But the first thing that hit them was the people.
Citizens crammed into the Columbus safe zone in a way they’d never lived before the Emergency, though whether that was because of the dangers the survivors went through outside, or how the chaotic reconstruction efforts unfolded, it wasn’t immediately clear. Once-placid Ohio streets were now tight-packed: the start of what residents called The Mile.
Stretching from the terminus of the Enclave, The Mile veered left onto the old Brewery District’s High Street, transformed into something like from a dusty old cyberpunk novel. Vacant blocks from before the rise of the Furies were now a confusion of improvised dwellings and encampments, and the remaining three-floor brick apartments now had extra structures crammed in around them. Caravans and camper buses without wheels further contributed to the chaos. On High Street, the typically wide Ohioan thoroughfare was choked into two narrow lanes filled with pedestrians milling either side of the central bazaar containing yet more stalls and shanty structures and even tiny dwellings built along its length, semi-permanent structures turned into something more long-term during the passage of the past year. Tarpaulins and outdoor sheeting and banks of plastic rollers arose where metal sheets and cladding gave out, contributing in their own way to the character of the street. Off the main thoroughfare, even more ad-hoc construction flowered like cancer among the old storefronts and the occasional lone bungalow, old fences gone, the street trees sometimes only visible as posts lashed by a dozen different ropes and plastic ties, or else otherwise covered in pinned-up notices.
Despite the disorienting crush for humanity around them, for all the visions Tom entertained about re-entering a city after so many years of devastation, the scale of the place was still far less grand than anything he’d imagined, even with the crowds surging along the sides of the slow-moving truck.
There was something medieval about the place, many of the people with dirty skin and hair and clothes despite the vaulted promise of hot showers, revealed as just another clever PR stunt to calm the new arrivals. The dilapidated housing everywhere didn’t help. More than a few of the half-buried brick buildings sported armed guards. At some points, public address speakers were strung between the light poles, while dozens of cords and electrical cables crisscrossed the street every way he looked, including overhead.
There were no animals, but children ran through the crowds, some dangerously close to the truck as it passed. And the sound of it all – the regurgitation of five thousand conversations and outdoor announcements and canned music and laughter – added a frenetic air to things, enough for Tom to reach for his temple as if thinking to cover his ears. Lilianna leaned out over the rail of their open-top tour, drinking it all in, delighting at each new revelation, Lucas considerably more timid by her side. Open-air food vendors hawked roast meat, chestnuts, turnips and sweet potatoes, women selling rough loaves and piecemeal cakes from burlap sacks, trading with passers-by in amongst stalls selling random commodities like butter and milk and canned meat and kitchen appliances and melons and transistor radios and cleverly-hacked CD players, batteries, salvaged children’s toys, time pieces, a barn full of furniture traders, a barricaded ethanol fuel station with a checkpoint off a side street. People haggled over jackets and boots, old women knitting on chairs and selling socks, and any number of children begging for alms. The Vanicek kids even glimpsed a pair of phone booths attended by a queue of at least twenty Citizens waiting for their turn. Who they were calling, no one could tell them.
Lucas sat wedged between his father and the yellow-eyed old man with the hospital tag. Tom’s son peered at their fellow passenger, torn between the still-unfolding spectacle and conscious of the old man not joining in.
“What happened to your dog, mister?”
“They said no dogs,” the man said. “I had to leave him.”
“You left him behind?”
“Why didn’t they tell me before the train?”
The man sniffled and wiped his nose on his sleeve and broke into a hacking, psychosomatic cough. Tom thought at once about the old man’s medical check and caught a look of humorless amusement from Swarovsky sitting with Lilianna across from him. The old man gathered himself and waved his work slip at Vanicek.
“What did they give you?”
“Foraging, they said,” Tom answered him slowly. “What about you?”
“I was a steelworker in my day,” the old man said, knowing it seemed unbelievable. “They put me on wall detail. Building Services, they said?”
“Seems they’ve got a department for everything,” Tom replied.
“We’re always expanding and repairing the barricades,” Swarovsky said reassuringly. “It’s valuable work.”
She looked at Tom.
“Foraging too,” she said. “It’s a good start.”
“We’ll see,” he said. “How much of the City’s under your control?”
“Mine personally?”
“I think you know what I mean,” Tom said.
“The truck stops near the First Gates, at the other end of The Mile,” she said. “That’s where they first re-entered. We hold the Brewery and most of German Town now. We’re adding housing all the time. We need to. The City’s growing faster than expected.”
“So where’s this building of yours?”
“You’ll see soon enough.”
*
THE MILE ENDED at the biggest set of closed gates yet, the shanty town flowering into a few final booths, a cluster of street vendors selling little more than scrounged treats, black market novelties like old proteins bars and candy; and near them a pair of roughly-welded steel observation platforms towered over the open space. A crackling voice rang out, amplified over the City’s tumult, and it was only then Tom noticed a fracas on the far side of the square, a young man trying to get away chased by two sentries straight into the path of another squad. There was a single gunshot and the people in the area hurried backwards and away, but the crowd soon closed back in on the youth as the guards bludgeoned him to the ground. A moment later and it was like nothing had gone on at all.
