Malorie(4)

“Yes,” Tom says.

“Yes,” Olympia says.

Malorie tries to close her eyes a third time. Tries to shutter her imagination to what lurks outside.

A lot.

She tries to close her eyes a fourth time, a fifth, a sixth. She wants to say something about how unfair this is. She wants to tell someone her age. Someone raised before the creatures came. How it shouldn’t be that a mother and her children have to flee the place they call home, so suddenly, to enter a world where the threats are worse than those they leave behind.

She grips the hands of her children and takes the first step away from the Jane Tucker School for the Blind.

This is the new world. This is how things are and how they have been for many years.

From hysteria to the complete unknown.

The three of them, blind, draped in cloth, setting out.

Alone.

Again.





ONE


Tom is getting water from the well. It’s something he’s done every other day for the better part of a decade, the three of them having called Camp Yadin home for that long. Olympia believes the camp was once an outpost in the American frontier days. She’s read almost every book in the camp library (more than a thousand), including books on the history of Michigan. She says the camp lodge was most likely once a saloon. Cabin One was the jail. Tom doesn’t know if she’s right, though he has no reason not to believe her. It was a Jewish summer camp when the creatures came, that much is for sure. And now, it’s home.

“Hand over hand,” he says, taking the rope that connects Cabin Three to the stone lip of the well. He says it because, despite the ropes that tie every building to one another (and even link Cabin Ten to the H dock on the lake), he’s trying to come up with a better way to move about.

Tom loathes the blindfolds. Sometimes, when he’s feeling particularly lazy, he doesn’t use one at all. He keeps his eyes closed. But his mother’s never-ending rules remain firm in his mind.

Closing your eyes isn’t enough. You could be startled into opening them. Or something could open them for you.

Sure. Yes. In theory Malorie is right. In theory she usually is. But who wants to live in theory? Tom is sixteen years old now. He was born into this world. And nothing’s tried to open his eyes yet.

“Hand over hand.”

He’s almost there. Malorie insists that he check the water before bringing it up. She’s told him the story of two men named Felix and Jules many times. How his namesake, Tom the man, tested the water the two brought back, the water everybody was worried could be contaminated by a creature. Tom the teen likes that part of the story. He relates to the test. He even relates to the idea of new information about the creatures. Anything would be more to work with than what they have. But he’s not worried about something swimming in their drinking water. The filter he invented himself has taken care of that.

And besides, despite the way Malorie carries on, even she can’t believe water can go mad.

“Here!” he says.

He reaches out and touches the lip before bumping into it. He’s made this walk so many times that he could run it and still stop before the stone circle.

He leans over the edge and yells into the dark tunnel.

“Get out of there!”

He smiles. His voice echoes—the sound is a rich one—and Tom likes to imagine it’s someone else calling back up to him. For as lucky as they are to have chanced upon an abandoned summer camp with numerous buildings and amenities, life gets lonely out here.

“Tom is the best!” he hollers, just to hear the echo.

Nothing stirs in the water below, and Tom begins to bring the bucket up. It’s a standard crank, made of steel, and he’s repaired it more than once. He oils it regularly, too, as the camp giveth in all ways; a supply cellar in the main lodge that brought Malorie to tears ten years ago.

“A pipeline that delivers water directly to us,” Tom says, cranking. “We could put it exactly where the rope is now. It passes through the existing filter. All we’d have to do is turn a dial, and presto. Clean water comes right to us. No more hand over hand on the rope. We wouldn’t have to leave the cabin at all.”

Not that the walk is difficult. And any excuse to get outside is a good one. But Tom wants things to improve.

It’s all he thinks about.

The bucket up, he removes it from its hooks and carries it back to Cabin Three, the largest of the cabins, the one he, Olympia, and Malorie have slept in most of these years. Mom Rules won’t allow Tom or Olympia to sleep anywhere else, despite their growing needs, a rule that Tom has so far followed.

Spend all day in another one if you need to. But we sleep together.

Still. A decade in.

Tom shakes his head and tries to laugh it off. What else is there to do? Olympia has told him in private about the differences in generations that she’s read about in her books. She says it’s common for teenagers to feel like their parents are “from another planet.” Tom definitely agrees with the writers on that front. Malorie acts as if every second of every day could be the moment they all go mad. And Tom and Olympia both have pondered aloud, in their own ways, the worth of a life in which the only aim is to keep living.

“Okay, Mom,” Tom says, smiling. It’s easier for him to smile about this stuff than not. The few times outsiders have passed through their camp, their home, Tom has been able to glean how much stricter Malorie is than most. He’s heard it in the voices of others. He saw it regularly at the school for the blind. Often, it was embarrassing, living under her thumb in public. People looked at her like she was….what’s the word Olympia used?