The Feed

by Nick Clark Windo

  Kate puts an arm around him and leans into his body. They clasp hands.

  “I’m so scared, Tom. I’m scared we’ll never find her. I’m scared of what we’ll find if we do.”

  Tom pulls her in close. They hold each other for a long time. It doesn’t bring Bea back, it doesn’t bring her any nearer, but it is comfort. When they are together, she feels less fear.

  “It moves so quickly, when it’s close to the earth,” Tom says, nodding at the slightest clipping of sun over the hills.

  “We’re moving, not it. Come on, Tom, you know that,” she corrects him, mumbling now, tired, and gently squeezes his waist. She smiles as something settles within her. Warmth fills her cheeks and the light gleams in her eyes as she watches the sun set behind the rough-treed horizon. She breathes in deeply. “But you are right. It would be a very good life. And I trust you, Tom. We’ll find her.”

  The following morning she wakes scared and confused. Churning red dreams clog her mind, and a sense of freezing space. Absolute zero; icy cold. Blue canvas snaps and judders close to her face. The air here is clear. It cools and calms her skin. Her feet tingle pleasantly in the dewy grass but the ugly color seeping through the bandage on her leg is horrific.

  “Looking good, Kate. It’s okay, it’s just me. I didn’t leave you for long, I promise. Hungry?”

  “Yes,” she says, and finds some clothes bunched up in the rugs. “And exhausted.”

  “Let’s see it.”

  She lets him examine her shin and apply some cream, and then she pulls on her trousers. She clumsily laces her boots as he rekindles the fire, then sits and watches him. He pours water into chipped tin mugs and she examines his face.

  “Here you are.” He strokes her hair. “You hang in there, right? We’re nearly there.”

  She sits and waits, then drinks from the cup. It’s warm, and pure, and good.

  With more food and another day’s rest, her body grows slightly stronger. They sit in the afternoon of the second day on the curve of the hill and talk.

  “You’re quiet,” he says.

  She nods. “I’m trying to fit things together.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like exactly where we are.”

  “I don’t exactly know,” he says, mimicking her. “Pretty much bang in the middle of the country. From what Mark said, it’s a couple more days to the Pharmacist. You’ll make it. He’ll fix you and he’ll know. If he’s one of the taken like Mark said, he’ll know where Bea is for sure.”

  She thinks about that for a while and then says, “I can’t remember what she sounds like. I’m not sure I can even picture her face.”

  He pulls her in to him and says nothing while they watch the pond below.

  “Describe her to me?” she asks when he doesn’t respond, and he rests his head on hers.

  “Come on, Kate. Don’t talk silly. Let’s just get her back.”

  Later, while he’s dozing in the sun, she descends carefully to the water. She has been watching the pond all day; it has virtually been calling her down. She tiptoes in until the water is high up her thighs and kneels. The hairs on her arms and legs stand, her breath speeds up, and her head rings as her pulse rate flies.

  “I thought I’d lost you,” he chastizes, stretching as she nears the top of the hill soon after.

  “I had to feel the water. It’s amazing.”

  He lies back on the rugs. “Well, you didn’t miss much. I’m still me,” he says. “Tom Hatfield. And you’re my wife, Kate. Your sister was Martha. Who knows what happened to Rafa. And those are dangerously wet clothes. Why don’t you take them off?”

  She does and climbs in under the canvas. Her skin puckers as his hands run down her spine. They kiss. It has been a very long time. Tom moves and she moves too, tentatively at first, hidden beneath their canvas in their copse upon the hill.

  After two more days’ walking, as her body weakens again, she sees hand-painted signs on the road. She points them out to Tom.

  If you’re good to us, we’ll be good to you.

  We’re happy to help, if you are too.

  Come in peace, or leave in pieces.

