Tucker was carefree. Topher is contained to the point of repression—a rule follower, a future judge or prison warden. Tucker is wild and wicked . . . was . . . was wild and wicked. Tucker is dead. Topher is stern and steady and grave. Tucker was dark and deep and complicated and infuriating.
Topher is straight and dull. Tucker was a risk taker. He jumped off cliffs and bridges, swallowed unknown pills that kept him awake for days, rode his longboard down impossibly steep hills. He set out hunting alone at night, disobeying our strict buddy system—an insane thing to do, even for him. Topher said his twin had a death wish. He got his wish. Tucker is dead. And Topher is alive. I wish it were the other way around.
“Close his eyes, please, Raven, or I will.”
He uses my full name, not “Rave” as everyone else does. Raven doesn’t suit me. When I think of ravens I imagine something serious, clever, and sleek. My puffy golden Afro and smattering of freckles make me look frivolous and festive, like a firework, which doesn’t suit me either. “The raven is inside you,” Mom used to say, and I always thought that meant it would hatch out one day, that I would morph into someone less . . . chaotic.
I still look in the mirror sometimes and am not sure who I see. Black mom, long-gone white dad. Does that make me mixed? And does part of that mix have to be the white family I don’t even know? A halo of tawny hair, full lips, rich mossy eyes, golden skin. Adding all that to my mom’s posh English, my stepfather Jack’s Michif, and the French they taught me at school makes me feel like about ten people at once. Rave suits me, like a party, but only some of the time. Not right now. Rage would be a better name right now. My karate instructors used to joke that Rage could be my fighter name, in between telling me that anger needs to be controlled, especially in martial arts. But of course, they couldn’t have known what was going to happen, how we would lose control of everything.
I feel a small twinge of guilt for wishing Topher had died in his twin’s place. A small twinge of guilt, until I remember that if Topher could have chosen any of our little band of survivors to sacrifice, it would likely have been me, the girl who was never good enough for his brother, the troublemaker who got us all arrested in the park. He would choose me because he has convinced himself that Tucker’s misbehavior was my fault. Or maybe he would choose me because I took him down in about eight seconds whenever we sparred at the dojo. Tucker says . . . said . . . Tucker said. Tucker will never say anything ever again.
He said Topher claims he lets me win. I never believed that.
Topher would choose me because of a raft of things that can’t matter anymore, now that the world is gone. He clings to the lost world, like an infant to the corpse of its mother, or a dog lingering by its dead master. Maybe now he’ll finally let go. It’s been ten weeks; that’s more than enough time for rot to set in.
The world is gone. It was taken from us, the way a massive heart attack takes a life. Swiftly, ruthlessly, almost as though there is nothing personal about it. It just has to be done.
We survived because we wanted to spend the summer volunteering with kids in a remote wilderness camp. Well, some of us wanted to. For me and Tucker and Topher, the judge, and our parents, gave us no choice but to accept a last-minute negotiation to keep us out of juvie—two months’ free labor and we would “talk about further restitution in the fall.” I guess Tucker’s panic-stricken threats to run away or do something worse if they separated us moved them too. We got to stay together and quickly adapted to the idea of a summer as junior camp counselors. Ten weeks at a wilderness camp? For Tucker anyway, what could be better? Why should the label “community service” change that? He had no shame. Topher felt enough shame for both of them.
As for me, I bore my shame. A small part of me felt guilty for dragging these two nice white boys into my messy life. A bigger part of me felt guilty about dragging my hardworking, long-suffering parents into it. The rest of me focused on the goal—a good summer, a debt paid, a lesson learned—and gave thanks that I didn’t lose Tucker as part of the deal.
But then . . .
Had it been two weeks earlier, I might be dead too. I would still have been in high school in Calgary, which, from the glow in the sky, from the days of low rumbling booms, we assume was bombed to nothing but ashes and ghosts. A week later there would have been a hundred campers here, with enough food and fuel for a week. Instead, there were only nine of us, junior counselors and trainers, for two weeks of training with Pip and David. Food for a hundred divided by eleven equals eight or nine weeks of supplies, ten if we ration carefully. Simple math. The end of the world doesn’t change that. We even have weapons; basic hunting and archery were planned camp activities, and remote camps like this always have rifles, in case of bears. So we train with them, carefully, responsibly, conserving ammo as much as possible, since there’s every chance we will need it. We have no way of knowing if the rifles or crossbows will be of any use. We have few ways of knowing anything. Communications were cut somehow, along with the main power that first night. We wait in the dark, armed and fatalistic. If they notice us, our chances are slim. They haven’t noticed us yet.
Pip and David set out in the van to find answers but never came back.
After two weeks of knowing nothing Felix rigged something up with the satellite phone and the old radio tower on the hill. We tried to send distress calls, but all we got in return was a low-frequency humming that Felix finally figured out was a video signal. He theorized that someone had hacked into one of the emergency broadcast system servers. Some of it was emergency broadcast stuff. There were repeated generic instructions to “shelter in place,” but eventually those stopped and were replaced with amateur videos.
The bandwidth was prehistorically slow. A one-minute video took hours to download to Felix’s laptop. The videos were like something from a shooting game or a horror movie. The creatures were named “Nahx” by some Russian gamer on the day of the invasion, and the name stuck. They are like walking night, moving shadows, blindingly fast and utterly ruthless. They shoot with whining dart guns. The darts do little physical damage, like tranquilizer darts, but they kill in seconds, filling their victims’ eyes with weird metallic tears. The Nahx kill indiscriminately—women, children, soldiers or not.
There are videos of humans vainly fighting back. It is often young men—they hoot and swear with feigned courage as they waste their bullets on armored enemies who won’t fall. The Nahx are unstoppable, is what the videos tell us, even the ones where we fight back. Felix spent hours a day downloading the videos, his laptop charging from the radio tower solar panel. Who is making and sending the videos is mysterious, but the message inherent in them is clear, to me anyway. They remind me of the futile bleating of a mortally injured animal.