by LeMay, Jim
He looked up quickly to take in the whole figure at once. Despite the crepuscular light and rotted clothing he could tell it had obviously once been a person. It huddled in one of those pre-Last Day chairs that adapted perfectly to the sitter’s form (according to the older folks of course; neither he nor any of the other kids had ever sat in one that still worked). Having sat there for nearly thirteen years, it had long ago relinquished the last of its flesh but seeing entire human skeletons unnerved him. The pallid ivory of rib, femur or some other bone poking through the shredded fabric didn’t bother him. Finally he looked at the largest exposed bone, the skull. It nestled in a tattered nest that might have been a sleeping robe’s collar, leaning slightly forward. The open jaw and large black eye sockets gave it a look of perpetual surprise.
John had seen enough human skeletons to know that the heap of small bones lying in the lap had once been hands, that there weren’t enough for two complete hands and that the missing bones suggested tiny critters, long ago, seeking food. At least the house had protected its resident from larger scavengers like dogs or coyotes.
Resting among the remaining hand bones was a device John recognized as a “reader” that could be detached from the commcomp for use in another location. A little sadly, he recreated the scene in the room as it must have been all those years ago. The man – the skeleton’s garment was almost certainly a man’s night robe – had been sick with that horrible infection that had killed nearly everyone on earth, including John’s father. Knowing he was dying, the man had decided to spend his last hours in the chair reading, or perhaps listening to music. At least until he grew too sick. The skull had stared sightlessly at the blank reader screen with the same quizzical expression for nearly thirteen years.
John turned suddenly away, stalked over to the covered windows, determined to ease tightness in his throat that had nothing to do with heat, dust or darkness. He grasped the draperies on each side of the slit that admitted the mad little demons. The room had lain in darkness long enough.
“John! I found one!”
John jumped and turned toward the sudden shout, still clutching the draperies. The corroded rod supporting them screeched in protest as it parted from the wall. The collapsing drapes rained ancient dust. Only a few deft back-steps saved John from envelopment by the filthy decomposing material and most of the dust. Sudden, blinding light banished the dark just as Rossi’s shout had shattered the quiet. But not the heat. John yanked his handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his face. The handkerchief came away muddy. He sneezed.
The shout had shocked John especially because of Rossi’s almost preternaturally quiet nature; he seldom spoke above a murmur. Rossi stepped in from the hallway holding up a story book for beginning readers. For a moment John was nonplused.
Then he remembered and smiled a little in spite of his irritation. A few weeks before Rossi had asked John to teach him to read. At not quite thirteen years old, he had never taught anyone anything, let alone a kid older than himself how to read. He had no idea how to even begin! To gain time he had told Rossi they didn’t have the right books, like simple beginners’ books. They would have to wait until the gang’s return to Coleridge Gardens in the fall. There he could look for the books he had first learned to read. At John’s age, the stretch between the beginning of summer and next fall seemed a long time. He would think of something by then. Rossi might even forget about it.
That wouldn’t work now, though. There Rossi stood with a beginners’ book in his hand!
The usually dour Rossi said with an eager smile, “This book’ll do, won’t it, John?”
John couldn’t disappoint him. “Yeah. Yeah, that’ll do.” He brushed futilely at the dust on his clothes. All that accomplished was to make them both sneeze.
“For now though,” said Rossi, “we’d best finish scroungin’ this place. It’s gittin’ late.” Resuming his role of older-kid-in-charge.
John looked back at the immobile figure in the corner. The light had chased the dread from the room. The figure now looked just like what it was: a misshapen bundle of bones.
To Rossi, of course, the skeleton was only another object to search for truck, as they called marketable items. He had lived close to death his whole life, first as an orphan in a town that hated orphans, now as a member of a scrounger gang ransacking deserted towns and farms full of corpses. Rossi had been a baby before the Last Days so he didn’t remember what a world full of people was like. He found nothing unusual about skeletons littering towns like this.
But John had not been raised in the casual violence that Rossi accepted as part of life. He had been born during the pandemic that preceded the Last Days in a small isolated town. The survivors had wept over and buried those lost in the pandemic in his infancy so he had no memory of it.
Rossi followed John’s glance to the figure in the corner and went immediately to it. John watched in grisly fascination as the rotten clothing disintegrated in Rossi’s hands. Some of the bones clattered to the floor. The skull toppled forward as Rossi pulled a strand of some kind over it, examined it closely and held it up triumphantly for John to see: a chain with a metal disk hanging from it. The figure of a man carrying a small burden had been etched on the disk.
“What is it?” asked John, unconsciously speaking softly.
“It’s a medal.” Rossi’s spoke quietly too, but he always did. “I think it’s St. Christopher, the guy Stony wears around his neck.”
“Who’s St. Christopher?”
“Some kinda god, I think. Stony says he pertecks travelers. I’m gonna ast Stony if I can keep him t’ perteck me.” The gang generally held truck in common and split profits after selling it. One could, however, request to keep a specific object and deduct its value from his share of the profit, or “take”. John would almost certainly keep one or more books as part of his take.
“Jackie has one too,” said Rossi.
