Evergreen

by Cox, Matthew S.

  Madison rambled about her friends, Becca, Melissa, and Eva, coming up with ideas about where they might be and why they hadn’t called her yet. Fortunately, her guesses didn’t include death or kidnapping by the ‘blue gang.’ Harper clung to her, muttering random incoherent attempts at saying “sorry,” though even she couldn’t tell if she apologized for failing Dad, for not being able to tell Madison the truth, or for not being able to fix whatever had gone wrong with her mind.

  She missed her parents so damn much it hurt, and couldn’t do anything but curl up on the bed and cry. Madison cuddled close continually running a hand through Harper’s thick, red hair. It eventually struck her as backward for the little sister to be comforting the big sister. That thought helped her calm from bawling to staring into space.

  At the clamor of Cliff and Ken coming in the front door, Harper hastily gathered her composure. She sat up and faced away from the door so neither man could see her face. They dragged something heavy down the hallway to Jonathan’s room. Madison grabbed her phone and poked its button.

  “Siri, call Mom.”

  Harper brushed her sister’s hair out of her eyes. “Maddie… Mom and Dad are, umm…”

  “Trying to call?”

  Harper bowed her head. “They can’t call us. They—”

  “Have no phones?”

  “It’s—”

  Heavy knocking shook the front door.

  “Harper, can you see who that is please?” yelled Cliff between grunts.

  Argh! She wiped at her eyes, grabbed the shotgun, and trudged down the hall to the living room, which already seemed a little bit warmer—though still remained too cold to take off her coat. Madison followed, staring at her phone. Jonathan, seated on the floor near the fire, had taken his coat off.

  At seeing a smiling thirtysomething woman with strawberry blonde hair in the small window, Harper slung the Mossberg over her shoulder and pulled the door open. Their visitor carried a cardboard box of plastic containers. Her blue ski vest, flannel shirt, jeans, and work boots seemed a bit too casual for the aftermath of Armageddon.

  “Hi! I’m Carrie Rangel. I live right next door. Noticed I have new neighbors.” She offered the box. “Here’s some food to get you started. Figure you had enough work getting settled in, so I ran over to Liz and got you some stuff.”

  “Oh, thank you.” Harper accepted the box. “That’s really thoughtful.”

  “Are you okay, hon?”

  Being caught with red-ringed eyes embarrassed her enough to make her look down. With Madison hovering right behind her, she couldn’t talk about their parents—at least not until she’d broken that news in private first.

  “Yeah. It just hit me hard that we’re kinda safe here. Had a scary couple weeks. It feels so normal here I started thinking about all the stuff that’s gone.”

  “Oh, yeah. That’s gotta be rough. Especially on someone young like you.”

  “You’re not old.”

  “Thanks, hon. Most kids your age think thirty-four is ancient.” Carrie laughed.

  “Guess you’re on the militia, too, if you live on this street.”

  “Naw. I ain’t cut out for that. I’ve lived here for the past eight years. Didn’t leave with the others.”

  “Oh.” Harper’s eyes widened. “What happened to them? Did they run or did the Army force them out?”

  Carrie shrugged. “I can’t rightly say. My husband was in New York on a business trip. He called me a couple minutes to five in the morning when he saw a news report about a detonation in Washington DC. He said people in his hotel were already in a total panic. They didn’t have any warning. The line went dead. Still don’t know if he survived. I hid out in the root cellar for a couple days. By the time I risked poking my nose above ground, half the people around here’d already took off.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry about your husband.”

  “Thanks, dear.” Carrie patted the box. “There’s a woman, Elizabeth Trujillo, up the highway a little at the quartermaster place. They work out food allotments. Sometimes it feels like they’re being a bit stingy, but they have to make it last until the farm’s up and running.”

  “Yeah.” Harper nodded. “Mayor Ned gave us the explanation already.”

  Ken emerged from the hallway. “Oh, hey Carrie.”

  “Hi, Ken. Stopped by to say hello; brought them some provisions.”

