Ration

by Christina J Thompson

  “Sorry,” she said, quickly handing it its flask.

  John’s eyes instantly grew wide with disbelief.

  “Sorry?” he echoed. “Did you really just apologize to a ration?”

  She shot him a glance, feeling her face turn red.

  “What? No, of course not!”

  “I heard you!” he crowed, pointing at her as he burst into laughter.

  “I told you I’m tired!” she snapped.

  “I can’t wait to tell Sydney! You apologized to a ration, I can’t believe it!”

  Sydney was his eight-year-old cousin, and Amber rolled her eyes.

  “Sometimes you’re a real ass, you know that?”

  “At least I’m not losing my mind!” John hooted, doubling over as he cackled.

  “Whatever. I need to go get my food allotment, I’ll see you around.”

  She spun on her heel, the ration’s footsteps following behind her. The sound of John’s laughter burned in her ears, and she muttered under her breath, navigating through the dirt alleys between the houses as she made her way back home.

  Amber’s mother had her food allotment waiting for her when she arrived, and Amber quickly removed one of the three strips of dried meat from the plastic packet. It was covered in salt crystals, and she instantly regretted the second drink of water she had taken. She should have saved it for after she had eaten like she usually did to wash the saltiness down.

  She could feel the ration watching her, and she moved to the dirt shelves in the corner of her room, lifting the plastic curtain to reveal a stack of cakes. Without a word, she handed it six of them—two for each meal—and she did her best to ignore the sound of it chewing as she finished her own food.

  The cakes would be allotted depending on the strain of each family’s ration; some strains required more and some required less. They had been allotted sixteen cakes the day before leaving for the resource center to get them through the approval process upon their return, as it could take up to two days for the council to admit the certified ration allotment order the center had sent back with them. Once that happened, Amber would collect the ration’s food allotment each day when she went to get water.

  Mica was in the other room, portioning out the six-month supply of supplements they had been given at the resource center.

  “Do you have mine?” Amber asked as she walked in. Mica’s face was flushed red, and her cropped, blonde hair was stained dark from the sweat that dripped down her forehead.

  “One week,” she answered, handing over two small bags. “And a week’s worth for the ration. I’ll give you the rest when I’m done.”

  “Thanks.”

  Amber went into her room, sitting down on the edge of the bed as she opened the first bag. She wasn’t allowed to help her mother divide them up, as only one person in the household was permitted to sort through their supply. This was to prevent blaming others if a mistake was made, which meant that her mother would spend the next several hours putting together dozens of bags for each person in the family and the ration. The only exception to the rule was that now it was her responsibility to give the ration its daily dose. If she made a mistake, it would fall on her shoulders, not her mother’s.

  She removed fourteen of the brown capsules, bracing herself as she stared down at them. This was the worst part of the day, especially since there wasn’t enough water to help swallow them. She would have to choke them down dry.

  Each capsule contained synthetic nutritional supplements and a metabolic inhibitor, and like everyone, she had to take them twice a day. This helped people survive on less food and water while staving off illnesses caused by vitamin deficiencies. Without them, everyone would starve or die of disease.

  She finished swallowing the last one and opened the ration’s bag. It would have to take nearly twice as many as she had. The capsules were slightly different than hers; they were longer, and they contained different compounds designed to promote fast muscle growth. It would also enable the ration to survive the harsh working conditions it would soon experience without compromising its final yield.

  Amber carefully counted out twenty-five of them, setting them on the floor in front of her.

  “You have to take them,” she said, gesturing to the small pile. The ration immediately obeyed, sitting down and gingerly picking up the first one.

  As she watched it begin to swallow them, she couldn’t help feeling a twinge of curiosity. Aside from simple commands, the rations were too dumb to comprehend spoken language, and any necessary communication for work or other daily chores was usually done through physical means and gestures.

  This time, it felt almost instinctual for her to speak to it, and she couldn’t understand why. She furrowed her brow for a moment, then shrugged. It was likely just the result of knowing that she alone was responsible for its survival and growth this time, nothing more.

  “Amber! Hurry up and bring the ration to the grid, your father will be waiting!”

  “Coming!”

  She beckoned to the ration, using the same hand motions she had used with the ones before, but she couldn’t stop herself from adding a quiet whisper.

  “Let’s go,” she told it, reaching for her hat. The ration leaped to its feet, grabbing the last few of its capsules and swallowing them all at once. It paused at the door, waiting for her, and she sighed as she led it out of the house and towards the grid.

  †‡†

  CHAPTER THREE

  Amber slowly crossed the expanse of bare earth that lay between the settlement and the mine grid, the ration following close behind. When she was a child, she used to run, but as she got older she had learned that it wasn’t worth it. While running definitely cut down on the time it took to get there, it also made her feel even more dehydrated and tired by the time she arrived, draining the energy she needed to conserve for the work she would have to do.

