This has been such a long week. . . lots of domestic disturbances. . . no bike riding. So here is another chapter full of my Frankenstein attempts to create action. It's funny how leaden and lumbering language gets when you are trying to talk about things happening quickly. Amid magazine rejections (oh, there were some!)I managed to get almost done with a short story. I've reworked this chapter a lot because there are some historical reveals and that made me crazy during first draft. I honestly didn't know what happened to Madison's world, but I didn't want to break stride to do world-building. I could pretend that she simply didn't know, and that worked well enough until I started asking people to read later drafts. I confess, I don't do outlines. Nothing kills desire like boredom, right? Besides, what was important to me was the tone and voice of the novel. More stuff to do: Yes, in my spare time, I need to promote this blog. But feel me on the rejections. Ouch! Who wouldn't shut the door for a few days?
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Chapter Five
The next morning, I crawled out of the hay and folded my coats. I was alone in the loft. Tierney's bed had been kicked apart and his coats were gone. I hobbled to the old house, barefoot, looking for Tierney. Wherever he was, he had my damn shoes.
The wringer-washer was in a corner of the back porch, and I took a moment to turn the crank and examine the old split rollers. It was dusty but seemed to work. A thing like this was worth, oh, it might be worth two suckling pigs, or a portion of slaughtered hog. A woman might trade a half-pound of coffee for it. It certainly would earn its worth many times over in time saved. I couldn't let it sit by for someone else to find.
I carried it to the truck and loaded it carefully. After that, I went out into the weeds far from the truck to do my business. No toothbrush, no soap, no water, no paper scraps. And I was barefoot. By the time I hobbled to the truck again, I was in a sour mood and Tierney was heaving the wringer-washer off the side of the truck.
"Are you crazy? Stop that!"
"It's not coming." He stood on the truck bed next to the gun with its fat belt of ammo. A tendon bunched in his jaw like a horse that had set his teeth against a bit.
"Do you have any idea what a thing like this is worth?" I walked around the truck and found the washer. The top had come off. I bent down and looked at the two parts, touching a spot of fresh metal. "You broke it!"
"Good." Tierney jumped off the truck. "You won't be doing any laundry where you're going."
"You're an idiot, Tierney."
"Need some shoes?" He reached into the back of the truck and held up my wingtips, tied together by their laces. I reached for them but he yanked them away and tossed them on the truck's front seat.
"It was worth a ham, Tierney." I got in the truck. "Think about that. Maybe two hams."
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Slow going. The pavement was buckled and frost-heaved as we made our way north. The last people who drove these roads were probably the looters who had cleaned out the house, and that was a very a long time ago. In low spots, streams ran over the road and Tierney paused to estimate the depth before bouncing through the water. He took a road that lead us down the far side of the ridge, and it meandered through a housing development. The yards and streets were crowded with wrecked furniture and fallen trees, but only two or three places had burned. Tierney drove through the neighborhood once and circled back.
"What are we doing?"
No answer. He stopped the truck next to a tangle of brush and vines that had once been someone's yard. I saw a moss-covered skull under a branch, the jaw crushed. We got out of the truck and he gave me a handful of rags.
"Stuff these in your shoes."
"How generous." I jammed the rags in the toes and put them on. They still didn't fit. I followed him around the first house and in the back door. While he rummaged through the kitchen, I searched the rest of the place, pretending I was an archaeologist who had just opened an ancient site. What happened to the family who lived here? It was hard to tell because successive groups of people had come later, making a fire in the living room and using the bathroom floor and the hallway leading to the bathroom as a toilet. The stench was blistering. The family must have owned a lot of pink toilet paper because bunches of it peeped through the excrement, still vividly pink. For once, I didn't want to go upstairs.
Tierney scored a package of pasta. We went on to the next house.
All together we searched ten houses. In some ways they were all the same, furred and peeling walls, mushrooms sprouting from the swampy carpets, utterly destroyed furniture. But Tierney found something in every house. He looked behind stoves and on top of cupboards. He removed drawers and searched inside for things that got pushed to the back. In one place he found three ramen noodle packages.
I looked for shoes and books with no luck. Books were popular for starting fires with the waves of squatters who came after. Or maybe the family themselves had burned the books in the first long winter, trying to keep warm. And shoes were gold anyway. You never saw a corpse with shoes.
In one place we found five bodies all laying on a bed, the covers pulled up to their jawbones. The mother lay on her side, facing two smaller bodies, and the dad's mummified fingers cupped a handgun. All had small holes in their skulls. They had been dead a long time, but not ten years. I looked around the room and saw an oil lamp with a rag wick and soot stains flaring up the side of the wall. The window was sealed with carpeting. This family had lived for some time in the world as it is now, but had decided not to anymore.
Tierney tucked the gun into his belt and closed the door softly. At the front door, he picked up a shard of pottery from the yard and carved a number 5 into the door wood.
"What's that for?" I asked.
"It's a sign to others there are dead in this house."
"There are dead in all the houses. You didn't mark the doors."
"These people were from our time. They were survivors."
In a way I understood. It's not that the other dead, the Demented and the people killed right after, weren't important. They were the ones who built the houses, made deevees, wrote books. May they rest in peace. But they'd gotten off easy—no First Winter for them. They hadn't spent the last ten years hoping that it would stop raining so the beans would grow. Anyway, I was sad about the family in the last house. I couldn't shake the memory of our winters, and wondered if Dad had ever thought about finishing things that way.
Tierney went to the next house, and I sat on the curb near the truck. He came out with a frying pan and an empty plastic jug. I gathered firewood while he carried the jug down the hill and into the woods. I watched him go, thinking I had the wingtips, he'd left the keys in the truck, and all the junk he'd just gathered was sitting three feet away.
I thought about it too long. He came back with a jug of mossy water and set it down next to the wood I'd gathered. "There's a lot of water in your country."
"Too much. This wood's not going to light."
He had a lighter in his pocket and with a few pieces of paper, he managed to get the smallest twigs to smoke, then flame. "I've seen places that haven't had rain in ten years. The rivers are dry and the groundwater is used up. Everything is dead."
"How do the people live?"
"They don't."
He blew on the flame and added more twigs. When he got a good fire going, he nestled the pan in the coals and heated water for soup. We ate two packages of ramen noodles and drank the salty pan water. Neither of us spoke.
We drove through the remainder of the afternoon, weaving around dead cars and fallen trees. Sometimes I had to drag branches out of the way, sometimes it was armchairs. Once it was a busted-up merry-go-round with all the animals gray and peeled lying in the road as if they'd been shot.
We came to a wide, long road, a highway. Tierney stopped before driving out on to it. It was dense with cars. If I narrowed my eyes I could almost pretend I was looking at a moving highway from a movie. With open eyes I saw piles of rags and bits of broken stuff and nothing moved but the wind.
"You want to drive on that?"
Tierney tapped the gas gauge. From where I sat it looked like we were down to a quarter of tank. "I'm tired of driving in the trees."
"And this is so much better."
"Maybe we can find some fuel."
I sighed and he put the truck in gear. Traveling with Tierney was like not going anywhere; all he did was look for more stuff. But we did travel a little faster on the highway. From time to time he ran over bones, and after the first time I felt them pop under the tires I didn't mind so much.
Late in the afternoon, the sun came out, casting weak spears of light from the clouds. The cars looked rusty and derelict in the sun. As we got closer to Portland, there were more obstacles, and Tierney had to stop and back track around them. I started seeing signs over the old green interstate signs, hand-painted in black. "Canterbury."
"What's Canterbury?"
Tierney eased around a three-car pileup. "Probably a refugee camp."
"Can we go?"
"No."
Toward dusk, Tierney pulled off the highway, turned left and drove onto an overpass. At the top, he stopped, got out and walked the length of the overpass, checking each car and truck. Same thing I'd seen him do all day in the houses. Now it was cars. I sat and watched him, wishing I had something to read.
He stopped to look at one car, opening the driver's side door and leaning inside. He walked to the passenger door and then the back doors, opening each. Finally he waved to me. It was a rusty, nasty old thing on the outside, but inside the upholstery was dry and smelled like plastic. There were no bones.
"German engineering," said Tierney.
"Whatever that means." It was almost better when Tierney didn't talk.
We bedded down for the night in the car, me in the far back curled up under my wool jacket, and Tierney in front. Before we settled in, Tierney took the wingtips, tied their laces together and looped them through his belt. I lay awake wondering how far I'd get out there, barefoot with all the broken glass and old bones. I could have gone any time, but I lay there thinking about it instead.
The next morning I had to do my personal business behind a stalled truck on the overpass. Again in my bare feet. Tierney could do it over the side, another injustice of the world. I walked back to our truck, cold and angry. Day two had begun.
"Where are we going today?"
"Portland."
"Same as yesterday." I climbed into the truck. "But we never seem to get there."
Tierney gave me the wingtips and I rearranged the rags inside before putting them on. Having shoes made a difference. If I had a shot at escaping today, I'd take it.
We drove down into the highway graveyard again, circling and back-tracking and pushing between cars. Occasionally I got out to shift a small object that we couldn't drive over. Sometimes we both had to get out. The closer we got to Portland, the more panic I saw in the arrangement of the derelict cars. People had been ramming each other, driving over the highway dividers and coming down on top of other traffic. A lot of bodies were in these cars.
Once I saw a small sedan with all the windows rolled up tight. A slight steaminess framed two people in the back seat, who were turned around and looking out the window. Their skin, though desiccated as old apples, was still in place. Even their dark prune eyes were open and staring. One of them had a string of pearls. Their skeletonized finger bones still rested on the back of the seat. Although the car's gas flap was open, the car hadn't been looted, not even for shoes.
Tierney honked the horn. What were two more dead bodies? I did my job and we moved on.
Tierney stopped often to look for fuel. Whenever he saw a gas flap that wasn't open, he'd thread a piece of tubing into the tank. Sometimes he would get a few drops of rusty looking fluid in his water jug which he would distill into another jar. I would sit and watch him as the day went on.
"You aren't going to find much," I told him. "And what you find won't be any good."
"Did I ask for your opinion?"
"No, but you could certainly use it."
He made some irritating sound. Good to know he hated me as much as I hated him.
In the afternoon he found one untouched gas flap in the middle of a massive accident. Other scavengers had missed it because you couldn't tell one jumble of steel from the next. Tierney threaded his tube into the tank, sucked on the other end and quickly dunked it into the jug as bright pink fluid began to flow.
Tierney waved me out of the truck. "Look for more containers, Madison. Clean ones."
I grabbed up all the water bottles I could find in the road, carried them back. The gasoline was flowing quickly. "More. Bigger."
"Only two hands!" Even when he had what he wanted he was still rude.
We were close to an on-ramp, so I wandered between the oncoming vehicles, looking inside. Almost every car had coffee cups with lids or water bottles, but I never got used to opening the cars and reaching over dead bodies. The smell after all this time was faint, organic but not altogether unpleasant. Sometimes the act of opening a car door was enough to make a skeleton disarticulate itself all over the road.
I reached for one water bottle and came away with a bony hand still attached. I screamed and threw it away, then stood for a moment catching my breath. That's when I saw buildings on the other side of the ramp, behind a parking lot circled in razor wire. I could just read the lettering on a billboard-sized sign:
"Canterbury Exclusion Unit #0493."
This was it. Although it was cobbled together from a shopping mall, it had an official look. Refugees could be inside, or some form of government. Maybe someone could help me get home.
Tierney was many car lengths back, still hunched over his tube. I started walking quickly. Once off the ramp, I broke into a shuffling run, keeping cars, trees and utility poles between me and Tierney, in case he happened to look up. There was no entrance in the front. Razor wire enclosed a parking lot and nothing moved inside but leaves and bits of paper.
Now that I was closer I saw shacks on the roof of the largest building. Too small for houses, possibly guard towers where soldiers waited all day for people to shoot at. I watched the shacks for a moment, wondering which bothered me more—Tierney catching up with me or the possibility of getting shot. After a few seconds, I hurried on.
The entrance to the place was on the far side of the complex. I was relieved to put the width of the building between myself and Tierney. The doors were steel reinforced and tightly closed. I tried the buzzer first, leaning on it a couple of times and feeling a faint vibration on the other side of the door. After a few seconds, I tried the door knob and it opened with a dry squeak.
Inside was illuminated by a green-tinged glow coming from boxes high on the walls, very faint but enough to cast light in the place. Weak solar was still working, somewhere. The second thing was the shivering scent of old, old decay, as though I'd just opened an abandoned refrigerator.
"Hello?" I called out and was immediately sorry. My voice echoed and swelled, coming back louder than before.
Something, somewhere, slid across the concrete floor.
I froze, fighting the blind impulse to run for the door. Instead I held my breath and listened. After a moment I breathed again, and went forward. I was in some kind of waiting area. Two plastic chairs stood outside a glass-framed office. Inside the office, I saw filing cabinets, a desk of papers, a soda machine that looked--amazingly--plugged in and lit up.
Beyond the office was a long wall bisected with another door, locked from this side with a complicated bolt system. The organic smell was worse close to this door. Undisturbed.
As I turned toward the office, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and heard the dragging sound again.
A person lurched into view, wild-haired, tall but without a beard. He or she—it—dragged one leg as it shambled out of the gloom, arms out stretched. It wore the remnants of a uniform with a bit of needlework over the breast pocket.
"They're all here." The voice was cracked and hazed, but still feminine. "Check the records."
"Who's here?" I asked.
The woman stopped a few feet away from me, but her smell made the rest of the trip. She reeked of death and mildew, something like a dead cow I once found floating in the creek, long dead and stewed in water. I stepped backwards, my body knowing before my brain that no one could smell like that and be sane.
"Want to see?" she asked and began to laugh.
I turned to the door I'd come in, but lost a shoe and stumbled. Like an animal, the woman was on me, reaching for my neck. I wrenched away, pushing her off balance, and ran to the office, locking the door with her on the other side. She raised fists crenellated with yellow fingernails and pounded against the glass.
