The World That Remains (Evergreen Book 2) Read online

“Okay.”

  Harper darted in again and swept his leg, easing him over onto his back. The takedown felt a bit fast, but also like he rolled with it, letting her put him on the ground. She glanced at her hands, clutching two fistfuls of his sleeves by his armpits. “How does it work if the guy doesn’t have a shirt on?”

  Cliff placed his palms flat on her shoulders. “Push. If you can make them overextend past their balance point, they’re gonna go over backward. Even if you can’t fully sweep the leg, preventing them from taking a step back can make the difference.”

  They reset and tried it a few times, alternating between Harper doing the sweep and receiving one. With each repetition, the energy level increased almost to the point it felt like a real fight. Despite the speed and force Cliff used to fling her to the ground, his expression remained a complete picture of calm. The sixth time she landed flat on her back, she grimaced, but didn’t let herself whimper at the soreness in her side or shoulder. Cliff didn’t look like he’d put all that much effort into throwing her. Rather than feel pissed at him for getting too rough, she became angry at herself for being too soft and delicate.

  “Again,” said Cliff.

  Harper sprang to her feet and faced him. She imagined she’d been cornered by one of the blue gang and had two choices: win or wind up without pants. With that mindset, she rushed in and committed to the technique at full strength. For the first time since he started teaching her hand-to-hand skills, she felt like he hadn’t let her put him on his back.

  “Oof,” said Cliff. “That’s what I’m talking about. You don’t have to be bigger or stronger if the other guy doesn’t know what he’s doing. It’s all about leverage.”

  She grabbed his hand and helped him up. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize. That’s what I’ve been trying to get you to do from the start. Now, in a real situation, you’d go from that toss into a wrist lock. Try to force them over onto their front.” He wiped his chin with his thumb. “Or if you’re in Afghanistan doing a clandestine mission, after you knock someone down, it’s a great opportunity for knife work.”

  “Ack.” She cringed.

  He patted her on the shoulder. “No, I’m not going to demonstrate that. The Evergreen Militia isn’t going to be conducting any black ops missions.” He winked. “Just dealing with thieves, rowdy drunks, or idiots.”

  “Right.”

  They resumed sparring. The twelfth time Harper landed hard on her back, her body waved a white flag. The mere thought of sitting up hurt.

  “Ow,” she muttered, gasping for breath. “I think I’m done.”

  “All right. We should both get some water.”

  She peered up at him from the ground, squinting a bit at the sun behind his head. “You know what’s really messed up?”

  “I can think of a lot of things that would qualify as ‘messed up.’” He set his hands on his hips, his breathing also rapid, but not as fatigued as hers.

  “Sometimes, it feels like a relief not to be stressing out over college or worrying about what kinda career I want. It’s almost relaxing now with everything so different.” She gazed up at the clear, blue sky, a fringe of green from trees at the edges of her vision.

  Cliff offered a hand.

  She grasped it. “I mean, if I could, I’d deal with high school and college all over again ten times to get my parents back and un-break the world, but… yeah.”

  He pulled her to her feet. “Don’t feel guilty about appreciating the relaxed pace of life.” He tossed a small towel to her. “It’s not exactly relaxed.”

  “I know. We’re back in the Old West… carrying guns everywhere. No medicine, no technology.” She dabbed sweat off her face and forehead. “But, I dunno. Whenever I stop being miserable, I feel guilty about it. So many people died. I have no right to think going back in time might not be a horrible thing.”

  “There’s no need for you to feel guilty about not being miserable all the time. That’s a dangerous way of thinking that’ll lead you to a dark place. Yeah, plenty fine to be sad, but don’t let it eat you up.

  “Okay… I’ll try.” She followed him into the house.

  He ran water from the kitchen sink into two large glasses before handing her one. “Could be, humanity just reached a breaking point and needed to turn the dial down. Past few years, things have been getting crazier and crazier. Everyone was always angry at everyone else, or offended at every little thing. Hating each other for bullshit. No one talked to anyone; they screamed. One side shouted their ideas, the other side shouted their ideas, and no one heard a thing.”