  The mine pits were cut deep into the ground. Tarps of opaque plastic were stretched over them, supported on ropes tethered near the edges and offering the workers a little shade. Amber moved past the dozens of other grids that belonged to her neighbors, stopping when she reached the one marked with a large ‘485’ carved into the dirt. She could hear sounds of digging coming from inside, and puffs of dust escaped from the edge of the tarp as each shovelful of dirt was moved by her father.

  “I’m here, dad,” she called out, kneeling down and peering into the hole.

  Her father glanced up at her. The gray streaks in his coarse, black hair were hidden beneath a layer of dust just like every inch of the rest of his body, seeming to paint all of his features the same color. His exhausted, blue eyes were the only things that stood out—even his teeth were stained with brown earth. Like her mother, he was relatively young, but the scorching sun had etched deep creases into his skin. When they were smoothed out with dirt, like now, Amber could almost imagine what he had looked like as a young man.

  “We won’t get much done today,” Richard sighed, wiping his cheeks and mixing the dirt in with his sweat. There was no such thing as clean anymore, and the mask of clay that formed from the sweat and dust actually helped prevent sunburn.

  “Is there anything left in the last vein?” Amber asked, sliding her body between the tarp and the ground and dropping onto the makeshift dirt steps that led down into the pit. They had hit what appeared to be a thin vein of salt rock a few months ago, but her father had been concerned that it wouldn’t last long. The look on his face confirmed it.

  “That’s the last of it,” he said, gesturing at a small pile of pale rock he had stacked off to the side. “I’m hoping we’ll find another vein, but we won’t get very far today.”

  She could see where he had begun digging into the side of the pit, starting another course around its perimeter that would slowly close in on itself until it reached the center. Her heart sank. They only had a few more months to find enough salt to both preserve the harvest and meet their quot
a. If they didn’t, they would get a smaller ration next cycle.

  “I’ll get these packed up,” Amber said, moving towards the chunks of salt. “Do you want me to walk back with the ration to put them in storage, or wait here with you?”

  “Show it how to load the tailings before you do anything,” Richard answered. “We need to get a few hours of work in.”

  She nodded, beckoning to the ration as she crossed to the other side of the pit. It was a large area, nearly 150 feet long and almost 200 feet wide, and they would spent the rest of their lives digging there unless they managed to find enough of the valuable salt to buy a second grid and try their luck elsewhere. Finding enough to do so was based solely on the yield of their current grid, and so far, it didn’t look hopeful. Her parents had started digging there before she was born, and they had never been able to find more than the bare minimum necessary for preservation and quota requirements per cycle.

  Each family had one hammer and one chisel per worker to chip out pieces of salt rock, tools that were expected to last a lifetime. The shovels they used were fashioned from thick, hardened plastic, just like everything else they used in life. Dirt and plastic, that’s all that was left. Everything organic had rotted away, and any metal scraps from the time before the drought had long since been scavenged by the administration to build and maintain the resource centers.

  Aside from small solar lights, technology had died for everyday people. Instead, the resource centers hoarded it, using it to create rations and supplements to care for the population. It was a terrible price to pay, but no one had much of a choice. This was the world humanity had created all those years ago, and now they had to live with the consequences.

  “Like this,” Amber murmured under her breath, showing the ration how to load old dirt from the discard pile onto large circles of plastic. It watched her, then copied her movements, quickly filling one of the circles. She passed a thick piece of twisted, plastic rope through the loops that had been tied around the circle’s perimeter then cinched it tight, creating a sack. Tomorrow, the ration would start carrying sack after sack to the dumping ground nearly a quarter of a mile outside of the settlement, helping her family slowly excavate their grid while they sifted through the fresh dirt they dug for anything valuable.

  This was her life, a mundane existence that revolved around salt. Her only hope for escape was the applications she had put in at the resource center. Unless she was selected, she would spend the rest of her life working for eight hours a day in the grid, followed by a couple hours in the evening reading from the few books their settlement had been assigned. Education beyond that had died with the earth, but it was better than nothing.

  “Fill the rest,” Amber whispered to the ration, pointing at the stack of plastic circles that remained. “You’ll carry them out tomorrow.”

  She watched it for a moment as it began to work, making sure that it understood what she wanted it to do, then she turned away as she began to dig.

  The hours passed slowly, and her mind went blank as she fell into the repetition of her task. She would dig out a scoop, then kneel down and sort through it with her fingers for any sign of salt. If there wasn’t any, she would move over a couple feet and repeat the process, leaving a line of small piles of sorted dirt that the ration would pick up as she worked around the perimeter of the grid. On a good day, she would make it halfway down one whole wall before it was time to leave, increasing the depth of their grid shovelful by shovelful.

  Amber sighed, thinking back to the first day she had come to help her father. She had been young, only seven years old. The resource center considered that age old enough to contribute, so their quota had been increased to provide for the additional worker her family had. She had cried her eyes out, refusing to work when she had realized how miserable it was, and her father had let her be, ignoring her as he did both his own work and hers.

