The Doomsday Book of Fairy Tales

by Emily Brewes

  “THAT’S NOT RIGHT,” I said out loud. My voice came out rough from sleep and disuse. It hurt to talk. “Mrs. Metzler gave me those shoes. I traded them for a coat.”

  From a distance that couldn’t quite be fathomed, I felt Doggo lick my fingers. I reached up and scratched his muzzle. “Hey, buddy! You hungry?”

  He started shaking and whining and licked my hand more frantically, like he used to do when I came home from work. When I tried to open my eyes to see what was going on, I couldn’t. They’d been taped shut.

  “What the hell?” I shouted, feeling at the tape but not quite able to make myself pull it off.

  Doggo barked. In response, I could hear bodies rousing outside, muffled by distance and at least one door.

  “Jesse? Are you awake?”

  My chest tight with barely contained panic, I explained, “I can’t open my eyes.”

  There was a moment of nothing, then a rustle, then the sudden warmth of another human body next to mine. The tape took a few eyelashes with it as it was pulled off. Even so, once my eyes were open, I still couldn’t see.

  “Wait,” said my helper, putting a hand on my shoulder. “It’ll take a minute to come back.”

  The room around me, a bleary smear of colours, slowly resolved into shapes, surfaces. It looked like Asa’s, only he wasn’t at his workbench. The pot of twelve-year-strong soup sat still and cold on the unlit methane burner. The close warmth I’d grown accustomed to was gone. In the midst of my attempt to pinpoint what was amiss with the scene before me, Doggo’s head popped into view and started licking my face.

  “Food Bringer! Food Bringer! Food Bringer!” He managed to speak clearly despite his wagging tongue. “You’re back!”

  “I didn’t go anywhere,” I assured him, looking around. “Least it doesn’t look that way.”

  My helper turned out to be the medicine woman. She grabbed my chin more than a bit roughly and used it to steer my head as she flashed a light into my eyes and peered into my mouth. “Well, you’re alive at any rate. Based on all your fevered jabber, I wouldn’t agree that you went nowhere. How’s the cough?”

  A quick search for the infamous tickle turned up no results, and I said so.

  “Clearing up then,” she declared. “Fine.” She pulled the blanket off me and shoved it into a plastic garbage bag. “Pillow,” she commanded, holding out her hand.

  I struggled to sit up. My joints were stiff, some exquisitely painful, which made moving slow. Before I could manage to hand it to her, she reached behind me and whisked the pillow into the bag.

  “Did you have anything with you apart from that bag? Any personal effects you unpacked?”

  My head felt full of something dense and heavy, like wool made of lead. It took a great effort of thought to answer her question. “Um, no. No, I don’t think so.”

  “Good.” She shoved my backpack into my chest and glared into my eyes. There were flecks of red and gold in the brown that could only be seen at such close proximity. “Then take this and your fucking dog and get the hell out of here.”

  I felt like I’d missed something. Between the hefty fluff in my head, and Doggo trying to jump in my lap, I couldn’t make one complete thought. The only thing I knew with certainty was that the medicine woman was really angry at me.

  “Did I do something? Where’s Asa?”

  She used a smirk of visible satisfaction to drop a single word into my lap like a glob of molten solder. “Dead.”

  Though I was still somewhat at sea in the present moment, she went on, “He caught whatever you had, that damned cough. Didn’t survive the night. Started coughing at suppertime, and he was dead by morning. Because of you.”

  “Wait, you can’t know that for certain —”

  “You brought sickness here! You spent so much time near him — an old man. Your cough became a fever, you blacked out. Asa was taking care of you when he took sick, too. The only reason you’re alive is because he paid for the pills, all of the pills, and insisted they be given to you.”

  She took a moment to collect herself, to catch her breath. Whereas I was still reeling from the idea that Asa died. That it was my fault. Now who will make the knife handles?

  “Someone’s sent for a constable from the tower to escort you. A hearing was held, in absentia, while you were comatose. They’ve sentenced you to be banished. You’re getting what you wanted.”

