Holiday Magick (45 page)

“Okay.” I bent and kissed her cheek.

“Hey Lilly, how about a good-bye hug?”

When she made her way across the room, I leaned in and whispered, “How about this: you make that pumpkin roll for Christmas, and if we all like it, we'll start a new tradition and have it at Thanksgiving
and
Christmas instead of boring old pie.”

“Deal.” She grinned and squeezed my neck before picking up Jasmine for a goodbye kiss.

We loaded up the car and started heading home, but I just kept thinking about the spirit. Would it come back? Were Mom and Dad safe? Just around the corner from their house, I noticed a farmstand with a big “Half-Price Pumpkins” sign over a cashbox. I turned in and jumped out of the car before Mandy could protest. Stuffing money into the box, I bought the nearest pumpkin and turned back toward my parents' house, trying to ignore Mandy's eyes rolling at me. Pulling up to the house, I snuck over and set the pumpkin on the front steps. Just in case.

Thanksgiving, as we know it in the United States today, has its roots in the famous harvest feast of 1621, between the Plymouth colonists and the Wampanoag Native Americans. The Pilgrims had a very successful harvest that year, in part thanks to Squanto, a Native American who had been kidnapped as a young boy and lived in England for a time. Squanto helped the settlers learn to fish and provided them with seeds. He also helped the two groups communicate by translating the settlers' language for the Native Americans. While days of thanks were common in both the English and Native American cultures at the time, the 1621 harvest was especially memorable as both groups celebrated it together. Americans today celebrate the third Thursday of November as a day to give thanks, spend time with family and friends, and eat delicious food.

However, Thanksgiving may not always be celebrated that way. Who knows when mankind might have another reason to give thanks?

They'd planned to call it Thanksgiving since the day after Jeremy got scalped.

Maybe it was the simple hedonistic human celebration of surviving, but Blue could clearly remember talking with a couple of the guys about how they should set aside at least that one day a year, wash their faces, and clean under their fingernails. Maybe they could turn off the Flashers for the night even.
Flashers
. That was Nicolas's smart-aleck term for the clunky solar power lights they'd set up on either side of the camp.

One of the kids, the loud one called John, approached Blue the day before the first official Thanksgiving. He started in with his self-righteous lines about “yadda yadda, we shouldn't turn off the Flashers” and “yadda yadda, why jeopardize the camp so that the dead can be remembered and the living can celebrate being alive?”

Blue was their leader, because he was twenty-three and because one evening, not too long ago, he'd killed his six Mangled captors and escaped their decayed camp. While rumors generously circulated that he'd done this effortlessly after being drugged, beaten and batted around, the truth was that Blue was in the right place at the right time, with the right rough blade clutched in his hand when the Mangleds took their swings at him. But reputations build legends, right? And legends make good leaders.

John wasn't the only one whining or worrying about the Thanksgiving feast. Nicolas, the cool kid with the floppy hair and downturned eyes, sent a message to Blue through one of the pipsqueaks. Food was gonna be scarce, he said, even worse than last year. Blue sent the pipsqueak back with the message that they'd just have to boil boots and belts if it came down to it, because the feast
would not
be cancelled.

Blue, back in the days before survival and fear, had had a vivid dream where the world looked like nothing more than a piece of mottled Swiss cheese, with craters dancing across the horizon where houses and businesses and schools used to be. He didn't like to think about it anymore, because thinking about it allowed for the possibility that he had glimpsed the future with some evil part of his brain…or worse, that he had somehow brought it all to be.

The landscape was indeed covered in craters now. They were the entry points of the violent monsters that had overtaken the world, and pockmarks left behind by the foolish humans who had thought explosions and weapons might solve everything.

Their camp was situated in one such crater, one of the impressive ones that required a ladder to get in and out of. (Nicolas liked to remind them regularly that some needed the ladder more than others. Blue, who stood a full five foot four in boots, usually needed the ladder.) Their camp was composed mostly of old thermal blankets, tarps, deconstructed clothes, padding, batteries, and a generous smattering of drapes and curtains from a half-blasted home goods store they'd stumbled upon last year. At first it was entirely survival…finding clothes that were warm and practical, finding fabrics that would buffer the winds that howled over the top of the crater. Then, as time and fear danced a bit further away, embellishments cropped up. A few of the girls added buttons to their clothes, ribbons to their hair. One of the more resourceful boys cut the letters of his name from a fire-engine-red fabric and sewed them onto the outside of his tent. One of the pipsqueaks created a dress that looked a bit like an ugly cloth bag.

Within the camp, respect was important. Sure, the pipsqueaks were pretty easy to wrangle, because a bunch of traumatized five- to ten-year-olds generally
want
a leader. The older kids were the challenge. A few of them were close enough to Blue's age that they craved experimenting with their bravado, with their new muscles and adult coordination. Plus there was the issue of the older kids remembering their former leader, Grayson Porrow, with great detail and love. Grayson had been cool in every respect, fearless, old (almost 30), and about six foot two.

