Savages

by Christina Bergling

  And we did. He always found something for us. A day later with a roasted squirrel in my gut, I felt only shame at pleading to eat a man who had ambushed us with an axe. I couldn’t look into his eyes for another two days.

  “Front door?” he said, a statement and a question.

  I broke from his path and climbed the small stairs to the cement porch of the house. Pieces of the fallen fence where sloppily nailed over the large window beside the door. They were thrown up hastily and askew, nails bent and slammed in sideways. There were hatch marks in the wood and in the siding from an attack, where someone had tried to force their way in.

  Crushed against the bottom of the house, buried under dust out of sight, I could make out the remains of a doll and a toy car. A plastic leg jutted up from the dirt beside clumps of matted synthetic hair. The rest of the doll was impacted in the ground, half buried like a tiny corpse. I could not make out the color of the toy car. It was all brown, but I could articulate the small wheels, the recognizable shape. I felt my knees swoon as a flash of my son on the carpet with his fleet of toy cars threatened to wash up over me. He duplicated the rumbling noises of motors and the squealing of tires as he smashed the small toys together. He turned his face up to me as he smiled when he realized I was laughing as I watched him. I was snapped back to this reality, to the dusty broken toys of dead children, by the sound of his footsteps on the roof.

  I could track his movements on the house by the sound—the only sound in the silence. I could picture him entering and moving through the house in his standard, practiced execution. Always through the roof. It puzzled me as to how they never thought to fortify the attic or roof and how they never thought to attack through the roof. They were all open and vulnerable, easy.

  I followed the sound of his boots across the shingles, slow and methodical. They scuffed from where he scaled the wall, making a small perimeter then settling at the distant edge. Next, I heard the splintering smash, which I assumed to be the small vent into the attic. Pieces tumbled down to softly thud on the dead grass as he cleared his entry. Bumps and fumbling through the confined space; I could almost taste the stale air with him. I closed my eyes to put my mind with him and avoid those damned toys.

  I heard the attic ladder slam down followed by a quick series of footsteps weaving their way closer to me. There was a scrape on the other side of the door as he lifted the bar bracing it, the rub of metal as he slid the latch, the click as he twisted the locks. Then he held the door open for me.

  I stepped in cautiously, almost crouching into the dim light. It was a house, once even a home. The comforts of carpet and stairs and walls seemed more foreign the longer we were on the road. Shelter seemed instinctually confining. I felt my body shrink into itself, tight and guarded in what used to define my normal.

  The furniture was largely gone. I imagine they burned it through the winter. The empty rooms reminded me of house hunting with my husband with a bump on my belly. Walking into these strange and empty houses and concocting futures out of them. Him holding my hand by the ends of my fingers as he led me through each. I tried to fight all these artifacts of life that threatened to rip me into memory and regret. Ghosts and phantoms were licking at my neck as I pushed through the now vacant house.

  We went to the kitchen first. Food always took priority. He turned on the faucet, and it sputtered a bit of black water into the sink before he shut it back off.

  “Unfortunate,” I said. “You think they found ground water?”

  He grunted and turned to the fridge. As he took the handle in one hand, he lifted his small knife in the other. I pressed my back into the counter and rested my fingers on my cutlass. We both took a breath together, and he snatched the door open.

  Empty, dark, surprisingly clean. He rolled his eyes and let the door fall closed.

  I shrugged. Empty was better than a rabid raccoon, or a stack of severed hands, or the wrapped corpse of a newborn as we had found in other refrigerators. I let my hand fall on the knob of the cabinet. I noticed the white handle with small pink flowers brushed on it looked exactly like those in my grandmother’s kitchen, where I would climb into the pots cabinet and eat crackers in my cave.

  Damn this house.

  Was I really even here? Was this just another fever dream starving in the desert? I slipped my hand into my pocket and pinched my thigh until my hand trembled. Pain blazed up my nerves and flashed over my body. Nope, not dreaming.