The glass shivered with each blow and wouldn't hold long. I searched the room for a weapon, turning out desk drawers and going through cabinets. There was nothing but dust and old papers, and one small thing made of plastic and metal. It fit in the palm of my hand, a thing with four opposing teeth encased in a rigid plastic grip, like the mouth of a snake. When I squeezed it, the teeth came together, making a small clacking sound. I didn't know what it was supposed to do, and it wasn't much use now, but at that moment it was all I had.
The creature hurled a chair through the window, and the glass exploded into the room, sending shards flying across the desk. The woman climbed through the window, over the spears of glass still jutting from the window frame. Her thigh hooked a shard and the tip plunged into her. She kicked herself free and came on. I pushed the chair between us, she swept it aside. I grabbed an old keyboard and thwacked the side of her head. As she reeled, I caught her lower lip between the teeth of the little tool I'd found.
The creature howled from the pain and shook her head, shaking me with it. I felt blood and warm breath on my hand. Was she Demented? Or just crazy? I squeezed harder, released the tool and took another bite on the creature's cheek. She grabbed for my neck, nails tangling in my hair.
And then a gunshot rang out. The creature exhaled once and dropped to the floor, my tool still in her flesh. Tierney stood in the other side of the window, holding Dad's gun.
"Did she bite you?"
"I bit her." I bent down and retrieved my little tool, which I was now oddly fond of. "She was crazy, not Demented. You didn't have to blast her."
"Let me see that." He took my tool. "A staple remover. I will say this, you have your moments."
In the faint glow, I could read the name on her breast pocket. Denise. She wore a pair of decent-looking boots.
"My size." I removed the boots, gagging at the warm, gassy odor. Tierney reached for them but I held on, knotting the laces together. "Oh, no, you don't. These are mine. I earned them. What is this place?"
"What the sign says. An exclusionary unit. Want to see?" He went to the inner door I'd seen earlier. He shifted the bolts and pulled it wide, spilling a little of our green light into the darkness. He propped open the door with a little metal foot attached to the lower edge of the door. "Take a good look, Madison."
I got up reluctantly and walked over. The first thing I saw was metal prison bars reaching from the floor up into the darkness above. On the other side of the bars, where the light barely reached, I saw bones. I had to look for a long time to be certain of what I was seeing. I'd seen bones before but never had I seen so many. It was a sea of bones and tangled cloth, four or five feet thick and crowded against the bars. I saw hundreds of skulls, some still covered with tufts of hair, and I saw long bones and rib cages, thousands and thousands of them. At our feet, millions of tiny bones were scattered on the floor like broken beads, as though these people had died reaching through the bars.
"Demented," said Tierney. "There are thousands of units like this all over the country. Every city had them. There were so many infected that managing the disease overwhelmed the hospitals, and this was all we could do. Forty percent of the population was symptomatic in the first year. Who knows how many since? We no longer have any way of tracking it."
I pictured the Demented crushed in here, trampled underfoot, all of them finally dying as close to the door as possible. Was it any more or less humane than shooting them on sight or wrapping them in concertina wire until they cut themselves to bits?
"I don't remember much about Before," I said. "No one talks about it."
"Can you see why?" He let the door fall shut. "It's enough to dream about it every night."
Tierney went to search the office, stepping over Denise like so much trash. I went outside where it was cool and smelled of rain. June 23rd by my reckoning. Summer was still a month away. I looked at gray buildings with broken signs, loot spilled out the doors and left to blow away. In a few minutes I got my breathing under control, a few minutes after that the shaking stopped.
When he came out, Tierney handed me a can of soda. I took it and felt the tension in the metal sides. It was still cold. I couldn't remember the last time I had one. Tierney worked the ring for me and the can popped, releasing a mist of sparkles. I drank until the fizz hurt my mouth.
"It's wonderful." I passed him the can.
"The taste that beats the others cold." He took a small sip and passed it back. "Might be the last one in the world."
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Monday, March 2, 2009
4. Madison On the Road
This has been a long week, and I'm late posting this chapter. I sold a short story to Spinetingler Magazine this week. The editor was incredibly nice about the story, and it reminded me how much I like to write (and sell) short stories. They can be little puzzles, satisfying to play with, pretty to hold. Anyway, I started writing a new one immediately about an alcoholic paranormal house inspector. An idea just begging to be written, right? So I drifted on Chapter Four because I knew the edits would be difficult. I wanted to change the tone, develop Madison's reaction to her father's death and explore Tierney's reasons for dragging her off on an adventure. He doesn't see her as anything but a troublesome kid at this point. Concurrently, I'm getting Chapter Eleven ready for my critique group next weekend. This is where he begins to see her as something more. I enjoyed playing Before and After with these two chapters. Maybe "enjoy" is the wrong word. I'm struggling with rewrites, and not just with the novel. I edited a short story recently and a friend said, "Oh, I finally see what you mean!" I had been dicking around with this thing for six months, and he'd read it three other times. I have to wonder if there's something blocking my blood-brain barrier that I can't make the story arc clearer in earlier drafts. The weather today is very pretty. Wasn't it supposed to rain?
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Chapter Four
Jayden was screaming, a grinding keen that rose above the random gunfire and revving engines like a serenade to the end of the world. George struggled to his feet, wiped the blood off his bald skull, and made his way to her. As the soldiers swarmed Pinkus's body, I saw the two of them hurrying across the lawn to their house.
Pinkus's men had broken ranks and scattered. Several of them were stumbling down the center of the road, guns abandoned. Infected. Dad always said it happened in the blink of an eye. As I watched, one of their own men lifted a rifle and fired, paused, fired again. The Demented soldiers dropped, one by one.
I used the hem of my dress to wipe the blood off Dad's face and closed his eyes. I felt nothing about having just killed a man. My very first. I was furious at Dad. What lunatic makes shooting a Demented woman his last living act? I hated the way Dad had been hell-bent on destroying Dims, without even stopping to consider whether he was right to do it.
First Mom, now Dad. Even if he was wrong, he shouldn't have died like this, so far from home. His body needed to layed out properly. He needed to be buried. I looked around for help, but the fighting had moved down the street and I was for the moment all alone.
Dad was dead. He shouldn't be dead.
I heard an engine and I looked up to see a chopped-up truck with a gun in the back hurtling toward me. It screeched to stop three feet from Dad, and a man leaned out the driver's side window. It was Tierney.
"Fifty soldiers are headed this way right now, Madison. You need to come with me. "
"My father's dead."
"I know. I'm sorry." He winced. "There's nothing we can do for him now."
"I'm not leaving him in the middle of the street! People won't know where he is."
"He'd want—" Tierney sighed and pushed open the truck door. Already I could hear rumbling engines in the distance. "All right. Take his feet."
Tierney placed his arms under Dad's shoulders and I grasped his ankles. Together we dragged him to the nearest sidewalk, Dad's head lolling on the ground.
"Thanks. My sister's house is right over there."
"This is far enough. Come on, Madison." The engines were close, probably one street over. Tierney held open the truck door.
I looked at Dad, lying among last fall's wet leaves, his shooting hand on his chest. My eyes were warm and prickly.
Tierney reached out and grasped the back of my neck, pushing me toward the truck. "Cry later."
I climbed over to the passenger's side. The engine thrummed and throbbed like a winded horse. I couldn't remember being in a truck that was on before. Tierney pushed my blood-soaked skirts off his seat and slammed the door. "You're a mess. You better not be infected."
He did something with a lever and the truck lurched forward. Butterflies exploded in my stomach. "You're going too fast!"
"Shut up!"
I tried to see Dad one last time, but he was already out of sight. As we passed Jayden's house, smoke was pouring out the front door and flames were shooting through the roof. Pinkus's body was gone. I hoped Jayden and George got the kids out in time.
"My boots are in there," I said. "My book too."
"Gone now." Gunfire burst behind us, one shot pinging our tail gate. Tierney grabbed my hair, pressing my head to the seat. "And stay there."
He reefed furiously on the wheel and floored the gas. "Okay, is there any way out of this town?"
"Where are we?" From the floor of the truck, all I could see was the torn seat filled with little crumbs of foam rubber.
Screeching tires and more gunfire. Tierney stomped on a pedal so hard his leg was straight. I sat up in time to see a huge damn thing, a truck or something, bearing down on us.
"Yow!" Tierney tore around a car barricade, shaving paint off both sides of our truck.
"Left, left, left!" I said. "Now straight."
We dove down a hill that was so steep my butterflies got butterflies. At the bottom, he swerved toward the river and floored it. He cranked the wheel right, more screeching tires. Suddenly a bridge loomed over our heads. We bounced over small chunks of concrete that had fallen onto the road and I looked up to see white sections of sky in the gaps where the concrete chunks had once been.
I saw Tierney measure the distance up the ramp to the top of the span. The nasty big truck was on our tail again.
"No," I said. "We're not. . . We can't. . . No one uses that bridge!"
"We're dead already, aren't we?" Tierney stepped on the pedal and the truck almost lifted off the road. "Or at least you are."
Pinkus. "Good point."
At the top of the ramp, Tierney cut our speed to edge around a car barricade. We passed within inches of a totem pole of skulls. Someone's red hair bleached almost pink caressed my side view mirror. Beyond the barricade, more random cars dotted the road, but those looked like they'd stopped functioning while their occupants were trying to get somewhere. Doors and trunks stood open, looted in the years since the bad thing happened that made all the cars stop.
I heard the massive stuttering of the big truck engine as it pushed its way through the barricade. Cars teetered and fell, glancing off the truck as it continued up the ramp after us.
"Hang on," said Tierney.
Up the ramp and onto the bridge. I'd never been so far off the ground in my life. On our right side, the river was a low-bellied snake creeping into a gray landscape. On the left, I saw Oregon City cloaked in smoke and crowned by concrete spears of another bridge that had long since crumbled away.
Tierney zigged and zagged across the roadway, avoiding cars, and other stuff—televisions, furniture, piles of laundry that might be skeletons. This had to be what flying felt like. I reached for the door handle, the dashboard, anything to keep me from bouncing out of the truck.
At mid-span, Tierney stepped on the brakes and we came to a stop just before the road fell out from under us. For the next thirty feet there was nothing but a wicker basket of road and empty air, bisected by steel beams. I saw the river churning between the holes in the bridge.
Behind us, the big truck kept coming.
"We're going to fall! We have to go back."
"Right." To my horror, Tierney threw our truck into reverse, driving backward the way we'd come. Toward the bigger truck. I watched us getting too close, within shooting range. Guys standing on the truck bed raised their guns. I counted ten of them. At the last possible second, Tierney threw the truck forward, aiming for the left side of the bridge, going faster than ever. The broken road yawned in front of us and I screamed.
As we breached the hole, I saw what Tierney had seen—a slender ledge of asphalt, lacy and insubstantial but just wide enough to hold us. Cutting sparks off the side of the truck, the ledge crumbling behind us, we flew.
"I love this truck!" shouted Tierney.
We touched down on the other side and I whirled around to see the big truck braking at the edge of the hole, blue smoke boiling from its wheels. It almost stopped. Then as if a tailwind had come up, the front wheels rolled over the edge and rested for a moment in the netting of exposed steel beams, before the metal yielded like tired rope and the truck began to fall, surging and bucking. Some guys jumped clear, others didn't. The truck, sections of bridge and people tumbled in a mass toward the water.
Under us, the entire bridge shook. Tierney struggled to hold the wheel and keep us from hurtling into the railing. We sideswiped a refrigerator. Suddenly I saw tree branches in the road and Tierney eased to a stop. We were on the other side of the river.
We sat breathing hard. Tierney slowly unwrapped his fingers from the wheel. I looked back toward the river, trying to catch a glimpse of what had happened to the big truck, but trees blocked the view.
We were in a town, on a highway. It had once been only minutes from Oregon City by the bridge, but now it might as well be on the moon. Trees had been falling over the roads for years and no one had logged them out, making the highway impassable from both direction. If anyone had ever lived here, they were all gone now.
For the next hour, Tierney and I took turns hauling branches off the road. Sometimes we could drive forward a mile or so, other times peeling off one set of branches only revealed a denser nest beyond. Mostly we had no choice but to turn around and try another route.
The terrain was steep and dotted by houses that had been mounted on posts driven into the hillside. Most had collapsed, belching boards and wet carpeting down the slopes. The houses which still stood creaked and swayed in the breeze, ready to let go at any moment.
Tierney worked his way higher and higher on the ridge until he found a road that followed the crest through land that had once been farmed. Squared-off orchards and the occasional house could still be seen amongst forests of saplings.
Finally he found a place he liked, a house and barn set off the road. Both structures were still standing, though the house had a limb lying across the roof. Grass and shrubs grew three feet tall in the front yard and the driveway had a thin smoke of cottonwood fluff over it. No tracks in the fluff. Tierney pulled over, turned off the engine. We sat and watched the place for a while.
"Anyone left around here heard the truck and knows where we are," I pointed out. It was a lonely place but not sad, not like the housing development filled with old bones in Oregon City. This place looked the way our valley would have looked if we'd all died ten years ago. Empty and left to itself.
"Do you have to argue every point with me?"
"I'm trying to be helpful."
"Well, you're not."
After a few more irritating minutes when absolutely nothing moved, Tierney started the engine and guided the truck through the field and behind the barn, leaving the house's yard and driveway undisturbed. We climbed out.
"I'll check the barn. Stay here."
"The hell I'll stay here."
"Madison—"
I gave him a look—you aren't my father. He sighed and started out, edging toward the barn door. I followed more gingerly, my feet sore from hauling branches.
Inside, the barn was dark and dusty and smelled of animals. I wandered around and looked at stuff while Tierney climbed the hay loft. There wasn't much. The feed grain was gone, the animal fodder (must have been cows) was so old and dry it looked like formed dust. I saw a wooden hay scale and a broken hoe handle. Not much else.
"Nothing," said Tierney when he came down.
