Garden Haven

Today’s gang of thugs was slowly surrounding us.

 “Now where can we go?” Em asked, as we stared out at the ocean. I pulled out my knife.

“We could swim, but they probably can too,” I said.

Then Em spotted the boat. A rowboat, pulled up on the sand, oars lying inside. We were pushing it out into the water when one of the thugs grabbed Em.

I pulled him away. He punched me a couple of times, all around my head, making me dizzy. But then I stabbed him. Right in the stomach. Blood poured out, and the guy collapsed. I think I killed him. That stopped the others just long enough for us to get the boat in the water and start rowing.

We rowed away, listening to gang hollering and crashing around, watching them try to swim out to us.

I wanted to throw the knife overboard, but I just washed off the blood in the water. I’d never stabbed anyone in the stomach like that. Cut a few guys on the arms when fighting, was all. I’d never killed anyone. It made me feel sick.

 “There’s an island out there,” said Em, pointing.

“Probably full of guys with guns,” I said.

“It has one of those big mansions on it. Maybe they have guards. And guns.”

My head started to ache from where I’d been punched. “Whatever.” And I lay down under the seats and went to sleep.

Emmie and I had been running from the fights and the gangs for months, after our parents died and our house was burned. We ran all the way to the ocean.

The heat and the storms had destroyed so many things that when the third pandemic hit, the internet collapsed, then most of the power grid. We couldn’t get food or medicine or paper towels. Dad planted a big garden, which kept us going for a couple of years.

Then he got sick. And Mom got sick. We buried them in the garden.

Neither of us got sick. Maybe because we’re only in our teens.

A few months later, the crazies showed up. Roving gangs of mostly men, with guns. When they found nothing useful in a house, they burned it down.

I’d heard them coming and saw the fires they’d set.

“We gotta get out of here,” I told Em.

“Ty, where can we go?”

“You wanna stay here and get—”

“Shut up,” she said.

Em and I filled our backpacks with clothes, blankets, matches, some wilted carrots and stale bread, and a big kitchen knife. We slid out the back door while the gang was kicking down the front door.

After that, we ran and hid, ran and hid. I try not to remember much about that. I fought when I had to. Punching attackers felt good, but Em hated it. And hiding was safer.

I woke up because Em was shaking me.

            “Tyrick, wake up! There’s a wind, it’s pushing our boat out to sea!”

I mumbled that she should have woken me earlier, but she’d fallen asleep, too. Running and fighting and hiding is exhausting, worse when you don’t have enough to eat.

The island was a lot closer now. It looked green and inviting. But that wind was blowing us past it. We each grabbed an oar and rowed like hell until we finally landed on the gravelly island beach. Across the water, to the west, the sun hung red over the dry hills We dragged the boat away from the water.

The mansion she’d seen loomed above us on rocky ledge. A tree had fallen on its roof.

Then three large people wearing masks over their mouths appeared. I pulled out that knife, even knowing that I could never take all of them.

The big black man said, “You stole our boat.”

“We didn’t know it was yours,” Em said. “A bunch of people were chasing us.”

The big white man chuckled.

The woman said “You kids want to stay on our island?” I’d never seen such a huge woman, at least six feet tall, muscular, with light brown skin and fuzzy reddish hair.

Em and I looked at each other. “We got a choice?” I asked.

“You need to quarantine for awhile,” she said, “to make sure you don’t have whatever the current sickness is. We’ll tell you about the place while you do that, then you can make up your minds.”

They took us to the mansion. Its fancy wallpaper was peeling and moldy, and weeds grew where some of the floorboards had rotted. But we were both so tired, and I felt kind of sick, so we just rolled up in our blankets and fell asleep.

Em was shaking me. Again. “Go ‘way,” I mumbled.

“Ty, are you okay? That big woman is here. She wants to talk.”

I sat up and retched. Em had some water in a leather bottle, and gave it to me. I fell asleep again.

