The Feed

by Nick Clark Windo

  “Don’t hurt us!” the man cries, and tries to bite Tom’s wrists.

  “Who’s us?” she demands, and lowers the stick to the side of the man’s head. She glares at the trees around them, her heart pounding. “Who’s there?” she shouts. “Or I’ll kill him!”

  After some silence, another figure emerges. Small, bundled, and shaking, a woman approaches, her hands raised in the air. “Please don’t hurt him,” her weak voice calls.

  Tom lets the man go to scoop him up again and push him between two of the thickset spikes on the van. Sylene has never seen him like this, snarling in the night. His frenzied eyes are deadened, like an animal’s.

  “Who are you? Where are the children?”

  “W-what children?” the man stammers.

  “Please don’t hurt him! Take anything you want!” the woman cries.

  Tom, still fiercely holding the man, falters. He glances back at Sylene. “Open it,” she orders, gesturing at the van with her stick. This close up, the spikes look less forbidding. She touches the flaking paint on one of them. The spike is made of wood.

  The weeping man pushes his wife aside and opens the doors of the van. It’s then that the woman starts screaming: “Please don’t take him, please leave us the boy!”

  Inside, the van is nearly bare. There are empty wooden shelves and some boxes, but nothing else besides a pallet on which a body is strapped. The corpse of a child, all bundled in rugs, more bone than anything else.

  Tom gags from the smell. “What the hell is this?”

  “Our son!” the woman cries. “Please don’t make us let him go!”

  Once the sun has risen, she takes another look. The oval shell is metal, but the wooden spikes are moldering. Decoration, the man tells them; this is the first time they’ve not deterred an attack. Tom is sitting, distant, down the road. He hasn’t slept all night. Sylene opens the back of the van again. There is nothing of any use. Some shards of tech and lumps of wood. Hardly even any food. Some leaves. Are those potatoes? A box of near-rotting apples. And the child. The bones. These pitiful people’s son. Dead for over a year, by the look of him.

  “Be careful,” she tells them. They still won’t meet her eye. “You shouldn’t light fires at night.”

  And they, skittering around her, pick up the bridles and start rolling the van away themselves. Sylene watches them go. Then she turns to Tom. He looks up at her from where he is sitting on a disintegrating mossy log. His expression is entirely eroded.

  “It makes no difference now,” he says. His voice is husky. Bone dry. “But what was that noise? Before we got them? They knew we were coming.”

  “I don’t know. It must have been them. Were they trying to scare us off?”

  She reaches her hand down. Tom looks at it, dangling in front of his face, and then, taking it, with effort stands.

  They spend two days going more slowly, but pick up pace as they near a town. Tom’s fire has collapsed, hope barely kindling anymore. They have approached along a stream and they reach a crumbling bridge: a redbrick hump with low-arched sides. “I know where we are,” he says suddenly. He has been so quiet these last two days, and withdrawn, but now something brings light to his face. “Do you recognize it, Kate?”

  “Are there any Hubs around here?”

  “Hubs?” He frowns. “No. We’re in the middle of nowhere. Don’t you recognize it?”

  “Remind me.”

  A fence bursts outward from a paddock, the earth all churned. There’s a church amid the trees with scorch marks on its walls. The stained glass is warped. This place is like nowhere she’s ever seen. Of course she doesn’t recognize it, and the slight enthusiasm in Tom’s eyes is dimming as he waits. Cottages line the road. One rosebush has taken over three front lawns. There is movement in an upstairs window, a flash behind curtains, and then nothing more.

  In the end she just smiles at him and nods.

  “We need to get up high.” Tom turns away from her. “So we can see around. Look for their camp, for smoke. We have to be tactical.” His eyes are exhausted; there is so little light left, but still he scans above the houses, points at a ridge of rock that stands tall. “That will give us a good view. Let’s see if there are any supplies here. You’ll soon recognize where we are.”

  They follow the road as it curves past a village hall. Notices for rummage sales and fetes and posters for films are still up behind cracked and milky glass.

