The World Without Flags

by Ben Lyle Bedard

  “What’s gotten into me?” He makes another puff of a sound, the most perverse chuckle you can imagine. “This.” He waves his arm over the table. “Everyone acting like nothing’s changed, nothing’s changed. There’s a war out there and they’re coming for us!”

  “Calm down now,” Norman tells him. “We know it too, but the fields have to be planted. Nothing we can do about that.”

  “Don’t tell me to calm down, old man,” Matt hisses, his body tensing.

  I feel Eric stiffen next to me. Most of us respect Norman, but Eric has always held him in much higher esteem than anyone else, I don’t know why.

  “Matt,” Eric says in a flat voice. It’s the closest thing that Eric gets to menacing.

  Matt snaps his attention away from Norman at the sound of his voice. “And you,” he says acidly. “You don’t do anything! What kind of leader does nothing?”

  Eric just watches him and sets down his mug.

  “What kind of man are you?” Matt asks. He stands up and my hand flies to my knife, but it’s not there! I search for it frantically, feeling my heart race. If Matt’s got a gun, this could be over before I have a chance to do anything!

  “What do you want me to do?” Eric asks. He hasn’t even stood up himself. He’s sitting there, vulnerable, calm.

  Matt swallows and looks around the room. I put my hand around my mug. Next plan. If he moves toward Eric, I can hit him with a mug of hot cider. I have to hit him as hard as I can in the nose. It might break his nose and scald his eyes long enough to make a difference. I scan the table. No knives, no forks, not even a damn spoon.

  “You don’t know,” Matt says finally. “You don’t know what they do. You think we’re safe here? You think the war can’t touch us?”

  “No, I don’t think that, Matt.” Eric’s voice is low and even.

  “You know what these people are like?”

  “Who?” asks Eric.

  “These, these,” Matt splutters, “these soldiers! I know, I’ve seen them. After the Worm, they came in tanks and they just shot everyone.” Matt’s eyes are wild and he seems to be having a hard time talking but he can’t stop either. “They just shot everyone. I was thinking that it would pass, all of it would pass, so we just stayed in our house. I told them they’d be okay. But the soldiers came, they came into our house. They took everyone and we went into the streets and I said to be calm, just be calm, and they’d be all right. But that’s not what, that’s not who, that’s not what they’re like!” Matt throws his mug to the ground where it shatters into a hundred pieces. Norman and Crystal stand up and back away. Matt continues, his eyes wild and violent, fixed on Eric. “They shoot everyone!” he hissed. “Don’t you understand? They shot everyone! My son. My wife. My daughter. They shot them all like they were, they were nothing!” He trembles all over.

  “I know,” Eric says. “I’ve seen it too, Matt.”

  Matt shakes his head like he can’t believe it. “No, you don’t know.” He raises his hand and points at Eric. “If you knew, you would be getting ready. You’d be getting our guns. You wouldn’t be knee deep in shit all day!”

  “Matt,” Eric says. “I know.”

  “You don’t know,” he responds. But some of his crazy energy has dissipated. He’s shaking all over. He looks about ready to collapse. “They’ll kill us all.”

  Eric stands up and walks around the table. “I know,” he tells Matt. He’s looking at him straight in the eyes. “I do know.”

  Matt’s lips trembles like a child’s. His face collapses. “Then why don’t you do something?”

  Eric reaches out and puts his hand on Matt’s shoulder. At first Matt takes a step back, but then he seems to lose the will to pull away and just stands there. “They killed everyone but me. I didn’t do anything and they killed everyone. Except me.” Matt dissolves like all the bones have left his body. His eyes are dark and empty, pits drilled into his skull. He looks like he’s going to collapse into a puddle and drain away into the earth. Eric takes him by the shoulders and gently leads him to Crystal.

  “Take him home, will you?” he asks her. “He needs some sleep.”

  “Sure, Eric, sure,” she says. She takes Matt from him who’s in some horrible daze and leads him out of the Lodge.

  Pest sweeps up the pieces of the mug while we all silently finish our cider.

