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

by Williams, Beverly

  I elbowed him. “Spill.”

  “Your blood.” He furrowed his brow. “I know there isn’t any guarantee, but a chance exists it’s what protected me. So I was thinking—”

  “Already done.” I explained what I’d done with Matthew and Thom and Sam.

  “I owe you,” he exhaled gratefully.

  “Pay up,” I ordered, pulling him down to the ground with me.

  He stroked his fingers along the side of my face.

  “So beautiful,” he whispered, bringing his lips to mine. And for once, I felt like I was.

  Matthew got bitten a few days later. We’d fallen asleep at the picnic area, and a rotter happened by. It wasn’t a particularly bad bite, even. But it broke the skin on his left forearm. That’s all it takes. I woke up and saw Matthew stabbing the rotter. I wished desperately it had bitten me instead. That day, we were as terrified over possibly losing Matthew as we had been over possibly losing Eric. But he’d only been bitten once, and he healed up quickly. His bite acquired that bright blue luminescence for a while, too. His and Eric’s Angel’s Glow vanished within three weeks, though.

  Eric and I talked over our theories. I felt sure now that Eric’s blisters had been due to the ethanoic acid, and his pink eye whites had been part of how his body fought off the infection. (Matthew’s eyes had briefly taken on that pink tint, too.) We figured the Angel’s Glow was also part of how their bodies fought off the toxin. We surmised the immunity I carried might not fully get passed along, or was passed on in a mutated form, since I never reacted to bites with the symptoms they had, and because of my Angel’s Glow’s permanence.

  Whatever the case, we now had a pretty definitive link between Gareth, who’d saddled me with the Angel’s Glow in the first place, and the rotters. He’d put the Angel’s Glow in me long before the first reports of the rotters spread, and I knew it wasn’t like him to try to solve a global problem he saw coming. Rather, he’d want to make sure of his own immunity before unleashing a virus-or-whatever of his own design, and I felt certain that beta-testing his antidote would’ve been the only reason he might expose me to something positive. I realized I’d been his test subject as much as his servant, his punching bag, and his lampshade. But this realization didn’t come with the emotional gut punch my Gareth rememberings had in the past. I wasn’t mad or upset. It was just a factual discovery. I found I didn’t care about what Gareth had done to me back then. I’d gotten through it, he wouldn’t be hurting anyone else anymore, and now I was able to take my horrible past and use it to save my loved ones in the present. That’s what was important.

  Eric and I told Thom, Matthew, and Sam after Matthew healed. About my bites, my not turning. That, best as we could tell, it was Gareth’s doing—both the rotter whatever-it-was, and my immunity to it. We told them of Eric’s exposure to my blood, and about their own exposures, too. I thought they might be upset that I hadn’t given them a choice about the matter, but they hugged and thanked us. Then we went to tell Jeff, so we could offer protection to the rest of our people.

  was fishing around in my backpack for a box of mints which had strayed from its designated place when I felt something I’d never noticed before: a tiny pocket next to a seam, way down on the inside, near the bottom. My fingers brushed over the lip of it, which was barely perceptible against the main canvas. I slid my finger into the pocket and felt paper. I pulled it out and unfolded it, and as I did, another paper tumbled out. The tiny note from the farmer’s wife.

  BELONG.

  I set this down beside me and put my drink bottle on it so it wouldn’t fly away. Then I read the other piece of paper.

  Hey kiddo, it began. I recognized the writing.

  My hands were shaking so hard I had to set the paper on the deck in order to read it. I plunked a couple of rocks down to keep it from fluttering off along the breeze.

  I’ll probably be long gone from your life when you find this. Hopefully your time with Farmer Joe will prepare you for a world that’s far different from your previous home. He has a lot to teach you.

  What you’ve been through is horrendous. It’s so far beyond criminal there are no words for it. I want you to understand that if anything happens to me, it isn’t your fault. I want you to know you’re worth it. You deserve to be happy. Live. For yourself, for your siblings. Live for me. It boggles my mind that someone who’s been through such hell could turn out to be such a beautiful person. Be at peace with your scars. We all have things we’d change about ourselves if we could.

