I was nine when the world changed. I remember my mother looking at my father, shaking her head in quiet dismay while pictures of disaster and destruction flashed on the television screen. I didn't understand.
"Are we safe, Ted? Are we safe here?" she asked.
"Safer than most places."
"What's happened?" I asked, watching my parents' pale faces.
"Changes, Tyler," Mom finally said. "Everything changes."
The world crumbled around us. Little pieces went first -- things I didn't notice so much. Communications outside our own area became difficult and then impossible unless someone went outside the valley. The roads grew less traveled, and cars stopped moving. During that first winter -- only weeks later -- no one came to clear the roads of snow. That winter was worse than usual. Drifts rose as high as my neck. Mom, Dad, and I went no farther than from the house to the barn and back. Power failed, and no one came to fill the tank for heat. We spent the daylight hours near the fireplace, reading and sometimes playing games. We kept busy. We kept quiet.
That first winter was hard. Mom became obsessive about sewing, while Dad cared for the animals. He worried about planting crops the next spring. I read and wrote and sometimes drew, but finding paper, I realized, was going to be more difficult soon.
We had no real news about anything after that first few days, not about the world at large, not about Carlyle, the town ten miles away. Our nearest neighbor had gone off to Arizona in late autumn, a month or more before the trouble. Dad didn't figure they'd be coming back, so he raided their place for a few things -- mostly farm equipment and every book he could find. And paper -- glorious paper, just for me.
See, it wasn't like in the cities. I learned about them later, about where the riots started, the buildings burned down, and people went crazy. We lived quieter here. Annoying for a child who no longer went to school and didn't see another kid for months. We became insular and self-sufficient. Dad rode a horse to town once a week when the weather got better. Mom worried each time, but he came back with the only news we got, plus things he'd traded for while there. I knew there were things he told mom that he didn't tell me, though. Not until I was older.
The honest truth? No one ever really knew what had happened on the coasts, thousands of miles away from us. There was talk about war and armies marching our way, but the most we ever saw was a handful of National Guard who helped around the farm for a few days and moved on. They'd had no answers, either.
Lonely years, those first few. Traders passed through the area, but everyone kept a watch on them, and there were a few that the locals ran out. School started up again in town, but it only ran for a few weeks at a time, and we had to stay there, boarding with local people and working for our stay. Only a few of us were still around, and no one spoke about the old days. Dad turned out to be really good at fixing, adapting, and making things. I helped him and became his apprentice -- a future for me, Dad said.
In the summer of the fourth year -- I was 12 -- we heard about the hordes coming our way.
"We have plans," dad said. He'd grown steady over the years. Mom still seemed dazed and lived in her own world of cooking and sewing. She never asked about life outside the house anymore, but she paid attention now. "Don't worry."
"How far away?" I asked. I'd never feared strangers before. "How many?"
"They're still at least ten days out, at least for the main group. A couple thousand," Dad said, and I felt a shiver go through me. "They're dangerous because of their numbers. As far as we can tell, there aren't many weapons left, though. They've been moving for years, heading from the big cities of the east. Like most of the other places, we're going to try to buy them off with supplies as long as they move on."
"What do they want?" I asked. "Where are they going?"
"They don't know anymore," Mom said. "They're just moving to keep moving and not look back."
We both looked at her, startled.
"She's right," Dad agreed.
"They'll need clothes," Mom added with a nod. "We can spare some."
Mom had, in fact, piles of clothing she'd mended and made, and I had the odd feeling she'd been preparing for this from the start.
I watched from the highest hill the day the mass passed through town and settled in a field beyond for the night. I tried to remember the last time I had seen so many people back in the past before the change. That time was lost to me now.
Amid that crowd, Dad found two men with almost a dozen kids they were caring for, including two babies born on the long walk. Dad talked to them for a couple days, and they stayed when the others moved on. They took over the neighbor's old house -- and Mom sewed more, visited often, and smiled again.
Dad and others picked out more people from other groups that followed, all of them families of one sort or another. Most did well in their new homes, and the valley started to prosper.
By the time I was fifteen, we had a certain normalcy in Haven Valley. We had guards that helped keep strangers away, and we lived in our own little world. Everything had changed since that first day ... but we had our place, and we survived. What does anything else matter?
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