Memoir
The Survivors’ City, Montana
Summer 1883 (give or take)
I was walking on the outskirts of the main square of our tiny town. I looked out over the twenty-some-odd grey and red and faded yellow wooden houses that ran along narrow roads we’d cleared to the east of the main square, wondering whether this spot was as secluded as I’d hoped if I could still see the main square so clearly. I took a few more steps for added safety, and then I dropped to the ground. I was alone.
I had filed a piece of flint until it was sharp enough to carve into wood without my having to try. And then, on the back of a tree in a thick block of forest, I began making a list of all the questions I had about my life so far that no one would answer. The sun was warm on my skin as it crept through the breaks in the overgrown forest.
This was my sixteenth summer in my family’s town. This late in the afternoon, after we’d been let out of our lessons, most of the kids from my generation were running around the rugged terrain just outside the city walls, closely supervised by an elder from our family, one of the original Survivors. I relished being let even an inch outside the city walls, but I savored time alone even more.
Our lessons were monotonous. We studied passages from a Bible I was sure was outdated—its version of our language sounding different from our own—and we talked extensively about the evils of the outside world. On rare occasion, we’d discuss primitive mathematics and archaic scientific principles. We did this day in and day out, five days a week, for the last ten years of my life. I remembered every word I had ever heard and every sentence I’d ever read, so repeating these ideas over and over again grated on my nerves. I hoped that I would stop aging soon. Once we stopped aging, we didn’t have to go to lessons in the rotted-wood, flat-roofed room that functioned as our schoolhouse. By then our powers would be matured, our talents determined, and our futures set.
It would also be time to start building the next generation. This idea thrilled me less. From what I knew about it (at the time)—the whispers I had heard from my sisters and the quiet and polite sentiments I’d heard from Lizzie, the elder I was closest to—I knew it involved being extremely close to the boys in our generation. But I had always been unnerved by the touch of others, unable even to hug my family members without trepidation. As a Survivor, though, our fundamental principles were simple: praise God and continue our line so that we might do God’s work—an arbitrary purpose that was, as of yet, undefined. And I couldn’t argue with work I had been put on this Earth to do. At least, I couldn’t then.
We spent our Sundays, of course, in the small, dilapidated, chapel opposite the square from where I sat. It was the first building the elders had erected when they chose this pass as their homestead over 190 years before. They were waiting for the boys in my generation—only the third generation since they had settled—to grow old enough and strong enough to build a new church that would accommodate our growing village. We had seventy-eight family members spanning across three generations, and when the church was built, there were just the fourteen of them, though, if I counted correctly, Rebecca and John Surrey were already expecting their first child when they arrived in Montana.
I had been sitting quietly in the forest for some time, my list on the tree bark seeming paltry but still bolder than any words I had ever spoken aloud in my life.
My first question: Where did we come from?
The elders in my family believed that we had survived treacherous events that would have killed humans because God had willed us to. In our Bibles, there were stories of Abraham and Sarah welcoming a child into the world when they were each nearly 100 years old and of Noah taking over a century to build the ark. They referred to these stories to speak of instances in which God had done this in the past. And I didn’t doubt that it could happen so much that I doubted that it had. Hadn’t Abraham and Noah had special relationships with their Lord, special purposes to fulfill? We lived in an isolated town with walls erected to protect us from the outside world. What purpose were we fulfilling here? And why those fourteen Survivors? Twenty-six of them had been exiled from Salem so long ago. Why hadn’t God willed the other dozen of them to live? I couldn’t accept it the way they could, but to say this to them was a risk I could not take.
My second question: If the world outside is evil, should we not bring the word of God to them?
This is one I never understood. For all the time we’d spent with Bibles, talking about God’s Word, and about the evils of the outside world, why, then, did we not evangelize as the Book told us to? Like so many other hushed traditions in my family, it was illogical, conflicting directly with some of the more loving messages in our revered text. I believed, quietly, that we had reason to venture into the world outside our walls, that we needed to fulfill the purpose they were so convinced we were put here to do. I also believed that outside those walls there was a greater world.
My third question: How do we know there are no others like us?
The elders had always maintained, without even the slightest wavering on the matter, that we Survivors were the only ones of our kind. But they had taken it so much further than that, insisting that there were no other supernatural creatures in this world, nor had there ever been. Recently, in late night discussions with Lizzie and Sarah, elders with whom I felt close, they had told a few of us tales of how the outside world believed in creatures that God did not create. They had given us some aging copies of literature that a select few from my generation—Noah, Benjamin, and me—were allowed to read. We each got one book that, in turn, we’d end up sharing with each other. Until then, we had only ever read the Bible. Noah received a copy of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Benjamin got a copy of Beowulf, and I got a tattered, gold-lined compilation of Hesiod works including Theogony and Works and Days.
