2015 Young Explorer's Adventure Guide Read online

  His eyes watched me from under those dark brows. “With guns we could stay where we liked for as long as we liked it. Nobody could make us go.” It sounded like a very important point to him.

  “Guns ain’t hoddy, Woody!” I just about yelled.

  “I know guns aren’t hoddy, Leanne,” he said calmly, like he was correcting my grammar or whatever. “They’re not toys, just like you say. But they’re...tools. And we ought to use what tools there are.”

  I glared down at him and said, “I’m the alpha. I decide.”

  “You’re the alpha.” But again he said it like some kind of challenge.

  “Go back to bed,” I said, my tone low and lifeless now. I felt like I’d lost an argument somehow. “Go to bed.” It was all I could think to say.

  Elwood went.

  We had found him when there were enough of us to call ourselves a pack. Elwood was like all the other kids — half-starved, scared, crying, hopeless. When they were on their own like that after the Big Sick, you really had no choice but to take them in with you. I hadn’t really known Elwood was anything special until I saw him studying a map he’d found. We were on the edge of a city. It was way too dangerous to go in there, so I was leading us away. Elwood had the map unfolded where we’d stopped to rest on the side of a road. I went over and looked, and he pointed and said, “We’re here.”

  I looked up at a sign and saw he was exactly right. “How’d you know that?” I asked. He couldn’t read, but somehow he had made sense of the lines on the map.

  He had shrugged. “Just worked it out.”

  What was he working out now? I wondered. What was this about guns? He must have had this in mind for a while, and had come to talk to me about it at night when everybody else was asleep.

  Did Elwood want to take over the pack from me, become the new alpha?

  I lay down in my bed again and tried to sleep, not even caring if the nightmares came back.

  …………………………

  The pack had chores — bring back water from the river, collect firewood — because it seemed important to give them things to do. They needed “structure.” Another of my mom’s words. Sometimes I try to do what I think she would have done...but she was never in the position I’m in, taking care of almost twenty kids at once in a world that has changed forever.

  But I thought we’d done okay. The pack was still together almost two years after the Big Sick, though we had lost a few and gained some others. I’d done my best, and I intended to keep on doing it.

  From the house we had taken over four months ago, we could reach three different large suburban areas. We always needed supplies, so about once a week I’d lead them down to one of the places to hit the empty houses for canned goods and clothes and anything else we needed. I avoided the stores, remembering that other pack that had moved in on the Walmart. That group had been violent, vandal-like, breaking things for no reason.

  Sometimes the young ones got out of hand on these raids of ours, finding a bunch of toys and going crazy. Funny though, only about half my kids will play with toys; the others don’t understand the shiny plastic things. They have their own games, a hundred different ways to play tag and hide-and-seek. I don’t quite understand their rules, but sometimes I just sit and watch. I like to hear them laugh.

  Today I took them down the other side of the hill, toward an area of suburban housing named after Native Americans. But I stopped everyone a quarter of the way there. Smoke was coming up from the streets ahead in three different places.

  “It’s just fire,” complained Carlos, who loved the raids best when we found candy, especially chocolate.

  “Yeah,” Timmy said. “Fires happen.” He gave me a big what-can-you-do? shrug.

  Fires do happen. Chemicals ignite, gasoline leaks, lightning strikes. But three separate fires were too many. “We’re going back,” I ordered. That started up a whole whining and cussing chorus, if “zox” and “mudel” can really be called cuss words. I said, “Shut up and get moving!” Which probably wasn’t how Mom would have handled it. But she was dead. Everybody in my family was.

  I thought of them as we hiked back up to the peak and the hidden house. But the images of black and green bodies was too awful, so I thought instead about how I had managed to survive. I had stayed at the house, where everyone was dead. I avoided the bodies, which were too heavy for me to move and anyway I probably couldn’t have made myself touch them. I watched TV, seeing all sorts of scary stuff and no regular shows until the power went out for the last time. I ate all the food and walked around in a daze. Finally I packed a bag and got into the SUV in the garage. It took me about twenty minutes to start the thing, then I gunned it right through the garage door and ran it up onto the lawn across the street and halfway up the porch.

