The Alliance Page 7

  Moses lifts his shoulders. “He’s single. Was living in some underground house before the EMP. Has a temper that boils like a hot pot. He’s good at taking initiative.”

  “Like how?”

  “I dunno. He found some construction cones and a sign that says ‘Road Out Ahead.’ He set them up at the end of Field to Table Road.”

  “Not sure you can call that initiative.”

  “At least he’s trying. Got any better ideas to keep people from coming back here?”

  Moses’s voice is thick with frustration. Switching tactics, I ask, “How far did he go?”

  “Only to the end of the road. . . .Why?”

  “It’s about ten miles until you get to the first major town.”

  “They got any antique car dealerships?”

  “Not that I know of. Just used lots. What would you want with an antique car?”

  He points over to the lane, where the Englischer men have pushed the cars and trucks that were in front of Field to Table into a sentinel-like line, so the useless can be used as part of the blockade. “Anything older wouldn’t be fried like the rest of these vehicles with computers.”

  I say, “Don’t know about any old cars, but the museum has some old tractors.”

  “Now we’re talking. I wonder if any of them run.”

  “Why? What could you do with a tractor?”

  “Everything. Drive for supplies . . . scout the area. If we could find implements for it, we could use it to work the ground too.”

  “You’re not serious. You’re going to steal a tractor from the museum?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he says. “I am. Unless somebody’s already beat me to it.”

  “But you still want to try to go get one?”

  His reckless grin is answer enough. I think of Anna and Seth and the supplies a tractor might gather that—a few months from now, when our storehouse is empty—might fill their hungry mouths. I tell him, “I could show you where they are.”

  Moses tilts his head toward me. “I know it’s a small town, but we’ve no idea how dangerous things have gotten. You sure you’re up for something like that?”

  A question much like Jabil’s before he checked Moses for injuries. “I wouldn’t have offered to go if I wasn’t sure.”

  Moses appears taken aback by my brusqueness, as he should be. “I—I’m sorry,” I stammer, face growing hot.

  “No harm, no foul. Just want you to know the risks before you’re in over your head.”

  “These days, life itself is a risk.”

  He smiles. “Won’t argue with you there.”

  Moses

  I hobble down the Snyders’ steps without my crutches, though I can tell within a few feet that I still need those things bad. If I squint, I can see Henri up the lane, leaning against a beam holding up the pavilion. He’s as recognizable from his hat as from the smoke twisting up from the spark pinched between his fingers. We’re not supposed to meet until midnight, a half hour from now, so that means I don’t have much time to talk Leora out of coming along on this trip.

  I look back at Henri one more time before I continue walking, and it’s like looking at an aged version of my father. Boredom doesn’t sit well with someone with a mind like a machine and a body used to working sixty-hour weeks, as Henri once did as an experimental wielder for New Holland. I could tell his grease-stained hands were going to be itching for another project as soon as we finished the perimeter. He even talked about continuing the perimeter along the other side of the property, although it already has a six-foot-tall fence where forest land bumps up against the community, making it difficult for someone—to put it in Charlie’s terms—to “vault.” So two days ago, to keep Henri occupied, I told him about my plan to filch the museum’s equipment.

  I also flattered him a little by telling him he was probably the only one around here who could figure out how to get the old tractor engines running, if it was possible at all. He eyeballed me a second, sucking his cigarette like it was the straw in a drink.

  The greedy old codger knew he could get more from me if he said nothing, so—as always—I couldn’t stare right back and wait him out. I caved. I told him if he helped me, in repayment I’d try to find a gas station along the way, which pretty much means we’ll have to loot a few places before we can find Henri one pack of cigs. At least his cigarette stash held out until we finished the perimeter today, or else he probably would’ve taken off without me.

  I knock lightly on the Ebersoles’ screen door and then open it when no one responds, because I don’t want to keep knocking and wake up the family. Leora seems unsettled when I enter the kitchen and see her using a toothpick to administer glue to a wooden dollhouse. By the lamplight, I watch her lips press together, so I know she’s heard me come in. She lets go of the dollhouse long enough to turn her face toward the shadows, wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her dress. I remove my shoes and cross the room over to where she’s standing.

