The Light Pirate(74)
After the wound was bandaged, Phyllis and Wanda sat in the kitchen and drank tea so honey-sweet it made Phyllis’s teeth ache. Every few minutes, Phyllis would forget what had happened and everything seemed almost normal. But then she felt the pain in her head, the sharp stab in her ribs. She reached up to touch the bloodied gauze wrapped around her head and saw the dark stains on Wanda’s nightshirt, and it all came rushing back. Phyllis focused her eyes on the tablecloth, trying to will her swollen brain to hold on to the moment. Wanda had carried them through the night. It was Phyllis’s turn to carry them into the day. Her hand shook as she raised the mug to her lips.
“What do we do now?” Wanda asked. Phyllis could see the exhaustion beginning to take hold of her young friend. She was in shock—they both were—but there was so much that needed to be done.
“We move,” Phyllis said with a deep sigh. “It was always gonna happen someday. There’s no way to know if someone will come looking for them. If there are more.”
Wanda shook her head in disbelief. “There has to be something else. We could set traps. We could…we could be ready for them.”
Phyllis was having a hard time not slurring her speech, and she didn’t want Wanda to notice. She focused all her energy on forming the words she needed to get out. “We’re not set up to fight. But we are set up to hide and hide good. If they found us, it’s only a matter of time before someone else does, too. Fair chance there’s more, someone to wonder why they didn’t come back. And next time, who knows what happens. The water’s rising anyway, honey. It’s time.” Phyllis watched Wanda’s face as she resisted this, then accepted it; the shift happened so fast it was almost invisible, but Phyllis knew this girl, this woman, inside and out. She could see the understanding take root and begin to grow. One minute Wanda was prepared to defend this house to the death, and the next, she was cataloging what she would bring and what she would leave behind.
It wasn’t just the intruders. The water was already taking the driveway, the lower garden beds, the citrus grove. In a year, it would be lapping at the house. They could wear their muck boots downstairs, wading to the kitchen instead of walking. They could keep mostly to the second floor. But even that was temporary. A waiting game, to see how fast the water would rise and how long the wooden frame of the house would stand against the tide. No, life had already changed in unimaginable ways, and now it would change again. This had always been the way it would go. Creating this off-the-grid sanctuary was a stopgap. A bridge to span the chasm between the old world and the new. But even the idea of the grid, of being on it or off it, was just another ruse of civilization. The grid was gone. In some ways, it had never existed at all. She hadn’t ever imagined that she would live to see things progress this far, but here she was—living. She watched as Wanda came to terms with all of this.
“I know a place,” Wanda finally said. “In the nature reserve. I…it’s where I go when I want to think. The trees are sturdy enough to build in.”
Phyllis nodded, suddenly aware that by now Wanda knew this land even better than she did. “All right. That’s where we’ll go.”
“But what do we do with the…” Wanda trailed off, unable to choose the right word. “We can’t just leave them. Can we?” Phyllis considered the corpses in the other room. If only she’d been faster, been stronger, if only she’d been the one to pull the trigger. But she hadn’t. The days of wishing for things to be different were gone. Those men were dead because Wanda had killed them. Ruthlessness was not such a bad quality in this place.
“We burn them,” Phyllis replied. “We burn everything.”
In the pantry, Phyllis filled a plywood crate with glass canning jars containing the harvests of years past. These stores had diminished over time, but that only made them more precious. There would be no more harvests from the garden, no more days spent over a hot stove, sterilizing jars, boiling vegetables, slicing fruit, making jams and sauces and sides. This was all of it. Stepping around the drying blood, she tried not to look at the bodies as she gathered the last of the jars, but there they were. The smell of them was already blooming. The heat of the early-afternoon sun shining through the window grew more intense by the hour. She would have opened the window, but pieces of the older man’s head had spattered against the latch and she couldn’t bring herself to touch it.
She realized she had stopped packing up the jars without noticing, that her hand was grazing the bandaged wound on the side of her head while she stood, frozen, staring into the open eyes of the dead boy. He was so young. There was something almost familiar about him. The older man she couldn’t bear to look at. The pink of his head, the crush of it, the pieces that were missing and the pieces that were still there—she recalled the shape of his mouth as he trained her own rifle on her, a smile, a laugh even, and was glad he was dead. And then it hit her. The day at Target. The father and his twins.
She was sick in the corner. As quietly as she could, so that Wanda wouldn’t hear. Her head pounding, she retched until there was nothing left. She put her hand against the wall to steady herself and waited until the static intruding on her vision cleared. She filled the crate as quickly as she could and left these two bodies to their pyre. There was nothing more she could offer them. Not even her remorse. She told herself that if she were a better woman, she would say a few words. A prayer. A scrap of ceremony. She paused in the doorway, the crate heavy in her arms, and tried to locate some semblance of respect. But she couldn’t.