Helen’s bare feet were cracked and calloused, and her toenails were gnarly, overgrown and yellowed. The hems of her pants were a mess of loose threads, and the denim was so worn that it was more grey than blue. She sat beside the campfire whittling a stick into a small spear. The children watched her indirectly as they always did. It had been months or maybe even a year since their parents had failed to collect them from summer camp. All the other councilors had gone. But, not Helen. Helen still wore her Camp Amaia baseball cap. She collected food from what was left of the camp’s preserves as well as hunting and gathering what she could. Aura, the eldest of the children at fourteen-years-old, told the others that the preserves were magical and infinite, and they believed her because that was easier than fearing the hunger that chased them. Helen was only twenty-six or twenty-seven, but the children all assumed she must have been forty or fifty because her hair had quickly turned dishwater grey and bits fell out every time she ran her fingers through it. She did this compulsively and thoughtlessly.
Notre protectrice, little Fe called her. Helen had given Fe, the youngest now that Chansey had gone, her old college French textbooks. The little girl spent her days exchanging old words for new ones. There was a sense of accomplishment in translating her world into a new vocabulary. It made it different in a way that wasn’t really substantial, but it was something.
Once, two men had come up to the camp thinking that they would help themselves to the supplies held there. Helen had taken the hunting rifle she kept strapped to her back and popped two of her precious remaining bullets through the men’s brain stems. She was a good shot. Her mother had taught her to hunt when she was young. That had happened late in the previous autumn, and it was a blessing, in many ways, that they had come to rob them. Those men had provided the camp with the majority of the meat that sustained them through the winter. Big game hadn’t been spotted since before things got desperate, and the traps they set for smaller animals were empty more often than not. There were still fish in the lake, but their eyes were white and sightless, and their scales sloughed off at the slightest touch. Barely alive before the hook pierced their gaping lips.
Aura was telling the younger children a story as they all indirectly watched Helen. “…and then Avery said to the demon…” Stories took up much of their time. Aura was skilled at crafting elaborate tales. Over the course of the past few months, she’d been shaping a saga that featured all of them. Tanner was a lion tamer, his role inspired by his dark golden hair. In reality, he allowed his mane to fall into his eyes to hide the moisture that resided there permanently, but in the story, he was unafraid. Avery, the twelve-year-old with a talent for climbing trees and raiding birds’ nests, was a witch. Jamie was seven, and until Chansey and Liz and all the others had gone, he had spoken of his parents as if they might still come to retrieve him. In the story, he was Superman with a pet dinosaur.
The camp itself had once been cliché and lovely, a relic of a former, more plentiful time. Nestled deep within the pinewoods of the Rockies, it was a smattering of log cabins and archery ranges. The lake’s cold, murky waters sparkled brilliantly when the sun hung low in the sky. Now the pines were mostly skeletons, stripped by the beetles that had progressively ravaged the forest once logging had stopped. Perhaps objectively, the camp was still lovely in its own way. Without the chatter of young campers wearing colorful tee-shirts and picking dried glitter glue from their fingers, it had adopted the haunted quality of liminal spaces; schools during summer vacation and dusty gas stations on empty stretches of highway.
Helen went to check the traps. She moved as if her spine was collapsing in on itself. A symphony of cracks and moans accompanied her wherever she went. She coughed incessantly, but they all did. Lungs weren’t built for this new atmosphere. Evolution couldn’t keep up with the increasing demands of their environment. Avery went with her as well as Emmett, a boy of thirteen who had once been a promising athlete though now his teeth were rotting out of his grey-white gums. Aura stayed behind with Fe and the other small ones. In her story, they had just outsmarted the devil, and that was cause for celebration. Tanner grinned the kind of grin only little boys could produce. By the time they’d grown up, it would be corrupted. If a man grinned, it meant danger; it meant filth and violence and triumph and entitlement. Like the men who’d come to rob them. But when they were young, it could still just mean joy.
Emmett touched every tree they passed. One of them, he was sure, was secretly a door to somewhere else. A Narnia or Terrabithia or Middle Earth. Anywhere really, it didn’t matter. When he touched it, he would know. A sense of wonder would wash over him, and he would be certain that he had saved them all, delivered them to the promise land. One of these days, it would happen. It had to.
Helen sang softly to herself, but the children listened intently. It was an old song, before their day, before hers even. Some girl group back in the eighties. What were they called again? Who knows? No one, ever again. Perhaps there was still internet somewhere in the world. Somewhere, someone maintained a server and had access to a search engine. The whole of human knowledge available at the touch of a button. They could look up the name of the girl group, find the lyrics that evaded her. They could look up how to survive this, how to rise up from the ashes. Or maybe that wasn’t true. Probably, that wasn’t true. It was difficult, sometimes impossible, to imagine the world wide web simply ceasing to exist. A modern day burning of Alexandria.
