The Sheep

“Mutations that are acquired in life are called somatic mutations,” Ellie said, reading from a dusty biology textbook as her feet dangled from the edge of her bed. “Often, they are localized and are not passed on to progeny unless they occur within the gametes.”

“What does that mean?” Tom said, squinting his eyes at the page as he hovered over his sister. He hated biology.

“I don’t know,” Ellie said, shrugging. “It’s your textbook. I’ve got six more years until I take 9th grade biology.”

“Well, keep reading,” Tom said. He started pacing back and forth. “There’s got to be something useful in there.”

Ellie found her place on the page and continued reading. “If the gametes of one parent contain a mutation, that mutation will be passed on to their offspring, and the mutation will be present in every cell of the resulting zygote.”

“So, does that mean the animals are safe or not?”

Ellie flipped to the end of the book, found the glossary, and ran her finger down the page until she found the word gamete. Her eyes widened and her cheeks blushed.

“Um,” Ellie said, closing the book and handing it to Tom. “I think it’s saying that if the blast happened after a birth, the animals are okay.”

“Only okay?”

“Well, as okay as we are.”

“Fair enough,” Tom said, drumming his fingers on the book’s cover. “And, what about animals born after the blast?”

“Well, then, they may have inherited a mutation.”

“Is that bad?”

“I don’t know.”

Tom’s drumming grew louder and fiercer.

“Dammit!” Tom said, tossing the book on the floor. A cloud of dust rose up around it. “I’m going out there. I don’t care what mom says. I’m sick of being stuck here.”

“She hasn’t said anything,” Ellie whispered.

“That’s the point. She’s been sick for five days now, and she needs food. Good food. And Dad’s not coming back. Deadbeat said he was going to drive to town, listen for a radio signal, and hope that the President had something meaningful to say about all this. As far as I can tell, Dad’s got nothing to tell us, and neither does Kennedy. The fact that we haven’t heard anything from anyone, and no one’s coming around says it all. We have to do something, unless you want to start eating the flies and the rats in the wellhouse.”

“Where are you gonna go?” Ellie said, looking out her bedroom window.

“I’m going to check our trees. Someone has to.”

Ellie raised an eyebrow. “And that’s it?”

“That’s it,” Tom said, turning toward the door of Ellie’s bedroom.

Ellie stood up and dusted off her dress. “Then I’m coming with you. It’ll at least stop you from doing something stupid.”

Tom smiled. “Then maybe you shouldn’t come.”

“I’m coming!”

“Well then, put on your coat, and grab a scarf. It’s cold out there.”

Tom went to the closet near the front door of the farmhouse and pulled out his father’s fur-lined parka. He didn’t have one of his own. He hadn’t needed one until now.

Ellie was in the kitchen, dressed and ready, pulling a potato sack from the wastebin.

Tom walked over to her. “I don’t think we’re going to need that,” he said.

“Why not?” Ellie said, holding open the bag. “Look how big it is. Imagine how much fruit it’ll hold.”

“Fine,” Tom said with a sigh. A sigh not only for the useless potato sack, but also for the calendar hanging on the wall in the kitchen. According to the calendar, it was August. The calendar doesn’t lie. Looking through the kitchen window, it looked like December. With another sigh, he waved Ellie along. “Let’s go before Mom wakes up.”

Tom walked to the front door and pushed Ellie behind him before he opened it. The chill of the air was enough to make him want to close the door again, but he had already come this far. The sky was gray, and the sun was gone. It felt like winter, but there was no snow. And, yet, the ground was covered.

Tom bent down and ran his fingers through the gray dust that coated the wooden porch. It smelled like a cozy fire on a cold winter night. It was ash.

Tom led Ellie out through the front door of the farmhouse and around to the side, beside the chimney. There stood a pile of firewood stacked high as the roof. Set a few feet out from it was an old tree stump with an axe stuck in it. It probably hadn’t seen use since February, back when real winter had come to an end. But now they were in a new winter. An August winter; made real enough by the madmen with their fingers on the buttons. The way the government talked about it, you duck and cover and it’s over. But it had been a week now. It wasn’t over.

Tom pulled the axe from the stump and hoisted it over his shoulder. It felt good. “More useful than a potato sack,” he said.

“We’ll see,” Ellie said, clutching the potato sack tight between her fingers.

“The first orchard is about a half-mile down the road, and Dad’s still got the Ford, wherever he is.”

“Like you know how to drive it anyway.”

“He lets me drive it when Mom’s not around.”

“Me too,” Ellie said, smiling.

“Well it’s gone now, so let’s get walking.”

Tom twirled the axe in his hands as they walked down the dirt road, following the path of a wooden fence toward the first of the orchards. It was an apple orchard, and the harvesting season was already in full swing. The hired help had been working it while his father lounged on the couch. They must have fled on the day of the blast because Tom never saw them again. They probably took what they could and went home to their families. That’s what Tom would have done. Every man for himself. Mom had been out that day. She was driving home in the Ford after bringing a lunch out to the workers. She inhaled more than a bit of what rained down out of the sky that day.

Even when his father left for town, Tom didn’t believe for one second that he was coming back. He probably thought that anywhere was better than here. He was probably right.

“Here it is,” Tom said, pointing the head of the axe over toward an opening in the wooden fence.

They didn’t really need to wait for the opening in the fence to see the state of the orchard. It was like summer had crashed straight into the wall of winter. There were apples, alright, but they were all on the ground, not on the trees.

The apple trees themselves were bare to the bone. Leaves littered the ground around them and appeared to already be mulching. The new soil was as black as the apples themselves.

“We can’t eat this,” Tom said, tipping the rusty axe back onto his shoulder.

“It doesn’t smell so bad,” Ellie said.

“If we eat them, we’ll be as sick as Mom. Believe me.”

