Agviq

by Michael Armstrong

  “Sure,” said Tuttu, “and Karl brought back a whole crate of foam cups. And we’ve got enough paper plates for a century of picnics. Good idea,” he sneered. “We can run a contest, see what the best recipe is for Styrofoam mousse and baked Crest.”

  “Man, we need some of that stuff,” said a short, fat guy Claudia remembered as John. “You think I’m going to give up my supplies if everyone else does? So that you can ration it out, they get fat, and we starve? Bullshit.”

  “You’re right, Siqpan. I don’t think anyone should give up their supplies”—he looked around the room, staring at each person—“unless everyone does.”

  “How you going to make sure no one holds out?” Mick asked. “Strip search ’em?” He groped toward the frosted blonde, and she squirmed away. His wife, Pat. A couple of men laughed at that.

  “Pick a day,” Tuttu said. “Everyone brings all their food to Stuaqpak. And then we go around to each house, and search it. Anything left behind—I’m sure people will forget things—gets taken.”

  “Fuck that,” Mick said.

  “Bullshit,” Karl said.

  “Communism,” Siqpan added.

  The group starting arguing, voices rising, and Claudia looked to Tuttu, he to her, at Malgi, and she saw where it was going. They wouldn’t do it. They were too used to owning, too used to having possessions, not used to sharing. That’s what got lost with the hunting, she thought. People owned things then, sure, that’s how an umialik got rich, but a good hunter shared his game. He might get the best parts, but the meat got shared, passed from his hunting partner, who might be his brother-in-law, to his grandma, to his uncle, around and around, in a complicated network based on family connections, so that no one starved, no one went without unless everyone starved. But when people quit hunting, when they quit sharing food, it all fell apart, and it became mine, mine, mine.

  Natchiq moved around to Tuttu’s right, and Kanayuq to his left, and out from underneath their atigis they pulled not their rifles, but Mini-14s with big magazines, and she bet they weren’t set on three-shot bursts. The two cousins slid back the bolts on their assault rifles, locking and loading the guns, and at the sound the room suddenly shut up.

  “Okay,” said Tuttu. “We won’t ask for donations anymore, and we won’t tell you to contribute. But we’re taking Stuaqpak now, it’s my qaregi’s, because we’ve put everything in it, and if you want anything . . . Come and get it.”

  “Hey,” Mick said, “I put shit in here, I’m not going to let you keep it.”

  “Sure, Mick,” said Tuttu. He flipped through the inventory sheet. “Some lipstick, right? And I think you donated a box of bubble gum.” Tuttu reached down to the candy rack, picked up the last remaining box of gum there. “Here.” He flung the gum at Mick. “Anybody equally generous can have their stuff back. We don’t mind.” He flipped through the list again. “Toothbrushes? Yeah, someone turned in some toothbrushes. Twenty cans of hair dye? That might be worthwhile when we all get gray hair, huh? Plastic forks? Deodorant? Toothpicks? This is valuable crap, right?”

  Karl and a couple of the men moved forward, but Natchiq and Kanayuq lowered their assault rifles to chest height, and the men backed off. They moved back to the door, shaking their heads, and the crowd broke up.

  “Bring it all in!” Tuttu shouted after them. “Bring it all in or nobody gets anything.” Mick turned at the door to say something, glared at Tuttu, shook his head, and walked out.

  “Nobody gets anything,” Tuttu whispered.

  The cousins lowered their guns, set the safeties. As they got down off the checkout counters, Claudia noticed their hands were shaking.

  Gonna be trouble, she thought. Gonna be bad trouble.

  Chapter 8

  STUAQPAK was black, brown-black, the black that a room got when the sun set and the lights had been out and eyes adjusted to night sight, pupils dilated so that the irises were little rings. A candle lantern dangled from a rope on the ceiling, casting a pool of light a body wide on the first floor. The lantern swung back and forth in a narrow arc, a pendulum, making the circle of light dance around. Every now and then the candle caught a glint of glass or steel: display cases tipped over, racks of sunglasses strewn on the floor, the barrel of a rifle poking out from cover, the small circle of a hunting scope.

  Silent soldiers, Claudia thought, peering out from her position along the ledge of a balcony looking down from the second floor onto the first. They’re damn good at waiting, at being still in an uncomfortable position for an uncomfortable amount of time. “Oscar’s Army,” Tuttu called them, using Malgi’s tanik name. Natchiq, Tuttu, and Kanayuq, of course, and she and Tammy and a boy named Puvak. Six pairs of eyes peering into the darkness.

