“Andrew, wait,” I whisper. I glance around, expecting people to pull guns on him. But no one moves. Amy opens the door a little more.
“You said you know my mother?” she calls out to us.
We nod. She looks uncertain, then glances at the crowd of people that has formed on the other side of the road and frowns. When she looks back to us, she opens the door wider.
“Come on in.”
Andrew, Cara, and Eddie help me down from the truck bed. Dave and Eddie get back in the truck, and Amy steps aside as we enter her home. We continue through the archway from the foyer into the kitchen. The windows look out onto a deck, the beach, and a dock with a small rowboat.
“Can I get you some water?” she asks.
“That would be great,” Andrew says.
“Yes, thank you,” I say. Cara nods and gives a quiet thank-you, but her eyes are focused more on the windows looking out to the beach.
Amy walks over to the fridge and opens it. The light inside turns on and my eyes go wide. I look over at the electric stove and the microwave above it. Both of them have the time showing in green. As Amy hands us the glasses of water, she follows my gaze to the stove and chuckles.
“You have no idea how excited we all were to get electricity back. The electric comes from solar panels and some wind power. A lot of the people on the Key had it already, but the rest we had brought in from the hardware stores when the power went out.”
I take a sip from my glass; it tastes better than any of the boiled water I’ve had since we left the cabin.
“So...” Andrew says, placing his glass down on the granite island. “I don’t mean to be rude...”
“Oh no,” Cara mumbles just as I say his name in a warning tone.
He continues, holding up his hands in defense. “No, it’s just... who flipped the switch down here? You guys are pretty well set up and, from our experience so far, fairly...” He’s trying to find a delicate way to say it, but Amy helps him.
“Progressive?”
“Yeah. I mean, thisisstill Florida, right?”
She smiles and leans against the counter. “Yes, and there are still some Floridians mixed in, but most of these people are from elsewhere.”
“How did they all come here?” Cara asks.
“Did you try the old SR-905 route here?” Amy asks.
Cara shakes her head. “We took Route 1. We were about to backtrack to 905 but the men in the truck came.”
Andrew shoots me a look of surprise at how not-shy Cara is being.
“And you would have wasted your time,” Amy tells us. “There’s a bridge there....”
“Card Sound,” Cara adds helpfully.
“That’s right. Well, I should say therewasa bridge there. We destroyed it.”
“Why?” Andrew asks.
Cara is back with the assist. “One road in, one road out.” And Amy nods, smiling.
“We’re surrounded on all sides by water. When we demoed the bridge, Route 1 became the only road we would have to protect. Apparently, there were a few other people in the country who thought the same. Guy named Jarrod walked all the way down here from Seattle, picked up about fifty other people along the way. A romance novelist from New Hampshire had a winter house down here, so she came and brought a handful of people. You guys know Daphne De Silva?”
Andrew and I shake our heads, but I see Cara’s eyes flicker with recognition. She remains quiet, though.
“Well, anyway,” Amy continues. “A few others from Texas, California, Illinois. And they all arrived with a small crew they met on the road. There’s some old podcast host who’s here—he says it’s a real thing, when several people have the same idea at once, but who knows if he’s making it up. Light bulbs, telephones, record players. Apparently all invented simultaneously by different minds. Multiplediscovery? Multiple realization? Something like that. The point is, every single one of them came here because they thought it’d be safe and secluded.”
The things my mother and I were hoping for when we went to the cabin.