  One day, Gareth will pay for his transgressions.

  I hope you know, and that you’ll always remember, how much I care about you.

  You are strong, and you are brave. Happiness and love will find you if you let them. Keep singing. Never give up hope.

  ~~B.

  I wanted to read the note again, but my vision had blurred. Officer Bissett had known. He’d known the probable punishment for his kindness, but he helped me anyway. He’d known what would happen to my stepfather. Not the details of the reparation, but that it would eventually be doled out. And he’d known the direction my life could go. A small, still pearl of peace formed around the ache in my heart for him. He had known it all, all along.

  I must’ve tranced out entirely, because suddenly Eric was sitting by my side.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  I gestured mutely at the paper. He leaned over, squinting, but couldn’t read it from where he sat.

  “Just found this,” I managed to articulate, pulling the note from beneath the rocks and passing it to him.

  He read it, and read it again. Then he flipped it over. On the back was an addendum I hadn’t seen. A rule that hadn’t been on Officer Bissett’s original list.

  RULE #11: Hang in there and remember to breathe.

  “Wow.” Eric handed the note back to me. “Space?” he asked.

  “For a bit.”

  He kissed my right temple, stroked my hair, and left me to my thoughts.

  I tacked the tiny “BELONG” note and the letter up in the lean-to alongside the Polaroid pictures.

  I do live now. I sent the thought out to Officer Bissett. Then I remembered the distant star I’d wished on. We’re all made of elements from stars. We can return to being stars, too. Maybe he had done so, and had been part of that star. Maybe he’d heard my wish and guided me into making it true. This was thought lightly, not with True Belief, but with a wistfulness for it to be true. I allowed it to feel true for me.

  Thom arrived and immediately noticed the new note on the wall. He read it.

  “Back too,” I said.

  Thom read the back of it, and sat down at my side. He peeled a clementine and its bright, fresh scent filled the lean-to. He ate a section and held out a few wedges. I accepted.

  He looked at what I held in my other hand: an old piece of paper I’d pulled from my backpack. The writing was in forest-green ink. It was Officer Bissett’s list of rules. I took out a purple pen and added the eleventh rule, then handed the list to Thom.

  He read:

  1. Protect yourself. Don’t hesitate and don’t apologize for it. Especially, don’t feel guilty about it.

  2. Use your senses and your brain. Draw your own conclusions.

  3. Virtually nothing is impossible.

  4. The best solutions are usually the simplest.

  5. Get along with others, within reasonable bounds.

  6. Live in the moment, when you can.

  7. Healing hurts.

  8. Try to ease suffering—your own and that of others.

  9. Getting lost may help you find yourself.

  10. You can’t completely know another person.

  Then, in my tiny, cursive handwriting:

  11. Hang in there and remember to breathe.

  Thom rose and fastened the list next to Officer Bissett’s note, underneath “BELONG,” where it belonged.

  All those rock-wall-building days (and the busy days interspersed with them), no one k
new what Sam and I were up to. We’d clean ourselves off in the stream at the end of the wall-working, usually limiting ourselves to mornings. We’d put on fresh clothes, and return to camp, sore but feeling full. Full, but empty. That is, we both ate more than ever before. Physical labor of that sort made me far hungrier than simply walking around all day. The guys teased us both about it.

  When the rock wall reached the final small stone marker, when we’d built the ending of the wall and tapered it down to the ground, we admired our work. It was exquisite, every bit as resplendent as Renee’s description of Goldsworthy’s wall.

  While we were building, I’d felt a twinge of guilt for putting all this work into something that didn’t seem to have a purpose.

  “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful,” SammyJo said softly. She started crying. “I didn’t know it was in me, to be part of something like this.”

  My guilt dissipated into the ether.

  “It’s always been in you,” I told her, reminding her of the henna she’d decorated me with. Then I recalled how damaged I was when I’d arrived at camp and how much work it took to draw me out of the catastrophe I’d been. Kitastrophe.

