Good Intentions (The Road to Hell Series, Book 1) (2 page)

River

Gathering the bundle of fish I’d caught, I lifted them off the ground and grabbed my pole. I’d eaten so much fish over the years, I kept expecting to sprout gills one day. Gills were a better option than starvation though. Despite the vast quantities of fish I’d caught over the years, I still hated the vacant stare of death in their eyes and the fact I’d been the one to cause it. I avoided looking into their eyes as I swung them over my back and gathered the rest of my equipment.

Turning back to the ocean flowing through the canal, I stared across the deep blue water swirling with rapid currents. On the other side was a rocky shoreline and pathway that practically mirrored the shore where I stood. More fishermen and women stood on the rocks or waded down into the water. I couldn’t make out any of their features, but it didn’t matter anyway; I’d probably never meet any of them. Below me and across the way, there were more people walking the rocks, plucking crabs from between them, and tossing the clawing creatures into baskets.

The crisp, briny smell of the ocean tickled my nostrils as I inhaled the familiar, well-loved scent. I brushed away the strands of black hair the breeze tugged from my ponytail and blew across my eyes. The power of the sea, the life flowing through it called to me, making me feel strangely more alive and yet all alone as I watched the sun dancing across its surface. Above me, seagulls and herrings cawed and circled before plunging into the water.

An older man with gray hair and a kind smile waved to me before gesturing at the stripers hanging heavily against my back. “Nice catch today, River,” he commented.

“Thanks, Mr. Wix,” I replied and shifted the weight of the three fish I’d caught. Now that it was mid-May, the bigger stripers were finally starting to come through the canal again. The most we were allowed to pull from the ocean was three a week, so as not to deplete the fish population now that they’d once again become Cape Cod’s main food supply. Mostly, I only caught one at a time so they wouldn’t go bad but today was a special day and I had plans for these three. “Good luck to you.”

He wiped the sweat from his forehead. “I think I’m going to need it,” he muttered.

I knew how he felt. It had taken me years to become as good at fishing as I was, and I most certainly hadn’t done it alone. After the bombs, it had fallen on my shoulders to keep my family fed. Gage was still breast-feeding, thankfully, but my mother and I were on our own.

One day, with my stomach grumbling and my head spinning from lack of food, I had decided to take my small, freshwater pole here. On my first cast, I managed to hook myself in my right eyebrow. After cutting the line, I placed a new hook on the line and successfully cast the hook into the water. I’d barely had time to breathe before the pole was snatched from my hands by the strong current, which had probably been for the best because if I had miraculously managed to catch something, it would have snapped my pole like a toothpick.

I had returned to my neighborhood, desolate and starving as I shuffled down the street at sunset. My eyebrow throbbed from the hook still stuck in it; I’d had no success in getting it out on my own. One of my neighbors, Mr. Anderson, had spotted me walking down the street, sniffling as I tried not to cry. He’d taken me into his garage, pulled the hook from my eyebrow with a set of pliers, and placed a piece of ice over it.

I’d sat on a stool, with the ice over my eye, and stared at all of the poles and lures hanging from the hooks and pegs on his back wall. Many on the Cape enjoyed fishing, but he had reveled in making his own hooks, lures, and poles. To him, it had been better than actually fishing; to me it had been a stark reminder of my recent failure.

“Seems we’ve got some things to teach you, young miss,” he’d said after I’d told him my story and how my mother and I hadn’t eaten in two days. He’d sent me home with a smallmouth bass to eat, and instructions to return early in the morning so I could start learning how to fish. He told me if I was late, he wouldn’t offer again.

I showed up a half hour early and ready to go. He taught me how to catch fresh water fish for a few years before determining I was old enough and strong enough to handle saltwater fishing. He’d also patiently taught me how to bend the hooks and create lures, with a vise and a pair of pliers, in his garage. When I was ready for them, he’d given me a couple of his poles and taught me how to care for them.

