The World Without Flags

I stand up. “We’re safe enough out here, aren’t we?” People turn around, surprised to hear my voice. Some of them might not even recognize it. Like I said, I don’t talk much. But I can’t let Eric just sit there like that. I sit back down quick enough though.

Randal looks up at me. He clears his throat. “Truth is,” he says. “I don’t know.”

Then it’s like something broke. Everyone’s talking at once. Then the talking transforms into something more like shouting and people are standing up and Randal stands up too, and I can see by the way he keeps glancing at the doorway that he wants to make a dash for it. I realize that I made it all a lot worse with my question. I should have kept quiet like Eric. I should have waited.

But it’s too late for that now. People are scared. It’s in the air like a stench. Even Franky is shouting now, trying to get people to calm down. But it’s no use. Soon it’s all chaos and I hear someone else crying and I look over and it’s Artemis. She’s sitting and shaking and covering her face while the people all around us are shouting. I have a feeling nothing is real, like I’m suddenly surrounded by strangers.

I begin to think about war, really imagine it. Not far south people are shooting at each other and killing each other. They are dropping in the streets. They are burning in their homes. They are dying. And it’s coming here. I’m eyeing the door too, just like Randal, like an animal searching for an escape, when I hear a long whistle. I look around, half-thinking that war had come already and the whistle was just the beginning and then there’s another set of whistles, fast and loud. I look down at the stage.

It’s Eric. He has a whistle in his mouth, shining silver. His arms are up in the air and he’s waving them to get everyone’s attention. He blows the whistle again and keeps on blowing until everyone is looking at him. He stops waving his arms and takes the whistle out of his mouth. He makes a calming movement with his hands and everyone looks kind of ashamed and we sit down, first one, then several, then all of us. There’s a moment when there’s nothing but the sound of people settling back into their seats. Finally when it’s quiet, Eric takes a deep breath.

“We have nothing to do with this war,” he says. “Nothing. We are too far north to bother with. They’re not going to care whether forty-three people living by a lake in Maine join them or the other side. They probably won’t come here.”

A tiny voice rises. “What if they do?” It’s Fiona. She’s been with us since the beginning. She was with us the final year on the island.

It’s a good question. Everyone turns to listen to the answer.

Eric looks around. “We have everything we need here. Food. Shelter. Safety. There’s no reason to choose a side. There’s no reason for us to get involved. If they come, I say that we refuse to pick a side.”

“And if they force us?” This question comes from Wesley. He’s only five or six years older than me, and he’s a favorite of all the girls. He plays guitar and has long hair and thinks of himself as a carpenter.

Eric pauses, thinking, and, for a moment, I’m afraid he’ll keep thinking and vanish into himself, but then he says, “That is something too complicated to speculate about.” He looks around. “We have to wait. If that happens, we’ll deal with it then.” The crowd murmurs a bit about that. I know they want certainty. They want to feel absolutely safe. They want Eric to say something that will make it all go away. There are people who will say what people want to hear, to make people feel safe. They’ll even lie to them. But that’s not Eric. “Listen,” Eric continues. People turn back toward him. “We’re a strong community. We don’t just survive here, we thrive. We can handle this together.”

“I need to say something.” People turn to see Norman standing up. He’s one of the older guys. Like me, he doesn’t say much. He works most of the time in the barn, so he always smells like manure. He’s a tough old guy and pretty highly respected by everyone, including me. He’s wearing his patched and faded overalls and plaid shirt. People wait for a second while he gathers himself. “I just want to say that maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if we did join one of them groups.” Norman looked around them. “Seems to me we need some type of organization. Maybe then we wouldn’t have to worry so much about all the bandits on the road. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if we did join up with them. Maybe that’s exactly what we need.”

There’s a few people who nod.

But then Matt stands up, red in the face. “Yeah, easy to say that,” he says. “But how do we know which side to choose? We choose wrong and the other side will kill us dead. We sign up with the Gears, the Stars kill us. We start flying a Star and the Gears kill us.”

“What if we don’t fight? We just surrender? They wouldn’t kill us then.” This is Crystal. She spends most of her time baking in the farmhouse.