Chapter 5, The Centaur's Wife

5

Her first night in the city, Tasha sleeps on the floor beside Annie, in a house just down from the destroyed hospital. Strangers lie beside them—no one wants to be alone. The girl, Elyse, sleeps on the couch, her breathing laboured. When Tasha wakes up some hours later, in the early hours of the morning, Elyse turns to her, pale and worried in the dim light.

“Was it a dream?” she whispers.

Tasha sits up and draws her knees to her chest. “No dream.”

Her words wake Annie, who puts a hand on Tasha’s arm.

“Did you sleep okay?” Annie asks.

“Yes,” Tasha says, knowing what she means. If a night terror was going to visit her, surely it would come now, with the end of the world. “I slept fine.” More than fine. She slept like the dead.

Maybe they are dead, she thinks, even as the people around them begin to stretch and stir. Maybe this is a terror that finally makes sense.

“What happens now?” Elyse says.

Tasha takes Annie’s hand and kisses her palm and is rewarded with a tired smile. “Now we figure out what happens now,” she says.

When she stands up, everyone turns to her, waiting.

“We’ll be all right,” she tells everyone as she leads them out into the streets. “Everything will be all right. We’ll take it one step at a time.”

First, we must help the wounded. She and Annie stand for hours that day in front of the hospital wreckage, tending the injured, making sure everyone is bandaged, setting broken bones. There is morphine in the ambulance and they use as much of it as they need. She doesn’t think about saving it until later.

Next, food. She and Annie—trailed by Elyse, who won’t let them out of her sight—find a convenience store two streets over. No one else is here except for a young man who sits slumped at the till. When they walk in, he blinks as though he doesn’t quite believe they’re real.

“People will need food,” Tasha says. She uses her doctor voice—calm, certain, and unhurried. He nods. She wonders if he’s been here the whole time. She pulls her wallet from the pocket of her scrubs and empties all her cash onto the counter. Thirty-five dollars. “If people come in,” she says, “let them have whatever they want. I will pay you for the rest of it later.”

He is young, nervous. He doesn’t ask her how she’s going to pay for the rest of it; he just nods and takes the money. When she turns back to the door, one of the firemen who came with them from the coast—his name is Kevin, and his yellow jacket is smudged with soot—is standing in the doorway.

“There’s a grocery store nearby,” he says. “People are panicking.”

When they get to the store, people are crying and shouting, appealing to a man who stands in the front of the registers with his hands up to hold them back.

“The system is down,” he says. “I can’t ring anyone through.”

“The sky fucking fell apart!” someone shouts. “When do you think the system’s going back up?”

Tasha pushes her way to the front of the crowd. “Hello,” she says to the grocery store clerk. “What’s your name?”

The man looks at her as if she makes no sense, but says, “Alan.”

“Are you the manager?”

He looks around nervously. “One of them. I don’t know where the other ones are.”

“I’m sure they’ll be here eventually,” Tasha says.

Even though she hasn’t asked, he says, “The tills won’t even open when the system is down.”

“That’s okay, Alan. We all understand. But people need to eat.”

“There are restaurants,” he says, feebly. “They have generators. After the hurricane a few years ago the power went out and they were packed for like a week. I remember.” He looks at Annie, then behind her, then back at Tasha. “I can’t—I don’t have the authority to do anything. It’s not my fault.”

Another voice shouts. “This wasn’t a fucking hurricane! Half of the city is gone!”

Tasha ignores the other voice. “I know it’s not your fault.” She reaches out and puts a reassuring hand on Alan’s arm. “But we have to work with what we have right now, Alan, okay? Some of these people don’t have houses anymore. We don’t know what’s happening. When you add that to being hungry, it’s a lot. People just want food. We can pay for things later, when the system goes back up.”

When the system goes back up. This is another thing you learn in the ER—that hope is like a kind of lying.

“There’s no power,” he whispers. “How are people going to cook?”

“We’ll find a way,” she says. His shoulders relax. She beckons to Kevin. “Help everyone get what they need,” she says, and then, leaning close to his ear, “Make sure no one takes too much.” She turns and heads for the door.

Outside, Annie looks at her. “You’ll need to eat too,” she says.

“I’m fine,” Tasha says. Above them, the sky is grey and brown.

Next, we need places for everyone to sleep. When the cell towers are still down late into the afternoon, she gathers the paramedics and the other firemen who came with them, all pale with fatigue but alert—and sends them to survey the houses still standing near the hospital. Asking for shelter when people answer the door. Forcing open doors when no one answers.

She also asks everyone to put their phones away and stop checking for reception. For now. Just for now.

Help will come. Help will come. Until then, we’ll help each other.

Help will come.

She says the words over and over until they mean absolutely nothing.

Later still on that long day in the city, Annie says to Tasha, “You need to sleep. And not on a floor.”

Annie is also tired, Tasha wants to point out. Elyse, who has followed them everywhere today, says, “Should we go back to the house we were in last night and snag the bedrooms?”

Tasha and Annie glance at each other. “There are a lot of houses,” Tasha says. “Let’s find another one for the three of us.”

Elyse’s shoulders slump in relief. They both see it, and say nothing.

Annie is the one who finds them a townhouse one street over from the wreckage of the hospital. The front door isn’t even locked.

“Hello?” Annie calls as they step inside, but no one answers.

Everything is peaceful and quiet. Their footsteps echo on the floor. The windows are dusted with a layer of fine brown dirt, and Tasha makes a mental note to clean them as soon as she can.