"No Dims?"
Tierney gave me a look—don't push me.
We went to the house after checking a garden shed and pump house. The back porch smelled of soap and apples, and the first thing I saw was an old wringer-washer on the floor, something I'd wanted for years. It had a hand crank and didn't need electricity. With the truck, we could get it home easily.
Newspapers and broken glass covered the floor. Tierney booted the glass aside for me as he went. Looters had been here. There wasn't a house standing that hadn't been looted down to the floor boards in the last ten years. The cupboards hung open on broken hinges, the refrigerator shelves and ice cube trays were cast around the room. Tierney went through it all systematically, sifting and sorting but not finding much except a single old spoon.
I turned on the faucet and got rust. Dead mouse in the sink.
The house must have been owned by an old person. The living room furniture had the kind of scratchy upholstery that inspired women to crochet doilies. I counted twenty doilies in all. Even the looters hadn't bothered with this stuff, although I would have taken the rag rug.
Upstairs were two bedrooms. The tree branch had punctured the roof in the larger of the two rooms, creating a perilous maze of branches, dirt, rain-rotted wallboard and small scurrying animals. The looters had probably seen this room and decided the whole upstairs was a loss. The other room was undisturbed, the bed neatly made. The closet was stuffed with winter clothes, and had a funny chemical smell.
"Mothballs," said Tierney.
Together we examined the coats, sweaters and suits. Both men and women's things, all with buttons and zippers that actually worked. Tierney took some shirts and left the rest. I needed something to wear that wasn't blood-soaked (don't think about Dad) and finally settled on a man's trousers and blue shirt. I found a red reindeer sweater with shiny metal bits, the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. But a sweater like that could be seen for miles, and there was no way I could take it with me. I folded it carefully and tucked in the far back of the closet, in case I ever got back here. I set aside some wool jackets and pillows aside to take with me.
I dropped my dress on the floor and put on my new things. I used a blue sash to belt up the trousers, then tied the loose ends of the shirt around my waist. I found a pair of men's wingtip shoes in the closet and dragged them out. No one left shoes behind.
Tierney waited for me on the back porch with a bucket of water. He passed me a battered metal drinking cup.
"Found the well. Thought you might want to. . . the blood and everything."
"Thank you." I drank and then plunged my hands into the bucket. I dried myself with one of the wool coats and when I was done, he dropped four strawberries into my hand, nice big ones. I fell on them, suddenly starved. They were sweet and juicy and I ate them, stems and all. "Oh, those are good."
"Thought we'd sleep in the hay loft," he said.
"Okay. I found some pillows." My throat tightened up like a string purse. I was about to spend the night with a complete male stranger and all I could say was okay, I found some pillows?
"Tomorrow we're going to need food and water, so we'll get an early start."
"We should be back to the valley by afternoon. I don't mind fasting until then. Besides, there might be more berries around here."
"Madison." Long silence. "We're not going back to the valley."
"Oh, yes, we are." I glared at him. "We have to get back to the valley as soon as possible."
"Not happening." Perfectly calm, he took the pillows out of my arms and stepped off the porch, heading for the barn.
"You have some place else to go? Now that you have a truck and a gun?" I slipped my feet into the wingtips and clumped after him. "And where would that be, anyway?"
When I got inside, I heard Tierney walking around in the hayloft overhead. He leaned over the ledge and said, "As far away from Pinkus as possible."
"Pinkus is dead." I removed the shoes, which were hopelessly big and slippery on my feet. It was evening. The sun was down and the cold damp air of spring was rising from the ground. I hoped someone had found Dad and brought him inside. I hoped Jayden and the girls were all right.
Tierney climbed down the ladder. "You can go up now."
"Just let me go home, Tierney. Swear to god, I will be no further trouble to you."
He sighed. I couldn't see his face in the gray light, but I could imagine his squint eyed look of exasperation. "I wish I could but it's just not possible."
"You can't make me go with you. You don't own me."
He reached down and grabbed the wingtips. "Then I'll own these."
"Give them back!"
He turned around and walked toward the loft. "Come along, Madison."
"My father died today!" I yelled after him. "He was a good man. He gave you a job and you left him dead in the street!"
"Are we telling the truth tonight, Madison?" He turned, his voice harsh. "Here's the truth. Your father is the only reason I came back for you at all. There's a war going on right now because you murdered the most powerful man for two hundred miles. You think your family wants to see you now? Their only chance of surviving this mess is if they never see you again. Think about someone else for once."
My eyes stung. I made my way to the ladder and reached for the first rung. My hands grasped the wood without strength, like meat. I stood there, dumb and useless, too tired to fight anymore. He was right—the whole thing wouldn't have happened if I had done what Dad wanted from the beginning.
"Madison." I heard his leather coat creak very close to me. "That was good shooting. You saved a man's life."
"The wrong man." I swallowed, tamping the lump in my throat, and climbed the ladder to the loft. Tierney had scraped the last bunches of hay into two separate mounds. I took the one closest to the cobweb-draped window and bundled under the wool coat. Beneath my head was the faint clean linen scent of the pillow. Someone had washed this pillowcase long ago, before there was any Gant or Pinkus.
Tierney followed a few minutes later. "You all right?"
"Sure, never better." Damned if I let Tierney know how I felt. Damned if I ever forgot the hurt that filled my body as if every bone had been crushed. The migrant was right about one thing—cry later.
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Chapter Four
Jayden was screaming, a grinding keen that rose above the random gunfire and revving engines like a serenade to the end of the world. George struggled to his feet, wiped the blood off his bald skull, and made his way to her. As the soldiers swarmed Pinkus's body, I saw the two of them hurrying across the lawn to their house.
Pinkus's men had broken ranks and scattered. Several of them were stumbling down the center of the road, guns abandoned. Infected. Dad always said it happened in the blink of an eye. As I watched, one of their own men lifted a rifle and fired, paused, fired again. The Demented soldiers dropped, one by one.
I used the hem of my dress to wipe the blood off Dad's face and closed his eyes. I felt nothing about having just killed a man. My very first. I was furious at Dad. What lunatic makes shooting a Demented woman his last living act? I hated the way Dad had been hell-bent on destroying Dims, without even stopping to consider whether he was right to do it.
First Mom, now Dad. Even if he was wrong, he shouldn't have died like this, so far from home. His body needed to layed out properly. He needed to be buried. I looked around for help, but the fighting had moved down the street and I was for the moment all alone.
Dad was dead. He shouldn't be dead.
I heard an engine and I looked up to see a chopped-up truck with a gun in the back hurtling toward me. It screeched to stop three feet from Dad, and a man leaned out the driver's side window. It was Tierney.
"Fifty soldiers are headed this way right now, Madison. You need to come with me. "
"My father's dead."
"I know. I'm sorry." He winced. "There's nothing we can do for him now."
"I'm not leaving him in the middle of the street! People won't know where he is."
"He'd want—" Tierney sighed and pushed open the truck door. Already I could hear rumbling engines in the distance. "All right. Take his feet."
Tierney placed his arms under Dad's shoulders and I grasped his ankles. Together we dragged him to the nearest sidewalk, Dad's head lolling on the ground.
"Thanks. My sister's house is right over there."
"This is far enough. Come on, Madison." The engines were close, probably one street over. Tierney held open the truck door.
I looked at Dad, lying among last fall's wet leaves, his shooting hand on his chest. My eyes were warm and prickly.
Tierney reached out and grasped the back of my neck, pushing me toward the truck. "Cry later."
I climbed over to the passenger's side. The engine thrummed and throbbed like a winded horse. I couldn't remember being in a truck that was on before. Tierney pushed my blood-soaked skirts off his seat and slammed the door. "You're a mess. You better not be infected."
He did something with a lever and the truck lurched forward. Butterflies exploded in my stomach. "You're going too fast!"
"Shut up!"
I tried to see Dad one last time, but he was already out of sight. As we passed Jayden's house, smoke was pouring out the front door and flames were shooting through the roof. Pinkus's body was gone. I hoped Jayden and George got the kids out in time.
"My boots are in there," I said. "My book too."
"Gone now." Gunfire burst behind us, one shot pinging our tail gate. Tierney grabbed my hair, pressing my head to the seat. "And stay there."
He reefed furiously on the wheel and floored the gas. "Okay, is there any way out of this town?"
"Where are we?" From the floor of the truck, all I could see was the torn seat filled with little crumbs of foam rubber.
Screeching tires and more gunfire. Tierney stomped on a pedal so hard his leg was straight. I sat up in time to see a huge damn thing, a truck or something, bearing down on us.
"Yow!" Tierney tore around a car barricade, shaving paint off both sides of our truck.
"Left, left, left!" I said. "Now straight."
We dove down a hill that was so steep my butterflies got butterflies. At the bottom, he swerved toward the river and floored it. He cranked the wheel right, more screeching tires. Suddenly a bridge loomed over our heads. We bounced over small chunks of concrete that had fallen onto the road and I looked up to see white sections of sky in the gaps where the concrete chunks had once been.
I saw Tierney measure the distance up the ramp to the top of the span. The nasty big truck was on our tail again.
"No," I said. "We're not. . . We can't. . . No one uses that bridge!"
"We're dead already, aren't we?" Tierney stepped on the pedal and the truck almost lifted off the road. "Or at least you are."
Pinkus. "Good point."
At the top of the ramp, Tierney cut our speed to edge around a car barricade. We passed within inches of a totem pole of skulls. Someone's red hair bleached almost pink caressed my side view mirror. Beyond the barricade, more random cars dotted the road, but those looked like they'd stopped functioning while their occupants were trying to get somewhere. Doors and trunks stood open, looted in the years since the bad thing happened that made all the cars stop.
I heard the massive stuttering of the big truck engine as it pushed its way through the barricade. Cars teetered and fell, glancing off the truck as it continued up the ramp after us.
"Hang on," said Tierney.
Up the ramp and onto the bridge. I'd never been so far off the ground in my life. On our right side, the river was a low-bellied snake creeping into a gray landscape. On the left, I saw Oregon City cloaked in smoke and crowned by concrete spears of another bridge that had long since crumbled away.
Tierney zigged and zagged across the roadway, avoiding cars, and other stuff—televisions, furniture, piles of laundry that might be skeletons. This had to be what flying felt like. I reached for the door handle, the dashboard, anything to keep me from bouncing out of the truck.
At mid-span, Tierney stepped on the brakes and we came to a stop just before the road fell out from under us. For the next thirty feet there was nothing but a wicker basket of road and empty air, bisected by steel beams. I saw the river churning between the holes in the bridge.
Behind us, the big truck kept coming.
"We're going to fall! We have to go back."
"Right." To my horror, Tierney threw our truck into reverse, driving backward the way we'd come. Toward the bigger truck. I watched us getting too close, within shooting range. Guys standing on the truck bed raised their guns. I counted ten of them. At the last possible second, Tierney threw the truck forward, aiming for the left side of the bridge, going faster than ever. The broken road yawned in front of us and I screamed.
As we breached the hole, I saw what Tierney had seen—a slender ledge of asphalt, lacy and insubstantial but just wide enough to hold us. Cutting sparks off the side of the truck, the ledge crumbling behind us, we flew.
"I love this truck!" shouted Tierney.
We touched down on the other side and I whirled around to see the big truck braking at the edge of the hole, blue smoke boiling from its wheels. It almost stopped. Then as if a tailwind had come up, the front wheels rolled over the edge and rested for a moment in the netting of exposed steel beams, before the metal yielded like tired rope and the truck began to fall, surging and bucking. Some guys jumped clear, others didn't. The truck, sections of bridge and people tumbled in a mass toward the water.
Under us, the entire bridge shook. Tierney struggled to hold the wheel and keep us from hurtling into the railing. We sideswiped a refrigerator. Suddenly I saw tree branches in the road and Tierney eased to a stop. We were on the other side of the river.
We sat breathing hard. Tierney slowly unwrapped his fingers from the wheel. I looked back toward the river, trying to catch a glimpse of what had happened to the big truck, but trees blocked the view.
We were in a town, on a highway. It had once been only minutes from Oregon City by the bridge, but now it might as well be on the moon. Trees had been falling over the roads for years and no one had logged them out, making the highway impassable from both direction. If anyone had ever lived here, they were all gone now.
For the next hour, Tierney and I took turns hauling branches off the road. Sometimes we could drive forward a mile or so, other times peeling off one set of branches only revealed a denser nest beyond. Mostly we had no choice but to turn around and try another route.
The terrain was steep and dotted by houses that had been mounted on posts driven into the hillside. Most had collapsed, belching boards and wet carpeting down the slopes. The houses which still stood creaked and swayed in the breeze, ready to let go at any moment.
Tierney worked his way higher and higher on the ridge until he found a road that followed the crest through land that had once been farmed. Squared-off orchards and the occasional house could still be seen amongst forests of saplings.
Finally he found a place he liked, a house and barn set off the road. Both structures were still standing, though the house had a limb lying across the roof. Grass and shrubs grew three feet tall in the front yard and the driveway had a thin smoke of cottonwood fluff over it. No tracks in the fluff. Tierney pulled over, turned off the engine. We sat and watched the place for a while.
"Anyone left around here heard the truck and knows where we are," I pointed out. It was a lonely place but not sad, not like the housing development filled with old bones in Oregon City. This place looked the way our valley would have looked if we'd all died ten years ago. Empty and left to itself.
"Do you have to argue every point with me?"
"I'm trying to be helpful."
"Well, you're not."
After a few more irritating minutes when absolutely nothing moved, Tierney started the engine and guided the truck through the field and behind the barn, leaving the house's yard and driveway undisturbed. We climbed out.
"I'll check the barn. Stay here."
"The hell I'll stay here."
"Madison—"
I gave him a look—you aren't my father. He sighed and started out, edging toward the barn door. I followed more gingerly, my feet sore from hauling branches.