  My grandmother’s weathered pots and pans did not greet me in the cabinet.

  “Holy shit,” I said, mouth agape.

  He stopped opening and slamming empty drawers and turned. I held the cabinet doors open and turned to him, my jaw still dangling.

  “Holy shit,” he breathed.

  From top to bottom, the cabinet was stacked with canned goods. Rows and rows of glorious pictures of baked beans, corn, fruit cocktail, cocktail weenies, Spam. My stomach seized as the well-composed pictures got my mouth watering. This could feed us for weeks, months. I could almost feel myself smiling.

  “Preppers?” I laughed.

  “Close enough. Love those crazy bastards!” He took a can of beans in his hand and gave it an almost affectionate, longing look. “We need a bag or something to tote this shit around.”

  “We can’t stay?”

  “Only a night or two. You know the drill. Can’t risk them having scouts or parties coming back home, or those other drifters.”

  “Always have to keep moving.”

  “Right.”

  I was so tired of moving. Even faced with this upsetting house, the thought of continuing to trudge out on the road was always crushing.

  He walked out of the kitchen a little lighter. I would venture to say almost skipping through the shadows if I didn’t know him better. I trailed behind him, letting a smile tease at my lips. Food. One major necessity handled in the immediate, allowing us, for just the briefest of seconds, to think about anything else.

  “Bug out bags!” I heard him yell from one of the back rooms. “Ditch that rejected high school shit; we finally got you a proper bag.”

  There were four of them propped in the corner, straps facing out, ready to go.

  “Why didn’t they bug out?” I asked as he pushed one into my arms. I dropped with the weight of it.

  “Too scared maybe. Thought they could secure things here better. They did for a while, clearly.”

  “Until we came along.”

  “Until they came after us.”

  He was like a kid at Christmas, tearing open the bag and marveling over its contents. He sat on the floor and pulled the first bag between his legs, letting his twitching feet betray his composure. I stood behind him and leaned against the wall, like I had many times over the shoulders of my boys attacking their latest present or toy.

  Once he was settled, he slowly unzipped the bag and spread it open. He began plunging his hands in and meticulously lining up the contents on the carpet beside him.

  Three plastic bottles and several sheets of tablets.

  “Water filtration bottles and iodine tablets,” he said.

  Thin silver packages with labels on the front.

  “Dehydrated food.”

  A small folded square of silver fabric.

  “Reflective mat.”

  A crushed box of Ziploc bags, a bag with matches lining the bottom, another with a crushed roll of toilet paper.

  “Dry bags.”

  A small axe with a leather sheath, a black hunting knife in a canvas holster, a folded camping shovel, a couple of small black boxes.

  “Tools, obviously. Compass. Flint.”

  A spool of wire with a hook stuck into the top.

  “Fishing gear.”

  At the bottom, a couple of bundles.

  “Tent, blankets, a couple long sleeved shirts.”

  “Holy shit,” I said again.

  “You can say that again. And again.”

  I could not deny that this one house was a lifesaver
. We could survive off these scores for months, longer. It was an unfamiliar idea. I did not quite know how to process it, how to accept the concept that we could be okay for just a moment.

  “Bring me some of that food,” he said. “We’re going to need to repack these bags, take as much as we can.”

  “What do we do with what we can’t take?”

  “Not sure. I don’t want to leave any of it. We’ll probably never be back here again. But it would be such a waste. Let me see what we can fit first.”

  I returned to the kitchen that had gone from haunting to salvation and began stacking the cans of goods into my arms. My cutlass felt foreign and abandoned dangling from my belt, bouncing against my leg. It belonged in my hand; it lived in my fingers. But I took a breath and lowered it down, let it hang lifeless for the moment. Food was always the priority. I almost wanted to let myself enjoy the moment and the sweet sensation of all the weight and cans pressing into my forearms.

  I walked awkwardly back down the hall, leaning back to allow the cans to balance on my chest. One, then two, leapt from my arms and bounced off my foot and against the carpet. I should have flinched at the noise, at identifying our position. Yet I just smiled to myself and continued my mission.

