She was fast, but not quite fast enough. Phyllis didn’t know what was happening until it had already happened. The rifle was snatched from her hands and then jabbed into her gut. She couldn’t breathe—a hollow ache vibrated in her solar plexus. Broken ribs, she thought, her mind cataloging the pain from a great distance. She felt a sharp crack to the side of her head and fell to her knees, the floor rushing up to meet her. Concussion. Cracked skull? Crumpling, her ears ringing, her sight smearing, she saw her attackers looming over her. The older man had her gun in his hands. The younger had an assault rifle slung over his shoulder that he hadn’t even bothered to raise. He hadn’t needed to. She glimpsed, for a moment, how pathetic she must look to them. How easy to snuff out. The older man raised her own gun. Pointed it at her.
And then the shots: three of them, sharp and even, one after another. The older man’s head snapped back, pieces of it spraying backward, while the younger looked down at a dampness spreading across his chest, confused to find two holes in his torso. Phyllis could see his mind catching up with his body, the slow, horrible realization that his companion was dead, that he would die also, that he was already halfway there, the threads that kept him connected to his body quickly unraveling. The two figures fell in slow motion. Wanda walked into the room, gun still raised. Phyllis watched as she stepped over the corpse of the older man and looked down at the dying boy. She could see now how young he was: barely older than Wanda. Phyllis’s head was still roaring where they’d hit her, but she swore she heard Wanda say something to him. She struggled to match the sounds to words as her brain shut down and consciousness slipped away from her.
Phyllis came to on the floor of the pantry. She wasn’t sure how much time had passed. Her head felt like a shattered egg. Strong arms lifted her, propped her against the wall. Wanda knelt down in front of her and held a cold washcloth against her forehead. Phyllis tried to reach up to touch her temple, but Wanda caught her hand and laid it back down in her lap.
“Don’t touch it,” she said. “I’ve got you.”
“What…” Phyllis tried to reassemble the jumble of moments that had led to this one. She looked past Wanda’s concerned face and saw the bodies on the floor behind her. She saw the blood, sticky and bright, congealing in a wide, shining pool. She remembered enough, in pieces. It took a little time to make sense of it, but that would be the concussion slowing her down. Wanda cleaned the wound and stitched it as if she’d been practicing for years. And in a way she had been. No, in every way. What had Phyllis been preparing her for if not this?
After the wound was bandaged, Phyllis and Wanda sat in the kitchen and drank tea so honey-sweet it made Phyllis’s teeth ache. Every few minutes, Phyllis would forget what had happened and everything seemed almost normal. But then she felt the pain in her head, the sharp stab in her ribs. She reached up to touch the bloodied gauze wrapped around her head and saw the dark stains on Wanda’s nightshirt, and it all came rushing back. Phyllis focused her eyes on the tablecloth, trying to will her swollen brain to hold on to the moment. Wanda had carried them through the night. It was Phyllis’s turn to carry them into the day. Her hand shook as she raised the mug to her lips.
“What do we do now?” Wanda asked. Phyllis could see the exhaustion beginning to take hold of her young friend. She was in shock—they both were—but there was so much that needed to be done.
“We move,” Phyllis said with a deep sigh. “It was always gonna happen someday. There’s no way to know if someone will come looking for them. If there are more.”
Wanda shook her head in disbelief. “There has to be something else. We could set traps. We could…we could be ready for them.”
Phyllis was having a hard time not slurring her speech, and she didn’t want Wanda to notice. She focused all her energy on forming the words she needed to get out. “We’re not set up to fight. But we are set up to hide and hide good. If they found us, it’s only a matter of time before someone else does, too. Fair chance there’s more, someone to wonder why they didn’t come back. And next time, who knows what happens. The water’s rising anyway, honey. It’s time.” Phyllis watched Wanda’s face as she resisted this, then accepted it; the shift happened so fast it was almost invisible, but Phyllis knew this girl, this woman, inside and out. She could see the understanding take root and begin to grow. One minute Wanda was prepared to defend this house to the death, and the next, she was cataloging what she would bring and what she would leave behind.
It wasn’t just the intruders. The water was already taking the driveway, the lower garden beds, the citrus grove. In a year, it would be lapping at the house. They could wear their muck boots downstairs, wading to the kitchen instead of walking. They could keep mostly to the second floor. But even that was temporary. A waiting game, to see how fast the water would rise and how long the wooden frame of the house would stand against the tide. No, life had already changed in unimaginable ways, and now it would change again. This had always been the way it would go. Creating this off-the-grid sanctuary was a stopgap. A bridge to span the chasm between the old world and the new. But even the idea of the grid, of being on it or off it, was just another ruse of civilization. The grid was gone. In some ways, it had never existed at all. She hadn’t ever imagined that she would live to see things progress this far, but here she was—living. She watched as Wanda came to terms with all of this.
“I know a place,” Wanda finally said. “In the nature reserve. I…it’s where I go when I want to think. The trees are sturdy enough to build in.”
Phyllis nodded, suddenly aware that by now Wanda knew this land even better than she did. “All right. That’s where we’ll go.”
“But what do we do with the…” Wanda trailed off, unable to choose the right word. “We can’t just leave them. Can we?” Phyllis considered the corpses in the other room. If only she’d been faster, been stronger, if only she’d been the one to pull the trigger. But she hadn’t. The days of wishing for things to be different were gone. Those men were dead because Wanda had killed them. Ruthlessness was not such a bad quality in this place.
“We burn them,” Phyllis replied. “We burn everything.”
In the pantry, Phyllis filled a plywood crate with glass canning jars containing the harvests of years past. These stores had diminished over time, but that only made them more precious. There would be no more harvests from the garden, no more days spent over a hot stove, sterilizing jars, boiling vegetables, slicing fruit, making jams and sauces and sides. This was all of it. Stepping around the drying blood, she tried not to look at the bodies as she gathered the last of the jars, but there they were. The smell of them was already blooming. The heat of the early-afternoon sun shining through the window grew more intense by the hour. She would have opened the window, but pieces of the older man’s head had spattered against the latch and she couldn’t bring herself to touch it.
She realized she had stopped packing up the jars without noticing, that her hand was grazing the bandaged wound on the side of her head while she stood, frozen, staring into the open eyes of the dead boy. He was so young. There was something almost familiar about him. The older man she couldn’t bear to look at. The pink of his head, the crush of it, the pieces that were missing and the pieces that were still there—she recalled the shape of his mouth as he trained her own rifle on her, a smile, a laugh even, and was glad he was dead. And then it hit her. The day at Target. The father and his twins.