“Nope,” Cassie didn’t even hesitate to answer. “I’ve got better ones here. Even if they do cheat at Monopoly.”
Mike snickered in the kitchen. He tried to turn it into a cough.
After a long minute, Steve sighed. “Fine. I guess we’ll stay. For a few months, at least. But Pamela, you’ve got to promise, if this flu thing gets out of control...”
Pamela nodded.
Feeling the tension in the air fade, I stepped around Steve and Cassie so I could talk to the other families. “So listen, like Pamela said, we need to be safe and quarantine the house till we know for sure what’s going on with the bus driver. But that doesn’t mean you’re stuck inside the house. If you get restless and want to go outside, feel free. Just make sure you don’t go visiting the other houses, don’t let them come into this house, don’t trade stuff with them, and if you talk to them outside, avoid touching them or standing too close while you talk so you don’t spread any possible germs.”
“When will we know for sure what it is?” One of the men asked, and I realized I didn’t even know the names of all my housemates yet.
“Pamela says we should know by tomorrow.”
Nodding, they drifted back to their rooms.
Satisfied the general panic was over, I turned to find Tarah standing behind me.
“I’ve got to go grab my phone from the truck,” I told her, reaching for my coat and boots. “Want to go with me?”
She nodded, and once she was ready, we went outside, walking fast, the snow crunching loudly beneath our feet.
We wove our way through the tree stump obstacle course to my truck. I found myself wishing I’d started building that tiny house back at my grandma’s. Then maybe Tarah would have had a house of her own now away from all the drama and possible virus infection.
At my truck, I quickly grabbed the disposable phone from under the driver’s side of the front seat and called Grandma Letty. Unfortunately the news wasn’t good.
“What’d she say?” Tarah asked after I hung up.
“There’s no way it’s the sedatives. She says Pam’s probably right and it’s the flu.” I hid the phone again, this time wedging it under the backseat on the seat frame. We got out of the truck and started to return to the houses. Then, on second thought, I turned back and, as quietly as I could, popped my truck’s hood.
“What are you doing?” she whispered, though no one was outside to hear us.
“Getting more car insurance,” I muttered as I removed one of the spark plugs from the engine. Steve seemed okay for now, but who knew if he might change his mind and try to make a fast escape with Cassie in the future? If he did, he’d have to do it without transportation. I added a spark plug from the bus’s engine with my truck’s plug in my coat pocket. Then we headed back to our house.
At the porch, I was reluctant to go inside. It was freezing out here, but it was also peaceful.
I took a deep breath of sharp, cold air, then another. “Cassie’s right. It does smell like Christmas here.” The crisp, pine-filled air cleared out my lungs, taking the last of the tension with it. Inside the house, it was too easy to forget where we were. Out here, I could think clearer, breathe easier.
“Yeah. It makes me miss Christmas back home a little.”
I glanced sideways at her. “Missing your family?”
She shrugged. “Yeah, but we were already sort of prepping for the separation for when I went off to college.”
“You could still go, you know. If we got your name cleared...”
“I know. But to be honest, college was really their dream, not mine. You don’t have to have a degree to be a journalist.”
“True. But still, they’ve got to be worried about you.”
She looked down at her feet. “Yeah, um, about that...at your grandma’s I might have posted a message under an alias in a forum my brother visits online a lot. The alias was a nickname he gave me when I was little, so he’ll recognize it.”
At my widening eyes, she hastily added, “Don’t worry, I didn’t give any hints about our new location. I just told him in a roundabout way that I was out of state and starting a new life and that I’m safe. I disguised it to look like someone vaguely talking about shopping for a vacation home, but he’ll get what I really meant and tell our parents.”
I thought it over, then realized I’d just have to trust her. I let out a long, slow breath. “Okay.”
Tarah leaned against my side at the porch railing and tilted her head back. “Wow. Have you ever seen so many stars?”
Despite seeing through her attempt to distract me from worrying, I still looked up and was stunned. Back home, even outside of town the nearby city lights made it hard to see the night sky, so only the brightest stars showed up. Here, the mountains helped block the lights from the nearest town, allowing the full moon to light the world around us. As a result, not only was every star easy to see above us, but I could even make out the Milky Way.
And then there were those amazing peaks all around us. Back home, East Texas wasn’t flat. It had rolling hills everywhere. But we didn’t have anything like the Black Hills mountains. The steep peaks here rose on all sides, with our settlement nestled perfectly in the middle. The effect should have been imposing. Instead, it was…comforting.
I understood then why Grandma Letty had suggested this place for our village. It wasn’t just that she already owned the property. If she’d liked another area better, she would have raised Hell itself to buy the right land instead.
It was because everything about this area promised safety. The shelter of the surrounding peaks, the camouflage of the thick pines and cypresses and the hardwoods that would eventually add their own color and beauty in the summer and fall. The stillness of the place, so quiet we could hear the gurgling creek where it still ran free in the unfrozen middle of its course.
I could see how this place might look in a few months, maybe a year or two. It really could be stunning in every way, from its gifted people that it kept safely hidden, to the eventual town those people would build with their own sweat and imagination. That is, if they could find the courage to make it happen. Right now they seemed broken and shaky. But this place could fix that, could heal them and build them back up again.
This village didn’t have to be some sad place for society’s rejected and unwanted, where they simply hid away and tried to survive.