Inside, the barn was dark and dusty and smelled of animals. I wandered around and looked at stuff while Tierney climbed the hay loft. There wasn't much. The feed grain was gone, the animal fodder (must have been cows) was so old and dry it looked like formed dust. I saw a wooden hay scale and a broken hoe handle. Not much else.
"Nothing," said Tierney when he came down.
"No Dims?"
Tierney gave me a look—don't push me.
We went to the house after checking a garden shed and pump house. The back porch smelled of soap and apples, and the first thing I saw was an old wringer-washer on the floor, something I'd wanted for years. It had a hand crank and didn't need electricity. With the truck, we could get it home easily.
Newspapers and broken glass covered the floor. Tierney booted the glass aside for me as he went. Looters had been here. There wasn't a house standing that hadn't been looted down to the floor boards in the last ten years. The cupboards hung open on broken hinges, the refrigerator shelves and ice cube trays were cast around the room. Tierney went through it all systematically, sifting and sorting but not finding much except a single old spoon.
I turned on the faucet and got rust. Dead mouse in the sink.
The house must have been owned by an old person. The living room furniture had the kind of scratchy upholstery that inspired women to crochet doilies. I counted twenty doilies in all. Even the looters hadn't bothered with this stuff, although I would have taken the rag rug.
Upstairs were two bedrooms. The tree branch had punctured the roof in the larger of the two rooms, creating a perilous maze of branches, dirt, rain-rotted wallboard and small scurrying animals. The looters had probably seen this room and decided the whole upstairs was a loss. The other room was undisturbed, the bed neatly made. The closet was stuffed with winter clothes, and had a funny chemical smell.
"Mothballs," said Tierney.
Together we examined the coats, sweaters and suits. Both men and women's things, all with buttons and zippers that actually worked. Tierney took some shirts and left the rest. I needed something to wear that wasn't blood-soaked (don't think about Dad) and finally settled on a man's trousers and blue shirt. I found a red reindeer sweater with shiny metal bits, the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. But a sweater like that could be seen for miles, and there was no way I could take it with me. I folded it carefully and tucked in the far back of the closet, in case I ever got back here. I set aside some wool jackets and pillows aside to take with me.
I dropped my dress on the floor and put on my new things. I used a blue sash to belt up the trousers, then tied the loose ends of the shirt around my waist. I found a pair of men's wingtip shoes in the closet and dragged them out. No one left shoes behind.
Tierney waited for me on the back porch with a bucket of water. He passed me a battered metal drinking cup.
"Found the well. Thought you might want to. . . the blood and everything."
"Thank you." I drank and then plunged my hands into the bucket. I dried myself with one of the wool coats and when I was done, he dropped four strawberries into my hand, nice big ones. I fell on them, suddenly starved. They were sweet and juicy and I ate them, stems and all. "Oh, those are good."
"Thought we'd sleep in the hay loft," he said.
"Okay. I found some pillows." My throat tightened up like a string purse. I was about to spend the night with a complete male stranger and all I could say was okay, I found some pillows?
"Tomorrow we're going to need food and water, so we'll get an early start."
"We should be back to the valley by afternoon. I don't mind fasting until then. Besides, there might be more berries around here."
"Madison." Long silence. "We're not going back to the valley."
"Oh, yes, we are." I glared at him. "We have to get back to the valley as soon as possible."
"Not happening." Perfectly calm, he took the pillows out of my arms and stepped off the porch, heading for the barn.
"You have some place else to go? Now that you have a truck and a gun?" I slipped my feet into the wingtips and clumped after him. "And where would that be, anyway?"
When I got inside, I heard Tierney walking around in the hayloft overhead. He leaned over the ledge and said, "As far away from Pinkus as possible."
"Pinkus is dead." I removed the shoes, which were hopelessly big and slippery on my feet. It was evening. The sun was down and the cold damp air of spring was rising from the ground. I hoped someone had found Dad and brought him inside. I hoped Jayden and the girls were all right.
Tierney climbed down the ladder. "You can go up now."
"Just let me go home, Tierney. Swear to god, I will be no further trouble to you."
He sighed. I couldn't see his face in the gray light, but I could imagine his squint eyed look of exasperation. "I wish I could but it's just not possible."
"You can't make me go with you. You don't own me."
He reached down and grabbed the wingtips. "Then I'll own these."
"Give them back!"
He turned around and walked toward the loft. "Come along, Madison."
"My father died today!" I yelled after him. "He was a good man. He gave you a job and you left him dead in the street!"
"Are we telling the truth tonight, Madison?" He turned, his voice harsh. "Here's the truth. Your father is the only reason I came back for you at all. There's a war going on right now because you murdered the most powerful man for two hundred miles. You think your family wants to see you now? Their only chance of surviving this mess is if they never see you again. Think about someone else for once."
My eyes stung. I made my way to the ladder and reached for the first rung. My hands grasped the wood without strength, like meat. I stood there, dumb and useless, too tired to fight anymore. He was right—the whole thing wouldn't have happened if I had done what Dad wanted from the beginning.
"Madison." I heard his leather coat creak very close to me. "That was good shooting. You saved a man's life."
"The wrong man." I swallowed, tamping the lump in my throat, and climbed the ladder to the loft. Tierney had scraped the last bunches of hay into two separate mounds. I took the one closest to the cobweb-draped window and bundled under the wool coat. Beneath my head was the faint clean linen scent of the pillow. Someone had washed this pillowcase long ago, before there was any Gant or Pinkus.
Tierney followed a few minutes later. "You all right?"
"Sure, never better." Damned if I let Tierney know how I felt. Damned if I ever forgot the hurt that filled my body as if every bone had been crushed. The migrant was right about one thing—cry later.
Friday, February 20, 2009
3. Chaos in OC
I worked on Chapter Three obsessively this week. The next few chapters all seem to live in a gray area between interesting writing and plot-building action. The story is most yoked to its genre predecessors when I have to make characters do things that I don't, in the real world, know anything about. Read it and see what I mean. I asked my daughter to take some photos of Oregon City as it is now, and I'll try to get those uploaded soon. The land that time forgot, our OC. A great place for the apocalypse. The sun is shining though it is still cold and still winter, and I haven't had enough coffee. More editing after I caffeinate.
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Chapter Three
Jayden's house was the biggest place in Oregon City. It stood three stories high on the edge of a bluff. From the top floors you could see across the river, and on a clear day, almost as far as Portland.
The bluff was shaped like a folded paper fan, with the ridges rising from the river's edge, where the courthouse and government office buildings stood. Most of these were empty, burned out or flooded. A ninety-foot solar-powered elevator carried people from the bluff to the river. Jayden's husband had it running perfectly, but like everything in this town, no one was allowed to use it because the wrong people might find out there was electricity.
Jayden met us on the front steps wearing a turquoise dress shot with silver threads. She squealed when she saw us, waving an armload of bangles. She looked plump, sleek and well maintained, life in town suiting her down to her little silver slippers. The fact that she was so much like Mom, with her clothes and jewelry, always made me feel uneasy in my own skin.
Jayden had always been Dad's favorite and they hugged a long time, with more squealing on my sister's part. When it was my turn for a hug, she gathered me up in clouds of scent.
"I hope you're looking for a husband, Madison!" Her voice rang like a bell. My cheeks flushed red hot, and I forced myself not to look at Tierney. Though I couldn't imagine why it mattered what he thought about anything.
Jayden continued, oblivious. "You've come to the right place. We're having a very special guest for dinner tonight. Won't that be fun?"
While she sent her servants to unload the cart and take Pilot to the stables, Tierney dropped his pack on the curb and pulled out a book. He handed it to me. "Remember what I said."
I took the book and slipped it under my jacket to examine later, in private. No one had ever given me a book before. "Thanks."
The last I saw of him, he was walking down the hill in the rain, heading north.
Jayden stopped shouting directions to look at Tierney. "Who was that?"
"No one," said Dad. "A migrant. Let's go in."
After coffee and brunch, we left Dad and George in the breakfast room. Jayden took me to my room and tossed an armful of dresses on the bed. "Something will fit, I'm sure. The pink silk would look wonderful with your complexion, Madison."
She fluttered out and down the hall without waiting for my answer. I shut the door, pushed the mounds of pink and blue and yellow onto the floor, and sat on the edge of the bed to look at Tierney's book. The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.
I slept through the afternoon, only waking when Jayden's two daughters came in and bounced on my bed. I slipped the book under my pillow and got up to examine my sister's dresses. My nieces squealed at each dress, demonstrating a preference for sequins, bows and flounces that had to be genetic.
"Doesn't anyone want to wear pants and have adventures anymore?" I asked them.
The girls shook their heads. "Wear the pink one, Aunt Madison!"
I chose one that made me look least idiotic and ripped a handful of fluttery stuff off the bodice in a great shred. The dress fit and didn't look half bad, a long clingy blue thing with lace sleeves. Jayden hadn't provided shoes but I couldn't wear my Danner boots with the dress, so I put on fresh socks and called it good.
"We still get our share of Dims," Jayden's husband, George, was saying as I entered the living room and took a seat on a stiff little settee in the corner. "Why just last week we took out a nest of them down by the river. How many was that, Travis?"
"I believe it was fourteen," said Travis. He sat on the sofa next to Dad, holding a tiny cordial glass in his red fist. "I put down half of them myself."
Jayden's house was full of beautiful things, carpets, crystal, painted screens and scrolled furniture, all of it taken in trade for George's work. When we were kids Jayden used to spend hours decorating the tiny rooms in her doll house. Her life wasn't so different now, the rooms were bigger, that was all.
"My brother here is too modest. You put down ten at least," said George.
"Well, you put down nine."
I cleared my throat. "I thought you said fourteen. Now it's nineteen dead people?"
Across the room Dad scowled at me. "Forgive my daughter, gentlemen."
"Ah, Madison!" Jayden's cheeks were flushed to match her rose colored puff of a dress. "Please say good evening to Mr. Pinkus. I know you've heard about my sister, Mr. Pinkus."
Pinkus? There was Dad looking uncomfortable and George and Travis, both looking starchy. Another man sat before the fireplace, mostly hidden in the wing chair. He leaned forward and I saw Pinkus's familiar, almost colorless blue eyes. He held a cane made of gnarled wood with a gold nugget mounted on top.
"Come here, young lady. Let me get a look at you." I got up and walked to him. He took my hand and held it feverishly tight. I felt spots of sweat on his skin. He was in his sixties, with a gray beard and the pink cheeks of a man who liked his hooch. "So this is the one who gave my nephew the black eye. Quite a shiner, young lady."
"I used a book, sir."
"Resourceful." He tightened his grip on my hand. "Of course we don't have much use for books where I come from. I told my nephew a dozen times to stay away from literate women. Nothing but trouble. But that boy will not be moved. Can't stand in the way of true love, can we gentlemen?" He laughed and bowed his head to Jayden. "And ladies, of course."
I escaped to my corner. The men went on to talk about looters and migrants, but I was busy rubbing my palm on the sofa cushion and didn't pay much attention. It was the same conversation men had whenever they got together. Where were the migrants coming from, what were they saying about conditions in other parts of the country? How well armed were the looters? What happened to them when they were caught?
Yet there was an undercurrent in the room, and it was more than just Pinkus's remark about true love, nauseating as that was. Jayden kept hitting her little crystal glass of spirits. Pinkus repositioned his chair to look at me, as though unwilling to let me out of his sight. George's hand had a slight tremor when he reached for the decanter. Dad watched every glance, his drink untouched.
The conversation changed. George tapped his fingers on his belly and talked about how none of the solar panels in Oregon City worked anymore. "Oregon City never gets enough sun. I keep trying, Mr. Pinkus, but I just can't make it work with all this rain. Don't know how we'll survive another winter."
I'd heard George make this statement many times over the years, the same woeful look on his face. But this room alone had steady electric lights glowing in three lamps and a chandelier. Clearly the solar was working just fine in Oregon City.
Pinkus glanced at the lights, as though he was in on the joke too. "We get enough rain, don't we? I hope you don't have to burn any of this fine furniture for heat, George. Or your wife's lovely gowns."
Jayden jumped up. "I'll see to dinner. Madison, will you help?"
Once the living room doors were closed, she rushed me past two of Pinkus's bodyguards who were stationed next to the front door. "We need to gather some herbs, guys. Won't be a minute!"
I peeled off my socks and followed her out to the front yard in my bare feet. And what I saw almost made me fall over. Six automobiles rumbled at the curb, the lead car a long white limousine. The others were chopped together monsters with guns and grenade launchers mounted to their roofs. I'd never seen so many cars in one place. Soldiers lounged against their rigs, guns at their hips.
For a moment, I couldn't catch my breath.
"Here's the mint, down here. Help me." Jayden pulled me into a crouch next to her. "Happy now? They arrived while you were napping."
"What's going on?"
"It's your bridal party. Or should I say army?" She snapped off a branch of rosemary. "You made quite an impression on Pinkus's nephew."
"Gant?"
"Pinkus is here to get you and he's not going to trade. If you don't go, Pinkus said he'll burn us out, kill Dad and take George." Like Mom, Jayden had a vein of steel deep inside her frivolous self. I saw it now, toughening the lines of her face. She lowered her voice. "It's over, Madison. You're going with him, and you're going to marry Gant. The best thing you can do for us is to go peacefully. Don't make Dad have to protect you. Because he'll die, Madison."
"I'm not marrying Gant."
"You should have thought of that yesterday!" She stood up in a swirl of pink and waved to Pinkus's soldiers. In the house, I pulled on my socks and followed Jayden into the kitchen. As we entered one of the servants gasped and dropped a china gravy boat on the tile floor.
The atmosphere in the kitchen went silent.
"It's all right," said Jayden. "We're going to be fine."
I looked at the hand painted porcelain that had just exploded on the floor, and at the white faces of the cook and two maids. Clearly they thought the situation was a long way from fine.
George stuck his head in the kitchen. "Everything okay, hon?"
"Just fine. Nothing to worry about."
