by JJ Pike
Jo inched around the counter and put her hand over Aggie’s. “I know. It’s a lot to take in.”
Aggie took her hand back. She didn’t want comfort. That would make her unravel. She wanted sharp thinking and a plan. A good, solid, workable plan. She wanted to do what her mom wanted her to do. “Where do we start?” she said.
“If you’re going to extend the barn—I saw your drawings, I wasn’t snooping—we should start there.”
Aggie nodded. There wasn’t much plastic material in the barn. They could do that in half a day. Less, if everyone pitched in. Then they could start building their new quarters. Using the barn meant she didn’t have to build all the walls; she could extend. Much easier.
“I can help,” said Jo.
Aggie nodded. It was kind of her to offer rather than just assume or do what adults usually did and take over. Maybe she was going to get on with Mad Jo after all.
Midge skidded into the kitchen, her cheeks flush and full, her eyes happy and wide. “What are we doing?” She was the only one who still honestly thought it was going to be okay if they followed the rules and went about their regular chores. She’d fed her goat Pippy, run around with the chickens, maybe even exercised one of the horses. In her world, things were hunky dory. She would do her part and the universe would do its part and her mom and dad would be back and order restored. Aggie hadn’t realized until that minute how little hope she had that anything would ever be the same. She couldn’t let Midge see that. She smiled.
“Are we off to start on the fort,” said Midge, “because I have some ideas.”
Jo frowned. “The fort?”
They’d told Midge they were going to build a fort because they didn’t want to frighten her, but that was patronizing. Aggie patted the stool beside her. Midge plunked herself down beside her sister.
“We have had a change of plans, Midge.”
“Margaret,” said Midge. “Why do I have to keep telling people? I want to be Margaret from now on.”
“Margaret, we’re going to build a new place to live.”
“I know,” said Midge.
“It’s not going to be so much a fort as a…” Aggie thought about what they were about to embark on. What was it going to be? “A rustic cabin.”
“What does rustic mean?” said Midge.
“Umm, it means sort of plain and simple…and in the country.”
Midge frowned, crinkling her nose at her sister. “Like this?”
“Even simpler. Like the cabins Davey Crocket used to live in.”
“Like Grizzly Adams?”
She’d been reading too much outdoorsy stuff with Dad at bedtime. She was obsessed with mountain men who’d survived off nothing but berries and lichen for three months. “Kind of,” said Aggie, “but maybe with more indoors stuff than Grizzly.”
“So, we keep the bears out?”
Aggie nodded.
“And the supplies in?”
Aggie smiled. Her little sis was pretty sharp.
“And repel all boarders?”
Aggie grinned and gave Midge a hug. Having a little kid about the place made it feel less dire.
Midge climbed down off her stool. “We’re building a fort.”
Aggie and Jo laughed. She’d cornered them good and proper.
“I’ll get my boots and then tell you my plans,” said Midge.
They collected Petra and Sean on their way down to the barn. Jo pressed ahead with Midge, who was head-over-heels in love with Reggie, determined to teach him new tricks, while Aggie explained the new plan to Petra and Sean.
“How will Mom and Dad reach us if we get rid of all our plastics? I mean, we need our phones at least,” said Petra.
“We’re going to keep the phones over by the bear barrel and the other waste.”
Petra reared back. “We’ll never hear them over there.”
Aggie nodded. “We’re going to come and check them twice a day.”
“How will you keep them charged,” said Sean, “if you strip all the electrical wiring and get rid of the generator?”
“We’re going to create a ‘plastics zone,’” said Aggie. She was making it up as she went along, but it was solid, all the same. Mom had said to take the plastics to the dump. She hadn’t said exterminate them, melt them down, blow them up. She’d meant to put a good distance between them and whatever she feared they could do to her family.
Midge—shoot, Margaret—had given her the idea. They were going to build a tiny fort on the far side of the property and keep those few plastic items they couldn’t do without in a kind of quarantine. The mini-fort would have walls 14 feet high made of solid wood, cross beams that didn’t allow animals to crawl up and fall in, and a small door so it was difficult to get in and out. She’d learned that from Dad. He’d made their root cellar entrance as inhospitable and uninviting as possible. The baby bears had only gotten in there by chance, probably sliding down and pinging off the walls like fat, fuzzy, roly poly ping-pong balls. The momma bear hadn’t been able to figure it out. “If people come looking,” he always said, “they’re not going to be friendly. They’re going to be needy. Give them one chance to be decent. Give them something—an energy bar or a bottle of rice and beans—and let them be on their way. If they take what you offer and keep on coming, well, then you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do…” He never specified what that meant. Aggie had taken it as license to kill, but knowing Dad, he probably meant something like, “Shoo them away as quietly as you can.” He was a big ole softie that way.
Jo and Midge were playing with Reggie by the barn door.