“Jack’s is a cross,” said John. “They call it a crucif – something.”
The figure in the chair looked far less human now, just rotting threads clinging to a disarranged collection of bones, many of which now lay scattered about the floor. The skull gazed vacantly at John from approximately where the lap had been. St. Christopher hadn’t done a very good job protecting this guy. But then, maybe he hadn’t been much of a traveler.
“Let’s git to it, John. Stony’d have our ass if he saw us fuckin’ around like this.”
Scroungers considered it bad luck to dawdle after entering a deserted house. They believed some essence of the former occupants still hovered about the place. These shades, knowing they no longer needed their things, didn’t mind newcomers taking whatever they wanted. Disturbing their final rest longer than necessary, though, was a breach of etiquette, like a person overstaying his welcome at a friend’s house.
Once started, under Rossi’s direction, they moved quickly and efficiently. Though John was a novice Rossi had three years’ experience under the older gang members’ supervision.
Rossi went first to the desk. Ignoring the commcomp, which had become immediately worthless when its power source disappeared during the Last Days, he ransacked the desktop and drawers for once-trivial items, from paper clips to letter openers, and for the more valuable metal objects that clever smiths could turn into tools. His most valuable discovery lay in a bottom drawer, a full ream of paper. Instead of just dumping it into the bag with the rest, he set it aside. It would be among the last objects packed into the cart, carefully wrapped and placed in the safest place. Paper was finite, irreplaceable and fragile. This ream was probably as valuable as everything else in the desk combined.
John concentrated on the shelves behind the desk. He dumped everything but the books into his bag, even the stuff he didn’t recognize – the older guys could throw away anything unsalable. As Rossi emptied the desk drawers, John filled them with books for safety, stacked atop each other or, if space did not permit, on their spines (never the other direction as
that, according to his mentor Matt Pringle, caused their rotting spines to deteriorate further). Bound paper books had been rare even before the Last Days; most books had been recorded on various electronic devices like the commcomp, or small thin wafers reputedly containing thousands of books each, unreadable now that the commcomps were dead.
No experienced scrounger worked randomly so, after finishing the desk and shelves they searched the rest of the room in an orderly fashion: end tables, wall niches and around the skeleton, and found little else of value. The humid climate had mostly consumed the fabrics, including the drapes and the furniture was too ungainly to take. The lamps, made of the so-called “composite” materials, could not be shaped into anything useful by tinkers or smiths.
Thanks to Rossi’s expertise they stripped this last room of the house, in short order. They finished packing the cart out front and sat for a moment on the house’s front stoop in the shade, exhausted more from heat than their labor. Their cart was full. It was nearly mid-afternoon, the hottest part of the day.
After a time Rossi said, “Time t’ dump this shit an’ head for the crick.”
They stood, grabbed the bar on the front of the truck, as Stony called his carts, and pulled it down broken, overgrown streets to the stash hole, a partially collapsed house in the northeast corner of town. It only took a few minutes but in such a small town no place was more than a few minutes from any other. They rolled it through the back door, across a landing and down a set of rickety steps to the basement. They took longer unloading than they should have because of the basement’s coolth but finally returned up to the heat and light.
They went to the gang’s hole-up on the west side of town, the second floor of a house that had been old even before the Last Days. They had found other houses in better condition but their boss Mitch hadn’t liked them for either hole-ups or stash holes. Rival gangs would check them first as they themselves had done. Finding none of the guys there, they went out, crossed the back yard and the meadow where their mules grazed, and down sloping overgrown fields to the creek, a mile or so west of town.
The other two young guys were there already in the shallow brown water of the bend shaded by willows, naked. Big Miller sprawled against the bank, half asleep. His great size had earned him his nickname. He was strong and loyal if a bit slow in wit. Little Jack Kincaid, seldom still for long, splashed around, whistling tunelessly. The cheap red glass beads on the string holding the crucifix around his neck glittered in vagrant shafts of sunlight. Neither saw Rossi, approaching wraith-like through the willows, followed by John. As an orphan Rossi had learned that the least-noticed kids lived the longest and still found the practice efficacious.
When, to the always skittish Jack Kincaid, Rossi seemed to suddenly materialize before him, he yelped in terror. Then he laughed and splashed water at him and then at John when he broke through the willows. Miller woke up with a startled grunt.
“You assholes!” Jack laughed. You scairt the shit out a me.”
“Then I don’t wanta share the water with y’, Jackie,” said Rossi. But he stripped, as did John. They waded into the water and squatted in the mud where it was marginally cooler to spend the next two or so of the day’s hottest hours.
“Where’s Stony?” asked John.
“Checkin’ his snares,” said Big Miller. “Don’t know where that old fart gits his energy.”