  “Can we show them?” she asked. She didn’t mean the whole camp. Just my guys. Our guys. They’d taken her under their wings just as they’d done with me, like she was a little bird learning to fly.

  “Let’s go get them right now.”

  When we got to the lean-to, Eric, Thom, and Matthew were sitting on the deck, working on some new project of their own. We all gave hellos. I grabbed the “no tracking” note from my bed and balled it up, tucking it into our fire pit. I didn’t need it anymore.

  “Can we borrow you guys for a bit?” Sam asked timidly.

  They all left what they were working on and followed us.

  The brothers liked our wall as much as we did. I don’t know why we all felt so strongly about it. It isn’t like people couldn’t do this stuff anytime they wanted to.

  “I know it’s kind of useless,” Sam said shyly, but Matthew hushed her by putting his finger to her lips.

  “It’s the best thing anyone’s done around here in a long time,” he said. “It’s fantastic. It’s amazing.” He hugged her. Then he wove a few quick little braids in her hair and tucked twigs into them.

  This fascinated me. Sam’s continuing practice fighting with Matthew was drawing them together. It was a discordant realization. We’d escaped from violence and now were making bonds through a play practice of it. I wanted to vocalize this to them, but the words stuck in my mouth like a heaping spoonful of peanut butter.

  Eric and Thom stood at the wall’s far end, one on each side. They studied our work and admired its build.

  “That’s strong. That’s going to last,” Eric said when they returned.

  We had a strange little group. I thought of the words Thom had said to me when he’d first seen all those braids in my hair. “You’re weird. I like you.” I realized we all were a little weird, and this was the perfect family for me.

  “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.” Aldous Huxley

  Thom had disappeared again. I finally found him at the near-silent river, but not in his usual spot. He had crawled up on a ledge. He was remembering. Thom seemed paralyzed by it, practically catatonic. He lay on his side, staring vacantly out at the water.

  I’d spent some time like that, during the days I’d worked too hard while my body was trying to heal. I had remembered then. I hadn’t rested enough, or eaten enough, or had enough to drink. And I had terrible nightmares. My head was filled with constant screaming. Our lean-to was filled with it, off and on, too, some nights. After a particularly bad dream, I waited until the others slept again, and then I left, to give the guys some peace and quiet. The next day, Matthew found me near the stream, under a flowering tree, covered with fallen petals, and unable to respond to him. He stayed with me all afternoon. He was going to get Eric and Thom, but I grabbed on to a fistful of his shirt and he said, “Okay, it’s okay,” and he stayed.

  Eric and Thom found us and they all took care of me until it passed.

  On the night we’d first talked about my memory doors, Thom had been right―there was something good waiting behind at least one of them. Remembering good made an unfamiliar clicking in my head. I grabbed the memory door’s doorknob, started to turn it, and then realized someone had taken over turning it from the other side. I took my hand off the knob and watched it turn, and then the door slowly swung open with a creak. I watched it open, and I leaned to the side to peek around its edge. Waiting for me there? It was Thom—younger Thom. Thomas. Not as I know him now, but from Before. I never expected to see him there, but the moment of awe was immediately followed by a staggering bombardment of all the details of meeting him. Remembering good was hard—Thom was right, again. But I was ready, and it was necessary.

  I’d been preparing for Thom’s remembrance to hit ever since mine did. Thom and I had been like magnets from the beginning; our bodies remembered even when our brains didn’t consciously register why it felt safe to be together. What if his remembering flipped the polarity and instead of drawing us closer, it pushed us apart? How could we possibly deal with that without everyone getting hurt?

  I felt panicky. Adrenaline rushed through my system. My heart fluttered. Wisps of light formed their own sky in my field of vision.

  “I know,” I consoled him.

  I pulled Thom to me, stretching beside him and facing him in the moss on top of the ledge—half expecting him to not respond and half expecting him to shove me away. I put an arm under his neck and pressed his head to my shoulder. I stroked down his cheek, down the back of his neck, down his back. I stopped my fingers over a branding scar on his lower back. He’d acquired it in one of Gareth’s Programs. It’s what his rock arrangement resembled.