  The entrance to the camp is set back from the verge, a gateway standing proud of a tall wooden wall. Daubs of paint around it nearly look like flowers. As they enter, she drags herself to a stop and asks Tom to take the lead: gesturing at her head and her exhausted eyes, she tells him to do the talking. The camp is centered below them around two train carriages, derailed and rolled down the hill. Tents and shacks circle them and huge vegetable patches radiate away. A woman in a colorful sarong leaves the plants she is tending nearby and sways up the hill toward them. Her skin is dark, her hair pulled back. After eyeing them cautiously, she waves at a wooden tower where a gun barrel flashes in the shadows and nods them on down the hill.

  “This is damn impressive,” Tom mutters as they pass furrowed rows bursting with vegetables. “They must have a real plow!”

  She murmurs agreement but is distracted. People tending the plants examine the two as they pass. Two children careen around a row of beans, skid to a halt, and gawk. She waves tentatively and they do the same. The rhythmic sound of clanging metal rings out from a building whose roof leaks smoke. Behind the two train carriages are the skeletons of others. They have been cannibalized, their inner frameworks revealed, and an old lady covered with beads and ornaments sits on the grass before them. She has lost an ear and has a clipped lip. She shells peas, which she drops into a pot. “Sit down!” she calls out over the sound of metal, waving them forward with fat fingers. “My name’s Claire. Give me a hand!” She steals a smile and tosses them a thick and uneven ceramic bowl, wafts a hand at the piles of pods. Her speech is slurred by her misshapen lip. “They’re best out of the pod. Cook them, you lose the sugars.”

  “Thank you,” she replies. “I’m Kate, this is Tom . . .” And then she becomes silent. She pops a pod open. It is lush, fresh, fibrous, green, and grown right here apparently. Seismic emotions heave within her. Exhaustion melts her body and mind. So much she wants to say, so much she needs to ask, but she knows she should leave the talking to Tom. She slips the pod into a pocket.

  “So how long are you staying?” Claire asks over the sound of metal being hammered.

  “We’re not,” Tom replies.

  “Oh! Then thanks for preparing our dinner.”

  “We’re looking for a Pharmacist,” he continues. “I hear there’s one nearby?”

  Claire brushes the mound of empty pods from her skirt and looks sideways at him. “You know he’s taken?”

  Tom nods. “My wife’s leg. It has an infection.”

  At Claire’s gesture, she rolls the trouser leg up and shows her the bandaged wound. The smell is pungent and Claire recoils. “God knows you need it, but he may not help you. He’s not a good person. Things”—she grimaces and twirls a finger at her head—“have gone wrong. Take something valuable to trade, that’s the only advice I can give. How did you do it, Kate?”

  She looks at Claire, frowns at Tom, and rubs her leg, muttering, “It really hurts.”

  “A dog,” Tom explains.

  “Well, go out the way you came in. Turn right at the road. Toward the end of tomorrow, you’ll reach the edge of town. Be careful. There are people there who do bad things. Turn right at the fountain and keep walking. He lives in one of the more desirable addresses in the area!” Claire laughs. “Now, are you sure you won’t stay for dinner?”

  “We can’t stop. We’re looking for our daughter,” Tom falters. “She was stolen. In a van with horses—”

  “With spikes?”

  “You saw them?” Tom gasps.

  “They came past here last week. They know where all the camps are.”

  “Kate!” Tom grabs her hand, startling her; her thoughts are sloughing away, distracted, fuzzed out by exhaustion. “She’s seen the van!”

  “From a distance.” Claire nods vehemently, her jaw set. “They’ve tried it on befo
re, but I didn’t know they were in the market for children.”

  “Do you know where they were going?”

  “North,” Claire states strongly, and then, her shoulders dropping and her face folding, her eyes lost in the expanse of her face, “I’m sorry. They’re not good people either. The world these days. It’s not unlikely that they were going to the Pharmacist, you know.”

  She feels Tom’s grip tighten even more. He turns to her, and something has become steely in his eyes. “We’ll get her back, Kate. We’ll get Bea back.”

  “Good for you!” Claire has to raise her voice over the noise of hammering metal. She changes her tone abruptly. “Now, you get that leg fixed and get out of there! Find your child if you can. Come back either way. Have food with us, stay here awhile. Be happy!”

  “What is that noise?” Tom yells.

