I look out from my hidey-hole. A hurricane, red lightning, the orange light of the setting sun dancing across the bottom of the twisting clouds. The wind ruffles my hair, blows it across my face. I pull it back, tuck it under my hood again. A bad one. Thunder drums the ground, shakes my bones. Sand skitters and the wind howls through the blackened skeletons of skyscrapers.
Everyone’s parents are gone.
I try to swallow the lump in my throat, but it stays there, making it hard to breathe. I miss Mom. I miss Dad. I sniff, scrub the tears from my eyes with the back of my hand.
I have to move. The storm is going to be a bad one, and this place is too high to block much wind. I jump off the ledge, falling for one heartbeat, two heartbeats. The sand buries my feet up to the ankles when I land. I pull them out and skitter down the face of the dune. At the bottom I pause. The wind moans, making it hard to hear. Nothing moves but sand.
I run, passing cars nearly covered by drifts. I don’t hide in cars anymore. I saw another girl do it, and a group of boys found her in the middle of the storm. Her screams were worse than the wind. When it had cleared, the boys left. She didn’t.
I don’t trust boys anymore.
I run around a corner and see a bunch of kids in the middle of the street, and I try to stop. The sand goes out from under my feet and I fall on my butt. I scramble backwards, breathing hard. I hold my breath and look around the corner. They didn’t see me. They’re too busy eating.
They look like a pack of hyenas gathered around a zebra. On second thought, hyenas probably have better manners.
Had. They’re probably all dead now, too.
They’re all boys. Of course they are. My tummy rumbles. When was the last time I ate? I can’t remember. Maybe two days ago? Three? I squint, trying to see what they’re eating. Maybe I can scare them off, or distract them long enough to—
One of the boys moves aside and I see the thing they’re eating. It’s huge. I think I remember horses being that big, but it’s black. Too many legs. Covered in spiderhair. The head is long and narrow, has mouthparts like a praying mantis. I lose my appetite.
Bad things happen to kids who eat monsters. Not even the birds eat those. Bats sometimes. I saw them do it once. I don’t eat bats anymore.
I watch them for a little while more to make sure they didn’t see me. I can nearly hear them tearing in to the carcass over the wind. They don’t look my way. I lick my cracked lips and dash across the intersection, look back.
They haven’t moved.
I heave a sigh. Good. Good. Now, where to hide? The storm isn’t far away, and light is fading fast. I have maybe twenty minutes.
Minutes. What use is a minute anymore? Or hours? Or days? They died when my parents did. Parents and teachers and older brothers.
I run again. I want to get as far away from those boys as I can before the storm hits.
The sand kicks up. I wrap my scarf around my face. Red. The last bit of color I own. The last bit of my brother.
I run west, into the sun, away from the storm. My eyes dance along the fronts of the dead skyscrapers, trying to decide on one. All the same, right? It shouldn’t matter where I stop, as long as it’s empty. As long as it’s out of the wind, but my tummy pits every time I slow down. I’ve learned to trust my tummy.
I run on.
Then, an expanse. Sand and dust devils where a river used to be, miles across. A bridge to the south. I look back. The storm is closing. I look back over the once-river. It’s miles wide. I’ll never make it across in time.
I swallow. I’m not running anymore, but my breath quickens, my throat tightening, and I feel light headed. Like there’s not enough air. I can’t be caught out in the storm when it hits. I can’t. I remember the first time I was caught out. The only time. The wind. The lightning cracking the ground. The way my hair stood on end from the leftover static. The monsters. So many monsters. My breath goes faster, but not fast enough. My throat feels like it’s closing off. I look back. The storm is closer. Tears bud in my eyes. Not again. Please not again. I whimper and whip my head back and forth. The buildings aren’t safe, but neither is the storm. Which do I risk? I start across the sand, down to the dead riverbed, then I turn around. At least one of the buildings must be safe, right? Safe enough? As I climb the bank again, the pit in my tummy gets colder, starts to claw up my throat. I turn back. The dead river, then. The sand swirls around my ankles, as I take one, two, three steps out, but the gusts are already strong enough to nearly push me over. I won’t even be a quarter of the way across before the storm hits. I whimper and my chest feels like it’s falling into itself. Where to go? Where to go? Where? Where? Where?
