Sun Bleached Winter

by D. Robert Grixti

  * * * *

  In the morning, Claire doesn’t get up.

  “My head,” she croaks when I try to shake her up. “Damn it, it’s burning. I’m too tired to...” Then her words turn into an illegible moan as she falls back asleep. I shake her again, but all I can prompt out of her is a half-hearted stir.

  “It’s the fever,” Jessica says, leaning over her to change the dressing. “It’ll get worse before it gets better, and by this point, she’s completely exhausted.”

  She unravels the bandage, revealing a layer of dried blood and scar tissue, which she scrubs gently off with the tip of her finger. Underneath, the cut is wide open, and the skin around it is swollen and discolored.

  “Hmm, it’s stopped bleeding,” she observes, pouring alcohol into it from a small plastic bottle and then rinsing it with water. “The tissue’s already starting to scar, which is good, but...”

  “So it’s healing up, right?”

  She shakes her head, applying fresh styptic over the cut and digging through her knapsack for a new bandage.

  “The cut may be starting to close up, but it’s far from healed. Look at this.” She runs her finger along the side of the wound, where the discoloration is most prominent. “All of this area is swollen, and there’s obviously an infection. What she needs is strong antibiotics, probably a tetanus injection as well—I doubt you’ve been able to get vaccination boosters in the last couple of years, right?”

  I don’t say anything.

  She inhales deeply, and stands up.

  “She’s not in any condition to be walking around. It’ll slow us down a bit, but you’ll have to carry her. We don’t have the time or supplies to wait here until she feels better. Besides, at this point...”

  She gives me a solemn look.

  “Yeah, I know,” I say softly. “She’s not going to just get better. You’re right, we have to keep going to New City.”

  She leaves my side and starts folding up our bedding and packing it away. I stand in silence, watching Claire sleep, begging fate to not take her away and cursing it for threatening to. If not for the throaty rattle she makes each time she draws a breath, there would be nothing to distinguish her from a half-frozen corpse.

  Is this my fault?

  * * * *

  Before we leave, we search the building for supplies, on the off chance we can find something for Claire. Jessica helps me hoist Claire off the ground and onto my shoulder (where I almost double over from the weight at first and have to make a conscious effort to orient myself and stay on my feet) and we travel single file through one of the corridors branching off from the entrance hall.

  There’s nothing of note in any of the offices, and anything that’s not office supplies or yellowing paper has been looted long ago. I find a medicine cabinet in a staff break room off the back hallway, but the glass is smashed and the only thing left inside is a packet of aspirin. I check the back of the box, and it’s at least four years out of date.

  When we emerge into one of the offices in the eastern wing, we find a pile of pallid corpses, tossed in the corner in a pile behind a line of overturned desks. What flesh is left on them is green and flaky, and they’ve been stripped naked. Jessica examines them and declares that they’re at least a few months old and we dismiss them, moving on. We proceed down the hallway, ducking into each door we pass so we don’t miss anything. Aside from loose-leaf papers scattered everywhere, an occasional piece of collapsed furniture and one room where a bunch of smashed computer monitors have been tossed around, it’s relatively clean.

  “There probably wasn’t much here worth looting in the first place,” says Jessica, shoving aside a pile of folders on a desk and rifling through a drawer. “It’s an office building, after all-not a place that would have been hit hard in the initial panic.”

  We end up coming full circle back into the opening lobby, and that’s when Jessica decides it’s time to leave. We take a minute to gather the last of our things, and then we walk up to the thick doors that protected us from the dogs last night.

  “Ready?” Jessica asks.

  I nod, my left arm supporting Claire’s body on my shoulder and my right one hanging beside my coat pocket, ready to withdraw the revolver.

  “Stay close to me. You won’t be much good in a fight while carrying her, so we have to be careful and move quietly. Got that?”

  Holding her rifle out in front of her with one hand, she pulls one of the doors open. Freezing air whooshes through and punches me in the face. The heavy mist from yesterday is gone, and without it, the town seems less ominous. It’s amazing how the city hall is still standing, I reflect, walking down the steps into the empty car park, because, now that we can see it clearly, the town just looks like some long forgotten war zone. It’s just a collection of dilapidated shells and jagged, broken shapes. Behind the crumbling facades of the buildings and beyond the mess of twisted side streets that jut off from the main road, the only things to find hiding are memories. The old world is gone, driven out, fleeing. It doesn’t want to be found.

  I keep my hand on the holster of my gun as we walk slowly down the main street, taking careful steps, one at a time, but I don’t think we need to worry. In the light of the day, we can see the town for what it is: dead. Buried.

  Lifeless.

  * * * *

  All that’s left of the train station is a single platform, a tiny, collapsing station house with a boarded-up door, and a rusting metal billboard that says Black Valley Station: Waterfront City Line Only.

  A huge metal behemoth lays dead across the access road leading to the tracks, derailed and rolled onto its side, probably in the chaos immediately following the world’s end. I try to look through the windows as we pass it, but I can’t see anything beyond them. They’re impenetrable, pitch black: portals into some other world where misery reigns supreme. Two of the carriages twist together in a haphazard embrace around a coupling. An old leather jacket juts out between them, wavering idly in the dead wind. The arm is torn off. There’s just a hole where it used to be.

