Faller

by Will McIntosh

  Or the photo. Orchid was bright and beautiful, and hadn’t been shy in suggesting they become more than friends. But, strange as it was, he pined for a woman he didn’t remember, who, as far as the evidence was concerned, was as mythical as living elephants and the ocean. He couldn’t love Orchid, because he still loved that woman.

  “Wait,” Orchid said, sounding exasperated, as they reached the door to the next room. He waited patiently while Orchid backtracked to the other end of the room, then retraced her steps, counting quietly. Evidently Orchid had broken one of her rules. She had to take an even number of steps crossing a room. Clue had no idea why she insisted on following so many arbitrary rules, but there was no harm in it.

  A shout up ahead sent Clue and Orchid racing through the doorway, down the narrow hall leading to the pantry.

  Fish was squatting in front of the locker’s open door. Butter was on her knees, sobbing.

  The locker was empty. Completely cleaned out.

  “It was Steel’s tribe. I’ll bet anything,” Fish said. He was standing in the empty locker, arms folded.

  “Then we’re not getting it back,” Poppy said. “There are at least two hundred of them.”

  The weight of what had happened began to penetrate Clue’s shock. It was a death sentence. Scavengers had picked over just about every nook and cranny in the world; there were no big undiscovered caches left in the wild, and they couldn’t get by on rats, cats, pigeons, and bugs alone.

  “We can steal it back, at night, just like they did to us…” Fish said.

  “They’d know it was us, and they’d kill us,” Orchid said, her voice a monotone, drained of hope.

  “Where’s the padlock?” Poppy asked, looking around.

  “What do you mean?” Rex asked. “They broke it off somehow.”

  Holding the torch close, Poppy examined the brackets the padlock had been threaded through on the door and wall. “But where is it? Why would they carry off a broken padlock?” He looked up. “Who was last to go in here?”

  “I pulled out the day’s rations this afternoon,” Clue said. “But I locked it afterward, if that’s what you’re—” Clue hesitated. He remembered pulling out the cans and pushing the door most of the way closed with his foot until he could set the cans down on the table and return …

  Clue squeezed his eyes closed. “Oh, no. Oh, no.”

  Poppy reached over to the shelf, held up the open padlock.

  He’d noticed that picture, and got to wondering. He’d never gone back to lock the door.

  Clue looked at Daisy, standing with her forehead pressed against the doorway, and clenched his eyes shut again. “Oh, God. I’ve killed us all.”

  No one disagreed.

  This couldn’t happen; he couldn’t watch Daisy starve knowing it was his fault. And Orchid, and the rest of his tribe.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  He had to figure out a way to get their food back. But how could he? How could anyone?

  6

  CLUE LIMPED up the dark stairwell, feeling his way along. His ankle was throbbing. His sneaker felt too tight, which meant the ankle was swelling. He didn’t want to stop and see how bad it was. It didn’t matter how bad it was; he had to keep at it until he got it right.

  The toy paratrooper’s chute opened every time without fail if he folded it the right way, while his hadn’t inflated once. It might have to do with his weight versus the toy, but he didn’t think so; he suspected he wasn’t traveling fast enough when he opened the chute. It made sense—he could get the chute to open by dragging it along the ground, but only if he ran very fast, or there was a strong breeze. The air was what pulled the chute open.

  Pushing open the heavy door, he raised his hand to shield his eyes from the bright midday sun. The black tar roof was steaming hot, and sticky underfoot. His head down to avoid the sun, Clue went right to the edge.

  When he saw how much higher he was, he took a half-step back. He eyed the pile of mattresses in the lot, now five stories below instead of three. From ground level the pile looked huge, but from up here it seemed like a very small target surrounded by a lot of very hard ground. Daisy, who was standing beside the mattresses, waved up at him. Clue waved back, somewhat less enthusiastically.

  This had to work, or he was going to get badly hurt, even if he hit the mattresses.

  Three figures appeared around the corner of the building next door and strolled into the lot. Their bodies looked strange—flattened and foreshortened by Clue’s bird’s-eye view.