  It’s Eric who speaks finally. “Please, let’s keep this to ourselves. Matt’s been through enough. Let him forget this.”

  Looking around at us all, I have the feeling it’s only going to get worse from here on out.

  12

  As I’m leaving to follow Eric up the hill to our house, I feel a tug on my arm. I stop and turn around. It’s Pest. He’s got a smile on his face that makes me feel. Well, it makes me feel uncomfortable.

  “Can I talk to you?” he asks. His voice is high like a kid’s, but there’s something adult in it. It gives me the creeps. I tell Eric I’ll meet him at home, and then turn back to Pest with my arms crossed. When Eric is out of sight, Pest takes a deep breath and lets it out slow. Pest has this dark, curly hair that I don’t think has ever been combed. I think he cuts it himself because it’s uneven and messy. It looks like something’s died an unpleasant death on his head. He has a small little nose and dark eyebrows that make his eyes even more menacing. I notice again the glimmering blue of his eyes.

  “What?” I ask, crossing my arms.

  He doesn’t answer, but just holds out his hands. It’s my knife. I snatch it out of his hands instantly, a flash of anger shooting through me. I should’ve known it was this little jerk!

  “Don’t get pissed,” he tells me. “I did it for your own good.”

  “Is that right?” I narrow my eyes at him.

  “You’re too protective of Eric,” he says. “You would’ve pulled that on Matt and then things would’ve gone very badly.”

  I open my mouth to deny it, but the little shit is right so I just shut up.

  “Eric is more capable than you give him credit for,” Pest says to me. “He can handle himself. You should trust him.”

  “You should mind your own business,” I tell him. Nothing worse than being told things you know are true by someone younger than you. And someone who you don’t like. It sucks.

  Pest just shrugs at me and turns away. He walks away into the dark.

  “Touch my knife again and see what happens,” I say into the night.

  “Buenas noches,” I hear, already far away.

  Spanish. A fleeting, unclear memory of Lucia zips painfully through my mind before I can fend it off.

  Creepy jerk.

  13

  The view from the top of the second lookout is one of my favorites. It looks down over a green carpet of pine trees to the south and west. There’s a lake far in the south west too, like a blue eye staring upward. I don’t know the name of that place. I’ve never been very far from the Homestead, at least not that I remember clearly. I come up here myself sometimes to watch the horizon or the clouds. Sometimes I draw. Sometimes I just sit and look and listen to the quiet.

  But I’m not alone today. Artemis is manning the lookout. We had stopped using this lookout like four or five years ago. We didn’t see the point anymore. We don’t get as many visitors as we used to. Not many bandits and gangs come this far north. It’s a long way to ride or walk to steal carrots. Once word of the war came, though, we thought we should use it again. Artemis volunteered to watch three times a week. She gets bored, so she begged me to come to visit her.

  She’s standing with her elbows on the banister, looking lazily out to the south. She’s like the portrait of boredom. If I had my drawing stuff with me, I’d have to draw her, but I left it at home. I try to remember so I can draw it later. “Hey, Kestrel,” Artemis says, without looking toward me.

  I make a hmmm sound to show I’m listening.

  “You ever think that we’re better off now than we were before? I mean, the world, not just us, but like the wh
ole world?” I can tell it’s a rhetorical question so I just wait for her to continue. She pauses for a second. “I was talking to Beth the other day and she was telling me all about the wars she knew. There were two World Wars, I guess, before the Worm. And then another one in a place called Korea. And another one in some place called Vietnam.” Artemis yawned and then leaned back and stretched. “I guess a lot of people got killed. Millions. I can’t even imagine a thousand people, let alone a million, can you?” Again, rhetorical, so I’m quiet. Artemis is gazing up toward the sky now. “I mean, yeah, we work a lot and sometimes we’re hungry and it can get pretty friggin boring, but at least we’re not dropping bombs on each other, right?” Artemis turns away from the balcony and comes over to sit next to me. “I know all the older people talk about the Worm being a plague and a catastrophe, but I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t so bad. Right? I mean, sometimes I really like the world just the way it is. I wouldn’t want to go back, even though all those people died. Do you think I’m a bad person for thinking that way?”

