Circles in the Dust

by Matthew Harrop

  He stood straight up, drawing his bow back once more, taking aim on a certain trunk the man would pass in just a few moments. He slowed his breathing, taking aim, waiting for the right moment. The figure continued in its straight path, closer, and closer, nearly to the tree David had chosen.

  There was a quiet twang and the slap of a bowstring against David’s sleeve, followed a split second later by the crunch of bark and the thud of an arrow burying itself in wood, and the figure stopped, the arrow quivering inches from their face. David saw them look his direction and all around him, searching for their attacker, but he was standing in the midst of shadow and couldn’t be seen. He let the fear of the unknown set in for a moment before making his presence known. He turned his head and lowered the pitch of his voice.

  “Drop your weapons.”

  The figure snapped its head back in David’s direction. A hood drooped over their face. They raised their hand and David saw the familiar glint of a pistol muzzle, waving from side to side a little, trying to pinpoint David’s location.

  “Now,” David bellowed as the figure defied his order. There was a slight pause, the muzzle straining to find a target in the dark wood.

  “No,” the figure shouted back, his deep voice wavering. “What do you want?”

  A second arrow came out of the wood and struck the tree, closer than the first to the man’s head. He jumped and cursed under his breath and let his pistol rotate around his finger then fall to his feet.

  “Take off your hood,” David answered. “And step into the light.”

  The figure, beaten but curious, obliged. He stepped forward and was bathed in the ethereal moonlight. David caught his breath. Illuminated before him was a face obstructed and framed on all sides by a shaggy black mane. He wore a stony expression, though his wide eyes betrayed his fear.

  “What the…?” David uttered to himself, unable to believe this was really who he thought. Louder, he shouted, “Mitch?”

  His eyes widened. He stood at a distance but David could still see the change in his visage. The man tried to speak but floundered in his first few attempts.

  “Wh—wh—Who’s out there?” he finally managed to call out. “How do you know who I am?”

  “What are you doing out here?” David tried to keep his voice firm but couldn’t help but feel his own fear flow out of his bones.

  “Who’s there?”

  “You never could help going out to see what made a noise in the woods, could you, Mitch?” David called back.

  “How do you—” Mitch began as David took a step forward toward him. He kept his head down as he advanced. Mitch’s hand twitched toward his hip as he heard David’s footsteps, which a vicious “Hands in the air!” from David arrested. A smile was battling his hard expression as he walked toward the terrified man in front of him, but he suppressed it. He could see Mitch licking his lips, eyes darting to either side, obviously contemplating a dash through the night, though he remained planted in his place.

  David kept an arrow nocked on his bowstring, trained on Mitch’s heart as he came closer and closer. He came to within ten feet of him and decided to have a little fun, stopping in a closer pool of shadow.

  “Any last words, Mitch?”

  “Last words? What? I thought—Please, who are you? Don’t hurt me, we can talk this out—” The panic inside the man showed itself in the violent shaking of his jaw as he tried to beg for his life while his nervous feet squirmed as if the ground were suddenly too hot to stand on. He tucked his head down in his shoulders, trying to make himself a smaller target, even scrunching his face up around his nose. “Why wouldn’t you just—Come on, please—I’ll do anything.”

  David almost couldn’t take it anymore, the laughter was coming up too strongly now. He reflected for a moment that this was a part of the old David he had obviously not shed quite yet. He would get there. Eventually.

  “Dance.”

  Mitch gave him a quizzical, disbelieving look. “Dance…?”

  “Dance, now!” David shouted, bringing the arrow back to his cheek. Mitch began sobbing and kicking his feet around in a little jig. His hands jerked and twitched as he whirled them around while keeping them tucked defensively against his body. That pushed David over the edge. He guffawed and turned away, not trusting himself to keep the arrow pulled back while laughing. He shot it into the ground a few feet away and let his laughter come. Mitch jumped as the arrow dove into the ground beside him and let out a whoop. He took a hesitant step away from David, who had doubled over, his face still not visible to Mitch.

  “Hey,” Mitch growled. He reached over and grabbed David by the hair, still bent in an uncontrollable fit of mirth, and pulled his face up into the light.

  Shouts of pain and laughter mixed as David’s face came into sight. Mitch swore and pushed him over. David lay there, still laughing, unable to control himself. He sat there for a minute while a stream of curses flowed over him, along with a few kicks. After a minute of this, David took a few deep breaths and contained his laughter enough that he could speak again.

  “Okay, okay,” he said, “that’s enough!” He grabbed Mitch’s foot as it came in for another landing and pulled him down on the ground with him.

  “You son of a—”

  “Mitch!” David yelled over the latest expletive. “What the—”

  “David!” Mitch’s anger melted as his wide eyes settled on his old friend. They clasped their hands and embraced, patting each other on the back. “Where have you been?”

  “Where have I been?” David asked incredulously. “I’ve been back in the valley. Where did you go?”

  “Here! To find something else, remember?” Mitch gazed at him expectantly, and David thought back to the last time he had seen Mitch.