  Well, seven eyes, she corrected herself. All but Natchiq wore black eye patches over one eye, their shooting eye; Natchiq wore dark glasses, the rubber cup on his scope folded back. It was Tuttu’s idea, the eye patches. The shooting eye would get adjusted to the dark behind the patch. If someone came into Stuaqpak carrying a flashlight—and they probably would—Natchiq in the dark glasses would shoot out the light, Tammy would shoot out the candle with a kid’s water pistol—an Uzi water gun—and when it got dark again, they’d flip the patches back and shoot with the night-dilated eye. “The poor man’s night-vision goggles,” Tuttu called the trick.

  Boxes and crates cluttered the west side of the second-floor balcony, the odd angles casting triangular shadows. Trademarks of famous brand-name televisions and appliances had been printed on the boxes, but Tuttu had pulled a shell game: inside the boxes were food, essential supplies, the unnecessary stuff stored downstairs in food boxes. Like a Marxist physician doing triage, he’d separated the Stuaqpak goods into three categories: that which was necessary for survival, that which might help them live longer, and that which was totally useless. It was amazing how much junk in the store fell in the latter category: all the vanity items, innumerable little knickknacks, and things like clothes that did not cover or keep you warm, tools that performed no useful function. Waste. All waste.

  Cold pervaded the room, a clean, pure cold, the cold of a place that had been without heat for some time, so that every object had cooled to the same temperature. A thermograph of the room would have shown the candle lantern glowing orange-red, six bodies red, and everything else blue or turquoise or green. No heat, all cold, all waiting. Claudia thought of the guard duty as training, training for that time when the tuvaq had formed and they would sit on the ice waiting for seals.

  Now they waited for brigands, scoundrels, and thieves: whoever was determined to raid Stuaqpak. Tuttu had laid down the gauntlet, had scratched the line in the snow: those who share with all share what is in Stuaqpak, and those who share with none get none. Claudia saw what he had done, knew as well as Malgi and Tuttu the importance of it. If they were to survive beyond when the store food ran out, they had to learn to share. Put-up or shut-up time, she thought.

  Claudia sat at the southwest corner of the balcony, with a clear view down to the checkout counters. To her right Kanayuq stood up, stretched, then quickly ducked down behind a row of sand-filled fifty-five-gallon drums at the top of a stairway connecting the two floors. Racks of souvenir T-shirts for the tourleys hung along the south wall, with sayings on them like LONDON, PARIS, ROME, BARROW, or MY GRANDMA WENT TO THE TOP OF THE WORLD AND ALL SHE GOT ME WAS THIS DAMN T-SHIRT.

  Over where appliances used to be sold, to Claudia’s left, Tuttu guarded the main stash of supplies; he had a good shot at the main door. A little armory had been set up in the northwest corner, all the shells and cartridges and guns packed behind boxes of books and more fifty-five-gallon drums of sand. Tammy hunched down in the armory, ammo laid out before her, ready to toss shells and cartridges to anyone who needed them, extra guns and rifles before her if someone’s weapon jammed. Natchiq, the man in shades, set up position at the northwest corner of the balcony, and between him and Tuttu was Puvak, a thirteen-year-old boy who’d turned out to
be a hell of a shot with a .22 rifle.

  Puvak had come from his father’s house, the house of Amaguq, a second cousin of Tuttu. Amaguq’s family had been the only other villagers to go along with Tuttu’s plan. Shortly after he’d come over to Tuttu’s side, Amaguq’s house had been burned to the ground and he and his son had moved into the qaregi; they split watch duty between Stuaqpak and the big house. Amaguq’s watch had fought off an attack the night before, and Claudia knew there’d be another raid that night. Amaguq had taken a bullet in the arm—fortunately, just a .22 bullet and hardly a wound at all—and like his namesake, the wolf, he had been all for taking the offensive, fangs bared. But they didn’t know who had attacked, and it was only two houses against maybe twenty, so all they could do was defend what they had.

  And wait.

  Claudia didn’t think they could keep holding off attacks much longer; they had only so much food, though they had a lot of bullets. A lot of bullets. She’d asked Tuttu about this, and had been surprised at how quickly he agreed. His strategy wasn’t to fight them off; his plan was to wait the brigands out.

