Night of the Purple Moon by Scott Cramer

said. “Some of the kids were in my class. The boy was carrying two bags. One bag broke and cans spilled everywhere.”
    “We think he stole food from them,” Ben said.
    “They beat him up really badly.” Gabby bit her lip and paused, as if she were reliving the event.
    “Why didn’t you stop them?” Duke asked.
    “We were afraid,” she said. “We kept hoping someone would come to help him. The police. The fire department.”
    “Soldiers,” Ben added.
    Of course, no adults showed up.
    The electricity stopped working in their neighborhood five days after the moon turned purple. Street lights went dark. Fearing the gang would know they were inside, Ben and Gabby had never turned on any lights, but the problem was the refrigerator. Fresh food spoiled.
    It was the following day they peered out the window in disbelief and horror as the gang killed a boy right in front of their house.
    “They threw stones at him,” Gabby said in a choked voice. “They kicked him. He wasn’t moving and they kept kicking and kicking.”
    Jordan heard gasps around him. He saw Toucan’s mouth agape in the flickering candlelight. He knew his little sister didn’t understand everything, but he was certain that Touk was feeling the fear behind every word Gabby spoke.
    “Did he steal something?” Duke asked.
    “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what he did, or why they did it.”
    To no one’s surprise, Gabby said that she and Ben could not sleep that night. In the morning they heard laughter and shouting. The gang was breaking into houses up and down the street.
    “We hid in the basement,” Ben said.
    “We heard them above us,” Gabby added. “I recognized some of the voices.”
    “They went crazy, smashing dishes, breaking windows,” Ben said. “They were like animals.”
    The ordeal lasted minutes, but to Ben and Gabby it felt like hours.
    “You’re lucky they didn’t find you,” Eddie said.
    Heads nodded in agreement.
    Ben and Gabby emerged from the basement to discoverer the gang had taken what food they had left. But they were still too afraid to venture outside of the house. Thirst rather than hunger finally forced them to leave. Two days later the water stopped working.
    They made their way to the Penobscot River under the cover of darkness. The mouth of the river was one hundred miles away near the coastal town of Bar Harbor. That’s where their grandmother lived. She was old and stayed in a nursing home, but she was their only relative. They planned to follow the river and find her.
    That first night of their journey Ben and Gabby sought shelter in a small cinderblock building next to a maze of canals filled with water. They made a bed of pine needles on the cold cement floor. In the morning they saw how murky the water in the canals was. A rack held several long poles with nets. Ben dipped a net into the water and scooped up a squirming ball of baby eels. They realized they were at an eel hatchery.
    “We’d been drinking water from the river, and we were so hungry,” Gabby said.
    “You ate eels?” Barry blurted.
    “Gross,” KK said.
    Gabby shook her head. “We thought about it.”
    “Gabby thought about it,” Ben said. “Not me.”
    They broke into a nearby house and stocked up on pretzels and peanut butter which lasted them all the way to Bar Harbor.
    They reached the coastal town fifteen days after leaving Bangor, chilled to the bone, their feet badly blistered.
    “The air was filled with smoke,” Gabby said, now telling the story alone. Ben had fallen asleep. His chest rose and fell in an easy rhythm. “A lot of houses had burned down.”
    “We’ve seen smoke rising up on the mainland,” Abby said.
    Gabby nodded, but her thoughts seemed far away. After a moment she continued. “Ben and I hid in a car. When it was dark, we looked for the nursing home. We found it but the smell was so awful…” Her chin dropped to her chest.
    Jordan glanced at Eddie and their eyes met. They