Stay.
Or don’t.
But if you leave, don’t come back.
That’s rule number seven. So far nobody has broken it. Only six people have gone, and none of them have come back. I’ll be the seventh.
The rules were all pulled out of a book. It’s not even a good book. I’ve read it. It has seven typos in the first chapter. Ronald Henson had no idea that his book would be the book that six hundred and fifty-three people would base their lives on.
“The Apocalypse: How to Survive” only sold twenty-five copies, I’m told. Jeannette said that she worked in the cubicle across from him. She said he’s the one who convinced her to come North.
I often wonder where our prophet is. Did the great Ron Henson survive? Did he hear the world end over the screeching static haze of a radio like we did, or did he end with it?
I don’t want to live here anymore. Dad says our cabin is the oldest in Utopia. He points out that we are one of only five buildings with running water and solar panels.
But it’s lonely here. I’m the only teenager. The only kid who was born before. Who knows what “city” means. Who rode the subway. Who had a smartphone. Who danced at a school dance. To be fair I’ve only been to one. It was in seventh grade, a week before Dad dragged me up here. It isn’t like I even had fun at the dance either. It was so awkward, and Derek asked Cindy to dance, not me, and that creepy kid from my algebra class wouldn’t stop looking at me.
I’d give up our stockpile of chocolate to have that creepy kid here now. He was a lot better than Jeremy.
Jeremy is twenty-five. He’s tall and lean, with a little pinched nose and two thick eyebrows that threaten to merge. His eyes are deep—not like the ocean, but like black holes. He is always trying to help me with things, like I can’t do them myself. I’ve taken to chopping wood and washing laundry in the stream only when he is off scouting, or hunting, or whatever he does out past the fence.
Everyone else is older than forty or younger than five. They appreciate his energy. Or maybe they are afraid of him. That’s why they’re allowing him to attend the council meetings. That’s why they don’t say anything when he stands too close to me, or puts his hand on my back and slowly inches it down. Yesterday, he tried to convince Dad of the importance of repopulation, advocating for arranged marriage in Utopia.
I need to get out of here.
…
After eavesdropping, I followed Jeremy out past the fence. The bitter scent of woodsmoke faded, and all that was left on the breeze was pine and moist earth. My heart was in my ears, and my feet slid between fallen leaves and sticks to the green carpet of moss that kept my feet from betraying my presence.
I don’t know how long I stalked him, but the sun got lower and lower, till orange filtered through the trees, cutting past the emerald canopy, splitting the blanket of shade into patches of light and blotches of shadow. He stopped and I slipped behind a tree, holding my breath. My lower back, where he always touched me, itched. I didn’t want to be caught out there alone with him.
When I peered around the tree, he was nowhere to be seen. Had I been found out? No. If a deer couldn’t detect me at thirty feet, Jeremy certainly couldn’t at ninety. I kept waiting.
The longer I waited the more I noticed it. A stench hung in the air. It was heavy and sour, like iron and rot. Death.
…
My pack is ready. Inside I have a change of clothes, three plastic water bottles, my sewing kit, salt, flint, kindling, rope, and the coat I made from wolf pelts–it’ll double as my bedding.
I pick up my journal and pull out the picture of mom and dad that’s tucked inside the cover. He changed after the car crash, when twisted metal and smoke and a crimson puddle stole his smile, and he started crying every night when he thought I was sleeping. But he was still my dad then. After that month when the earth trembled and crackling screams flooded the airwaves before they went silent, his eyes became empty. He died with everyone else. The man who lives with me now is just a shell. I never thought I would miss the crying.
More than the crying, I miss his laugh. When I was little, he and mom would tickle me until I cried, and he would roll on the ground laughing with me and pounding his fist like a drunk drummer. Even after she died, he was always playing practical jokes on the neighbors with me. We hijacked Miss Sorenson’s Bluetooth speaker and played the Barney theme song over and over. We still did things together back then.
My journal goes in the pack too, along with my two remaining pens. It may seem impractical. It’s not like I think my writing is so great that someone will find it and turn me into the next Ronald Henson. But if I’m leaving everything behind, I need to stay me somehow.
Next to the pack, on the bed, lies another journal. The burgundy stained leather binding is cracked, and those cracks are filled with dirt. This one isn’t mine. I picked it up last night.
…
After following Jeremy, and holding my breath behind a tree, I finally heard his footsteps leaving. By then it was dusk, orange had turned to red, and the shadows had stretched and deepened. I crept toward the spot where Jeremy had disappeared. As I squinted in the fading light, my foot missed the earth and I tumbled into a hole. I landed with a crunch. The sound of bones breaking, but not mine.
