by Sean Platt
The circle erupted into raucous laughter suggesting that Greggie had landed an excellent blow on Flare. Nicolai watched their eyes and, when attention spilled toward him, made exaggerated guffaws of agreement, going so far as to kick a log sticking out of the fire. He felt wrong in every way, but if one thing had become abundantly clear in recent years, it was that it wasn’t usually safe to wander without a crew. Crews would kill each other for daring to walk across undisturbed snow, but everyone killed solo travelers. In cities, it was nearly impossible to make your way across town as a solo and not be seen, and even though Amsterdam was already looking like a dead end, he’d had to make it here, just to be sure.
Greggie attacking Flare’s manhood was like pitting a strongman against a toddler, but luckily Flare knew his place within the group and didn’t try to fight back. He pouted for a moment then settled enough to resume eating his fruit, like every one of the sixteen men in the room. They might as well eat it now, while they could. Fruit had become extraordinarily rare, especially anywhere urban. Someone had to find a tree and take the time to harvest it. Another person had to wait for that someone to pass, knife them in the kidney, and take the fruit. Nothing came easy.
“What about you, Nick?” said Greggie, glancing over.
Nicolai, surprised, looked up. He hadn’t expected to be called out. Some of the guys in the crew had been together for over a year, but most were just a few weeks or months in. Nicolai had six months’ tenure and usually had the protection that came with seniority. But Greggie had never really trusted Nicolai, and he liked to remind him of it every once in a while. Nicolai had a knack for strategizing, finding routes around other crews’ territories, planning travel, and allocating assets when facing a battle or a takeover, but Greggie seemed to see Nicolai’s usefulness as a double-edged sword. If the quiet raider with his cutesy spectacles was too smart and too valuable, the group might come to see him as leader.
“What what?” said Nicolai. He pronounced the second “what” like “whot,” as per the group’s preferred dialect. He was a chameleon, able to adapt to the mannerisms, tonalities, and affects used by any group he spent time with, thus blending in and building rapport. It gave him immediate trust. It wasn’t something he had to try to do. It simply happened.
“I’s askin’ if you’ll be partaking of the fruit.”
Nicolai held up an apple, pitted with worm holes.
“I meant the pussy fruit,” Greggie said.
Nicolai didn’t hesitate. He’d learned that in any crew, there were times to pick your battles and times to stand strong. The latter times were few and far between, and you had to choose them carefully lest you spend your capital like a fool. He responded without thought, reservation, or the smallest notion to challenge Greggie’s plans to conquer a rare female crew, which had bunkered in a few blocks away.
“’Course.”
“What if she squirms?”
“All da better for da pleasure.” Nicolai gave his face an ugly grin then shifted as if the thought had aroused him. It didn’t. Relations between the sexes had degenerated almost immediately once the rabble rose to take what it felt it was owed. He’d heard there were large pockets where communities still lived in civility, but Nicolai had yet to find them. Besides, civvies were prey. Until he found his place, it was wiser to hide among hunters, where men ruled and took what they wanted. They justified rape as a biological necessity, but the idea of needing to conquer someone to find release was absurd. Every man in the group had at least one hand.
Greggie watched him for a moment. He looked like he wasn’t quite believing Nicolai, and that was bad.
An arm’s reach away, a tall man that went by the crew name of Perry Ringo was bending over to rearrange food on a blanket. Nicolai reached out and shoved him in the rear, sending him stumbling forward into the fire. Perry’s hand landed on a burning log, and his pant leg caught flame. He screamed and stumbled back. Todd threw Perry’s blanket at him to smother the orange as it licked him. Everyone laughed. Perry was their newest, and easily the weakest. He’d be killed by his crew soon enough.
Greggie watched Nicolai’s display. Then his distrustful expression broke, and he looked at Perry and laughed. Beside Nicolai, Val Sparks held up a fist. Nicolai bumped it.
