The Survivors (2 page)

“What family?” Sarah asks.

“Exactly,” Miles answers. “I wasn't supposed to tell you—not that you were paying attention anyway—because it might have scared you. The looters did some really bad things to the mother and daughter, too.”

“Shut up!” Sarah says.

“Stop! Right now!” Nat calls to both of them.

There's a long silence.

“Did you really have to do that?” his father asks Miles.

Miles doesn't answer, which makes Nat let out a long breath. “Oh, Miles,” she begins.

“Forget about that,” Miles says abruptly. “We're here now. And I thought—finally—we were all on the same page.”

“And what page is that?” Sarah asks. She tries to sound sarcastic.

“We get out of the city and stay out until it's safe to go home,” Miles answers. “Here at least we have enough to eat.” There is no hesitation in his voice.

Sarah and her parents are silent.

“We voted, remember?!” Miles asks, trying to keep anger from his voice.

Sarah is silent.

“Okay. Then let's get with the program, people!” Miles says. He heads back to his work.

Sarah's father disappears back inside the cabin. Emily continues to hop and fidget, so Sarah goes over and gives her handful of grass. Emily nuzzles her long nose, wide-set eyes, and bumpy head through two slats in the wooden corral fence, and Sarah scratches her head.

“It's all right. Things are fine,” she lies.

When Emily calms down, Sarah heads back to the river for a real swim; the river is the place she goes to get away from her family.

Among some trees on the riverbank, she takes her damp bathing suit from a tree limb and changes out of her wet clothes. Falls back into the cool, flowing water. Just when she's starting to relax, her mother appears and sits down on the bank like a lifeguard.

Sarah ignores her. Rolls over on her back and floats.

“I know this it tough,” her mother begins.

Sarah says nothing.

“None of your friends are around. And we spend way more time together as a family than we used to,” her mother adds. “We're all adjusting to that.”

Sarah blurts, “Since when did Miles become the boss of our family?”

“He's not the boss,” Nat says.

“Well he acts like it.”

Nat is silent.

“Is it true—about that family?” Sarah asks.

“Yes. Miles just wants to keep us safe and get us through this—these
times
.”

Sarah spits a fountain-like mouthful of river water. “‘These
times
,'” she says sarcastically.

Her mother shrugs. “Every generation has something—some issue to deal with, like a war or a depression. Yours will be the volcanoes. Think of the great stories you'll have to tell your own kids—”

“I thought we were talking about Miles.”

“Okay, yes. Miles gets pretty intense about things,” Nat says. “Especially about our cabin because it belonged to Mr. Kurz—”

“I know all that stuff,” Sarah interrupts.

“But what we didn't know was how much he and Miles bonded,” her mother continues. “They spent a lot of time together. I think he became a grandfather Miles never had.”

“Or maybe the father he never had?” Sarah asks.

“Don't be cruel,” her mother says sharply.

Sarah doesn't reply.

“But in some ways you're right,” her mother says. “We had our family issues. Maybe this time together is a gift. Try to look at it that way.”

A small dragonfly lands on the bridge of Sarah's nose—she crosses her eyes and tries to focus on its cellophane wings, its bug eyes; but it's too close. The dragonfly's feet tickle her skin as it launches itself back up in the air; she itches her nose. “I hate it here!” she says. “I wish we were back at Birch Bay—our own cabin. That's where we're supposed to be living.”

“Let's not talk about that,” her mother says.

“We're going to have to someday,” Sarah says.

Her mother does not reply.

“Okay, let's not,” Sarah says. She takes in a big breath of air and lets herself sink to the bottom of the Mississippi River—which is less dramatic than it sounds. They are only twenty miles from the headwaters at Lake Itasca, and here the Mississippi is only waist deep. It's narrow enough to leap across in spots. A cold, clear stream with small rocks and tiny shells on the sandy bottom, and the deeper pools where the river bends. Underwater, she opens her eyes. Pretends she's a fish. Minnows with horizontal stripes and half-transparent bodies flicker by. A silvery shell the size of an ear glints like mother-of-pearl, and she grabs it. Underwater there's no sound except for her own heartbeat—and the muffled
“Baaack!”
of Emily. She sounds far away—where Sarah would like to be.

She stays down a long time, hoping that her mother will think she has drowned. It wouldn't be the worst way to go, sort of a cool, drifty death with all the dust washed away. She imagines shouting, splashing, hands reaching down to save her.

When she spews air and resurfaces, her mother is halfway back to the cabin. Clutching her shell, she emerges from the river, grabs a towel hung over the side of Miles's old raft, and dries off. She changes behind a little board screen that she made herself. On the way up the path, she yanks up a handful of thin grass, shakes off the dust, and carries it back to the corral. A nice treat for Emily.

Emily, with her soft, droopy ears, her Roman nose, her wide brown eyes and musky smell that Sarah has come to love. Emily was a “free parting gift” from the squatters occupying the Newell family's real lake cabin—where her family
should
be living right now. Birch Bay was their destination when they left Minneapolis: a cozy summer cabin near Brainerd that had belonged to her grandparents. The place they always went to on summer weekends. But this time when they got to Birch Bay, it was occupied by squatters. A family with kids and a biker and his wife.
You folks are gonna have to move on. It's a dog-eat-dog world nowadays
, the creepy biker, big Danny, said; and since he was a big guy with a big gun, and his wife was related to the local sheriff who would protect them, the Newell family had to move on. It was her family's most humiliating moment ever—especially for her father.

“But the bad people you came from don't make you a bad goat!” Sarah says.

“Baaack, baack!”
replies Emily.

