Yesterday
The school: Our haven, home-away-from-home, sometimes prison and now our hope.
We walked through the forest, back toward town, and I was struck with a powerful sense of deja-vu. Of course, I hadn’t lived this moment before, it only felt that way as we retraced our steps. Last time we were like this, Sasha had been here. Renzo too.
It was the four of us now. My clothes slowly dried from my body heat, though my undergarments still chafed against my skin. I imagined what I looked like—hair matted and unbrushed, clothes ripped and dirty, sores and scratches all over. I was more a creature of the forest than a girl.
I expected a storm, thunder and lightning, tidal waves and typhoons, nature’s melodrama. Anything to wash the death away. Instead, the sun shone the kind of sunlight made for picnics and ballgames or picking seashells from the beach. The perfect weather for everything. Except this.
Dirk had a weapon and at least four shots. There was a gleam in his eyes. His finger caressed the trigger. When he heard a sound, he gestured for us to stop and then looked through his scope, scanning into the distance.
“Adults?” I asked.
He sounded disappointed. “Just a squirrel.” He followed the squirrel with his scope and then made a pretend shooting noise. “Squirrel stew for you.”
I thought of how far I’d come, not only in distance, but in life. How only a few years ago felt like an eternity. An entirely different Ruthie Stroud.
Yet, there would be no forgetting. The scent of the forest with its pine and earth, the crackling of leaves, and the rustle of trees will always remind me of that moment.
Theo had stopped and leaned against a tree, his head against the bark.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
He looked into the treetops as if an answer was hidden there. “What if we don’t have to do it?”
“What other choice do we have?”
“To stop,” he said. “To stop and wait.”
“For how long?”
“However long it takes.”
Max was silent, so was Dirk, but Dirk shook his head, as if disappointed with a lame team member he’d picked in gym class.
I said, “I don’t think you mean that. I think you’re just saying it, but you’re not the guy who wants to just stop.”
“I don’t know who I am, Ruthie. That’s what scares me.”
I hated seeing his confidence crumble. I approached and hugged him. “You’re my brother.”
“I’m your brother,” he repeated, emptily.
“Better believe it.”
That seemed to get him walking again. He was tired, stumbling along, but at least he was moving. After a while, we came to the edge of the forest, just as we did before. We were on one side, the road and town on the other.
“Hunting season’s open,” Dirk said, and he stepped out.
We followed. No hiding this time. No scampering behind cars. We walked in the middle of the road, and even with only four bullets, we felt invincible.
There was power in knowing what you wanted, visualizing its outcome. It was a magical quality, as if you were making it real. Maybe we should’ve done this from the very beginning. All out war. But our parent’s voices, their values, kept us back. The hesitation, the ingrained need to please and follow their instructions. We’d always needed to break away from them. To break and heal and become our own people. It’s very possible our plan was a gross mistake, the biggest mistake ever, but at least it was our mistake.
Worlds could shift on our accord, too.
I said before some images burn in your mind. Images I will never forget no matter how hard I try. Mental scars. I have to put up a wall somehow, a place with a lock and key and bury them with every ugly thought I’ve ever had.
I passed such images on our way to the school. While Max, Theo, Dirk, and I were surviving in the forest, something beyond words happened in our absence in town. A whole battle must’ve raged. The streets literally flowed with blood.
I’d studied some medieval history in school, mainly about the Black Plague and how bodies were left in the street to rot and bloat, people too scared to touch them, and that’s all I thought of now. I wasn’t seeing them as real. I couldn’t. I saw it as an exhibit we could take a field trip to, the way people dress up and re-enact early Colonial settlements. Or people helping out with a disaster preparedness drill.
I am in a video game, and they are pixelated images.
I am walking down the street of a living nightmare.
Men, women, and kids lay in the streets. On stoops. Slumping against cars. Household weapons littered the area like items dropped from the sky. Baseball bats here, a battery-operated drill there, kitchen knives, a two-by-four. An electrical cord wrapped around a woman’s neck like gothic jewelry. A kid’s face was impaled with pens. Someone took a blow from a garden hoe.
They fought each other with whatever they had.
