“You’re a king among men,” Mitch says. When she catches me smiling, she rolls her eyes.

  16

  ROSE

  I stand in the kitchen eating my bowl of acorn porridge—a dark brown gruel with next to no flavor that I tried to liven up with diced apple and a cinnamon spice blend. It didn’t liven very well, though the added crunch gives the impression of eating something more substantial. This morning’s breakfast was made from acorns leached with hot water. Though faster than cold water leaching, the heating process cooks out the starch that acts like a binder. For acorn nuts, as we’ve named our salty snack, that’s fine. But baked goods, and Daisy’s dotorimuk, might fall apart without it.

  “It’s not bad,” Jesse says from a couch in the living room. He still eats like the voracious teenager he was not that long ago. Like he has a hollow leg, as Pop says. I imagine his cells dividing, mitochondria pumping, organs working to keep him healthy and strong, all of which requires fuel.

  On the same couch, Holly and Clara scrape their bowls clean. Everyone got a measured cup, but I took a half cup and split the remainder among the kids. Holly surreptitiously spooned some of hers into Nora’s bowl, as I knew she would—she tries at every meal. It’s not enough, for me or them. No matter how small my plate, meals look paltry. My clothes are loose. The weight I wanted to lose is melting away.

  Unease swirls in my stomach. I set my bowl in the sink and gaze through the windows. In the distance, the Sisters’ peaks are visible again. The smoke blew out after a few days, and the sky has been clear ever since. As in every autumn, I wish for a soaking rain to quell fires. Like most autumns, I’m sure the rain won’t come and more land will burn.

  An urge to scream grips my chest and throat, expanding upward as though attempting to expel my anxiety via my mouth. Instead of howling like a banshee, thereby outing myself as nuts to the assembled diners, I do what I’ve started doing whenever I’m overwhelmed: take a lantern into the pantry and shut the door behind me.

  I breathe deeply, three counts in and four out, while I appraise the shelves. A couple of weeks ago, it was distressingly sparse but for our pre-packaged food. Now one shelf is lined with twenty pints of Oregon grape-salal-raspberry-huckleberry-apple preserves, another with Ziploc bags of dried apples, a third with seeds: dock, plantain, and even the small seeds harvested from the “helicopter” pods of maple trees. I run my hand down the large jars of acorn nuts, caress a handful of the early hazelnuts, sniff the mint leaves Adele found hiding in the garden and dried for tea. Proof we’re not starving sits right before my eyes. We’re okay.

  For now, a shitty voice whispers.

  “For now,” I say aloud, altering the tone from fear to gratitude. “We’re okay.”

  Once the ball of latent scream dissolves, I return to the kitchen. Jesse and Clara are gone, along with most everyone. Mitch, who just finished watch, relaxes on a couch. At the dining table, Holly and Amber study our reference books, turning pages already wrinkled and dog-eared from use.

  I ponder what we’ll eat for dinner tonight. Fish, if they catch more today. Freeze-dried food if they don’t. Last night, we grilled some special type of fish they caught in the river, which everyone pronounced delicious. They were wrong, but I choked it down after dousing it with bottled lemon juice and lots of pepper. Unfortunately, my wish that hunger would make seafood delectable remains ungranted thus far.

  Large jars of beige acorn sludge line the kitchen counters. With the help of the generator, we blended shelled nutmeats with water until finely ground, then dumped the resulting slurry into the jars. Once the acorn meal settled, the leached tannins colored the water brown. Several times a day, we pour off the water and refill with fresh.

  Depending on tannin levels and frequency of water changes, we might have cold-leached flour as early as today or in as much as a few weeks. Over the past days, the deep brown of the leaching water has lightened to a pale tea. I select a jar for a taste test and pour the water into the sink, careful not to send acorn meal down the drain with it.

  “How’s winter looking?” I ask the girls.

  Amber’s face scrunches adorably. “Not great. This says you can eat the inner bark on some pine trees to make starvation bread, but it doesn’t say which ones, or if you can eat firs or cedars.” She flips through the pages. “There’s also a section on how to make alcohol.”

