Last Drop

Kari doesn’t know what prompts her to strip off her gloves, bend low over the corpse and unclasp the silver heart-shaped locket from around its neck. Only what’s useful, she constantly reminds the other scavengers. Food and medicines and water, always water, not that they ever find much anymore, but her team needs the thought to keep them going.

They aren’t natural scavengers like she is. They didn’t grow up with the uncanny ability to find four-leaf clovers and unusual flowers, much less learn how to press them between the pages of favorite books, much less turn a talent into a career.

She can’t remember how long it’s been since she saw a green growing thing. She only recalls the last one she saw: just after she joined the group, a tiny pink flower poking up through the scorched earth. An almost miraculous sight, a reminder that plants have as much of a will to live as people.

Then, before she could register what was happening, Makayla’s little girl spotted it, ran up and picked it. Later that night Kari, jaw set, pulled her blank journal from her pack, approached mother and daughter, and showed them how to press the flower -- already limp -- to keep it. Better preserved, dried with some color, than dead and brown and shriveled. It wasn’t worth getting angry over, she reasoned: the flower was unlikely to survive without rain, and the fires weren’t far enough in the past to think that wasn’t still a risk.

But it had been nice to dream, even if the dreams became tears later that night. Since then, Kari’s stayed clear of the other group members, even when scavenging.

She gently removes the silver chain. The locket is big, but not too heavy: silver-plated, then. It twists as she straightens, gleaming untarnished in the glow of her headlamp. She tries not to look at the corpse but she can’t help it: so rarely do she and her team ever see remains not charred by the fires, or torn apart by wild animals. Somehow only decay has touched this corpse. Shreds of a springy flowered dress and a denim jacket cling to the bones; the locket must have been what fashion bloggers -- a species even deader than the forest landscape -- used to call a “chunky accent piece.” The image Kari forms in her mind’s eye, what the girl must’ve looked like, is so clear, she could swear she’d known or at least seen her, if not back at the caves then before.

Speculating what could’ve happened to the girl helps nothing and no one, but Kari can’t help it. Everyone knew by now to stay out of the direct, scorching sunlight. No wounds are apparent, nor any sign of an accident -- no fallen tree branches, no nearby cliffs. Rain hasn’t fallen in weeks if not months, and the remains are too fresh for the girl to have, say, drowned in a flash flood. And the girl’s remains are the only ones around. She wasn’t one of a pair or group, which was Kari’s first hope: that there’d be food and other supplies to grab, a bounty of other people’s misfortune that would justify her striking off on her own.

That leaves the disturbing notion of the remains having been discarded. Possibly the girl committed suicide, in this spot or wherever she’d been living. She could even have passed naturally. Possibly.

Kari tucks the locket into one of the pouches on her body armor vest and continues on her way. She only has a few hours till daylight and for the first time in her short career, she doesn’t want to be out here alone.

Halfway back to the caves Kari encounters one of the other scavengers, struggling under the weight of an extra pack. The whole pack? she wants to ask, but she’s afraid that one question would lead to more. Questions he wouldn’t want to answer. Questions whose answers could get him kicked out of the group. Answers he might do anything to avoid providing out here in the still dark, away from the others. So she shoulders the pack wordlessly and walks on beside him.

The dark sky is just starting to shade blue when they arrive back at the caves. No one asks any questions at all, once they find the sleeping bag and extra jacket and batteries and all the canned food. The sleeping bag and extra jacket go to Makayla, who hasn’t been able to keep her daughter warm enough to sleep. Kari gets the batteries for the scavengers’ headlamps. The canned food -- with its precious, preserving water -- goes straight back to the pantry to be apportioned for this morning’s meal. Everyone is too hungry and thirsty to ask where it all came from, and Kari’s teammate soon melts into the background.

It can’t go on like this. No matter where tonight’s bounty came from. If water is scarce all the way up here in the mountains, where everyone said it would be plentiful -- back when no one could have predicted the spring fires, or the lake drying up so that now the fish flopped in the mud along the edges of a gradually shrinking large puddle -- then scavenging every night feels like seeking the impossible for the unattainable.

Kari makes her way to her bedroll in the cave’s sleeping area. She’s too tired to eat, and she’s thirsty, but her canteen is still about one-quarter full; even shouldering that pack, she never did stop to finish it off. She takes a brief swig now. She’ll finish the rest in the morning.

She strips off her boots, jacket, vest, cargo pants. All the way down to the thin thermals that are practically a second skin by now. The last thing is the headlamp. That only comes off once she’s on the bedroll, breathing into the dry dark.

She can’t stop thinking about the locket.

Why did she take it? What use could it possibly have? Was taking it desecration? Should she have tried to bury its owner? Most of all -- most petty, most relentless -- should she open it? She isn’t sure she wants to. She might see a smiling parent or boyfriend or perhaps worse, nothing at all. That would make the locket an empty accessory. It would mean that no one meant enough to the dead girl to keep close to her heart.

But she suspects her brain won’t shut up until she sees what’s in there.

The rush of tears that comes over her surprises her as much as her decision to take the locket did. Pressed under the clear plastic is a small four leaf clover.

Tonight the dreams and tears and memories are one and the same. Kari recalls the hundreds of pressings she left behind, still in their original books, when she went off to college. She remembers how she learned to press facts and theories between the covers of her notebooks instead. How plant pathology, with its endless field sampling, had satisfied the itch to scavenge: a more respectable alternative to scavenging trash heaps. How she’d wanted to turn the mysteries of plant disease into solvable ways to end famines.

Here she is, now, unable even to scavenge enough to keep a tiny group of survivors going.

She sobs soundlessly into her bedroll, clenched hard against the draft and anyone who might hear an escaped sniffle, try to comfort her. Weeps long past the point when the tears dry up. In the cave’s darkness she isn’t sure when her body finally gives up and relaxes. Only that in the instant before exhaustion claims her, she needs to see the clover again.

Without sitting up she reaches over, grabs her headlamp, switches it on, aims it at the locket she’s been clutching this whole time. She regards the clover, rubbing her fingers over the clear plastic that protects it.

It’s greener than she’d expect, greener than it should be for having been dried for however long. Maybe that’s because of the plastic. Then she sees something else. It’s hard to discern the opaque filament extending from the clover’s stem. She’s not sure how she sees it at all, but once she sees it she can’t unsee it: a root, the slenderest wisp.

Fingers trembling, ever so delicately she lifts the clear plastic covering from the clover, taking care not to tear the delicate pressed leaves.

Then she reaches for her canteen. Detaches the cap, drips some of the last remaining water into it. She places the clover root in the water. Maybe it’s too late; the root has been dry for too long, and anyway the water will evaporate and the clover will get either too much or not enough sun, and it’ll die and she won’t even have it pressed to remember it by. But plants have as much of a will to live as people, and who knows, maybe the clover root will defy science, and the mere memory of water will awaken some dormant cell, bring it back to life.

It’s worth the long shot. And tomorrow Kari will get up and go out and see what more she might do to sustain it.