Foreverland Is Dead

old.
    “Where am I?” another asks .
    The girl shines the candlelight on each bed. The one in the back corner looks empty, but the rest are filled with young girls, all about the age of puberty, maybe a little older. The girl with the candle isn’t sure how old she is. Her breasts are loose beneath her shirt, no bra. She’s definitely past puberty. She feels older than the others but isn’t sure. She can’t remember her birthday or where she was born.
    I don’t know my name.
    There has to be an adult somewhere, someone that knows where they are and how they got there.
    And who they are.
    She takes the candle to the front door and steps outside. The wind quickly snuffs out the flame and almost knocks the candle from her hand. The sun isn’t visible, but morning light bleeds through the sky from her left. She quickly notes which way is East.
    She feels the helicopter’s whoop-whoop-whoop in her chest. To her right, near a barn, there are three windmills, each with big white blades spinning on a post. Grit blows into her eyes and she drops the candle to shield her face. Knee-high grass waves in a wide-open pasture.
    Hooves stampede up to a five-wire fence near the windmills. A horse rears up and neighs. Two others join it, stomping around when they see her. Just past the horses, the barn looms, the doors swinging on rusty hinges that sing in protest.
    One of the girls comes outside, followed by two more. They crowd together. The early morning chill has them hugging themselves, teeth chattering.
    “Who are you?” one of them asks.
    “Go back inside,” the blonde girl says.
    She looks to her left, away from the whoop-whoop-whoop of the windmills and rampaging horses, to see a big cabin built from logs like the bunkhouse.
    “Hello?” the blonde calls, walking toward it.
    Ther e are no lights inside it. She steps onto the empty porch, the boards creaking under her bare feet. Some of the girls follow from a distance. The blonde cups her hands over one of the windows. It looks like a dining hall, of sorts: a long wooden table with chairs on both sides and an elegant candelabrum in the center. Empty and lifeless.
    Her breath fogs the glass.
    There’s a large garden on the other side of the building , filled with sprawling vines and rows and rows of vegetables. Compost bins are at the far end, and maybe a hundred yards past that is another cabin. Not really a cabin.
    More like a two-story modern brick house.
    One of the youngsters climbs onto the porch . Her hair is black, her skin dark. The other two follow. Two more are still inside the bunkhouse.
    The blonde steps quickly past them. She just wants to find someone who knows what’s going on. These are just kids.
    Grassy stalks stab the soft bridges of her feet. She folds her arms over her chest, hunches against the chilly wind and shuffles past the garden. Ten black-dotted faces of solar panels are near the compost bins that are turned towards the East where the sun is due to rise at any time now.
    “Where you goin g?” someone shouts.
    She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know where she is, how could she know where she’s going? But someone does. Someone has to be in that house, and they would know. Someone knows why there’s a bunkhouse of filthy girls running around in bare feet and long tshirts in the middle of nowhere.
    Someone has to .
    She’ s halfway there when the back of her neck starts to tingle again. She’s not touching it this time. It’s a low vibration. It tickles, at first. Makes her skin itch. She reaches up to scratch it and remembers what it felt like the last time she did that. But each step makes it worse.
    Electric lines extended out from the lump, tiny bolts of lightning crawling along her jaw and the back of her head. She looks back. The girls are watching from the front porch of the dark and empty dinner house.
    She starts for the brick house again. One step.
    Two.
    Three.
    The tingling begins to sting. Tears well up in her eyes, blur the house. She’s twenty steps away from the front porch with ceiling fans and bench swings and glass tables. There’s a lamp in one of the windows, illuminating the front room.
    “Hello ?”
    S he’s ten steps away when her ears begin ringing. Someone will hear her. Someone will come out. Someone will tell her where she is.
    Tell her who she is.
    “Is anyone —”
    An electric shock shoots from the lump in the back of her neck, her teeth snap together. Her jaw clenches. Black shutters drop