Tom was last off the truck, joining his family and Dr Swarovsky as the white-tagged trio and a couple of Reds bled away into the passing crowds. Lucas pressed into his father’s side, the Citizens barely making way for their packs or the idling truck, and Tom grabbed Lilianna’s wrist as if she were nine again, reminded of their last trip to Thailand when she was still little, but his teenager twisted herself free, despite staying in Tom and Swarovsky’s shadow all the same.
There was a blast of music nearby, almost as startling as the gunfire, and the newcomers arose from their instinctual crouch as a trader shouted apologies, teeth missing in the smile beneath his wool cap as he repaired electronic appliances from his command of a tall stool; and Tom’s emergency reconnoiter took in ever more details in his search for threats: a group of young men nearby demanding attention with boisterous offers of rickshaw taxi rides, a few more stopping passing customers, and more than a few of them focused solely on the female clientele who brushed them off easily enough, more afraid of losing their spots in a queue at another pair of payphones beside an old one-legged guy on a crate busking with an antique lyre.
“You have phones?” Tom said to Swarovsky.
“Landlines only,” she answered. “Everyone has to share. Funny, the phone companies were just getting rid of them all around when the Furies hit.”
There was a moment’s hesitation, each regarding the other. Tom mulled the Furies, wondering what sense anyone had made of it all yet, and admitting a thirst for solid information like the investigative reporter he’d once been. As for the doctor’s thoughts, they were as unreadable as he’d found with almost any woman – an area where his powers regularly failed him.
“I wish mom could’ve seen this,” Lila said in a broken voice.
“Yeah,” Tom agreed and brushed her cheek with the back of his scarred hand. “I wish your mother and Richard and Jessie and Dai
sy and everyone else we lost could be here too, honey.”
But there was something hurt in Lilianna’s look. Tom knew well enough what it was – his long-standing refusal to put his ex-wife’s death above those of their other trusted friends, as the children would have him do. And as always, his regret followed pretty quickly after, not that it’d stop him repeating the same fool move next time the subject arose. There was too much pain there. For all of them. He stepped closer, acknowledging his daughter’s sorrow, and for a moment expected her to rebuke him instead. Lila wordlessly pushed her fist slow-motion into his upper arm and hung her head, leaning into him for comfort anyway.
“Are you ready to go?” Swarovsky asked.
“Is it far?” Lucas asked.
“A tough guy like you, I thought you’d be used to walking?”
Lucas wilted under the doctor’s playfulness, nothing much akin to actual playfulness in her face or her voice. Tom jostled his son, encouraging him with the world’s most forced grin he pushed even further for cheesy effect. Lucas’ glum face broke, lightened.
“I don’t think they have the bus running, son,” Tom said. “Sorry.”
“No buses, but there’s talk of getting the street cars running,” Swarovsky said.
She led the small group away trailed by more of the children’s questions.
*
ARMED GUARDS PATROLLED the metal walkway above the First Gates and a pair of Bearcats rested to one side in an oasis of faded road surface just beyond the ebbing crowds. A man in black combat gear with an equally dark ponytail moved among the half-dozen men and women like he was in charge. His gaze flicked their way and passed on. Other Citizens crisscrossed their path as the doctor led Tom, Lila and Lucas across the plaza-cum-public meeting place. A teenage girl wearing a ski cap clutched an armload of skinny newspapers, distributing them free, and Lila snagged one as the crowd thickened into a knot around an impromptu Speaker’s Corner. The Vaniceks could barely glimpse the lightly-bearded man haranguing passers-by about something to do with the “Council of Five” and its many departments.
Tom was still craning his neck when he nearly collided with a man twenty years his junior, something feverish and intense on the other’s face.
“Watch yourselves, blue-tag,” the man grinned. “Three Furies just last night and you not even with a knife and fork.”
The young man was still in motion, impossible to understand his intent through the cloud of homebrewed spirits on his breath. Tom almost physically waved him off, trying to make light of the encounter for his children’s sake, but he almost immediately cut the act short noting the doctor’s lucid gaze.
“How are we meant to protect ourselves if someone wakes up dead?” he asked her.
“Everyone knows how to get clear of the Dead,” she said. “The guards will come.”
“If they can,” Tom said.
“That’s why we ask everyone to lock their doors, Mr Vanicek.”
They were stopped on the eastern edge of the bazaar, Tom’s children milling near him like waiting for ice-cream money. Swarovsky gestured until Tom kenned her meaning and pulled out his new ration booklet.
On the first page was a list of rules:
IN THE INTEREST OF PUBLIC SAFETY, WE ASK ALL CITIZENS TO OBSERVE THE FOLLOWING RULES
Lock your bedroom door at night.
Curfew is 10pm sharp. No travel after Curfew without a permit.
No weapons without a permit.
Report all incidents and thefts to Public Safety.
Unjust bloodshed means exile. Murderers will be hung.
No looting. Thieves will be hung.
We work to eat. Play fair.
Ration fraud will result in disqualification. Repeat offenses exile.
