The Feed

by Nick Clark Windo

  Deeper exhaustion than she has ever known overwhelms her. Feeling so alone. Even a sudden flash of pain as she stumbles on her bad leg fails to energize her. It’s all too much and she lowers herself to her rug.

  “You know what, Mark?” she says. “Not all stories are for sharing.”

  Mark snores gently, bathed in the sterile glow of the solar lamp. Tom points, his eyes catching the light in the darkness, and she nods. Lifts the blanket and rolls out as he tiptoes toward the door. She has barely stopped beside him before he tries to kiss her. When he tries again, she slaps his hands away and they freeze at the sound, glancing at Mark lying unconscious on the floor.

  “No. Tom, don’t . . .”

  “What’s the—”

  “What do you think the matter is?” Kate’s voice is quiet but her consonants are hard. Her eyes are hardening too, despite the tiredness that loosens her cheeks. “You separated us, Tom. We agreed and agreed and agreed. I had no idea where you were going, no way of finding you.”

  “I thought you’d stay at the camp. I’d have come back for you—”

  “With Bea missing? You thought I’d stay?” Her whispers slice through the darkness, and when his hands come toward her she hits them away again. “You live in a fantasy world, Tom! We never split up!” she hisses. “There is no way of finding people. There is only getting lost. You do not do that to us. Why—did—you—do it?”

  In the end, after searching for words, “To get Bea” is all he has.

  Her face folds into her hands. She heaves sobs, trying to keep them silent while tears flood from her eyes. When Tom’s arms enclose her, she doesn’t resist: she feels him judder as he weeps.

  “Is she here, Tom? Are these the people you saw?”

  “I saw that woman,” he whispers between tears, “but I don’t know if they took Bea. It might be them. Revenge for the man Graham killed? It might be those others just as well.”

  She grips his jacket until her knuckles shake. “Do you trust Mark? Is he with them?”

  “They hit him hard.”

  “They hit everyone hard. But maybe he’s taken.”

  “Kate,” he says, brushing her hair back. “Are you okay?”

  Her expression locks. “What the fuck do you think?”

  “We’ll find her, Kate,” he mumbles, after flinching. “If she’s not here, we’ll escape and keep looking. We need to befriend these people. Let’s keep pretending we don’t know each other. They’ll get spooked otherwise. Just don’t lose hope, Kate. We’ll find her.”

  In the darkness, time loses sense, but at some point they are ordered, blinking, into the room outside. Kate notices Tom look around it as they emerge, particularly at a rectangle of floor where the stained carpet has been removed. She watches him blanch before seeing that three chairs have been arranged, in front of which Nigel and Margaret sit, armed.

  “Sit,” Nigel rasps, pointing his gun at the chairs, and they do.

  “Why did you come here?” Margaret demands.

  When none of them speaks, Nigel leans forward. “You know, your lives are paused. Since you were in my sights—you on borrowed time.”

  Mark laughs. “And I just thought that you were a terrible shot.”

  Kate turns to him. Tom stares at him. Everyone looks at Mark until he rubs his hair and examines the cuffs on his sweater, intent suddenly on their frays.

  “Why you here?” Nigel wheezes after a while, like he’s pleading for an answer, and Kate watches him and Margaret as Tom speaks, gauging them, intent on his every twitch, on every flicker around her eyes. Here they are if she can interpret them: the clues she has been waiting for.

  “I’m looking for children,” Tom says. “They were stolen. I was told to come here to find them.”

  “Here?”

  Tom nods meaningfully and Nigel glances at Margaret, who frowns. “Who told you to come here?” Margaret asks. “For children?”

  “A man I met said you lot would know what’s happened to them.”

  Margaret’s face is pained. “Your children?”

  Kate carefully observes it all as Tom shakes his head, lying. “A friend’s.”

  “Well, I’m sorry,” Margaret says. “We keep ourselves to ourselves. It’s a—”

  “You?” Nigel demands of Mark.

  “I’m keeping this guy company.”

  “And you never met her?” Nigel spits as he leans back into his chair and jabs his finger.