  “It’s for my sister,” she says, without looking at me. The glued truss falls, hanging from the gable end like an appendage. “It broke a few years ago.”

  “What made you decide to fix it now?”

  “Because it’s about the only thing I can.”

  We’re no longer talking about wood glue and dollhouses. I step closer and reach for the toothpick. Leora flinches, and then releases it. I dip the toothpick in the open container and dab more glue along the end of the truss. “You push against that side,” I instruct, “and I’ll push against this one.” Leora presses against the left side of the truss and looks at the space behind my head, so I look too as I press against the right. She’s staring at the grandfather clock that stands like a guard in between the kitchen wall and the sitting area, where I’ve heard the Colorado woman sleeps all day, as if compensating for the rest of us who can’t.

  Turns out, watching glue dry is about as entertaining as watching paint dry, so my mind wanders, letting me forget how awkward this feels. What would my mother think of Leora if the two of them could meet? No doubt she’d appreciate Leora’s individuality and spunk, which caused her—that first day—to stand up and vocalize her thoughts like a woman, and then go outside to swing beside me, a stranger, like she was nothing more than a carefree child.

  My mother was once full of individuality and spunk as well. She met my father when he, a graduate assistant, came late to her senior thesis presentation in a political science class at Rutgers University—a calculated move because he wanted to take her out for coffee to make it up to her. She was going to become a human rights lawyer, but his charming gaffe won her heart, and they got married right after graduation instead.

  The fumes must be getting to me, because I hear myself speaking these thoughts aloud. “You know, you kind of remind me of my mom.” Leora’s head remains forward, but she looks at me from the corner of her eye. “What?” I quip. “You didn’t think I have one?”

  “No. Just can’t imagine what I could have in common with your mudder.”

  “Well, her life didn’t turn out the way she expected it to, either. She gave up her dreams of law school to stay home with my brother and me since our father was gone all the time.” My mother claims that the decades of war have changed him, that he wasn’t so abrasive and withdrawn when they fell in love over textbooks and coffee. I can’t remember him that way, but I also can’t remember our mother being as beautiful as pictures prove she was.

  “Your vadder was gone a lot?” Leora asks. “Did he abandon you?” I’m not sure if I’m imagining her defensive tone or if she’s just curious.

  “You could say that.” I shake my head, wondering how we ever got onto this topic. But now that I’m this far in, I might as well tell her the rest. “When I was a junior in high school, my brother and I came home from practice and found her sitting in a rocker on our porch, knitting a pink sweater. She told us to sit down. So we sat. Then she told us that our father had a son in Afghanistan, apparently fathered when he was stationed
there. Four years old. Just a baby, really. Then she went right on knitting, like she’d told us we were having pork chops for dinner or something. Later, I saw a baby at Mass wearing that pink sweater.”

  “So your vadder left after that?”

  “Strangely enough, no. I mean, no more than he ever did, being overseas so much. Maybe that’s another way you remind me of her. Her beliefs kept her faithful to my dad when anybody else would’ve been divorcing him in a minute, kind of the way your beliefs set you apart from the rest of the world.”

  The front door opens. Jabil steps into the kitchen’s dim nimbus of light, holding his straw hat to his chest. He looks at me and Leora, this broken house between us, and his lips press together in a masculine form of Leora’s earlier expression. Jabil studies me, trying to get down through my layers to find out who I am. He’s going to be looking awhile. Whenever I peer in the mirror of my shaving kit, I can’t recognize myself. And it’s not just the long hair and beard replacing my military cut; in my pupils, I can see the soul reflection of that little boy in the desert whom I irrationally tried to protect.

  Jabil says, “I told Leora the only way I’m letting her go into town with two strangers is if I ride along.”