I swept up the broken glass and carried it to the dustbin on the back porch. I looked across the back yard to the stone fence at the edge of the bluff. Beyond that, the sky was golden. The rain was over. Next door, I saw a flash of glass in the office building that had been converted into the Oregon City militia's guard house. Men with guns were scooting along the bluff, positioning themselves behind the fine old houses.
Was Jayden right? Had Pinkus come for me?
All we had--valley or Oregon City--were a few bullets and some farm tools. We survived in the valley because Dad grew vegetables for Pinkus and traded on their past friendship. Oregon City survived because of the inhospitality of the geography. You couldn't assault the bluff from the river and you couldn't come over the hilltop without an army to back you up.
"So you're the young lady who blackened my nephew's eye. . . ."
I hurried back inside, heart racing.
Jayden shooed me toward the living room. "Madison, will you please announce dinner to our guests?"
And I probably would have done it. I was thinking about the frozen smile on my sister's face which looked one or two chips away from falling off, and how George was boring as all hell, but he was a husband, father and an electrician. If I lived here, I'd probably get to like him. I might even learn to tolerate Travis, as long as I didn't have to marry him. These weren't bad people.
But as I passed through the hall, I looked out the rippled glass window and saw a lone figure wobble between two buildings across the street. Her arms were outstretched in the same way Mr. Chandler's had been, all those years ago. She tipped from side to side and as though she couldn't remember how to walk and each step was an effort.
She was small and ragged, no bigger than a child. Her hair was a dirty gray toque and her mouth was open in a perpetual dry hole. She wore a torn skirt and frayed sweater, clothes of the person she'd been before the infection. I couldn't imagine how she'd stumbled through town without someone shooting her full of holes.
I moved without thinking, reaching for the door knob and flying down the porch steps before the bodyguards could react. By now the Demented woman had stepped onto the sidewalk and was headed into the street. Pinkus's guys hadn't seen her yet, but they saw me.
"It's the girl," said one, raising his rifle. "She's doing a runner."
I hurried across the street, holding up my arms. "Don't shoot!"
The Demented woman wobbled into view and the first soldier raised the alarm. "Dim! On the corner. Dim!"
She came toward me, her eyes cloudy. Did they blink? Could they? I choked back sudden fear—I'd never been this close to a Dim before. Even I could see she was completely absent inside her mad skull. Maybe Dad was right; they weren't people anymore.
"Put your guns down!" I turned to face the soldiers, placing my body between the woman and the front line of soldiers, all of whom had their weapons raised.
The stand off lasted a second, probably less. The woman pushed against me, showing more strength than I had thought her capable of. I stumbled out of her way and she continued to wobble across the street. At that moment, Dad stepped off Jayden's lawn, calling my name.
"Madison, stand down!" He walked toward me.
"Stop right there!" shouted a soldier.
Dad took three more steps and a rifle cracked. Dad froze in place. He seemed to hang in the moment, completely still. And then a seep of blood colored his teeth and bubbled through his lips.
"Dad?" I ran forward and got to him as he fell to his knees. I saw blood pulsing inside his coat next to his heart. The infected woman must have kept moving because Dad's eyes tracked her movement behind me. And he raised a handgun I didn't know he had, aiming it over my shoulder. I screamed as he fired.
The woman's head exploded, spraying a wall of blood and tissue behind her into the soldiers' faces. The first line reeled backwards, hands to their faces, sweeping the stuff out of their eyes and mouths. The line behind them peeled away as though the first bunch were already infected.
I looked at Dad but he was gone, slumped to the ground. His eyes were filled with white sky.
"Dad, you son of a bitch," I put my hands on his bloody chest as if there was some way to push the life back into him. "She wasn't going to hurt anyone."
Militia from the guard house filled the street and poured over the lawns, guns out. They prodded Pinkus's unnerved soldiers back toward their vehicles. The men who'd taken the most blood spray in their faces had dropped their weapons and were running away, half crazy or infected.
Above the chaos, I heard Jayden's screaming for George. She stood on the street, half way to Dad, but staring back toward the house. I followed her line of vision and saw George kneeling on the lawn, hands behind his head. Pinkus stood behind him, one hand cradling George's throat, the other pressing a gun to his temple.
"Attention!" shouted Pinkus. The militia stopped in their tracks and it was silent on the street. "All I want is the girl. We have no business with the rest of you."
Dad's gun lay in a pool of blood next to his hand. I palmed it and wiped it on his sleeve. While everyone else was looking at Pinkus, I lifted the gun, sighted, held my breath. I'd trained on this piece and if there was one thing Dad always believed in teaching us, even when school days were over, it was what to do with a gun.
"Now I don't want to hurt your electrician, but unless I get what I want—"
I squeezed the trigger. The blast was huge, keen as an arrow. Pinkus flopped backwards like a slaughtered hog, hand to his throat. George fell in the other direction, free.
All of us valley kids could shoot.
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Chapter Three
Jayden's house was the biggest place in Oregon City. It stood three stories high on the edge of a bluff. From the top floors you could see across the river, and on a clear day, almost as far as Portland.
The bluff was shaped like a folded paper fan, with the ridges rising from the river's edge, where the courthouse and government office buildings stood. Most of these were empty, burned out or flooded. A ninety-foot solar-powered elevator carried people from the bluff to the river. Jayden's husband had it running perfectly, but like everything in this town, no one was allowed to use it because the wrong people might find out there was electricity.
Jayden met us on the front steps wearing a turquoise dress shot with silver threads. She squealed when she saw us, waving an armload of bangles. She looked plump, sleek and well maintained, life in town suiting her down to her little silver slippers. The fact that she was so much like Mom, with her clothes and jewelry, always made me feel uneasy in my own skin.
Jayden had always been Dad's favorite and they hugged a long time, with more squealing on my sister's part. When it was my turn for a hug, she gathered me up in clouds of scent.
"I hope you're looking for a husband, Madison!" Her voice rang like a bell. My cheeks flushed red hot, and I forced myself not to look at Tierney. Though I couldn't imagine why it mattered what he thought about anything.
Jayden continued, oblivious. "You've come to the right place. We're having a very special guest for dinner tonight. Won't that be fun?"
While she sent her servants to unload the cart and take Pilot to the stables, Tierney dropped his pack on the curb and pulled out a book. He handed it to me. "Remember what I said."
I took the book and slipped it under my jacket to examine later, in private. No one had ever given me a book before. "Thanks."
The last I saw of him, he was walking down the hill in the rain, heading north.
Jayden stopped shouting directions to look at Tierney. "Who was that?"
"No one," said Dad. "A migrant. Let's go in."
After coffee and brunch, we left Dad and George in the breakfast room. Jayden took me to my room and tossed an armful of dresses on the bed. "Something will fit, I'm sure. The pink silk would look wonderful with your complexion, Madison."
She fluttered out and down the hall without waiting for my answer. I shut the door, pushed the mounds of pink and blue and yellow onto the floor, and sat on the edge of the bed to look at Tierney's book. The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.
I slept through the afternoon, only waking when Jayden's two daughters came in and bounced on my bed. I slipped the book under my pillow and got up to examine my sister's dresses. My nieces squealed at each dress, demonstrating a preference for sequins, bows and flounces that had to be genetic.
"Doesn't anyone want to wear pants and have adventures anymore?" I asked them.
The girls shook their heads. "Wear the pink one, Aunt Madison!"
I chose one that made me look least idiotic and ripped a handful of fluttery stuff off the bodice in a great shred. The dress fit and didn't look half bad, a long clingy blue thing with lace sleeves. Jayden hadn't provided shoes but I couldn't wear my Danner boots with the dress, so I put on fresh socks and called it good.
"We still get our share of Dims," Jayden's husband, George, was saying as I entered the living room and took a seat on a stiff little settee in the corner. "Why just last week we took out a nest of them down by the river. How many was that, Travis?"
"I believe it was fourteen," said Travis. He sat on the sofa next to Dad, holding a tiny cordial glass in his red fist. "I put down half of them myself."
Jayden's house was full of beautiful things, carpets, crystal, painted screens and scrolled furniture, all of it taken in trade for George's work. When we were kids Jayden used to spend hours decorating the tiny rooms in her doll house. Her life wasn't so different now, the rooms were bigger, that was all.
"My brother here is too modest. You put down ten at least," said George.
"Well, you put down nine."
I cleared my throat. "I thought you said fourteen. Now it's nineteen dead people?"
Across the room Dad scowled at me. "Forgive my daughter, gentlemen."
"Ah, Madison!" Jayden's cheeks were flushed to match her rose colored puff of a dress. "Please say good evening to Mr. Pinkus. I know you've heard about my sister, Mr. Pinkus."
Pinkus? There was Dad looking uncomfortable and George and Travis, both looking starchy. Another man sat before the fireplace, mostly hidden in the wing chair. He leaned forward and I saw Pinkus's familiar, almost colorless blue eyes. He held a cane made of gnarled wood with a gold nugget mounted on top.
"Come here, young lady. Let me get a look at you." I got up and walked to him. He took my hand and held it feverishly tight. I felt spots of sweat on his skin. He was in his sixties, with a gray beard and the pink cheeks of a man who liked his hooch. "So this is the one who gave my nephew the black eye. Quite a shiner, young lady."
"I used a book, sir."
"Resourceful." He tightened his grip on my hand. "Of course we don't have much use for books where I come from. I told my nephew a dozen times to stay away from literate women. Nothing but trouble. But that boy will not be moved. Can't stand in the way of true love, can we gentlemen?" He laughed and bowed his head to Jayden. "And ladies, of course."
I escaped to my corner. The men went on to talk about looters and migrants, but I was busy rubbing my palm on the sofa cushion and didn't pay much attention. It was the same conversation men had whenever they got together. Where were the migrants coming from, what were they saying about conditions in other parts of the country? How well armed were the looters? What happened to them when they were caught?
Yet there was an undercurrent in the room, and it was more than just Pinkus's remark about true love, nauseating as that was. Jayden kept hitting her little crystal glass of spirits. Pinkus repositioned his chair to look at me, as though unwilling to let me out of his sight. George's hand had a slight tremor when he reached for the decanter. Dad watched every glance, his drink untouched.
The conversation changed. George tapped his fingers on his belly and talked about how none of the solar panels in Oregon City worked anymore. "Oregon City never gets enough sun. I keep trying, Mr. Pinkus, but I just can't make it work with all this rain. Don't know how we'll survive another winter."
I'd heard George make this statement many times over the years, the same woeful look on his face. But this room alone had steady electric lights glowing in three lamps and a chandelier. Clearly the solar was working just fine in Oregon City.
Pinkus glanced at the lights, as though he was in on the joke too. "We get enough rain, don't we? I hope you don't have to burn any of this fine furniture for heat, George. Or your wife's lovely gowns."
Jayden jumped up. "I'll see to dinner. Madison, will you help?"
Once the living room doors were closed, she rushed me past two of Pinkus's bodyguards who were stationed next to the front door. "We need to gather some herbs, guys. Won't be a minute!"
I peeled off my socks and followed her out to the front yard in my bare feet. And what I saw almost made me fall over. Six automobiles rumbled at the curb, the lead car a long white limousine. The others were chopped together monsters with guns and grenade launchers mounted to their roofs. I'd never seen so many cars in one place. Soldiers lounged against their rigs, guns at their hips.
For a moment, I couldn't catch my breath.
"Here's the mint, down here. Help me." Jayden pulled me into a crouch next to her. "Happy now? They arrived while you were napping."
"What's going on?"
"It's your bridal party. Or should I say army?" She snapped off a branch of rosemary. "You made quite an impression on Pinkus's nephew."
"Gant?"
"Pinkus is here to get you and he's not going to trade. If you don't go, Pinkus said he'll burn us out, kill Dad and take George." Like Mom, Jayden had a vein of steel deep inside her frivolous self. I saw it now, toughening the lines of her face. She lowered her voice. "It's over, Madison. You're going with him, and you're going to marry Gant. The best thing you can do for us is to go peacefully. Don't make Dad have to protect you. Because he'll die, Madison."
"I'm not marrying Gant."
"You should have thought of that yesterday!" She stood up in a swirl of pink and waved to Pinkus's soldiers. In the house, I pulled on my socks and followed Jayden into the kitchen. As we entered one of the servants gasped and dropped a china gravy boat on the tile floor.
The atmosphere in the kitchen went silent.
"It's all right," said Jayden. "We're going to be fine."
I looked at the hand painted porcelain that had just exploded on the floor, and at the white faces of the cook and two maids. Clearly they thought the situation was a long way from fine.
George stuck his head in the kitchen. "Everything okay, hon?"
"Just fine. Nothing to worry about."
I swept up the broken glass and carried it to the dustbin on the back porch. I looked across the back yard to the stone fence at the edge of the bluff. Beyond that, the sky was golden. The rain was over. Next door, I saw a flash of glass in the office building that had been converted into the Oregon City militia's guard house. Men with guns were scooting along the bluff, positioning themselves behind the fine old houses.
Was Jayden right? Had Pinkus come for me?
All we had--valley or Oregon City--were a few bullets and some farm tools. We survived in the valley because Dad grew vegetables for Pinkus and traded on their past friendship. Oregon City survived because of the inhospitality of the geography. You couldn't assault the bluff from the river and you couldn't come over the hilltop without an army to back you up.
"So you're the young lady who blackened my nephew's eye. . . ."
I hurried back inside, heart racing.
Jayden shooed me toward the living room. "Madison, will you please announce dinner to our guests?"
And I probably would have done it. I was thinking about the frozen smile on my sister's face which looked one or two chips away from falling off, and how George was boring as all hell, but he was a husband, father and an electrician. If I lived here, I'd probably get to like him. I might even learn to tolerate Travis, as long as I didn't have to marry him. These weren't bad people.
But as I passed through the hall, I looked out the rippled glass window and saw a lone figure wobble between two buildings across the street. Her arms were outstretched in the same way Mr. Chandler's had been, all those years ago. She tipped from side to side and as though she couldn't remember how to walk and each step was an effort.
