Tent City Read Online Free PDF Page A

make a trade. Your services for some of my food supplies. You must be low if you are out here trying to catch your breakfast. Then it’ll be fair and I don’t owe you anything.”
     
    “Deal. Now get out of here. You’re scaring off the fish.”
     
    And with that I’m off, but instantly I feel regret about my decision. I probably made a mistake and I feel nervous about having him around Brody. I come back to find Kit asleep.
     
    I do take a dip in the river to clean myself off and then rinse my running clothes out. Brody stirs just as the sun is about to come up and I decide it’s time to wake Kit.
     
    She looks peaceful wrapped up in her bag beside Brody. Her blond hair falls around her, and her usually animated face looks serene and still. The sun is glowing pink and orange, and I just want to pause it for a while.
     
    I imagine I’m somewhere else. Maybe I’m on a beach where there are plenty of coconuts to eat, fresh water to drink. Mom, Dad, and Brody are playing in the sand and I’m on my towel and the only thing I have to worry about is working on my tan.
     
    I guess we haven’t had it so bad here in the Midwest. There are other parts of the world, lots of parts actually, where they are still starving and worried about clean water. Mom says when she was a kid that went on then too, but it was places far away like Africa, and other ‘third world’ countries as she called it.
     
    The big question now is how it had happened so fast. Things have only really been bad for seven years. I can still remember the times when we went into town and had McDonald’s, or Subway, if Mom was worried about saturated fats.
     
    It all started with locusts. Swarms of them so thick, they blocked out the sun for days. While we hid under the veil of darkness, they fed. They devoured until everything was gone. It’s so strange that so much could disappear so fast.  Acres upon acres of corn, wheat, and soybeans in the Midwest disappeared.
     
    The southern regions lost all of their goods, yet to be harvested. Whole farms were wiped out in a matter of hours. Locusts are a small threat alone, but in hoards they are deadly, at least for all the crops.
     
    The Council tried to kill the locusts with big vats of arsenic tainted water, but after the locusts disappeared, we were still left with all the poison. Some of that leaked into the water supply and many got sick from the contamination. The water problem has supposedly been fixed, but it left its own ripple of deaths.
     
    Farmers in the Midwest did better than most of the rest of the county because around here everyone has cellars with shelves and shelves of canned fruits and vegetables. I can’t imagine what it was like for everyone else who went to the grocery stores only to find them raided and ransacked in people’s panic of the end of the world.  
     
    The swarms happened everywhere. Then, what little food that was left was tainted, or unfit to eat. Those who were hungry enough not to care ate it anyway and most of them died.
     
    A lot of people think it has something to do with the end of the world. Some think it was overuse of natural resources and the gluttony of humankind, but I don’t care to think about it at all. I just want to figure out a way out of this mess so I can get my old life back.
     
    “What’s for breakfast?” Kit asks in her hoarse morning voice.
     
    “Why is it always about food with you?” I ask with a smile.
     
    “Because I’m always hungry, duh.”
     
    Just as I’m digging through the packs for perishable items we should eat first, Jack comes walking up with fish in hand. He’s wearing torn jeans and a flannel and an overloaded backpack. He should look like an ordinary boy, but those gray eyes and dark hair make him easy on the eyes. He looks almost exactly like this picture my mom had of an old time actor named Tom Cruise, or something. Except for the eyes. The eyes were all his. I’ve never seen anything like them