~~~
The strange noise occurred about an hour after the meeting. And it was a very loud noise, like a dinosaur was using cars as batting practice.
Then what came next sounded distinctly like a helicopter and something else that sounded like that octopus coming alive and tripping over its own tentacles. A couple of the men, including the speaker from last night’s meeting, went outside to see what was going on.
They were gone about twenty minutes and then we heard laughing outside. They came through the theater’s doors, each carrying a huge box.
“Someone dropped this!” a man with long, thin gray hair in a ponytail joked. He took out a small steak knife from his jean jacket and sliced through the tape.
It was packed full of smaller, colorful boxes of breakfast pastries. “Pop Ups.” I hate those but they sounded like a gourmet treat now, even though they were clearly a knock-off from the original. I ate a bunch back at the college but they had a different wrapper on them. I could recognize them no matter what, they had a weird smoky smell and burnt bottoms. I don’t get why they needed to come in different wrappers, they all have the same stuff inside.
Some of them rushed back outside to get the rest of the boxes. The camp could now have a good sized meal, feasting on: Pop-Ups, Cinnamon Cereal Chomp, powdered milk, Slim Tims, and several loaves of Wander Bread. It all tasted exactly like their names implied. A lesser version of the original. But that didn’t matter much right now, as food was food to them.
John and I appeared to be the only ones disinterested in the food, as we didn’t move an inch since the boxes were brought in.
Micah glanced our way. John said out loud, “What if it’s poisoned?”
“It’s probably from the Underground.”
I looked to John for an explanation. He said there was this group of rich citizens out there who smuggle people like us out of the camps and into Canada. If they can’t rescue us, he said, then they try to feed people. Clothe people. He said that they’re everywhere, you just don’t know where. Like it could be a soldier or a police officer or even a priest. John said that the Underground was growing.
I wasn’t weary of consuming questionable food from an even more questionable source; I just wasn’t hungry.
People didn’t really listen to John, as they were divvying up the stuff, and deciding what would be eaten now and saved for later. They were all sitting on their knees, huddled around this one box with strawberry jam filling smeared all over their faces from the breakfast pastries. Most of the people slept soon after without bothering to wipe the strawberry jam off their faces. They looked like they had devoured the bloody guts of a few small children during some sort of ancient wayward religious sacrifice.
They relocked the doors and John helped them push the furniture back against them for added security.
Then we heard another loud noise.
This was way more frightening, in my opinion.
We heard voices, dozens of angry voices shouting intelligible words.
One of the women inside started freaking out, “Oh my god, we took their food! They’re going to kill us! Quick, throw some of those boxes outside to them.”
Some people rushed to her aid, grabbing what remained inside those boxes to give a hasty peace offering but Micah stopped them.
“Wait, wait,” he waved his hands. “The other men and I left half of those boxes for them, they have no reason to be angry.”
“Yeah, they can’t expect us to starve on their behalf just because they were here first,” John piped in.
“We should still give them back!” the same woman squealed.
“It’s best that we all stay in here,” someone else said.
“Don’t you open those doors!” another yelled.
“They’ll bust in!”
“I want to try and hear what they’re yelling about,” the man with the ponytail said as he crept up near the front of the theater, where the source of the voices were coming from.
Intrigued, John followed the man.
They both listened for about five minutes, without responding to the Nomads. John returned, “They were going on and on about a ‘last meal.’ It was hard to make it out but they kept saying, ‘Attack! Attack!’ too.”
Micah was calm and lost in thought. Probably weighing the options and each possible outcome as I was. Like, maybe they’re warning us about something. Maybe they’re trying to hurt us. But I don’t see why they would think that they could possibly hurt us. We still have muscles.
Micah finally walked up and asked for a steak knife from the long-haired guy. He let it drop into his shirt pocket.
They were both pushing a big desk aside when the bomb hit.
~~~
They looked like they were on a bad reality TV show, like some producers dumped them on an island. The Nomads. I didn’t go near them, as most people in the theater didn’t either. Not out of fear, but out of smell. A mix of every offensive smell known to man, with a top note of urine stain.
A few of the Nomads died, a lot of damage was done to where they had been living, and I got my stuff back. Some of it, anyway. John found it. I didn’t ask him how or where he got it, I didn’t care. I did ask him, though, whether or not the food in boxes might be poisoned. He said he didn’t think so because, “Explosions are fun. Food poisoning is boring.”
The Nomads carried their dead in a sort of haphazard ceremonial march to the golf course a few hours later.
I guess the first time the helicopter dropped the boxes of food at the park (long before John and I arrived here), the Nomads went and got it and brought it back to where they camped out. By the missing section of Something Wicked. They went on to say that this is how the enemy smokes us out. They do it by starving us and then dropping food. So we crawl out of our holes and they drop the bombs. They also mentioned that we shouldn’t move so much during the daylight hours and stay hidden and scattered, as the enemy would prefer us to be confined in one location (such as the theater) because then it would be like taking out a litter with one stone.
