by Hickey, Greg
Outside the meal halls, Samuel segregated himself even more from the rest of the colony. On the night he installed his food boxes in the three meal halls, he stripped the sheets and pillow off a bed in one of the sleeping halls and carried them out to the very edge of the colony where he had removed some of the poles from the fence. He could sleep there in peace, without the constant cloying presence of the other colonists. None of them ventured out that far, save for the occasional visit from Penny. His days were dominated by long periods of utter seclusion, punctuated by masses of colonists swarming around him at each mealtime. When he was alone, the broken bridges and inefficiencies of his meal box solution lingered in his mind. But Samuel began to sense the answer to everything lay in the four scraps of paper with their mysterious pictures.
He had tried several times to match the torn edges of any two scraps, but none of them aligned properly. They must have been ripped from different drawings altogether. And if that were the case, Samuel doubted whether he could make any sense of these pictures individually, if there was even anything to make sense of in the first place. So what if he had found a picture of a bed? What could such a picture possibly mean? And why might someone intend it to mean anything at all?
During his first night at the fence line, Samuel awoke from a frenzied dream. He had imagined himself in one of the meal halls, taking down a full box of meal cakes to distribute to a seemingly infinite horde of colonists. The process began with the same tedious repetition. Stoop down, grab a cake from the box, break it to the right size and pass it into a waiting hand. Stoop, grab, break, pass, stoop, grab, break, pass, over and over and over again. He saw the hands and arms close in around him and block out the light, as the limbs of this human forest grew into an impenetrable thicket, the branches brushing against his face, catching on his tunic. They were everywhere, no bodies, no faces, just little brown hands and arms all around him. He tried to work faster, to feed these insatiable limbs as quickly as they appeared, but for every hand that accepted a meal cake, two more seemed to spring up in its place.
Soon he could scarcely move at all. The hot acid churned in his stomach and stung the back of his throat. They began to grab at him now, these innumerable hands, at his tunic, his legs, arms, hands, face, grabbing and grabbing, mindless, bodiless hands, driven only by an incredible sense of wanting. Samuel began to struggle, but it was like fighting a mountain of fluffed pillows. The limbs wound themselves around him. Every blow he delivered was met not by solid flesh but by some insipid softness that absorbed the force and sucked him deeper into its hold. He tried to yell, and the hands pushed their way into his mouth. He tried to bite them, but it was like biting into thick, sticky mud. The hands gave way and then returned to clutch at his tongue, teeth, tonsils. They reached under his tunic, through the arm and neck holes, pushed into his nose and ears. He shut his eyes to keep fingers from poking into them. The arms encircled his throat, the little hands squeezed and he began to choke. Tiny stars flashed on the insides of his eyelids, then blurred and faded into darkness.
He awoke in the dark meadow, lying in the grass next to the partially disassembled fence, the blanket and sheets coiled around his body. He continued to thrash about for a few seconds until he opened his eyes and realized where he was. He stopped struggling and began to disentangle himself from the web of bedding. Then he sat bolt upright, ripped the sheets from his body and gathered them together in his arms. He sprinted across the meadow to the river, threw down the bundle of sheets at the foot of the bridge he had repaired and then destroyed, and tore them into long, thin strips as his hands quivered with joy. He knew how to fix the bridges.
When he had reduced the sheets to a heap of cloth ribbons, he draped them over his shoulders and waded into the river. He started at the cracked center of the bridge and used the sheets to lash two planks of wood around each of the broken spanning beams. From there he moved outward and tied on the cross planks that made up the walkway. As dawn broke over the colony, Samuel secured the last plank in place. He waded back to the shore and walked tentatively across the bridge. The planks held. He raced back across, then returned to the middle, jumped up and down a few times, and vaulted into the river.
Yet Samuel’s joy was short-lived. He knew daybreak forewarned the sound of the meal bells and the resumption of his burden. He sat on the river bank and allowed the first rays of sun to dry him. But he hardly needed to rest; he did not feel tired at all. A great flood of energy coursed through his veins, and it took all his self-control to sit still and bask in the day’s first light and wait to resume his work on the bridges once more. When the bells sounded, he sprinted to the nearest meal hall, rushed through his chore and then hurried through the other two halls. As he withdrew the last meal cake from the box in the third hall, he pulled with it a rough scrap of paper.
By now only a few cakes remained and Samuel was anxious to finish his task. He pocketed the drawing, passed out the remaining cakes and ducked out of the hall, far too eager to finish the bridges to consider the particular significance of this latest enigma.
He went to the nearest sleeping hall, stripped three beds of their sheets and blankets and returned to the fence to remove more poles. He realized he could work more efficiently if he cut the wood into manageable planks at the fence and then wrapped them in a bedsheet and dragged the whole bundle behind him to the river. By the midday meal, he had cut and hauled enough wood to repair two more bridges. Again he raced through his mealtime duties and flew back to the river.
