Welcome to the Greenhouse

by Gordon Van Gelder

  A hundred million starving, miserable people. Of every hundred people, ninety-nine dead, within a hundred years of humanity’s apex. Might as well call it extinction and be done with it. No reason he should still be hanging around.

  Bear fingered the ring. He felt as though he had made his wife a promise, though he had never spoken the words. Happy goddamn anniversary.

  Orla would only have laughed and kissed him. Eventually, he figured, he’d either get over being mad at her for dying first, or die too, and end the argument that way.

  Thanks to the fish with the ring in its belly, hunger didn’t wake him early the next morning. And that changed everything.

  The morning after the fish dinner he awoke to a cool breeze blowing through the window. The sun was up. The window screen was gone, and a girl was exiting Orla’s closet. Bear lay still and observed her through slitted eyes. She had dark, tangled, dirty hair that went down well past her skinny butt. She had pulled on some clothes of Orla’s: a shirt, a pair of jeans. They hung off her. She was struggling into a pair of Orla’s walking shoes, biting her lip and grimacing. Bear could see the crusted sores on her feet from where he lay. She couldn’t have been more than thirteen years old.

  Next she moved over to his chest of drawers, not three feet away from the bed. He breathed through his mouth, shallow and quiet.

  She must have climbed the dead aspen. He had left the window open to let the breezes in. These days you didn’t say no to a cool breeze, not even at night in winter. It was a screened, second-story window on the slope of a steep hill, and the aspen was dead: brittle and as skinny as she was. A difficult climb. Anyone bigger wouldn’t have been able to pull it off.

  He was not sure why he had awakened. She was quiet as a whisper as she emptied his drawers and pocketed the few items she seemed to find useful. It may have been the stink: she reeked of feces and body odor.

  He spoke finally. “You won’t find much in there, I’m afraid.”

  She spun to face him. She had a petite face with big eyes as dark and clear as obsidian. Sunlight glinted on the knife blade in her hand. It was a long blade, a serrated one. A fine hunting knife. It would gut him as easily as he had gutted that trout last night.

  “Stay where you are,” she said. She stood just beyond arm’s length. From her accent he could tell her native language was Spanish. Orla would have known what country she was from. She had been in Central America back in the sixties. Medecins sans Frontieres. But the girl’s English was sharp and clear as broken glass. “Try anything and I’ll kill you.”

  “Fair enough.”

  A tense silence ensued. He felt a twinge—it wouldn’t be breaking his promise to Orla if someone else did him in. But his intruder, she was just a kid. She did not want to harm him, or she would have killed him at the outset. He didn’t want to make a murderer out of her for his own convenience. Besides, she might muff it, and sepsis was an awful, lingering way to go.

  “I have provisions downstairs,” he said. “I’ll show you where I keep them. You look like you could use some, young lady.”

  She eyed him suspiciously, but the left corner of her mouth twitched at the “young lady.” After another long pause, she shrugged. “All right. Get up. Don’t get cute.”

  He swung his legs out of bed and stood. His joints were always stiff in the mornings.

  She stared as he stood, and stepped back. “Usted es un gigante!” He remembered a little of his college Spanish: You are a. .. what? Oh. Of course. A giant.

  It was true. Even in his current state he could easily have overpowered her. But he did not. He felt a deep pity. A dreadful fate, to be alive so young at the end of the world.

  He led her into the kitchen and showed her the hidden door in his pantry. It led down into the cellar. As she stepped over the threshold and headed down the complaining stairs, he shone his flashlight in across the shelves onto Orla’s hand-labeled Mason jars.

  The entire underside of their ranch house was filled with food. Jars of pickled turnips, potatoes, peppers, carrots, green tomatoes, and a hundred or more different kinds of jams. Sealed carboys, filled with beans, rice, and corn.