  We step onto the tracks, only barely visible in the snow, and walk along them, side by side. After seemingly only a few minutes have passed, I look over my shoulder to see the edge of the town receding into the distance, already left behind and forgotten.

  The tracks pass through what seems like an endless series of fields with nothing in them except layers of grey ice and occasionally the carcass of a tree. Nothing much happens and my mind wanders, thinking of Claire. Soon, whole hours have passed and we’re still walking, still following the train tracks through an expanse of nowhere. I look to the right and beside us, on the other side of a barrier of snow and death, runs a highway. Cars are stopped in a line along it, waiting for a traffic jam that will never clear. I can’t tell if they have colors from this distance. They’ve become simple grey shapes on the horizon, just like everything else in this damned place.

  We hear faint shouting. On the highway beside a stranded caravan, far enough away so that we can see them and not be seen, a man and a woman are pushed to their knees by a pack of marauders and their hands are tied behind their backs. Rifle barrels are thrust into the backs of their heads, and the woman starts screaming.

  I wrench my revolver out of my coat pocket, and turn towards the commotion. Jessica’s hand falls on my arm, gently pushing it back down.

  “Keep walking.”

  “But…those people! They’re going to be—”

  “What are we going to do about it? You with Claire on your shoulders and me almost out of ammo?”

  Silence.

  “Come on,” she says, ushering me forward. “They’re distracted. We can pass by unnoticed. Do you want to save Claire or not?”

  I put the gun back into its nest in my coat. I look away and keep walking.

  Two loud gu
nshots resonate from behind me. The woman’s screaming ceases. I try not to notice.

  I focus on the journey, on following the railway tracks. I look ahead. They go on forever, through more fields, even after the highway turns away to the right and is eaten by the hills.

  Claire’s starting to get heavy.

  Keep walking!

  Do these tracks ever end?

  “How long until we get to New City?” I ask.

  “We’ll be there by sundown. These tracks pass right through it.”

  “Are you sure they’ll let us in—Claire and me?”

  She looks at me, puzzled.

  “Why wouldn’t they? You’re with me.”

  I look away from her.

  “You said they wouldn’t have taken that woman or her children.”

  She doesn’t respond.

  “Jessica,” I push. “Will they let us in or not? Is Claire going to die?”

  After a pause, “We’ll wait and see,” she says, without expression. “Just keep going.”

  I keep walking forward, starting to get tired under Claire’s weight. She hasn’t moved or made a sound since we left the city hall. At this point, I can’t help but wonder if it’s wrong for me to wish that she’d wake up soon.

  I stare dead ahead, watching lengths of track undulate in front of me.

  I hope they take me somewhere far away from this.

  Chapter Twelve

  When we finally reach New City, the sun is low in the sky and everything’s painted deep purple in the impending dusk.

  I catch my first glimpse of the city as we pass over a hill. Before me, and going onwards towards the horizon, there’s a vast body of grey sludge—the ocean—and, on the very edge of it, a smudge of grey ruins, where an occasional tall building rises up into the sky, still intact. The inhabitants of the city have built a makeshift wall around it to protect it from the tundra, made from boarded-up train carriages, overturned vehicles, sheets of bent metal, and mounds of broken brick and stone. The end of the highway we passed earlier spirals down from the hills and runs into the city, though it’s been blocked by a huge gate made of what looks like steel taken from the hull of a ship. Glass portholes line the side of it and, even though it’s too far away and not light enough to see, I’d bet there’d be a pensive face behind each one, keeping watch for approaching marauders or wild animals.

  A narrow road crosses the railway tracks as we draw closer to the city. There’s a blue road sign standing beside it, reading Waterfront City: Next Exit—1km. Someone’s painted a line through the words and scrawled a message of their own underneath in red: “New” City—we don’t have room for you. Fuck off!

  Soon, we come to the end of the railway tracks, which descend into a colonial-style train depot, made of faded red brick. The same steel material that blocks off the highway into the city is here too, fashioned into the walls around a guard post. Through one of the portholes I see a tired-looking man, pointing an assault rifle at us as we approach. A chain-link gate fastened across the space between the wall and the brick archway swings open, and a mustachioed man dressed in a neat black suit emerges from behind it, aiming an automatic handgun at us with his left hand and waving with his right.

  “Welcome to New City, partners!” he calls out in a hearty voice. “If you’re a friend of ours, state your business. If you’re not, turn around now or we’ll fill you with bullets.”

  Jessica raises her hand and waves back.

  “Hey! It’s me—Jessica Riley, from the enforcer squad. I’m back!”

  We hear the suited man throw a laugh and he lowers his gun, waiting for us to finish walking to the gate.

  “Who’s that?” I whisper to Jessica.

  “His name, unfortunately for him, is Thomas Morrow,” she whispers back. “He’s the leader of New City. Don’t know how that happened—I think he was chief of police when the end of the world came, but he’s the big boss now, and he’s the one who sets the rules.”

