Before the Strandline- Storm Read online

  Hand copied from the diary of a young girl named Darby, recovered near the FEMA camp of upper Palatka, by Wordsmith No. 12 in the third year of the power-out and the second year of the FlareOut War. Record archived in the Castle of Dreams and kept for the time of reckoning by me, Wordsmith No. 3.

  At my house, the sky danced with the wildest colors on the day the electricity finally died. It looked like a giant had melted crayons across the stars. Everything else went quiet: no bells, no humming, no television. Some of the phones still rang, but not for long.

  Our whole neighborhood came out to stand in the street and stare. It was a Saturday evening in the spring, so a lot of people were at home after mowing their grass and getting ready to eat barbecue.

  Mister Barkman, the man three doors down from us who lived in the ugly pink house, looked up with his mouth open for the longest time.

  Ella got on to me for making fun of him. But he didn't yell at her the way he yelled at me. Mister Barkman liked Ella because she stopped and talked to him about his crackpot theories when she walked me home from the bus stop, but I thought our neighbor had ugly yellow teeth. I think he might have suspected something about that. Besides, he always complained that my cat, Calico, snuck around his house at night, leaving dumps in his carrots and lettuce.

  Calico because she was white and black and orange: one white foot, one black foot, and two orange feet, in the back.

  Mister Barkman called the lights and colors in the sky the aurora borealis, and then he said we should get worried because the sun had just slapped us back to the Stone Age. Since he was always saying stuff like that, we didn't listen . . . at first.

  This time when he claimed it was the end of everything it was hard to make fun of him. We lived in the middle of Florida, and the sky had never been filled with lights like those before. Ever. Never. And then, when the transformer on the power pole in front of his house exploded like a bomb, and the wires sizzled all the way to his roof, and the ugly pink house caught fire and burned down, we thought maybe he might be on to something.

  The sky colors weren't just a cool light show; they were a sign. That's what some of the grownups said after the shouting and screaming had died down—a sign from God, a sign from Heaven, a sign of the times, a sign that Mother Earth was done with us. I thought the lights were pretty; Mister Barkman’s fire not so much.

  Ella and Brittany, my sisters, and Ryan, my brother, and I watched the firemen race down our street and start to fight Mister Barkman’s house fire. Then, all of a sudden, they stopped, packed up their stuff, and hurried away. We never saw them on our street again. People grumbled about taxes and rotten service from the county.

  Over our heads, the sky blazed greens and blues mixed with swirling slashes of pink while all the lights inside our houses winked out. Some of the neighbors said it was a solar flare, some people said, "No, it's something bigger." No one knew because Google went away and the Internet and the phones after they ran out of juice. How do you charge your phone when the electric stops? You don't. And how do you find out what's going on when you can't Google it? You can't.

  At first, it was exciting and a reason not to go to church on Sunday. But after Mister Barkman’s house burned down, the moms and dads started to talk in hard whispers and angry headshakes.

  The first night everybody wandered around using the light from their flashlights and cell phones. Our dad dragged down our camping lantern from the attic, and we huddled around its tiny circle of light eating cheese crackers and bologna, waiting for the real lights to come back.

  You probably guessed it—they never did.

  The aurora borealis drew us kids outside that first night like a giant firefly over our heads for hours and hours. We couldn’t get enough of being outside, watching a rainbow swirl at night, and then it was gone. I remember how dark the night seemed and how quiet. Nighttime was super quiet without the hum from the streetlights and the air conditioners.

  On Monday my brother Ryan got up, tossed his books into his book bag and started to walk off to the high school. Ella and Brittany didn’t even try to make it to their community college. Mom didn’t want Ryan to go and was only happy when Dad went with him. I tagged along.

  What else were we supposed to do? The television stayed off. The house got stuffy and hot. It was better outdoors where the early morning breezes could ruffle up your hair.

