Bird box

“Thank you, Rick. But I just can’t do that.”

Her voice is listless. Destroyed.

“I understand it’s terrifying. Of course it is. But that’s the catch, I suppose. There’s no other way.”

Malorie thinks of hanging up. But Rick continues.

“We’ve got so many good things happening here. We make progress every day. Of course, we’re nowhere near where we’d like to be. But we’re trying.”

Malorie starts to cry. The words, what this man is telling her—is it hope he gives her? Or is it some deeper variation of the incredible hopelessness she already feels?

“If I do what you’re telling me to do,” Malorie says, “how will I find you from there?”

“From the split?”

“Yes.”

“We have an alarm system. It’s the same technology used for triggering the recording you’ll hear. Once you take the correct channel, you’ll go another hundred yards. Then you’ll trigger our notification alarm. A fence will be lowered. You’ll be stuck. And we’ll come looking for what got stuck in our fence.”

Malorie shivers.

“Oh yeah?” she asks.

“Yes. You sound skeptical.”

Visions of the old world rush through her mind, but with each memory comes a leash, a chain, and an instinctive feeling that tells her this man and this place might be good, might be bad, might be better than where she is now, might be worse, but she will never be free again.

“How many of you are there?” Rick asks.

Malorie listens to the silence of the house. The windows are broken. The door is probably open. She must stand up. Close the door. Cover the windows. But it all feels like it’s happening to someone else.

“Three,” she says, lifeless. “If the number changes—”

“Don’t worry about it, Malorie. Any number you come with is fine. We have space enough for a few hundred and we’re working on more. Just come as soon as you can.”

“Rick, can you come help me now?”

She hears Rick take a deep breath.

“I’m sorry, Malorie. It’s too much of a risk. I’m needed here. I realize that sounds selfish. But I’m afraid you’ll have to get to us.”

Malorie nods silently. Amid the gore, the loss, the pain, she respects that this man must stay safe.

Only I can’t open my eyes right now and I have two newborns in my lap who have yet to see the world and the room smells of piss, blood, and death. Air comes in fast from outside. It’s cold and I know that means the window is broken or the front door is open. So dangerously open. So, all this sounds good, Rick, it truly does, but I’m not sure how I’m going to get to the bathroom yet let alone onto a river for forty miles or whatever it was you said.

“Malorie, I’ll check in on you. I’ll call again. Or do you think you’ll be coming right away?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know when I’ll be able to come.”

“Okay.”

“But thank you.”

It feels like the most sincere thank-you Malorie has ever spoken in her life.

“I’ll call you in a week, Malorie.”

“Okay.”

“Malorie?”

“Yes?”

“If I don’t call, it could mean the lines have finally died on our end. Or it could mean the lines at your place are out, too. Just trust me when I tell you we will be here. You come anytime. We will be here.”

“Okay,” Malorie says.

Rick gives her his phone number. Malorie, using the pen, blindly scribbles the numbers on a page in the open phone book.

“Good-bye, Malorie.”

“Good-bye.”

Just a simple, everyday talk on the phone.

Malorie hangs up. Then she hangs her head and cries. The babies shift in her lap. She cries for another twenty minutes, unbroken, until she screams when she hears something scratching at the cellar door. It is Victor. He is barking to be let out. Somehow, he was blessedly locked in the cellar. Maybe Jules, knowing what was coming, did it.

After rehanging the blankets and closing the doors, she will use a broomstick to search every inch of the home for creatures. It will be six hours before she feels safe enough to open her eyes, at which point she will see what went on in the house while she was delivering her baby.

But before then, with her eyes closed tightly, Malorie will stand up and step back through the living room until she reaches the top of the cellar stairs.

And there she will step by Tom’s body.

She will not know it is him, believing it to be a bag of sugar that her foot nudges, as she kneels before the bucket of well water and begins the laborious job of cleaning the children and herself.

She will speak with Rick a number of times in the coming months. But soon the lines reaching the house will die.