Samuel completed the first bridge by mid-afternoon, rested for a few moments and moved on to the second. About an hour into his work, as he was about to carry a load of spanning planks into the river, an older male approached Samuel’s bridge. Samuel watched him curiously. It had become rare of late for another colonist to so willingly venture into his presence. Yet the man paid him no mind. He settled to his knees at the river’s edge, leaned his head forward and cupped his hands to drink. He started to rise and a sour look passed over his face. The man’s mouth drooped open and his tongue extended twice in a forceful, undulating movement, as if trying to expel some wretched flavor. His brow furrowed and his eyes crossed. He was halfway between kneeling and standing when his knees buckled, his eyes rolled back in his head and he crumpled to the ground.
From his position a few meters away, Samuel saw quite clearly the look that passed over the colonist’s face as he fell: eyes wide, lips pressed together and turned down at the corners. Samuel froze as the man dropped to the ground, then crept along the river bank to where the colonist lay motionless on the grass, the same expression etched on his cold, stony face, and in that moment, Samuel knew exactly what was meant by one of the pictures.
XVII
Samuel pulled the five scraps of paper from his pocket and sorted through them until he found the one he wanted. He turned the picture in his hands to find the proper orientation, knelt next to the colonist lying still and lifeless on the ground and compared the man’s face to the image on the lower right side of the paper.
The expression was the same: the circular, hairless head, the eyes that popped from their sockets and stared blankly into nothingness, the lips pinched together and turned down at the edges with a thin trail of spittle running down from the left side of the man’s mouth. And the wavy lines next to the face in the picture unmistakably represented the river. The two circular shapes above them remained a mystery, but Samuel had no doubts about the meaning of the lower images. The river, or something in the water of the river, had caused this man to collapse, had caused his face to look this way. Before Samuel had found this scrap of paper—what was it, two days ago now?—he had never seen anything like this happen to anyone in the colony. So whoever had made this picture knew what was going to happen to the river before it even happened.
Samuel sat down hard. He stared at the man’s lifeless face, then out at the river. The sluggish, blue-gray blur of the current muddled against the still, green backdrop, the colors
rubbing together like layers of crayon in a child’s drawing. His mind shut down. All conscious thoughts ceased, all except for one that played on over and over again, an eternal heartbeat in a desolate, gray wasteland. Someone knew. Someone knew. Someone knew.
Then his mind began to slowly reawaken, and the other thoughts came back to him one by one. But how could they know, how could they… unless… unless… unless the person who had made this picture had also done this thing to the river, the thing that made this man frown and shoot out his tongue, made his knees wobble as he began to stand, made his eyes widen and roll back in his head as he fell to the ground? Someone had done this thing to the river.
Samuel turned back to the colonist lying beside him. He had never seen a dead person before, much less seen anyone actually die, for the people of the colony died peacefully in their sleep at a predetermined age and were rolled into the sleeping hall floor when the beds were turned to be cleaned. As far as he could tell, the man had merely fallen into a deep, deep slumber from which he could not be roused. But Samuel knew, somehow, that his state was not a good one, was not at all desirable, was something to be avoided. The expression fixed on the man’s face tied Samuel’s innards in knots, yet he could not look away. It was the same expression that swept across his features as he fell, a look of ultimate pain and surprise, nothing like the blissful repose Samuel had noticed on the faces of colonists asleep in their beds. Something was very, very wrong, and it must be rectified as soon as possible. That one of the scraps of paper had specifically referenced this very incident made Samuel all the more uneasy.
Beside him, the river rolled on, smooth and steady as ever. Samuel had waded in its calm current just moments earlier. Yet something in the water had killed the colonist lying at his feet. If that something had been placed in the river itself, then it would wash away with the current in time and the water would be safe enough to drink. But when? And how would he know? Samuel did not dare drink from the river himself. He must assume the thing in the water was still there, find it and remove it. He walked briskly upstream along the river bank. Two more colonists lay motionless on the grass. He looked away and went on. In a few minutes he reached the point where the river escaped under the fence and away into the meadow beyond the colony. Another picture was caught in the junction between two fence posts.
Samuel recognized the circular image from the drawing of the poisoned river water. But he had no time for these pictures now. He knew he could not prevent the entire colony from drinking from the stream. He must do something at once, before too many colonists even had the chance to approach the river. He rested his arms on the upper cross pole of the fence and forced himself to think. Nothing came to him. His pulse throbbed in his head and echoed with the dull tick-tock of dampened bells. He stared down at the river where it surged under the fence. He was afraid to look behind him to see if more colonists had fallen along its banks. He must think. He must act. He must do something, anything. But still nothing came to him, only his own silent, rhythmic prodding. Think… think… think…
For the first time in many weeks, Samuel did not know what to do. Before this moment, he had scarcely needed the help of another person. Now there was no one who could help him. His breaths came short and hard, as though he had just sprinted from one meal hall to the next. Little trickles of moisture began to run down his brow. But still his mind remained blank. He closed his eyes, and his thoughts grew even more empty. He felt his skull attempting to burst out of his skin. He tried to slow his breathing. He could control that. With his eyes closed, it became easier to block out everything else. Soon even the sound of the rushing river water faded from his thoughts. He focused on the air flowing in and out of his chest. Breathe. In. Out. Slow. In. Out. In. Out. He opened his eyes and looked out to where the river ran down from the windswept mountains in the distance. It was a strangely peaceful sight, so long as he ignored the thought of the invisible toxin that coursed through the bloodstream of the colony. His breaths grew calm. In. Out. In. Out. His vision refocused and the river and the meadow beyond the fence came back sharp and clear.