  He remembered it all now.

  Thom squeezed his eyes closed and buried his face against my chest. I wrapped my arms around his head, and I cried with him. I realized I was stupid for ever thinking Thom and I could be pushed apart. We weren’t magnets. The power which drew us together wasn’t one that could be reversed or negated.

  We fell asleep like that, and when I awoke, he was stroking my hair. He’d come back to me.

  One of his fingers dragged up the longest length of scar on my back, underneath my clothing, and he took a slow, shaky breath, letting remembrance wash over him and not fighting it. This long scar was from the night we’d actually met. We talked about That Program.

  The Stoic Boy was there again. He was a bit younger than me. The boy took his share silently and was herded to the waiting area. It was just off the main event floor, like the wings of an especially ill-fated stage, separated from the leering howls of the crowd by a red velvet curtain. You might think it’s the sort of place which would be lit only by a flickering, bare lightbulb, but it was actually day-bright. The atrocities visited upon our peers could be seen more clearly this way. The room smelled like spoiled meat and the grungy, moist walls were unadorned except for a framed Successories poster—evidence of Gareth’s tar-black humor. I leaned against the cold concrete and it calmed the damage on my back.

  The Stoic Boy passed several kids who were crying and tending to wounds. Zack. Bailie. Terry. He slid down the grimy wall to sit on the floor next to me.

  Out in front of the audience, Rose was screaming. Even so, I wasn’t sure whether it was worse out on the main floor or here in the disgusting room that overlooked and stretched away from it. Gareth made sure circumstances were horrific regardless of where we were.

  The Stoic Boy cringed, barely noticeably, as he settled into place on my left. I offered him my juice box and he drank some and thanked me, then he sighed.

  “I still want to live. In spite of it. I wonder when that’s going to change again.” He drank more juice, then handed it back.

  There was fussing and crying in the corner. Someone was dying.

  I decided the boy
wasn’t just talking to the wall. “Soon, it’ll change. But it will change again, again. Like the weather. Try to wait it out, when the storm hits,” I told him, “and you’ll pass through it just soon enough.”

  We watched the corner. More fussing came from it, louder, then more crying.

  “I’m Thomas,” he said, offering his hand hesitantly, as if he wasn’t sure what etiquette dictated in this situation.

  “Ally,” I told him, shaking it.

  Instead of just shaking hands, we kept holding on afterward. We leaned together and I focused on listening to him breathe, trying to stop hearing the hell surrounding us. I wondered how many tears it would take to drown us all there, but it was with calm detachment. Being near Thomas somehow separated me from the rest of our reality. He slid an arm around me. I wanted to cling to him; I wanted to continue to escape into the serenity of his embrace.

  I thought the Program was ending, except then they announced they’d be putting four of us in the Cage. Cage matches ended with one survivor.

  Gareth’s “lovely assistant” stumbled into the cattle pen. He was probably nine years old, maybe ten. He’d been forced to wear a sleeveless gown to mockingly show off the wound where his arm had been three weeks ago. His dress’s sequins sparkled and flashed. Thomas startled when the boy haltingly muttered four names, because mine was among them. I’d been chosen to go into the Cage. I let go of Thomas and stood.

  “Live,” he told me, moving to stand.

  I nodded grimly, helped him up and hugged him quickly, then stepped toward the door and away from the light.

  I knew how this would generally go. I’d been there more than once. This time, though, I ended up with my most fabulously long cut. It slashed from the lower outside thigh of my left leg to the top of my right shoulder blade.

  The Program closed, and I lay in a puddle of blood, marveling at how it had gotten so cold so fast. I could blurrily see the audience forming a line to get their phones back—no camera or video devices were allowed inside the theater. I watched Thomas watching me from behind the red curtain. I closed my eyes slowly and opened them again, acknowledging him and trying to convey that somehow things would get better. He held a hand my way, then he turned his head, hearing his father summoning him, and he had to leave.