~~~
It was weird talking to the Nomads. They had been here just a few months and had been at some other camp before then. They must have had an awful time because there was maybe a full set of teeth for every five people and clothes that looked like they were salvaged from the garbage can of a mechanic. There were perhaps a couple dozen of them left, they said there was at least a hundred of them in the beginning. But bombs were dropped and people were starved so their numbers were whittled down. So it was decided that we would move at night in small groups.
After the ceremonial march thing and the Nomads said a few words, people started to scatter into their mouse holes.
A few stayed behind to dig the grave. No one had shovels; they all used their hands and feet to break away dirt. One had a small cardboard box to scoop up dirt. One woman stood by, holding some wilted flowers she probably just happened to find growing somewhere while on her way to the burial.
John and I hung around for a little bit with a handful of people from our camp. We helped them dig a hole and find some flowers to put on top. Made it look like we cared.
Here we were again at Adventure Golf, where the fun never stops. I spotted the same shoulder blade from before just a short distance away.
“That one there was my wife,” a Nomad who smelled of rotten, black bananas pointed to a body-sized dirt patch. We expressed some condolences and one of his comments struck me as odd, “She was laid to rest less than a week ago.” I saw a small bone sticking out, either from a finger or a toe. You’d think they would bury the bodies a bit deeper.
John and I started to head back to the front gates of the golf course when pieces of the past day’s events started to come together. Those particular bones I saw had no flesh on them. According to my anatomy book, a lot of factors are involved with the length of time it takes for a body to decompose. The elements, bugs, how well the body is buried, and so on. That body we found ha
d been buried for seven days, give or take a day. It takes at least twenty to fifty days, if not much, much longer, for a body to fully decompose so that just the bones and maybe the hair is left. I couldn’t double-check my facts because the damn book was stolen but I knew my hunch was rightthese bones were picked clean like a chicken wing.
Fuck.
And now, at this very moment in this very spot, the Nomads outnumbered us.
The man turned and looks at me, practically salivating, “We have extra room back at our neck of the woods. We can certainly squeeze in a couple more bodies.”
I started to back away and so did John. He had no idea yet, but still. On a good day, who would want to sleep next to someone who smelled like that?
They were all looking at us now. “No, thank you,” I managed to say rather calmly. “We have other plans.”
The Nomad smiled, “Well, please let the others know of our offer.” Even if I hadn’t discovered their secret, it would have been just as creepy. Having a toothless, dirty man act so cordially is just odd.
“Sure thing,” John lied.
As soon as we were out of their sight, I ran and John followed suit. “Why are you running?” he yelled. “Are you gonna get sick?”
I felt nauseous indeed but I don’t think I was going to vomit. Luckily, the shock of it all was a bit stronger than my queasiness. We came to a safe spot, by the games where people could toss rings onto the tops of bottles and win stuffed animals. I don’t quite understand why people would want stuffed animals. Animals are for eating. I don’t care to have a toy that looked like a potato, why would I want one of a rabbit?
I had to sit and catch my breath. I had never run so hard in my life, but John was fine. He wasn’t gasping or choking for air like I was.
I really wanted some water but I had to tell John first. “I think...that they’re...cannibals.”
John didn’t seem to have taken it all in, so I told him about what my book said and the connections I made.
Then he started freaking out. “Who the hell eats their own kind? I’ve gone for days without much water, longer without food. I’ve been aboard buses filled with sweaty morons and puking children but I would never kill anyone who’s innocent!”
“John, I’m so scared! What if they come back for us?”
“I won’t let them.” John started walking around, trying to think of what to do. I was doing the same. Although, I wasn’t thinking of a plan. I was trying to go through the alphabet in my head. One thing I remember from school. “A” would be for “apple”, “b” would be for “ball”, and so on. But when I got to “C” and “D”, the only words that came to mind were “cannibal” and “death.”
“We need to get to higher ground. Did you see how weak those people are? Three of them together couldn’t lift up a box of that food without taking a break every ten feet. They may not be able to run after us, but we can’t take chances when we’re sleeping. They could have guns or some weapons on them. Let’s go pack up some of those Pop-ups, fill some bottles with water, and climb to that stuck cart on top of Something Wicked. Then we can”
“Hold up!” I screamed. He stopped talking. “What? Climb to top of Something Wicked?” I asked. That couldn’t possibly be what he said.
“Yeah, it’s high enough,” he shrugged, like it was a normal thing to do.
I was mortified, he couldn’t be serious. This had better be a bad joke.
~~~
There we were, it was now dark. I was in front of him and he was behind me. He said he would break my fall if I were to, you know, fall.
Hand over hand. Don’t look down, he told me. But I did. Several times. And each time I felt like I was going to faint. I told him so and he said he would give me a moment to “gather my strength” like it was just right out in front of me, waiting to be grabbed.