  I look at Leora. Her smile appears more like a grimace. I say, “Shouldn’t you ask her what she thinks before you start telling her what she can and cannot do?”

  The brim of the hat bends in Jabil’s hands. “We know nothing about you, Moses.”

  “And your point is . . . ?”

  I know what Jabil’s point is, and if I were in his shoes, I’d want to protect Leora from someone like me as well. Regardless, I still bristle at being seen as the bad guy—especially when Jabil considers himself the good. If our lives weren’t so messed up, he and I could maybe become friends. But since we’re coming at this EMP from opposite sides, so to speak, it’s a little hard to meet in the middle. Tension’s not only rising between me and Jabil but between the Mennonites and the Englischers, exemplified by Charlie’s hammer incident. If we can keep up a steady balance of give and take, we might be able to get along. I don’t want to have to find this balance, but—as always—it looks like I’m going to be the one who has to compromise. Either this is a side effect of being a little brother, or I’m more into nonresistance than I thought.

  Leora murmurs, “Stop, just stop,” and lets go of her side of the dollhouse. The truss falls. I watch her face and see that her puffy eyes are looking at nobody but him.

  “We’ll be taking my wagon,” Jabil says.

  Moving to the front of the dollhouse, I hold the truss together on my own. Only now, looking at it from this angle, I see that it’s a smaller replica of the house I’m standing in—down to the picture window facing the meadow and the long pine table where I woke up to find Leora holding my hand. “Did you ask your uncle if you can ride with me, Jabil?” Try as I might, I can’t keep the derision from my voice. “I’d sure hate for you to get in trouble.”

  Jabil looks like he wants to spit. Instead, he walks over to Leora. “Ready to go?”

  She nods and says under her breath, “Don’t be rude,” before crossing the living room, and I am unable to tell if she’s talking to me or to him. Either way, I watch them go and then look back at the dollhouse, which I’m holding together like an idiot. The plastic windows on either side of the door resemble eyes, staring at me, trying to figure out what I’m hoping to accomplish. That’s just the thing: I don’t know myself.

  Leora

  I SIT ON THE BUCKBOARD between Jabil and Moses, my spine balanced so the jostling wagon won’t knock my body into either of their shoulder blades. Henri sits in the back, quiet to the point that sometimes I forget he’s there. Then again, Jabil and Moses are quiet too. The tension between them is as palpable as it was in the kitchen, when they sparred with each other without lifting a hand. Are they attracted to me, or are they attracted to the concept of winning a prize?

  Jabil clears his throat in the silence. The rhythmic clomping of the horse’s hooves over the asphalt could put me to sleep if my racing mind weren’t trying to keep pace with my heart. The stars are brilliant tonight; the moon is full, which is good. We’ve never seen the city of Liberty as devoid of light as this. It reminds me of a ghost town, though I have only read about such places in books. Cars, trucks, and vans are tilted here and there—reminding me of an ogre’s game of Hot Wheels that he cast pell-mell over the two-lane road.

  Some drivers thought to push their vehicles to the edge of the embankment and lock the doors, but these are the ones that have been hit hardest by vandalism. Plastic hubcaps, chrome pieces—possibly too heavy for people to carry—and shards of glass from broken windshields glitter in the grass. Perhaps vandals felt the drivers must be locking their doors because they had something valuable enough to protect and, subsequently, to steal.

  Flashlight beams slice through the darkness of the hardware store up ahead, fitted with windows that remain intact. The beams appear disembodied, but I know they are not. For what are the people searching? And who are they? I can’t imagine the citizens of Liberty, after just one week, would be capable of forced entry and theft. But, then, do any of us know what we’re capable of until a situation or a person forces our hands? I am a perfect case study of situational ethics: a trustworthy Mennonite girl riding along with an Englischer who’s made it clear that he hopes to steal from the museum that survives on insubstantial donations alone.

  In the background, high in the crags, I hear the repeated pop of gunfire. Moses’s hand goes down and rests on his holster.