  “They know there’s stuff in Stuaqpak,” he had explained earlier in the day. “So when stuff runs out they’ll come here. But they’ll also think their neighbors have stuff, and if we make it hard to get at Stuaqpak, they’ll steal from their neighbors. When the bullies take all the food from the victims, the victims will come to us.”

  But Claudia hadn’t been so sure the victims wouldn’t just start fighting for the bullies. She knew bullies, knew that once a bully defeated someone, he could make that person do what he wanted. Tuttu was a little more confident. “If the victims come to us with anything they’ve got left,” he said, “they get an equal share of what we have. But if they go to a bully, all they get are handouts. They’ll come to us. When we’ve got a real army, we’ll crush the bullies.”

  So they waited, waited for the bullies to be bullies, and waited for the victims to become soldiers. Claudia looked at the meager supplies on the second floor of Stuaqpak and knew that when everyone joined together there’d barely be enough to share. But that wasn’t the point, she saw: the point was to get everyone to share, and like the parable of Christ and the loaves and fishes, they’d find the food from there.

  The big heavy exterior door creaked open, and several sets of footsteps—Claudia counted at least three—thudded down the arctic entryway, the hall connecting the main floor of the store to the outside. Around her she heard the dull clicks as rounds got chambered into firearms. She slid the receiver back on her own shotgun, hand trembling a bit as the first shell rose up in front of the firing pin.

  Tuttu chambered a round, then ejected it, twice, his signal to Tammy to shoot out the candle. A stream of water whisked up to the little light, and Claudia felt the cool spray drift down toward her as the flame sizzled out. The footsteps stopped as the light went out, and then a big flashlight came on, light glowing down the entryway. Pistachio shells—Puvak had found a box of packaged nuts—crackled as the intruders came around the entryway, and Claudia swore she could hear Natchiq breathe in as he set up his shot.

  The person with the flashlight rolled across the doorway, arm holding out the lamp like Dante’s Bertrans in Hell holding out his head. Natchiq’s rifle cracked once, and the flashlight shattered out. Her shot now. Claudia flipped her eyepatch up, aimed the shotgun to the left of where the flashlight had been, a buck load in the chamber, and squeezed the trigger. The muzzle flash lit up the room like heat lightning, and she fell back behind cover just before two bullets thudded into the steel drums and books before her. She thought she heard a thud as her shot hit something, and then she heard a low groan.

  Two shots from Kanayuq and Tuttu or Puvak answered back, bullets seeking muzzle flashes, and she knew how it was going to be: shoot for where you saw people firing from, and when you shot, move, although they had the advantage, because they could fire behind easy cover and the brigands below had to find cover.

  Tuttu’s poor-man’s night vision goggles only worked with the first volley, because any night-sight got zapped the minute a firearm fired. Claudia thought she saw someone scuttle under the balcony, out of range, something they had worried about. If they could keep brigands from coming in, everything would be safe, but if the raiders got under the balcony and out from the open space from the second floor down to the first, the brigands would be under them and could move around at will. Tuttu didn’t worry about that, because he said they’d have to go back out the way they came, and it’s a lot harder to scuttle when you’re dragging a fifty-pound box of deodorant.

  Someone ran up the stairs to the second floor. Kanayuq put his rifle down and picked up a Mini-14, the sound of the magazine clicking in and the bolt being locked loud and distinct in the brief silence. The person on the stairs grunted something, and then screeched: a woman slipping on the marbles Puvak had littered on the steps and then falling on what the boy called “arctic pungi sticks,” boards spiked with ten-penny nails laid across the treads. A light flared from the stairs, something caught fire, and the woman on the stairs tossed a torch or something at Kanayuq.

  Thinking it over later, Claudia couldn’t decide if the woman’s rage had given her better sight, or if she had just been lucky. The torch whirled end over end toward Kanayuq’s sniping post, bounced off a wall, and as she heard the glass shatter, Claudia knew what it was. A cloud of gas or diesel fuel spilled from the Molotov cocktail, catching a rack of T-shirts on fire, and raining down on Kanayuq. If he’d stayed down he would have been fine—a couple of rolls on the ground and the fire would have gone out—but when you’re on fire you don’t think. Kanayuq rose up, flames crawling up his arm, and in the dark he might as well have put a glow-in-the-dark target over his chest. Two shots fired from under the second floor, and the shots thunked into Kanayuq hard and fast, some kind of bullet, Claudia thought, that gave up all its energy as soon as it hit something: tumblers or dum-dums or whatever.

