“Do you want someone else to walk them from time to time?” Tasha asks. She takes a step closer to Heather, puts a hand on Greta’s tiny head. “Aren’t you tired? Are you getting enough sleep?”
“Is anybody?” Heather takes a step back and Tasha’s hand falls. She can see that Annie is irritated, but Tasha doesn’t blink.
“Let me know if you want me to do anything for you,” Tasha says. “I know none of this is easy.” Behind her B looks defeated.
“Where are those flowers from?” Annie says. She’s stepped back onto the front path—she must see the flowers in the window.
“They were a gift,” Heather says. “For my birthday.”
Annie looks back at her, then at Brendan. “Where did you find tropical flowers?”
As if on cue, Jilly wakes up and starts to cry; Heather backs away from the door and reaches for her boots. “I will help when I can,” she says, finally, because they’re not going to go until she does. “Now can you leave me alone?”
After this, she walks in the forest a little less and in the city a little more, just enough to ease B’s suspicions. She watches the townspeople as she walks—first they clear the debris from the centre of town, take what they can from the wreckage and pack away anything useful they can find. The strip mall near the central square is relatively undamaged—she watches person after person carry box after box inside.
Time inches slowly forward. The days seem twice as long as she remembers days to be.
On one of her morning walks she sees that someone has grouped the generators from restaurants and other businesses together behind the mall. By the time she returns from the forest there is a chicken-wire fence around them, complete with a makeshift padlocked door. All day long, the generators hum intermittently. The key to the enclosure hangs at Annie’s waist.
More days go by, and there is no news. Tasha sends volunteers on scouting missions but none of them come back. Other people pack their bags and leave late in the night—some in cars but more of them on foot or on bicycles. Mothers and daughters, fathers and sons. Whole families. They don’t come back either.
The vines grow thicker over their backyard pool. Soon they cover it completely.
When they’ve been in the house for a little over a month, a man comes back to the house next to theirs. He knocks on the door one morning right before B is leaving to go to the strip mall. Heather, bleary-eyed and grumpy, gets the door.
“Hello,” the man on the doorstep says. He looks faintly surprised. “You’re not Denise.”
“No,” Heather says. She fights down a rush of guilt. “They haven’t come back.”
He nods. “Probably better for them, in the long run.”
No one says anything for a moment. B emerges from the kitchen and comes to stand behind her.
“I live next door,” the man says, and waves his hand in the direction of the house to their left. His voice sounds hollow, almost robotic. “I’m Joseph.”
“Brendan,” B says. He steps forward and reaches across Heather, takes the other man’s hand. “This is Heather. And this is Greta,” he points, “and Jilly.” He looks over to the house. “Everything all right?”
“We were away,” Joseph says. “I just got back.”
“We?” Brendan asks, and Heather wants to kick him. “Your family?”
“I came back alone,” Joseph says. That hollowness again. He jerks a thumb at the house. “I have chickens in the backyard. Surprised to find them still alive, to be honest.” Then he laughs. It is not a nice sound. “I guess the natural world outlives us all, anyway.”
Chickens? Heather thinks. And now she can smell it, the faint scent of acrid chickenshit under the thickness of ash and dirt that still falls through the air. She hadn’t noticed any chickens. But she hasn’t noticed much. The babies. The walking. The boxes carried into the strip mall.
The pink bicycle in Joseph’s driveway, lopsided against the garage.
“Anyway,” Joseph says, “I’ll have eggs for a while. Don’t know how long—until the feed runs out and they all die, I guess. I’ll bring over my extras, if you want them.”
“Thank you,” Heather says, finally. “We’d be grateful.”
Joseph looks at her again. This time he seems to see the babies—really see them. “It’s fine,” he says, abruptly. Then he jerks his head in the direction of the city centre. “Who put them in charge? Tasha—right? Annie? Where’s the City Council?”
“Dead or gone,” B says.
“So—what—we just let them hoard the food? Is that what’s going on?”
“They’re rationing the food,” B says. “We don’t know how long everything will have to last.”
“And gas?” Joseph says.
“People were taking gas,” B says. “But we’re saving it now for the generators. I’m sure you could get some if you asked for it.”
Joseph laughs. “No need for that,” he says. “My van was destroyed when the meteors came. Surprised I made it back alive, to be honest.”
“Do you want to help with the rebuild?” B says. “I’m just about to head in now.”
Joseph blinks.
“B,” Heather says. She fights to keep an edge from her voice. “He only just got back.”
“We need all the hands we can get,” B says, not meeting her eyes.
“Maybe,” Joseph says. “Not now.” Heather can almost see the words in his head. What’s left to rebuild? He steps back down the path. “I need to sort out my house first.”
Later that night, lying exhausted on the bed, B says, “Maybe we should think about chickens.” He’s only half joking. “Maybe we should start a farm.”
“We don’t know anything about farming,” she says. “We’d starve.”
He shrugs. “Maybe we’ll starve anyway.” He reaches for Jilly. They both do this now, she’s noticed—reach for the babies when they should be reaching for each other.
“It’s not a bad idea,” Heather says, relenting. “But I wouldn’t know what to do. I’d be useless.”
“You could learn. So could I.”
“Do you really think we’ll starve?” She stares at him over Greta’s coppery head.
B pauses and then shakes his head. “We won’t. We can’t. Tasha won’t let that happen.”
“Tasha can’t feed everybody.”
“So what do you want me to say?”
She flushes. “I don’t know.”
“We’ll ration the food until help arrives. They must be mobilizing the army. I don’t know.” Jilly starts to whimper and he sits up, rocks her softly. “Maybe they’ll send in a train.”
“Send a train where?”
“I don’t know! Jesus, Heather—it’s like you want them to fail. Like you want us to fail.”
“I don’t,” she says. “I don’t want that.”
“How can I be sure?” he says. “You don’t tell me things and you disappear for most of the day. It’s like—” he looks straight at her—“it’s like I don’t even know you.”
What to say? They don’t know each other, not really. They’ve been thrown together the same way they were thrown into this house. But he will be hurt if she says this.
“I’m so tired,” she whispers. “I want the girls to be quiet. That’s all I want. And that only happens when I walk them. I don’t have space for anything else.”
He looks away. “I’m sorry. Forget I said anything.”