She was small and ragged, no bigger than a child. Her hair was a dirty gray toque and her mouth was open in a perpetual dry hole. She wore a torn skirt and frayed sweater, clothes of the person she'd been before the infection. I couldn't imagine how she'd stumbled through town without someone shooting her full of holes.
I moved without thinking, reaching for the door knob and flying down the porch steps before the bodyguards could react. By now the Demented woman had stepped onto the sidewalk and was headed into the street. Pinkus's guys hadn't seen her yet, but they saw me.
"It's the girl," said one, raising his rifle. "She's doing a runner."
I hurried across the street, holding up my arms. "Don't shoot!"
The Demented woman wobbled into view and the first soldier raised the alarm. "Dim! On the corner. Dim!"
She came toward me, her eyes cloudy. Did they blink? Could they? I choked back sudden fear—I'd never been this close to a Dim before. Even I could see she was completely absent inside her mad skull. Maybe Dad was right; they weren't people anymore.
"Put your guns down!" I turned to face the soldiers, placing my body between the woman and the front line of soldiers, all of whom had their weapons raised.
The stand off lasted a second, probably less. The woman pushed against me, showing more strength than I had thought her capable of. I stumbled out of her way and she continued to wobble across the street. At that moment, Dad stepped off Jayden's lawn, calling my name.
"Madison, stand down!" He walked toward me.
"Stop right there!" shouted a soldier.
Dad took three more steps and a rifle cracked. Dad froze in place. He seemed to hang in the moment, completely still. And then a seep of blood colored his teeth and bubbled through his lips.
"Dad?" I ran forward and got to him as he fell to his knees. I saw blood pulsing inside his coat next to his heart. The infected woman must have kept moving because Dad's eyes tracked her movement behind me. And he raised a handgun I didn't know he had, aiming it over my shoulder. I screamed as he fired.
The woman's head exploded, spraying a wall of blood and tissue behind her into the soldiers' faces. The first line reeled backwards, hands to their faces, sweeping the stuff out of their eyes and mouths. The line behind them peeled away as though the first bunch were already infected.
I looked at Dad but he was gone, slumped to the ground. His eyes were filled with white sky.
"Dad, you son of a bitch," I put my hands on his bloody chest as if there was some way to push the life back into him. "She wasn't going to hurt anyone."
Militia from the guard house filled the street and poured over the lawns, guns out. They prodded Pinkus's unnerved soldiers back toward their vehicles. The men who'd taken the most blood spray in their faces had dropped their weapons and were running away, half crazy or infected.
Above the chaos, I heard Jayden's screaming for George. She stood on the street, half way to Dad, but staring back toward the house. I followed her line of vision and saw George kneeling on the lawn, hands behind his head. Pinkus stood behind him, one hand cradling George's throat, the other pressing a gun to his temple.
"Attention!" shouted Pinkus. The militia stopped in their tracks and it was silent on the street. "All I want is the girl. We have no business with the rest of you."
Dad's gun lay in a pool of blood next to his hand. I palmed it and wiped it on his sleeve. While everyone else was looking at Pinkus, I lifted the gun, sighted, held my breath. I'd trained on this piece and if there was one thing Dad always believed in teaching us, even when school days were over, it was what to do with a gun.
"Now I don't want to hurt your electrician, but unless I get what I want—"
I squeezed the trigger. The blast was huge, keen as an arrow. Pinkus flopped backwards like a slaughtered hog, hand to his throat. George fell in the other direction, free.
All of us valley kids could shoot.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
2. Madison leaves home
This chapter is short. I spent most of the weekend revising Chapter Ten, which really needed it. This one needs work too, considering I could barely read my notes. I may tweak this chapter in situ, or play around with blogging tools, or add more to my disclaimer paragraph (which I'm doing now, talk about procrastination). I was visiting my best friend in Chicago (hey, C!) where the weather was very warm. The break from Oregon's endless cold explains why I got as little done as I did. But then, who knew you could go to Chicago for a vacation paradise? And who knew Oregon could stay this cold for so long? I saw about a thousand geese migrating over my house today and I saw some leaf buds too, but that does not mean it's spring. BTW, howdy to my first follower, a man with a gun who shares more than just a name with Davy Crockett.
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Chapter Two
I awoke in the dark with Dad holding a lantern in my face. "Get up."
"It's not morning." I pulled the blankets over my ears.
"I'm not asking again." He walked out, banging the door. I sat up, shivering in the cold. A sliver of gray light came through a gap in the curtain, but certainly not enough to be called morning. I pulled on jeans and sweaters and went downstairs.
Dad was cleaning his shotgun at the kitchen table and Aunt Margo stood at the stove pouring hot water over coffee grounds. Coffee was one of the things we traded for aggressively. Every year, three pigs were slaughtered for coffee barter. Pinkus had connections in Mexico. Dad was talking about adding another pig to the deal because by September we were using grounds two days in a row. We were all wild about coffee in the valley.
"What's going on?" I asked, getting my cup from the cupboard. "Something happen?"
"I'm taking you to your sister's."
Margo dropped the coffee pot lid. It clanked and crashed against the stove.
I turned to Dad. "The hell you are."
He slid a shell into the gun. No reply.
"Is this about Gant? That wasn't my fault. You were there!"
Margo carried her cup to the table and sat down, folding her hands as if she were about to pray. "You run around here like a wild animal. It's not decent. No wonder men want to—"
"So you're going to marry me off like a crate of vegetables because some jerk touched me?" Not waiting for an answer, I pushed away from the table and watched them scramble to save their coffee.
"Pack your things!" Dad yelled after me.
Upstairs, I flopped on my bed. So it would be Travis. I was going to be an electrician's wife.
Chris and Riley were still sleeping when I threw my bag into the pony cart. I was sorry not to say goodbye. We were seven miles from Oregon City, but the boys only made the trip every few months. I could well be married by the time I saw them again. Cracks of sunlight slanted through the clouds and mist rose like a sigh from the cornfield.
Aunt Margo stood in the screen door and shivered. "At least it's daylight."
"I don't know why we have to leave so early," I said. "Jayden won't even be awake when we get there."
Dad dropped a sack of potatoes into the cart. "I'm not losing a whole day over you, Madison. We're leaving now and that's final."
Tierney walked over from the barn carrying a gray bundle. He nodded to Dad and tossed his things into the cart. I wanted to ask why he was coming with us, but Dad was one question away from losing his temper. I could always tell, since I was the one who usually put him over the limit.
"You be home as soon as you can, William," said Margo. She gave me a last look and slammed the screen door. With Dad and Tierney walking next to the horse and me following the cart, we left the farm and headed north to Oregon City. I didn't look back.
The first mile or so we walked through valley land. Every inch of it was under cultivation, hay, corn, vegetables, stock. As we walked by the homes of our neighbors Dad would click his tongue if there was no smoke coming out of the chimney or whistle under his breath if there was. If I hated Dad and thought he was a tyrant, I can only imagine what these people thought of him.
The track started up the hill, the cart's bicycle tires digging into the chucked road bed. We rose through a dense forest. I could still glimpse the walls and roofs of the houses that remained standing, but no one lived in them anymore and each year the trees and shrubs grew higher and closer. I could imagine walking up this hill and not knowing there had ever been houses and barns in these woods.
As we climbed out of the valley, Dad and Tierney shouldered their guns. On top of the hill, the forest yielded to what had once been housing developments, but this area was unprotected and no one lived here. Blackberry vines clambered over the walls and roofs of the places left standing, creating green hummocks with the occasional broken window revealing a dark and forgotten interior. The mounds reminded me of Sleeping Beauty's castle where all the inhabitants were under a hundred-year spell. I used to dream about sneaking up here on my own to explore.
"Did you come through Oregon City when you arrived?" Dad asked Tierney.
"I came over from the river. I turned inland at the first checkpoint."
"New Era Road. I know the place." Dad was silent for a moment. "After this blows over, I hope you'll think about coming back. You're a solid farmhand."
"Thank you." Tierney laughed in a way that didn't sound as though he found anything humorous about it. "A solid farmhand."
"I was a lawyer Before," said Dad. Tierney didn't respond.
Where streams had broken over the road surface, we guided the horse through small canyons in the red clay. Pilot was used to this terrain, but the extra care we had to give him made Dad uneasy. Tierney went ahead with his rifle and watched the bushes while Dad and I walked with Pilot.
"I thought the Demented were all dead around here," I said.
"There's always more. It's an infectious disease."
"But they aren't dangerous."
"Their blood is."
"So that's why you shoot them full of holes? To let the blood out?"
Dad tugged on Pilot's bridle, making his head jerk in surprise. "We're not discussing it."
We turned into an empty grid of streets. I remembered houses had once stood here, but the Oregon City militia had burned everything when Dims overran the area. Thousands of old bones filled the ditches.
Up ahead, Tierney walked by one forlorn skeleton that had died curled on its side in the middle of the road. Tierney checked out the bits of bone that poked through the moss-covered rags. It looked the size of a kid. Closer to Oregon City there was an effort to bury the Demented but out here, they were just left to rot.
"I think someone ought to bury these people," I said.
"They aren't people," said Dad.
"Then what are they?"
He made some kind of grunting noise that didn't sound like human language.
"Is the whole world like this?" I asked.
Tierney looked back at me. "Most places are a lot worse."
"No more talking, Madison," said Dad.
The wind turned cold and heavy clouds boiled over the sky. I smelled rain in the air. We were closer to Oregon City now, in an area that used to be part of the city but was now just more ruins. A church, a school, a shopping center. Barriers of old rusted out cars stacked three and four high blocked the roads. Dad walked Pilot over crumbling sidewalks to get around them.
When we started seeing skulls on fence posts, I knew we were close to the checkpoint. I never understood why people did it--nailing bodies to the sides of buildings or hanging them from trees. If it was supposed to warn other Dims to stay away, it showed a basic misunderstanding of Demented 101. Scarecrows didn't work on crows either. Yet all checkpoints looked like bone yards, and the ones going into Independent Canby were worst of all.
The entrance to Oregon City was marked by three pyramids of mossy skulls in front of an old store. It was just beginning to rain as we arrived, and we hustled under the awning to stay dry while Dad took out his identity papers.
"William Rodgers," said the main guy, reading Dad's card. He was bulky under his canvas coat, though I couldn't tell if he was carrying firearms or just fat. He had gristly brown hair all over his face but none on his head. They had furniture spread around the parking lot and smoke poured out of the engine block of one old car. I smelled meat cooking. Barbecue.
His friend was a tall, rangy dude who saw me and never looked away. "And who might you be?"
"Eleanor Roosevelt."
Tierney made a genuine laughing sound.
"You look like an Eleanor," said the tall dude. "Ellie."
"Madison!" yelled Dad. "Give the man your I.D."
I handed him my social security card and the tall dude mouthed the name printed on the surface, which did not say Eleanor Roosevelt. Since I was born Before, my card was official. My brothers were born After so they carried hand-written birth certificates. Oregon City was the only place that cared if you were the person your papers said you were. In a place like Independent Canby, all they wanted to know was whether you were Demented or not.
The tall dude handed back our cards. "Where you folks going?"
"George O'Malley's residence. His wife is my daughter," said Dad.
"Thought I recognized you." The first man, gristly guy, pointed toward Pilot and the cart. "What you got there?"
He and Dad walked into the rain and threw back the tarp. Tall dude leaned against the wall next to me.
"So, how old are you?"
"Ask my father, moron."
His lips peeled back from his broken teeth. "You don't want to talk to me like that."
"Whoa, whoa," said Tierney. "This one's just up from the country, hasn't learned her manners. Apologize, Madison."
"I will not."
Tierney grabbed my arm and yanked me away from the wall and out into the rain. "Go to your father."
"It's pouring!"
"Go to your father."
By then Dad was staring at me, so I shrugged and went. Tierney and the tall dude were yucking it up in no time. I hated all of them.
"That man has about fifty pounds of shooting iron on him," Tierney said when we were on the road again. His voice was barely audible over the drumming rain.
"So what."
"You aren't going to last an hour with people like this unless you keep your mouth shut."
I looked at Tierney. He was tall, thin like all migrants, with bunches of hard muscle filling out his arms and shoulders. He wore torn clothes and busted-down boots. His cracked leather jacket was zipped to his neck and slick with rain. His hair, if it was ever clean or dry, would be blond. He looked as old as Dad, but all migrants looked old because of their hard lives. He could be any age.
"Maybe I don't want to last an hour," I said. "Maybe I don't even want to last five minutes."
"If you understood anything, you'd know what a stupid thing you just said."
"Go to hell, migrant."
"Tierney," shouted Dad. "What do you know about photovoltaic cells?"
They walked on chatting about solar while the rain poured out of the sky.
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Chapter Two
I awoke in the dark with Dad holding a lantern in my face. "Get up."
"It's not morning." I pulled the blankets over my ears.
"I'm not asking again." He walked out, banging the door. I sat up, shivering in the cold. A sliver of gray light came through a gap in the curtain, but certainly not enough to be called morning. I pulled on jeans and sweaters and went downstairs.
Dad was cleaning his shotgun at the kitchen table and Aunt Margo stood at the stove pouring hot water over coffee grounds. Coffee was one of the things we traded for aggressively. Every year, three pigs were slaughtered for coffee barter. Pinkus had connections in Mexico. Dad was talking about adding another pig to the deal because by September we were using grounds two days in a row. We were all wild about coffee in the valley.
"What's going on?" I asked, getting my cup from the cupboard. "Something happen?"
"I'm taking you to your sister's."
Margo dropped the coffee pot lid. It clanked and crashed against the stove.
I turned to Dad. "The hell you are."
He slid a shell into the gun. No reply.
"Is this about Gant? That wasn't my fault. You were there!"
Margo carried her cup to the table and sat down, folding her hands as if she were about to pray. "You run around here like a wild animal. It's not decent. No wonder men want to—"
"So you're going to marry me off like a crate of vegetables because some jerk touched me?" Not waiting for an answer, I pushed away from the table and watched them scramble to save their coffee.
