Xander appears on the path with Lochie and Emily, the two Australians. Wisps of smoke trail behind them. I sit up as Xander passes the joint to Topher.
“Where did you get this?” Topher asks, taking a deep drag. He passes it to me and I puff on it silently. When it becomes clear I’m not giving it up, Xander produces another one and lights it on the embers of our fire.
“Broke into the office,” Xander says. “Sawyer and Felix are hoarding medicine in there. And this.”
“They confiscated it from me when I arrived,” Lochie says, in a halo of smoke. Lochie looks like a stoner, a typical sunburned and bleached-hair surfer dude, but he’s also a hard-core survivalist who can make a fire by rubbing sticks together and eats insects and slugs for our amusement.
Soon we’re all as high as the silver moon. Emily sits behind me, arranging my tangled curls into a dozen little braids and twirling and tying them with ribbons of dry grass. She’s a pale and dreamy hippie chick, who paradoxically is also something of a weapons expert, from her outback farm upbringing with three gun-crazy brothers. She taught Tucker to use the crossbow. They practiced until his aim was lethal.
Not lethal enough though, apparently.
I never liked having my hair fussed over for longer than a few minutes. When I twist away from Emily, she turns her attention to Xander, making him a crown of pine fronds. He wears it with surprising dignity, like Chinese royalty, a beautiful Ming dynasty prince.
As he starts another tune on his harmonica, I lie back and gaze up at the stars again. By now we are used to the large bright ones that move in unexpected patterns, and the occasional flashes. Sawyer thinks the Nahx are destroying satellites, one by one, and space junk that interferes with their ships. This is why our satellite phone stopped working. Our cell phones turn on, if we charge them with the solar generator, but apart from reading old e-mails or looking at photos of people we’ll probably never see again, they’re useless.
Ten weeks. It’s been ten weeks. There are eight of us left. Right now five of us are so wasted, a band of invading Smurfs could paint us blue and eat us. But who cares? I have nothing left to lose.
The stars move, and move back. One pops in a flash. And one shoots out of sight.
Yes. Like that last beautiful night on Earth.
The first group of campers were due to arrive in two days. We had been training, building on skills we already had. Pip and David had to make the most of us, since half their crew had been denied work permits due to some kind of immigration screwup. Self-defense and martial arts was my class. Topher would do canoeing and fishing, Tucker, what else? High ropes, climbing, and zip line—the dangerous stuff. Mandy would teach first aid, Emily weapons and hunting, and Lochie botany, maybe what mushrooms to eat, depending on how you want to feel. Xander, a friend of Tucker’s whom we roped in at the last minute after another permit was denied, was down for orienteering. He threw himself into it with typical zeal. We all did. To avoid a sentence of vandalism and destruction of city property, it was a pretty good deal for Topher, Tucker, and me. And the rest were getting a nice wage. Oh, what fun we were going to have helping kids learn “How to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse.”
Shit. The irony.
That night Tucker and I disappeared down to the lake right after dinner, stripped down to our bathing suits, and sparred, old-school karate style, on the dock until I was able to knock him into the lake. At the last second he grabbed my wrist and pulled me down after him.
“Illegal hold,” I said, spitting water.
“Hold this,” he said, pressing my hand to his crotch under the water. But Xander and Topher appeared on the shore.
“Have you seen the meteors?” Topher said. But of course they weren’t meteors.
On the second night of the invasion we hiked up to the ridge and watched the repeated blinding flashes from the horizon, waiting each time for the sound wave to reach us like a thumping blow to the chest. We had no word from anyone in Calgary. By this time the phone, TV, Internet, and radio were all dead. Without ever discussing it, we all came to a silent consensus that Calgary was gone. And with it Tucker and Topher’s parents, Xander’s family, and all our other friends. In the early days, we spoke of these losses as though they were real and confirmed, but eventually we stopped discussing it. Tucker confessed to me that he still thought of his parents as alive.
“It’s easier,” he said, which was odd. He was never one to choose the easy path, even when it came to emotions. Maybe he meant it was easier for Topher.
As for my parents, they were planning to make their annual drive out to the coast, leaving on the day of the invasion. Maybe if they weren’t in an urban area, or were able to get off the main roads, they could be hiding somewhere too. Jack was an experienced wilderness camper, and though Mom wasn’t a big fan of camping, she knew what to do. But it all depends on what time of day they left. And how far they got. I try not to think about it, because there’s also a chance that they’re dead with everyone else. And everything I wanted to prove to them, everything I wanted to apologize for, everything I promised to fix is gone. Forty-eight hours was all it took. Our world is gone too. We grieve. And survive.
But for what?
I blink away the afterimage of exploding stars as Topher lies down beside me.
“We have to get out of here,” I say.
“I know.”
“The food is almost finished, and anyway there won’t be enough daylight to properly run the solar for much longer. And we have hardly any fuel. We should have rationed better.”
“I guess we thought we’d be rescued. Or something. We were supposed to shelter in place, remember?”
More irony. Of all the government advice and instructions I have ignored in my life, that “shelter in place” is the one I ended up following. I’m pretty sure it was the wrong choice.
“The fuel will run out before the snow comes,” I say. “Then we’re completely fucked.”
“Hunting is obviously dangerous,” Xander offers. I look up to see that everyone is facing us, listening.
“Where can we go?” Lochie says. “I don’t know much about this area, but I think Xander and I can keep us alive in the wild for a little while. As long as we keep clear of the baddies.”
“We’re about a day’s hike from the nearest town,” Topher says. “But Tuck was heading that way.”
“It might be safer to go in the other direction,” Xander suggests. “Toward Calgary, stay off the highway though, go along the river. There’s a kind of tourist resort at Whatsitcalled, in the foothills. Right? Maybe people are hiding out there. That’s what I would have done, if I’d been in town. Headed to high ground.”
“How long?” Emily says.
“Two days maybe. There’s a lot of uphill. It depends what we take with us.”