The bedrooms upstairs are neat. No children live here, at least none who are small. Both the master bedroom and the smaller one overlook the destroyed backyard. A fence is blown in on the right-hand side. A maple in the garden is split in half, its carcass bent and leaning against the small bedroom’s window.

There’s a couch in the master bedroom. “I can sleep on that,” Elyse says.

Annie shakes her head. “You take the other room.” She slides an arm around Elyse’s shoulders. “It’ll be more comfortable. We’ll be right next door, Elyse.”

Elyse looks away, her lip trembling. “I’m not—I know I shouldn’t be scared—”

“I’ll sleep on the couch,” Tasha says. She smiles at Elyse, at them both. “You and Annie take the bed until you’re comfortable, Elyse. Everything’s going to be okay.”

Elyse looks down at the floor. “I’m sorry,” she says.

“It’s fine,” Tasha says. “None of this is going to be forever.”

She waits for Annie to protest, but she doesn’t say a word.

Over the following weeks, they mobilize their resources. They go to all the restaurants, most of them in ruins, and move the working generators to a spot behind the strip mall. They clear the wreckage of the hospital, searching for supplies. Some of the eastern wing is still standing, along with the front stairwell where people had climbed out from the basement that first afternoon.

Elyse goes everywhere they do. She can’t exert herself too much, so they ask her to sit in a chair in front of the rubble and count and pack what they salvage into boxes. Cotton balls and tongue depressors, scalpels wrapped in plastic. Water from burst pipes has crept over what’s left of the floor, and their shoes squelch as they crouch down in doorways to peer further into the wreckage. Tasha’s sneakers are soaked through. She can tell by the wrinkle in Annie’s nose that hers are too.

They find other things—a baby’s bonnet, a suit jacket smeared with dirt and blood. A watch lying face up in a puddle, the digital face blank. A silver earring shaped like a goose. After a while Elyse gets restless packing boxes and moves around the wreckage, popping random things into a yellow bucket Annie found.

“Look,” she calls. When they turn, she holds up a Get Well card, the lilac ink now smudged. “For Sharon. Get better soon—love, Edgar.” She stares at the card before dropping it in the bucket. “I hope Sharon and Edgar survived.”

Other things they discover: a torn cerulean purse; a zip-lock bag filled with salted peanuts; a day planner with soaked pages that have softened into one misshapen hunk of paper. A loop of child’s teething beads. A soggy romance novel. Twenty empty pill bottles. Six more solo earrings, and one diamond ring.

“We should have a lost and found,” Elyse says. “We could keep it somewhere central. Maybe by the sign in the square?”

She heads deeper into the darker hallways, where Tasha and Annie have already been, and Tasha calls out, “Don’t go any further.”

Elyse stops, turns to them. “But—there might be more stuff in those rooms. And what if there are…people? Shouldn’t we be looking?”

“We’ve looked. You don’t need to go in there.” Annie’s voice is firm.

Elyse’s face trembles. She closes her eyes. Annie goes to her, puts an arm around her shoulder. “If anyone was still alive under the rubble, we would have heard them by now,” she says. “They would be trying to make noise. Have you heard anything?”

What’s left of the hospital is silent and dead.

On another day, they search a school. It was empty when the meteors hit and sustained little damage—but the pipes have burst here, too, and books bob softly in the hallways. They squelch through the corridors and take what they can.

“Won’t the kids need these things when they come back?” Elyse asks, after they’ve trudged outside yet again with their arms full of books and dropped them on the grass.

Tasha and Annie glance at one another.

“I think,” Tasha says, carefully, “we can assume that won’t be for a while.”

Elyse stares at her. “But—you said help will come.”

Tasha nods. “And I think it will. It just might take longer than anyone expects.”

Elyse nods at this, slowly. “There must be places that weren’t hit as bad.”

“Of course,” Tasha says. “But they might be on the other side of the world. We need to take care of ourselves, and prepare for the future as best we can. If for nothing other than to keep people busy. I don’t want anyone to worry any more than they have to, and the best thing for that is to give people something to do.”

“Okay,” Elyse says. She goes back to organizing the books.

It is helpful, the repetition—bottles in boxes and boxes in boxes and this food goes here and let’s gather blankets and keep them all in one central place so that no one stops to think about the fact that there is no one in the pharmacy, there is no one at the bank, there is no power, there is no news from elsewhere.

She and Annie have help, for which Tasha is more grateful than she can say. Kevin from the fire trucks, other paramedics from their old seaside city. Brendan, with the red hair and the girls and the dark-haired wife, Heather. Alan from the grocery store. Other people who open up their homes to strangers and share their food. Still others who defuse confrontations that break out in the streets. There is so much fear in the air, so much fighting. But slowly, slowly, the survivors come together.

On the nights that she can’t sleep, Tasha sends Annie and Elyse home and walks the city with other insomniacs—foraging, she calls it. Never looting. It isn’t just her own survival she’s thinking about. She’s thinking about everyone else. That’s how they’re all going to survive—by thinking about everyone else. She goes up and down the night streets with others that she trusts—Kevin, and Alan, and Zeljko, the youth from the convenience store—and together they search for anything that might help them survive.

She hardly sleeps. But then, she’s used to that.

