Scout grinned and said, “Sure thing, Uncle Florin,” and we ran to our assignments.
Ten minutes later, four women were piling branches and leaves on the canoes. When that was done, they started making a wall at the edge of the veranda. The rest worked throwing and spreading more protection on the roof. I went with Bebe to check the water tank and other systems around the house. About an hour after we woke up, I called for everyone to come back inside. Bebe, Toni, Scout, and I stayed upstairs for a few minutes to make sure that we hadn’t lost anyone and when the hail started again, we made sure that the door was closed.
Down in the basement, Ariel and the girls had set out some food on a blanket in the middle of the room and we ate.
This was my life. It had been this way for all my adult and teen years. Man versus the Environment. It was getting tedious. Hiding in a bunker while the Earth tried to kill us. Or punish us. Or maybe just ignore us. There were differences now though. For most of my life, I had been alone. Yeah, there were about a dozen people where I lived, my grandfather’s family and my moms and dad and my aunt and uncle but most of the time I was alone. I had entered “this world” during my lonely teenage years, and I had never really outgrown them. I didn’t go off to college, live with roommates, play sports, get a job, or date girls. In a lot of ways, I had never “grown up”. But then again, neither had any of these women.
How many of us were there? Toni had brought 12. No, 14 if I counted correctly. And Ariel and the other three girls, and me. Nineteen people. I wasn’t used to that. Nineteen of us, huddled together in a basement while the storm tried to rip through our shelter. At least we weren’t out in the jungle. What would I have done if we were outside during this? How would I have survived? Probably I would have…
I stopped myself. What did it matter how I would have survived outside? I wasn’t outside. I was here. How was I going to survive here? Now? With 19 people.
I sidled up to Ariel and asked, “Ariel, do you know how long it will last?”
She put her head on my shoulder and said, “I like talking to you. No. I don’t know. But things will be different when it’s over.”
I said, “Yeah. More will have died. And we have new relationships and social structures to adapt to. It seems like we know each other a lot better and will probably be a lot more cooperative.”
She said, “I meant the weather.”
I said, “What?”
She said, “The weather will be different. From now on. I don’t know how. I’ll have to learn. It has always been this way. It’s going to be different.”
I said, “We don’t know how to be different, do we?”
Ariel said, “No. But we are already different. Florin, I hadn’t talked to another person for what? Sixteen years? And now…”
I said, “And now, you are a comfort and a leader. Their mother and sister and aunt, I guess. I guess I am too. Time to let ourselves grow up. Ariel, they look sort of happy. All of them will be different too.”
Ariel said, “But you worry about them reverting. You won’t revert. Neither will I. Neither will Allie, Christie, or Bebe. Because you and I won’t. Because they are our family.”
I said, “So as long as Toni and Scout, and probably Zena, don’t revert, then we’ll be OK.”
Ariel said, “And the key there is for you to maintain relationship with them. Those three especially. And Beth, the girl who wanted a hug. She feels good about you and she will be a good influence on the others.”
I said, “Probably so. It really will be about the relationships, won’t it? Ariel, when I got here three weeks ago, I think that there were about 80 people here. Today, or by tomorrow, there might only be the 19 of us plus some number of breeders. Maybe 20 of them.”
Ariel said, “Breeders? The people in the village at the north end? I bet there’s only a handful after this. I used to watch people sometimes. To see if I belonged with them. The ones you call breeders won’t survive what’s happening outside. Not many of them, anyway. Not many at all.”
I asked, “Why not?”
Ariel said, “Because they don’t have relationships. They don’t care about each other.”
I said, “I thought that they were families?”
Ariel said, “No. They are a mob. Florin, I think that they are all insane. Well, more insane.”
I said, “But they are men and women and they live together, right?”
She said, “You haven’t seen them. I watched them. I thought that maybe I belonged with them after the people here left. We’re going to have sex, right?”
I said, “Um, I…well, you want to, right?”
She said, “I really do. You were going to make love with me before the storm started. I felt really hot. It was fun. I thought we had time, but we didn’t. I know how it works. Anyway, the breeders are different. They don’t have relationships. They don’t even use names. They laugh and have sex and eat and sleep. They sleep where they get tired. They have sex where they feel like it. They eat if they can find something. They trade at the Trade Village but where they live, they don’t even do that. If they see something, they eat it. If they want sex, they grab somebody. If one of them gets hurt, the rest laugh at them.”
We sat quietly for a minute before she went on, saying, “They are like…I don’t know what. Like children with no parents. They aren’t mean, they just don’t care. No, I guess that is mean, isn’t it? It’s like a lot of children went off and didn’t want any rules and they never figured out that they needed any. They won’t survive.”
I said, “Some of them will find shelter.”
Ariel said, “Nope. They won’t. They have houses and huts. But when the hail started, they would have stood around laughing as it battered their bodies. Some of them would have run for cover and stood laughing as the ones in the open were pummeled to death by the hailstones. When some of those lay dead on the ground, the ones inside would probably laugh and push someone else out into the storm because it was funny. It would be so funny that someone else would run out voluntarily, just for the experience, and they would die too. Florin, I don’t think that they have a concept of death. Florin, I’ve seen them have sex with the dead. If they wanted sex and a dead body was there, and it wasn’t too old, they’d have sex with it, the same as if it was alive. And they didn’t seem to know the difference.”