  “Yeah.” She gulped down half her glass in one breath.

  Cliff pointed at the window. “Look at that sky. Not a plane or contrail in sight. It gets pretty quiet now. So dark at night.”

  “You think we’ll really be okay here?” She ran more water into her glass and chugged a few mouthfuls.

  “Could be.” He winked. “It ain’t the worst place we could’ve ended up.”

  3

  Relative Normal

  Dinner consisted of canned ravioli—again.

  At least these two cans had been cheese ravioli, so Madison didn’t spend the entire time she ate with a glum face. Harper hated forcing her vegetarian sister to eat meat, but she would rather do that than watch her starve. As Cliff had so indelicately put it back in January, ‘vegetarianism is a first-world problem.’

  That, of course, had started the first real argument of her new family.

  Madison yelled that being a vegetarian wasn’t a ‘problem,’ and lots of people in other countries avoided meat. She claimed ‘half of India’ had been vegetarian—though Harper had no idea where she’d gotten that statistic from. Cliff had come close to barking at her, but managed to keep himself calm long enough for the outburst to remind Madison of fighting with Dad and switched her from screaming to sobbing.

  After that, a truce had developed. Cliff no longer picked on vegetarianism being impractical in a world where not having anything to eat at all had become a real possibility. For her part, Madison begrudgingly ate meat whenever they had no other choice. Though the farm’s chicken population thrived, roughly half the meat consumed in Evergreen still came from hunting, and it had been getting rarer lately. Food, in general, had become lean. In fact, that Madison’s protest of eating meat had scaled back down to only a sad expression and no hesitation about eating it concerned Harper. The past couple weeks, she’d been constantly hungry, never eating enough to feel satisfied. The only times she stopped feeling hungry was when worrying made her sick to her stomach. Madison and the other kids had to be the same way, though none of them complained about wanting more food.

  They all knew they had no choice.

  Most nights when the girls cuddled up with her in bed, the faint growls of their stomachs sang them to sleep. Madison accepting meat—when it happened to be available—with barely a whiff of protest broke her heart.

  After dinner, Cliff tended to the dishes while Harper headed out to the cinder block grill in the backyard. Two large metal pails of water she’d set on the fire about an hour ago gave off steam but fell short of a boil. The same fire that had heated dinner would give her a hot bath. It took every ounce of strength for her to carry one pail into the house and down the short hall to the bathroom, a task complicated by oven mitts.

  She upended the steamy water into the tub she’d filled before sitting down to eat. Leaving the water in the tub for a while let it warm up to the house temperature since it came out of the pipe icy cold. Dumping the heated water into it right away resulted in a tepid or merely cold bath. She filled the pail again and brought it out to the grill, then carried the second near-boiling pail in and added it to the bathtub.

  That done, she stepped into the bedroom she shared with her two sisters. Both girls sat on the edge of the bed, ready for a bath with only towels on.

  “Okay, it’s ready,” said Harper. “You two can go in first.”

  The girls stood at
the same time and padded out to the bathroom at the end of the hall, a mere six feet from the bedroom door. Harper set the pail down, dropped the oven mitts on the floor next to it and poked her head into the bathroom, knowing Madison wanted her to hover close for security.

  Lorelei dropped her towel and tested the bathwater with one foot.

  Madison spun to stare at Harper, drawing a breath as if to yell ‘get out!’ like she might have done back home in the normal world if her older sister had barged in on her. Caught off guard, Harper braced for the shouting, but her little sister relaxed.

  “I’m okay,” said Madison in a calm voice. “Thanks for being worried.”

  “Ooh. It’s warm,” said Lorelei. She shifted her weight onto her left leg, pulled her other leg over the tub edge, and stood with both feet in the water making soft squeals and gasps.

  Harper smiled, forcing herself not to cheer at her sister no longer being so terrified of everything that she refused to have a closed door between them. The girl wanting privacy for a bath felt like another step back to normality. “Okay.”