  “Up here, I think,” Tom says as they hit the main road, and points. “Yes, look!”

  The shop’s doors are still locked but its windows have been broken. At Tom’s insistence, Sylene goes in under the hanging shards. Bodies of mannequins surround them, tangled in ropes, harnesses, and clothes. She skids on the dusty floor.

  “Remember it?” Tom asks again. “It’s where we bought this old thing.”

  He lifts the hem of his jacket. Sylene smiles and laughs and looks around the shop.

  “A while ago,” she agrees, and walks away. She finds a large rucksack and transfers the contents from her own, turning this whole thing over in her mind. Food, a pan, some mugs, her hat; she puts aside the small T-shirt with the airplane on it . . . and repacks it all as Tom furls a rope. She watches from the corner of her eye as he takes some ancient vacuum-packed biscuits from a dust-laden shelf, spots some map packs and waves one at her.

  “France,” he says. “Do you remember those trips we went on?” And then, when she says nothing and just goes back to her packing, “Do you miss teaching the kids French?”

  “Of course I do. So what else shall we get?”

  “Some waterproofs and some wax. Let’s get a tent. In fact, let’s get two. When we find Bea, we’ll need the space. Have you seen any knives? And test those flashlights. I’m sure the batteries will be gone, but who knows . . .”

  They camp at the foot of the ridge. Rain clouds have built but come to nothing, and as the sun sets, they lift, their undersides reflecting red and gold back onto the earth. They eat a weasel that Tom has caught, tangled in a contraption of wire and lured by some moldy biscuit. Birds fill the sky, sweeping the air for bugs.

  “I tell you one thing I liked about his place,” Tom says.

  “Whose?”

  “The Pharmacist’s. And that was the music. That Wynton Marsalis when we first went in.”

  Sylene eats from her bowl with her fingers. “That wasn’t Wynton. It was Sonny Rollins. I’d know that old stuff anywhere.”

  “Well,” Tom says levelly, “it was nice to hear music, anyway. It’s something I miss. When was the last time we heard any? Can you even remember?”

  “I like the birds,” Sylene says. “They’re enough for me. Just hearing them now, with the light, and the air . . . it’s like being free.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s good, that’s all.” She frowns. “All this nature is good. Are you all right, Tom? You seem a bit . . . you know.”

  Sylene continues to eat but Tom has stopped. He stares off into space. Sylene takes the stick from the fire and slides off more meat while Tom surveys the rocky ridge and the ribs of cloud hazing out.

  “I wonder how Margaret and Nigel are,” he says.

  “This really is delicious.”

  “They made a nice couple, didn’t they?”

  She licks her fingers. “Can we have it again tomorrow?”

  “Don’t you think?”

  “Yes, Tom,” she sighs, “they did.”

  “And Jane, I wonder how she is. She’d love this sunset. Do you think she’s still painting?”

  “I hope so, Tom.”

  “Yeah,” he says, and puts his plate on the ground. “That would be nice.”

  He stands and walks toward the woods.

  “Going far?” she calls, but he is gone.

  Sylene takes the remains of the weasel off the fire and kicks the ashes down. She finds some leaves and wipes the plates, and lays out their rugs beneath the canvas. She watches the sky and the birds.
She breathes deeply on the air. She smiles to herself, lost in thought, and something melancholy hazes her eyes. The last sky she had seen before she left was blazing. It had taken her over a day to climb the Scraper, and at the top, barely able to breathe, she’d unsealed the airlock, fighting the crippling heat. The metal had seared her palms as she had gripped the handle and twisted. She cried out, gripped it and twisted again and again and again until it finally released. Some ancient alarm sounded as she opened the outer hatch, and that was when the heat really hit her. Smacked her down. It was like her face had been flayed in an instant. She could feel her throat blistering with every breath as she climbed the final rungs and hauled herself outside.