  It’d been at least two decades since they had had access to groceries shipped from elsewhere, and maybe twelve years since the local open-air market that replaced the grocery store petered out. Since then, he and Orla had lived off wild game, water hand-pumped from their private well, and supplies they had stored up before the collapse. Orla had spent years preparing. All the years of their marriage. She had dedicated herself to their survival—even before it was clear to most that collapse was imminent; well after everyone else had died or moved on. Cured hams and chickens and turkeys hung from the rafters, and a rack held jalapeño jerked beef. Bear figured he had a good three or four years’ supplies left, if he continued the way he had. After that it was the bullet, dammit, whether Orla liked it or not.

  What caught the girl’s eye, he could tell, was the medical supplies. Orla had been an ER doctor till the town had shut down ten years back, and had stocked up on bandages, antibiotics, medicines, and whatnot. All kinds of whatnot. There were vitamins and supplements, cold remedies, and the like. Most of these were post-date by now. After the last and biggest Deflation in ‘84, even the mercy shipments had stopped coming in.

  The girl stood on the bottom step, silhouetted by the light he shone—fists tight little balls, shoulders stiff. Then she turned and darted up the stairs, past him into the kitchen, where she pulled the tablecloth off the table. One of Orla’s handmade vases shattered on the floor. Bear looked at it. His vision went red. He roared—grabbed the girl’s arm, wrenching it—yanked her off her feet. Her eyes went wide.

  “You little shit!” he yelled in her face.

  Then he felt the sharp bite of her knife blade in his gut and dropped her. She backed away, knife at the ready, eyes wide, breathing fast. Mentally, he revised her age upward. She was more like eighteen. He lifted his torn, bloodied shirt and checked his belly. Just a scratch. The folds of skin there had protected him.

  He ignored the girl—maybe he’d get lucky and she’d slit his throat while his back was turned—and knelt to pick up the pieces of broken vase. These he carried gingerly into the study. He laid the pieces out on the hearth. Maybe I can glue them back together. But pain squeezed at his heart and he knew he never would. He just didn’t have it in him.

  He heard the girl clattering around, and after a few moments he sensed her watching him. He turned. She stood in the kitchen doorway. Orla’s tablecloth was slung over her shoulder like a hobo bag. Medical supplies and jars and bags of food stuck out between the hastily tied knots. The burden of living had never been heavier on his shoulders than it was in that instant.

  “Sorry,” she said finally.

  Bear passed a hand over his eyes. “Just go.”

  She stood there silent for another moment. When he looked back next she was gone.

  Two mornings later when he went downstairs, he found the vase glued back together, its cracks all but invisible. It sat on the kitchen table next to his now-empty, second-to-last bottle of Super-Glue, with the now-slightly-soiled tablecloth beneath it.

  That week fire season started. The winds came up and lightning storms rolled across the sky. Smoke hung in the air. It clung to the low areas and snaked through the valley below his house. Charred wood smell stank up Bear’s clothes and hair and made his eyes burn. Bear spent the two days hiking through the back twenty, scanning the horizons from every angle, checking for fires. From the ridge that stretched along the southern edge of his property, he saw what he had been dreading. A line of smoke and flame snaked along the ridge next door.

  He trudged back home. His house perched on a ridge that adjoined the one now aflame, the ridge about a mile or two to the west. Uncleared brush and dying trees filled the valley between the two. If the wind got much stronger, it would carry sparks into the valley and up toward his ridge. Time to chop down the last two trees in range of the h
ouse: the dead aspen next to his bedroom window and the big ponderosa by the front porch.

  The aspen he didn’t care about. But the ponderosa… Orla had loved that damn pine, with its widespread branches and needles green and vibrant; its slats of rust-colored bark and the black vertical fissures that separated them.

  “She’ll outlast both of us,” Orla had told Bear once. She called the tree Old Lady, or Old Woman Pine. When it dropped its cones on their roof, they would bounce down on the shingles with a frightful clatter, and drop around the eaves onto a cushion of pine needles so soft you never heard them land. Orla would look up from whatever it was she was doing and smile. “Old Lady’s heard from.”

  He looked up through the branches that morning. “Nothing lasts,” he said.