Ellie massaged the burlap of the potato sack between her fingers. “So, what do we do?”

“We keep walking,” Tom said. “These orchards are useless.”

“All of them?”

“All of them.”

“But… then… where are we going?”

“Roger Alder usually keeps a healthy crop of livestock in his pens. He might be able to spare something.”

Ellie seemed to be eyeing the axe in Tom’s hand.

“It’s two miles back the other way,” Tom said, pointing back toward their farmhouse. “You sure you still want to come?”

“I’m coming,” Ellie said firmly.

“Good,” Tom said, tapping the head of the axe into his palm. “We might have a lot to carry.”

They walked for over half-an-hour before finding themselves in the driveway of Roger Alder, looking up at his screened-in porch.

Through the screen, shadowed beneath a gable, was Roger Alder, sitting in his rocking chair, but he wasn’t rocking. He was just sitting.

“Mr. Alder?” Tom called out from across the driveway.

There was no response.

“Mr. Alder?” he shouted again. “It’s me, Tom, from the Barrows farm.”

Tom could feel Ellie tugging on the back of his parka. “He’s not moving,” she said.

“I’m gonna go see about him,” Tom said, his fingers gripping the axe tight and squeezing it firm against his chest. “Don’t go anywhere. You hear me?”

Ellie nodded.

Tom took his steps across the driveway with caution. The view was no better, even when he placed his foot on the first step of the porch. He mounted the second step, flipped the latch on the porch’s screen door and swung the door open.

“Mr. Alder?” Tom said, feeling sweat collect around his palms in spite of the cold.

He stepped inside.

Roger Alder sat in his rocking chair, motionless, his eyes closed and his face peaceful. A thick coating of ash covered the brim of his straw hat, the legs of his jeans, and the hollows of his eyes. He was dead. Tom was sure of that.

There should have been a smell. But not even the rotten apples and leaves going to mulch in the orchard had much of a smell. Maybe being out in the air for so long was having an effect on their senses.

“Tom!” Ellie cried out from somewhere beyond the porch.

Tom looked out through the screen door to find Ellie absent from the driveway.

“Dammit, Ellie!” Tom called out. “Where the hell are you?”

“Around back!” Ellie replied.

Tom descended the porch stairs and slammed the screen door behind him, causing the whole porch to rattle. He raced around the side of the house to find a small red barn in the back. The large barn doors were swung wide and only shadows lurked inside.

“C’mon, Tom!” Ellie called out from inside the barn. “Come see!”

“What are you doing in there, Ellie!” Tom said, walking up to the open barn doors. “I told you to stay in the driveway.”

“But… look,” Ellie said through the darkness.

The barn was unlit except for the back wall where a missing roof board allowed a bit of dim, gray light to shine down from the bleak sky above.

On the straw ground sat Ellie and a single sheep resting on its side. The sheep’s wool was patchy and hung off its body in limp, yellowed clumps.

As Tom walked deeper into the barn, he could see that the pens were empty. The gates had been opened and the animals had been released. Whether it was Roger Alder who did it or someone else, Tom didn’t know. All he knew was that the animals were gone. All but one. Even from where he stood, the sheep didn’t look well. In fact, it was moving about as much as Roger Alder.

Ellie draped her potato sack over the sheep’s body.

“Is she?” Tom said, kneeling down beside Ellie.

Ellie nodded. There were tears in her eyes. She wiped her cheeks with the sleeve of her coat. “But… look behind her,” she said.

Tom craned his neck to find that there were two little lambs behind the sheep, behind what was surely their mother.

“Look how tiny they are,” Ellie said, reaching over and running a finger through one of the baby lamb’s wool. Her finger came back wet.

“They must have just been born,” Tom said, setting his axe down on the straw of the barn floor.

Ellie was staring at the axe, and tears were flowing again. “Are we going to…”

Tom shook his head. “No, I don’t think we can.”

Ellie rubbed at her cheeks again, this time with both sleeves. She looked relieved.

“They came into this world no worse for wear,” Tom said. “Maybe they survived, protected inside from it all. Just like us. I bet they’re hungry.”

“Yeah,” Ellie said.

Tom reached over the mother, picked up one of the lambs, and handed it to Ellie. “Can you carry this one?” he said.

Ellie nodded.

Tom reached down for the other lamb and picked it up. As he did so, something scurried out from beneath it. It looked like a cockroach, but it was blood red.

“You ever see a red cockroach before?” Tom said, cradling the second lamb in his arms.

“No,” Ellie said, standing up with her own lamb. “I don’t think there are red cockroaches.”

“Must be my imagination,” Tom said. “We’d better get going.”

“Where to?”

“We keep on walking,” Tom said, scanning the ground for the red cockroach. “Mom needs food. We need food. And I think there’s a lot more that we need to see.”

Tom was turning to leave when he heard Ellie scream.

“Ow!” Ellie said. “It bit me. It fell out of the lamb’s mouth and bit me.”

“What bit you?”

“It was red.”

“Like a cockroach?”

Ellie nodded feverishly. She was still clutching the lamb, but a red welt was rising up on the back of her hand.

Tom held out his own lamb in one extended arm and pried open its mouth with his free hand. He gave the lamb a quick shake, and two red cockroaches fell out onto the straw floor. They were gone in an instant, scurrying away to who knows where.

“Put down your lamb, Ellie,” Tom said, setting his own lamb down onto the ground.

Ellie bent down, and the lamb practically fell through her arms onto the straw floor.

Tom picked up the axe, swept Ellie behind him, and reached out toward the mother sheep’s head. He had to know. He just had to.

Tom pinched the wool beneath the mother lamb’s chin and gave it a sharp tug.

The mouth fell open, Tom gasped, and red was all he saw.