  “What I wanted,” I repeated. My system reboot wasn’t yet complete.

  “You wanted out, didn’t you? If only they’d done it sooner.”

  Another lull, during which I tried to work out if it was because her anger was too great to form words, or just that she resented having to talk to me more than was professionally necessary. Guilt rose up from the floor, flowing around me like water. It felt like sitting in a warm puddle, uncomfortably like wetting the bed.

  When my cognitive engine was warmed up enough, I managed to say, “I’m sorry. Did you know Asa very well?”

  She didn’t deign to look at me when she spat, “Does it matter?”

  I felt the need to say something, to eulogize the generosity of this stranger, acknowledge the loss. All I could think of was “Asa was the most skilled craftsman I’ve ever known. It was a privilege to watch him work. If I could trade my life for his, I —”

  “Don’t.” The medicine woman shook her head. “It’s pointless to say things like that, especially when you don’t mean them.”

  “How do you know I don’t?”

  She just shook her head again and left the room.

  Moments later, the constable ducked his head in.

  “You,” he said, pointing. “With me.”

  I shouldered my backpack and picked up Doggo. He wouldn’t stop licking my face, though I turned my head away so he couldn’t lick my mouth.

  “Oh, Food Bringer! I’m so glad you’re back!”

  “At least somebody is,” I muttered, ducking out through the low door, back into the land of the living.

  RISE OF THE LIVING DEAD

  A SPEAR OF PINK LIGHT shot over the eastern horizon first thing. Instead of being struck breathless by its beauty, or even complaining of its brightness compared to the dank shades of the Underground, the thing that came to mind was the pain in my face where I’d been branded a murderer. Having already made the mistake of rubbing the undressed burn and coming away with a slough of crispy skin (not to mention more pain), I did my best to think about anything else. Doggo remained asleep with his snout shoved under my knee. I scratched his ears instead of my face. It wasn’t as distracting as I wanted, but it gave my hand something useful to do.

  To the best of my knowledge, Doggo’d never been outside before. After the better part of a day and a night, he seemed about as impressed with it as he was with anything else. That is to say, his enthusiasm for outside hinged entirely on whether there was any food to eat, and how much of it he could have. It was an all-you-can-eat buffet of not much.

  When I had set out to leave the Underground, there was always some small part of me that thought of it as temporary. A holiday from living hell to which I would return. Maybe I’d find Olivia, or my dad, or whatever other ghost I might try to dig up, and once our unfinished business was concluded, I’d mosey back. If not to the neighbourhood, then somewhere else back Underground. It’s not that I liked it so much that I couldn’t conceive of leaving it forever, but it’d become familiar. Comfortable. Like a pair of shoddy shoes that smell bad enough to be kept outside the front door but are worn nonetheless. The ones you’d wear to the dump.

  I suppose I’d also figured it couldn’t possibly be safe to stay top-side indefinitely. We’d gone Underground for a reason, right? Just what reason that was had admittedly become a bit blurry. There was still flooding — bad flooding that washed away entire settlements if the sumps went down. There were deviant groups like the ogres, or the variety of polygamous cults that were said to exist in the remote corners of the world below. Was that safer than braving the
elements?

  Had we hidden out of fear? Or was it shame? If we couldn’t see what was happening — if we literally buried our faces so that the fruits of our busy labours fell and rotted above us but were at least out of sight — that surely constituted a kind of safety. Didn’t it?

  We thought we’d saved the world because we marched willingly into our graves, alive but mortified by what we had wrought. The noble sacrifice of the narcissist. Perhaps all we had saved was our delusion that we were entirely in control for our own demise.

  My movement disturbed Doggo enough to wake him. He yawned dramatically, stood up, and trotted over to one of the pillars of the parking structure we’d sheltered in. After a thorough sniff of the perimeter (though what he could possibly be smelling apart from his own scent was a question unanswered), he lifted his leg as high as he could and pissed for some time. He trotted back, smacking his lips.

  “What’s for breakfast, Food Bringer?”

