The Fall of Polite

by Sam Kench

  Maria pushed on through the field, breaking her way through the ice, until she was past the pile-up. She returned to the side of the road where the snow was less punishing. Cars sped past her, their headlights blinding her if she tried to look back. Stop looking back, she told herself, stop looking back.

  HER MUSCLES WERE ACHING when she reached the town’s baseball field where Mark had played little league years ago. The field had two dugouts, a supply shack off to the side, and a yellow plastic topped chain-link fence that encircled the field. Up the hill from the field was the town dump. Maria trudged up the incline, the snow falling faster and faster minute after minute. Her breath pumped out in front of her like steam from a vent.

  The front section of the dump had two small compactors with a glass booth between them where the controls were. Maria crouched down behind the metal ‘dump’ sign just outside the tall chain-link fence that surrounded the area. She looked on in horror at a boy from her high school as he was shoved into one of the compactors by three more of her classmates. She didn’t know them well but in a school that small, they were all too familiar. The basin of the compactor came to just below the boy’s shoulders. They laughed at him and pushed him back inside when he tried to climb out.

  Maria looked further into the dump; a closed gate, and beyond that, the junkyard. Mounds of scrap metal reached for the sky. She squinted and tried to look over the junk mounds for a coat or blankets. It was too far and too dark to see, but she figured there had to be something useful there.

  The sound of a large mechanism coming to life turned Maria’s attention back to the compactor. One of the boys had gone into the control booth and had figured out how to start it up.

  The boy inside screamed amidst the garbage as an iron wall began sliding towards him.

  The other two kept him inside and hurled overlapping insults at him. The boy in the compactor started to cry, and the laughter outside lessened without altogether stopping. A tinge of guilt seemed to infect their chortling.

  Maria realized now who these boys were to each other. The one in the compactor was one of the school bullies, the three outside the compactor were his usual victims. They had run across each other scavenging at the dump and come to blows. The bully, without his usual backup, found himself on the other end of the torment, easily overpowered by the victimized trio in this new world lacking the rules of the former.

  The compactor was coming to a close; the bully backed against the far side, the heavy metal edge moving towards him, pushing trash into his torso. A long wicker couch bent and snapped apart behind him. A thin shaft of wicker stuck into the side of his face like shrapnel. The bully screamed and apologized and cried great-big-blubbering tears.

  The three outside stopped laughing. Their fun was over, time to let him out. They backed away from the edge. The bully tried but couldn’t pull himself out, he was buried in trash above his waist by then. The boy inside the booth tried to stop the compactor but didn’t know how. He slammed on all the buttons. The second compactor on the other side of the booth began to close as well, though that one didn’t harbor any human life.

  Maria turned away and headed back down to the baseball field as the bully was crushed alive. The bully’s scream got even louder. It distorted, then stopped altogether before reaching its natural conclusion. His death knell echoed off the surrounding mountains. Maria wished she could have lived her entire life without ever hearing a sound as terrible as that. She made her way down the hill, sliding and stumbling through the snow. She thought it not possible to feel any colder.

  Maria climbed over the chest high fence and looked into the dugout which had been flooded with water that had now frozen. A solid layer of ice came well above the top of the long bench that ran along the dugout. Maria stepped onto the ice, ducking her head against the roof and holding onto the chain-link fronting to avoid falling. She pulled herself along with her hands on the chain-link, and slid her feet across the icy floor.

  The dugout was angled away from the wind and kept most of the snow out. Maria looked down through the ice, brushing away the thin layer of snow that had managed to get in. She saw a thick letter jacket sitting on the floor under the foggy ice. Wool and pleather. It looked so warm to her, even frozen solid. She looked over baseball hats, jackets and jerseys, baseballs and bats, all frozen beneath this floor of solid ice.