One night when she comes home in the early hours of the morning, Annie is waiting for her, just inside the front door. “Hi,” she whispers, and Tasha closes the door behind her and then Annie pushes her up against the door and Annie’s hands are in her hair, Annie’s tongue is in her mouth, Annie’s hands are pulling hard at the zipper of her jeans. Her skin feels grimy and dry but so does Tasha’s—they slide against one another like paper dolls, crumpling together, falling to the floor.

Tasha makes a sound deep in her throat, then lifts her head and bites Annie’s ear. Annie puts a hand over her mouth. “Shhh,” she says. “You’ll wake Elyse.”

Tasha laughs into Annie’s palm. She slides a finger deep inside of Annie and watches her wife shudder in the dark. Then she pulls her hand away.

“More,” Annie whispers.

Tasha only shakes her head. “What about Elyse?” she says, but her mouth is on Annie’s shoulder now, her fingers slick and hovering over Annie’s face. She sticks a finger in Annie’s mouth and Annie sucks it.

And then it is gone, the desire, the shock of its absence rushing cold into the room. Tasha pushes herself up, sits back against the closed front door. Annie blinks at her, surprised.

“I wasn’t serious,” Annie says. “Not really. I mean—it’s not like we haven’t had to be quiet before.”

Before. Once upon a time in a seaside city long, long ago. They’d had silent sex in the guest room in Annie’s parents’ house a hundred times. The laughter building in them, ready to burst.

Before. It hasn’t been that long, but it feels like it. Tasha pulls her knees up and sighs a little. Then she takes Annie’s palm and kisses it, folds Annie’s fingers over the kiss. “It’s late,” she says. “And it’ll be another long day tomorrow. We should go to bed.”

This time Annie is the one who pulls her hand away, her fist balled tight, like she’s a child afraid the kiss will disappear.

Elyse is on the couch when they go upstairs to their room. They climb into the bed without speaking and wind their bodies together—Annie curled inside and Tasha behind her, her arms sliding around Annie’s slender torso. Her golden-haired princess, all dirt and sweat.

Another evening, Tasha’s alone on her rounds, driving the ambulance in widening circles, looking for places they might have missed. Just as she decides to turn for home, she once again sees the dark-haired woman, Heather, coming toward her from the mountain, carrying her babies. Their red hair shines even from this far away. Tasha stops beside her.

“Heather,” she calls. The woman keeps walking, her eyes on the ground. “Are you all right?”

Heather lifts her head, startled, then nods. “I’m just tired,” she says.

What happened in that other fire? Tasha wants to reach out and touch her. To crawl back to that moment in front of the hospital, when she touched Heather’s forehead and heard the high-pitched sound of screaming. The taste of starlight at once impossible and unmistakable in her mouth. Where had that come from? What did it mean?

“Okay,” she says instead. “Well—Annie and I are in a townhouse by the hospital. The one with the blue roof. If you need anything.”

Heather shrugs. “Okay,” she says. “Thank you.”

“Where were you walking?”

Heather’s face is still shuttered, but she says, “I was just in the forest for a little bit. The trees relax me.”

“I was just curious. I don’t care where you go.” Then, tentatively. “Maybe I could come with you sometime?”

Heather doesn’t say anything, but since she’s still standing there, Tasha asks, “Remember that first day, by the ambulance, when I touched your face? What did you see?”

Heather sighs. “That there was a fire,” she says. “Or—there had been a fire. And you were alone.” She looks back down at the ground. “Sometimes I see things like that. Other people’s—memories. I know it sounds ridiculous.”

“I saw you,” Tasha says, and Heather’s face softens in surprise. “Or—I heard you. When my hand touched your face, I saw the mountain and clouds, and I heard you scream. What happened? Did someone fall?”

Heather stares at her for a long moment. “My father,” she says, eventually. “My father had an accident on the mountain. He died.”

“I’m so sorry.” Tasha feels her eyes blur with tears.

“It’s all right,” Heather says. “It was a long time ago.” Then, still looking at Tasha, “Your fire wasn’t a long time ago, was it?”

Tasha looks away from Heather, out through the windshield of the ambulance and up the street, which is slowly being overtaken by green. “No.” She sniffs, then wipes at her nose with her hand. “My parents, two years ago. They died in a house fire.”

“I’m so sorry,” Heather says. When Tasha turns back to her, there’s an understanding deep in Heather’s eyes. Tasha wants to fall into it. She feels tiny, like a child.

“I try to forget,” Tasha says. “Or—not forget, I’ll never forget, I just—concentrate. On something else. You know?” Then she takes a breath, uncomfortably aware that she’s starting to babble. “How did you see what you saw? And why did I see your memory? That’s never happened to me before.”

Heather lifts her shoulders a little. “I’m not sure,” she says. Now her face is—not unfriendly, exactly, but warier. “I should get back,” she says. “I’ve been gone a long time.”

“Do you want a ride?”

“No, thank you.”

“Well. You know where we are if you…need anything.”

“Yes,” Heather says. “You said that already.”

Tasha flushes. “Right,” she says. “Well—I’ll see you around, then, I guess.” Heather only nods and starts walking. After a moment, Tasha puts the ambulance in gear.

To her right, the mountain. She’s heard the rumours about it. Strange animals in the trees. People who disappear. The stories the city people tell about the mountain comfort her, in a weird way. They remind her of the stories her mother told her as a child. The mountain and its secrets have endured—they will survive long after all of humanity is gone, whether by disaster or illness or old age.