  “Nice.” He nodded at Harper. “Great meeting you. Sorry to run so quick, but I need to get back out there.”

  “Umm.” She looked over his unremarkable coat, jeans, and boots. “Is there like a militia uniform or something? If someone needs us, how do they tell who to look for?”

  Ken smiled. “There ain’t all that many of us yet that people can’t remember. But generally, anyone walking around with a gun looking like they’re not in any hurry to be anywhere is probably on the militia.”

  “Oh. What am I supposed to do?”

  “If you just got here today, nothing really. Get settled in, rest from the trip. Walt will send one of us over to bring you to the HQ eventually.”

  “Okay. Yeah… rest sounds good. Feels like I’ve been walking for weeks.”

  Ken laughed, waved, and slipped past Carrie out the door.

  Cliff trudged over, appearing somewhat winded. He paused by Jonathan long enough to tell him he now had a bed, then approached the door where he fell into an easy conversation with Carrie. Harper took the chance to check out the box. It contained mostly canned goods, but one of the plastic containers held fresh chicken.

  Oh, that’s not going to last. Guess we have that tonight. “Umm… how are we supposed to cook this?”

  “Fireplace,” said Cliff and Carrie at the same time.

  “You’ll need to rig a metal rack to hold a pan in the fire so you don’t have to hold it. I’m using an oven shelf.” Carrie walked over to the kitchen, opened the oven, and removed one of the wireframe shelves. “Our houses are pretty much identical. This will work.”

  Cliff appeared amused at the woman making herself at home in their house.

  While Carrie worked the oven shelf into the fireplace, wedging it in the bricks, Harper carried the food to the kitchen counter. She decided to make use of two vegetable cans—one peas, one carrots—plus the chicken. Granted, as cold as the weather was, she could probably leave it outside and it would be as safe as being refrigerated, but no sense risking a critter making off with it.

  Also, she hadn’t eaten actual food in months.

  She had no idea what time it was, but they’d been rattling around the house long enough that it had to be a few hours past lunch. Perhaps a little early for dinner, but no one had eaten anything since they woke up. A few scattered seasonings the former occupant had collected remained on a rack above the stove, evidently of no interest to whoever had raided the place. She picked up one bottle. It didn’t look too old, and the chicken needed something. She doubted butter or oil in any form existed here anywhere.

  “Looks I’m cooking on borrowed thyme,” muttered Harper.

  Cliff groaned. “Why don’t you have dinner with us tonight?”

  After washing her hands, she took the chicken out of the container, dropped it in a large pan, and dusted it with an assortment of seasonings. The peas and carrots went into two separate aluminum pots. Those could sit at the edge of the oven-shelf-turned-grill as they didn’t need to cook so much as warm up.

  Harper grabbed a pair of tongs from a drawer and headed into the living room.

  “You ever cook over a fire before?” asked Cliff.

  She gave him epic side eye.

  “I’ll take that as a no.” He chuckled. “Okay, best thing to do is use glowing coals for food heat, not over the actual flames. Move the burning wood to one side.”

  “This fireplace isn’t that big.”

  He grabbed the poker and jabbed it at the wood. “It’s plenty big enough for this. Of course, we’re trying to warm this place up as well as cook… don’t do what I did a
s an idiot teenager.”

  Jonathan scooted back, grinning.

  “What happened?” Harper slid the vegetables onto the oven shelf, as away from the open flame as possible.

  “Friend of mine had this cabin up in the hills. Our dumb asses thought it would be an awesome idea to go hang there for a week in freakin’ February. It was so damn cold and the place was, uhh… ‘rustic.’ No electricity or heat. We only had the fireplace for warmth. My cousin John lost his damn mind. Found a railroad tie or something abandoned in the woods behind the place and chopped it into bits with a maul.”

  “If there was a mall, why didn’t you just buy firewood?” asked Harper.

  Cliff glanced at her. “Please tell me you’re joking.”

  She blinked. “Kinda. Pretty sure you don’t mean mall, but I have no idea what you do mean.”