After bitching to each other about the heat they lay quietly in the shallows, except for high-strung little Jack Kincaid. He described every item of that day’s take and speculated on its original use. A favorite topic among the young guys was the inexplicable pre-Last Days habit of people cluttering their homes with so much stuff. Then he talked about the hunting trip he planned when they next took a day off to hunt for food. Boss Mitchell wouldn’t let them use precious ammunition for hunting but Jack, starting the previous summer about the time John joined the gang, practiced with a clumsy homemade bow and arrows. Last winter he had used part of his take to buy a real bow and arrows. He had practiced all winter and continued now as time allowed. Despite the others’ good-natured ragging and though he had failed to bag even a rabbit – which John occasionally did with his powerful slingshot – he vowed to bring down a deer before the summer ended.
Then they heard the slightest of movements in the willows and Stony appeared, a small wiry man with white hair and beard and a patch over one eye.
“Hey, boys,” he said, “got room for a old man?”
They greeted him. Miller moved over to make room, then said, “Hottest day yet, ain’t it, Stony?”
“Yeah, only the middle a May an’ it’s already hotter ’n the hubs a hell.”
Jack laughed. “The hubs a hell! It don’t git no hotter ’n that, Stony.”
“Any luck with the snares?” asked Miller.
“Not this time. Got a vole an’ a field mouse. Don’t reckon we’re hungry ’nough t’ eat critters like that yet. We’ll finish off the smoked fish tonight. I’ll fix some corn bread. I got some nice mushrooms t’ go with ’m. Oyster mushrooms.”
The boys made appreciative noises; they liked the way Stony prepared oyster mushrooms, battered lightly in cornmeal and fried.
“Found us another stash hole too,” Stony said. “I’ll show y’ when we git back t’ work.”
“Why so many stash holes, Stony?”griped Miller. “The one we got ain’t nigh full.”
“I tol’ja. If another gang finds one a your stash holes they ain’t likely to look for no more. The more stash holes y’ got the safer your truck is.”
That didn’t satisfy Jack Kincaid. “But Mitch hisself said they ain’t been nobody here since the Last Days.”
“That don’t mean somebody won’t’ find the town. We found it just a couple weeks ago.”
“That ain’t like you, Stony,” persisted Jack. “You always tell us t’ ‘look on the bright side’ a things.”
Stony grinned his nearly toothless grin. “You got it half right, Jackie. Look on the bright side, sure, but expec’ the worst.” He looked like he would have winked if he’d had another eye.
Stony was unaccountably cheerful for one so well known for his bad luck. He had been forty when the pandemic struck. His hair had turned white nearly overnight and in subsequent years he had lost most of his teeth. One cheek was caved in where they were all missing. An infection of some kind had cost him an eye and he had lost an ear lobe in a bar fight. He was unusually susceptible to colds and other types of sickness and no one, himself included, expected a long life for him. He reminded others, however, that he and everyone alive were the luckiest people who had ever drawn breath. The devastating pandemic of 2072, Chou’s Disease, had killed 80 to 90 percent of the earth’s population. Civilization had crumbled so quickly no one knew the number for sure. Most of the few who recovered from Chou’s succumbed to starvation, pestilence or violence. To Stony, being among those few survivors was the best case of luck there had ever been.
“Wonder how the other guys is doin’,” mused Rossi. John had been wondering the same thing.
Jack laughed. “They’s partyin’ in Nellie’s Fair while we bust our balls. “They made a bunch a money off ’n the church truck an’ ain’t even thinkin’ a us.”
“They only been gone a week,” said Stony. “They ain’t even got t’ Nellie’s Fair yet.”
They talked in a desultory fashion, speculating about the other guys, discussing the heat and the upcoming evening’s work. The shadows finally grew longer. Stony stood up and stretched.
“It’s a mite cooler boys,” he said. “Let’s go git some more truck. Big, I b’lieve it’s your turn t’ see t’ the mules.”
They would work until dark and return to the hole-up where Stony would prepare supper.
* * *
The gang had left its winter hole-up in Coleridge Gardens the first week of April to “go trucking,” so-called because their word for the useable, saleable goods they sought was “truck.” It consisted of two f
ive-member factions, one of men in their forties and fifties and the other of youths in their teens. The older men, the original gang members, clearly controlled the gang, which often rankled the youths’ impetuous leader, Red Leighton. The oldest of the leading faction and gang leader was Boss Hank Mitchell, who most called Mitch, in his late fifties; the youngest was Matt Pringle, a little over forty, ex-college professor, one-time intellectual and John Moore’s friend and mentor.
They avoided the few farmsteads of one to a few families they saw. Farmers disliked scroungers because they took articles they might need themselves and, in any case, no one trusted armed wanderers of any kind. They followed the Sheridan River north and east for nearly three weeks to the Green Hills, a beautiful country of tree-clad ridges separated by flat creek bottoms, quite different from the gently rolling prairies around Coleridge Gardens. Matt told John that even before the Last Days fewer people had lived here than the Coleridge Gardens area. Poor soils and new means of non-agricultural food production had gradually driven the farmers and businesses depending on agriculture away, except for a few stubborn hold-out farmers that cultivated the creek bottoms.
“A paradox of the late twenty-first century,” Matt Pringle had said, “was that, even though the world population had doubled in less than a hundred years, population actually dwindled in lots of rural places like this. Most people lived in the cities. It’s just the opposite now. The cities are empty. Survival was easier in the country.”