  “Let’s do that!” Mitch calls from the living room. We have six bottles of liquor that are going fast. When hunger makes sleep difficult, it helps to quiet the brain and rumbling stomach. We didn’t bring the stocked bar from my house; while scrambling to escape zombies, drinking didn’t seem like a smart idea. In hindsight, I wish we’d brought it all—we might as well party while we starve to death.

  “We should make our own edible plant book,” Holly says. “Once we can ID a plant, we can list all its characteristics and uses in one place instead of hunting through the books to see what each says.”

  “That’s a great idea,” I say. “What about pictures?”

  “We’ll draw them. I saw my art supplies in the fifth wheel. Did you bring them?”

  “I thought you might want them at some point.”

  Holly smiles her thanks. I wink and taste a pinch of acorn meal. Only a bland, vaguely nutty flavor, with no trace of tannins. I send the universe a heartfelt thank you that it worked again. The numerous jars in the kitchen, along with the acorn nutmeats we dried for future leaching, represent a lot of food. It won’t last long feeding thirty people, but it buys us time. And it has the bonus of not being fish, which gives me hope for a non-terrible dinner tonight.

  “Have you seen Daisy?” I ask.

  “Garden,” Mitch says. “I’ll get her.”

  Almost everyone is outside on watch, childcare duty, gardening, or chopping and stacking the firewood that’ll be our main heat source this winter. While searching abandoned homes, we found two fireplace inserts—one of which has a cooking surface—and both are now installed in the cabin. Along with the soapstone stove in the pool house and the wood stove in the guesthouse, we’ll need many cords of wood to last until spring.

  While I wait for Daisy, I lay finely woven cloth inside a large colander and dump in the acorn slurry. I gather the cloth’s edges and twist to wring out the leaching water, following the book’s suggestion to save the starchiest, milky beige liquid, which can be simmered and sweetened to make a delicious drink. I’m not sure about the delicious part, but The Littles will have fun drinking acorn milk. Once the hazelnuts are ready, we can make hazelnut milk, then use the leftover pulp to flavor and thicken our porridge.

  Amber and Holly inspect the cattail rhizomes we cut into small discs to dry, then test one by grinding it with a once decorative—now utilitarian—mortar and pestle. The resulting white flour is full of fibers that must be sifted out. Even with that task ahead of them, the girls murmur cheerily.

  Sudden urges to scream notwithstanding, I don’t feel as helpless as I did two weeks ago. Foraging has fostered a sense of harmony with my surroundings, and the forest, once a place to get hopelessly lost, now feels like a pantry of sorts. Though I murder garden plants indiscriminately, my black thumb doesn’t seem to extend to the wild.

  Daisy enters the cabin with Mitch. Her sweaty bangs stick to her brow, a leaf clings to her chest, and there’s a crescent of dirt beneath every fingernail. “Hey, Rose. What’s up?”

  “The acorn flour is done, and I thought you might want to make dotorimuk. But it can wait for another day. You look busy enough.”

  Daisy blows her bangs off her forehead, hands on her hips. “I’m working with Adele in the garden. Have a toilet you want scrubbed? Your taxes done? I’m your girl.”

  I laugh as she leaves to wash up in the pool house, then I check the remaining jars of slurry, drain those that are ready, and spread the wet acorn meal on cookie sheets. What we don’t use promptly will be dried before it molds.

  Daisy reappears wearing a clean version of her standard jeans and tank top. Though she ordinarily exudes confidence, she assesses the kitchen with tense, shifting eyes. “Dotorimuk needs time to cool. Without a refrigerator, it might not be ready tonight.”

  “We could put it in the spring house up the butte,” I say. “Didn’t people do that once upon a time?”

  “Or the pond,” Amber suggests. “I tried to wash up in there one day, but that water is cold as shit. I’d rather be dirty.”

  Daisy’s laugh is higher than usual. “What if I mess up? I don’t want to waste food.”

  “What’s the worst that could happen?” I ask. “If it doesn’t jell right, we’ll use it to thicken broth or porridge.”

  Daisy nods, moves for the large pot on the range, then stops. “My mom used acorn starch from the store. Do you think there’s a difference between that and this?”

  In the past, she’s spoken of her mother with love and humor, but also with a certain wistfulness, as though unsure if she met her mother’s standards. Her mom was a great cook, and this might feel like a final exam. I can relate; I often wonder if my mom would be proud of the person I’ve become, if I’ve lived up to her expectations.

