And perhaps also for me. They might not kill me outright, but if the Elders still believed in a contagion, they would probably throw me outside the gate, to be fed to those monsters. I shuddered. My sense of self-preservation eclipsed my desire to protect my community. I would not sacrifice myself that way, I decided. It was not God’s will that I died. He had allowed me to escape, despite my sins. He had a plan for me and would not allow me to die, I reasoned. Not yet.
I pedaled back to the road where the gate stood. It seemed such a flimsy barrier against those shadow creatures. I heaved my bike over it, mindful not to damage the precious contents of the basket.
I paused here, at the border of our world and Outside. I stared down at my dress, sticky with splotches of the dead man’s blood. I knelt down to the ground, smeared some mud over the stains. I gathered some stalks of yellow mustard at the side of the road, tucked them over my basket to hide the contents and walked my bike home.
At the kennel, I was greeted by Copper and Sunny, who sniffed me vigorously. Copper flattened his ears and whined.
I reached down to rub him. “It’s okay, boy. I’m okay. I’m okay.” It seemed that the more I said it, the more it had to be true.
Sunny licked my filthy cheek, and I broke down. The bit of sympathy that the dogs showed me was enough to cause me to sit on the ground and sob. The terror and adrenaline drained out of me in my tears, shaking through me.
After I reached hiccupping, dry sobs, I scrubbed my sleeve across my face. I forced myself to stand and walk my bike into the barn.
The darkness made my skin crawl, but I reminded myself that I was safe here. I was no longer Outside. I unpacked the contents of the basket. The dogs investigated the bag of dog food, noses quivering. I lifted it and the cans up high on a rack, where they couldn’t reach.
“That’s for later,” I told them.
I gathered the antibiotics and headed back to the last paddock.
The young man—Alex—lay sleeping peacefully on the straw. I tore open a carton of the antibiotics, read the instructions twice. I removed three pills from the package, added a couple of ibuprofen. I propped his head up on my knee and forced the pills into his mouth. He gurgled and sputtered when I poured water past his lips.
“Antibiotics,” I said, curtly. “Take them.”
He did as he was told, swallowing the pills. His glazed eyes followed me as I sat back against the wall of the barn, a shaft of sunshine warming my back.
“There are enough for you to take for the next three weeks. Don’t lose any. There aren’t any more.”
“Thank you,” he whispered. His eyelids began to drift shut.
“No.” I shook him, hard. Anger burned brightly in my voice. I wanted answers. My Amish reticence faded in the darkness of what I’d seen, the urgency of needing to know: “Wake up. You need to tell me what happened Outside.”
His eyes opened, and he took in my disheveled appearance. “You saw?”
“I saw. Now, tell me.”
“At first, I didn’t realize there was anything wrong. I don’t think that anyone did.”
I loosened my grip on the young man’s collar. His head thudded back to the straw, and his gaze landed somewhere on the ceiling. He blinked hard, and I thought for a moment that he was going to try to lose consciousness again. My hand balled up. I wouldn’t let him. I wouldn’t let him slip away that easily, leaving me without answers.
But then I realized that he was blinking back tears.
“You’re not from around here,” I prompted, my voice softer.
“No. I’m from Canada.” That explained the slight rounding of his vowels.
“Why are you here?”
“I was looking at graduate schools.” His mouth twitched. “I wanted to get my PhD.”
“To be a doctor?” Plain folk didn't go to college. Children were educated through the eighth grade, most often in one-room schoolhouses like the kind I had gone to. I remembered my mother telling stories of forced busing to public schools back in the seventies, but the Amish had eventually won a Supreme Court case that allowed them to educate their children as they saw fit in the name of religious freedom.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Before, I’d resented it, wanting more than my teacher, the fifteen-year-old sister of a friend, could give me. I had to sneak away to the library and pester the librarians to answer questions that she could not. But right about now, thinking about Mrs. Parsall’s children, I didn’t resent it so much.
“Not a medical doctor. Not any kind of useful doctor. My undergraduate degree is in anthropology.” His gaze flicked to me. It seemed that he was weighing me, deciding how much I would understand about Outside. Trying to figure out how naive I really was.
“I know what anthropology is,” I said quietly. “You study people. Other cultures.”
“Yeah.”
“I have a library card,” I said. What I wanted to say was I’m not an idiot.
“I didn’t mean to imply that you were . . . that you didn’t understand.” It came out a bit haughty. “Sorry.”
I nodded and waited for him to continue.
Eventually, he licked his lips and went on: “I came to the U.S. a week ago. I told my family that I was looking at schools.”
My sharp ears detected the slight change in his story. “Why were you here, really?”
A smile crossed his lips. “Well, that wasn’t the only reason. There was a girl.”
I didn’t prod him. There wasn’t a girl now.
The smile faded. “I visited two schools. The first one was just . . . meh. They’d offered me a partial scholarship, but their program wasn’t very good. Snotty private school. Even with the scholarship, I’d be paying off the tuition until I was sixty. Not worth it for a professor’s salary.”
“You want to teach?”
“Yeah. Folklore.” He gave a small shrug. “The second school was better. The head of the department had published a lot, was a nice guy. Public school, cheaper tuition.”
“And . . . the girl?”
“Cassia.” His eyes softened when he said her name, and his eyes crinkled. I had never seen Elijah’s eyes do that when he said my name. “She was there. Studying biology.”
“How did you know her, if you were in Canada?” I was suspicious, looking to pick apart the threads of his story.
“We met on the Internet, fragging enemy soldiers.”
I looked at him blankly. He didn’t look like a soldier to me.
“Playing video games,” he amended.
It was unfathomable to me to know someone who lived hundreds of miles distant. “You met playing video games?”
“Yeah. My parents thought it was pretty outrageous too, but”—he gave another of his small shrugs—“two of my friends met their girlfriends on online dating sites. I figured that it was just as legitimate as that. We talked every day for about six months.”
“And you . . . fell in love when you saw her?” I knew about the concept of online dating sites from my peeks at magazines, but I had never actually used the Internet, so it was hard to understand exactly how they worked.
“No. I fell in love way before that. Love without first sight.” He gave a grim chuckle. “I killed three batteries on my cell phone talking with her in those months.”
I couldn’t wrap my mind around falling in love with someone from afar. I was accustomed to seeing Elijah every day, felt affection out of sheer force of familiarity, force of habit. For me, that was love. Tangible. Love was what was in front of me, not a distant fantasy.