Black River Falls by Jeff Hirsch(3)

“Help! I’m being attacked by a rabid bear! Help!”

Hershey Bar pawed at Greer’s shoulder, pulling the collar of his shirt down enough to expose the corner of one of his tattoos. A chill crept up my spine.

This is probably a good time to mention that, yes, when I say Greer, I mean that Greer. Trust me, I find the amount of time I spent hanging out with Greer Larson just as strange as I’m sure you would. Even after all those months, when-ever I looked at him, it was like I was seeing two Greers at the same time: the Greer of Lucy’s Promise and that scowling kid at the bus stop with the shaved head and the grubby denim jacket. The one whose big brother gave him his first tattoos in the seventh grade with a ballpoint pen and a sharpened paper clip. What happened to that Greer? Same thing that happened to all of us, I guess. October Sixteenth.



Once we got the branches I needed, we headed over to the clearing. Greer and the dogs flopped down by a stand of mountain laurel while I started digging four holes for the main posts that would hold up the fence. It was sweaty work, made sweatier by the leather gloves and the rubber and plastic mask.

“So I was talking to Eliot this morning.”

I muscled out a shovelful of dirt and rock. “Oh yeah? He decided whose heart he’s going to break yet? Astrid’s or Makela’s?”

“Jury’s still out on that one,” Greer said. “No, you know Jen and Marty? They have that cabin over near Mantel Rock? Eliot was talking to them the other day, and they said they’d heard about a couple kids living on their own out on Joseph’s Point.”

“Why would anybody live on Joseph’s Point?” I asked. “The place is nothing but a swamp.”

“Marty says they’ve been there since the outbreak.”

I stopped digging. “You serious?”

Greer shrugged. “That’s what he said.”

“How old?”

“He says six. A boy and a girl.”

I pushed the blade of the shovel back into the hole. “No way. Two kids that age couldn’t make it alone on Joseph’s Point all this time.”

“Word is they come out for the supply drop, grab what they need, and then go right back. Marty said he even saw them once. Looked pretty bad off.”

I thought about that for a second, then tossed the shovel aside and grabbed one of the larger branches. “Okay, well, find Gonzalez when you get to the supply line. He’ll get his guys to look into it.”

“Absolutely. Good plan. Or I could just go down to Joseph’s Point and get them myself.”

“Seems like a waste of time, going to get them just to hand them over to Gonzalez.”

When Greer didn’t say anything, I turned around to find him grinning at me in that slightly maniacal way of his.

“No way, man,” I said. “You know the deal.”

“But—”

“We don’t bring anyone else up here, and the Guard leaves us alone.”

“Oh, come on,” Greer said. “Gonzalez was totally winking when he said that.”

“He was not winking! The only reason we even got to make that deal—”

“Is because Gonzalez is a comic book nerd who’s obsessed with your dad.”

“—is because we keep to ourselves and the Guard’s got bigger things to deal with. Bringing more people up here changes that.”

“How?” Greer asked. “It’s two kids. Little ones. They’re probably adorable.”

“If you want to go look for them, fine. But if you find them, you have to hand them over to Gonzalez.”

“And what’s he going to do with them?”

“He’ll find their families or something.”

“Dude!” Greer said. “They’ve been out there for eight months. That means no one’s looking for them. So what’re Gonzalez and his guys going to do? Stick them in that stupid shelter of theirs? How do you think that’s going to turn out?”

“Greer, I promised him.”

He jumped to his feet. “Well, what the hell did you do that for? It’s not like you talked to me about it. Like you talked to any of us about it. These are two little kids! Alone!”

“What did you want me to do? Go to war with the National Guard? Take the chance of screwing over everybody here just because you want to play superhero again?”

“I’m not trying to play—”

“You think they’ll just ignore this? Why? Because we’re a bunch of kids?”

“We’re supposed to be helping!”

“We are helping!”

“Card!”

“The answer is no!”

Suddenly Makela called out from down in the camp. “Greer, come on! It’s time to go!”

I snapped back to reality, surprised to find Greer and me squaring off with each other, panting as if we’d just run a mile flat out. His gray eyes had gone stormy and were locked on mine. My throat ached from shouting I didn’t really remember doing.

“Gre-er!” she called again.

“I’ll be right there!” he yelled back over his shoulder.

But he didn’t move. He stared at the ground, fists clenched, shoulders hunched. The silence between us was heavy and strange. It was like when a storm tears through a summer day and then retreats so fast it’s hard to believe it ever really happened.