  Luckily I’d put on my seat belt. After that I walked. I couldn’t drive. It was stupid to try, since almost every street had a wreck or something else blocking it. I walked, and I ate food out of other people’s houses and slept in couches of strange homes.

  Then I started finding the kids. They all wanted me to take care of them, and that, somehow, was what I ended up doing. It gave me a reason; it gave me something to think about besides myself. The young ones had it worse than me. So I started my pack.

  When we got back to the house, I told everybody to stay inside today. That got me another griping earful, but I promised candy later if they were good. I had learned to keep a secret stash.

  Elwood came up to me in his quiet way when the pack was inside. “You’re worried about another pack down there, right? Maybe we should keep watch today and tonight, in case they come up here. What do you think, Leanne?”

  I blinked. It was a sensible idea, and I should have thought of it. I put two kids at upstairs windows and took Maeve outdoors with me to sit in the tall grass. I would make going outside on guard duty a kind of treat, I figured. Maeve was very serious about the watching. She had tangled black hair that she chewed on while her eyes stayed fixed on the rising hillside below. It was strange to remember a world where electricity flowed, planes flew, phones worked, and people—so many people—were still alive.

  I didn’t have a watch, of course, but I’d learned to figure the hours by how the sun moved. I told Maeve to go in and to send out Bao. He started to get bored pretty quick, so we sang songs, stuff I remembered from my MP3. You couldn’t see the suburban area from here, but the smears of the smoke were still in the sky.

  I sent in Bao. Out came Vicky.

  After Vicky was Timmy.

  I wasn’t really that worried about the other pack — if there was one — coming all the way up to this peak. Why would they? Pickings were still pretty good down there. Eventually, though, the food would run out, and we would have to move on somewhere else. Someday, probably far in the future, the pack would have to hunt or grow crops, or maybe do both. I don’t know how to do any of that. I hope it’s a problem that comes along when I’m old, when someone else becomes the alpha. They are all going to grow up, after all. But they won’t be adults like I used to know. They won’t even be like me, who still remembers How the World Used to Be.

  Timmy swatted at a bee, even though I told him not to, and got stung. He started crying, and I took his hand and pried the dead stinger from between two knuckles on the back of his hand. It was swelling a little, but he’d been stung before and wasn’t allergic. If he had been...well, there wasn’t much I could do about things like that, which was scary. I miss a lot of the comforts of the old world, but maybe I miss doctors the most — just knowing they existed, that somebody would take care of you if you got sick or injured. Of course, they hadn’t been able to do anything to stop the Big Sick....

  Dark started to come, and I went in and fixed dinner. I didn’t light a fire, so we ate cold stuff. Only Carlos complained. Nobody was watching from the upstairs windows anymore. They’d gotten bored.

  I went back out when it was night, taking a jacket. None of the kids came with me;
they’d figured out guard duty wasn’t any kind of treat. The moon was rising, and the stars were out and bright — brighter than they used to be because there’s no pollution anymore. I leaned against a tree and hummed to myself and watched the hillside without really seeing it anymore. Tomorrow we would go raid one of the other two places for fresh supplies.

  By the movement of the moon it was getting to be time to go in and make sure everybody laid down to sleep. I gave it a few more minutes, taking a careful look around now, even walking the perimeter of the whole house.

  I heard a branch snap. I thought I heard a voice. Two voices. One saying something to the first one in a sharp whisper, something like “Be quiet!”

  I froze. Suddenly my heart was beating so fast it almost hurt. I was in the overgrown grass, but the moonlight was on me. I bit my lip and made myself move, slowly, carefully, back under one of the trees. The closest entrance into the house was around a corner from me. I could hear the pack inside, laughing and squealing and probably tearing the place apart. But the voices I’d heard came from somewhere out in the night.

