“What?”
“Look,” he says, kicking the demolished dock, grabbing a plank with his hand and trying to tear it up. “This wood isn’t rotten, not quite yet, so it’ll float a bit. Long enough. And if that is a boat over there, we’ll need fuel.” And all I can do is stand there, staring at him, staring at Callie, who looks so empty and in that way so heartbroken.
“Are you saying,” Emily says, “that we’re going to use that old wood as a raft? To take us over there, where there may or may not be a boat?”
“It’s either that,” Stan says, “or we just stay here and admit we’re going to die. And I, for one, am not really good with that option.”
SO EMILY AND I go to the shed.
On the way there I look up to the sky. The clouds are swirling again.
But in the eye of it all there isn’t sunlight. There are drones. The ones with the missiles. They’re rising up and spreading out, and I can see how they’ll bank around and settle in. There’s just two of them. The smaller one that fired the first shot—I can’t see it anywhere. But it was pulled back as soon as the missile was fired. And as much as I hate it, this means we need to hurry.
I nudge Emily and point to the drones. “We need to—”
And Emily says, “Hurry, yeah, I see. Jesus.”
So we run to the terrifying shed.
There it is, right where I hoped we’d left it, as in behind us, as in for good. There’s that roof, still completely bare, as though even the snow won’t touch it. I don’t want to go in, but I have to.
So I close my eyes, and we duck down and make ourselves as small as possible so we can fit through that makeshift entryway. It doesn’t take much maneuvering before we’re inside, and I’m somehow further unsettled by how surprisingly easy it was to get in. I open my eyes, and Emily reaches out for my hand.
We scan the space frantically, our eyes lingering and then passing over a bunk bed, a desk with three surge protectors and a mini fridge under it. There’s an axe and a cabinet mounted on the wall. How so much stuff fits in this space I don’t understand, but it’s almost like it’s just slightly bigger on the inside than out.
“There,” Emily says as she ducks down and dives for the corner, where there are a bunch of red plastic jugs with capped yellow spouts—what anyone in any country would recognize as fuel containers.
“Emily, you’re a genius,” I say, and I duck down to help her.
There are six containers, which is probably as many as we can carry between the two of us. They’re empty, so now there has to be fuel left in those old gas pumps, or we’re screwed. We gather them all up, and then Emily grabs the axe on the wall to take with her. She winks at me as she does, and I do something I never imagined myself doing inside this little shed of horrors: I laugh.
But the joy is short-lived, because as we scan the room one last time to make sure we have everything we need, I notice something weird with the floorboards that the containers had been sitting on.
It’s a trapdoor.
I set the containers down and crouch before the door.
“Lorna!” shouts Emily. “What are you doing? We have to go. I can hear the drones from in here!”
“Just one second!” I say. “Do you see this? Emily, we have to open it. We can’t just leave without seeing what’s in—”
A crack, like a gunshot, rings out. I can tell it’s not right outside the shed—we’re probably not even in target range—but it brings me back to earth all the same. I can hear the drones hovering, and so I stand back up, pick up the containers, and let Emily drag me out of there.
We move fast, Emily just in front of me. The drones are nearly in a firing position right above the shed, but once we’ve run a bit, we can see that the drones don’t seem to be following us. Maybe they’re keeping their distance, sure, but maybe they also aren’t after us. Maybe they’re after the shed and whatever was under that door in the floor.
Stan and the Icelings are in sight, so I just dig in and keep going. We’re hurtling toward the docks, and when Stan sees us and what we’re carrying, he smiles for the first time in a while.
“Hurry!” he shouts, but we’re going as fast as we can. As we approach I see that another pair of drones is hovering and shining some kind of spotlight over what was once the trembling field, where everyone else left on the island still is.
“How do we know if there’s still gas in that pump?” I ask, forcing the drones out of my head so that I can keep moving forward.
“I already got what we need out of it,” Stan says, pointing to four red fuel containers at his feet, identical to the ones we brought from the shed.
“What the hell?” I say. “Why did you make us go over to that creepy shed then?”
“These are for fuel,” Stan says, pointing at the cans at his feet. Then he looks up at us and nods at the extraneous empties in our arms. “Those are for the raft.”