The Deathless Trilogy

1.2. Collected

From the edge of our cornfield, I watch a large soldier get out of the tank, and I know he's going to check our house. This time I'm not imagining it, it's really happening. I hold my hands over my mouth again to keep from screaming, but my heart still pounds so loudly I swear he'll hear it.

My thoughts stop as he reaches the door and disappears inside our dirty grey house. After a few minutes, I find the soldier again through the windows of the greenhouse, and I squeeze Mom's hand to stem my anger. That's my place, I think. This man has no right to be there.

Before the blast, the greenhouse had been an enclosed sunroom off the kitchen, but during the nuclear winter, half the roof ripped off. My grandpa used the opportunity and his bags of soil from the basement to convert the sunroom into an indoor garden, our greenhouse. My mom told me I get my green thumb from him.

Garden beds in raised troughs over well water line the room, allowing green shoots and vines to grow in every direction, and I watch the soldier pace the rows of plants in confusion. He snaps a tomato from its vine, takes a bite of it, and drops it on the floor, crushing it beneath his boot before disappearing into the house again.

My cheeks warm with anger. I can't stand not knowing what he's doing or where he is. Part of me wants to run screaming after him. But another part of me, the part I never listen to, imagines snapping his neck like Dad did to the rabbit when he took me hunting three years ago. The last time I held a gun before today.

Don't think about the rabbit, I tell myself, but its eyes are already in my mind. Before I shot it, before Dad and I even went to the meadow, Daniel joked with me that he would always be the better hunter. We were always competitive like that, so with his words in my mind, I pulled the trigger. The shot echoed across the meadow, startling even me. We ran over to grab my prize.

Dad saw it first and bent down beside it. "Oh no," he said.

My heart instantly dropped. Competition was the last of my worries. "What?"

"He's not dead yet. He's in a lot of pain, Isla. When you're in this situation, what does a good hunter do now?" he asked, still trying to teach me despite the animal dying beside him.

I knelt down and saw what I had done. The rabbit's fur—which I'm certain Dad would have compared to Mom's hair had I not shot it—was covered in blood, which spouted from the bullet hole in its side with each breath. The rabbit screamed as its whole body shook, and I began crying. I was stuck on Dad's words: "He's in a lot of pain."

"Isla, stay with me, what should you do now?"

I couldn't think of anything except that I had caused this. I was making this creature suffer.

Dad grabbed my face to focus me. "You have to be strong. You can't be weak now, this is survival. You have to do something. What do you do?"

He moved his hands from my cheeks, but I was paralyzed in shame and guilt and terror. The rabbit's black eyes widened in pain and fear. He was looking straight at me.

"I'm sorry," I cried to the rabbit.

Dad pushed me to the side, and I fell in the clover, gripping my stomach to keep myself from vomiting. I watched as he swiftly twisted the rabbit's neck. The screaming stopped, and then my crying was the only sound in the meadow.

Dad sat back, waiting for me to calm down, his bloodied hands hanging over his knees. I caught my breath, and he wiped his hands on the grass before crawling toward me.

"You cannot ever do that again. Do you understand?" he asked softly.

I nodded, still crying.

"You have to be stronger than that, Isla. We won't be around forever to hunt for you. What if you're left alone? One day you will have to kill something, and if you're too weak to go through with it, you'll die. Do you hear me? You have to be strong enough to protect and feed yourself, and that means you will need to kill at some point. What you just did was inhumane."