The Resistance, Jenna Marie [books to read to get smarter TXT] 📗

Faded green grasses crunched beneath her feet with every tired step she took. Days upon days of walking blindly through thin forests and across overgrown pastures had taken its toll on both her and her younger brother, who trailed feebly a few feet behind her. Relentless sunlight beat down upon them, tanning their exposed flesh. A burn was developing on the girl’s nose and it stung when she touched it.

“Can we sit down for a second?” the boy grumbled as he climbed over a stone embedded in loose soil. “We’ve been walking all day,”

“I know,” she replied, her eyes scanning the area ahead of her. Her gaze settled on a lone tree in the distance. “Let’s go to that tree over there so we can get out of the sun.”

She led him through tall stalks of grass, leaving a flattened path in their wake. The boy dragged his fingers along the grass to his sides until it became too short for him to reach. Gnarled roots gradually appeared, looping into and out of the dried earth below them.

Finally they reached the shade. The boy threw himself down at the base of the tree and leaned back against the trunk with his eyes closed. After swinging the light package off her back and brushing a few ants away, the girl sat down next to him and let out a sigh.

They sat there for a while, letting the sun sink lower in the sky and lose its intensity before heading out once again. For now, the shade granted by the wide leaves suspended above them provided welcome relief to their strained eyes and worn bodies. The boy quietly dozed off against the side of the tree under the watchful eye of his older sister, who longed to do the same. She knew that if she did, an animal might come by and steal their only food, or a storm would roll in over the plains without their knowledge and barrage them with a heavy downpour to which they had no real shelter from. A person could even walk by and kill them both in their sleep.

This was unlikely, of course. Neither of them had seen another person in days, and every house they had come across was vacant and raided: glass from broken windows covering the floor, bedrooms torn to pieces, and kitchen cabinets bare – save for the few things that were past or near their expiration dates and would not keep.

As the sun began to set to the west over a far ridge of mountains, the girl gently shook her brother awake. “Brian,” she called. He stirred.

“Hmm,”

“Come on. You should eat something.”

“Did you catch another rabbit?” he wondered quietly, his dark brown eyes barely open.

“No,” she said, opening the backpack held securely between her knees. “It’s just what’s left from earlier.”

“Oh,”

She pulled out the strip of fabric that held the last few pieces of charred rabbit meat and unwrapped it. The chalky smell of smoke and cooked meat wafted up at them. To her dismay, there were only three pieces left. She hurriedly grabbed two chunks and handed them to her brother, saving only one for herself before he noticed and refused his share. They ate their dinner slowly, consuming what she knew would be their last meal for a while if she didn’t catch any more.

Darkness settled quickly over the prairie. She didn’t light a fire because it wasn’t unbearably cold or breezy that night. Brian had moved slightly farther from her to a softer spread of ground to lie down on. Time passed and she figured he was fast asleep. She took a long look around. There wasn’t much to see in the moonlight-washed darkness, other than the wide open field whose grasses rippled like water in the wind.

Water. They hadn’t had any in a while, leaving their lips chapped and throats raw. To do tomorrow, she decided, tilting her head back and shutting her eyes.

“Jen?” asked a quiet voice from near her. She opened her eyes.

“Yes?”

“Where are we going?”

She stared across the land to where the black horizon blended with the edge of the Earth. “Away.”

—

Early morning sunlight radiated across the pastures and was filtered through the wide leaves of the tree, forming a patchwork of light on Jen’s face. The bright light shook her from her startlingly unpleasant dream of her parents and everyone else in their hometown who was swiped away by the epidemic. Entire countries and continents were decimated, including most or all of North America. For all Jen knew, she and Brian could have been the only two people left. This idea, although of great doubt in her mind, was a possibility that she was not ready to face head-on.

Brian was still asleep in the same position he had dozed off in, on his side in the dirt. He was so exhausted he hadn’t ever moved in his sleep. The same could be said of Jen, except for her foot that had slid off of a tree root.

Suddenly to her left side started a quiet munching. She flicked her eyes over without moving her head. A brown rabbit had hopped up alongside her in her sleep and was nibbling on some grass poking out of the ground. It was so close that if she reached out without extending her arm, she could pet it. But there was no time for that. She and Brian needed to eat.

Without another second’s hesitation, she pounced on the small animal and caught it beneath her. It wiggled free and took off; she scrambled to her feet and lunged at it, moving faster than she ever thought she could except out of desperation. Her forearm landed on top of it with a crunch as the rest of her body’s weight rained down on the creature. The rabbit struggled for another moment before becoming still. Jen winced. Sorry, little guy.