  “Half of cooking is experimenting,” I say. “When you mess up, you learn for next time. You should see some of the horrible shit I’ve made.”

  “I’ve never made anything but horrible shit,” Mitch adds.

  Daisy finally smiles, wiping her hands on her thighs. “Okay. Let’s do it.”

  She measures numerous cups of acorn meal into a large pot, combines it with approximately five times the amount of cold water, and heats it on the stovetop. Then she stirs. And stirs. And stirs. “It could burn if you stop,” she explains, then inspects the contents and stirs in salt. “It’s starting to thicken.”

  The tan mixture has turned caramel brown. Daisy lifts the spoon, drizzling some on top. “A little thicker. I think.” The next time she checks, the drizzle sits on the surface, and she shuts off the heat. “Now we pour it into containers and let it cool.”

  “It’s kind of like soapmaking,” I say.

  “It is?”

  “When you make soap, you mix it to what’s called ‘trace.’ That’s when the oils and lye have emulsified, and a thin drizzle of your soap mixture stays on the surface.”

  Daisy pours the dotorimuk into glass casserole dishes. The small amount of acorn flour has yielded a remarkably large volume of food. Maybe not the most caloric meal, but it should be filling. “How do you know that?” she asks.

  “I used to make soap. I sold it for a while.”

  “That’s a good post-apocalyptic skill. Maybe you can sell soap to everyone one day.”

  I watch her smooth the brown mixture. “And you can sell acorn jelly.”

  “My mother would love that. Her daughter, the bike builder who always ate takeout, selling homemade Korean food. Hey, if we grow vegetables next summer, I could make kimchi. I helped my mom with that from the second I was born.”

  I clap my hands in excitement. “I love kimchi!”

  “What Rose means is that she loves kimchi that isn’t too fishy,” Mitch adds. “Though she thinks kombucha is delicious, so you’d assume she’d eat anything.”

  Daisy laughs. “I drove my mom crazy by going vegan for a few years. I can make kickass kimchi without fish.”

  I pretend to swoon. “Marry me.”

  After hours of gardening, processing cattails, and wood stacking, we sit down to dinner. Daisy’s spicy topping of soy sauce, sesame oil, and various spices perfectly complements the mildly nutty dotorimuk. The texture is a cross between gelatin and tofu, chewy and satisfying. Even the kids gobble it down, and not just because they’re hungry.

  I save half my dotorimuk for last, then eye my portion of fish. I dumped sauce on it to disguise the taste, but I refuse to have flaky flesh be the final texture in my mouth. “Is there no end to the fucking fish?” I mutter.

  “What happened to being thankful for everything?” Tom asks beside me.

  “I want to be thankful that I don’t have to eat fish.”

  His low laugh rumbles. A moment later, half his dotorimuk lands on my plate, and my fish disappears. After our fourth straight day of fish for dinner, I’m not arguing. Besides, it likely has higher calories and protein, which Tom needs more than I do. The only way he’ll take mine is if he thinks he’s doing me a favor.

  “You’re sure?” I ask.

  “Yup.” Tom lifts his next bite, stops to inspect his fork, and extracts a long auburn strand of hair. “And I get a prize.”

  “Extra calories,” I say. “Lucky.”

  Across the table, Francis lifts his empty plate. “For once, I’m full. That was great, Daisy.”

  Everyone chimes in with compliments. Daisy shrugs, though she can’t quite hide her smile. “It was easy.”

  “We should look for more oak trees,” Barry says. “Pretty sure there’s some by Brownsville and Sweet Home. We could check the roads again, too.”

  Nods follow his suggestion, enthusiasm lighting many faces. But I know how much it takes to feed large groups of people and how quickly it’ll whittle down to nothing. How quickly we’ll whittle down to nothing. It’s already happening despite the extra calories we’ve obtained. Over a month on low rations has sharpened features. No plate is left uncleaned, and though we act civilized when receiving our portions, I see the craving in people’s eyes.

  Pop smiles reassuringly—I swear he can read my thoughts—and I remind myself that for now, we’re okay. We have apples and acorns and enough spices to drown out the taste of a hundred servings of fish.