A small group of Mangleds had shot Grayson Porrow five times. Six times, if you counted the bullet that had grazed and removed a chunk of his left ear.

The number of children and teenagers in Blue's group was unusual, and he knew that. The few survivors that he encountered were always adults. Even after he explained that his camp was made up almost entirely of what had once been the River City Elementary School, other survivors liked to make cryptic comments. “It's dangerous to burden yourself with dependent souls,” they would say. “It's especially dangerous to burden yourself with children.”

Blue's camp might have been made up of young people, but the older kids were good about looking after the little ones. A couple of the older girls had even taken on motherly roles with the Pipsqueaks, something that Blue wholeheartedly encouraged.

Dusk fell early that night, the night before Thanksgiving, and the Flashers flicked on, one by one. Blue took his usual station at the front of the camp, perching on the edge of the crater and fixing his eyes numbly on the dead horizons. He wasn't the sort of leader to retreat to an office and hide while his underlings did all the work. Maybe, just maybe, he also had a tiny bit of a type-A personality, but he liked to take first watch and know that everyone was safe.

One time he was sick with a fever and a sore throat and all that stuff, you know, the kind of sick where you suddenly feel like you're going to grow purple fur and pink spots and your tongue will shrivel up and fall out of your mouth? Yeah, yeah, it was that kind of sick. And Blue had been so sick that he couldn't take his turn at the guard. His replacement had fallen asleep and…well, they'd been lucky. It wouldn't happen again.

Not to say that the other kids were bad at working, of course—they couldn't afford to be. There was always wood to gather and cut, to transport to various parts of the camp. There was rain collecting, and meat processing, if anyone was lucky enough to find an animal to kill, and tending to the little garden they'd created outside the crater, on the “main land” as Nicolas liked to call it.

There were scouting missions twice a month, which usually consisted of Blue and Nicolas setting off to raid abandoned houses and businesses for supplies. At first the area had been ripe for supplies, but that had dried up relatively quickly with so many mouths to feed. That meant that Nicolas and Blue had to travel farther and farther to find supplies, which also left the camp unprotected for longer periods than Blue liked to admit…sometimes for most of a day.

Once upon a time they'd gotten their hands on an abandoned bicycle, which allowed Blue to travel into what had once been Granertown, population 2306. They had been able to search farther and bring back more supplies in less time with that bike. That had been short-lived, though, because the bike's back tire had gotten trashed and…well, there weren't a lot of tires just laying around.

A voice from below alerted Blue to a familiar presence.

“Shouldn't you be asleep?” he said, raising an eyebrow in what was perhaps the most intimidating manner he could manage. “Pipsqueaks are supposed to be in bed by sundown. Come on, Danny, you know that.”

“I don wanna sleep.”

“If you don't sleep, you don't grow right. You'll stay that size forever.”

“Kim said we're gon turn off the Flashers tomorrow night.”

“We might.”

“But the Mangleds could sneak in. Nicolas said the only way we can see ‘em from really, really far off is with the Flashers. And that the light scares ‘em ‘cause their eyes are bad.” The boy said this in the brave, matter-of-fact tone of any eight-year-old that has seen his entire world fall to pieces around him.

“Hey. Come up here,” Blue said, and the boy's eyes widened at the unexpected invitation. He scrambled up the closest ladder and perched on the edge, next to Blue. “Do you know the last time I saw a Mangled?”

The pipsqueak shook his head.

“The last time I saw a Mangled, I was in the middle of their camp. They'd dragged me there and tied me up. Scary stuff. But I went all Steve McQueen on them and broke out of there.”

“Who's Steve McQueen?”

“Never mind. Listen, the point is, I haven't seen any of them, not even one, since I stabbed the really big one in the chest fifteen times.”

The boy turned almond-shaped eyes upward to Blue, an empty sort of bewitchment in his eyes at these words. “Were you afraid?” he whispered.

“Huh? Nah. No, no one's afraid when they have to choose between themselves and someone else. You wouldn't be either. You just do what you have to. If the blade's in your hand, you use it, you know?”

“What if one of ‘em gets in my tent?”

“Then you kill it in your tent and then you come tell me and I'll make you one of these belts. See? Like I have.” Blue lifted his tattered gray vest and motioned at the leather belt he wore. It was studded with various pins he'd found and claimed since the Awakening, most of them old military pieces that had doubtlessly been left behind by dead soldiers and veterans. “Only heroes have these belts. It used to be that the president gave them to the brave guys in a big ceremony. He'd hand them a fancy belt with all of these pins on it, like this one, see?” He motioned at a pin that, judging by the discoloration, was made from some cheap material and sold in some trinket store once upon a time. Maybe even in a trendy shop like the one Blue had worked at, in a mall somewhere, when his name was still just Benny and he could dye his hair blue and scowl at his mother. “This
particular
pin right here means strength and valor in a time of great danger.”