by Chris Bostic
“Wasn’t me!” Dad grumbled as he stood up and neatly folded the newspaper. He laid it on the table nonchalantly, and the headline flew at me like a 3D movie.
Martial Law Declared in Knoxville.
I froze, ignoring whatever Mom said in reply. As soon as Dad disappeared upstairs, I snatched it off the table. Except for a school project, it had to be the first newspaper I’d read in my life.
Other ominously titled articles took up the whole first page underneath the headline.
National Guard Deployed.
Six Dead in Clash with Police.
Travel Restricted Without Permit.
The paper slipped from my fingers to land on the table. It couldn’t drown out Austin’s growling anarchy metal, which seemed to take on a life of its own. As the music swirled around me, I shook, not from the beat. Or lack thereof.
I couldn’t believe what was happening to our town. Only it was, and it was about to get much worse.
CHAPTER 3
“Kids?” Mom called from upstairs, shaking me out of my stupor.
“Yeah?” I answered for Maddie, who remained balled up on the couch.
“Come on up, okay?”
“Yeah, sure.” I walked back into the living room first to shake Maddie out of her lovesick lethargy. “Mom needs us upstairs.”
“What for?” She rolled over, wiping drool from her mouth. Even more terrifying were the bloodshot, puffy eyes.
“Whoa! What the-”
I bumped into the coffee table as I backed away from the crazed raccoon, afraid of getting rabies from her pink polished talons.
“Really, Zach.” Maddie sat up with a huff.
I kept a hand clutched to my chest to keep my heart inside. “Sorry, but you should really ease up on the eyeshadow. You look like you’re wearing a Halloween mask.”
“Thanks.” She ran a hand through her disheveled raven-colored hair. “Like you’ve never looked your best.”
“At least I’ve never looked like a red-eyed zombie before.”
“Vampires have the red eyes, dumbass.”
“No wonder you like to sit in the dark all the time.” I laughed at my own joke, which was more common than I preferred. Somehow no one else seemed to appreciate my particular brand of humor.
“Jeez, you’re such a moron.” Maddie finished pulling her long hair into a ponytail, leaving a few strands loose to frame her ghastly face—probably on purpose. She wasn’t completely obsessed with contrasting black and pale like some kids. She was too worried about being pretty and popular to do all that. “Not all vampires need to stay out of the sun, you know.”
“Good, then I’m pulling the blinds.” I strode over the window and grabbed the cord. Before I could give it a yank, a sharp voice startled me.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Mom said.
“Jeez, Mom. You scared the crap outta me.”
“Better now than later,” she replied. “You never were a fan of taking a dump in the woods.”
“Mom, gross,” Maddie said.
“Point taken, darling,” Mom said. “Anyway, you two forget that I was wanting to speak to you?”
“Uhm…no.” I dropped the cord to the blinds and turned the rest of the way around to face her. “What about Austin?”
“He’s already helping me out. At least I have one kid who listens.”
I fought back a retort and nodded.
Mom was looking like a zoo keeper again today, which had nothing to do with her actual job in pharmaceutical sales. She was in her knee-length khaki shorts and matching tan button-up shirt.
“I need you to gather up your stuff. We’re gonna start our, erm, vacation a bit early.”
“Now?” Maddie shrieked and shared a quick glance with me.
“It’s barely June. I thought we were going in July.” I didn’t add anything about needing more time to hang out with Katelyn, but it was foremost in my mind. Especially since it sounded like her trip to Myrtle Beach was canceled.
“Plans change.” She waved her hand dismissively. “Like I always say, Be Prepared.”
“That’s the Boy Scout motto.” I snorted at the irony. Even though my buddy Joe was in Scouts, she hadn’t let me stay in the program. Still, she always ran around quoting them.
“Whatever. At least they got that part right.”
“Right, because they’re not good enough at making kids self-reliant.”