I took in the stories of mythology from the Greeks, sordid tales of creatures unlike man and unlike us, blasphemous talk of gods and idols, of violence and trickery that startled me. Lizzie and Sarah wanted us to know that, outside our walls, man sometimes believed in such ridiculous creatures. They had been satisfied enough to believe that all those legends of superhuman creatures across history and in every culture big and small were just examples of tall tales and idolatry. They admitted it was possible that we had ancestors like ourselves, but they believed that, because so many of them had ended up together in such a small town at such a precise time—Salem, at the height of the witch trials—and had escaped unscathed, then they must surely be the last remaining Survivors of their kind. Always surviving. This belief is the reason we never sought out another name for ourselves. To my family, surviving that first winter had made them Survivors in every sense of the word—they had endured, and they had been given a chance to continue the line of this rare species. This made them believe that God had chosen them, those fourteen children, to save this unique breed of immortal superhuman. That belief developed our basic principles.
My fourth and final question: How could we be destroyed?
This was, of course, the darkest of my questions. Though I was reticent to admit it, I wanted to know how to die. This did not seem like an outrageous idea to me since death appeared to be universal across all cultures except for ours. So I believed that surely we could die, and I wanted to know how it could be done.
Needless to say, since their exile in 1692, not a single Survivor had done anything other than...survive. The youngest member of my family when I was sixteen was a three-year-old girl named Anna. The oldest member, by birth year, was Lizzie, who looked about eighteen years of age but had been born in 1670, over 210 years before. And we accepted this as normal: we expected immortality from each new addition to the family, we assumed invincibility against all circumstances.
But I had wondered. What if this ever got out of hand? What if ever there were an evil Survivor, a force that needed to be stopped? What would we do then if none of us knew how to destroy the other? I understood destruction as a necessary evil in God’s world. My family saw it as a blessing that we had been so peaceful—with the world around us and among ourselves—in all our years that no one had ever had to find out what destruction was like. We never saw eye-to-eye on this.
I had eventually given up with the flint and rested against the tree, absorbing the quiet surroundings. Abruptly, I heard footsteps—rather, the unmistakable whir of a young Survivor running at top speed. In a fraction of a second, Noah was sitting beside me on the ground, his hair windblown and his clothes disheveled from the run.
“Hi, Sadie,” he said, his chest heaving a little bit. Noah had not yet stopped aging, so he was capable of getting tired or short of breath with exertion. He was precisely my age and, though I wasn’t especially close to anyone in my generation, I guess I was closest to him. Noah and I had grown up hearing the story about two babies being born at exactly the same time at a stressful moment in our history. Other than that, no one ever talked about the process of childbirth. And they never let on who belonged to whom.
“Hi, Noah,” I said, perturbed that my time alone had ended.
He lay back on the twigs and leaves on the ground and tried to catch his breath. Noah looked exactly like Lizzie. His hair and eyes were fair, his skin rosy. I don’t know whether Lizzie was still having children when Noah and I were born, but if she was, it meant that she was definitely his mother, which hurt me a lot to realize that meant she wasn’t mine. Then he eyed the tree I was leaning against. “Interesting list,” he said, nodding toward the carvings.
I shrugged. “You wouldn’t say anything about it, right?” I asked.
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said. “You have enough trouble, as I see it.”
I shrugged again. “I don’t think it counts as trouble that I don’t have an active power yet. That can’t possibly be something I’ve done wrong.”
“I didn’t say it was. I just know they’re giving you a hard time about it. I wouldn’t want to make it any harder on you than it already is, especially since John seems to be the most concerned about it,” he said. He sat up and pulled his knees to his chest, his posture mirroring my own. I felt some ambivalence in the air between us, and then I could sense some tension. This extra sense had been developing lately, and I believed it was the beginning of my so-called powers. But it didn’t seem to fit with any of the powers of any of the original elders, so I had yet to mention my budding talent to anyone. It was useful in learning some things, though, like how Noah was starting to envision a life where he and I would end up together in some form or fashion or how the tension in that moment stemmed from his concern over what he perceived as my rebellion. I couldn’t place how I knew this, I just did. Unfortunately for him, these feelings became more articulate at the precise time at which I had decided I would, one day, live outside the walls of this city. I had realized that this would mean going against part of the purpose of this family (rebelling, as he feared), and I knew I could not bring anyone into it with me. In essence, at sixteen years of age of what was destined to be a very long life, I had decided that I would spend my life alone.
For better or for worse, I had kept that promise. I regretted it every day.