The Feed

by Nick Clark Windo

  “It’s a lot for a little girl to take in, sweetie,” Kate whispers softly. Her hands are shaking; she turns the little girl’s pale face to hers, her hands nearly covering her ears. Her words are stranded together, a murmur, a plea. “And don’t worry, Bea, don’t worry. It happens so rarely, it won’t happen to us, there’s nothing to be afraid of. But this is why someone is always awake—”

  “To kill the others,” Sean restates, “if they’re taken. Do you get it, Bea?”

  There is a silence in which Bea starts to cry, her face, still held tightly in Kate’s hands, crumpling as fat tear globes grow from her squeezed-closed eyes. Kate turns beseechingly to Tom. “That’s enough!” she says, but, “This is nonnegotiable,” Sean continues impassively, rapping his knuckles on the tabletop. “Lack of adherence to the rules will be met with disciplinary action. They’re not rules. They’re facts. Facts of survival.”

  “Okay,” Tom says, “I think that’s—”

  “I had to kill my wife.” Sean’s voice is shaking, his hands are shaking, held out before him as if something is going to erupt. “I had to kill my wife. Do you think the fuck I wanted to do that? It’s the way the world is. Get used to it. Strengthen up.”

  “A-and that is what happened to Jane?” Bea stutters before Tom can even interject.

  “Yes, Bea,” Danny says softly, glancing from Sean to Tom to Kate, and reaching over to take Bea’s little hands. “She was taken and Graham had to stop it.”

  Bea turns her teary gaze from Danny to look directly at Tom. Her pupils are vast as the candlelight catches the blue around them, this girl who is not even yet six. “And Guy?” she asks, her voice quivering. “You made him dead too, Daddy?”

  Tom stares at her, at her round cheeks framed by her irregularly chopped hair, at her eyes, almost tired with shock. Kate’s watching him too. Exhausted. Petrified. They look so similar, these two. He nods, his jaw tensing. He knows he is breaking her world. “You just have to do it, darling. You see their pain.”

  And now, instead of Bea’s shocked face, he sees Guy’s. The pain. The feeling of Guy’s throat collapsing in his grasp. And then it’s Ben’s, and the grass beneath Guy’s head is the woolen carpet under Ben’s at the top of the tower, when each second flooded Tom forward from the moment he made the decision, when he saw the pained twitching on his brother’s face as something broke into his brain, and he was shaking his life away. The horror of what he had to do, of what he was already doing. That horror had been flooding everyone’s lives, everyone in the world. Their only choice: killing the people they loved and enduring the filthy guilt, or drowning in the lurking terror that their loved ones weren’t themselves. It was turning them into monsters. The horror and the paranoia, competing with each other, tightening the city, choking the world until it broke. It broke. It collapsed and brought them here.

  “And . . . that’s why you watch us? Because you would do this to me?” Bea asks.

  The next morning, the morning of Bea’s birthday, there are no shadows. All normal tasks on the rotas are ignored. Bunting goes up beneath the clouds; tables are brought outside and decorated with leaves and flowers. All this change confuses Bea, just six, only six, and still with him, for a while.

  “It’s like a holiday,” Tom tells her. “To celebrate your birthday.”

  “Lift me higher, please.”

  He does; he puts his hands under her feet so she can stand on his shoulders and reach higher into the tree.

  “A holiday,” he continues, “is a day when everyone can forget their troubles and not worry about the future for once, to be with the ones they love.”

  “Got it!”

  When he lowers her, she is holding a large oak leaf, very similar to every other leaf up there, including the more easily reachable ones. “Why that one, Beaty-Bea?”

  “Just look at it, Daddy, it’s a special one.”

  Bea stretches to get the leaf as close to his face as possible, then takes his hand. He lets himself be led by her, likes feeling the tug of her, loves feeling her fingers wrapping around his.

  “Oh, I do love holidays,” she says, and sighs as they stroll back down the hill.

  “Do you know about the seasons?”

  “Of course! It’s spring.”

  “No . . .”

  “Summer!”

  “That’s right. And what are the other seasons?”

  “Spring, summer, autumn, winter.” Bea’s voice takes on the rhythm of an incanted chore.

