They set out next morning, shutting the kitchen door but making very certain that it was unlocked, and walking down the long, curving drive the bus had climbed. When the house was almost out of sight, Jill stopped to look back at it. "It's sort of like we were running away from home," she said.
"We're not," her brother told her.
"I don't know."
"Well, I do. Listen, that's our house. Dad's dead, so it belongs to you and me."
"I don't want it," Jill said; and then, when the house was out of sight, "but it's the only home we've got."
The drive was long, but not impossibly so, and the highway—if it could be called a highway—stretched away to right and left at the end of it. Stretched silent and empty. "I was thinking if there were some cars, we could flag one down," her brother said. "Or maybe the bus will come by."
"There's grass in the cracks."
"Yeah, I know. This way, Jelly." He set out, looking as serious as always, and very, very determined.
She trotted behind. "Are you going into Poplar Hill with me?"
"If we can flag down a car first, or a truck or anything, I'm going with them if they'll take me. So are you."
She shook her head.
"But if we can't, I'm going to Poplar Hill like you say. Maybe there's somebody there, and if there is, maybe they'll help us."
"I'll bet somebody is." She tried to sound more confident than she felt.
"There's no picture on the TV. I tried all the channels."
He was three paces ahead of her, and did not look back.
"So did I." It was a lie, but she had tried several.
"It means there's nobody in the TV stations. Not in any of them." He cleared his throat, and his voice suddenly deepened, as the voices of adolescent boys will. "Nobody alive, anyhow."
"Maybe there's somebody alive who doesn't know how to work it," she suggested. After a moment's thought she added, "Maybe they don't have any electricity where they are."
He stopped and looked around at her. "We do."
"So people are still alive. That's what I said."
"Right! And it means a car might come past, and that's what I said."
A small bush, fresh and green, sprouted from a crevice in the middle of the highway. Seeing it, Jill sensed that some unknown and unknowable power had overheard them and was gently trying to show them that they were wrong. She shuddered, and summoned up all the good reasons that argued that the bush was wrong instead. "There were live people back at that place. The bus driver was all right, too."
The iron gates were still there, just as she had seen them the previous day, graceful and strong between their pillars of cut stone. The lions still snarled atop those pillars, and the iron sign on the iron bars still proclaimed Poplar Hill.
"They're locked," her brother announced. He rattled the lock to show her—a husky brass padlock that looked new.
"We've got to get in."
"Sure. I'm going to go along this wall, see? I'm going to look for a place where I can climb over, or maybe it's fallen down somewhere. When I find one, I'll come back and tell you."
"I want to go with you." Fear had come like a chill wind. What if Jimmy went away and she never saw him again?
"Listen, back at the house you were going to do this all by yourself. If you could do it by yourself, you can stay here for ten minutes to watch for cars. Now don't follow me!"
She did not; but an hour later she was waiting for him when he came back along the inside of the wall, scratched and dirty and intent on speaking to her through the gate. "How'd you get in?" he asked when she appeared at his shoulder.
She shrugged. "You first. How did you?"
"I found a little tree that had died and fallen over. It was small enough that I could drag it if I didn't try to pick up the root end. I leaned it on the wall and climbed up it, and jumped down."
"Then you can't get out," she told him, and started up a road leading away from the gate.
"I'll find some way. How did you get in?"
"Through the bars. It was tight and scrapy, though. I don't think you could." Somewhat maliciously, she added, "I've been waiting in here a long time."
The private road led up a hill between rows of slender trees that made her think of models showing off green gowns. The big front door of the big square house at the top of the hill was locked; and the big brass knocker produced only empty echoes from inside the house no matter how hard her brother pounded. The pretty pearl-colored button that she pressed sounded distant chimes that brought no one.
Peering though the window to the left of the door, she saw a mostly wooden chair with brown-and-orange cushions, and a gray TV screen. One corner of the gray screen read mute in bright yellow letters.
Circling the house they found the kitchen door unlocked, as they had left it. She was heaping corned beef hash out of her frying pan when the lights went out.
"That means no more hot food," she told her brother. "It's electric. My stove is."
"They'll come back on," he said confidently, but they did not.
That night she undressed in the dark bedroom they had made their own, in the lightless house, folding clothes she could not see and laying them as neatly as her fingers could manage upon an invisible chair before slipping between the sheets.
Warm and naked, her brother followed her half a minute later. "You know, Jelly," he said as he drew her to him, "we're probably the only live people in the whole world."