| Title | Presently Untitled |
| Genre | Sci-Fi |
| Warnings | Strong Language |
| Rating | PG |
| Words | 1632 |
This was originally written off a prompt on Writer's Digest. Use the first line of your favorite song as the first line of your story. The line fit, but was trite, so it's changed. Either way, this is what I gotz. | |
“You caught something!”
I keep on poking the dusty ground with a stick. “Yeah. It’s too scrawny to be worth anything.” Kevin is always nagging me for food. I don’t really blame him, but that squirrel - I hope it’s a squirrel, otherwise it’s one sick-ass raccoon - will take more energy to skin and cook than it will give us for eating it. “Move over. I’m gonna let it out, maybe it will fatten up and come back in a few weeks.”
Kevin pouts. His lower lip is trembling when I toss my stick to the ground. Maybe I played up the utility of the cage a little bit too much when I was scavenging for wires. “I’m hungry, Jess.”
And now there are tears, too. I pat his scruffy head and crouch down to his level. “Listen, Kev, I know you’re hungry. I’m hungry, too. When Mom gets back from the stream, I’m going out to find something for lunch, OK?”
He smiles and nods approvingly. I wonder if he’s catching on that these are empty promises. Mom left for the stream almost a month ago, and the damn thing’s only a mile away. She’s not coming back. Hell, I’d be surprised if she’s even alive at this point. And Dad’s dead, but that’s not exactly news to Kevin.
As soon as the cage door hits the dirt, the squirrel takes off. Ranger, Kev’s part-time stray mutt, bolts after him. Lucky squirrel, he dodged death twice. “I wonder how many lives squirrels have,” I mutter under my breath. I want to ask Kevin if we can have dog for dinner but don’t want to risk another crying jag.
He sits quietly for a few minutes, thumbing through his ratty copy of Cat in the Hat, before turning to me. “Hey, Jess, if cats have more than one life, and squirrels do, too, how many lives do people have?”
I finish rigging up the trap. “We only get one, Kev, so don’t blow it.” The sun is already above the treeline. Time to get moving. “Why don’t you come with me to look for lunch?”
That got him going. He grabs his little bag, a holdover from the one month of Kindergarten he got before everything went to shit, and takes up a good pace next to me. He tries to convince Ranger to follow, but the moron is still barking at the scrawny squirrel. “Maybe we’ll find Mom. Wouldn’t that be great, Jess? I bet she’s been waiting for us this whole time.”
“I don’t think we’ll find her today. She went a different direction.”
He spends most of the walk jabbering. I don’t really know what he’s saying, and I don’t really care. He’s probably talking to all those friends who didn’t make it. So I just keep walking until I don’t hear his clumsy footsteps anymore. “Kev? Kevin?”
“Over here!” He’s a few hundred yards behind me, farther away than I ever let him get. Damn kid. “Look! I found something!”
He plops a round, brown rock into my hand. “What the...An acorn?” He nods, excited. “Well, what the heck am I supposed to do with this?”
“Grandpa told me the Injuns used to eat them.”
“In-di-ans, Kev, not injuns. Jeez, why don’t you just call them ‘Reds’.” I toss it lightly a few times. “And, I guess they did, but I don’t know what to do to it so we can eat it. What if it’s poisonous or something if I screw up?” I turn it around in my hand while he stares, the pout coming back. A big, round tear starts falling down his cheek. This stupid little nut is his chance to help, and I’m shitting all over it.
I feel really, truly helpless. I’ve kept us alive this long by bashing rodents over the head with rocks or opening up the old, questionable cans of food I find in dumpsters. Beyond that, I’m useless. What higher authority got the bright idea of leaving a six year old boy with his fifteen year old sister?
“You’re really smart, Jess,” Kevin insists. “You’ll think of something.”
I hate how much he depends on me.
“There was a library back in town. We’ll need to carry all we can, so dump that shit outta your backpack.” He starts crying again, so I tell him to hide it by the big oak tree. No one is going to want his copies of Dr. Seuss, after all.