The conversation around the fire turned from the next morning’s plans — a little raid, a little rape — and became more reflective as it often did in the evenings, each of the marauders reaching back in time to their youth, before the world became a circle of Hell. It was interesting, thought Nicolai, that nobody ever discussed who they’d once been. They talked about things they’d had before the chaos (televisions, terminals, computer phones, and Doodads) and things they’d done (played soccer, traveled, and so on) but never who they used to be. Nicolai had a theory about it. Maybe, if the crew admitted to once having been firefighters and accountants and administrative assistants, they’d feel more human, both to themselves and to each other. If they did that, maybe they’d feel the ghosts of their former selves looking over their shoulders, watching the people they’d become with shame and disgust.
Nicolai waited for an opportune moment then dragged his blanket away from the fire, into the corner opposite the one with the bodies. If he looked back across the fire and toward the building’s front, he could see the burned husk of a building across the canal. He found himself wondering what it had been. Had it been a smoking den? A red-light window where women once stood on display, offering services willingly that the group was now planning to take by force? Or had it been something more ordinary and outside of the Amsterdam clichés? Someone’s home? A cultural museum?
Moving quietly, watching the group of marauders around the fire, Nicolai opened his pack’s flap and reached into its bottom. He moved his single clean shirt and found the unauthorized stash of cans and jerky with his fingers. He had a can opener in one of the outside pockets, and of course he had his crossbow should he need to hunt game. He had all he’d need for a week at least, assuming he could find a fresh source of water. And he’d be fine once he left the city behind. Amsterdam was full of water, and the immediately surrounding areas would be as well. Because the city itself was such a draw (Nicolai had followed his crew to Amsterdam after hearing the same bullshit promises of pirate air travel out of Europe as everyone else), the surrounding area would be relatively quiet.
If he was careful, he could make it out, even as a solo.
For nearly a year — since the last of the networks had died, leaving underground communications and drones entirely black — Nicolai had felt the need to go north. The loss of all knowledge from the West (scant as it was) felt like a shearing. From what he’d been able to glean, the US was managing to stumble upright while Europe burned. That had given people hope, seeing as the period prior to the chaos was filled with such unparalleled levels of global cooperation. If the US was making it, they’d send help. But now, with those channels gone, it felt like the opposite might be true. Maybe the US was recovering, but it had just enough to save itself. And maybe the prior decade’s friends and partners had become America’s discarded loose ends.
Italy was entirely lost. He’d heard the same about Spain and the Baltics. There were rumors of air service out of Amsterdam and similar whispers about solace in England. The latter made stereotypical sense to Nicolai. English people were classy, so maybe they’d found a way to brace themselves and live in class. It was a ridiculous thought without any grounding, but it also seemed possible. England was cut off by the English Channel, so maybe they’d been able to guard their borders in ways the landlocked countries hadn’t, fending off the worst of the marauders and Rake Squads. Maybe they’d been stable enough and had held that stability and were still clicking along rather than decaying into chaos. If that was true, it would mean that getting into England might mean a fresh start. It would also mean that getting into England would be hell.
If Nicolai was to have any chance of survival, he’d have to head north. So
he’d met up with his current crew in Milan, when it was only seven men strong, all of them headed north on the same rumors. Nicolai must have felt to the others like an asset, and they’d taken him in rather than fighting. Nicolai, ever the chameleon, had adapted, immediately becoming as crass and cruel as the others. He’d fought in battles, trying and often failing to keep blood from his hands. He’d stolen; he’d cheated; he’d beaten and killed. The crew had skirted Switzerland — which had been controlled since 2029 by a despot known as Petra the Cannibal — despite it offering the most direct route. Their options were to go east into Austria or west into France. They’d gone west. From there, it would have made sense to try for the English Channel first, but Greggie had nixed that obvious answer and had sent them on a sometimes-marching, sometimes-rolling journey to Amsterdam where they had crashed into a predictable dead end.
The crew had given Nicolai strength in numbers, but he couldn’t stand what he felt himself becoming. The other men, as far as Nicolai could tell, had embraced their barbarian natures. It made psychological sense: Hardening themselves made them powerful at a time when most people felt only fear. That was all that mattered. If they had to kill and raid and rape to keep their rapport and identities as a crew, mercy was irrelevant. That was the cost of holding their power.