I stop, look south. The bridge. It’s close enough. And the pit in my tummy recedes. Maybe there’s some rocks I can crawl between, or some crumbled out concrete. I don’t know what’s there, but my tummy doesn’t protest. I’ll have to be fast.
I run.
The wind blows harder, and I’m now running across the face of it instead of away. I have to lean into it so I’m not pushed out into the river of sand. Soon the wind is kicking up sand into my eyes, and I pull my goggles up from around my throat and push them against my eyes, and tighten the straps. I hate these goggles. They’re super scratched and I can barely see anything.
I reach the base of the bridge, the western corner of the big concrete block where the road ramps up and stops being a road and starts being a bridge. The wind is less here, almost completely gone. I look up, hoping there might be some way to climb up to the latticed steel of the underbridge, where I can nestle like a spider. There isn’t. Lightning strikes the ground, a shock of red blinds me and the blast sets my bones rattling and my ears ringing. I scream and cover my head, stumbling. A brief hailstorm patters down around me and I feel a dozen-dozen burning impacts on my clothes. The image of molten sand and burning glass splits my mind. Am I on fire? My heart becomes a hole in my chest and I slap myself where the stuff hit me. No fire, but my clothes are knobby with smooth and squishy dollops that burn my hands. I look up. The crater is only twenty feet away. I hold my breath, eyes glued on the crater while the wind howls and yanks at my clothes, nearly strong enough to lift me off my feet and send me tumbling across the once-riverbed. The crater starts to fill in with sand. Nothing moves but the wind.
I let out a sigh and my little tingles spread across my shoulders and the back of my neck. I turn away and run.
Didn’t get hit. No monsters yet. The lee of the bridge will protect me from the storm, but the monsters definitely find me. Gotta find real shelter. You can only be so lucky. I round the south corner of the concrete ramp and see something to the east. A boat, one that’s longer than a house and twice as wide. The deck where they steer the ship sticks out of the middle, all the windows shattered and toothy, and there are broken cranes all over the deck. I push toward it. I can’t run anymore. The wind is too strong, and it takes all the strength in my legs to trudge against it. The ground shakes again and again, and thunder peals so fast my chest never stops rattling and my ears never stop ringing. Ghosts of light through the haze of sand, and the little skin I don’t have wrapped up in layers feels like it’s being peeled away by a million tiny needles. An image flashes through my mind; Johnny peeling up the first layer of the skin on his fingertip with a safety pin.
I reach the lee of the boat and fall to my hands and knees without the wind to support me. I can breathe again. I pull away my scarf and cough, panting, look behind me. Dark shapes leer in the swirling sands, dreamlike. My heartbeat quickens. I pull my scarf back up over my nose and look up at the boat. It rests cockeyed, the side nearest me dipping into the sand. The angle of the deck is so steep I’m afraid I might not be able to make it, but somehow I scramble up and find a door that leads below. The smell of rotting fish gags me through my scarf. I wonder if I might be able to find any left or if they’ve rotted into black sludge. I tried eating sludge once in the back of a nearly empty supermarket. I nearly died.
I pull out my flashlight. My hands tremble and the light flickers when I thumb it on. Spiderwebs and sand swirling in. Well, even if there isn’t any fish left, at least there will be spiders to eat. I step inside and shut the door behind me, but I don’t bolt it.
It might be safer than the storm, but you never know who might be living in a place like this.
Or what.
The light of my flashlight is dim. I hate this flashlight, nearly as much as I hate my goggles. It barely works, so I have to shake it really hard and the magnets inside rattle around and make it easy for things to find me. Other kids. Monsters. But I don’t have anything else, do I?
