There isn’t a lot of meat. The broth is salty. I feel full.
Thank you, Art.
I wonder who at this table will eat me? Although I’m a short woman and there’s a good chance I’ll outlive most of the men.
I almost fall asleep at the table. Spoons clink against bowls. Len cries as he drinks spoonfuls, salty tears slipping into his ragged beard, flannel shirt loose on him.
A single gunshot the next morning brings us to the airstrip.
It’s sunny for a change. Kate and I walk over together. We haven’t said anything about what I’ve done. It should have been some kind of personal Rubicon and maybe it was but what I feel is that I held out on Kate. That I didn’t share food with her. Like I cheated. There was a time when we’d have talked about it. It’s what lesbians do, you know, we talk and talk. We negotiate our needs and our wants. We explore our feelings. But here, at the end of the world, it’s okay that some things won’t be resolved. We’ll go to our deaths with resentments and unfairness clutched to us like greedy children. What else have we got?
There’s a white T-shirt flying on a stick.
We all sit on the ground, the edge of a trench, whatever. I mostly feel as if I don’t have the energy to deal with this. Not after Art. No more decisions.
“What do you want to do?” Len asks everybody and nobody in particular.
“They surrendering?” Callie asks.
Eric’s face doesn’t exactly change but I suspect he’s thinking, “moron.”
Callie is perfectly nice. I think she was local, administration. Like a secretary or data entry. I can imagine her thinking she’d work for a few years, get a nest egg, and then get a job in Juneau. Or maybe she’s like a lot of Alaskans and she likes the ass end of nowhere and she had a husband who loved snowmobiles or something.
“I don’t trust them,” she says.
Oh for Christ’s sake.
“We can ask them,” I say. I thought I was too worn down to care but I remain myself—opinionated and unwilling to shut up till the end.
Everyone looks at me.
I stand up and yell over the tipped Land Cruiser that forms part of a barricade. I yell, “Hey! Are you surrendering?”
Kate finds me embarrassing sometimes.
A guy comes over the hill. He’s dressed in camo pants and a T-shirt and he looks normal, not super skinny. He waves his arms. “We need help! We’re dying! We’re sick!”
“All of you come out in the open!” Eric yells.
It’s a long five minutes or so before three men shuffle to the edge of the airstrip. We shout back and forth. They are all that’s left, they say. We don’t believe them. One of them weeps.
It takes most of the morning before we are convinced. There are four more guys too sick to walk. We could shoot them.
They don’t look starving. That’s the important thing.
“What if we quarantine them?” Kate asks me.
“We’d be talking Ebola levels of decontamination,” I say. “Bleach. The whole nine yards. We don’t have that stuff.”
“I’ve already had the flu,” she points out. “I’d be immune. I’d just have to be very careful.”
Three of us have had it and survived. They decide to risk meeting; everyone else will be ready for an ambush. We have rubber boots and Wellingtons, and latex gloves and hairnets that were for the kitchen staff. The three put on raincoats and gear and I use duct tape to seal the sleeves of the raincoats to the tops of the latex gloves. When they come back I will make them walk through tubs of bleach and wash everything off before putting on a pair of gloves and taking all the homemade gear off.
“Cover me,” Kate says to me, grinning—I am a terrible shot—and walks across the airstrip.
No one shoots.
That evening, in our bed, she tells me what it was like. The graves. The newly dead. The smell. The sick. The trash and carelessness. “They were, like, teenagers,” she says. One of the sick men died during the afternoon.
There is a box truck three-quarters full of supplies. Bags of beans and rice. MREs. These weird emergency bars.
Kate tells me they were convinced we had medical supplies. One of them said that he knew we had supplies when they smelled meat cooking. They assumed then that we had power, maybe a freezer.
“They’re just kids,” she says. “Like my students.” Kate taught English, Freshman Composition, in Houston. “Just clueless kids.”
“Like we have a clue,” I say.
We eat MREs. Mine is Mexican chicken stew. There is the stew and a packet of red pepper to spice it up, Spanish-style rice, and jalapeno nacho cheese spread. There are cheese-filled pretzel nuggets. There is Hawaiian punch, so sugary that when I taste it, tears come to my eyes. And these weird crackers, like saltines but coarser. Some weird refried beans with so much flavor. There’s a full-sized bag of peanut M&M’s. It’s weird, seeing it all bright. It’s exotic.
Kate gets spaghetti with meat sauce (we reached in and drew blind so we wouldn’t know what we were getting). We agree she won. It’s like canned spaghetti and comes with a weird cracker that is shaped like a slice of bread but isn’t either bread or a cracker. Cheez Whiz-type stuff, hot sauce, potato sticks, and blueberry-cherry cobbler.
I feed her some of mine because, I keep saying, I ate yesterday. Besides, I’m full. We share her blueberry-cherry cobbler, which has no crust and isn’t really anything like a cobbler but who cares and we keep the M&M’s to share in bed.
Cheese and crackers! A meal!
It makes me think that maybe we’ll survive. Maybe in a few months there will be fish in the ocean and Len will show us ways to catch them. It makes me think that a society that made things this marvelous will not just disappear.
It makes me think that none of the rest of us will get the flu.
It makes me believe we will hang on.
We sit in our bed in the big main building of the Coast Guard station—no one lives in the houses because they are too hard to defend. Our home is a mattress and box spring sitting on the floor of an office, next to a desk. I feed Kate a yellow M&M and eat a brown one.
“Don’t eat all the brown ones,” she says.
“Oh, do you like them best?”
“No, you’re giving me all the pretty ones and eating all the broken and brown ones.”
“I ate yesterday,” I say.
“I ate today.” She picks up a red one and holds it out to me on the palm of her hand.
I take it.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry I ate.” I wish they had surrendered before.
“I want you to eat,” she says.
“You’re not.”
“I am,” she says, and pops an M&M in her mouth. “Now I am again.”
I sigh and settle on my side.
“Promise me you’ll eat me,” she says. “If it happens.”
I don’t say anything.
“You’re so brave,” she whispers. “I would if I could but I can’t. I can’t be like you.”
I smell the M&M’s and the dusty carpet. I feel the bones of my hips on the mattress.
“Eat me because I love you,” she says. “Because you love me. Because you have to. Promise me.”
ECHO
VERONICA ROTH
Veronica Roth is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Divergent Series (Divergent, Insurgent, Allegiant, and Four: A Divergent Collection) and the Carve the Mark series (Carve the Mark, The Fates Divide). Her short stories and essays have appeared in the anthologies Summer Days and Summer Nights, Shards and Ashes, and Three Sides of a Heart. The Divergent Series was developed into three major motion pictures. Veronica grew up outside of Chicago and graduated from Northwestern University. She now lives in Chicago proper with her husband and dog and writes full-time. You can find Veronica on Facebook and Instagram (@vrothbooks) or at her website (veronicarothbooks.com). Her next two books are a YA short story collection, The End and Other Beginnings: Stories from the Future (fall 2019, HarperCollins), and her adult fiction debut, The Chosen One (spring 2020, John Joseph Adams Books).