The actual climbing probably wouldn’t have been so bad if it weren’t dark and if we weren’t carrying extra pounds of stuff like food, water, and so on.
“I don’t think we thought this through enough,” I said, a bit too late. “For example, where are we going to pee? How long can we actually stay up here? What do we do when we run out of water?”
“Don’t worry about that. I can always climb back down to get us some more.”
We finally made it to the car, although he had to pull me in because I had no discernible muscles in my arms, despite what my book tried to tell me. Now that I was up, I didn’t know if I was capable of going back down.
We sat in the front two seats and deposited our stuff in the back of the lime-green car. There were three cars attached to ours with four seats in each of them, so that made a total of sixteen seats for our living space. I guessed I had lived in places smaller than that.
I sat down and almost immediately put the seat belt on. The car wasn’t going anywhere soon but I didn’t want to take chances.
John looked at me. “You know, if the car falls off the track, you won’t be able to easily jump out of it.”
“Yes, thank you for that. I feel much better now,” I said sarcastically. And a little mean-spirited, I must admit.
“Are you mad at me?”
“No, just scared.”
“Hey, come here,” he turned, leaned his face right next to me and kissed me. I found myself kissing him back without doing much thinking.
We spent the rest of the night talking, joking, and kissing. We would get on some sort of tangent and when there would be a small lull in the conversation, we would suddenly remember that we could just kiss each other again.
We looked at the stars and tried to remember their names but couldn’t. So we made some up. I’m glad to say I gave those burning red balls of gas some pretty names such as Chloe. I also named a cluster of stars Chandelier. John gave them dumb names like Gassy.
I asked him if he liked me but he said he would have to think about it. And he smiled. But I don’t know what that means.
~~~
We slept during the day, on the bottom floor of the cars since we didn’t want to risk anyone seeing us up there. Not that many people would care to climb and join us on Something Wicked.
I woke up and I couldn’t uncurl my back or else I was afraid it would hurt even worse. John gave me a back rub and while it didn’t help much, I pretended it did.
I told him about Canada and my plan to escape there, too. Somehow.
He said that that was his plan as well and we should take a road trip there. Can’t imagine what roadside attractions we would see along the way. I’d think we’d see more bullet holes than anything else.
I didn’t have to start worrying about the having to pee situation because the following morning the last meal was served. Again.
The helicopter flying over on the coaster was our wake-up call. It went right over our heads, they could have seen us if they had thought anyone crazy enough to hide out in a roller coaster like that. It dropped the packages closer to the theater.
The bombs would be following soon. We scrambled, we took only about half of what we brought. We hung like monkeys on the poles, carefully maneuvering around each segment of the track. We finally came close enough to the ground where we could let go without seriously injuring ourselves.
Since the bombs were closing in on the park, most likely the guards that occasionally walk around the perimeter might be busy with the helicopters. Or at least, that’s what John and I were betting on.
The gates weren’t that high but they were decorated with barbed wire. We didn’t care, we would feel the stings on our hands and legs later.
John climbed over the fence with ease, like he’d done it a dozen times before. I impressed myself actually, but I knew I was still slowing him down. He opened his arms as I jumped and caught me.
Then a swarm of helicopters flew over our heads. We watched them swirling around in the air for what seemed an eternity, then we ran. We ran across the highway and came to some abandoned business buildings.
We heard explosions
and felt the ground shake underneath our feet. We looked for a good place to hide until the chaos settled down.
Instead we found some soldiers with big guns and a fleet of school buses.
~~~
They handcuffed us and we boarded the bus. We sat together in the first row.
“Think you could outsmart us, hiding up in a roller coaster?” the man with the lop-sided face sneered.
Then a bus driver and another soldier stepped on. I don’t know if I have ever seen this one before, they all start to look alike after a while. Unless they’re missing an arm or have a lopsided face. He sat next from us, with his gun pointing at us the entire time. I didn’t think this soldier had it in him to shoot us but I wouldn’t doubt his nervous fingers might unlock the trigger.
The newer soldiers are always the nervous ones. And usually the traitors. But eventually, once they feel power, they’ll learn to crave it. Demand it.
I stared out the window since I hated looking at the ugly, greasy soldiers. John sat on the edge of his seat, like he was ready to be my bullet vest. I would tell him not to bother, but I didn’t want to say anything since a soldier has his way of turning around whatever you say, even if you ask for water.
Nothing was said to us except, “If you don’t play by the rules then you move back a space. You’re lucky you didn’t lose a turn.”
The ride must have taken about half an hour. I saw no other cars out on the road, if you don’t count the fleet of buses that were trailing behind us.
The bus stopped in front of the university, the same one I was at.
The hole that demolished the front door of the building I was in had been rebuilt. Weird. And there was a new hole in the building next to it. The only ones who could have rebuilt it would have to be the soldiers. Unless they pointed the guns and made the prisoners do their work for them.
The War Game Page 5