Strangers in the Night

by Flex, Raymond S

  “So you don’t trust me?”

  “Give it time, Mitts, you only got here yesterday. It’ll take time to build a reputation.”

  “You’re going up there—to the ‘Research Centre’—to check out my story, aren’t you?”

  The girl rose up from the armchair.

  Mitts rose to meet her.

  The girl barked out a command.

  Mitts didn’t even have time to interpret the words before the door swung open, and the muscled man appeared there, in the doorway.

  He held the handgun outstretched, pointed at Mitts’s chest.

  Mitts held himself still.

  Very slowly, he raised his hands over his head.

  The muscled man spoke to the blond girl without taking his eyes off Mitts. “You want me to escort him back to the holding area?”

  The girl stepped toward the muscled man, apparently nonplussed by this experience.

  “Nah,” she said, slipping past the muscled man. “Let him walk around a little. He won’t get far—he knows everyone has their eye on him.”

  And, just like that, the girl disappeared into the corridor outside the room, leaving Mitts alone with the muscled man.

  And the gun.

  * * *

  Following the showdown with the muscled man—the none-too-unexpected revelation that the blond girl didn’t trust him—Mitts decided to remain in his room.

  He slumped in the surprisingly comfortable armchair, resting his feet on the bed.

  He could feel his temples throbbing. His side throbbed too. He wondered what sort of treatment the blond girl had administered him.

  Was she even medically qualified?

  What if the wound went septic?

  Overly curious now, Mitts reached down and peeled back the bandage just a touch.

  He peered down into the open wound.

  A dark-red. Some purplish bruising about the edges.

  Creaking hinges interrupted his inspection.

  He glanced up.

  The black-haired girl peeped in around the edge of the door.

  She smiled at him pleasantly, glanced about the room, and then said, “Samantha’s not here?”

  “ ‘Samantha’?” Mitts repeated.

  Only when her name passed Mitts’s lips did he realise what it meant.

  The blond girl’s name.

  The black-haired girl, as if she’d just allowed something incredibly delicate—and exceptionally valuable—to slip through her grasp, brought her fingers up to her lips.

  She arched back her shoulders in surprise, a little like a scolded cat.

  Mitts smirked a touch. “You weren’t meant to say that, were you?”

  The black-haired girl, still wearing her frightened expression, still clutching her fingers to her lips, shook her head.

  As Mitts took her in, he realised that she had soft, hazel-brown eyes. She wore a single earring; a spiral of something silver hanging down from her left ear.

  Her right ear, he saw, had been torn.

  Its lobe was missing.

  “I think she’s already gone,” Mitts replied, finally answering her question.

  The black-haired girl nodded a couple of times, but made no move to slip away.

  “Do you want to come in?” Mitts asked.

  The black-haired girl looked back over her shoulder, out into the corridor behind her, and then she said, “I’ve got a better idea.”

  * * *

  Outside, in the daylight, Mitts couldn’t quite believe he had lived below ground for seven years.

  It was such a long time.

  If he lived to be seventy years old, he would’ve spent ten percent of his entire life down there.

  His first concerns about going outside had to do with the fact that none of them wore suits.

  When he asked the black-haired girl about this, she shot him a funny look.

  As if he was some sort of extra-terrestrial.

  She told him there was no danger.

  That there was no need for a hazard suit.

  That there was no radiation.

  Not anymore.

  Although Mitts wanted to know more, he was distracted by the mere act of walking outside.

  When they’d emerged out of the Station, and onto the road, Luca—which turned out to be the black-haired girl’s name—told him to take care not to trip over any of the loose ground.

  And, as Mitts had taken his first steps, he had seen why.

  What had once been a—quite probably—beautiful cobblestone street was now dug up all over.

  The cobblestones lay about in all different positions. The asphalt layer, beneath, exposed.

  All mixed up with earth and sand.

  Despite Luca’s warning, Mitts stumbled a good few times.

  One of the times, Luca had to reach out to stop him falling.

  They walked through the dilapidated streets. Past the plaster-walled cottages. The wildly overgrowing hanging baskets. Cracked windowpanes. A few of the cottages’ roofs had collapsed in on themselves. It made certain parts of the Village look like a bombsite.

  Mitts breathed in. The air was sweet.

  It was totally different to breathe in fresh air.

  So unlike the recycled air of the Restricted Area.

  Down there, everything had felt stilted.

  Not quite real.

  Not even the passing time had felt real.

  Mitts assumed he would have to fill Luca in—all over again—about what had happened to him. But, on the contrary, it seemed that she already knew everything.

  Word had, apparently, travelled fast.

  They trudged along the crumbled-up streets, winding their way upward through the Village. It was when they turned a corner, past a cottage which had a name plate declaring it ‘Lily Pond’, that Mitts, for the first time, caught sight of the periphery of the Village.

  Even if he had had it described to him, he wasn’t sure he would’ve believed it.

