Sidney looks over at Petra one more time then goes about picking up branches too. It’s still late afternoon but who knows how long Petra will need to recharge in the sun, especially since it’s partially hidden under the trees?
She ignores the pain on her face. She finds bark and throws it into the same pile Henry’s been collecting, then she eyes the trees around them and, finally finding a trunk that looks large enough to hold her weight, starts to climb.
“Where you going, kid?” Henry calls up. She’s already half way up the tree.
“Getting food,” she says. She’s hardly hungry—she’s certainly had her fair share at the twins’ mansion, but she knows from experience that won’t last. She might as well scavenge now while she’s still good and full and has the energy to do it.
The tree is empty, so she climbs the next one and the next, until, finally, she finds a nest—three tiny birds chirp at her from the nest as she gathers four eggs and pops them into a pouch she’d fashioned over her shirt. The birds’ chirps get louder and, though she’s more than accustomed at hunting birds to eat them, she can see these ones are far too tiny to have much meat on them, so she leaves them alone. Their unborn brothers and sisters will do, she reckons.
Back on the ground now, she sees that Henry’s got Petra’s hand in his as he turns it over, prodding at her nails as if he’s looking for something.
Sidney places the eggs on the ground. “What are you doing?” She approaches and stares at his grubby hands. They don’t belong on Petra’s clear skin, she decides, so she pushes him away from the still figure.
They may have made a great team, but she’s still not a hundred percent sure about him.
“I’m just looking for her lighter, kid,” he says as he backs off. “Thought she’d start us a fire, but hey do you know how long that’ll take to make from scratch!?”
She glares at him, then decides he’s telling the truth.
“Fire’s easy,” she finally says. “Now that I have my knapsack.” She walks to the bag and grabs a small looking glass which she brings up to eye level. She grins at him as he understands what she means to do.
“Where did you find that thing?” he asks.
She doesn’t want to tell him that she’s a gatherer, that she sometimes takes things and keeps them in her bag, even if they don’t belong to her. Nayne had told her that’s not a good thing to do. So she just says, “I found it. Finders keepers, right?”
She doesn’t say that she’d found it in one of the drawers in the twins’ mansion—somewhere that she knew she wasn’t supposed to snoop, but snoop she did anyway.
Henry grins back at her. “Right,” he says as he watches her stare into the air, then pile just the right amount of kindling together. Then she places the glass over a tiny bit of straw, angling it in such a way that it catches the sun’s rays. A thread of smoke rises into the air, then she angles it a couple of different ways until more smoke rises. She places the glass on the ground beside her knee and leans in to blow at the smoke until, before long, they have a small fire on which they throw more kindling, branches, dried leaves.
“How old are you, kid?” Henry says. His eyes stay on her for the most part as he speaks but from time to time, they land on Petra again, that questioning look in his eyes.
“I’m ten,” Sidney says, “ten and a quarter.” She’s always had it down to the month. Nayne had told her to stop trying to grow up too fast, but grow up, she’s doing. “And stop calling me kid. I can take care of myself.”
Henry puts both hands up in the air as if in surrender, and he chortles. “Sorry, ki—I mean, sorry Sidney. Of course you can take care of yourself. Of that, I have no doubt!”
She narrows her eyes at him, gauging if he’s teasing her. Then, understanding that he isn’t, she relaxes momentarily.
Remembering how he fought hard, despite all his injuries, she wants to ask him what’s his story. Her nayne had always said everyone has a story. “It’s just up to you to decide if it’s worth listening to.” She didn’t really understand what Nayne said at the time.
But right now, she is curious about this raider that they’d saved, that now seems to want to travel with them...but why?
“How could you be a raider?” Sidney finally says.
She knows them to be awful. Not good people. She’s heard enough stories about them to know that. Yet he didn’t accept the other one’s bribery of medicine.
When he nods and stares at the fire, she’s relieved that at least he’s not about to lie that he’s not a raider. Something tells her that’s at least a good thing—that he’d admit to being one.
“It’s difficult to explain,” he says and she huffs again. If he’s about to censor himself just because she’s a “kid,” she’s not interested in hearing more.
“I’ll try to though,” he says, “because this is the reality of the world we live in.”
She remains silent because it sounds like he’s about to offer her his story. So she listens.
Thirty
Henry
“I’d always been part of a community,” he says. He keeps his eyes on the fire. The sun’s starting to head down so he knows whatever charging Petra’s done won’t be nearly enough for her to be back up again until tomorrow morning.
“My family was large.” He thinks of his parents, his eleven brothers and sisters, a family that was unusually big for Allendians.
Where most families consisted of only the mom and dad—or two moms or two dads, and maybe one kid or two, his family just kept growing. “Just in case,” his parents always said as they laughed about it.
“I was twelfth in a line of twelve kids.”
Sidney’s eyebrows shoot up and he laughs. “Yeah. I know.”
“Where did you all live?” she asks.
Allendian homes are all efficient, all square shaped with up to three bedrooms. Allendian laws didn’t allow for bigger than that, which is why the twins’ mansion in the forest was unheard of.