Someone had lifted me, was giving me more water. It tasted like the cookies my mother used to make when I was just a kid. Gingery. My head felt better. It had a cool cloth on it. “Roll over on your side,” said a man’s voice. “Carefully.” I did. He began to massage my neck, and back. I fell asleep again.

When I woke up again, I felt much better. A pottery cup of water lay beside me, along with a plate that held a slice of bread and butter. I hadn’t had butter in years. I ate it all and drank the water. It still tasted gingery.

Em appeared with a bowl of plain water and a cloth. I washed, and found a place to piss, and felt human again.

“Tanice wants to talk to us, if you feel up to it,” Em said.

We sat outside, on some big rocks while Tanice talked. She was the big red-haired woman,. She was still wearing a mask.. She’d brought us bowls of stew, beans in a meaty broth. I hadn’t eaten anything so good in years.

Tanice explained that this place was called Garden Haven. It had been developed about seventy-five years ago, by a group that wanted to create what Tanice called “sustainable living.” Most of that group were dead now—of old age, not one of the sicknesses.

The whole island, about 200 acres, had been owned by one billionaire. His wife had convinced him that the climate was in trouble. They found some people who wanted to make a place that could survive if everything collapsed, and they called it Garden Haven.

“Our system makes sure everyone is cared for,” Tanice said. “Everyone has a job, and everyone is fed and has a place to live. If the Council decides that you can join us, we’ll put you where you’re needed, and you’ll be taught how to do the work.”

“If you have gardens, I could work there,” Em said. When Dad died, she’d taken over his garden, until one of the gangs destroyed it.

“You need to quarantine for ten days to make sure you aren’t sick,” Tanice said. “The Council will come down and meet you in a few days.”

“But you have doctors,” I said, thinking of the gingery medicine.

Tanice smiled. “Healers,” she said. “The Founders stockpiled some antibiotics, and we learned how to keep them growing, so we use them sparingly. Instead, we use herbs and hands-on healing techniques.”

She left us, and we explored the small, gravelly beach.

“How do you “grow” antibiotics?” I asked Em. She didn’t know.

We found a boathouse, with rowboats like the one we used, and some sailboats. Em told me what she’d learned while I was sick. Tanice and the two men who had met us were guards, keeping the island safe. The Council was a rotating group of nine people who dealt with disputes, and coordinated with another group, called the Planners, who organized everything.

We went back to the old mansion and cleaned up a better place to sleep. Tanice had brought us bags of hay to cushion our ragged blankets. The bag material felt like linen. “They grow flax,” Em explained. “That’s what linen is made of. Here in in the northwest ocean, it’s warm enough to grow a lot of things. Beans, flax, all kinds of vegetables.” While she was telling me more about the gardens, I fell asleep.

The next day, we met the Council. And the last two Founders, Leonie Sharma and Kendall Fortuno. They had white hair and wrinkled faces—hers pale, his golden brown. I hadn’t seen anyone with white hair and wrinkles for a long time. The sickness always got the old people first, before starting on the rest of us. Tanice said that Leonie was a hundred years old, but I didn’t believe it.

We all sat on the beach in a circle. The Council was mostly people our parents’ age, all colors and sizes. Em and I had to tell them our whole story. It was hard. I didn’t want to think about it. It got worse when Em told them about how I’d killed a man. Leonie asked how I felt about that. I hate that “how did you feel” stuff, but Em poked me, so I said “awful.”

Then someone brought food—more stew, and that wonderful bread and butter. And small pottery cups of beer, and everyone toasted The Founders, and Leonie and Kendall smiled.

I guess we passed, because when the ten-day quarantine was up, Charles, the black guard, came to get us, and brought us to what he called The Circle. He explained that was where almost everyone lived.

As we walked up the hill above the beach, I could see windmills sticking up on the horizon. Not those giant white ones, but the old-fashioned kind I’d seen in pictures of pioneer life, back when we still went to school. Charles told us that the windmills drew up water, and created power for heat and lights. We followed a path through some big pine trees. Then the trees opened up into a cleared area, grass with gravel paths through it, surrounded by doorways cut into a hill that looked like humans had made it.