  She remembered watching him tear into the dirt, moving as fast as he could, and she remembered him nearly fainting from the additional exertion as he tried to compensate for her unwillingness to help. Her mother was the caretaker for several of the neighbor’s children, a job that provided more salt as payment than working in the grid would, but it still wouldn’t be enough to meet the new quota.

  Amber remembered her parents’ hushed, concerned whispers that night as they had discussed what would happen if they didn’t find enough salt, and she had decided right then that she would do everything she could to help. She had learned her lesson that day, and that was the first and last time she had ever cried from the work.

  Since that day, she had helped dig down almost thirty feet on top of the eight her parents had done when the area was first assigned to them, making their grid the deepest out of the entire settlement. The depth made no difference, however, since it had produced very little of the precious resource they were searching for. Work meant nothing if no salt came of it.

  According to what she had been told, the area had been a salt mine hundreds of years before, filled in at one point to level the ground in hopes of growing genetically-modified crops that could withstand the high salt content of the soil. The venture had failed, though, and the land was deemed useless. It had lain forgotten until the other two salt mines in the region were emptied, and after realizing that hauling salt from the oceans on foot would be impossible, a desperate search of old records had led to the mine’s rediscovery.

  The resource center claimed that the area should hold rich salt deposits, but the promises seemed empty. Only a few grids contained salt rock in excess of quota, and theirs definitely wasn’t one of them. So far, they had found nothing beyond scant mining scraps mixed in with the fill dirt that had been used to level the ground, and fresh salt rock would likely be much farther below.

  The resource centers stressed the need for salt, saying that it was necessary for maintaining the energy demands required for growing enough rations to feed the population. This was part of the reason why the rations spent almost six months with the families they were assigned to: not only was there not enough room to house them at the resource centers for longer than the time it took to grow them, but having a dedicated laborer capable of hauling heavier loads was essential to making progress at the grids.

  The other settlements performed different work; most salvaged plastic for recycling, like Amber’s parents did before she was born, but there were a few mineral and heavy metal mines in the region as well. The people of each settlement did what they could to contribute to the resource centers, and prior to harvest, the rations joined in on that task.

  The rations were livestock, similar to the beasts of burden used long ago before animal life went extinct, and Amber was grateful that they now had another one. Instead of doing most of the hauling herself as she had for the two weeks since harvesting their last ration, this new ration would take over that part of the daily tasks for the next five and a half months.

  Amber set her shovel down, reaching for her flask of water. She filled the lid, feeling the water turn the dirt that layered the back of her throat into mud as she swallowed. The ration took her cue, pausing in its work as it did the same. She met its gaze; its eyes were bright and eager as it stared at her, and she felt an unexpected flash of awkwardness as she looked away.

  “I think that’s all we can do today, Amber.”

  She glanced at her father as he sank down onto the ground, leaning back against the dirt wall and yawning.

  “I’m too tired to keep going, we all need sleep. The sun will be down in a few hours, I think it’s best if we head back.”

  Amber nodded.

  “I’ll show the ration where to dump the dirt. There’s enough time to take a load or two.”

  “I’d appreciate it,” Richard sighed, struggling to his feet. “That would give us a head start in the morning. If you’re not too tired, you might help carry a few bags. I don’t want to wear the ration out any more than necessary, it hasn’t gotte
n any rest, either.”

  “I will,” she said, walking over to her father and picking up his shovel. She set it and hers against the wall near the dirt steps, ready for the morning when they would return. “I’ll make sure the hauling sacks get stacked up when we’re done, too.”

  “Thank you, my dear.”

  Her father leaned down, giving her a quick kiss on her cheek. She smiled, then moved to grab one of the small sacks used for carrying salt. The few chunks of rock were disappointingly light, and she sighed as she placed them in the center of the plastic and cinched the top. Richard took the bag from her outstretched hand, carrying it gently as he climbed the steps out of the pit.

  Amber turned to the ration, pointing at the sacks of dirt it had gathered. She hesitated for a moment as she glanced up to make sure her father was gone, then she quietly spoke.

  “Pick them up. We’ll have to make a couple trips.”

  She heaved two of the bags onto her back, the rope that held them closed digging into her neck and shoulder as she carefully balanced herself to lift one more. Each weighed more than fifty pounds; the ration could carry twice as many, and between them, they should be done in three trips.

  She felt gravity increase on the load as she climbed up the steps, and she paused at the top, trying to catch her breath. She lifted her hand, shielding her eyes as she glanced to the east where the dumping ground was. The ration appeared at her side a moment later, and she grunted as she jerked her head in the direction they needed to go.

  Amber whispered a curse as she began to walk. No matter how many times she made this trip, she would never get used to it. The sun felt even more brutal than usual, and shimmering waves of light hovered over the ground in front of them, an illusion created by the sunlight mingling with the heat that rose off the earth.

  When she was younger, she used to stare at the mirages, trying to imagine the life the books described before everything died. Sometimes she still did it, but now it felt more depressing than exciting. The books told of a world that was foreign to her, a world that had been lost in the wake of humanity’s destruction, and her heart ached at the knowledge that it would never be seen again.