  17

  CLARA

  We’ve caught three rabbits in our snares. We set dozens outside Barry’s property, where I currently kneel on a garbage bag over dead grass. The bag is to keep my scent off the ground, same as my gloves will keep it off the snare wires. Our latest location is in a yard filled with picked-over blackberry bushes. It’s a good spot; I found fresh rabbit scat. That’s something I never imagined saying, just as I never thought I’d be threading murder wires through washers and evaluating where to best strangle a small animal.

  “This is my last one,” I tell Jesse.

  He looks up from his own snare. “You made the noose fist sized?”

  “No, I’m a moron who doesn’t listen to directions.”

  Jesse grins, impossibly gorgeous for someone who’s had only cold showers and is covered in dirt. He crafts his noose and hangs it at a hole in the blackberry brambles while I pound a stake into the ground. I loop the loose end of my snare around the stake, then use a small twig to keep the noose facing the right way. I arrange more brush to funnel the animal through the snare, then sit back on my haunches, proud of my skills and unhappy I’m plotting to kill something I only ever thought of as cute.

  I mark our snares’ locations on the map. We don’t want to miss any on our twice-daily rounds, both so our meat doesn’t spoil and so no animal suffers longer than necessary. At crashing brush from the woods behind us, we run toward where Holly and Amber check snares, arriving in time to see Nora drive her spike into a zombie woman’s eyeball. Though we have far fewer Lexers in comparison to Eugene, and we haven’t seen a large pack since that first one at the deck, we can’t ever let down our guards.

  “Help me move her?” Jesse asks Dalton, who quietly materializes whenever Amber steps outside the gate.

  Dalton takes the woman’s ankles, Jesse her armpits, and they trudge deeper into the woods with her body swinging between them. Animals will avoid our snares if one lies nearby, just like deer stay at higher elevations rather than be chased by dead bodies down here. Just like we left town without sufficient supplies rather than become a zombie meal.

  Holly and Amber stand by a long, narrow log Sam propped against a cedar’s trunk. Under his tutelage, we attached several simple snares along its length. He said squirrels love shortcuts, and sure enough, three hang from the log, wires tight around their necks and their little paws pulled close to their chests as if in prayer. I feel sorry for them, but after six weeks of rationing, if it goes in a pot, it goes in my mouth.

  “Let’s take them to Troy or your grandpa,” Amber says as Jesse and Dalton return. “They promised they’d teach me how to dress one.”

  “I watched them do a rabbit,” Holly says. “I’m thinking it’s similar?”

  They loosen the nooses to extract the furry bodies. Amber hands me one. I imagine peeling off its skin and swallow the excess saliva in my mouth.

  Dalton pulls the knife from his belt, reaching for Amber’s squirrel. “I’ll show you.”

  I hand Dalton mine, glad to put off this task, even if I am being a wimp. “Does anyone mind if I do this one?” Holly asks.

  “I have absolutely no problem with that,” I say. Jesse laughs, and I turn to where he and Nora lean against a tree. “I don’t see you lining up to gut squirrels.”

  “I’m hard at work keeping you safe from zombies,” he says, puffing out his chest.

  I roll my eyes, although he did dress one of our rabbits. He didn’t say a word about the process, but he wasn’t overly enthusiastic about dinner that night.

  Dalton sets his squirrel on the log and points to its tail. “First, you skin it. There’s different ways, but my dad did it like this. You want to cut right under its tail, just past…past the….”

  Holly and Amber watch expectantly while Dalton turns a shade of neon pink straight out of the ’80s. He taps his knife on the squirrel’s butt, helpless to go on. “Past the anus?” Holly asks slowly.

  Dalton nods in relief. I manage to keep a straight face in spite of Jesse and Nora silently cracking up behind him. He situates the squirrel on the log and slices under its tail. “So, yeah. Just past the…you know. Make sure you get through the tailbone, then slice some hide at the top of each back leg.”

  Holly and Amber start on their squirrels. At the crack of tailbones, I wince. They imitate how Dalton steps on the base of the tail and pulls the legs upward, peeling skin off the torso toward the head until the squirrel’s pink, fascia-covered flesh is exposed. With its head and upraised arms trapped inside the inside-out hide, it looks for all the world like someone who got stuck taking off a tight shirt.