The Feed

by Nick Clark Windo

  Tom freezes. Danny freezes.

  “Nigel, I—”

  They all freeze. Then the bare-chested man hurls his towel at Danny’s face with a cry and barges a table over. They haven’t seen outsiders this near, up close, for so many years, and Tom at first can’t move. This can’t be real. Computers avalanche to the floor as the man careens toward a jacket on a chair, making a jabbering noise as he runs. Tom still stands while Danny leaps, but the man is too fast: he knocks Danny back with an elbow to his face and stamps on his knee. Then he grapples a gun from the jacket and thrusts it at Danny, at Tom, at Danny again. His hands are shaking and the safety is off. His mouth chews at the air before choking out malformed words.

  “Who you? What you done with Margaret?”

  “I—I don’t know,” Danny stammers. “Listen, friend, we’re not a threat.”

  “Back!” The man jabs the gun’s snout at them. The sinews in his neck strain and his bloodshot eyes are bulbous. “No you move or I fucking shoot you. Nigel?” he calls back into the corridor. His speech is slow, words still clearly hard to find even after all these years. “Margaret? The fuck you done to them?” His eyes are wild as he whips the gun back and forth, the ugly, stubby thing. A shot from this distance will be brutal.

  Danny, his voice a calming murmur, raises himself on his elbows. “Hey, pal, why don’t you just—”

  “Said don’t move!” the man screeches, then corrects himself. “You,” he commands Danny, “there.” He flicks the muzzle between them, drawing Danny across the room like an angler until he is next to Tom, a gun’s narrow arc between them. “You got food?”

  It’s dark, near impossible to see, but Tom catches a very animal expression in his eyes. How pale the man is. How the filthy skin sucks his ribs. The sores coloring his skin. “Yes, we have food,” Tom whispers, and nods. “Outside.” The gun steadies on his chest. “It’s hidden,” he adds, but the sound of the explosion is too loud for the size of the room, and muzzle flash eradicates the shadows for a blinding instant. The man’s bare chest erupts in a tangle of gristle and bone as he is flipped around, his gun spasm-firing, the room flaring bright again. Chips fleck up from the floor. Something sears across Tom’s thigh as the man collapses against a table, unleashing an animal sound. Danny jumps on him, smothering him, while Tom limps across the room and, coming at him from the side, pushes Graham’s arm down and rolls the gun out of the old man’s grasp.

  They skid through puddles, shoulder their way through doors and back out onto the forecourt, where Tom snatches up the chain. Take it as a weapon? His hands are uncontrollable. He tries to tie it, misses, misses again. Anything to slow these people down. Which people? Who? A shot smacks out. Fragments of tarmac burst. Danny and Graham flinch wildly as they push the cart to speed, while Tom scans the blank windows above them. Another shot and a feeling like a massive beetle flying unimaginably quickly past his ear. A long muzzle emerges. Tom raises his own gun and shoots. Turns. Runs. No more shots have been fired by the time he catches them, their eyes wild, their feet flying, the cart’s wheels thrumming the tarmac, jarring on the cracks.

  “Are they after us?” Danny gasps. “Are they coming?”

  They force the cart around corners, heaving it and ramming it through the guardhouse gates. The empty road is different now. It stretches before them. Wrecked cars are places of ambush; leafy trees where people can hide. Behind them, from the facility, the buzz of motorbikes fires up.

  “We need to put roads between us,” Tom shouts as he runs. “Crossroads!”

  As they career down a slope, the cart picks up speed. They let it.

  “We need to hide,” Danny yells back.

  “We have to hide the cables and fuel!”

  Graham’s breath heaves, his gray-blue eyes petrified. With small, rapid strides, his gait is neither fast nor sustainable. He clearly doesn’t have the strength for this. As the cart hits a crevice, the wheels crunch and jump. It goes faster.

  “We need to ditch this!” Danny shouts, yanked forward even as he’s trying to control it.

  “It’s what we came for!”

  “Tom, we have to hide!”

