The Feed

by Nick Clark Windo

  Who was doing this to them? And why? Their lives had been paper-thin. Smoke leaked up from the estuary like ink in water. Drifts, not of smoke but obscurity, were also swallowing the Feed: pools blocked by the company or the government (it was now difficult to tell them apart), information closed off and all privacy settings rescinded as they trawled desperately to locate the intruders. At night the clouds reflected fire from all around, the colors of blood and ink. Sucking up the smoke, they had congealed and densified above like the crushing panic in her brain, her brain that, one morning, had been touched.

  “It’s me,” she had said from the bed when she woke that time, when there had been someone in her head.

  Tom had nearly laughed—he didn’t know what had happened yet—and he’d rubbed her hair as she’d frowned. Held her stomach, increasingly baby full. They had gone through their questions, as the new protocols demanded: What’s your name? Kate. Mine? Tom. How did I propose to you? With a ring, in an apple, on a hill. Yes, it’s you . . .

  It had taken time to persuade Tom, but she’d been adamant. They had waited until his parents were out, at a meeting with the government. Entire cities had gone offline that morning. She had persuaded Tom up to his father’s study, to access their homeHub. As she had watched, he’d gone through her BackUps. He’d been lost in her mind, looking for those moments in her dreams when she’d been sure that someone had invaded her.

  Empty windows stare at her. The wind stirs up phantom movements. Her shallowest breath is deafening in this silence. The soles of her boots have aged since she wore them last, when they had escaped the city and she had been pregnant with Bea. Although cracks run through the rubber now like the cracks running through the roads, somehow everything feels the same: her pounding heart; her thoughts shorting out; seismic terror tearing up through the veneer her safe-feeling life has been; the poisoning doubt that Tom is really Tom. What’s missing now is his capacity for hope. It had gotten them through before; it had raised her spirits higher than she could have achieved alone. But his hope had more stamina than hers. They saw the world so differently. And now here she is, alone.

  The dog’s paws pad beside her, light and ready. It seems they’re now a team.

  Bea’s abduction hits her in the stomach harder than anything physical ever could. She would sacrifice anything for her daughter in that moment: her own life, Tom’s, the entire planet; she’d give them away to get Bea.

  She runs, on and on, the dog at her feet, checking the map at junctions. That afternoon she sees it in the near distance: the storage facility, squat amid the hills. Where else could Bea be? Who else could have known about the camp? They spend the night in a truck that has lain on its side so long its metal has rusted to the road. Its thin walls are being eaten away by time, but its stronger framework stands for now. She builds a small fire, taking her time with a lighter running low, while the dog disappears. It brings back an animal, still twitching in its jaws. Kate flays and then partly burns it, feeding the dog scraps of cindered flesh and throwing most of hers away when it isn’t looking.

  A truck blocks the gate, a dark lump of metal beneath the dust-dirtied transparent curl. It has been driven hard up against the gateposts. Its cabin has been torched and the fabric of the seats burned. The mirrors are melted, elongated and frozen. The glass is cracked and smoked from the inside, and bales of barbed wire have been rammed in. She shucks off her rucksack and goes under. The dog, sphinxlike, shifts after her. The sun is hot and the day peaceful: the type of day that waits for a noise, but no noises come. They circle the facility, keeping behind the tree line. Where the undergrowth thins out, they wait. She sees no people, no movement, nothing. She is dizzy with hunger, with the constant contraction in her stomach, but she won’t ever stop. She walks. She climbs. She stumbles through the heat. She tries to imagine what Bea is feeling, to picture where she’s being kept, but that way hideous images lie and they suffocate her mind. She tries to understand why Tom ran, what possessed him to leave her; she tries to structure her memories to work out how she’s now alone. She tries to clear her mind of thoughts that will not be escaped.

