“What if they won’t let me leave?”
Tom made a noise. He told the sentries they were just there for the tour and a black guy wearing sunglasses shot him an amused look. Luke held Tom’s hand as they passed through and just as quickly released it, the boys ahead of him and their eyes like snakes on the move.
“Just checking it out,” Tom said to the guy in the padding.
“No play, no pay, mister,” the jaded bald dude replied.
It was dark inside the main foyer, voices ringing out over each other despite acres of scuffed carpet. The dead service industry was retrofit well, the old motel counters given over to a handful of men and women, more than a few padded up like they were on their way to play roller derby. If any were actually wearing helmets, Tom had the thought that he’d turn his son around and wheel immediately for the door.
“Is that what he said, dad?” Lucas asked. “They’re paying to send me here?”
“I think the idea’s you pay your own way by attending classes.”
“Classes in what?”
“That’s a very good question.”
With Lilianna’s chaotic report still fresh in mind, Tom approached one of the unattended counters with Lucas decidedly not holding his hand. A boy aged about nine started shouting angrily across the far side of the room, coddled by a couple of rough, but well-meaning adults, and the reality of the situation seemed undeniably grim.
“Hi,” Tom asked at the counter. “Could you tell me what we’re meant to do here?”
The man could’ve been the twin of the guy in the softball armor. He wore bracers on his forearms, though he had a jacket over the top to lessen the effect. He also sported a black eye – a real shiner – and he tutted through the nuisance of having other human beings notice it.
“New arrival?”
“Yeah.”
“School’s not mandatory,” the guy said. “Frankly, not sure how much longer we can keep this going. A lot of carers need somewhere for the youngsters so they can earn. Doubt you’re any different, huh?”
“This is feeling a hell of a lot like the shit we had to put up with before,” Tom said.
“You got a better idea, buddy?”
The man made like he was wearing an apron he might untie and throw at the newcomer.
“You’re welcome to jump in and help out.”
“I’m already on the Foragers,” Tom said.
“Damn,” the other man replied. “I heard Foragers get two stamps per day. Danger money.”
“This place doesn’t look secure to me,” Tom said. “Dangerous. You’re all wearing armor, for fuck’s sake. What do you teach them here?”
“It’s pretty . . . free-form at the moment,” the man admitted and scratched his shaved head in acknowledgment. “We have guys teaching leatherwork, watch repair, electronics –”
“Electronics?”
“There’s no mains power, but anything with batteries is worth a trade.”
“Sounds like a prison workshop.”
“The Council’s working on a curriculum, teaching some of the old things: history, civics, math, you know,” the man said. “We have some basic classes already. Some of these kids, they can’t even read.”
The man – teacher, whatever he was – uttered his last words with a sigh that left him deflated, and Tom kenned the existential horror to think how far back into barbarism nearly five years of apocalypse had pitched the next generation.
Lucas pulled him away looking fearful.
“I don’t want to stay here.”
“That’s fine for today,” Tom said. “But what about tomorrow?”
“I’ll stay with Lila.”
“She’ll be working too.”
“I can stay in the apartment.”
Tom scoffed.
“There’s no way that’s safe.”
“Dr Swarovsky –?”
“You’re kidding me, right?” Tom said. “We barely know her.”
“I thought you thought she was nice,” Luke said. “Lila said you want to bone her.”
“Don’t talk about sex that way.”
He tried grabbing Lucas by the hand to exit the building and was left grasping stupidly for empty air, his son following along in a huddle, the boys on the path still hanging out.
Lucas started up again once they were back on The Mile, the boy now holding to the good sleeve of Tom’s jacket as they forged through the slow-moving queues of gawkers and fellow travelers along the promenade. Tom led them plunging through a gap into a side street, the bullets in his pocket weighing on his mind.
“You can earn a day’s rations just doing whatever stupid shit they ask you to, for tomorrow at least,” Tom said to the boy. “If what that other guy said’s true, Foragers earn better than some of the other jobs. We have to get on our feet before we can afford ourselves too many other luxuries.”
