Black Helicopters by Blythe Woolston Read Free Book Online

Just a little piece of glass. I’m hardly cut at all, but, now I know it’s there. I notice the crunch of broken glass under my boots. It used to be a window. Now it’s just pointy teeth scattered on the hillside. Nobody will ever look out that window to see if trouble is coming ever again. Trouble came.
    If Bo and I were home, there would have been three of us. More eyes to see. More hands to fight. I wonder what that would have meant. Then I hear words in my head that sound like Da: “You were following orders.” The words in my head are right. We were following orders.
    We still have orders to follow. We are at the bottom of the hill. Two days ago we would have been standing beside the back porch. Tonight we are walking past a stinking black place crowded with burnt things and nothing.
    The root cellar is cut into the bank of the hill over there. In daylight it looks like a woodpile with a tarp over it from most directions. You can only see the plank door if you go behind the stacks of split wood. If you do go back there and open the door, all you see is a hole in the ground, some board shelves with cans of food and some jars of things Mabby canned before she died. We never ate that food. It’s too old to eat now. We don’t put food in the root cellar anymore.
    When Bo pulls the door of the root cellar open, it smells like dirt and wet. It doesn’t smell like smoke. We pull the door closed behind us. Bo finds the flashlight hanging on the back of the door. He cranks it up and the light shoots out onto the dirt floor. He hands it to me. Part of me wants to look at the words Mabby wrote on the jars: PEACHES, CARROTS, PICKLED BEETS . Sometimes in the summer, I come in here where it’s cool and dark to look at the letters my Mabby wrote. It helps me remember that she was real.
    I can’t read the labels now. Bo needs the light to see, so I shine it where he is working. He shifts some plastic milk crates full of rusted hinges and parts that don’t fit anything. He moves some boards leaning up against the back wall. He steps aside, and the beam of light threads down into the tunnel. This is the back door to the den. This is the way out Da made. Da might be in there, waiting for us.
    We need to go find him.
    There’s a med kit in a coffee can on the shelf. We need that. I hand the flashlight to Bo. He moves fast to the first turn point, then he keeps going, silent. I follow in the dark. I know where I’m going. It’s like getting a cup of water in the middle of the night. I’ve done it so many times.
    Then the light swings back on me and makes me blinder than the dark ever did.
    “He’s not there,” says Bo. “It’s caved in at second turn.”
    Da probably got out before the collapse. He didn’t need the med kit. That’s what I think.
    When we get back to the root cellar, Bo pushes the few last jars of food Mabby left behind out of the way. Behind them, there are other jars. Nothing says what’s in them, and you can’t tell by looking because they just look black. One, two, three, four, five. All there. Da never took a jar, either. He might have just been in a hurry; that’s what I think.
    Bo picks up a jar and unscrews the lid, and then he dumps it out on the floor. Inky water and another, smaller jar. He opens that jar. There’s a little kiss of air when the seal breaks. There’s a neat roll of money inside, just like Da stashed it. Five jars, five wads of money. The money and the med kit go into the backpack. The jars and the lids go back on the shelves. The boards and the milk crates cover the entrance to the den. We turn off the light and wait for our eyes to adjust. We open the root cellar door and step from the darkness inside to the darkness outside.
    The air smells bad. The smoke has all blown away, but the smell of burning is thick as snot. It makes my eyes water and my nose run.
    Before we leave, we have to retrieve the intel from the job shed. The padlock is still on the door. That’s a good