  Halfway there, Dad slowed down and Ryan took my hand. He was like that. Not like the other brothers who pretended they didn’t have sisters or brothers or parents. I guess those brothers wanted their friends to think they were hatched out of eggs in a vulture’s nest. They liked to pretend to be tough. Not Ryan. He was tough without trying.

  When Ryan saw that everyone was there at school, kind of wandering around, looking lost and worried, he squeezed my hand and said, “Come on. Let’s find Colonel Kennedy. He always told us to gather here in an emergency.”

  “Who’s that? Your Junior ROTC leader?” Dad sounded a little bit relieved. “Your teacher?”

  “Colonel. We call him Colonel.”

  We found Colonel Kennedy near the bleachers on the football field, talking quietly with a few people. He was a big man with a bunch of white hair and eyes the color of blue marbles. He looked down at me, and at first, frowned; but when I stood up as tall as I could and looked him straight in the eye he started to laugh, but not for long. Dad and Ryan moved in, pushing me out of the conversation the way big people do to kids.

  I listened to everyone claim they knew someone who knew someone who knew exactly what was going on. The Russians had bombed the vehicle assembly building at the Cape. The terrorists had dirty bombed Orlando. The earth had turned upside down, or something inside the planet had flipped.

  “The government is on its way. We should stay close to our homes. Bag up everything in your refrigerator in plastic bags. Don’t poison each other by eating spoiled food,” said a lady with straight gray hair cut perfectly straight across her forehead. She had a clipboard. She stood higher up on the bleachers, so people could see her, hear her. I didn’t know who she was.

  “How long? How long until we get help?”

  "That's a little less clear. We're getting emergency information over shortwave, but it's a . . . little . . . spotty." She held the clipboard in front of her chest like a knight's shield.

  A voice yelled from the back of a lump of people, “We heard someone say that the grid’s collapsed, and it could be six months.” Grumbles greeted the shout. Someone yelled, “What do we do about food? Water? We’re all on city water. We can’t flush our toilets. What about meds?”

  Colonel Kennedy walked forward to stand next to the lady with gray hair. He held up his hand and without raising his voice said, “Go home. Stay home. Take stock. The grocery stores are taking cash only until they run out of supplies. Panic will accomplish nothing. Students should continue to assemble here for information and instructions. We’ll be here doing what we can for as long as we can.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  I recognized my gym teacher from middle school. He had a big voice, and it was easy to hear him.

  “It means that we may be in for a stretch of tough living. I hope you’re prepared.”

  A few people hustled away from the crowd, heading toward the closest strip mall, I guessed. I saw my dad glance over at Ryan. They turned to talk to the Colonel some more.

  We had some stuff tucked away in the pantry. We used to call my mom's rows of cans her #10 Worrywart Supply. All of a sudden, the thought of those funny cans made me feel better, especially when I saw some of the other moms crying.

  I saw Lucy, a girl in my sixth-grade class. I waved. She dropped her head
and burst into tears. She seemed pretty lonely standing there. I couldn’t see anybody who looked like her official parents. I walked over to her and peeked into her face, touched her on the shoulder. “Hey. What’s wrong?”

  She looked at me like I had two heads or one eye or both. “Come on, Darby. Don’t you hear what they’re saying but not really?” Her nose was running.

  I wanted to say, “Of course, I heard stuff,” but I didn’t know what she meant, not at all. I knew worry was creeping through the grownups like a little nipping dog that never shuts up.

  Me? I was a cat person.

  “My dad. My dad’s plane was flying when the sky went all dizzy. My mom couldn’t call him. The phone rings and rings and rings, and then it just stopped. There’s no news. My mom’s at home crying. She doesn’t know what to do. There’s no one to call. We don’t know anything.”

  “Lucy, did you come here to find out something? My brother came to talk to Colonel Kennedy. Ryan thinks he’s someone who will know what we should do.”

  "A man over there says the planes crashed, just fell out of the sky. He says his brother called him before the phone went dead and that a plane fell right on top of his barn, and it burned. It all burned."

  “Do you want to talk to Ryan’s Colonel?”

