hesitates.
“She knows more than you think. About the world. About what your chances of survival are.” He pauses. Her face isn’t far from his, and she smells the berry sweetness of his breath.
“Our chances of survival,” he says softly.
Margie lets the rope trail from her fingers and stumbles to the other end of the porch until the railing bites her hips.
“What do I have to do to prove my loyalty to you, Marg?” Calvin asks. “How many nights do I have to sit out here tied up when we both know your knots are crap and I could escape anytime? What will it take for you to trust me?”
Margie slumps, sliding down until she sits on the edge of the porch. Fireflies flash in the gardens, bright reminders that for some creatures the world hasn’t changed.
“I’m the one who had to kill my mother,” Margie confesses. Her chin trembles, her whole body shaking. A breeze trips up the mountain, cool and crisp like fall. “After the change we got out of the city and we found a place and for a while it was safe, but then we were ambushed. My father yelled but no one could hear. They took my mother, and my father resisted, and I didn’t know what to do but grab Sally and run into the woods. I watched what they did to my mother, and when my father tried to fight, they killed him and tossed his body aside. I could smell the death and hear the moans and then they just left my mother on the ground while they ransacked inside. I told Sally to stay and I found my mother and there were bite marks all over her and she said nothing when I held the gun against her.”
She inhales as if she’s never known air before. “We had somewhere safe, and they took it.”
Calvin strips the ropes from his arms and pulls her against him. More than anything else in the world Margie wants to sob and grab hold. Just to know that there’s someone out there to help her survive so that she doesn’t have to carry it all.
He holds her so tight she feels like she might snap, and she pushes against him because she needs to hear his heart and feel every inhalation. “Sally doesn’t know,” she says against his shoulder. “She doesn’t know what it takes to survive.”
He presses his lips against the crown of her head and whispers, “Hush,” into her ear with his hot breath. Around them night peepers scream to each other, tree frogs wailing for the darkness.
Margie doesn’t tie Calvin up but instead lets him help her inside, where they lie on the couch and she thinks that maybe there is such a thing as survival in this world.
When the two men charge into the cabin, Calvin’s the first to reach for the gun. Margie falls from the couch to her knees and wants to scream for Sally but presses her lips tight, hoping that maybe the strangers won’t know there’s someone else inside.
Calvin flips off the safety and raises the gun to his shoulder. The strangers are tall and broad, one of them with a tangled beard and the other with black hair slicked back behind his ears. It’s almost too easy to see the family resemblance to Calvin, and Margie goes numb as she notices.
“How quaint,” the bearded man says. He strolls inside as if there isn’t a shotgun pointed to his chest. He glances around— at the map on the table, at Margie’s face that’s still rubbed a little raw from Calvin’s unshaven cheeks.
He turns to face Calvin while the slick-headed man leans against the door frame. “Nicely done, little brother,” he says. “You checked there’s food enough for winter and the other guns are secured?”
Calvin nods, eyes downcast.
Margie chokes. Her body flames a deep burning red as shame churns inside. It feels like the moment her family was ambushed on the road, when time seemed to slow down and she noticed the most pointless details. Now she feels the grit of the hardwood floor biting into her knees and realizes how badly she needs to pee.
Slick Hair moves toward the loft. “Where’s the other one?”
Margie tries to block his way and she’s shoved to the ground, her head hitting the corner of a chair as she falls. She paws at the man, hooking her fingers in his clothes, but he bats her away, crushing her hand until she feels something pop and give.
“Sally!” she screams, loud and raw and filled with rage. The bearded one grabs her, lifting and twisting until her arm’s behind her back, his knife against her throat. She struggles, not caring at the bite of the blade into her skin.
“Margie,” Calvin says. It’s his voice that stops her. He’s still holding the gun. Her gun. She wants to close her eyes, but she doesn’t because she deserves this. To see what she’s brought down on her sister.
Her lips still vibrate from when Calvin kissed her, and she spits at him, hating the taste of him still in her mouth. He blanches and sidesteps her attempt at outrage, and his two brothers laugh, Slick Head reaching out and slapping his shoulder hard enough to make him stumble. Calvin’s cheeks flare a bright embarrassed pink, and his eyes leap to Margie’s and then away again, a shuttered mortification flashing through them.
“Tell her to drop the ladder,” Beard says into Margie’s ear.
She shakes her head. Already she can feel the sobs coming, and they taste like failure. She swallows and chokes trying to get the words out: “Don’t do it, Sally. You stay where you are!”
“Drop the ladder or I start carving your sister!” Beard shouts up toward the loft. He slides the blade along her collarbone and then digs it into Margie’s shoulder. Even though she bites her lips, she can’t stop the scream. The pain’s nothing like she’s ever known before, an explosion of fire as her body realizes how deeply the knife has sunk.
Margie’s knees give out, her legs limp and useless. As she slides toward the floor she looks to Calvin for help, but he just stands there, his hands tight around her gun and his eyes on the blood curling down from the gash in her shoulder.
He kissed that exact spot the night before. Traced his lips over that stretch of skin as she gasped and pulled him closer with a type of need he’d said he’d never been a part of before. Now the flesh is torn, the edges ragged from the unsharpened knife, and he looks like he can’t stop trying to figure out how something once so whole and perfect can become that broken so easily.
Margie braces her uninjured arm against the floor, fingers splayed to hold her weight before she collapses. She’s wheezing— loud and gagging from the pain. Beard grabs her hair and drags her out into the middle of the room to make sure Sally can see what he’s doing.
He pushes Margie to her knees, yanks her head back until her spine arches. Presses the knife against her throat, sweat glistening along the ridges of her tendons. “I don’t like asking twice,” he growls up at Sally, who huddles behind the banister, eyes wide and hands pressed over her mouth as her shoulders shake.
“Stop it!” Sally shouts. “Okay, I’m coming down. Just stop hurting her!”
She unfurls the ladder as Margie begs, “No, Sally, stay up there,” but Sally ignores her.
She’s halfway down, her bare toes wrapping over the wooden rungs, when Slick Head grabs her around the waist with a thick arm. Sally’s already anticipated the move because she pushes herself back, twisting the rope of the ladder around his neck and hauling his feet from the ground.
He kicks out, the rope tightening, and his mouth wrenches open—a black, choking maw ringed by yellowed teeth.
“Jeffrey!” Beard shouts as his brother starts to scratch wildly at his throat, his face flaring red.
“The knife!” Slick Head wheezes out, and Beard throws Margie to the ground. He jumps toward his brother, but Margie kicks at his feet, throwing him off balance so that he trips and falls, the knife skittering from his hand as his fists slam against the hardwood floor.
Sally’s there in the middle of it, swooping in for the knife as it slides past her. Everything stills as the pieces of the moment reorder and shift back together again: Margie struggling to