Those Who Lived: Fallen World Stories Read online

  “What?” I said.

  “With Jon and them,” she said, low and urgent. “You know if they go they’ll want you to come. But we need you here if we’re going to manage. Please.”

  I stared at her, speechless. “I wasn’t planning on going anywhere,” I said finally.

  “Good,” she said. “Good.” She reached out as if to pat my arm, and I edged backward with a vision of her squeezing me the way she had the basket.

  That night in the gathering house, an argument between two tables broke into outright yelling. Suzanne banged on her tabletop and got up. The whole room, those arguing and those who’d been watching, fell silent.

  “I think we’ve had enough of that,” Suzanne said. “You’ve all had time to think and research and talk. Tomorrow after dinner, anyone who wants to suggest a plan of action can get up and present it, uninterrupted, covering all the points they feel they need to. And when everyone who wants to has spoken, we’ll take a vote. Until then, please try to remember that we’re a community, and we all want what’s best even if we disagree on what that is.”

  When she sat back down, everyone around me returned to their food and their quieter conversations. My gaze skimmed the room, my fork hovering over my half-finished pasta. I’d been hearing a lot, the last few days, but I hadn’t been keeping track of who’d been saying what. Who was for the whole “community” picking up and leaving, and who was for us all staying here? Who might be in the middle, thinking the group should split apart?

  I had no idea how the vote would go. But no matter what Jon had said, tomorrow something was going to be broken.

  I was checking the bean plants the next day when it occurred to me that maybe none of what I was doing in that moment mattered. Maybe tonight everyone would decide to go. While I supposed we could bring along a few seedlings, we were hardly going to carry the contents of the greenhouse with us.

  “You all right, Tessa?”

  Suzanne’s voice tugged me back to the present. I was crouched there, my hands dug into the soil. I had the urge to take off my gloves so I could feel exactly how warm or cool it was, rub the soft grains between my fingers. But I wasn’t sure how long I’d already been hunched there unmoving, for her to have asked that.

  “Yeah,” I said, getting up and brushing my hands together. “Just thinking.”

  She was pouring water into the channels between the plots, using the buckets I’d filled with snow yesterday and brought inside to melt overnight. If we wanted to avoid using up well water on the plants, we were going to need to find some large trough-like containers to catch rain once the snow was gone.

  If we were still here.

  I knelt by the lettuce patch to inspect the leaves for bugs. There weren’t many this time of year, but all the major tasks were taken care of. Now that I’d gotten the foundations in place, I could probably write up a daily to-do list and the colony residents could handle everything here on their own. Until summer. It’d get tricky again then, but that was months away.

  “You don’t talk much about your folks back home,” Suzanne remarked. She paused, twisting a strand of gray-blond hair back into the clip that held it away from her face. Not bothering to look over, as if it wasn’t a weighted comment.

  “I don’t have ‘folks’ back home anymore,” I said. Crunch, a beetle shell under my thumb. “So there isn’t much to talk about.”

  She drew in a breath. “You know, when April... When we had to let her go, I couldn’t quite accept it at first. You never think, especially after you’ve seen them grow up, that you’re going to outlive your kids. But it was harder that way. Holding myself back from the full blow. It just hangs over you, waiting.”

  “I accept it,” I said. Crunch. Crunch. I ripped the edge of a leaf. “I accepted it before I even knew for sure.”

  Did she think it was the same? She’d seen April’s body, helped them carry it into the woods, and said a final good-bye. I’d gotten silence from the phone and an empty room. But I’d known. I knew.

  “I just wonder, the way you keep to yourself, if you’ve given yourself a proper chance to settle in...”

  I was on my feet, spinning toward her in the same motion, before I felt the flare of anger inside me. “I’m here,” I snapped. “I wouldn’t be here if I thought there was any chance they were out there for me to find. Why can’t this just be the way I am?”

  She was looking at me now, hurt and concerned. My skin crawled at the thought of the reassuring words she might try to offer next. I jerked off my gloves.