He looked at Lucas.
“That includes time off school.”
“So I have to go?”
“I’m asking you to,” Tom said. “Not gonna force it. You know that. It’s a chance to earn supplies and find out if it really is that awful. Obviously, if you don’t feel safe, you get the fuck out of there.”
He relaxed his cursing around the boy without Lila present, hoping the severity of the language might underscore the gravity of the straits they were in – or might quickly find themselves in without a few days of rations under their belts. And the sheer moral compromise of it all didn’t sit well with him, turning Tom’s face into an unpleasant scowl making other Citizens veer away as they turned back onto their path.
*
LUCAS WENT TO classes the next day and Lilianna returned to the Orphanage, not that it was one, exactly. Maybe out of pride, she didn’t want to call it childcare – the demeaning term she’d come to use for watching out for Lucas while Tom was about more urgent business trying to vouchsafe their survival.
Escorting his children to school and work felt so normal it felt just as deeply wrong, and the previous night’s attack notwithstanding, he only left the beleaguered-looking School with deep misgivings, hesitating on the path outside it three or four times until remembering his son’s eventual quiet willingness to submit to the task before him.
Lilianna surprised Tom too. There was something wistful and not quite admitted in her demeanor, as if his sixteen-year-old didn’t herself recognize the apparent willingness with which she returned to the awful chores in that madhouse of the day before. Tom wondered if it was the lure of other people, maybe even other young men, that drew his daughter, very much like a moth to the flame. But the previous tragedy and Laurance’s gruesome death in their own home seemed to hang even more heavily on his daughter than the rest of them. A new fearfulness coiled within Lucas also more palpable than before, heaping further concerns on Tom’s misgivings.
Perhaps Lilianna knew she was making a difference – or she saw she could do something to help. All Tom knew was how poorly the cloak of normalcy fit over this disorienting new life of theirs, his solo transit back through the Night Market, asking directions three times before orienting himself on the Forager’s Depot, giving him his first chance without his children to really drink in the surrealness of his choice to thrust them back into the press of urban life, however grotesquely it was transformed. The City was nothing like the world as it’d been, and Luke, more so than his sister, didn’t have those many memories of the past to compare.
But their father remembered.
Navigating his way through the crush of people headed in and out of The Mile, as much then as at any moment before, Tom deeply questioned why he shouldn’t gather what he could today and get out of there for good the following morning.
Population density in the reclaimed Brewery District at least meant Luke and Lila were close to each other if either needed help when Tom was doing whatever he was doing. Making a living, he dumbly thought. What at first seemed claustrophobic about the City rapidly made sense, the close working and
living conditions crucial to help this strange new life function for the quickly-increasing ranks of Citizens drawn to their chance for salvation.
MacLaren’s mission to the Big Falcon was aimed at building another rations Depot closer to the City’s eastward expansion. These days, and with most of the City without power, a distance of only a couple of miles was a costly burden in time and effort. And as Tom bumped shoulders with surly-looking Citizens squeezing to overtake him, if the growing City didn’t forge its first new boroughs soon, the cramped conditions would only trigger problems of their own.
Tom mustered with another eighty-odd workers in the forecourt of another mall reclaimed from one of the City’s old industrial buildings and now reclaimed again as Foragers HQ. He and his new comrades clustered in motley groups beside a row of parked trucks and a half-dozen orange-painted APCs. The plastic-sheltered rows of gear framed their morning assembly: a veritable tent city covering stacks of everything from copper pipe to cartons and cartons of toilet paper still shrink-wrapped on pallets. Tom joined the rear of one cluster of men and a few women as two Army trucks pulled in further along the compound and about twenty body-armored troopers jumped out.