  He was wasting time. He tilted his head left and right, loosening the tense muscles in his neck, shook both hands at the wrist, then stepped onto the low ledge, which was two bricks wide. One final time he studied the pile of mattresses, mentally rehearsed the procedure.

  Leap out, let yourself fall at least two stories to build up speed, then pull the rip cord. If the chute doesn’t open, curl up into a ball.

  Laughter drifted from below. The three figures were watching him.

  Let them watch. Let them laugh. Clue took a deep breath and leaped. For an instant he hung in the air, then he plummeted, the whistling of the air growing louder. He delayed as long as he could bear, then pulled the cord.

  He felt the chute jump out of the pack, heard it whoosh. The harness jerked, sending pain shooting across his ribs to his armpits. He looked up: the parachute was partially inflated, rotating slowly as the lines twisted around each other.

  He was looking up when he hit the mattresses; he hit awkwardly and spun off, slammed chest-first into the dirt with an oof.

  The parachute floated down over him as the onlookers roared with laughter.

  Clue jumped up, whooping with joy. He dug himself out from under the parachute, limped to Daisy, lifted her in the air. “Did you see that?”

  “I did, I did.” Daisy laughed. She was far too thin, her jutting cheeks nothing but bones lying under a thin sheaf of skin, her eyes sunken. He was going to fix that. It had taken a catastrophe for Clue to realize the point of the parachute, but now he understood.

  Clue set Daisy down, spun to face their visitors, whom he now recognized as Shoeless, Red, and Runner, part of the relatively harmless Subway tribe. “Get your cans ready, gentlemen; it won’t be long now.”

  “You’ve got to be joking,” Red said, pointing at the sky. “You might as well have filled that pack with bricks for all the good it did you.”

  Red’s companions laughed appreciatively.

  “Go ahead and laugh,” Clue said, unable to stop grinning. “As long as you spread the word. I will jump, but there has to be a crowd of at least two hundred, paying a can apiece.”

  “Oh, sure, you bet,” Red said, his tone making it clear he thought Clue was a self-deluded idiot. That only made Clue want it more. He would do this. He would save his people. The parachute still needed work, and he had to figure out how to keep the harness from digging into his armpits. All he had to go on there was the toy’s painted-on harness, but he’d figure it out.

  “Clue,” Runner said, laughing. “More like No Clue. Clueless. Haven’t a Clue.”

  “More like Faller,” Red said.

  Red’s friends burst out laughing as if it were the most hilarious thing they’d ever heard. Clue liked the name, though. He liked it better than Clue. Faller. It felt right; it suited him. From now on he would be Faller.

  7

  THE QUICKEST route to the Tower was straight through the heart of the city, but with so many people following it was easier to wind along the edge of the world, where there were fewer rusting cars blocking their path, less trash underfoot.

  Faller walked close to the edge, just shy of the point where tripping on a brick might send him tumbling into eternity. He had two reasons for walking so close. First, it unnerved the people following him. Second, the vastness of the sky soothed him, and Faller needed soothing. Doubt and anxiety were growing with each step.

  “Don’t do this,” Orchid said. “We’ll find another way.” She
carried on tracking her steps as she spoke, poking out thumb, forefinger, thumb, forefinger, so she knew if she was on an odd step or even.

  “People are going to remember this day, like they remember Day One,” Daisy said, taking twice as many steps to keep up with Faller and Orchid.

  Orchid threw back her head and laughed a bit more heartily than Faller thought necessary. “I don’t think Faller plunging to his death is in quite the same category as Day One.”

  “I think it is,” Daisy said, splitting off momentarily to move around a lamppost canted at an angle. “Everyone will talk about this for years.”

  “This will be remembered about as well as when old Crabby got pushed out a fifth-story window by a dog trying to get the beans Crabby was eating.”

  “Can we stay on topic? We’re talking about how people will sing songs about me.” Faller looked pointedly at Orchid. “And can you please stop referring to this as me plunging to my death?”

