I walked along for hours, my mind wandering. I was thankful for the bright moon that saved me from needing my flashlight. It felt funny to think that same moon was shining over the compound, that it was still there the same as always, with my whole family asleep in their beds. I wondered how long they would be awake before they knew I was gone. Well, before Papa and Ruth knew. My aunts and uncles had known even before I did, hadn’t they? As soon as they heard about Zeke Johnson, they must have started planning. Maybe even before that, I guessed. They all knew this day would come.
Eventually the day started catching up to me, and then all at once I felt so tired I could barely stand. I went a little deeper into the woods, farther from the road, and found a good spot to make camp. There was a small tarp and some lengths of cording in the pack Amber had given me, and I strung up a little shelter from a low branch. Then I unrolled my blankets and was gone as soon as my head hit the pillow. You’d think I’d be too scared or worried to fall so quick into such a black, heavy sleep, but I guess those hours of walking had given my mind time to run itself out. I slept for hours and woke up when the sun was already high in the sky. I figured they’d be up and looking for me now around the compound.
I wondered how long it would take for the thought to settle in that I might have gone farther than just across the woods to my usual stomping grounds. My clothes were all still there, I’d barely taken anything from my room, and no one knew what Amber had in that little trailer to recognize that things were missing. Oh, Ruth and Papa would be hopping mad that I wasn’t right there at breakfast, showing off my woman skills to that man. But I was pretty sure it would be tomorrow before they really started to think I was gone. They didn’t think I had it in me. It gave me a little bit of satisfaction to know that they were wrong, but the thought of them coming after me still made my heart pound.
It was hot and muggy enough to make me wish I’d gotten up sooner, so I decided to change into a pair of the shorts and a short-sleeve shirt Amber had packed for me. Now, I slept out in the woods all the time, but I’d never felt the need to change clothes out there before. I felt silly looking around and worrying that someone might see me when I knew good and well it was just me, the birds, and a family of squirrels watching from their nest in the fork of the big oak I’d camped under, but I couldn’t help it. Then I found out that taking pants off didn’t work exactly the same way as putting them on, which I had only ever done the one time, and I got my feet tangled up and fell over trying to get out of the blame things. Since I was down there I figured it might be safer to stay that way, so I scooted myself over to where I was sitting on my bedroll and peeled them the rest of the way off.
Putting on the shorts was a lot easier, but I had to laugh when my feet came right back out the leg holes almost as soon as I’d stuck them through the waistband. It felt more like putting on underpants than pants! The short-sleeve shirt wasn’t so bad, and I tied the shoes back on even though I still wasn’t sure they were strictly necessary. I got up and walked around in a little circle, trying to get used to having so much skin out in the open. It felt strange, but these clothes were admittedly cooler and easier to move around in than my old dresses. By the time I ate a little bread and goat cheese from the pack and rolled and tied up my blankets, my hair had fought its way almost completely out of the braid I’d started out with the night before. It stuck to the sweat on my face and neck, and on impulse, I picked up my knife to hack the whole mess off. I knew I was just bluffing, though. I could never go back home with short hair. Clothes were easy to take off and put back on, but I’d been growing that hair since I was twelve and Papa made Ruth stop cutting it off at the shoulders to keep the tangles at bay. I dropped the knife into my pack and twisted the whole mop into a big knot as high up on my head as I could get it.
The undergrowth got too thick for me to venture very far from the road, but I pushed in as far as I could for fear of being seen. The sun was too hot out on the road anyway, but the mosquitoes were worse in the shade. I walked for a few hours in a sweaty daze before I came across the exit to what was left of a town. It curved off the hi-way so part of it hung in the air, held up by big round concrete pillars, and the pavement had broken off in big chunks and fallen to the ground underneath.
I knew I should keep moving, but curiosity got the best of me and I picked my way down the embankment to the low road. It was all abandoned gas stations and restaurants up above, but down there was just houses. It looked like they had been laid out in neat rows, with little square yards out front and a porch on each house, but now the yards were all grown up in tangles of weeds and vines, and a lot of the houses had either burned or caved in from weather. The brick ones had held up best, but only a few with metal roofs still looked anything like whole. There were old rusted-out cars and trucks in front of a lot of them.
It was spooky, walking along those abandoned streets. I was used to big empty spaces, but this was a place meant to hold people in. There used to be families living in those houses, and now there was nobody left. I guess I’d never really felt it before, what it meant that the world had emptied out. It looked like God had reached His mighty hand and turned the whole place upside down and just shook it until all the loose pieces fell away and were lost. All that was left either grew out of the ground or was nailed to it, and every bit of it looked broken and wrong. I could hear the sound of my own breathing all of a sudden, too loud and heavy. Even the silence was wrong in that place. Papa preached that vengeance was God’s, and it sure looked like He had taken vengeance on the people who used to live in this town. And all the towns like it, all the cities and countries of the world. It took my breath away to see even that little piece of it.
At first when the scientists and the government agents noticed the birth counts going down, they didn’t think nothing of it. This was a story Ruth had told me many times and one I had heard all the grown people talking about since I was too little to really even understand it all. Things were different back then in the mid-2000s—people lived fast lives. Everything was lit up and electric and run by machines, everyone driving their cars around everywhere they went. This made the air and the water real dirty, even though most of the cars had changed over to run on electricity instead of gasoline, and it made the people tired and run-down and mad all the time. Papa said his grandpa Jed had often preached about things he heard growing up and how, back then, children were not always looked at as blessings from God, and sometimes people even did terrible things to them. This hurts me to try to think about, and Ruth would not explain what kind of terrible things, since she said it was in the past and gladly so. I’m not too sure she even knew the specifics, having been born and raised a girl on the compound, but I guess they’d both heard the grown-ups’ whispers and stories the same way I did. I walked through that empty town and tried to imagine what terrible things might have gone on inside those houses, but I couldn’t. The whole place felt empty and sad now, but it was hard to believe that the people who lived in those little houses and sat on the porches had been evil.
Ruth said that at first it seemed like people just didn’t want to have so many babies anymore, which should have showed right off that something was wrong, because, to hear her tell, they shouldn’t have had babies since they didn’t want to take care of them and barely knew how anymore. That would have showed sense, she said, and Lord knows people didn’t have too much good sense in those days. For one thing, young girls and unmarried ladies had been having babies on accident for as long as anyone could remember, which was a whole possibility that I couldn’t really get clear on, but then all of a sudden, that wasn’t happening so much. And then by the time Jed married my great-great-grandmother Anna, it was hardly happening at all.