“Not as good as me.” Mom headed over toward the door to the basement, slowing the stride of her hiking boots only long enough to make her case for the thousandth time. “Video Game Merit Badge, that’s just a joke. And a badge for chess too. Seriously, Zach? Might as well be Girl Scouts.”
Mom opened the door and disappeared down the steps, presumably leaving Dad upstairs to work on his packing. That left me with a still sleepy, or rather lovesick, Maddie stunned in the living room.
“What the heck was that all about?” she asked, probably not expecting me to answer.
“I have no idea.” I truly didn’t. Then the newspaper headline popped back into my head. I took off for the kitchen, saying, “You gotta see this.”
“What?”
“Hang on, sis,” I said as I grabbed the paper off the table and rushed back to thrust it in her face. “Read it.”
“Yeah, the world sucks. So what?”
“The part about travel restricted.” I shook the paper like Dad had done earlier, trying to prove a point that wasn’t about to sink in through her over-dyed hair. “Who plans a trip in the middle of a martial law crackdown.”
“Our mother,” Maddie deadpanned. “Are you surprised?”
She had a point. Only Mom would do something crazy like that. Especially after the Feds had just been there.
“So, what were the cops looking for?”
“Was it cops?” Maddie said, questioning my word choice. She stifled a yawn before continuing. “It looked like a bunch of guys in suits and sunglasses. I thought they might be looking for aliens or something. I kinda expected the one guy to pull out that pen thingy and tell us all to stare at it.”
“The mind eraser?”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“You watch too many movies. But seriously…what were they doing here this time?”
“I dunno.” My sister chased a loose lock of hair across her forehead and tucked it behind her ear. “They took Dad’s laptop and all our old cell phones, but that was about it.”
“Good thing he hasn’t used that thing in years.” It wasn’t such a good thing about us losing our phones. Not that I had expected to get mine turned back on, but it brought home the idea that I really wasn’t going to be able to text Katelyn anytime soon.
Maddie headed across the room toward the steps. She paused on the first one to remark wryly, “Considering that they’d already been bugged, I don’t know why they wanted our phones.”
“If that’s true,” I muttered. It sounded like conspiracy theory nonsense to me, but Dad remained convinced someone was out to spy on all of us, not just him.
Maddie disappeared upstairs, seemingly more willing to pack than I would’ve expected. Ordinarily, she’d whine for a week about a simple camping trip. She’d been going on for ages about how she had no interest in making the trip to the Smokies our only summer vacation. Her sights were set on beaches, apparently much like Katelyn’s.
I never understood the connection between girls and beaches. I couldn’t have cared less about sun and sand, not that the mountain getaway was going to be any better. Not with my crazy family.
“Zach?” Mom interrupted my thoughts with one of her typical shouts from halfway across the house. The woman never stood still and rarely lowered her voice.
“Yes?”
“Give me a hand with the rain barrel, honey?”
“Sure.” I wanted to ask her what Austin was doing. Her favorite son was supposed to be downstairs too, but he must’ve been too busy planning his latest piercing to be bothered. Or maybe he
actually was packing.
I strolled down the steps in no hurry at first before jumping the last two onto the hard concrete. Music thumped from the opposite corner. A sliver of light poured from beneath Austin’s door, lighting a path on the cold floor. Ever since he had moved to the basement, we heard him far more than we ever saw him.
“Over here,” Mom said, and I knew exactly where she would be. I had to push my way past a wall of plastic tubs before finding her in the back corner by a giant blue water jug. She had an empty milk carton in each hand.
“We need to pack a bunch for the trip,” she said. “Might as well bring it with us rather than waste it here.”
All I could see was myself ending up sitting on, or underneath, milk jugs in the back of the Jeep. “Isn’t there plenty of free water in all the streams?”
“Sure, but we’d have to treat that. Might as well use up the clean water first.”
I shrugged and kneeled next to her. I wasn’t so sure how water from the roof could be any cleaner than a mountain stream, but I knew better than to ask. I’d get a thirty minute dissertation on how rainwater harvesting was saving the planet—and our family checkbook.