The smell was even stronger down there. It was sweet and vile. I remembered the day when dad first took me scavenging and we came upon a dead bear. I remembered the maggots, the black flaking blood, the exposed bones, the hollow sockets. Sickly sweet, and unforgettable.
My stomach heaved, and lunch poured onto whatever I’d landed on. It didn’t help the odor. When there was nothing left in my stomach my body finally relaxed.
My eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness.
The walls of the hole were jagged, gouged by the metal tooth of a shovel.
The floor of the pit was lumpy.
I groped around on the ground, and something sticky encased my fingers.
Fully dilated, my eyes finally took in what I was touching. Flesh, and exposed bones, and torn clothes. It was a grave. Ten corpses in various states of decay. I recognized the clothes from six of them.
The realization of what Jeremy does when he’s away closed in on me. A vice clamped down and squeezed the air from my lungs. If anything was still in my stomach I would have hurled again.
The sky was a mauve shroud through the hole above me when I finally started breathing again.
It was on one of the bodies I didn’t recognize, one with most of the flesh still intact, that I found the journal.
…
I sit on my bed for the last time and open the journal:
Apocalypse Year 1 Day 126,
People here in Bunkerville blame the sun. I don’t get it. Solar flares? No way.
The earth shook our bunker like a kid trying to get the last tic tac. In twenty-seven days, the duration of The Last October, the planet’s face ruptured into an old lady’s, all wrinkled. The mountains are cracked, split open like clamshells. The fissures that zigzag and crisscross the continent every hundred miles are either full of water from the ocean or deep flows of angry red lava.
No way the sun did that.
When we scavenged Detroit, it might as well have been flat. Nothing was standing, except of course Munger Middle School. It seems even the end of the world isn’t strong enough to put an end to our educational system.
We even have school here in Bunkerville. I was about to graduate before The Last October, and now I have to read and memorize that damn book. The one that predicted all of this. The one that taught us the rules.
It’s the apocalypse and we still haven’t learned anything. We’re still listening to the words of old men, not doing anything to move forward.
-Maggie
A smile tugs at the corners of my mouth. School. I bet they have some people my age there. I turn to the last entry.
Apocalypse Year 4 Day 7,
Mom gave me her locket today. She said the picture inside is of my father. She told me he was gone before she even knew she was going to have me. And today, I saw him. He was on the back of that book everybody is always quoting.
The Great Ronald Henson is my dad. I’m going to find him. He said to either find a bunker or go up North. ‘Farther away from the equator equals closer to Utopia.’ He wasn’t a great writer.
I’m going to find him. I want to live in the open. I’m going North to Utopia. I bet he’s there. I’m so over Bunkerville. A bunch of paranoid Michiganders playing house. Why do I have to go to school? It’s the apocalypse and I’m an eighteen-year-old woman!
Mom cried when I told her. She’s always crying. I just can’t stand it. The world ended, get over it already.
-Maggie
In the back of the book is a pocket, and my fingers quest for whatever is inside, finding the locket. It’s gold, with flowers carved along the edges. Shaped like a heart. Inside is a picture of a man with thinning hair and a faint mustache. A young Ronald, no doubt about it.
I leave the journal but put the locket around my neck. Maybe I can return it to her mom.
On my hip, I have my seven-inch hunting knife. Strapped to my pack are my bow and nine arrows.
Dad used to take me hunting. After mom died, he wanted to make me self-sufficient. I suspect he was considering ending it all, and it made him feel less guilty if I could take care of myself. He thought I was too young to know what it meant when he would look at the rafters and grip his belt or when he would stand too close to the tracks at the subway station. So close, his hair would flutter when the train arrived. For all his flaws, he succeeded. I’m only seventeen, but I’m the best hunter in Utopia. Not even Jeremy has brought in as much meat. But I suppose he probably wasn’t hunting for animals most of the time.
The lights are out. The floor is shaking from the chainsaw that hides behind dad’s nose when he sleeps. Time to go.
I wonder if Dad will read the girl’s journal. I wonder if he will find the note I left for him on the last page. I wonder if he will do anything about Jeremy. Or will he say Jeremy is just upholding the rules, protecting Utopia?
The moon hasn’t yet risen, but tonight the sky is on fire.
Green rivers flow.
Blue clouds shimmer.
Purple dancers twirl across the sky.
Pink lightning shoots from one end of the heavens to the other.
Aurora Borealis.
My feet carry me into the black cloak of the trees.
I’m free.
Every step takes me deeper into the blackness. Every breath is of darker air. Every moment my eyes strain harder, until finally, I am blindly walking into the unknown.
Milk of the Mind 