  From his time pacing through the quiet little village, and looking upon all the houses which were in desperate need of being fixed up, he had wondered how this little community had managed to get so little done in the time they’d dwelled here.

  Now he had his answer.

  An enormous wall.

  Five storeys high.

  Far taller than any of the cottages.

  The wall appeared to be made of various pieces of scrap metal, and wood. It was located about a hundred metres out of town. There was a large gate which consisted of a system of wheels and pulleys. It seemed to have been haphazardly patched up with various bits and bobs over time.

  A sort of rampart clung to the top of the wall; precarious-looking wooden planks, all hastily nailed together.

  Mitts guessed they’d salvaged materials for the wall from the cottages.

  That explained why the cottages were in such awful condition.

  Mitts looked back to Luca. “This is the way out?”

  “And the way in,” she said.

  “And this,” Mitts said, eyeing the top of the wall, “it goes all the way around the Village—protects the entire periphery?”

  “Yep,” Luca replied, and then, almost out of nowhere—or so it seemed to Mitts—she took hold of his hand. Gave it a squeeze.

  Mitts looked back into her hazel-brown eyes. He felt something stirring in the pit of his stomach.

  He wondered if he was a little nauseous.

  If he was reacting to whatever pills Samantha had given him.

  But, no, it was something else.

  Luca tugged on his hand, leading him somewhere else. She smiled. “Come on,” she said. “I’ve got something else to show you.”

  * * *

  They walked for what seemed an awfully long time.

  After a while, Luca released his hand.

  In the end, the purpose of the walk turned out to be to arrive at a cottage.

  One which was located at the very edge of the Village.

  The cottage h
ad a thatched roof, turned green with moss. It had scarlet-painted window and door frames. The garden had been kept in a better state than the majority of cottages about town.

  “My house,” she said, taking him by the hand again, and leading him on.

  The two of them headed up the garden path: a sequence of concrete slabs dropped down onto the lawn.

  Once inside the cottage, Luca brought Mitts into the kitchen. He watched her as she lit a few gas lamps about the place—it was getting a little dark now. She ignited one of the hobs at the gas stove, placing a metal canister of water over it. “Tea?” she asked.

  “No electricity?” Mitts replied.

  Luca coloured a little. “No, I’m afraid not—we did try for a few weeks, but, well, there were just too many of us to keep the generators ticking along.” She reached up for the cabinets above her, flipped open the doors and removed a pair of chipped, white porcelain mugs. “The only place that can really justify twenty-four-hour electricity is the Station.”

  “I suppose that was one of Samantha’s policies?”

  Luca blushed even more. “Yes, as a matter of fact it was.”

  It seemed to him that Samantha had succeeded in placing the Village in an iron grip.

  Later, as they sipped at their tea in silence, Mitts listened to the quiet of the Village.

  It was incredible.

  Nothing like what he remembered of the real world.

  No cars trundling back and forth. No people calling out to one another in the street. No aeroplanes soaring overhead.

  As he savoured the milky tea, Mitts couldn’t help asking Luca if it was fresh.

  She nodded in reply.

  “Yesterday,” Mitts went on, “when I arrived here, I thought I could smell chicken . . . some sort of soup?”

  Again, Luca nodded. She placed her cup down on the table, and then pointed off somewhere behind her. “We have farms a little way down the hill. That’s where we keep the livestock.”

  Mitts considered this, that he had been living with his family, down in the Restricted Area, and all this time they had been so close to live animals. And their produce.

  Mitts sucked down the rest of his tea.

  Finished, he stared at the final splash of brown-orange liquid lurking in the bottom.

  He glanced up at Luca.

  She was in tears.

  Surprised, and acting out of instinct, more than anything else, Mitts got up from his chair, went around the table. He crouched down at her side and laid his hand on her shoulder.

  As he did so, he felt a slight spark pass through his fingers.

  Something he couldn’t explain at all.

  But it was there.

  “What?” Mitts said. “What’s the matter?”

  Luca held herself still for several seconds, but then something within her seemed to let go.

  She drew in a rattling breath and then sobbed it out.

  She crossed her arms on the table, and then pushed her face into them.

  Mitts remained by her side, waiting for her to get over this traumatic response.

  Finally, Luca gathered herself together.

  She straightened up, looked Mitts in the eye. Her eyes sparkled with tears. “When I heard,” she began, “when I heard about your story, about what happened to you, about how your . . . your entire family, how they were . . . killed . . .”

  Here she broke off for a few seconds, to gather herself back together, to make her voice ring straight and true once again.

  She continued, “It reminded me about my own, about my family.”

  “Did the same thing happen to you?” Mitts replied.

  This whole experience felt so surreal.

  Mitts knew that he was still in shock over all that had happened; not just the murders of his family. He somehow knew that, over the coming weeks—the coming months and years—it would be a slow process for those wounds to heal.

  The scars would always remain.