  When we get close enough to see him properly, I decide that he’s not a man I want to make friends with. We stop in front of him, and he stiffly shakes Jessica’s hand. Then he turns to me and eyes me carefully, regarding me with a cold sneer. His aging face is void of emotion and very stern. Above a thick black moustache and a narrow, pointed nose, his wide grey eyes glimmer with something I can’t quite define, but something that unsettles me nonetheless. I get the sense that he’s charismatic and intelligent, a man who wants you to trust him, but the way he looks at me gives me the strange impression that he doesn’t care about anyone or anything that doesn’t directly concern himself. His cold face says that, to him, everybody else is just a means to an end—but it’s not a face of evil. No, that’s not the case. It’s a neutral face. The face of indifference.

  “Now, who might you be?” he asks me, in a tone that sounds something like forced friendliness. “You look like you’ve come quite some way. Seeking salvation from the outside world, perhaps?”

  His voice is familiar. Unbidden, a memory floats into my head, only a week old now, but feeling much older: me turning the knobs of a ranger’s radio transceiver, waiting for someone to call to me from a place beyond the snow and ice.

  “My name is Lionel Morton. I heard the radio broadcast,” I say. “I met up with Jessica along the way and came here. My sister is sick. Jessica said it would be safe here, that we’d be able to get help.”

  His eyes glance over my shoulder at Claire’s limp body. He nods thoughtfully, but doesn’t respond. Instead, he addresses Jessica.

  “No Rowan? I thought you said you were going to bring him back?”

  Jessica hangs her head.

  “A shame,” says Morrow, his face still without expression. “He had a good eye with that gun of his—though I suppose not that good, evidently.”

  “He was my friend,” Jessica says softly.

  “Yes, he was. A dangerous thing to be in this world, it seems.”

  Jessica raises her head, and looks pointedly at Claire and me.

  “We’ll need a replacement for Rowan on the guard roster. That’s why I brought him with me. He knows how to shoot, and his sister can work on the crops, when she’s better.”

  “I see,” says Morrow. He doesn’t address her again.

  “Do you understand that if you wish to live here, Lionel, you have to work?” he asks. “Everybody in New City has a duty. It’s how we survive. We don’t have room in this world for comfort, or for freedom of choice. We have to do whatever’s necessary, and my duty is to make sure nobody forgets that.”

  “I’m prepared to do whatever I have to do,” I reply. “I want my sister to be alive, and I want her to be safe.”

  “Well, New City is certainly safe,” Morrow says, pondering my words. “You won’t live a comfortable life here, but if being alive makes you happy, it will at least be a happy one. We’re all that’s left of humanity, all of us here behind these walls. You understand the importance of prolonging humanity, don’t you?”

  I nod. Maybe the old world is gone, but I can still hold onto Claire.

  He turns away from me and calls to the gate guard over his shoulder.

  “Simmons, call for someone from the station. Get this wounded girl to the hospital. Then take Jessica inside, get her debriefed, take her to her quarters, and give her a sedative. Rowan has been killed by the savages.”

  Then he turns back to me:

  “You are permitted to enter our city. You will start work tomorrow. I will take you to Rowan’s old quarters, which will be yours now. Someone will bring you dinner, and then, you will get some sleep. I will visit you in the morning, and tell you what you are to do.

  You look like you have seen a lot out there in the uncivilized lands. No doubt you’ve seen the barbarians. Perhaps you’ve even had to kill some of them. I
hope that is true, because it will help you keep a calm mind about what you will have to do whilst living here.”

  The guard behind the porthole comes out and nods at Claire. He doesn’t say anything to me. I kneel down to help him lift her into his arms, and she sighs softly as she leaves me. He carries her back through the gates, Jessica following him close behind. She looks over her shoulder at me as she disappears into the darkness, saying goodbye. I raise my hand in a half-hearted salute.

  “Follow me, Lionel Morton.”

  Morrow leads me past the gate and through the city. The streets are abandoned, and the remaining buildings are closed up as the city sleeps. We come to a four-story building, and I follow him through the entrance and up a flight of stairs. He stops in front of a room labeled 202 and opens the door. I step through, and he shuts it behind me, and leaves.

  The room is dead, decaying. The paint on the walls has peeled away and now there’s only cracked concrete. The carpet has been torn up, leaving a floor of stone tiles, slightly scorched, with a few broken. It’s bare except for an unfurnished kitchen area and a single bed.

  But it’s a real bed.

  It’s a civilized person’s bed.

  * * * *

  When I wake up in the morning, Thomas Morrow is leaning against the dusty kitchen counter, lazily perusing an aged hardcover book. As I pull myself out from under the covers with a soft rustle, he looks up over the page and watches me.

  “You’re here early,” I say, picking up my coat from the edge of the bed and putting it on to block out the freezing air wafting in through a broken window.

  “In New City, we run on a careful schedule,” he says smoothly, turning the page in his book. “Those who don’t have night duties turn into bed at ten in the evening, and they rise in the morning at six sharp. You only arrived last night, so you are excused from it this time, but you should know that you’ll be expected to follow it from now on.”