Survial Kit Series (Book 1): Survival Kit's Apocalypse

by Williams, Beverly

  Sarah did a fairly good job of hiding her disappointment. “Yeah, I’ll check with him. We’ve never gotten to use that before. Maybe we can do the picnic thing another time?”

  There was a pause. Thom finally started to fill it in. “Maybe—”

  I cut him off before he said something he’d regret. “So, Sarah, we’ve gotta go. Promised Eric we’d check in on him.”

  “Oh, yeah, that’s right!” Thom said, looking relieved and trying hard not to sound it.

  “Well, darn! That’s too bad. Hey! Fishies! Awwww! What are they?” Sarah pointed to the fish who kept darting out from the shadow of the float, only to rush back under it again.

  “Barracudas,” I answered nonchalantly, hopping into the water. I hoped that by showing her it was nothing to get worked up about, maybe she wouldn’t get worked up about it. This strategy was unsuccessful, however.

  “The—the h―what now?” Sarah asked, color draining from her face.

  “The barracudas. They live under here. Don’t worry, they won’t bother you—”

  “Oh, but they are botherin’ me. Now you two, pull me into that water and escort me to shore uneaten!”

  We both cracked smiles and followed her directives. Well, I tried to. She swam so fast, I couldn’t keep up.

  The shack’s too-big square table was cold around me, but warm under my back. I felt the coolness of it. I traced the grooves of the wood’s grains with my fingertips, trying not to think. I’d been lying here a long time, alone. Since the appendectomy, I hadn’t been able to manage the tight, rough climb to my corner under the lean-to, and I missed it.

  Thom came in, and I waved once, silently, to acknowledge him. He sat and picked up his guitar, smirking while setting the capo aside. He played a Baptist Generals song, “Floating.”

  “I was once the sand, yes I was/I’ll go there once again/Yes I was/Will you hold my hand and dream with me?” I sang to him while I stared up at the stained ceiling.

  Thom played some songs I didn’t know. Maybe they were his own. He played until after the sun went down and the sky had gotten dark.

  Thom held out a star pill. I stuck out my tongue and he placed the pill on it. He took a couple himself, then settled back into his chair for a few minutes.

  I pulled out my MP3 player and connected a splitter jack to it, plugged in two sets of earbuds, and handed Thom a pair. He put them in without question.

  I pulled my shirt off and resecured my bikini top’s knots, and the tiny embedded specks of blue in my skin glowed unusually brightly. I wondered what made them glow more.

  “Stand,” I request-commanded.

  Thom did.

  I held the music player with him leashed to me by its cords. Then I slipped in my earbuds and filled our heads with Modeselektor’s “Dancingbox.” After a minute or so, I let go of self-consciousness completely, throwing my body into the song. Thom smiled, and after a few seconds more, he joined in. We had our own little rave, and I was the glow stick. Thom eventually spun me so much our earbud cords were a tangled web around us. I laughed so hard I was helpless when the time came to get us unstuck.

  The next morning was a long one. I had Doody Duty and still couldn’t seem to keep it from sucking me into the Tar Pit. I wasn’t healed enough for such things, and was determined not to admit it. By the end of the morning, I was a real mess. I got myself cleaned up and felt like every joint in my body was creaking as I walked along the trail, trying to decide what I should do.

  I made my way back to the lean-to area. I didn’t know where to go to hide since I couldn’t get in under my corner. Thom had been playing at the shack—I’d heard him, even listened outside the door for a while, but couldn’t bring myself to go in. I don’t know why. He would’ve taken my company, morose or happy. He’d have played for me, or he would’ve been quiet for me, or he’d have left for me. I didn’t want him to have to.

  I considered finding Matthew and working on something mechanical, but my hands weren’t functioning well enough.

  Eric was away on some mission. These recent assignments had been easier on him.

  So the lean-to was empty, and I headed for the inside section of the sad corner… but something was there. A cabinet of sorts, set on the built-in shelving we’d added to that corner. It sat about two feet off the floor and was mostly plain wood on the outside. There was a little washboard attached on one side, and a small sign at the top of the door: “Princess Palace.” Eric’s “TRESPASSERS WILL…” note had been shellacked to the top of the box.

