Malorie answers Rick's call and learns the evacuation route

Malorie’s call with Rick is the moment a ringing landline converts the wreckage of the house into a route forward. After giving birth in the attic and losing Olympia, Malorie hears the telephone below and chooses to answer despite her pain and the exposed, damaged home. Rick tells her that Tom had left a message days earlier and directs her toward a refuge by river: a journey of at least twenty miles, ending at one of four channels where she must eventually open her eyes. The instructions offer hope, but only by making the journey’s greatest danger explicit.

Background: A House Built Around Fragile Systems

When Malorie first arrives at the house, Tom explains how much of its ordinary infrastructure has failed. There is no internet, mail, or newspaper; the cell phones stopped working weeks earlier, and the people maintaining the towers may have stopped working or died. A landline remains, as do the lights, because a local hydroelectric plant may continue generating power if its gates have been left open in the right way. The river is therefore both a source of power and a possible route out, while the well supplies water because running water has already failed. Everyday needs have become laborious and dangerous: residents carry buckets and use outdoor latrines, all while blindfolded.

That fragile arrangement shapes the significance of the later call. The telephone is not a dependable link to a functioning world; it is a single surviving connection, and Malorie has no assurance that it will remain available. The interruption of the storm’s aftermath by its ringing gives the sound immediate practical force. Someone has heard Tom’s earlier message and is calling back, but Malorie must first cross the damaged house and reach the instrument.

Answering the Call After the Birth

Olympia’s body hangs from the attic window and thumps against the house in the wind when the telephone begins to ring below. Malorie has just given birth to a boy and a girl. She places the girl in her lap, covers her with her shirt, and feels for the steep, old ladder stairs; the passage notes that no woman who has just given birth should have to negotiate them. Still, the phone keeps ringing, and Malorie decides to answer.

She descends with the newborns, reaches the small end table, and fumbles for the phone while her body aches and burns. She asks who is calling, hardly able to take in the fact that she is using a telephone at all. The man identifies himself as Rick and says that he and his community received Tom’s message a few days earlier, though they had been busy. When Rick asks her name, the exchange establishes that the call is not a chance contact: Tom’s earlier attempt to reach help has finally produced an answer.

Rick’s Route and Its Risks

Rick’s first instruction is direct: Malorie should take the river. He asks whether she knows where it is; she recalls that it runs behind the house, about eighty yards from the well. The route is not a short crossing. Rick has found the group on a map and estimates that they will need to travel at least twenty miles. He warns that the river will split, making the journey as dangerous as it is necessary.

The crucial direction concerns the four channels at the river’s division. Malorie must take the second channel from the right; she cannot simply follow the right bank and expect to reach the refuge. Rick also tells her that she will have to open her eyes. Malorie slowly shakes her head, resisting the instruction. The route thus depends on a reversal of the survival practice that has governed her life: blindfolds have protected her from seeing the creatures, but navigation at the river’s split will eventually require sight.

Rick offers a cue intended to make that moment recognizable. A motion-activated speaker near the river plays a recording in a loop for thirty minutes. The refuge cannot station someone at the river all day, Rick explains, because doing so would be too dangerous; instead, the group uses devices to maintain a clear understanding of the woods and water beyond its facility. When Malorie hears the loud, clear recording, she is to open her eyes. She thanks him but says she cannot do it, her voice described as listless and destroyed. His directions therefore resolve where to go without resolving the central terror of how to get there.

A Destination, Not an Immediate Rescue

Rick makes the urgency plain: it would be a tragedy if the phone line failed before Malorie knew where to go. When she asks him to come and help, he does not promise a rescue. Instead, he reassures her that whatever number she has in mind is acceptable: the refuge has room for a few hundred people and is working to create more space. Malorie’s count is three. Rick tells her not to worry about the number and to come as soon as she can.

The call’s promise remains conditional. It gives Malorie a destination and a method for recognizing the correct channel, but the river journey is still hers to undertake, and the instructions require her to confront the very act of looking that she has spent years avoiding. Rick’s reply nevertheless changes the meaning of the route from an isolated attempt at escape into a journey toward a community that expects newcomers. When Malorie and the children eventually arrive, Rick describes a self-provisioning facility with crops and captured animals: chickens for eggs, a cow for milk, and two goats that the community hopes to breed. The call’s distant promise of a better place thus has a concrete counterpart in the farm and space awaiting them.