Emmy Laybourne - Sky on Fire

‘Shoot,’ I mumbled.

There weren’t any extra staples in the box, either.

‘Be right back!’ I hollered.

You had to shout to be understood in the stupid air masks.

I didn’t want to think about Niko and Josie, and Alex trying to communicate through them on the bus.

They should never have left and every time it even came into my mind that they had left, I got angry.

I didn’t need to be angry just then, though. I needed to be smart. We had to get the store sealed up quickly.

I headed to Home Improvement.

I passed Chloe on her air mattress. She still had her mask on and all her layers and was totally out cold. The sleeping pill Niko had given her was strong.

She was going to be so pissed off when she woke up and discovered that Niko and the rest had gone on without her.

She had missed the whole drama of Astrid and me telling everyone we weren’t going. That it wasn’t safe for us to go out, because of our blood type.

She certainly hadn’t been consulted when Niko took her off the bus.

But we were right, I told myself. It was too dangerous for us to go out there. Astrid had gotten just a momentary whiff of the compounds and had gone berserk. Us out in the open air, trying to make it sixty miles to Denver? We would have murdered them.

I was sure of it. We made the right choice.

And we had enough supplies in the Greenway to last us for weeks or months. Long enough for the others to make it to DIA and arrange some kind of a rescue. Or long enough to wait out the compounds – we had heard the effects would only last for three to six months…

As I got back with my reloaded staple gun, I saw that Caroline and Henry were gently bouncing next to Chloe’s slumbering form on the air mattress. Luna was curled up next to them.

They looked like three little aliens and their pet dog, out to sea on a raft.

Then there came a loud THUNK from the gate.

Astrid jumped and looked at me.

The THUNK came again.

‘Hey!’ came a voice.

‘Hello?’ Astrid yelled.

‘I knew it! I knew I saw a light! Hey, Jeff, I was right! There’s somebody in there!’

‘Who are you?’ I shouted.

‘Name’s Scott Fisher. Open the gate and let us in, would ya?’

‘Sorry,’ I lied. ‘We can’t open it.’

‘Oh, sure, you can. You just did. It was just open a minute ago. We saw the light! Come on!’

‘Yeah! Let us in,’ echoed another voice. Jeff, I presumed.

‘Dude, you have to let us in. It’s like an emergency out here!’

Dur.

‘Yeah, I know,’ I said. ‘But we can’t.’

‘Well, why the hell not?’ he demanded.

Astrid came next to me.

‘Because we let two grown-ups in before and one of them molested a girl and tried to shoot our leader!’ she shouted through her mask.

‘Well, now we’re not like that. We’re real nice.’

‘Sorry,’ Astrid said. She patted the plywood and nodded for me to nail it.

‘Come on!’ he yelled. ‘We’re thirsty and hungry. People are dying out here! Let us in.’

‘Sorry,’ I yelled.

I shot a staple in.

Scott and Jeff rattled the gate some and cursed a fair amount, but by the time we got the rest of the plywood back up, we could hardly hear them.

I was examining the wall, and had made up my mind to add another layer of plastic sheeting, after we got the purifiers running, when Astrid tugged on my arm.

‘While we’re all geared up, let’s go throw some food down to that guy from the roof.’

‘What?’ I asked.

‘Let’s throw them down some food and water!’ she yelled.

‘Why?’ I asked.

She shrugged.

‘We have so much and they have nothing. We should help them.’

Aargh, I didn’t want to go up on the roof. Not at all.

I was exhausted and I wanted to get the air purifiers set up.

But Astrid stood there looking at me like it was obviously a good idea. Like it was obviously the right thing to do.

‘I want to get air purifiers set up, first,’ I argued.

‘Me and the kids will do that,’ she yelled through her mask. ‘You should take the food up while the guys are still outside.’

‘But—’

I couldn’t think straight enough to tell her why it wasn’t a good idea. Maybe she’d think I was lazy or scared to go on the roof or something.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll do it.’

She turned toward the kids without even, I don’t know, saying thanks.

‘Caroline and Henry,’ she called. ‘Grab a cart and come with me.’

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘First we get the purifiers running. Then I take the food.’

Astrid looked at me and sighed.

Okay, it’s hard to read expressions through the plastic visor of an industrial face mask, but what I read in her expression went something like:

Ah, this dumb kid feels like he’s getting pushed around so he’s taking a stand on a small, insignificant detail. But I guess if he needs to win this little victory for the sake of his pride, then I will give in.

Then she said, ‘Fine, but let’s hurry.’

We had eight different models of air purifiers in the Greenway and four to six units of each. Astrid and I set up the larger ones, and Caroline and Henry were in charge of putting the smaller ones around the store.

We used a lot of extension cords, as most of the outlets were on the walls.

I headed to the Pizza Shack. We had moved all the food into the big refrigerators there when we realized we’d be staying for a while.

I grabbed some EZ cans of tuna and a bunch of old bread and some fibre breakfast bars no one liked and some horrible Popsicles not even the least discriminating of our kids would eat. And a couple gallons of store-brand lemonade.

I threw the stuff into an empty plastic storage bin that was sitting around from before and carried it back to the storeroom.

We’d been alone in the store for all of two hours and already she was bossing me around as if I were some little kid or something. Not good.

Holding the tub in my arms, I entered the storeroom backward, nudging the doors open with my back.

I turned and nearly dropped the tub.

I was so wrapped up in thinking about Astrid I had forgotten about the bodies.

It was bloody back there. Robbie’s body lay half off the air mattress. The air had mostly gone out of the mattress, so his bloody corpse was just lying on a flattish rubber mat. The blanket we’d thrown over top of him was saturated with blood in a couple of places.

Just beyond him lay Mr Appleton, who had died in his sleep. A more peaceful way to go, to be sure. As if to prove it, his air mattress was still pleasantly inflated.

The outsiders who had come and torn our group apart were now dead in the storeroom.

I hadn’t had time to really think about Robbie and the way he betrayed us.

He and Mr Appleton had come to the store and we had let them in. But when it came time for them to leave, Robbie hadn’t wanted to. Mr Appleton fell ill and then, later that night, we had found Robbie with Sahalia.

In the scuffle, Brayden had been shot and Robbie had been killed.

Mr Appleton died later in the night. There wasn’t much we could have done to change that, I don’t think.

But Robbie…

I could have looked at Robbie there and been angry. As far as I understood it, he had tried to get Sahalia to sleep with him. Whether by force or by manipulation, I’m not sure. But he showed his true colours and they were disgusting. A, like, fifty-year-old man with a thirteen-year-old? Disgusting. We thought he was a loving father-type guy and he turned out to be a letch.

And if Robbie hadn’t assaulted Sahalia, Brayden would still be okay. Niko and Alex and the rest wouldn’t have had to try to make it to Denver.