  A motorbike buzzes over the crossroads behind them, doesn’t take their turn. Tom spins to look, trips, rips his knuckles to the bone, and Danny and Graham are twenty feet away, thirty, more. He gets up. Hand to face. Feet pounding. The motorbikes’ roar drowns all else under the low-clouded sky.

  “Flip the cart,” he shouts after them, his stomach clenching with pain.

  “Fuck the cart!” Danny cries back.

  “No!” He sprints to catch up with them, grasps the metal lip, heaves and digs his feet in to stop it. His thigh explodes with pain as more blood bursts into his jeans. “Get these off,” he pants, hauling off a keg, which nearly smashes his foot. He uncaps it and rolls it away, gushing fuel, as Danny wrestles the others. “Tip the cart! Roll the kegs off the road!”

  Tom pushes, and runs, and looks back, and runs, the keg ringing like a bell, its rolling dents scuffing his palms, energen-gen-gen whizzing around. Fuel on his feet, the ends of his trousers slapping. Danny and Graham race for the trees. Tom abandons his keg to gulp out fuel and jumps off the road. Winded, he stands and runs again, lifting his legs like a hurdler over the grass. Two motorbikes crest the hill as he reaches the trees. Will he vomit? His throat is too dry; it won’t be possible. He does and tries to keep it quiet as the bikes stop by the cart. People shout and point. The bikes race off: one away, while the other stops by his keg in the road. The man dismounts. Woman. It’s a woman. Would he kill her if he had to? Crush her throat like Guy’s, like Ben’s— She looks at the keg and then up off the road directly at him.

  He pulls back.

  Is she now approaching, gun out, gun up, halfway here? Should he glance out again?

  He does. The road is empty. The motorbike’s still running; could he make it there in time? Then he sees her some trees away. Searching. She takes tall steps over the undergrowth, her pointed features framed by a dark bob. A breeze blows up. The branches shake and the leaves hiss. Tom creeps backward, keeping the thick trunk between them. She’s so close he dare not breathe. And one of the sticks under his feet will snap, surely? Now that he has circled around the tree he is in plain view of the road, and he sees a motorbike in the distance, tearing back toward them, its growl irritating the air. Still the woman peers into the wood, her back to him, and he rests his hands on the bark. Blood on his hands. Graham shot someone. Why shouldn’t he? All in self-defense.

  Tom pulls out the gun and thumbs off the safety. The motorbike has disappeared in a dip, but when it reappears, he will be caught. The woman moves to the next tree, her eyes on the deeper wood. They both hear the motorbike. She turns to look; he doesn’t; he pushes in against the trunk, pulling the gun to his chest. The motorbike comes in loud and the woman is back on the verge beside it, shouting, pointing. They both rev up and spin around and speed back up the road until he can’t hear the engines anymore, only the bashing of the trees and the crackle of the leaves. There’s the sodden smell of moss. A massive pain crushes his lower back. His legs are jellied, his skin cold with sweat. And he has to put his hands to his face to prize open his jaw to breathe.

  When he calls for them, they take a while to emerge. They see their own fear reflected in one another’s eyes. They see the dirt on one another’s faces and where the tears have run rivulets through it. They right the cart in silence, raise the kegs, the colorful bundles of cables, and all their other stuff, and lash it down with shaking hands.

  They find a turnoff as soon as they can, and then they take a smaller track. Old-style warning signs tell them to keep out, that they will be prosecuted, that there is danger of death. Tom cuts the chain on the gates, and past a tangled thicket of bushes they find a sheltered overhang.

  “Let’s sleep,” he says. “And then we’ll travel by night. No fires. No sound. Let’s go home.”

  When it is dark, they reluctantly rejoin the ro
ad—they can’t move the cart over the earth. The world is spectral, the clouds silvered scuffs. Tom’s injured fingers throb. His thigh stings, and through the rip across his trousers he sees a puckered-open slash, stanching and welling as he limps, dark shadows glinting on its crusting edge in the grayed-out light. They talk rarely but listen a lot. They hear engines gunning on nearby roads and their eyes widen in the night.