This mountain, the one closest to them, rises pristine and untouched into the clouds. Did Heather’s father fall from there?

Then Tasha shakes her head. We can endure, she thinks. Maybe Elyse is right—maybe help will come. We just need to be smart and care for each other and focus on concrete things. The things we know to be true, and not the things we imagine.

There’s a spark of something in the city. She can sense it. It isn’t hope yet, but it’s close.

When she gets back to the middle of the city, there is yelling in the square. The area in front of the name boards is chaotic, frenzied, filled with rage. Half the people left in the city, it seems, are milling about in the streets, angry and frightened.

Tasha pulls the ambulance up as close as she can, then jumps out, shoving the keys into her pocket. “What’s going on?” she shouts, making her way through the crowd.

Kevin stands in front of the crowd, his arms spread wide, holding everyone back. Behind him, in front of the name boards, stand three people—a woman, a man, and Annie.

The woman has one arm locked around Annie’s neck. The other hand holds a knife against Annie’s throat.

“What’s going on?” Tasha says, again. She clenches her fists and fights to push a long-ago dream memory away. Fiery birds burning holes in the ground. A woman who screams and screams.

“What’s going on?” the woman shouts. She looks right at Tasha. “The food is disappearing—that’s what’s fucking going on! You think we’re stupid? You think we don’t know you’re going to take off with the gas?”

“I don’t think anyone’s stupid,” Tasha says calmly. She holds out her hands and takes a step forward—and then, when the woman moves the knife and Annie winces, stops. “We’ve been collecting and saving what we can. So that everyone will survive. That’s all.”

“So it’s looting when everyone else does it but it’s fine when it’s done by a fucking stranger?” The man steps forward and jabs a finger into Tasha’s collarbone. Tasha can’t remember his name.

Tasha spreads her hands farther, steps back from him. I have nothing. I have nothing. “I haven’t accused anyone of looting,” she says.

“She did!” the woman screams, jerking her head to Annie.

“They were.” Annie speaks through gritted teeth. “They climbed over the enclosure. They were trying to get at the gas.”

“So what if we were?” the man shouts. Wendell. That’s his name. “Who the fuck do you think you are, anyway? You don’t even live here.”

“I’m nobody,” Tasha says, and she means it. “But I do live here now. And so does Annie. We’re just trying to help.”

“Well, guess what,” the woman says. “You’re not helping. Do you think hoarding all of the food in that godforsaken mall is going to help us in the winter? Is hoarding the gas going to help other people come to the city and help? Is it?”

“Help is coming,” Tasha says. “We just have to be patient. We just have to look out for each other. I know this is hard.”

“Do you?” the woman screams. She flings Annie away from her and moves toward Tasha, brandishing the knife in her face. “My home was destroyed. I haven’t slept in three days. I don’t feel safe. And no one is coming. No one is coming to help.”

Tasha doesn’t flinch. “Many of us don’t have homes anymore.” She ignores the ripple of unease that goes through the crowd behind her, like a great beast slowly waking from sleep. She ignores Annie, stumbling forward to stand in the crowd. She reaches tentatively for the woman’s shoulder, but the woman shies away. “But we’re building a new home, together. One that can last for as long as we need it.”

The woman laughs, then sobs. She turns around and throws the knife at the boards—it goes deep, splintering an unknown name in two. “We’re fucking stuck here,” the woman says. “We can’t leave because you won’t let us have gas to go. How far do you think any of us is going to get on foot? I’ve seen the vines growing over the roads. And we’re going to run out of food. Whatever you think you’re building—it isn’t going to last. We’re all going to starve.”

“We’re not going to starve,” Tasha says. Then she says it again, louder. “We are not going to starve.”

“Maybe not now,” the woman says. “But if help doesn’t come, we’ll all be dead by the end of the winter.” Her eyes burn. “And if that doesn’t happen, the mountain will drive us all mad anyway.”

Tasha’s breath stills, for a moment. “What?” she says.

“You’re not from here,” the woman snaps. “You don’t know—but we do. Just wait. We’ll stay here and starve, and people will start disappearing. They’ll get lost, or they’ll walk too close to the mountain and bears will eat them. Bears—or other things. Monsters that hide in the trees.”

“Monsters aren’t real,” Tasha says. She keeps her voice soft. “That’s only a story. And I won’t let anyone go up the mount—”

“You don’t have anything to do with it!” the woman cries. “We all know—but you don’t. You haven’t lived in the shadow of this mountain. You do not understand.”

Tasha feels the crowd behind her shiver, as if they were on the edge of unleashing a wail. “Heather goes near the mountain. She’s fine. No monsters at all.”

“Heather?” the woman sneers. “The one with the crazy father who died on the mountain? It’s because of her that we all stay away! She’s the last person you should be talking to. She’s already nuts.”

“She’s not nuts,” Tasha says, severely.

“Bullshit. She says she went up the mountain, but she walks like this?” The woman acts out a limp, staggering around. “How’s she supposed to get up the mountain? She’s a liar. Don’t believe a word she says.”

Tasha glances around. The people from her city look confused, but everyone else looks uneasy, like these are things they’ve been whispering about for years. She locks eyes with a man who stands beside Kevin. He shrugs.

“We’ve all heard things about the mountain,” he says. “But they’re only stories. You know, the kind parents tell to keep their children in the house. Johnny went up the mountain and was never seen again. That kind of thing.”

“They aren’t just stories!” the woman cries again. “You know they aren’t.”