  The sun-smacked tarmac of the forecourt expands before her, a heat haze shimmering. Rusted fire escapes entwine the building. Dark watermarks color the walls. Kate holds Bea’s T-shirt tightly in her hand; she has made the dog smell it, as if that will help. She smells it again herself and there Bea is, realer than real: frizzed hair, flushing cheeks, a glinting concentration in her eyes. Kate’s stomach lurches and chips of tarmac fly, peppering her legs, before she even hears the shot. The dog barks up at the windows. Another bullet impacts at its paws and Kate runs without thinking in front of it with her arms wide as a third shot rings out and they dash behind a cabin together, the dog’s eyes as huge as hers. It nestles closely between her legs, whimpering, as they inch along the wall.

  A hand grips Kate’s face. Someone flips her to the ground. Her head resounding with the dog’s barks, her vision warps and a man shouts and scuffles fly around her head and there’s a smack and a howl and the thump of a gun and the weight of a pelt as it lands beside her. Kate is hauled up and pushed at gunpoint through a shuttered door. Someone wrestles her rucksack off, and as her head snaps back, she glimpses the dog’s corpse behind them. After rattling along a network of barely lit corridors, they emerge into an atrium, a pyramid of dirt-streaked glass with a cracked green marble floor. The doors have been smashed and metal grilles forced in their place. The original fake plants are still in their beds, and here she sees her captors. Hunger-carved faces. Skin tight to the bone.

  “The fuck do you want?” one of them rasps. He has a V cut from his lip. His cheeks sag to the sides and, even with his mouth closed, Kate can see his browning teeth.

  “Nothing.”

  “Then why you here?”

  “I’m passing through.”

  “Where you from?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’ll fucking kill you if you don’t tell!”

  Kate chews her lips and looks into the surprisingly hazel eyes straining beneath his bald head. “I’m going north.”

  He stands in front of her, hands on his hips, the butt of a blade protruding from his belt. He glances at a woman with a still, pinched face and sharply bobbed dark hair before turning back to Kate. “Where you from, tricksy? You taken?”

  “My camp was destroyed. I’m going north. No.”

  As the man circles her, she sees the woman thrust her hands into her rucksack. A sweater. Her hat. Bea’s T-shirt is thrown to the floor. Her food. The map. She is shoved and her head jerked back.

  The man’s loose lip flaps as he wheezes out on a breath of decay: “Why?”

  “Because my family’s dead, so what else can I do?” she spits with more venom than she has.

  The man stays close, his breath whistling, his eyes searching hers. Arched back like this, her heart cracking her ribs, all she can see is the upward space of the atrium, the massive cobwebs across the moss-covered glass. Still holding her twisted backward, the man turns to the woman with her hands in her bag. “Anything?”

  “No.”

  “Lock her in the storage room,” he wheezes, and throws her sprawling to the floor.

  She has been in the dark for a long time now, in a place of self-denied sleep. She mustn’t sleep; she mustn’t. She scratches the wound on her leg to stay awake with pain. Is it exhaustion, hunger, or fear that makes her imagine things? As a child, make-believe ghosted her life. She had written her parents stories and sketched out accompanying art. She never drew well, but words she could wield, and she lived for her parents’ praise; they soon learned not to comment on the pictures. Martha had been the one encouraged to draw, and together they had made little books. Their parents had been teachers of art, made redundant by the Feed in a changing world, yet determined not to be changed by it.

  Kate crawls to the moldy pipes now, her boundaries lost in the darkness of the room, and puts her ear to the ducts. She can h
ear the children in her head but not through her ears. She imagines ghost sounds like the ghost images of what might be happening to them that she tries to banish from her brain. Pain and panic engulf her. On the pulse of a heartbeat she is jerked back to another dark night, six long years ago. Everyone else had been cleared from the farmhouse apart from Graham and Jane. They were the only ones with a chance of having any idea what to do. She and Tom had reached the house a week before, trudging the last of the road-frosted miles, their heads cavernous with silence. The world had quieted. Who knew how many had died in those months? Who had known how long it takes people to starve? Weeks of lying gasping on the ground. The horror of the world. People stunned, most to death straightaway, others enough to be easy prey. And no help coming—no people, no apps, no systems. Time to face facts: the world wasn’t rooting for them either.