About twenty meters outside the fence line, he could just make out a thin black tube that ran up to the river and dipped down into the dancing current. Samuel hoisted himself up to the top of the fence. He had one leg over the upper cross pole when he stopped. He had never passed beyond the fence line before. As far as he knew, no one in the colony had. Even after he had removed dozens of poles from the fence, he had never strayed beyond the imaginary line that extended between support posts. He started to swing his leg back to the colony’s side of the fence when he realized he had no choice. He must investigate that tube.
Samuel tightened his grip on the fence and hoisted his other leg over the pole. He was outside the fence now, outside the colony. He hurried to where the tube ran deep into the river and yanked it from the water. A viscous brown liquid leaked out one drop at a time. Samuel followed the tube away from the river, holding the dripping end aloft to halt the flow of the liquid. The black tube snaked across the meadow with no end in sight. Samuel pointed the hose away from him and the brown liquid continued to stain the grass at his feet. He took the tube in both hands and bent it in half. The flow stopped. He unbent the tube and wound it up again, cinching it together in a simple knot. Then he used the window latch to dig a shallow hole in the ground, placed the knotted end of the tube inside and buried it.
When he was done, he stood up and gazed around. The meadow was empty. It looked identical to the meadow of the colony, but without the swarms of people. He skimmed his feet over the ground. The grass here felt rougher, the blades broader and sharper beneath his toes. The mountains surged upward in defiant challenge to the flat, green valley, and the late-afternoon shadows rippled over the flanks of the peaks to make them appear alive and muscled, crouched and waiting at the edge of the plain. Samuel felt himself longing to stay, to be completely alone for just a little while. But he knew he had to check on the river. He forced himself to turn back toward the fence and return to the colony.
As he swung over the cross pole, a colonist approached the river in the distance, moving with an unmistakable, light, careless gait. The figure did not scurry across the meadow but walked more upright, more relaxed, than the other colonists. It walked like Penny. In an instant, Samuel had leapt down from the fence and was running along the river, yelling as he ran.
Penny heard Samuel’s cries as he sprinted after her, and she waved in his direction and continued toward the river, gesturing for him to follow. He raced on headlong. Fear crept over her face as he closed in, but she drifted ever closer to the water. Samuel’s legs churned madly. For a moment he thought she might run, might make for the stream. He drove himself forward. Then he was on her, grabbing her around the waist and dragging her to the ground as a breathless shriek caught in her chest.
Samuel tried to explain. “The river… you can’t drink it… not yet…”
But as he held her to the ground, he saw another colonist kneel on the bank farther downstream and stoop forward to cup some water between his hands and raise it to his mouth. Samuel leapt to his feet and was about to call out a warning when he realized he needed to know if the river water was safe. By then it was too late. The colonist dipped his head forward and drank. Samuel waited, his head thumping. But the colonist stood and walked away without distress. Samuel slumped against Penny in relief as she fluttered beneath him, then he recovered himself and helped her to her feet.
“What is it?” she asked. “What is happening?”
“Nothing,” he said. “It’s nothing. Let us go and take a drink.”
They walked side by side to the river, knelt along the bank and dipped their hands into the cool rushing water. Samuel raised his hands first, paused a moment, then sipped the liquid from his palms. It tasted cold and fresh and wonderful. Penny drank, then stooped to fill her hands a second time, and Samuel quickly splashed another handful of water into his mouth. Penny sucked up he
r second palmful in one long, slow slurp, and Samuel felt the frantic rhythms of his body subside as she gazed at him over fingers cupped against her lips. He smiled at her and slid to his knees for one more drink.
XVIII
As the sun rose and the sky leaked blood-red the morning after the deaths at the river, Samuel removed another two dozen poles from the fence. Using the sheets from two beds, he lashed together six rafts, one for each colonist who had died, loaded each body onto a raft and pushed them into the middle of the river. The current carried them down to the edge of the colony, under the fence and away, across the outer meadow. Then he returned to his work at the meal halls, which he had neglected the previous evening. The boxes were full to the brim, and Samuel gave everyone double their normal ration to compensate for his absence.
The next day, Samuel finished his repairs on the remaining two collapsed bridges. When he had tied on the final piece of wood, Samuel waded out of the water and lay on the river bank, basking in the sun. He breathed easy now, felt his arms unclench and his fingers peel open. He knew he had just averted a major disaster two days before. Yet he had been up to the challenge once again. And now the bridges he had so long neglected were finally complete. He closed his eyes against the bright sunlight and stretched his limbs as far as they would go, spreading himself out on the soft grass and feeling with self-satisfied pleasure the lean tautness of the muscles in his narrow arms and legs, their every movement, contraction and relaxation a physical extension of the will of his mind.