Sarah snuggles against her, but Emily is fidgety. Nervous. Her eyes keep turning toward the woods. Toward Miles, who is working across the clearing.

“What's wrong?” Sarah murmurs.

“Baaack, baaack!”

Sarah holds out more grass, which Emily munches on. But she keeps looking around.

“Lend a hand anytime!” Miles calls; he lifts another board onto his sawhorses.

“I'm feeding Emily.”

Miles mutters something she can't hear.

“Look what I found in the river,” she says. She holds up the shell. The inside curve looks like a pearl; by tilting it she can reflect weak sunlight.

“Clam,” Miles says. “Actually a clam shell. The clam inside got ate by an otter or a mink.”

“‘Eaten,'” she says.

“That's what I said,” Miles replies, and keeps sawing.

She gives Emily another handful of dusty grass—and when she stands up, she sees a dog watching them from the edge of the woods. A dog the same color as the brush. All grays and browns and tans, like oak leaves. She squints to see him better, but suddenly he's not there.

It was definitely a dog. An old one, too. A gray muzzle and square head, which is how she noticed him—his large head with its up-slanted eyes. And a tattered part of a collar hanging down—she's sure about that. Somebody's lost dog.

She glances again at Miles, who remains intent on his boards. His shotgun leans nearby. She doesn't say anything about the old dog.

GETTING GOAT GIRL OFF TO
school today will be a good thing. One less person to worry about. Plus she'll eat there. It's not as if they don't have enough food—he can always catch a fish in the river—but he keeps track of their supplies. Flour, cooking oil, salt, rice. Somebody in the family has to.

Just beyond the woodpile, a gray squirrel hops from to branch to branch, chattering, kicking up small puffs of smoke as it searches for pinecones. Far off, a woodpecker hammers:
tumma-tumma-tumma
. Close by, everything is quiet.

Too quiet.

Miles puts down a board and slowly straightens up. Chickadees nearby are frozen in place: none peck, none flutter, none peep. One of them has flattened its little gray-and–white-and-black body against a small tree trunk. Miles's eyeballs turn toward the woods, and his left hand reaches toward his shotgun that leans against the stack of boards; his fingers close around its cool, smooth, steel barrel.

His gaze stops on a bandit mask—not a real robber, but a bird sitting twenty feet away on a branch. Gray and white, with a black band across the eyes, it's about twice the size of a robin.
Songbird with hook-tipped bill and hawk-like behavior. Perches watchfully on treetops, wires. Impales prey on thorns and barbed wire
. Northern shrike. He has read about it in Mr. Kurz's bird book—it was checked on his list of birds observed: number 131 of 152 species.

The shrike fixes its beady black eyes upon a chickadee, one that has not flown away or hidden itself. The little bird is pecking at something on the ground.

Miles could change what is about to happen. He could shout, or toss a piece of wood to frighten off the shrike. But he doesn't intervene. This is nature.
Nature has its own rules. If you want to learn about the woods, you have to keep your eyes peeled and leave things alone
.

The shrike launches itself in a silent glide toward the ground, where it nails the little bird. There's a brief flurry of tiny chirping noises, but it's over in a second. The kill, that is. A moment later, the shrike lifts off carrying the limp little bundle of feathers. It's a bird-eat-bird world.

Before Miles returns the stubby .410 gauge shotgun to its leaning position, he quick-aims at a tree, then swings the gun 360 degrees around the clearing. Danny the squatter gave him the shotgun. Sometimes he thinks he should have swung the gun on Danny and shot him—or at least held it on him and driven the squatter families away at gunpoint. But he didn't. There were children watching, and he didn't really know guns then. But in truth he was chicken. Weak. His whole family was weak, and so they moved on—rode away from their own summer place. He spins and aims one more time at an imaginary bad guy in the woods, then sets the gun down within reach. One thing for sure: Nobody is going to drive them away from this place.

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN
her life, Sarah waits for a school bus. Back home in Wayzata, her mother drove her everywhere, as did all the mothers in the families she knew. Waiting to be picked up from the mall or the movie theater was annoying, but at least her mother drove a black BMW. Now, standing beside the dusty highway, she feels like a stupid hitchhiker. Like a homeless person.

Miles waits with her. Gun over his shoulder, dusty bandana around his neck, he bends down to inspect the fine layer of ash on the highway. To Sarah, the white dust looks like thin silk draped over everything. A weird kind of shrink-wrap. She wonders how the trees can breathe.

“Hasn't been a car along here in at least two hours,” Miles says. He has yellow sawdust in the dark hair on his forearms.

“So?” Sarah replies.

“So maybe the bus won't come,” Miles says. He glances toward the woods. “I should be out hunting, not standing around.”

Sarah checks her watch. “It will come.”

Miles pitches a stone across the ditch and into the trees. “You ever read that Jack London story about cabin fever?” he asks. “Two guys stuck in a little shack over the winter in Alaska?”

Just when she gives up on Miles, he always surprises her. “No, haven't read that one,” Sarah says.

“Anyway, they get really crazy,” he says, widening his eyes. “It's sort of like that movie
The Shining
but in a cabin just like ours!”

“Stop it!” Sarah's lower lip trembles out; she turns away so Miles won't see her cry.

“Sorry, Little Sis,” Miles says, putting an arm briefly around her. “Just kidding. I promise I won't go crazy.”

“It's not you. It's Mom and Dad that I worry about.”

“Hey, we'll get through this. Next spring maybe we can go home. Back to the suburbs.” He makes a face.

“Do you think our house will be all right?” Sarah asks suddenly. “I mean, just sitting there empty?” Her voice turns weepy at the end.