  The sky was bleached. The earth stretched away, red-soiled, dried out and jagged. Dry wind roared in her ears. She stumbled a few steps, already feeling her skin burn away and peel. Parts of her clothing were melting. Before her, the vast circumference of the plungehole dropped down, the curved walls of its windows obsidian black, wormholing toward the depths of the earth, so many miles deep. She was taking the journey. She had decided to follow Darian and she had signed up to go. But she had to be sure she’d do it. It terrified her too much. It was suicide to go, she was sure of that, and how could she make herself die? It was against nature. Self-preservation: that most powerful of instincts.

  So here, on this utterly barren plain, she threw her arms back and opened her chest to the sky, embraced the heat and all the other things that, never mind the actual light, had for the last minute been ravaging her body. Ten seconds was enough to kill someone, but she wanted to be sure. It had seen to her husband in thirty. So she stood for a minute, and for a minute more, until her dark hair curled and she couldn’t see for the dryness of her eyes. She felt things run underneath her clothes but didn’t know if it was fabric or skin. The gurney was waiting for her. To send her back. To do her duty. To stop this from ever coming to pass. And if it had worked for him, she was determined to find her son.

  It is dark by the time she hears Tom return. The night has become chill and Sylene is under the rug. She sees he has bulges in his pockets as he stands above her, looking down.

  “Do you mind if I sleep first?” Sylene asks, already nearly there.

  “Sure.”

  “I’m exhausted.”

  “That’s fine,” Tom says, and removes the rocks. Two large and heavy things. “For the dogs,” he says. “I don’t think we’re safe here.”

  When he slides in beside her, Sylene rolls onto her side. She looks out along the earth and listens as he fidgets, as he takes off his clothes behind her. She hears the rocks clink as he drops them next to her head.

  “Good night, Kate.”

  “Good night.”

  In the morning they climb the wide-toothed rocky hills. She is sick again as they go—she had told him she’d catch up—and she retches behind a bush. She looks out at his back, trudging slowly up ahead of her. Did he hear it? Did he not? She doesn’t know anymore, has no idea what he’s thinking. He keeps on ahead and now, near the top, the wind turns her hair to little whips, which flick her face. He is away and small in the distance.

  Tom has stopped on a wide, flat rock where two valleys converge below. She sees he is waiting for her, but she is exhausted by the climb and goes slowly, her hands on her thighs as she hauls herself up the last of the slope. The slate clinks under her surely splitting boots as the ground gradually flattens out. As she approaches Tom, she can see into the other valley behind this spine of hills and there are lakes, long ones, the low sun reflecting off them through the early-morning haze. It makes the colors glow. The water is striated. Woods checker the landscape with the rolling fields and roads. It is perhaps the most beautiful view she has seen.

  “A beautiful enough view?” Tom’s voice, quiet for so long, knocks the silence apart.

  Sylene nods, hands on hips, as high as the sky, looking down on all below. “Exactly what I was thinking. I can’t see any smoke, though, or camps,” she says. “There are some houses over there, and there—look—that’s the village we’ve come up from, isn’t it?”

  Tom nods as she continues to scan the land.

  “But I don’t see any life. How long will we watch? Tom, this could take forever. We need to find another way. Is there anything about the Feed that could help us?” She turns and he is standing surprisingly close. With the sun in her eyes she can’t make out his face; she raises a hand to shield them.

  “Let’s sit, Kate. I have something for you.” Tom reaches behind his back.

  Sylene is tired. Her limbs are weak. The taste of vomit stings her throat. She sits. Tom kneels in front of her and pulls from one pocket an apple and from his other pocket another.

  “Thanks, I’m starving.”

  He watches her eat, his own apple held tightly in his hand.

  “Where did you get these?”

  “The van. In a box. I took them.”

  “You should have gotten more.”

  Tom rests his hands on his thighs and looks out at the view. There is so much air around them and so, so much light. It is clear for miles around. “You have no idea what this is, do you?”

  Sylene stops eating. Tom is speaking very quietly.

  “You don’t know,” he says, almost musingly. “It’s not that you can’t remember.”