They’d caught a rabbit. Emmett offered Helen a high five. Avery climbed up into a tree to seek out eggs, not finding anything. She hummed the melody Helen had been singing, or at least an imitation of it. She wasn’t sure she’d ever heard the original.
Helen never let the children touch the dead animals. She skinned them and dressed them herself. Over time it had become meditative, almost prayerful.
-Thank you, she whispered to them, and then:
-You’re welcome.
Because it was a kindness she was affording them, wasn’t it? What was the point of being wild now? Anything new wouldn’t survive to produce viable offspring. There was no continuation to hope for. Just more of what today was, and then nothingness. And the nothingness had to be a relief. Half the things they caught, they really shouldn’t have eaten. That was part of the reason Helen wouldn’t let the children help. She didn’t want them to see the already rotting meat or the maggots burrowing beneath so recently alive skin. She didn’t want them to see the cancer and the mutations. Didn’t want them to get any ideas about what might be happening inside their own bodies.
The skin fell from the rabbit as if the muscle underneath had been waiting its whole life to shrug it off. The entrails were shrunken and grey and riddled with tumors save for the spleen which was swollen and a deep, sickly jewel-toned blue-red. The liver was spotted an infectious yellow. But at least this one didn’t seem to have too many bugs.
Before bed, Fe led them in prayer. She’d been raised Catholic, and though she’d let most of the teachings slip from her mind, lessons about long-dead sons of God seeming silly now, she remembered her prayers.
-I pray the lord my soul to keep…
The words didn’t mean anything more than any other words meant, but they were ritual, and ritual rooted reality. If they didn’t pray before bed, there was nothing to differentiate their sleeping hours from their waking ones. When Fe rose in the morning, she would commence studying her français, exchanging old words for new ones, hoping a fresh tongue might provide some sense of motion among the monotony.
But sleep did not always come readily. Sometimes they tossed in the creaky old bunk beds of the cabins. The mattresses were thin and smelled of mothballs. At the beginning, Helen had waited for all the children to fall asleep before crying softly to herself. Not anymore though. She was too tired to cry, so tired her very bones seemed to succumb to her weariness.
On this occasion, Jamie found that unconsciousness eluded him, and he slipped from the iron bars of the bunk bed. They had been repainted at the beginning of the summer, before things got bad, a bright cherry red. The paint was still slick, not yet imbued with the roughness of rust. Jamie stepped outside, his bare feet molding to the cool earth. Long dead pine needles stabbed between his toes, and he wrapped his arms tightly around himself. The sky was murky, stars few and far between. Once upon a time, it wasn’t like that. Way out there, the stars had shown brighter than almost anywhere else Jamie had ever seen what with the utter lack of light pollution. Not anymore. The lake was the same way. Once shimmering and crystal clear, but the faraway war had caused it to become sludgy and dark.
But still, he looked up into the vast absence and spoke softly to the parents who had neglected to collect him. He repeated highlights of Aura’s story to them as if it was his real life. They couldn’t hear him; he knew this. He did. But on the off chance they could, he didn’t want to regale them with stories of his honest, bleak existence. He wanted them to think he was a hero. He wanted them to think he was okay.
Jamie startled, hearing the soft crunch of leaves behind him.
-It’s just me, Tanner said.
He folded his legs beneath himself next to the other boy. They settled into a comfortable silence. Wind whistled through the naked trees and chilled them, goose bumps raising across their sun-soaked skin. The scraps of fabric they used as clothing did little to shield them from the elements, but they had grown increasingly numb to any and all discomfort that fell short of acute pain. Tanner scratched at the heel of his hand. He was always itchy, mostly on his feet, his palms, and between his fingers. The flesh there was peeling back, pink and raw. Jamie tugged at the skin of his forehead in an attempt to relieve the soreness of his scalp. His hair, once chocolate brown and soft as a puppy, was matted into one immovable mass.
-Do you ever wish? Jamie asked after what felt like a long while.
-What for?
-Anything.
Tanner poked at the sores in his mouth with his tongue and shrugged.