  “And what sort of weather is it in summer?”

  “Hot and sunny.”

  “And what sort of weather is it in winter?”

  “Daddy, please, can we stop talking about the weather now?”

  He rolls up his lips and nods: fair enough.

  “Did you find out what soil’s made of?” she asks, skipping beside him.

  He scowls. He’d forgotten this.

  “Don’t you know, Daddy?”

  “There’s a lot that we don’t know anymore.”

  “Where did Guy go when you made him dead?”

  She is looking up at him, snatching glances as she trots to keep up, waiting for his answer. But he just smiles and tells her he doesn’t know. He doesn’t. Not anymore. For a while, the world had known: you died, and you’d been BackedUp. People were saved, their memory states preserved in cold storage. Just before it had all collapsed, he had done something he hadn’t told anyone about. Not Kate, not anyone. He had killed Ben the day before. It was night and he came quietly upstairs, into his father’s empty office. The night flattened the city but the fires threw up shadows. The end was so close, but he hadn’t known that then. Barely thinking, because he had already decided what to do: he accessed the homeHub and Ben’s SaveYou files. His BackUps. And there he was, his brother, the stored memories of his life, rapidly moving layered skeins. All saved. Digital replications of his brain. What Tom was doing was so deeply taboo, scouring the thoughts of a dead man. But he had to know. That moment, when Ben had been taken, he had wanted to see it. So he had riffled right to the end of Ben’s final day and gone in.

  Ben’s thoughts, Ben’s emotions, Tom immersed himself in them. Ben finished working, ate dinner, bade Tom good night. Closed his eyes. A fragmented jumble of dreams suddenly warped. Everything squeezed. Even for Tom, who had only been watching this, something behind his face had felt squashed, crushed, compressed, and then . . . there was nothing. Nothing at all. Absolute freezing. Hellish void.

  Tom had withdrawn from Ben’s SaveYou states and stood staring at the blackened city below, his own ghost face reflected in the glass. Who were they? That was what he had wanted to see. But no. There had been nothing after Ben had died.

  Feeling sick, he looks down at his daughter. She glances up one last time and plainly fakes a smile. He asks if she’s okay about their conversation, what they’d talked about the night before, and she shrugs heavily. They walk the slope in silence until she dashes to Graham on his porch. Tom watches her go. Purses his lips in response to Graham’s wave and goes briefly into the kitchen. Kate is at the table, sewing together a little dress. Her movements are ragged, her face flushed.

  “It’s from one of Jane’s,” she says between her teeth. “Do you think she’ll notice?” Suddenly she winces and sucks a finger. “Dammit, I can’t see anything in this light!”

  Silence stretches between them until Tom nods grimly, turns and goes to the generator shed. It’s only as he leans to turn the power on that he notices Kate has followed him. She stands by the door, folding her arms against the dampness of the room. Her face is stiller now.

  “So when are we leaving, Tom?” Her arms go out to him when he doesn’t reply and then her fists clench back. “Tom, you promised.”

  “We shouldn’t just leave everyone, Kate. They’re good people.”

  “Yes, we should! Because if we stay here, we die. Stay and die or leave and maybe survive. This place is being targeted, Tom!”

  “What are you talking a
bout?”

  “Guy, Jane, we’re all being—”

  “Guy was taken miles from here! There is nothing to suggest it’s targeted. Stop stoking up the fear! It’s random, bad luck—”

  “Stop pretending, Tom, stop living in a dream! We have to make difficult decisions! And if you can’t . . .”

  “What?” He reaches for her hand.

  Tears quiver in Kate’s eyes. “Then I have to think about Bea.”

  She lets his hand drop and moves toward the door. She waits there, under the lintel again, waiting for him to speak. She clearly wants him to speak, desperately wants him to say something, anything, to have a solution for it all; wants to share some of his hope. But when he comes up with nothing, she leaves.

  Bea and Jack are intoxicated—they’ve never had a party before—while the adults approach the celebration stoically. They decide to turn on the fairy lights, using up the meager supply of energy from the car battery. What does it matter anymore?

