The Brink

by Pass, Martyn J.

  Alan cut his bonds and allowed the maimed body to fall to the floor, noting that the missing hands and feet were still cooking on a rusting half-barrel barbecue directly opposite the pole. Feeling sick to his stomach, he took those parts and threw them on top of Richard’s body, glad that in some strange way the scavengers hadn’t been cannibals, merely sick and twisted individuals that’d done it to him to mock him, to heap those insults upon him before he died.

  Moll sniffed his remains and walked away. It saddened Alan to see the man so badly treated, so maimed by the violence done to him that any kind of remorse at the genocide he’d just committed was submerged beneath the images of the tortured man. He’d been wronged by that guard, but not to this degree, not to within a hundred miles of this kind of punishment.

  Alan searched the last of the camp and, finding none alive, fired off the last two rounds before throwing the thing into the flames along with any other weapons he could find. There was nothing left to do now and so, taking a flaming brand out of the camp fire, he began to light each of the tents in turn. When the place was ablaze, he left the devastation through a breach in the wall made by the explosive and never looked back.

  21

  As the years passed by, no one at the camp had much time to dwell on those events that, for a while, had rocked their small, fragile world. When the stranger had been driven out, life returned to the hard struggle it’d always been. With Rachel and the others in charge, work began on the allotment almost immediately and it never stopped. Every patch of soil, every salvaged grow-bag, anything that could hold seeds or bulbs were made use of until their world became green again.

  It’d been a close call. Those first crops almost didn’t make it. Then the shoots started to come through as the last of the supplies dwindled to almost nothing. Then there were the first crops. Small, stunted things, but a hope of more to come, that it was possible to make it, that there was a chance in the soil yet.

  In the third year a man wandered up to the gates of their camp and stood waiting to be seen. He was lean and short and wore battered army fatigues two sizes too big for his frame and he carried his world in a rucksack on his back. When the guards asked him his business, he said he was there to deliver a package to a man by the name of ‘Doc’ and he was under strict instructions to give it to him alone.

  Doc was called for and they met at the gates, the man refusing to enter the camp and expressing his wish to be on his way as soon as he could.

  “Where are you from?” asked the medical man.

  “North,” he replied.

  “And you want to speak to me?” The man shook his head.

  “I’ve been told to give you this,” and with that, he rummaged in his pack for a small parcel, neatly wrapped in paper and tied together with string. He passed it to Doc who held it in his hands, wondering what on Earth it could be.

  “If I could trouble you for a few litres of water, I’ll be on my way,” said the man, offering his battered canteen to Doc. A guard took it from him and ran to fill it from the water tower.

  “What’s your name?” asked the medical man.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he replied.

  There was an awkward silence as they both waited for the guard to return. When he did, the canteen was passed back to him along with a cloth bag of food.

  “You’re very kind,” said the man. “Have a nice day.”

  And with that, he turned and left, retracing his path away from the camp until he disappeared around a bend in the road.

  Doc watched him go before he began to consider the package in his hands. With a scalpel that he carried in his pocket, he cut the string and unwrapped the paper, exposing a small cardboard box about the size of his hand. He felt a sudden fear inside, a terror that its contents would confirm something he’d avoided thinking about since the stranger had gone and something he didn’t want to believe was true. With trembling hands, he lifted the lid and gasped.

  “What is it?” asked the guard next to him.

  It took him a few moments to compose himself before he could speak again. Tears rolled down his cheeks as he stared into the box.

  “She’s alive,” was all he could say as he looked at the photograph, recently taken and hastily printed onto old paper. There was his daughter, Janet, smiling in spite of her hair loss and the scar that ran down her left cheek. At her side, her tongue lolling out of her mouth, was Moll who gazed beyond the camera to the man behind it.