After the Burn by Franklin Ard

Author:Franklin Ard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rogue Owl Press

***

Six months ago, I got locked in this old walk-in freezer that my daddy used to cure meat. Daddy ran a butchery from the house. The freezer didn’t work, of course, and it was all beat up and smelled like spoiled jerky. Daddy had shoved me in there because he got pissed off that I hadn’t done my chores. He shut the door behind him, said he’d leave me to think about my actions, and then went out to make a delivery.

Although the freezer wasn’t functional, it was still cold in there because it was February in Vermont. Instead of doing my chores around the homestead, I’d trudged through the snow to the old junkyard where I liked to hang out and clear my head. It had a bunch of ancient cars and tractors and household junk from way before The Burn.

The snow had made my pant legs damp, and my ankles were freezing. Hiding my face against the aluminum wall, I felt isolated and out of breath. It was Jamie who finally saved me, and that’s how we met.

The door swung open, and Jamie’s lean frame was silhouetted by the daylight behind him. He’d been skulking around our homestead for days, stealing cheap cuts of meat. Although I’d seen his campfire flickering in the cow field three nights in a row, I hadn’t yet made his acquaintance.

My teeth chattered. “Daddy and me were playing a game.”

Jamie dragged me into a patch of frozen grass. “That’s some kind of game,” he said. “Your daddy plumb forgot about you.” He helped me out and gave me his coat. “What should I call you?” he asked.

“Billy the Kid,” I said, joking. I liked to pretend I was somebody, that people would actually notice me. I had this picture book of Old West outlaws, and The Kid was my favorite. Nobody crossed him, that was for sure.

Jamie took me back to his camp. Sitting beside the campfire, Jamie told me all these stories he knew from the Civil War. He said he liked to think about that time period because it reminded him that things were always shitty and people always scraped to survive, even before The Burn and The Collapse.

“It’s kind of crazy, but now it’s like we’re living the way people did back then,” he said.

We talked about our family histories and realized that our parents were both from the same neck of the woods. Jamie’s dad was from Mississippi, and my mom and dad came from Alabama—back before The Burn.

As I understand it, after the solar flares hit, things went downhill quick. Somehow, word spread to our parents about folks making a new life in Vermont. Green mountains sure sounded better than baking under the furious sun in the South, and so they made the journey with groups of other families. This was before Jamie and me were ever born.

“I may have grown up in Barning, but I won’t say my heart really belongs here,” Jamie said. “Not that it matters much anyway.

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