  A bird starts to warble, a specter dipping along the hedgerows beside them. Later, another trills in. Within minutes the dawn chorus cascades through the air, the sky rounded by the heart-pumping escalation of scales. They are back on the outskirts of the village and pass one of the burning cars, now cold and rough to the touch. There are no foxes, and only a few scattered bones in the gutter.

  “That’s a chaffinch,” Danny says after a while, pointing somewhere up ahead, the first speech among them for hours. “You can tell by the upward cadence of its call.”

  The bird screeches again and Tom squints as it launches from a twisted pylon: a Feed mast for a rural zone. Others follow it, arcing to branches, each and every bird as green as the translucent ash leaves catching the dawn. Their wings are like darts and their tails carry something of the Jurassic. “They’re parakeets, you fool!” he says, chuckling, and Danny breaks out laughing, discovered, before they press on in silence.

  Tom soon notices Danny avoiding all the manhole covers in threes.

  “Every little helps,” Danny quips. And then, approaching a crossroads, the three of them see it at once. The silence expands around them until: “Holy fuck,” Danny whispers.

  There is a man ahead. He has been stripped, flipped, and tied to a pole. His feet have been nailed to the wood. His knees have been smashed, his throat sliced, and his nose and genitals removed. Birds are on him. Dogs are beneath him, licking his blood from the pole. No sudden movements, but still the animals turn. Their blood-lipped mouths quiver. The threat of stones barely keeps them back, pawing the earth and muscular. But eventually the birds peck and tear the corpse’s skin again and the dogs turn back to wait for bits to fall.

  They spend the day inside a house from whose bookshelves flow gummy waterfalls of rotting mulch. The quilts are thick with floral patterns of overgrown mold that has expanded up the walls. Midday sun bakes the day outside and time pulls on like the tide. Dogs and foxes pad in clans separately through the debris. Birds land and scrabble on the roof. Sometime in the broken afternoon Tom hears the sound of engines, gunshots . . . a mass of dogs barks. Two motorbikes roll up the road, circling the debris, the helmeted riders looking. And then deep silence fills the world once more.

  Dusk comes. It’s the time of skylarks and house martins for a while. Then, with nothing but the creaking of wheels, they roll out into the night. Tom limps as efficiently as he can. Nothing else until a quick-moving figure slips out from another house. He leaves the door gaping wide and follows them, confidently, at a distance.

  Away from the village and into the deep countryside they go, followed all the way. At its darkest, when the world is most quiet, Danny starts to sing softly, and Tom and Graham join in. Songs whose words Tom had forgotten he knows, tunes he has not heard for years, whose words rise unbidden in his mind with emotions too snagged not far behind. They stop long before dawn for food and sit on the cart, leaning against the kegs and bales. Danny passes pignuts around, throws some into his mouth. The sky is clear above them, the stars like pinpricks through space and time, and Tom shakes the nuts and selects one, pebble-sized, to hold in the air.

  “I’m not sure I remember this right—I heard it as a child—but if you hold up a grain of sand, it will obscure ten thousand galaxies. Ten thousand galaxies, of billions of stars each, covered by one single grain.”

  Graham and Danny both tilt their heads up.

  “Do you reckon there are aliens?” Danny asks after a while.

  Graham chuckles. “I remember a comic strip from when I was a child. That one with the boy and the tiger. They said the surest sign of intelligent life in space is that it has never come to see us. They were very wise, those two.”

  “Do you think if we asked them nicely they’d help?” Danny says. “There must be someone up there who can save us.” He arcs his arm expansively across the sky, then his face falls. “Fuck, do you think it’s aliens?” he whispers, aghast, and points at his head. His eyes are suddenly very wide. “Y’know, who got into Guy’s and Jane’s minds? Aliens!”

  “Oh . . . don’t be ridiculous,” Graham mutters after a shocked pause.

  “More likely to be the Chinese or something, right? Those China lads,” Tom adds, surprised by Danny’s thoughtlessness, trying to make whatever happened to Jane better somehow, somehow more palatable than . . . aliens. Maybe it had been the Chinese; they had been an immense technological power, developing similar things. But China had collapsed with every other country. The truth was no one had known who was responsible. Not Ben, not his father—whoever these people were who had brought about the Collapse had remained anonymous to the end.