I think back to the lamps that we used to have for when the power went out. How we used to giggle at the lightning outside and huddle under blankets, all around a dancing flame, reading and snacking and…
I sniff and rub my eye. A bit of sand gets in and makes it worse. A little knife under my eyelid, scratching up my eye. I blink harder and the tears come and wash it away, but my eye still feels like a little knife cut it and my vision’s still blurry.
“Come on, Eve. Stop thinking.”
I swallow and move deeper in to the wreck. I’m walking more on the wall than on the floor with how bad the ship is tilted. I stop at one of the doors and peek down, then shine my flashlight into the room. Old skeletons. Grown ups. They would have stopped all this. They would have known what to do. They wouldn’t have let the boys take over.
I jump across the door and wince at the thump. I crouch, turn off the flashlight, hold my breath. Probably for nothing. My heart thumps in my throat, my hears, but I don’t hear anything else. Boys like to stay together. To hunt. I shudder, remembering the spears and leers. Deep breath. Don’t think.
Just the howling wind outside.
I take a deep breath and turn the flashlight back on. A spot of ghostly light appears on the far wall, revealing a white bannister, bleeding orange from a dozen black wounds, just like how some of the monsters bleed. I shudder.
I creep down the hall, looking into the open doors before stretching across them. I can barely reach without jumping, but I don’t wanna risk making any more noise. Not until I’ve explored everywhere in the ship. I did that once. Only once. I had to bail out a 2nd story window into some sand. My wrist still aches during storms.
I reach the end of the hallway. I haven’t seen anything but dead grown ups and I’m starting to think it’s safe. But then I hear something.
“Hello?”
I freeze, turn off my light.
“H-hello?”
It’s a boy’s voice. Younger than mine, I think.
“I saw your light.”
Crap. I swallow, creep closer to the staircase. It’s basically level with how the ship is tilted. I peek around the banister and I see a flickering orange glow. He’s got a fire.
“I’ve got a gun!”
I snort and smirk. Now I know he’s alone. Boys always lie about having guns when they’re alone. Scaredy cats.
“You don’t have a gun,” I called out. This should be easy. He’s probably got some food, and I don’t feel bad about stealing from boys because they probably stole it from someone else anyway.
“I do too!”
I smirk my head and start down the stairs. Or across them. It’s hard, because the stairs are just metal rectangles with metal diamond crisscrosses on the top, but they’re lying on flat now, so they look like little mountains with only one side filled in. Stepping on the peak is tricky, but not that hard. It’s like when I used to dance around like a ballerina, except now—
“Don’t come down! I’ll shoot!”
I take another step on my tiptoes and roll my eyes. “You will—“
A flash and a bang. I scream, fall on my bum, my leg slipping through the opening, a burning pain tearing along my shin. My eyes fill with tears as I claw the air, the wall, finally finding the handrail, but my hand can’t get a good grip on it. It won’t close, and I hear the boy clomping through the dark. He’s at the bottom of the stairs, and I can half see him in the dim firelight. I scramble away, pushing up the stairs with my good hand and my feet. He starts to climb after me, then falls on his face. I finally climb to my feet and jump across the stairs and land hard on the wall at the end. I don’t have my flashlight, so I crawl across the floor, my hands searching for the lip of the door so I don’t fall in. I can hear him behind me, banging up the stairs, but I feel the lip of the door, stand up and jump across. A light appears over my shoulder and a screeching, whining sound.
“Wait!”
I look back over my shoulder and see a blinding white spot. How come he gets a gun and a flash light that actually works? But I can see now, so I run, holding my arm and jumping over the doors.
“Wait! I’m not gonna hurt you!”
The sound of his footsteps echoes after mine, but I can reach the door before he catches me. I jump over another door, but my foot catches on the other end and I go down hard, knocking the wind out of me. I try to gasp, but it’s like there’s a stone between my lungs and my vision starts to go dark. I try to crawl away, get up and run, but then I hear, feel him thump down next to me. I can hear the screams of the other girl in my head and I try to push away, my bad arm scraping along the wall and jamming glass needles up and down my bone. I cry out and stop, cover my face with my good hand and whimper.
“Please don’t hurt me. I’ll… I’ll give you what you want.”
