Finally, I turned back to the fence, my fingers twining in the chinks. I could only stand there and watch as the rows of peas, spinach, tomatoes, and pretty much everything else, burned.
Shouts started racing toward me in the chaos the early morning had become. There was nothing we could do but stand at the fence and watch everything we had worked for for the last five years burn.
Maybe there was a God out there. The sky finally couldn’t hold any more pressure and the rain started to fall. As I watched the fires sizzle out, a hand slipped into mine. I didn’t even have the will to turn and see who it was. It felt like nothing mattered anymore.
We were finally done for.
NINETEEN
Even though no one had died, the feeling of death and despair hung in the air like a ghost.
We had salvaged what we could out of the garden. Two tomato plants, half a row of squash, a small patch of potatoes, and one broccoli plant was all that had survived. The amount of food it would eventually produce would feed everyone in Eden for less than a week.
Inventory of our stores were immediately taken. We had enough to last about four months if we all went on starvation diets. We’d been counting on a good fall harvest.
Two days after the burn I had taken Bill with me on scouting duty. He got the truck to start at the cabin I had found and together we filled the back with everything that had been in the storage room beneath the house. That would buy us another month or so if we were careful. Nearly everyone cried when we drove the truck back through the forest and showed them the supplies. I sensed Bill was harboring hard feelings toward me for not telling everyone about what I had found before. How could I have forgotten about something so important until now?
Three weeks after the burn, I came back from my morning scouting duty, joining the others for dinner. We were each given a roll and half a scoop of canned corn. After receiving my plate, I sat next to Sarah, watching my movements as I did. My skin was turning a light shade of pink under my normally tanned tone. The sun had been brutal the last few days.
“You should go see Avian about that,” Sarah said as she looked at my arm that rested next to her pale white one. “He has some aloe he could put on it.”
“I’m fine,” I said as I tore a small piece off of my roll. “I’m sure someone will need it more than me.”
Sarah nodded her head, not wanting to argue with me. She scooped her corn into her spoon and raised it to her lips with a shaking hand. I looked at her closely as she chewed the bite carefully.
Sarah looked like a skeleton. She had started dropping weight even before the burn happened, and then when we all went on starvation rations, she started declining even more rapidly. She was frightening to look at now, I didn’t want to know how she would look in a few more weeks, a few months from now.
“I’m not very hungry,” I said as I picked my plate up and scooped my corn onto her hers. I broke half of my roll off and set it there as well. “Why don’t you have mine?”
“Eve,” she said as she looked at me with tired eyes. “You have to eat too.”
“I’m not hungry,” I said again as I stuffed what was left of my roll into my mouth. As I stood, my stomach growled. Before Sarah could protest further, I walked toward the medical tent. Just as I was about to step inside, West stepped out, nearly crashing into me. My eyes dropped to the tear in his shirt. His sleeve was soaked in blood and I saw fresh stitches in his arm.
“You alright?” I asked stiffly. West and I still had not talked much since I had attacked him.
“Fine,” he said shortly. “I just fell.” He walked away without saying anything else.
A strange rock seemed to form in the pit of my stomach as I swallowed hard and stepped inside.
“Hi,” Avian said as he looked up at me with a small smile. He pulled off a pair of bloodied latex gloves.
“I have an hour or so,” I said as I sat on a stump, pulling my knees to my chest and resting my arms on them.
“You should be sleeping,” he said as he busied himself with cleaning up. “You’re going to over work yourself.”
“I’m not sure that’s possible.”
“Of course it is,” he said as he finished up and sat across his examination table from me. “You’re still human. Look how much weight you’ve dropped already.”
I didn’t look, but I knew Sarah wasn’t the only one who had dropped some. We all had.
“Are you still eating your rations?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I lied. Somehow I sensed Avian knew I wasn’t telling the truth.
He knew better than to argue with me though, so he just stood and bent down to a wooden box that sat on the floor. Being careful, he pulled the CDU out and set it on the table. He grabbed West’s notebook and opened it to the last pages.
Over the last few weeks, Avian and I had been pulling the CDU apart, piece by piece. We had been matching parts to those we found in the notebook, making our own notes as we went along. We were always obsessively careful to make sure we put it back together exactly the way it had been before. We tested it every time after reassembly on Avian. He flinched from the shock of the electricity every time.
Today we were looking at its core.
We pulled the outer shell off, exposing all the inner working parts. We unbolted several of the larger parts we had already completely torn apart. Next we unscrewed the inner casing of the core.
A small band created the core of the device and at the center a small blue ball glowed with such intensity it was almost painful to look at.
“That must be this,” Avian said as he tapped at a drawing on the page of the notebook. It just looked like a ball on the page and had a long name that I wasn’t sure I could even pronounce. “It’s what makes the entire thing work.”
“What is it?” I asked as I stared at the glow.
“I’m not even sure,” Avian said as he shook his head. “When it’s on, this band that surrounds it spins. I think the two of them are what makes the electrical charge that shorts everything else out. I’ve never even seen anything like the center piece.”
“If we could figure out what it is and make it bigger, would it be able to make a pulse that could wipe everything out? So that it wouldn’t have to be touching them like this does?”
“I suppose,” Avian said as he turned the device over in his hands, looking at it from a different angle. “It seems like it should be able to work, in theory.”
I mulled that over silently. We had to do something. Soon. We had to figure this out or we were all dead. We were already headed that way.
Avian and I carefully pieced the CDU back together, frustrated as ever. We both had expected this to happen. We knew eventually we were going to find the parts we didn’t understand. As we bolted the shell back on, Avian powered it up and calibrated it. He handed it to me and I pressed the button as I held it to Avian’s arm. His muscles twitched violently as the shock leapt through his system.
“Sorry,” I said as I handed it back to him and he powered it down.
Avian just chuckled as he stored it back in its box. He sat back down and looked at me with his intense blue eyes.
How was it possible for someone to be so good? We’d been so fortunate to have Avian in Eden. He’d given up his life in a way to keep us alive, tying himself to this one place, a constant prisoner. How had I been so lucky to have him come into my life? It could have been anyone who found me, some twisted man who could have taken advantage of a young girl who didn’t know who she was, didn’t know anything.
My chest felt tight as I looked back at him, a weird feeling forming in my stomach. I suddenly thought about the feeling of my hand in Avian’s, thought about how it felt to have our hearts beating to the same rhythm, the way it had felt when I kissed him. I wanted to do it all again. I needed it right then in a nearly painful way.