  I knelt beside him and piled the cans beside his itemized array of new supplies. Then I turned to retrieve the fallen cans and their other compatriots.

  “There’s no way it all fits,” I said over his shoulder when the entire mound was next to him.

  “Have a little faith. Food is the priority obviously, but canned goods are heavy. We can sacrifice some of this other shit; we’ve been living without it long enough. But we take as much food as we can bear to carry.”

  He propped two empty bags up beside him and began lining the bottoms with cans. After each layer, he hefted the bags to test the weight. Then he continued stacking. Once the bags dragged hard toward the ground when he lifted them, he began to fill in the space with the meager possessions from our former bags and the supplies from the floor.

  A small pile of cans did remain on the floor, but I was impressed at how much he had managed to Tetris into those bug out bags.

  Calmly, I looked down at him. Then the wave swelled up within me, taking me by surprise and causing me to waver in my boots. Every cell in my body screamed to touch him. Repopulate. Flesh. Connection. Yet every iota of my logic screamed no. Somewhere within me, primal wiring crossed, carnage intersected carnal, adrenaline begged endorphins. After being so close to death, I wanted to feel alive. With each survival, I felt closer to him, and something in me begged to consummate that.

  My desire for him was like my desire to eat my gun every morning. It was not something I did; it was something I lived with.

  “We gotta check the other house,” he said, thankfully snapping me back to myself.

  The finds had animated him; he was no longer trudging. He had been infected by an energy different than that of victory. I strained to separate my consciousness as far as possible from my foolish flesh and focused on following him again. We abandoned our former bags on the dingy, flattened carpet and heaved their replacements onto our backs.

  We exited through the sliding glass door into the backyard, which adjoined three others. The deck furniture was twisted into a barely recognizable mass of metal and shattered glass. The grass had long ago perished and crunched under our feet. A doghouse slumped forgotten beside the fallen fence.

  That’s when we heard it, the sound piercing the silent world. It split my skull. My uterus tightened, and my nipples flushed as if milk was flooding in. It was the cry of a child. It was that unmistakable infant scream.

  3

  He froze in front of me, mid-stride, one foot dangling above the ground. When was the last time we had heard a child? Could children still exist in this place? I felt something familiar and forgotten well up inside me. Quivering, I heard my breathing fall quick and shallow; I felt tears on my cheeks.

  The world started to flicker as I hyperventilated. I saw him turn and tip his ballistic sunglasses forward to look at me before the scene blinked out. In these endless seconds, I saw the square lights of the delivery room, the blonde curls tied back on the nurse coaching me and holding my anesthetized leg, the blue cap of the doctor looking between my legs. Dante’s hand clutched my shoulder as he leaned forward anxiously. I was losing him to the moment, to his anticipation. My lungs were burning as Goldilocks counted eight…nine…ten… beside me. My leg trembled in her arms; my face contorted as I pushed, pushed blindly into relief. “It’s a boy,” Dante was crying. I felt a smile tease my exhausted lips. Then his cry ruptured the world.

  I threw up the barbecue chips at our feet.

  We didn’t speak; he continued to look at me over dusty sunglasses, volumes spoken in that silence. For the first time in our many months or years, I thought I might have seen fear in the edges of his face, actual panic; somewhere writhing beneath well-checking me. This was something he did not know how to handle.

  The continued sound of the infant shrieking brought me back. I breathed deliberately through my mouth as I followed him, counting my exhales like in yoga to focus my mind, keeping those hazardous memories at bay. Eight…nine…ten…

  The sound persisted, kept shooting out of the next house at us like arrows, threatening to fracture the planet until it divided underneath us and swallowed us whole. How could a sound that once governed my world be so foreign and unbelievable? I didn’t know I could want to die more than I did the day before, any of those hellish days before. It was as if I could feel the sound breaking against me, as if we were battling our way against prevailing winds.