“And Heather?” Tasha presses.

The man shrugs again. “Every village has its idi—” he sees Tasha’s expression, catches himself—“someone eccentric, right? That’s all it is.”

Tasha grits her teeth. Maybe she goes there to get away from all of you. Then she stops and stills herself. They are all terrified, she thinks. They are all dancing on the edge of so much. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out the keys to the ambulance, then drops them on the ground in front of the woman. “Take the ambulance and go. The last thing I want is for people to stay here and sink into despair.”

The woman stares at her. “You’re not serious.”

“Do I look like I’m making a joke?” Tasha turns to face the crowd. “Anyone can leave here,” she says. “You can take the ambulance right now and go. Try to find another place that maybe hasn’t been hit as hard. Send help our way if you can.” She turns back to the woman. “If you don’t want to stay, then I want you to go.”

The woman looks, briefly, hurt by this, but again her anger flares. She bends and grabs the keys. She shouts. “Anyone who wants to come—get in.”

The woman throws open the driver’s door and climbs inside. She turns the key, and the engine rumbles to life. The man who was standing beside her runs around to the passenger side, then gets in. And suddenly other people are scrambling into the back, tossing a few of Tasha’s carefully gathered boxes out onto the ground to make room. The woman in the driver’s seat yells, “Stop! We might need that!” Then she looks straight at Tasha. “Fuck you!” she shouts, and she rams the pedal to the floor.

People scream and jump out of the way just in time as the ambulance speeds down the street and around the corner, out of sight.

Tasha turns to Annie. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” Annie brushes at the grime on her pants.

“What happened?”

Annie shrugs. “You heard her. I confronted them trying to break in—they ran, and I chased them to the square. Then she pulled the knife.”

Tasha nods. Her hands tremble, even as she continues to hold them tight in fists. The crowd is slowly dispersing around them.

How many, she wonders, already regret that they didn’t jump in the ambulance too? “Where’s Elyse?”

Annie runs a hand through her hair. “Back at the house. I was just out doing a final walk around the mall.”

“Don’t walk around alone anymore,” Tasha says, thinking of the crowd. A beast gone back to slumber.

“Me?” Annie says, incredulous. “Tasha, she was yelling at you.”

She’s already turning away, heading back to the house. “I’ll be fine,” she says, and Annie doesn’t answer.

The next morning they’re awoken by Elyse, who starts coughing so hard when she gets out of bed that she falls over.

Tasha is on her feet right away. Annie reaches for the towels they’ve stacked by the nightstand just for this. She lays them over the mattress, mounts the pillows, and covers them with a towel too.

“I’m sorry,” Elyse rasps, as she climbs onto the bed and lies face down over the pillows.

“Don’t be silly,” Tasha says.

Annie starts counting, and with each beat Tasha slaps Elyse’s back, working up and down her ribs, dislodging the buildup in her lungs bit by bit.

As Elyse coughs mucus out onto the towel, Annie swaps one towel for another. She doesn’t stop counting.

Eventually, Tasha’s efforts start Elyse coughing in earnest, and she eases off and steps back from the bed, raising an arm to wipe the sweat from her forehead.

After she’s coughed herself out, Elyse lies silent on the mattress for a few minutes. Then she turns over, sits up, and reaches for her shirt. “Thank you,” she says. Annie gathers up the filthy towels.

Tasha thinks about Elyse every time the wind rises, kicking up dust and debris. Once upon a time Elyse had wanted to be a doctor too. The new drug she was taking, the surgery—these were going to help her climb a mountain.

If help doesn’t come, Elyse will be lucky if she lives out the year.

“Let’s have another session tonight,” Tasha says as they all start to get ready for the day.

Elyse shrugs. Already she’s trying to put it behind them. “I should be good now,” she says. “I’ll help Annie in the pharmacy. I won’t be a bother, I promise.”

“You’re not a bother, Elyse.” It’s what Tasha says every time. It’s what she says to everybody.

Elyse shrugs at this, too, and goes out the bedroom door.

The people who took the ambulance don’t come back. Tasha tries to forget them, tries to focus on the city. They keep stockpiling all the food they can find. They build greenhouses, make garden plots, plant as many little seed packets as they can. The days are long and unrelenting.

There is no news. Sometime after the knife incident, others break into the strip mall in the night, steal gas and food, and drive away from the city.

Even though there is very little rain, the grass grows high, vines climb over the houses, and weeds fill the road. But the bean, pepper, potato, and tomato plants they grow yield vegetables that are stunted and unappetizing—if they yield anything at all. Tasha goes from one greenhouse to the next, adding fertilizer collected from the garden centres. Nothing works. The vegetables do not get bigger, and they all taste the same—bland, with a faint tang of metal, of burning.

We’re all going to starve, the woman had said. Celeste, Tasha had found out later. She had lived in the mountain city all her life. Her words run on repeat through Tasha’s head while she tries to sleep.

We’re all going to starve.

“How much do we have in the supply rooms?” It’s late summer and Tasha has begun to ask this question once a day at least. She and Annie are sprawled on a mattress on the floor of their makeshift clinic—a little store in the strip mall that used to be a butcher shop. They’ve dedicated one of the generators to keeping its fridges running, to safeguard the medications they’ve scrounged.

Tasha spends most of her nights here now, in case someone needs her. Sometimes Annie joins her, though mostly she stays at the townhouse with Elyse. When Tasha sleeps alone, she dreams of birds who burn holes in the ground. A bat made of human flesh and ribs. She wakes screaming, slick with sweat.