  She had found Tom. She had gotten them from the city, driven by the life within her: their baby growing inside. Their speech was malformed, their instincts animalized, because being attacked was now the norm. Tom’s hope had gotten them through—her drive and Tom’s hope. The farmhouse had been her aunt’s, but they had found others there. Social obligations had died with the world, but the people there were kind. They made Kate comfortable as the contractions started and she was engulfed in panic. Gone was the data, the previously detailed experience of her life: the metrics that told her precisely what was happening to her body and kept her updated on the baby’s progress and her own. The structure of information that had withheld fear and raised her above animals shattered as roaring pain burned through her body and opened her up in a damp room in the darkness of the countryside with two old people valiantly doing their terrified best while Tom backed away, horrified at the sounds and the incredible smell that saturated the room. No vids. No info to gulp on. No mundles to stream her to relaxing times. Only fear and pain and panic, and then exhilaration that pounded her heart as it pounds her heart again in imprinted memory of that time as she feels once more the weight of her baby as Bea was passed up, slick and screaming, into her arms. She remembers the tug and stretch before the cord was torn and they were parted. Parted but never closer. Never stronger. Never more bonded by anything so pure, by love burning through fear, the strongest substance in the world.

  Then.

  Not now.

  Now Kate’s limbs shake with too much emotion for her body to process, and she retches at the floor. Bea is gone. What might be happening to her daughter courses through her mind. She stays on the ground, trying to stifle the thoughts until the lock snaps, the door opens, and candlelight comes cupped in a hand. The woman’s up-lit hair makes dagger-sharp shadows on the walls. Her voice is surprisingly warm, but tired, the edges worn away. “Why did you come here?”

  “I told you,” Kate gasps. “I’m traveling north.”

  The woman puts a bowl of chunks of things in a congealed stew on the floor.

  “Wait!” Kate heaves in a desperate breath. “I’m so tired!”

  “So sleep.”

  “Don’t you still watch each other?”

  The woman glances into the large room outside before, sighing, she pulls down a rug. She folds the musty thing over Kate, then squats on a box, drawing a hammer from her waistband and laying it on her thigh. “Sleep then, tricksy. I’ll take care of you.”

  Kate wakes with a gasp from a dream that was sucking her down from the top of the tower through a burned-out world into a chasm that was opening in her brain. The woman is no longer there. The faint glow of candlelight touches the half-open door and she hears retching in the distance. A tired sound. But, rested at last, she feels alert and awake. Does she have time to run? To search the place, to find the children and escape? She crawls to the doorway. There are tables covered in tech. Then candlelight licks her face and she hurriedly lies back down. Exhaling, the woman sits on the box and wipes her mouth. She puts hands to her stomach and manipulates it, then squeezes her eyes tight shut and, unknowingly watched, shakes silently with tears.

  “Get up, tricksy!” the man with the cloven face croaks. “Get the fuck up.”

  Kate stumbles as they ricochet through the maze of corridors. The sun has risen, the tar-smeared glass coloring the day like smudges of a desert dream. They squeeze into a breeze-blocked room with smashed windows and a sharp wind, where the split-lipped man drags her to one side. High above the forecourt, he thrusts a rifle’s snout into a crook and forces her head down to the scope.

  “Can you see them?”

  The circular sight blurs over the ground as she scans and catches a man in the crosshairs. He has gray skin and short curly hair. He wears a frayed sweater and his bruised face is up, briefly, toward the sky. He is talking. It is Mark.

  “I see one.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “No.”

  She moves, blurring the ground again, and catches a leg, an elbow, then locks on someone else. Hands in his pockets, his head bent, listening to Mark. It’s Tom. He looks up at the facility, unknowingly at her, with her finger on the trigger as he looms large in the scope.

  “Can you see the other one?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “No!”

  But she knows he abandoned her. She knows he separated them. She knows that’s not how he should behave. Is it really him? Her finger tightens around the trigger, but the man wrenches the rifle away and brings it up to bear, elbowing her aside. The gun recoils and he squints back through the scope and fires three more rounds, each shot impacting Kate’s ears.