  “Wait.” Madison eyed the steam wafting up from the tub. “It’s still okay if you wanna share it to save firewood. I remember saying we could do that. Not demanding you stay with me like I’m some little kid, but… I don’t wanna kill trees.”

  A trace of pleading in the girl’s eyes made Harper think her sister wanted her to stay close more than she admitted. Maybe she only acted like it didn’t bother her and still feared separation, even if they remained in the same house.

  “Up to you,” said Harper.

  Lorelei bent to touch the water with her hand. “Ooh. Warm.”

  Harper bit her lip at the tiny child’s prominent ribs. She’d improved quite a bit in three months, no longer looking like a refugee from a war zone. Still, Lorelei appeared quite obviously underweight. Need to take her to the doc again just to make sure.

  “Yeah, c’mon. Water’s getting cold.” Madison smiled. “If we ever have normal hot water again that doesn’t need fire, we should take our own baths. But, it’s okay to share so we save wood.”

  “Where’s Jon?” asked Lorelei.

  Madison blushed.

  “He’s gonna take the next bath. There’s not enough room in the tub for all of us at once,” said Harper.

  “He’s a boy,” rasped Madison in a whisper.

  Lorelei looked over at her with a ‘so what?’ expression.

  “I’ll go after you guys,” called Jonathan from his room. “Don’t waste more wood. I can use the same water. Don’t care if it’s hot as long as it isn’t freezing.”

  “Okay,” said Harper, stepping into the bathroom and closing the door.

  Madison dropped her towel and entered the tub. “Ow. It’s too hot.”

  “Don’t add more water. It’ll cool off too fast anyway.” Harper slipped out of her clothes, then eased herself into the water, adoring the hot bath far more than the icy one she’d had on the way to Evergreen.

  She sat at the back end of the tub, Madison in front of her, Lorelei closest to the drain. The six-year-old played with a plastic duck more than washed herself while Madison soaped up. Harper basked in the wonderful heat, waiting her turn for the soap.

  Bathing had become a once-a-week event, except for a point in February where the pipes froze and they went two weeks without one. Her mind wandered off to the past, specifically how she’d never thought much of showering before, sometimes taking two in one day. Memories of her old bathroom back home played across the tip of her mind. She remembered weird, random things like the scratch on the side of the sink cabinet she caused as a four-year-old trying to roller skate in the house. Or Mom’s pulse-jet showerhead. Or the multicolored seashell soaps her mother put everywhere. Even the little white toilet brush holder Mom bought on that one trip to Target felt like a cherished artifact that had been stolen from her.

  Daydreaming of her old life brought with it a crash of sorrow at losing contact with her friends. Scenes of hanging out in her room, or Christina’s pool, or going to the movies with them, tormented her. Renee’s face came to mind from one time they’d gone to McDonalds when they’d all been eleven. The girl had stuck French fries up her nose while crossing her eyes. A remembered chorus of giggles almost made Harper cry.

  Renee could be dead, as could any of her old crew. Not knowing the truth let her mind fill in every imaginable horror from a giant chunk of concrete falling out of the sky and crushing them to the blue gang getting their hands on her friends and doing horrible things. Harper hated that she assumed the worst possible scenarios. The Army might have found them all and brought them somewhere safe. Maybe Christina, Renee, Andrea, Darci and Veronica sat around together at some survivor camp, crying over losing her.

  Yeah right.

  Madison twisted toward her and offered the soap. “Here.”

  “Thanks, Termite.” Harper proceeded to lather up.

  Lorelei splashed at the water in front of her.

  “This is kinda weird, sharing a tub… but the world is weird.” Madison picked up the plastic bowl floating beside her and poured water over her hair. “We shouldn’t kill more trees than we really have to, even if it is embarrassing.”

  “Snot barrasing,” said Lorelei. “It’s bathing.”

  “Kids used to all share baths a long time ago,” said Harper. “Like back when people still rode horses.”

  Madison held her arms out to the sides. “I don’t see any cars, do you?”

  “Horses?” chirped Lorelei. “I like horses! Can we ride a horse?”