  “What,” Sylene asks, slowly wiping her lips, “don’t I know?”

  “Over there.” Tom nods. “It was on the other side of this valley. We walked up for sunrise, set out before it was light. We sat there looking down and you said it was the most beautiful view you’d ever seen. That was where we stayed, that lovely B and B. Can you see it?” He points into the valley at a tiny building by a river, half hidden by distance and trees. “And you’ve always checked your apples since.”

  Sylene looks down at the fruit, half eaten, the juicy flesh exposed. When she looks back at him, he lifts his hand and flicks his wedding band with his thumb. She glances at her own hand, at the two rings there, one glinting with diamonds.

  “Can you remember what you said?” he asks. “Apart from yes.”

  She can’t hold his gaze. She looks down at the rock they’re on and lets the wind whip her hair about her face. So this is how it happens . . .

  “When’s your birthday?” he asks.

  Sylene stays silent.

  “What was your sister called? How about our dog?”

  Her hands are shaking and she feels tightened to her core.

  “What was Bea’s first word? What’s your favorite book? Who the fuck are you? What was our wedding song? Who are you? Kate? You made that racket by the van, didn’t you? You tried to stop me from finding Bea!”

  Sylene looks down, at the stones worn to sand between the fissures in the rocks. Worn and worn, worn down by time, the unbearable weight of its crushing.

  Tom’s hands are clenched, different bits of his face stretched and compressed at once. “Please,” he groans. His head drops and he starts to cry. “Give me something, Kate, please.”

  “I was a language teacher. I taught kids French.”

  Tom lunges at her and pins her to the ground, knocking her skull onto the stone. “No, you didn’t! You taught English! You just heard me say that in the shop!”

  She tries to push him off. She heaves at his chest but he forces her back. She kicks his shin, her knee connecting with his thigh. He tumbles and she manages to roll away, but is only halfway to her knees when he grabs her legs and pulls. Her arms collapse, her face smashing into the stone. Her chin and palms scrape along the ground until he flips her. Pinning her wrists above her head, he forces her legs out and lies, crushingly, across her, his face down close to hers.

  “Who are you?” he snarls.

  Stones bite into her back as he shakes her, lifts and drops his weight, winding her, again and again and again. “Stop,” she gasps, but there is no air in her lungs and no room for her to breathe.

  “Who are you? Where’s my wife?”

&nb
sp; Sylene tries to speak, tries to push him back, but Tom kneels on her stomach. His hands are around her throat. His fingers tighten and she can’t draw breath. He chokes her. He throttles her. She can feel the cartilage stretch in his grasp and can’t gasp any air. She claws his face, rakes her thumbs across his eyes. Tom screams and throws himself away. Then he comes at her once more but she is on her knees by now with a hand to her stomach and another out to stop him.

  “The baby,” she gasps. “You’ll kill the baby.”

  Tom stops, his hands shaking, inches from her throat. The wind ripples his trousers. Whips at his jacket. Blood runs down his face. He staggers.

  “The baby,” she pants. “Don’t hurt us.”

  And the look in Tom’s eyes and the space in his mouth as he collapses to his knees. His shoulders drop as something drains from his face. Sylene staggers aside. The wind pulls her, flips her hair. She works her palms flat around her stomach and continues to back away.

  Tom

  Animals in the Ruins

  He stands in the river, waiting, his feet made ageless by the eddies of water and the layering light. They are cold, cold enough for him to feel the pebbles only when he flexes his toes. He moves his fingers, also icy stiff. The water rushes past his ankles, pulling at his shins. It flows before his eyes, passing away, until it could be him that’s moving and the river’s standing still and time has been inverted or lost. Then there’s a flash of something: a glinting writhe amid the roiling water. He lunges. His fingers connect with something firm that bounces away. Before his heart has beaten again he sees another flash of scales and stabs a numb hand down and grabs. He hefts the fish out and pushes it to the ground. He tries to lift its head, to snap its spine, but it won’t break, so he leaves it to flap in the mud, gills gasping.