by A. E. Shaw
Tension flickers about Aiden’s chest as he registers the bones lashed together to make the framework of this dwelling. The inside is dark, and it smells worse than its inhabitant. Clearly, however, he must accept whatever hospitality is offered with dignity and respect…but as he stoops to enter, his stomach contracts in empty revulsion, and he baulks.
“I like the outside,” Aiden mutters, pulling back, but trying to excuse his behaviour all the same.
“Likewise, but you are cold. Sit near the fire with me, and we can talk.”
Jere’s voice is like nothing Aiden has heard before. It makes words hard to understand. It is, though, curiously persuasive.
“I won’t bite,” Jere says. “You will have some food?”
Aiden clicks his teeth, experimentally, as if wondering why the man might bite him. He finds no answer in the test.
Jere’s eyes widen.
Aiden looks into them, unmoved. As his hand traces his stomach and feels the hollow there, he realises that this is a fine case of the world supplying him with precisely what he needs. “I will, yes, have some food. Thank you.” He hopes the food will be of a higher standard than the accommodation.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The City
Any urge to speak to each other is quelled by the repetitive scenery that lines Selina and Alej’s march. All the while, there is no-one. The feel of abandon is everywhere. Stone and wood litter the roadsides in heaps, fused together in places, grotesque lumps of stone mushed into strange shapes and discarded. Everything once here has crumbled into one; buildings of how many generations, destroyed by what? There’s nothing to indicate what caused this, though even if there was, Alej and Selina would hardly be the best people to identify it, it’s true.
Selina has become comfortable with the silence. It helps to distance this, here, from her memories. The noise is the strongest memory she has of her childhood. The crowding, the stench and the closeness wasn’t so much of a problem - her family were much luckier than most, with their little home, room for six to sleep, their space a gift of time and skill and inheritance and fortune, her family having of just enough of everything to keep it their own.
Whenever she ventured outside she was reminded how lucky they were to have a roof to keep the weather out, to have walls to separate their family from others, the smallest hint of privacy. But it was the noise, the incessant sound of humanity rippling perpetually about the streets that characterised her home. Laughter – some real, some desperate, some cruel. Friendship and fighting, endless, constant drone of the exchange of words and ideas, stories and plans, all meaningless in the seethe. The thousands of babies who would cry on rotation throughout the night so you could never quite drown out their sobs, however loudly you sang, however much fabric you wrapped around your head to muffle the noise to try to allow you to sleep. It was normal, yes, but as she got older, it seemed to get louder.
They’re still at the outskirts, Selina and Alej, at the edge of their journey. Perhaps people have moved inwards. Perhaps there was an answer to the crowding and the shortages - maybe they’ve found a way of existing elsewhere. Maybe things are better now. Selina pushes thoughts aside because she must, so she can continue to place one foot in front of the other and shift forwards, over, and over again.
But by mid-afternoon, sustained only on pinches of gummy moss and the occasional “Are you alright?” the thoughts are vast and relentless. Where is everyone? is the question writ so large over her every move that it’s all she can do not to shout it to the snipping winds. Why is it like this? Things look worse the further in they go. Mosses and moulds ripple everywhere, and there are swirls and tides of dirt all down the streets, the earth roads untrodden and wasted. It isn’t as if it was clean before, where - when - she was from, quite the opposite, but this isn’t living filth, this is what’s left.
This is what’s left.
There are no signs of the sudden disappearance of a population, no small fires still burning, pots strung over them, belongings left for time to consume or to be handy for stragglers like themselves. This is a place that has been attacked. But who would? Who could? Even the marauders were only those from the North or from the West who had hoped for more further along the way, who’d panicked when they found a full world which couldn’t feed them sufficiently to make the journey back.
Selina fights with her younger self, picking at her mind for any indication of how this could have come to pass in the time she has been away. There must be explanations, Selina thinks, and she can imagine several, she just can’t pick one that would make sense of everything.
They’ve been walking for more than a night and a day, and night is well on its way to falling again. Something must break the tedium. They should stop somewhere, but nowhere is any better than the last expanse; the feeling that around any corner might be a sign, a clue, drives her forwards, and Alej follows, because he can.
When it begins to get dark, parts of the city start to glow. There is a curious luminescence to the edges of heaps of debris, and even to the dust that hangs in the air. It is insubstantial and intangible, but it’s also eerie and simultaneously convenient, allowing them to continue their movement, even when the sky gives up aiding their progress.
Alej inclines towards the sides of the street, and Selina says, “Don’t, don’t walk there. Stay with me. We should keep to the middle of the road, as long as it’s this quiet.”
It is a strange piece of advice, automatically delivered. It’s from when she was travelling with her mother. “When you are moving from one place to the next, Selina, you should walk in the middle of the roads so that people know that that is what you are doing, that you are just passing by, and that you do not want anything from them.” It is next to laughable to employ this logic now, but Selina finds a comfort in employing even the least useful advice to this time.