  Orchid grabbed his arms, yanked him to a stop. “I’m trying to paint an image for you, to bring you to your senses.” Her dark eyes, shaped like two slivers of moon, searched his. “Because I care about you. More than you know. Please, don’t do this.” She squeezed his arm.

  “I’ll be fine.” He tried to sound reassuring despite his own doubts. And if he wasn’t fine, at least he will have died making amends for the terrible mess he’d created. “Come on, everyone’s waiting.”

  They came to an inlet where a ledge of jagged asphalt dropped off, revealing blue sky and pink-white clouds below. Faller veered around it, eyeing the broken ends of huge pipes jutting out into space from the rock face, the gaping hole even farther down that was the abrupt end of one of the subway tunnels crisscrossing the world.

  With the Tower looming, they cut toward the heart of the city, away from the edge. Weeds plucked at Faller’s pants as they cut along a shattered sidewalk, past red-brick apartments atop plundered stores. They passed under the legs of a giant billboard that pictured beautiful people no one ever remembered seeing, not even in the early days before the die-off. The beautiful people on the billboard were smoking cigarettes.

  He wiped his sweaty palms on his jumpsuit.

  They cut down a narrow cobblestoned street, the red- and brown-bricked buildings hugging the street.

  “There he is,” someone called from above. Three young girls were on the roof of one of the tenements, probably a vantage point from which to watch his jump without having to pay. He raised his hand and waved to his fans. Fans was the only way Faller could think to describe them. It was one of those words that sat unused in that place in the back of his head, because it never applied to anything. And now, here, suddenly it did. Faller liked having fans; it put a swing in his step.

  “Watch,” Orchid said, pulling his hand.

  Faller looked down just in time to sidestep a jutting femur someone had tried to stuff down a sewer. There was a skull as well, wedged into the too-small sewer opening. Probably someone had found the bones in an apartment they wanted to live in.

  Still two blocks away, they reached the roadblocks the Steel tribe had erected all around the Tower, to ensure everyone paid. It stuck in Faller’s craw that the Steels would get ten percent of the gate and free admission, given that they were the bastards who’d stolen the food in the first place, but a tribe as small as Faller’s could never pull off this sort of event without an alliance. At least it ensured there wouldn’t be many gate-jumpers; few people thought saving one can of food was worth risking a trip off the edge.

  A block ahead, the crowd grew thicker and more boisterous. Faller picked up his pace.

  There were more people packed in the street along the edge side of the Tower than Faller had ever seen together in one place. Many had dressed for the occasion in whatever passed for their finest—skirts, suits, colorful bandanas, cowboy boots. Most of it was worn, soiled, and wrinkled almost beyond recognition. It was depressing, how the colors so vivid on Day One were draining out of the world, replaced by the browns of dirt and rust.

  A roar went up as Faller approached. He held up his hand, then noticed a strange mound in the weeds by the crumbling fountain. It took him a moment to recognize it as a pile of pillows and mattresses. He stopped short, pointed at the mound. A roar of laughter filled the air.

  “Just in case,” shouted Fish, who was standing close to the mound. It set off another round of laughter.

  “It’ll have to be a lot bigger than that if my chute doesn’t open,” Faller shouted. His stomach was in knots; he wasn’t in the mood for banter, but this jump was an excuse for people to gather and celebrate. That was at least part of the reason they were paying a can of food none of them could afford to pay.

  Many were probably hoping the parachute collapsed into a fat spinning tail and he plummeted one hundred seven stories (he’d counted) to his death. But he was going to disappoint them. He was going to fly, not five stories off the roof of an apartment building this time, but on and on like a bird over the tops of buildings, until he drifted softly back to earth amid a cheering crowd.

  Faller squatted beside Daisy so he would be eye level with her. “Why don’t you wait here, with Butter?” He pointed Butter out, sitting with Speedy on a blanket spread on the sidewalk. Daisy wrapped her arms around him; Faller hugged her in return, fighting back tears. If things went wrong, he hated that Daisy would be here to witness it.

  Giving him one last squeeze, Daisy said, “Please don’t screw up.” Having given him her vote of confidence, she joined Butter and Speedy on the blanket.

