“All right,” Tom says again. “I’m opening my eyes.”

Malorie tenses.

“I’m fine,” Tom says. “It’s okay.”

Malorie opens her eyes. On the kitchen counter there are two buckets of well water. Felix is standing blindfolded by the back door. Jules is removing his blindfold.

“Lock that door,” Tom says.

“It is,” Cheryl says.

“Jules,” Tom says, “stack the chairs from the dining room in front of this door. Then block the window in the dining room with the table.”

“Tom,” Olympia says, “you’re scaring me.”

“Don, come with me. We’re going to block the front door with the credenza. Felix, Cheryl, turn the couch in the living room on its side. Block one of the windows. I’ll find something to block the other one with.”

The housemates are staring at Tom.

“Come on,” he says impatiently. “Let’s go!”

As they begin to scatter, Malorie touches Tom’s arm.

“What is it?”

“Olympia and I can help. We’re pregnant, not crippled. We’ll put the mattresses upstairs over the windows.”

“Okay. But do it blindfolded. And be as careful as you’ve ever been in your entire life.”

Then Tom leaves the kitchen. When Malorie and Olympia pass the living room, Don is already in there, moving the couch. Upstairs, the two women delicately place Malorie’s mattress on its side against the blanket covering the window. They do the same in Olympia and Cheryl’s rooms.

Downstairs again, the doors and windows are blockaded.

The housemates are in the living room. They are standing very close together.

“Tom,” Olympia says, “is something out there?”

Tom pauses before answering. Malorie sees something deeper than fear in Olympia’s eyes. She feels it herself, too.

“Maybe.”

Tom is staring at the windows.

“But it could have been . . . a deer, right? Couldn’t it have been a deer?”

“Maybe.”

One by one the housemates sit upon the living room’s carpeted floor. They are shoulder to shoulder, back to back. In the center of the room, the couch against one window, the kitchen chairs stacked against the other, they sit in silence.

They listen.

fourteen

Cold river water splashes across Malorie’s pants as she rows. Each time it does she pictures one of the creatures in the river, cupping its hands, tossing it upon her, mocking her attempt at escape. She shivers.

Olympia’s baby book, Malorie recalls, taught her many things. But there was one sentence in At Last . . . a Baby! that really struck a chord:

Your baby is smarter than you think.

At first, Malorie struggled to accept this. In the new world, babies had to be trained to wake up with their eyes closed. They had to be raised scared. There wasn’t room for unknowns. Yet, there were times when the Boy and the Girl surprised her.

Once, having cleaned the upstairs hallway of the children’s makeshift toys, Malorie stepped into the living room. There, she heard something move in the room at the end of the first-floor hall.

“Boy?” she called. “Girl?”

But she knew the children were in their bedroom. She’d locked them in their cribs less than an hour before.

Malorie closed her eyes and stepped into the hall.

She knew what the sound was. She knew exactly where every object in the house was located. It was a book falling from the table in the room Don and Jules once shared.

At the children’s bedroom doorway, Malorie paused. Within, she heard soft snoring.

A second crash from the unused room and Malorie gasped. The bathroom was only a few feet from her. The children were sleeping. If she could just get into the bathroom, she could defend herself.

Blindly, her arms raised in front of her face, she moved quickly, smashing into the wall before finding the bathroom doorway. Inside, she hit her hip hard against the sink. Frantically feeling along the wall, she felt the cloth of a towel hanging. She wrapped it tightly around her eyes. Knotted it twice. Then, behind the open door, she found what she was looking for.

The garden axe.

Armed, blindfolded, she exited the bathroom. Gripping the axe handle with both hands, she inched toward the door she knew was always closed. A door that was now open.

She stepped inside.

She swung the axe, blindly, at eye level. It struck the wood wall and Malorie screamed as splinters exploded. She turned and swung again, this time connecting with the opposite wall.

“Get out! Leave my children alone!”

Heaving, she waited.

For a response. For movement. For whatever it was that knocked the books over in there.

Then she heard the Boy, at her feet, whimpering.

“Boy?”

Stunned, kneeling, Malorie found him fast. She removed the towel and opened her eyes.

In his tiny hands she saw he held a ruler. Beside him were the books.

She picked him up and carried him into his bedroom. There, she saw the wire lid of the crib open. She set him next to it on the floor. Then she closed it again and asked him to open it. The Boy just stared at her. She toyed with the little lock, asking him to show her if he could open it. Then he did.

Malorie slapped him.

At Last . . . a Baby!

She recalled Olympia’s baby book. Now her own.

And the one sentence from it she tried hard to ignore came back to her.

Your baby is smarter than you think.

It used to worry her. But today, in the boat, using the children’s ears as guides, she clings to it, hoping the children are as prepared as anybody can be for what may come, farther along the river.

Yes, she hopes they are smarter than what may lay ahead.

fifteen

I’m not drinking that water,” Malorie says.

The housemates are exhausted. They slept packed together on the living room floor, though nobody slept for very long.

“We can’t go days without water, Malorie,” Tom says. “Think about the baby.”

“That’s who I’m thinking about.”

In the kitchen, on the counter, the two buckets Felix filled are still untouched. One by one the housemates lick their dry lips. It has been twenty-four hours and the likelihood of its being much longer weighs on all their minds.

They are thirsty.

“Can we drink the river water?” Felix asks.

“Bacteria,” Don says.

“That depends,” Tom says. “On how cold the water is. How deep. How fast it flows.”

“And anyway,” Jules says, “if something got into the well, I’m sure it’s gotten into the river.”

Contamination, Malorie thinks. It’s the word of the hour.

In the cellar are three buckets of urine and feces. Nobody wants to take them outside. Nobody wants to go out there at all today. The smell is strong in the kitchen and hangs faintly in the living room.

“I would drink the river water,” Cheryl says. “I’d chance it.”

“You’d go out there?” Olympia asks. “There could be something standing right on the other side of the door!”

“I don’t know what I heard,” Felix says. He’s repeated this many times. He’s said he feels guilty for scaring everybody.

“It was probably a person,” Don says. “Probably somebody looking to rob us.”

“Do we have to figure this out right now?” Jules asks. “It’s been one day. We haven’t heard anything. Let’s wait. One more day. See if we feel better.”

“I’d even drink from the buckets,” Cheryl says. “It’s a well, for fuck’s sake. Animals fall into wells all the time. They die down there. We’ve probably been drinking dead animal water this whole time.”

“The water in this neighborhood has always been good,” Olympia says.

Malorie gets up. She walks to the kitchen’s entrance. The water glistens at the rim of the wood bucket, shines in the one of metal.

What would it do to us? she thinks.

“Can you imagine drinking a little part of one?” Tom asks.