* * *
It was only a few more days until Helen fell ill. She had been giving out rations from a can of mixed fruit when her strength failed her. She shook like a leaf, unable to even maintain her grip on the can, sending the precious sustenance tumbling into the dirt where the children had to scoop it sloppily into their mouths. Helen had been feeling feverish for a few days, and that morning, her throat had been causing her a great deal of pain, though she’d never have admitted it. From there the sickness progressed quickly, ravaging her body, destroying what stores of strength she had left. There was no warmth left in this world for her in spite of the fact that her was burning up with fever. They wrapped her in every blanket, every tarp, every scrap they could find to try and ease her chills, but nothing would do.
And then the vomiting started, and the diarrhea. Her body folded in on itself. Before long, blood leaked from her along with the liquid and stomach acid and shit. She was delirious with exhaustion, forgetting the children’s names on occasion. She called them her grandmother’s name or her childhood dog’s or her college roommate’s or her high school girlfriend’s. Avery thought it was as if she was slipping in and out of the chronology of time. It was as if she was experiencing all of time in this moment. That made her holy. The little girl indulged all superstitions that entered her mind to try and save Helen. She burned a bundle of any living plants she could find as if they had the power to cleanse. She wove bits of dead grass together and left them high in the tree branches as offerings to any god who might see fit to help them. She whispered the prayers Fe taught them over Helen like incantations.
Emmett remained on high alert at all times. His bloodshot eyes assumed a permanent expression of shock, his pupils retreating to be nothing but afterthoughts in the dark seas of his irises. Emmett ran to the lake often to drench rags in the freezing water to place on Helen’s forehead. He cleaned the bloody sick from her lips when she puked. It amazed him how much her body could project. She hadn’t held anything down in days, yet somehow there was still enough bile within her to cause violent fits of nausea. He was the one who first noted the immense swelling in the glands of her neck and tonsils and white lesions inside her mouth.
They rationed out the aspirin they had left. There was no other medicine. They’d used it all up in their vain attempts to prevent the others from going. How long Helen was sick, none of the children could have said. Day and night ran together like the mixing of paints. All the color melts away until only a muddy mess remains.
The moon hung high and full, bathing the woods in a surreal grey light the night Helen called Aura alone to her side. It wasn’t as bright as it had once been during such a celestial event, but still the moonlight managed to pierce the atmosphere just enough to get itself noticed.
-Aura, I am going to die, Helen said.
Her voice was full of gravel and barely more than a whisper.
Aura swallowed and found herself running her fingers through her short, tight curls. Before, she had worn them long and thick, but they proved to be too delicate to survive in these conditions, so she had taken a pair of safety scissors and hacked them off.
-I know, she replied.
-You’ll have to be Mother now.
Helen cleared her throat and felt a sharp burning in her esophagus. When Aura didn’t reply, she continued:
-There’s nearly no food left. You’ll have to sustain them on stories.
Aura picked at the dead grass beneath her. Helen reached for her hand, but in the measly light she caught her knee instead. This moment of clarity was rare and therefore precious. It didn’t seem to Aura that Helen was likely to have another.
And she was right. In the morning, Helen, leur protectrice, was dead.
Briefly, they considered eating her as they had with some of the others that had gone. But the disease that had taken her had been so devastating, they feared that it would be transmitted to them even if they were careful to cook the meat entirely. Besides, she was their Helen.
While the others hoisted her corpse in a solemn march as deep into the woods as they dared wander, Aura slipped into the pantry. Helen had never permitted any of the children to enter there, instead bringing out a week or so worth of rations at a time. Dust hung so thick in the air it sent her into a coughing fit that left her doubled over, expelling dark, sticky phlegm from her lungs. Helen had spoken true. The stores had not been infinite as Aura had told the others. They were nearly gone, only a few preserves remaining. Desperation overwhelmed her, and she sank to her knees, a wild, mournful exclamation escaping from the hollow of her chest. But Aura was Mother now. She was Wendy to the Lost Boys. So she set to work crafting an elaborate tale that could sustain them a bit longer.
If she thought about it too much, she couldn’t bear what she knew she had to do. To get through the next few hours, Aura retreated to the frigid shore. She hadn’t any paper left to scrawl on, so she rehearsed the story over and over again in her head until she almost believed it herself.
-What did Helen say to you last night? Tanner asked at long last as they sat quietly around a small fire.
They were sharing what Aura knew to be the last cans of food. A feast compared to the portions they’d grown accustomed to. No use rationing anymore. She’d been waiting for this moment, but now that it had arrived, she felt ill-equipped to answer his question. Her thumb pressed its way into her palm, helping to ease the tensions in her hand and declaw her fingers.
-She said she has not truly died, Aura replied carefully, looking intently at the flames.
-Helen said she has cleared the path to our next world. A mirror world. Where the things that have occurred in this one never came to pass. We are to meet her there, and there will be a great feast, and our bodies will be healed, and all things that cause us sorrow will be banished.