  “It’s the smithy!” Claire shouts back. She nudges the side of the uneven bowl they’ve been dropping the peas into. “When they’re not forging metal, we use it for pots.” She points a chubby finger across the grass. A building of brick and flint has a squat structure of beaten metal panels clamped onto it. The furnace bows at the seams and the wall is smoldering black around it. A chimney at the top spits out filthy smoke. There is a man there, beating a hammer on an anvil: a lump of stone, covered with metal. “Tell Steve I said you could peek.”

  Leaving Claire behind them, they pass rows of cabbages and carrots, and tall and arching beans. Tom looks around them in wonder as they approach the furnace. The man, covered in dirt and sweat and veiled by the drifting smoke, hammers and hammers away.

  “We could never have dreamed of this,” Tom whispers. “We were living on a knife edge. Let’s do it, Kate: let’s find Bea and come back here!”

  Back on the road, she examines the veins of the pea pod she has taken. She can still feel the heat of Steve’s furnace, where the moisture was sucked from her face. Dried-out skin. Dissolving. She rubs the leaf’s wetness on her cheeks as she walks. Tom’s face is still all scrunched. “Their knowledge was so far in advance of ours.” He stops abruptly. “Do you think they were taken?”

  She pauses in her stride and looks for a moment back over her shoulder.

  “It’s almost like . . . who cares if they were? They were doing so well,” Tom continues, deflating and starting to walk again. “What’s going to happen to us? This world?”

  “Do you think we can change the future?”

  Tom shakes his head. “I’m not talking about changing it. I’m just talking about surviving for it. Making a civilization that is going to last, and grow, and be good, and . . .”

  He gesticulates passionately, but his voice trails away and he is lost in his thoughts. She pulls a stick from a bush and flexes it between her hands, thinking too and, like him, not sharing. Her hands are shaking with the fever now. She’s burning up. Nearly done. She doesn’t have long. After a while, she looks at him. “Tom, does the name Darian Charles mean anything to you?”

  His face folds somewhat as he thinks, almost grasps something but doesn’t. “Nearly. Maybe,” he says. “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” She sighs. “It’s been in my mind recently. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  They sleep early, before they reach the town, and get up again before dawn. The earliest touch of sunlight hints at gold, but there is a haze to the air. They see the first person before the sun is up: a man partly hidden in the bushes, emaciated, his skin like a leather sheet shrink-wrapping his bones. He mutters and rants. They leave him. Later, when the sun has risen, they see two more people sitting by the road. “Stuff?” one of them spits, a woman as thin as wires. “Stuff? Stuff? Fuel?” She bares her rotten teeth. The man next to her chews something. Rags. He talks nonsense, mangled sounds. His spittle has dried into gray-flecked foam. He watches them. His eyes roll. They stagger on.

  In the outskirts, they see the fountain, brown and dry. Soon the neighborhood Claire described becomes obvious: wider, tree-lined streets. Most houses were torched long ago and stand rotting, their ancient contents cascading out. Vines have overgrown the road like a knotted green blanket. The farther they go, the more people they pass. Vacant eyes. Tight skin, faces drawn. They moan. Reach out and shuffle. Some try to stand. They all seem to be going, slowly, the same way.

  “What’s wrong with them?”

  “Keep moving,” Tom tells her, eyes wide, as they are surrounded by the slowly shuffling horde for a while. In the distance, at the end of a particular house’s railings that have been fortified with planks and razor wire, two men guard metal gates. “Any thoughts?” he asks her, taking her arm, glancing back at the brainless people behind them.

  “To get drugs,” she says simply, and limps on.

  The guards recline in two torn armchairs with long guns across their laps, wearing black T-shirts, scuffed trousers, and sunglasses with thick colored rims. They do not stand.

  “We want to see the Pharmacist,” she tells them.

  They move to look at her, these guards, like automatons, their eyes flicking like shadows behind their dark lenses.

  “The Pharmacist,” she reiterates. “We’ve come a long way.”

  One of the men, eventually, stands. He takes a heavy key from his pocket and unlocks the gate. He heaves against what used to be an automatic mechanism and goes through. Shoots them a flashing grin. Locks the gate and walks leisurely up the drive.

