meal he got up and headed upstairs with his plate of food. It would be the third night in a row he had gone up to his room to be alone.

  “Hey, Barry,” Abby called and patted the seat beside her. “Join me.” He shook his head and didn’t stop. She’d pay him a visit later on to let him know that she cared about him. She’d also ask Kevin to research post-traumatic stress disorder to get some ideas on how they could help Barry.

  Abby worried about Zoe Mullen for a different reason. Zoe was both anorexic and fearful of puberty. They were the same age and height, but Zoe weighed at least thirty pounds less than Abby. Her elbows popped out in sharp points. Abby wished that Kevin had not announced that lesser amounts of body fat on a girl delayed puberty. It gave Zoe justification to starve herself.

  Unaware that Abby was watching, Zoe slipped little bits of her dinner to the old Labrador Retriever, Edmund. It explained why the dog sat at her feet every meal. Abby was at a loss what to do for Zoe. It seemed that the harder she and others tried to convince her to eat, the more Zoe tuned them out.

  Tonight Kevin was running council. Kids twelve years of age and older took turns running the nightly meeting. The sun had just set, and after everyone had cleaned up and washed the dishes, he lit candles and called the meeting to order.

  CDC updates were always the first order of business. Jimmy Patterson stood and referred to his log book. Jimmy’s job was to listen to the radio broadcasts during the day, a task well suited to the fifth grader who took excellent notes. “The scientists made an antibiotic that killed the pathogen in a test tube,” he said.

  All heads swiveled to Kevin.

  “That’s an important first step,” Kevin said, “but we shouldn’t celebrate yet.”

  “When are we getting the medicine?” Duke asked.

  “Soon,” someone shouted.

  Cheers rang out as excitement surged through the room. Abby, always aware of possible setbacks, whooped and clapped nevertheless. It was the first bit of good news from the CDC.

  “The scientists first have to run human trials,” Kevin shouted above the fracas. “Just because the antibiotic kills germs in a test tube doesn’t mean it will work in people.” He held up the red card, the signal to move on to the next agenda item, but it took another five minutes to restore order.

  Derek, representing the burial team, stood and pointed to a small map of the island, which few could see or cared to see. “Grid twelve, twenty-four bodies,” he said. Nobody had questions and Derek sat down.

  The meeting rolled on. Toucan and Danny wandered away. Colby admonished the group for being wasteful and snuffed out a candle. They voted on what type of pie Duke should bake next. Apple beat out cherry by six votes. KK got up and moved beside Jordan. That drew a sharp look from Emily. Abby suspected that KK had a crush on her brother and she wondered if Emily might, too. Jordan, not surprisingly, was totally clueless.

  Abby delivered the garden report. “The tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, and pumpkins are all doing well,” she said. “But something is eating the lettuce; a rabbit or groundhog, perhaps. We need to find a way to stop it.”

  “Let Edmund out,” Jordan joked. “He’ll scare the rabbit.”

  Everyone laughed, knowing the Lab was too sweet and gentle—and way too lazy—to scare anything.

  “The hardware store has chicken wire,” Eddie offered. “We can build a fence.”

  Agreement to build a fence was unanimous.

  “Are there any volunteers?” Kevin asked.

  Seven hands shot up.

  Few of these kids would have volunteered for hard work before the night of the purple moon. Their parents would have had to order them to do it. The new willingness didn’t surprise Abby. The more you worked, the less you thought… the less you thought, the better you felt.

  They always saved the best topic for last in order to end the meeting on a good note. The farm, without a doubt, was their most successful operation. Henrietta, Matilda, and the chickens never let them down. The milk and eggs produced daily were excellent sources of protein, especially for the two babies, Clive and Chloe.

  Emily stood. “Henrietta and Matilda were extra good to us today,” she began. “They gave us… well, they gave Tim… five gallons of milk.”

  “C’mon, Emily, how hard is it to milk a cow?” Jordan teased.

  “You’d be lucky to get a drop!” she said.

  “Let’s have a milking contest,” Jordan said.