“Hobbit holes!” cried Em. She loved our parents’ old books, tales about elves and fairies. I’d rather read mystery novels.

“Underground homes,” Charles told us. “Both warmer and cooler, safe from storms. Most of us live by the sun, but the windmills provide some electric light if we need it.”

Charles showed us one of those underground places. It had skylights, a room with tables, chairs, and a couple of old sofas, and two big dormitories, one for males, one for females. He said that we’d be living with what he called “kids your age,” whose parents had died, or who wanted to be on their own. Em liked that idea. She’d always had lots of friends when we went to school. When the schools had closed, Em and her friends would leave paper notes for each other in their mailboxes. Until most families disappeared. Or died.

So of course Em made friends with all the people in the house, and talked and talked about them to me, about George who wanted to build and repair houses, and Chloe who was learning how to make cloth, and Jake who helped with what they called recycling.

“You mean he’s a garbage man,” I said.

“It’s not like that!” Em said. “Jake has to learn where to put everything so it can be re-used, as well as recycled.” Then she went on and on about how composting worked, including the composting toilets we used. I did not want to hear about that stuff.

Em did get to work in the gardens. “Everything grows here,” she told me. “Things that shouldn’t grow in this climate. Avocadoes. Corn. Pumpkins. Huge ones. I don’t know how they do it. They’d grow cotton, too, but it takes up too much space. So they grow flax.”

I was assigned to work with what they called “the stock,” animals that live in pens and shelters in the middle of the island. Sheep are just walking bundles of fuzz, and chickens are stupid, but I kind of like the goats. They can escape any fence if they feel like it, and have evil yellow eyes. Chrisanne, my boss, showed me how to milk the goats, and to comb the burs out of their long hair. She said they made cloth out of that goat hair, as well as using sheep wool. Her clothes were made out of coarsely woven material that kind of looked like goat hair. She called it “linsey-woolsy,” part linen, part wool.

I hoped that my jeans would last a long time. I did not want to dress like some medieval serf.

Three others, all older than me, worked with the animals. They’d been doing it since they were younger than I am. So I got the dumb work, like cleaning out the chicken houses, and helping to repair fences. Cleaning chicken houses stinks. A lot. But I didn’t mind collecting and washing eggs. because back home we’d only had powdered eggs, and then no eggs at all.

Meals here were mostly vegetables—beans and potatoes and carrots and squash and a lot of green things I didn’t recognize—along with egg dishes and yogurt. And fresh fruit—apples, grapes, peaches, even bananas. I asked Em how they traded for bananas, and she told me they grew them. I said bananas only grow in the tropics, and she just grinned. “I told you, everything grows here,” she said.

Fresh fruit was one of the first things to go when everything collapsed. Now, I ate all I could get. Sometimes we’d have stew with some chicken or goat meat in it, although a lot of people here were vegetarians. More stew for me.

Living with so many people, being told what to do and how to do it--I just wasn’t used to that. I felt restless, jumpy, and bored. But Em loved it. After work, she was always going off somewhere with Chloe or Terry or Jake.

When we’d been there for a couple of weeks, Em told me there’d be a dance that night, at the Circle. She wanted me to come, but I said I was tired. I was, tired of working so hard. Not in the mood for a bunch of dancing dorks. Besides, how could people party when the rest of the world was such a mess?

Everyone in our house went, leaving me alone. The music kept me awake half the night.

I did like the classes in fighting. Charles taught ordinary fighting, and Tanice taught us how to fight with long sticks. The class met every other day. It was the best part of my life here. At first, I figured that I was pretty good, until a girl named Alice flipped me on my back without even trying. Tanice explained that Alice knew something called aikido, and would teach it to us. It’s a dumb way of fighting. The idea is to avoid violence by controlling attacks so no one is hurt. Made no sense to me.

            Then this kid, George, started in on me. George grew up here. When he turned 17, he wanted to be on his own, so he lived in the dormitory with us. His parents are Planners, people who figure out how to get everything done. George wanted to be a Planner, too, but he had to study for a long time. Meanwhile, he helped to build and repair houses.