  First he brought down the aspen. He used a comealong and an axe. Once he had it down, he was dirty and sweating, and doused himself in the icy well water. Then he chopped the wood into sections, dragged it over near the workshop, and cut it down into firewood. Next day it was time to deal with the ponderosa. He got out his axe and his comealong. He went so far as to lift the axe and give the old lady a whack. The bark shattered where the blade struck, and the wet white living wood beneath splintered. He rested the bit of the blade against the tree’s root, rubbed his face, and looked up through the branches.

  He couldn’t do it. Old Lady Pine had been too much a part of their lives, for too many years. He ran his hand over the gouge he’d made. If this tree is to be the death of me, so be it. He put his tools away.

  That night Bear woke to find his bedroom on fire. Flames crawled in through the window and across the ceiling. Acrid smoke clawed his sinuses and lungs.

  He rolled onto the floor, choking and gagging. Somehow he made it down the stairs. No conscious thought was involved. He returned to himself on the lawn in front of his home, watching flames devour his home. Painful welts bubbled up along his left forearm but he had no memory of how he had gotten them.

  The winds were up. The ponderosa whipped to and fro in the grip of the flames devouring it. The roof had already started to cave in. Orange light shone from the upper-story windows. Even from here, the heat scorched his face and the light hurt his eyes. Through the open front door he saw that the staircase banister was alight. And now flames attacked the ceiling beams in the living room.

  He looked at the blazing door frame and a powerful urge gripped him. I’m going to perdition anyway, for loving Orla more than I ever loved God. It was as good an end as any.

  But in that instant before action followed thought, a yank on his arm threw him off balance. Something—someone—was dragging him away from the flames. The young woman who had broken in before pulled at him now.

  “Come on!” she yelled above the noise. “Venga ! We have to go!”

  He looked down at her. She was covered in soot and her gaze was wild with fear.

  He looked back at the house. Orla. Orla.

  Then he saw a troupe of children at the far edge of the lawn. They were skinny as this young woman was, dirty and stiff with terror. The fire hadn’t jumped to that copse where they stood, but soon it would. Old Woman Pine was cracking—splitting—about to go down. When it did, it would tip down the hill toward them. He couldn’t run into a fire and leave them with that memory. God knew what else they had already seen. With a grunt of anguish, he ran after the young woman, amid falling branches and billowing smoke. He snatched up a couple of the littlest ones. So did the young woman. The rest fell in around them. Down the hill they went.

  They ran far and hard, following the muddy creek. He noticed a youth—the next oldest after the young woman. He carried a younger boy on his back. Others carried toddlers. He glimpsed an infant. Babies saving babies. The young woman yelled at them, dragged them back to their feet when they stumbled, forced them on, away from the burning trees. At least three times she circled back and returned with someone who had stumbled or fallen behind.

  They found a mine-tailing pile against a hillside. It was poisoned— lifeless. No brush to betray them by catching fire while they slept. They all huddled on the rocky ground in the predawn chill. Even the littlest ones were too spent to weep.

  The fire moved on around them. Bear eventually dozed.

  When he awoke, he found himself surrounded by a silent, ragged army of sleeping children. He sat up in the predawn gray, gazing around in wonder. They ranged in age from infants to preteens. Most of them looked to be maybe between five and eight years old. There must have been twenty or so: girls and boys, about evenly mixed, best he could tell. Some of the older ones had weapons: knives, clubs, sticks. All had sticklike arms and legs; several had distended bellies, including the one infant, who hung limp in the arms of one of the five-year-olds, clearly too weak to cry.

  It was a boy—he had no diaper—and lay limp in a foul, brown-stained blanket in the lap of one of the younger girls. The corners of his eyes crawled with flies.

  The young woman soon came into view dragging a heap wrapped in a filthy blanket. Bear recognized the blanket: it had come from the house. She was covered in soot and had swaddled her head in an old torn T-shirt. She had a military-issue rifle on her shoulder. She dumped the bundle at the feet of the youth, and gave him a good, hard shove with her foot.