He’d allowed me to use his materials in exchange for giving him a fish every once in a while. When we ran low on supplies to create our fishing gear, we would scavenge for metal and other scraps we could find from junkyards and abandoned homes.

On my fifteenth birthday, he’d gotten together with some of our other neighbors to scrape up enough supplies for me so I would be able to have my own workspace. To this day, it was the kindest thing anyone had ever done for my family and me, and I’d openly wept over the gifts.

I may have been sixty years younger than him, but I quickly became his adopted daughter, or perhaps I’d become his replacement for the grandchildren he’d lost. They were living in Kansas with his son when the bombs were dropped, and they had been his only remaining family.

Whatever I was to him, we had both needed each other, and when he passed away in his sleep the following year, I’d spent the next six months crying every time I went out to fish. I still thought of him often and couldn’t help but think of him now as I stood in his favorite fishing spot, but instead of tears, I smiled as I stared out at the water.

Turning away from Mr. Wix, I started climbing the boulders, careful to avoid the people set up around me. The canal was one of the best places to go for the saltwater stripers; unfortunately, everyone in the area knew it. The rocks were clustered with fishermen and women looking to feed their families.

At least we were a coastal community; from what I’d heard, the inland towns of Massachusetts were worse off than us, but then we never knew what was true and what wasn’t. Rumors swirled like the wind around here.

I glanced up at the Bourne Bridge, arching gracefully over the canal. At one time we’d been allowed to travel freely over the bridge, but after the war finally ended, barricades had been established on the bridge to stop the crush of people trying to move onto the Cape after the bombs had fallen.

What had once been a thriving tourist community, now depended on being able to feed its own by shutting out the rest of the world.

After the bombs, the Cape had experienced an influx of people looking to get as far from the radiation fallout as possible. There hadn’t been enough homes for them, or resources, and the homicide and robbery rate skyrocketed overnight. People killed each other for a loaf of bread before it had been determined that the ocean hadn’t been affected by the radiation from the bombs, and it was still safe to fish from its waters.

The terror and insanity of those first six months was something I could never forget. I would lay in my bed with Gage in my arms, praying no one would break into our house, kill us, and then claim our house as their own, as was becoming the frequent practice. All through the night, the screams of others would resonate through the air, fires would erupt, and sobs were heard.

The only protection we’d had against the roving groups of thieves and murderers were the residents from our neighborhood who would patrol every night, looking to keep as many people safe as they could. Still, they weren’t able to save everyone.

Eventually, the small military presence we had here at the time, what remained of the police force on the Cape, and most of the residents got together to start removing anyone who hadn’t been a resident before the bombs. Afterward, they’d shut off the Bourne and Sagamore bridges.

Now, soldiers guarded the bridges against people coming over. Military boats patrolled the canal and surrounding ocean to keep out anyone who might try to cross over that way. The supplies we had here were shared and bartered amongst the towns on the Cape and with those across the canal as well as they could be, but it was essential that the natural resources weren’t depleted beyond their ability to replenish themselves.

I turned away from the bridge and my mind away from those early, awful memories. Things were far better now, and today was a day mostly of celebration, not one of melancholy, I decided.

Finally breaking free of the rocks, I straightened and adjusted my catch when I reached the asphalt pathway running the length of the canal. When I was a kid, the pathway had been well maintained, the grass cut, and the asphalt smooth. It had been a popular place for tourists to walk, bike, and run while watching the water and birds.

Now, I kept my eyes on the pathway to avoid the potholes and broken chunks of pavement upheaved over the years by the weather and foot traffic. I kept one hand on the strap holding the stripers against my back while the other swung free. The nearly knee-high grass tickled the back of my free hand when I cut across it to the railroad tracks beyond. I followed the tracks for over a mile before slipping into the woods.

There were places to fish closer to home, but none of them yielded as large of fish as the ones caught from the canal. Besides, I liked to walk along the glistening ocean waters and pretend things were the way they used to be before the war.