  “A maul is kinda like the bastard offspring of an axe and a sledgehammer, but dull.”

  “What the heck is the point of that?”

  “Splitting wood.” Cliff threw another log in. “So anyway, we were freezing our asses off. We burned so much wood so fast we got the temp up to ninety something inside the place. Guy next door came running over because we had literal flames coming out the top of the chimney.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah.” Cliff laughed. “That was a fun week.”

  Harper set the chicken pan over the fire and knelt nearby. “Probably not as fun to be stuck living in a cabin out in the woods.”

  “This isn’t exactly a ‘cabin in the woods.’” Carrie smiled. “Evergreen’s a real town. Just… without electricity for the time being.”

  Cliff prodded the fire. “We’re a ways off before anyone’s going to get a power plant online again.”

  “Maybe those solar panels will work out?” Harper shrugged.

  “Maybe.” Cliff pushed himself up to stand. “Gonna go pack out my room.”

  Carrie sat on the couch, making idle chitchat with Harper while the food cooked. Prior to the war, she’d worked from home, doing crafty stuff she sold online mostly for fun as her husband made enough for them to live on as a lawyer. Madison sat on the floor beside Harper, her attention absorbed on the dead iPhone as thoroughly as if it worked and she played a video game. The sight of her like that made Harper want to scream, to grab and shake her, do something, but guilt got in the way. What if Madison blamed her for not shooting the guy? Did she see it all happen? Her sister could’ve watched everything from under the table in the dining room—if she’d been looking.

  Harper thought back to that moment when the bullet exploded out the front of Dad’s chest. Her dying father emptied the rest of his magazine out the patio door to keep the thugs at bay. He’d survived only long enough to grab Madison and shove her at Harper while yelling, “Run!” The bloody handprint he’d left on that T-shirt all they had left of him.

  Once he stopped firing, the men came rushing inside. It hadn’t even occurred to her until hours later when the running stopped that pausing to grab Madison’s flip-flops from the lawn might’ve gotten them both captured.

  But, the bigger question remained: had Madison curled up with her face to the rug because she’d watched her mother stabbed to death and her father shot, or had she been like that the whole time?

  Harper talked about her old life and friends with Carrie, sounding like a robot. Words came out of her with no more emotion than if she described a movie she’d watched, not reality she’d lived. She almost envied Madison in that her little sister probably didn’t have such dark fears as to what may have befallen her friends. Some of them probably left with the large wave of evacuations within the first few days. But escaping Lakewood didn’t guarantee bad things didn’t happen to them elsewhere.

  Eventually, the chicken looked and smelled done. She took it off the fire and carried it into the kitchen, set the pan on the stove (since that wouldn’t burn) and cut each breast in half both to check it and to split the portions. Satisfied the meat had cooked through, she turned to grab the vegetables, but Carrie walked in with the peas, using her flannel sleeves as oven mitts. Harper dodged around her, grabbed actual oven mitts, and went for the carrots.

  “Cliff, food,” called Harper, while portioning out the four half-breasts on each of four plates, plus a pair of thighs on a fifth plate that amounted to a roughly equal portion of meat. To each plate, she added as even as distribution as possible of peas and carrots, then carried them all to the kitchen table.

  He hurried out from the bedroom. Jonathan scrambled over to the table while Madison dragged her feet. Everyone dug in at once, except Madison, who just stared at her plate.

  “C’mon, Termite.” Harper prodded her. “It’s actual food. Hot food. Eat.”

  “It’s chicken.”

  “I know… it’s what we have.”

  Madison looked down. “But it’s an animal. It makes me sad that it died. You know I can’t eat meat.”

  Cliff looked up with a ‘you gotta be kidding me’ expression.

  “I know you don’t eat meat, but things are different now. There isn’t food like there used to be. We don’t have a supermarket to go to and get veggies and tofu and whatever. We can’t be picky.”

  Madison scowled. “It’s not picky. It’s wrong. The chicken died.”

  “So did the world,” said Jonathan past a mouthful.