Mom patted the oversized spigot on the bottom of the tank, and I got a partial lecture. “This filter makes it purer than that crap they sell in the store…for a tidy profit too, I might add.” She handed me the first jug. “Set ‘em in the crates as I fill ‘em?”
“Sure.”
We worked an assembly line production until the whole tank ran dry. There was easily fifty gallons. Good thing it hadn’t rained in quite a while or we would’ve run out of empty milk jugs.
She hopped to her feet, ready to sprint off to her next task. Before she could leave, I had to ask, “Why are we leaving so soon?”
“It’s time,” she said cryptically.
“How so? I don’t get it.”
“It’s just time to go.” She patted my cheek like I was a two-year-old. “Don’t worry, honey. Momma’s in charge.”
“That’s what scares me,” I muttered to myself as she bounded upstairs.
CHAPTER 4
After moping to the sound of Austin’s muffled war music for a moment, I finally headed off to my room to pack. I pushed the door open to my hideout from a world of crazy.
Every day when I came home from school, I expected to find my entire room reorganized into military precision like our basement storeroom. Instead, the blanket was still thrown haphazardly across the bed, which was completely normal. I pulled open my closet door to find everything exactly where I had put it. Not neat enough to please my dad. It barely pleased me, and I wasn’t that picky.
I found my duffel bag under a small pile of semi-dirty clothes in the far corner of the room. I threw it on the bed and started shoving in a little bit of everything. Upon realizing I only had one fistful of clean underwear, I stepped to the hallway.
“How long are we staying?”
No one answered.
“Dad? Mom? I need to know how many days of clothes to pack.”
I expected the usual answer that I needed to bring five or six days of boxers, maybe even a week to ten days. Any more than that, and they’d be doing laundry because no one has more than ten pairs of underwear. Especially not all clean at the same time.
I was met with more silence. Before I could raise my voice to Mom-like levels, she finally replied.
“Bring all you’ve got, kiddo. Dirty ones too.”
I shook my head, not expecting that answer. “All?”
“Yes, please.”
“Uhm, okay.”
I returned to my room to make clothes sausage, cramming everything into the one bag and sitting on it. The seams stretched painfully and the zipper groaned as I finally jammed practically my entire wardrobe into the bag. It was amazing how much space gym shorts and t-shirts took up.
Even if we had air conditioning, I would’ve been sweating after that struggle.
I flopped onto the bed. The duffel bag was too stiff to use as a headrest, so I rolled it onto the floor with a thump and stretched out on my pillow. I stared at the ceiling and wondered at how quickly my day had turned from flying on the clouds to lower than whale crap on the bottom of the ocean.
Katelyn’s heart-shaped face stayed foremost on my mind as I ran through how the day should have unfolded. She would’ve smiled and looked around my room, and not even groaned when she noticed the pile of clothes semi-arranged next to my bed. I would’ve dropped her hand long enough to straighten the blanket and waved for her to have a seat. In mere seconds, we would’ve been stretched out on the mattress, and maybe even started to make out a little as the sinking afternoon sun turned my room to shadows.
Voices from the hallway took over, stopping me at a critical point. I shook them out of my head to resume the dream. Before I could run a hand the rest of the way up Katelyn’s imaginary shirt, Mom and Dad were suddenly inches from my door arguing about clothing.
“You can’t wear khakis and dress shoes on this trip,” she said, completely ending the daydream as miserably as the rest of my summer.
“They’re slacks and loafers, and I can bring ‘em if I want to.”
“Harold, for heaven’s sake. Women wear slacks.” She paused as if considering her words. “Well most do, not me. Anyway, be a man and please pack some jeans.”
“But-”
“You’re not gonna need your ties either, darling. At least not until we need to do some field first aid, and I’ve got stuff for that.”
It probably should’ve disturbed me that Mom thought first aid was more a reality than a possibility, but I’d been used to her talking that way for years.
“Yes, dear.” Dad agreed quickly, but that wasn’t unusual either. She had a way of being firm and soft simultaneously, kind of like shaking your hand and stealing your wallet at the same time.