The pathway beneath my feet was well worn by some of my neighbors and myself. Around me, birds chirped in the trees whose leaves had recently bloomed again. I watched the play of shadows over the ground before me as the branches swayed with the breeze. Over my head, a squirrel screeched and leapt from one branch to another. It chased after another squirrel, its tail raised as the other ran away from it.

A sense of peace stole through my body. Some of my first memories were of being soothed by nature, and I’d always felt a strong affinity to the earth and all of the living things on it. It was a balm to my soul, one that strangely energized and revitalized me. But then, I had some pretty strange ways.

Unable to resist, I rested my fingers against the trunk of a red maple with leaves the size of my hand. I sighed when I felt the pulse of life flowing through the tree and into the earth where its roots ran deep. My fingertips tingled, and a smile tugged at my mouth as I swore I felt the worms turning over within the dirt.

I didn’t know if others could feel this thrum of life or not; I had never asked. I had enough personal oddities that only those closest to me knew about. I didn’t need to add another one to the pile.

It may not be an oddity. This could be something everyone experiences.
I tried to convince myself of this, and it could be true as I was sure I didn’t know
every
thing about my friends and family, but for some reason, I doubted they felt this too.

Reluctantly, I tore my fingers away from the rough bark. A strange sense of loss filled me, but I continued onward. I couldn’t stand around touching trees all day. Even those who loved and accepted me might toss me into the nearest holding cell they could find if I never moved away from a tree again.

I wouldn’t blame them if they did either.

River

The pathway opened up to reveal the backside of my neighborhood. Stepping onto the street, I made my way down the road toward the small, gray, Cape-style house at the end of the block. I was almost to the door when I heard footsteps behind me. Glancing over my shoulder, I smiled when I spotted Lisa running toward me.

Her oak-leaf-colored eyes were alight with happiness as she arrived at my side. “There you are!” she gushed. “I’ve been waiting for you for
hours
.”

I glanced at the early morning sun hovering over the trees. It had probably been more like minutes. Lisa wasn’t exactly known as an early riser and had a tendency to exaggerate;
she
should have been a fisherman. Her light-brown hair, pulled into a ponytail, bounced against the back of her neck when she fell into step beside me. She tugged up the sleeve of her faded red T-shirt when it slipped off one of her shoulders to reveal her collarbone. The knees of her pants had holes in them from the time she spent in the large community garden in the center of our neighborhood.

“You haven’t been up for an hour, much less waiting for me for
hours
,” I replied with a laugh.

She grinned at me and did an odd little half skip. “You’re right,” she admitted.

Walking by our neighbors’ homes, I noted the sagging porches, the faded shingled siding, and broken shutters on most of them. Vines encircled the porch railing of the house on my right. The vines had started taking over most of the porch last year and were slowly weighing it down. There was little time for anyone to do home repairs anymore, and many didn’t have a way of obtaining the things they would need for some of the repairs.

Money as currency was almost a thing of the past. I’d heard some still used gold and silver to obtain certain things, but paper and coin currency was gone, and I didn’t know anyone who would choose gold over a meal or clothing. All that mattered anymore was survival. Food was the main currency; it was exchanged and bartered for on a daily basis.

“Where’s Asante?” I inquired of Lisa.

Asante was a Guard in the community and Lisa’s boyfriend for the last year and a half. Two months ago, she’d moved out of her parents’ house and into one on the next street over to live with him.

“With everything going on today, he had to go into work early,” she replied. “You know how crazy and hectic things get on Volunteer Day.”

“I do,” I said and shifted the weight of the fish on my back. May fifteenth may have become the most looked forward to day of the year on the Cape since the war had devastated the nation.

“You are going today, right?” Lisa inquired.

I nodded and slid the fish off my back. “Wouldn’t miss it.” Few in town would, my mother most likely being one of them.

