by Ike Hamill
“I saved her. Now she needs to get going,” the man said.
The woman approached me. She got close enough that I could smell the lake mud.
“Your fingers are purple,” she said. “Have you been surviving on berries?”
“Pretty much,” I said.
The woman pulled a plastic bag from inside her shirt. She unrolled it and presented a hunk of smoked meat. She bit off a pull to show me that it was okay. It tasted fine but the sand ground between my teeth.
“Matthew told you to stay along the banks?” she asked.
I nodded
“We don’t know why, but they’ve been staying away from the water,” she said.
I glanced at Matthew. He wasn’t pointing his gun at me anymore, but he hadn’t put it away.
“It wasn’t always so,” she said. “In the beginning, they would come right into the shallows. But there were a lot more of us then. Maybe they were attracted by the numbers.”
“What are they?” I asked.
“Monsters,” she said. She shrugged, like it was a perfectly normal thing to say.
“Where do they come from?”
“Everywhere. They’re everywhere now,” she said. “Stay along banks. It might not always work, but it works for now. That’s the best you can hope for.”
I nodded. “Listen, does anyone run a boat across the lakes? I’m trying to get over to Thunder Bay.”
She shook her head. “Two is safe. Three is generally okay. You get more than three people in one place, and you’re in trouble. If you see anyone else, keep your distance.”
The man was nodding along.
I began to suspect that both of them might be a little crazy. I started to back away.
“Safe travels,” the woman said.
I raised my hand to her and continued on my way.
# # # # #
I got better at navigating as the days passed. I stayed reasonably close to the shore. It wasn’t always possible to keep it in sight. The east side of the lake was riddled with islands and little inlets. If I had stuck right to the edge, I would be there still.
I went a while without hearing any Roamers and I began to think that the crazy mud people had just made them up. When I ran out of food, I stopped and set up snares. After a day, I had a rabbit and a squirrel. They filled me up for a moment, but I realized that I was going to have to find a better way to eat if I wanted to keep moving. I explored a couple of abandoned buildings and finally found a stash of canned food to fill my pack. That carried me until I reached a ruin named Sudbury, and I could fill my pack again.
The train tracks led west and made for good walking.
Chapter 32
{Trial}
“SHE HAS BEEN TALKING for an hour, and she has barely said two words about Optioners,” a young woman said.
Cleo cleared her throat to silence the interruption.
She eyed the young woman. “Do you warrant that the witness is stretching out her testimony to delay judgement?”
“I do,” the woman said. She glared at Madelyn.
Madelyn didn’t break eye contact until she turned her head and spat on the floor. When she looked back, the young woman appeared to have lost some of her nerve.
“Let’s vote to terminate this testimony. In favor?”
Some number reported, “Aye.”
“Against?”
“Nay.”
“The vote was inconclusive,” Cleo said. “We’ll continue the testimony. Madelyn, you have to get to the point or we’ll judge you without your story.”
“Understood,” Madelyn said. If they had asked her, she would have said that the Ayes had carried. Regardless, her throat was getting tired and she was sick of the story too. She skipped ahead.
Chapter 33
{Story}
BEFORE I LEFT THE banks of Huron and skirted north to Superior, I decided that I wanted to see the water one more time. I found a place where my train tracks got relatively close, and I set off south, through the trees. As night fell, I made a small fire on the bank of the river and caught a fish with some tackle I had stolen from a house.
It was almost like camping.
The sky above was an endless ocean of black.
In the south, the clouds were lit up with orange from the city.
I heard them before I saw their lights. When they were still a hundred meters out, people wailed and screamed as the boat capsized. I threw all the wood I could find on the fire to make it a beacon for the swimmers. As they splashed and paddled towards me, I packed up my gear and retreated to the safety of the woods. I still wasn’t sure what they were.
They dragged themselves up from the water, coughing and vomiting. They huddled around my fire for warmth. There were more than a dozen gathered there before the splashing stopped. They were all too exhausted and weak to be dangerous, but I kept my distance until one of them called to me.
“Hello?” a woman asked. Her voice was so pitiful. She hugged a little boy to her side and stroked his head.
“Who are you talking to?” someone asked.
“I saw a ghost in the trees,” the woman said.
At the mention of a possible ghost, one of kids started to cry. I felt guilty that I was adding to their misery. I came into the circle of light from the fire.
“I’m not a ghost,” I said. “That’s my fire. Don’t come closer. I’m armed.”
“Who are you?” the woman with the little boy asked.
“Just a traveler.”
“Thank you for building the fire. We couldn’t see the shore,” the woman said. “When the boat started to go down, I thought we would all drown,” she said.
“Some did, thanks to you,” a man croaked. He sounded miserable.
“I did what I had to do,” the woman said to him.
“Where did you come from?” I asked.
The woman glanced at the others and saw that nobody else was going to answer.