  “I’m going to get some fresh air,” I said before she could speak, and went out.

  It wasn’t just fresh air I needed, I thought, standing behind my cabin and gazing into the stretch of pines. A fresh space. A fresh atmosphere. Suzanne hadn’t done anything wrong, really. I was just getting wound up by all the debating. My head was too cluttered.

  While everyone was eating lunch, I went to one of the cabins that held our supplies. I took a tent, a few blankets, a box of granola bars, a jar of peanuts, and a backpack. I didn’t need much. Just to leave, let my mind clear, and return after they’d decided. Maybe it’d all be back to usual. Or maybe I’d walk up to the cabins and find them cleaned out.

  A chill passed through me at the image. But it didn’t make much difference, did it? The things that mattered to me would still be here.

  I waited to leave until it was getting dark, around dinner time. Jon passed me on his way to the gathering house as I left the greenhouse with a ripe tomato in my coat pocket. He nodded in greeting and said, “You’ll be coming?”

  To dinner, he meant. Which meant, to the vote. “In a minute,” I said.

  When the last few residents had headed in, I hefted the backpack over my shoulders and set off.

  There were patches of bare earth amid the snow that ringed the bases of the trees. I walked on them as much as possible, to avoid leaching away the warmth in my boots. The evening air was crisp but not sharp in my throat. I found a comfortable rhythm, stretching my legs with long strides, pushing off the ground I crossed and left behind.

  I judged it’d been about an hour when I reached a small clearing, the yellow grass dusted with frost. It was completely dark now. Stars glittered in the circle of inky sky that was framed by the treetops. Here, I thought.

  Before I set up the tent, I followed the edge of the clearing the entire way around, peering into the forest in all directions. I spotted no sign of anyone living nearby. At the opposite end of the clearing, a small river ran past, its banks snow crusted and its surface solid with rippled ice. I broke away a small chunk—it wasn’t very thick—and brought the water beneath to my mouth with my cupped hands. The cold stung my fingers and my throat and seemed to trickle right down to my toes. It fixed me to the snowy ground.

  I was here. Just me. The comments, questions, looks, and everything else that had been heaped on me in the colony over the last few days sloughed from my skin like autumn leaves.

  After a couple of mistakes, I got the tent up. I unfurled one of the blankets outside it and lay down in the middle of the clearing, staring at the stars. There were so many I lost track when I tried to count them. I held up my arm and watched them being blotted out by my hand. Still there, just unseen.

  The ground beneath my back was firm. Stretching out on all sides, all the way around the planet. For a second, the thought of the vastness of it took my breath away. I was held by it, by the world and its pull.

  Somewhere out in the darkness Hilary and April’s bodies had been laid to rest. To return to the earth. Maybe the idea should have been unnerving, but it comforted me. If every one of us returned eventually, then no one was ever really lost. I had wandered off into the woods without a map or a clear destination, but I knew exactly where I was. I was in the shape of my hand against the stars and the hard surface pressing against my back.

  If only I could just stay here.

  In the morning I woke up bundled amid the blankets in the tent. I had
a pain in my shoulder from lying on that hard ground and an ache in my stomach. Without shedding the blankets, I sat up and dug the box of granola bars out of the backpack. I ate a couple, and the last handful of peanuts, but the ache didn’t leave, only twisted into a mild queasiness. The food felt gritty in my throat. I was too used to hot oatmeal and pancakes from the colony’s kitchen.

  I’d have to get over that.

  The decision would be made now. The arguments presented and the votes cast, far from my spot in the woods. I tried to push the thought away, back to that other place. I got up, stretched my legs with a walk around the clearing, and scooped a drink from the river, but it stayed with me. An uncertainty, hanging over me. Waiting, the way Suzanne had said, although she’d been talking about grief.

  Just beyond the ring of pines stood a birch with icicles dangling in a jagged line down its branches. A bird or a squirrel or some other animal—Kaelyn might have been able to tell—must have scampered along one of those branches and jostled some free. Splinters of ice littered the shallow snow around its trunk. A slice of sunlight glinted off them.