Aura rambled on, giving details of this paradise. There would be dinosaurs and magic and their parents would be waiting for them. Helen had been testing them, you see? And they had passed, so now she wanted to welcome them to their new kingdom. When Aura dared glance up, she found the others leaning forward, wide-eyed and hopeful. People want to believe fairytales. It’s easier than being afraid.
-How will we get there? Fe said.
She had her skinny brown arms wrapped around her skinny brown legs. Pustules decorated her flesh. One of her eyes was half-closed as it suffered some sort of infection that wouldn’t go away no matter how diligently she cleaned it.
-It’s underneath the water. We are to row out in one of the canoes and dive in. We will emerge in the new world, Aura told them.
They seemed to believe her, which was good. Aura’s mother and aunts had come to Camp Amaia as children many years ago, and they had told her stories of the year a camper had drowned in the lake. Aura knew that the waters were where supplied by glacier runoff, and therefore they were so cold that hypothermia would hit almost immediately and drowning would occur without much struggle. And she knew that the bones of ancient trees covered the bottom of the lake. Bodies of those who died there were never recovered because they were caught in the great branches hidden beneath the surface.
The following day was dreary and cool, the wind whipping the skin of their faces raw. She would take them out on the lake one at a time, Aura told them. Otherwise they would overwhelm the portal, she said. Really, she was just afraid that if they all went together, those who didn’t jump first would realize the story was just a story.
The water glittered under dust kicked up in the air, and Emmett volunteered to go first. He wanted to be there waiting for the rest of them on the other side. Aura rowed the two of them out past the eye line of the campsite. Emmett was quiet, eyes gazing in an unfocused manner towards the horizon. When Aura stopped the canoe, she reached forward, held his face between her two calloused palms and kissed his cheeks. The canoe rocked wildly when he jumped, and he surfaced only once with a violent gasp and met Aura’s eyes before sinking down into the inky depths. For a moment, grief overwhelmed her, and she felt her actions had been traitorous. But it was better – it had to be – to die like this than to starve slowly or have disease destroy them as it had Helen.
Next was Jamie and then Tanner and then Avery. Each was just like the last. A quiet boat ride with the wind moaning through the woods. The sky a sickly grey orange and the water was black beneath them. When Aura rowed into shore, her arms aching and her heart heavy after Avery, she didn’t find Fe waiting for her as the others had been. She stepped out of the canoe, the sharp rocks of the beach biting into the thickened soles of her feet. Aura wandered through the campsite, knowing it would be the last time she saw what had become her final home. Fe, she found in the main cabin where they had all slept together the past few months. The little girl had pushed the bunk beds to the side of the room and created a carefully planned pile of their things. The French textbooks. The notebooks and scraps of paper where Aura had planned out their stories. Tanner’s ratty stuffed lion. The bird feathers Avery had collected before birds had become rare. Emmett’s old tennis shoes, which had long since been torn to threads. There were many more objects Aura recognized as belonging to previous occupants of the camp, but she could not decisively place them. And on top, Fe mindfully set Helen’s Camp Amaia baseball cap. In the wall, she had carved their names using a pair of hot pink craft scissors. Dust hung gently in the evening sunlight that fell through the window making the room feel lofty and surreal. When she heard the creak of Aura’s feet against the wooden planks, Fe turned.
-Is it time? she asked.
Aura nodded.
-What is all this? The older girl softly pressed one of the feathers between her fingertips.
-This place will remember us, Fe said.
-Okay.
Aura extended a hand, and Fe took it, following her out onto the lake. It was a kindness she was affording them, wasn’t it? There was no continuation to hope for. Just more of what today was, and then nothingness. And the nothingness had to be a relief. The sun was disappearing quickly behind the horizon, and Aura felt tears drip down her chin as she watched it. The final sunset.
-Why are you crying? Fe asked.
Aura brushed the tears from her face. Her chapped lips broke open and burned as she stretched them into a smile.
-I’m just so happy, she replied.
She didn’t row as far out that time. There was no need. There were no eyes waiting on shore that might be disturbed by what they saw.
-Come on, we can go together, Aura said.
She encapsulated Fe’s little hand within her own, and together they plunged into the murky abyss.
K. Felician is graduating in the spring after studying English and philosophy in Missoula, MT though she's originally from Wyoming. She writes about things that scare her, and she's very inspired by writers such as Virginia Woolf, Jericho Brown, and Shirley Jackson as well as many others. She's at the tail end of her coming-of-age, and her ideal profession is mountain cryptid.