“We’re from Bay City,” she said. “It’s north of Saginaw.”
“I know it,” I said. The place wasn’t more than two-hundred kilometers north of Detroit.
“We had to get on the boat. There was nowhere else to go,” she said. “The blast came up from Detroit, and the Buzzers came down from the Yoop. Death was all around us.”
A guy from the other side of the fire interrupted before I could ask what she was talking about.
“Shut up,” he said. “He’s about to say something.”
He leaned over the log next to him.
As the others gathered around, I realized that it wasn’t a log. They were leaning in close to listen to a torso. It was burned so badly that it looked like a charred log. The arms and legs were gone. The mouth was a cracked red hole.
“What is he saying?” someone asked.
The man closest to the stump-man translated the whispers. “He says that it’s not safe here. He says that the Buzzers are from this side of the lake and they hunt fire at night.”
“What good has his advice done us?” a woman asked.
I was still standing several meters from the group. It seemed like maybe it was time for me to back away. I didn’t want to know why they were dragging around a burned stump of a man and listening to him whisper.
“Shhh!” someone said.
All the heads turned towards the woods when we heard the click.
As weak and weary as they were, they gathered themselves together in an instant. Everyone began to splash back into the water. As I heard the second click, my mouth was hanging open. I couldn’t believe that these people who had nearly drowned a moment before were now rushing back into the lake to stand with only their heads exposed. Even the kids were perfectly silent. Their wide eyes reflected back the firelight as they stared towards the woods.
Two more clicks came rapidly.
“Lady!” someone whispered from the water. “Get in before they get you!”
I began to put it together with what the mud people had told me. Individually, they were cr
azy, but they all seemed to agree on this one point—the clicks were dangerous and the water might mean safety.
I ran west a few paces so I would have a patch of water to myself. I slogged in at the next click.
When the clicks intensified, the heads of the refugees disappeared under the water, one by one. I didn’t know what to think. I dunked myself as well.
I held my breath for as long as I could. When I came up, I saw that the others were already making their way back up to the bank. Whether they thought it was safe, or they had just given up, I couldn’t tell. As I waded to shore, I realized that I was less afraid of the group. We had survived together.
They crowded around the fire again. I got pretty close so I could dry off.
The man leaned towards the stump again. He told us what the stump said.
“We have to stay close to the water and try to find a place with lots of rocks,” the man said. He leaned in to hear the next whisper. “It’s safer to travel in the daylight.”
“Mommy,” one of the boys said. “I have to go to the bathroom.”
He was too old to carry far, but she found the strength to pick him up. “Let’s go a little ways away from the group.”
She looked at me, but didn’t ask for my help. I volunteered.
“I’ll go with you,” I said. “Safer in numbers, I suppose.”
“No,” the man next to the stump said. “It’s not.”
Still, I had an ulterior motive.
# # # # #
As her son relieved himself on the rocks, I moved close to the woman.
“How is that person still alive?” I asked.
“Rex?” she asked. I shrugged. “The burned man? He’s an Optioner.”
Of course I knew at the time that the Option would drastically reduce the effects of aging and stave off things like heart disease and obesity, but I had never heard of a living hunk of charcoal.
“You’re kidding,” I said.
She shook her head. “He was on the boat, all burned up like that. In exchange for his help, we’re dragging him along with us. Nothing kills him.”
“That’s impossible.”
She shrugged. “Clearly not.”
“How much help could he possibly be?” I asked.
“He knows about the Buzzers. He knows how they operate.”
“What are they?”
“There are different stories out there. On the ether, there was a story that the Global Initiative created nanomachines to repair the wind currents. Apparently, a bad update was sent out to them and now they’ve turned deadly. I don’t believe any of that. Rex says that a splinter group of Optioners turned them loose in order to clean out all the people who refused the cull.”
“Why would they do that? They need us to do all the basic services,” I said. “Who is going to manufacture and grow food? Them?”
“Rex says that the splinter group wants to return to a more natural state, like pre-industrial. They want to live like people did a hundred-thousand years ago.”
“That’s crazy,” I said.
She shrugged and shook her head. “Look at where industrialization got us.”
“One other thing,” I said. “You guys said that you were trapped between the Buzzers and the blast that came up from Detroit?”
She nodded. Her son finished his business and she told him to rinse his hands off in the lake.
“Yeah, when Detroit went up?”
“Pardon?” I asked.
“Detroit,” she said.
“What do you mean it went up? I’m from Detroit. What part?” I asked.
She gently touched my arm and led me and her son back to the fire.
“Guys,” she said, stopping the light conversation. “She’s from Detroit.”
# # # # #
It was the burned up guy who had the full story about Detroit. He didn’t want to tell his story, but he didn’t have much of a choice. With no limbs, he was fully dependent on the group for his survival, such as it was. He whispered it to his translator. One sentence at a time, the guy next to the stump told us what happened.
