Emmy Laybourne - Sky on Fire

‘We’re bored!’

‘Just be bored, then,’ I yelled. She was such a brat.

I raced toward Home Improvement.

Why had I spent time building us a room? I should have been making weapons.

I needed my brother, who could make anything out of anything. Or Niko, who just naturally thought in terms of survival.

I paced through the store, aisle after aisle.

Home Improvement seemed like the best option.

I came to the barbecues.

And the lighter fluid.

My best idea was to squirt it on them and light them on fire.

Stupid idea, I know, but I was in a panic.

Back at the gate, Astrid was poking putty into one of the holes in the gate.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked as I ran towards her.

I carried a case of lighter fluid and a couple of those long-neck fireplace lighters.

‘They’re gone,’ she said quietly. ‘At least for now.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I haven’t heard a sound.’

‘Okay, okay, good,’ I said.

‘Were you going to barbecue them to death?’ Astrid asked, her hands on her hips.

I was mad, for a second, then I saw her eyes twinkle in the glow from my headlamp.

And I started to laugh.

Her laughter joined me and it totally got away from us until I had tears coming down my face.

‘Shoot,’ I said. ‘You’re funny.’

‘Sometimes,’ Astrid answered. ‘I got some wood putty. Want to help me plug up these bullet holes?’

‘Sure,’ I answered.

As we worked, I told her about an idea. ‘I saw some chainsaws in Home Improvement. They’re mostly kerosene, but there are a couple of battery-powered ones.’

I knew a little about chainsaws, because I’d helped my uncle clear some land down near Placerville during the summer. Uncle Dave had two chainsaws, one gas and one battery. The battery one was a lot less powerful than the gas one, but it cut scrub oak okay. I shuddered with the thought of what it would do as a weapon against a person.

‘Can’t you use the lighter fluid?’ Astrid nodded toward my can of Kingsford.

I grabbed the bottle.

‘No, it’s not kerosene. It’s… aliphatic petroleum solvent. Whatever that is.’

‘Well, how are you going to charge the batteries?’ she asked.

‘Maybe a car battery?’ I suggested.

‘Yeah, that could work,’ she said.

We were a good team. I was glad we had decided to work on being friends. She was holding up her end of the bargain and I was trying my best not to worship her.

‘Where have you been? Do I have to do everything around here?’ Chloe chided when we returned from hooking up the chainsaws. They were playing hospital, and Caroline, appropriately enough, was the patient.

‘Bad guys were trying to get in,’ Astrid told her.

‘Bad guys?’ Henry repeated.

He and Caroline looked up at us with an identical expression of fear in their two sets of eyes.

Every once in a while, taking care of the twins, I’d feel a sort of a lurch in my heart. They were so, erm, beautiful. I know that’s a dorky word to use, but they were. Their smallness and warmth. Their wide-open smiles and abundance of freckles. It made my chest ache to think of how Mrs McKinley, if she were still alive, must be missing them. Whether it was in her honour or in her memory, I had to keep them safe.

‘How bad?’ Chloe asked.

‘What?’ I said.

‘On a scale of one to ten, how bad were the bad guys?’

‘I don’t know,’ I told her. ‘Bad enough.’

‘They couldn’t get through the gate, though,’ Astrid said. She ruffled Henry’s hair. ‘Too bad for them.’

Astrid had a pretty good approach with the kids. Josie would have withheld the truth, probably, and spun some story. But they seemed happier just knowing the facts: Bad guys had tried to get in and couldn’t.

‘Caroline, it’s time for a sip of ginger ale,’ Chloe directed.

Caroline sipped dutifully.

‘Okay, now Henry’s going to take your pulse,’ Chloe said. Henry knelt by the futon and pressed his fingers somewhere in the vicinity of Caroline’s elbow.

Henry and Caroline looked at each other with big, serious eyes.

‘It’s better!’ he announced. ‘One hundred nine and four eighty pressure.’

‘Excellent,’ Chloe nodded. ‘Now the patient must eat more crackers.’

Henry fed his twin crackers a bite at a time, and Chloe looked on, content and the very model of efficiency.

‘Dean, I had an idea,’ Astrid said. ‘I saw a brass fire pit in Home Improvement. I thought maybe I’d drag it over to the Kitchen. I don’t want to light it in here, in case it gets too smoky, but I thought it might be kind of cheery to have a fire at night.’

‘Yeah, sounds cool.’ Exhaling, I ran a hand through my hair. So far, the morning had been pretty… intense. ‘I’m going to eat some breakfast,’ I told Astrid. ‘And then I’m going to do a security check on the store.’

‘Good idea,’ she answered.

NIKO HAD JOSIE IN his arms. Her head lolled back, bobbing loose. Sahalia was sobbing, clinging to Ulysses, who was also crying.

Me and the others were just standing there gaping. It was hard to grasp. Our bus had been taken and we were out in the dark.

‘We have to get it back!’ Sahalia shrieked. ‘We have to attack them and get Brayden and kick them out!’

‘Guys…’ Max tried to butt in.

‘How?’ Niko said from behind his air mask. ‘They have guns. There are five of them!’

‘Guys!’ Max yelled.

‘We need to find somewhere safe until Josie wakes up. Then we’ll figure out what to do.’

‘They’ll be far gone by then!’ Sahalia protested.

‘Guys!’ Max shouted.

‘What?’ Niko yelled.

‘I know where we can stay,’ he said. Then he pointed over to a clump of dead trees. There was a military floodlight near there and in the glow you could make out a sign: ‘Meadow Flowers Mobile Home Community.’

‘What is it?’ Batiste asked.

‘It’s a trailer park,’ Max said loudly through his mask. ‘My auntie Jean lives here.’

Niko was right; we had no choice. We couldn’t catch up to the bus on foot. And if we somehow did, there was no way we could kick the cadets off it. We had to go and seek shelter.

It didn’t keep Sahalia from crying and cursing the whole way.

Niko had to carry Josie. It did not look as easy as it looks in the movies. He had to stop and rest a lot and I was afraid his mask would come off.

The little kids were all clustered around me and I did not blame them; it was really scary.

Sometimes a fuse would blow at our house. I used to be scared to go into the basement to flip the switches. I was scared because the basement was so dark and there were things there in the darkness. You couldn’t see them but you could feel them. Flattened boxes, Dad’s old tools, the lawn mower – none of it scary with the lights on, but the thought of it all just lurking there made me scared. I would always be afraid that a murderer was hiding in the shadows, waiting to grab me, even though I knew that was totally illogical.

Walking down the road was like going into the dark basement, except that there really could be a murderer lurking in the shadows.

There was likely a murderer lurking in the shadows. It was statistically probable.

Maybe you are wondering if we didn’t have flashlights. We did.

But Niko wouldn’t let us use them. He said he was afraid we might call attention to ourselves.

(And call an O monster, I assume.)

So we had to see by the light from the military lights. Which was not very much.

We came to the Meadow Flowers entrance and walked through the trailer graveyard.

There was blood on one of the trailers and a lot of clothes out on the ground in between two others, all of them trampled into the mud. Purposely trampled, it seemed to me.