  “Probably firecrackers,” Jabil says, without much conviction, and I wonder: Where is the local police force? The fire company? Perhaps they’re taking care of the elderly who cannot forage for water and food, and—I realize with a sinking feeling—perhaps they’re also taking care of the patients at the local hospital and nursing home. Both places would be transformed into institutions of terror, since the machines keeping everyone stable have shut off. And what happens when the medicine runs out, and no trucks are running in order to bring new supplies?

  I am appalled. I have not considered the severity of other people’s plights; I have been wholly consumed with my own.

  The mare, responding to Jabil’s prodding, shifts into a canter. The wheels click smoothly along Main Street’s blacktop, as if we’re old pioneers traveling forward in time. I bite back a gasp, perceiving that this is where the violent looting took place, and then—I guess—radiated outward, the EMP affecting Liberty like a bomb detonated on the courthouse square. I was not expecting a little town to be affected by such devastation so fast. The quaint line of windows are piebald with holes from rocks being thrown through them or else shattered completely. It looks as if some of the owners have attempted to keep people out by building barricades with pallets, equipment, and furniture they do not care to lose.

  But it’s obvious the people who initiated this defacement either became bored and moved on or are in the process of making their rounds and will be back. The store owners must know this as well. The proprietor of Liberty’s gas station and repair shop is sitting outside the double garage doors with a shotgun resting in his lap. Behind him, the six-by-eight-foot window—which once read Friendly’s in swirling calligraphy of navy and gold—is nothing but a long, dim rectangle studded around the edges with shards of glass. By the moon’s glow, it looks like the owner hasn’t been sleeping, eating, or bathing regularly since the EMP. And he certainly doesn’t look friendly.

  A few of the store owners—maybe believing order will soon be reinstated—have already tried cleaning up the worst of the mess. Rusted oil barrels, filled with refuse, burn brightly. The penny-sized holes drilled through them, to increase the oxygen flow to the fire, cast a crosshatch pattern across the cobblestone sidewalks that were walked by tourists just one week ago. Nobody is huddled around the flames, of course, as even nighttime holds vestiges of summer’s warmth. But staring at those barrels, flames lapping to
ward the sky, I imagine none of this might be fixed by winter. What are people going to do then?

  “Looting’s worse at night,” Moses explains. “‘The light disturbs the wicked and stops the arm that is raised in violence.’”

  “A man who quotes Job and knows the behavior of criminals,” Jabil says.

  “Take it or leave it. That’s who I am.”

  I do not need daylight to see the tension mounting, for I can feel it in the concrete set of their shoulders alone. I long to inquire about Moses’s life history, but refrain because I know it would irk Jabil to give Moses extra attention. “Why haven’t they come to loot us?” I ask instead.

  “They’ll come,” Henri responds swiftly—the first words he’s spoken since we started the trip. I turn around to look at him, sprawled across the pile of empty feed sacks. He nods at me and smiles. The transformation is astonishing, like a storm cloud exposing the sun. But then the wagon jolts to a halt. I face forward and see that a woman’s come out onto the street and taken hold of the horse’s bridle. Jabil pulls back on the reins. The horse prances inside the harness and tosses her head, as disoriented by this woman’s materialization as we are.

  “Hate to bother you, but can someone please tell me what’s going on?”

  The woman’s desperate tone reminds me of my mother’s voice two years ago, when she had us three children sit at the kitchen table and then paced behind our vadder’s chair, trying to explain his disappearance. My compassion stirred, I stand from the buckboard and pull my skirt to the side. Easing past Moses, I prepare to climb from the wagon when his fingers latch onto mine. I look back at him and see his eyes are filled with warning. He releases me, but slowly, our fingertips brushing so that his calluses abrade my skin.

  The woman sees me step down and lets go of the bridle. Long skeins of black hair hang on each side of her face. The whites of her eyes glimmer in the moonlight. Though her voice, when she spoke, sounded older, she looks childlike—mainly because of how fine-boned she is, dwarfed by a man’s blue parka that billows around her knees.