  I shrugged and stopped myself from once again scratching at the branding mark on my cheek — again! Then I hauled myself to my feet and pulled on my backpack. Doggo took the opportunity presented by a lull in the conversation to shake himself from nose to tail.

  “Let’s go see what we can find.”

  WITH THE BRAND ON MY FACE, I would never be let back into an Underground settlement. It identified me as a murderer and that I wasn’t to be trusted to keep the safety of others above my own. They burned the mark onto my face so that it was difficult to hide or to cut away.

  I was branded because a man was kind to me and that kindness had cost him his life.

  Whether it was my intention to kill him was irrelevant. The mere fact that I hadn’t taken myself into a corner somewhere to die, as any conscientious citizen would, was fault enough. Either stayed in the lift-shaft charnel house or surrendered to a carbon reclaimer for assisted suicide and transubstantiation into stove fuel. Never mind that I would have left the Underground immediately, if only the powers that be had not decided to get rid of the exit I knew.

  It seemed to be late summer, but it was hard to tell. Leaves on trees were sparse, though there were also quite a few on the ground. Even the trees they’d imported from warmer places, the ones that were supposed to be heat- and drought-tolerant, looked ill-used by what passed for weather these days. What leaves they did have were yellow, thin, and withered.

  The heat of the day was surprisingly tolerable. We even passed standing water as we headed north, up the former 400 highway. Must’ve rained recently, I supposed. I warned Doggo not to drink from puddles and ponds like those. As tempting as thirst made them look, we went out of our way to find a small creek of running water. My backpack had a fold-away plastic water skin that I proceeded to crumble a purification tablet into then fill with creek water. The water skin went back in the pack while the tablet worked its magic; the pack, I noticed, was quite a bit emptier than I remembered it being.

  At Asa’s, I’d helped out enough to earn a few spare tokens, which were spent replenishing our meagre stock of supplies. The tribunal who’d found me guilty of murder hadn’t seen fit to kit me out with provisions when they banished me. One of them might’ve taken the liberty of lightening my load for me. Might as well have killed me themselves, the cowards.

  The roads were empty, as they’d been on our initial journey to the Underground, but the intervening thirty-five years had not been kind. Grasses shot up through broad cracks so that, to someone unfamiliar with the history of the area, the road would be invisible. Just a different patch of ground here and there, black as though permanently scorched. Branded, like I was.

  Buildings were scattered along the roadside for miles and miles and miles beyond the former borders of the big city. Apart from being derelict, the houses in builders’ subdivisions appeared sound enough. By contrast, few of the former box stores looked especially sturdy. Frames of steel listed to one side or another, hung with tattered remnants of foam. Signs that had identified these places had fallen. The silhouettes of their logos and lettering had been faded by sun and wind and rain. It made deciphering them nearly impossible, like those 3D optical illusions my mother showed me as a kid.

  “Relax your eyes. Stare through the picture,” she’d instructed.

  Eventually, something would appear but not an identifiable image. More like a cut-out, a shape of the pattern that leapt out of (or into) the page.

  One shadow sign looked like an inverted triangle with points or spikes sticking out of its top. Recognition was slow but came eventually.

  “Hey, I remember this one,” I said aloud.

  Doggo didn’t answer. He was off in the high grass, finally wise to the existence of other creatures and their butts, desperate to make a kind of canine contact. There was no one else around to hear me. I suppose I’d just felt like talking. Perhaps that night would be time for another story.

  The stories had been still since Asa died. Perhaps it was pure coincidence, but the fever had taken a lot out of me when I hadn’t had that much to give, and on top of that I’d killed a man. I’d half expected to be haunted by him: to wake by a dying fire in the night and see him looming over me, his good eye glaring down in accusation. The only images that came to me when I recalled Asa were of his hand, his sure movements, his unflappable demeanour. I wondered if anybody had tried to help him, or if he’d tried to make it away from the settlement to die in an empty corner. From the little I knew of him, he wouldn’t have wanted fuss.