“It’s chicken man!” George would yell, whenever he saw me. Then he’d make clucking noises I ignored him, but he kept at it.

One day, the goats got out, and I had to chase them all over the island. Chrisanne said it was my fault for not repairing the fence well enough. Once I got the goats back in and the fence repaired, I still had to clean a chicken coop, making me late for dinner. Everyone else had eaten. George, Em, and Chloe were sitting outside our house when I showed up, filthy and grumpy.

“Chicken man!” announced George, making Chloe giggle.

I told him to shut up and started inside.

“Better hose off the chicken shit before you stink the place up,” said George.

Good fighters don’t fight, that’s what Charles says, so I turned to walk away. George grabbed my arm. “Running away?”

“What is your problem?”

“Taking in every runaway scum from the mainland is a dumb idea.”

“Talk to the Planners.” Again, I turned to walk away. George grabbed my arm again. I turned around and stared at him. He yanked my arm, hard.

I punched him in the stomach.

He tackled me, and we rolled around in the dusty grass. He’s bigger than me, but I’m a better fighter. The fight went on and on. Somewhere in there, I briefly noticed that we were surrounded by people. I was ready to take on whoever joined in. That’s what always happened when I got in fights at school. But no one did. They just watched.

I was getting up, slowly, after the last round of punching. George was barely on his feet. And there was Tanice. “Had enough?” she asked us. We stared at her, and at the people surrounding us. Then we both sat down, exhausted.

A small white woman appeared, asked me what hurt, prodded me a little, said “He’ll do,” then did the same thing to George.

“Go wash yourselves,” Tanice said. We did. I collapsed into bed, ignoring Em, who wanted to worry about me.

The next morning was awful. I was starving, having missed dinner, but my mouth hurt so much that I couldn’t eat. George didn’t appear at breakfast at all. At work, I asked Chrisanne if I could take the day off. “You choose to fight, you take the consequences,” she said. I have no idea how I got through that endless day.

When I got back to the house, Tanice was there with George. “Come with me,” she said, and herded us into the house where the Council meets. Only Kendall was there. I figured we’d be punished.

 But instead, the old man asked questions. Why did we fight? He made each of us answer, and wouldn’t let the other one break in. Would you do it again? I said I would if someone got on me like George did. Did I think that was the best way to solve an argument?

            “It’s the only way I know,” I said. “You can’t let people get away with shit forever.”

            George said I hit him first. I said that he gave me a lot of crap and then grabbed me.

Kendall asked George why he teased me.

            “He’d get so mad, it was funny,” said George.

            “So people are funny when they’re angry?”

            “Tyrick is.”

            “But no one else is funny enough to tease?”

            “He doesn’t know how to get along with people. He doesn’t belong here!”

            “I see,” said Kendall. “So when you become a Planner, you won’t let anyone from the mainland into Garden Haven?”

            And George nodded. And Kendall let him go.

            But then Kendall and I talked some more. He suggested that I focus on learning aikido, so if someone bugged me, I’d know how to deal with it without punching. He also said that the current Planners did not agree with George at all.

            “But he’ll become a Planner!” I said.

            “That remains to be seen.” And Kendall let me go.

After all that, I stayed by myself as much as I could. George and I ate together when we had to, but avoided each other the rest of the time. I did pay more attention to aikido class. It’s the opposite of everything I’d learned about fighting. You meet attacks by gently putting the attacker on the ground. Not very satisfying. Until I managed to gently put Tanice on the ground.

For a moment she lay there staring at me. Then she laughed. “Good work, Ty!” she said.

I realized that with aikido, I wouldn’t have to stab people, or pound on them until we were both bloody, like I did with George. So I started studying it with Tanice and Alice. I got better and better at aikido. It helped me in another way, too. I stopped wanting to punch idiots.