She carefully grabbed the rabbit around the neck and stood up, carrying her prize back to the tree with her. She had never caught a rabbit with her bare hands before – the first one, which they finished off last night, she had thrown a pocketknife at. The very same tool, stored away in a compartment in the backpack, was used to skin the animal.

She set a fire with loose twigs, some dead grass, and stone, and raised the rabbit above the flames on a splint. The smell of cooking woke Brian.

“You got another one!” he said, walking over to the fire. Smoke billowed up around them.

“Yeah.”

A few minutes later, she deemed the meat edible and pulled it off of the splint, dropping it onto the strip of cloth and cutting it up with the pocketknife. She gave two pieces to Brian and ate two herself before wrapping the meat in the fabric and zipping it away in the backpack.

“Alright, let’s keep going,” Jen decided, rising to her feet. They kicked dirt on the fire to smother it and continued on in the same direction. “We have to find water today. Keep your eyes open.”

As the sun rose higher above the horizon, the heat beating down on their faces intensified. Sometime midmorning they reached the crest of a tall hill and stopped for a break. Brian sat down in the grass but Jen remained standing, her squinted eyes fixated on a dark line at the edge of the field. It was a forest.

“There are trees over there,” she said. “Maybe there’ll be a stream or a pond nearby.”

“And what if there isn’t?” Brian wondered.

She stared at him. “Then we keep looking,” she said as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. “There has to be water around her somewhere.” Determined, she continued toward the small forest just out of their reach. Brian jumped up behind her and followed. As they approached the trees, individual leaves could be discerned blowing in the wind from the mass of green that lined the horizon.

The fields gradually faded into the wild foliage of the forest. Birds sang in the trees and flitted from branch to branch, oblivious to the state of the world around them. Beneath Jen and Brian’s feet, gnarled roots slithered up to the surface in an effort to trip them, stretching outward from the wide trees that towered above.

“Try to listen for running water,” Jen instructed her younger brother.

“I am,” he said.

They continued on into the darkness. Golden light streamed down through the branches above them and spotted the decaying forest floor, revealing small vegetation that rubbed against their legs. A jagged branch stuck out from one bush and scraped Jen’s hand as she walked by. She was starting to worry. The chirping of crickets and the singing of birds pierced the air and seemed so loud that it would be impossible to detect a stream. After half an hour she figured they wouldn’t be seeing any water at all. But their luck held: Brian had slid off the path while looking up at the canopy and not down at the uneven ground and fell onto a slope that led directly to a narrow flow of water. It was nearly inaudible and sounded more like the wind blowing than anything else. It was hidden behind dense foliage and if he hadn’t fallen they would have passed it. They rushed at it and like wild animals drank the cool water as though they hadn’t had any in weeks, when really it was only a few days since their last sip.

Jen filled the empty water bottle she had been carrying in her backpack to the top and stored it away somewhere on the bottom.

“I want to get out of the forest before it gets dark,” she said.

“Why? Wouldn’t it be better to stay hidden in here?”

“No,” she replied. “Not if there are bears. Now come on, I could see the field through the trees a little while ago. We can go out that way.”

They turned around and carefully retraced their steps back the way they came. After a little while Jen’s back started to hurt. The filled water bottle added extra weight to the backpack, making it more laborious to carry around.

“Do you think we’ll find any houses soon?” Brian asked.

“I have no idea. I don’t even know where we are, Brian,”

Jen’s excellent sense of direction enabled them to easily escape the darkness of the forest and return to the field. Brian tried protesting, saying that it would be better if they stayed in the forest, but Jen wouldn’t listen to him. They’d be better off in the grass than getting mauled by a bear in the middle of the night. After another two hours of walking, their legs cried out in protest. Sharp pain shot up from the base of their feet and their muscles ached to the bone. Brian asked if they could sit down, but Jen made him wait until they found a shady place to rest. Finally they came upon a young oak tree and collapsed gratefully below it. Brian laid down in the shade to take a nap and Jen sat down in the dirt. She soon laid down as well to relieve her sore back.

She was shaken awake by a hand on her shoulder.

“What is it, Brian . . .?” she asked sleepily. The sun had moved considerably across the sky and was now beating down on her. Her brother didn’t respond, but a twig snapped somewhere nearby. “Brian?” she opened her eyes and found herself looking down the length of an arrow, pulled back and ready to fire.

Her breath caught and she pulled herself upright. The young man aiming at her with the bow was somewhere around her age, and his tanned face was expressionless. He wore a gray T-shirt and green cargo pants, and an arrow sheath was slung