  A long time later, after the shadows of the trees have moved and the moisture in the air has turned chill, they are still waiting. The remaining guard hasn’t stirred. His expression has not changed.

  Tom points at the empty armchair. “Can my wife sit? She’s hurt her leg.”

  When the guard taps the trigger, she lowers her rucksack and sprawls on the road. Takes the hat from her bag and a sweater. Tom sits on the tarmac too, beside her.

  Sometime in the near-total darkness of the night, the guards swap. New ones sit and the retiring one walks up the drive.

  “Any news?” Tom calls from the ground.

  The new guards look at him blankly. One of them has a little box; inside it, a pill. He tips it out and holds it gently in his palm.

  “Hey,” she demands. “We want to see the Pharmacist!”

  The guard’s teeth glint in the darkness as he settles into his chair. He palms the pill into his loose mouth and smiles dreamily upward. “That’s nice, friend. Does he want to see you?”

  It takes a day and a half. At night they shiver; during the day they move with the shade. Over time the group of spindle-thin people with opaque eyes edges down the road to lie moaning just a house away. The guards swap. Each new pair swallows their pills. And then, in the early hours of the morning, one of the guards kicks them awake and they stagger, unseeing, up the gravel drive. It scrunches as they stumble and the house looms before them. She watches its faintly glowing windows, like something strange is emanating, and as they draw nearer she becomes aware of fleeting shapes: slips of movement skimming past her legs. Some hiss and others mewl. Dim lanterns show that the raised wooden veranda writhes with cats. Fur shushes on wood and the prickle-clatter of claws makes her skin itch. A man with hock-sized fists, a monolithic face, and vacant eyes stands beside the door.

  “The Pharmacist would like to see us,” she tells him.

  He jabs a blunt finger at their rucksacks. “Leave them. Shoes off.”

  Tom raises an eyebrow.

  Another jab. “Socks too.”

  “Anything else?” Tom asks, but the man stays silent.

  She passes barefoot into the house and finds the hallway, like the veranda, seething with fur. Beneath this living carpet the boards run bare up the stairs. But the guard stretches his arm toward a chipped door and, exhausted, finally she grasps its handle.

  As soon as there is gap enough to escape, music slides out: a tenor saxophone thrilling above a band from the candlelit room within. The recording is crackly, dusty, like time itself has aged, and her eyes are black holes in the
gold-tinged darkness. She makes out tables and chairs covered with the pooling innards of machines. At the far end of the room a long wooden counter fills the space, shadowed shelves behind it. The Pharmacist sits cross-legged on a sofa. His nose is angular and his mournful eyes hooded, his cheeks abnormally long, broad furrows in his raised brow. His greasy hair is brushed over his scalp. He wears trousers, a shirt, both scuffed and stained, and a frayed bow tie, tightly done. He does not move until he finishes reading and then looks slowly up at them. He claps his book softly closed and leans out of the shadows. His voice is like a desert breeze.

  “What do you want?”

  “We need drugs for my wife’s leg. And information. Our daughter has been abducted.”

  “I see. And what would you choose if I were to grant you only one?”

  Tom glances back at her, caught off guard. She looks at him, his fingers tense and clawed, and at the Pharmacist, relaxed, cross-legged, observing.

  “Her leg,” Tom explains. “She might lose it.”

  “And you have already lost the child. So that is your answer: keep the leg.”

  “No!”

  Tom strides forward and the Pharmacist gasps with delight. His gaze, now sharp, shifts in the shadows of his face, flicking keenly between them. A smile lives at the corners of his lips as he waits and watches expectantly.

  “What price?” she says, her voice scratchy as she breaks the silence, waiting no longer for Tom. She’s leading this now. “For either.”

  “Ah.” The Pharmacist releases the sound like a piston. “It depends.”

  “On?”

  “What you have.”

  “So, we have a deal: we just have to find what we have that you want.”

  “If you have anything I want.”

  “What do you want?”

  “What do you have?”