But I still didn’t like hanging out with lots of people. When Em was off with a bunch of friends, I’d go down to the beach, because no one else ever went there. One day, I discovered that I could walk around most of the island, over the rocks, and through little sandy places where streams ran into the sea. Eventually I came to some big stone cliffs. I climbed up as far as I could. From there, I could see a green blob on the horizon. Another island.

I could take a boat and explore it. Get away from all these stupid people who didn’t want me here. Get away from dumb smelly chickens. I went back to the boathouse.

While I was standing in one of the sailboats, trying to figure out how it worked, Charles came in.

“Taking a trip?” he asked.

“Maybe.”

 “Nothing to hold you here. Take one of those boats any time. Just let me know, so I can get it back.”

I said something about Em.

“She’s doing fine. She’ll miss you for a little while, but she has friends.”

Angry, I said, “You telling me to leave?”

Charles grinned at me. “Have a seat.” He lowered his huge body onto a bench where he could look out at the water. I didn’t sit down. He started talking anyway.

“When I got here, little older than you, I hated it. They put me in food prep—cutting up huge barrels of stuff, cooking it, canning it. Hot, steamy, boring work. Women’s work, where I came from. Got into fights, just like you. One night I stole a boat, went back to the mainland. Got grabbed by some crazies as soon as I landed. I ought my way out, but got real cut up.”

I thought about what would have happened to Em and me if we hadn’t found the boat. I sat down and listened to Charles.

“At least I’d hidden the boat well enough so those bastards didn’t find it. I managed to paddle back here, collapsed on the beach. Remi found me, brought the healers. You haven’t met him yet,” Charles added. “Pretty old now, but one of the best guards I ever met.”

For a couple of minutes, I looked across the water to the green horizon of the mainland.

“You think I could be a guard someday?” I asked.

“Tanice says you have it in you, if you work hard. It can get boring, patrolling the island. Not many find their way here.”

Then I had an idea. “What if—if we had more fighters, and could go back and fight off the gangs, and look for people like me and Em, who wouldn’t find their way here without us? Keep them from getting beat up. Or--or worse.”

Charles nodded, his eyes on the green ocean. “We’ve talked about that now and then. But this island isn’t big enough to take care of so many more people. Folks are having babies. We’re having trouble finding places for youngsters already. Too many people in one place, folks start to fight.”

“What about that island over there?” I waved in its general direction.

He stopped gazing at the ocean, and looked right at me. “Is that where you were headed?”

“Maybe.”

“Well now. Some of us have been thinking about that. Find more space for people. Set up another place like this, what they call “sustainable.”

“This place is more than that,” I said. “Like all those giant vegetables. Bananas. And healers who just put their hands on you and you feel better.”

“Figured that out, did you? Leonie showed us how. She joined the first group because other people thought she was a witch. Or just plain crazy.”

“Can she do that--that witchy stuff--with a new island?”

“Probably. But we’ve learned a few witchy things from her, over the years.”

I gazed toward the new island. “What if someone already lives over there?”

“There was one of those big mansions there, but it blew apart in a storm. Rich people don’t travel any more. Yup,” he said, when I stared at him, “couple of us sailed over there last summer, checked it out.”

“A whole empty island?”

 Charles grinned at me. “Not fond of crowds, are you? I gotta tell you, Garden Haven’s idea of how to live is a good one, as long as folks like us can live away from all the happy campers. I got me a house way out on the end of the island. Do my work, then go out there away from everyone. Lots of us like that.”

So I stayed on Garden Haven. Someday, we’ll set up a new Garden Haven on the next island. I mean, this place is a great idea, as long as people like Charles and me can get away now and then.

THE END

Bio: "My varied experiences-- actor, director, professor, fundraiser, and freelance writer--inspire my novels, stories, and plays. Most recently, my stories were published in “ Fresh Words,” "The Gateway Review" and "Fifth Di" magazine. They have also appeared online in a number of publications, including “Synchronicti”. My fantasy novel, "Siljeea Magic", was indie-published in 2019. My current magical realism novel is under contract with Pegasus."

E-mail: Judith Pratt

Website: Judith Pratt's Website

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