  Mark looks back and forth between Kate and Nigel. “God’s truth,” he says. “We’ve never met her before. I thought she was a ghost. I saw one once, this would have been back in, oh—”

  “Get out, then,” Nigel interrupts. He glances at Margaret and then continues, his face seething while something softens hers with relief. “Go, get out. I don’t give a shit. But if you turn, if you stop for a second, I’ll shoot you.” He points at Mark. “You most.”

  “Well, hold on!” Mark replies. “Maybe I don’t want to leave!” He puts a hand to his chest. “My name is Mark, and I offer you no threat. I will take nothing from you. I will give you, however, stories. I travel from place to place, listening, remembering, and telling what I know. To keep the tales true, to preserve them, and let them live. If you find my stories acceptable, if you find them enjoyable, and you are so inclined, I would be happy to eat your food. I shall leave when finished, or before if you ask. This is what I do.”

  Nigel’s face folds in on itself as he breathes laboriously. “A fucking storyteller,” he gasps. “You can shut up. But you two? What’re your skills? What knowledge you have?”

  Mark claps Tom on the shoulder. “This man has one of the greatest skills of all. This man is a fantastic listener.”

  Nigel sighs. “Listen. You don’t shut up, I’m going to fucking hurt you.”

  “But,” Mark declares, “he also cooks up a storm! Just last night we were sitting in a field and I said I’d kill for a steak. Off he went, and not for very long, and when he got back, he told me not to look. I sat there while he did his stuff, and when he’d finished, there it was. Get it out,” he tells Tom, and then turns back to the others. “There were leftovers.”

  Tom reaches into his rucksack and unfurls a package, revealing meat and potatoes.

  “What is it?” Nigel whispers.

  “I’d taste it first.” Mark squats down and takes a piece. “It’s good,” he adds, and eats.

  They are in the refectory, a long room with a chess-tiled floor, metal tables, and a kitchen partly obscured by a burnished old canteen. Kate sits with Margaret while things clatter in the kitchen.

  “So how long have you two been here?”

  Margaret looks down into her cup. “Years now.”

  “And where did you live before?”

  “A village down the road.” Margaret glances over Kate’s shoulder before seeming to make a decision. “My boyfriend used to work here. That’s why we originally came.”

  “Nigel’s your boyfriend?” Kate tries to keep the surprise out of her voice. A sudden sizzling bursts from the kitchen and she looks back as Tom stirs something heavy. Cooking. One of his skills, apparently. When she turns back, Margaret is looking out the window and her mouth is tightly shut.

  “Not Nigel?” Kate murmurs.

  “He was shot in the raid. Killed for fuel.” Margaret laughs bitterly.

  “I’m . . . sorry.” Kate sees Graham in her mind’s eye, blood on his arms as he handed her baby to her. Face ashen as they sat on the grass and he told them about the man he shot. The way his hands had trembled.

  “They both worked here. At the start, this place drew a lot of attention. A storage facility for the Feed? Come on. Not that anyone could make it work. It broke. They were desperate. But we got good at protecting it. Then . . .” A hand goes to Margaret’s stomach and another to her throat. Her body buckles as she retches. “I don’t know why I’m staying here anymore,” she whispers after a while, glancing over Kate’s shoulder. Although she smiles, the sadne
ss stays in her eyes. “Maybe I should leave with you.”

  “I feel sorry for Tom’s friend,” Kate whispers, leaning forward. “Losing a child must be crushing. They’re so innocent. The fear they feel must be so much more . . .” And then it hits her. Who needs the Feed to feel her daughter’s fear? Who needs tech to empathize? She puts her finger and thumb to her eyes, but tears still leak out.

  “Did you lose someone too?” Margaret reaches across the table. “A child?”

  “Have you seen any?” Kate asks, her lips wet as she speaks.

  “Children?”

  Kate nods and wipes her nose.

  “No. I haven’t for years. Of everyone when the Feed went down, they were least able to cope. My daughter was . . . I wouldn’t know . . .” Margaret glances at the kitchen, at Tom as he cooks, and her hands go again to her stomach. “Maybe his friend’s children were in the van that tried to break in here. It was spiky and pulled by horses. The men were armed. They’re sending a message like that, aren’t they?”