“He was down in Silverwood to see his sister and play a round of golf,” the translator said. “The riots were beginning to move from the city and out into the suburbs. It wasn’t like last time. The people weren’t just blocking traffic—they were stopping vehicles and pulling people out. They took people’s credentials. If they had a grocery pass, the people were beaten, or worse.”
“What do you mean, worse?” someone asked.
Madelyn thought about Austin. She imagined him doing his share of beating.
The translator listened to the whispers and then relayed the answer. “Some people were strung up from light poles. They had signs hanging from their feet that said, ‘Sister of Optioner,’ or ‘Dirty Optioner Father.’ It was turning into warfare between the classes.”
One of the women spat into the fire.
“The Civilian Guard brought in incendiary weapons to disperse the crowds. Rex watched the live feeds from the back of his vehicle as his driver took him back west. It didn’t take long for the citizens to overrun the Guard and take the weapons. Minutes after that report, the first base blew up. The rest went off like a string of firecrackers. The whole city turned into an inferno.”
The translator listened for a while to the whispers. He was slow to repeat the next part. “His vehicle was stopped by an improvised blockade. They figured out he was an Optioner and burned him on the street. Whenever his fire went out, they dumped more fuel on top. They only stopped when they ran out of fuel. He pretended to be dead while he wished it was true. His driver threw him in the backseat to take his remains home.”
They were silent while they waited for the next part of the story. The fire crackled. Madelyn looked into the coals and wondered what it would feel like to be down in that heat.
“His estate was overrun. The driver was going to toss his torso on the lawn. He managed to moan and get the driver’s attention. He begged the driver to take him to his yacht. He thought he could convince the man to nurse him back to health. Once they got to the pier, the driver dumped him in the little boat where we found him. The driver stole his yacht.”
“Serves him right,” someone said.
“Come on,” one of the women said. “Leave Rex alone. He kept us alive so far. Don’t you think he has suffered enough?”
“This is important,” a man said. He stood up. “How we treat Rex is important. Those Optioners decided that they were better than the rest of us. They decided that they should live forever and the rest of us should die off like the dinosaurs. They consider themselves to be the next phase of humanity.”
He looked around at us, making sure that he had our attention.
“I say that they’re inhuman. Their humanity is gone. They expunged it when they took the Option of altering their cells. We might learn something from Rex, but he might just as well betray us. We don’t know if he wants to live or die. We don’t know what he needs to regrow his body. Maybe he has a way to take our limbs. Maybe that’s why he’s helping us.”
“Come on,” someone said.
The man turned on her. “Do you know how they work? Does anyone?”
Nobody had an answer.
“Think about it tonight,” the man said. “In the morning, before we leave, I say we vote. My vote is going to be to throw him in the water and let him float away. We won’t be killing him. He exercised his Option and divorced himself from us. I say we return the favor.”
With that, the group conversation was done. People made sleeping areas near the fire. I helped collect more wood so we could bank it up before we slept.
# # # # #
I got up before dawn and went deep into the woods. I had lived alone for a while. One of the byproducts of my solitude was increased modesty. And I had reason to be modest. The fish that I had eaten came out with a vengeance. When I came back, two men were awake. I could just see them from the orange glow of the fire.
They were strapping that charred stump of a man to the back of the guy I thought of as the translator. The guy helping him was none other than the man who had called for a vote to push the stump out into the water. Now, for whatever reason, it looked like they were working together to save him.
When they saw me, the translator finished tightening the belt and he took off to the east. I cocked my head and watched him stumble and run through the mud. I turned back to the guy who had called for the vote.
He was holding out a knife.
I froze.
I admit it—I was so confounded by what I saw that he might have been able to put his knife directly into my heart before I thought to stop him. Instead, he stepped carefully over the fire and then turned and ran after the translator and the stump.
I squinted after them and then turned back for the fire. I put some of the extra wood on there and poked around in the coals to coax the flames back. I sat down on a rock and looked into the darkness. Way down the shore, I could still see their shapes moving as fast as they could in the dark.
I looked south, towards Detroit. The orange glow that rimmed the sky had a different meaning since the stump’s story. I tried to revise my mental image of Detroit. Much later, watching videos on the ether, I saw the city burn. It was the first of many, but it was one of the worst. Roamers swept through most places before the riots turned bloody. Not Detroit, though—Detroit destroyed itself with human hands for the most part.
The sun was just starting to come up when I heard the gurgling sound next to me.
I blinked in the early light and saw the dark river that my feet were resting in.
I thought they were all still asleep around the fire. Why not? They had endured a major trial to get across the lake. They weren’t asleep. They were dying or dead. Some had their throats cut. All of them had knife wounds, either in their chest or right through the eye. I saw into the slits down their abdomens—a lot of the people were missing organs. Their bodies had been harvested.