“We have enough,” Annie says. “If we’re careful.”

“How much is enough?”

Annie sighs. “If we’re smart, enough to last us until spring. Maybe a little longer. We’ll be eating crackers and canned tuna and nothing else by the end of it.” She circles Tasha’s right breast with her hand, thumbs her nipple. Moonlight glints on her wedding ring—silver, identical to Tasha’s. The only thing that either of them have left from their old lives, except for each other.

“Tasha,” Annie says, slowly, “help isn’t coming, is it.”

Tasha raises a hand and holds Annie’s palm to her chest. “We just have to be patient. We’ll figure it out.”

In September, one of the city residents suggests that they plant clover in the gardens to enrich the soil.

“Next spring, we can till it in, and it’ll release nutrients as it decomposes,” he tells them. His name is Joseph. He doesn’t trust Tasha. He doesn’t trust anybody.

Joseph often goes out of town on his bicycle, searching for news. Sometimes others join him and sometimes he goes alone. On bikes they are still able to weave their way along roads choked with grass and vines.

They bring back supplies—bags of rice and lentils, dented cans of tomatoes and beans. More often than not they bring only stories: death in that city, death in that town. Looting and fire and terror and fear.

One night when Joseph returns, he half staggers into the clinic, his shirt spotted with blood.

“Jesus,” Annie says. She loops his arm around her shoulders and brings him to the back room, then settles him down on the mattress. As she strips him of the shirt, Tasha pulls on a pair of gloves. A four-inch slit gapes down Joseph’s side.

“What happened?” she asks.

The front bell sounds and they all look up—it is only Elyse, coming in carrying a bag of chips.

“I—I didn’t know if anyone had eaten,” she falters when she sees them.

Tasha waves her in. She looks back to Joseph. “Tell me what went wrong.”

“Ambush,” he says, hissing as Tasha swabs his skin with disinfectant. “Pushed me off the bike and took all of the supplies. Swiped at me when I got up and ran after them. I didn’t have a lot—I guess that was a good thing.”

“They didn’t take the bike?” Annie says.

“No.” Joseph manages to laugh. “There’s so much green shit on the roads, even the bike is practically useless.”

Tasha shines the beam of a mini flashlight on the wound. It isn’t as deep as she’d feared. There is bruising and swelling around it, but the edges are clean and no ribs appear to be broken.

“No more going out alone,” Tasha says. “That’s an order.”

Annie snorts, softly. Tasha half expects Joseph to snap at her, but he only says, “I don’t know how much longer we’ll be able to go out anyway. The roads are impassable.”

Tasha wipes the cut with disinfectant on a small sponge, working as gently as she can. “When was your last tetanus shot?”

“Tetanus shot?” he says. “I think the kids got theirs—two years ago?” His face clouds over. “My oldest hated needles. I got a booster of some kind at the same time so he could see it wasn’t the end of the world.” A sharp intake of breath—at his own words or the action of her hand, she isn’t sure. “It might have been tetanus. I don’t know.”

Elyse opens her bag of chips and passes it to Joseph. He reaches in, silently, and grabs a handful, crunching as Tasha cleans the wound. When she’s done, Annie hands her a small tube from a satchel that sits on the counter. Tasha’s own personal medical kit. It’s one of the first things she put together when they arrived.

“Surgical glue,” Tasha says when she sees Joseph stare at it. “It’s safe, I swear. If the cut was deeper, I would stitch you.” She closes the wound, then covers it with a bandage. “No biking for at least a week,” she says. “Also, keep it dry for at least two days. No showers, no long, luxurious soaks in the tub.”

He doesn’t laugh. “What are you going to do when the winter comes? When no one can leave the city?”

“Anyone can leave,” Tasha says. “I’m not stopping them.”

“That’s not what I mean,” he says. “What if something happens in the city? What if you aren’t enough? I see the way people look at you now. Half of them hate you and half of them look like they think you can fucking cure cancer. What are you going to do if the food runs out?”

She sits back on her heels. “I’ve always tried to be truthful. I never said—”

“Help will come,” he mocks. “You’ve been saying that for months. I’m not an idiot! You’re making it so that people don’t want to leave.”

“I’m trying to give everyone hope,” Tasha says around a sinking feeling in her gut. “I’m trying to give everyone something to do. Is that bad?”

“Is having something to do going to save them in the winter when we run out of food? What happens when we run out of the water-purifying tablets that you stole from the store?”

“I didn’t steal them, I collect—”

“You know what I mean! What happens when the sun sets at four in the afternoon and doesn’t rise till ten and people scare themselves by telling ghost stories about the mountain? You think everyone’s going to be calm and happy and satisfied when we’re in the dark all the time?”

“No one’s going to tell ghost stories,” Tasha says, trying to keep her voice light. “We’re just going to survive.”

He snorts. “You really have no fucking clue, do you. You’re already telling them a fairy tale. Stay here, work together, everything will be okay. When in the end we’re all going to become ghosts.”

We’re all going to starve. We’re all going to starve.

“We’ll find a way,” Elyse insists, her voice surprisingly loud. “Annie and Tasha will help us find a way.”

Joseph rolls his eyes. “Sure, kid, sure.”

She bristles. “I’m not a kid. If you hate it here so much, why did you come back?”