  Faller and Orchid continued to the Tower. Biter, the Steel gang leader, was waiting at the foot of the steps outside. He was a remarkably handsome man, tall and muscular, like one of the men on the billboards, only less clean, and wearing a dirty neon-orange T-shirt instead of a suit.

  “Word is, we’ve got close to three hundred cans,” Biter said, grinning.

  “That many? Terrific. Worth risking my life over. No doubt about it.”

  Biter nodded. “Good. Hang on to that thought as you’re climbing. We don’t want to issue refunds.”

  “I won’t be taking the stairs down. I guarantee you that.” Faller’s voice was shaking.

  While he and Orchid strode toward the Tower, Faller looked up. It was impossibly tall. He was afraid to think how he’d feel when he was at the top, looking down.

  He pushed open a squealing door and stepped into the dark lobby. They skirted broken glass sprayed from broken windows, and stopped at the stairwell.

  “There’s no point in you walking up all these steps with me.” He waved toward the doors. “Go on out and wait for the show. I’ll see you in a couple of hours.”

  Orchid looked so terribly sad. It broke Faller’s heart. “Is there anything I can say that will change your mind?”

  Even if he wanted to, there was no way to back down now. If he did, in all likelihood the Steels would drag him up the steps and toss him off.

  But even if the Steels weren’t involved, he would still jump. They needed food. Daisy needed food.

  “No.”

  Orchid’s eyes filled with tears. “If you’re really going to do this, I want to be there with you.” She held out her hand. “I’ll carry your gear. You’ll need all of your strength for the jump.”

  “No, no, that’s all right,” Faller said. “I’ve got it.”

  Orchid tugged the pack out of his hand. “Give me that. It’s a hundred flights; you’re going to be so exhausted you won’t know which way is down.”

  Faller let go of the pack. She was probably right, and in any case arguing with Orchid was futile.

  They headed up the first flight. Faller’s heart was thumping, his fingers tingling with anticipation. Orchid counted steps under her breath.

  8

  BY THE fiftieth floor he was entirely spent and ready to give up. To celebrate reaching the halfway point, they rested.

  Faller’s head was pounding in time with his heart, his calves quivering
.

  Orchid pulled his canteen from the pack, took a drink, then offered it to Faller. He accepted it, took a long drink.

  “Promise me you’ll take care of Daisy if anything happens to me.”

  “Mm.” Orchid didn’t look at him.

  He put a hand on her shoulder. “I need to know you’ll take care of Daisy.”

  Orchid stood, Faller’s pack still slung over her shoulders. “You know I’ll do my best. But it’s you she counts on.”

  “I know.” He took a swig of water; his throat stayed dry no matter how much he drank. “That’s why I have to do this.”

  * * *

  BY THE eightieth floor he was numb, staggering like a drunk. He waited for Orchid, who was walking a half-flight behind him, counting her steps aloud.

  “You should turn back. You have to climb down as many steps as you’ve climbed up. I’m afraid you’re going to take a tumble and hurt yourself, and there’ll be no one around to help you.”

  Orchid laughed dryly. “You’re afraid I’m going to hurt myself?”

  “Yes.” He wrapped one arm around Orchid. “I’ll wait for you in the street. If all goes well, I’ll get there before you.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want to be on the stairs, inside, when you jump.” She gestured toward the next flight, whispered something under her breath meant only for her. “Let’s go.”

  Sighing, Faller headed up the steps.

  * * *

  WHEN HE reached the top, he collapsed, gasping. He was nauseous. His legs were quivering and the edges of his vision were grey. Orchid dropped beside him.

  When the worst of the nausea had passed Faller lurched to his feet, spat a few times onto the concrete to clear the phlegm from his mouth, and went to the edge. Most of it was ringed by a wall of transparent plastic, but two sections had broken off, leaving nothing but a waist-high wall.

  He changed his mind about jumping as soon as he looked down.

  The street was far, far, far below. Just three blocks beyond was the edge. The endless blue sky was staggering from this vantage point.