Walking by the fences surrounding the community garden, I glanced inside at the man and woman already weeding the plot set up on almost three acres of land. The houses that had once stood on the land had caught fire one night nine years ago. The owners who had survived the fire had moved into the empty homes of those who had died over the years or been killed during the turbulent times following the war. The small gardens everyone had been growing behind their homes had been moved here. They’d been combined and expanded on with the land left behind by the fires. Almost everyone in the neighborhood worked in the garden, but some spent more time in it than others.

The neighborhood I remembered from my early childhood was far larger and far different than the closed-in streets that had once existed. Due to the burned down houses, the neighborhood had grown to include homes I’d never been able to see from here before. I knew everyone on these roads and most of the people in town. Before, I’d barely known anyone beyond my street and school. The whole neighborhood working together over the years was what had kept us all alive.

At the next house, Lisa followed me up the steps and inside. When the screen door creaked shut behind us, the owner of the house, Mrs. Loud, glanced up from the paper she’d been reading and smiled at me. The town still put out a monthly paper of events that was passed around the residents, as there were never enough copies for everyone to have their own.

Pushing her glasses onto her head, Mrs. Loud folded the paper and pushed it aside. “Good catch, Ms. Dawson,” she said to me.

I unhooked the largest fish and placed it on the counter she’d built between the living room and kitchen of her home. “Lucky catch. Can I get some salve?” I inquired.

Mrs. Loud took the fish and placed it into the small cooler behind the counter. The rolling blackouts made it difficult to keep things well refrigerated, but the fish wouldn’t stay in there for long, and there was ice inside to help keep it cool when the next blackout occurred.

“Bailey still has a rash?” she inquired of my youngest brother as she slid the top of the cooler closed.

“Yes, but it’s getting better.”

She pulled the green tin of homemade salve from the shelf. I didn’t know who made the stuff, it wasn’t anyone in our neighborhood, but it worked miracles on Bailey’s diaper rash. It was also great for the cuts my hands often received from fishing and from making the lures and hooks.

“That’s good.” Mrs. Loud put the little green tin in front of me. “Anything else?”

A pair of new shoes would have been fantastic. I looked down at the hole in the top of my shoes and stuck my big toe through it. I wiggled it back and forth as I debated her question. I could probably get another couple of weeks out of the shoes if I had to and Gage really could use a new pair of pants. He was growing so fast it was almost impossible to keep him clothed.

“I could use some new pants for Gage,” I finally said.

“Another growth spurt?” Mrs. Loud asked. “He’s going to be taller than everyone in town.”

“He is,” I agreed.

Beside me, Lisa picked up one of the shell necklaces on the counter and ran it between her fingers. Not many people traded for the necklaces, but they were pretty, and they helped to keep Josie, the young widow woman down the street busy. I lifted my hand to the pink and white shells around my neck. None of them were bigger than a nickel, but they were all polished until they shone. Josie had given it to me a few months ago when I’d stopped by with some fish for her.

“I’ll add a couple of inches onto his last measurement and have the pants made up for you within the next couple of days,” Mrs. Loud said.

“Thanks, Mrs. Loud. I’ll see you later today.”

“Wouldn’t miss it.”

I nudged Lisa toward the door. She looked up at me and blinked, pulled from her thoughts by my prodding. Releasing the necklace, Lisa gave Mrs. Loud a smile before we returned outside again. She walked with me down the street toward the small Cape house I shared with my mother and two brothers.

“I should get to work,” Lisa said and waved toward the garden. “I’ll see you in a couple of hours.”

“Sounds good.”

She smiled at me, glanced at my sagging, blue house, and squeezed my arm. Feeling as if I were carrying a hundred fish on my shoulder instead of two, I walked up the cracked walkway to the faded gray door with my shoulders hunched. I stopped myself from knocking on the door before entering; it was my home, but it had never felt like such to me.