Something dark washes over Joseph’s face. “The mountain called me back. I had nowhere else to go.” He laughs a little. “Whatever. You know what? You let Tasha and Annie find a way for you, Elyse, and tell me how that goes. As for me—I’ll do just fine without you, thanks very much.”

Tasha stands up, brushes her pant legs off, and tries not to sound hurt. “Just be careful with that cut and you won’t need any saving. If you do, you know where we are.”

Joseph, looking not a little ashamed of himself, puts on his bloody shirt and heads out the door.

“We could go,” Annie says after he leaves. “You and me and Elyse. We could take one of the fire trucks and drive away from here right now. A fire truck would make it through.”

Tasha sighs. “Where would we go? What’s better than here?”

“I don’t know,” Annie says, “but it’s better than starving to death surrounded by madmen.”

“No one’s mad,” Tasha says. “They’re just afraid. That’s all.”

“So then what did Joseph mean by the mountain calling him back?” Elyse says.

No one has an answer.

The next day, Tasha slips out of the clinic alone and makes her way to the forest. She has come often since that day weeks ago when she saw Heather and the twins. She’s found that the trees calm her down too. And there is something oddly addictive about the mountain—how small she feels in its shadow, how insignificant. The world has changed so much as to be almost unrecognizable, but the mountains endure.

For the first time since she started walking in the woods, she spots Heather, up ahead of her, telling stories to the babies. A genie and three wishes. Fairies who come to steal babies from their cribs.

“Come with us,” said the fairies, “and we’ll give you halls of golden toys and warm fires to sleep near, and so many good things to eat.” The babies were cold and defeated by the rumbling of their stomachs, so they held out their hands and the fairies scooped them away.

“Where do the fairies take them?” Tasha calls out, softly.

Heather whips around, then relaxes a little when she sees it’s only Tasha. “Somewhere better,” she says. Shadows play over her face. To her girls, she says, “But don’t worry. You’re safe with me and Daddy. Everything will be okay.”

Tasha takes a step forward.

Heather takes a step back, then holds her ground. “Is something wrong?”

“No.” Tasha comes to stand in front of her. “Sorry. I just—I found I like to go for walks out here too.”

The babies crane their heads to look at Tasha. “They still don’t sleep,” Heather says. “I have to walk them all the time.”

Tasha nods. She has heard this from Brendan. “They’re what—five months old now?” she says. “If it’s colic, they should grow out of it soon.”

“I guess,” Heather says. Up close, she is a shadow of a shadow, her eyes frantic and bright. “I feel like that day will never come.”

“I can imagine.”

Heather laughs. “Can you?”

Tasha shrugs.

Heather turns and starts walking again—not an invitation, not quite a dismissal—and Tasha falls in step behind her. They walk for a long time in silence, stepping carefully over the forest floor. They’re not on a path—not exactly—but as Tasha follows Heather’s lead, she begins to see a faint impression that tells her someone has been this way before. They come to a break in the trees and set out across a small field matted with tall weeds and grasses, tangled wildflowers. Milkweed with seed pods the size of her hand. Queen Anne’s lace that reaches her shoulders. Sunflowers that are taller than she is. The greens are so deep they’re hard to look at, too strong for the eyes. It’s intoxicating, but it makes Tasha uneasy.

The babies watch Tasha with bright, interested eyes. One of them—Greta?—smiles at Tasha, then stretches her hand out to the milkweed. Without looking, Heather gently intercepts her baby.

“Why won’t you talk to me?” Tasha asks, at last.

“I don’t talk to most people,” Heather says, some amusement in her voice. “Surely everyone has told you that by now.”

“But—I heard you scream,” Tasha says. She feels ridiculous, but presses on. “I heard you scream, and you saw me after the fire.”

“Why do you want that to matter so much?”

“Shouldn’t it matter? What does it mean?”

“You tell me. You’re the doctor.”

“Oh, stop with that!” Tasha shouts. “I just want to know. I want to understand.” She takes a couple of steps ahead of Heather and throws an arm out to the vegetation around them. “Why are plants growing like this out here when we can’t grow things in our gardens or the greenhouses?”

“How am I supposed to know the answer to that?”

“I don’t know!” She’s embarrassed by the loudness of her voice. “No one else comes out here except for you. And me. No one else goes to the mountain. Instead all I hear are stories about the mountain from people who struggle to believe that coming together as a community will help us get through the winter. And yet everyone’s perfectly happy to believe that the mountain is home to monsters, or whatever. None of it makes any sense.”

Heather keeps walking.

“People do tell me that you’re crazy,” Tasha says, baldly. She watches Heather’s shoulders stiffen. “They say that you went up the mountain and when you came down you were never the same.” She wants to take the words back instantly.

“By people,” Heather says, “do you mean my husband?”

Tasha feels shame creep up her neck and stain her face. “No.”

Heather glances at her. “You’re lying,” she says. “Or maybe he’s not the only one who says that. That’s all right. What else did he tell you?”

“He didn’t say you were crazy,” Tasha says. That was other people. “He just said that something happened to you when you were young.”

“What else do people tell you about the mountain?”

“More stories,” Tasha says. “A friend of a friend who disappeared on the mountain years ago. Monsters who live in the forest trees. Shadows people see when they’re drunk. That kind of thing.”

“Stories are never just stories, Tasha. You of all people should know that.”

She blinks. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You don’t know?” Heather says. She sounds amused and also exhausted—a touch manic, a sliver hysterical. “You tell stories to the people every day.”