  The flames ignited the T-shirts, and that wall began to burn. Two more bottles broke below, and then a third, a fourth, a hail of flaming bombs, and Claudia saw their strategy. They were going to smoke Oscar’s Army out, and burn down Stuaqpak in the process. The woman on the stairs ran back down—Claudia hoped her foot hurt like hell—and two more people ran back to the entrance, rolling across the doorway, and out.

  “Cover me!” Natchiq yelled, and he ran from his hiding place over to Kanayuq.

  The point of a rifle poked around the doorway, but Tuttu fired two quick rounds and the barrel pulled back. Tammy hurled two fire extinguishers across the room to Natchiq. Natchiq grabbed one, sprayed the flames licking at Kanayuq’s parka, then knelt down at his brother’s side. He opened up Kanayuq’s parka, put a hand on his chest, and when he held it up to the light of the flames burning at the wall, Claudia could see Natchiq’s hand sticky with blood up to the wrist. Natchiq pounded his fist on the floor, looked up, grabbed the Mini-14 and fired a full magazine at the doorway, the wood splintering away from the frame.

  Big long flames flared up to the second floor, thick acrid smoke curling up to them. Claudia glanced down at the first floor, over at Tuttu. He shouted something, over and over, screaming at Natchiq, it looked like. Natchiq stood, looked down at his brother, grabbed something from the dead man’s neck and yanked it loose, and ran over to Tuttu. Tammy said something to Claudia, and then through the roaring of the flames she began to hear.

  “—get the hell out, grab everything, get to the roof,” Tammy shouted.

  Claudia snapped out of the fear and the shock and the light and the smoke stinging her throat. She ejected a shell from her shotgun, reached down for the boxes of shells next to her, threw them in a little daypack, and ran to Tammy.

  Tammy had slung six rifles over her shoulders, looking like a girl guerrilla, two pistols stuck in her belt. She crammed box after box of shells and cartridges into a big duffel bag, hurled the bag to a ladder coming down from the roof, then crammed more sh
ells into another bag. Little Puvak pulled a box of beans after him, and Tuttu and Natchiq were pushing a box marked TOILET PAPER—God knows what it really is, Claudia thought—toward the door. She looked around for something to save, saw a box of monofilament line, fishing hooks, lures, and other tackle, and grabbed that.

  “They’ll have the loading bay doors covered,” Tuttu said. He had a big coil of half-inch hollow-core polypropylene rope over his shoulder.

  Claudia nodded; they’d anticipated this. The second-floor stockroom door went down to a big loading bay and another stockroom. But the ladder went up to the roof, through an access hatch. Natchiq climbed up the ladder, and they started passing boxes up to him.

  “Throw the food down at those assholes,” Tuttu yelled, “and hang on to the ammunition.”

  Claudia, Tammy, and Puvak scampered around trying to salvage what they could, but the smoke got thicker and thicker, and finally Tuttu stopped them and pushed first Puvak, then Tammy, up the ladder. Claudia followed them, then paused at the top of the ladder and looked down at Tuttu.

  The smoke curled up toward her, sucking up the open hole, and she could feel the heat of the flames rising toward the second floor. Tuttu stared back at the boxes they’d cached, at Kanayuq’s body toward the stairs. She could imagine what he was thinking: Stuaqpak was the last link to the old world, the storehouse of everything that had connected them to Outside. As the flames licked at the television sets, the microwave ovens, the tourley knickknacks, at the cosmetics counter and the big empty meat freezers, they consumed whatever it was that had made them part of the old world, a world with a Coke can on every street corner and wads of old bubble gum on every street.

  “Son of a bitch,” Tuttu muttered, and he climbed up the ladder, joining her on the roof.

  A southerly wind blew into their faces as they came out onto the flat corrugated steel of the roof. The smoke curled up and out of the opening, and then Tuttu dogged the hatch. Stuaqpak’s roof curled down to the east, toward the arctic entry. The five of them kneeled down on the ribbed roof, the flames roaring beneath them. At the north end of the building, Claudia knew, a second-floor exit opened out to a metal staircase; someone would be at the staircase, right below them. Next to the staircase would be the freight-loading bays, so the whole north end would be covered. Tuttu looked at the pile of boxes—ten total of food, plus the two duffels of firearms and ammunition, and Claudia’s box of fishing gear—and shook his head.