  Madison’s lip quivered.

  Unbelievable. Everything that’s happened and she’s about to cry over a piece of damn chicken. Harper drew in a breath to scream, but couldn’t bring herself to do it. Her little sister, the only family she had left, had become emotionally brittle. Shouting over chicken was both pointless and excessive. Instead, she wrapped her arms around Madison and hugged her in silence.

  Forks clinked and scraped.

  “We have to eat, Maddie. Some days, we might not even have food at all. The war destroyed civilization. There’s no supermarkets. Even if no one bothered to nuke the big farms, there aren’t any trucks to bring the food anywhere. These people are sharing their food with us. We can’t waste it. It totally sucks that a chicken had to die, but I don’t want you to die. Okay?”

  Madison stared at the chicken for a little while before picking up her fork and stabbing it. She raised the half-breast to her mouth and nibbled on it while crying. She whispered an apology then took a bigger bite, crying harder as if she made a meal of a family pet.

  Harper had to look away. “I’m sorry, Maddie. Please don’t think I’m asking you to eat that just to be mean.”

  “I know,” sniffled Madison. “I still feel bad.”

  Cliff looked like he wanted to ramble off about vegetarians, but he contented himself to chat with Carrie about the city. According to her, a little over two thousand people remained out of the ten thousand or so that had lived within the official limits of Evergreen prior to the nukes. The remaining citizens had only just started getting into anything like a routine. Someone she referred to as Earl wanted to reopen a bar, though they didn’t have a lot of liquor around. With money being useless, he planned to ration it out like they did food until the farm got going and he could brew beer. Maybe people would wind up trading whiskey rations as a form of money.

  Madison ate her chicken between sobs. Despite that the girl needed real food, Harper felt like a monster for twisting her arm into eating meat. Maybe once the farm got underway, she could arrange a vegetarian diet for her. Thanksgiving had always been a bit of a joke at home. Dad got into the habit of molding a tiny turkey out of tofu for Madison.

  No one cares about Thanksgiving anymore. No one noticed Halloween. Harper sighed, thinking about Christmas and the new laptop she’d been begging for (for school of course) and dropping hints that having her own car would be awesome even if she got an older one—but now, if Christmas still existed in any form, the only thing she’d want would be her mother and father alive and with her.

  Harper barely held back the rising emotional storm long enough to finish off her plate, then
stood without a word and ran down the hall to her new bedroom. She leapt onto the bed, face-first in the pillow, and sobbed for her parents, trying to keep as quiet as she could.

  19

  Gone

  Harper opened her eyes to a dark room.

  She couldn’t remember at what point she’d fallen asleep while sobbing into the pillow, crushed by guilt and loss over her parents. The truth that they would forever be gone had been stalking her like a wraith ever since she’d dragged her little sister out of the house. It followed her all the way here, and finally sank its claws into her heart once she allowed herself to hope this place might be safe.

  Madison lay beside her, still asleep. She clutched her iPhone the way normal kids slept with teddy bears or dolls. The girl hadn’t at all been phone-obsessed before, and that worried Harper the most. Sure, she’d texted a lot with her friends, but this new fixation came not from the lack of a phone but out of some futile attempt to disbelieve reality in hopes their dead parents would call.

  Someone had covered them both with the comforter they found at that other house and also taken Harper’s shoes off. Crying so hard had left her tired despite having napped for a while. Her head swam with emotions: grief and guilt over her parents, anger at whoever launched the nukes, fear at what she’d gotten herself into by joining the militia, loss and worry over the future she wouldn’t have. A little hope snuck in there somewhere, hope that perhaps Evergreen might offer something akin to civilization. So far, the people here had been friendly and helpful. She could’ve done without the strip search, which made her feel a bit too much like she’d been sent to prison. But, with only two doctors and limited medical facilities, it made sense to make sure no one brought anything nasty into the town. Even something as mundane as a bad flu could kill people now.

  We’re back in the Old West. Doctors making house calls with the little black bag or some crap like that.