He steps closer to me and I stiffen, biting my lip, tears dropping from my eyes.
“I’m not gonna hurt you.”
I don’t say anything. He’s trying to trick me. He shot me and he just wants to play with me. I hate him. Tears stream down my face and my cheeks burn, but I don’t wanna die. I don’t look at him.
“You shot me.”
I hear him swallow in the dark.
“I… You scared me. I thought you were gonna hurt me and take my stuff. So I shot.”
I sniff and glare up at him, my cheeks and forehead burning. He probably stole his stuff anyway, and he’s worried about me taking it. Good. He should be worried. The light coming from his flashlight is a dim spot on the floor, flickering lower and lower, but even in the darkness I can tell he’s not looking at me. Some of the light reflects off the wall, enough that I can see his face. He’s short, shorter than me. Dressed in rags like me, with a skinny face and big brown eyes and dark brown hair. He looks like my older brother did when we were younger.
“I was just trying to scare you. I didn’t think I’d hit you. I’m sorry.”
I sniff and blink away tears. When I speak, my voice is watery. “You coulda killed me.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I really didn’t.” He looks back over his shoulder and gestures to the stairs. “I have food. It’s not much, but we can share.”
I swallow, but look away and nod. “Okay.”
He extends his hand to me, but I push it away.
The fire’s warm, but I barely notice. I’m holding my arm, rocking back and forth. It feels like somebody’s sticking me with a red hot poker and hot blood runs between my fingers. I whimper.
“Can I see?”
I shake my head, gritting my teeth, but the firelight fades and I sway, the back of my throat closes and my the bottom of my stomach lifts and I almost throw up. My mouth’s wet like a dog’s and I have to swallow again and again to keep from drooling.
“I’m just trying to help.”
“You helped enough.”
He’s sitting across the fire from me. A spool of old, burning rope as thick as my wrist. Even with the fire I can’t get warm and I can hardly breathe. I stare into the fire, rocking back and forth, back and forth, the red hot drill screwing into my upper arm. I squeeze my arm, squeeze my eyes shut, and it makes it worse. This time my stomach lifts and I do throw up, a wave of fire ants shooting out of my mouth. I retch again and again, and the fire ants start crawling up and down my throat, the back of my nose. I cry softly.
Then he’s beside me, his hands on my arm. “No!” I try to push him away, but my good arm feels like it’s made out of gummy worms and he doesn’t seem to notice. He pulls away the fabric and looks at the hole in my arm, blood still dribbling out of it. It looks black in the firelight. Like monster blood. Am I a monster? No, I can’t be. I only ate them one time. Only one time. And I had to. The boys made me, laughed at me. I—
I scream. My whole arm feels like it’s on fire, my bone feels like it’s been struck by lightning, and I can feel my muscle clenching and squeezing, like I’ve got tiny spiders running around inside my arm. My whole body jerks and pulls, trying to get away and I’m screaming and screaming and then it stops.
The boy’s looking down at me, smiling, sweat on his face. I push him back, and he falls on his butt and nearly into the fire. “What’s wrong with you?!” I yell, grabbing my arm and turning away.
“I was helping—“
“Helping? You call that helping? What’d you do, stick your fingers in it?!”
I grip my arm hard, but something’s different. Something feels weird. It doesn’t hurt as much when I squeeze it, so I raise my arm so I can see it in the firelight and pull the hole in my sleeve open.
“I fixed it.”
I gasp and scoot away on my butt, my eyes wide, my heart trying to claw its way out of my chest like a cat. His mouth falls open and he reaches out towards me.
“Stay away!”
“What? I fixed it. Not all the way, but like—“
“I don’t care! You have powers! Like the bad boys! You’re a monster!”
He flinches and his eyes start to water. “I.. I am not! I don’t hurt anyone! I’m a good guy!”
“You can’t be a good guy. You’re a boy,” I spit.
His lip trembles and he starts to cry, then he stands and runs into the dark, sobbing. My cheeks and forehead burn and my throat gets tight, but I don’t follow him. He’s just trying to trick me, but I don’t care. I don’t.
