Hannah

Kevin and I made love for the second time on our first night in the cabin. I initiated it, as a way to demonstrate to him how apologetic I was for having doubted him after our run in with the wolves. I should have trusted Kevin; after everything that we had been through in Prospera the one thing I should have learned from all of it was to always trust Kevin. What he had done was nothing short of astounding. He had led us out of the only place we’d ever known and that we thought we would ever know, through the forest that we had been told nobody had ever returned from alive and had brought us to a place of safety that was a part of the outside world that we’d always thought of as being so far away that it might as well not exist. It had been a heroic effort on his part, from leading us over Guardian Mountain to killing the deer to saving us from the wolves; he had remained unruffled throughout and had guided us in one piece to within touching distance of our goal. We’d soon be coming into contact with the outside world, our thoughts turned to what we would do then.

The next morning, with the aid of the daylight, we went through the cabin thoroughly in search of anything that would prove useful. We found a lot. The bedroom cupboards were stocked with clothes and linen, the cupboard in the bathroom had soap, toothpaste, some medicinal products and detergents. A cabinet in the dining room contained fishing rods, a box of hooks and reels, a broom and a mop. Outside on the porch there was a big axe bracketed to the wall and a large metal bucket that Kevin suggested we use for heating up water. After going through the house and finding so many useful things, Lisa, Miranda and I worked together to give the place the cleaning it so desperately needed. I used the broom to clean the floors, Lisa used a stick from outside to whack the dust out of the furniture and Miranda used a cloth to clean all of the surfaces. The mess was worse than we thought. The dust that covered everything was thick, sand had been blown inside through the few windows that were broken and in Miranda and Lisa’s room there was an old bird’s nest.

“How long do you think it’s been since anyone’s been here?” Miranda asked.

“Could be months, could be years,” I responded.

“I opened the valve on the pipe that leads from the lake to the house, so the plumbing should be working,” Kevin entered the cabin and said to us.

Miranda went into the kitchen and opened the taps to see if it was working.

“We were just speculating if this cabin has been abandoned for months or years,” I said to Kevin.

“Definitely years, I was looking at some of the wood on the outside and it’s quite badly decayed.”

“Plumbing’s working,” Miranda called from the kitchen when the water started flowing out of the taps.

“You’ll need to run all of the taps for a while so the fresh water from the lake can clean out any gunk that’s built up in the pipes,” Kevin said.

Kevin walked outside after issuing that instruction and grabbed hold of the axe that was bracketed outside.

“Are you going to chop some firewood?” I asked him from inside.

“There’s a small room behind the cabin with a lock on it; I’m going to break the lock to see what’s inside.”

The rest of us continued cleaning while Kevin went to try and gain access to the room behind the cabin. From inside we only heard him strike the lock three times, obviously it wasn’t very strong. Once the water from the kitchen taps stopped flowing brown Miranda went to the bathroom to run the taps in there. She was busy with that when Kevin walked back into the cabin with what he’d discovered in the room behind the cabin. Lisa and I froze when we saw what he was carrying in his hand. In Prospera we had learned about those things as students, about how much damage they’d done and pain they’d caused. The sight of it alone terrified the both of us; we couldn’t understand why Kevin would bring it anywhere near us.

“What are you doing with that?” I asked him.

“It’s what was locked in the room.”

“You know what that is right? It’s a gun! Do you know how much damage those things have caused in the outside world? They have killed millions of people!”

“Hannah, I thought that you had learned not to believe everything that we were told in Prospera as the absolute truth.”

“Put it back! Put it back and let’s never talk about it again, we’ll act as if you’d never found it.”

“I’m not going to do that; this could be really useful to us.”

“Are you listening to me Kevin? Those things kill!”

“Exactly; we don’t have any food left having eaten all the beans last night; we’re going to need to hunt an animal again and with this it’ll be really easy.”

“You’re putting us all in danger by insisting on using that thing!”

“No, I’m not; all I need to do is figure out how it works, once I’ve done that I’ll be able to use it safely and there’ll be nothing for you to worry about.”

“What if something happens to you while you’re figuring out how to use it? We can’t do this without you.”

“Behind the cabin there are tracks that go through the forest, that’s probably the route that the people from the outside world used to get here; follow those tracks and you should reach the outside world without any problems.”