  Curious, I opened the door, and found a small note from Eric: “The name is Mattie’s fault; now Thom and I have only filthy nicknames for the P.P. We love you.” I smiled at this, in spite of my sadness.

  On the inside of the door, there were small pockets. Some of them had little treasures—an amethyst quartz crystal, a batch of isopropyl alcohol wipes, a bottle of ibuprofen, some sturdy tissues. I folded the note and tucked it in an empty pocket near the top of the door.

  I slid back-first into the tiny enclosure. All the exposed wood had been sanded smooth. It was padded and lined with… things. Tiny blue lights powered by a battery pack were strung around the door, should I desire light. I turned them on. There were ribbons of differing textures hanging from the wall. One of Matthew’s rags, doused with a bit of WD-40, was in a Mason jar (to preserve the smell) by my leg. A strip of cloth from Eric’s softest blanket was in one pocket. A tube of Tokyo Milk Kabuki 09 lotion—my favorite—had its own pocket, too. Another pocket held a couple of river-worn pebbles from Thom’s Mercury River. A large corner compartment held a water bottle and a small bag of chips. There was even a little LED flashlight, hanging from a tiny hook.

  I closed the door the rest of the way and locked the three locks. One was a deadbolt. One was a chain with a latch. The last was a twist lock from a porta-potty. I smiled at this too. Any time that third fortification was locked, they’d know where I was—when unlocked, a green “vacant” sign showed outside. When locked, a red “occupied” sign showed instead.

  Somehow, they had made the box ventilated. Cool, fresh air drifted through it. The P.P. muffled the sounds and lights of the world and gave me new ones to discover. Recessed in the wood of one wall was a tiny xylophone—that would’ve been Thom’s idea, but I could tell Matthew had contributed to it: the metal they’d used was the same material my half-mask had been made of. Eric had engraved each note with its name. The xylophone had been set in a pentatonic scale, which Thom would’ve chosen. I ran a fingernail across it and its soft, lovely song chimed near my ear. I turned the lights back off.

  There was an elaborate carved heart on the ceiling. I reached up and traced it. It was embellished with glow-in-the-dark paint which had been charged when I opened the door. The heart was initialed by my guys.

  That wasn’t the only thing glowing. There were messages from each of them:

  Fuck ‘em, sweet, hot, worldly sister. Love, Mattie

  “They tried to bury us. They didn’t realize we were seeds.” (Mexican proverb) Love, Thom

  You had me even before you pulled out the hammer. Love, Eric

  I scrunched inside the box, which was perfect scrunching-into size, and I waited, and I felt.

  I don’t know how much later it was before Eric asked me his question. Similarly to how the bad beginning of my life had turned into a Tar Pit, the good times we were having were melding into something of their own. The inverse of a Tar Pit. I didn’t know what to call the airy joy filling most of my days. Fluffy Cloud Time, perhaps.

  “What do you think about Thom?” Eric asked.

  An ambiguous Eric question. It was just an opening; he already knew how I felt about Thom and understood it better than I did.

  I decided to be difficult and answered, “I think he’s magnificent.”

  “He’s smitten with you, you know.”

  I hadn’t. Eric gave me some time to process this.

  I’d recently had a conversation with Thom where I
’d asked whether he planned to find a lady friend. He’d shaken his head, eyes far away. I asked if he’d find a gentleman friend, and he kept shaking his head. “If I happened to be looking, it would be for a lady friend. But I’m not looking,” he’d said, and then he switched the subject.

  I described this to Eric.

  “Yeah, he told me about that. You know what he said when I asked why he wasn’t looking?”

  I shook my head.

  “He said, ‘She wouldn’t be Her, so why bother?’ And I asked him, to be certain, ‘“Her?”’ And he said, ‘Don’t play dense, you know who.’”