But recently, Nicolai had found himself bothered by surprising knee-jerk reactions that suggested he was melding into the crew’s collective mind. He didn’t like how he’d responded so immediately to Greggie’s taunt about choosing a woman to rape, or how his own actions and attitudes were helping to perpetuate those of the rest of the crew. He didn’t like how he’d kicked Perry into the fire to deflect suspicion about his own lack of team spirit. It had done the job; times were tough, and saving face, in a crew, was a close cousin to saving his own neck. But it wasn’t how Nicolai wanted to live, or how he wanted to be.
Tomorrow, if he stayed with the crew, things would get worse.
There was a female crew bunkered into a bombed-out basement two blocks away. Only that wasn’t exactly true; Nicolai had been on the recon mission with Val and Will the Mooch when they’d seen two young women with machetes sneaking between buildings. He’d been with them later after the trio had covertly followed the women back to their hole. He’d seen the faces of the people who’d come out to greet them, rush them inside, and grasp at the bag of food they’d managed to scavenge from the city. Nicolai, who wasn’t quite as jaded as he should be, knew civilians when he saw them.
It wasn’t a crew at all. If the world still held any innocents, that was what they were.
In a way, conquering a female crew would at least have forced Greggie’s crew to fight for its supper in a way that conquering civvies would not. Female crews were usually tougher and more dangerous than male crews because their survival required it. Life among marauders acted as an intense selective force, leaving only the truly strong. If the group was a girl squad as Will had reported and Greggie had immediately begun to profess, it would actually have been suicide to storm them. Their entrances would be booby trapped. The women would have many guns, and maybe explosives. They’d be fierce fighters, impossibly strong and large in number, because more members meant more survivability in the open.
But this wasn’t a crew. It was a huddle of people — men, women, kids, and adults, including at least one old head with all-white hair — who must have heard the same rumors of exodus through Amsterdam as the rest of them. A group who’d made the very unwise decision to step inside the lion’s den.
Nicolai had considered trying to explain that Will’s assessment was inaccurate, but there was no point. The crew, as an entity, couldn’t afford any mercy. Maybe some of the men still had an inkling of humanity inside them, but the spark would be too dim to admit. Women were women, said the group mind, and if Nicolai told Greggie that they were civvies, Greggie wouldn’t even have waited to attack. He had his hard-on now, and if he saw what he thought were easy pickings, they’d have made their raid already. They’d have taken prisoners then killed the remainders.
Across the room, Nicolai listened to the drunken chortling as it circled the fire. They hadn’t found alcohol in months, but somehow they always sounded drunk.
Nicolai pulled his crossbow closer, feeling to make sure the bolts were still there, secured to the frame.
Then he closed his eyes, deepened his breathing, and pretended to sleep.
The bounty of food in their new home was more than the crew had seen in months, much of it fresh and in need of immediate consumption. It only took another hour or so for the men to retire and fall, satisfied, into pleasant comas. A half hour later, the room was filled with echoing snores that Nicolai thought could have woken the former occupants stacked in the corner.
Nicolai waited through what felt like another twenty or thirty minutes before rolling over, sitting up, and looking around. He stepped carefully to a window and looked out, noting the moon’s spot in the sky. Most had lost their true concept of time, but time seemed moot with no schedules to keep. Now and again, they’d run into a group of travelers with a running watch amongst them, but once the group was dead, Greggie would pocket the timepiece as a trophy without so much as looking at the hands.
The moon had nearly reached the peak of its arc, based on what Nicolai had seen in the sky as they’d marched through the previous weeks. He had no idea what time it was, but it mattered only that it was late enough for the crew to be out for the night.
After tiptoeing silently around the room using panther-like skills perfected during years of wandering, Nicolai knelt next to Val Sparks. There were several members of the crew who could arguably be second in command to Greggie, but the others were too tightly clustered. Val, on the other hand, had made his nest in a corner, far enough from the others to suit Nicolai’s needs.