“Speak,” said Midge. She made a “quacking duck” gesture with her hand. “Speak.”
“You sure you want him to do that?” said Jo. “He’s a barker by nature. I’m not sure we want to encourage it.”
“I am going to train him to repel all intruders,” said Midge.
“And make them walk the plank?”
Midge stopped, the treat in her hand hovering in mid-air. “We can have a plank?” Her eyes were wide, happy, full of hope.
Jo laughed.
Reggie lunged at the treat, slobbering all over Midge’s hand.
Aggie marched through the barn and made a bee line for the hydro-farm. It was solid plastic. It would have to go. It was a shame, because Dad had spent so much time and energy and money getting it up to par. She slid the door open.
The hydroponic farm was smashed beyond recognition.
Petra gasped. “Oh, what in the world? Dad will be so mad.”
Midge edged around her and peered in at the devastation. “Daddy did this,” she said.
Everyone turned and looked at her.
“He was thinking about it yesterday, but he got too sad and his hand was bleeding.”
“Dad did this?” said Aggie.
“His hand was bleeding?” Jo picked up the axe that lay in the straw by the opened door.
Aggie, Petra, and Midge nodded.
“There’s blood over here.”
Aggie took stock. There was no wiggle room left. He’d been much, much more serious about getting rid of plastics than she’d thought. “We have our answer,” she said. “We strip the cabin down. Doesn’t matter how many floorboards we have to pull up or walls we have to open, we tear it apart until there’s not a shred of plastic left in there.”
Chapter 5
Paul was torn. He didn’t know whether to stop and try to help people or keep going and send back professionals who knew what they were doing. Briefcase man hadn’t lasted five minutes in the back of the cruiser. He’d gurgled and died where he lay. They might all be as compromised.
He drove a couple more blocks, his guts churning. The buildings had windows and doors and facades that were intact. The ash had all but cleared. The wind might bring some this way—there was no way of knowing if he was out of danger—but it wasn’t raining down like it had been up on 37th and 38th Streets.
He spotted a police officer standing in the middle of the roa
d up ahead. She wasn’t moving, but neither was she curled on the ground dying. Paul pulled over, double parked, hiked his jacket back up around his ears, curled his hands into his sleeves so they weren’t exposed to the air, but once again held his arms high in the air so she would know he was no kind of threat. She didn’t look his way. He took it slowly. She couldn’t be dead and standing, so there was a good chance she was in shock. Wouldn’t be good to spring a surprise on someone who had a side arm. “Hey there.” She didn’t move. He stepped closer, easing himself into her peripheral vision. “Any clues what’s going on?”
She turned to him with a glassy stare. She closed her eyes, her lips moving and her right hand making the sign of the cross. Paul waited while she prayed. “You’re talking. You’re good. I was starting to think no one made it.”
“I believe they inhaled something,” said Paul.
She put her mouth into the crook of her elbow, nodded, and waited. Was he supposed to be the authority here? She had the uniform and the gun and the baton, but it was as if she was waiting for him to make the next move.
“I need to find my mother,” said Paul.
The officer shrugged.
“She worked for K&P.”
No reaction.
“The building that went down? K&P?”
“I don’t know nothing,” she said, through her jacket. “Keep going south. Two blocks. Then east three blocks. Command Central is over there. They will know…” She paused. “…something.” She hadn’t moved. Nor did it seem she was going to. She just stood and stared, cradling her nose and mouth in the crook of her elbow, watching the parade of slow-moving survivors trudge down the avenue. There was nothing she could do for him. He needed someone who still had their wits about them.
Paul abandoned his cop car but kept the guns in his belt. They dug into the bottom of his ribs in the most comforting way imaginable. He wasn’t invulnerable, he knew that, but he was armed. If anyone came at him, he’d be all pop, pop, pop, you’re not taking me down with you. Not that he’d seen any humans who could take him down.
The dust was much lighter now but he knew to keep himself as covered as possible. There were fewer injured people the further south he went. “Data,” his mom’s voice reminded him. “Everything you see is data.” This data told him that people in the immediate vicinity of the blast had been exposed to a toxin that pocked their skin so badly it made them bleed and decimated their lungs in record time. When he found someone from K&P, he would need to tell them that. They’d know what to do with the information. “No detail is too small,” she said. “You never know what matters and what doesn’t. That’s the beauty of science. You collect it all, then you sort. Don’t allow your preconceptions to get in the way of the data.”
When he turned on to 30th Street, everything changed. Ambulances lined the sidewalks, medics rushed from patient to patient. This was the triage zone. They’d been collecting and working on people all this time. He grabbed the first medic he could. “There are more survivors,” he said, “further north.”
“We’re doing the best we can,” said the medic. “They are being transported to local hospitals. If you’re injured, head over to the line and you’ll be assessed. If you’re not sure…” He looked Paul up and down. The ash covering his clothes spoke for itself. “You were close to the blast site. You need to see someone.”
