Foreverland Is Dead

before sunset. The girls wanted to pet the horses. Kat knew what food they ate and how much. The barn had a feed room with tack and barrels of oats.
    They straightened up the kitchen. Dinner was pickles and boiled potatoes. T he brick house sat in the distant dark, one eye lit on the front porch.
    They went to bed, but she doesn’t remember doing it .
    Cyn quietly sits up. Her feet hurt like she’d been walking barefoot. She doesn’t recall taking off her boots. She’s wearing the same t-shirt. The smell of death clings to it like smoke. Or perhaps that’s the dead body still staining her sinuses.
    She reaches under the bed and slides out a box. She digs blindly through a stack of shirts, finds a pair of socks near the bottom and something else. Something leather.
    It’s curved at the bottom with a smooth, cold handle. There’s not enough light to see but she knows what it is. She lights the candle. Buck knife.
    She unsnaps the latch and slides it out of the leather case. The blade is silver, heavy. She flicks the end, listens to it ring. The edge is sharp but the tip is dull.
    The lines on the wall.
    Are those days? Has she been marking how long she’s been there? There are so many. She pulls the bed from the wall, the legs grinding. The lines go all the way to the floor.
    More than a year.
    Cyn snuffs the candle out and gets on her knees. She reaches under the bed, feels one of the boards that support the mattress. She unsnaps it one more time and reaches over the bed, gouging a line in the wall.
    A new row begins.

    There are plenty of tools in the barn, but no buckets. A dozen eggs fit in the cradle of Cyn’s shirt. It’s more than they’ll eat, but she wasn’t going to leave the eggs to rot. The cisterns stand like black sentinels drinking from the roof. There’s a door to the kitchen on the outside of the dinner house.
    Cyn slide s the keycard into the slot, listens for the gears to turn before pushing it open. She flips the light switch, turns on the griddle, and looks for butter.
    The re’s a list of daily chores tacked to the refrigerator. She puts it in her back pocket. The refrigerator is stocked with milk, fruit, and dried strips of meat. The meat could be from a hunt—there’s probably elk and deer—but milk and fruit? Oranges don’t grow where there are snowcapped mountains. Someone had to bring those.
    They’ll be back .
    No butter in the fridge. There’s a cabinet below the sink but no food, just hundreds of plastic bags containing clear liquid. They look like IV bags. The shelves on the door contain brown bottles of peroxide and iodine.
    Medicine, good.
    She grabs one of the IV bags. No label. Maybe medicine or nutrients. If things get desperate, they might be drinking them.

    Half the eggs get burned.
    Mad finds a tub of lard and turns the heat down, salvaging the other eggs. Cyn scrapes the blackened bits onto a plate. They each get two eggs and a banana. Cyn’s eggs look like they were cooked with a hammer.
    They eat in silence.
    Kat’s the first to finish, licking her plate. She starts scraping the inside of the banana peel. Miranda picks at her food, pushes the crispy parts to the edge. Roc pinches them off her plate. Miranda doesn’t complain.
    Grit gusts against the windows. It sounds cold.
    Roc takes her plate to the kitchen, returns with a jar of preserved apples. The top pops. She dips two fingers inside like chopsticks.
    “We need to start rationing,” Cyn says.
    “There’s enough food for months,” Roc says.
    “We might be here longer.”
    “I don’t plan on being here that long.”
    “Where you going?”
    “Out there.” Roc points at the front door. “I’m not waiting around to die; I’ll hit the hills and take my chances.”
    “That’s not smart. Grizzlies are out there.”
    “How do you know?” She plucks out another apple.
    “ We’re in the mountains. This looks like Wyoming or Montana. Either way, bears live here.”
    “She’s right,” Kat adds. “This is the wilderness. You won’t survive two nights out there. Plus, we’re at the end of summer. That means it’s going to get colder.”
    “And we need to conserve food.” Cyn reaches for the jar.
    Roc slides it away. “Maybe I’m Daniel Boone.”
    “You don’t know who you are.” Cyn looks around the table. “None of us do. And until we know more, we need to work together. We need to survive until someone finds us.”
    “That’s your plan? Hang around until someone finds