  “You said you were going to the city…?”

  “Well, yeah, I said I was starting there. But don’t you remember? I tried to get you to come with me, I was leaving the valley for good. There was nothing there anymore, man. No food, no people.”

  “Yeah, apparently I missed that,” David admitted. He caught himself just as he was about to say something . “Where did everyone go?” He didn’t want Mitch to know that he already knew where they all were. Mitch was his old friend, one of the reasons he was still alive, but he had to be careful what he said. He didn’t know which side his old ally was on yet.

  “We all kind of spread out, though I got some of the old gang to follow me here. I came back and tried to tell everyone there was this place where they were making a fresh start, where they were actually growing food, man. Some didn’t believe me, but most did. There were fewer people left back home than I thought. You weren’t at your cabin when I got back, David. I waited for a couple days, I swear, but I figured you must have left or…” His eyes dropped and he let David fill in the rest. “It’s real though, I swear. Just a short walk that way,” and he pointed the way he and Elizabeth had been heading.

  “When did you find this place?” David asked, still curious how he had missed everyone leaving.

  “I went to the city right after the last time I saw you,” Mitch explained. “And from there I just struck off in a random direction. I went west until I hit the Palouse; I figured I would probably have to walk all the way across it before I found anyone, and that made me nervous. So I just kind of made a circle down south and back around the valley, sticking to the forest mostly, where I could find some berries and stuff. I never would have made it without the plants you showed me were edible. I lived on shoots and twigs for a little while there.

  “I came all the way around to this side of the woods, a little south of here, and figured that was it. There wasn’t any safe haven, and I was gonna die out here. I knew my last shot was going north; God knows how many people went south and promised to come back if they found anything down there. I thought maybe the Canadians were better prepared than we were and I could find some lodge where they had dug in when everything went to shit.

  “On my way the
re, I was walking along one day, wondering how much longer I really had left, when I saw smoke off on the horizon. At first I got excited and ran toward it, but then it got all muggy and I couldn’t see it anymore, so I figured it was a mirage or something. But I kept at it anyway, on the off chance I had found someone, just one person. I’d been walking for weeks and hadn’t seen a soul, man. I don’t know how many people there are left in the world. I never really thought about it until I left, in the whole world, I mean, but it hit me when I was out there.

  “I came to this place, what, toward the beginning of the last winter? They let me in and fed me, told me I could live there, right? So I told them there were a few people left where I came from, maybe ten or fifteen? They got all excited and told me I could go get them, bring them back here to live at the Base. That’s what they call this place. So as soon as the snow lets up, I come back to the valley and go around trying to pick up everyone I could. A couple had died, you remember Bruce, and John? And of course, I went to your place but couldn’t find you, so I left as soon as I could with a handful of people from the valley, and they’re still out here.

  “I get back here and apparently everyone and their grandma heard about this place and started showing up like crazy. So I come through and there are all these people camped out around the Base, and they all just laugh when I tell them we’re on our way there. We get there and they tell me they’re ‘so sorry’,” his voice absolutely dripped with sarcasm as he put quotes around this phrase, “but they couldn’t take anyone else in. I told them I had just been there a couple weeks before and they’d told me to go get all these people, but they didn’t care. So now we’re all just sitting out here, waiting to die.”

  “So you’re just waiting out here, hoping they’ll take you in?” David asked.

  “Pretty much. I don’t know how much longer we can make it though. We would have left a long time ago. I would have headed north myself, even though everyone always wants to go south, but there are some people here all the way from Edmonton who say it’s still buried in snow. They were headed south and chanced upon this place.”

  “Wow.” David had figured there couldn’t be much to the north, considering basic geography, but south had been ruled out for the same reason Mitch had mentioned, that no one had ever come back. He was surprised Mitch had made it as far as he had; he must have really been living on roots and tree bark. “Did they recognize you when you got back with everyone from the valley?”

  “Couple of them,” Mitch answered bitterly. “They knew who I was. I could have stayed and been just fine, but they told me, they told me, to go get the other survivors. Their leader, though, that mayor, what a cold bastard he is. Wouldn’t budge. He didn’t care that he’d told me to go fetch any other survivors I knew of. Who knew overpopulation would be a problem, right?” He coughed a bitter laugh and went on. “One of the guys tried to smuggle me in, told me I could come in but there was no way he could get the others in. He was a good guy, at least. But there was no way I was going in and leaving the others I’d brought from their home to starve out in the cold.”

  David was surprised at Mitch; he had never been one to stick his neck out for anyone besides himself. He must have changed since last they had talked. They had been a kind of team in years past, but Mitch had said goodbye when they had come across some seeds and David had wanted to try growing food rather than taking it. They had still been on good terms with each other, but that was the end of their real friendship. Now look at Mitch, trying desperately to get into the place that had cracked the farming code, just as David had wanted to.

  “So now you guys are just waiting…?” David asked.

