He was tall and strong back then, even though he was already old, and she had heard that he had once been a professional athlete back before they stopped having teams. She imagined that must have been a long time ago, years before she was born, but he never talked about it. He mostly talked about her, and he was the only one who did so. No one else ever even paid attention to her except when they needed something. Her brothers ignored her. Her mother was a strange, distant presence, physically there, but mentally off in a place only she could visit. She barely acknowledged the rest of the family, lost in distant stares and words spoken so softly that no else could hear. River’s grandfather said it was because her father had broken her mother’s heart.
River didn’t know if this was so, but she supposed it was. She remembered very little about her father. She remembered that he was a big, noisy man who took up a lot of space and made her feel even smaller than she was. She was only three when he left. No one ever knew what caused him to go, but one day he simply walked out the door and never came back. For a long time, she thought he would. She would stand in the yard and look for him in the trees, believing he might be hiding there and daring them to find him. Her brothers laughed at her when she told them what she was doing, and eventually she tired of the game and gave up looking for him.
They lived in a small woodlands community north of the big Washington State cities, out on the Olympic Peninsula where it was still heavily forested and mountainous and empty of people and their problems. Their isolation protected them, they believed, and so they stayed in their small community, a group of about thirty families, waiting for things to change back for the better, keeping hidden and secret as the rest of the world slowly receded into a distant madness they knew about only from listening to radio and from infrequent encounters with travelers. But her grandfather was wary.
“You must never go out alone,” he would tell her, even though the others said it was safe and nothing would happen to her.
He didn’t explain, and she didn’t ask. She believed what he told her, and so she was careful not to go anywhere by herself. She was reminded of the disappearance of her father, even though she did not believe anything bad had happened to him. But when her youngest brother vanished one sunny afternoon without even the smallest trace, she knew that it was because he had ignored her grandfather’s warning. The others laughed, but she knew.
Then, two months later, when the red haze passed overhead, even though it was gone in less than a day, he told her not to eat or drink anything taken from the earth. She did as he said, but the others didn’t listen. When they began to get sick and die, he warned them they would have to leave, but they didn’t listen to him then, either. They refused to leave their home, insisting that things would get better, that the sickness would pass. They believed themselves protected in their sheltered enclave, so far removed from the rest of the world.
They believed themselves safe from its horrors.
Even though she was only nine by then, she knew they were wrong in the same way they had been wrong every time before.
It was only after all but fifty of them had died, her mother and brothers included, that they acknowledged that her grandfather was right and made preparations to leave. They built rafts to ferry themselves down the waters of Puget Sound in search of a new place to live. There were islands all along the western shoreline; one of them would provide them with a safe haven to disembark and start over.
They set out in good weather, four rafts in all. Within twenty-four hours, a storm caught up with them. Winds reached fifty miles an hour on the open water in a matter of minutes. The trailing raft was lost, capsized with all its goods sunk and its passengers swept away. Plague surfaced on the second raft a week later, and the passengers on the other two made the decision to abandon it, leaving those aboard to fend for themselves. Some talked afterward about the need for sacrificing the few for the good of the many. Fear set in as the journey wore on, and everyone began to realize how much danger they were in. It was going to get much worse, her grandfather told her privately. Bad enough that they were going to have to leave the others because sooner or later their behavior would turn irrational and everyone left alive would be at risk.
Two nights later, while the rafts were tied up in a small cove and the others were sleeping, her grandfather woke her, held his finger to his lips, and led her into the dark. She looked back once or twice as they slipped away, but no one saw them go. They walked inland through forests and fields, past empty farms and houses, skirting the towns and keeping to the countryside.
They foraged for food, which her grandfather seemed to know something about.
Most of what they found was bottled or packaged, so they were not afraid to consume it.