  One bat had its end resting on the bench and was leaned against the wall. The handle stuck several inches out of the ice. Maria grabbed onto it and tried to pull it free but the majority of the bat was encased in ice and it had no give. She slipped while pulling on the bat and fell onto the icy floor. Her fists pounded the ice in frustration.

  She tore open another packet of hand warmers and held them to the ice, hoping despite reason to melt enough ice around the bat to free herself a weapon. She made no progress and instead rubbed the hand warmers over her body which left a black residue on her hands.

  Maria slid her way to the exit and looked up. Moving along the hill by foot were the three boys who had just murdered their high school bully together. Maria backed up to the darkest corner of the dugout and knelt down until they passed. They weren’t talking anymore. They shuffled through the snow in silence, looking down at their feet. A brownish-orange spray of vomit covered the smallest boy’s front.

  After waiting long enough for them to leave her sight down the road, Maria exited the dugout. She cautiously passed the compactors. The bully’s body, from his chest up, lay on top of the closed compactor, his lower body crushed with garbage into a tiny cube inside a large metal container. She quickly averted her eyes and swallowed the traces of vomit that came up out of her throat from her continuous nausea.

  A loose chain held the gate to the junkyard shut. She pulled on one side of the gate and opened it wide enough for her to squeeze past under the chain, then pulled it level behind her.

  Her search was slow as it took a while to even brush away enough snow to see what she was looking at. She had to be careful not to cut herself on whatever was underneath. Mostly she found useless garbage; empty, soggy cardboard boxes, broken kitchen appliances, and bicycle frames with either flat tires or no tires at all. She pulled a purple jacket out from underneath a pile of soiled magazines with excitement, only to find it in a child’s size. She put the hood over her head anyway and let the rest of the jacket hang over her shoulders like a shrunken cape, the slightest protection from the wind chill.

  She kept digging through junk and eventually found a pair of thin, pink, cotton gloves with holes on the fingers and palms. They were already soaking wet and she felt colder with them on, so she stuffed them into the jacket pockets hoping they might dry and be more useful later on. There were blankets to be found but they were full of holes and bugs and were soaking wet. She left them behind, but took a big blue plastic tarp off from over a pile of cinder blocks and wrapped it around her shoulders.

  It was hard to tell what she was seeing with only the light of the moon to search by. She made the choice to come back in the daylight and have another look. Fearing sleep without a weapon by her side, she looked through pieces of broken wood, giant shards of plate glass, and jagged chunks of rusted metal. She settled on a long metal rod with a diagonal break at one end that had once held up clothes in a closet. She also found a thin, red toolbox with a small padlock on the front. Maria struck the lock with a couple of downward jabs from her makeshift spear before the lock broke open. Throwing open the lid and looking inside, she found a Philip’s head screwdriver, a hammer, a small pouch of nails, a tape measure, and sandpaper. She took the toolbox and left the junkyard.

  The door to the supply shack was locked, the metal handle, cold. She retrieved the hammer and gave the handle a hard downward whack. The metal dented, the screws pulled away from the base, the handle hung downward. Another whack and it fell to the snowy ground. She fumbled around in the hole until the handle on the other side fell to the floor of the shack and the door swung open.

 
Snowflakes rushed in behind her. Maria slammed the door shut. The inside was pitch black, save for a faint beam of moonlight streaming in through the hole where the doorknob had just been. She hadn’t gotten a look around as she entered so she blindly inched away from the door to escape the cold draft that blew in. With her hand outstretched she moved forward until she felt something metal, a shelf probably. Maria set the hammer down and sat on the floor. She laid the child’s coat over her like a tiny blanket and wrapped herself up in the plastic tarp. The slippers she wore had soft bottoms and had soaked straight through. She kicked them off and rubbed her feet together under the tarp to warm them up. She laid her head against the wooden floor and breathed stale dusty air in the darkness.

  SHE SLEPT A DREAMLESS NIGHT and awoke tired in the dim morning light. The crotch of her pants was soaked through with blood.