  “Jane reminded me the other day of those colonists up on Mars,” Graham states quietly, his voice dark. He glances briefly up at them. “Do you think—”

  “No, listen,” Danny interrupts, his eyes glinting; he’s warming to his theme. “I’m sure I saw a whole load of ents about aliens doing this sort of thing—”

  “Exactly, Danny, ents,” Tom stresses. “They weren’t real! It was people, but why . . . ?”

  “Ooh!” Danny exclaims. “I just remembered a fact too!” He pops in another nut. “Do you know how many cells there are in the human body?”

  Tom and Graham shake their heads.

  “No, I mean that’s a genuine question. How many cells are there in the human body?”

  “I thought you were telling us the fact?” Tom points out.

  “A million?” Graham muses. “We’ll raise it in the next knowledge session. Maybe Kate or Sean knows.” He shakes his head. “But our pool is getting smaller.”

  “Anyway, anyway,” Danny races on, “the point is that all these cells are dying all the time, right? And they’re being replaced. So,” he says, cocking an eyebrow, “how long do you think it takes for all the cells in our body to change?”

  Graham glances at Tom. They both shrug.

  “Seven years. That’s what I just remembered. Seven years ago you were actually, physically, a different man from now. Isn’t that cool?” Danny nods contentedly and lobs another nut into his mouth. “I learned that at college, when I was doing law.”

  Tom looks at him. “You were never going to be a lawyer.”

  Danny shrugs. Jumps off the cart and gets into the harness. “I’d’ve been a millionaire by now.”

  And as they travel through the cool night air, talking more freely about the past than they ever have before, confident now that they’ve lost their pursuers, a figure follows them in the darkness, just close enough to be able to listen and quietly enough not to be heard.

  During the next day, they sleep outdoors under the bramble bushes at the edge of a beech thicket, taking turns to watch each other as the crickets bask and the sun cooks the earth. They walk through the following night in silence, hearing voices on the wind and, as dawn spreads, seeing people who are not there; maybe they used to be, or will be in the future, but Tom, Danny, and Graham don’t care anymore because they are ravenous and they stink. They are beat. And as the sunlight melts the sky, it feels like reality is washed away. They become effervescent with the nearness of home.

  They hit the downward track, the grasses of the valley, and when they finally reach the lawn, Danny lays himself flat and, crumpled over, kisses the earth. Shouts go up, and Bea and Jack run at them. They leap on Danny, who keeps his face to the earth, hiding his tears, Tom sees, while Graham stands still, leaning back, hands in his pockets, observing their camp with a small smile on his exhausted face. And Tom feels something melt inside himself too: relief, safety, hope, all the good things in the world about bei
ng home, though when he is in the shower later, he examines the raw mouths of the blisters on his hands, the scratches etching his body, and the swollen bloody fissure on his thigh, and he notices, as if examining someone else, that he has lost weight in those few days. And Kate, later still, after dressing his wounds, watches him sleep throughout the night and into the following day.

  The unfamiliar feeling of a T-shirt—threadbare—pulled over washed skin brings back memories of his childhood, of going to bed on summer nights while it was light, of the world being topsy-turvy as he was supposed to sleep while it was blatantly still day. And here washes up the dreamlike memory of an evening when he went downstairs to find his parents, his bones hurting deeply, and one of his father’s friends had called him—had he?—“the Experiment.” He had heard that, he was sure, holding the handle. The familiar click of the kitchen latch as the farmhouse door closes reminds him that he’s home now. With Kate. Sean has demanded a camp meeting before lunch, but now they climb the hill together, the tree canopy cocooning them. He has left his boots unlaced, his feet unbound in their cracked leather shells. Bea collects leaves as the shadows of the branches of oaks and plane trees grab her. Kate holds the silence. Then she stops.

  “I’m glad you’re back, Tom.”

  “Me too.”

  “I was worried.”

  “Me too.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  He tries to hide his limp as he starts to climb the dark-earthed hill again, but Kate grips his fingers and grabs his elbow while Bea is too far away to hear.