She thinks of Joseph, and looks down at the ground. “What? I do not.”

Heather sighs. “Tasha. Of course you do. ‘Everything will be okay if we stick together and help each other out—’ ”

“Everything will be okay,” Tasha says, fiercely. “That’s not a story—it’s the truth. We just have to be there for each other.”

Heather snorts. “This city is not good at that kind of thing. I could have told you that when you got here.”

“But you didn’t,” Tasha presses. “You barely talk to me at all.”

“It’s all I can do to hang on,” Heather says, her hands going to her babies’ heads.

“Were they there for you? The people in the city?” Tasha asks, softly. Even though she knows the answer.

Heather casts her a sidelong glance, but keeps on walking. “Who wants to be there for the village idiot?” she says. “Especially when they can make the village idiot into a story herself?”

Tasha thinks again, oddly, of fiery birds burning holes in the ground. Octopuses who gather treasure. A prince gone to find a woman locked in a tower. “My parents told me stories when I was young to help me overcome something,” she says. “To give me hope, to help me hang on. And then I got older, and I didn’t need the stories anymore. But the stories that people tell in this town feel different. These aren’t stories that help. They don’t inspire hope—they inspire fear. I can’t let that happen. Everything that we’re dealing with is bad enough, and stories that scare people are only going to make it worse. Why are people afraid of the mountain, for real?”

Heather cocks her head slightly to the side. “You know why,” she says. “My father died there, a long time ago. Mothers tell their kids that people disappear on the mountain. That way they avoid it, and no one gets hurt.”

“Are there trails up it?”

Heather shrugs. “There used to be. They’re overgrown now. The city made them off-limits.”

The forest suddenly feels still and heavy. The light has changed—the sky clouding over. “What about the monster stories, though,” Tasha asks. “Creatures that hide in the trees? Ghosts who lure children away?”

Heather doesn’t answer.

“None of it makes any sense,” Tasha continues, frustrated.

“Why does it need to make sense?”

Tasha trips on a whorl of green and almost falls. When she straightens, she says, “Because people are already on edge! And when they tell each other these stories, they feed their paranoia. People talk about monsters and they talk about how we’re all going to starve. People have no hope.”

Heather nods. “You’ve been talking to Joseph,” she says. “Look, Tasha”—and her tone is almost kind now—“everything is unfamiliar. Even the city that some of these people have known their whole lives. They’re telling stories to make sense of it—to try and understand it. That’s all.”

“But what good will stories about monsters do?” Tasha presses. “That doesn’t help people gather food or ration supplies or believe that we’ll be able to take care of one another. If anything, it makes it worse.”

They step out of the trees into another tangled meadow. There’s a greenhouse here, half swallowed by wildflowers and grass.

They both stop to stare. Tasha is confused. She turns to look at Heather. “Did we build one all the way out here?”

Heather walks to the greenhouse, puts her hand against the clouded door.

It’s old, Tasha realizes. It’s not one of theirs.

Heather grasps the door and pulls it open. The babies coo and stir.

Tasha can smell the flowers before she sees them. When she steps up beside Heather, her eyes fill with colour—the blue rustle of a jacaranda tree growing tall in the middle of the greenhouse. Pink and orange and red lilies that burst at their feet, the twining shocks of white and purple orchids that reach up through the tangles of green. The deep, dark red of amaryllis.

“Where did this come from?” Tasha says. “Why is everything—why is everything growing?”

“I don’t know,” Heather whispers.

“Did you build this? Is this where those flowers came from, the ones in your house?”

“I—no. Not me.” Heather shakes her head. “My father built this greenhouse. A long time ago.”

“Did he plant all of this?”

“Yes. But I thought everything died after he did. I haven’t been back here in years.”

Tasha stares into the greenhouse, tries to focus. The colours swim together. “Well, it isn’t dead now,” she says. “You’re sure this isn’t where your flowers are from?”

“I have no idea,” Heather says. She is staring at the amaryllis.

“Why are things growing here when they aren’t growing in the other greenhouses?”

It’s Heather’s turn to snap. “I don’t know, Tasha! Why are there vines growing over the houses when nothing grows in the gardens? Why are the goddamned sunflowers six feet high and the tomato plants turning yellow?” She falls silent and they both stand for a moment, breathing in. It smells sweet in here, and fresh. Everything feels new and also secret, as though it hasn’t been disturbed in years.

“Jilly,” Heather hisses suddenly and Tasha snaps back to herself. The baby looks at them, her hand caught in a plant hanging down by her face. Two green half moons are clamped around her fist. Tasha reaches for the plant and pulls it open. Jilly’s hand is unharmed, though covered with a sticky, greenish-white residue.

Tasha wipes the baby’s fist clean with her sleeve. She pulls a bandage from her side bag and wraps it around Jilly’s hand just in case. “Don’t let her put her fingers in her mouth until you’ve washed them.”

Heather nods. Then she puts her hand around Tasha’s. “Thank you,” she says. “I know I don’t say that enough.” She swallows. “We’d best get back.” She turns toward the city, not waiting for Tasha to follow.

Tasha pulls the greenhouse door shut, then runs to catch up. “If stories are never only stories,” she says, “then why do you tell the twins about fairies stealing babies from their cribs?”

Heather laughs—a high, clear sound that makes Tasha shiver.

“That story wasn’t for them,” she says. “It was for me.”