  Emily flashed a confident smile. “Anytime.”

  Abby saw that KK wasn’t smiling.

  Kevin waved the red card. “Please, finish your report,” he told his sister.

  “We got six eggs,” she continued.

  Colby lurched forward. “What? Only six? Was it Toby?”

  The outburst jarred everyone.

  Emily shook her head. “I didn’t see any sign of him,” she said. “Sometimes a chicken will go a few days without laying an egg.”

  Abby breathed a sigh of relief. Colby, who had the build of a bulldog, was capable of seriously hurting Toby and his two friends if he got angry enough.

  “It was them,” Tim said in barely a whisper. “I saw their footprints.”

  “Tim, how come you didn’t tell me?” Emily asked.

  Colby pounded the table with his fist, drowning out Tim’s response. He said with a growl. “We have to stop them before they really do something to hurt us.” Veins bulged in his neck. “They drive recklessly—Chad almost ran into me the other day. They waste water.” Colby turned to Derek. “Right, Derek? You told me they left a hose running where they’re living.” Derek nodded. Colby pounded the table again. “We have to teach them a lesson. Who wants to come with me?”

  Three hands lifted. Thankfully Jordan wasn’t one of them.

  Abby shot to her feet. “No. Let’s talk to them.”

  Colby snorted. “Talk? Give me a break.” Suddenly he pointed to the window. “Look, they’re spying on us. Let’s get ‘em!”

  Two faces disappeared into the night.

  * * *

  “Wait!” Jordan shouted as he sprinted after Colby who led the pack chasing the two shapes in the front of the mansion. It was too dark to tell which two boys they were after.

  “Jordan, don’t let Colby hurt them,” Abby had shouted at him before he left the mansion. How was he supposed to do that? Colby was two years older and twenty times stronger. Jordan thought that maybe he should do nothing. Stand back and let Colby beat them up. Toby would think twice before he stole eggs again.

  The group soon surrounded their prey. But it wasn’t Toby, or either of his friends. An emaciated boy and girl in wet, tattered clothing shivered and huddled close to each other, eyes wide with fright. They had to be from the mainland. Jordan guessed they were brother and sister; the girl, maybe twelve, the boy several years younger.

  “We’re not going to hurt you,” Colby said in a gentle tone. “We thought you were someone else. Where are you from?”

  “Bangor,” the girl said in a raspy voice.

  Bangor was the biggest city in the state, one hundred miles inland. The Castine Island survivors had seen smoke plumes from distant fires on the mainland and had smelled a terrible odor when a westerly wind blew. These kids could describe the situation and answer their questions.

  “How did you get here?” Jordan asked.

  The girl pointed to a low dark shape on the pebbly shore. It was a small boat. “We drifted from Bar Harbor. Where are we?”

  “Castine Island.”

  “An island?” she exclaimed, her voice croaking from dryness.

  Abby stepped up to the pair. “You need to warm up. Come
inside.”

  They still seemed fearful, despite the invitation and Colby’s explanation for why they had chased them. The boy’s legs gave out when he tried to walk, so Colby picked him up and carried him into the mansion. Abby and Jordan moved to assist the girl. When Jordan took hold of her bony arm, he thought of Zoe.

  Ben and Gabby Ortelt, brother and sister, ten and twelve years old, respectively, changed into dry clothing that KK found for them. They sat next to each other on the couch, appearing nervous and untrusting, Jordan found it incredible that they had arrived in such a small boat. The constant exposure to salt water and wind explained their puffy hands and raw, red noses and cheeks. How long had they been adrift? Each of them gulped water. When Emily served them leftovers from the evening meal, though, they looked sick after only a few nibbles.

  “Your stomachs have shrunk,” Jordan said.

  Kevin scrunched his face. “Huh? Who told you that? Our stomachs don’t shrink. They stay the same size. When you haven’t eaten in a few days, your digestive system slows down. That’s their problem.”

  Jordan rolled his eyes. “That’s Kevin Patel,” he told the visitors. “He thinks he knows everything.”