  Sunlight made its way into the shack through the hole in the door and through the small gaps between the painted boards that made up the walls. She sat up, rubbing her neck and stretching her limbs. She had a look around the inside of the shack: three metal shelves and a plastic trunk. She found a box of baseball gloves and a large can of baseballs, but no bats. She found an empty gym bag and folded up the tarp to put inside with the tool box on top.

  She opened up the plastic trunk and found it full of junk food; cardboard boxes of snack sized chip bags, pretzels, and crackers. She ate until that empty feeling in her stomach went away, then she stuffed as much as would fit into the gym bag, which wasn’t very much.

  She put the slippers back on; still damp, but protection from direct contact with snow. The gloves were still sopping wet and freezing. She threw them to the floor and cursed. The hood of the child’s jacket was detachable, so she took the hood off and wore it as a hat. She ripped off the sleeves at the shoulders and squeezed her arms through. As she picked up her broken curtain rod for defense she thought about how she might run away if she saw someone who looked like she did. She felt foolish… foolish and doomed.

  MARIA WENT BACK TO THE JUNKYARD to look it over more carefully and completely. She spent a few hours searching. It wasn’t snowing anymore. Too cold to snow. She hadn’t found anything that she considered useful, even with the aid of sunlight, when a woman several years older than her entered the junkyard. She had short brown hair that looked like she had cut it herself.

  She had in fact cut it herself, and recently. Her hair had been long and flowing until it almost caused her death when it obscured her vision in a fight two nights earlier. The knife in her hand was used to saw the strands short, and to best her opponent in the final moments of their conflict. She hadn’t noticed Maria upon entering the junkyard, but now they were both eyeing each other.

  Maria held out her curtain rod spear and the woman held her steak knife at waist height, the tip pointed in Maria’s direction. The stranger walked further into the junkyard. The two circled each other in silence. Maria’s hands trembled, and though she tried to hide the fear from her face, it still came across. The woman either hid her fear better, or didn’t feel any.

  They circled each other until Maria was at the gate. She slipped out under the chain and walked backwards away from the junkyard. The woman put her guard down first and started rooting through the garbage. Maria turned her back to the woman only once she was all the way down the hill and out of the dump. She left past the baseball field and got back on the road.

  SHE SPENT THE REST OF THE DAY WALKING, the tarp wrapped around her shoulders to guard against the windchill. At night she sojourned to a collapsing shack in the woods off to the side of the highway. The shelter was made from rotting wood that someone else had already haphazardly constructed and subsequently abandoned. She stopped herself from crying when the impulse came late into the night. Gunshots sounded a couple of times before daylight broke and stopped Maria from entering REM sleep. Whenever a bang brought her back into consciousness, the sounds of the forest continued to pervade her shelter, long after the gun blasts decayed, and made falling back asleep a challenge despite how exhausted she felt.

  At the start of the day, she awoke again with blood between her legs, fresh blood, still flowing. It wasn’t the embarrassment, it was the thought of how vulnerable it must make her look that convinced Maria that she needed to cover up the blood somehow.

  She punctured the blue tarp with the tip of her spear. She stuck two fingers into the hole and ripped a section of the tarp off to tie around her waist, like a towel at the beach.

  Her head felt like a steel drum being banged on by an angry child. She feared frostbite but thought she had managed to dodge it so far. Real shoes, boot preferably, would be necessary if she were to continue on foot much longer. It was a miserable existence, but giving up wasn’t an option to Maria. It never crossed her mind. She tried to focus on the destination rather than the journey.

  A BLUE PICKUP TRUCK with peeling paint pulled to a stop beside Maria on the highway at midday. The rest of the road was empty. A husband and wife sat in the front seats. The man, her father's age, had a thick brown beard like a lumberjack, which he had in fact been until jobs recently stopped being something that people still performed. He had sad blue eyes, but a warm smile as he leaned forward to speak past his wife to Maria. ‘Do you have anyone?’