  Kate unclasps her fingers, waiting for Margaret to speak some more, feeling the sickest she has ever felt but close to something now, surely? This spiked van. Hope kindles in her stomach.

  “We saw them coming up the road to the main gates, the ones you came through. They tried to move the truck first. If they’d opened it, they’d have seen it’s full of concrete. Stupid fools. We took up positions. We’d already agreed to kill. That was not a difficult vote.” She shivers. “And when the van stopped where the fence gets low, one of the men went to jump over and . . . we shot him.” Margaret looks up at her. “I shot him . . .” She points between Kate’s eyes. “They all started shooting. No thought. Like animals. But they went north after that.”

  “North where?”

  Margaret shrugs, assessing her.

  Kate puts on a smile. She really tries to make it look genuine, but she can feel it quivering. “And where the hell did you learn to shoot like that, Margaret?”

  “Gaming.”

  Margaret’s eyes are so sincere that Kate actually laughs for real, and the laugh is contagious. Soon they are both crying, mouths stretching, heaving for breath.

  “Right, what’s the joke?” Nigel yells, and Margaret quiets immediately.

  Kate leans across the table again. “What did you do, Margaret? Before all this.”

  “I was a teacher.”

  “Me too.”

  “Augmented maths and VRT.”

  “English. For the little ones.”

  “It’s a long time ago.”

  “A different world.”

  A hooting erupts from the kitchen, where Nigel, having tried whatever Tom is cooking, burns his mouth on a piece but swallows it nonetheless, and dances with joy at the flavor.

  They eat Tom’s stew later. He won’t tell her what the meat is, but she finds blond fur. She doesn’t want to be near him. She wants to find Bea. Silence lies heavily on them as their cutlery clinks against the plates, the sound of slurping, chewing, and nothing else. The smoky candles reflect in the walls’ white tiles, like the fire of some distant sun has been caught deep in the ceramic itself.

  Once everyone is stuck in a satisfied stupor, Mark raises a finger. “The ancient Greeks had people like me. People who knew every story. They were like walking libraries. Remember libraries? We used to talk about primitive people, didn’t we, but think what they had to do to survive. Catching things, cooking things, doing things that we in our technological excellence outsourced to machines and now have no knowledge how to do anymore. How many of you can even remember any stories? That’s where I come in. So, who wants one?”

  “Excuse me,” Margaret says, and leaves the canteen.

  “We don’t need your stories here, I already told you that,” Nigel says tiredly. He yawns and jabs a finger at Tom. “We want his cooking.”

  “In the camp I’ve come from,” Tom tells them, “we didn’t let people tell stories about the past. The memories brought back too much pain.”

  “And that, my friend, is exactly what stories are for!” Mark proclaims. “The Greeks called it catharsis. The past is the past, but it’s here to stay, that’s kind of what they believed. All the emotions it caused have to be got rid of, so what we need to do is talk—”

  “I’ll make sure Margaret is okay,” Kate says, and they shift to let her past. The unstoppable tune of Mark’s voice follows her into the unlit corridor. She listens for other sounds. For children. The smell of damp has become an essence of this place. She feels the mold slide off the walls as she runs her fingers along them. In cavelike cold like this, the children would not survive for long. But what about that spiked van? Are they looking in the wrong place?

  “Kate?” Margaret is silhouetted back by the canteen door. “Are you all right?”

  “Sure.” Kate can smell an acrid tang on Margaret’s breath. “But I’ve had enough of stories.”

  “Come on, then.”

  She follows Margaret onto the tarmac at the front of the station, where the murky glass of the atrium dully reflects the stars. Like the fire in the canteen’s tiles, it’s like the glass holds the sky somehow, containing the galaxies above them. She hadn’t been expecting it to be night.

  “It’s so quiet, isn’t it?” Margaret remarks, hands on hips as she looks to the horizon.

  “What happened to the man you shot?”