  “Maybe.” Harper buried her face in the foamy washcloth.

  “I like baths, too,” said Lorelei. “I didn’t have them before.”

  “Whoa.” Madison paused in dumping a second bowl of water over her head to rinse shampoo. “Like, ever?”

  “Nope,” chirped Lorelei.

  Eyes closed under a layer of soap, Harper felt around for the bowl. Someone—probably Madison—handed it to her. “Why not?”

  “I dunno,” said Lorelei. “Mommy never put me inna tub before. It’s good ’cause it’s fun and not too much water. I can’t swim.”

  Harper pictured Mila Cline, the nine-year-old creepy girl, quoting the statistics of how many people each year used to drown in bathtubs. The idea of that kid saying such a thing struck her as simultaneously probable, awful, and darkly funny.

  Lori doesn’t talk much about her parents. What kind of kid never had a single bath?

  Madison and Lorelei discussed horses while Harper rushed the rest of cleaning herself. She got out of the bath first, dried off, and wrapped herself in the towel before taking a knee beside the tub and teaching Lorelei how to bathe herself.

  The girl didn’t seem interested in doing much more than playing.

  “Come on, get clean,” said Madison. “Trees died for this bath. Don’t waste it.”

  Harper chuckled.

  A little while later, Harper plucked Lorelei out of the water and dried her off. All three wrapped themselves in towels, then hurried across the hall to the bedroom where they finished drying off and changed into their nightgowns. Harper’s nightgown had a bit too much transparency for her to feel comfortable going outside, but in the near dark, it covered her well enough for a brief excursion. She stepped barefoot into her sneakers and hurried to collect the refilled pail she’d set over the fire before taking her bath. It hadn’t quite become as steamy as the first two since the fire had died down, but it remained far warmer than the water sitting in the tub.

  She lugged it into the house and poured it into the tub to heat the water for Jonathan, then stuck her head into his room. “Tub’s all yours.”

  “Cool.” He set his book down and headed into the bathroom.

  Harper went to the living room where Cliff occupied one of the recliners, reading. Madison and Lorelei sat on the floor in front of the sofa, playing with dolls. A little less than an hour of light remained. In this new life, darkness defined bedtime�
� for everyone.

  “You know,” said Cliff without looking up from his novel, “in olden days when the entire family used the same bathwater, the father would go first, then the wife, then the kids from oldest to youngest. Ever hear that saying ‘don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater?’”

  “Don’t throw me out,” said Lorelei.

  Harper and Cliff chuckled.

  He peered over the book at her. “No one’s throwing you out.”

  She grinned at him.

  “Umm, yeah.” Harper moved around the sofa, sat, and pulled her feet up under a thin blanket. Instead of going for her book, she decided to watch ‘sibling TV.’ “Everyone’s heard that phrase.”

  “Know where it came from?”

  “No, but I have a feeling I’m about to find out.” She raked her fingers at her damp hair.

  “By the time the youngest kids got to the tub, the water could often be so dirty it was literally possible not to notice a baby in it.”

  “Eww,” said Madison. “And why would anyone put a baby underwater?”

  “It’s just a phrase.” Harper shrugged. “And I second that eww. I’d rather take a cold bath than get into water that’s too dirty to see through. The point of a bath is to get clean, not add more grime.”

  Cliff chuckled.

  “How did people make soap back then?” asked Harper.

  “Good question.” Cliff scratched at his beard. “There’s gotta be a book about that somewhere.”

  “Wow, the master of useless trivia doesn’t know something.” Harper raspberried at him.

  “Careful, young lady.” He wagged the book at her.

  Laughing, Harper reclined into the sofa under the blanket, comfortable enough that she risked falling asleep right there. Madison hadn’t been much of a doll person, at least after eight. Though, video games had been more to blame for that than anything else. Sitting there watching her sister play dolls with Lorelei put a giant smile on Harper’s face. Madison appeared to be having fun, even if the ‘girl who outgrew dollies’ mostly did it for the little one’s benefit.