  If they were this far up, these intruders could see through the screening trees to the house’s candlelit windows. They could probably hear the kids playing inside. I didn’t know what to do. I could only think to just stand there under the tree cover. A real grown-up would come along and tell me what to do. How to get out of this trouble.

  Even two years after the Big Sick, I could still have a thought like that. It kind of disgusted me.

  And that was what got me moving.

  Crouching, I went to where I knew a broken flower pot was. I picked up a pot shard with a sharp point. Then I started circling, watching the slope. The road that led up here had never been paved. Now it was overgrown and about invisible.

  I listened. I heard the jingle of metal, and footsteps. Not bare feet — shoes. I gripped the shard tighter.

  Light flickered on the slope. Lights. My heart raced again. All the laughter and horseplay from inside the house stopped.

  The light didn’t come from torches. It wasn’t fire. Those, I realized, were flashlights. There were half a dozen of them, all converging toward the house. I was still hidden under the trees. I coiled. Whoever these people were, they were a threat to my kids. They weren’t going to have a fun time getting past me, I vowed.

  Then I heard a metallic click. It was followed by a high, piping, emotionless voice that said, “All of you — back off, or I’m going to start shooting you.”

  I turned and saw moonlight gleam on a blue-black hunk of metal held up by Elwood’s two bony kid-arms. The pistol wasn’t shaking in his hands, though. His dark eyes glinted in the stray glow of the flashlights.

  That boy was just full of surprises.

  I shifted my stance, crunching dead leaves, and one of the beams flicked my way. I’d given myself away. Elwood, just five steps away, looked at me. I watched as the barrel of the pistol jerked toward me.

  “Woody—” I said, or only started to say.

  Behind Elwood there came a sudden movement, little arms wheeling, thin legs pumping awkwardly, all accompanied by a shrill shriek. This wild shape collided with Elwood’s back and took him out like a football player making a dirty hit. Elwood yelped. There was a huge yellow flash, bigger than anything I ever would have expected, from the gun’s barrel. The sound was thunder, one great big clap of it.

  The pistol flew down, practically at my feet. I waited for the pain, for the blood. As I blinked, feeling hot and cold at the same time, I realized the bullet hadn’t found me. But...

  “Is anybody hurt?” I asked. That shot might have gone anywhere, even back into the house. “Everyone? Woody? Is anyone shot?”

  I looked at the gun lying at my feet. I stared for a long moment. Then I asked those shadowy figures, “Is anybody out there hurt?”

  Another long moment passed before somebody said, “No. The shot must’ve gone wide.” It wasn’t a kid’s voice, or an adult’s. It had to be their alpha.

  I said, “Good.” But I still held the jagged piece of pottery in my grip.

  I looked over at Elwood again. Lydia was kneeling on his back, slapping uselessly at his head, missing every other time. Now she was babbling, “Leanne says no guns! Leanne says no guns! Leanne says—”

  “Lydia. Lydia! That’s enough, honey. You can get off him now. It’s going to be okay.” I had no right to say that last thing; I had no idea if it was going to be okay. I squinted out against the flashlights. “We don’t use guns. That shot was a mistake. Do you use guns?”

  Another long pause, then the same voice said, “No. Do you start fires?”

  “No,” I said. I realized he meant the three fires we’d seen earlier. So this pack hadn’t started them. “We don’t do damage for no reason. We’re just trying to stay alive.”

  I heard the crunch of boots. A figure about my size appeared. With the flashlights behind him, he was just a shadow as he approached. He stopped, and I stepped slowly out from under the trees. By moonlight I could see his blond hair, cut short and sticking out. I hadn’t cut my hair all this time.

  He said, “We’ve been using that area, Cowichan Valley, to forage. When the fires started, one of my kids saw a group heading up to this peak. We came to check you out.”

  I glanced and saw my kids’ faces pressed against the house’s windows, all scared, some crying, some putting on a brave show. They all had to have seen Elwood pull out that pistol he’d grabbed in secret on one of our raids. He had meant to do good, I told myself. He was sitting up now, brushing leaves off himself.

