Chapter One
From her vantage point high in the roof, Evie studied the barren landscape. As usual, nothing moved.
She never got used to the silence.
In the beginning, people had come, confused but still confident.
As time passed, they dwindled to a few—exhausted, bewildered, and hungry.
After a meal, the wanderers, as she and Markey had come to call them, moved aimlessly on, convinced they’d find something better over the hill. Evie’s heart squeezed in her chest when she said goodbye to those people. Especially the children with eyes like crushed velvet. She’d send them off with a small parcel of food.
Some people were not so friendly and Markey had been forced to keep their small hoard of provisions hidden behind a panel in the library. They’d been luckier than many. Her parents’ country bed and breakfast hotel was well stocked with food. They’d eaten the refrigerated stuff until the generator gave out and denuded her father’s avocado plantation, living on the fruit until Evie half expected her skin to turn green. The trees were now like everything else around, bare and lifeless. In the early days, there’d been a good supply of canned and packaged food in the pantry, but that dwindled fast.
Evie knew the day would soon come when she would have to go too. What would she find over the hill, where the purple-grey cloud sat unmoving on the horizon? No one had ever come back to tell them. |