  ‘What?’ Maria asked, still walking, still shivering.

  The man took his foot off of the brake and let the truck slowly roll forward, keeping pace with Maria. ‘Are you on your own out here?’

  Maria was more alone than she ever had been, but she didn’t think it would be smart to tell the man that. She didn’t know if she should tell him anything.

  ‘It’s okay, honey.’ The woman said. Her skin was loose, especially around the neck. She looked as though she had lost quite a lot of weight rather quickly. She wore a selection of multi-colored rings on her fingers and a fake gemstone necklace. ‘We’re all scared out here,’ she sounded genuine, caring.

  The lumberjack nodded. ‘There’s a lot of crazy people out here. I promise, we’re good folk.’ There were deep creases around his eyes when he smiled. He reminded Maria of Santa Clause from the old stop-motion movies.

  ‘You can come with us if you want.’ The wife said, flirting with eagerness.

  ‘My brother’s got a farm over in Danbury. Corn and tomatoes and such. Some cows and chickens. If things haven’t gone back to normal by Spring, we at least won’t be left wanting for food.’

  ‘What do you say?’ The wife asked gently.

  Maria looked them over. They seemed honest. It was clear the lumberjack was massive even while seated in the cab, but he didn’t come across as dangerous despite his size. He had a carnival-teddy-bear quality. She stopped walking. The truck stopped too.

  The eager woman leaned through the window. Maria backed away and tightened her grip on the rod. ‘Stay away from me.’

  ‘It’s okay, honey, we’re not gonna hurt you,’ she sighed sadly. ‘I’m sorry if anyone has hurt you. I can’t believe things have gotten this bad. I never thought it would get this way.’

  Another vehicle sped past going double the speed limit. Maria’s wary eyes were glued to it and the couple took notice.

  ‘Look,’ The lumberjack said, ‘It’s bad out here, this whole damn country’s fallen apart since the bombs fell.’

  Maria pulled her attention away from the other vehicle and looked the man in his sad blue eyes. Bombs? She wondered. She hadn’t heard or seen anything about bombs. She supposed no one really knew exactly why and how everything went wrong.

  ‘My name’s Eamon. This is my wife, Beth. You look really cold out here. And scared. And well, we want you to come with us.’ Beth took his hand. ‘You’d be safer with us. We had a-’ Suddenly Eamon’s sad eyes got a whole lot sadder and he stopped his sentence short.

  Beth rubbed his shoulder as he lowered his head and tightened his face, holding back tears. His skin grew pink. She turned back to Maria. ‘Will you come with me and Eamon? I think it would be good for
all of us.’

  Maria looked away from her. She looked at the smoke pumping out of their tail pipe and at the snow behind the truck changing color from the exhaust. She felt the slightest bit of warmth drift from the inside of the truck and she could smell the artificial heat pumping out of the air vents. ‘Okay.’

  4. THE DEAD COWS, THE NAZI,

  AND THE GANG OF BASTARDS

  MARIA SAT IN THE BACK SEAT. It took a while, but she warmed up considerably. She thought back to a school trip she had taken. An overnight to an observatory in Maine. Her and Stacey snuck out of their hotel room at midnight. They spent an hour hopping back and forth between the cold pool and the hot tub.

  ‘Thank you for letting me ride with you,’ she projected toward the front seat.

  ‘Thank you for riding with us.’ The woman said.

  ‘What’s your name?’ The man asked.

  ‘Maria.’

  ‘You must’ve been so cold out there.’

  ‘Yeah. I thought I was going to die for a minute there.’ Maria meant from the cold, but then her mind drifted back to the basement. She thought of Buddy. She thought of how Mark had left her to Buddy. How he had ignored her calls for help. She hated him. Both hims.

  ‘What do you think?’ Beth asked.

  ‘Sorry, what?’ Maria had drifted off in thought.

  ‘I said we could stop by the house and pick you up some clothes.’