"Pack your things!" Dad yelled after me.
Upstairs, I flopped on my bed. So it would be Travis. I was going to be an electrician's wife.
Chris and Riley were still sleeping when I threw my bag into the pony cart. I was sorry not to say goodbye. We were seven miles from Oregon City, but the boys only made the trip every few months. I could well be married by the time I saw them again. Cracks of sunlight slanted through the clouds and mist rose like a sigh from the cornfield.
Aunt Margo stood in the screen door and shivered. "At least it's daylight."
"I don't know why we have to leave so early," I said. "Jayden won't even be awake when we get there."
Dad dropped a sack of potatoes into the cart. "I'm not losing a whole day over you, Madison. We're leaving now and that's final."
Tierney walked over from the barn carrying a gray bundle. He nodded to Dad and tossed his things into the cart. I wanted to ask why he was coming with us, but Dad was one question away from losing his temper. I could always tell, since I was the one who usually put him over the limit.
"You be home as soon as you can, William," said Margo. She gave me a last look and slammed the screen door. With Dad and Tierney walking next to the horse and me following the cart, we left the farm and headed north to Oregon City. I didn't look back.
The first mile or so we walked through valley land. Every inch of it was under cultivation, hay, corn, vegetables, stock. As we walked by the homes of our neighbors Dad would click his tongue if there was no smoke coming out of the chimney or whistle under his breath if there was. If I hated Dad and thought he was a tyrant, I can only imagine what these people thought of him.
The track started up the hill, the cart's bicycle tires digging into the chucked road bed. We rose through a dense forest. I could still glimpse the walls and roofs of the houses that remained standing, but no one lived in them anymore and each year the trees and shrubs grew higher and closer. I could imagine walking up this hill and not knowing there had ever been houses and barns in these woods.
As we climbed out of the valley, Dad and Tierney shouldered their guns. On top of the hill, the forest yielded to what had once been housing developments, but this area was unprotected and no one lived here. Blackberry vines clambered over the walls and roofs of the places left standing, creating green hummocks with the occasional broken window revealing a dark and forgotten interior. The mounds reminded me of Sleeping Beauty's castle where all the inhabitants were under a hundred-year spell. I used to dream about sneaking up here on my own to explore.
"Did you come through Oregon City when you arrived?" Dad asked Tierney.
"I came over from the river. I turned inland at the first checkpoint."
"New Era Road. I know the place." Dad was silent for a moment. "After this blows over, I hope you'll think about coming back. You're a solid farmhand."
"Thank you." Tierney laughed in a way that didn't sound as though he found anything humorous about it. "A solid farmhand."
"I was a lawyer Before," said Dad. Tierney didn't respond.
Where streams had broken over the road surface, we guided the horse through small canyons in the red clay. Pilot was used to this terrain, but the extra care we had to give him made Dad uneasy. Tierney went ahead with his rifle and watched the bushes while Dad and I walked with Pilot.
"I thought the Demented were all dead around here," I said.
"There's always more. It's an infectious disease."
"But they aren't dangerous."
"Their blood is."
"So that's why you shoot them full of holes? To let the blood out?"
Dad tugged on Pilot's bridle, making his head jerk in surprise. "We're not discussing it."
We turned into an empty grid of streets. I remembered houses had once stood here, but the Oregon City militia had burned everything when Dims overran the area. Thousands of old bones filled the ditches.
Up ahead, Tierney walked by one forlorn skeleton that had died curled on its side in the middle of the road. Tierney checked out the bits of bone that poked through the moss-covered rags. It looked the size of a kid. Closer to Oregon City there was an effort to bury the Demented but out here, they were just left to rot.
"I think someone ought to bury these people," I said.
"They aren't people," said Dad.
"Then what are they?"
He made some kind of grunting noise that didn't sound like human language.
"Is the whole world like this?" I asked.
Tierney looked back at me. "Most places are a lot worse."
"No more talking, Madison," said Dad.
The wind turned cold and heavy clouds boiled over the sky. I smelled rain in the air. We were closer to Oregon City now, in an area that used to be part of the city but was now just more ruins. A church, a school, a shopping center. Barriers of old rusted out cars stacked three and four high blocked the roads. Dad walked Pilot over crumbling sidewalks to get around them.
When we started seeing skulls on fence posts, I knew we were close to the checkpoint. I never understood why people did it--nailing bodies to the sides of buildings or hanging them from trees. If it was supposed to warn other Dims to stay away, it showed a basic misunderstanding of Demented 101. Scarecrows didn't work on crows either. Yet all checkpoints looked like bone yards, and the ones going into Independent Canby were worst of all.
The entrance to Oregon City was marked by three pyramids of mossy skulls in front of an old store. It was just beginning to rain as we arrived, and we hustled under the awning to stay dry while Dad took out his identity papers.
"William Rodgers," said the main guy, reading Dad's card. He was bulky under his canvas coat, though I couldn't tell if he was carrying firearms or just fat. He had gristly brown hair all over his face but none on his head. They had furniture spread around the parking lot and smoke poured out of the engine block of one old car. I smelled meat cooking. Barbecue.
His friend was a tall, rangy dude who saw me and never looked away. "And who might you be?"
"Eleanor Roosevelt."
Tierney made a genuine laughing sound.
"You look like an Eleanor," said the tall dude. "Ellie."
"Madison!" yelled Dad. "Give the man your I.D."
I handed him my social security card and the tall dude mouthed the name printed on the surface, which did not say Eleanor Roosevelt. Since I was born Before, my card was official. My brothers were born After so they carried hand-written birth certificates. Oregon City was the only place that cared if you were the person your papers said you were. In a place like Independent Canby, all they wanted to know was whether you were Demented or not.
The tall dude handed back our cards. "Where you folks going?"
"George O'Malley's residence. His wife is my daughter," said Dad.
"Thought I recognized you." The first man, gristly guy, pointed toward Pilot and the cart. "What you got there?"
He and Dad walked into the rain and threw back the tarp. Tall dude leaned against the wall next to me.
"So, how old are you?"
"Ask my father, moron."
His lips peeled back from his broken teeth. "You don't want to talk to me like that."
"Whoa, whoa," said Tierney. "This one's just up from the country, hasn't learned her manners. Apologize, Madison."
"I will not."
Tierney grabbed my arm and yanked me away from the wall and out into the rain. "Go to your father."
"It's pouring!"
"Go to your father."
By then Dad was staring at me, so I shrugged and went. Tierney and the tall dude were yucking it up in no time. I hated all of them.
"That man has about fifty pounds of shooting iron on him," Tierney said when we were on the road again. His voice was barely audible over the drumming rain.
"So what."
"You aren't going to last an hour with people like this unless you keep your mouth shut."
I looked at Tierney. He was tall, thin like all migrants, with bunches of hard muscle filling out his arms and shoulders. He wore torn clothes and busted-down boots. His cracked leather jacket was zipped to his neck and slick with rain. His hair, if it was ever clean or dry, would be blond. He looked as old as Dad, but all migrants looked old because of their hard lives. He could be any age.
"Maybe I don't want to last an hour," I said. "Maybe I don't even want to last five minutes."
"If you understood anything, you'd know what a stupid thing you just said."
"Go to hell, migrant."
"Tierney," shouted Dad. "What do you know about photovoltaic cells?"
They walked on chatting about solar while the rain poured out of the sky.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
1.5 The rest of chapter one
I'm going out of town for a few days and decided to post this ahead of schedule. Chapter One has now been rewritten about three times: once for my critique group, once for an agent submission, and again for this post. I'm always amazed by the gap between what I see in my mind and what is readable on the page. Letting text rest for a few months is the only way to rewrite. I can't tell you how many clever lines I scrubbed during this last rewrite. And there are still a few left that should come out.
When the novel first appeared to me, I was so obsessed with Madison's voice that I had to play it big. I used to say amen every day for her voice. Now of course it annoys me, all her opinions and judgments. I'm hoping her voice carries through the edits, despite my need as the author to construct a narrative that I can live with. We both live here, Madison and I.
That's all I've got today! Here's the text:
Chapter One, Part Two
I washed the dishes and made the bread dough and then went up to my room to find a book.
Our house used to be full of books when Mom was alive. Dad's law books, Mom's art books, all my grandparents' books. Our library survived First Winter when everyone else we knew burned their books for heat. It wasn't until Aunt Margo moved in that Dad developed his lunatic hatred of learning. I hid as many books as I could in my closet and watched Margot spend the first few days of her honeymoon hauling the rest out to the woodpile for the migrants to burn on their cooking fires.
I continued to learn on my own even after the book purge. I taught myself French, including the talking part. Every summer I set myself to learn two Shakespeare plays. I also tried to teach my two brothers to read. Chris and Riley were born After, so they never went to school. By the time they were old enough, Dad had ruled on the subject of education and they never had a chance.
I had some success with Riley. He learned the alphabet and could write his own name, but Chris was far too wiggly to sit still that long. Neither of them displayed the least curiosity about what was inside a book. Since I was kind of foggy about math, I never gave that a try. Maybe one of them had scientific aptitude, but no one will ever know. Thanks, Dad.
Because we moved to the farm while I was still a baby, we were better prepared than most when the lights went out and diseases began to kill so many people. We were far from the city in a part of the world where we got more rain rather than less. Soon we were feeding a dozen other families. One of the first guys who turned up for work was George, an electrician who built solar panels in the old days. In a very little time he married my older sister, Jayden, and installed solar on almost every house in the valley.
Solar wasn't a lot of electricity—usually only enough to run the refrigerator for a few hours a day—but my brothers were constantly plugging in old things, appliances and electric toothbrushes to see what they did. One day they tried a deevee machine in a computer laptop and it worked. Until Dad found out, we watched deevees every day, whenever we could sneak away from work. We watched Star Wars and The Simpsons, and my brothers did good barter with other valley kids for disks. Because they didn't burn, everyone had stacks of them in their houses.
We took all kinds of things in trade for viewing time. Toys, books, food, if someone's mother happened to be a good cook. I wanted to trade for clothes, but if you were caught wearing something that wasn't yours, the adults would know immediately there was an alternative economy going on somewhere. The whole thing depended on silence.
Sometimes when we were watching deevees, my brothers asked me what it was like in the old days. Were there yellow people like Homer Simpson? Was Darth Vader real? What was it like to fly in a space ship? To my brothers there was no difference between cars, airplanes and space ships. In the seven years between when I was born and when they were born, the world had changed so much that all Before stuff looked like magic.
On less charitable days, I suspected my brothers were like dogs, color-blind and unable to recognize themselves in the mirror. Maybe I was getting like that myself.
###
I took my book outside to Mom's Lexus. It was parked between the trailers and the chicken shed, hidden from the strawberry field or other places Margot was likely to go. But to get there, I had to walk past three of Pinkus's men, including his nephew, Gant. They were cleaning their firearms on a picnic table, lunching on hooch and deer sausage while they worked. I said hey on my way to the car but Gant stared at me, saying nothing.
The Lexus had been parked since it ran out of fuel. The tires were gone but almost everything else was still intact, including Mom's purse which sat on the floor next to the driver's seat, full of her pictures and credit cards.
It was a nice place to sit and read. I stretched out in the back seat and propped the book on my chest. It was an encyclopedia and I was trying to read carefully, so when the door flew open and Gant leaned into the car, I was caught off guard.
"The boss's daughter, all by herself." Gant propped one heavy black boot on the floor of the Lexus. He wore a black leather vest and long shredded blue jeans. His biceps were puckered with scars.
Gant was in charge of all the soldiers that Pinkus had stationed on our farm. His father was the guy Dad got out of jail all those years ago, but like his uncle, Gant wasn't grateful for past good deeds. Staying out of jail hadn't kept Gant's father alive anyway; he'd died of blood poisoning during the first winter. Since Pinkus had no children of his own, Gant was Pinkus's heir, though it didn't mean they had any love for another. Dad didn't have to tell me to stay out of Gant's way.
I sat up, closing the encyclopedia. "Shove off, Gant."
"Mind if I sit down? Thanks." He climbed in, bringing the reek of hooch with him. He had a narrow, beaky face and close-cropped hair.
"What do you want?"
"To talk to you, Madison. That's all."
"My father won't like it. I'm not kidding, Gant."
Gant laughed and walked his fingers across the upholstery to my leg. His fingers climbed up my thigh and kept walking. "It doesn't matter if your father likes it or not. I like it."
I twisted away from him but he slid across the seat, forcing me against the door. "I'll scream. Swear to god."
"Go ahead. If you don't make me happy, Uncle Pinkus will hear about it. Do you want your dad to swing on the end of a rope? Think about it."
"Guess I'd better make you-" I swung my book at his face. "-happy."
It connected with his jaw and he snarled as he pawed it away. I reached for the door handle and he caught me by the arm, yanking me close. His lips crawled over my neck and when I looked in his eyes, I saw a black mark on his iris as though someone had taken a tiny slice out of his eye.
"That's better," he said and touched my boob.
Suddenly the door on my side flew open, and the book-reading migrant, Tierney, looked inside.
"Your dad's asking for you, girl."
For a moment, Gant's grip on my boob got tighter, then he pushed me toward Tierney. I climbed out, shaking.
"Go to your dad," said Tierney. "And don't look back."
Dad stood at the corner of the chicken shed, his face so white it was almost green.
Behind me, windshield glass shattered.
###
Of all of us kids, I was the one who had expectations. If the world hadn't gone to hell, I'd be in college, preferably some place far from here. Both my parents went to school, Mom in New York and Dad in California. Those were just names now, places I would be as unlikely to see as fly to the moon.
What was much more likely, in fact inevitable, was that I would get married very soon.