Everyone looked like they were waiting for a speech. Instead, ten experienced-looking men and women emerged from the main building headed at once to different vehicles. The workers around Tom surged to their rides with a familiarity he didn’t possess, and after a moment’s indecision, Tom jogged after one of the last of the apparent unit leaders headed towards the orange personnel carriers.
“Excuse me,” Tom said. “My first day.”
The man was short, but burly, male-pattern baldness erased with a close shave. He wore Kevlar over a t-shirt exposing hairy, graying arms. Like everyone else it seemed, he wore a chunky leather-strapped wristwatch.
“I’m Turner,” he said. “They should’ve given you a slip?”
Tom offered the crumpled piece of paper still folded up from his pocket. Turner stopped halfway to the lead APC and held the paper away from him so he could read it without glasses. He then squinted at Tom and crushed the slip in the palm of his hand.
“I’m Tom Vanicek,” Tom said and offered his hand. They shook.
“You’re not drooling or pissing in your pants,” Turner said. “You can join my team. Hop in.”
The older man marched to an APC and yanked a door open as two troopers in mostly black protective gear arrived toting AR15s. The shorter of the two men had a shotgun across his back. Both wore handguns at their hips. Three other men trailed them while Tom took in all the crews streaming to the other APCs and trucks. A walkie-talkie chirped into life in Turner’s hand as he checked in with Tiger One, their companion vehicle for the day.
“Where are we headed, boss?”
The speaker was the tallest of the newcomers. Tom could tell at once Claypool would’ve been grossly overweight back in the day and used to throwing it around. Survival had torn the pounds from his frame. Although his clothes were mostly new, they hung from him as if a reminder of the man he’d once been. A porcine cast remained to his small-eyed face, the kind easily fit on a bully. Ruddy-cheeked, he acknowledged Tom with a weird arrogance borne of time on the team.
“Claypool,” Turner said.
He nodded to the sentries and the other two men, a wispy Latino called Graves and young Eurasian guy wearing a black string vest to show off his lithe, but hard-cut frame.
“Graves, Lee, this is Vanicek,” Turner said. “He’s joining the team.”
The men nodded to each other. The bigger of the two troopers thrust out his hand.
“I’m Hugh, son of Anders,” the man said.
“Vanicek.”
“This is Fitz,” Hugh said and motioned to his graying offsider. “He doesn’t talk much.”
Tom nodded as Turner looked back to Claypool with familiarity.
“Sector 53 today,” he said. “We’re finally checking in on that airliner.”
“Hot dog!” Claypool grinned.
The radio squawked. Turner listened to a woman’s voice, like a businessman on his cell, and motioned for the others to mount up.
*
THEY CLAMBERED INTO the back of the personnel carrier, Tom quickly finding one of the small hatches to give them some light, not really conscious before of what he’d signed onto. The claustrophobic troop carrier forced fresh adrenalin through him and he loosened the collar he’d foolishly done up on his faded work shirt.
The other men climbed in after Tom and the door hung open a moment before a tough-looking woman and an older white man with graying dreadlocks followed. The gray-haired man shut the door and turned the winch.
“Hsu’s already moving,” he said.
Tom nodded to him.
“I’m new –”
“No shit,” Claypool said and laughed, shoving it in everyone’s faces even if he didn’t seem that off-put no one else joined in.
“My name’s . . . Vanicek,” Tom said after Claypool’s interruption.
The other guy ignored Claypool and shook Tom’s hand.
“Chicago Jones,” he said and motioned with a thumb to his companion. “Miranda.”
Tom shook Miranda’s hand and looked back at Claypool, tightness in his throat as he regretted not hitching in the open-air truck.
“What’s the airliner and how long’s it gonna take to get there?”
“You don’t like our ride?” Claypool replied and laughed. “I guess you could walk.”
“I’ve had some bad experiences in confined spaces,” Tom replied and met Claypool’s eye. “Makes me kinda stabby.”
Claypool snorted like it was a good joke.