  She looks at me with genuine concern. Artemis is always worried about being seen as a really nice person. Being nice for her is more important than anything else. So this isn’t a rhetorical question.

  “You’re not a bad person,” I say.

  Artemis smiles and nudges me with her shoulder, which is the closest she can expect to a hug. “Sometimes,” she says, yawning again, “sometimes I think it’s beautiful here, don’t you?”

  We look out over the pine trees. The sun hits the lake and it shines like a golden coin.

  It’s a rhetorical question, but I answer her anyway. “Very beautiful.”

  14

  I’m tired from planting all day, but I want to see Franky anyway. There’s been a lot of time in the fields lately. Nothing but work and sleep gets old after a while. Besides, I’m tired of talking with Eric, especially lately. Everyone else has kind of moved on from the war talk, but Eric won’t stop thinking about it. Every night, it’s the same thing. He stares off into space, his mind grinding away at the problem while I try to eat. Some people get annoyed when people eat with their mouth open. I get annoyed when you think too much while you eat. It doesn’t make a sound, but it’s way more irritating than chewing with your mouth open.

  I’m filthy when I knock on the door. I’m happy when I have to wait because that means that Franky is alone. Diane and Amber must be out, probably down to the farm helping Crystal. Sure enough, Franky comes to the door alone and smiles when he sees me. He stands back from the door.

  “Well look who it is?” I smile at him. “Come on in,” Franky says. He knows better than to wait for me to answer him. That’s one of the things that I like about him. He doesn’t expect me to talk much. “I have something I think you’ll like.”

  I smile wider as he leads me into the backroom of their house. Most houses here are the same. It’s one big room without windows. Sometimes there are sheets hung up to separate one part of the house from the other. Sometimes, like at our house, there’s a loft. But it doesn’t change much from that. We’re not really the greatest at building houses yet. We don’t even put windows in them because winters are too cold. We learned that lesson pretty hard the first few winters. We’d much rather be warm than have a little bit of pale light.

  Franky’s house is a little different. He built a wall that divides it almost exactly in two, a front part and a rear part. In the rear is his workspace. Diane and Amber are crammed into the front part. I think that’s why Diane and Amber spend so much time in other parts of the Homestead. There’s not much room for them here. It’s mostly beds and all the plastic junk we collect. I step over a faded yellow plastic duck and then through the sliding wooden door into Franky’s workshop.

  I love this place. First off, I love the smell. It smells like grease and smoke and steel. To me, it’s the smell of creativity. There are shelves everywhere crammed with stuff from the old world: radios, televisions, mysterious black boxes, microwave ovens, chainsaws, little engines half-taken apart, toy cars, springs, screws, and nails, rubber bands, twist-ties, and ghostly plastic bags stuffed to the brim with other plastic bags. Then there’s shelves upon shelves of tools: screwdrivers, wrenches, hammers of all sizes, tools I don’t recognize and tools that might not even be tools at all. Something in me takes a lot of delight in all that stuff. I love the idea of getting in there, seeing how things works, fixing things, making my own things. I get excited. It’s like pure inspiration for me in here. I must have drawn this place from memory like a hundred times.

  “Come here,” Franky says. “Look.” He leads me over to his workbench, which he keeps surprisingly neat considering the rest of the place.

  On the workbench is a weird contraption. I feel my heart jump inside me, even though I’m really tired. If there’s one thing I love, it’s a contraption, the weirder the better. On the lip of the table is a crank, just like the one Crystal uses to grind up deer meat. The crank is hooked to an axle that turns a rubber belt. Connected to the belt is some aluminum thing bolted down to the table. There are wires running from this to a turntable. There’s a record on the turntable. I see where this is going and my heart races with excitement.

  “Go ahead,” Franky says. “Crank it up!”

  I should have been tired form working all day, but I forget about that as I leap to the table. I start cranking and the record player starts spinning. I look up at Franky’s whose eyes are sparkling.

