CHAPTER 3
The Forgotten Place
Either the flash or the boom from the explosion—she couldn’t know which—startled Elsie from her sleep. Thing is: She hadn’t realized she was sleeping; she’d only begun telling herself she was simply resting her eyes and the world dropped away and she was transported, weightless, to some other place, some other world, when the sound of the explosion anchored her rudely back to her present circumstances. She rubbed her eyes and squinted against the dark of the night; somewhere, a fire was raging, a flickering glow on the distant horizon. A few months ago, such a sound would’ve set her heart racing, but now, two months into her newfound life, it served only to remind her that she was neglecting her duty.
Answering a pleading ache from her crisscrossed legs, she stood up and stretched, her hand holding tight to the broken brick wall. It was a long fall from this distance, she judged. She kicked at the ground; a piece of rock flew from her perch and sounded, some seconds later, on the ground below.
Another explosion lit up the dark; this time she saw it happen. Some chemical silo, miles distant. Flames erupted skyward and showered the surrounding buildings with light and stray metal. The fire smoldered a little but soon became indistinguishable from the gas flares and yellow electric lights that dotted the landscape of the Industrial Wastes. They were curious, these explosions. They happened fairly regularly, enough that it was clear they weren’t part of the normal workings of the Wastes. The older kids said there was a war going on, but between whom, they couldn’t say. They’d all grown accustomed to the noise—the flash and the boom—and treated it as you would the sound of the garbage truck appearing at your curb, or the mailman knocking on your door.
She was tempted to press the voice-box button of the doll she held in the crook of her arm—it was an Intrepid Tina toy and so came preprogrammed with every manner of confidence-building aphorism—but held off, having been forbidden by the older kids to do so for fear of alerting anyone to their presence in the warehouse. Instead she pulled the doll’s face close to hers and gave it a quick pat on the shoulder with her fingertip.
“It’s okay, Tina,” said Elsie. “No explosions here.”
The dark was taking on a tinge of blue, heralding the coming sunrise. To Elsie’s left, just below her, a light winked. She looked at it; a voice came in a loud whisper: “Elsie!”
“Michael?”
“It’s five. Hit the hay.”
“Got it.” Elsie grabbed the small bag at her feet. Opening it, a burlap bag one might carry onions or potatoes in, she stowed the provisions she’d packed for the evening: a flashlight, a bag of raisins, and a yellowed pamphlet on earthquake safety (her only reading material). By the time she’d finished, Michael appeared at the top of the stairs that led from the perch. For a moment, they shared the narrow space that was the warehouse’s stairwell, the brick wall that had once hidden it long broken away.
“How’d it go?” he said.
“Fine,” said Elsie. “Nothing special. Couple explosions, just now. One after another, real quick. Otherwise, normal stuff.” She paused, remembering. “Oh. And I saw him.”
“Him. The Weirdo?”
“Yeah, but it was a ways off.”
The boy sniffed a few times, looking out at the vista. They’d called the figure the Weirdo, or at least that’s what Carl had called it—he was the first one to have spotted the figure—and it had first made its appearance a few weeks prior. They couldn’t tell if the Weirdo was a he or she—it was too shrouded in clothing and blankets to be discernible. They’d quickly deduced that this person—whoever it was—was mostly harmless, as it rarely strayed very close to their hideout and when it did, a well-placed rock seemed to scare the thing away handily, like a sad, stray dog.
Clearly, Michael was unalarmed, saying to Elsie, “Well, Sandra’s got some oats on the stove. If you’re quick, you could be first in line.”
“Okay, thanks,” said Elsie. She handed Michael the rusty machete she’d propped against a pile of bricks at her side. He accepted it with a grunt of thanks. It was the only weapon the Unadoptables carried—they’d found it nearly a week into their residency in the Wastes, lodged amid a thicket of half-hacked blackberry brambles. She took a few careful steps down the wooden stairs before lighting the flashlight, as she’d been taught. It was one of many precautions they took; the more invisible they remained, the less likely they were to be found out. Even in this farthest redoubt of the lonely Industrial Wastes, a vast wilderness of burned-out warehouses and buildings, which the Unadoptables had taken to calling the Forgotten Place.
The light was growing as Elsie made her way down the twisting stairway, lighting the path ahead through the great breaks in the brick walls and the emptied window frames. By the time she’d made it back to the floor of the abandoned warehouse, the place was filled with a dim light and a fire was raging in a metal barrel in the center of the massive room. A few pigeons darted between the eaves and the rafters, high above her head, and the sleeping forms of the other children were like the peaks of little waves on the weathered wooden floor. Sandra was stirring something in a black metal pot, and she greeted Elsie as she arrived.
“Morning,” said Sandra.
“Morning,” said Elsie. “Whatcha cooking?”
“Gruel. I think,” the cook said, smiling. She scooped up a ladleful of the pot’s contents by way of demonstration: It looked like phlegm.
“Yum,” said Elsie. “I love gruel.”
“That’s the spirit,” said Sandra. She grabbed a tin bowl and, filling it with the pasty stuff, handed it to Elsie. “Dig in.”
Elsie could feel her stomach growling as she made her way over to the children’s dining area: an old cafeteria table, rotted by weather and disuse. By now, the rest of the kids were rousing and pulling themselves from their salvaged blankets. A familiar mop of black hair appeared from one such blanket and proceeded to shake itself out: It was Elsie’s sister, Rachel, fifteen years old as of this morning. She sat in her pile of blankets as if marinating in them, clearly mourning inwardly about having a birthday in such desperate circumstances. Elsie put a spoonful of gruel in her mouth and let the warmth descend into her chest and fan out across her shoulders and into her arms. She watched her sister stare into space until she couldn’t take it anymore. “Rach!” she said.
Rachel looked in her direction; her eyes were sad, quiet.
“Happy birthday,” said Elsie, stirring her gruel.
Her sister smiled and pushed herself up. Many of her fellow sleepers had made their way over to Sandra’s pot of morning mush. Rachel walked over and sat across the table from Elsie.
“Thanks, sis,” said Rachel.
Elsie spoke around a mouthful of food. “Get some gruel. It’s good. Sandra made it.”