  The clouds relax and split. There are unexpected colors before sunset. Kate’s face is infused with the light; it collects, rosy, in her eyes, but she will not look at Tom. He watches her watching the woods, her gaze forever drifting toward the track, as, with an accompanying warble from Jack, Bea emerges from the farmhouse in her new dress. Leaves have been stitched onto it; as she points out to Tom, her oak leaf forms a pivotal part of the arrangement. They talk, they eat, they admire the sky’s colors and wispy clouds. And then, with no warning, a noise rips the world apart. Tom drops to the ground. Bea clings to him. He lurches for Kate as a static rattle scores the air and its ringing after-noise shudders the silence. Birds burst up, away, and circle far above.

  “Sorry!” Danny calls from the gazebo, and then music starts quietly.

  Bea’s face becomes simultaneously scared and full of awe. “What is that noise, Daddy?”

  Tom breathes back his pounding heart and nods at the gazebo. “Go look.”

  Soon they are all dancing around the fire, dancing to songs from the past under strings of lights as forgotten voices live again. The corner of their field is lit, the grass glowing green in the night, amid the unlit trees, between the dark bodies of the hills, the deep silence of the country laid out around them, the sky above them, the stars, the world that they are on.

  The music proves addictive as the fire rips into the night. Even Graham dances with Bea, a slow, flexing jive. Kate dances with Sean. Tom watches them from where he sits with Danny, who jigs Jack on his lap. He watches as Bea detaches herself from Graham and prances up to Kate, who gives her hands to Sean, who lets the little girl stand on his feet and sways her around the fire. Sean smiles, Tom is surprised to see; he actually smiles.

  The night air is cooler now, and Tom watches the fairy lights dip as the battery loses power. He watches as, at the outer edge of firelight, the smoky swirls coalesce into a darker shape: a moving shadow that sharpens into the silhouette of a man. But all the men are here. This shape is a new one, an intrusion, a cancerous presence amid them, and something flows through Tom like the power buzzing in the lights: he shouts and grabs Bea, and with tumbling strides they group together by the table. The shadow throws dark trails into the smoke as it raises its arms. The wind turns and rolls the smoke away, revealing, for an instant, this man. He is middle-aged. He has chopped curly hair, dirty clothes, and a very level gaze. He steps forward. He holds the silence as his nostrils flare, perhaps for the smoke, perhaps for some other reason; his eyes do not flicker.

  “Hello. My name is Mark.”

  Sean strides forward, drunken-bold. His sleeves are already rolled. “What do you want?”

  “I offer you no threat,” Mark soothes, his face creased, his hands held out. “And I will take nothing from you. I will give you, however, stories. This is what I do. I am a storyteller, traveling, remembering, and telling what I know. To preserve tales and let them live. If you find my stories acceptable, if you enjoy them, I would be happy to eat your food. This is what I do.”

  And Sean, right close to Mark now, without changing his stride, punches him in the face.

  Graham ushers Jack and Bea firmly away, and with Mark tied up in the darkness against the wall of the shower stall, the others group up on the far side of the fire.

  “I don’t care who he may be,” Kate shouts, shaking Tom’s hand off her arm. “We don’t welcome people here by hurting them, Sean!”

  “He’s from the storage facility!” Sean hisses, and jabs his finger. “Tom led him here!”

  “We have no way of knowing—” Tom protests, and Mark watches all this from a distance as:

  “This is the attack!” Sean snaps, pushing Tom back. His voice gets higher and higher, his spine more and more stiff. “This is it! Someone get the gun!”

  Kate groans and strides away. She snatches a jug and a cloth from the table and, kneeling in front of the trussed-up man, wipes the dried blood from his face.

  “Who are you?”

  Mark stretches his lips, savoring his answer like a wine. “I’m . . . whoever you want me to be so I don’t get punched again, please. I’m not taken, if that’s what you’re worrying about.”

  “Well, that’s us reassured,” scoffs Danny, standing close behind Kate. He has a hammer in his hands.

  Tom steps forward. “Where are you from, then?”

  Mark shrugs. “Where is anyone from anymore?”

  “You can make this easy,” Sean growls, putting a fist in his palm.

  Laughing lightly, barely acknowledging the threat, Mark observes them from beneath cushioned brows. “Originally, from Loxburgh. Would the taken know of that?”