  Lucy just shook her head as tears fell off her chin. She scuffed at the gravel next to the school’s running track. When she turned and walked away all by herself, I hoped she’d be okay, but I didn’t know how she could be, not until she knew, she really knew what had happened to her father. I looked at my dad and my brother, trying to imagine not knowing where they were or what had happened to them and realized there were scarier things than not being able to flush the potty.

  ***

  A few days after the pink house burned down, we had a neighborhood block party, and everyone brought their frozen meat and cookout grills to Miss Wren's place at the end of the cul-de-sac. We ate and ate, or some of us ate and ate. A lot of the kids just played and ran and thought it was great that they wouldn't have to go to school until the lights came back on. The grownups huddled in small groups and looked grumpy, but I knew that it was worry.

  That was also the night the first scary motorcycle men came around. At first, it was just three guys roaring down our road on big, shiny motorcycles. They got to the party and the end of our street, Magnolia Lane, and made people jump out of the way because they zoomed around the circle where everyone was standing. It was annoying. A couple of the dads used curse words. Later the cycle gangs became a reason to run and hide, but at first, we thought they were silly and mean.

  Ryan didn’t say anything then about what it all meant. He just pulled me and Ella and Britt out of the way so that we wouldn't get run over that first time. That's when he wrote it down in a book: how many, what they were riding, if they had weapons. He started to keep track like me, kind of; I kept a journal, but he gathered evidence. Mine was more like a diary. His book was more like a cop keeping track of the facts. I knew that he planned to go to the school and make a report to his Colonel.

  It was a good party other than the scary men on motorcycles.

  A week after the party, people got really worried because they got really hungry and thirsty. We had a hand pump in our backyard for our yard water. It was the well we used for watering Mom's pretty flowers in the spring. My job got to be going to the pond at the front of the neighborhood to get a bucket of water to prime our backyard pump. It used to be one of those fancy ponds that had a fountain shooting up in the middle of it. Now it was just a mucky mess.

  People got sick when they drank the pond water, but they wouldn’t get sick when they drank our pump water. But something went wrong with the well; it dried up overnight, and you had to pour more water into it to keep it going. It was a big pain, but it was clean water.

  The grownups organized us kids into a water-fetching brigade to keep us busy. They put a big girl named Chloe in charge. She made a schedule. She used one of those pens with all the different colored inks. It was pretty cool. She hand copied a bunch of them and gave them out. Ella and Britt carried water on Mondays. Me and Chloe on Tuesday and like that.

  That’s how I know what happened. I guess I was a witness. I guess I still am.

  Chloe was big when the lights went out and the water stopped flooding out of our faucets. She was almost twenty. She was nice to me and always offered to carry the heaviest buckets, but I liked having a job. I missed school. Ryan still went to school every day, but not to study. He made the trip to find out what he could, to trade for this and that. He liked having a job too.

  Chloe and I went for water one day so there would be pond water to pour into the pump the next day. Chloe walked me to our neighborhood sign. Some of the boys had tied up a rope from one of the big letters in the sign so you could tie the bucket handle to the rope and toss the bucket out in the pond and not lose it. The edge of the pond down to the water was mucky, and the more kids that paraded down to the edge the worse it got.

  It was hot the day when the first one of us was taken. Chloe and I laughed all the way to the pond trying to make a song about having to haul stupid buckets of stupid pond water. For a big girl, Chloe was okay.

  She made me sit behind the big stone sign at the entrance of our neighborhood to rest and wait while she walked down to the pond to sling the bucket out in the middle where the weeds and mud weren’t so bad. She didn’t want me to poop out halfway back to our cul-de-sac. That’s what she told me.

  The bucket had just started to sink when we heard the first engine.

  Mister Randolph still drove his motorcycle around on errands once in a while for the neighborhood, before the gas got too hard to find, so I didn’t think much about it, but then there was another engine and another. I could feel the roar of them in the blocks of the sign behind my back and under my butt. The ground rattled with the sound.