We spend more than an hour shoving our backpacks and pockets full of these disgusting looking nuts. I should be ecstatic right now - even if these things taste like ass, they’ll fill us up and keep us alive. On the walk back to the town, I end up having to carry both the bags, and I start to feel a few stabs of resentment. My mind starts wandering down the same old path: if it were just me then...
Then what? Then I’d be alone and scared and hungry and not have any reason whatsoever to try to change it.
I make it a point to guide Kevin around the mass grave at the town entrance. He knows it’s there. How could he not? It smells exactly like what you’d imagine rotting flesh would. Almost like rotten chicken, mixed with rotten pork, mixed with dog crap. So we take the long way around, down a cluttered alley, across an empty side street, right up to the front door of the rural library that looks like it was a Hardee’s in a previous life. It even has the double glass doors with pock marks where the We Proudly Accept Visa sticker used to be.
The library is musty. Not in that old book way, either. In that I think there are a few dead bodies in here kind of way. I keep expecting a dislocated limb to fall out of the ceiling tiles. There’s almost no light, and dust dances lazily in the few shafts of sun that filter through. Like a bunch of dying fairies. I think about it like that just to keep my mind off the bug-creeping feeling working along my skin.
Even though the library is small, there are dozens of book racks. I spot the non-fiction section, but it’s useless. They don’t teach the Dewey decimal system anymore. Instinctively, I head for the reference terminal. Kevin watches me as I fumble with the monitor’s power button. A few choice words escape my lips, and Kevin pulls on my shirt. “Sorry, sorry, Kev, this stupid piece of shit just--”
“I don’t think that’s going to work, honey.”
Stranger danger. My head snaps up, and I push Kevin down and under the desk. “Who the fuck are you?”
The man’s hands are up near his face. “Name’s Tom. I thought I’d save you the frustration of tryin’ to use a computer that ain’t got no juice.” His voice is twinged with an odd jumble of southern accents and spiced with a bit of Chicagoan. Against my will, I’m comforted by that last bit. It’s been a month since I’ve seen a living soul other than Kevin. The familiar accented a of the Midwest reminds me of the normalcy of crowded cafes and busy streets.
I laugh a little and nod to the terminal. “Force of habit, I guess. Sorry for being so rude. I’m Jess.” I extend a hand but he doesn’t take it. There’s only so long you can leave your arm out before it gets tired and/or you feel like an idiot. “Hey, so, you wouldn’t happen to know where the outdoorsy type books are?”
Tom studies me like a lab animal. I’m fairly sure I look like one, too, what with my big tangle of black hair that hasn’t seen a comb for months. And the thread-bare jeans. And the vain attempts at face washing. “‘Outdoorsy’?”
Before I can respond, Kevin pops out from under the desk. “We found a whole bunch of--” I slap my hand over his mouth and shush him harshly.
“Look, Tom, we’re just trying to get by. I’m not exactly a woodsman, and I’m sure you’ve had plenty of time to map this place out, so if you could just point us in the right direction, I’d appreciate it.” He points to the back right of the building. “Thanks.”
I drag Kevin along behind me. It’s hard to keep both him and the bags of nuts quiet. We’re turning the corner of the first row of potentially useful books when Tom clears his throat. “I should stick with you,” he calls. “Doesn’t seem right to leave two kids runnin’ around out there on their own.”
“We’ll manage,” I mutter. Kevin gives me that obnoxious little kid pleading for candy look, and I put my hand up. “We’ll. Manage.”
Big boys don’t take a hint as well as little boys. Tom is right behind me. “I insist,” he says.
I grab the first promising book off the shelf. “We have what we came for. We’ll be fine, but thank you.” I turn around. He’s dangerously, uncomfortably close. Even in the dim light, I can tell he’s maybe a senior or a college freshman. I run through my options. He may not be a grown man, but I don’t stand a chance in a pinch.
He’s getting ready to insist more firmly. I’m getting ready to move on to fisticuffs and tell Kevin to run like the wind. But a bit of light reflects off something around his neck. It distracts me to the point his words sound like white noise. Round. Yellow. Long, delicate chain. Mom’s necklace.
She wore it until the day she disappeared.
Well, shit. This changes things.