I listen to him cry for a long time. The fire’s almost out by the time he stops.
When I wake up it’s cold. The only light comes from the embers, barely warm, and they look like little worms munching on what’s left of the rope. I sit there, staring at it for a second, watching them squirm, wondering what it would be like to be a little fireworm like that. Inching along, chewing on the rope, burning up, hot all the time. Then I remember the butterflies that used to be, and I wonder if after the worms are done eating they burrow down into a little cocoon of ash and wait, glowing, changing, waiting for the right time to crack open the cocoon and fly. Fill the air with pretty wings of fire, like fairies.
But butterflies don’t exist anymore, and fairies don’t either. Pretty things can’t survive anymore. Not flowers or trees or little girls. Only spiders and monsters and nasty, evil boys. I sigh, close my eyes. Stay in your cocoons, little fireworms. Don’t come out until the world is better. When it’s safe to be a girl again.
I uncurl, stretching, feeling my muscles become small and hard, my knees and elbows aching, my arms and legs trembling. I hold it there, my everything tense and taught. Strong. Quick. Then I notice the little hard spot that sits deep inside my arm, resting against the bone.
I relax and touch the spot; I can feel the scar, a raised disk that’s kinda rough where my skin used to be smooth, and I push harder. There it is. It doesn’t hurt, but I can feel it, move it around inside me, like a rock in my shoe. I roll my shoulder and I can feel my muscles sliding past it, and my upper arm aches a little when I squeeze my hand into a fist.
Stupid boy.
I get up. It’s too dark to see, so I pull out my flashlight, shake it a couple of times. The rattles fill the room, echoing back on me like a bunch of snakes. The sound makes me shiver, but I grit my teeth and shake harder, the magnet going sho-shook sho-shook inside the plastic tube. I turn it on and the beam falls on the hallway where the boy ran. My tummy grumbles. I try to remember how long it’s been since I ate last. Yesterday, I think. I found some spiders, little black crunchy ones. Then I got lucky, found a big, hairy tamantula that was eating a lizard. I caught him and cooked them both over a little fire. My big brother said that spiders were supposed to taste like, lobsters even though he’d never eaten any spiders before. Well, I’ve never eaten any lobsters, so maybe he’s right.
But that was yesterday, and I’m hungry again. My stomach feels like it’s trying to gnaw on itself, and I remember what that boy said after he shot me.
He said he had food. He promised he’d share.
Least he can do. I get up, my little light making everything seem washed out and ghostly. Like the stuff isn’t there until I shine my light on it, and then only barely. It makes my heart beat and my tummy twist, but I swallow and step around the burned up rope and towards the door where I thought the boy ran.
“Hey. Hey kid.”
My voice echoes and comes back to me ghostly too.
Just let it go, I think. He probably doesn’t have much food anyway.
But he might. And he owes me.
You started it. But that voice is small and I don’t listen to it. He owes me.
I step over the threshold, the big door with a wheel in the middle laying flat against the tilted wall. I don’t hear anything, so I call out again. “Hey kid.”
“Go away.”
Just leave him alone. He didn’t mean to hurt you. He was just trying to scare you away.
Doesn’t matter if he didn’t mean it. He nearly killed me.
I walk half on the wall, half on the floor. Like I’m straddling a little ravine, except instead of water there’s rust and paint chips.
Maybe he was right to. You were gonna beat him up and steal his stuff.
He’s a boy. He probably stole it from someone else anyway.
My tummy squeezes at that, making a tight, hard knot.
Brandon was a boy, too, and he protected you. My face burns and I grit my teeth.
He was my brother. He doesn’t count.
I step through another doorway and the wall shifts and makes a big whop that echoes and fades.
“I said go away!”
“I just wanna talk.”
“I don’t wanna talk to you. You’re mean.”
“Too bad.”
“I’ll shoot you again.”
I freeze, my mouth dry like the sand outside. Of course. Boys always solve their problems with violence.
You’re bigger than him and he knows it. He’ll back down.
Bullets don’t care how big you are.