  “Gotta go faster than that!” he tells me. “Really give it a spin!”

  I put my back into it. Then I hear it. It’s faint, but I can hear it. Distant music, like it’s playing in another house. Another time even. Ghost music. The cranking makes more noise than the music and I’m starting to sweat, but I don’t care. Is there anything better than music in the whole world? Then I hear singing and words, distant, faint, beautiful. . .

  Mama, take this badge off of me

  I can’t use it anymore

  It’s getting dark, too dark to see

  I feel I’m knockin on heaven’s door

  I’m sweating and my arms are burning from turning the crank, and even though I’m trying hard, I’m slowing down. The music goes into slow motion and the notes start to stretch out longer than they should. It still sounds great.

  “Here!” Franky cries. “Let me take a turn at it!”

  I step back and Franky steps in and starts cranking. The music picks up speed and I get closer to the turntable to listen.

  Knock, knock knockin on heaven’s door

  Knock, knock knockin on heaven’s door

  Knock, knock knockin on heaven’s door

  I hear a flapping sound and the music stops. When I look over, I see the belt has slipped off the aluminum block. I look over to Franky and we both laugh, sweating from the exertion of cranking. We laugh for a bit before Franky starts coughing. When he stops, he smiles again.

  “Well,” he says. “It ain’t much now. I got to figure out a way to amplify the sound and keep the power steady.”

  “You need a battery,” I tell him.

  “Don’t I know it,” he answers. “Batteries are hard to come by.”

  “What is that?” I ask him, pointing to the aluminum block that the rubber belt was hooked to.

  “Aren’t we talkative today?” Franky teases. I blush and frown a little, but thankfully Franky just smiles and answers my question. “That’s an alternator,” he says. “You can find these things in old cars and trucks. If you spin the wheel here, it generates electricity. Well, if you’re lucky it does. I imagine most of them have rusted to shit, excuse my French. I had to re-build this one to get it to work. And it doesn’t make much energy, really.”

  I look at it, fascinated. I’m not like a lot of the old people who talk about things they used to have back when, you know, before the Worm, and how they wished they could have it just one more time. . .but I can see the real use of this! I imagine all those cassettes I have, being able to play them whe
never I wanted. Hours and hours of pure, beautiful music! Oh yeah, this could come in real handy. I bend over and look in the alternator. I can see the copper wires in there and I remember some lessons that Eric gave me on electromagnetic fields from those books he hoards.

  “It’s a magnet,” I say.

  Franky’s eyes open in surprise. “There’s one in there, all right,” he says. “If you spin copper around a magnet—“

  “You get an electric field,” I finish.

  Franky wiggles his eyebrows at me. “Bullseye, kiddo.”

  I feel a thrill. I love when Franky calls me kiddo. Maybe Eric’s lessons aren’t such a waste of time after all.

  Then Franky gets serious. “Hey, look,” he says, “do you know what Eric’s going to do about this war thing?”

  I look at him and frown and shake my head.

  “He doesn’t mention it, huh?”

  I feel uncomfortable suddenly with these questions, like I’m talking behind Eric’s back.

  Franky smiles at me and stops being serious. “Hey, do me a favor? I want this to be a surprise for Diane for her birthday, so don’t tell anyone about the music, okay?” He looks at me, thinking. “Maybe you could help me out once in a while?”

  I smile from ear to ear.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” Franky says.

  I go home and can’t stop smiling or thinking about that music. I don’t even mind when Eric doesn’t say a word during our dinner of venison stew.

  15

  I’m so exhausted from work that I can’t eat. Eric and I are sitting on the hill, overlooking the newly-planted fields. The goon squad walks around the field banging on metal pans to scare away the birds. Queen trots next to Pest and barks whenever she sees a bird or a squirrel. What we need is more dogs, but they’re hard to come by. Everyone keeps their dogs, especially the females. We’re lucky enough to have Queen. I watch as she lifts her head suddenly and then Pest points and she goes leaping away, tongue out, happy as can be. I guess Pest has been teaching her to hunt, and it seems as if she likes it.