August Ansel - The Attic

“Pee in that bucket when you’re clean,” Arie said. “It’ll save me a trip later.”

“All done,” she said. Arie had given her clean clothes: a sweatshirt and soft old set of pajama bottoms. When she turned to take the bucket of bath water—now so opaque with soap scum and the dirt of the body it resembled the swirling murk of a disturbed creek bottom—Renna looked like a child brought in from a downpour. The clothes, though not over-large, looked voluminous on her. Her wet hair clung to her face and neck in dark strings and dampened black splotches on the shoulders of the green sweatshirt. She huddled on the Packard seat, shivering. Dark smudges of exhaustion showed beneath her eyes.

“Wrap up in Handy’s sleeping bag. And pull up that hood—keep your head warm.” She set the bucket of swill by the back wall to be taken topside later. “How did those apples sit with you? Any bellyache?”

“No. I’m hungry, though.”

“Yes,” Arie said. “I can smell it on you. Here.” She handed Renna a chunk of rabbit jerky. “You need the protein while you heal,” she said. “Easy does it. Small nibbles, and chew until it’s liquid in your mouth. Then swallow.”

Renna bit off a corner of the pale meat. “It’s good,” she said. “Kind of sweet.”

“I always enjoyed a rabbit.” Arie took a piece of jerky for herself and rolled the remainder back in its paper wrapping. “There are a great many rabbits these days. I’ve tried to think why that is—seems like all the extra dogs and coyotes would have knocked their numbers back, but I keep finding them in my snares.”

“God is providing for you.”

“Is that so?”

Renna nodded and chewed.

“The last time we spoke together of God, you had a very different opinion.” She opened her mouth to tell Renna what she’d screamed at Arie that first morning: God will fuck you . But looking at her gaunt, earnest face, Arie thought better of it. “I won’t look sideways at the bounty either way,” she said.

“This is a good place,” Renna said. “It was your house?”

“My grandmother’s. But yes, mine after she died.”

Renna’s gaze travelled over the tall shelves—boxes, baskets, bottles, piles of goods from top to bottom. “You have everything in here.”

“It’s been plenty,” Arie allowed. “Up until now.”

“I went in so many houses. I hardly found a thing.” She twiddled the bit of jerky between thumb and forefinger. “Well, sometimes there was something, small stuff like what you’d drop and not notice under the couch. But mostly it was piles of…” She shrugged.

“All the things we couldn’t live without.” Arie looked at the shelves, too. Years of accumulating that started long before the Pink happened.

“I found this giant box of microwave popcorn once. I tried to hold the first bag over a fire.” Renna laughed, an utterly infectious and unexpected sound in the attic. “Oh my gosh, it was so stupid,” she said. “I was holding it up with one of those giant barbeque things.” She mimed the scissors action of tongs. “I thought if I sort of, you know, toasted it—”

“Like a marshmallow,” Arie said, knowing how the misplaced attempt must have ended.

Renna laughed again. “Like a marshmallow. The grease in it made the whole bag just…whoosh. A torch. I dropped it right in the fire,” she said, grinning as though telling a story about a camping trip gone wrong instead of a desperate act of hunger. “It started popping. All these burning pieces of popcorn were flying out everywhere. I got three burn holes in my sweater. But I found a few pieces later that weren’t too black.”

“You’ve been alone all this time?”

The girl said nothing at first. She nibbled around the edges of her jerky, making a smaller and smaller bit, then put the last of it in her mouth. She licked her fingertips with delicate precision, like a cat cleaning itself. Not looking at Arie, she shook her head. “No, not all the time.”

Arie sat very still. “So you’ve seen others. Been with them?”

“Yes.”

“Near here?”

“Pretty near.” Renna was almost whispering now.

The tiny white hairs on Arie’s arms stood up. “How near?” she said, matching Renna’s quiet voice. A wind was kicking up outside, and the old stove vent began its thin metallic clatter. “How many?”

At first Renna sat silently, and Arie thought she might clam up altogether. But she leaned back on the old car seat and crossed her arms tightly over her scant chest. “The high school,” she said. “They have a sort of—” She paused. “Like a village, I guess.”

That small sense of alarm deepened. “A village?” Arie asked. The local high school was four miles away, as the crow flew.

“No,” Renna said, “not a village exactly. More like where they put people during the twenties, those places for terrorists.”

Arie stared at her. “The peace camps?” Renna was talking about the Muslim internment that took place shortly after the 2024 elections. “Those happened before you were born.”

“My dad showed me pictures.”

“You’re telling me someone has turned the high school into a sort of prison.” Arie couldn’t picture it. She hadn’t thought there were enough people left alive in town to group together so specifically.

“They make you think it’s a good place,” Renna said. “That’s how they get you in. It seems safer.” She swiped at a tear with the back of one hand.

Arie knelt on the floor in front of her. “How many?” she said. “How many people are there?”

Renna brushed away another tear, but her face looked set. “I don’t know for sure,” she said. “There were seven, I guess, when I…when I left.” She counted on her fingers, mouthing silently to herself. “Yeah, seven men in the main building. And some women. But in the bunkers, I don’t know.”

“Bunkers?”

She nodded. “That’s what they started calling the portable buildings. The music room, the typing room, and that long skinny building where the science classrooms were.”

Settling on Renna’s uninjured side, Arie sat close enough that their shoulders and elbows and hips touched. “People are kept there?”

“I don’t know how many,” she said again.

“You were kept there, though.”

“Not in the bunkers. I was always in the main building.”

“You weren’t captive, then? You were part of their group?”

Renna rested her chin in the palm of one hand. “I left,” she said, and pressed her long fingers across her lips, literally keeping her own mouth shut.

“Yes you did,” said Arie. “And here you are.” She wouldn’t push Renna about it now, but she had to get a sense of how many people had been pulled into the high school compound, discover what might be going on there—whether they had supplies, how large a problem they were to her.

From the open sky panel, over the sound of the rising wind, there was the slightest thump against the edge of the roof. “Here’s Handy,” she said. “Fish for lunch, maybe. More healing-up food for you.” When he started down the ladder, she stood ready to help him carry things in.

He was much larger than Handy. In the instant it took for Arie to register the intruder, he dropped into the attic in a single fluid move, landing squarely between the women and the ladder. She tensed, body poised to find an escape, traitor mind yelling at her to get between the man and the girl. But the Packard seat rested squarely over the inside hatch, and her knife lay useless on the work table. Stupid , she thought in that endless moment. She reached for her short spear. Before she had even tightened her grip on the handle, he had crossed the space between them and yanked it from her belt, cutting the fleshy pad beneath her thumb as he did. Renna scrambled awkwardly off the seat and tried to scoot into the dark recesses under the eaves.