The Ocean in the Fire Read online

  Despite the hostile company, Brian smiled brightly when Kate handed him her bow and an arrow when they were several yards into the woods and away from the house. Each arrow was carefully handcrafted by one of the Holloways. Poe could always tell which ones she had made. She paid by far the most attention to detail as she carved, leaving intricate patterns on the stone.

  Connor had always said they would eventually run out of bullets, and they would need to know how to hunt and defend themselves with weapons other than guns. Poe could use a bow and arrow, as well as a gun, but she preferred the knife that she always kept holstered at her waist. Her brother had made it for her and given it to her on her fourteenth birthday and it hadn’t left her since, except when she went to sleep. And even then, it rested snugly under her pillow. “You’re really going to let me try?” Brian asked.

  “Of course. You’re going to need to pull your weight around here just like the rest of us. Can’t have you sunning yourself and sipping iced tea while the rest of us work can we?” She smiled and winked at him. He seemed grateful for the good-natured tease. Poe knew what it felt like to be the one on the outside, and though she still wasn’t sure about Brian, she wouldn’t wish that feeling on anyone.

  Kate placed his hands in the proper places on the bow, and carefully slid the arrow between his fingers. “Now, see that tree over there? Try to hit it.” Brian pulled back and let the arrow fly. It breezed right past, not even touching the bark. Drew gave him a pat on the back that seemed to tell him not to give up, while her father watched and snickered.

  “Ugh, I’m no good at this.”

  Kate smiled. “It takes practice. Since we aren’t seeing any signs of deer yet, let’s keep working on it.” She gave him another arrow, and lined him up again. This time, the arrow hit the side of the tree, only grazing it but it was enough to build Brian’s confidence.

  After about an hour, Brian was hitting the tree every time. Poe and Drew stood guard, ever careful of running into strangers who may want to turn into unexpected guests. Brian’s arrival shook them up; not just her father, all of them. Afterward, every time they went in the woods,

  Poe swore she sensed people moving through the trees, a shadow here, a whistle there. In between the chirps of the birds, she thought she heard voices, whispers of strangers that she did not care to know. In that way, Brian was a blessing: waking them up to the fact that no matter what, they couldn’t afford to lull themselves into a false sense of security. The minute that happened is the minute they would lose everything.

  Though sometimes, no amount of paying attention can prepare you for what comes next.

  As they stood there in the middle of the quiet woods, Poe and Drew heard a loud crashing sound, like a bear smashing its way through the forest, and it was just enough for them to make another critical mistake. They would never find out what the noise was, but as they turned to investigate it, they lost their concentration and didn’t hear the footsteps coming toward their group.

  Connor had quick reflexes, but they weren’t as sharp as they used to be. As the woman who they hadn’t seen since the night they brought in their new arrivals ran toward him, he was unable to duck out of the way before he felt the sting of a knife blade through the skin on the side of his abdomen.

  Gabriel leapt on the woman instinctively, using all his weight to subdue her. Poe recognized the woman as the wife of the salesman, both of whom her father had turned away. She realized in that moment that she hadn’t even bothered to learn the woman’s name before she had been kicked out. Despite her obvious anger at the woman for stabbing her father, she had to wonder what it said about herself that she showed more respect to the farm animals they slaughtered, giving them a name before they died, than she did another human being. A feeling that was something like shame flooded her, and she tried to shake off the nausea that came with it.

  Possibly from the shock of being captured, the woman dropped the knife. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Anna? Huh?” Gabriel shook her as he spoke. Poe noticed that her brother had bothered to learn who she was, even knowing what her fate would potentially be. Evidently, there was more humanity left in her brother than in herself.

  “It’s his fault! My husband’s dead and it’s his fault. He lived a good life, never hurt anyone.” She looked at Connor. “And you just sent him off to die…like he meant nothing,” she sobbed under Gabriel’s weight, and seemed to struggle for breath.

  Poe was at her father’s side, gently examining his wound. “He’s okay. It’s just a flesh wound. She barely made it through the skin.” She helped her father sit on the ground, trying to give him a moment to recover from the shock. It surprised her to find him shaking, but only after the woman spoke.

  “You could have killed him!” Gabriel continued to shake Anna, her head smacking hard against the ground as he did so. Just as Poe thought he was going to knock her unconscious, her mother pulled Gabriel up.

  “Gabriel! No,” Kate yelled. Anna took the opportunity to get up and run back into the woods from where she came.

  “You let her get away!” Gabriel yelled at his mother. Poe had never seen him yell at her before and it made her stomach hurt.

  Her mother put her hands on his shoulders. “I will not have you get blood on your hands. Not for this. There’s going to be hard things that we will have to do now. We’ve already had to do things that no one your age should ever have to do.” She glanced at Connor then turned her attention back toward Gabriel. “There may be a time where you have to take a life, but this is not that time. Even if all of them are still alive, now that we know it’s a possibility, we will be ready.”