  Luca sunk her teeth into her lower lip and nodded. “Yes, someone . . . someone killed my family.”

  Mitts reached out and took hold of Luca’s hand. She was trembling. He glanced about himself. To the kitchen. To the tiling. To the appliances. Everything had been kept so clean. “Do you live here alone?” Mitts asked.

  Luca nodded.

  “Doesn’t that make you feel lonely?”

  Again, she nodded.

  It was as if something possessed Mitts then.

  His eyes latched onto Luca’s.

  The gap between their lips closed.

  Just as Mitts felt their lips brush together, Luca spoke up.

  Her voice was only just above a whisper.

  “There’s something you need to know.”

  “Hmm?” Mitts replied, still stuck in a haze.

  “Samantha, she protects people. That’s what she does. She stayed up with you all night, didn’t she? Slept in that armchair beside your bed?”

  Mitts drew back from Luca.

  He looked into her eyes.

  She went on, “She does the same with everyone. Everyone who comes in under the same conditions that you did. That I did. The first few times that we brought people into the Village there were . . . there were . . .” here her lips trembled again “. . . suicides.”

  Mitts felt his blood run cold. “You mean, on the night . . .”

  “Yes,” Luca said, cutting him off, “on the night that they were saved, that they were brought here, to the Village, they decided to finish things, that they had already gone through too many changes, that they couldn’t manage another one.”

  Mitts held himself still.

  He thought about Samantha.

  How her snoozing away in that that armchair beside his bed had seemed an almost homey scene.

  But now he knew the grisly truth.

  Samantha had been worried about him.

  Worried that he wouldn’t be able to take any more.

  Mitts turned back to Luca. “You thought that I might . . .”

  “The first night is always the hardest, if it’s going to happen that’s when it usually does . . . that’s why it’s important not to leave anyone alone, to make sure they have company. And Samantha takes on that burden for herself.”

  Mitts really had no idea how to react to this information. What he was supposed to do with it. Perhaps he wanted to point out that shoving people into a cell as soon as they arrived to the Village wasn’t the best way of putting them into a positive state of mind.

  But, catching a whiff of Luca’s perfume, he decided to say nothing.

  He was certain he had smelled it before, but it was only now—now that he had left behind the sensory overload that had been his milky tea—that he could properly acknowledge it.

  Lilacs.

  Sweet and clear.

  Natural.

  As Mitts moved into Luca again, feeling his mouth moisten as he drew closer, she spoke to him, in a voice at a husky whisper. “I’d like to show you some drawings,” she said, “of things I’ve seen.”

  Right as their lips touched another time, Mitts felt vibrations passing through the floor of the cottage. At first the thunder was distant. And then it was close.

  Deafening.

  What sounded like a whole convoy of trucks.

  Full-sized trucks.

  Once again, Mitts drew back from Luca, looked at her with a panicked stare.

  What was this?

  What was going on here?

  But Luca had nothing to say.

  Knuckles pounded the front door.

  The door flew open.

  Someone screamed for them to get down.

  A gunshot spat through the air.

  Sam America pulled his overcoat hard about his body. The chill of the wind was almost unbearable. It cut him down to the bone. He had been wandering inland for what seemed like months.

  Despite the time, he could still taste the salt from the sea breeze.

  Could still feel where the sea spray had
stripped the moisture from his cheeks.

  Whenever he removed his overcoat, and looked down at the stars-and-stripes design emblazoned on his clothing, he couldn’t help but see the worn-out material.

  Feel a sense of pity.

  It would never be quite as brilliant as it once had been.

  The worst part of Sam America’s journey inland was that he had found nothing—nothing except for the ever-present mud underfoot, constantly slipping beneath the tread of his boots.

  It seemed almost as if the world was escaping this reality, and turning to another.

  It was days like these—thoughts like these—that made Sam America wonder if the world truly was lost. Was he fighting in a manner which had long ago ceased to be effective?

  The village had been unexpected. But, considering that the expected for Sam America was the grim rainy days—the slightly sour, acidic burn of raindrops running down his face—the unexpected was to be embraced.

  Sam America trod over scrap metal, wood, all these little pieces that had been salvaged, nailed together—welded together. This had been a last stand, of a sort. One last try for the humans who had dwelled here, in these, surely once delightful, tumble-down cottages.

  Sam America walked among the rubble.

  He had no idea what he was looking for.

  In all his journeying throughout the land, he hadn’t found so much as a single soul alive.

  Not a human soul, in any case.

  But he couldn’t quite let go of hope.

  Because it was all he had left.

  As Sam America trod over the broken-up bricks, listened to glass breaking beneath the tread of his boots, he heard, over his shoulder, a cough.

  Thick, and full, and alive.

  COUGH.

  COUGH.

  SALTED WOUNDS

  . . . COUGH.

  Mitts flinched awake.

  The world seemed to press in on him from all sides.

  His brain felt almost numbed.