  “The new suburb?” Sean asks, standing his ground.

  “Well,” Mark says, jutting his lower lip out, “it was looking pretty ratty when I left it.”

  “When was this?”

  “Soon after the Collapse. So . . . what’s that?” Mark shrugs again. “Years ago. I’ve come down from the north just now. There’s not many camps, not many people, and some very dangerous ones at that. I’ve found enough friendlies to survive.”

  “And the cities?” Danny says. “Are there people left alive?”

  Mark moves his eyes around them, as though looking for the hopes they hold, before he shakes his head. “Fuel stations going up, scrapers coming down. Animals have taken them now. The dogs are huge, mutated, muscular things with massive teeth. Cerberus hounds from hell. And what few people there are are savages, little better than animals.”

  “Have you seen this?” Sean demands, but his voice is weaker than before. Mark shakes his head. “Well, if you haven’t seen it, you can’t say it. Unfounded conjecture is dangerous.”

  Mark tilts his face. “That’s going to limit my repertoire.”

  “So what stories can you tell?” Danny interrupts before Sean can speak again.

  “I can do poems, I know a bit of Shakespeare. I can tell old news or just make something up. What would you like? Something for the birthday?”

  “How do you know it’s a birthday?” Sean growls.

  “I’ve been watching you.” Mark laughs, then faux scowls. “I thought you all looked friendly.”

  “How did you find us?”

  Mark glances at Tom and Danny for a second before clearly rethinking what he was about to say. “I found your filtration tanks days ago, down by the stream. Tonight I heard your music. You should be careful. I saw men prowling. A van like a metal porcupine, pulled by horses. They’re hunting for children for mating, I think.”

  The embers of the fire rustle behind them in a breeze that, moments later, touches the unseen trees across the grass at the entrance to the track, hidden in the darkness of the night.

  “There are so few people out there,” Mark continues, “so it’s a solution of sorts. But you don’t want to attract them here, believe me.”

  “So how do we know you’re not taken?” Danny asks, agitated again all of a sudden.

  “Send me away; I’ll find somewhere else to
settle.” Mark shrugs at them from the ground. “Or we’ll have to learn to trust each other. Because I don’t know about you either. Are any of you taken? You might be, any single one of you.”

  Summer draws on and then one night, while it is still dark outside, there is a stretched moment when Tom is aware of his dreams. In the gulp of a heartbeat they are swallowed. By the time he sits up they are gone and all he is aware of is Kate’s hands on his shoulders, shaking him, and her voice echoing in his ears.

  “What’s happening?”

  “A noise: I heard a shout. There was glass breaking.”

  Tom hurls the bedclothes off. He shoulders into Kate, reaches back to grab her arm, turns to the window and pushes his face to the pane. Orange light licks the night, and there’s a sound: a roar of hungry moving air racing hot into the sky.

  He pulls on trousers as he charges onto the landing, shouts as he runs down the stairs: “There’s a fire in Graham’s hut!” He hears movement in Sean’s room, sees the door open and Sean stumble out. Tom barrels through the kitchen and grabs the handle of the garden door. Pain sears his hand and flames burst into the room, folding up and along the ceiling. His face wet, his eyeballs dried out, the flames race, lick the wood, stretch to get inside, howling.

  “Tom, here, the table!”

  Sean is behind him and they turn the table and heave it at the fiery doorway. Then Graham is with them, with Sean, pulling the table back, having another go, while Tom uses a saucepan to punch out the window. He goes through, feet first, and tumbles to the ground.

  In the still-dark air, the camp comprises juddering shadows and sparks and smoke. Shifting golden light carpets the lawn. A fire? Fire is on every hut. It licks the front of the farmhouse. Shouts and smashing glass ricochet in the night with the thump and crash of things breaking. The smell of burning everywhere. Tom dashes through the choking smoke toward the children’s hut. The only one without fire, its windows are broken and the door hangs wide. Inside, the beds are overturned, sheets slack on the floor. Beside the upturned table, Danny drowns in a pool of blood. His book has been ripped in half and they have cut his throat, but not well: bubbles grow and burst from the laceration. A whistling sound. Blood congeals in his hair. His terrified eyes gulp up and rove. He can’t move his head.