I sat and let that sink in before I said, “Ariel, how do you feel about that?”
She sighed and said, “Florin, how should I feel about that? That isn’t how people should be. They are insane. But they aren’t me. I didn’t have relationship with them. They didn’t even see me. Should I have cared what they did? They made their choices.”
I said, “I guess so.”
Ariel said, “Look, I understand the difference. We aren’t like that. When Scout was in trouble, you put yourself and three others in danger in order to save her. That was the right thing to do. That’s how we are. That’s our rules. When Zena wanted to touch your penis, you let her, but you didn’t just grab her and have sex with her in the middle of the room. That’s our rules. That’s why I belong with you. Lizards eat bugs. Fish eat fish. People have families. Breeders aren’t people. Not anymore.”
I said, “That sounds kind of harsh.”
She said, “Was it harsh when those men made you kill them because they were too stupid to live? Were they human? Yeah, Homo-sapiens but not human, right? How much humanity was left in them? And if there and been much humanity, why would they make you kill them? But at least they had relationships and a form of family and society.”
I said, “At the um, tribal council, or whatever, ten men went off to live with the breeders.”
Ariel said, “They had no idea what they were really going to. Yep, they could live there just fine. It wasn’t like they were cannibals or something. No one would murder them or even rape them anymore, but they went to live in the wild. There are two hundred of them, living like happy little animals. No rules. No responsibilities
. No understanding.”
I said, “Um, no, just 30 of them. Well, plus the 10 that went to join them.”’
She said, “That’s my point. The last time I saw them, maybe ten years ago, there were 200. Tomorrow, well, by next week when the injured die from neglect, here will be fewer than five. Trust me.”
I thought about that. Trust her. I did trust her. There was no reason not to. Nothing she had said contradicted anything that I knew to be true. It might not be what I wanted it to be but there was no reason to think that she was actually wrong.
I said again, “How do you feel about all of that?”
Ariel said, “Florin, I feel about you. And about Allie and Christie and Bebe. And Toni and Scout and Beth and Zena. That’s all I can have feelings about. I have feelings about what happened here a long time ago. I have feelings about what happened here for the past few days. I have feelings about lying in the ocean floating and sleeping. I have feelings about tomorrow and next year. The lizards and birds and fish take care of themselves.”
She paused and then added, “And I have feelings about getting to make love with you and live with our family and be Florin plus Pahu plus Ariel. You kissed me but I want to feel you play with my breasts. I want to feel you kiss and suck on them. I want to feel my vagina being filled with your penis. I want to feel what having an orgasm with you is like. I want to feel us walking naked in the rain on the beach. I want to feel the other girls lying against my skin in our beds. Don’t kiss me yet. Not here. Wait till we’re alone. For now. I don’t trust the Nomads.”
I said, “Why? What do you mean?”
Ariel said, “They aren’t settled. If you start kissing me, we’ll all get confused. Wait till it’s just you and me. Or just the seven of us.”
I supposed that she meant five of us but maybe she felt that Scout and Toni were close enough friends that if they saw Ariel and I kiss it would be OK.
By that time, we had eaten, and everyone had taken a chance to reacquaint themselves with how running water and flush toilets worked and were now gathered in their small groups and chatting again. We spent the rest of the afternoon and evening telling stories about our lives before the cataclysm and me telling what I knew about the world beyond the atoll. At some point, we went to sleep with Ariel singing to us again.
CHAPTER Twenty-Eight - Calming and Relaxing
There was no way to tell time in the basement. We didn’t have a clock and there were no windows. I woke up several times during the night, but it was quiet and no one else seemed to be awake, so I went back to sleep. Later, I woke up and the lights were on and I noticed that most of the women were awake and active.
I sat up and waited for my turn in the bathroom. I had slept with Allie and the other girls but hadn’t paid attention to who was next to me. In one room with 19 people like this, there wasn’t much individual interaction going on. The truth was, it was boring. The stories last night had been fun, sad, funny, or interesting but mostly we were just sitting here, passing the time. I had done a lot of this over the past 18 years. Days and days of sitting and waiting, punctuated by bursts of frantic preparations and repairs and emergencies. This was the “same as it ever was.”
A trip upstairs to survey the situation showed that we were stuck here with nothing to do for now. Ariel thought that the current storm might last for another day, at least. The hail outside the house was a foot deep. It was warm outside, and the stones melted quickly but there was so much hail that it built up as fast as it melted. I couldn’t see the little stream that ran from the house to the cove, but I imagined that it must be running a lot higher than when we first arrived. And the noise was still deafening. We didn’t stay upstairs long. The basement was better. I guess that I had been hoping to be able to get away for a few hours with just my family but that wasn’t happening; it was just too loud.