He turned around and went back outside with the gun and the box of bullets that he’d also found in the room to teach himself how to use it. Miranda and Lisa were curious to see how he would get on and took up standing positions by the porch window where they could watch him. I was far too terrified of what might happen to Kevin to watch with them. I sat down on the floor next to them with my back against the wall and my head in my hands, hoping nothing that we’d learned happened because of guns would happen to Kevin. Lisa and Miranda’s commentary on what they were watching didn’t help my anxiety the slightest bit.

“What’s he doing?” Miranda asked Lisa.

“It looks like he’s trying to work out how to get the bullets in,” Lisa answered, “He’s keeping the end with the opening pointed away from him, hopefully that means that if there’s an accident he won’t be hurt.”

The times when they were silent were worse. I spent that time waiting for a noise, either from outside or from Lisa and Miranda that would signal that some sort of disaster had taken place.

“Looks like he’s figured out where the bullets go; he’s putting one in,” Lisa said after several tense and silent seconds, after which there were more tense and silent seconds.

“Nothing happened; why did nothing happen?” Miranda asked.

I presumed that Kevin had just tried to fire the gun. My heart was now pounding, I was shaking and sweating and I couldn’t get my breathing under control. Something was about to happen that would either see Kevin return to us alive or not.

“He’s fiddling with something, maybe now it’ll work,” Lisa said.

The sound that followed reminded me of the term that our teacher used when she’d described to us what the people of the outside world suffered through during the countless wars that they were constantly fighting. ‘The sounds of death’ was how she had described the noise produced by the weapons used in conflict. The noise from the gun going off had pervaded the space all around us and had penetrated us as if we had been struck by the bullet itself. Doubts about the course we were on came flooding into my mind. What on earth were we thinking seeking out a place where people kept things like this? The sound of the gunshot was still ringing in my ears and the violence of it was still reverberating through my mind and body when a second shot rang out, quickly followed by a third.

“Is he okay?” I asked from behind my hands which I was using to cover my face.

“He’s okay; he’s figured out how to use it,” Lisa answered.

I stood up off the floor and looked outside at Kevin with Lisa and Miranda. He was holding the gun and looking at it with a sureness that didn’t sit comfortably with me at all. What I had taken away from the horrible sound of the gun going off was that the elders of Prospera were right to scare us about certain things from the outside world as a way to ensure that they never became a part of life in Prospera. The ease with which the gun that Kevin was holding could bring about devastation was frightening; I didn’t want us becoming so familiar with and dependent upon such things that we started seeing them as absolute necessities. Kevin slung the rifle onto his shoulder with the strap that was attached to it and walked back to us looking like a very different person, a more dangerous person.

“Right, I’m going to look for some food; I’ll probably be gone for a while so don’t get worried and come looking for me,” he said to us before turning around and going back into the forest with the rifle slung over his shoulder.

There was nothing for the three of us to do but return to cleaning up the cabin while we waited for Kevin to return. Miranda and I cleaned all of the rooms in the house and made an effort to make the cabin more homely. We replaced the linen on the beds with linen from the cupboards, spread a tablecloth over the dining room table and went through the clothes in the bedroom closets to see what we could wear. There were clothes for boys and girls, and most of it was winter wear, which was good given how low the temperature had dropped and would continue to drop. I went through all of the cupboards and set aside clothes for all of us to wear after we’d had our baths later; Miranda was washing the linen that we’d pulled off the beds in the bathtub for us to put back on the beds when it was dry because the linen we’d taken out of the closets and put on the beds was also smelling terribly dusty. While we were busy inside with these chores Lisa had gone outside and was using the big axe to chop firewood for us to use in the fireplace, to boil water and to cook whatever Kevin brought back with him if his hunt was successful.

All of us pitching in and doing our bit to help out made it feel like we were back in Prospera and that wasn’t altogether a bad feeling, especially after what Kevin had put me through with the gun. I questioned even more than I did before if we were doing the right thing. I was starting to miss Prospera and not even the freedom that Kevin and I had to be with each other was enough to stop me from worrying that we were making a mistake by travelling to a place where they had guns and other instruments of violence that we could only guess at.