  Poe looked at her father. She expected him to be angry at Kate for letting his attacker go, but he wasn’t even looking at her. He was staring straight at Gabriel. “Where’d she get the knife, Gabriel?” Her brother’s face fell. The skin on his cheeks grew white. “She didn’t have that knife when we saw her that night…she was wearing a dress. There were no bulges on her sides where a knife would be.” Connor’s voice grew low. “I’m only going to ask you one more time. Where did she get the knife?”

  Gabriel avoided his gaze. “I’m so sorry, Dad.”

  “Say it.”

  He took a deep breath. “I never went back to the cars that night. I let them keep all their supplies.” Suddenly, panic seemed to overtake him, and the voice that he could barely find moments earlier came out in a flood. “I thought they at least deserved a chance! I thought we would see them coming long before they could ever hurt us.” He ran toward his father and knelt before him, like a subject to a king. “I’m so sorry. I never thought this would happen.”

  Poe found herself glaring at her brother. From her place at her father’s side, she hissed, “Exactly.”

  Connor’s silence hung in the air like the stench of death that no doubt permeated the town they had left behind. Poe just knelt there, frozen, unsure of what was about to happen next. Her brother and her father had never seen the world the same way, but this? Her father would see this as a complete disregard for everything he stood for. And that was something she wasn’t sure either of them could recover from. It would certainly remain with her forever. She hoped that maybe, one day she could look at her brother and not have at least part of her see the gash in her father’s side.

  “Gabriel, take your father home. Blake can patch him up.” Poe saw her pull Gabriel closer to her. “And talk to him on your way.”

  Connor shook his head and glared at Brian. “I’m not leaving you and Poe out here with him. Drew can fix my wound. I’m staying right here.”

  Her mother started to protest, when Drew jumped in. “Connor, Blake has more supplies back at the compound. Sure I can do a traveler’s job, but you’d have less chance of infection getting worked on back there.” Drew leaned over and spoke to him quietly, presumably so Brian couldn’t hear. “Nothing will happen to your girls while I’m here. I promise.”

  Connor sat silently for a long time, s
taring into Drew’s eyes. The exchange between the two men seemed deeper than the current circumstances. There seemed to be a wordless agreement between them, an interaction that Poe wasn’t sure any of the rest of the group would understand—something that seemed bigger than a simple walk home.

  Finally, her father spoke. “Keep them safe. Swear to me.”

  “I will.”

  Gabriel went over to his father and tried to help him get up, but Connor shook him off. As he headed back toward the house, Gabriel followed several feet behind, and Poe wondered if they’d ever walk side by side again.

  When they were out of sight, her mother spoke again. “I know that was frightening everyone, but we still have a job to do. Everyone pick up their stuff and let’s move on.”

  They went deeper into the woods, with no sign of a deer. Kate decided to have Brian use that time to practice some more. After about a half hour, Brian’s arm began to cramp up, and they decided to move forward once again.

  As they walked, Poe thought of her sister. She wondered if Harper would have leapt to Gabriel’s defense, or flanked her father as she had done. After what her father had done to Harper when Brian first arrived, she guessed the former. If that had never happened, the answer may have been different. Harper had made an art form out of getting what she wanted, but it was always something trivial. When she had finally asked for something real, she had still gotten it, but it had come at a cost. It occurred to Poe that she may be the only one of her father’s children that still had any desire to make him happy, and the pressure of that weighed on her like a thousand stars.

  Just as they had gathered up all of the arrows, a deer poked its head out of a nearby cluster of trees. The group ducked down and slowly moved toward it, keeping their steps slow and deliberate. The deer seemed to sense them, and continued to move deeper and deeper into the woods, its dark coal eyes searching for them but unable to find where they were hiding. Though Poe was enjoying the smell of the forest after a fresh rain, she noticed that as they were stalking the deer, they were traveling much farther away from the compound than they normally did. “Shouldn’t we turn back?” she asked her mother.

  “Normally I would say yes, but we don’t know how much longer we’re going to be able to find game like this. We need to take advantage of this opportunity.” Though something inside Poe told her to turn back, they pressed on.

  Finally, the deer stopped long enough for them to get a clear shot. “Please, let me do it,” Brian said as she started to raise her own weapon.

  “Look, I know you’re getting better, but…”

  “Please. I…” Brian lowered his voice to a whisper. “I need this. I need to feel like I’m helping. I’m so tired of being useless. Please.”

  Against her better judgement, Poe relented, lowering her bow. “Just don’t miss.”

  He didn’t. The arrow plunged right into the deer’s leg. Unfortunately, that did not render him immobile, and he bounded even deeper into the woods. “He’s hurt! I can finish him off!” Brian took off after the wounded creature.

  “Brian no! We don’t know what’s there. Slow down!” The rest of the group hurried after him, finding their cries ignored. Poe wasn’t used to running through the woods, ignoring the loud crunch that her footsteps made which she would normally worry would scare away her prey. “Stop!”

  The smell should have been enough. But Brian didn’t stop until he was right on the edge of the embankment. The rest of the group gathered around him, wanting to know what finally made him stop his pursuit.

  Poe didn’t stop fast enough.