  In my former backyard, on the island, shards from the smashed walls of my first greenhouse were probably still scattered in the snow, if the snow on the island hadn’t already melted, leaving the glass to mingle with mud and grass. The footprints of the boys who’d destroyed it would be long washed away. Their lives, the walls my dad helped build, the studies I’d started in cross-pollinating different strains of vegetables, my mom’s hands on my shoulders as she told me I was going to do great things for the world. The world she’d been talking about. Most of the things I’d planned to do, the future I’d pictured—the friendly flu had washed all that away too. Like an immense flood only the strong, the lucky, and the stubborn had withstood.

  I wasn’t sure which of those I was anymore.

  I’d seen the colony’s greenhouse and flung myself at it wide-armed, but maybe that had been foolish. Foolish to think I could replace even one piece of what I’d lost. That there was anything I could hold onto that wouldn’t be broken too.

  That greenhouse was still there, of course. Even if everyone else left, they couldn’t stop me from staying. I could keep to myself there and tend to the garden, the same as always. I saw it like a premonition: myself, red hair strung with as much gray as Suzanne’s blonde, a wandering benefactor. Walking the roads with a bundle of seeds and roots to pass on to whomever could use them, looping around in my journey to return to where I’d started from.

  My eyes misted up, a tear tracing a prickling line down my cheek before I’d realized I was crying. What was there to be upset about? I could have what I wanted. The garden, the work, and peace.

  Unless that wasn’t what would make me happy after all. I groped inside for a sense of it, of what I wanted—not just could tolerate or accept but actively wanted.

  Nothing, I came out with. I don’t want anything.

  That couldn’t be right. But no other answer offered itself up.

  I hadn’t meant to be gone for very long—and my queasiness had already circled back around to hunger with only two granola bars left in the box. I took down the tent, the poles rattling together and the fabric warbling against itself, stuffed it into the backpack with the blankets, picked up the pack... and set it back down.

  I’d thought coming out here by myself would clear my head. It had seemed to last night. But now my mind was cluttered with uneasy thoughts again. I couldn’t blame anyone but myself.

  It should have been simple. Go back, get to work in the greenhouse, let the others do whatever they were going to do. So why did it feel so hard?

  I left the pack and went down to the river. The water was still sharp on my tongue. I looked out across the span of ice, seven or eight feet wide, stretching into the woods in both directions. Dark patches mottled the white-gray surface where the water threatened to break through.

  That was more like the truth than the ground I was crouched on. A thin solid layer suspended over a current that could wash it all away at a hike in the temperature or the crash of a fallen tree.

  I straightened up and edged over from my drinking hole. Carefully, I set one foot on the ice. Then the other. The ice held, emitting a soft creaking like the wind through the greenhouse vents as I eased toward the middle. I spread my feet apart and stood there, gazing down the line of the river. The trees along its bank bent toward it, forming a ragged sort of tunnel. The dark patches blended into the shadows they cast.

  This is it, I thought. This is where I am. So where do I want to be?

  A breeze tickled under my hair, across my neck. I left my scarf loose around my shoulders. I had no idea how deep the water just an inch or two beneath my feet might be. My attention drifted down to the shifting current, followed it along the curves and bends of the river—and came back empty. There was still just me, alone in the woods, adrift without being in motion.

  Alone. The ice creaked louder, with a crackling edge, and that one notion overwhelmed the rest. I could fall through and no one would see. No reaching hands would grasp mine and pull me out.

  Panic fluttered in my chest. I took a hasty step and a seam parted in the ice to the right of my boot. Water seeped up through it. I stiffened. With a tentative slide of my other foot, I eased away from the crack. The treads of my boots scraped over the uneven surface, one and then the other, like I’d done between the colony buildings for the last two months.