He held the tip of Val’s sharpest knife over the back of Val’s hand as the man slept, setting the tip against his skin and waiting to see if he’d stir. When he didn’t, Nicolai took one last look around then slammed the heel of his own hand against the hilt, driving the blade through Val’s flesh. The tip sank into the soft pine floor underneath with dull thud.
Val tried to scream, but Nicolai had already shoved a wad of socks into his open, snoring mouth. That had been tricky, but Val was a heavy sleeper. Nicolai had known for months that he’d need to be on his way and had been testing Val nightly since, seeing how far the sleeping man could be nudged without waking.
Val bolted awake at once, thrust rudely back into the world.
“Mmmm!”
The scream was pure shock blended with agony. His jaws tried to bite down, but Nicolai, hands free, shoved the sock in farther, leaving no room in his mouth for anything else.
“Shhhh…” Nicolai said. He leaned closer, back in the corner and eyes peering up at the other sleepers. “Val, how would you like your own crew?”
“Mmm! Mmmmmm!” He jerked at his pinned hand, but the blade was so sharp that his struggles merely deepened the wound. A crimson puddle, looking like ocher in the dim room, pooled across the moonlit wooden floor. When Val’s palm tipped up, it looked like he’d been finger-painting. Nicolai had already shifted his weight, pinning Val’s other hand to the wood underfoot.
Nicolai shrugged his crossbow higher up onto his back on its strap then slipped his own knife from its sheath at his side and held the blade against Val’s throat. The edge had been honed by many boring hours sitting with the crew, running a stone back and forth across the metal. A dark bead of blood formed under the cutting surface and ran down the man’s stubbly neck.
“I can ask one of the other guys if you don’t cooperate.”
“Mmm!”
Nicolai pivoted in a blink, striking Val hard in the temple with the elbow connected to his knife hand. The bandit rocked like a bobblehead.
“I really want to give you a chance here, Val,” Nicolai whispered into his ear. Snoring echoed through the room was like a roar. The sounds Nicolai and Val w
ere making were inconsequential by comparison. “You’re the most levelheaded of the guys worth listening to. I’ll kill you and ask Will if I have to, but you’re my first choice.”
Nicolai shifted to get a good look at Val’s eyes. His foot was still on one hand, the knife upright and lodged in the other. Val’s hair had fallen into his face when Nicolai had struck him, but after a moment of effort, he seemed to focus. Nicolai saw an encouraging species of truth dawn inside them. Val wasn’t going to challenge Nicolai or try to maintain his manly pride. He knew the crew’s quietest member had turned out to be a sleeper, and that the choices were to do what he said or die.
“Nod if you agree to listen,” said Nicolai.
Val nodded, trying to swallow around the sock. His face was filthy, and a tear of pain had streaked through the dirt, leaving a single moonlit track.
“I’m going to leave this group. I have already killed Greggie. You will find him over there, facedown, stuck through the back of the neck and pinned to the floor in a pool of blood. I used your knife — the one with the carved handle. The one you pick your teeth with. Do you understand why?”
Val nodded vigorously. Of course he understood. It was exactly how Greggie had claimed his place with the crew, by dispatching the former leader with a knife through the back of the neck. It wasn’t an efficient way to kill someone. Nicolai would have preferred to quietly slit his throat and slash his larynx so he couldn’t yell out, but symbolism mattered. So he’d stuffed a sock in Greggie’s mouth as he had for Val, slashed just his larynx to mute him further, then pinned him flat by sitting on his body. The rest took less than a minute.
“You will have two choices when you get up. You can tell the others that I killed Greggie and try to rally the crew to pursue me, but I don’t think it will work. They’ll see your knife and decide you’re a coward and liar. Will or one of the others will rally their own cliques to hold you down and cut you to pieces. Your other option — and this is what I’d choose myself — is to say that you killed Greggie and are claiming the crew for yourself. I advise you to do it confidently. Say that I woke up and saw you do it. Tell them I ran. They’ll believe that of me. They think I’m a coward.”