  We marched tentatively across the brittle grass and into the house that shared the backyard. Their small community. No safety procedures this time. No cautious casing and entry. He plowed through the sliding glass door, barreled through the kitchen without a glance to evaluate any resources. The child lured him in with singular focus.

  The interior of the house whipped past me in a blur as I kept my eyes to his back and my steps at his heels. My heart thudded in my ears as I just kept counting my breath and following mechanically.

  We found him in a closet at the top of the stairs. A closet: smart, more secure. His small body was swaddled in tattered blankets on the floor. He could be left on the floor alone while his parents went to slay drifters; he was too young to move. He was conceived and born into this disgusting world; he would have no memory of the one we mourned before it.

  He stopped in front of the closet, frozen, arms down at his sides, weapons still in hand. He just stared down at the whimpering ball of flesh. Then he all of a sudden roused, slipped his sword into its sheath on his back, tucked his gun into a holster, and bent down very slowly as he reached to cradle the infant.

  I couldn’t watch. The hallway closed in around me. It was suddenly so stifling, so unsafe. The sound of my own erratic breathing deafened me. My hands went numb; I could feel myself starting to shake. I turned and ran. I sprinted down the carpeted steps, over the torn linoleum in the kitchen, back out into the glaring light of the dead backyard. My steps were sloppy and desperate. I staggered out onto the rotten grass and just meandered in a circle, digging my hands into my hair.

  He had the small child enveloped in his arms when he caught up to me, ratty blanket dangling out from his embrace. He was looking down at the child, whose fit had now dwindled down to shuddering sobs. The baby was bright red from screaming. I turned away from them and leaned forward with my hands on my knees, struggling to find my breath. He stepped around me to face me and just looked up at me calmly.

  “If we take this child, it will get us killed,” I finally said.

  “If we don’t, what we have done will kill this child.”

  “Children die now. They all die. This world is not good enough for them anymore. I had children. I buried my babies.”

  “You’re a mother, and you can say that?”

  “I say that because I am a mother. W
as a mother. I miss my babies every day, but I would rather them be buried than living through this.”

  “We killed his chance. We did that. Not this world. He’s our responsibility.”

  “Is that like intervening when a woman is being beaten to death? It would be a mercy not a tragedy.”

  “Was it mercy in that field today?”

  “No. That was survival. The survival you taught me.”

  “So what then? We leave him to starve? We beat his head in with a rock like the fucking savages? Tell me.”

  I had no words. I stood breathing, reeling. As always, I could not argue with him, no matter how my very core screamed against it. I could not walk his line unless he dragged me.

  “You expect me to be his new mother,” I said coldly, looking away.

  “I expect you to be a human being. We are still that after all—humans. As long as we’re living.”

  “One happy family,” I muttered, turning and storming back into the second house.

  A fucking baby. How could there be a fucking baby in this world? How could he want to take this fucking baby around this world? This was going to get us fucking killed. I could not be around that goddamn baby, could not have it stirring up all I buried in those two small graves. I felt the throbbing of rage and panic and fear and pain and every single heavy emotion that had ever slammed through my veins. My eyes were welling up, and I was teetering on the edge of the present again.

  “This one looks like me, too”, Dante cooed into my ear as the new babe suckled at my breast between us. Dante pressed his hand against the top of the tiny head as I ran my finger slowly along the miniature arm. “No baby, not so lucky this time,” I replied calmly. “Those are my eyes. Just you wait.”

  I crouched against a wall sobbing as my former life receded.

  Dante.

  Jordi.

  Eli.

  I could not keep their names from dancing in the wrinkles of my brain. Three sets of eyes, two brown and one hazel, staring at me, dead and lifeless. Three voices echoed around my mind, beckoning me from the past. I could not escape my boys; their ghosts perpetually possessed me, held me permanently as their prisoner to our lost and haunted life. They pulled me into the undertow; a sea of memory nearly drowned me then abandoned me once more. They left me sputtering on the empty shore. Alone.