An hour later, I was bored and had everyone stand up and follow me in some Qi Gong exercises. Me and 18 naked women stretching and posing. For a guy who’d never really seen a naked girl until a few weeks ago, I was sure comfortable with it now. They did look nice. I think some of them thought that I looked better than the men that they were used to as well. Friendship does that.
We stretched and breathed and relaxed and calmed ourselves. I kept us going for as long as we were still enjoying it; maybe two hours.
Lunch was the same as the day before. We didn’t play any games. I did let them ask me all the questions that they wanted to about what I knew about the world “outside”. And I embellished my answers as much as I could to fill the time. Before bed, we did more exercises. We hadn’t walked at all for almost two days now and we needed some activity.
Toni was increasingly worried about the one Nomad canoe that had chosen not to come here with the others.
One thing that I noticed throughout the day was that the women seemed to be more and more at ease, both with me and with each other. Instead of making us anxious and tense, the forced isolation from the outside world and the inability to make individual choices resulted in a closer society or family feeling. Like a large family reunion with all of us forced to stay together in one room. Our individuality and fear seemed to be melting and was replaced by friendship and connection. It was the opposite of what I would have expected, and I didn’t know why it was having the effect that it did. It didn’t matter. There was a lot more casual touching going on by the end of the day, and that included a hand on my arm or shoulder or back every once in a while, sometimes from girls that I didn’t even know their names.
Ariel woke me up. The room was pitch black.
She called out softly, “Hey, everyone wake up. Someone near the lights, please turn them up so that we can see.”
I could hear some stirring and the lights came up about half way before Ariel said that it was enough.
She said, “Everyone wake up. It’s time. Come on. We’re going upstairs.”
It took a few minutes for all the women to rouse themselves and each other but when we were ready, Ariel had us follow her up. I was directly below her on the stairs and even in this dim light, I was plenty pleased by the beauty of that tiny butt of hers as it wiggled two steps in front of me.
Ariel marched us to front door and then outside onto the sand. It was wet but the hail was fully melted.
As each one of us stepped out from under the covering of the veranda, we gasped at what we saw. Not at the devastation of the trees and bushes stripped and battered. Not at the fact the so much around us was crushed and flattened. No, we were stunned to see the sky. And as we looked up, we halted in our tracks and those behind us pushed us forward to get us moving again.
Some of us didn’t speak at all. Those that did said simply, “Stars!” or “The Moon!” We hadn’t seen either for 18 years. But for the first night that any of us had seen since that first day of the volcanoes erupting worldwide, we saw the clear night sky.
Some of us just stood and stared. Some collapsed on the ground, either on their knees or seated or lying on their backs. Lots of them cried. A few questioned if we were dead. No, we weren’t dead.
Moonlight reflected off the water of the atoll. We weren’t dead. For me it was a realization. After 18 years, after all that we had been through, after all of the preparation and pain and longing and hope and hopelessness, we were alive. Nineteen of us here on this tiny island in the southern Pacific ocean; alive. I don’t think that any of us had expected to ever see the sky again. As far as we knew, it was the sun and moon and stars that had died, and we were never going to see them again. But here they were. Alive.
We lay there in awe until the sun came up.
Ariel said loudly, “I don’t know how long it will last. If the sky goes dark or the wind picks up, run back inside.”
Toni said, “So, it’s safe for now?
Ariel said, “For a while at least. Go where you want but not too far.”
I wasn’t surprised a minute later when Allie announced that she was going to catch a fish a
nd ran toward the water.
Ariel held onto my arm and said, “I will have to learn to know the air again. And to talk to the wind. They’ll be different now. It will take time. I won’t know what is going to happen now. Be careful.”
That was interesting. I was a pretty could predictor of weather based on the climate science that I had studied; Ariel was an intuitive predictor of weather based on years of observation and intuition. Now, things were changing for her and the patterns that she had learned might not work anymore. My own training might work better for the normal cases. Ariel hadn’t seen the sky in 18 years; I didn’t have to see the sky, or even to have seen particular weather patterns before in order to take a guess at what was happening. I had theory to back up my predictions. We weren’t at a total loss to figure out what was going on just because Ariel’s intuition might not work for a while.
Like Allie, several of the women went more or less immediately back to what they were used to. A few went to look at the canoes and see what shape they were in. Bebe started a survey of damage to our buildings and systems. Several organized themselves to see what food could still be salvaged from the beaten down plant life and to estimate what would grow back and what we would live on for the next several months. I walked down the beach with Ariel.
Without realizing it, I was headed back to the place where we had been starting to get to know each other before the hailstorm hit.
We walked along the water’s edge, and I watched the sky. Sunshine. Actual sunshine. About nine in the morning. I couldn’t get over it. Blue sky. There were white clouds here and there but there was open sky for the first time in forever. This afternoon would be windy, but my bet was that it wouldn’t be violent. As far as the reason for the change, I didn’t have enough information to know. The past week had been severe. First the torrential rain, then the hurricane force winds, then the devastating hail. It was like Biblical plagues or something. And now cool air and blue sky. There would be winds this afternoon but not like we had several days ago.
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