Chapter Sixteen: The Wayward Ones — Part 6

Aside: Heath’s Tale — Father’s Pride, Part 2

It becomes apparent to Heath, as the hours pass, that nobody knows where she is. Maybe the cops that got stunned unconscious didn’t see where Jim ran. Maybe the witnesses made themselves scarce. The tree lurches a little, distracting her worries, and Heath sighs, shifting her weight to get more comfortable. She’s been napping cautiously all day, but something in the air, in the moment, has her edgy, cautious. The Center Park feels entirely empty. Nobody comes under the tree, there is no noise to indicate people passing near her, and she can hear no animals or insects chittering. At the same time, she knows she is invisible, or at least nearly so from the ground. She wonders if her father is still out there, somewhere, waiting for a moment to get at her. At one point she has to pee, and though she puts it off at first, she knows that eventually, she’ll have to act on it. Surrendering, Heath pulls down her pants and panties, crouches awkwardly back against a branch, and lets the stream flow from between her legs. When she’s done, she fishes into her backpack and pulls out a washcloth, wiping herself, then folds the cloth so the wet side is inward, and puts it back away.

She’s dozing in the way that causes time to pass in flickers. It isn’t until the night chill settles into muscles and bones that Heath even considers climbing back out of the tree. Even then she’s afraid that her father might be waiting out there in the park for her to come to ground. She decides instead to stay up the tree all night, or at least until she’s too tired to stay safely in the branches. She doesn’t come down even when she has to go to the bathroom again, but she doesn’t put the washcloth back in her pack after she has cleaned her backside with it. Instead she lets it fall down beneath her, where it catches on some branches about twenty feet below, sitting there until a breeze chases it to ground.

Heath is still in the tree when the Storm hits. First, there is a tingling on her skin, and she clings even tighter to the tree, mesmerized by the sudden explosion of luminescence around her. The tips of the branches at the edge of her tree seem to be glowing with an intensity that is somewhere between electricity and fire, focused at pinpoints and sparkling like stars. It takes her a moment to realize that the creeping sensation across her skin is related to the glowing forces rippling in waves across the edges of every tree in the park, whether they are massive oaks, or determined little fruit and nut trees. It is like a thousand angry flashes of lightning are sparkling on the leaves of the trees, until something more fantastic draws the lightning away. She clings to the trunk of the tree as it shivers and hums, lightning ripping violently all around her, screaming like demons as its claws rip the sky and Earth, the force of its percussion popping in her ears. Though the tree isn’t moving, it moans and struggles, holding to the Earth as if something from deep within is trying to shake it from the roots up.

Gravity itself shifts and lurches, and at first she thinks the tree has uprooted and is falling, until everything settles back to almost upright and steady. The tree, having somehow held against the fro, settles peacefully back to level. Gravity resets itself, sort of off center, sort of lighter than before. At least she thinks it’s lighter, she suddenly feels off balance, like gravity has decided not to aim back in the same direction. Heath doesn’t have much time to consider, because the rain that follows the upheaval of physics around her is so violent, so severe, the only thing Heath can do is cling to the tree with all her strength and hope she won’t be shaken loose. She clutches the tree out of fear for most of the night, shaking, sobbing, and crying, her belongings and her body drenched in wet, most things made useless by the sopping.

Somehow, despite the horrors of the night, despite the terror of the day before, despite the cold hours of morning made worse by the near drowning resultant of two hours of brutal rain, Heath feels better emotionally than she has in years. It’s as if something in the horror of the Storm has cleansed her of both emotional suffering, and its false counterpart, numbness. When the light of morning allows for the first hint of sight, Heath starts her steady trek to the damp, soft earth at the base of her new best friend. As she crawls down out of the tree, she discovers three things simultaneously. She pauses on a lower branch as she makes the first discovery.

The Storm has not spared but a handful of people, and those people are in the town square, where the bodies of the dead are being piled. She can see the survivors bringing them in from houses all around, can see smoke rising high into the air from buildings hidden by the trees and walls of the park. She watches for some time, until she sees her mother, one of thousands, set like kindling on top of the growing rows of bodies. A massive soldier in an office uniform has a checklist, and is walking along the rows of bodies, marking them off. Heath doesn’t dare approach the crowd directly, perhaps irrationally afraid that she is either marked off already, or was never on the list to begin with. She isn’t worried, because nobody is looking for her, or more accurately, nobody seems to see her at all. She makes her second observation when she is forced to look away from the horrific event.

Near the center of the park, something is humming and building mist. It’s been pulling at her all night, so much so that she’s gotten used to it. Whatever it is, she knows it is nothing like anything she’s ever seen before. Her instincts tell her to avoid it. She can trace its outlines by the way things seem to hang within it, climbing straight into the sky, then arching slowly toward the Northwest. She has no idea if it goes off into space, or comes down somewhere else, she just knows it pulls at her a little, like it wants her, so Heath leans against the tree as the weight of the death is combined with this new discovery pushes down on her. While she is braced against the tree, she makes her third, very important discovery.

There are Others her age that she sees wandering in the park, watching from the trees, existing in the same kind of distraction that is currently in charge of Heath’s mind. Some have been alone a long time; some are recently without a home, just like her. She decides to call them over, to talk to them. Over the next weeks, their numbers grow to twenty, more or less, and all of them are orphans and outcasts, watching from the shadows as the survivors burn and bury the dead, hoard the food from the fields, store away supplies gleaned from the world around them. The twenty of them find it easy to stay out of sight, to gather food as needed, either from the fields, the arbor, or the supply sheds, and the twenty of them sleep and move as one, forming a family that is invisible to those who have survived the storm.

Heath stays hidden, always cautious about her father, who she did not see in the piles of bodies that were built up every day, and moved to the fields to be burned at night. Her father is not among the survivors, or the dead, initially, perhaps because, like her, he had chosen to hide from the law on the night of the storm. His body is found by its smell, some many days after the last bodies were buried. He had died that night, crouched down in an alley, scalded by the liquid fire of the Storm as it ripped through him on its way into and out of the ground via the conduction of a nearby lamppost.

Heath helps establish a leadership role within the Others, does so by creating a loose democracy. All of them seem to think Heath is a boy, or at least treat her no different than she wants to be treated, and she doesn’t do anything to change their mind about who she is. The democracy, loose and by show of hands, works quite well, as does their movement at the outskirts of the city. They live in several places, kept warm by fires they make at night, and shielded by tarps from the sight of the Glenn. Their shelters are made of tarp and poles, and are set in the forest that literally surrounds the Glenn. They move about town in small numbers, and are shunned whenever they are seen. Since nobody wants to notice them, since they don’t seem to pose any harm, the Others remain untouched and unconsidered, at least until the Outsiders come in and upset the balance and order of things.

The Outsiders cause the locals to cling to a new set of boundaries in which the Others are now within, instead of without. In a matter of a few brief days, the entire climate has shifted. The social inertia that had been a product of the larger population of the Glenn, and the world as a whole, is no longer in effect, and the People of the Glenn are becoming heated, even agitated. Heath and her friends have to be more cautious, avoid direct contact with the survivors within the Glenn, because the Major is now fervent on reigning them in, breaking them into schools, putting their hands to use. Heath and hers are too smart to be caught, however, and she knows there is an opportunity in the presence of the Outsiders, one the Major will never understand. So she chooses to watch, and wait, for that moment of potential to present itself. When it does, she’ll take it to a vote, and use the repercussions of the group decision to free herself and the Others of the Glenn forever.