  Kevin faced them. “I do know a lot,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone.

  Gabby’s lip curled into a tiny smile, and both she and Ben relaxed visibly. Jordan wondered if he should continue arguing with Kevin to put them more at ease.

  Abby asked them what they knew about the CDC and the worldwide epidemic and they answered with blank expressions. They knew nothing other than what they had witnessed. Abby explained how the germs attacked the hormones associated with puberty and the efforts of the scientists to develop an antibiotic. Ben yawned and leaned his head against his sister’s shoulder. “You guys have been through a lot,” Abby said. “Go to bed. You can tell us what happened to you in the morning.”

  “I want to hear what happened to them now,” Barry called out. Barry was sitting halfway up the stairway. Earlier, Jordan had seen him disappear with his meal.

  Jordan wanted to hear their story now, too, and he was glad when they spoke quietly to each other and told the group they would stay up.

  Gabby described how they found the bodies of their parents in bed the morning after the moon turned purple. They soon discovered the police didn’t answer the phone. Nobody did. There were no TV or radio stations broadcasting. The internet didn’t work. There was no traffic, no activity at the neighboring houses. They heard no jets taking off or landing at nearby Bangor International Airport. The sun and sky and clouds were weird colors. “We thought the space dust might have killed our parents,” Gabby said. “So we stayed inside. We didn’t want to breathe it.”

  “We never went upstairs again,” Ben said. “It was too sad to see mom and dad.”

  The next day the siblings witnessed a chilling scene out the window.

  “A gang of kids chased a boy down the street,” Gabby said. “Some of the kids were in my class. The boy was carrying two bags. One bag broke and cans spilled everywhere.”

  “We think he stole food from them,” Ben said.

  “They beat him up really badly.” Gabby bit her lip and paused, as if she were reliving the event.

  “Why didn’t you stop them?” Duke asked.

  “We were afraid,” she said. “We kept hoping someone would come to help him. The police. The fire department.”

  “Soldiers,” Ben added.

  Of course, no adults showed up.

  The electricity stopped working in their neighborhood five days after the moon turned purple. Street lights went dark. Fearing the gang would know they were inside, Ben and Gabby had never turned on any lights, but the problem was the refrigerator. Fresh food spoiled.

  It was the following day they peered out the window in disbelief and horror as the gang killed a boy right in front of their house.

  “They threw stones at him,” Gabby said in a choked voice. “They kicked him. He wasn’t moving and they kept kicking and kicking.”

  Jordan heard gasps around him. He saw Toucan’s mouth agape in the flickering candlelight. He knew his little sister didn’t understand everything, but he was certain that Touk was feeling the fear behind every word Gabby spoke.

  “Did he steal something?” Duke asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what he did, or why they did it.”

  To no one’s surprise, Gabby said that she and Ben could not sleep that night. In the morning they heard laughter and shouting. The gang was breaking into houses up and down the street.

  “We hid in the basement,” Ben said.

  “We heard them above us,” Gabby added. “I recognized some of the voices.”

  “They went crazy, smashing dishes, breaking windows,” Ben said. “They were like animals.”

  The ordeal lasted minutes, but to Ben and Gabby it felt like hours.

  “You’re lucky they didn’t find you,” Eddie said.

  Heads nodded in agreement.

  Ben and Gabby emerged from the basement to discoverer the gang had taken what food they had left. But they were still too afraid to venture outside of the house. Thirst rather than hunger finally forced them to leave. Two days later the water stopped working.

  They made their way to the Penobscot River under the cover of darkness. The mouth of the river was one hundred miles away near the coastal town of Bar Harbor. That’s where their grandmother lived. She was old and stayed in a nursing home, but she was their only relative. They planned to follow the river and find her.

  That first night of their journey Ben and Gabby sought shelter in a small cinderblock building next to a maze of canals filled with water. They made a bed of pine needles on the cold cement floor. In the morning they saw how murky the water in the canals was. A rack held several long poles with nets. Ben dipped a net into the water and scooped up a squirming ball of baby eels. They realized they were at an eel hatchery.