“I’m fine,” said Paul. “I kept myself covered up.”
“Your funeral,” said the medic, “and I don’t mean that facetiously. I mean it literally. You don’t get checked out, your chances of survival go down. The damage isn’t always visible to the naked eye. I saw people walk in here half an hour ago on their own steam. Now? Dead.”
Paul weighed his chances. He’d been right there, beside the blast site. He couldn’t call it “Ground Zero.” Even though he’d only been a baby when that went down, to New Yorkers “Ground Zero” only meant one place. Every other disaster was once removed from that horror. So, where K&P had gone down was “the blast site,” at least for now.
He’d done his best not to breathe in the fumes or whatever, but he’d helped Firefighter Robeson get under the rig, carried on breathing when Michael Rayton opened the cab door, and shuffle-run through inches of toxic ash before pulling two cops out of their car. He had to have breathed at least a little in. And he knew, because of Grandma Margaret’s cancer, all it took was one rotten, malignant cell. One cell and the body would turn on itself, eating you from the inside out. That was not what he wanted.
He found the line and took a number. There were nurses, medics, doctors, all of them working at triple speed. When his turn came, they ordered him out of his clothes. His jacket looked like a thousand moths had been munching on it for a dozen years or more. Another ten minutes in that ash and it would have eaten its way through the second jacket and started on his hoody and then his skin. He dropped it in the hazmat bag along with the rest of his clothes, then grabbed one of the little cotton towels an orderly was offering and stood in line. They’d confiscated his guns, tagged and bagged them, assigned his belongings a tracking number, and pointed towards the decon unit.
“I want the guns back.” He didn’t want to sound desperate, but he didn’t want to lose the firearms either. Losing his clothes had left him naked. Losing the guns left him stripped and raw and exposed. Neither form of nudity suited him.
“If anything’s left after they’ve been sterilized, you’ll get it back.”
“Sterilized?”
The orderly shrugged. “They say whatever’s out there’s a kind of poison or something, so we can’t transfer it from here to the Clean Zone, the other side of the decon unit. But don’t worry,” the orderly smiled a tooth-gapped smile, “it’s all been tagged, so it will come back to you if it’s not phooff vaporized. That’s why they gave you a number.”
The orderly moved on down the line while Paul inched forward towards the massive, tented shower unit along with scores of other men.
They’d segregated the men and the women, so it was kind of like being in the locker room after soccer. Kind of. If being in the locker room was the same as being buck naked in the middle of the street, on an August morning, the day you’d lost track of your parents right after the biggest attack on New York since 9/11.
“Where were you?” The guy in front of him—pot belly, balding, 400 years old at least—turned, one fist out for a fist bump, the other discretely shielding his family jewels. As were they all.
Paul gave it up, touching the man’s knuckles with his as briefly as he could. The guy’s hands were covered in dried blood just like his. Didn’t want that getting on him. Man, this was still a nightmare even though he’d made it to safety.
“Cat got your tongue?” His accent was heavy. Polish or Russian or Ukrainian.
“Sorry,” said Paul. “I was up on 38th Street.”
“No. By the blast? And you’re walking? You’re one lucky dude, dude.”
Paul didn’t feel lucky. More frustrated. He needed them to speed things along. He wanted all the contaminants off him, but he also wanted to find whoever was on the other side of the decon units, so he could start talking about how to launch the rescue mission to find his parents.
“Excuse me?” Once again, Paul grabbed a passing official. “Any chance I can go in now? My parents are missing, I have to…”
“Register missing persons at Desk 3 once you have been decontaminated.”
“But I think they’re in the blast zone,” said Paul. “I need to go find them now.”
The guy’s face fell. “Search & Rescue can’t go in there any more, sorry.”
Paul felt the blood rush to his face. “Can’t go in? What does that mean?”
“There’s still an active agent in the air, burning people. No one can go in and the people coming out, well, not many of them are going to make it. I’m sorry.” He pulled his arm from Paul’s grip and rushed away.
“So sorry for this news, my friend.” The guy in front o
f him looked genuinely sorry. “I was selling hot dogs. In my usual spot. I was further south than where you were at. It wasn’t cool. Not cool at all. None of this is cool. I am Fyodor, Fyodor like the writer. You know him?”
Paul didn’t have anything to say. He didn’t want to make small talk, nor did he want to talk about the last four hours. He wanted to forget what he’d seen. “No!” Alice’s voice again. “You have to remember everything. Literally, everything.”
“I understand completely,” said Fyodor. “You don’t want to talk about it.” They shuffled forward a few paces. At least the line was moving. “I live near to here. Rent controlled apartment. Landlord wants to get us out because he can sell those puppies for millions of dollars if we are out, but the city won’t let this happen. God bless America, where I can work and live and feed my children.”
