The Alliance (7 page)

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 toward 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.

“We believe it’s an EMP,” I explain. “An electromagnetic pulse that’s wiped technology out. Someone might be able to fix it—but probably not.” I pause and scan her, watching as she hugs her arms to her chest. “Are you cold? Do you have food . . . water?”

She shakes her head. “Ran out of food this morning. Not a crumb left in the place. I have a baby. How can I nurse him if I’m not eating?”

I see no baby, unless he is tucked inside her parka. But she knows—and
I
know—that I cannot turn a mother and baby away, even a baby who might not exist. “Come stay with us,” I say, knowing what dissension this will bring to the
Englischers
. I also know what dissension this will bring to the group in the wagon. Jabil will agree that it is Christlike to take this woman in, but I am not sure how Moses and Henri will react. I glance behind me. It’s impossible to see Henri due to his position in the wagon bed, but Moses’s censure is clear.

I tell the woman, “You and your baby can come stay with us,” and then add, “if you’d like,” to make sure she’s aware she has a choice.

She looks at me and then looks at the wagon. “Maybe the government will figure it out before I have to do anything. Maybe things will get better.”

“And maybe they won’t.” I reach out and squeeze her hand. “Come if you need help.”

The woman nods. I climb back into the wagon, being careful not to brush Moses’s legs as I move past him to sit in the middle. Jabil clicks his tongue at the horse without acknowledging me. The mare moves forward. I peer over my shoulder, watching the dark-haired mother standing in the apex of such devastation, the light from the fire flickering across her face.

Outbuildings, salvaged from various historic landmarks around town, surround the Liberty Museum like the ring of a wagon train: a schoolhouse, a pioneer cabin, a replica of a mining shaft. A lean-to, divided with roughly hewn logs, is where the old equipment and tractors are parked. I motion Jabil in that direction; he snaps the reins lightly on the mare’s back. Regardless of the town’s destruction, no one’s thought to dismantle the museum. Even the grainy windows of the schoolhouse are unbroken, which appears abnormal, compared to how drastically everything was demolished just a mile from here.

There is an old fire truck that still gleams red despite the darkness; it actually looks better at night than it does during the day—the rusted chrome pieces spangled with silver, made new. Two tractors squat like metal skeletons under the shed and resemble pieces from a junkyard rather than the vehicles Moses believes will get us around. But he
is overjoyed to see them. If not for his ankle, I could picture him leaping off the wagon like a child eager to examine a new toy.

“What d’ya think?” Moses asks.

Henri leans forward and squints. “Can’t think much at this point,” he says. “Other than the fact that they’re old.”

Jabil gets down out of the wagon and ties the horse to the lean-to beam. I watch him stroke the mare’s neck, which is damp with sweat. Field to Table enables our community to be more self-sufficient than most, so our horses are unaccustomed to walking to town.

“Do you think she needs water?” I ask.

“Probably,” he says, looking worried. “I should’ve brought some.”

Moses calls from inside the lean-to, “You won’t be needing that kind of horsepower for long if we can get these beauts running.”

The muscles tighten in Jabil’s jaw. He is very fond of his horses and has never been around vehicles, other than the two-ton truck Sean used before the EMP to taxi the logging crew to and from jobs. Jabil must feel peculiar to be out of his element—the same man who oversees many aspects of our community with ease.

“C’mon,” he says to me. “Let’s look in the museum. They’re going to be here awhile.”

“I don’t think we can get inside.”

“Sure we can.” He continues walking. I follow, curious, and when we’re standing in front of the wooden door, he simply withdraws a key from his pocket. “They gave me this when we remodeled part of the museum last year,” he explains. “Forgot to return it.”

“How convenient for you.”

“Convenient for us now.”

Side by side, we enter the museum, which is an octagonal log structure with no windows and only one door. Jabil stops briefly to prop it open with a rock. The floor plan is open, except for a few small booths that house artifacts from the days when mining was Liberty’s main source of revenue. Then the mines closed, turning the bustling town into an impoverished eyesore that limps along on tourists stopping by for gas and burgers before venturing farther west.

The air is musty, the cement floors clean. We cannot see very far, but weak illumination filters in through the gap where the front door is propped open. This light reveals the taxidermy versions of a cinnamon bear, a wolf, and a mountain lion collecting dust in the museum’s loft.

The creatures’ elevated position and sightless marble eyes make me feel like they’re leering down at us, waiting to pounce. A wooden donation box with a tiny lock sits atop the entrance table. I cannot believe no one’s thought to break in and steal from it.

As if in sync with my thoughts, Jabil says, “Probably shouldn’t let Moses see that,” and gives me a rare grin.

“He said money’s no good anyway,” I murmur. “Food, medicine, and ammunition are the only things worth taking.”

Jabil crosses the gap between us, obstructing the moonbeam directed toward the entrance. “What about heirloom seeds to last us until the next planting season? What about farming implements to work the ground? Don’t let him persuade you, Leora. We don’t just need ammunition. There are other ways to go about this apocalypse than the use of violence.”