  My heel crunched through the ice by the bank, forming a geometric pool. I scrambled into the drift of snow, onto the firm ground, my heart thudding. As I glanced back the way I’d come, I gripped the low branch of a nearby tree, as if the river might try to pull me back.

  The crack looked like little more than a sliver from here. Not so threatening. I drew in a breath and released it. I’d been fine.

  Then I turned around and saw Suzanne in the clearing by my pack. Beneath the line of her woolen hat, her eyes were wide and worried. She took a couple of steps toward me.

  “I didn’t want to startle you,” she said. “You looked like... I’m so glad you got off the ice.”

  “Of course,” I said, confused by her intensity. “I wasn’t going to stand there forever.”

  “No,” she agreed. “I was afraid maybe you wanted it to break.”

  That I— Oh. The thought of plunging into that frigid water sent a shudder through me. “I don’t want to die,” I said with a little laugh.

  But the way she was still studying my face, maybe that wasn’t obvious. I imagined what the scene must have looked like from her point of view. Remembered how I’d felt poised over the river and standing in the clearing just a little while ago.

  Nothing.

  I didn’t want to die, no. But how much was I alive? I was here, substantial enough to touch the earth, to blot out stars, but a rock could do that. Life put down roots and extended leaves. When was the last time I’d felt I could do that?

  Maybe a part of me was already dead. Maybe it had died like my parents, silent and unseen, and that was why I hadn’t noticed. Until I’d come to myself and looked inside and found nothing but a vacant space and a disconnected line.

  All at once, the sensation of aloneness that had struck me on the ice pressed in twice as hard.

  “Oh, hun,” Suzanne said, taking another step forward. She opened her arms, and even though something inside me still balked, I wanted so much I didn’t care that she wasn’t Mom or Dad or that I barely knew her. I knew she wanted to be there for me.

  I stumbled to her and she wrapped me up, my face pressed against the padded down of her coat, damp with the tears already leaking out. She held me and rocked us gently on our feet. A low anguished sound came out of my throat. Suzanne didn’t say anything, just hugged me tighter.

  I sobbed and sniffled, and one clear thought floated above the rest. I wanted her to understand.

  “They’re never coming back,” I said. I’d known that. I’d thought that. I was sure I’d even said
it, to Leo, or to Kaelyn. But saying it now, the truth of it filled me as if I was only just uncovering it. They were gone, and I’d never even had a chance to save them. My parents and so many others, lives upon lives across the entire Earth. And even the living didn’t always come back.

  “No, they’re not,” Suzanne said softly. “But they never completely leave either. We carry them with us. It does help, but I know it hurts too.”

  Yes. I had been carrying them, tight and close around me like an impenetrable casing. But I was here, alive, inside the squeeze of Suzanne’s embrace. I caught my breath. The crying had left salt in my mouth.

  I stepped back, but not so far that Suzanne couldn’t keep one hand on my arm. “How did you know where I was?” I asked.

  “You left enough footprints to follow,” she said. “I would have gone after you last night, when we noticed you hadn’t come to dinner—Jon was worried; he said he’d seen you right before and you’d looked a bit odd—but I thought you might need some time on your own. I didn’t want you to feel that we didn’t care whether or not you came back, though.”

  So Jon had been thinking about more than just campaigning for votes. “How did it go?” I said, my stomach clenching. “What did everyone decide?”

  Suzanne’s expression turned puzzled. Then her eyebrows rose. “We didn’t have the debate or the vote, Tessa. Everyone felt you should be a part of it too.”

  “Oh,” I said. So the question was still looming. The clenching inside me became a knot. “I don’t know what’s the best thing to do.”

  “None of us knows,” Suzanne said. “We’ll just make the best guess we can. And the things you know, about growing food, about the people we might have to deal with outside the colony, they’ll help us do that. If you’re willing to talk about it with us.”

  About trying to find another, useable greenhouse in a city, or ways to garden without one. About the stories Kaelyn and Leo had related, about this Michael, his Wardens, and the other survivors.