  Margaret keeps breathing in the peaceful air. In the moonlight, the tarmac looks like a stretch of silvered sand. She tilts her head and takes her time to evaluate Kate. Then she grunts, a small noise, as if she has made up her mind about something.

  The following morning, with a uniform cloud across the sky, Kate walks beside Margaret toward the perimeter fence. Tom and Mark erect a ladder, and some dogs sprawling in the grass on the other side prick their ears. A lump of something sodden lies amid them, and when Nigel shoots at them, they bark. He shoots closer and they curve away, sandy streaks against the green.

  Parts of the man are less than a smear. Elsewhere, bones stick through the flesh. A hand with a cuff of skin lies to one side. The chest has been stripped, the stomach excavated. The blast had removed the top of his head and the soft innards are gone, tongue marks inside the skull, yet his lower face, although gray-skinned, looks strangely serene. His chin is stubble-dark.

  “We think they’re from the north,” Nigel grunts. “They always use the same road.”

  “And did you actually see children?” Tom’s voice is steady.

  “No,” Nigel concedes.

  “But maybe there were?”

  Nigel doesn’t move. His mouth contorts, his split lip sagging to the sides. “They weren’t good people,” he grunts. “So I hope there weren’t.”

  They don’t stay out there for long. The dogs become too bold too quickly, edging back toward them and starting to snarl. Pausing to catch her breath, her head swimming, Kate lets the others go ahead, but Tom falls back.

  “Kate, we have to talk.”

  “No, we don’t.”

  “Are you avoiding me?”

  “Just carrying on what you started.”

  “I wanted to find Bea!”

  Mark and Nigel climb the fence ahead, but Margaret waits for Kate, watching.

  “We need to get after this van,” Tom mutters. “It’s the same one I saw, the one with all the spikes. We’ll leave tomorrow.” At her continued silence, his voice rises in pitch. “Kate, can you at least tell me what happened to the others? Is Danny okay?”

  She shakes her hands out and, when they reach the ladder, stops beside Margaret. Gestures Tom up first. Then she follows Margaret, feeling suddenly nauseated. As she climbs over the top, she catches her leg on the fence. Only Margaret hears her gasp, and she doesn’t mention it until they are back inside the building, in the atrium, alone, where she demands to see. The puncture wounds are now vividly colored. Lightning streaks of red craze outward and are surrounded by concentric bruising. Even Kate is shocked by the sight.

&
nbsp; “Shit,” Margaret assesses. “Is that painful?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wait here.”

  Margaret works quickly when she returns, pulling a tube from her pocket and applying a cream that cools Kate’s skin immediately.

  “Ted told me about the medical stash. Nigel doesn’t know I know. But this looks nasty, Kate.”

  “What’s the cream?”

  Margaret shows her the tube. It’s crinkled and white with nothing but a quickcode. “Not much use without the Feed. It smells right, though. But you need to find a Pharmacist.”

  “They don’t exist.”

  “Of course they do. But that type of knowledge is rare, not to mention the drugs, so it’ll cost you,” Margaret says. “What’s a leg worth, though? You need to find a Pharmacist.”

  With that word, and the dusty dryness of the place, Kate is in the pharmacy of her youth, there with Martha while their mother talked to a man in a white lab coat. It was the earlier days of the Feed, and while some packaging was quickcoded, others still had colorful designs. The pharmacist stared through his spectacles at her and her memory warps to the last medic she had seen: in the tower, a physician peering at her, one of a horde of lab-coated drones who worked for Tom’s father. The Collapse was imminent, she and Tom had been moved into the tower, and she was undergoing many tests. Checkups, Tom’s father had said, and he’d apologized: he would have helped them before, if only they’d told him she was pregnant. If only he’d known. Why hadn’t they said? And again, that feeling of nausea, the morning sickness; she feels sick like that at the more recent memory of the acrid tang on Margaret’s breath as the real world and the dusty atrium swim back around her.

  “Ted was your boyfriend?”

  Margaret’s application of the cream slows slightly.

  “Margaret, are you pregnant?”

  Kneeling amid the dust and crystals of shattered glass, Margaret glances up. “I don’t know.”

  “You have morning sickness, don’t you?”