I heard his footsteps pad back to his bedroom, probably to dump out his entire garment bag to fill a backpack instead. It wouldn’t take much space for him to pack jeans. I’d only seen him wear one pair—ever.
Thinking of jeans, I rolled back over to bury my face in my pillow. As hard as I tried to conjure an image of Katelyn in those tight-fitting jeans she’d worn all winter long, I couldn’t concentrate. Between Mom yelling commands and the headlines in the paper, my summer was in turmoil only a few hours after it actually started.
The so-called vacation was seeming less like a semi-enjoyable family trip, and more like a giant question mark. The biggest unknown was when I’d see Katelyn again. I had a sneaking suspicion that a full load of clothes meant it might be weeks before we got back home, and there was no doubt she would’ve given up on me by then.
With a sigh, I sat up and muttered to myself. I would’ve rather talked to a pet, but man’s best friend wasn’t welcome in our house. The opposition to cats I could almost understand, but not even a lousy guinea pig was allowed. As I was told many times, we didn’t need another mouth to feed, especially if we ever needed to bug out.
I stood up and grabbed the duffel bag off the floor. It must’ve weighed a good fifty pounds. I took one last glimpse around the room to see if I could bring anything else along to kill some time. Three or four weeks of family camping would be worse than torture, and I knew plenty about that. My parents always said the new government wasn’t reserving torture for terrorists anymore. They’d supposedly moved on to their own citizens, and were on their way to making torture as commonplace as traffic tickets.
I didn’t have a working phone, and my other electronic devices were more outdated than my dad’s tie collection. There were a couple of books lying on the floor next to my rarely used desk. I flipped over the first, one from a super-popular, fairly new dystopian series. Joe had hooked me up with that one.
There hadn’t been a lot of new movies released in a while, and especially not any with a big budget, otherwise that book surely would’ve been made into the next blockbuster. But it took money to go to movies. A ton of it. T
he theater had never been cheap, but it’d truly become ridiculously expensive.
I tossed the book aside, not willing to read it for a third time. The ones under it were a collection of popular stuff I really didn’t like. They were Austin’s hand-me-downs. I hated zombies and vampires, but those were right up his alley. He had left them behind when he’d moved to his new room in the basement a couple years ago, and I hadn’t been bothered to bring them to him.
“So much for reading,” I said, and turned to the door. “No phone, no games, no nothing. Should be a great time.”
“It’s not about that,” Mom said, startling me. She stood outside my door wearing a backpack, a knee-length leather jacket draped over her free arm. “Don’t worry, we’ll find ways to keep you occupied.”
“I’m sure you will,” I grumbled. We’ll probably spend all the first day making our own compost heap and digging a latrine. “Should be a real blast.”
“That’s the spirit,” she said. She hopped down the stairs with more energy than the average forty-year-old should have, leaving me planted at the top step.
I hovered for a while longer, not quite as ready to head out of town. Camping I didn’t really mind, but we never stayed in a real campground with showers and a flush toilet. Even a smelly porta-potty like the plastic ones they brought into the park for big events would’ve been an upgrade over the composting outhouses. The cobwebbed sheds they were crammed into were creepy too, and always smelled horrible. No matter how much you didn’t want to, a guy couldn’t resist taking a look into the pit. Maybe taking a dump in the woods wasn’t so bad after all.
“Coming, Zach?” Dad said as he brushed past me in the hall. He’d opted for more of a business casual look, going with brown khakis rather than the usual slick dressy pants.
I pushed aside visions of a turd monster floating in a sea of clumpy brown latrine water, and headed to the stairs.
I made it halfway down when the entire house shook. I clutched the railing to keep from slipping while the duffel bag tried to pull my arm out of its socket. Before I could get the question out, the house was enveloped in a roar that rattled the window frames. I would’ve sworn the glass would crack. The thunderous growl turned to a sonic boom and scream of jet engines.