  “We’d been drinking water from the river, and we were so hungry,” Gabby said.

  “You ate eels?” Barry blurted.

  “Gross,” KK said.

  Gabby shook her head. “We thought about it.”

  “Gabby thought about it,” Ben said. “Not me.”

  They broke into a nearby house and stocked up on pretzels and peanut butter which lasted them all the way to Bar Harbor.

  They reached the coastal town fifteen days after leaving Bangor, chilled to the bone, their feet badly blistered.

  “The air was filled with smoke,” Gabby said, now telling the story alone. Ben had fallen asleep. His chest rose and fell in an easy rhythm. “A lot of houses had burned down.”

  “We’ve seen smoke rising up on the mainland,” Abby said.

  Gabby nodded, but her thoughts seemed far away. After a moment she continued. “Ben and I hid in a car. When it was dark, we looked for the nursing home. We found it but the smell was so awful…” Her chin dropped to her chest.

  Jordan glanced at Eddie and their eyes met. They understood that odor all too well.

  After Gabby and Ben realized they were truly on their own, they remembered from previous visits to Bar Harbor with their parents that a lighthouse keeper lived on one of the small islands dotting the harbor.

  “We didn’t think he’d be alive,” she said. “But to live on an island you must keep a good stock of food.”

  They found a rowboat on the shore that was perfect. It had oars and life jackets and a bleach bottle cut in half for bailing water.

  “We took turns rowing,” Gabby said, lightly resting her hand on her brother’s shoulder. “When we were about a hundred yards from the island, the wind picked up. No matter how hard we rowed, we drifted out to sea.”

  They moved at the whim of the currents and winds, often out of sight of land. At still other times the fog was so thick they couldn’t see each other. They lost track of time. The peanut butter and pretzels long gone, they spoke of ice cream sundaes, apple pie, and Twizzlers. T
hese fantasies sated their hunger briefly but left them hungrier than ever. The biggest problem was no fresh water. A powerful thirst consumed them. Their tongues swelled. They sipped sea water in a moment of weakness, triggering violent stomachaches.

  Kevin spoke up. “You can only last three days without water.” Nobody paid attention to him or took their eyes off Gabby.

  “When we saw a jetty, we thought we’d reached New Hampshire.”

  Helplessly they drifted past the mouth of the harbor—the Castine Island harbor. Gabby said she tried to keep her eyes open, fearing that if she fell asleep she would never awaken, never see her brother again.

  Someone to Jordan’s right started to cry.

  “Next thing I knew,” Gabby said, “I was drenched by icy water. We had washed ashore. I shook Ben but he wouldn’t open his eyes. Wave after wave pounded us, and I worried we might drown. Somehow I managed to roll over the side of the boat. I was up to my waist. I dragged Ben into the water, and he finally came to. We crawled up to the sand. And when we looked up, we saw this incredible house on the hill, and there was light coming through the window.”

  Her story finished, Jordan excused himself and stepped outside. He located their boat in the cove across the road. The ebbing tide caused it to lean onto the bed of wet polished stones dappled with moonlight. He was surprised to see that it was a sailing skiff, not a rowboat. He understood the confusion. The skiff had oars, a centerboard, transom for a mast, and pins for the rudder.

  The mainland was a cruel, ruthless, and dangerous place, and this tiny vessel had delivered Ben and Gabby here against impossible odds. He rested his hand on the stern, hoping to soak up some of their luck.

  * * *

  Abby parked the cruiser in front of the house where Toby, Chad, and Glen were staying this week. By going alone she hoped she’d stand a better chance of getting through to Toby, the leader. If he listened to her, the others would, too. She didn’t care where they chose to live, but they should share the workload.

  Abby felt an added urgency to her mission. The renegade boys had no idea how lucky they’d been. If Gabby and Ben had not arrived when they did, Colby would have paid them a visit. It wouldn’t have been pretty. Abby feared the next time they stole eggs, nobody could stop Colby.