  They kept their helmets on when they scuttled down to where Chloe stood next to the water. Like bugs, they looked like bugs with one big glassy eye. They didn’t shout or yell or threaten. They pushed her down and hit her and then used the rope on the bucket to tie her hands and her ankles.

  When they pushed her down in the mud, she’d looked up, straight at me. One of the bug-faced monsters stepped on her back. His boot left a smear of muck across her top.

  I tried to stand up, to push up against the wall behind me, but she’d mouthed at me to stop, to stay down. She’d screamed then and started to fight the motorcycle bugs. She bit and kicked and thrashed. That was almost scarier than the bug boys. Chloe never raised her voice. Never. I froze.

  Chloe losing her mind made me freeze.

  Then they took her. And she was gone.

  And I had to talk about it to Chloe’s mom and dad.

  “Tell us which way they went after they took her,” Chloe’s mom asked, but it came out all scratchy and broken because she’d been crying and crying.

  "I don't know. Chloe made me hide. She . . ." And then I was crying because I'd not only hidden, but I'd crawled under the hedge that grew around the sign that no one clipped any more. I’d stayed there until the ground didn’t rumble and the air had gone back to being still and silent.

  I remember Chloe’s dad grabbing me by the arm and his fingers digging into my skin. It hurt. I must have yelped or something because my dad said, “Brad, what do you want her to say? What could she have done? We should have seen this coming. We should have known it would come to this.”

  Someone gasped. Maybe it was my mother. I’m not sure.

  Chloe’s mom stopped crying after that. Her face turned the color of a rotten plum, and she started to breathe funny: short, gurgly, and wet. She stood up and grabbed her head. When she fell down her eyes rolled back, and there was nothing but white. Ella and Britt grabbed each other while I just stood there watching Chloe's mother jerk and moan.

  Chloe’s dad held his wife in his arms shouting things as if he could apologize for what was happening to
her. High blood pressure. No medicine. No doctor. No refills. Stroke. Maybe it was a stroke.

  She died—right there on our kitchen floor. I don’t know what happened to my friend Chloe, but I kind of think she died, too.

  After that, there was a funeral and a meeting. They buried Chloe’s mom in her backyard under the clothesline she’d put up to hang her washing on. A few people wanted to bury her by the pond in honor of Chloe, but others disagreed; they said that her dead body might leak into the water and poison it.

  That was part of what they talked about at the meeting. Us kids were there because the grownups were afraid to leave us alone, because of Chloe. They talked about other stuff too: the food going fast or gone, the water dangerous to use without boiling, the guns (what there were of them) low on ammunition, making sure to use the latrine behind the Smalls’ house, setting up a neighborhood watch—with guns and golf clubs.

  Some of the older boys had started trying to shoot squirrels for food, but they weren’t very good at it. They wasted a lot of bullets and made a lot of squirrels mad. I can still hear the chattering of mad squirrels from the trees all over the neighborhood, cussing the stupid boys.

  Ella pulled out her slingshot and started practicing in the backyard, trying to knock over pinecones with garden stones from Mister Barkman’s walkway. She practiced and practiced. She wanted a gun, but that wasn’t happening. Brittany dragged a ratty copy of "Edible Woods" around, trying to figure out which plants were good to eat and which ones would kill us.

  Ryan was a good shot. I remember that. Right from the beginning he knew how to hunt, because of Colonel Kennedy who’d taught the Junior ROTC kids stuff like marksmanship. That's what Ryan called it: Marksmanship. He went to the high school as often as he could. It had become the center for what was left. Some of the kids got together to try and keep up with their studies, but after a while, it got to be more important to shoot at squirrels.

  I went with him to school sometimes. He never walked the main roads, not anymore. Maybe that’s why our mom let me go with him, after all. My mom fussed about it, but I went anyway. People did that in twos or threes, walked from our neighborhood up to the football field at the high school, especially after the Bug Monsters started taking people: girls, women, anyone they wanted. I couldn’t imagine what they wanted with more mouths to feed.