  The alpha and I gazed at each other for a while. My heart had slowed some, and everything didn’t have such a shiny edge to it anymore. I drew long breaths.

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Twelve years and three months.”

  “I’m twelve and five months.” He sniffed a little laugh. “I guess that’s not much difference, huh?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. You got flashlights. Shoes.” The pack had lowered their beams at a wave from the alpha, and I could see the group more clearly now. They had backpacks too, like a scout troop.

  “Yeah,” the alpha said. “But no guns. Just like you.” He smiled like he was really glad to be smiling, like he’d been waiting to do it.

  I smiled back.

  “Jethro Adar Bitterman.”

  “Leanne Elizabeth Quincy,” I said. Some of my pack don’t even know their middle names, and hardly any ever use their last names.

  I tossed the pot shard and invited them all into the house. I had picked up the pistol, dumped the bullets into my pocket, and tossed the thing up into a rain gutter. I’d get it down later and get rid of it and give Elwood a talking to. Guns might make us strong in the way he was thinking. But guns also took away a lot of options. You could either shoot somebody or not, threaten somebody or not. Those were limited choices.

  And anyway...weren’t enough people dead already in this world?

  Jethro and I sat in living room, watching the kids start to play together, each side forgetting bit by bit that these were others, outsiders. Soon Timmy was making everyone look at his bee sting, and one of Jethro’s kids showed off a more serious-looking scar on her knee.

  “In all the time since the Big Sick,” I said, “we haven’t met with another pack like this.”

  “It’s hard to know who to trust,” Jethro said. He drank from a canteen, then passed it over to me.

  I had a swallow of water. “You ever try to tell them about electricity, airplanes, the Internet?”

  He laughed. “Yeah, I’ve tried. But it doesn’t do much good.”

  I nodded, in a way that felt knowing and a little sad. “They’ve forgotten. Some were so young when the Sick happened they never really knew the old world.”

  Jethro let out a long sigh. “Kids today...”

  I passed him back his canteen. There was still a serious issue to settle. “So—what are we now? I mean, your pack a
nd my pack. Are we all a...pack?” I was hoping we could join up, be one together. That seemed like a good idea to me.

  “Pax,” he said.

  “Oh...packs.” Still two separate groups.

  He sensed my confusion. “No. Pax. P-A-X. It’s an old Greek word or something. It means peace. We’re at peace.”

  I smiled again. Peace sounded good to me. It might be the start of something bigger.

  We sat, content and quiet, and watched the young ones romp around the big room like happy little maniacs.

  Of USBs and Fingerprints

  Salena Casha

  Salena Casha’s work has appeared in over 30 publications. She was a finalist for the 2013-2014 Boston Public Library’s Children’s Writer-in-Residence. Her first three picture books were published by MeeGenius Books. One of them, titled Nuwa and the Great Wall, was featured in the 2014 PBS Summer Learning Project for kids and won honorable mention in the 2014 Hollywood Halloween Book Festival. When not writing, she can be found editing math books, carving pumpkins and travelling the world. Check out her website at www.salenacasha.com.

  The electrical wiring of Kara54’s nerves sizzled as she stood outside the door, the echoes of the doorbell ringing in her ears. Would they like her? Would she function properly? She fingered the USB port at her side and tried to tell herself that her manufacturers had made her without a glitch, that she came from a top-of-the-line assembly belt, born from the guts of another machine. Her skin, though artificially grafted, was pure shadow and shade, her wiry hair braided in tight cornrows. They’d even given her blue eyes so she wouldn’t scare her new family. Underneath it all though, she was just gears, spools and bits of plasma.

  Still, a part of her hoped for some semblance of love, the kind that smelled like chocolate chip cookies and hugs; the type she’d seen in glimpses on a handheld screen her handler let her watch.

  The door opened a crack, the dark-almond eyes of a seven-year-old gazing up at her. She looked more like a doll than Kara54 was, with jet-black hair and a flowing blue dress. Her right knee was bright red and her lip was split. A trickle of blood stained her deeply tanned face. Kara54’s handler placed a hand on her shoulder.