  Eric fiddled with the zipper on my backpack. “I don’t think he’s ever even wanted anyone before. He’s never had a girlfriend, not even a hookup. I don’t think he felt any person could relate to him, or that someone would want to be with him, after they knew about what happened. Then: you. He’s never gotten anywhere near as close to anyone else. He’s never wanted to.”

  “He’s never seemed jealous,” I pointed out after a few minutes of silence.

  “No, he’s never been like that about anything, no matter who had it or how much he wanted it.” Eric looked down at the ground. “I’m open to discussion, anyway, regarding this specific situation. With Thom. Assuming it’s what you want. If it is. As long as you’re still mine. With me.”

  I thought my heart might explode, I loved him so much.

  Thom had always been safe to be around. Unattainable, and as disinterested in touching others as I had been. We’d gravitated to each other naturally. I thought it was because we were similar that way, but the reason for it ran deeper. Since early on, we’d often touch, in a minor fashion, whenever we were around each other. Some force was pulling us together, and we didn’t fight it. We’d simply let it be, without considering what long-term effects it might have. At least, I hadn’t considered it. What I felt for Thom wasn’t what I felt for Eric at all. It wasn’t the variety of love I felt for Matthew, either, though. I hadn’t ever explored my feelings for Thom beyond that.

  I didn’t know what to say, so I tugged down the neck of my shirt as far as it would go, showing Eric the mark he’d left the day he claimed me.

  I didn’t know what to think, either. It felt like a tornado had landed in my brain, flinging my thoughts around. Thom.

  t was an accident, really, when we figured it out. We’d spent an absurd amount of time trying to find the best way to kill rotters. Not that they were terribly hard to kill, but they were always a nuisance and a danger, looming about the perimeters of our lives. We’d tried to find especially easy solutions for those in our group who were weaker or squeamish or generally not well-equipped to protect themselves. The children were especially vulnerable. All our campers were armed with knives, at least, but if a rotter’s close enough for you to stab it, it’s probably close enough to bite you.

  The best solutions are the simplest. Officer Bissett’s fourth rule. He told me something else about it: the simple answers usually take the longest to arrive at. “You rarely find an elegant solution without processing some complicated wrong ones,” he’d said.

  This ended up being one of those elegant, simple ones.

  I was holding an open bottle of vinegar, preparing to clean soot from a glass chimney belonging to one of our three oil lamps. Thom arrived, tossing his slightly bloody knife on the deck and pulling on a long-sleeved corduroy shirt. The chill hadn’t yet worn off from the early-morning air. As he fastened the shirt’s buttons, I noticed one was missing. I’d fix it later.

  “Squirrel,” he said, explaining about the knife. My guys weren’t picky eaters.

  Thom picked up a cloth, poured vinegar on it, and helped me clean.

  A rotter blundered into our campsite and bumped along the last layer of security. Our wired bells rang. Post Watch is slacking again. I tried to remember the schedule to figure out who was supposed to be watching out for us. It didn’t matter. We had a rotter. It stumbled through the alarm wire and continued toward us.

  Thom instinctively reached for the leather sheath he usually carried his knife in, then he remembered tossing his knife aside. I was unarmed, too—a rare state. It wasn’t particularly worrisome. Just a single rotter, an old one who was falling apart. So old, in fact, that it hardly stank.

  Thom threw his vinegar-soaked rag at its face to buy us a second while he reached for his knife on the deck. The rotter drew back abruptly. The rag fell. It hadn’t caused any visible damage. Still, the rotter turned about and staggered away from us. Thom retrieved his knife and stabbed the rotter’s brainstem, and the rotter fell to the ground.

  Funny, I thought. Vinegar. It was such a simple solution it actually felt pretty lame.

  And then I understood about the forests, and about why the rotters avoided certain trees. Acetic acid. I remembered the slime I’d collected the day I saw that rotter move quickly away from the blue spruce stand. I rummaged through a box and pulled out the slime vial and sniffed at it. It smelled like vinegar now.