  She was in the pit before she even knew her feet had left the ground. She saw Drew watch for a moment right before she turned her head and was met with the blue, contorted face of a corpse. The sight made the scream that she was feeling deep inside her catch in her throat, and she was unable to get out more than a rasp. She scrambled to get herself away from it, but as she did so, another shifted in the pile around her and landed on top of her, pinning her to the side of another. A dead hand rested against her thigh, as if inviting her to stay with him, to lie down among them because after the pandemic had chewed them up, that’s where they would find themselves eventually, company among the dead and stories for the dying.

  Poe knew she shouldn’t, but she did it anyway. As she sat there, pinned down by a mountain of decaying flesh, she searched the faces for people that she recognized. Their town was small enough…she was certain that there would be someone in the pit that she knew, possibly several of them.

  She was right.

  She didn’t recognize him at first, since she had only seen him once before: on the night that her father chose who would live and who would die. Lying on top of a pile adjacent to her, looking as though someone had dragged him to the edge and rolled him in, not having the strength to carry the full weight of him, was George, the man who her father had replaced with Blake.

  Poe hoped it wasn’t his wife who had to dump him there. Maybe the people her father had turned away had stuck together and some other person had saved her from having her last memory of her husband be the rubbery touch of his cold dead hands. His face was pointed toward the sky, and Poe thought to herself that while they weren’t buried under the dirt, at night, they were buried under the stars, and maybe that counted for something too. If Tonya were there, she would have told her that, though Poe had a feeling Tonya wouldn’t let her get that far. Poe couldn’t say she would blame her. If someone had condemned someone she loved to death, no words would ever soothe the anger that would rest deep inside her heart. It would lay right beside the love for the person that she would have to spend the rest of her life missing with the fierce passion that came with a life cut short.

  Her breath came in huge gulps, and she thought she was about to pass out when she saw Drew jump into the pit beside her, throwing the body off of her. “Are you all right?”

  “My ankle…it really hurts.” Drew seemed to ignore the blue and gray faces around them as he gently pressed the bone, watching as she winced. “The bodies…”

  “Don’t look at them, look at me.” He made eye contact with her and held it, and despite who he was, she couldn’t help but be grateful.

  “It’s not broken, but it’s sprained.” He yelled up to the horrified onlookers. She shifted her focus to Drew and her mother’s screams seemed muffled. “Tie a rope to that tree and toss it to us.” As he yelled the instructions, he glanced up and realized they were already wrapping the rope around the trunk. He turned back to Poe. “Now I’m going to squat down and I want you to wrap your legs around me the best you can, and hold on to my neck. I’m going to get you out of here.”

  Poe nodded. “Thank you…I mean really…” Drew waited for her as she tried to find the right words when she realized she had already retrieved them. “Thank you.”

  Securing his footing, he carefully pulled them up and out of the pit. A couple times, Poe watched as the crumbly dirt gave way and he had to find another step before he had planned on it, but after some meticulous climbing, they were back on solid ground.

  She didn’t tell anyone who she had seen.

  Brian reached a hand out to Poe to help her off Drew’s back, but she waved him away. Drew echoed her actions. “Thank you very much for your help everyone. Now stay as far away from us as you can.”

  As the house grew closer, the first person Poe saw in the distance was her father. They had been gone far longer than they usually were when they went hunting, and the entire group was running toward them in a panic. Unfortunately, Poe thought, they had no idea how panicked they should really be.

  “Stay away from me!” Poe shouted at her father, who was now at full speed. She struggled to stay propped up next to Drew while she simultaneously waved off the coming crowd. If she had caught the disease and he touched her before she could stop him, she would never forgive herself. “Stay away!” Her father only slowed his pace when he noticed that Brian and Kate were following Drew and Poe at a sig
nificant distance.

  His already quite pale face grew white. “What happened?”

  She looked at Drew. “He saved my life.” She gingerly reached for his hand. “I fell in a pit…the place where they dumped…the people from town. He jumped in after me and saved me. He didn’t even hesitate for a second.”

  Her father looked at Drew with an expression Poe had never seen before. “Is that true? You saved my daughter?”

  “Her ankle was hurt. She couldn’t get out. I couldn’t just leave her in there.”

  Poe expected her father to say thank you, but he didn’t. Instead, he got ready to do damage control, and to her surprise, glanced away like a wounded animal. She expected a bit more sentiment, but realized that her father was who he was, and not even a near-death experience would stop him from being himself. “You were both in the pit with the infected. You will have to stay out here for the night.”

  Drew glared at him. “Brian was only out here for a couple hours.”

  Connor glanced at her mother before continuing. “Yes, but he wasn’t lying in a pile of the dead. I think the extra precaution would be wise. I’ll call Gordon on the radio and see if he’s heard of any other precautions for something like this.” He stared at Poe. “You’re going to be fine, sweetheart. I promise.” She took his statement as the sentiment she’d been waiting for. Connor never promised things in the way most fathers did: the way where the child knows it’s just a sweet yet futile attempt to make them feel better. Connor’s way was different. When Connor said it, Poe knew he truly believed he could change the outcome of whatever situation. Like everything else he built through his own blood and time, he could mold it into whatever shape he wanted it to be. To her, he could move the stars if he wanted to badly enough. So when he told her she would be fine, she knew he would make that happen.