“Why? Shouldn’t we keep out of sight?”
“There hasn’t been anyone around for all this time…and besides, if anyone is around, we want to be able to see them before they grab us. People hide in small, dark spaces.” And that last is not a truth that she has ever known, but another her mother would say, from a time before, when small, dark spaces were still to be found.
Alej defers to her apparent knowledge without question. Of course he does; he has no need to assert himself. He’s content to progress through the experience, switching off as he does, because he is moving and that is enough. He allows himself to be fascinated at times, noticing the heaps and contours of the landscape, feeling he could walk forever through this fantastical and unseemly place. But for all that he is calm and contented, Selina seems increasingly on edge. He feels he ought to be able to help and support her, but is infinitely unsure as to how. He’s relieved things aren’t as she’d told him they used to be. The idea of the sea of people, the things that he’d said to her, he’d been wondering what that might look like, that much is true, but he didn’t want to see it at all.
Looking at Selina twitching, her steps growing longer and quicker until she’s pacing as fast as one might without it being termed running. Alej does his best to slip back into his meditations, for she certainly doesn’t appear to want to discuss things any further with him. She’s looking increasingly tired. He’d suggest stopping to rest somewhere, but guesses that when she’s ready to do that, she’ll let him know.
As time passes, the dark sky tries to get even darker, in ways neither of our intrepid wanderers can process. Is it in the quality of the air, which gets less and less as they go, or perhaps stays the same, but is less use to them as their own levels of nourishment and energy are depleted? Is it a trick of the light itself, or of the lack of it? Are the glowing patches decreasing, or growing fewer, perhaps with their own stamina running dry? There is an eerie sense of being inside, whilst definitively not being so.
There is no sense of the mountain down which they walked and scrambled, and clambered, not here, amidst ruin heaped high. No sense of the green of
up there. Everything here is dust and slime. There are holes in the sides of the roads now too, body-long and deep. Neither can see quite how deep they go, and neither mention them to each other as they go because there can be nothing about such constructs that is pleasant or worthwhile. The feeling at this point in the journey is that there is nowhere to hide; nowhere to feel safe. All the roads are the same, and everything along them is timeless rejection.
Selina slows, at last. It looks like there’ll be no better offer for resting tonight. “I have to stop,” she says to Alej, apologetically.
“That’s fine. Where should we go?”
In the silence of their surroundings, Alej’s voice sounds loud, ever more singsong, but there isn’t even an echo, more a sucking of the words like speaking in a vacuum.
“I think perhaps it’s all the same. I don’t…once there was…but now…” even as she tries to speak, she realises just how tired she is, as if the movement of her feet was all that was generating awakeness.
“What about food?”
“I…oh, I don’t know.” And she doesn’t. She hasn’t even thought of this. They have a little left from the journey, but it won’t last through even one more day of this.
“We could look in all…this?” Alej offers, gesturing at the roadside.
Selina shivers, visibly. “No, no…I don’t think we should…disturb things.” That sums up, she thinks, with a scattering mind, her feelings. There is something here that ought not to be toyed with, or shifted, just in case…just in case.
“If, in all this time, we haven’t seen a single person, maybe it’s only that there is no-one here?” Alej’s unusual forthrightness comes from hunger, sleepiness, and the increase of hours of wondering how he might help.
“Maybe. I don’t know. I would rather we didn’t…”
“You’d rather we slept right here, in the open?”
She scans him uneasily for signs that he would not do that. “Maybe at the edge of the road, maybe at the edge of the rubble…but I don’t want to leave the road. I don’t feel we should.”
“Well!” he exclaims. “Then we shan’t.” If he had it in him to assess his own feelings, he’d appreciate that he doesn’t actually want to investigate the unknown of this land in the darkness either.
He makes his way to the roadside and tests, with a firm hand, the stability of the heaps of stone. He settles for one with the least glowing material upon it, and lines its side with his overshirt, sacrificing one kind of comfort to gain a delicacy that is innate, rather than logical.
Selina smiles for the first time in a while at the way Alej is tending to the ground. She doesn’t know what, exactly, it is about him, but he is good in a way that he doesn’t quite seem to understand even of himself.
He looks back to her, all childish pride and simultaneous invitation. The pair of them aren’t far from delirious in the dry dereliction that has become habit in such a comparatively short period of time. She grins at him. And this alone, to Alej, is proof he has succeeded at something in today.
He sits himself amidst the stones as comfortably as he can, shifting a large block of rock closer. He swipes it clear of dust and beckons to Selina to sit upon it. She does, drawing her clothes tighter about her, fishing in the pockets for what little food remains.