A battlefield on Main Street.
It seemed like the island’s whole population had converged here.
It was impossible to tell who fought first; the scene was chaos brought to a standstill. The aftermath of hell on earth. A tornado had ripped through this town while we were away, the cries of the dying, the moaning and pain, the courage and cowardice. Every body told a story, a story we would never know.
They are not real.
They are all too real.
I saw insides, things never meant to exist outside of a body. I saw someone’s dog—oh God, it was Robbie, eating something, and I would never look at him the same again. I didn’t have the strength to yell at him to stop.
This was the route I took to school. Every day, over and over, and I thought of all the times I was here fantasizing about being somewhere else. How boring it was. But boring is good, I saw. Boring was the opposite of this.
Keep walking, I thought. Keep walking, and the nightmare will recede.
Every block brought more.
Neighbors, Mr. Amram, the gym teacher, Sally Jenkins, the post lady. I closed my eyes, not wanting to see, using my foot to check for spaces where I could walk. I thought if I closed my eyes long enough, hard enough, seeing stars behind my eyelids, maybe the images would be gone forever. I bumped against what I didn’t want to know, and I nearly tripped. Even with my eyes closed, I saw them. My mind conjured them.
I saw too much. I saw things no one should ever see.
The air was filled with moans, a weak chorus of the dying.
Theo said, “Maybe we can help some of them?”
Max answered, “They’re beyond help.”
They were mannequins. Store mannequins that fell from a truck. Crash-test dummies in a safety demonstration. A Normal Rockwell painting someone threw acid on. Hallucinations.
Anything but real.
Though I could’ve reached out and touched Max, Theo, or Dirk, I felt alone. They walked with their eyes forward, straight ahead, refusing to look. Only Dirk had a strange excitement, an energy of expectation.
People fought and died. Not just people. People I knew. People I recognized. Part of me felt guilty we hadn’t been there to help.
I couldn’t get to the school fast enough. I wondered how many of us were even alive anymore.
Now
The Detective listens to my story, jotting notes in her yellow pad. I say, “You must’ve seen the bodies by now.”
She nods. “There are blood spatter experts on scene trying to figure it all out.” She looks at me. “You must be terrified.”
“I was.”
“I mean now. Talking to me. All the adults around here. Every doctor, nurse, orderly.”
“There are kids here, too.”
“It’s okay if you’re scared,” she says.
I focus on the badge near her belt. “You must be scared all the time. Being a detective, I mean.” I get the feeling she’s not used to people asking her questions.
“Yes and no. I solve puzzles. I make order from disorder. And that…disorder can be really scary.”
“How do you deal with it? The awful things people do to one another?”
“Well,” and she stops and thinks. “I try to make sure that justice is served.”
“To catch the bad guy?”
“That’s one way of looking at it.”
“What if they’re all bad?”
“I don’t think they are. Do you?”
I nod. “Sometimes I think the infection was just an excuse.”
“That’s a pretty depressing way of looking at humanity.”
“Maybe it’s the truth.” I notice she has a wedding band on her finger. “Married?”
“Yes. Two years.” It’s the first time I see her smile.
“Do you have kids?” I can tell she’s uncomfortable with the question. “Sorry. That’s rude of me.”
“One day.”
“Do you think you’ll be a good parent?”
“Who’s questioning who?” She pauses. “I’d like to think so. But I’m not sure you know until you are one. Why?”
“’Cause I’ll never be a parent.”
“Well, you’ve got lots of time to change your mind.”
I hear the chirp of her phone. She checks her text message. “Your father’s about an hour away. I let him know you probably won’t be ready for discharge for several days.”
“As long as he’s able to visit.”
Detective Perez peels the pages back from her yellow notebook. “They found the bus, by the way. Submerged, as you said.” She reads, eyebrows furrowing. “Strange, though. The bus driver’s body. She had a pair of scissors in her back. What do you make of that?”
“I think she was driving like a crazy person and the kids tried to stop her.”
She nods and closes her notebook. “You were very brave.”
“I wouldn’t call what we did brave.”
“What, then?”
I think a while and say the only thing that makes sense. “Necessary.”