No one is forcing you to be here. Contribute.
Smile. We are rebuilding the world and you are part of it.
*
THEY FOLLOWED THE doctor to the first of the old side streets, one which now ran beneath the shadow of an impressively uninterrupted boundary wall at least thirty-feet high. Whoever made the decisions around these parts judged the barrier sufficiently impregnable that there wasn’t a guard in sight, which only rekindled Tom’s doubts.
There were plenty of people on the street itself. A once-vacant lot on the corner of the plaza was now another compact marketplace called the Night Market – an assemblage of more than twenty stalls under the cover of their shared recycled fence-sheet roofing which gave it a third-world feel despite patchily-dressed Citizens eating and conversing like hipsters, but Tom and his children were distracted by the dozen-or-more competing aromas wafting from the quasi-permanent stalls, men with wheelbarrows delivering assorted produce to the back laneways as they continued past, following the doctor, but leaving their stomachs behind. Only tiredness seemed to quell the children’s complaints.
The street opened up more on the next block. Three youngsters were crouched poking sticks into one of the old drains beside a distraught-looking man squatting in sandals, tears running down the face he cradled with stained fingers. A series of gunshots rang out somewhere far away, a second or more between each. Unperturbed, a woman on an electric bicycle sounded her bell and shuttled past them along a row of chained-up motorcycles and mopeds on the corner before a storefront now running as an open-air workshop.
Night was coming on in full. A Hispanic kid lit a few lamps for the benefit of several thin, middle-aged men sitting at a round table on the footpath Swarovsky led them towards. The three-floor building had a smaller brick house beside it and then a gap in the street where someone had inserted a pair of caravans so tight their front doors were almost kissing. Tom made another quick appraisal of the settlement and whistled something between his teeth about the fire risk.
“Don’t worry, Mr Vanicek,” the doctor said. “We have a department for that too.”
The sitting men greeted the doctor despite their card game, but she only returned a polite nod and adjusted her heavy bag with no intention to stop.
“You live here?”
“It’s close to the Night Market, and transport,” she said.
“Everyone’s living pretty close together, huh?”
“Benefits of centralization.”
“More like danger,” he said. “How do we get a meal around here?”
He held up the ration booklet.
“You’re not carrying food?” Swarovsky asked.
“Nothing that smells as good as anything back there,” Lila said for all of them.
“The vendors are . . . it’s a complicated arrangement,” the doctor replied. “It’s mostly by trade for now. Barter.”
“It’s a shit-show,” a man said to them as he came out of the open bike shop.
The man was old enough to seem fatherly, which he put to good use inviting himself in for a quick hug the doctor grimaced through as the man then finished wiping his oil-stained hands on a rag.
“That’s why everyone’s pushing to reintroduce currency,” the mechanic said. “If you’ve got stuff to trade, you can work out a deal with the vendors. Trade your rations. Bulk stuff. Otherwise, gotta get the ol’ license book there checked off on with the bankers and run up a tab. Six kinds of hassle.”
Tom nodded politely despite only understanding half of what he meant.
“I’m Kit Conners,” the man said and offered his hand. “This is my shop.”
“Mr Vanicek’s moving into Monty Anderson’s.”
Tom and Conners shook. The older man gave a wry smile and nodded, unconsciously using greasy fingertips to work his graying moustache.
“What are you gonna do with the people living there now?” he asked.
“There’s people there now?”
Tom said it, but he was quickly echoed by Lila and her brother.
“Calm down, Mr Vanicek,” the doctor said.
“You’ve really got to start calling me Tom one of these days,” he answered. “You knew there were people here already?”
“They don’t have ratification from the Housing Committee.”
“Neither do I.”
“That’s easy enough,” Swarovsky said. “I’m on the Housing Committee.”
“You’re on the committee?” Tom said. “You have committees?”
“There’s any number of committees,” the doctor said. “We could find one for you too, Tom. Fire safety, perhaps?”
“You’re asking me to join a committee?”
Tom scratched his head, trying to keep the tone light, Conners watching with the air of a benevolent grocer and no idea the whole City had Vanicek and his children more freaked out than any of them let on.
“Our committees can always use more people with level heads.”
“You’ll have to excuse me,” Tom said. “I’m still getting my head around no longer living through the apocalypse. I’m not ready to join the PTA.”
He met Swarovsky’s eye. Conners decided his presence was no longer justified and patted Tom on the arm before signaling further farewells.
“Nice to see you home safe and sound, Eva,” he said.
The doctor gave a closed nod, still focused on Tom’s expression.
“Yes?”
“There’s people in the apartment?” he asked her. “We don’t have anywhere else to live.”
“You were the one dissatisfied with the arranged housing, Mr –”
“Hey, your buddy Kit there called you Eva,” he cut in. “Least you can do is call me Tom.”
“We’re still getting to know each other, Mr Vanicek.”
Swarovsky faked an unconvincing smile for the children’s sake.
“Let’s go up and see what can be done.”
*
After the Apocalypse Book 1 Resurrection: a zombie apocalypse political action thriller Page 6