Susan Pfeffer - This World We Live In

I landed face down in a puddle, and for an instant I was in a state of total panic. I remembered Mom in the cellar, and I swear I thought I was going to drown.

What shocked me to my senses was how much I hurt. When you’re in that kind of pain, you almost wish you were going to drown in a half inch of water.

I rolled out of the puddle and moved my fingers, my hands, my arms, my legs, until I was satisfied I hadn’t broken any bones. The palms of my hands were scraped and it felt like my knees were, too. My chin and jaw hurt horribly, but I wasn’t spitting any teeth out. I was going to be a total-body black-and-blue mark, but no one dies of bruises.

I crawled back to the bike. It was lying on its side, but the two trash bags were unbroken, and both tires looked okay.

That was when I realized how lucky I’d been the day I got lost. What if I’d had a flat tire? I’d been miles away from home, with no idea where I was, and I would have had to walk back.

Sometimes I think all I’ve done for the past month is cry, but that didn’t stop me. I sat by my bike, telling myself over and over again how lucky I was, and I sobbed.

I didn’t have to use my sweatshirt to blow my nose this time, though. I’d found a tissue packet at one of the houses, so when I was up to it, I dug through a trash bag and located it.

That’s progress.

I was just finishing the tissue packet when Syl rode over. We were south of our meeting spot, but she must have looked around for me, and since I was on Howell Bridge Road when I fell, I couldn’t have been too hard to locate.

“You’re a mess,” she said, helping me up.

“I rode into a pothole,” I said.

Syl nodded and straightened up my bike. “Which will be easier?” she asked. “Riding or walking?”

Either way, it was going to be a mile uphill. “How about letting me die here?” I asked.

“Laura would never forgive me,” Syl said. “Do you need a few more minutes?”

What I needed was a completely different life. “I’ll try walking,” I said. “I’m feeling too wobbly for the bike.”

“All right,” Syl said. She grabbed the handlebars of her bike with her right hand and the handlebars of mine with her left, and began pulling them behind her, while I hobbled by her side.

“You’ll be all right,” she said after a few of the most agonizing yards I’ve ever walked. “You couldn’t make it this far if anything was broken.”

Just because I knew it was true didn’t make me any happier to hear it.

“I remember once, months ago,” Syl said. “Right after the air got bad. The band I was with—”

“You were with a band?” I asked.

“Not that kind of band,” Syl said. “When you’re on the road, you find bands of people to travel with. By foot, by bike, even by truck.”

“There are trucks?” I said. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw a truck.

“Of course there are,” Syl said. “How do you think food gets to Howell? And they’re always bringing supplies to the safe towns. They’re not supposed to give people lifts, but sometimes they do.”

“Were you with a band of people when you met Matt?” I asked.

“Just one other person,” Syl said. “We’d split off because he wanted to try fishing in the Delaware. Anyway, this happened last summer. We were in South Carolina, I think. There were a half dozen of us, and we saw a man lying on the side of the road. You could tell right away his leg was broken, and he was screaming in pain.”

“Did you do anything?” I asked.

“There was nothing we could do,” Syl said. “Even if we’d set his leg, we couldn’t carry him with us. If you can’t keep up with a band, you get left behind. People died all the time, but mostly when they were dying, they were quiet or moaning. This guy must have broken his leg right before we saw him. He was going to lie there on the side of the road for days before he died. He knew it. We all knew it. Eventually he’d pass out, but until then he was going to scream because he was in agony and because he knew he was going to die.”

“And you left him there?” I asked.

“One of the guys I was with said we should put him down,” Syl said. “Maybe someone else did. We didn’t stick around to find out.”

“Did you ever tell Matt that story?” I asked.

“No,” Syl said. “I haven’t thought about it in months. It was the way your bike was overturned that made me think of it. One of the guys I was with took the bike and rode off. If you had a bike, you didn’t stay with people who were walking.”

“Would I have gotten left behind?” I asked. “I mean, after a fall like I took just now. If I couldn’t keep up with everyone else?”

“Oh yeah,” Syl said. “Sure. But you would have found another group in a day or so. There were always groups of people to grab on to.”

I hated the story of the guy with the broken leg, but I kind of liked the image of all these groups wandering around together. When you’ve shared a room with the same three people for months, fresh faces sound appealing.

We walked in silence for a while, and I fantasized about a group of good-looking guys and me. It’s a good thing I have a permanently gray complexion or else Syl might have noticed how hard I was blushing.

Mom wasn’t too happy when she saw how I looked, but she found some peroxide and cleaned my palms and knees. Suddenly, I was six years old again and had fallen off my bike.

She was glad for the books, though, and Syl appreciated the blue jeans. Jon didn’t say anything about the air freshener, so maybe ocean breeze isn’t his favorite.

The worst night I can remember in ages.

I’ve been having nightmares for a couple of weeks now, ever since I got lost. Horrible dreams about the mound of bodies. A lot of times I see us in the mound, or I think I’m with Mom and then I look around and there’s the mound and I have to climb on top of it to find her.

Twice I had dreams that I was in Mrs. Nesbitt’s house after she died, and I’m looking around for things and wherever I turn, there she is. Both times I woke up thinking Mrs. Nesbitt was still alive, and I had to remind myself that she was dead and I had gone through her house, with her body lying on her bed, and that I had believed at the time it was okay to do that.

One dream I had was so much like a horror movie, it was almost funny. Mrs. Nesbitt and I were playing tennis (which is a funny thought right there), and I looked up at the stands and everyone watching the match was dead. Nobody I knew, though. They all looked like ghouls.

I don’t know if I’ve been in a bad mood because of the nightmares or if I’m having the nightmares because I’m in a bad mood. Probably both. I know I haven’t been sleeping well, and that hasn’t helped.

But last night I had nightmare after nightmare. I don’t know if I ever woke up. It felt like one dream led directly to another. In one I was going through someone’s house and I opened a closet door and piles of corpses fell out. Then I was in the same house and I opened a different door and the dead people were all people I knew. Then I saw Mom sitting in a rocking chair, and she said, “Don’t look at me like I’m dead,” only she was dead.

But then I had the worst dream—maybe the worst dream I’ve had in my life. I was walking to school and everything was normal, the way it had been. The sun was shining, and I remember how happy I felt seeing the sun again. I wasn’t sure if everything was back to normal or if none of the bad things had ever happened. It didn’t matter. The sun was shining, and I was walking to school. The closer I got to town, the more people I saw. Everybody was happy, so I realized the sun had returned. We were all celebrating because we could see the sun again.