She finds a roll of leaves, stashed away back, way back, up by the stream, and peels a few away, holding them out in her palm as you might if you were offering them to a horse. Alej takes a couple, and tells her to eat the others herself. He’s grateful for something to get into his body. He hates the way his stomach feels so tight. A couple of leaves won’t make a great deal of difference to that, but it’s a start. They aren’t yet completely dried out, so the act of chewing is a small relief to their dry, hoarse mouths, too.
It occurs to Alej in the vaguest of ways as he swallows the last mouthful that he has always felt resoundingly well, but that he now he feels weak, and strange. Not only tired, but completely and desperately not right. It doesn’t become him.
They settle down together, no further words required, both reaching easily towards sleep. With nothing to wrap around themselves, no idea what’s to come, they position themselves for rest against each other; Selina’s head on Alej’s chest, his arms gently around her.
It’s not quite enough time for the deepest sleep to take them when Selina is violently awoken by a fear which evolves, as she scrabbles for consciousness, into a sound out of range that she can feel in her chest, pinprick-tight and panicking, expanding into a loud humming, high, getting higher, consuming the soundscape, small as it was, no indication anywhere within her vision as to the cause.
She smacks into Alej’s throat with the back of her own head, so suddenly does she jerk upwards into alertness, and, so brutal is her motion, she catches him hard and drives him instantly from sleep to unconsciousness.
She bites down hard on her lip so’s not to scream, as much in fury with what she’s done as in fear for what might yet happen to the pair of them. She searches everywhere with the old, old inside compulsion we all have in such moments of terror, that instant response of stop, drop, hide. She digs her teeth into the skin of her lip harder still, breaks it, focuses on the pain to prevent herself from making any noise (even if any she made could possibly be heard above the increasing drive and rent of the piercing sound).
Even in the shadows, there isn’t a hint of movement. Selina stares, and stares, and can’t make anything register in her understanding. She forces herself to her feet, knowing if nothing else that she cannot stay here because the noise is cramping inside her, mauling at her organs, and still getting louder by the moment.
With strength borne of necessity she fixes her fingers tight around Alej’s upper arms and hauls him from where he’s sat. She makes for the nearest of the holes in the ground and doesn’t hesitate to shove Alej’s body in, although there is a second of panic when he falls just far enough to gather a momentum that makes the point at which his limp, utterly relaxed self hits the ground unnecessarily hard.
With the volume about her increasing she has no further time to deal with this and tumbles herself down there too, trying not to land on Alej any more than she can help, then scrambling about trying to pull enough earth and rubble from outside down over them that they’ll be hidden from sight of whatever is coming.
As her hands tussle with the smooth sides of their would-be hiding place, they come across a strip of fabric, damp and slippery but running down as far as she can reach. With everything she has, in a panic that is lung-burstingly intense, Selina yanks it.
Rocks hit her ankles first. And then her knees, and thighs, and then they’re falling all over her - small, but painful, and she pulls harder at the fabric which is larger than it seemed and tougher, too, waxy, perhaps, rather than damp, dark and thick once she has enough to get a grip on it, and in the dark, is it enough?
It must be enough, it has to be, Selina pulls it down, down over her and Alej and then it is heavier and heavier too, dislodging a mountain of stones so it seems, and with all the reserves of common sense she has left, Selina folds her arms above her and Alej and curves herself by him so that there’s space between them but not so much that the stones dent the material down there too: preserving all the air she can. The sounds grow more muffled, and the sensation falls back a little to bearable, and she is holding her breath, scared to take too much, scared that Alej is dead next to her, scared that this will be her last moment.
It is not.
The noise ratchets up to deafening once more, even with everything about her rammed into her ears, and even with the insulation of the great weight of debris that coats them separate from the surface, she can still hear that the sound travels in a wave at a slow, but even pace, thinks that they will surely explode with the intensity of sensation at its crescendo, and is endlessly relieved when that intensity finally tails away, and, eventually, disappears into the distance. There is a residue of that piercing, that weightiness inside
her, and she waits for an eternity, for both to disappear even when she really listens for them, before she tries to free them again, which she tries to do only when she thinks that there can only be space for a very few more breaths in here, when the heat becomes too much, and she feels herself once more on the brink of helpless terror.
She pushes her crossed arms up over her head at the top of the fabric, ducks away as a shower of dirt falls onto her face, into her hair. She moves her hands upwards and finds air which feels oh so much fresher than it did when she last breathed it, whether that comes by way of comparison, or fact. It means Outside is not impossible to return to. She draws her knees up in the remaining space, and eases the rubble down, down, to where her feet had been (and to where Alej’s still are, but first things first). As their cover settles, and as she can once more see the sky (which is less than black now: morning can’t be far away?) and she pauses, gathering her breath, and holding herself as quiet as she can to hear if anything remains of the threat, such as it was, before she dares to try to get out.