  The situation reminded me of an old billy goat we had kept in our yard for a time, back in Trout Creek. We might’ve always had him, or maybe we’d taken him on from a neighbour who’d passed. Anyway, he was a grizzled thing, mostly blind and totally skinny. It was the kind of thinness I’d seen in other old animals, where their skin starts hanging off their bones and every movement looks painful.

  One morning, I went looking for the old bugger. I’d fed all the animals, apart from the chickens — those were Mum’s cross to bear. I couldn’t find him. His tether, still staked to the ground, was chewed through, but there wasn’t any blood about. Probably not snatched by coyotes then. I moseyed through the yard, shaking the feed in the bucket and calling his name.

  “Abraham!”

  Must’ve been a neighbour’s original. Our family’s naming conventions strayed from the biblical.

  “C’mon, Abe! Breakfast!”

  I was about to give him up for lost when I caught sight of the frayed end of his tether peeking out from under the back porch. This was a small deck, no more than a foot or so in height, that bridged the gap between the back door and the ground. I followed the trail of the tether to a patch of earth that had been scraped out by a piece of rotten skirting.

  Crouching by the broken opening, I squinted into the darkness. There, balled up at an unnatural angle, was Abraham. Slivers of light slanted in from the gaps in the deck boards. He was all twisted so his head bent back across his body. One eye stared open, glaring at me. The other was a bloodied gap. Further examination revealed that he’d caught it on a screw on his way under the porch. His tongue lolled from his mouth. It was grey and dried out, looking more like a dirty rag than a body part. And somehow, as grotesque as the scene was, it made me laugh.

  When I brought Dad over to see, he failed to find anything funny about it. Instead, he hunkered down, reached one work-gloved hand into the hole and gave a mighty yank. With a few wet snaps, old Abraham was pulled free. Back into a world he’d tried so hard to escape, it killed him.

  That was Dad’s assessment, anyway.

  “Musta got spooked. Went tearing under here and broke his fool neck. See?” He held Abraham’s body dangling by one foot. Apart from the new damage inflicted by his rough-handled rebirth, it was easy to see the loose way his head related to the rest of him.

  “Poor thing,” I said, or something similar.

  Dad scoffed. “Only poor thing about it is that he was kept alive too long for the stew pot. Animals aren’t meant to go on and on for
the sake of human feelings. They’re born, they breed, they’re eaten. Law of nature.”

  His speech ended, Dad let go of Abraham’s foot. The sack of skin and bones slumped wetly to the ground.

  “Get the wheelbarrow and truck this over the hill by the Barrinows’ old place. Mind you’re back in time for lunch, and keep an eye for scavengers.”

  “Shouldn’t we bury him?”

  “Burying’s a people thing,” was his reply.

  With a grunt, he was gone back to his workshop.

  “NOW IS THE TIME for food, Food Bringer,” Doggo declared, parking himself in my path. I had to stop so short, I nearly fell on top of him.

  “Holy crap! You want me to crush you or something?”

  “The snack creatures that run through the grasses are too fast to catch. Use your powers to call them to my mouth.”

  I crouched down to scritch him behind the ears, but he snapped at me. He wasn’t trying to make contact, just warning. I jumped up, anyway, my feelings hurt.

  “What the fuck is your problem?”

  “I hunger. Now is the time for food,” he repeated.

  My hands went up in mock surrender. “Fair enough, but if you bite the hands that feed you, how are they supposed to bring food?”

  Doggo just stared at me. Either all his goofy friendliness had fled, or it had gotten buried under a thick layer of instincts. Perhaps they’d all tumbled out of whatever cranial storage closet they had been in, overwhelming the sweet simpleton I knew as Doggo.

  “Besides,” I continued, kneeling to dig through the pack, “if you’re so clever, why can’t you catch your own food? What kind of wild and wily predator can’t even snag a mouse?”

  “Mouse?” Doggo leapt to his feet, tail raised in alert, ears perked for sound. “Where’s the mouse? I’ll catch it!”

  There was precious little in the pack that wasn’t purification tablets, but nonetheless I took the time for a thorough rummaging.

  “I thought you just said mice were too fast for you.”