  “Tomás,” she said. Her tone was sharp. “Get them up.”

  The boy groaned, gave her a sullen look, and sat up rubbing his arm. “All right.”

  “Get them fed. Get Vanessa to help you. I need everyone to meet me at this man’s house tan rápido que posible. Bueno?” As quickly as possible. The boy blinked and nodded. He shook the girl next to her, who stirred. They two began waking the others.

  “You.” The young woman gestured at Bear. “Come with me.”

  He raised his eyebrows and leaned his elbows on his knees. “Try again,” he said.

  She grimaced. He spotted impatience and regret. “I need your help,” she said. “We need supplies. Your—¿como se dice?—su bodega.” She wiped at her eyes and he could see her exhaustion. “I’m sorry. Usually my English is better. Under your house—the food. La medicina. It is still there. We need it. The children need it.” A pause. “Please.”

  He stood. He couldn’t help it; he towered over her. She stepped back and half-raised her rifle. But Bear simply extended his hand. “Lewis Behrend Jessen. Pleased to meet you.”

  She looked at his hand as if she had forgotten what the gesture meant. Then she blinked, lowered her weapon, and took his hand in a brief, strong grip. “Patricia de la Montaña Vargas,” she replied. “Call me Patty.”

  “I’m Bear.”

  While they hiked back along the stream bed, he asked, “Where are you from?”

  “Mexico City. My parents were profesores. Professors. At the university.”

  She said nothing else. He didn”t pry, but clearly there was a lot more to tell. How had she made it so far, across the thousands of war-torn miles between there and here? Where did the children come from? Where were they all headed? And why?

  As they came up over the rise, he saw the smoking ruins of his home. The fires appeared to have burned themselves out. The air was still and cool.

  Old Lady Pine rose above the rubble: a blackened, ruined post. Everything but the barn had burned to the ground. His hundred-acre wood was now nothing but ash and char. The sun rose, swollen and red as a warning, over the eastern ridge.

  As Patty had said, the larder was mostly intact. In another stroke of luck, though the barn roof had caved in on one side thanks to a fallen tree, the walls still stood. So they had shelter.

  It took them three full days to extract the supplies. Bear insisted on doing it right, pulling out the debris and shoring up the cellar infrastructure as they went. He had been a mine worker in his college days, before he got his engineering degree.

  Patty paced across the ridge with the crook of her rifle in her arm, watching the horizons, while Bear organized his tools, built the supporting structures, and directed the
children to carry the timber and debris out of the way.

  By the first evening they had extracted enough rations for a decent meal. They camped out in the shell of the barn, exhausted. A soft rain started and the temperature dropped sharply. They huddled, shivering, under the portions that had a roof. Still, Bear was grateful for the rain. He persuaded Patty that it would be safe to have a fire in a barrel for cooking, light, and warmth.

  “No one will see the flames behind these walls,” he said. “And with all the fires right now, the smoke means nothing.”

  “A fire would be nice,” she replied, and sent the children to the unburned areas below to gather firewood.

  By the end of the second day they had most of the supplies out of the cellar. He found the gun safe. The children cheered when he brought out his Colt and shotgun, and all the boxes of ammo. He felt better for having his Colt—not least because of what the children had told him the night before.

  There were twenty-three, including Patty. Bear set about trying to learn all their names. He kept asking over dinner that first night, and they kept telling him, but their names rolled off his old brain. They were all so dirty and bony and so quicksilver fast he couldn’t tell them apart. For now, he settled for remembering Tommy (Patty called him Tomás, but he was of Asian ancestry and told Bear his name was Tommy Chang) and Vanessa (a freckled girl of Northern European ancestry, with curly red hair and a lisp, who didn’t know her last name). They were the next oldest after Patty. Tommy didn’t know how old he was but thought he might be thirteen. Vanessa said she was twelve. They told her that Patty had rescued them from a work camp down in Denver, two months before.