“We lived in our home in the eastern grid,” he remembers fondly. “You’d be amazed how little space each of us took up there. We all shared. Everything.”
“Wow,” she says, nodding her head, though he can see she still can’t quite grab the concept of it all.
“Was it illegal?” she whispers. “Did you all get in trouble?”
“There was no law against it, but we did get charged extra for energy costs. It was only fair. There were so many of us! Until the—”
He doesn’t have to say more, though Sidney nods in understanding.
“I was still little when it all happened,” he says. “Everyone around me started getting sick. Then they were dying. I was taken away before it got really bad.”
“You’re supposed to be frozen, aren’t you?” Sidney says.
Henry nods his head. He was to be taken to another dome, placed in cryogenics like the rest of them until the flu was taken care of, until it was time for the re-emergence. He must have been one of the last ones.
“I can’t really remember what happened,” he admits. “But I didn’t make it there. Then, when I was a teen, the raiders found me. Took me in.”
He stays quiet for a moment, remembering the raiders—their own set of barbaric rules and their dedication to finding survivors. His eyes shift back to Petra again, then to the girl. He knows the last thing he’d want is for either of them to land in their hands, but it’s inevitable. This much he knows more than anything.
Still—
When Sidney speaks again, he’s reminded of the impossibility of their situation.
“My nayne always said when worlds end, in the most violent ways, survivors don’t tend to be nice. Or decent or innocent. They’re just survivors.”
The words are true enough, Henry thinks. When the flu hit, violence was rampant, wasn’t it? People were desperate in those days. Desperate to live, desperate to be cured. The normally civilized Allenda was far from it until there was nothing but silence and dust in the str
eets.
Still, it doesn’t seem right that a ten year old should know that truth.
“Well I don’t know about that,” he lies. “I mean you seem—decent enough, I think.”
They watch each other over the flames. It’s silent but for the occasional crackle and shift of a burning branch.
“When did your nayne die?” he asks.
“Over a year ago.” She shifts her weight and leans back into a fallen log, stretching her skinny legs ahead of her. Her eyes stay on the fire but he sees them water. She doesn’t wipe the tears as they flow freely over her cheeks.
A part of him instinctively wants to comfort her. He was the youngest in his family, and every single one of them came running to him when he’d cried.
But in the little time that Henry’s known Sidney, he’s come to understand that she’s not the type who’d need someone to comfort her when she cries. In fact, he’s certain she’d push him away if he tried. So he stays put. His eyes land on Petra again.
“But why are you a raider?” Sidney asks.
When his eyes draw back up to look at her, the tears are gone. Just left with a streak of brown on her cheek. Her other cheek is red from before, but she doesn’t seem to care.
“I mean—you haven’t tried to eat me—yet,” she says. She glances at the eggs she’d placed on the ground. Neither one of them’s eaten a thing. He can’t even remember the last time he’d eaten.
“I won’t try to—eat you,” he promises with a chuckle. “I’m not that type of raider.”
“Then what type are you?”
He frowns and stares back at her. She’d already decided he’s not a good person, though he thinks maybe a part of her trusts him because of their earlier scuffle. If he’s being honest with himself, he knows he probably wasn’t a good person, once.
Still, tough child or not, he’s not about to get into any details with her.
“I’m a survivor,” he offers, “but only because of you two. I owe you my life.”
His eyes land on Petra again and he decides he’s tired. It’s a good time for a nap.
“We’re traveling far tomorrow, soon as she’s done charging,” he says, as he points at the bot. “We should sleep.” He’ll talk them into traveling a different way. Out of the dome.
At first, he thinks she’s going to insist he elaborate. Then, she leans further back into her little log too.
He takes a look around and, finding no other suitable log around to lean on, lies on the ground and shuts his eyes, meaning to sleep everything off until the next day.
A couple of hours later though, he’s woken by a shrill whistle from the middle of the wood. He shoots up to a sitting position and sees that Sidney’s fast asleep across the way, a slight snore coming from her. Petra hasn’t moved in all this time.
Maybe it was a bird, he thinks. Still, he doesn’t go back to sleep, unconvinced.
When the whistle reaches his ears again, he looks behind him and sees a small light dot up the space in the forest.
Oh no.
The light diminishes, then comes back on again and he’s up and running before he can talk himself out of it.
He tries to stay stealth, he tries not to be too noisy to wake the sleeping child, but before he reaches the light someone rams into him, holding his arms behind his back, and another person slams a heavy object into the back of his head, over and over again, until he loses consciousness.
Thirty-One
Sidney
Before she even opens her eyes, she stretches out all her limbs, basking in the warmth of the morning sun despite a slight chill in the air. She imagines herself a piece of elastic and keeps stretching until her muscles ache, then she finally opens her eyes. The left one is still sore but she can see through it just fine.
Looking up, she sees Petra’s still charging, but hopes it’ll be done soon, since it’s fully sunny now.
The fires died down, leaving wisps of charred leaves here and there, though an ember still burns under all the gray.
Her eyes search, but Henry’s nowhere to be seen. Maybe off to “use the facilities,” as Nayne woulda put it.