  “Waiting, yeah I guess. Trying to talk them into letting us in, or giving us some seeds, or something. They claim they have nothing to spare, that the best thing is just for us to move on, try and find somewhere else that can help us. We’ve tried telling them there’s nothing out there, that they are our last chance, that they might be condemning half of what’s left of humanity, but they don’t care.”

  Mitch’s voice had turned from an excited babble to a low growl as he recounted his relations with the people of the Base. David knew this was what he had come for; peace, so that they could all stop calling themselves survivors and merely people once more.

  “How’d you ending up finding out about this place, Dave?” Mitch asked, shifting the conversation away from himself.

  “Me?” David knew he couldn’t tell Mitch about Elizabeth; the word ‘hostage’ came instantly to his mind. He didn’t know what else to say though. “Umm, some guy came through the valley, a little while ago. He said he had heard about this place, he was on his way here from the coast. I was running out of food, nothing left in the valley. I didn’t really expect to find anyone out here, honestly.”

  “No one did,” Mitch said, casting a conspiratorial grin at his old friend. “Who was that guy? He might have made it out here.”

  “His name was…Earl, I think. It was a while back.”

  “Hmm. No one named Earl’s come through here.”

  “Must have gotten sidetracked or lost or something,” David postulated.

  “Must have. Probably for the best, anyway. In any case, you should come with me back to our camp,” Mitch offered, rising from the ground. “I was just on patrol out here, things have gotten pretty rough between us and the Base. My shift should be just about up by now though.”

  “Yeah, uh, I think I’m going to go ahead and try my luck at the Base, actually,” David said, rising as well.

  “They’re not going to let you in,” Mitch rebutted.

  “I know, but I came all this way,” David explained, trying to make this lie as convincing as possible. “I just… need to give it a shot, before I write it off. I couldn’t live with myself if I knew I hadn’t even gone down there and tried.”

  “Dave, they’ve got guards all around the place,” Mitch warned. “Trust me, I don’t know how safe it is to even try and get in anymore.”

  “I know, I know. But I have to try. You have to understand, I’ve come so close to starving, I thought I was going to die alone in the woods…”

  Mitch sighed and gave David a long, hard look. “I get it,” he said after a minute of deliberation. “You haven’t changed, have you, Dave? At least come get some food, then. We don’t have much, but I’m sure no one would mind sparing some for a newcomer.”

  “No, no, I don’t think I could eat a thing. I found a stash of food I’d forgotten about before I left, and I actually just ate, so I’m good. Thanks, though, Mitch. I appreciate it.” David hoped Mitch wouldn’t find it odd that he refused a meal, but before Mitch could say anything about it, he tried to deflect his comment by adding, “I’ll come find you when they kick me out of the Base.”

  Mitch laughed and grabbed David’s hand, giving it a hearty shake. “I’ll be waiting.” He turned but, just before he turned away, David caught a glimpse of something disconcerting in those eyes, lurking behind the quick, fraternal acceptance. Something that made him catch his breath.

  “Hey, Mitch,” David called to the retreating figure.

  “What?”

  “You forgot something.” David tossed the pistol Mitch seemed to have forgotten about to him.

  “Thanks.” Mitch replaced the pistol in the holster at his hip. “Our camp,” he went on, “is just inside the forest by the Base. You’ll see the smoke. Come find us. Oh, and Dave, I know I’ve never had to tell you this, but be careful out there.” Then he turned and made his way back into the woods, and David watched him go, waiting until he was out of sight before he turned to go back to the clearing.

  He returned to find Elizabeth slumbering, unaware of the danger they had narrowly avoided. Things might have been very different had that not been Mitch come to investigate. He sat back down on the log, wide awake now, and waited for dawn to come.

  CHAPTER 18

  David was on edge, more than he had been thus far on the journey to the Base
. He couldn’t keep from constantly scanning the woods in every direction, just waiting for Mitch or someone else to show up, or for them to drop into one of the outlying camps around the Base. He waited while Elizabeth rolled up her bedding and ran her fingers through her hair to smooth it down. David tried to hurry her without transferring his own worries and fears. He tapped his feet and rubbed his hands on the sides of his pants, unable to contain the storm raging within. She never seemed to dawdle but at this particular moment he was sure she was taking as long as physically possible to complete the simplest tasks.

  When she finally stood up and draped the strap of her duffle bag over her shoulder, he breathed one quick sigh of relief, though it was the only one he would be allowed all morning. The sky was a muted gray, only a few shades lighter than it had been when David ran into Mitch. David turned on his heel and began marching off in the direction of the Base, taking the lead from Elizabeth.

  “Is everything all right?” she asked, scurrying after David in his frenzied march.

  “Sure, why wouldn’t it be?” he replied.

  “You know where we’re going?”

  “I believe it’s in this general direction, is it not?” he called back, keeping his head facing forward.

  “It is,” she responded slowly. “Did something happen while I was asleep?”

  “Nope.” He knew he needed to pace his response time, but he felt like everything was slowing down around him; his feet could not carry him forward fast enough, and slowing down at all was no option. It felt like running through chest-deep mud. “I just want to get to the Base before anyone wakes up out here, that’s all.”