My sister, Jayden, had married well. I remembered a lot of back-slapping between George and Dad the night they worked out the deal for Jayden. Their marriage kept George in Oregon City where he could maintain everyone's solar, and in exchange my sister was the best-dressed woman in town. She worried all the time about George getting kidnapped by Pinkus or someone like him, but Oregon City had a militia and so far even Pinkus would rather barter for George's services than kidnap him. Thanks to George, Oregon City had electric streetlights, but of course they could never use them, or bad people would know they had them. That's new world logic for you, right there.
George had a brother, Travis. He was about thirty and acted like he was sitting on a tack whenever we were alone together. Dad talked about me marrying Travis, but I couldn't seriously consider spending the rest of my life with a man whose great passion was copper wiring.
I wondered how much longer I could hold off marriage. Sometimes I'd catch Dad looking at me as though weighing barter credits in his mind. Like I was pumpkin on the vine and he needed the field for something else.
###
Dad didn't come home for dinner but we had a houseful of people just the same. Aunt Margo, Aunt Gayle and Uncle Edward, their two kids, Sue-Lynn and her kids, Christine and her grandbaby, James. I was run off my feet dealing with all the children so I didn't notice until almost dark how weird the adults were acting.
They were all sitting around the dining room table when I brought four-year old Kayla in to her mom, Sue-Lynn. She was spitting mad she couldn't keep up with the big kids who were playing hide and seek. She was so tired from trying she could barely keep her eyes open.
All the adults shut up as we walked in.
"What?" I asked.
Aunt Margo looked like she'd been crying and Gayle was patting her hand.
"Your skirt, Madison," said Gayle. "It's not decent."
I 'd hitched it up to my knees to chase kids. "You'd think you all never saw legs before." I poured myself a glass of water from the pitcher on the sideboard. "What happened to that pig Gant? Dad send him back to Pinkus?"
No answer. Margo had her lips folded so tight they looked like cracked cement. Uncle Edward tapped his cane on the floor. Sue-Lynn kissed the top of Kayla's head and didn't look at me. Gayle gave me a flat, unblinking stare.
"What? Somebody die?"
"Go bring the children inside now, Madison," said Aunt Margo. "Now."
I stomped out and slammed the door. A year ago I would have said, "You can't order me around! You aren't my mother!" Not anymore. I guess that's what being eighteen has taught me—they can order me around. Mom had been dead for three years, the aunts have taken over and there's no use fighting it.
I wasn't in any hurry to get back in the house after that. The kids were still playing hide and seek, so I played It until I found them all, and by then it was full dark and Dad was home.
Twelve families lived in the valley, plus single people like Misch and Mrs. Hammett and Jorge. At any time, there were ten to twenty migrants living in the various barns, working in the fields by day and cooking dinner over campfires by night. So even though the valley was a big place, no one was ever more than a few minutes away from another person. For kids, it was great. You were never alone and almost never bored.
When there was trouble, all the families and migrants would hunker down at our farm. It didn't happen so much now that most of the Demented were dead, but every once in a while there'd be some reason we needed to pull together. Dad said we were only doing as well as we were because of geography. Directly north of us was Oregon City and south was Independent Canby, Pinkus's country. Pinkus owned the river between Oregon City and Salem, and even though that was sixty miles of territory, there was hardly anyone left alive. He controlled it with his army of men like Gant.
I wasn't sure why the families were gathering tonight. There hadn't been any infected around the valley in weeks. The migrants we had were decent enough. I couldn't think of any reason for Dad to come home with Sue-Lynn's husband, Cal, and Christine's husband, Pete, and all of them go in the dining room and close the door.
Finally, we located Riley and I shooed them toward the house, game over.
"It's better in the dark!" said Chris. "Five more minutes?"
"You don't even know what a minute is," I said. "Get in the house."
"A minute is sixty hours," said Riley. "Am I right?"
"When I'm playing hide and seek with you, it certainly feels like it."
They ran inside and I saw a slight movement out of the corner of my eye. Something shifted in the shadows next to the pump house.
"Hello?" I called. No answer. I heard gravel scraping against a boot and then silence. At the back door, I saw a big square thing lying by the doormat. My encyclopedia.
When the novel first appeared to me, I was so obsessed with Madison's voice that I had to play it big. I used to say amen every day for her voice. Now of course it annoys me, all her opinions and judgments. I'm hoping her voice carries through the edits, despite my need as the author to construct a narrative that I can live with. We both live here, Madison and I.
That's all I've got today! Here's the text:
Chapter One, Part Two
I washed the dishes and made the bread dough and then went up to my room to find a book.
Our house used to be full of books when Mom was alive. Dad's law books, Mom's art books, all my grandparents' books. Our library survived First Winter when everyone else we knew burned their books for heat. It wasn't until Aunt Margo moved in that Dad developed his lunatic hatred of learning. I hid as many books as I could in my closet and watched Margot spend the first few days of her honeymoon hauling the rest out to the woodpile for the migrants to burn on their cooking fires.
I continued to learn on my own even after the book purge. I taught myself French, including the talking part. Every summer I set myself to learn two Shakespeare plays. I also tried to teach my two brothers to read. Chris and Riley were born After, so they never went to school. By the time they were old enough, Dad had ruled on the subject of education and they never had a chance.
I had some success with Riley. He learned the alphabet and could write his own name, but Chris was far too wiggly to sit still that long. Neither of them displayed the least curiosity about what was inside a book. Since I was kind of foggy about math, I never gave that a try. Maybe one of them had scientific aptitude, but no one will ever know. Thanks, Dad.
Because we moved to the farm while I was still a baby, we were better prepared than most when the lights went out and diseases began to kill so many people. We were far from the city in a part of the world where we got more rain rather than less. Soon we were feeding a dozen other families. One of the first guys who turned up for work was George, an electrician who built solar panels in the old days. In a very little time he married my older sister, Jayden, and installed solar on almost every house in the valley.
Solar wasn't a lot of electricity—usually only enough to run the refrigerator for a few hours a day—but my brothers were constantly plugging in old things, appliances and electric toothbrushes to see what they did. One day they tried a deevee machine in a computer laptop and it worked. Until Dad found out, we watched deevees every day, whenever we could sneak away from work. We watched Star Wars and The Simpsons, and my brothers did good barter with other valley kids for disks. Because they didn't burn, everyone had stacks of them in their houses.
We took all kinds of things in trade for viewing time. Toys, books, food, if someone's mother happened to be a good cook. I wanted to trade for clothes, but if you were caught wearing something that wasn't yours, the adults would know immediately there was an alternative economy going on somewhere. The whole thing depended on silence.
Sometimes when we were watching deevees, my brothers asked me what it was like in the old days. Were there yellow people like Homer Simpson? Was Darth Vader real? What was it like to fly in a space ship? To my brothers there was no difference between cars, airplanes and space ships. In the seven years between when I was born and when they were born, the world had changed so much that all Before stuff looked like magic.
On less charitable days, I suspected my brothers were like dogs, color-blind and unable to recognize themselves in the mirror. Maybe I was getting like that myself.
###
I took my book outside to Mom's Lexus. It was parked between the trailers and the chicken shed, hidden from the strawberry field or other places Margot was likely to go. But to get there, I had to walk past three of Pinkus's men, including his nephew, Gant. They were cleaning their firearms on a picnic table, lunching on hooch and deer sausage while they worked. I said hey on my way to the car but Gant stared at me, saying nothing.
The Lexus had been parked since it ran out of fuel. The tires were gone but almost everything else was still intact, including Mom's purse which sat on the floor next to the driver's seat, full of her pictures and credit cards.
It was a nice place to sit and read. I stretched out in the back seat and propped the book on my chest. It was an encyclopedia and I was trying to read carefully, so when the door flew open and Gant leaned into the car, I was caught off guard.
"The boss's daughter, all by herself." Gant propped one heavy black boot on the floor of the Lexus. He wore a black leather vest and long shredded blue jeans. His biceps were puckered with scars.
Gant was in charge of all the soldiers that Pinkus had stationed on our farm. His father was the guy Dad got out of jail all those years ago, but like his uncle, Gant wasn't grateful for past good deeds. Staying out of jail hadn't kept Gant's father alive anyway; he'd died of blood poisoning during the first winter. Since Pinkus had no children of his own, Gant was Pinkus's heir, though it didn't mean they had any love for another. Dad didn't have to tell me to stay out of Gant's way.
I sat up, closing the encyclopedia. "Shove off, Gant."
"Mind if I sit down? Thanks." He climbed in, bringing the reek of hooch with him. He had a narrow, beaky face and close-cropped hair.
"What do you want?"
"To talk to you, Madison. That's all."
"My father won't like it. I'm not kidding, Gant."
Gant laughed and walked his fingers across the upholstery to my leg. His fingers climbed up my thigh and kept walking. "It doesn't matter if your father likes it or not. I like it."
I twisted away from him but he slid across the seat, forcing me against the door. "I'll scream. Swear to god."
"Go ahead. If you don't make me happy, Uncle Pinkus will hear about it. Do you want your dad to swing on the end of a rope? Think about it."
"Guess I'd better make you-" I swung my book at his face. "-happy."
It connected with his jaw and he snarled as he pawed it away. I reached for the door handle and he caught me by the arm, yanking me close. His lips crawled over my neck and when I looked in his eyes, I saw a black mark on his iris as though someone had taken a tiny slice out of his eye.
"That's better," he said and touched my boob.
Suddenly the door on my side flew open, and the book-reading migrant, Tierney, looked inside.
"Your dad's asking for you, girl."
For a moment, Gant's grip on my boob got tighter, then he pushed me toward Tierney. I climbed out, shaking.
"Go to your dad," said Tierney. "And don't look back."
Dad stood at the corner of the chicken shed, his face so white it was almost green.
Behind me, windshield glass shattered.
###
Of all of us kids, I was the one who had expectations. If the world hadn't gone to hell, I'd be in college, preferably some place far from here. Both my parents went to school, Mom in New York and Dad in California. Those were just names now, places I would be as unlikely to see as fly to the moon.
What was much more likely, in fact inevitable, was that I would get married very soon.
My sister, Jayden, had married well. I remembered a lot of back-slapping between George and Dad the night they worked out the deal for Jayden. Their marriage kept George in Oregon City where he could maintain everyone's solar, and in exchange my sister was the best-dressed woman in town. She worried all the time about George getting kidnapped by Pinkus or someone like him, but Oregon City had a militia and so far even Pinkus would rather barter for George's services than kidnap him. Thanks to George, Oregon City had electric streetlights, but of course they could never use them, or bad people would know they had them. That's new world logic for you, right there.
George had a brother, Travis. He was about thirty and acted like he was sitting on a tack whenever we were alone together. Dad talked about me marrying Travis, but I couldn't seriously consider spending the rest of my life with a man whose great passion was copper wiring.
I wondered how much longer I could hold off marriage. Sometimes I'd catch Dad looking at me as though weighing barter credits in his mind. Like I was pumpkin on the vine and he needed the field for something else.
###
Dad didn't come home for dinner but we had a houseful of people just the same. Aunt Margo, Aunt Gayle and Uncle Edward, their two kids, Sue-Lynn and her kids, Christine and her grandbaby, James. I was run off my feet dealing with all the children so I didn't notice until almost dark how weird the adults were acting.
They were all sitting around the dining room table when I brought four-year old Kayla in to her mom, Sue-Lynn. She was spitting mad she couldn't keep up with the big kids who were playing hide and seek. She was so tired from trying she could barely keep her eyes open.
All the adults shut up as we walked in.
"What?" I asked.
Aunt Margo looked like she'd been crying and Gayle was patting her hand.
"Your skirt, Madison," said Gayle. "It's not decent."
I 'd hitched it up to my knees to chase kids. "You'd think you all never saw legs before." I poured myself a glass of water from the pitcher on the sideboard. "What happened to that pig Gant? Dad send him back to Pinkus?"
No answer. Margo had her lips folded so tight they looked like cracked cement. Uncle Edward tapped his cane on the floor. Sue-Lynn kissed the top of Kayla's head and didn't look at me. Gayle gave me a flat, unblinking stare.
"What? Somebody die?"
"Go bring the children inside now, Madison," said Aunt Margo. "Now."
I stomped out and slammed the door. A year ago I would have said, "You can't order me around! You aren't my mother!" Not anymore. I guess that's what being eighteen has taught me—they can order me around. Mom had been dead for three years, the aunts have taken over and there's no use fighting it.
I wasn't in any hurry to get back in the house after that. The kids were still playing hide and seek, so I played It until I found them all, and by then it was full dark and Dad was home.
Twelve families lived in the valley, plus single people like Misch and Mrs. Hammett and Jorge. At any time, there were ten to twenty migrants living in the various barns, working in the fields by day and cooking dinner over campfires by night. So even though the valley was a big place, no one was ever more than a few minutes away from another person. For kids, it was great. You were never alone and almost never bored.
When there was trouble, all the families and migrants would hunker down at our farm. It didn't happen so much now that most of the Demented were dead, but every once in a while there'd be some reason we needed to pull together. Dad said we were only doing as well as we were because of geography. Directly north of us was Oregon City and south was Independent Canby, Pinkus's country. Pinkus owned the river between Oregon City and Salem, and even though that was sixty miles of territory, there was hardly anyone left alive. He controlled it with his army of men like Gant.
I wasn't sure why the families were gathering tonight. There hadn't been any infected around the valley in weeks. The migrants we had were decent enough. I couldn't think of any reason for Dad to come home with Sue-Lynn's husband, Cal, and Christine's husband, Pete, and all of them go in the dining room and close the door.
Finally, we located Riley and I shooed them toward the house, game over.
"It's better in the dark!" said Chris. "Five more minutes?"
"You don't even know what a minute is," I said. "Get in the house."
"A minute is sixty hours," said Riley. "Am I right?"
"When I'm playing hide and seek with you, it certainly feels like it."
They ran inside and I saw a slight movement out of the corner of my eye. Something shifted in the shadows next to the pump house.
"Hello?" I called. No answer. I heard gravel scraping against a boot and then silence. At the back door, I saw a big square thing lying by the doormat. My encyclopedia.
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