I lick my lips. “You were lucky to hit me the first time. You really wanna try again?”
Silence. I lick my lips, trying not to shake. I’m hungry, but more than that I want that gun. I wanna be able to make the boys afraid of me instead of being afraid of them.
So I try again. “How many bullets you got?”
“Enough.”
Dumb kid. Doesn’t know what’s good for him.
“You really gonna try and shoot me again?”
“It worked last time.”
My hand rubs my upper arm where the bullet hit me before I can stop myself. Maybe this time he won’t miss. Maybe this time he won’t heal me. Maybe this time… But I need that gun. Even if he doesn’t have any bullets left, it’ll still scare most boys off. I swallow and take another step. The wall shifts and whops underfoot.
“I’m not joking!”
Crap. He’s even scareder now, and that’s bad. Scared things get mean. I’ve been bitten enough times to know that. But his voice is high pitched and warbly. I lower the flashlight, even though it’s already starting to die. He’s afraid, but not of me. “You’d never shot at anybody before, had you?”
Silence. I take another step, and this time the floor doesn’t shift. That’s good.
“How’d it feel? I bet you liked it. I bet you’re just like the other boys. You like being mean. You like hurting girls.”
“Nu-uh! I do not! I was just—”
“Don’t lie!”
I’m standing in the doorway now, and I can see him in the corner, sitting against the wall, not looking at me. He sniffles, and in the washed out, fading light he looks like a sad ghost dressed in old rags. Like a peasant in one of those books I used to read with dragons and fairies and princesses. For a second my cheeks burn and my shoulders feel tight. I shouldn’t be making him feel bad. He’s probably not a bad boy. He didn’t have to heal me. Didn’t have to share his fire. Didn’t have to sleep alone after I yelled at him.
But then a little fire stirs in my heart. This isn’t some stupid story. He’s not a prince and I’m not a princess. He’s a boy, and boys are bad. They hurt and kill and steal.
“You’re not supposed to hurt girls, you know. Hurting girls makes you bad.” I glare at him and try to sound like my mom used to when she told me off for being bad.
“I thought you were gonna kill me,” he whimpers, staring at the gun in his lap.
“Girls don’t kill people like boys do.”
That’s a lie.
Boys aren’t people. Boy’s are monsters.
“It was an accident, I swear!”
I step over the threshold, carefully so I don’t scare him, so I don’t slip and fall. The boy doesn’t move.
“You’re not supposed to hurt girls, you know. Hurting girls makes you bad.” I glare at him and try to sound like my mom used to when would get mad at me.
“I thought you were gonna kill me,” he whimpers, staring at the gun in his lap.
“Girls don’t kill people like boys do.”
That’s a lie.
“Nuh-uh,” he murmurs, and the fire in my heart burns brighter. I hop through the door and I have to hold onto the doorframe when my feet slid out from under me and I land on my knees.
“Yeah-huh! Boys are the ones who beat you up and take your stuff!” Tears fog my vision and I scrub them with the back of my hand. “Boys are the ones that throw you in a pit and laugh at you. They’re the ones who… who…” I think about what happened to that girl in the sandstorm that took shelter in the car and she gets caught in my throat and no sound comes out.
He slams his fist against the floor and it makes a really loud bang and for a second my heart stops because I think he’s shot me again, so I throw my hands up in front of my face, but there’s no flash and no hurt, so I slowly lower them again. He’s yelling at me, pointing his finger, but I didn’t notice because I was so scared of getting shot again.
“—because some bad boys hurt you doesn’t mean we’re all bad! And it doesn’t mean that all girls are good, either!”
I glare at him, but I don’t rase my voice because I’m watching his gun. He’s not pointing at me with it, but he might. “Oh, yeah? Name one bad girl.”
He falls silent and looks at the floor. I think I see his face change color, but I can’t really tell in the pale, fading light.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought, you dumb boy. Girls aren’t the ones who go around—“
He mutters something and I stop.
“What did you say?”
He swallows and sniffs, then rubs the back of his hand across his nose.