All’s quiet in their little setting but for the occasional chirp of a bird, then she remembers that neither she nor Henry were hungry enough to eat the eggs she’d found.
So, she grabs the eggs and places them gingerly on the side of the ember—shouldn’t heat too much too fast that they’ll burst, like that one time she’d placed an egg straight on the fire. Even then, she still managed to save some of it to eat. “Good eats, barbecued eggs,” she says, as she uses a skinny long branch to stoke and prod the eggs until they’re in a spot she’s confident will do.
Then she stands and looks around, still not seeing Henry anywhere. Maybe he’s off to find water or—something.
Looking around though, she wonders just how far away they are from that mansion—they’d run for a while, but who knows if it was far enough away from them. Who knows if they’d come looking for them out here?
She looks at Petra again and, seeing no signs of movement or any indication that the bot will wake soon, she decides on a tree that looks nice and tall—twenty feet into the air. She remembers that they had run south, so looks north and climbs up the tree. From the top of this one, surely she’d be able to see the house, even if they did run far enough away.
Maybe from here, she’d also be able to tell where they are in terms of the city? Likely not, but worth a look-see, anyhow.
At the last minute, she throws on her knapsack in case she comes across any more eggs or maybe even some birds. “All their gizzards,” she mutters, remembering how delicious the food was at the mansion, and trying to fight the urge to go back there to get some more.
At the top of the tree, she finds a comfy enough fork in which to plop herself. This is far better than the city, she decides as she plucks one of the tree’s leaves, sniffs it, and chews on its shiny edge.
From here, she can just barely make out one of the mansion’s many roofs. So they are a few clicks away, that’s good, she reckons. The farther the better.
Of course they’re too far away from the city—all she sees are the tops of trees.
Turning her head to look over on the other side, she’s certain they must be close to that vault now. If they reach that vault of food, she won’t have to fondly think of the food at the twins’ mansion any more. Then they can make their way past the vault to the outer edges of the dome, to the—
She holds her breath when she hears movement from below. She wonders at first if it’s just Henry returning from—wherever—or if it’s Petra waking finally.
But there’s something off about the sound—something like, well like the sound of more than just one person.
She looks through a space in the branches and leaves and tries her darnedest not to move, not to scream.
Because four people walk through the trees and stop just where Petra still stands. Sidney bites down on her lip hard, knowing that, even if she had more explosives in her bag, she won’t be able to take this lot on and win. Because it’s unmistakable—as she looks over their dirty coats, ripped jeans and heavy boots, their scraggly facial hair and the toothy grin one of them maintains, with bad yellowing teeth to boot, she knows without a doubt they’re raiders. And the one she’d hurt along with Henry walks with them, his neck bandaged.
They speak with guttural voices in a dialect she’s not accustomed to, but she can understand in their tones that they don’t mean to just walk away.
Then another raider drives on a bike through the trees, with a long trailer behind him. Henry sits in the trailer, his arms tied behind his back. A thick stream of blood has dried on the side of his face and his eyes are wild with fury or with fear, she can’t tell from up here. Still, his eyes dart back and forth between the raider with the yellowing teeth and Petra.
Then he looks at the fire. Sidney knows he’s looking for her now, but stays put. Doesn’t breathe. Doesn’t move an inch.
<
br /> Then, as if in understanding, Henry’s face remains passive as he watches the other raiders tie Petra’s hands behind her back, grab her under the arms, and make her still body sit down on the back of the trailer beside him.
Sidney’s heart races a mile a minute as she realizes they mean to take Petra away.
One raider kicks at the fire, causing one of the eggs Sidney laid there to burst. He yells angrily at Henry as if it’s Henry’s fault his shoe is now dirtier than it was before.
But Henry glares back at him, his chin in the air, his jaw set. He lowers his chin slightly though his eyes stay on the other raider. He mutters something so low, the words don’t reach Sidney’s ears. The raider doesn’t like Henry’s answer, whatever it was. He punches him—once, twice, several more times until Henry’s face drops down to his chin and he remains slack. She wonders what he’d said to them, but if it wasn’t clear to her before that he’s not one of them, it is now. She fears for him as she does for Petra.
The other raiders walk back into the trees and start their bikes, then they noisily rip through the forest towards the north—leaving Sidney in the tree, hearing nothing but her pulse hammering in her ears.
Thirty-Two
Petra
They’ve taken over the twins’ old mansion. This much Petra knows, because she recognizes the walls and the crown molding across the room.
It’s a smaller room than the ones she’s seen before, but big enough to hold her and what looks like Henry, crumpled up in another corner of the room, his hands behind his back as her hands are still behind hers.
Then—laughter from another side of the house. Men’s laughter. Her last moving memory was of her dancing and singing to Henry and Sidney before they got to that clearing. Then memories from when she was charging under the sun pop up. Three men—no four—came and took her and Henry away. Where did Sidney go? Her ears registered movement in the trees. So logic states Sidney must have climbed, just in time to not get caught. Good. If a bot were capable of hope, this is what it would be. Then all she has to worry about now is Henry.
Petra: Allendian Post-Apocalypse Page 9