  I immediately began drawing conclusions. The acid in those trees and their soil wouldn’t cause immediate harm to rotters, which is why the occasional ones would shuffle through. It must be enough to deter them generally, however, as long as they didn’t catch scent or sight or sound of something tantalizing. As long as they weren’t moving in a big group. But something about the vinegar must make their… survival instinct?… kick in. Vinegar is more concentrated than the acid rotters would be exposed to around the trees. If vinegar did this reliably, we’d finally have a means of defense everyone could use.

  “Vinegar? That’s… science-y,” Thom said after I laid out my theories and he took a sniff of the slime sample. He dragged the rotter’s body into the woods and away from home.

  I quickly changed out of my pajamas and into day clothes, then located a spray bottle and filled it with vinegar. With new solution ideas to test, I prepared to set out from our site to find a victim.

  “How do you feel about experimenting?” I asked Thom when he got back.

  “Positively,” he answered.

  We headed out in search of rotter prey. Of course, when you want to find something, it becomes more elusive.

  “We need a rotter,” I complained. “Where are all the rotters when you need one?”

  “Did I mention you’re weird?” Thom asked, elbowing me.

  I didn’t have time to form a retort. Two rotters stumbled into our path.

  “You shall receive,” Thom commented.

  “Hold.”

  He hung back, waiting. Armed and ready.

  I approached the rotters, held up the bottle, and pulled the spray trigger. A mist of vinegar wafted over them. The rotters leaned back. Then they moved away.

  “Really!” Thom said, with awe filling his voice. “I was worried that was a fluke back there.”

  We followed the rotters to the edge of a small town. They didn’t even turn back at the sound and smell of living flesh, at least not this soon after the vinegar treatment. We put them down and set out to find more.

  The next batch we encountered was bigger. Thom took the spray bottle, reset the nozzle from “mist” to “stream,” and squirted them from a greater distance. The results were the same—on a larger scale. Good deal! We put those rotters down as well, and headed for camp.

  “Maybe this will heal Jeff’s damaged calm,” Thom commented.

  We’d lost quite a few campers to rotters recently. Jeff took each loss personally, as if he was ultimately responsible for every life residing in his camp’s bounds.

  “Shall we find him and demonstrate?” I asked.

  “Immediately!”

  We collected Jeff. He walked with us, too frazzled to inquire about what we wanted him for.

  “More rotters this morning,” Jeff finally spoke. “We lost Sarah and Amanda.” Jeff swore. He never swore. The words sounded foreign as they fell from his tongue.

  We were walking behind Jeff, and I noticed Thom wince when he heard about
Sarah. He hadn’t let her get any closer, and I think he felt guilty about that, though I’m not sure why. I squeezed his hand, and he squeezed mine back, and I trotted forward to walk next to Jeff, to give Thom a little space.

  “Sorry,” I told Jeff. “One made it in by us this morning, too. Moving because of the cold, perhaps.”

  “The Post Watch crew needs remedial training,” he groused. “Again.”

  I disagreed. The PW crew just had a lot of people who didn’t give a damn. They fell asleep or got bored and left. Or they’d fixate on staring out in one direction. Or whatever. They’d never be on the level we needed them to be at for camp to be completely safe, no matter how much training they received.

  “We’ve got a present for you,” Thom told Jeff, hoping to calm him.

  Watching Jeff get angry was awkward. He couldn’t conceal it and didn’t know what to do with it. Eventually he’d explode into a tirade, sputtering nonsense. Then he’d kick or punch something and hurt himself. It always made me feel embarrassed for him. I silently thanked Thom for cutting off Jeff’s complaining before it escalated into a full-on diatribe.

  Rotters blocked the trail ahead of us. I almost laughed at my relief. Relief at seeing the risen dead!

  I held an arm in front of Jeff at chest level. He’d tensed when he saw the rotters, but he hadn’t yet had time to take out a weapon.

  “Wait,” I said.

  Thom stepped forward and demonstrated our new stratagem with the spray bottle. An arc of vinegar streamed across the rotters’ faces. It worked as beautifully as before. The rotters went away, with Thom following them to end the danger they might present to someone later.

  Jeff started crying. This was an unexpected drawback to our demonstration. Worse, he hugged me. I one-armedly hugged him back.

  “This changes everything!” he said.