  “Are we done here, Nigel?” The woman has to shout to be heard.

  “Yeah,” Nigel spits back. “Get rid of her.”

  Kate’s vision still has the silhouette of the scope, the center of her sight a circle scored by crosshairs, as the woman drags her from the room.

  “What’s happening?” she yells as the gunfire echoes after them.

  “We were raided,” the woman pants as they run. “They got inside and killed someone.” She heaves doors open and trips down some stairs. “Then there was another group. Two days ago. Ram raid. Then you. Now this. What the hell . . . You were lucky you weren’t shot,” she adds as they reach the big room. “But we have rules. We still vote. Though now there’s just us two.”

  Kate breathes heavily by the door to her prison. “Then thank you. It sounds like I’m alive because of you.” She puts her hand out. “Kate.”

  The woman grasps it. “Margaret.”

  “And those two men? Did he shoot them?”

  Margaret’s voice lowers. “I don’t know. Nigel is . . . stressed.” She forces Kate back into the shadows of the storage room and locks the door behind her.

  After an unmeasurable time in darkness, the door is wrenched open and Mark and Tom are pushed in. “We’re not here to hurt you!” Mark exclaims, bouncing back toward Nigel’s silhouette, while Tom stiffly rights himself.

  “Shut the fuck up, the lot of you!” Nigel spits.

  “Wait,” Mark appeals. “Let me tell you a story—”

  The door is shut in his face.

  “Ow!” Mark kicks something in the darkness. “Shit. Hold on, Tom.”

  A glow fills the room as Mark shakes a lamp, solar-powered and compact. He looks up at the shelves, at the boxes. He slowly moves the light around and then cries out.

  “Welcome to the cupboard,” Kate says, and sees Tom’s hand lower, revealing a thin leak of blood from his nose. So he recognizes her. She’s conflicted. Relief. Anger. Fear. Is it him? Surely. Either way, the others mustn’t know they’re acquainted. “I’m Kate,” she continues quickly, extending her hand toward Mark. “They’re probably listening, aren’t they, but what’s the harm in introductions? My name is Kate. Who are you? Where are you from?”

  “Oh. Mark,” he says, and winks exaggeratedly at her. “Nice to meet you, Kate. I’m from Loxburgh. You?”

  Tom’s hand falls heavily on her shoulder. His eyes are hollow, like he hasn’t slep
t for days. She has never seen him so dimmed. “Kate,” he whispers. So, there . . . it is him . . . surely? “How long have you been here?”

  “A night. Did they hurt you?”

  “They were a tough crowd,” Mark concedes, interrupting them, and she turns reluctantly back his way.

  “Do people always try to kill you on sight, Mark?”

  “I am, I admit, having a bad streak. But I think this lot are more scared than vicious. I don’t think the children are here, Tom. I think it’s the others. The spiky van gang. We’re kindred spirits,” Mark explains to her loudly for anyone listening in. “Sworn to wander the world together in search of stolen children.”

  Tom’s voice is hushed and urgent as he takes her to one side. “Mark managed to escape from the farmhouse. Sean tied him up.”

  “That’s a very unromantic way of describing it.”

  “Just talk quieter, Mark,” Tom snaps. “Like Kate told you to.”

  “I escaped against all odds so I could help you in your plight!” Mark faux whispers.

  “Sean beat him to a pulp but he managed to sneak away.”

  Beneath his bruises and the shadows of the storeroom, Mark pulls a hurt expression. “Tom, you have to set these stories up better if we’re going to work as a double act.”

  “There’s a difference between telling tales and lying!” Tom hisses.

  “Oh, come on, a little embellishment never hurt anyone! A sympathetic exaggeration of some facts, the considered exclusion of others. It’s entertainment!”

  “I told him I wanted to travel alone,” Tom whispers fiercely to Kate.

  “No one wants to travel alone,” Mark counters quietly, and turns back to Kate, talking exaggeratedly loudly again for the benefit of any eavesdroppers. “And you? How did you get here? Was it Kate, you said? Have you been traveling alone? Who’s been watching you sleep?”