“A 747 came down in the Emergency,” he said. “Folks been speculatin’ about it for a while, but we been workin’ a grid. Could be a good payday.”
Tom nodded and let his eyes make a slow reconnoiter of the wagon. None of the other Foragers had firearms. He brought his eyes up to note Claypool smugly grinning at the blue tag around Tom’s wrist.
Tom met his gaze again. There was something sullen and goading behind the other man’s eyes somehow underscored by his past unrelished weight loss. It left something wrong with his face, slack like old plastic over his hard-angled skull.
“You still on probation,” Claypool said.
“We’ll see about that.”
It was an empty remark, but Tom didn’t want to voice any real fears, sick with facing yet more fresh unknowns and with no guarantee he’d live to see the end of the day.
*
THE WINDOW HATCHES gave flickering insight onto the ruins of the outer city. East and then north of the Brewery District, the residential streets of Columbus remained clogged with cars rusting in their nearly five-year sleep. At times it felt like driving through a museum, a dormant necropolis honoring the last days, with the city bearing so many scars from that time it was hard to think many people had been through these parts since Columbus fell.
Of course, however the Emergency played out in these parts, once the extent of the threat was fully realized, people and their lemming-like instinct to flee built-up areas had taken hold. The gridlock of cars proved that, plenty of skeletons on the asphalt streets with untended trees and lawns and gardens escaping freely, gone wild themselves. Wolves trotted between the cadavers of old wrecks never subject to collision, entropy manifest like a virus among the once familiar world. Doors on homes were crossed out by previous Foraging efforts, but the buildings themselves were mostly stout wherever fires or other mysterious predations left them standing. There were a few signs of more recent incidents, including an upturned orange-painted minivan with its back half burnt away, plus the banners the Council erected on the bigger roadways for those making the journey to Columbus on foot.
Past Foragers had carried out their systematic efforts, but the inner suburbs of Columbus were long-since picked clean even before the Council set their sights on reconstruction. Survivors during the past few years – or maybe those who eke
d out a life in the ruins soon after the apocalypse – consumed or destroyed most things of value not nailed down. But the needs of day-to-day survival from years past weren’t the same needs as the City.
Chicago Jones told Tom the Council decreed to leave the homes intact – an optimistic vision of the time when the whole area might be re-inhabited.
The wisdom in that decision soon became clear as Vanicek’s crew headed through an intersection and past some well-looted stores, and then where the housing should resume, instead the APC growled its way through a blackened forest of homes destroyed in some major blaze in the early days of the catastrophe. The city’s lush trees were mostly regrown, recovered from their injuries like the housing never would, the skeletons of dozens of wooden homes casting a pall across the cityscape and turning it into a minotaur’s maze.
With the truck following behind, the orange APC then turned north.
*
COLUMBUS WAS LAID out with wide streets and lawns, nothing of the same urgency of bigger cities – and a testament to the power of the automobile as well as humanity’s inclination towards convenience. Looking back on the wreckage of it all, it was hard for Tom not to lament how, without an off switch, humanity’s survival instinct was ultimately its own downfall, the world’s advances drowning it in unhealthy excess. By comparison, the social claustrophobia of The Mile made far more sense, however much it irked Tom’s introversion.
Passing through more orange-tagged suburban streets, the two-vehicle convoy threaded its way ever north, turning through some gates off a grassed-over street to enter a curved feeder road leading to a medium-sized technology park. Industrial fences and huge vacant factories and silos crowded the background and the next few streets over, but the tail of the airliner drew the eye like nothing else could.
The passenger jet had come down on the corner of one of the bigger buildings, six stories of white-painted concrete and glass demolished on one side, the plane and the rubble it caused blocking the internal road between a stumpier office block and its associated internal garden, now overgrown and with seedlings peopling the nearby churned-open street. The airliner’s left wing was thrust through the second building’s upper floors and yet more white-painted brick littered the approach. The trucks pulled in as one and the silence as the APC engine cut seemed complete.
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